EP 156: Cultural & Societal Resilience | Mark Eckhardt

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. My name is Fleet Mall, your host and today I'm having a conversation with Mark Eckhart, CEO of Common A, a global organization that incubates transformational projects around the world. So in this conversation we talk about how we can do a better job of sense making and build resilience by making informed and impactful decisions, really on a micro level to create change collectively. He talks about what he calls the four meta crises, which are increasingly complex and outstripping our ability to problem solve both individually and collectively. We talked about how to develop our capacity for sense making, for good sense making through prioritizing self care and education. And we also spoke about how to respond constructively to systemic racism by addressing it in impactful ways that will really make a difference. So give it a listen. Great conversation with Marc Eckhart, CEO of Common. Welcome Mark.

Thank you, Fleet. It's good to be with you again.

Great to have you again. My name is Fleet Maul, your co host for today and we're here on day three, which is about cultivating resilience at the community, cultural and societal level. And I'm really excited about the conversation we're going to have today with Mark Eckert and I want to give you a little bit of his background. So Mark is the CEO of Common, a global creative accelerator and community that catalyzes products and ideas for social good and and founder of One Million Truths. Mark works with entrepreneurs, businesses and organizations to advance social innovation and promote a new way of doing business, one that is pro people and pro planet. He maintains that a better world comes down to creating powerful experiences that remind people they actually love and care about the welfare of other human beings. With this philosophy in mind, Mark has been called on the has been called on to work with high level executives, renowned creative professional startups, large corporations, and even US Presidential candidates. Mark has been a mentor to a gamut of business professionals, helping them find the tools they need to generate experiences that inspire people to take action. He previously spent 15 years as a successful producer, composer and performer and trained for 15 years to become a Zen Buddhist priest, furthering his exploration of the human condition. And Mark says that together we can become fearless.

Indeed.

Yes, indeed.

So.

Yeah, you have such an interesting background and we share a Zen background and we kind of both share, both being Zen practitioners and being entrepreneurs, you were on a track to really go even further into it before you made a shift. And we'll talk about that in a moment. But I just wanted to first kind of reflect on these past couple of years that we've been through, which been incredibly challenging with the COVID 19 pandemic. And I know you recently went through a bout of that yourself. And after having kind of avoided it all that time, and.

Along with that, we're facing the existential crisis of climate change, which is more in our face than ever. I think that disruptions or climate disruptions are becoming really obvious and already sever impacting some of the more vulnerable marginalized communities around the world.

We have ongoing geopolitical conflicts and wars and refugee crises around the world. And now we have this latest tragic invasion and refugee crisis in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. It's a really challenging time for humanity on this planet. And of course, there's a lot of us, more of us than ever before. And that creates a lot of pressures.

On each other and on the environment. And so we have some really serious challenges. And at the same time, at least in the west, certainly in the US and I think to some degree in Europe, you know, we seem more divided than other. The cultural political landscape is more divisive and polarized than ever, which, which really brings concern for me about whether we can find the social cohesion we need to come together and bring solutions, some, or at least figure out how to relate with some of really daunting challenges we're facing. So I wondered if you could reflect on that landscape, on what these last couple of years have been like for you, especially as an American black man with your background, but living in Europe, living in Denmark, you're much closer to what's going on in Ukraine. And I'm sure that's impacting Europeans in a way that Americans can't even feel. So I'm just curious about how it's been for you and what's kind of going on for you personally on that level.

Thank you. That's a big question with a lot of parts and aspects to it, as you just shared and explained.

I'll start with my experience of Europeans and being in Europe. Immediately, as tensions increased and accelerated.

Older generations who were alive during World War II and soon thereafter immediately started referring to that conflict. So you could just see the trauma coming back to life. And on the surface again.

I think a lot of people were shocked. I didn't think that they thought it would go get to this point or go this far. And certainly there's just very practical realities beyond just the emotional ups and downs. Prices of utilities are increasing. There's significant concern about food supply and all those kinds of everyday life components. They're all under scrutiny and all very uncertain at this moment.

I think one of the good things about being in Europe and being part of a social democracy is at least the system here in Denmark is cohesive. But it's also very adaptive too. And it has the resources and it has the history of responding and being oriented around, you know, the needs of the people here. I think that that is certainly an advantage. There's much less of. I'm in it for myself and I need to prioritize my own survival. There's a significant degree of belief and faith that we'll move forward together.

