This is the Rex check-and-call for Wednesday, June 12th, 2019. At any moment recently, has uttering or writing down 2019 sound like, how the hell did we get 2019? Like, a little crazy. And so I have a poem for us to start with by Sylvia Plath titled, Mushrooms, and it goes as follows. Overnight, very whitely, discreetly, very quietly, our toes, our noses take hold in the loam, acquire the air. Nobody sees us, stops us, betrays us. The small grains make room. Soft fists insist on heaving the needles, the leafy bedding. Even the paving, our hammers, our rams, earless and eyeless, perfectly voiceless, widen the crannies, shoulder through holes. We diet on water, on crumbs of shadow, bland, mannered, asking little or nothing. So many of us, so many of us. We are shelves, we are tables, we are meek, we are edible. Nudgers and shepherds in spite of ourselves are kind multiplies. We shall, by morning, inherit the earth, our foots in the door. Then I, being a huge fan of mushrooms, figured that was a maybe an interesting metaphor for what I hope is happening in the world as a countermeasure for the bad stuff that's happening in the world. Hey, Estee, you are muted. Yes, I know. By default, I've got it set to muted coming in. Somewhere is the unmute button. Where to go? Ah, shall I unmute you, and then you can find it? There we go. You are now unmuted. I'm on the iPad, and I'm, yeah. I think on the iPad, you have to touch the screen, and then the buttons show up. Thank you. Give that a go, but not sure. Greetings, what's the temperature where you are, Estee? Upper 70s, 80s, at 6 o'clock in the morning. Like, ungodly, I just turned on my air conditioner for the third day in a row. And are you at long range, or no? Sorry, you're not. No, no, I'm, yeah. You haven't been here, but I'm down on a different range. Oh, that's right. In the Bay Area, yeah. Cool. So I'd love everybody to meet Ishtha. Ishtha is, some time ago, I thought I would like to bring catalysts into recs.  Somehow they've shown up, and they think this way.  It was great fun. She actually brought along two of her friends from Delhi. Were they also both in Delhi? No. No, they're both in London. Both in London. Oh, that's right. That's right. It's very weird how the little Zoom format sort of obliterates distance and all that, except for when we talk about how hot it is, or hey, good night, while we're busy waking up and having our morning cup of coffee or something. It's like, hey, it becomes, in a weird way, incidental. Kind of strange. So I've invited Ishtha to be a recs catalyst. And I'd love to think through a bit what that might mean for her and for us, and how we might work on those sorts of things. I think that'd be interesting. Ishtha, do you want to just say just a couple words on where you are on your journey? Sure. So hello. I am based in Delhi, India. And I am desperately trying to leave my little hot oven, because I've been here a long time. And I'm trying to look for a change in context. So some of the things that inspire me, hello. Hi. Some of the things that inspire me, I think, are conversations about gender and conversations about sustainability. And the medium that has most inspired me, and I think I've used the most in my life as theater. So I'm kind of trying to figure out how to bring all of these things together, what it means, where it can take me. Jerry, I've recently just heard back from the master's program I applied to. Yes. So I got in. Yeah, great work, Shree. Awesome. Thank you. So that's in London. And it's called Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures. And it's something I am looking forward to doing, still figuring out the logistics of it and the funding and things like that. But that's where I'm at. And so hopefully, in another couple of months, I'll be in a new time zone, in a new not-so-hot city. Not-so-hot city, a little cloudier. But hey, good trade-off, exactly. That is great. Let's just go around and check in and say a tiny bit about where we are, where we are geographically, and where we are, maybe journey-wise. Jamey, do you want to start? Sure. Hi, I'm Jamey Cascio. I am a professional futurist. I've been doing it since 1995. I am in Northern California, the broader San Francisco Bay area. I think the two Rex adjacent things that I've been orbiting around lately. One is this last weekend went to a memorial service for my sister's late husband. But what was fascinating and touching about that was just how many people came to pay tribute to this guy. He was a writer and an actor. It appeared on some TV shows and done some Broadway. But just the variety of people who were there, the connections that he had made in his life just was enormously, emotionally powerful, but on gutting in some ways, is that realizing just how much a whole of a whole was left in people's lives from his passing. The other is this was the 15-year anniversary of my first promulgation of the participatory penopticon concept. So 15 years ago, I wrote a piece for world-changing about the idea that as we start carrying around networked, always on cameras. That is what we call, and now we're just regular phones. It's going to fundamentally change how we relate with each other and how we relate to our culture and society. It's going to change politics. And just I started playing out some of the potential consequences at a time when most phones didn't have a camera. The fastest connection you could get was Edge at 128K connection. So you weren't going to be doing any kind of streaming media if there was any such a thing as streaming media. And so what's been really fascinating for me is to watch how people have responded. Because that's actually been one of the forecasts I've made that has really resonated for people. And I think has, and I know for a fact, has changed how some people and organizations have looked at the tools that they have available to them. Witness is a human rights group that was founded by Peter Gabriel. And their role was to provide video cameras for human rights activists around the world. And the guy, one of the more recent presidents of Witness told me directly that my participatory panopticon concept shifted how Witness did business or did their work. Really tried to emphasize the distribution of multiple cameras and not just trying to get a single high quality camera to add activist. And there's a lot more to talk about there. I think that one of the big conclusions that I've come to is that the threat that we all are seeing around deep fakes and other kinds of manufactured images and video, manufactured and falsified video. I think one of the opportunities for pushback on that, it comes from having a multitude of diverse perspectives. So a single camera can be easily faked. A small number of official cameras, still pretty readily faked. A mass of diverse, personal, individual cameras from multiple perspectives, really, really, really hard to fake all of that. And so if we don't want to call it truth, but maybe we can call it veracity, comes from diversity. And so I'll leave it at that. That's lovely to make, because we're entering a world where our reality is going to be messed with very heavily, as you well know. I also went to the original link that I had on world-changing. World-changing site is gone, right? You know if your original post is in the Internet Archive? It is, but it's also I have it linked. So I have the World-changing Archive of all of my stuff at OpenTheFuture.com. Oh, good. So if you saw the posts that I put up the other day about the. I just put that in our chat. Terrific. And that actually links to some of the older stuff via the WC Archive subsexual. Cool, thank you. Asti, do you want to check in a little bit? Sure. Ishtar, welcome. It's delightful to see you. I think everyone on this call and others in Rexwoods would note, first of all, that I love to talk about gender or like you. And actually, as I say that, I must confess that it took me a long time to love to talk about gender. I felt compelled to and afraid to and uncertain about. And about 10 years ago, Jerry, you were really helpful in helping me learn to bring out what I and others around me, men and women knew. So welcome on that score. The thing that I've been working on for quite a while, one of the things is shifting, interrogating the underlying models of our technology from that gender perspective. And it's a journey that began with noting that if you closely observe how women run their lives, you find that they're not actually multitasking, but doing something we call multi-minding. And further discerning over time that this tasking business, which is, oh, by the way, very machine-like, really dominates how we think about how our technology world is constructed and how we operate ourselves in it. So kind of became this closet missionary for shifting from tasking to minding as the core description of how we go about our lives. And then realized as the politics in this country got worse and worse that really what I was talking about or we were, it's a whole bunch of us, was relabeling productivity or redefining productivity as relational. It's about an economy and lives that are driven by flows of relationships or flows that are in themselves relational. And most recently, I've been preoccupied by, and Todd, who's on the call, is one of my compatriots on this, the question of, what would our world look like if software were feminist? So I just started a couple of folders, both physical and digital. I love that smile, labeled feminist software. And it's kind of right. Some of them have a question mark after that. Some of them have an exclamation point. Some of them have both. But that's what I'm thinking on, working on. And then another part of my life, which I've recently been encouraged to or empowered myself to talk about in other forms, is it's not rethinking. It's co-creating the future of the tradition into which I was born and which I have learned to find very valuable, which is Judaism and the Jewish community or Jewish network worldwide, which happens to be a very relational view of the world. So in my spare time, I'm involved with a podcast called Judaism Unbound, and figuring out how to turn, now that it's celebrated a million downloads, what to do with that glorious network of people whose minds and hearts are completely opened by listening into these conversations or feeling part of those conversations. So enough about me. Bestie, thank you. That's a fabulous, a lovely snapshot. And I'm now pondering the feminist's software angle. Like, what are the attributes? What are the things that would make a software feminist? Exactly. Yeah. Todd, do you want to jump in? Certainly. This is fun. And Ishta, it's great to have your face and your voice here, mixing it up a bit. So one of the largest, maybe most foundational inquiry for me right now is actions that are motivated by doing versus actions that come from a state of being. And I'm interested in this from an organizational angle and also from an individual or a leadership angle that part of the state of the world that we are in right now is that we have so much information, so much access, so much misinformation, that there are millions, if not billions, of people who are searching for instructions on how we navigate current state of affairs and the amount of misinformation and the degree to which perhaps the most important things in life can never be reached through instruction has led me to this importance of our states of being. And so I have been in many different ways working out this question of how do we step into states of being in which our truest unique creative selves come forward and what are the obstacles to being in those states? I don't think that for all the problems in the world, all the brilliance in the world, perhaps what we need most is for people to be most fully themselves. And that comes with a bit of faith that our unique selves in connection provide the healing and the path forward that is needed. Not everyone will agree with that. But it's an exciting exploration and it has applications that for how we organize, what leadership looks like, and even feminist software, which I just adore when Estie comes up with new