Nurturing Conditions for Change with Scott Williams and Morag Gamble

Episode Transcript
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Morag Gamble (00:00):
Welcome to the Sense-Making in a Changing World
Podcast, where we explore thekind of thinking we need to
navigate a positive way forward.
I’m your host Morag Gamble,permaculture educator, and
global ambassador, filmmaker,eco villager, food forester,
mother, practivist andall-around lover of thinking,
communicating and actingregeneratively.
For a long time it's been clearto me that to shift trajectory

(00:23):
to a thriving one planet way oflife, we first need to shift our
thinking.
The way we perceive ourselves inrelation to nature, self, and
community is the core.
So this is true now more thanever and even the way change is
changing, is changing.
Unprecedented changes arehappening all around us at a

(00:44):
rapid pace.
So how do we make sense of this?
To know which way to turn, toknow what action to focus on, so
our efforts are worthwhile andnourishing and are working
towards resilience,regeneration, and reconnection?
What better way to make sensethan to join together with
others in open generativeconversation.

Morag (01:02):
In this podcast, I'll share conversations with my
friends and colleagues, peoplewho inspire and challenge me in
their ways of thinking,connecting and acting.
These wonderful people arethinkers, doers, activists,
scholars, writers, leaders,farmers, educators, people whose
work informs permaculture andspark the imagination of what a
post-COVID, climate-resilient,socially just future could look
like.
Their ideas and projects help usto make sense in this changing
world to compost and digest theideas and to nurture the fertile
ground for new ideas,connections and actions.
Together we'll open upconversations in the world of
permaculture design,regenerative thinking community
action, earth repair,eco-literacy, and much more.
I can't wait to share theseconversations with you.
Over the last three decades ofpersonally making sense of the
multiple crises we face.
I always returned to thepractical and positive world of
permaculture with its ethics ofearth care, people care and fair
share.
I've seen firsthand howadaptable and responsive it can
be in all contexts from urban torural, from refugee camps to
suburbs.
It helps people make sense ofwhat's happening around them and
to learn accessible designtools, to shape their habitat
positively and to contribute tocultural and ecological
regeneration.
This is why I've created thePermaculture Educators Program
to help thousands of people tobecome permaculture teachers
everywhere through aninteractive online dual
certificate of permaculturedesign and teaching.
We sponsor global Permayouthprograms, women's self help
groups in the global South andteens in refugee camps.
So anyway, this podcast issponsored by the Permaculture
Education Institute and ourPermaculture Educators Program.
If you'd like to find more aboutpermaculture, I've created a
four-part permaculture videoseries to explain what
permaculture is and also how youcan make it your livelihood as
well as your way of life.
We'd love to invite you to joina wonderfully inspiring,
friendly, and supportive globallearning community.
So I welcome you to share eachof these conversations, and I'd
also like to suggest you createa local conversation circle to
explore the ideas shared in eachshow and discuss together how
this makes sense in your localcommunity and environment.
I'd like to acknowledge thetraditional custodians of the
land in which I meet and speakwith you today, the Gubbi Gubbi
people and pay my respects totheir elders past, present and
emerging.

It's my delight to welcome to the Sense-Making in a
Changing World show today, ScottWilliams, UN advisor, author,
Warm Data host, ultra marathonrunner, sustainability leader,
and explorer of the rightrelationship.
Scott's fully immersed in theworld of global capital and

(03:58):
global dialogues, things that Ireally know nothing about, but
yet in conversations we've hadduring Warm Data, we're both
Warm Data hosts trained by NoraBateson.
There was a similar heart and adeep care for the planet and for
life that I felt in working withglobal systems, I focused mostly
with local communities.

(04:19):
Scott, on the other hand, worksmostly with global institutions.
Scott very kindly accepted myinvitation to join me on the
show and for me to be able toask my naive questions about the
global economic system.
I hope you enjoy this episodeand a deep dive into the
juxtaposition of the global andthe local.

(04:45):
I really wanted to dive in withyou to sort of explore some of
these ideas of the Global Southfunding, the global north, and
all of those sorts of you talkabout, you know, the things
you're talking about with rightrelationship and what are the
kind, understand a bit moreabout the global financial

(05:05):
system and yeah.
My work has always been at thecommunity and talking about, you
know, and it has been about thisidea of changing.
It's interesting trying tounpack a whole lot of that
through working with Nora aboutshifting the language.
And then you mentioned somethingabout how..

(05:28):
I think it was something thatyou mentioned on one of the
conversations about how even theloans that different countries
get, they need to pay back atdifferent rates and it's
completely skewed against theGlobal South.
And that just sat with me and itstill sits with me so long as
this incredibly unjust system.

(05:50):
And I haven't, I have been sonot in that world that I, but
yet I work all the time withcommunities.
I work with communities that aretalking about climate change.
I work with refugees and I, youknow, there's all these programs
and projects and activities thatare happening.
My question is really like, am Imissing something really

(06:14):
important that I need to knowabout the things that you
understand?
So that the efforts that we'reall putting into doing things
practically on the ground is notjust for naught.
You know, that's kind of, what'sbeen sitting with me when I,
since I heard this thought, oh,it was like a big kick in the
gut really, you know, and thatalso that when that sort of, the

(06:39):
naive kind of is smashed a bit,why didn't I know this before,
you know, I mean, I've lecturedin food politics at Griffith
university.
I remember the students sittingthere in the audience, you know,
going, why didn't I know thisbackstory to the food system.
I felt a bit like that sittingthere going, why didn't I know

(07:00):
the backstory to the economicsystem, you know, and I'm still
sitting with that.
So thank you for joining me tounpack this a little bit in
trying to understand what isactually going on and where are
the places where we can workwith this.

(07:21):
And, and also, I guess,somewhere in the midst of all
this, to understand a bit moreabout how permaculture and the
SDGs might link, whether there'sany kind of light you can shine
on that part of theconversation.
So it's quite, quite a broad andopening questioning, and I'm

(07:42):
sitting here very much as anabsolute novice in the world
that you live in.
Just hoping to find some kind ofclarity, I suppose.
So I don't know if there's anystarting points within any of
that, that I just said that wecould explore.

Scott (08:05):
Oh, there's so many starting points and it certainly
can't be a linear explanation,but so many reasons that measure
would be all wrong if I tried todo a medium and I'm a complete
novice to this as well.
So I think that's, I used tounderstand the financial system
and the economic systemperfectly five years ago.

(08:28):
Probably.
I was very sure of that.
I'm much, much less sure of thatthen becoming less sure of it as
each day goes by that I actuallyknow very much about anything
actually, which is such a lovelyfeeling, of no longer trying to
hold those illusions ofcertainty that I actually, you

(08:49):
know, that's that in itself is ahard thing.
Like, as you were saying, thatbeing confronted with the
naivety, but, not so much evenno naivety, just the veils and
layers between you and whatother people are doing.

(09:10):
Because it always comes down tohuman beings.
It's all human choices.
It's not some grand overallconspiracy.
And I certainly don't believe inanything like that.
There's no overriding systemhere.
There's just a combination ofreinforcing behaviors that
overlap each other and continueto reinforce him in a certain
direction or not in a certaindirection.

(09:33):
And where to start.
There's a wonderful, quoteattributed to an Italian
gentleman by the name of LucaPacioli, back in 1492 or 1494,
he's commonly thought of as thegodfather of double entry
accounting and the currentmodern version of accounting,
you know,“A person should notsleep until the debits equal the

(09:57):
credits”.
And as a trained charteredaccountant, who did accounting
at university, and who's a goodsort of, cog in the machine for
a long time, working at PWC fora long time as an accountant and
a very good accountant too.

(10:19):
Very good interpreter ofaccounting standards and
creative in being able to comeup with ways to account for life
in ways which were compatiblewith the underlying metaphors
and the underlying assumptionsloaded into the economic and
financial system that you couldaccount for the dynamic

(10:42):
processes of life by doubleentry accounting.
And it was a moment for me backin about 2006, I think it was
around like 2006, early 2007,it’s just a simple realization
that, okay, there's alwaysdebits and credits and they all

(11:05):
balance but something's notright.
You know, there are some verybig not rights going on, whether
it's inequality or whether it'san emerging climate crisis or
well-known climate crisis, butnot as substantially impacting
as it is today.
The food system crisis orwhatever it was like, but

(11:27):
there's something missing.
And then understanding moreabout the notion of
externalities and the ability toexternalize as like, yeah, we
were like, we're just oneplanet.
I'm pretty sure it's all kind oflinked up somehow, but not
having much of a sophisticatedunderstanding of that led to a

(11:49):
lot of reading and a lot oftalking to people and, you know,
ultimately led me towards yeah,complexity, science, and complex
systems theory and cyberneticsand shared friendship with Nora,
with her late father who stillseems to live in my daily

(12:09):
presence in terms of his wordsechoing from 50 years ago, it
was if they were spoken today.
Yeah, that, that statistic thatyou mentioned about which, I
think I'd had glimpses of, andI'd had a pretty good

(12:33):
understanding that it wasoccuring, but it really got
reinforced last year when I wasworking on the UN high-level
initiative on what was calledfinancing for development in the
year of COVID and beyond.

