ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Greater Than Code. And I am Artemis Starr, here with my fabulous co-host, Jacob Stoebel.

JACOB: Hello. And it is my pleasure to introduce our special guest this week, Willem Larsen. Currently paying the bills as a Software Engineer and Technical Coach, Willem has been engaged with accelerated team and community learning for over 25 years. He is co-author of 5 Rules for Accelerated Learning, author of the Language Hunter's Kit and founder of Language Hunters, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to a renaissance in how communities of practice learn together in technology, language, science, and music, and both a wildlife tracker and Search and Rescue tracker. Welcome to the show.

WILLEM: Thank you. It's wonderful being here.

JACOB: So our first question we ask everybody is, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

WILLEM: Yeah, so my superpower is basically meta. That is my superpower. So for as long as I can remember, I've been thinking about thinking and learning about learning and knowing more about how we know and exploring about how we explore. And you know, it just goes on and on, Russian nesting dolls. The irony being that, as far as how I acquired it, it's probably because of also for as long as I can remember, I felt like there was something desperately wrong [laughs] - how everyone was interacting, how systems, whether public school or other systems I was in were working. And it was just like the sort of clawing sense of doubt that anything like this is normal or okay. I mean, that's my superpower is meta. Currently, I'm into physics about physics. So, it just keeps going. [Chuckles]

JACOB: There's something in your bio - community learning. Can you say a little bit more about that?

WILLEM: When I was really young, like in my late teens, early 20's, I got on this path of outdoor skills and nature awareness and wilderness living, what some people might call wilderness survival. But then of course, wilderness is sort of a modern colonized concept of the natural environment. And pretty much all natural environments at some point were, if not now, human tended, right? So, we human beings built the Amazon and human beings maintained the great prairies and where I live in Portland, Oregon, human beings spurned to maintain Oak Savanna grasslands that were abundant with acorns. So anyway, what I learned about when I was getting into this, as you're already hearing, is that there were these stuff, the staining communities that indigenous traditional communities that flawlessly transmitted everything that one generation knew to the next generation. And then it would increase, and then built on that. And they had no universities and no public schools. They had no textbooks. They had no libraries per se as we know them. But still, they managed to maintain and increase these massive store houses of knowledge and ability. Everything from how to build a canoe and make a bow, to how to maintain a landscape and to know when climate is varying and what to do. So when I found out about this, I got super interested in these indigenous cultures, which are still with us today. Portland has I think like 75,000 native Americans in the greater Metro area. It's a thriving population of folks all over the world or all over the country. So I got really interested in like, what are these cultures? And at the time I thought, "Oh, native folks are just like the fairies. They're just fading away." And then I found out that no, they're still here and they're still thriving and still working hard to maintain their cultural, unbroken lineage practices and language. So really my introduction to accelerated learning is from these kinds of communities and these kinds of teachers. I've had several friends and mentors who were indigenous folks and still are. So I've got to experience firsthand what the expectations are of a learner in an indigenous community and how different that was in a sort of the modern world, as a child are these systems of learning where you expect spoon feedings and in fact you're compelled to accept the spoon feeding. Too many questions are breaking outside the system of transmission and knowledge, disrupts the [inaudible]. Whereas the flip side of this is that in this world of tracking and nature awareness and community learning, it was like the more better questions you had, the better you did. And the better you were at generating and then pursuing your own lines of research without ever getting an answer from a mentor, the happier they were even though they'll support you. So it was like creating self-sustaining learners. And so yeah, that just followed me and followed me and it followed me into my interest in endangered heritage languages. For example, I don't speak Danish and much of my ancestors were Danish. And I don't speak Irish and some of my other ancestors were Irish. I've completely lost those languages. So what's funny is what our modern culture puts indigenous peoples through were more than happy to put our own families through and our children through. It even cracks me up that one of the great horrors in America is the residential schools where kids were stolen from their native families and trapped in these schools and forced to speak English. But then what is the most popular children's fantasy novels in the world is Harry Potter. I mean, those kids are gone for like nine or 10 months out of the year. It just blows my mind that this is like normal. I've run into folks, friends in the US who also sent their kids off to boarding schools.

And so anyway, there's all these structures that get in the way of us really exploring human potential and service to these other industrial needs or other cultural needs that we're prioritizing. We're saying we care less about human potential and the maintenance of our human habitat which is all in the news right now. We care less about that than we care about these industrial or mass needs, economic needs. So yeah, accelerated community learning, it really opens up Pandora's box of every possibly issue when you start designing a learning environment as I originally did for nature skills and tracking and then went on to do for endangered heritage languages. You realize that when somebody is struggling in a space that what they're struggling with may be in the large sense, like they're totally blocked by it, is something that everybody in that space is troubling, struggling with in the small, maybe at 1%. This person's 100% block, but everybody else is like 1% blocked or maybe 8% blocked. So by unblocking whatever is going on for that person, suddenly you've harvested an increment of acceleration of potential for everybody else. And it ends up as you design these learning and performance of environments when it comes to software and software teams, it becomes like Richard Pryor and Superman III where he's like, it's called salami slicing, where he got all the fractions of a penny. And then that came up again in the office space movie. But for every 50,000 employees and getting checks once a week in a company where they're getting fractions of a penny and Richard Pryor is like, "Oh, I'll just take all those fractions of a penny and it won't be that much." And it ended up being millions after a few months.

The capacity of these original communities, looking out for everybody, neurodiversity. We've got all these terms as we're struggling with, "Wow, why don't things work?" And you have these original communities that still understand that every child that is born in the community is a treasure and it's going to teach us about our own humanity and capacity to learn as a community. We're not going to go, "We don't have time for your different way of seeing the world. You've just got to squash it into this box." No, in fact, we learn from your way and we grow because of it and we get even more capacity. I've certainly seen this happen on a software teams that I've participated on. I also designed learning for a coding bootcamp and same experience every time you accommodate someone and you just may take a new working agreement and the cohort, everybody's experience would improve.

