Episode 3 – Nora Bateson

🎤  “The times that we’re going into right now are going to hurt and they’re going to be confusing but there is also the possibility of a fantastic beauty. A beauty unlike anything we would know now as beauty.”

🎤  “You can say all you want that the change begins within, but the change I would say, actually begins in between“

🎤  We talk a lot about fixing broken things… but the broken things are not broken broken things… they are an expression of a trans contextual relational processing and mutual learning.

In this third episode of the #21for21 series, Carola and Marco talk to thought leader and award winning author and filmmaker, Nora Bateson, about change, relationships, mutual cross-generational learning, memories, trans contextual research on living systems and warm data.

In the inspiring and thought-provoking conversation that follows, Nora does not shy away from telling us like it is. Her unique view on the world and our relationship with it is a must-listen!

Listen to the episode below 👇 🎧

About Nora Bateson

• About Nora Bateson (bio)
• The Bateson Institute 
• Warm Data Labs
• Interview about Ecology of Mind
• Books by Nora Bateson

Episode transcript

Marco van Hout  0:06

Welcome to Dear future I’m ready. This is 21 for 21 with Nora Bateson.

Nora Bateson  0:11

Dear future I am ready because it’s very, very strange. The super weird, the kinky, the unexpected, the details that don’t make sense the things that happened in peripheral vision that do not land. I have the things I have no words for the ways that I have never been before. The me I have never met yet.

Marco van Hout  0:40

Nora Bateson is an award winning filmmaker, research designer, writer and educator, as well as president of the International Bateson Institute based in Sweden. Her work asked the question, how can we improve our perception of the complexity we live within so that we can improve our interaction with the world. And the international lecturer, researcher and writer, Nora wrote directed and produced the award winning documentary, an ecology of mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology and information technology together into a study of the patterns inequality of living systems, or books small arcs of larger circles is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity. Nora has also coined the term warm data and initiated the warm data labs as an exploration of trans contextual information.

Introduction  1:37

This is the future I’m ready. A podcast brought to you from Amsterdam by Digital Society School and Transformational Studio. Your hosts for today are Carola Verschoor, and Marco van Hout.

Carola Verschoor  1:50

21 for 21 is a podcast about transformation. This is happening right now. And it is complex, which is why we are talking to 21 transformational leaders, people who are ahead of the curve and to whom we can ask, Hey, what’s the view like from out there? We want to ask them to inspire us in our transformational journeys. Today we are talking to Nora Bateson about systems complexity and the importance of trans contextual perception. It is such an honor and a big, big pleasure to have you with us, Nora. Welcome.

Nora Bateson  2:21

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Marco van Hout  2:21

Welcome Nora!

Carola Verschoor  2:23

All right. So let’s dive right in. And we’re going to start of course, by looking at what’s happening around us in some kind of maybe naive hope of trying to understand what’s going on. We’re in a context in which there are all of these paradigmatic shifts taking place, systems are collapsing, structures are collapsing, ways of doing are be are asking us are begging us to be revised and changed and renewed, there is a need for new things to emerge, while at the same time with all of this sort of creative Renaissance, there is also a lot of creative destruction taking place. I’ve, we’ve both read a lot of your work, we’ve listened to a lot of your most recent podcasts, and we’ve heard you say, is going to hurt. And this worries us but at the same time also kind of triggers our creative spirits and our ingenuity to try and find new ways to make a better kinder and brighter future possible. What’s your take on what’s happening out there today?

Nora Bateson  3:25

Out there, in there, over here, under there. The truth is, it’s everywhere. And that’s what makes it tricky…that there’s all this change taking place, even within our own bodies, with the shifting of our own microbiomes in response to the different kinds of ecologies and foods and emotions and you know, all kinds of things, the virus and so on. So where’s the change? And what is transformation? Right? So one of the things that I think we have to be really careful of with the idea of transformation, and is that, you know, David Christian was always quoting me on this because I said it once in a lecture and he was like, yeah, that’s the issue is like, we’re not actually trying to put wings on caterpillars. Right? If you talk about transformation, you got to recognize that Caterpillar is gone. And so, you know, one of the things that’s always been true about you know, transformational seminars and this and that and, you know, the whole existence change systems transformation, trendy rhetoric, as that essentially there’s an underlying understanding that what we’re going to do is we’re going to change some necessary bits so that we can actually keep living the way we live.