turns of phrases and they always take us into new places. Thank you. Any questions for Tadda? Any thoughts? Feel free to jump in. Jamai's question of what if you hate yourself is like, that is a key thing in order at one of the obstacles to being in a state in which we are creative and bringing our uniqueness to the world is not feeling safe. We're not appreciating the fact that you have something to offer no matter your place, role, or status in life. And so, Jamai, that's a tough one. I mean, I know you're partially joking and asking for someone else, but that's a real concern. Well, yes, I am partially joking, partially asking for someone else, and it's mostly me. But it's also the prevalence of self-loathing is remarkably high among younger people. At least in the US, I don't want to try to generalize more broadly than that. But going by the kind of conversations I see on Reddit, for example, and other places online, the amount of self-abnegation is so profound. There's a joke, would you accept a million dollars if your worst enemy got two million dollars and say, well, why would I turn down three million dollars? You know, it's the proper response. And so, it is just kind of asking for me, but also more broadly, there are a lot of people who are in that position right now of feeling like not just that they don't have something to offer, but that it's what they have to offer is worthless. Yes, yes. And that brings me so much sadness, and there's so much truth to that. And also, the challenge of in that state, new information may not change their point of view, or they need an experience of themselves as different. Not just reading a blog post that says you are valuable. Somehow, strangely, I feel like we are paving a path to the door of Bill Burdette to check in. I don't know what gives me that instinct, but Bill, do you want to step in? I'm going to turn a corner here. Oh, good. Part of what I'm doing right now. I'm in Miami. We've got a Center for Social Change. We've got seven charities to share office space with it. We consider ours to be sort of like a laboratory, a social laboratory, where we can try things out, see what works, what doesn't work, et cetera, and then expand on what works. But our most recent project that fits right in with this conversation is our School of Love and Relationships. So are.  Otherwise, it's not still under construction, but we're working on it. The point, it's really sort of interesting the way that we're talking about the challenges. In other words, the negativity in the environment. But in essence, it's through a relationship that you address that problem. And we've already done four workshops so far, basically centering around the work of a woman named Susan Campbell, who wrote a book called Getting Real, which is about building relationship conversations. And then the work of Dr. Sue Johnson, Attachment Theory. We did a workshop on that. And the last one we did was Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication or Compassionate Communication. So I mean, the variety of things that we're doing are introducing primarily millennials, late 20s, early 30s, into the realm of discussion of relationship and where the problems are. And it's sort of interesting, because especially with Attachment Theory, you get the a-has of what you're doing to interrupt that relationship. But at the same time, then sort of create the opportunity for relationships to solve the problem, in other words, creating the safety, et cetera, that we even talk about here as a fundamental dysfunction. Now, just as a totally often in one left corner, though, what was interesting, I was doing some reading in my esoteric books this morning. And what they were distinguishing was the difference between the role of the masculine energy in the world, which is action, the doing part, versus the feminine. And the way that they describe the feminine was that the divine substance of the world, hold the feminine, holds all of its intelligence. So it's interesting to hear Estee talk about feminine software. Feminist. Feminist software, because he had inherently sort of carries the message that that's where the intelligence is in the feminine. And we've basically been pushing it out. I mean, one of the things that we're one of the psychologists that we're going to be featuring in our workshops is a guy named Terrence Reel, who really, really, really gets into the problem of relationships being so patriarchal, in other words, that it's inherently led from the male perspective of, I'm in charge. If there's one, it's me. And it sort of makes the entire conversation about relationship building very difficult, because they can't just get drawn into it. The therapist themselves get painted with the brush of feminine, trying to be nice to each other, get everybody in the room. And the male is sitting there saying, no, I'm going to do it my way. And that kind of disjunction is part of what one needs to be able to sort of at least articulate and sort of explain how it's not going to work out very well if you keep doing that. You need that feminist software in there. You need that part of it. And to an extent, part of what we do here is study systems theory. And we're very much into the work of a guy named David Snowden, who's from Wales and basically has what's known as a Tenefin framework. And it's very much a complex adaptive system orientation, which means that you can't predict what a human system will do. You've got to nudge it, figure out where it's going to go and feed the good direction, that kind of thing. But it's very much built around more of a we question. In other words, asking what it is that you're going to get as a we outcome. He criticizes very much the engineering approach to systems theory, which always asks an I question. What can I get out of this? What can we produce for me? And they then lament the fact that they get all these quote unintended consequences because they're not paying attention to the we outcomes. They're just looking for a specific I want this, can I get it? And then it sort of falls apart. So in any event, that's what our Center for Social Change and this School of Love and Relationships is going to be working on. In other words, if you sort of back up through the systems theory, the one thing that starts of all rolling in the wrong direction with respect to society and relationships in general is a lack of understanding. Where is the value of it? I was reading a book that stimulated this idea of the school called All About Love by Bell Hooks, who was criticizing the fact that we've got too much of a mystical concept of what love is. And so we don't study it. We don't really apply it. And as a result, we don't get any good results because we just think it's out there and we'll somehow bump into it. And so I said, okay, we need a School of Love. Got it. I can do that. So that's what's happening in Miami. Bill, I wanna share with you that the reading that caused me to start asking about feminist software was Bell Hooks most recent book or recent book called Everyone's Feminism is for Everybody. I had suddenly realized that I'd never read anything by her and pick that one and three days later was obsessed with feminist software. Good, good. Just for grins, here's Bell in my brain. And I've not read any of her books. She's absolutely on my list of people to read more of, but I've not read All About Love. I've not read Feminism is for Everybody. She is in fact on my list of contrarians who make or made sense, which is kind of the heart of the Rex thesis. These are people who were expressing the kinds of hypocrisies, difficulties, differences in the world, the way we see things wrong and offering ways to see things right. So anyway, so here's a whole bunch of stuff on Bell Hooks. I will put a link to this spot in my brain in the chat right now. Perfect. Super interesting. Any more on Bell? Anybody else gone deep into Bell Hooks? Nobody? Okay, well, whoever does check back in at some point and let's see what goes where. And just by way of checking for me, I'm in sunny Portland where it's gonna be a mild 97, 98 degrees today, which turns out to be a really wimpy temperature next to what it's gonna be in Delhi, what it already was in Delhi today. So I feel bad that it's a little bit warm here. Warm and beautiful, like gorgeous, yeah. And I'm realizing more and more, I think it's sinking in more and more. And I just did some sort of strategy work with Sheila Kim, the dear friend. And realizing more and more that the inside Jerry's brain kind of conversation, the conversation in context where like, and this goes to what we've been saying here where I can actually be me and do the things that I'm compelled to do that are obsessive compulsive in my life, like feeding my brain, actually do that with people together are the center of what I ought to be doing much more of. And got to figure out how to manifest that in the world, which is kind of a piece of where I am right now. But other things that I might do that sound really great, like I would love to develop a workshop series around design from trust, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, hmm, I am not a black belt workshop designer and I don't have a book published on the subject yet and et cetera, et cetera. And like, that's interesting. I'd love to do the work, but it's not the thing I do naturally it comes naturally that I'm practically obsessed to do. So, so I'm trying to figure out how to riff on inside Jerry's brain because now I've done a dozen in IJB calls which are, which are interesting. They're exactly like this except I share my brain in more often. And that's either an interesting and enhanced conversation or to some people sort of boring. So how do I become less like Jason Silva? I mean, I don't want to do shocks of awe and like everything is fabulous with the universe floating behind me and cells multiplying in the corner. That's not my thing and the high production value is not my thing. Or like some, you know, like other people who are doing really interesting things. And in the process of thinking about that, I ran across a YouTuber. So here we go. Let me just find, let me just put a thing up from this YouTuber. Oops, where is she? Um, not that one, not that one. Oh, come on. Should be standing right here. There we go. Natalie Wynn. So her YouTube handle is ContraPoints. Anybody see ContraPoints? Oh God, I love her. I love her. Okay, okay, good. So Contra, here is a critique of Jordan Peterson done by ContraPoints. And so a tiny bit of a plot spoiler. ContraPoints is a trans female and started posting on YouTube in 2008. And only in 2016 kind of found the identity ContraPoints and the mode she uses now to create videos, which is highly produced, very theatrical. She loves set design. She puts on costumes. She plays herself against herself. She does all sorts of intercuts and interesting things. But the thing that really attracted me was she discovered in this persona how to adopt some of the rappers. And I don't mean like people who sing rap. I mean the rappers with a W that indicate that that were how the far right bloggers were blogging. She basically looks like, looks like potentially a far right blogger. And she is very appealing to, she's sort of an antidote, like a friendly virus for the far, for people who are being radicalized to the far right. And she was mentioned in a recent New York Times article I'll also post here about the journey of somebody into the alt right.  