What if there actually is enough? Well, there is. — LBW 7.6

Welcome. This is Living Between Worlds for June 17th, 2026. Uh, I'm Gil Friend, and with Ken Homer, glad to have you here with us to talk about possible futures. Um, but let me take you back in the past first. Uh, 1972, 24 years ago, um, the Limits to Growth report came out from the Club of Rome.. It charted a global perspective on resource and population and the jam that humanity finds itself in. It was a pretty dispiriting report for a lot of people. But in that same year, I ran away from home. I was living in Washington, D.C., cooking in a natural foods restaurant. And when all my pals ran off for the summer to the Rockies for the first Rainbow Family gathering, which is kind of proto-Burning Man, if you will, you know, smoke dope and run naked through the mountains all summer, I went to Carbondale, at Illinois, where Buckminster Fuller was scholar in residence to do a month-long process called the World Game, which was an intensive design charrette for the planet, a deep dive look at where are we now, where would we like to be? And Bucky phrased it as a world that works for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone. And I thought, that sounds good to me, I'm going to go work on that. And we spent a month in deep dive, a week of really whole systems brainwashing and orientation to the issues, and then 3 weeks of diving deep into looking at energy, food and agriculture, transportation, housing, education, communication, recreation, and a number of other issues. And in each case, we followed a design science process that Fuller had outlined, which involved looking looking first in real detail, where are we now? What are the state of affairs in each of those domains? What resources are available? What's the status of humanity? What needs are being met and not met? And then we would define the preferred state. What would be the ideal of the 100% wellbeing for all within planetary limits that the Limits to Growth report had outlined and so forth. And then in what was for me a remarkable sleight of hand, which has stayed with me for this till this day, we didn't look at how do we get from here to there, We stood in the, in the future, we stood in the imagined successful future and looked backwards and asked, how did we get here? We reverse engineered the mission year by year. What did we do in the last year? What did we do in the last 5? Worked our way back to the present, much as NASA did when they did put together the Apollo mission. President Kennedy called for the United States to land a man on the moon within 10 years and bring them back alive. Part of the quote that's not always quoted, but it's important. NASA did it in 7 years, not 10. But at the time of that announcement, the mission wasn't planned. They didn't know exactly how to do it. And so on day 2, the day after the speech, the story is told, um, they held a victory party in Houston. They celebrated the successful moon mission, and then they sat down and asked, how did we do this? And that reverse engineering process is enormously powerful when you're, when you're looking at something that seems impossible.. Because with a goal so big and so far away, it's hard to tell what's the next step that I could take that could possibly get me to there. So the reverse was enormously powerful as a way to operate. And I came out of that with several distinct lessons that really turned my life ever since. One was that there's no necessary physical barrier to success for 100% of humanity within ecological limits. People are not hungry because there's not enough food on the planet. That's not the reason. Distribution, access, economics, other things. Uh, there's not an energy crisis because there's not enough energy. Depending on who you talk to, the daily solar flux is 8,000 to 17,000 times human energy demand.

It's not—

the problem's not, not enough. The problems are something else. So that was very clear. Number— and this was true in all of the independently working research groups. Second was that in all of these groups, despite our global whole systems perspective, most of the solutions were small-scale, decentralized, adapted to place. Number 3, it was really clear that one of the fundamental barriers was, was what I've come to call getting the prices right, breaking the grip of what Randy Hayes calls cheater economics, prices for things that don't reflect their real costs. Subsidies, uh, encouraging people to engage in economic activities are actually destructive for long-term well-being. Um, and fourth, uh, last but not least, I met my wife, who is still my wife to this day, as this work is still my work to this day. That's what's guided my work ever since, in co-founding Institute for Local Self-Reliance as a direct expression of that work in, in, uh, in inner-city America. And on through the work in the California government and with Naturologic advising corporates about these kinds of pragmatic, viable futures. And now as an executive coach to founders and senior leaders. Through all these is a sense that a theory of change that says seeing possibility is one of the most powerful ways to move people into change, into the possibility of change and the willingness to work to make something different. So what's new on the landscape now is the Global Justice Report released recently by Thomas Piketty, he the author of Capital, and a bunch of other researchers that did another deep dive into this question. How do we have a world that works, that meets the needs of all, that does it within planetary boundaries and is sustainable? Piketty, an economist, and many of these others are that. Did deep analytics on what would it take. How do you move the pieces on the game board that shift us to dramatic decarbonization, shift into consumption patterns, greatly increase global equity as a comprehensive strategy to make these moves in three dimensions: resources, economics, and politics and power. So that's the frame. We're going to dive into that today. Ken is going to sort of walk us through a high-level summary. We'll have some discussion together in plenary as we usually do, and then we'll invite you into some breakout conversations where you can, all of you, engage more richly, and then we'll come back to plenary for harvest. That's our usual rhythm. Okay, ready for the ride?

Strap in.

Ken, over to you.

This is the Global Justice Report, a blueprint for a world that works for all, and, um, oops.

And we'll give you the links to this at the end of the deck— at the end of the day.