Well, that's wonderful. And I wish I could say we have that feeling in my country right now. It's. It's quite a bit more divisive than that.

So. And I can well imagine, you know, there aren't so many people still alive that went through World War II, but I would imagine it's like awakening this or opening this wound in the collective unconscious, even for people that didn't, you know, whose parents went through World War II. My parents went through World War II. And it's in my blood and my DNA, you know, whatever they transferred to me in terms of that experience. So I imagine there's widespread kind of reopening of a lot of wounds and trauma across Europe.

Absolutely, absolutely.

So you were a Zen practitioner on track to be a full time Zen priest and teacher. And you were dedicating your life to that for about 15 years. And then you took kind of a sharp right turn and decided instead to accomplish maybe even some similar goals that drove that path to get out and really bring value to life and to the world. And you felt you could do that in a more entrepreneurial way and supporting.

Entrepreneurial people. And so I'm curious about that shift. And also I know you're still a Zen practitioner and how your Zen practice supports your.

How your Zen practice supports your resilience. So maybe just a little bit about that journey, that shift, and, and how that context still guides your life and how it supports your resilience.

Sure. Well, my Zen practice is everything. It is the foundation for my life. It's the context for my life. And everything that I do is generated and can be traced back to my practice. I chose to leave formals and training after really kind of sitting with my experience of trying to bring the practice into the world and trying to bring it into kind of everyday life and business and really struggling. And so we're going back to 2008 and 2009. It just wasn't translating in a way that.

Was equal to my desire to make a difference. And, and at that time, it's so interesting, you know, here we are in 2022. But back then I found the Buddhist community, at least in America, to be very small and perceived to be way out on the fringe or on the end of the spectrum. And it just, there was a disconnect there that I didn't see being resolved or bridged in a way that suggested that I could be as effective as I had hopes of being. And so I made the tough choice to step out of formal practice. I took the vows. I am still a Zen Buddhist priest. It's just the form of my practice looks different from that of many of my peers who are still in it in the traditional sense. The other thing that I'll add to that, and I think this is important, especially given the polarization, the political divide in the U.S. the Santa Monica Zen center was super effective and really powerful. And I attribute that to our teacher, coach, of course, Yoshin Roshi. But at the same time, politics started getting woven into our practice and our Sangha more and more. And it ultimately broke down because of the same dynamics that we're seeing in the United States. So I had a little bit of foreshadowing of where we were going as a country at that time. And it was deeply concerning because the Sangha really got fractured to the point where it could no longer function. And I said to myself, wow, if this is going on in a much larger kind of meta sense in the country, we're in for a very hard future and hard time and lo and behold, it all's kind of proven out to be true.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's a whole nother conversation. But it's certainly been my experience and the, in the various Buddhist Sanghas and the Zen tradition and Tibetan tradition that I'm part of. What's going on in the cultural landscape of America has also impacted these communities in really deep and fractious ways.

So you decided to make a difference in the world in a more entrepreneurial way and supporting.

Incentive based, market based, capitalist approaches to.

Making a difference in the world with socially purposed business and social entrepreneurship. A lot of, let's say, more progressive people tend to associate capitalism purely with kind of a negative thing and purely Almost an evil force and certainly unrestrained laissez faire capitalism, unregulated capitalism, and in fact corrupt capitalism that's been very extractive and exploitative, has created a lot of collateral damage and certainly contributed to where we are, are with climate change, that and the size of our population.

But there are other alternatives. And I know your focus is on what maybe some would call a conscious capitalism or. Anyway, I'll let you talk about it. How do you see that making use of incentive based systems and market based systems can actually drive positive social change and even environmental changes?

Sure. I'll start with, I believe the 2021. I think it was the 2021 Edelman Transferometer report. And so at this point in time, if you look at all of the domains that people can trust or believe in, you've got business, you've got government, you've got media, and you've got nonprofits. At least as of 2021, maybe that's late 2021, the domain that is the most trusted by the public right now is business. That shocked me. Absolutely shocked me. Now if I just take that and I go back to 2009 or 2010, as I was transitioning out of formal Zen training and practice.

That was the point where the notion of conscious capitalism and social enterprise really kind of was thrust forward, forward into the foreground and into culture. And so right there I was presented with this form of doing business that was very much in alignment with, in the same spirit of my Zen training. And so I grabbed a hold of it, believing in the effectiveness or the efficiency. And I'm saying that in the most positive sense of business versus some other forms of enterprise. And I just got very lucky. I just met it at the right time and I happened to meet the right group of people that were already very immersed in the space. And it has proven to be just an incredible experience. Worked with a lot of people and we've done a lot of good. And we've also built a lot of enterprise value at the same time.