So I'm interested in the thoughtful critiques that ContraPoints brings out. But I don't wanna do that, can't do that. So I'm trying to figure out what's the middle space between Jason Silva, Natalie Nguyen, ContraPoints and other sorts of things that are interesting while using the brain context-y thing that I've got which I love using and feeding which God willing, someday in the next five years, 10 years gets replaced by something more interesting, better, more collaborative and more open. So that would be great and I don't know how that's gonna happen. There's always been, for the last 10 years, there's always been somebody on my peripheral vision who has promised, oh, we're gonna invent the replacement for the brain and it never actually shows up. So I'm still using this brain thing. But I'm wondering what that is and I'm wondering if any of you have ideas or suggestions for things to go look at. I'm also trying to be really aware of how people absorb information and I'm trying to be a bit of a pioneer in the arrangement of that information, the packaging of that information. By which I mean, I think the lingua franca of our time seems to be the three minute YouTube video or maybe the Instagram story, something like that, right? These are kind of like, if it's more than three minutes, people are like, eh, maybe not this time. And by pioneering a new medium, partly what I mean is, when I do short videos, I link them together so that they're at least in a playlist, that's easy, but I also put them in a Prezi, which is this zoomable place, so that if you played the Prezi, which I don't think a lot of people are doing, but if you played the Prezi, it would link together all of these short videos in a narrative that would make sense, that would then be the length of a tiny documentary, but nobody would notice that it was the length of a tiny documentary because it was more like going to French Laundry in Napa and having a whole series of really tasty little dishes that turned out to be a long and interesting meal. It's videotapas. It's videotapas, exactly. But that weren't this bulky, hey, you'd sit down here for two hours and watch hypernormalization, which I did because it's fascinating, but it's not that. Now, Natalie's counterpoints videos are definitely longer than three minutes. Of course, that's one of the problems, is that the Jordan Peterson one runs 25 minutes, something like that. And at some point, she's getting really deeply philosophical in places where I'm not sure I can follow, and in other places, she's just picking apart his argument in beautiful ways. It's like, holy crap, because, for example, Jordan Peterson calls all the left postmodern neo-Marxists. He basically creates this bucket, postmodern neo-Marxism, and he throws the entire left in there.   Here's what postmodernism is. Marxists are the opposite. You can't put them all together in a sentence. Like, neo-Marx, this doesn't work. And a lot of the people that the alt-right are basically drawing on are in fact postmodern analyses of life, et cetera, et cetera. So it's, she points out calmly and in a humorous way, all these deep contradictions. And if you're thinking while going into the alt-right, she'll pick you up and put you back on a different path, which is really interesting to me. That part of what she does, I find compelling and exciting. And I'm trying to figure out, given what I do and the assets I've got in this brain-weird thing, how do I package this shape it so that it's different, interesting and works in these ways? All suggestions, welcome. So I don't think it's an answer to what you're, as in I'm just being, thinking big, but... Big is good. Okay, but I don't know if you've seen this Netflix series called Explained. Yes, by Vox. Yes, yes. They're fabulous. Yes, exactly. And I feel like I've noticed that I've recently been watching a lot of Netflix series or shows and without realizing that are just giving me a lot of information or like historical background. And I don't realize it because it's so dramatized. And it's just, and I'm starting to notice that there's a shift because I've never been much of a reader. And I'm trying to also, like, I've been inculcating it, but I've never enjoyed reading.  In these 30 minute clips, which I usually watch as a break between my work. So I feel like that's really working for me. And I notice more and more people talk about these series. So it's big and production is huge. And it's, but I feel like this is one direction to think in. Another parallel thing like that is the School of Life series by Alain de Bouton. Short videos with some animation and stuff like that. Extremely good, taking on simple issues about life and love and relationships and sex and all that kind of stuff done beautifully. And then I follow a whole bunch of historians on YouTube because I love history and military historians, other historians talking about what happened in Europe in 10 minutes. It's like, and some of these are almost like, their shape, the pill shape is like cliff notes for somebody's history class. So that's something they could watch before the final and know a little bit more than they otherwise might've because they failed to read any of the materials during the course. That's kind of a little bit the shape these things sometimes have. But then you go into them and some of them are excellent and a couple of them are crappy and you're just like, okay, stop, go to the next one. But the ones that are brilliant are like, wow, I didn't know that. Jerry, I have a thought for you. Yes, please. Please go to the other direction. Yes.  Why am I not writing with it or thinking with it? And in my iPad, next to everything else, right? Right, right. So in particular, seeing Bell up there, right? And all of this and Todd jump in here if you want to build on or reject this idea. I feel like it would be marvelous for those of us who are about to sit down and work on that to do so with your brain and both digitally. And I'm not quite sure how we want you with it, but for me, the combination of live Jerry and digital Jerry is the magic place. So let's figure out how, I don't know if you've done this before, but yeah, we'll take on an authorship or sense-making mission, non-Jerry's, and engage you in both forms. Todd, was I the least bit practical? That was coherent. And I was asking myself the question, if Jerry did visual essays, what would his personal style be? If there was a way to simply weave and edit together videos with cuts to you that's doing sense-making between the visual element of that and the cleverness of your use of language, like you don't need to be as dramatic as ContraPoints. And I don't look good in drag, trust me. It's bad. I did that once for Thanksgiving. I look like my mother plus 100 pounds and 50 years in the future. It was bad. But I could see that, I can't see you in drag. I was trying to see you in drag and I can't. You don't want to see that because it can't be unseen. Have you seen the gender flip filter on the Snapchat? No. I've seen too many people's gender flip filters. Yes, yes. Can't unsee that either. I somehow fortunately have missed that one. It doesn't work very well if you have a beard. I can only imagine. So sorry, Todd. I absolutely intercepted you were saying something interesting and I couldn't help myself but jump in like that. We all enjoyed that. Let's see if you can recover the fact. Yeah, getting your tone of voice and your visual and your editing style there. Yeah. I completely see something because the difficulty of even editing together an hour and a half IJB session, you can get insights and you could kind of form that into a narrative but this is your domain. Is weaving together topics to create a new perspective? And so if in the course of 12 or 15 minutes I saw eight different video clips and had 30 pieces of copy interspersed by you delivered in a way in which you were being yourself and enjoying what you were doing, I think that would be pretty compelling. So I've done a couple of things that I'd love all feedback on. I've basically created some playlists that step through a topic in short chunks that are meant to be tasty and interesting in the ones I'm sharing here. Mostly it's my voice but not my face. So it's a voiceover with Prezi Animation which works okay, not fabulously. It's no Jason Silva but it's a production level that I can easily hit. Part of the question here is sort of what is the rhythm and look and tone that I wanna hit and what tools enable me to do that, right? And I think not being an explainer but actually I love the idea of an essay that you are actually putting forth a viewpoint that incorporates a number of other viewpoints. Like I'm thinking about what you did after the Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The post I put on Medium about Kavanaugh and adjectives? Yeah, yeah, like you had precise insights around that and how could that take on, how could that type of insight take on different form? So I have your Trump one video up running on another screen right now. Without sound, so I'm not hearing your voice. Without sound it just stays there for a while on images that kind of slowly pan around. It's not that exciting. Not images, words. And that's actually one of the problems that I would suggest you have with the IJB is that the brain is wonderfully dense with text, has very little, if any, imagery. And then when you're doing it on Zoom, fast cuts between pages and links don't animate very well. And so what you have is, if you wanted to look at it brutally, clumsy crude animation of words. But you see what I'm getting at. If you wanted to do this as a video production, you need some combination of more images and more clear movement. So if you're going through a list of words, at least let us see some life to the words. That's something that I've noticed even with previous IJB conversations is that sometimes it's hard to follow when you're bouncing between neurons and sometimes it's just kind of sitting there like somebody's vomited up a dictionary. And I'm being intentionally over the top with that. But I think you get what I'm saying. I do. And you know I love you, Chair. And we have such a long history. Exactly, exactly. It's fabulous. And I know that it's clumsy and slow and not that appealing and I'm trying to figure out given my abilities and given what I could crowd source or there's video mob in a bunch of other places where you can find people who do different kinds of edits and different kinds of things. Can I structure something that is regularly repeatable, doable with some extended resources? I totally get that. And I also get like when I do IJB, Peter Kaminski pointed out that one of his favorite things is when I kind of riff on some topic. So ask me about the potato and things like that. And I can go on for a while telling stories about the potato, illustrating them in my brain. But when I get in those moments in the middle of an inside jury's brain call, I'm moving pretty quickly because I don't wanna eat the entire call's time by telling the full story because that would be, I could go on for a while. And if I went slowly and went to the resources, it would be like interesting. So a couple of things. One is I find it very hard to go back over old videos and find clips that matter to shorten them up and repackage them. I could reproduce some of the nuggets that are interesting. So this thing about the potato, I could go cut something and make it more interesting than just my voice over some Prezi. I could drop in videos that I find elsewhere. I could have my talking head up in the screen. I could do a bunch of things like that, which would probably hop it up considerably but wouldn't bring it to any professional level of production but would make it a lot different and better. And I'm good at compressing. I'm really quite good at squeezing information. Often I think I speak too quickly and compress too much, if anything. So yes, no? Yes. Two things, one, I don't know if you wanna have your talking head right up close but maybe down in the corner, sort of shrunken away down in the corner with the activity going on. So you could like look up at it and go even put your fingers. The other thing about potatoes, I just keep flashing back to the Tater's precious scene in Return of the King where Sam is gonna make Tater's and Tater's precious and Tater's potatoes, boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew. So you may have a brain that's digital, my brain is just simply weird. That's good, that's the best kind. Any other thoughts along this line? It does what Jamea is saying makes sense or would you go a different direction or explore something? Is there something you've found compelling that I can borrow from in terms of some aspect? Let's see. I feel like another kind of content that works which you could maybe integrate is the concepts that you, so I think