Scott Williams (12:50):
But it's like, okay, we've got a major global
whole species planetary thinggoing on here, surely now is the
time to reconsider the way thatwe are, that we are thinking
about the distribution ofwealth, the way that we're
thinking about financialresources, the way we're

(13:11):
thinking about access to land,the way we thinking about access
to water, the way we're thinkingall the way from the individual,
through the community level, allthe way to the global.
And, you know, for many years,I've been sort of playing with
this sort of panickist idea, orI guess the, you know, Daniel
Christian Whal talks about it,and others have, obviously, it's

(13:32):
based on wisdom from thousandsof years ago, that everything
from the very smallest part oflife to the biggest global
systems are all completelyconnected.
So maybe that partly answers oneof your questions and one of
your openings that, does it makesense to work at the community

(13:53):
level??
Yes, it does, but not inisolation of an understanding of
how the global processes workand likewise, operating at the
global processes level, which Ioften am at the moment.
There are many people who arenot at all cognizant or aware or
in any way operating in thecommunity or individually.
And so, there's thesedisconnects and these
separations where the way thathuman beings actually are
interacting outside of protocolsand roles and descriptions and
expertise in institutions isactually quite different.
But then likewise people workingat that community level where
there is a lot more warmth,where there is a lot more
genuine human interaction, notunderstanding that actually
there are extraordinaryconstraints and restrictions on
the way that people feel,perceive, that they are able to
act in that level.
And so there's all of these,these breakages in what is still
an interdependent overallsystem.

(14:59):
It doesn't change the fact thatthose interdependencies are
there.
It's just that they're not ableto be perceived for the most
part.
And so, this statistic of thecost of borrowing for the
government of Kenya when theyissue bonds to the market, to be
able to fund their activities,whether it's feeding their
population, building newinfrastructure, building health
systems or whatever, there'ssomething like six or seven

(15:22):
percent interest they have topay each year.
So just like if you take out ahome loan, you borrow money from
a bank, the bank says, okay,you're a reasonable credit risk.
Okay.
You've got decent collateral,blah, blah, blah, all of that
stuff, okay, we'll charge you 2%interest or 4% interest or
whatever.
And I think the going home loanrate in Australia is something

(15:43):
like three or 4% or something atthe moment.
Maybe it's less something likethat.
Whereas the borrowing rate forthe government of Kenya is still
at around six or 7% for theentire government of Kenya, with
what, 60, 80 million peopleworth of activity contributing

(16:05):
to the ability to repay a bond.
Whereas for the Germangovernment or the American
government, it's negative.
So it's around negative 0.5, inSwitzerland, it's negative 0.5%
as well.
So basically people pay you feeto borrow money for you to be

(16:26):
borrowing money from them, whichdoesn't make any sense.
It does make sense if you lookat the way that the geopolitical
order thinks about itself, theconcentrations of stability and
confidence for investors and allof that sits very much within

(16:48):
the G20 space within the OECDspace and all of the other
countries in the world who areoutside these clubs are much
higher risk, so-called higherrisk because investors don't
feel confident, but it'ssomething I've been playing with
for a long time with the UNactually now for about eight to
10 years on exploring thesystemic nature of risk, moving

(17:09):
away from compartmentalizing,earthquake risk and flood risk
and this risk and the risk inKenya and the risk in Australia
and the risks in the SunshineCoast and the risks in
whereabouts to actually there isa planetary scale risks that
we've unleashed to pointourselves now, which for the
most part considered existentialrisks is kind of a term that is

(17:33):
often used.
And that just doesn't find itsway in any way.

Morag (17:42):
Just want to ask you that.
Like is that, you almost, Ithink you answered my question
right there, is that kind oflevel of conversation happening
in the corridors of the placeswhere you're working in the UN
this existential crisis, thetalking about the climate crisis

(18:03):
at the level that I'm hopingthat maybe they're talking about
it, is that one of the keydrivers yet?
Or is it still something else?

It is.
But it's the same reason that Iwould, in response to your
question about, is there a rolefor permaculture in the SDGs to
come together there's suchcompletely different, logical
types, the absurdity of the SDGscompared with the, just the

(18:39):
basic common sense ofpermaculture and a regenerative
approach to agriculture and thegenerosity, the sense of
generosity, honorable harvest,all of the indigenous thinking
around how we are inrelationship with the land, the
SDGs that, that completeantithesis of that, and that

(19:00):
thinking, that way ofcompartmentalizing and
separating what is an overallinterdependent inter-relational
systemic challenge intodifferent buckets, 17 SDGs, 169
indicators, 243 targ ets andthousands of people who know how
to fix all of that.

(19:21):
You know, none of that isactually true, but the problem
underlying below that, which isnow playing out through the high
level dialogue and energy thatI'm a part of the first time the
heads of state have been sort ofconvened by the UN general
assembly to do anything aboutenergy.

(19:41):
And the last time they met wasin 1981, and that was at the end
of the so-called oil crisis andwhat that gave rise to was
fossil fuel financing, cool andnormal, you know, not great.
What we're trying to do withthis high-level dialogue on
energy is to actually shift awayfrom a transactional approach to

(20:04):
a relational approach.
That is what I would like to seecome out of this.
But the problem is thatunderlying metaphor all the way
from Plato, through Descartes,and then the dualist notion of
mind and body, humans andnature, transcendental and real

(20:24):
world that, that separationgiving rise to those delusions
of the ability to control, todominate, to fix and to solve
that nature is a machine.
And it's an advanced mechanismwith pulleys and ropes.
This is what Descartes wastalking about, that if we can

(20:47):
just open it up, then we can fixit all.
And, you know, Nora has thisbeautiful, when she does her
training courses on Warm Data,she has these beautiful images
of interconnected andinterdependent.
And I'd been working for anumber of years in various UN
spaces and in different parts ofthe financial system, insurance

(21:08):
community, pension funds, andcentral banks, and whatever to
help to shift that thinking awayfrom interconnected to
interdependent.
Because when you view things asinterconnected, you view them as
able to be fixed.
All you've got to do is identifyall of the different parts and
the connections between thewhich are static necessarily

(21:29):
static, because you have decidedthey are static, even though
they're obviously not, but youhave decided by applying the
scientific method to be able toextract that connection between
that point and that point, ifyou fix that by putting more
money into it or putting policy,or doing some capacity
development, then you can fixit.

(21:49):
And it's the constant quest forfixes and souls.
And why is that?
Because that's what moneyrequires.
Money is the objectification oflife.
It's the elimination ofinconvenient relationships.
When you take nature and youturn it into money, you
eliminate all of the lifeprocess.

(22:11):
When you take a human being andyou turn them into a unit of
labor by giving them a wage, youcan, you have a notion that
you're controlling that, butactually all you're doing is,
and Gregory spoke about this byhaving a continuance in a
system, everything else has todiscontinue in random and
unpredictable ways.
And oops, that's kind of wherewe own now.

(22:34):
And so what is happening is thesame processes that have been in
place since the 1980s, sincebefore the 1980s, since the
Bretton woods conference in1944, since forever, in terms of
the, those who are the so-calledelite, those are who are the
decision-makers on behalf ofothers, maintaining this

(22:57):
underlying metaphor ofseparation and control.

Scott (23:01):
There's a lot of hubris and arrogance in there, nature
is a machine, time as a unit,you know, time is money,
idleness is seen.
All of that nonsense from theenlightenment era is still
playing through at a verynonconscious level though.
It's not that the people comeinto these conversations
consciously and go, right, theseare my metaphors.

(23:24):
I'm going to work with these asmy conceptual framings.
No, it's not even subconscious.
It's non-conscious, it'sinvisible, but it's sticky.
It's just, it's there from thefirst year you go to a
conventional educationalfacility where you are
indoctrinated into siloing andseparating and fixing and
gradings and the assessments andscorings and blah blah.

(23:47):
And that is the way that theseconversations continue.
And when you throw into the mix,you know, some poetry or some
spaces to explore differentperceptions on what we're
actually talking about, i.e,that we can't fix or solve this,
the only fix or solve that ispossible is for us to shift our

(24:09):
perceptions, to be able tounderstand that these are
constant dynamic, interdependentinter-relational processes.
And the best we can do is toshift the way we are behaving to
be more in harmony, to be ableto attend and notice them more
in the same way as humans, for97, 98% of our entire existence

(24:32):
on this planet notices the waythat trees grew.
They noticed the way when theflowers bloom, when the fruit
blossomed, they notice themovement of the insects, the
movement of the animals, the waythe clouds flow, the way the
wind went down, the valley, theynotice and attended to this in
the way that we notice in theteam to celebrities and sports

(24:53):
results and, you know, politicalnonsense and brand advertising
or whatever, but we noticed allof that stuff.
But we, and all of that isrooted in the notion of
separation of control and ofmonetization and
objectification.
So, going into these spaces withanything other than sort of a

(25:19):
sense of care and love, and howcan I help nourish, how can more
people who were working atcommunity level in a nourishing,
modality, or a way of justliving to nourish and care for
people?
How can that be brought intospaces, which are completely
absent of that, because that isnot seen as, in any way,

(25:41):
valuable to contributing, toachieving arbitrary goals, SDGs
Paris target, blah, blah, blah.
You know, they only heuristics.
They should only have ever beenseen as heuristics, but they
haven't been taken.
And then largely a distractionfor the left to focus on all of
these without actually changingthe culture underneath, without
actually changing the worldviewsand the mental models and the
stuff that, you know, GregoryBateson wrote about, the hard
programmed habits that we neverchallenged.
We Habitually don't challengethem because our brain doesn't
want to, it's hard work it's asyou said, it hurts.
It's like, dmn, I should haveknown that.
Dmn, I should've, you know,that's how much we wouldn't want
to do that.
And the brain doesn't want to dothat on a daily basis because it
is exhausting.
But if you do it together, thenit's less exhausting, that's

(26:34):
been my finding.
If you do it in, in a mutualspace with lots of people doing
it, then you, you're actuallyjust outsourcing bits of that
naivety, breaking down,shifting, that I used to take on
myself and do you know, that ledto multiple mental breakdowns,
nervous breakdowns, but doing itwith a group of people, it's a

(26:57):
very different experience then,we're all exposing ourselves to,
okay, this is what we're doing.
Why are we doing it?
Why aren't you doing that more?
What are you doing that, Scott?
but not in a judgemental way, ina kind, curious, exploring work.