Okay, so we're going to start with the conclusion, and the conclusion is that it is possible to reconcile planetary habitability and well-being for all, but only if the transformation occurs in three pillars simultaneously, which is decarbonizing energy, shifting towards sufficiency, and a great reduction in labor hours, um, which is something that I think most people would be pretty excited about. That will lead to large changes in our consumption, food use, forest cover, use of all of— I hate to use the word resources. I've been reading Vanessa Andriotti and she talks about bio-intelligence. So I think of the entire world as bio-intelligence, not as resources. And what I really appreciate about this report is that they are looking specifically at reducing income inequality and equality across the board between genders. Women and men should make the same amount of money. So this focus on equality and democracy is huge in this report. And, you know, this last line, the compression of global inequality is a necessary condition for shared prosperity. I also want to frame this as, you know, when I— I've studied a lot now for the last couple years about what some people call the poly crisis, the perma crisis, the meta crisis, the meta consequence. When I look at what's going on in the world, what bothers me the most is the lack of imagination. I see people going, "Oh, well, you know, it's the endgame of extractive capitalism and it's all going to shit." I don't hear people saying, "We can do this. We can have a vision where this all works and we actually don't have the resource constraints, we have political will constraints, which are a completely different thing." You know, that's— I think Al Gore said political capital is a renewable resource. So it is definitely possible. What I like about this report is that they've done a deep dive on this. So let's go back here. Their plan rests on these 4 things that are so often treated separately: redistributing wealth, reforming international finance, radical transformation of energy system, and shifts in consumption patterns. All of these need to be placed in the context of sufficiency. And rarely do they show up in the same reports. People say, "Oh, we have to do this or that." But I've first time seen them all come together in one place here. So concretely, what they're saying is that by 2100, we would close the gap, which is currently about 16-fold between the poorest and the richest. We're talking aggregate, not the billionaires and poor people. So the share of the bottom half of global wealth goes from— sorry, the gallery's blocking this— what is it? Goes from 2% to 30%. Billionaires would have to bite the bullet and lose their share from 6% down to half a percent. Meanwhile, nearly 90% of the world's population doubled their income, and they stop working 2,100 hours a year and go down to about 1,000. Hours per year. That would allow for a massive infusion of investment into healthcare, into education, into making people's lives meaningful. All the studies that I've read say that, you know, meaning does not come from having more. Elon Musk should pay attention to this. Being a trillionaire is not going to make you a happier person. Connecting with people, having meaningful relationships, feeling like you're part of something larger than yourself, doing service, those are the things that consistently show up in the psychological literature as things that create meaning in life and lead to longer and healthier lifestyles. So this last one, global warming, this is actually under an older piece of science that I think has been abandoned now. I don't think we're going to hit 4 degrees, but still, warming would peak at 1.8 centigrade rather than over 2 or 3, which is where we're currently headed, which is a huge, huge thing for us to be paying attention to.

And, um, that is—

we're gonna show the graphs later. So Gil, that's, that's, uh, enough, I think, for us to get started in this conversation.

Let's get started. Let me ask first, have any of you had a chance to read or look at the report yet?

Cool.

A few. Okay, the links are in the chat, so it's there for you in the future. Um, but whether you've seen it before or, or hearing it for the first time, what is— what can you summarize provoked in you? What are your thoughts, feelings, reactions? Shel, go with you.

Yeah, it's incredibly exciting, Gil. It's just— I, I've been saying for a long time that we do not have problems with scarcity, we have problems of political will, and that we have— we live in an abundant universe. I think it was actually last month on this call that I learned that I had been grossly underestimating the amount of solar, um, relative to the amount of energy needs that humans think we have right now. That I had thought it was that 1 hour of solar provides what humans use in a year. It's actually more like 1 hour of solar provides current human energy, um, needs for 100 years, which is kind of mind-boggling. So we've got plenty of hours of solar and therefore plenty of energy, and more and more people are moving toward electrifying things. And one of the nice things about that is that you're reducing moving parts and complexity hugely, which is why you can have a hybrid car and still have both systems fitting under the same size hood that was there before because the electric part doesn't take up a whole lot of room. I have an electric car and it's not all a panacea. The first electric bill we got, we said, oh my God, and we went out and put a, a 7 kilowatt-hour solar system on our roof, um, a few months later. And now at this point, the electric company for the last 2 months has been paying us, which is a very nice, uh, way to power our electric car. But obviously we have big issues in terms of how it's distributed, who has access, and not just within the U.S. here but globally. The, um, the, the people who have the most wealth have been by and large bottom feeding on the bottom. They're feeding on the bottom. They're extracting resources and not giving much in return, and people are in poverty and on and on. We all know. But so I, I think the Piketty Report and its good that it's coming from a source that I've been hearing his name for 15 or 20 years probably. So it's— there's credibility there that maybe people on this call don't always have. But the question is how, particularly in this time of President Voldemort, when, you know, how we get it into the fabric of our society to the point where Biden made a nice little start, but it all got reversed the moment that Trump was in office. I'll stop there.

And well, thanks, Shel. We'll get to some of that political consideration a bit. I would just note that it hasn't all stopped and reversed. Solar generation in the United States now exceeds coal. It exceeds gas around the world. China's, you know, 50% of the vehicles being sold in China are EVs. The energy transition is on. Some would say it's done. It hasn't played out fully yet, but it's irreversible at this point.

Yeah, I know, right?

Physics and economics.

But there are some things like, like Trump killing wind projects that are 80% complete.