I agree with everything Jamea is saying about more visual, less text and all of that but the kind of content you could bring in is maybe if you could pick up, because you narrate stories very well, Jerry. So if you could pick up a story for the theme or whatever concept you're trying to explain, it could just be like a series of storytelling. And what would the visual be while telling the story? Would it just be me talking or would it be clips I find that are sort of illustrative of it or what are you imagining? So what I imagine is a combination of the two because I think that also seeing the face of the person that is talking very often makes it more relatable. So I see a combination for sure. I would like to think more on this visual front but I'm just thinking content wise, how to keep it small and how to make it different from like what Todd was saying about explaining versus weaving. So I have a talking head video which is one of my five minute universities about the book, The Great Transformation. And that's me standing on, I think at Longridge, standing on the deck just kind of, talking about this book, which is interesting. But it's just a talking head. And then I've got a shorter thing about, here we go, a shorter video about the difference between ecology and economy, which is closer to me and just me sitting on a beach actually in the winter talking about these things. So those are more my face and talking head kind of materials. Anyway, thank you all for riffing along with this. I'm struggling with a piece of me wants to figure out how to be the Chuck Yeager of the new way we express ourselves with each other. I wanna be the test pilot of the new media vehicle that allows us to create a connected conversation that has online resources that we refer to and improve together, not just me in the brain showing, hey, look what I found, but rather each of us playing together in some new medium that allows us to share the best of what we're doing so that when Bill tells us about a particular theory that he's working with or nonviolent communication, he can grab artifacts and put them on the table in front of him easily while we're talking and we can recall them, add them to our webs of memory, enhance them, et cetera, et cetera, as well. Things like that. What does that feel like that is high function that allows us to have a much richer discussion and to walk away from the discussion with like, wow, okay, I have homework to do now, right? Because I mean, one of the reasons I'm putting some things in the chat here is that whoever doesn't have any of these videos or books or whatever we've been talking about, they'll at least be here so we can go chase them down. So that's interesting, but it's pretty primitive. Sorry, Asti, go ahead. No, I just had a semi-vision, a fuzzy vision, like fuzzy logic. I like it. And a question. So I think the thing that I'm envisioning is part of what Neural Lee or Neural tries to offer, though they've changed a few times so I'm not, this is the fuzzy part, okay? But it would be kind of lovely if during a Zoom, and I'm thinking in the Zoom context, right? In perhaps a screen-sharing window or its equivalent. So it's present all the time and very visual. We were able to bring in blocks or tabs or not tabs, blocks or kind of sticky zones, right? That are actually windows into the brain, but visual and significant, right? So that I end up with this sort of whiteboard or sticky board of accessible live, diggable into, my goodness, the language producing here, diggable into. I like it, diggable into. I could buy the domain now before it's taken. 3D, 4D, something, right? And maybe have it be collectively constructed, that is somebody's note-taking for you, visual facilitating in this form, but maybe others in the conversation are also bringing things in. So we've created some mind awakening surface, right? Yeah, the surface of topology, I like, what does the landscape of ideas look like is interesting? Yes, yes, and then I can go back and touch them and follow them, right? And maybe bring some other image under that cover to the floor in whatever, okay. And then the second thing is a couple calls ago, I ended up on a journey about zoom-based journeys for groups of people, right? With Dave Rizal, right? And so a person that I got to in that process, I'm wondering if you know Ben Roberts. Name's familiar. He does something called collective conversations. So I just feel like if you don't know each other and we're now, he's discovered Judaism unbound and working with that kind of in conversation with that collection of people. But the idea out of open cafe technology. Nope, never heard of him. Of harvesting, never heard of him. Yeah, right, okay. So conference weaving Rex Fellow? No, Rex Fellow Traveler. So I have a thought. Okay, it's on the screen. You know what fellow travelers are, right? Yes. Commies. Exactly. So I have a thought called Rex Fellow Travelers who are basically people who seem to be thinking along a lot of these same lines. And he is already under that. So I do not know him. Okay, so I will suggest to you email-wise that you talk and yeah, because there's something about, something that he does and the thinking about creating journeys with documentation. Yes. Here's the city's collective impact map that Christina, oh, so she's connected to them. Okay, good. Cause this would be a Kumu map about the city. Got it. Got it. You've got Kumu maps in Jerry's brain? Damn. I've got links to Kumu maps in Jerry's brain for sure. Yeah, yeah. In fact, if I go here, so that's a, this is a Kumu map. This is Christina, who I'm doing a bunch of work with these days through the Digital Life Collective, but I have her as a Kumu black belt. Yes. And here are some other Kumu black belts. I'll do them more, Jean Daunter. Yes. So that's a great idea. Ben is absolutely on the topics that matter a lot here. And, and funny- And oh, by the way, I'm thinking about Kumu as the mapping ecosystem stimulating tool for the 200 episodes of Judy's Unbound, the podcast and the people and the work. And so Christina and I have been talking about that. So all comes together in our- Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting because I attended your talk long ago about the Talmud as the original hypertext. And it's fascinating because Talmud commentary and all the various ways in which we've tried to link knowledge for Judaism, for example, but in other cultures, it's super, super interesting. And these were attempts to create patterns for living. Yes. What does it mean to be alive? What should we do? How should we do it? Why? All of that sort of thing. And one of the things that means to be alive is to make connections between things. Yes. And extend the conversation thereby, which we now refer to a friend of mine calls Talmudifying. Talmudifying. When in doubt, right?  But I feel like I should be wearing a teffelin and bobbing or something, but still. No. Okay. That is not needed for Talmudifying the conversation. Yes, absolutely not needed. Okay, thank God. Okay, all right. I know what to do next, yeah. Oh, excellent. Love that. Yeah. Bill, I'm curious, because a lot of people come through the things you've created and you do a really lovely job of filling their hearts and minds with a whole bunch of new information on theories, books, ways of being, processes, interventions, I don't know what else, but have you ever had a moment to sit down and imagine what a better way for people to step through those new ideas might be or what? Like how in an ideal world, what would happen? Besides like just putting the jack in the back of their head or having them like Trinity, learning how to run the helicopter, like, you know, how might that work? You know, in my mind, we've got to figure that out. And what I was thinking of when you were talking about your sort of trying to morph into something more engaging and everything, it was like to make Wikipedia more engaging. Yeah. It had a variety of materials that are available to it that included videos and stuff like that, which right now I don't think it does. And so it comes alive, but ultimately what we're really doing in our workshops is translating the stuff, the information to experience. Yeah. It's amazing how difficult it is to do that through just a flat medium. In other words, I can imagine that you could to an extent, in other words, make something scary, make something really sort of loving looking, et cetera. But at the end of the day, it's still projected. In other words, it's on the screen that they're seeing. It's not necessarily that they're identifying it with themselves. And that's a critical part of our workshop. Fortunately, the people who started it and everything, that's their primary motivation is to create experiences so that people aren't talking about a thing. They're having an experience of it. And so what we're talking about here might be a way to get to that, but you still have to have the relationship. You have to have the experience of the people directly. And to me, that's sort of like a two step. In other words, you can talk about it here, but it's not, we're not there. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And in the Incent Jerry's brain calls and sort of in that environment, Ken Homer's been really helpful. And I kind of got stuck trying to figure out, okay, now what do I do with that for these calls? But he's really good at somatic experience and having people in a Zoom call. All right, now stand up, do this, think this, go, you know, step through these sorts of things, be in your body, imagine this, whatever. And he's got a large vocabulary exactly or dance the YMCA. And he has a really deep bag of tricks, effectively, on these sorts of tools, which is lovely. And I think is a big addition to these sorts of things. But I think you're also talking about how do I experience a piece of nonviolent communication? How do we step through it as an exercise or as an experience? And that's completely doable. I mean, NBC is trainable, right? Right. And there's a variety of things like that where you could say, okay, hit pause, just step away from the device for a while and go do this, this, and this, and then come on back, hit resume and we'll pick up and keep going kind of thing. That's doable as well. And I'm very interested in local community and online community. Like how might you get together with other people to sit down and talk about these things for a while? And meetups never quite turned into what I thought it would or hoped it would. But the idea of people meeting in local geography to talk about ideas that are being talked about across the globe is super interesting. And also, it helps integrate these things, helps root them in local community, all of that. Exactly, swipe left, swipe right. Is this a good idea? And in a way, that word integrate really is what I'm trying to sort of communicate here. The fact that what you're doing to an extent stimulates the desire to go out and have the test of it. In other words, let me try this. Experience of it. And so a couple of thoughts here. One is that one of my beliefs about design from trust is that once somebody has experienced it, first I say that it's a weird experience. And if you've caught this in any of my videos, I basically say systems that are designed from trust generally get two predictable responses. The first one is, oh shit, this is never going to work.   Whoever thought of running a meeting with no agenda where the crowd is actually, this is never going to work. Then a lot of people bounce away at that moment. They're like, okay, so I'm not even gonna try it.  