Well, there's no doubt that incentive based systems, for all the collateral damage that I described, have created more prosperity for more people, distributed more resources for more people.

Overcome more illnesses, lowered infant mortality rate and many, many things than any other attempt at socioeconomic organization or systems. And yet there are challenges. And so how do we make that transition from a very exploitative, extractive, kind of unregulated or greed based capitalism to a conscious capitalism and get those economic engines driving change the way we want it to? So I know that's very much about what your work is about at Comm. And today on the summit. Our overarching inquiry for the summit is how do we develop the individual, collective, systemic resilience we need to come together and face and deal with and find solutions for the really daunting challenges that we're facing today. And in particular today on day three, we're looking at how do we create resilient communities and cultures of resilience and a more resilient society and the relationship between that and things like economic and social justice and racial justice. And so your work at common you have been incubating. And my understanding is you've been incubating socially purpose businesses of various kinds. And you know, I know you work with diverse groups of people. So what are you learning in that process about how we can create a more resilient society and what might be some of the drivers of that?

Sure, there's two things that come to mind. The first is up until now, we've really lacked the accounting systems that are necessary to support.

A wider experience in generation of resiliency. So right now we all know that the accounting system is just simply financial oriented and based. But if you go back to the work of Buckminster Fuller, for example, he recognizes up to eight, depending on who you're talking to, at least six different forms of value. And so now is the time to really lean into creating systems and ways of accounting for those different types of value and honoring them and rewarding them and incentivizing them. So for example, just a very simple example within the context of the common community. So we have members from all around the world, and there's a wonderful woman by the name of Marla Riegel, who on her own, without us asking or prompting her to, will pick up the phone and randomly call new members who have just joined the fold. Typically in a business community, you wouldn't make anything of that. You maybe say a thank you, but there's no way to capture that value that she's creating and she's actually catalyzing. And so we built a system to start capturing that and registering it and acknowledging her and increasing the overall value and resiliency of the community at the same time. The other side, the other thing that came up for me is just, and I think we touched on this towards the latter end of our prior conversation is, you know, we're at this time in between worlds and we've really kind of exhausted almost all of the ways in which we can respond to significant uncertainty and Transition. And the big one that I see, that's just a requirement, it's a mandate, is that we must evolve ourselves. We must develop greater capacity to hold perspectives, and we must develop the capacity to interact with conflict in a constructive manner. So it's those two things. We must evolve our capacity within ourselves to be in the world and in relationship with other people. And we also need to create systems that capture and register and acknowledge and compensate and incentivize all the other forms of value other than money and finance.

Absolutely. Consciousness needs to catch up with the problems we're facing today, and it has to catch up at scale. And I have no doubt that we can find very creative solutions to many things. I'm not naive about climate change and the disruptions not just simply going to be a technological fix, although I think technological innovation will play an important role. We also need to really shift the way we're living and we need to focus on adaptation because we are going to be dealing with some serious disruptions. But I think.

The human spirit is incredibly innovative. And I think any way that we can kind of unleash the positive aspects of that in ourselves and for others, there's always tremendous hope and possibility. I know. I read a recent book piece, well, back in January, I think that you did for Medium and about your work at Common. And in there you talked about how over the last two years you'd been somewhat internally focused within the organization, really taking care of your people. And. And I wonder what that journey has been like, because it's, you know, you mentioned at the outset that in Denmark there's a culture of, you know, taking care of each other. We'll get through this together instead of everybody being out for themselves. So during this time you've had a more inward focus with Common. It seems like a natural turning in and a challenging time to make sure you're well resourced to fulfill your mission. So how has that been?

Yeah, that's a really great question. Thanks for asking it.

So I was in the US when Covid really started to reveal itself. And it just became very clear very quickly for me that that point in time was not a time for us to promote ourselves and to try to grow or take advantage of the situation. What became clear was. Or what was clear is that we had a tremendous amount of resiliency and resources in the community in and of itself, and that we had everything that we needed. And so it was just a matter of just dialing up the way in which we engaged with that and our members and activated it. So at that point in time, you know, a significant majority, a significant portion of our members, businesses were vulnerable and threatened. And we just engaged. It just made sense that if we were going to call ourselves a community, we needed to tend to our community members. I mean, to do anything else just would have think. I just kind of. It just wouldn't have worked. It would have been bad choice. And I'm very proud to say that with the first round of COVID for anybody who chose to really fight and do whatever they needed to do to adapt and pivot their business, everyone.