Nora Bateson  4:51

And that is not what we’re doing. And the way in which those changes are taking place. are much more subtle. Sure the structures are changing. But deeper than that there are these underlying processes. And one of them, I think, is memory. So I think one of the most significant ways to kind of recognize transformation happening is when you look at you, or you notice that your own memories read differently. Let me give you an example. So when I was in my, I think I was 20, I might have been 20, I might have been 19, I was one of those kids who was, you know, I didn’t have a lot of money. I was in university, I was waiting tables, I was, you know, and I saved up and I went with a backpack and a friend. And just yesterday, I was thinking about that trip. And I started to cringe. I noticed something very different about that trip than I ever thought about before. For me, that trip had always been an adventure and exploration of other cultures and other worlds.

Nora Bateson  6:13

And I, in fact, went to school in Thailand and studied Thai. So I did take part in this in another way. But on that trip, let me just be perfectly frank, I was there on an exploration for me. I exploited the cheap labor, cheap hotel rooms, cheap travel, cheap beach experience. And when I look at that now, I actually feel really differently about it, I’m suddenly looking at those aspects of my life, that, that I used to see in a very different light and thinking, Oh, I’m sorry. And that’s really important, that’s where the transformation happens. I just wanted to kind of point that out in a very specific detail. Because it’s all too easy to think, oh, we just need to, you know, restructure the economy. And if we restructure the economy, then everybody’s gonna, you know, live in a different way, and so on and so forth.

Carola Verschoor  7:22

I really like the way that you just referred to noticing, you said, transformation starts taking place when you start noticing that something’s off that the way that you looked at things or understood things or perceived things, or you’re held on to things previously, and needs a bit of revision, or as we say in design needs to be reframed. So tell us about noticing and about reception. We’ve talked about that, in the when we introduce you about the importance of trans contextual perception, what is this?

Nora Bateson  7:57

And this is what my work is all about. So it’s, it’s looking at, you know, complexity and systemic processes, but recognizing that every living organism is actually partaking in multiple contextual relational processes. What do I mean? Okay, I’m a mom, I’m 400 trillion organisms, I’m a filmmaker, I’m my generation, I am my culture, my language, I’m a spouse, I’m a best friend. I’m a professional in this circumstance. So in each one of those relationships, there are very different patterns of communication, very different processes of learning and mutual learning taking place. So there’s multiple contexts if you look at a meadow, okay, where’s the meadow? Well, the meadow is necessarily, you know, requiring the earthworms and it’s requiring the plants and the butterflies to and the bees and the trees and the roots. And each one of these organisms is in a very different multiple contextual communication process with the other organisms.

Nora Bateson  9:15

The way that an earthworm is in communication with the tree is different than how it is in communication with the soil bacteria, and what it eats. It’s different than how it’s in communication and relationship with maybe, you know, my son when he’s getting ready to go fishing. Right? What’s an earthworm? Well, depends on where you look. So I’m interested in how these multiple contexts come together, because whatever it is that you’re looking at, it’s never just that and nothing more. Right? So we’re looking at, you know, this question of, what was that trip to Thailand? Okay, well, in the moment, it was part of a cultural thing, but as I look back, what I’m starting to see is that, you know, and I’m being very honest here. That trip to Thailand is pretty much a signature of almost everything that’s wrong with the world. And I did that. And in not only did I do it, I did it thinking that I was learning and exploring and becoming a bigger person and that this was, you know what, like oh.

Marco van Hout  10:26

You even thought you were becoming worldly? You were doing the exact opposite. Yeah.

Nora Bateson  10:32

And actually, what I was doing was, you know, participating in some really old and really ugly cultural patterns, but I didn’t know. Right? So trans contextual perception is that thing of being able to say, you know, whatever it is you’re doing, it actually has lots of contextual, you know, meaning and consequences.

Carola Verschoor  10:58

Absolutely consequences, he has an impact. And because, of course, to the point that you’ve just brought up, communication is so important, when we are able to communicate, the other person can show us their vantage point, even of ourselves, and when we communicate towards the inside, we also can learn of a different vantage point within ourselves that you really have to move in all of these multiple directions in order to perceive. But I think we’ve made it really difficult on ourselves. Definitely, from a Western culture perspective, because we’ve accepted that there were certain rules and certain ways of doing things.