Yeah.
Cause you know, exactly whatyou're saying about taking that
love and care and nurturingapproach, which is very much
what I feel where thepermaculture world is for me.
That's what it's about.
That's what draws me to it andit's very much about connection
and just being so present.

(27:37):
And I'm grappling with thequestion of how do we take that
to the kind of world in whichyou dwell?
And the reason why I mentionedthe SDGs was because I thought
that possibly that might be,like a little like Trojan horse.

(27:58):
You know, that somehow you couldreally describe the SDGs through
a permaculture lens, like eachone of those, but not seeing
them as separate buckets, butseeing them as a whole and just
redescribing them through apermaculture lens, it may be a
way to communicate in a languagethat is understood in your world

(28:20):
that then permaculture couldhave an opening to be discussed
and explored as a way for that,somehow it's seen as something
that can be used to supportcommunities.
So you kind of see where I'mcoming from.
Like I'm thinking here's allthese communities on the ground,

(28:41):
doing all of this amazing workand struggling so much to try
and find ways to ripple it out,but then seeing, you know,
millions of dollars just passingby and being spent over here,
not really doing anything orwhether they're actually adding
money into those nurturingsystems would destroy the very
nature of them.

(29:02):
I don't know, that's anotherquestion.
So there's kind of a few littlebits and pieces floating around
in that little section there.
One is about how doespermaculture be seen by the UN?
How does, how is a way that theUN may be able to support more
of these types of permaculturalapproaches?
Or is that the wrong question tobe asking altogether?

Scott (29:27):
Yeah, Yeah, I mean, I'm grappling with this because I
know I'm very much working atthat individual and community
level as well in as manyconversations as I can at the
community level.
But also I try to be at theglobal level for the way that

(29:49):
I've kind of been playing withthis over the years is there's
kind of only, there's reallyonly two levels.
Everything in between isarbitrary.
So there is a planetaryboundary.
There is just one planet, whichis floating around the sun.
And so that is a reasonable unitto be thinking because there's
just one species, which is allhuman beings.

(30:09):
And then there's a bunch ofreally interesting other
non-human parts of life which wekind of rely on.
And then there's the individualslash community level where
people are in real relationship,both with themselves, with each
other and with the land, buteverything in between is an
arbitrary construct for thepurposes of the maintenance of

(30:32):
the metaphor of separation andcontrol.
And so it creates an interestingtension working in and with the
United Nations and articulatingthat one of my practices in life
that I'm pursuing is to rub offall of those arbitrary lines

(30:52):
across our beautiful planet toallow us to have the
spaciousness to re-engage withnematicism, which I feel is
inevitable now that we are goingto have a period of extreme
human migration that has neveractually existed before.
And it's unimaginable to mostpeople, what hundreds of

(31:14):
millions of people quicklymoving is going to look like,
and why is that?
Because we're approaching wetbulb temperatures of around 35,
up to 35 degrees and plus 35plus on the wet bulb in a number
of different placesoccasionally.
And it's going to become veryfrequent in the very near future
and that's unsurvivable forhuman beings.

(31:36):
So people are going to have toleave places.
And at the moment that createstensions because of the
artificial nature of states,nations and all of that in
between.
The underlying, but then thereason why I do work within the
United Nations is I do believein the UN charter, I believe

(31:59):
very firmly in the UN charter, Ibelieve very firmly in the
underlying basis for why theUnited Nations was established.
I just don't think we shouldhave United Nations as the title
just United life maybe is abetter way of putting this so
that we can get rid of thissilly notion of nations, the

(32:19):
problem with the SDGs, apartfrom the categorization and the
distraction that that creates togo after SDG one on poverty or
SDG seven or energy or SDG 13 orclimate or whatever that, you
know, what's your favorite SDGis that they're rooted in two
fundamental assumptions.

(32:41):
And one is the perpetuationindefinitely of the nation state
system of the sovereign right.
And it specifically says in thepreamble that sovereign nations
will maintain the right to beable to act in their sovereign
interests.
That's deeply problematic,particularly when you're in

(33:03):
conversations about energy, thatwe have certain friends who are
sitting on certain large oilreserves in certain places with
a lot of sand who are suggestingthat it would be be within this
over an interest to perpetuallycontinue to put holes in the
Earth and allow that to come outto the surface and to sell it.

(33:25):
And that's actually allowed andencouraged within their SDGs and
the second one is that all ofthe SDGs are based on Kusnet's
flawed notion of GDP, which evenhe knew what he came up with in
the 1930s and 1940s.

The GDP was a stupid way of measuring human
progress, but all of them areactually understood through the
lens of the continuing growth ofGDP at three or 4% that leads
you back into that underlyingmetaphor again, or sort of the
platonic notion of separation.

(34:07):
Whereas, when I look atpermaculture, look at
regenerative agriculturepractices, I look at
re-relationshiping with theland.
We're looking at areintroduction of animist
concepts, the notion of everypart of life being animated and
at the rivers and the soils andthe worms in the earth, they're
our brothers and sisters.

(34:28):
They are just a different formof stardust on which we are in
relationship with.
And if we don't honor thatrelationship and respect that
relationship, quite frankly,we're fckd, you know, they are
too, but we definitely will be.
That is not in any wayunderstood at the surface level,

(34:54):
within any of the SDGconversations, but just like the
UN charter, the UN system hasbeen, wildly corrupted by the
influence of the geopoliticalelite beyond funding to a
program project fixed, solveimposition of this is the right
solution.
We're going to put it off-grid,solar, you know, solar farm in

(35:14):
rural Chad and people in ruralChad that just like, oh yeah,
that's so exciting.
But of course they’re notbecause it's like, this is what
someone in New York has decided.
This is a good thing, someone atthe world bank headquarters in
Washington, because they've gotmoney to be able to put this
project together.
Yes, there's an energy needthere.

(35:35):
So let's slap that in, insteadof, is there a different way
that we can actually talk to andbe in community and be in
conversation, in relationshipwith people who are energy poor,
because it's not actuallythey’re energy pour it's that
they are being constrained andrestricted by the conditions of

(35:56):
the systems, which sit above,above that level of community,
to be able to have the right tohave access to fresh water, the
right to have access to becauseof the decimation of the land,
by those interests who are ableto project that power because of

(36:17):
the prevalence of GDP, which asat the heart of the SDGs, but
underneath all of that is, yeah.
This sense of heuristics thatyeah, look, you know, ending
poverty.
It’s probably a good thing aslong as poverty is defined very
broadly as in poverty fromhaving our basic needs met as

(36:37):
opposed to poverty from havingFerrari's and Lamborghini's,
that, you know, everybody shouldhave right to sort of, you know,
interesting work, stuff to keepthem busy and occupied and
interested during life thatpeople should have the right to
fresh water, that people shouldhave the right to some form of
education.
Heaven forbid that it's thecontinuing formal education

(36:59):
system, hopefully not, but thatthey're able to be able to learn
new things rather than beformally educated.
All of that, if you situnderneath that and think about
how to knit all of thattogether, which is all knitted
together, and then playing thatback in, which is that's a role
that I try to play.
And for the most part, I’m oftenlaughed at, abused, or just told

(37:23):
not to come back, and more oftenthan not, it's just ignored.
You know, the emails go out,please give us your thoughts on
this, the email goes out.
Oh no, not those thoughts,different.
No, no difference.
We'll wait till he gives us theright thoughts but they are the
thoughts based on theunderstanding of the

(37:45):
interdependencies of life thatare missing from the
constructed, separated logic,which sits at that global
conversational level.
I don't think it's that farapart, because at the end of the
day, we're all humans.
That's what I hope is, you'rehuman, I'm a human, these people
who have these constructed rolesthat sit in these walls of

(38:08):
protocol, they sit within cages,but those cages don't exist, but
they're their metabolic system,their microbiomes, that does
exist.
That's real.
That's actually happening, therest of it's not.
So if we can just, you know, youcan't move that mist away.
It feels so simple some days I'mlike, yeah, this is so simple.

(38:32):
Then it's like, dmn, that mistis thick.
That’s some serious thickness

So I guess, coming back into that, yes, some days
it does seem simple and somedays it does seem possible when
you're in that flow state ofthinking there's possibilities,
then where does that take us?
How do we start to, like howwould someone like me then start
to negotiate those sorts ofconversations to be able to

(39:08):
somehow find a voice that cankind of echo through that mist?
Is there a way that my voicecould be heard and not
necessarily just my voice, myvoice as, or, you know, Ben
Ricky's voice from the Ugandanrefugees settlement.
How does that voice enter intothese conversations?

(39:29):
And in order to, I don't know,you know, like what is the
question is, you know, we weretalking about these limitations
that are there, that areconstructed limitations that
keep the Global South poor.

(39:53):
You know, these people who areinside these camps, where I work
with, you know, I talk with themevery day, you know, they are on
the frontline of climate change.
They are the ones that whenthis, when COVID is happening,
you know, the food system breakssomewhat and they stop getting
rations.
They, you know, whateverhappens, it happens to them kind

(40:16):
of first and worst.
And you start to question, well,what if that could shift, how,
what does that look like?
Where are some of the, maybe thecracks that you can kind of peel
back a bit and see a differentstory emerging and how could

(40:37):
that emerge or am I justcompletely diluting myself and
just carry on doing thecommunity work and building
local resilience andrelationship.
And that, that in itself willkind of crack open a different
possibility.

That's an easy question.
[laughter]

You know, I ponder these things in my spare time.
I don’t expect you have ananswer necessarily.
.

I have a thinking, not an answer.

Yeah, you know, because, I hear in you,
something that I hear in myselfwhen you speak, but because we
are working in different spaces,hearing your perspectives on
this, somehow just kind ofexpands my understanding so
massively.
So, I'm curious.