And my own instinct, my own intuition is at that moment, if they like it and they get it and it feels a little risky, but it feels like it worked and it took them someplace new and interesting and pleasant, they might want more of that, but they don't know that there's a pattern here and that this pattern can be replicated in lots of other areas, right? And that's a piece of what I wanna do with the Inside Jerry's Brain journey is illustrate that the same little pattern is true for animal gentling and traffic calming and workplace democracy and la-ma-ma, and if you scratched on one and liked it, here's how to get more of that. And I think I'm not making that message clear any place, right? I need to just cut a video that says what I just said, reshoot that little stretch. But that's a piece of it in that this is experiential and I can point you toward a little pallet, a little smorgasbord of things to go try next, a couple of which might be happening in your community, right? Here's a whole bunch of things that could be happening, search for them locally or here's where they're happening online or whatever else. And that immediately gets us into the realm of experience and connecting with other people and things like that. And I wanna do much more of that. I'm just not maybe letting myself do more of that. I don't know what, I'm confused. Thanks, Estie. Thank you, Estie. Yeah, thanks for being here. Thank you. We're gonna tell Mutify in the meantime. Is that different from Solomonifying? Are you trying to figure out how to turn off the video? Yes, I'm trying to hit leave meeting. Tap, tap, tap the image.  I have tapping, but it's bad. The tapping is not. It is not doing it, leave me. Leave me. No. No. She accidentally ejected herself out the airlock. Was that what you were kinda thinking, Jermaine?  All right. There should be like a little airlock, you know, effect on Zoom when we leave. Or we should have a choice of effects when we arrive and leave.  When you leave your images or spirals and fades away. Exactly, or goes, you know, whoosh. Yep. But did you see my comment there on the side? Design from betrayal is the opposite of design from trust. Well, I do talk about design from mistrust a lot, but I've never used the word betrayal. And I think that's actually a powerful word here because mistrust seems kind of... Too wimpy. Wimpy, yeah. But betrayal makes clear that I'm designing because I expect this, because I expect to be betrayed by a participant, by you. Or I expect to betray you. Or expect to betray you. Yeah. You know, it's basically you're building a structure to be prepared for somebody to be malicious. Right. And I say, how does that make you feel? I mean, I think it's part of the conversation about trying to encourage design from trust is to reinforce the idea that if you're not designing from trust, you're designing from the concept of betrayal. Right. And that makes you feel sick, doesn't it? It does. Very queasy. So... I like that. I haven't pushed the language towards better words like betrayal, so that's a great idea. So we can quote you. Jerry Mikulski likes design from betrayal. Exactly. That'll get some attention. And sometimes you have to do kind of the opposite to get some people to show up and pay attention, right? You have to... There's a lot of that. There's a fine line between an interesting, flippy headline and clickbait. There is. No, there is. There's supposed to be anyway. I know it's out there somewhere, Jermaine. So a piece of this quest for me that's never really materialized is what does... And that I'm very excited about and would love to see happen is what does the next medium for human communication look like? Right? Because we had storytelling and singing and performing before we had any language, before we had written alphabets and printing. Then printing press, then radio, then TV, then all kinds of things show up.  Then the intertubes show up and we have all this communication of different kinds, fabulous. But our tools are still basically like a stone axe for communicating with each other. And some people say that writing, written language is a temporary hack and that we're gonna be post-literate real soon.  I think writing is this very impressive, compressing mechanism for linearizing something. So I don't think writing goes away anytime soon, but some people do. But I do believe that we're moving towards some new kind of literacy, some new kind of communicational forms that matter a lot, that make it easier to do or struggling to do here. May I toss out something that I wrote into a science fiction game a while ago? You bet. Intuition networks. So if you posit a future where there is the ability to do deep mind, brain, computer interaction. And in that future, you have networks. If you can essentially tap into the, whatever parts of your brain are responsible for intuition, could you potentially share that capacity? And basically you have a circle of people who we're sharing each other's intuition capabilities and basically generating insights for each other. Everybody's focused, everybody is offered the same problem, then don't think about it because we're letting your back brain chew on it. And so basically communicating not by direct articulation, but communicating by insight, by shared digitally connected insight. Would it still narrow down to words as we talk to each other or would there be some other representation of the insights and the intuition? It depends on what other parts of the brain you're tapping. Right. Or do you want to communicate by feeling? Do you want to communicate by emotion? Do you want to communicate by proprioception? So if there was some kind of brain machine interface, could it let me step into your sense of intuition or premonition? Possibly, I mean, this is all conjecture. So the answer is yes, of course, but it depends on what kind of technologies are available. I think that if we do have effective brain mapping where we do have a better idea of not just what's going on in the brain, but how to translate that into a networkable medium, then the potential for shared intuition or intuition networks or insight networks, I think it's actually kind of there. And it doesn't have to be magical or telepathy or anything like that. It's simply the ability to share brain power in a way that is richer than trying to translate concept into linear language. Yeah, exactly. And moving backward toward a bit of what I was saying, it would be great if as I was sitting here thinking about what I'm trying to express, if a little listener agent sitting next to me were like, oh, do you mean this book, this talk, this whatever? Because in your brain, you start the, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I would love to share this YouTube talk that I saw once, in particular the little stretch where the author says blah. Like I'm thinking that, but the time it's going to take me to locate that and whatever else, we will be somewhere else in the conversation. And my job here is to pay attention to the conversation. So I'm not doing that. But if something could sit next to me and say, do you mean this, this, this, this, this, this, I see those and I'm like, no, no, no, this one. Just drop it in. This one, drop it in. This one, drop it in. And they become artifacts in our conversation quickly. We can then slow down and pay attention and I can explain it, whatever else. But that would be super interesting to me that something was paying attention to my thought processes and doing the lookup. Yeah, that sounds like a virus to me. Excellent. That it's basically you're, you're infecting someone with rampant free association. Oh, so good. Uncontrolled free association. So it's, I just keep this and then it reminds me of that and then it reminds me and eventually it all comes back to sex, but that's, that's the human brain. So if we roll this forward, could I conquer the world by doing this? Okay, why not? Go ahead, Jerry, just give it a try. Just give it a try. Okay, good. The old college try. Kind of motivating. So anyway, we have a couple of minutes left. We have sort of 10 minutes left in our call. Anything else that anybody's had to be like, since we're sitting here together, having chewed on a bunch of different things, anything else you'd like to put on the table, anybody? And I just want to apologize to Easta for basically this is, this is often my role in these conversations is to serve as a engine of distraction and superficiality, but with a really nice voice. And so. Jame is the picture of doom. We're all doomed. Doomed. Often, usually, but in a fun way. I mean, in a way that you'd like to be doomed. Yes, Tom? Yeah, well, the Rex calls us old to me. I think of you as our provocateur in residence. I'll take that. Okay, with the occasional cat, as we all saw earlier today. Yeah. Anything else? Easta, any thoughts, questions, reflections? And in particular, and you don't need to answer this now, but I would love us, Rex, whoever's in Rex, to be resources to you in your journey. And what's interesting to you is almost by default interesting to us because how you see the world, what you and your cohort are interested in, what decisions you're facing, all of that is like very interesting to us. I'd be happy to keep sending emails and thoughts with my, basically what's going on in my brain. But I think that the initial part of this conversation was something that I think I've been thinking about a lot when we were talking about relationships and self-loathing. Because I find 2019 has been a strange year because four close friends of close friends have committed suicide in the last, and yeah, and I think I have never had to deal with suicide so closely before. And I've never seen such a dense number in such a short period. And it's been all age groups, different contexts, different countries, different reasons. Some had access to therapy, some didn't, some had love and support in their lives, some didn't. And so it's really is, and I think one just happened two days back. So this is something that's just on my mind because I can't understand what can be done to support people better. The systems we have are not working. I agree. They're not accessible. So, yeah. We're already in the middle of a series of crises that are making it hard to sort of be alive and be connected. And then there's a whole bunch of actors who are weaponizing that and using it on purpose and pumping fear into that, which makes it three times worse. So it's hard to figure out where to intervene, how to intervene, what to do, other than to reach out and connect with people. And you want to be able to sit down and say, why? Like why did you make these decisions? What drove you here? What happened? What made it so impossible? Yeah. And which is why I'd be interested to know how Bill, the workshops you were talking about, how they're panning out and what people's takeaways are. Yeah. Bill, do you want to share a couple of links on the RECS list just after this call of some of your work and some of the things you've done? You're talking about terms of like educate tomorrow and stuff like that, or is it okay? Yeah. And the School of Love and Relationships and all that new, just put a couple of links up and that way all of us can benefit from where you are and Isha can pick up some of that and see what you've been up to. Okay, but let me just tell you one of them that I want to sort of share. That's maybe often in Lollaland, at least the way that she comes across. You've heard of Bill Bultetailer, the woman that had the problem with the... My son, Coutinius. Right, and he's got a segment on a program that sounds true, has called the Brainge Change Summit and there are like 24 different segments of it and everything, but she's one of them. And to me, she sort of stands out as what I call the future of humanity. In other words, her ability to function with a completely disparate, sort of like left brain, right brain functionality. In other words, the ability to actively function in a just right brain, just left brain, in other words, and thinks of herself as being in that situation. In other words, that she's got that capacity to choose. In my mind, we're so limited by our perception that this world has got to be done in this structure with this way. And it's fundamentally, there was everything that you read going back 100 years tells you that the functional aspect of economy is to create alienation so that you can solve it through the consumption. And to me, that's a fundamental aspect of our dialogue. In other words, our ability to find ways to create relationship as opposed to allowing the system to take it away from us. Because it's inherently, whether you call it economic competition or whether you just talk about the