ARTY: Wow. I'm glad I took notes through that whole thing. Let me give you a little bit of context about me. The overlaps of things are kind of interesting. I live in Austin, Texas now, but I grew up in Oregon, suburban Portland area, Salem, Bend. And so, I definitely have these roots of hanging out in the wilderness, woods, hippy love child. There's this class of people in Oregon that are the type of people that will like chain themselves to a tree.

WILLEM: Absolutely, yeah.

ARTY: And my dad was a bird biologist and really interested in environmental protection kinds of things. Got involved in environmental protection for Oregon and specifically doing research on animal migration patterns in the city and then working on legislature to protect green spaces that would allow for these creatures' habitats to be maintained and prevent urban growth from going into these critical areas, going on beach clean up. So, it's like on one level, I've been embedded in this sort of wilderness vibe world. I went to Oregon State, and then I ended up migrating my way to Austin as I got into software and tech. And I'm also in this accelerated learning world in that my research, my book on idea flow is a data-driven learning technique for software engineers, which is all about what are the specific sorts of observations we need to be able to make. They'd give us the right questions to ask that lead us to accelerated learning around how do we do better, how do we work better together as a team? How do we see together better as a team? How do we combine all of our capabilities and nurture and grow one another as a community, and working toward what does a peer mentorship team really look like? And so right now, I'm working on [inaudible] essentially to build a new kind of school, but it's very much anchored towards all sorts of principles. And so I think a fun direction to take this conversation would actually be talking about education system infrastructure. So if by chance you've got all these experiences with indigenous learning communities and the systems and things that work in that place and you've seen this world where what is normal is not okay and this feeling of 'this actually makes no sense', we can do so much better than the existing way that we have become used to doing things. And if you were to erase the existing education system and re-imagine what it looks like, what sorts of things would you do?

WILLEM: Well, I have one child that goes to public school, it's in high school and I have one child that my wife homeschools and a homeschool really it's unschooling. Usually the difference between homeschooling and unschooling is homeschoolers have a curriculum and unschoolers are follow your passion which is back to that self-sustaining researchers and find your own question and follow it skill. So, I'm a big fan of unschooling. In that sense, I really do think in the end, some of this gets entangled up with privilege. If you're working all day, you can't unschool your kid. If you're a two income family, both parents work, that's rough. But I mean, I honestly think that all education needs to come from family and neighborhood. And I believe that all our resources are right here, right around us within walking distance. All these people in these houses, who are they? What do they know? What are their capabilities? And everybody in my family, what are the hidden gifts for them? We don't even know because we're too busy working. And we spend our weekends recovering from our weeks of work. So that would be my first thing is just to de-institutionalize the whole thing. I was actually part of this really interesting effort in the early 2000's. The Portland school district suddenly found itself in a crisis where there was no budget for the Spring semester because they didn't come to an agreement with the teachers. So we were looking at like in a week, students would have empty schools to show up for, for their spring term. At the time I was again in nature education and outdoor skills and somebody, the city, I guess organized, we have OMSI, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry here in Portland had a big auditorium and they sat us all down, tables and tables and tables of people. The facilitator at the head of the room said, "Okay, there's two kinds of people in this room. There's people with spaces like community centers, studios, whatever. And there's people with programs, fencing instructors, math tutors, me, nature educators, et cetera. What we want to do is connect the two of you up. So get to know at your table like who's got a space and who's got a program." And magic started happening. I mean, it was crazy. When you put everybody together, open space style. I don't know how many listeners will be familiar with open space, but these environments where the people themselves self-organize to create their own experience, their own conversations. And that's what this facilitator was helping [inaudible] just by setting the conditions. And it was really magical. I don't know if I've ever felt such hope and excitement for certainly this city of Portland, since this experience. And the budget came through. None of it happened.

There was a community center director that I've connected up with and we just never had any reason to follow through. There were no students. They all went to school. Everything has been back to normal. And Portland has ground through one corrupt superintendent after another over the last 15 years. There's constant politics and problems and system's still broken as it ever was. So like these ways of thinking. It's like, you don't need experts. You just need to set the conditions where people can finally see each other face to face. And systems of privilege can be seen and resolved. I mean, it's an outrageously huge majority of homeschoolers and unschoolers I'm sure who are white. And even state to state, it's either made illegal or not illegal or more difficult or less difficult to homeschool. And you can imagine if you're a black parent who wants to homeschool, whether or not the truancy folks will come after you first or not, and of the white parent. I mean, all these things play into it. So what I would do is I would unblock all these systems and connect ourselves with each other. Especially now when friends of mine are on Twitter. I have a friend, @buildsoil and his name's Jordan Fink and he's just constantly like, "Plant Chestnut trees, plant Chestnut trees." I mean, if instead of going to school every day, there was like a million new school kids planting Chestnut trees to mitigate climate change and also improve food security. But right now, we've got all these massive resources, a massive human goodwill bottled up in these systems that don't work. I mean, they're being funneled. If they're successful, they're going right into college where they'll get their $100,000 of student debt and be crushed under that for however long the systems has left. I don't think it's complicated, but I do think it's about getting out of the way, which can be hard. So getting out of the way of people with goodwill and setting conditions for people to connect. So in a sense maybe like, a giant -- how would I accomplish that? A giant open space with a good invitation. And Portland has all these neighborhoods has done really -- Portland is a very designed city and it's really interesting everything that goes on here. There's definitely like a bunch of hippies who got in in the 70's. And the city government and the county government and they pull a lot of strings. And so we've got all kinds of cool programs and opportunities. And one is this idea that neighborhoods have their own identities. I can go walk to a bakery five minutes away and I can walk to a grocery store and walk to a coffee shop. And this is on purpose. The city is encouraging this kind of thing. And so in that same sense, we already have neighborhoods that have these identities that each neighborhood could have its own open space. I mean, who knows? Actually, I've talked about this with people. And so again, it's about the freedom to unlock human goodwill. I don't know if basic income is required to make this happen or maybe it's just tough to do it anyway even though you don't feel like you have the time.