Paying a billion dollars of taxpayer money to kill wind projects that are 80% complete, to be clear. So no, there's that, and there are fundamental trends underneath. I, I think I mentioned in a prior call, I've talked with a couple of folks who were very solid global analysts looking at the state of corporate sustainability today, where you see a lot of what's called green hushing. And maybe backsliding. And the general read we're seeing on it is that, you know, 5% of companies have gone backwards, 5% have actually accelerated, 90% are quietly continuing to do the work. Why? Because the fundamentals are there. So they're staying low because of the politics. They've scrubbed certain words out of their websites and documents to not trigger the guys who get triggered. But heads down, do the work, because the work's got to happen. Shell, thank you. George, and then Randy, and then Richard and Muriel.

Yeah, I, I, I first saw this when it came out and there was a flurry on Twitter or X of criticisms, and there's a whole bunch of criticisms out there of the, of the economics behind this, which it should be useful to look at. When I looked at it, I thought that it was interesting. And hopeful, but I don't think you're going to get a global wealth fund of 10% of GDP globally anytime in my lifetime or beyond it. And I don't think that you're going to get 10% less material consumption. Those things seem to me unrealistic. I admire what they've done. But I don't think that they're being very realistic at all. I also think that they focus too much on the energy without looking at carbon drawdown and what geotherapy, using ecological systems to repair the damage that we've done, can actually do and how that can be a mechanism for greater welfare for all of us around the world, mostly because of, of agriculture and mariculture. Which really needs support. I remember reading about a Dutch Greenpeace report from the 1990s, which looked at resources around the world and then divided them equitably with all the people in the world. I haven't been able to find it since then, but That seems to me to be a way to approach this that may be more realistic, and I think it would be useful to go back to that kind of idea, looking at what the resources are and then looking at it equitably. But as Aristotle points out, and I put in the chat, you know, it's not the resources so much as the human wants, the individual human wants. And that's what we have to manage.

And George, thank you for that. The charting of what it would look like to share resources equitably is one of the things these folks do in this report to feed that imagination and possibility. I note that what you're saying is not realistic has two different dimensions to it. One is technical realism. Are these things feasible technically? And the other is, could the human will be mobilized to make the changes that are necessary? So I appreciate that you have an opinion about that. We probably all do. The job, I think, is not to say, does this sound real or not, but how do we engage this? What do we do? Where's the possibility? Do we, you know, do we as one kind of cohort want this world? If we don't want it, give it up. But if we want it, then the question is, okay, where do we go with that? Where does What are the concentric rings of concern and commitment that need to be moved for this to go? Randy, and then Richard, Muriel, and so on.

Just very welcome for one quick second, if I can.

Can, go ahead.

Looking around this room, it's great to see all these faces, many of whom I've known and met on these calls, many of whom I have yet to meet. But I noticed that most of us are around my age, and I'm a boomer, you know? And I think one of the things that's really important to consider is that I remember reading a paper by Jürgen Randers a few years ago where he said the younger generation is going to look at what we've done, they're going to say, "Fuck you. We ain't putting up with this shit anymore. You've hogged things forever." Gen Y, Gen Z, they are not interested in accumulating stuff. They want a much more equitable world. I think that's really important just to bear in mind. I'm not saying there's not enormous challenges and things that we'll run into. Political headwinds that'll make this project hard to realize. But the fact that it's out there, that it does stimulate the imagination, that there's a whole cohort of younger people, much like in the '60s, who are gonna say, "We're done with this Eisenhower bullshit. We want free everything, and we want to be able to live our lives in a much different way than you guys have done it. You've screwed up the planet for us. You're no longer gonna be in charge." I think that's actually very, very hopeful, and it'd be great if they could look at this as a guiding, "Hey, Here's a blueprint that shows there's historical precedent for these kinds of changes. You look at what happened between 1900 and 2000 in the Scandinavian countries, from being very poor to very wealthy and having very high quality of life because they import money into education, they poured money into social services. A capitalist would say that'll never happen. So let's be careful how we frame things in terms of is this too hard, is this impossible, is this unreasonable. 'Cause the unreasonable stuff is the shit that actually gets done in the world in the long run. Just my opinion on that.

There's that. Thank you for your opinion. You know what's not realistic? The Berlin Wall coming down without a shot being fired. That was unrealistic. And nobody predicted it 6 weeks ahead of it happening. Randy.

Yeah, well, thank you for bringing this report to my attention. I loved it. The most important thing for me was to have a picture, a picture of where we could be and to bring all these pieces together in a mesh instead of saying just environment or just equality or just political change, but knitting them together to create a possibility and even a probability if we could all do these things. And I was really impressed. I liked the graphs a lot to show the changes that are necessary and how that they can happen. I saved something I read about 10 years ago that said it would take $22 billion to feed everyone in the world, including distribution. And I just saved that because I'm like, yeah, let's do it. So it's, Like I think you said in the beginning, or somebody said, I think it was Ken, the lack of imagination. I think Ted Turner tried to have a contest about 15 years ago to have a novel that showed a positive future. And the best, the one that won it was not very positive, but it got into the mind of people and how we need to imagine Nothing's ever happened without somebody imagining it. And this, I think, really gives us— and, and give— they give us 70, 74 years. A lot can happen in 74 years. I remember talking to my grandmother when she was 70 and what she had seen. A lot can happen in 70 years. And, uh, a lot of us are over 70 and we've seen a lot happen, and it can happen. And to have picture and a road to get there in all these different dimensions moving together. And I've been to Scandinavia. I've seen that where no one's starving, no one's begging on the streets. It's all clean. It can be done. So I love that they went into history and the dramatic changes and that systems have been developed on small scale that actually work. So thank you for letting me share.