Marco van Hout  11:42

What’s the role of education in that? Is that, I mean, there’s perhaps a difference between education and you mentioned learning a lot. What in your perception is the difference? And you know, in respect to what Carola just described: How does that fit in to that difference?

Nora Bateson  11:59

I mean, I think education has very little to do with learning. Frankly.

Marco van Hout  12:04

Yeah, exactly.

Nora Bateson  12:04

Other than that, what we’re learning to do is learning to be in the world that is moving through these patterns of devitalizing and exploitation. You know, basically, education teaches us to think about things in compartments. And it teaches us you know, when you’re sitting in a math class, you’re sort of learning math. But mostly, you’re learning about what it is to be in a culture in which sitting in a math class is important. The meta messages of sitting in math class are much stronger than the what you learned in math. I mean, I don’t know how much algebra you remember. But what you didn’t remember probably more viscerally is your relationship with the teacher how to be a good student, how to be a bad student, how to be the funny kid, how to be liked, who just sit next to, who not to sit next to, what it felt like to be judged by the other kids?

Nora Bateson  13:02

What is your relationship with authority? How does that relate to bosses and parents? And what were you learning about? You know, this program is about the future, okay? You’re sitting in math class, what is this the whole meta messaging of sitting in that stupid class learning about, you know, actually, you know, the quadratic formula is pretty fantastic piece of history. But they don’t tell you about history, they’re talking about your future, if you’re going to succeed, if you’re going to be relevant in the world you live in, you need to get this number of a great on the next test, you have to get into university, you have to go get a job, you have to make a, right? And you’re like, inside this industrial model. And even at the level of identity of our own selves, we have industrialized, the notion of self. Okay, so that’s a really different thing than recognizing that there’s mutual learning going on. Right? And when you start to look at that, what you’re looking at is, is how is it actually in that math class, that grouping of people are mutually learning how to be in a world that is inherently revitalizing and exploitative?

Carola Verschoor  14:23

How do we help people or even how do I help ourselves to learn to free ourselves from those programs and rules and disassociate for example, education and learning so that we may move more into a space of learning, which necessarily embraces diversity of opinion of thoughts of presence of everything? How do we do that? How do you transform while the world keeps spinning? You have part of the answer with your warm data labs. I hope.

Nora Bateson  14:59

I mean, this is what the warm data labs are all about. And it’s very subtle, because the places in which those deep patterning says deep expectations, those ways of learning to be in our world. You know, I didn’t go to school to learn to be racist. I didn’t take a, how to be a racist class. But the nuances of how to be a white woman, were implicit everywhere. In the way I got on buses, the way I walked down streets, the way I purchased groceries, the way I went, sat in the classroom, the way I entered the grocery, it was everywhere. Right? So now it’s like, I can recognize that this deep experience, of life is fused into my survival. Okay, this is the problem is that right now, the destruction and the extinction is fused into our survival. They’re totally connected. They’re inextricably compare. They’re latched and inter steeped and locked together in total interdependency.

Nora Bateson  16:25

This is a complete double bind. In order to survive, we have to take part in the systems that are destroying each other and the planet. It’s a total double bind. And so, you know, we can’t let go because we die. But if we don’t let go, we die. Right? And so where does that change happen? How can we begin to perceive differently? And I think one of the worst, most pernicious illusions out there is that you are an agent of change, and you can make a change, and if you look at that thinking is absolutely imbued with all the mechanistic, industrialized metaphors that are actually creating the problem. You are not exchange agent, you can’t make change. You are the system, you are the culture, you are that you know, that snowfox that blends completely into the tundra. So where’s the free will? How do you actually do this, and this is where the warm data comes in. Because what we’re doing is we’re actually re layering and repealing like the Moray phenomenon, different contextual memories and stories and voices, so that they start to loosen each other up so that the impressions start to loosen up other impressions way below the level of language.

Nora Bateson  17:59

And that what we’re starting to see is that probably the best you and I will ever have is attention. It’s that thing I was saying earlier, noticing, whoops, I didn’t see this before I can see this now. And in that moment of perception. There which, a whole future of, you know, getting my kids backpacking in Thailand, there went to whole, you know, a whole sort of way of framing my own youth, as this sort of, you know, nostalgia of my adventures, there weren’t a whole bunch of action that could have been built upon that scaffolding gone. Now, did I make a change? Was there a change made? There was a change in perception? And when that change of perception happened, the action is all changed?