ARTY: This all makes me so happy. I think one of the things that's fascinating though is, you talked about these things that happened, of these people with programs and these people with spaces and this magic happened when you connect the two and this spontaneous creativity of, "Hey, we can do this together." And it's so unfortunate that that didn't go through because it's like suddenly there's this opportunity to reinvent how we do all the things from the ground up, from the people up. And it's like throwing out your old software so you can build something new, taking into account everything you learned in the old generation. But the thing that's cool anyway, is that you got an opportunity to see that, you got an opportunity to see what was possible when the system was out of the way. I think it's that opportunity to see that, to know that it can happen, that gives us the will to go and figure out how to actually create that. So what are the constraints? What are the chains in the system that create this bottled up human goodwill? When you said massive human goodwill is bottled up in the system that wants to come out because there's so much suffering. And in Oregon you've got these roots in terms of hippy, tree-hugger love child culture. That people want to build communities and people supporting one another and people lifting one another and helping people shine and wanting to care about the environment together. And these things has core values.

Portland and Austin are pretty similar and in a lot of ways different, but there's a lot of really strong community in Austin as well, and a lot of appreciation for the arts. You've got art in food, in music, in all of these different things. There's a culture around tacos. It's like, "Let's see what kind of cool tacos we can make and we can all invent our cool spins on tacos." It turns into this fun, cool thing to go and check out all the nifty taco experiments because people do some pretty crazy fusiony sort of stuff. But it's awesome. The creativity is what's beautiful. And then when people are in a mode of honoring that diversity, honoring our creativity, honoring the 'when I put A and B together, I get this new cool, interesting thing'. It's another kind of unbottling that is embedded in the culture. And I think too, it's another one of those things that when the systems get out of the way and then new systems rise from the people self organizing to solve their own problems, you get a very different kind of emergent system. And we're kind of in this mode where there's been a lot of non-local growth and infrastructure. So as opposed to families and neighborhoods and people looking at one another going, "Okay, what skills do we got? How do we put our skills together to build a thing?" We've gotten in this mode of relying on the system to take care of us. And we give our money to the system. We give our hopes and dreams to the system and we wait for the system to respond and feel helpless and trapped as opposed to empower to self organize and make our own thing. "Hey, We've got a bunch of children that need an education. We got a bunch of college students that need an education. How do we come together to figure out how to solve this problem?" Well hey, these indigenous folks who've been doing this for generations, self organizing to lift their community, pass on their knowledge to the next generation as part of just a thing you did in the culture. And somehow as we started institutionalizing all of these things, that very basic wisdom and this cultural precedent of as you grow and learn things and become an elder, your focus then becomes giving back and nurturing and teaching the next generation. That's a very natural thing to do.

WILLEM: Yeah, isn't it? It's funny. I thought I made this up. It may turn out, I didn't make it up. But in working with the communities, I just realized like, you could say there are four stages of a human life. There's children, there's teenagers and there's adults and there's elders. And so each one of these stages is like mastered. They are masters of the gifts of that place. So children are masters of play. There's no doubt about it. Teenagers are masters of edge and risk. They push the culture, they jump off of rooftops. The creativity is insane. And adults, when you're really adulting well, you realize that you are in service, to the health of your own body, to your employer, to your family. You are like someone who is in service. And then you have elders who are masters of story. They have this huge, -- especially for better or worse, sometimes you have a parent who just won't stop telling the same story over and over and over. But that's their gift. And repetition sometimes, and I bet you this has happened to almost everybody who's listening, sometimes it's when the parent told you the story for the 10th time that they let slip a detail or whatever, and you're like, "You never told me that." That changes everything. That is so interesting. These things aren't bugs. They're features. Oh my God, I read this article about teenagers written by a neuroscientist mom, and it was the most condescending, insulting diatribe and the lack of brain development of a certain kind in teenagers. That's why they just didn't get it and took stupid risks. And it was like, okay, all my experiences told me if a human being is doing something, it is the gift of millions of years of evolution. And so, it is doing something powerful and magical. And so teenagers don't have insufficiently developed brains. They have perfectly developed brains for what they're there to do, which is push the edge. If they had brains that had the extra infrastructure that adult brains have, then again, that would be the bottling up of this potential that otherwise was available. And so you would no longer see them jumping off roofs. The first time I saw park core videos, we wouldn't have that experience, along with the sticking bottle rockets in your pants, which is not so awesome. But it's parcel of it. You can't have one without the other. Pushing edge is pushing edge and that's the magic of teenagers and the cultural creation. I mean, everybody's always chasing what they're doing in terms of social media and online art. So anyway, I just really deeply appreciate the full range of what it takes to be human beings.

And then when you have a community, this is one of the things in institutional school. Schooling is age segregation. We're going to march every monocrop of human beings of one particular age, from grade to grade to grade. When we know that big brother, big sister teaching younger brother, younger sister is a fantastically powerful mentoring method. And so, a school might go, "Oh, okay. One day a week in an afternoon, we'll have the sixth graders teach the fifth graders an hour of reading," whatever. But what if we just let it all open and the kids mixed, the teenagers mixed, the adults mixed, a lot of the toxic socialization of bullying. I have to believe that 99% of that is just being rats in a cage and bottled up, and not able to express yourself.