Thanks, Randy. Richard, welcome. Yeah, thank you.

There you go.

I just wanted to ask basically a question, and I apologize for those who've read the report and know the answer to this, but maybe someone can just very quickly summarize the key economic measures that are proposed to affect the redistribution. And I'll just note in passing that 2 approaches that I'm aware of that may be relevant. I don't know if they're in the report, but one was the Earth for All report, which I think had some similar aims. It was Potsdam Institute and the Doughnut Economics folks and Norwegian Business School, maybe a year-ish ago. Gil, I'm sure you're familiar with it. All proposed basically kind of a globalized nationalization, if you will, but sort of a citizens-driven nationalization of key resources, notably fossil fuels. And, and of course, distribution of shares of the AI companies has also been considered as a kind of a global citizen sovereign fund approach that could be imagined. And then last, I'll just mention the Global Carbon Reward of Dr. Dalton Chen, which is a central bank mechanism for debt-free finance for decarbonization, which was portrayed in the Ministry for the Future book by Kim Stanley Robinson under the name Carbon Coin. That is an initiative. It has gotten some attention that is out there as a concept. So plus we have UHI, Universal High Income, from Elon as a moniker, and Sam Altman and other notable billionaires and other folks have been pushing to really get this on the table from a policy perspective. ASAP because the job Armageddon is pretty much underway. So I'm just curious of those tinker pieces, if you will, and what's in this report. If somebody could give me a quick overview of how the 50,000 per year per person would be affected over time. Thank you.

I think some of those mechanisms are in here. Ken just posted in the chat a 6-page summary that he put together. It's a bullet-pointed summary, so you could scan that. Thank you. They do talk about a, a global justice platform with double majority rule, 55% of countries representing 60% of the world's population able to make decisions. They interestingly note that this could work whether or not the United States and China participate because they might not want to, or the United States in its current formulation might not want to. And they say in the absence of those, the climate damages that could be imposed on the United States by other countries through corrective taxes, tariffs, if you will, on 80% of US exports would raise the money that was necessary. Give you a picture of what we're talking about.

I don't know, a carbon border tax kind of concept.

Kind of a carbon, like a kind of a carbon tariff or a redistributional tariff. And United States might not want to participate, but if everybody else in the world slaps a tax on US exports, There you go. Uh, you might have noticed that the United States is not as powerful as it was 5 months ago, and the global perspective on US power and on the fossil fuel economy is not the same as it was 5 months ago. Speaking of impossibility, even 3 months ago, even 3, or even last week, or who knows what's going to happen on Friday when this thing gets signed or not signed. So, uh, you know, huge Like they say in football, backfield in motion. Richard, it's a shallow answer to a deep and important question. We're not going to be able to go into the details of it now, but I would encourage you to dig into the report. They're looking at technical and economic and political measures to get this. But to the point that's come up from a few of them, politics of this, how does this happen? It's not like someone, you know, no one's going to stand forward and make this happen by fiat. It's going to have to take a global groundswell from both grassroots and political and nation-state level. Uh, what I think these folks are doing is precipitating a conversation that hasn't been happening and now could start to happen with some framework. And people can disagree about the details, and they can argue about better ways to do things, but once we're into the conversation about what could a world that works look like, it's a very different conversation. Muriel, thanks for waiting.

Um, yes, thanks for the invitation. Um, so I did not have time to do more than scan the first few pages, plus which I found that the typeface was difficult for me to read online. But what I did not see was discussion or reference— maybe it's down there when you drill down to agriculture, regenerative farming. Um, people need to get grounded on making their living from the land that's nearby them, because that's the only thing that I think will give us the security to withstand the populism, the fascism, the fear. So one positive note, I just finished reading this book, Small Farm Conservative, I think was the title. But the guy, I became aware that there is this whole segment of the right-wing political category that is talking about the same kind of regenerative agriculture as that segment on the left. That was very encouraging. And let's see. So, but I think a lot of the people who are talking about a lot of this, a lot of us are city folk. And I'm in a position because I have a foot in farm world more than most city dwellers do. It's a great perspective and I highly recommend it. So externalities. It's my opinion that the way to address the externalities is to change people's values.? Because if we value the planet, it will be brought into our calculations. There are an increasing number and interest, it appears to me, in the younger generation in getting back to the land, doing regenerative farming. They need land and it is hard for them to find it. Where are the sustainable investments that we can put my investment, my retirement money in some of those, um, ag investments. Um, that's— we're gonna have to exercise our imagination. So here's a little, little thing that we could do that would cause a lot of attention. Let's ban all leaf blowers, all gas, electric, I don't care, ban all the leaf blowers because that would really raise consciousness. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, thanks, Muriel. Terry Gibbs, welcome. Good to see you. Been way too long, my friend.

Great to see you, Gil. Thanks for convening this. And I just want to express my appreciation for the topic. I wasn't aware of the report, and I think it's fabulous. And we have our incoming co-executive director. Terry Reitan, who's with us, and we would like to do an article about this.

Say, say, tell people, tell Terry, tell people who we is because most folks don't know.