nature of how our system requires that we make money in order to buy food, to get transportation, et cetera, et cetera. In other words, that caring that you were talking about between the kids that sort of like collapsed and can't deal with them with things. It's very difficult to solve that other than systemically. In other words, you've got to recognize that the system is set up because it takes advantage of it. So part of the reason I love the great transformation, Polanyi's book and the little five minute university I put on the list earlier, is that he describes the shift that destroyed the thing before industrial society. And he describes how we stayed alive before industrial society and how one of the things he says is that market economy requires market society. That a market economy can't have people subsisting off the land enjoying things without money and not in the labor force and all that. It basically must convert everything and everyone into free labor, free land for production and everything has to have a price. It's the cuckoo. The best analogy I have for it is like a brood parasite, a bird. Cuckoos, cow birds don't raise their own young. They lay their eggs in other birds' nests and the first instinct of the cuckoo chick is to push everything else out of the nest. And capitalism and this whole neoliberal thing we've bought and we're like completely submerged inside of is a cuckoo for these other intriguing ways of being alive that were how we stayed alive up until that time, right? And so, and human memory is short and not that many people read history and we don't tell these stories anymore. And so we've lost these notions of other ways of staying alive and what we're, that the conversation we end up having as well and you don't want socialism, do you? Look what Mao and Stalin did. And I'm like, Jesus people, those are not the choices. Those are not the choices on deck. So Rex is an attempt to explore those choices, like very much. Why are we forced into the choice that we're in right now? How do we get out of it? Who's doing it? So, and I completely agree that a lot of the alt-rights critique of what's going on, I agree with. It's just that some of the methods for, and many people are like, let's just smash the thing that we're in and whatever shows up, shows up afterward, but it's gotta be better than this weird, dysfunctional thing that we're buried in. So, yes, with lots of exclamation points after it. So you were, I think you were framing that when you started talking about Jill Volte-Taylor and her talk as a new initiative you're building or how does that fit in with what you're doing? You tie it back to the systemic aspect. In other words, you've gotta have a broader perspective as to where the relationship opportunities are. And if you tie it back to the systemic level that the relationship building, in other words, school of love and relationships is important, and then you watch the way that she's doing that. In other words, if you were to go through this series of 24 different Brainstream Summit presentations, a lot of them are very, very technical ways of showing how you can get to where Jill-Taylor Volte is. In other words, the parasympathetic, the sympathetic and the whole relationship and how one pushes you one direction and the other. In other words, they've got the science down perfectly, but they don't have a demonstrator as good as Jill-Taylor Volte from the point of saying, wow, here's the way it could be. So she's consciously electing the mix, almost like a fuel mixture of which of these states she wants to be in for whatever she's trying to do. And she's coming at it from trust. Is there a particular topic? I need to obviously do not pass, go, do not collect $200. Watch whatever it is that motivated you on this. So if you can share that link to the Rex list, that'd be even better. Remember that the original book called Trust, that footnote that I found basically points you at the fact that lack of trust starts here. If you can't trust yourself to basically take care of you, you're not going to trust anything else outside. So in essence, she's demonstrating the ability to have an experience which obviously is what she has. And a rebuilding process that allowed her to go out and find the left-brain parts that she had sort of disconnected from, but build them back in a way that she could trust and work with them. Wow. Yeah. That movie scene. I want what she's eating. Exactly. When Harry Metzali in the deli. Fabulous. Fabulous. Bill, thank you. That was as I typed in the side note. This is like the most insanely perfect Rex scene note to land on here at the end of our time together. Let's pursue this conversation on the list. I'm very happy to set up a pop-up Rex call. If this sort of bubbles up and we find another piece of this we'd like to chew on, just somebody say so. And we'll schedule another call like this. Otherwise we have another check-in call the second Wednesday of next month. But thank you. Aisha, thank you very much for staying up late and being with us here. Thank you so much for having me. It's been everything I expected and more. Yay. Thank you. I hope that's a yay. Give the kitty another scratch for us. You are exhibiting the School of Love and Relationships right there. That's right. In a total PG rated version. So thank you. Thank you. Bye everybody. Bye-bye. Thanks. Bye-bye. Thank you.


Hi, I'm Marsha Martin and I have here with me, Marta Locheman, if that's the right way to pronounce it. Marta, would you say it yourself? Locheman. Hi, Marta. Okay, I would never have gotten the accent right. So, okay. So welcome Marta. Marta is a candidate for this fall's Boulder County Commission election representing, what do you call it, the East County area? District two. District two. Okay. I should have done my homework better. That's all right. Longmont Lions, Evans Park. All right. So this is my first serious long conversation with Marta. We've chatted before. But I thought you would be interested in hearing Marta's case for running for county commission and what she thinks that she is going to be doing as county commissioner. So first Marta, why are you running? Why did you decide to run? Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me on too, Marsha. I appreciate that. And the question about why there's, it's really a culmination of a lot of different pieces, but I think the impetus of like what made you decide to run for this particular position is one of the questions that has come up and I think it's really important. So the, after doing a lot of different work around the county over the last 28 years in different issues regarding just access to information and resources for what I believe is just everyday community members, single parents, teachers, etc. Like myself. And after seeing that in several different institutions, and then going to work for the city of Longmont, I've worked for the city of Longmont a couple of times, but the most recent one was after the flood of 2013. During a data assessment coordination for the state of Colorado, Division of Local Affairs who asked the 14 counties once affected in that flood of 2013. Two years after the flood asked what happened to vulnerable populations and they were doing grant requests that the city of Longmont was one of the organizations who put in a proposal to find out specifically for our Boulder County community what happened to monolingual Spanish speakers during the flood. And so I was hired by the city of Longmont at the end of 2016 to do that data assessment for the state and respond to that question. That's three years after the flood. That was a significant natural disaster that is now documented with research connected to the climate crisis that we're in and for me three years later is an afterthought. And that was one of the pieces of being in community saying all of the different inequities in the way that access to information occurs for community members. So to be able to go in and do a data study was a really exciting opportunity to present information. And so that's what I did in a lot of different work and focus groups and conversations and interviews with folks all over the county and then created a report for the state created training materials that are still on the city of Longmont website. But one of those focus groups with a group of young Latinas in our local school district here in the county one of our local statistics here in the county. And we had gone through each focus group asking community members we talked with middle schoolers all the way to our senior communities throughout the county and asked what were the gaps in access to information during the flood. And there were many other barriers that were that were felt that were heard that were seen for providers, working with modeling with Spanish speakers, etc. And one of those focus groups, one of the young women went through the process shared what had happened with her own family shared how she had been a cultural broker for her family. We started talking about our students circumstances what they were feeling in their building personally and in their classrooms. And at one point she turned to me and I was working for the city of Longmont says she was looking at me as a government employee and she said, Miss, tell them to let us speak for ourselves. And that really was the voice and the reason that I said you know what this is bigger than me. Community perspective who are facing inequities in basic information and resource in in a whole lot of different places as I already stated. And so, even as a previous teacher and in St. Frank Valley School District, I remember telling my students just keep working hard. And, and then I realized with her voice that I have these experiences that worked on boards I've worked on national projects I built company, I have worked in the housing industry. So why not take all of those experiences that are connected to local community members and let us speak for ourselves. And be part of the decision making and the planning, the processes in the programs in Boulder County in a local way to build more impact so that's a longer response to your question but that was really the the voice that started this campaign in 2018. Well that's really I'm impressed that you can get it down to that one seminal moment like that. And that you care about it enough about one individual that that she could make that kind of impact on you and say, I am going to let you speak for yourselves. And I'm going to ask questions that I had planned to ask you out of order because this is such a good segue into question number three, which do you feel as a member of the Hispanic community. What do you feel that you are best positioned to accomplish both for that community and for the entire community of Boulder County. Yeah, that's a, that's a big question we could talk about that for a while, but it's important and, and what I want to make sure that that your viewers and folks listening etc are really clear about is that the work that we do in Boulder County, whether it's for our LGBTQ community whether it's for or with our elders or it's our faith communities, or in this case some of my background work is focusing on monolingual Spanish speaking and or bilingual families in housing advocacy. All of that work truly makes us better as a full community. And I say that because it affects all of us when we know our neighbors and we're connected to our neighbors and our neighbors know where the resources are when we have a natural disaster. That helps all of us, not just from a moral standpoint that we should be able to help our neighbors not just from an ethical standpoint of everybody should have access to resources and information, but it's also a business standpoint. Like how do we do better financially as stewards of our resources from a local government standpoint a county government standpoint. It's when our community members know how to access resources, whether it's day to day, or it's an emergency situation or it's either public health or it's natural disasters. And so that to me is one of the pieces around how it helps everybody and some of the other work that I've been doing since that