And likewise.
Whilst I'm at novice, this wholefinancial system malarkey, and
the whole political maneuveringsmalarkey, I'm an absolute novice
when it comes to permaculture orlike now, I am working with a
community garden finally in mytown and it's a fabulous

(42:04):
experience.
It's only been a few months now,finally, we got planning
permission or a group of peoplein the town got planning
permission, and there's, I don'tknow, we've got 60 plots or
something.
And there's some professionalgardeners who are helping to
support just if people need, butotherwise just find your way

(42:24):
into the soil and just spendingso much time with hands in soil,
knees on soil and feeling ourway into, into how to nourish a
care at a properly localized,totally present space, to be
able to then think about howthat relates to what I do in the

(42:45):
spaces where likewise, I'mtrying to nourish and trying to
care.
And I hold this notion ofstochastic generosity, very
close and letting go of any sortof sense that I'm trying to
create change which is how Ilived for many years when I was

(43:06):
leading climate change teams inPWC and I was keynoting all over
the world.
And I used to think I was very,very important and I was very,
very important.
I was very, very clever and Iwas very good at what I did and
all of that, I was very sure ofthat too Morag.
And lots of people told me that,so it must have been true but it

(43:27):
was all bllsht.
And coming to that realizationover a period of time that, you
know, I'm not even Scott, youknow, I'm just Scottying, I’m a
verb.
And most of me is not humananyway.

(43:48):
And by being able to change thecontext in which I exist to
spending hugely more of my timein forest areas and now in
spaces of growing food for myfamily and for my community,
changing the way that I'm ableto even describe my, what I am,

(44:10):
who I am, where I am, is beencompared to being in an office
environment day after day, butstill holding that when I'm in
conversations with people whoare still very much in that to
be able to recognize thepatterns, which they are
demonstrating about theconditions of the system they
exist within, but this notion ofstochastic generosity, instead

(44:32):
of, I think how I used to try toyou know, lead change was to try
and lead from the front andalways articulate.
This is where we're going thisis what we need roadmaps and all
that sort of rubbish.
We're going to go along thisdirection.
We're going to, you know, I knowI've done all the reading and
I've talked to everybody, I’vegot all these experts.
This is the way we're going togo but never actually being kind

(44:56):
to people.
just taking the time to be kind,to be playful, to be
spontaneous.
And actually just been reading abit of Jason Hickel’s new book,
Less is More, and he talks aboutthe enclosures that happened
back in, the sort of 14th, and15th century.

(45:19):
And it was an enclosure of landto be able to then maximize the
output, to increase the profitfor those who were in charge of
the enclosure, enclosure ofcolonial areas of the world,
colonial areas the world,Africa, Asia, Australia,
wherever to continue to maximizeprofit, but it was the enclosure
the mind as well, that happened,that created a form of numbing

(45:42):
away from being able to liveyour life in play and
spontaneity, in care for otherhumans, in care for the rest of
life.

(46:02):
And actually trying to come backto that and just living that as
a day to day reality and spacewhere it is not common.
It is not welcomed for the mostpart.
It's often feared.
Why are you reading a poem whenyou're supposed to be giving,
you're two-minute, short,specific comment on the state of
energy access in the world?

(46:24):
I think the poem holds morecomplexity.
That's why just, I don't knowwhy I just felt that that was a
way that I could maybe offersome care and kindness to other
people.

Scott (46:37):
And so this notion of stochastic generosity, you know,
not knowing where and when thechange will happen in people,
but knowing that if you're notkind and you're not caring and
you're not playful, you're notdemonstrating that, even in the
face of the grimness of thethings that we're dealing with,
which are very, very grim thatwe can still be.

(46:57):
We can still have fun, we canstill laugh, we can still be
playful with each other to thenbe able to open up different
spaces because play is how welearn.
That's knowing the differencebetween playing and fighting is
such a critical part of the waythat animals actually exist and
that we've existed for a longtime, you know, having little
punch-ups as kids, you know,that you’re not actually trying
to kill the other person.
You don't know how you know, butyou know, that, bringing that
into whatever you're doing andwhatever sort of, level for one
of a better term, whether it'sthe individual, just yourself
and your family or yourcommunity, or into the global
processes and working withfinancial system actors.
I just feel that the very, theabsence of having a voice like
that means that the possibilityof change is very, very small,
almost none.
The possibility of having thatvoice.

(48:03):
A voice like that and aworldview, a set of habits,
whatever, does create thepossibility for change and
understanding how systemschange, they don't change
linearly that actually thatcould be Gregory Batesons’s
term, the difference that makesthe difference is the
difference.
Okay, well, why continue to dothe same?

(48:25):
So how to find ways to not justbe at the community level in
terms of permaculture, how to,and you do this?
So when you're doing it indifferent communities, you're
not just doing it in yourproximity, geographically
proximate community, you'redoing it all over the world.
So I think you're very much aliving example of that.
And for me, it's de-burdeningmyself from the notion that I

(48:46):
have to do this because all thatdoes, it takes me back into the
same metaphorical construct offixing and solving.
You know, Scott's got to dothis, Morag’s got to do this.
No, you know, you'remeaningless.
You, me, you're nothing, I'mnothing, we're stardusts.

(49:07):
It's been over 14 billion years.
We're going to be in for another14 billion or so until something
happens.
We just, currently in this form,we can communicate this way, but
that's only very, verytemporary, but we will go on,
life just shifts matter, energy.
It just shifts in plays, that'sall what happens.
Taking that burden off yourselfbut whatever happens if I can be

(49:32):
kind and I can be caring, I canhave a spirit of generosity.
I can hold that reciprocity,that the grass out there and the
trees out there and the insectsthat they are giving me life,
there is a sense that I need todo what I can, to give them
life.
And that extends to every humanbeing.

And this, again comes back to the ending of
nation states, the ending ofthese artificial boundaries that
continue to keep us into acommunity or a city or a country
or whatever, all theseridiculous levels that just love
and care for everybody.
It sounds naive, but actuallythinking about it through the
lens of the way that theeconomic system and the

(50:14):
financial system works to yourearlier question, how do you
build that into accountingsystem frameworks?
And that's something that Icontinue to explore, how to
build that into reporting anddisclosure frameworks, how to
build that into supervisorymandates for the International
Association of Insurancesupervisors in Basel, how do you
build this into the bank ofinternational settlements?
How do you build this into theway that you actually price risk

(50:35):
into the way a government canissue a bond to be able to fund
the wellbeing and quality oflife of its citizens, not the
continuation of extraction ofminerals or oil and gas reserves
or whatever it might be or growit's for internal combustion
engine vehicles.

(50:56):
How can you actually completelychange the way that those very
boring bits that sit within taxcodes and they sit within
supervisory mandates withinaccounting frameworks.
How can that be loaded in withpermaculture thinking?
And of course, again, you know,these sorts of conversations
enable that but these sorts ofconversations across different

(51:17):
domains, more than I have playedin the academic spaces, in
writing different material forthe UN, bringing academics
together, as well as working inthe financial sector, as well as
working in the energy sector, inclimate folks, in the UN, in
water and green recovery andCOVID, like, these people don't

(51:38):
tend to talk to each otheroutside of their tracks, even
within the same university, evenwithin the same government or
the same business, you sitwithin your tracks, but those
spaces can be there.
And, and that's one of thereasons I love the Warm Data
practices.
And one of the reasons we'retrying to do this experiment

(52:01):
with the UN at the moment, orthe Zero-Step Warm Data approach
prototyping.
What happens if you open thesebig spaces up?
What happens if you give aninvitation for people to be a
human, not a politician, not afinancial sector expert, not a
bond issue or not an energydeveloper, but just a human
being like that, learning thatyou talked about, I hear your

(52:23):
perception.
You hear my perception, both ourperceptions shift.
Okay.
Now we're getting somewhere.

I wonder, how things are with the uptake of
the Warm Data conversations withyou and like, what's the
perception?
What are people seeing?
Are they getting involved?

Scott (52:49):
It's, you know, the original hypothesis that I wrote
down, sort of in the spirit ofthis, obviously being it's
rooted in adaptive process, notdialogic process.
So you are actually looking atwhat the patterns are and the
shifting of the patterns, noneof the content of the
discussion.
So much of the UN conversationsare about the content.

(53:12):
It's all about the content.
And the tonality is always thesame.
The aesthetic of theconversation is always the same.
It's like rice.
Okay.
Is it UN protocol?
That's the highest level.
Okay.
That means we've got memberstate governments in, that means
we have to follow all of thesevery strict rules.
That means we have to go throughall the countries of the world
and they all have to have theirsay and blah, blah.

(53:33):
And then the private sector,then civil society, then other
human beings, or there’s a levelbelow that, where we can have a
slightly informal, but, it'sstill very structured dialogue.
And it's about what did thatperson say?
Can I get a record?
Can I capture that?
Can I either use that againstthem?
Or can I use that to build someother form of, you know, change

(53:55):
in some way, but it's alwaysabout the content.
So offering a process, which isabout the tonality and the
aesthetic about the, you know,the information about the way
that people are responding asbeing understood as information
about the conditions of thesystem, in which they exist, not
about them individually andbeing able to see at that

(54:18):
systems level is not something,as I said, a number of times in
conversations with people, like,I just don't recognize it.
It's like, yep, because thatability to perceive in that way
has atrophied.
You had it as a three-year-old,you had it as a four-year-old,
probably by the time he got tosix or seven, you know, when
people asked you what you weregoing to be when you were a

(54:39):
four-year-old, five-year-old,it’s like, I want to be a fish,
you know, want to grow up to bea fish, perfectly normal answer.
Why can't I be a fish by thetime you get to sort of 10 or 12
or 14, I want to be a fireman.
I want to be an astronaut or bea doctor I want to be, or
whatever.
Very few kids at that age willsay, I want to be a fish still,
let alone.
And if a 40-year-old or a50-year-old says, what do you

(55:01):
want to be when you get older?
I want to be a fish.
It's like, okay, I might needsome medication there.
They need a little bit ofintervention because something's
not going right with theprogramming.
And that difference of thepossibilities that exist in that
structured dialogic process,where you're looking for the
content and you're working onthe content.