It's also shocking school teachers get worn down by these impossible expectations. And although I've had one or two really good experiences stepping into a classroom with friends of mine. There's this one class, Theories of Knowledge, which you can imagine I was very, very excited about. And it's a part of the international baccalaureate program that is some kind of AP high school program. So a friend of mine, Ken Siebold was teaching this class and that was an amazing, rich conversation and amazing experience. But that was like once or twice. And then every other time I've stepped into a classroom, I've been shocked at how the teacher speaks to the students and how the students speak to each other. The sarcasm and cynicism. I mean, I would not allow you to speak this way in my living room. I don't allow my kids to speak to me or each other -- this is shocking. It's cutting and it breaks my heart. And so real socialization, not institutional socialization where we learned courtesy and respecting, that people of other ages are developing at different rates and are in a different stage of their life and what we can expect from them and the opportunities that are there.

ARTY: This is so amazing. I've got a bunch of ideas in my head now as I'm thinking about like, if we had sort of a lifetime self organizing sort of education infrastructure that at each phase of life you self select for, I'm in this phase of life right now. Just let people categorize themselves. And children, all programs, all collaborations, all spaces are focused on increasing skills with regards to masters of play. So, a fantasy sort of dreaming and participating and collaborating in place sorts of things. And then teachers and things would be folks that have a lot of that childlike vibe energy and can help inspire the kids to really go all out with their dreaming. And then teenagers, teenager phase. It's like you kind of got to go through this phase of doing lots of stupid things and surviving.

Anyway, I certainly did my share of stupid things growing up and I scared my mom a lot. My mom was terrified through my teenage years. And I feel a little bad for that looking back now. But I mean, to your point, it's like this phase that you're going through of edge and risk. And one of the things I've seen movements come out of teenager, youth movements are often around this edge pushing phase because here's folks that aren't afraid to come up with new ideas and do things different and say, "This is wrong. Let's try and create a new way." And we can develop those skills in ways that are less likely to -- it's like you got to do stupid things to an extent, but maybe we can limit our stupid things or make them slightly more safer. I'm thinking about like artistic edge, cultural edge. There's definitely a bunch of ways that we could potentially do storytelling around different edge progression kind of thing to give people those ideas and adults that are in this kind of high risk taking sort of thing, but have experience with how to do these things safely. Like skydiving, for example. Take some adults that are skilled and gifted in that master of edge and risk and have those folks be mentors in this teenager world. And then you could do the same thing with adults. You could do the same thing with organizing elders together and working on this, what are the fairy tales of our culture that we're trying to pass down in history that we've learned about what makes societies work well and thrive. How do we pass our wisdom down? What are the biggest problems that need solving and how do we lead our world in a better direction?

So one of the reasons I decided to change my name this year, I'm turning 40 this year and I don't have kids. And so one of the things that's come up a lot in conversations is for a woman, there are significant evolutionary physical changes that happen when you birth children. And if you don't have kids, I'm sort of like a grownup little kid. I've got a lot of child and teenager in me still because I don't have kids. So instead the world becomes my kids and I do crazy entrepreneur things. You can see my love hat on here right now, too. This is what I do. I become a world warrior, trying to make the world a better place. And so as I was looking at my own skills, my own background, what is my own story, I start thinking about tattoo art and things like this of who am I that the art I started drawing gave me a picture of who I wanted to be in the world and then defining my own name became like defining a variable of something in code. Like who do I want to be in the world? What are the shoes that I want to try and fill? And then it becomes like a hat to wear and I decide what I want to stand for. I decide what kind of world I want to live in. And then I try and be those things, be what I want in the world. Be the type of leader that we need in the world.

And so this is my elder hat essentially. This is what I'm going to stand for. And I think we're at that point where we need to go back to basic fundamental principles of our indigenous cultures that have so much wisdom that has gotten lost in the normalization of things that don't make sense. The normalization of things that don't lead toward the thriving of humanity. If we know these things, if we see these things and we decide we're an elder and wear the elder hat, then it's really a decision to take responsibility to look forward toward the future, to take responsibility for the communities and stuff around us and go, "What are my skills? What is my star? What are my gifts and how do I use those gifts to best contribute to the people around me, to best contribute to our future?" Which is part of the reason I started gravitating toward, "I want to build a new kind of school." I want to rethink this whole school thing and see if we can do something that makes a whole lot more sense than what we're doing now. And there's plenty of reasons from a control standpoint to want to educate the generations in a certain sort of way that may not be in alignment with the best interests of the humans. And at the same time, we have gradually increased the level of abstraction of infrastructure such that we have bigger and bigger institutions at higher and higher levels that are further and further away from families and neighbors. And we can have empathy in these localized contexts. But as soon as we give our power away to something that is so big, we just become helpless to the machine and we do things that don't make sense and we get stuck in the system and can't even see that there's a potential alternative out there.

And so I feel like this next generation, there's a whole bunch of people that have really great ideas that I've seen doing really neat things. Sam Aaron, for example, is using Sonic Pi to teach little kids how to code with music because how fun is that to make your own musical mixes and stuff as a kid? And you could do that so easily. How much fun is that? And once you light that fire, that spark, all the other things get so much easier because then you have that desire, that researcher passion of, "Cool. I want to learn everything there is to know about this particular wilderness." It's like a wilderness of ambiguity. There's always more to learn, always more to uncover in this creative explosion of possibilities. And really that's what education ought to be about is igniting the fire in people's souls. Igniting the stars. And as elders, I think that becomes our responsibility to figure out how do we ignite the stars.

JACOB: Yeah. I was thinking about that too about this idea of like, what would happen if every community used its own resources to educate children in the way it sees best fit? That's the general idea that we're talking about. Is that fair? I just want to make sure before I go on.

WILLEM: Yeah. I mean, yes. Like all else being equal, yes. Although part of my work is like, "Can I provide more tools so it's not so trial and error for all those communities?" But yes. In the end, even without any facilitator training or this or that, yes, I trust all communities to figure out.