Yes, thank you. We are the Alliance for Sustainability. We're 43 years old. Gil is a former board member of ours, and we used to be the International Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture. We're based here in Minnesota., but we work nationally. And what I guess I would say, maybe just like maybe 3 perspectives. First, way back in 1980 and '81, I was having discussions with Frances Moore Lappé, who had written Diet for a Small Planet and Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity. And in those books, she argued that we have enough food to feed everybody on the planet, but we have political and economic systems that stop people from getting the food they need. And I had a talk with her one night where I said, "Well, Frankie, you know, I totally agree with you, but the way we're growing the food is destroying the planet. So could we feed everybody without destroying the planet in the process?" And she said, "I don't know. Why don't you go find out?" And that led me around the world to 45 countries over a year and a half. And the answer I got is yes, that we can. And that led to the creation of the Alliance. So that's the first thing. And I appreciate, Gil, your comments about the Berlin Wall what's possible, what's not possible. I always appreciate that about that, that perspective you have. So that's the first thing. The second thing that I wanted to just mention was that later on, I don't remember, and I think it may have been referred to before, but there was a report by the UN that $40 billion, with $40 billion, we could meet the needs of the poorest people on the planet for all of their fundamental needs. $40 billion. And $40 billion was, I think, I don't remember the figure exactly, but if you took that, I think it's, I don't, I'm not remembering the numbers, like 100 of the wealthiest people on the planet, we could meet all the fundamental needs of the poorest people on the planet. And that was a really important report. And we spent a lot of time promoting it because people need to know that it is possible that we can achieve this. And I think that's why I appreciate what you said, Gil Friend. So this report I particularly appreciate because even though it was pointed out there are various difficulties and various challenges, I think we need to know, and I like the idea of the intersectionality, that we're looking at it from a whole systems perspective. And I just think that we're excited at the Alliance about this report and about how we can use it to actually, at a time when things don't seem very hopeful, that we can show people that with some changes, and I think that there's an increasing interest about why it is that so many, you have your first trillionaire, that why should few people have so much and then also determine our future with like AI. So I'm very excited and I just can't say how much I appreciate being part of this call. I'm flying to Barcelona for a family wedding, so I won't be able to stay the whole time. But I really, really appreciate it, and Terry will stay.

Thanks for coming, Terry.

Yeah.

Mark, if I could just jump the queue ahead of you, Jane Bird has had her physical hand up and her cat's paw hand up, so I'm going to call on her and then come back to you if that's okay.

Thank you.

Jane, go ahead.

Hello, everyone. The situation of the world's first trillionaire It's just crying out for the question of who can hire, who is wealthy enough to hire humanity to save the Earth? Or in essence, save humanity, because we know the Earth itself endures all kinds of creation-destruction cycles. But who can really pay for this shift from killingree, as Bucky called it, all the weaponry to livingry, to the real stuff that makes life go. And that's— it brings me to the question of when people get that wealthy or even a lot less wealthy, do they start to become very, very afraid of being targets of the mob? And start to actually become afraid of humanity. The very concept of large groups of people that, quote, have to be controlled somehow by governments or quasi-extragovernmental authorities like themselves. And dealing with that fear in those people and its effect on their imaginations and their interest in people like Curtis Yarvin, seems to me to what we really need to put our attention on and pray, you know, thank heavens that, that people were able to generate reports like this. But the human issue where the political will— having the political will really, really means dealing with this fear in other people's imaginations of the other, of masses of people that you might want to control or feel you have to control?

Well, you know, there's fear in some people's imaginations, and then there's also nurturing the imagination of people who might want this world, which they would argue, and I would argue, is most of everybody once you get a sense of the possibility of it. Uh, you know, Muriel spoke to this before about the common, you know, the common feelings among right-wing farmers as to left-wing farmers and urban environmentalists and so forth. There's a lot of common ground to be found. And in my experience, it's often blocked by people saying, oh, that's a pipe dream. It's just not possible. It'll never work. But once we can start showing examples on the ground of it working, as Terry has been doing and Richard has been doing and others of you have been doing for years, you can't say it's impossible if it's there.

Well, that's how—

You can say it's impossible for it to scale, but if you can show what, as these folks have done, how it could, then the conversation shifts.

You do, you start to give people something else to identify with. I think, I think currently a lot of people, um, a significant part of our population in America have identified with very, very wealthy people who can control a lot of things. Unlike me being able to control my cat. So this watching soccer games, I see what avatars people have for their whole countries in these soccer players. And people who've identified with Trump, they love his lawlessness because they want that freedom that lawlessness represents.

Some do.

I'm saying some do, and this is a significant— the some who do are empowering tremendous amounts of, of difficulty. So the challenge of our imaginations in identifying with, with different avatars, different representatives of The vision that's laid out in a document like this becomes very, very, very important, and the artist's ability to represent reality to ourselves becomes paramount. And the artists who can interpret this document and promulgate its memes through the culture are very, very much needed.

Yeah, let me just, as a sort of art, let me just share one picture here if I can. Um, if this works, can you see a graph?

Yeah.

Um, this is, this is the world. These are different regions of the world. The light green is the percentage of population whose income would increase a lot, 50%, more than 100% income increase is the light green. The dark green is 20 to 100% income increase. The yellow is 0 to 20% income increase. The purple is income decline.

Excuse me, Gil, could you make that bigger? Command plus on a Mac or Control plus on a PC.