(55:23):
And that's what you hear.
That's what you receive.
That's what you're used tohearing and receiving to a
process where the content islargely irrelevant.
There is no set content.
There is no set things that aregoing to be talked about.
There's no SDG framings, forinstance.
Well, is this an energyconversation, Scott?
Or is it a climate conversationor is it yes, yes, yes it is.

(55:47):
Yes, yes, yes.
But is it, which one is it?
Yes, it is.
It is.
Yes, but which one?
It has to be one of them.
Yes.
Or all of them.
Now, you're just being a bstrd,you're just being vague.
Yeah.
And, you know, we need to bespecific.
I am being specific, you know,life is interdependent.

(56:08):
It's actually, as GregoryBateson wrote, you know,
everything is everything and Iget lost.
Yeah.
That's what this is about.
But getting lost when you'reused to always finding and
knowing and being certain, itdoesn't land very well.
So, um, the response has beenlargely, as I had hypothesized

(56:28):
it would be, that unless peoplewere forced to do it, like as a
mandatory training program or amandatory, you know, skilling up
or whatever, they would largelyignore it.

And it's been interesting to be able to see
the number of people who'veclicked on to the registration
page for the Zero-Step WarmData, the number of people who
have then clicked through to theregistration button to maybe
register for one of the pods ofconversation.
And then the number of peoplewho have actually registered.
And then the number of peoplehave actually turned up and then
people who have actually turnedup and stayed in a conversation

(57:04):
for the series, or even for oneconversation, or even just for
the whole of one conversation,because more and more, the
feedback I'm getting is after 20minutes or 30 minutes.
And so then that comes back tome to fail.
You fail, Scott's obviously,it's a failed process because
otherwise we'd stay.
If it was worth doing, we'd bethere, which has all sorts of

(57:26):
issues associated with it.
But if it's not a process that'srecognizable, then it's
obviously of no value.
And this is the challenge.
This is why I didn't say, let'sjust change the way that the
whole UN process works to doWarm Data because that's
madness.
It had to be as a prototype tobe able to understand what is

(57:49):
actually going on.
Is it, as I suspect, is it asI've observed, as others have
observed, as others have writtenabout, as others have tried to
do something about, yeah, again,it's coming back that yes, it is
very much that the conditions ofthe system do not allow the
individuals to have theirflexibility either in terms of

(58:13):
just the time or in terms of thecognitive flexibility, to be
able to consider something thatdoesn't have a specified
outcome, which again goes backto that underlying metaphor of
the illusions of control andseparation and domination and
projects and fixes anddeliverables and outcomes and
results-based management andindicators, which takes you back

(58:33):
to the SDGs, which are loadedwith those, which takes us back
into the money system, which isall about the objectification.
So it is all, you know, there'sobviously everything's all
connected here, but as a pointof intervention, to be able to
offer something, which isundeniably an invitation, which
is a game, which is creatingsome interesting spaces for

(58:58):
people to consider what you'reliterally saying that any human
beings in the online space whohas an internet connection, who
has any sort of form of cure,any, really don't think so, now
which stakeholder group you'refocusing on the human being one,
that one, and look, bring yourpets too, you know, no problem

(59:23):
but you know, we can havedifferent types of exchanges
there, thinking about that, veryinteresting

That is a very odd concept, the stakeholder one,
I've never quite got it.
I don't think I've ever quiteentered into the space.
I remember, I actually had a jobfor nine months working with the
government once.
And I didn't understand thethinking.
I think I was, I went through anormal schooling system, but

(59:51):
then I hit Schumacher Collegeand Fritjof and Gregory Batsone.
And when I was in my earlytwenties and that's kind of been
my world ever since, and I gotto this place, and I just didn't
really know what to do with thisstakeholder thinking.
And now, you know, I still keepthinking as I go, like I’m 52
now thinking maybe one day, Ishould understand how it works

(01:00:12):
so I can interact, so I caninteract with it better.
But, you know, as you werespeaking, I was also thinking
about how the Oceania pod that'shappening and the youth pod that
are happening, which are two ofthe ones that I'm working with
out of the 12 that you'vebrought together are just

(01:00:34):
beautiful.
The people have come in throughthe permaculture network who are
all part of this Oceania pod arejust saying, this is amazing.
This is what we need, thisspace, and people have been

(01:00:55):
crying, and you know, you'vebeen experiencing that in your
pods too.
There's been deep emotionalresponses to having respect,
like particularly now at thistime when people are locked
downs and, you know, a globaltrauma that people are
experiencing around thisexistential crisis that you're
talking about, and thisawareness that we've pushed the

(01:01:17):
limits of our one planet, youknow, and then within the youth
too, you know, when yourdaughter's there with my
daughter in this, and it's anamazing thing that they're
doing, and they're discoveringnew young people because that
group had been going for a whileand then they paused, and now
they've got this whole new worldof, of young thinking that's
happening.

(01:01:41):
And so I, you know, for me frommy perspective and being
involved in it, it's amazing.
And I, cannot, I can't see howit could, I understand when
you're saying, you know, like itdoesn't fit within those boxes,
but if you open that door andenter into that space and you

(01:02:03):
can not be touched by it, Iguess the question is whether
they kind of go, well, is itrelevant?
Maybe you’re still coming in,yeah.
Anyway, it's been an amazingexperience and I'm loving it.
So thank you for organizing.

Scott (01:02:25):
It's been, it's been very emotional month.
Um, since, since I guess thedouble bind that broke this
open, the will series, thisresistance and reluctance there
is also, and, uh, I don't knowif you were in, in, in the last
warm data reading cell on thepiece around, um, maybe it was

(01:02:48):
two ago about, is there, isthere a conspiracy?
I think it was called, um, itwas a Mesa log, one of Gregory's
metal logs.
And he said, they, they knewwhat they knew and they didn't
care about what they didn'tknow.
And in that lay the possibilityto become, um, conditioned to

(01:03:10):
and used to the greatest ofhorrors in inhuman times.
And when he was talking aboutthe prison guards in Dachau, he
was talking about, um, peoplewho had become accustomed to
atrocities, but that was in 1970or 71.
But actually when I look in theUN system today, those same sort
of systems conditions are there,but they're the reason why many,

(01:03:34):
many people go into the UN somego in for the wrong reasons.
But if you have that mindset,you would tend to go in directly
into the financial system, notinto sort of intermediary of the
financial system, because thesort of sociopathic rewards are
much, much higher, but mostpeople have a level of care.
Most people, when you get themout of their office space, out

(01:03:54):
of their constructed role, as agreen recovery expert or an
inequality expert or genderexpert, they're actually
beautiful people.
They're kind, they love life.
They genuinely want to, just aswe opened this conversation,
they want to do something whichhelps but the conditions of the
system only allow that care toextend to a frame and over time

(01:04:18):
that frame becomes real asopposed to just constructed.
And it becomes so real that tobe able to recognize beautiful,
nuanced, soft, uncertain, deeplyemotional, profoundly upsetting,
but just joyous moments, butalso being able to be in a space

(01:04:42):
where you don't know whenthat’s, you cannot predict in
any way that's going tohappen.Some of the feedback I've
had, or I guess I had feedbackfrom someone that you haven't
pulled the other day, a guy whoI've never met before.
I mean, I haven't met most ofthem.

(01:05:04):
I haven't met you in person, butI feel like I know you like a
sister in terms of what we'rethinking, being whatever.
But he said that the sessionsare beautiful.
They're really beautiful, butwhat's more beautiful Scott, is
it’s emotional, just talkingabout actually, but it's the way

(01:05:27):
that I can be with my familynow.
It's not just the way I'm inconversation and the way I'm
allowed to be.
And Nora talks about this.
It's not about the content.
It's about what is allowed to besaid, it’s about what that space
offers the possibility of yousaying, or me saying when I talk

(01:05:49):
to you, I feel I can just talkabout anything.
I feel you can talk aboutanything that is not the case
for a very large number ofpeople who are in that sort of
political, upper, financial.
They have allowed themselves tobecome incredibly restricted,
but he was saying, theconversations I've been able to
have with my kids, with my dad,talking about stuff we could

(01:06:13):
never talk about.
We should never be able to betalked about.
And that's extraordinary becausethat Is what's missing.
And that is what's missing inthis constructed structure of
dialogic processes ofsense-making activity, sort of
mindfulness and all of that,which are all still prescriptive
and outcome-based, you're stilltrying to get somewhere,
actually just being confused,messy, even in silence with a
group of people.
And as you said, this is aglobal trauma and this is a
little test for us because thisis nothing.
I mean, yes, COVID is terribleand particularly, I’m in
Switzerland andthe restaurantsare open for the first time in
six months today, we're stillgetting thousands of cases a day
as to what our hospitalizations,the helicopter flies over to the
hospital regularly.
You know, it's still, and that'shere.
I mean, let alone India, Brazil,other places where it's still
just disaster, but compared tothe destabilization of the
Northern hemisphere jet stream,which is already happening
compared to the full impacts ofthe climate crisis, the
ecological crisis, the soilcrisis, the forest crisis.
This is nothing.
This is this, the tiniest tasteof, can we find ways to get into
spaces where we can be togetherwith other people.
And that's been so beautiful andit is exclusionary and that it’s
online.
And that is something that, youknow, we have to live with just
at the moment, but we can bringmore in person and more people
coming together as people.
But I don't think the onlinewill ever disappear for some of
the reasons that you weretalking about with my daughter's
experience.
I mean, she's 15 years old.
She has the most inaneconversations at school, which,
she comes home, she's like, ohGod, I’m just going to talk to
these kids?
It's like, it's all about BTSthis, it's this, this, like the
latest celebrities.
It's the latest thing, that’s anH&M, it’s whatever.
It's like I just don’t care,yeah, it’s partly my fault in
the sort of stuff I've talked toher about since she was born,

Morag Gamble (01:08:39):
Yeah, I feel sorry.
We, are daughters, all the samething and we’ve both brought
them up with the same kind ofthinking, and they both don't
fit into that kind of normalschooling model.
And you know.