project was is around cultural brokering. I was working with the resiliency for all data assessment. After I finished that project, I was then hired I do consulting as one of my, my many jobs and my many work, you know, work projects as a single mom that's what it takes and I'm also an entrepreneur so it's exciting to take it out and do more. But one of, after that I was asked to do facilitation for Community Foundation Boulder County. And that work I was facilitating a national cohort for about 18 months we got stopped here, just like so many other projects and great work, due to COVID and not being able to do in person workshops, etc. But that work was around this concept of how do we, and how might we as county government or what institution you can fill in the blank but how might we create conditions for Latino bilingual cultural brokers to influence decision making. And so that is another piece that I think is important for general everyone in the community to understand that people like me, who are cultural brokers, it means that we are serving organizations, institutions around our county to meet needs not just for this sector of monolingual Spanish speakers or this sector of elderly folks or whatever your mountain community, whatever your kind of focus area is. That is a reciprocal job. We are being bridges to government agencies or to nonprofits or to different organizations. And so I think that's important that people understand that it is a given take conversation is a given take action. There's plenty of us all over the county who are offering that work and that service, and really, when I say service it's giving back to not just the person that needs the support, but also to the organizations and I saw a lot of them working with, as an advisor for Long Island economic development partners for the different chambers in our county for the VOA, which is voluntary organizations actually active in disaster to our sir in our response team here locally that are all wanting to be able to support in this focus with this study really to be able to support my language Spanish speakers or bilingual families or the Latin Latino community. And there's a real interest on both sides for us to be doing more work together and so that's, you know, part of what I think the message is really important. Again, we are better together, but it means that we've got to do the work to be connected. I've participated in several discussions, you know, the just transition committee for resilience, and, and so on. Also, a couple of years ago there was a really good. A really good presentation, a really good event that was around Caesar Chavez and, and what life was like, you know, during the strikes and so on, and back then, and those events have been conducted using translation as bilingual events and they would switch to where the primary speaker was sometimes speaking English and sometimes speaking Spanish so that one got an idea of what it was like to be the person who didn't understand the main event and had to understand sort of at second hand. And, and I think that that was really a transformative experience for me. Do you have having a more diverse local government aids in that in that building of awareness in an important way. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you just shared is important. And I say that because if we haven't experienced anything similar to their sector of our community, we can't say that we understand. We can't say that we're going to help you or we're going to work with you or because we don't know what the needs are right we haven't been in any similar of an experience. I do believe that one of the pieces you just mentioned is language and language access is really important. That's part of the work that I've been doing for years and years here locally. So I'm going to talk about how we build up our Spanish speaking youth into career paths, how the opportunities here locally we're such a fantastic hub of bilingual families and that's an academic success but it is a career path if we systematically set it up that way. I had a conversation behind for a long time that was one of the reasons I got into the school district got my masters and taught here locally because I knew there was a lack of representation, and I knew that there was lack of a formal program to support that. So that kids know that they have skill and a talent because that's very lacking in conversations for a lot of our youth around our local community. The same reason that that representative authority figure for, you know, without a better term from a classroom standpoint, also translates into, if we look at our school districts, who are teachers, who are staff, who are administrators, who is our top leadership. And we can ask that question in any organization and local government is the same thing personally City of Longmont has done a really great job. I'm a big fan of long one I've been involved for a long time to I we have that in common for sure I was one of the community members who was involved in creating the Longmont Latino strategic plan years ago in the early 2000s. That is now Longmont Multicultural Action Committee. I was the chair of that steering committee for years and ran that budget item, the budget line for City of Longmont and also ran the health and housing task force for that group. And part of that conversation, that was the impetus to get the Latino Chamber started here in Boulder County. That was the impetus to get housing inspections, the standard housing looked at it in a new way and consistent long, systematic changes and if we don't have people in leadership, who are from our own communities meaning in Longmont specifically, people who look like me, walk in life like me are perceived like me. And we, the Hispanic community Latino community Latinx community, we are a third of our community. And so that lack of representation and especially when we talk about the commissioner's office. That's a big part 20, 20% of our county. Who is never been represented. So be the first. Yeah. And then the Boulder County Commission's office. For me, we have to go from leadership has to be represented to help community come together. That's dynamic change that's how our policies get changed that's how our systematic and that's the work I've been doing for a really long time is every place that I've been is out a week. The community hearing what needs are and then creating institutional exchange and so creating impact requires someone like me to be in that seat with all those skills to be able to support just what you're talking about like what would that really look like and how would that support community. That's an example. So I can see that you have a broad understanding and experience with with what the, I won't call it a problem space, although in some cases it does pose a problem. Even when the in 2013 when the flood came in overnight. People were being called in to the city offices to work the disaster management. So I think it's a great example that the city already knew who is bilingual because you had to have a bilingual person on every single phone. Yeah, and that was that was the example of how the city of long month specifically was more prepared. The cities around that county. And that's a great example and some of those pieces are, how can we do that more broadly at a county level. And so because you do have that experience. I can get that requested to which is what are your specific main goals to accomplish while you're serving on the commission. Yeah, there's a few pieces and for me, it's a continuation of the work that I've been doing with an equity lens about really including more people into these conversations and doing similar but more broad collaboration with our nonprofits and with our agencies with our companies, etc, to really affect and change around affordable housing, accessible housing to continue the amazing work. Boulder County already has. When we talk about climate action and sustainability and resiliency and environmental action. We are way ahead nationally recognized from a county perspective. And so those programs have to continue. And how do we include more people in those conversations because as you and I talked a little bit offline there's some really big issues we around climate change that are affecting that is, you know, it's, it's not a secret anymore it's finally starting to be talked about here locally that are affecting people of color in a disproportionate way. And so, I believe the same way that we've been talking about people of color will have to be at the leadership table to ensure that we're part of the conversations so that we can include as we work on all of these different issues and there's a lot of community needs issue. And so, my work is going to continue to be focused on those different pieces and I think the other the piece around that that's important is that a lot of this role is also management and support of our 2000 Boulder County employees and so for me to be able to use my expertise and experience on the Lama United Hospital Board of Directors to be able to use my experience with the National Association of Hispanic Realistic Professionals and that board and other committees and task forces that I've been involved in here locally to take those perspectives and make sure when I'm representing Lama, but also all of Boulder County to do that same work that commissioners really have to be focused on here locally from an administrative standpoint. So that is important. It's not a secret that our Latino community tends to be less economically advantaged than the county population as a whole. And one of the things about that, you know, you were talking about future things you were talking about we're going to have a climate emergency and the adaptation to that and so on. It's harder when you are without means and without your which is what ends up happening to look ahead 10 years and think how you're going to be impacted and to stand up for for your situation. So you're going to have to, I think, be you'll be a person who's aware of that and can and can pull people in to that activity which might not happen organically. Yeah, I totally and that's, you know, the economic piece of where we are and what's happening, you know, due to COVID and what's going to be coming down the, the pike and in regards to our budget here locally, etc. Those are also pieces that with my finance background and being in the mortgage world and being in the real estate like it that's what I do every day is work on legal contracts and it's connected to land use and easements and that's a lot of the work that county commissioners do. Also, this piece around the way that we like you said how do we include community and make it a real authentic connection to the same needs that are from an economic standpoint that also means what happens with our employees what's going to happen with our employees moving forward and the way that businesses are being affected right now. What is going to look like six months from now and when you talk about that planning piece using using work that I've been involved in as a self employed person for the last 20 years you know, folks who've never been self employed. It's a very different experience of being your own CEO of being your own CFO of creating your budgets and your plan and managing other people's finances really what I've been doing for a really long time. And that's all it to the property taxes and the way that things get funded here in our county and so that those different perspectives are a really unique for a county commissioner and I think even for a lot of government electives. I think so too. Everyone would think we were crazy if we did not mention that today here as we speak, we have a movement of public demonstrations all over the country that were touched off by the death of George Floyd, in particular. But having to do with essentially this concept that black lives matter and I don't think that means black like out of Africa it means people of color who, who have who are are called out by their experience and their culture as different from the economic and voting majority in this country. And what