Is functioning and operating to this day. It's a huge feat in complement.

Of just the capacity of the community to really rise and function as a way that we, in the ways that we've always intended.

The other thing that we did was also just. We just told the truth and created space for people to express how hard it was and how scared they were and how much they were hurting because of the disruption. And that's something that we've heard people describe as very unique and very different from other communities that they're part of. And that openness and that ability to be with that part of the human experience is just a direct translation of our Buddhist training.

Let me circle back to this idea of conscious capitalism and then I want to ask you some examples of some of the businesses that are in your community so we get a real sense of what we're really talking about here. So you mentioned Buckminster Fuller had a scheme of some kind of eight values other than just the financial bottom line. And sometimes we hear about the triple bottom line. And sometimes, well, there's that work that's been done in Bhutan and around the world around the idea of Gross National Happiness, which expands obviously instead of just Gross National Product. And.

I've often had the idea ever since I was really in college that.

If we could just get businesses to pay the true cost of doing business, it would transform the whole thing. Because a lot of the exploitative forms of capitalism that are not so healthy are always exploiting something. Whether it's cheap labor in another country or able to get resources with subsidies from the government or whatever. They're exploiting something and then not paying for the pollution they're causing, or not taking care of the workers or taking care of the society in which their labor comes from, and these kind of things. So if businesses truly had to pay the true cost of labor, and we as consumers were willing to pay the true cost of what it cost to produce the goods it really shipped the whole thing. So could you give some examples of some of the businesses that common supports that are part of your community so we get a sense of what this really looks and feels like on the ground?

Sure. The first is I'll share with you, is called Syntropic World. It was founded by Christine McDougall, who is a ferocious student of Buckminster Fuller. So she is actually a training and education enterprise and a consultancy too. And she is helping people design businesses that really cause zero harm. So they address things like labor and how to make sure you're not exploiting human beings in the context of labor. And they look at the materials and the methods of. Of production and do a very, very deep dive into science and nature and those systems and dynamics. And the result of that are businesses that look and feel and behave very differently. On the other side of the spectrum, Graywell Gin.

An ethically manufactured and produced brand of gin that's done incredibly well. They've exceeded all expectations for performance and impact in the first two years. And they even partnered with Oceana to help push through new legislations that will remove certain types of commercial fishing nets from being used. Off the coast of California, we have an incredible director and documentary film producer, Kerry David. She's the founder of over and Above Africa. Basically what they do is they go and they document on film the work to protect endangered species. And she. She has also produced the first film ever about the women on the front lines of that battle to protect endangered species too. We've got everything from that to some of the biggest digital production companies, to consultancies that use data to unearth and illuminate inequity in the way people are designing systems and things like that. Overall, we work with people in 24 countries and 28 industries and we work with, with people who are just solo entrepreneurs all the way to folks who are large corporations that are publicly traded.

I wonder if your work borders on the emerging blockchain revolution and that world of smart contracts, because I don't even know enough about it to be dangerous. But from what I have read, there's a lot of promise that this could return ownership and sovereignty to the individual over one's data, so that there could be fair compensation for one's data instead of this current situation where we, we trade our data for conveniences with all kinds of online things and then our data gets used in all kinds of ways and really exploited. And that there's some idea that these smart contracts could set up a situation that would change how data is used. I Wonder if you're seeing any of that and if any of your community companies are involved in that.

Several people are. So an example of a company who is part of our community is Cerb Serve is using blockchain and other really kind of emergent technologies in the context of finance to really couple technology and trusts. And they're doing so in a way that's solely dedicated to addressing inequity and inequality in the financial world and spectrum. So that's a great example. Recycle Go is another enterprise that is using the blockchain, but they're using the blockchain to trace plastics in the supply chain. And so that's a very, very interesting endeavor. And then while our platform, which we're very, very close to introducing, to capture and share the flow of value that's moving in our community, while it's not built on the platform, the blockchain, it will be. So in version two or three, we'll bring that technology into. Into that design.

That's great. That's really exciting. So circling back to that piece you wrote for Medium about your work at Common, which was a great piece, you. You talked about four meta crises that we're facing today. Crises of capability, authority, sense making and meaning. And, and you talk about how increasing complexity and the intersection and interaction of these meta crises is outstripping our problem solving methods and capacity. Could you address each of those briefly and talk about, you know, that that's kind of.