Marco van Hout  19:00

Yeah,

Carola Verschoor  19:00

yes, indeed.

Marco van Hout  19:01

Can I relate this to an example? I think this perception is super important. And what is the role of togetherness in that? So for example, digital society school, we started with the United Nations Development Programme, this global hackathon five years ago, around the global goals, the sustainable goals for development. And what we tried is indeed, to get people together, to work on those goals to start understanding the problems that lie underneath them much better. And what we noticed is that everybody was focused on the solutions only wanted to solve the small pieces of the goals. And we started noticing already in the second year, that it was much more about the community, about the togetherness of people that had that kind of epiphany that had that kind of perception change and perhaps, you know, this, I know you hate the term changing mindsets. But perhaps you can respond to the need of people in those kinds of activities. Even though they are together, they’re learning together, they still want to, you know, work on things did, the focus is mostly on. Yeah, making that change.

Nora Bateson  20:20

What you’re discussing, what you’re talking about here is the fact of the way that I perceive the world. And the way that I am in the world is not just about me, you know, people like to say the change begins within. Yeah, you can say all you want that the change begins within, but the change I would say, actually begins in between. Changes in our relational process and how we see each other within this moment. And moving together into, you know, you talked about a transformational time, what I see right now is that, it’s like that experience of being at the beach and you’re in the wave, and you thought you were going to body surf but the wave caught you sideways, and now you’re just tumbling, and you don’t know how long you’re going to tumble, you don’t know, if you’re gonna bump your head on the bottom of the sea floor, you don’t know which way is up or down, you’ve got sand up your nose, down your bathing suit in your ears, if all of water, you can’t see, you can’t hear, you don’t know where you are, you dizzy, you’re upside down.

Nora Bateson  21:24

And that’s where we’re going. So the real question is, how do we be with each other? You know, have you ever had a friend come to dinner that you’ve known and loved for a long time, and suddenly they’re a vegan, and you’re like, Oh, my gosh, I don’t know what to make for you, I guess you’re sitting at the table, everything is really like, Ah, right? And, you don’t know where to be in relationship, because there’s been a deep change. And all the things that were before aren’t anymore, but you still love them, you still have memories with them, you still want to share a meal with them, you still want to host them. But there’s all this like, awkward thing. And, you know, I think increasingly one of the things that’s going to we’re all going to be dealing with is how to be in relationship with each other when we’re all changing. And in some ways, the pandemics been this great experience of that.

Nora Bateson  22:20

Because everybody went in their little cubby hole for lockdown. And we all changed. We’ve all been through a lot this year. But we didn’t go through it in relationship. So now you start to see your friends again. And it’s like, well, I changed and you changed. And we don’t know how each other changed. It’s like when you went on a trip and you came back and you learn things and you tried to tell your friends about your trip. But they didn’t understand because they weren’t there. Only this time we all went on a different trip. And no one really knows where they are anymore. And so you know, there’s a lot of mental illness, there’s a lot of loneliness, it is not even remotely like we’re going to go into transformation. times together with everybody nice, insane and thriving.

Carola Verschoor  23:07

All of these phenomena you describe, lead us to new questions. And I think that, as you said, noticing on trends, and really trying to think in terms of transformation requires asking these new questions very much in agreement with the fact that assuming or even presuming that the change comes from within, and that as individuals we have any kind of power to be the drivers of that change is leading to anxiety to burnout, to mental illness of very complicated degrees, very much in agreement with a fog that we have to learn how to be in relationship, not relating, and that I think that’s why the transformational change really comes not relating it to time and space, but relating it to inter being, relating it to the absolute blending of the fox in the tundra, as you said, How can we be together in acceptance of one another’s evolutionary process and the fact that while we are all changing, we are changing at different speeds and in different ways.

Nora Bateson  24:20

What’s in there. Okay, so with that, what I like to think about is mutual learning trans contextual mutual learning, how we’re learning at the, you know, all of us are learning at the same time to be in the world that we are, okay. You learn when you were a little kid, how to sit in a classroom, how to fill out a form, right? And that learning helps you then that is a learning that you can then use when you go in another context. When you go to the doctor, you’re going to fill out a form and you’re gonna, you know, start to create this identity of understanding how the doctor that you go into bank and again, you’re gonna have that same set of like, this is how I am in the world. This is how I do this world thing. And so what, what we have done is we’ve wound each, wound together in this. And so there’s a real difference between mutual learning being we’re learning the same thing. And we’re learning at the same time.