JACOB: I live in semi-rural Kentucky. If we're being honest, I'm trying to think about like what would my son's education look like in a system like that? And it probably would involve local churches very heavily. And as a Jewish/ACS family, I'm worried about that. And so in a way, and I can only speak for myself, I kind of prefer the sort of monoculture of a public school to the alternative. You know what I mean?

WILLEM: Yeah. I mean, the thing is the internet is neither good nor bad. Social media is neither good nor bad. It is a tool and it's having an incredible influence on our lives. And so the thing is, if you're all -- so, say Facebook has a really negative influence on elections and communities in certain ways, but also allows us to stay connected with family members that we never would have connected with and old friends. So you've got this force here. And what you just want to balance it out is with a local force and a local connection and local resilience because setting all your education issues aside, say there was a wildfire, a drought, a flood, if you could tap into the connection you'd already built through other systems you're involved in, in your own neighborhood, what a blessing, right? If you could trust, if you felt that any one particular police officer that showed up at your door or if you knew you were going to know who they were and that they knew your name and knew your background. And same with the MTs. So there's this power of human connection that we tend to like because we have all these systems that we've anonymized ourself out of the way and we're just like, "I'm an American. I have rights. And the thing is, you can both complain about it all being who you know, but that is like how humans tend to operate based on human relationships. It's, "Do I know you? Do I trust you?" So that's one thing. In some way, somehow, resilience is important and that has to do with local connections whether or not you agree with anybody. And as an aside, I found that I had some unpleasant realizations early on in my 20's that people who I agreed with, I had a really hard time making friends with. I actually couldn't stand them most of the time. So I found that my friendships emerged irrespective of agreement or disagreement about this idea or that idea. So there's like a thing there of, it's not necessarily about agreeing, but that's easy to say and it's certainly issues of prejudice and bias and privilege are all very real.

One thing that I'm doing though is, we always have this option to generate communities of practice wherever we are. So I'm in the third year of a symposium called The Thermodynamics of Emotion Symposium, whose goal is to share models and actually a few specific models that have come out of complexity thinking. One is called Immediate Moment Theory. One is called Human Systems Dynamics. It's a Glenda Eoyang. Immediate Moment Theory actually comes from an expert canine rehabilitator named Kevin Behan. And it's a model of behavior, human behavior, animal behavior because it's dogs and canines are what's going on in that relationship when in rehabilitation. I mean humans and canines. And then there's from the tracker world. So there's this idea of Concentric Ring Theory, that every environment we're in is a tissue that when an event happens, it propagates through the system in a spherical manner. If I go into the forest and I am walking too fast, this same pattern will happen every time. There'll be what is called a bird plow. A bird scared up from my feet, flies up into the branches. That will alert other birds feeding nearby, which will either crouch in bushes or also fly up and do sentinel that will alert deer nearby who will cock their ears or hunker down. And it'll just go and go and go until it finally dies out. And so, there's this idea that whatever, setting aside attention, setting outside thinking, that what we are is we are all part of this deformable medium, every spec, everything we hold in our hands, every puff of air, every human being, we're all participating in this substrate that transmits forces. And what we want is we're looking for coherence. We're looking for building systems that cohere and support their self organization. And that's why there's even humans here because that happened for millions of years of evolution of life. So, The Thermodynamics of Emotion Symposium embodies that.

The first year, we had keynotes and workshops, three days of that. And I was itching to move us to the next place where we had two days of keynotes the next year and one day of open space. Of course, again, an open space is where the participants themselves create an agenda for the day based on what they're interested in. There are questions. You put it up on a wall and then you have sessions where you meet and talk about these things because I can't know what people need and I can't know what they already know. Sometimes you're giving a talk to somebody and they already know it. The next thing which I would love to do and go like, thinking about thinking, I'd love to float up to the next level. So then this third year, we finally got to where we could have two days of open space. And the first day being keynotes. And the fourth year, I'm going to push for three days of open space. As we going along, I'm midwifing this cultural, this community of practice, which is like, "Listen, you know what complex systems are. If you are here, if you've somehow found yourself in this space, you belong here." And you know that in living systems, systems with many dimensions, more than we can keep track of, many parts more than we could ever count. And that where a single cause has many unforeseen effects. There's not a single cause and effect like a pool table. It's so that complex systems as agents interact, it gives rise to patterns over time and it's the patterns that we want to focus on. And then traditional communities are always looking at patterns. And they are store houses of patterns.

I'll never forget this one story in Indonesia. There was a tsunami several years back and it just blasted most of the developing areas, wiped out whole towns, cities. But they're in Thailand on the coast, was a story of this village of Moken. They call them sea gypsies, but they're sort of nomadic fishers. And there was a village where they saw the water recede way out and the sea floor being exposed for like a half mile out into the ocean. And there was an elder who was like, "This is the story we tell when the sea gets angry. She exposes the sea floor and that's when you have to run for high ground." So there was a culture who'd been telling a story. Who knows when the last time this happened? Hundreds of years ago? Who knows? But they encapsulate it. They put it into a story which made it easily transmissible. So people enjoyed telling it. Nobody had to wag a finger at them like it's best practices, right? No, it was a fun story to tell. Elders told it to children, children became elders, told it to their children. And then here it was, ready. And only, I think, one person in their village died and it was somebody who is disabled and just in the chaos, couldn't make it. And hundreds and hundreds, I think maybe thousands of people died on that tsunami all over the region. And this one village stood out as having escaped most of the damaging effects.