Scott Williams (01:08:53):
She always feels like this thing she has to say.
And she's like, I can't everthink about what to say.
Whereas in the Warm Data spaces,I can say whatever and people
will listen and then they cansay whatever.
And it's challenging.
It's interesting.
It's like, I don't know whatthey're going to say, sound, I
don’t know how that's going tomake me feel.

(01:09:15):
I do know that I'll go to schooland I'll basically be in the
same conversation over and overagain.
I know how it makes me feel.
I kind of know how it makes themfeel because they talk about it
but it's just that this very,very superficial level of us
being our roles as high schoolkids, basically living the
roles.
It's like, yeah, that's actuallywhat the education system is

(01:09:37):
for, is for you to get used toliving a role, because then you
go to university, you do a role,then you go into work and you do
a role and then you die andthat's your role.
Boom.
And none of that's true causeyou never die.
You just change into somethingin the matter, you are never

(01:09:58):
just one role.
You are always overlapping lotsof stuff.
And being able to be inconversation with people in
South Africa or with the amazingcommunity that we're all we're
both connected to in NakivaleRefugee Camp in Uganda,
particularly with Namuwongo youknow, about to go super
explosion and communitiesalready in very difficult

(01:10:21):
situations, about to be in much,much more difficult situations.
And they, and I'm working withthe people who in theory are
running the programs and thebillions and trillions of
funding to be able to make surethat those people are actually
able to live according to theUniversal Declaration of Human
Rights, which has largely beenscrapped and beamed in favor of
GDP, but it's still there.

(01:10:42):
And in theory, it's a guidingprinciple and a guiding
declaration of how we should bedealing and working with and
being within relationship withevery human being on the planet.
I just don't see another wayother than being in these sorts
of conversations, the only otherway, and it goes back to
something we were talking aboutbefore this conversation is my

(01:11:03):
ultra marathon running.
That's where I found this first,this ability for human beings to
shed their identities and justshared all of that and be
stripped back.
And then that happens through myexperience of ultra running out
on trails, in nature, thecombination of the humility

(01:11:23):
which is basically imposed uponyou by fast, immense sublime,
natural spaces, but also thatsuffering and that mutual space
of being there as humanstogether has created some of the
most beautiful moments in mylife.
Exactly like I experienced inthe Warm Data conversations,
because it's just humans beinghumans to be with humans, to

(01:11:47):
hold other humans, to care, tovent, to rage, to scream, to
just to be there.

Hmm.
You know, when somebody’s justsitting with me at the moment
when you're talking about what'sto come and the tendency of
reaching for solutions and I getstuck in this a bit because I'm

(01:12:20):
thinking, well, permaculture isgonna really help a lot of
people.
I speak to a lot of people in,you know, say in the refugee
camps and they're saying, thisis our lifeline, if it wasn't
with this, we would be sostruggling, you know, this is,
and so, so from shifting fromsolutioning to something, you
know, I'd love to hear yourperspectives on this because I

(01:12:45):
always feel like I get a bitstuck on this.
I have a solution, but not in away of going, well, here, do
this.
It's very much an offering ofconnection of remembering, of
localizing, of sharing, sharingseed, sharing resources, sharing
ideas, helping each other tofind a way to actually live in a

(01:13:10):
way that is going to mean lesssuffering.
That's going to mean more carefor the place, for the
community, for the children, forculture.
And so I get stuck in thissalute, you know, not see, I

(01:13:36):
don't know, and I don’t come atall like, but I, though this is
where I can also see there's aproblem because if you try and
go forward into somewhere likethe UN or to a larger grant
organization and say, I havethis solution that will help all

(01:13:59):
these people.
And yet, when I'm working withpeople, it's an everyday thing.
I'm talking with them every dayand we're finding solutions
together.
They're actually finding thesolutions and I'm kind of in
conversation with them to askdifferent questions, to help
them ask questions and makeconnections in other ways.
And it's really just this veryfluid process of working.

(01:14:22):
And so I guess it's, where doesthat even work and is
permaculture a solutioning thingor is it actually, People Need
People thing and that, and thisis a question that I, that I
hold.
And because you are in the WarmData world as well.

(01:14:43):
It's kind of a question I'd loveto get your perceptions on.
I don't know whether you haveany reflections on that.

Scott (01:14:57):
Yeah, I think about this all the time, because, you know,
permaculture has, for thoseoutside of permaculture, it has
sort of some cult-like branding,solutioning senses to it.
The same comments often youknow, saying to me around Warm
Data, this feels like some sortof cult, it feels like almost

(01:15:22):
like a religious practice orsomething.
And in some ways I see both andI'm a novice at one day, and as
I said, an extreme novice ofpermaculture approaches and
practices.
But yes, they're both practices,I think.
And that's important practicerather than a solution.
Yes, it's semantics, but it'snot, because the solution is

(01:15:45):
rigid in the transactional.
I, clever person, come to you,fix you, all good.
You fixed me clever.
Relational is I live a lifepractice, which has changed my
relationship with other peoplewith land, with seeds, with the

(01:16:07):
air, with water, with nutrients,with the worms, I'm offering to
share my practices, the way thatyou practice this relational
approach to life will bedifferent to mine because of a
thousand million differentcontexts.

(01:16:36):
But it's the shift from atransactional to a relational.
And I think this gets veryconfusing in those spaces, which
are rooted in the solutioningand fixing it's like, okay, can
we just buy permaculture?
How much does it cost?
Can we just buy it?
And then we'll just like, scaleit up, roll that sucker out the
problem.
No! And with Warm Data, samething, how much would it cost to

(01:17:04):
buy it?
Can we just buy it just by theInternational Basin Institute?
Just buy it.
Not again, not because it's nota thing.
You're trying to thingifysomething which is living and
it's constantly adaptive.
It's evolving because it'sholding the relationships.
It's not trying to suppress thecomplexity.
It's trying to live within thecomplexity.

(01:17:26):
And I think that's what I'mtrying to play with is, there is
complexity in every single oneof us.
There's massive complexities,trillions of complexities within
me, within the interfaces I havewith everything then between us,
then between all of us thenbetween the rest, those
complexities are in atransactional solutioning space.

(01:17:48):
Let's try and suppress them.
Let's control them.
Let's try and absent ourselvesfrom it as much of that
messiness so that we can takethat solution that worked in
Mongolia and replicated inUganda and replicated in France
and replicated in Australia,that's scaling and replication,
whereas a relational approachtaking much more than lessons

(01:18:11):
from the way that mycelia form,that we are all, I see us all as
sort of either a combination ofearthworms or hyphae, you know,
we're at the very end, we'rebeing, we're sending out, seeing
if there are resources seen, andsometimes we have to pull back
and sometimes, but actuallybeing comfortable with that,
that our explorations in ourcuriosity, into different ways

(01:18:32):
of being in relationship andliving in a rapidly changing
macro environmental space, amacro biospheric change, which
has only been experiencedprobably five or six times in
the history of this lovely ballrock and stuff floating in the
solar system.

(01:18:59):
But can we find a way to be ableto hold all of those
complexities everywhere?
Not hold them centrally?
And the mentality still withincorporations, within the
financial sector, within the UNsystem, within governments, is
how can we effectively maintaina form of colonialism, maintain

(01:19:24):
a form of systemic racismwithout acknowledging that we're
doing that by saying we sprinklefairy dust down here and here
and here, because we've seen ithere, it'll definitely work
here.
Whereas as you know, withpermaculture, it works
differently everywhere.
The soil conditions aredifferent the air, the density
of moisture, the people's livedexperiences, there's a million,

(01:19:49):
trillion and you can nevercontrol for all of them.
The only way you can control allof them is by dousing everything
with phosphate chemicals and,you know, nuking and
annihilating the soil.
And therefore you're justeliminating the context.
You're eliminating that, whichactually allows for life and the
relationship for life tocontinue.

So that's kind of how I'm playing with it, that
increasingly using this languageof transactional versus
relational, and Kaczynski talkedabout the map and the territory.
The transactional is the map.
It's back to the interconnectedballs.
It's, okay, we've got soil,we've got water, we've got
seeds.
We've got, we just stick themall together the same way every

(01:20:29):
time, no problem.
The territory is okay, we've gotwater and seeds and land.
Let's explore what therelationships are between all of
these.
And see if we can't tend andnotice that it's the tending and
the noticing, as opposed to thecontrolling and the dominating.

(01:20:50):
That difference is thedifference.
It makes the difference for me.
And it's so hard to not keepslipping back into that.
Like you were saying over andover again, how do we do this in
mycelial way?
How do we nourish the soils sothat we can have the blossoms as

(01:21:14):
opposed to focusing on whichblossoms we're going to have,
and forgetting to nourish thesoil, but we’re trained from
basically birth, and for agefour or five, to focus on the
blossoms and you get enoughblossoms, you're powerful you’ve
outcompeted everybody.
You've got status.
You're the best, which has neverbeen the case.