we have here now is either a wonderful thing or a scary thing depending on who you are. But while the sun is up at least what we have is a wonderful thing where persons of all backgrounds are going down and showing their support for this movement and acknowledging that we have a problem of unjust deaths that are being perpetrated by our police because, well I'm not even sure what the because is, I should be asking you what the because is. What is your perspective on that. What, what are the diverse peoples of America, rejecting about the current day America that has brought them all together in this demonstration. That's a big question for the whole answer, but I agree 100% like this is an important topic and you're right, the, the responding to it and inquiry about what you know what's really happened is super important it's going to become more important my hope is that it's not just a meme it's not just a dialogue it's not just showing up for a protest to say I'm out on the periphery watch watching from the outside because that in itself is privilege. And, to me black lives matter is a movement that truly has to just to be there as black lives matter, because in this country historically I'm an ethnic studies major have been really involved in inequities from a lot of different perspectives but I also want to make sure that are, you know, my black brothers my black sisters understand I'm not here speaking on their behalf, I also want to make sure and acknowledge that black lives matter, and we have a historical issue in the United States about how we have systematically pushed black people in this country to the periphery in every single way and systematically, there is a link and there is a connection to our indigenous people are native people are people of color, who have also been left out on the periphery and meaning not in the same way but also systematically from everything to the way that finance systems operate, have operated where people can live and have any historically been able to live. Those are connected back to the pieces that you already mentioned about the economic gaps. It didn't just happen that black people or indigenous people or native people or people of color, the Hispanic Latino demographic in this country suffer from significant economic gaps, it is historical processes, it's legislation, it's rules and restrictions that have kept other people on the outside of even participating. And we can look at even from voting, you know, and all the ways that have disenfranchised folks in significant ways. A lot of those mechanisms centered around real estate does your experience in real estate and finance, give you a better insight as to how to make sure that that the new mechanisms the land use and zoning changes that we put in and stuff are going to advantage people and tend to tend to work for social justice rather than anything else. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's an important question and I believe, you know, for me, that's one of the reasons why my candidacy is so unique, but also so important, because over the last 20 years, that's, you know, it's one of the stories that I talk about a lot in my financial literacy work, I'm a guest instructor all over that type of work as a national trainer for the Hispanic wealth project. And one of my first experiences working in a bank downtown Boulder, I worked in restaurants, you know, for years and years and then got an opportunity for an interview in a bank that changed the trajectory of my life.   And that was that, that same scenario for me that day, I was called over to a banker who told me she needed me to translate for her and hand me the phone. And told me tell him he's been denied for his loan. And that was my first experience in a professional landscape, where I, you know, she was handing me the phone and so I just told him in Spanish, I don't know how humiliating, embarrassing, how horrifying to have to tell someone that news, even if I had been part of that conversation from the very beginning, that would have been hard news to share. And then she took the phone back and said, okay, go. When she passed the phone back, I could hear him asking in Spanish, like, the same thing you and I probably would affect, okay, what are my other options? What do I need to do? Did I miss something? Is there a different loan? And that was truly for me, the beginning of what forced me to keep working really hard in this world of finances, because then I started understanding how significant the inequities of, again, a resource and information. And I also recognized at that moment, I did not know enough to help that person. And I also wasn't being given the opportunity to know enough to help that person. And so that really began my career in banking and moved up into management. And then I took an opportunity for the same reason in the mortgage industry that somebody wanted me because of my bilingual skills. They knew there was an economic benefit to that company. And then it happened in the real estate world. But all of that is connected and it's been my personal responsibility to continue. How much more can I learn? And how many more people can I bring forward with me? Because in this country, if you don't have finances, you don't have economic stability, you don't understand capital, you don't understand credit, you will never get ahead. People don't like to say that, Marsha, but the reality is in this country, finances matter and money is connected, zip code matters. And if you don't have money, you don't get into the same networks and you don't get to the same positions and it's wrong. It is wrong. And it's wrong. I keep coming back to that.  Right. Wow.  That was back in 1995. And, but that, you know, again, so I moved myself up in that company and I, and I brought forth, we have to change our policies. So bilingual people here became very evident to somebody needs to be bilingual in this building every day all day, not just part time when I'm working because Spanish speaking clients that are walking into this building and that happens everywhere around our county. So what's our responsibility, again, to do better together, whether it's morally, ethically or from a business standpoint, when we take care of different segments of our population who right now are not included or not resourced or not supported. We're missing a really important connection to do better. You are, we're, we're wasting all of that human capital and all of the talents that those people have. That's a really, and that's one, you know, from a, from a teacher educator standpoint, that's, we are, we're missing a significant opportunity to bring people up and lift them up, but give them the skills, give them the clear career path, give them job opportunities, meaning whatever sector of a community that we're talking about. So we are, we're running up against our 30 minute limit, but there's one kind of important noun that I think got stepped on in all of the talk that we had, but you mentioned the Hispanic wealth project. Oh, yes. Can you just a one liner of that because I think it was important, I think that it's important that people know that's what you're talking about. Oh, yeah, so that's, I'll try and be really, really brief on that. So I am a certified trainer for the Hispanic wealth project, which is a national initiative that's connected to the work that I've been involved in with the board. We're locally, the National Association Hispanic real estate professionals. The focus of Hispanic wealth project is based on data from like 2014. And it's addressing home ownership, small business and also investments specifically for our Hispanic Latino demographic around the United States. So this is from a national level as a trainer. And there's 44 of us in the country that are now certified trainers. Wow. Work is, again, it's about addressing the inequities of the financial system. It's about, you know, just one of those small pieces is addressing home ownership and so just from a data standpoint if about 76 to 78% of white Americans in this country own their home. And 50% of our Hispanic Latino Latinx demographic on their property. So just that small piece. That's a significant discrepancy because you and I know as property owners that that is the way that we build access to one banking relationship, which is significant. It's capital. It's long term equity. It's for a lot of us is a retirement fund for a lot of us. It's the way that we pay for college or make major plans for our family members. That's just, you know, one example of the systematic differences of how policies have brought community some communities further along in the financial realm. That's the way that we have access in this country. Wonderful. You would bring a lot of important knowledge. I think to to Boulder County's housing policy, which is tremendously important. We, as we strain the boundaries of land use that we have here. Yeah. And it's complicated and it also requires, I believe, a different lens and a different perspective to come up with creative solutions that we can do to open more doors and housing for all of us here locally it's so imperative and it's going to become even more so. As we rebuild from COVID-19. Yes. One final question and I know it's got to be brief because we, we, is everybody's eyes to watch as this have this movement going on that looks like it's going to be really transformative. I hope I'm hoping that it's really transformative in America. Do you believe it's going to help you be more effective as a commissioner that you are going to be coming in the aftermath of something that was really big but maybe really controversial, or do you think it's going to make your job harder. It's a good question. I mean, there's to me there's two pieces of that one is, is this current situation opening enough people's you kind of talked about, you know, the way that some of this, the protests and these opportunities for people to start having these type conversations. Is that going to open up our local communities. Leadership worship community activism into true policy change and true action. That would create to me a bigger wider broader opportunity for me to lead as a county commissioner. And it also for me helps me understand that there are more people again that need to be part of the decision making and the work that I do going forward. And I do believe it's twofold, because if our voters as an example, decide they are really, um, that they really are satisfied with status quo, and they really don't want to have that. And so if we have these perspectives, then we won't be accepting a huge opportunity here locally in Boulder County to make dramatic long term change with representative democracy but represent leadership from our county commissioner office so I think it is a big challenge.  And, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about that too is you know what what does more representative leadership mean to you and how do you feel like that could potentially be a benefit for all of us here locally. I think you have done a really good job of convincing me that that your perspective is necessary. And I think it's those experiences with with being on the outside of the bilingual dynamic that we've held in long ahead was gave me a new perspective and I think your perspective is going to be really important, especially if, as it did in the 1960s, really does take on the challenge of racial justice and we're having hints now that maybe we're ready for taking the next step in that after pretending there was no problem for so many years. So, thank you, Marta for coming here and talking to me today or virtually coming here and talking to me today. Yeah, and thank you for taking on the challenge and, and the risk of doing this. So I really appreciate it. And best of luck with your candidacy. Thank you. Thanks for having me and it's a great conversation and it's important to continue these dialogues so that's really important to Marsha. I appreciate you. You do it. Maybe you can come back in a while and we'll do it again when something else big is going on. Yeah. All right. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Take care.