You know, appeals like the complexity of getting away from us and how do we catch up with it. Right. So could you describe that problem a bit and how we might work with it?

Sure, sure. I'll do my best to kind of back my way into that. I started.

How do I want to begin this? So you're aware of One Million Truths, which is our initiative to address racial conflict and to foster racial truth and reconciliation. Very early in that work and then in those pursuits, I ran into many walls. I really saw, after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of conversations with people who were working in social justice and grassroots movements and all that kind of stuff, had a lot of people say, you know, we're taking one step forward and we're getting blown back, too. A lot of people within large corporations saying we've invested millions in DEI programs and initiatives and we're just not seeing the results that we expected to see. Granted, there's a lot of great work that does seem to stick, but the majority of what we've heard overall suggests that it's not sticking. And so that Just sparked questions I needed to know, and I wanted to know why it was so hard to make progress in this one domain. And then that led me to this massive body of work that has to do with global systems and complexity and meta theory and on and on and on. And so fortunately, I was connected with and introduced to Daniel Smachtenberger, who I know you're aware of and probably know Fleet. And, you know, he kind of grabbed me by the arm and we went for a deep dive from his perspective. And then I met other people in his community that are academics and researchers and very, very brilliant people who seem to have at least more of an understanding of what's going on than at least I did at that point. And it was there that I learned that, you know, our global capitalist system had really reached the end of the line. It had kind of banged into its constraints. And because of that we were seeing generator functions really kind of exacerbating these challenges. So destruction of the biosphere and the climate crisis, exponential tech damage to the epistemic commons and information commons, and on and on and on. So these generator functions that kind of resulted in the capability crisis and the sense making crisis, and the authority crisis and the meeting crisis. And underneath all of that, as I continue to peel back the layers, I've just kind of landed on the work of Zachary Stein or Stein, and he suggests that at the root of everything that's going on is a breakdown in intergenerational transmission of knowledge. So what we're actually experiencing in the form of authority crisis, sense making crisis, meaning crisis and capability crisis, is a breakdown in education. And so because of that breakdown in education, our problem solving methods and our systems and processes for addressing the dynamics in the world are not up to the task. Life in the world is moving at a rate of speed and at a level of complexity that our current systems aren't able to address. As things broke down and because of political propaganda and information war warfare and even the effects of social media algorithms, we started to see the deterioration of authority. So who do we trust? Who can we believe in? Who should we follow? Is up for grabs now? And it's really a battleground. And underneath that is just the damage done to the epistemic commons, which is the process in which we arrive at certain conclusions as a society. And then so when you can't draw conclusions as a society, that throws you into sense making. You know, we can't make sense of what's going on in the world. And that leads to a big question about who we are as a human being, as a species and where we're going. And again, underneath all of that is that breakdown in education. So Zachary talks about it as, or describes it as, you know, education in between worlds. I love that whole notion of we're in between worlds right now. We are in the middle of a transition which the likes of Immanuel Wallerstein and others in his area and field of study would suggest could be 20, 30, 40 years in length from this point even.

Wow. Well, I love Jack Stein's work and we've had Zach on this summit twice and if anybody wants to explore that, the lifetime access package gives you access to both, all three summits. So there he is, there's the book. Yeah, Zach Stein and that breakdown in the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and wisdom and experience is, is really serious. And the way he talks about the kind of innovation, the kind of transformation we need to bring to our education systems is really inspiring. And you know, and you know that's happening even in the well resourced communities in the West. Right. But even more so in communities of color where there's less resources. I think about indigenous communities where there's been a complete undermining of their culture historically that, you know, that's a major issue. I mean we have on day six of the summit here we're hearing from some amazing indigenous elders and one of their primary concerns is being able to pass on their wisdom and knowledge to their children and grandchildren. The children, grandchildren are losing the culture, losing the language, losing, you know, that, that ability to. And you know, so where is, where is the younger generations getting their information today? Are they getting them from mentors and through apprenticeships and direct personal transfers of knowledge and wisdom from wise adults? Not really, for the most part. Right. They're getting it from TikTok or wherever they're getting it. Right. So it's kind of a scary world in that way. So how do we catch up with this complexity? And I'm sure that's in part the mission of common. But how do we, you know, we've gotten behind the curve and maybe we are going to have to ride this situation of being between worlds for a number of years. But, but how do we develop the capacities to again be able to do the sense making and again creative.