(01:21:35):
It's never, in the way that lifeoperates in the way that
ecosystems, as you know, I'msure much better than I do.
Everything has its place andbehind it, hierarchies are
dynamically, always shiftingbetween all forms of life.
They're never statichierarchies, they’re always
shifting.

And I think that at the very core of the
questions that I'm bringing heretoday is this idea that you were
just talking about thedifference between the scaling
of something and the spreadingor something.
I've always been working at thatkind of level of spreading or
what I call it, myceliating.

(01:22:16):
But I guess where I am at themoment is acknowledging the
extent of the globalcatastrophes that we're facing.
And there's this urgency to needto do something more than what
I'm already doing.
How can I, not necessarily scaleup or maybe also kind of

(01:22:37):
slotting into that thinking, ormaybe by scaling, I can spread
faster and further, you know,not me, but these ideas so that
people who are, you know, havingto move from their places that
they are, people who arebecoming refugees, people who
struggle in whatever differentways they have the capacity to
understand these sorts of thingsor have access to this

(01:23:01):
information or resources orskills, because, you know,
generally, generationally we'vebecome disconnected from it.
And there's this gap and I guessthis is where I sort of see

(01:23:25):
permaculture helping to fillsome of that gap of linking back
knowledge that we have, at thebeing lost, that are being
pushed to the edges.
But bringing that knowledge backin or recreating some of the
knowledge that already has beenlost to be able to live in ways
that can, you know, like youtalk about care and love.

(01:23:48):
I mean, I always sound, I feellike I'm going to be a bit corny
when I say this, but it isaround, it is around peace and
it is around love because wehave more access to resources to
meet our needs then thedivisions between cultural or
religion or race become lessobvious because we're able to
meet our needs.

(01:24:08):
So I kind of see permaculture asa way of building peace.
And so it's actually the veryconversation that I had with one
of the community leaders in therefugee camp the other day
saying I work with Burundians,Somalis Rwandans, you know, like
Congolese and through doing thiswork with permaculture and

(01:24:29):
connecting people inconversation and offering these
seeds and tools and skills andaccess to land and collaborative
projects.
It's peace building.
It's the best peace buildingI've ever seen in my life.
He said, I used to be a peacebuilder, like with NGOs.
And he said, do you know, we'dgo and we'd have these

(01:24:51):
conversations.

Yeah, about peace

About peace and we'd have some here to say all
the right things.
But then as soon as we left, itwould go back to what it was.
So this ups me differentlybecause we collectively have
projects that we're working on.
We're collectively workingtogether with tools and land,
and there's something elsethat's happening that maintains

(01:25:17):
the connection, across cultures,across languages.
And this is so important.
And, and so, just seeing moreand more reasons why I love
permaculture every day when Ihear it described in so many
different ways in differentplaces and how it's just giving

(01:25:39):
a shared language for people tobe able to connect and be in
relation.

The permaculture of the mind as well, the
permaculture of humans haveplayed around with rewilding, I
mean, obviously rewilding ofnatural spaces, rewilding of
oceans, just allowing spaces to,with the magic of time, to be
able to find their way back toharmonies and balances and

(01:26:20):
exploring that in the humancontext, as well as being part
of nature that are rewildingabout imagination, that
rewilding of the possibilitiesof how we actually wake up each
day.
And I love something that’s WavyGravy.
I think you might know aboutWavy Gravy, the famous clown in
the US, you know, written on hisroof, above his bed.

(01:26:40):
You know, every day, muster mybest Wavy Gravy and that helping
people to have that sense toactually alleviate some of the
pressure that you're talkingabout, which I feel as well,
because of the sense of urgency,which is actually just an
artificial sense anyway, becausewe're only in the present than

(01:27:03):
anything that's to come.
Is just another present.
And we'll be there at some pointmaybe, or maybe we’re already
there depending on differentforms of indigenous wisdom, but
this sense that I'm just tryingto get up every day, every time
I wake up, open my eyes, feet onthe ground can I muster my best

(01:27:24):
Scotting today?
Can I muster my best Scotting?
What's that going to be?
And not being sure what that'sgoing to be, allowing therefore
for the possibilities to be muchmore open as to what that will
be.
And it's interesting, when I wasfirst playing around with how to
get this, this Zero-Stepexperiment even considered using

(01:27:46):
language about, you know, theissue of energy is not about the
energy, the issues of access toenergy and transitioning energy
systems from coal and oil torenewables or cleaner energy.
.

Scott (01:28:02):
It's not about finance or technology or politics or data.
It's about how we are inrelationships.
What are the stories that wetell ourselves about our
relationship with energy andwhat are the stories we tell
ourselves about other people'srelationships with energies?
And what are theintergenerational differences

(01:28:24):
between the stories that we tellourselves about our
relationships with energy andthe stories we tell ourselves
about other people'srelationships with energy, and
why are they different?
And can we explore that, andpositioning it all the way from
thingification and nounificationinto which permaculture by its
very nature is aboutrelationships.

(01:28:46):
It's about, again, coming backto the relationships over and
over again, but I see this and Imean, I talked to Nora regularly
about this and talk to others aswell about this sense that is
collapse inevitable?
This notion that things areaccelerating so fast in terms of
the wet bulb issue and thedestabilization of seasonality

(01:29:07):
preventing us from actuallybeing able to grow reliable food
crops, all of that sort ofstuff, regardless of whether we
engage in permaculture, we maybe at a point where the
seasonality prevents us frombeing able to have any form of
anything other than a foraging,foraging-based diet.
At some point in the future, Iactually got a question this

(01:29:30):
morning from a guy who I oftenjust bounce big ideas, he's
like, yep, just thought I’dthrow some ideas he threw the
question to me.
Is collapse the only solution?
Or do we have a chance to makeintelligent changes?
Which I thought was aninteresting question because you
know, permaculture at one levelis an intelligent change.
It's like moving fromindustrial, chemical fertilizer

(01:29:53):
and fossil fuel energy basedagricultural and food provisions
systems to meet the needs ofhuman beings to permaculture
approaches seems like anintelligent change, but I think,
what I was saying to human, whyI’m trying to live this practice
and why I was so happy to getall these pods of conversations

(01:30:14):
happening simultaneously forpeople to be able to dip in and
out and just practice, andpractice and practices, we’re
practicing for time that'sthat's not quite here yet, is
how I see it.
We are in a world, which isstill certain enough and has
enough edifices of structureeven through COVID, as they try

(01:30:34):
to reinsert themselves.
That educational system stillmakes sense, financial systems,
educational systems, healthsystems, but all of that still
somehow was working and willwork again, both of which are
problematic beliefs but they arebeing reasserted by the system.
But in having conversations witha number of indigenous elders

(01:30:57):
who I'm working with on somesystemic nature of risk stuff
and writings, they don't see anyconcern about the so-called
collapse of civilization.
Um, it's almost a welcoming ofit because a lot of people will
die and that's a hard thing toaccept, but actually it's

(01:31:20):
something we need to acceptanyway, because we are
definitely on track for threedegrees of warming.
We're probably more likely fouror five, six, ten or more
particularly with sort of themethane bursts, which appear to
be starting to presentthemselves in nearshore and
onshore areas around the worldalready.

(01:31:42):
So how can we prepare ourselveswith a life practice where we
jump out of bed each day, ifwe're lucky enough to have a
bed.
So how can I muster my bestself?
How can I be stochasticallygenerous and just care?
And what are the relationshipsthat I am tending and nurturing
to today?
Is it the soils?
Is it the food?
Is it the people on the otherside of the world?

(01:32:05):
Is it the people in my family?
Is it my microbiome?
Is it myself?
Is it just letting go ofidleness is sin and time is
money.
Just finally, just letting, howcan we prepare ourselves for a
time of extreme migration,enormous amounts of nomadisms,
the stability of all of thesystems, which most of the

(01:32:29):
people alive today have eithersome notion of, are controlled
by or are controlling.
That is all, that is fallingapart, but that is only a very
temporary phenomenon, been atemporary phenomena for a few
generations, you know, 300, 400years at the most, but really in
its current form, it'saccelerated egregious form
really only since the 1970s and1980s or since the second World

(01:32:52):
War at the longest.
So only a couple of generations.
Can we create a space?
It's our lifetime.
Yeah, in the early 1970s, wewere at 350, 360 parts per
billion, 370, maybe.

And when I was born, I think I was born in
1969.
And that was the last time wherewe were actually living within
one planet.
Right, exactly, exactly.
A Lifetime for me.

But now we're at a multiple, we’re really at a
too globally, but that's even,that's misleading obviously.
But I was basically saying thatthis is not a practice, which is
comfortable or recognizable.
And I don't have an expectationthat a vast number of people

(01:33:46):
will adopt this practice, acombination of sort of a
permaculture Warm Data.
But basically just therelational way of being an
animist re animating animismeffectively, and releasing
ourselves from dualism that lifepractice, I just want to start
those spaces, because as yousaid, when people do go into

(01:34:12):
those spaces, whoever they are,whatever their script, whatever
their life up until that pointis, even if they're 60 or 70 or
80, and they've lived a certainway, bang, that shift can
happen.
And I've had it just in the lastcouple of, just last week, I had
two moments of just a lady whowas in her late seventies or
eighties.

(01:34:36):
She said just this, I don't knowwhy I live my life like this.
Why?
And she was getting very upsetabout, you know, I was like, but
now, you know, I'm not going to,now I know I can, yeah.

(01:34:56):
She was like, I never thoughtI'd be able to make a change,
and I was like, wow, howextraordinary in a two or three
minutes of conversation, thatthis can happen.
So trusting in the properties ofsystems just as we do when we're

(01:35:17):
trying to grow food, you know,I'm not down monitoring every
aspect of the soil.
I'm not monitoring it at all.
I'm just, I'm just tending andwatching what I can go down
every day or every couple ofdays, take a few weeds out, put
a bit more hay on to coverthings up a little bit when it's
hot, put a bit of water on whenit's been dry for a few days,

(01:35:38):
but I'm very much relying on theproperties of the system to be
able to do what the system does.