So, it's like these complex systems, we look at patterns. And this whole pattern of like, midwifing is a pattern, even that stance. You hear technical coaches say over and over. Agile coaches like, "I'm here to make myself obsolete." So I've had The Thermodynamics of Emotions Symposium, I'm there to make myself obsolete. I want to grow this community so that people are speaking with authority about some really weird stuff that I introduced in year one from other experts. It's like, "You're all here. Maybe you're not quite sure why you came but you paid your money and here we are and let's own this material. Let's own navigating these complex systems." So, that's how I see it. We tend to go, "Oh, you have a recipe. Okay, well then I just have to be local and I have to give up my own values, [inaudible] and my cultural Jewishness." We tend to think in those terms of silver bullet practices, but it's like, "How do we explore this so we get all our needs met," so that you have local resilience that you receive the gifts of local education in the area. I mean, all of the genius that's around there, but it's also mediated by the fact that you, as a family, do have your own values and have your own past and connecting with other resources that have that. Again, it's gardening. Gardening is the best metaphor. Or like in traditional cultures, land tending or it's like you look around at the valley and you're like, "You see all these forests? See all these grasslands? Human hands have touched all of this." It's abundant with food and wildlife because we burn it every year on the cool damp season, because we replant, because we dig in the right places, because we poop or pee in the right places for fertilizer.

I mean, that's another whole idea is that where modern humans are constantly trying to reduce our impact. We got to be ecofriendly and reduce our impact. Whereas traditional cultures, there's like, "How can we have the biggest impact possible?" Because human beings, by their nature, are a blessing on the earth, not a curse. Whereas in our culture we're like, "Humans are clearly a curse, so let's just be the least bad. Don't be evil." We can do so much more than just not be evil. We can be part of these projects of building Amazons right here.

That's sort of my image of it why I kind of balk when you were saying like do we just let everybody willy nilly do their thing? And it's like, on the one hand, yes, everyone deserves that respect. I'm not the boss of anyone. And there are more tools, like we still tend to see conflicts on a team as like, "Oh, that's a personality conflict. It's your fault and your fault and your fault." Whereas in like a complex system's point of view, I'm like, "What information are they not getting? What resources do we not have? What pressures are pushing unneeded energy into the system that's making us less resilient and less able to deal with little frustrations between our team members?" You start thinking in a complex systems and it drains a lot of the small town garbage. There's nothing perfect about small town American life. So yes, I want our culture itself to improve. We don't necessarily have the tools quite yet.

ARTY: So what I'm hearing here is, so Jacob mentioned the rural Kentucky. Maybe in a particular area like rural areas, there's not going to be as much local geniuses such as comparatively to living in Portland, you're going to have a lot more local genius around than in the middle of Kentucky.

JACOB: I actually would dispute that. I think there is plenty of local genius. I think it's a matter of cultural diversity that is sometimes neglected by those in power. I think that's what I would put it.

ARTY: I should say though that even if that's not your specific circumstance, say, because I know nothing about the area where you live other than just what you rattled off. There's also areas where an entire community can be starved of education. Africa is a good example of systemic dysfunction where everyone ends up in survival mode essentially. And then as opposed to gatekeepers on information stuff, you've got gatekeepers around food. You know everybody's starving. It becomes a whole different set of dysfunction. And when you're trying to survive and you're on the edge of starvation, you can't really do anything other than focus on getting a little more lifeline. And economically speaking, so the friend in The Gambia in West Africa, I found out for $15 the cost of like three Starbucks lattes, you can give a family three months of lifeline. And once you got lifeline to survive, then now we don't have to focus on our immediate survival. We can focus on getting skills, figuring out how we're going to make money and do something that is a little bit more high leveraged than just get through the day and try to live. And when I start thinking about entire communities that are falling off the edge, the only way these people get away from the edge is with people that are in enough position of privilege that they can go, "Hey, you know what? I can buy you three cups of coffee." And we're in this place of how far do these people have to fall off the cliff before it's worth three cups of coffee? I mean, really it's like so little money of phasing people, but then what happens? We end up learning these normalized behaviors of, well, these poor people are generally trying to steal and are generally thieves.

And so if someone asks you for help, the thing that you should do is turn a blind eye to those people that want your help. And it's not that there aren't people that are thieves and there aren't people that are trying to figure out ways to get money because they're on the edge of struggling and that becomes a way of life. It's figuring out how to get money out of people. But the people that do that then, there's also just genuine kind people that are just on the edge. And then as soon as we normalize this behavior of turn a blind eye to the suffering, we hold these entire communities, entire continents in this downward spiral. And then these people that are in survival mode on the edge, think about your family being on the edge, how desperate you get, and then somebody comes up and says, "I'll give you food and feed your family if you'll take up arms for our cause," or whatever. If you were in that situation of being on the edge of death, what would you do? It's your family. And so it's like we pushed people down to this level of desperation and then we get systemic kind of wickedness and control dynamics and cold-heartedness and stuff that comes with you're supposed to be cold to these humans. And then we get these buildup of problems with wars and all of these other dynamics. And then we ended up spending all of huge budget on war as opposed to spending on education, as opposed to spending on lifting people, as opposed to investing in our communities and our people. And you know, you can have geniuses that are born anywhere. You can have people with incredible talents that are born any place in the world. We're all human beings. We all deserve an opportunity to shine our light.

And so, I feel like there's some things that we need that localized resilience. But when we're in a community that needs help with that, we also need ways to have non-local sharing contribution at a community level. Like how do we build a school in a new village and then help the people to self organize, teach them the skills to be teachers and to get the skills they need to be great entrepreneurs? I think the answer isn't one or the other. It's both.

WILLEM: Yeah. Africa is really interesting because there's billions and billions of dollars in gold, and diamonds, and resources that go out of Africa and into the coffers in Europe. That's totally skewed. And then we send aid to Africa. I mean, basically a situation I see in communities like Africa, big place, but all the different countries in Africa, I mean, there's loads of colonies of European countries and their purpose is to extract wealth and extract value out of these places. Although absolutely, contribute out of our privilege and send them money, but also listen to what they need and listen to of what their problems are. I think this comes up with what Jacob was saying. Like, are you telling me that if I did that? And it's like, you know your own local issues the best. There was a community in Gambia, I mean, I've heard the jokes about, "Oh, here come the white people building the third school in our village. Thank you." White charity work and first world charity work is always a bit sinister because that's the right hand. And then the left hand is arms flowing into the country and resources, gold. Shell oil has a plant and it's pumping a sludge, but now you can't dig any edible roots out of the swamp and the animals are dying. It's incredibly complicated situations and there's no easy way out. And I think always listening to the people who you want to help and them telling you what they need. And then in that same sense, like you were saying Arty, where it's like turning away because you're worried about what they know and how they know or what kind of person they are, but just listening. And if they tell you they need something that you think, "Well, that's not what you need," but you give it anyway to them. Then they discover, "Oh yeah, I needed this other thing." I mean, they start self organizing and having their own experience and we just trust them to do that.