Some kind of collective commons where we can come together and find a reasonable way forward together?

Everyone's situation is unique and so you have to take into consideration one's means. But I suggest, strongly suggest that everybody take a moment and think about the design, the current construct of their life and engage in a significant process of redesigning. And that has to begin, must begin at how you think about the world and your understanding of the world and how it's working and where it's not. For example, I think we must, must prioritize self care on a whole other level. And I think we must prioritize education. That doesn't mean go back to college, engage in formal education, but to really prioritize learning. Like in a Buddhist context. It's the Bodhi mind, the mind that's seeking wisdom that needs to rise in all of us significantly. So and so those are two things that I've done with my own life. I've prioritized health and well being because I know and can feel the effects of so much uncertainty and chaos. And so I've tripled down. I do not take meetings before noon at this point. My mornings are spent getting out in nature, tending to my health and educating myself. And then I engage in my work. I think we have to be super critical about who we're working with and how those engagements and collaborations are playing out and what they're founded on. And I think the big calling in the context to work is that it is really a mandate at this point to see what you're doing as a vehicle through which you can participate and contribute to the solutions. It just no longer seems fitting to think of business or entrepreneurship in the traditional sense. I'm going to gain wealth, I'm going to gain freedom, I'm going to be able to express myself in my own creativity. If you look at Patagonia and many other large corporations, even down to Common and myself, we do what we do in the context of business simply for and solely for the purpose of having impact in the areas that we deemed necessary. And for those people who can't make these shifts mentally and start making the adjustments, I think it is going to be very tough, very challenging. Then you'll be left behind. To be quite frank, we just don't have time to focus on anything other than that. And we cannot dedicate ourselves to anything other than solving these simultaneous and intertwining crisis that are truly external, essential threats. Like we are at a novel point in time and we need to be effective much more. So at this point that makes a.

Lot of sense and very similar to Zach Stein's work. You know, I think we have to bring it back to the individual to begin with, not to isolate. But if we're going to co create resilience and co create community in a new way. We. We have to be resilient individuals, recognizing our individual agency and sovereignty to be able to do that. And that is really about educating ourselves and taking care of ourselves. And it's one of the inspirations. We have a self care summit coming up in May because there's such a need to focus on that right now.

Yeah. And it seems the kind of the long cycle that we're in, over time, we develop social institutions, educational institutions, news media, various sources that we could kind of depend on, you know, kind of did a good job of holding the cultural commons for a period of time, for really many, many, many decades. And it's not that it was perfect, but you could kind of depend on it. And so maybe we all got a little lazy, though. We all got a little too dependent on and kind of abdicated authority for a lot of things. And you know, and even in urban areas, we tend to, you know, we don't organize as neighborhoods and with our neighbors, we just, you know, if there's a problem, call the police. You don't even take care of the kids on your block. Just call the police if there's a problem. Right. So we've kind of abdicated authority to the school, to the police, the institutions. And now with these institutions breaking down and the trust breaking down, we're kind of, you know, falling back on ourselves. We've got to do our own work again. And maybe then through that process, resilient individuals who are educating themselves and focused on acting locally and educating their own children and really transferring that, we can co create new institutions that are designed for the emerging future. In Aura Sharmer's kind of language. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense.

So.

You know, here in the US at least, we're still in this really difficult landscape around our whole history with racism and racial justice, especially with the history of slavery of.

African Americans and you know, the whole Jim Crow era and mass incarceration and then all the problems with the police and all the tragic police killings and then how all this really came to a head with the George Floyd murder and other murders, Brianna Taylor and others, and the Black Lives Matter movement. And.

I don't know where it's going exactly. I don't know whether we're getting better. We keep opening up the wound. Maybe that's a good thing. You keep pulling the scab off the wound, and in the long run, maybe that's what it takes to heal it. But it also feels like a lot of the Approaches are just creating more divisiveness and more polarization rather than bringing people together. And so. But it does seem like we can't build a resilient society on a foundation of economic, social and racial injustice. Obviously that's absolutely impossible. So I wonder if you could say something from your perspective about where we are around the issue of overcoming racism in North America. And I know there's racism throughout the west and Europe as well. There's racism the world over. We have our particular version of it here in the US and its particular very painful history. So I wonder if you have a sense of where we are and maybe some signals we could represent that might be a truer way forward, something that. Oh, that's a way forward together.