And just being in relation with it, you know, just
noticing things and feeling, youknow, I often go out even here
in Australia or in, particularlyin the Southeast Queensland
where I am, I garden barefootand people see my films and they
say, what, why are you doingthat?

(01:36:07):
You'll get all these parasitesor you'll stick a fork through
your foot, or you do all thesethings.
And I'm saying, because I feelthe soil, I can feel its
softness.
I can feel its temperature.
I can feel its moistness.
I feel the life I can tell whendifferent parts where I walk,
what's going on.

(01:36:28):
And it just is by noticing over,over decades that, you know, I
just, that's the feel.
And you know, I often feelsometimes that we totally
dismiss that as being a validperspective, what we notice and
what we feel as being an okayway to monitor and monitor

(01:36:49):
things rather than measuringthings.
.

Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
That's so important.
Feeling and noticing instead ofmeasuring and creating
indicators, it's all you do bydoing that, is, cut off every
other possibility.
If you set forward a measurementindicator, then that becomes the
only thing that you can noticeinstead of everything else and

(01:37:17):
stuff that you didn't even knowthat you could notice.
And you've got no idea ofactually intellectualizing in
any way of what you're noticing,but you can feel it.
And I, this makes it hard todescribe and that becomes
problematic.
When again, you're saying, howdo you, how do you take this?

(01:37:38):
How do you offer this intospaces where the descriptive
potential is very scripted.
It's very, very containedwithout actually those, in those
scripted and contained spaces.
Being able to experience thatshifting perception, which
allows for the shift indescription, how do you, it's

(01:37:59):
like, okay, well, there's aloopiness here.

There is.
And you know, there's the otherthing too, that you talked about
this, the woman who came intothe space and had that
transformative experience, it'slike similar things happen when
I find people come into thepermaculture world and then that
opening happens.
There's something that happensbefore you get to that point.

(01:38:28):
Before you enter into thepermaculture world, before you
enter into Warm Data space, howdo you find yourself there?
How do you nurture theconditions that open up these
spaces to your visibility, toyour realm of noticing?
And that's kind of, I guess alsothe question, like all of this

(01:38:50):
exists here as a, as a world,but there's sort of feels like
we talked about a mist or a fogbefore, but there feels like
there's this great big mist thatseparates them.
And it's hard to see that itexists, to know that it's out
there and I don't want toseparate it, but it does feel
like there is this quitesignificant disconnect.

(01:39:11):
And I guess it's, maybe it isjust that the possibilities of
it becoming visible.
And in what ways do we do thatrather than maybe, you know, I'd
been seeking and trying to couchit in the language of the UN for
example, maybe not the way to doit at all.
The way to do it is just to bein the beingness of that way and
shine and attract through itbeing beautiful, amazing,
attractive,, and therelationships that come from
that, and people who enter intothat space share their
experiences, who share theirexperiences, who share their
experiences and maybe that is,that is it.
Maybe that’s it.

Scott (01:40:12):
I think there's a sort of a form of social pollination,
almost that I kind of thinkabout that there is
extraordinary and growingpressure on people who have
roles like, you know, adaptationexpert or mitigation expert or
inequality reduction expert orwhatever.
The toolbox is pretty empty.

(01:40:37):
You know, it's when they sort ofopen up their toolbox, okay,
we’ve sort of tried all thosethings.
Okay.
Well, keep trying them for thesake of trying them, because
that's what the funding isasking us to do.
But increasingly thatunderstanding that the
dissonance between the toolsthat they're being trained in
that are available to them thatfeel comfortable and this ever

(01:40:59):
growing challenges, space,problem, issue, existential
risks, systemic risks, whateveryou want, whatever language you
want to put around it, that ison all the indicators, the
things that are actually beingmeasured, it's all going
backwards, conversation afterconversation.
Now that it is, you know, notonly are we not making progress

(01:41:22):
against the SDGs anymore becauseof COVID, because of the
pandemic, because of the changein the fiscal priorities and the
spending priorities ofgovernments, to do anything, to
say, jobs and GDP, rather thanto focus on the more holistic
changes in the quality of lifeand the wellbeing of humans and
all life, we're actually goingbackwards now, you know, we're

(01:41:44):
back to where we were or moremeasures of energy access,
access to water and sanitation,mortality, and all of these,
they're going back to where theywere in 2015 or 2010 or 2000,
like, okay, we need to be doingsomething different here, do
something a bit different,definitely different.
It's like, okay, well, this isdifferent though it’s too

(01:42:06):
different now it’s toodifferent, too different, too
different too different.
And this is my notion that, youknow, it's, there, there is a
timing aspect to this, like alltiming, like all periods of fear
and trauma and grief.
You can't rush it.

(01:42:28):
I just don't think there's, ifyou do, judgment comes in.

I've tried in the past, but I'm still dancing
between that dance between beingable to speak the language of
the system, having worked in thesystem and knowing the system do
an extent although knowing thatI know less than I used to, but
knowing the vocabulary thatnomenclature that, that is used
and being able to use that aswell as being able to use the

(01:42:55):
language of poetry and verbingand non-thingification and then
moving into those more beyondlanguage, beyond sort of
verbalizing spaces, that feelingof nurturing and nourishing,
attending, dancing between thetwo, and you know, it's, it's
overwhelming.
Some days it's justheartbreaking.

(01:43:22):
It's heartbreaking.
Why can't I do this?
But then releasing myself again,just go out in the forest.
And like, you're nothing, you'remeaningless.
You know, if you can just bekind and caring that actually is
enough.
Anything else on top of that, aripple effect, that's going to

(01:43:43):
allow someone else to be kind tosomeone else, as you said,
someone else to be kind.
So they'd be caring to then bethinking I can’t continue to be
violent in this way, thatfinancially violent,
institutionally violent,hierarchically violent, you
know, psychologically violent,or actually physically violent.
There's so many different typesof violence that if you live

(01:44:04):
your life with care and kindnessand offer of that and receiving,
violence becomes, it doesn't,it's just not there anymore.
There's no sense of, oh, I hatethat person, that person wronged
me.
Well, no.

(01:44:24):
What were the conditions of thesystem, which gave rise to that
person?
Speaking to me in that way?
It's not the person, it's theindividual and as again, it's
Gregory Bateson and thecybernetics said, has this been
proven over and over again?
There is no such thing as anindividual organism.
It's always in a symbioticrelationship.
It's always anatomically, it'snot possible to have a single

(01:44:48):
organism.
It's just not.
So it's not you, you're not theproblem.
You may be exacerbating it,maybe by not challenging the
conditions of the system, butyou are in a position quite
likely where you cannot or youfeel there's too much fear,
there's too much risk, there'stoo much at stake.
What about your family?

(01:45:08):
Related work?
If that shifts, then how do Ilive?
How do I, you know, the systemwants me to be like this.
If I'm not like that, what thehell happens?
Look at you.
Look at me, I'm still alive.
I'm still here.
I'm laughing more often than Iused to five years ago, but I'm
dealing with existential threatsevery single day.
I'm trying to think about how tocreate some space for us to be
able to work and playdifferently.
But there's a playfulness to it.
Do you genuinely want to liveyour life, be so serious, so
angry all the time?
I don't think most people do.
I really don't.
Even the people who say, youknow, this is how I am, this is
what I am.
I just, there's always somethingyou can see.
You feel it’s like, oh, no youdon’t really.
You don't want to be angrysometimes when you stab your
barefoot when you're gardeningwith a fork, there's been anger,
fair enough.
But living your life like thatevery morning waking up going,
I’m angry, I'm going to hurtsomeone today.
Just genuinely don't believethat life and we are a live
opera that’s not.
Life finds a way to be continuedto be in relationship with other
life.

Thank you so much for taking the time to explore

(01:46:45):
these ideas with me, Scott,because these are questions that
I sit with all the time and I'm,you know it's so nice just to
have an opportunity to explorethem with someone else and to,
yeah.
Thank you.

Thank you.
It's been beautiful.
And we need more, we need moreof these spaces.
This is what we do need to scaleor spread or whatever more
opportunities for people.

You know, this, I hear a lot of people talking
about being in zoom fatigue orspending too much, you know.
I’m actually loving thepossibilities for having
conversations like this.
You know, we're on other sidesof the planet.
The only way that we can havethis type of conversation is on
a platform like this, where wecan see each other, even though

(01:47:36):
we're not kind of 3d, we're atleast got visuals.
I can see your face.
So I think, you know, I love theopportunity to be able to have
conversations like this.
And I think, you know, in thelast 12 months, the space that

(01:47:57):
this has created forconversations that have taken, I
don't know.
I think this is what's helped meto get through these really
challenging times andchallenging thoughts about where
we're going and how do we moveforward and how do I, where do I
fit in all this?

(01:48:17):
You know, all these questionsthat you hold when you think a
lot about what's going on, youread a lot about what's going
on, you hear and see the impactsof what's going on all around
the world.
And you, and you care so deeplythat you want to be part of, you
know, doing the best thing thatyou can in the world with what

(01:48:42):
you have, and then all thesequestions emerge.
And, you know, so thank you forsharing this time with me today.

Morag (01:48:58):
So that's all for today.
Thanks so much for joining us,head on over to my YouTube
channel, the links below, andthen you'll be able to watch
this conversation, but also makesure that you subscribe, b
ecause that way we notified o fall new films that come out and
also you'll get notified o f allthe new, all the new interviews
and conversations that come out.

(01:49:19):
So thanks again for joining us,have a great week, and I'll see
you next time.

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