And also, yeah, geniuses are everywhere. They're absolutely everywhere. Actually one of my questions, which I think like in traditional cultures, I get the sense that you're not judged by your answers, you're judged by the quality of your questions. And so one of my questions is, what were rocket scientists doing 15,000 years ago? What problems were they solving with those minds that are just insatiable. And there's all kinds of human beings. There's makers and there's mentors, and this and that. But there are some minds that are just insatiable in the sense of what were they doing? And as I've gone on deeper into skills of tracking and outdoor skills, I've begun to discover like, "Whoa, this is really intense." And even if you just think of building the Amazon as the project of a rocket scientist, and how bio char, this material you can make that's kind of charcoal that you pack into mountains that will absorb water and hold nutrients, and then you plant trees in those mounds and you just slowly build out this grid of trees that are like edible nuts and this and that. And then one day, you've got this entire self-maintaining forest that has even overgrown the civilizations that built it. Like they're buried now under the abundance that they created. So we don't need the cities anymore. So just think like this as people who want to intervene in complex systems, listening to what the need is, contributing to what the need is and just being available and not trying to have answers, having lots of questions and leading with that in so far as anybody's asking me to lead at all. I just discover these communities over and over again. What they do is they'll have the same request and people will ask them what they need. And they'll say what they need and then they'll be given something else that is in line with the grant proposal that the person got or in line with some other priority or excess resource that they want to dump somewhere. And it's not actually what the community needs.

ARTY: Yeah. Lots of complexity, for sure. No easy answers, but one thing that we can start doing is contributing good questions. I love the not judged by the answers, judged by the quality of the questions we ask and how can we pass our questions on to the future through our stories and get people thinking about the right questions. There's a lot of really good stuff there.

So we're getting near the end of the show where we do reflections and share any final thoughts, takeaways, threads we saw through this that were interesting and insightful. And Willem, you get to go last. So Jacob, you want to start?

JACOB: Yeah, I was thinking about a podcast that I heard recently and it's called It Could Happen Here. It's an interesting series that sort of asks the question like, what would happen if there was a second American civil war? And it's not quite journalism, it's using journalistic principles to sort of speculate however wildly what a second American civil war might look like. What's something interesting that they really delve into a lot is like what happens when far distant the federal and state governments collapse and are not present? And they listed several examples. And I think one of them is Syria, which is now, they're in a civil war now, where cities that may be ethnically diverse and maybe traditionally they don't agree on everything, have sort of found ways to sort of connect around basic human community services in the way of finding water and electricity, food, and presumably that can be extended to education as well. The basic idea is like we're going to at least agree that it's on all of us to work together to sort of provide the bare minimum and we're going to leave each other alone when it comes to cultural differences. I just felt like in this discussion we're having, it seems to me that that might be the sweet spot. Local communities can surely agree on and find really innovative ways that they can provide for each other. And I feel like the sweet spot would be like what are the things that we're going to say, are we even going to see to the family level? Like families are going to get to decide for themselves X, Y, and Z. But as a community, we're going to come together and put our collective resources behind A, B and C.

WILLEM: That's awesome.

ARTY: One of the key things I remember you saying, Willem, was the story of how folks in Portland self organized to come up with an ad hoc education program. But this magic only happened with the people with the programs and the people with the spaces, when there were two key ingredients. One, the existing system had to be out of the way. And then two, space had to be created with the people with the spaces and the people with the programs to come together and self organize and say, "Hey, here's this problem that needs solving. Let's work together around this shared thing that needs doing that we all care about." The shared interest. And when all of those ingredients happened, there was magic. And I think one of the big challenges we have right now is the existing system is in the way, in a whole lot of ways. And there's various complex system dynamics with all of these things. But to have like a common, to get folks to come together to self organize, to set things in a new direction, we've got to have that shared ideal to build around. And I think going back to very simple first principles of like kindness. It's a pretty good one. There's things that we can agree on, on what does it mean to be a kind human? Let's start with that question and have a discussion about it. Start seeing all the different people's ideas about what it means to be a kind person. And some of these values, maybe we can phrase in terms of the questions to get people to come together around, what matters to us as human beings? What do we care about? I want to be able to chase and build my dreams. I want to be able to be the greatest version of myself that I can be. I want to be able to contribute my skills to others that need them, contribute my gifts. It seems like there's some basic things that we can agree upon for what it means for community to thrive. And we're in this era where existing system infrastructure is collapsing, is not sustainable for a number of reasons. And there's also a lot of cynicism and hopelessness and people coping by throwing all the things, all the people under the bus. There's a lot of that energy right now. And I think a lot of it is grounded in cynicism as a coping mechanism in essentially an undercurrent of hopelessness. And to give people hope, we need a strategy, we need a plan, we need a vision. And that vision isn't something that's going to come from one person. It's weaving all of our ideas together, our dreams together, our capabilities together. It's figuring out how we build local resilience and then share that knowledge across communities as well. So having kind of non-local sharing at the same time as we have local resilience and local self organizing structures. And I feel like if we had a space created for the people with the programs and the people with the spaces to come together, around what does plan B look like? Let's just throw spaghetti at the wall and see where we go with vision of all these things. I love this discussion because it's like once we have all this experience with seeing how all these different communities come together and organize these indigenous people, it gives us so much insight into what other possibilities are out there. And since we all have different eyes and come from different places, all of that is knowledge that could be applied collectively to figuring out how do we solve this problem? How do we come up with a way to do science to tell if we're doing better, what does it mean to thrive? How do we know if we're doing good or not? Can we define some basic ideas of what is better to do science around, to do community around? And I think we need to start making a deliberate effort to optimize systems for joy and thriving as a first order thing that we do. How do we scale joy and thriving? And in order to even have those discussions, we got to have the willingness to take risks and drive new edges. And so, I'm feeling like based on this conversation, the era of folks that are in their sort of teenager sort of phases that are master of edges coming together with people with wisdom about the education system is the right sort of combination of skills that have the capability combined to actually reinvent all the things. This has been such a fascinating discussion. The thing I'm wondering is with the existing system in the way, how do we create opportunities to start moving in this direction? How do we create the space for step one?