I can try. Does that help?

Much better. Yes.

Okay. Thank you, George.

Thank you.

So all the green and yellow are the percentage of population whose income would increase. The purple, the percentage of income would decrease. Here's your political landscape. Now, you know, there is a 2% of the world's population that may not like this idea. It's 2% and this is 98%. So worth the discussion. Mark Roos, and then we'll go to breakouts.

Okay.

Thank you. Can you hear me?

Yeah.

Okay. So we can about triple the impact of the political and macroeconomic intervention that this is talking about by fully supporting inventors and others with the strongest designs for disruptive technologies in energy, transportation, construction, and information technology. The specific technologies I support can all be at global mass scale by 2032, given near-term funding to complete developing and commercializing those already prototyped. The true path is combining political will, technology brilliance, and the creative destruction mission of capitalism. And the alliance that, you know, $40 billion that was mentioned a bit ago is less than a month of profits from a suite of technologies that I've been calculating by 2030. You know, it's, it's a lot less. Yeah, when we get the right technologies and we scale them to global use, the result is billions, hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars in each of those technologies in terms of profit, where the profit comes from selling at market rate or below market rate in the industrialized companies. Countries and greatly subsidizing the sale and financing the sale into developing world. And I have a lot more, but that's enough for now.

Put your contact information in the chat for people who want to follow up. We're about to go to breakout, but John, I see your hand up. So let's hear from you briefly and then we'll do that. Need your mic off. Microphone.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you. I'm new to this group. Newish. I think I've been here once or twice before. I sense this is a progressive left-leaning group. That's great. There aren't enough of us. However, we might think about entertaining a set of strategies. I agree, yeah, 2% will be against it and 98% would be for it if everybody understood everything about it, which is a big challenge. But rather than go to war with the 2% who are very well armed, much better than we are, we can think about some kind of strategies that might sound ideologically contrary, but that actually can work. I belong right now, I'm in a place in Mill Valley called The Portal. It's not for poor people. You know, you gotta belong and you gotta pay. And not everybody can come here. And there is an occasional Maserati in the parking lot. However, there's also a lot of people here who are questioning capitalism. We are going on a mission in a couple of weekends. We're going to a land experience. We're gonna be doing some actual agriculture and contact with animals, et cetera. So, but what I'm gonna, where I'm going with this is this thing works in part because it's this kind of way station between unbridled capitalism and completely whatever-driven, completely compassion-driven politics. And it's allowing people to hang out in there and explore these other options. So I just would put on the table the consideration of way stations and ways to help people transition to and redefine what enough is. I think we gotta do a lot of work on making what looks to a rich person like poverty actually get perceived as wealth because it can be, particularly with social integration and social support.

John, I'm so glad you've raised this. The question of enough is a big one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is a trillion enough? Well, not for that guy. Is a billion enough? Yeah, it's $100 million enough, right? I mean, this doesn't say necessarily take everybody down to the same income. There could be room for wealthy people to be wealthy, to never have a care in the world, to never worry about anything. But how much does that take? Maybe it's $100— you know, Scott Galloway says $100 million, says anything beyond that's just a waste of effort.

Yeah, I also think there's some element—

some— there's somewhere in there an element of safety. But the other element of safety, which a couple of people have alluded to before, is torches and pitchforks at the castle gates. It's another kind of safety to consider. We're in an unstable world. How do we move towards some kind of metastability? And Ken, you haven't busted people, including me, for saying we a lot, but he'll always challenge us on that.

Ken Beckerman, you listen to this. I'm in Spain now. I'm just chill, man. What can I say?

It's not about the money. It's not about money. It's about what you can buy with the money. If it ain't on the shelf, you can't buy it.

There you go.

Yeah.

So, uh, we're gonna go to breakouts, um, and I have two questions just to simulate that. You don't have to answer these questions, just get the conversation started. So here they are, putting them in the chat. How might you imagine this world coming into being? How might you imagine your life in such a world? And what would your role be in bringing it into being? We're sticking with imagination here because it's so easy, and I'd love to host a call sometime on what do you do when you come up with this great idea, but go, oh, you're— that's too utopian, that'll never happen. And it's like, it's a— that's what we call a thought-ending cliché. It cuts our imagination off. We don't even get the chance to exercise, well, under what conditions could that happen? So I'm going to propose to you that you suspend your your disbelief and your judgments about this is too unreasonable and just say, well, if it were possible, what would my role be in that? How could I support that? What could I do in my life to move it a little bit forward? Don't have to take on the whole thing. What's one action I could take? What's, you know, maybe I start hosting calls. Maybe I just read this report and start sending it to friends, say, hey, let's talk about this. What do you think about this?

Right?

Maybe I send the report to my Congress peeps.

Yeah.

But we're asking you to do two unusual things in this breakout. One is Don't dive into what's wrong with this report and why it's never worked. Just don't even go there. You can do that another time. Don't go there. And second is self-manage your time so that everybody in the breakout has a chance to speak.

Yeah.

And I'm going to set my alarm for 15 minutes. You'll have 3 to 4 people per room. So here we go. Enjoy.

All right.

Welcome back. Hope you had a nice time getting to know each other and Speaking about what's up, so we'd love to hear from anybody who'd like to share what they discovered in their breakout room.