Yeah.

I have to say, based on my experience within the context of One Million Truths, and again, after speaking with hundreds and hundreds of people at all levels of society and all levels of doing things.

I'm sorry to interrupt you a minute, Mark, could you describe that. I was going to ask you about that later, but could you just go ahead and tell people what One Million Truths is? Because it's an amazing project.

Oh, sure, sure. So One Million Truths is an initiative to foster truth and reconciliation and to help prevent and bring an end to racial conflict. So we are beginning. Phase One is simply an invitation to the black community, the black American community and allies to share their experiences with racism and to do so without pointing and naming names or blaming. But just say, this is what I have gone through, this is what my life experience includes and this is how racism has impacted me. And it's been incredible. We still haven't officially launched or fully launched, but we have stories from CEOs and very high level corporate executives to people in entertainment, in the world of professional sports, and many, many stories and truths from people in different parts of the country and living in towns and cities that, that I've never heard of and maybe you've never heard of. So it's. The whole idea is to one, let's just create this fabric, this tapestry that really conveys the scale at which racism plays out in daily American life, which create a safe place for people to express their experiences. And let's create an archive, a collection of stories that allow us to do better sense making and take better or more effective action.

And we've got a number of corporate partners and all of that kind of stuff lined up and we're just getting to the point where we're ready to, or very close to flipping the switch and bringing it live. Now, as part of those efforts of bringing all these pieces and elements together again, I've spoken to thousands of people, to be quite honest, and some feel like they're being effective. Most are not satisfied with the level of their efficacy. This is where it gets really difficult. And this is where some people may take strong opposition to my point of view. But what I have observed is that the issue of racism, systemic racism, inequality, social injustice.

Tends to happen. And it's siloed. It's very siloed. And very few people that we've spoken to, and these are folks who are veterans in the civil rights movement, et cetera, et cetera, very few people are able to draw connections to the other crises and challenges in society. So there is overall, in my opinion, a significant lack of understanding how if you take an action over here in pursuit of social justice, that the likelihood of activating something over here and causing externalities is very high. And people don't understand that. So when you talk to a young activist who's in their 20s and they go, I'm exhausted. It's because they're doing things that are actually activating other problems which initiate blowback immediately. So that's just a sign that the ways in which we're going about the issue could be outdated or not necessarily best fit for where we are in the 21st century. Another thing that's important to tease out is that racism is a form of intractable conflict, as is toxic polarization, as is this whole network of intertwining crises and challenges. And the thing about intractable conflict is you can't solve it with dialogue and negotiation or even social activism. And it represents just this 5% of conflicts that exist out there. And so when you're addressing something like systemic racism, you have to understand that it's a different type of conflict that you're pursuing and hoping to be impactful with. And if you go about in a traditional ways, which most people do, you're only going to generate blowback. And so that is really our work. Our work is to introduce this notion of intractable conflict. Introduce the ways in which academics and researchers have discovered that you can be effective with that dynamic and move people in that direction and hopefully generate significant mass and momentum in doing so. Where I see a huge opportunity in addressing racism is that in order to really, really be effective, you have to develop the ability to hold different perspectives. You have to be able to constructively respond to conflict. And those are the very skills, the necessary skills that lead to better rationality and sense making. And choice making and collective action. Those are the skills that are necessary to address the other, larger, other meta crises and larger crises that we're confronted by. So there's a huge opportunity for folks who are focused on racism to actually lead. And I think that that opportunity is the first of its kind. If you're addressing racism so we can generate enough mass and momentum and demonstrate that people have been through some type of educational journey and have landed in a position where they're effective addressing racism, but they're also qualified and capable of contributing to solutions for these other areas, then you have something that's potentially very powerful. The last thing I'll say is it doesn't matter if we address racism and we get that right. We've gotten to get racism, climate crisis, destruction of biodiversity, toxic polarization, all of that stuff. We can't think in silos anymore. We have to understand that all of this is interconnected and it fuels and feeds itself and each other and all the parts. If we don't do it, progress made in the area of racism and systemic racism and social justice will just get erased.

Well, that's very helpful and challenging and, and, and hopeful at the same time. What I'm kind of hearing is we need, you know, we have all these challenges and problems and some of them are very painful in the history of trauma related to things like racism and so forth. And they become very emotionally laden issues and, and reasonably so, obviously so. And at the same time, if we're going to.