WILLEM: That actually segues really well into what I was going to reflect on, which is this idea that that experience was so frustrating with the public schools and the programs and spaces and then they took it away. Somebody else with more power took it away that I had to change how I thought about things. And even in our conversation this morning, I'm just realizing I do think our culture has all these impediments to navigating complex systems and wise ways. Everything we're told, time is money and our homilies are blocking us from truly navigating the systems well and having the kind of lives that are worth having. And so, I think even on a software team, what we want is we want the management to get out of our way so we can really thrive. And there's our instructions for ourselves, I believe. Like nobody with any more power, we don't have control over them. So what we can do, I feel is get out of the way of people who we do have more power than, get out of their way and listen to them, listen to the system and provide resources to the system. Servant leadership to our own tiny patch. And I think it does influence, it does influence everyone around us.

One of the principles of navigating these systems in the Thermodynamics of Emotion framework is this idea that you see a little bird on the ground feeding and you're in a hurry or you're in your thoughts. So you just keep walking forward and your disturbance pushes and knocks them up in the way because who are they? They're just prey, and I'm the predator. And so I have more power. But if that was say a mountain lion, will you just keep walking forward? No. And so there's this idea of see the predator and the prey. And for whatever reason, in some sort of fundamental human way, if I can see in a child or in somebody who works for me or has less power than me, if I see in them the capacity for them, for the me to have to submit to them and what they choose and to be controlled by them. If I could see myself in that frame, their own ability to be an agent and have agency and see the predator and the prey, it changes me and it makes me more respectful, more courteous and I do more listening. I think just one or two small tools like that, I feel could shift things so much if we just share what works in these complex systems. But even setting that aside, I think no matter what, getting out of anybody's way, whether or not they choose to pass on the favor in their corner of the system is going to create more life and more possibility.

It's so interesting that we are having this conversation and everything, both of you are saying, because I also have a podcast I've been listening to. It's called The Fall of Civilizations Podcast and I'm going to spoil episode three because it's relevant. It's a super good podcast and it's just like telling story after story of empires that have collapsed. And all through the near East, there's a layer of charcoal and arrowheads and bones with fractures and scarring from weapons. All at the same archeological strata in time. And the question is, what happened? It's in these great city states and great empires that just disappeared. At the same level of char, they disappeared and abandoned, some forever, some re-inhabited years later. Who did it? There's stories of these sea people. Sea people that showed up, tens of thousands of them, right on shore without warning and bam! Overwhelmed the city and everything's burned, sacked, looted, and the city's dead. Who are the sea people? And this is like city after city throughout this whole region in the near East. [Inaudible]cities and Egyptian cities. What happened? And as the podcast goes on, the host gives his theory, which I'm an extremely big fan of, that part of the thing of this sea people is that they didn't seem to have any kind of leadership. They were just a hoard that showed up. A hoard, a leaderless hoard, no diplomats, nothing to argue with, just a hoard. And the tiny ships, big ships, they would just appear. What happened? Well, there is at the same time, there was 10 to 20 years of a kind of drought. Like there was a really terrible weather all through the region, all the plants and crops were suffering. There wasn't as much food coming out of the ground. And this was happening all through probably, much worse farther North. And Iceland had a volcano that blew and changed the climate for the entire region. And so what you had was a pebble that started a landslide of independent village peoples going, "My family is going to starve. We've got to go get food from somewhere else and I'll bring it back," until you had hundreds of thousands of climate refugees showing up at your doorstep.

Right now, I think we tend to think, "Oh, we're the first world. We're going to do everybody else a favor. We're going to decide who gets in and who doesn't. We're going to have walls." And it's like, see the predator and the prey. At some point, we may not have a choice who shows up. And the decisions they make if we have walls in their way, are going to impact our own families. We're being on top, even in terms of like English being the world language of business. Before that, it was French and before that it was Arabic. It just keeps changing. Next, maybe it'll be Mandarin, who knows? There's a wheel of fortune here and we can get off of it and root ourselves in our places and have a better future. And it's conversations like this that I think make that possible. So, thank you.

ARTY: All right, so that is a wrap. Thank you so much, Willem, for joining us. This was really, really great. I wanted to ask you one more last question to wrap up. This conference you mentioned, The Thermodynamics of Emotion Symposium, what is the date of this conference and how would people find out more about it?

WILLEM: It is the first weekend of October, every year. It's in Portland, Oregon. And there's a website: ThermodynamicsOfEmotion.com that has like images and pictures from last year and links to all our keynotes that are up on YouTube. There's lots of great resources. Honestly, I think I might do a Kickstarter for next year, so there'll be a big social media push for that.

ARTY: Let us know about that when the time comes. I think it's a really cool thing. It's something that we talk about a lot on the show. A lot of our listeners would probably be very interested in that. So, keep us posted.

WILLEM: Yeah. And thank you so much.

ARTY: And thank you for joining us.

WILLEM: It's a pleasure.