Yeah, hi, Brad Warren here. So John Kelly, who is on the screen, actually for me in the top left, he brought up this terminology that he uses called the sacred multiplier. And I just was like, I just lit up because I was talking about how I try to do whatever I can, even if it's just one newspaper that I recycle or one can.. And he said, yes, but you never know how many times that gets multiplied when you tell people that you do that, and then they do it, and then they tell their neighbor, and then they tell their whole block, and so on and so forth. So I, I'm, I'm gonna start looking in my life for this sacred multiplier wherever I can now and just point out to, hey, you just did a sacred multiplier. Don't put yourself down. That's gonna increase 10, 100. Just keep sharing, keep sharing. So thank you, John. He's on there. He's eating now, but just, well, thank you, Brad.

And thank you, John. That's very cool.

Yeah.

John, I'd like to, I'd like to know what makes the multiplier sacred.

Ooh.

If you care, if you care to tell us.

Yeah, no, it's, well, it's important. And I, I had to preface the word sacred cuz I said I start with the assumption that all the people in the room might include people for whom any organized religion is just something that they've distanced themselves from intentionally, and they don't wanna have anything to do with any kind of organized religion. Or they might, they might actually have a view of the world and a view of their participation in the world that interacts with a concept of divinity. And I said it, I wanted a word, I'm using sacred carefully, So with that caveat, so with that caveat, what do you mean by sacred? By sacred, I mean, it's really the intangibility, if you will, or the, it reinforces the purpose. That's the sacred part. It reinforces the purpose of the action.

Got it.

Sometimes in an indirect way. In an intangible way.

Got it. Thank you.

Does that work?

It does.

Thanks.

We could think about what is sacred and what's the, you know, people, you know, sacred supports life ultimately. And, and that's why people make things sacred because they, they support the life within them and they support being able to coexist with each other and nourish and teach each other and all that, you know.

Thanks, Mark. Yeah, you're welcome. So let's hear from the breakouts. Who, who would like to share something from your conversation? Or who'd like to just sit together in silence?

Yeah, Charles got his hand up.

Okay.

Yeah. So we, I, I started the conversation by reminding people of the old Ernest Callenbach book, Ecotopia, which is a path to the kind of world we're talking about. It's not either in terms of the process of how it happened or in the way that he describes his ideal society. It wouldn't necessarily be my ideal, but it's one path and we have many paths and we've had them for many years. We had somebody else in the room brought up the idea that marketing has kind of pushed us toward overconsumption, and before that everybody was kind of happy every after, living with enoughness. And I actually have a client who's working on a book about sufficiency and is going to go to press later this year. But I actually disagreed with that because Marketing exists at least as far back as the Old Testament. Or if you think about the prophets, they were marketers. They were marketing a set of ideas and beliefs. But basically, we all feel like there are paths and there are possible. And I think our work, collective our here, is figuring out those paths and figuring out how to make those paths not only paletteable, but enjoyable for enough people that we reach tipping points.

Thank you, Shel. Who else would like to share something from their breakout that they discovered? What came up in your imagination, either yours or your collective imagination, as you were talking?

Oh, some hippie values still exist. That, that came up. And the idea of an alliance between the different parts of, you know, like the different parts of the elephant, different facets of the diamond. We need politics, we need social media and all that. We need technologies, we need disruptive capitalism, or the creative power of the creative destruction power of capitalism. But I would add, I would put an adjective on that capitalism, say mission capitalism, you know, benefit. So, and that's, that's possible, you know, that's what we're up to.

Thanks, Mark. Monica, how about you?

Hi, thank you.

Um, I just wanted to share something real quick, and for me it's, um, I used to be so scared to say anything. I'm like, I don't want to sound stupid, I don't want to seem uninformed. And then I was like, wait a minute, why, why do I care so much what people think about me? And so I just want to share with you all my card that says Donut Economics on it. Um, and then it has bunch of really great uplifting quotes like all over. I'm just going really fast, but then it has like The Great Simplification back here on YouTube, and it just goes all the way back around. And it's like, I do this because I want to share what has helped me, what I think is a very like just amazing information like donor economics. And I, and I'm like, I know I get looks, but whatever. And so it's like the more that you talk about these ideas, the more other people get this, like, strength or courage to do it themselves too. It's like, you know, someone else is doing it. So I just wanted to share that, that that's what I will continue to do and continue to be in the community. And yeah, I just know that I just love being on these calls so much because it's just like we're, we're human beings that care.

So thank you. Monica, you may not be able to see it on your phone, but there's lots of smiles in room.

Yay!

I wonder, are you just getting looks from your car, or are you getting conversations also? Oh, both.

I'm getting, I'm getting, yeah, yeah, yeah, and this. So I really, I'm like, you know what, that's from your perspective. I know where I'm at, and I'm just thankful that I'm not angry like that, that I have to flip somebody off like that.

So Thanks, Monica. Terry, how about you?

Um, yeah, what we talked about was, um, there, there can even be currently solutions that are being explored, um, and/or tested. And so it, it's— there's the, the process of getting everyone to say agree to the what, and that's one step, right? But then to really get everyone to agree to the how is, is about conversations. And how do you start the conversations? How do you help to make potential solutions less threatening to others? Or, you know, that kind of thing. And so it's really about how do you start that conversation, find out what's important to all of the various parties that are going to be impacted, and then develop a way to get there that everyone can agree to, kind of a win-win approach. And that's going to be, I think, even harder than getting people to agree to the why. What has to change?