Find the transfer and find our way through the transformation that we all long for, we're going to need smart approaches, we're going to need wisdom based approaches, smart approaches that are grounded in, you know, really deep thought and understanding of complex systems and how to really work with this. Just, just, you know, coming out there with the anger, you know, the, the prophetic, angry voice is really helpful in waking us all up. But ultimately, you know, we need something, we need more skillful means if we're going to find our way through together, I think is what I hear you saying. And so, you know, how do we bring those worlds together? How do we bring, you know, the very. There's a lot of amazing work going on in the world by very thoughtful people that have really studied complexity and all kinds of things and you know, even the idea of intractable problems and how you can work with intractable problems, but you need very specific, skillful means and strategies. How do we transfer that knowledge and wisdom to the broader landscape of folks that very reasonably have the emotional energy around this has to change and has to change now.

Yeah, yeah, I'll try to share. Just kind of make one final point to kind of drive this home. There's a point where I realized that.

It really didn't matter how much progress was made in a kind of traditional sense along the lines of racism, if we're faced with sudden or drastic.

Impacts to our food supply, or if because of climate change there's significant migration because certain portions of the world or the country are really not hospitable any longer, or that there's a significant industry or part of industry that collapses. I just saw very clearly that because of the threats that we're confronted with now that the potential of something going drastically wrong was very high and it would override any progress made. Like it just comes right back down to the limbic system. It's likely that many of us will find ourselves highly activated and in survival mode. And when we're there, you can forget about any progress made around racial lines unless you've done the work to cultivate the capabilities that are necessary to deal with those kinds of tensions and dynamics constructively and across. I'm going to make a very broad statement. We are not there as America, not anywhere close. And there's urgency around this.

Absolutely. Well, that's really the reason for this summit. And it brings back to why we focus day one and day two, Day one all about that individual resilience. Day two, all about healing trauma and relational resilience. We've got to do to work to become resilient and weatherproofed. Resilient individuals who, when the world is putting us in fight or flight, we have the skills to get back into our best selves and work together and co create safety and community and connection. Right. And that's not easy. And we all really gotta do our work and build that capacity in ourselves and build those relationships and build those communities. Starting I think at the micro level where we can expand out from. Absolutely. So this has been fascinating and I just so appreciate your work and One million truths. People can find that at onemillion truths. Com. Is that correct?

That's correct.

Right. And I'm excited that you're going to be doing a full launch of that soon. For the people who you're inviting to share their stories there.

There'S kind of a process of validation and expression, I would imagine. And for the rest of us whose stories those are not.

It reminds me the, the potential for, in our Zen peacemaker tradition, what we talk about, bearing witness, the practice of bearing Witness and you know, bringing human dignity to, to the, to our shared histories of suffering by being willing to be with and witness and feel into and share. And that process seems to be one that's maybe it's an old technology, but a trustworthy technology for transformation. That willingness to just be with and bear witness to our suffering and our legacies of suffering.

Yeah, well said. Well said. Thank you.

Well, thank you so much, Mark, and thank you so much for the work that you're doing. And I always enjoy having these conversations and I wish you the very best. And I know things probably feel pretty dicey over there in Europe and I know that all of us are keeping the Ukrainian people and really everyone in our prayers because this suffering is just erupting out of cycles of collective trauma and suffering as we know. And it seems like there's a clear, you know, there's a clear.

Bad guy in the, you know, or bully in this place and you know, but nonetheless this part of long standing stuff and somehow we have to find ways to increase our connectedness, to get beyond this because it's our connectedness that's going to get us through. And I'm really encouraged to hear that, you know, some of these social democracies in Europe, like Denmark, that have really worked at creating that kind of cohesive connectedness in their society that really values the common, that that's alive and well and that you're experiencing that.

Yeah, yeah. It's fantastic. I describe Denmark as a wise old teacher. I'm learning about myself in ways I never anticipated by being here.

That's absolutely wonderful. Okay, well, be well.

You too. Thanks so much, Fleet. It's always an honor. I really appreciate being able to participate in the work you're doing. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know, having having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift. And you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

It is Ryan Seacrest here. There was a recent social media trend which consisted of flying on a plane with no music, no movies, no entertainment. But a better trend would be going to chumbacasino.com it's like having a mini social casino in your pocket. Chumba Casino has over a hundred online casino style games, all absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus now@chumbacasino.com sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group Void where prohibited by law 21 plus terms and conditions apply.