So I'm curious, Terry, in your work around conversations, what have you found to be some effective ways to get those conversations started? Do you have some hints and tips for us?

Um, well, what I learned is you ask what is important to, to people and start there, and, and also help them to Well, it's really empowering people by helping them to see their own power and their own, you know, empowerment in a situation. And that— and it— which also ties to, you know, mental health and the fact that societally we have not given enough credence to mental health and what that has done on a large scale. But it's really finding out what is it that's important to all of the different parties that are impacted and then trying to come up with a win-win-win solution that's gonna be agreeable to everyone.

Lovely, thank you. Peter, did I see your hand up there?

Well, we were—

Terry and I were, were, um, together, uh, in that breakout room. And, uh, so in a way, what we're doing at your expense is, um, continuing our conversation. And, um, I, I, I made a little note of Terry saying getting everyone to agree. Well, I don't think you can get anyone to to agree to anything, particularly if you're married to them. And so the skills that I think we need are really to learn how to have different conversations that are free of blame, and be brave rather than fearful in our conversations, and be willing in a way to when you talk to anybody and get to where they are, or the, the other person that you're talking with, start where they are rather than where you want them to be or where you are.

I think you'll find a lot of folks on this call agree with you about that for sure. Thank you. Thank you, Mark.

Yeah, the American Sharet Institute Institute up in Portland trains people in how to have those kinds of conversations and facilitate it. It's facilitated process which includes conversation, but it also includes like everybody up at the butcher paper around the wall drawing pictures of what they want. Um, and I, I know that can be extremely powerful I've been in a bunch of charrettes, and I also had saw the report on the original charrette that happened in Toronto, um, back in '73 or '74.

Yeah, Mark, thanks for that. Even, even if you're not able to do training, just the simple secret of being curious about another person and listening, and listening, and listening for what they care about and asking And when you talk to somebody who you might profoundly disagree with, you know, there's the reaction of saying, you're an idiot, you're wrong, I don't care. Or this possible reaction of saying, I haven't heard that before. Tell me why you think that. How did you come to that? Let's have a conversation about that. Opening something up rather than closing it is always a possibility. Mark, thank you. We'll go to Roberta.

Yes, thanks, Gil. I think the report, the summary of the report, just gives such a clear vision of what is possible, even if we're talking out decades. But, and there's so much that I'm hearing here about what's happening, and not just here, but in other parts of my life. And what I'm curious about is if there's a clearinghouse or an organization that tracks and communicates what's happening, so that there's a global connection to all the positive that's happening, telling the stories, keeping track of it. I see that kind of documentation in other places around smaller, not insignificant, but specific topics. I'm just wondering if there's anybody who knows anything about it, because that's the place that I've been.

There are tons, Roberta. Tons upon tons. And some people will probably post a few links in the chat before we're done.

Peter, why— I've seen your hand up twice and it's gone down. Did you want to make the third time the charm?

Sure, why not. I really endorse this idea that a— that what will need to emerge at some point is a new conversational capability to be able to address differences in perspective that instead of being the source of nasty argument can be an opening for mutual exploration. And part of that is grounded in everything someone says makes sense, everything. In some way to them at that moment. And how we explore the sense of another and allow them to get a sense of our sense of things, I think, is a skill that provides a chance for alignment about what matters. And you don't have to agree on every damn thing, but you have to find a way forward. Into a future that works and it's unpredictable. So I really, I think the emphasis on conversational skill is crucial, crucial, crucial.

And the other Peter—

It's gonna happen anyway because we need it.

Well, I'm sorry, Peter, because I think I jumped in to your first Peter hand raise.

All right, you said the same thing I said in a certain way.

Well, yeah, so yes, I've been focusing for a while on building my skills in conversation, and I've been doing it through my role as a mediator, which is trying to facilitate other people having difficult conversations, and the most important conversations are very often the most difficult conversations. And there is quite a bit of literature actually on this general subject. I live in Massachusetts, and some of the professors at the Harvard Law School have has actually provided a lot of interesting books on these general subjects. So I think that to focus on having— improving your conversation skills is really important. And I think that that will help bring the sort of the conversations that we need to have forward. And I think it's incumbent upon us to develop the skills to help other people have different kinds of conversations.

What a lovely note to go out on. Why don't you come back next month for another conversation with us all?

Gil?

And, and, and why don't you, if you have a chance to look at the report or the summaries of or just the article in The Guardian, which is in my LinkedIn post on this, you've probably seen. Use this as an— use the report as an opportunity for conversations with other people. Hey, did you see this thing that I saw? What do you think about this? And remembering that part of the art of conversation is the art of listening and learning to listen deeply and learning to listen deeply for what people really care about. Because when we get to what people really care about, guess what? A lot of the political differences soften.

Yep.

Maybe dissolve, maybe recede to the background because the common ground is so strong that from there we can maybe find pathways into action that we can actually share together. So thank you for sharing this call with us. Uh, love having you here. Uh, we love hearing from you. If you have comments, mail to us afterwards. Uh, We'll be back next month, always the third Wednesday of the month at noon Pacific time. Please tell your friends, as Ken said at the top, bring people who are not usually in this conversation with us so we can broaden it and see where we go together. And Ken, I wonder if you have any closing music queued up.

I just might.

You might, because, you know, we always end with the reminder 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.