Nora Bateson  25:20

And the way that I learned to fill out those forms and go into those offices, okay? Is really different than the way my friends that have different skin color have learned. Right? There’s a very different way, the way that I learned to get in my car and go someplace, is really different than the way, you know, a young black man in San Francisco would learn to get in his car and go somewhere, really different. So we’re mutually learning how to be in the context of our world. But the learning is not the same. And this is where I think a lot of the change maker stuff gets really weird, because it turns into these kind of blanket prescriptives of we have to be collaborative, we have to care. We have to- And, and that, that notion thing is actually totally weird. And, frankly, it’s very much like colonialism. We have to come up with a solution that we are going to implement everywhere and cookie cutter step.

Nora Bateson  26:29

And as we do that, what we’re gonna do is save the world because we are the privileged people who will save the world, okay, like, wow, take a look at the mechanistic thinking, take a look at the colonial thinking, take a look at the industrialization that’s going on there. Take a look at the loss. Okay, the loss at which weird vitality of life and relationship. And that’s where the change is, it’s in the rich weird vitality of relationship. It’s not in these bizarre blanket prescriptive no matter how positive they sound, I get irritated with this sort of discussion that we’re gonna have to all collaborate, what do you mean by collaborating? And usually, by collaborate, what people mean is you’re going to do your thing, and I’m gonna do my thing, and they’re gonna do their thing. And we’re going to operate like a big functional machine together. And this is very different from something like improvisation, where you come in together, you bring your history, but you go into a place you’ve never been before. And you show up in relationship and how I’m able to be in relationship and who I am when I’m with you, is really different than who I am when I’m with someone else, who I could be what I could give, what I could think about what I could feel what I could experience, totally different with different people. So how am I?

Marco van Hout  28:02

Nora in that improvisation, there is a lot of communication happening as well. So there’s no collaboration, perhaps, but communication is key, also, between cultures. What is the mutual language then? What is the mutual language that we need to focus on? So that it does connect us in that sense?

Nora Bateson  28:23

Nope…

Marco van Hout  28:24

There is none.

Nora Bateson  28:26

Nope. Let it go. I mean, what there is stories, and art and poetry and what there is, is experience and if you think of each person as a teapot of experiences and complexities and weirdness and then you think, okay, so I’m going to say this thing, like I’m in this podcast saying this stuff. And it’s so weird, because I have no idea what teapots these words are going to land in. I have no idea. And so I can’t actually calibrate I can’t be in response, you know, there’s probably somebody in you know, driving in their car somewhere or running along a path in the woods thinking she’s so full of it, it is about the change within, I can be the change maker, right? And through that person. I would say of course you can. Of course it is, right? But within a different set of ways of communicating that I might be able to express it to them in another way.

Nora Bateson  29:29

And so you know, this is where Harare you know, the guy that wrote sapiens, he has this great thing about freewill. And he says, you know, if you think you have free will, then you’re a fool. You’d have none. Because the context around you provide the things you’re choosing from and you think, okay, I’m going to, am I going to choose to be an improvisational actor or am I going to choose to be a programmer or am I going to choose to be a gardener, well, where did those choices come from? Did you produce those choices? You know, are you actually is that actually freewill. But the second you realize you don’t have freewill, like, you know, the language I’m speaking right now is English. And, you know, I could be putting together words from all different languages like the heretic in the Name of the Rose might one of my favorite characters, but then it would be incoherent.

Carola Verschoor  30:28

Though what appears there, just in that realization, are two things. First, our ability to discern, and where we relationally support one another as introducing different things that stand out and you’re like, “Oh, wait, I can discern, I can see things I can interpret things I can perceive. I can smell, I can hear things differently”. And the second is about being deliberate in our actions, understanding that because others have effect on us, we might also have a ripple effect or some kind of effect on the other and therefore being deliberate in what we’re throwing back in. And I think that sounds very rational, the way I’m wording it, I think it’s a much more intuitive process, especially when we come into a space of being of really sort of being in our bodies, and being present, then that exchange, that togetherness that mark referred to, starts becoming part of the unspoken, but however, explicit dynamic of how we interact and interrelate, if you don’t do it deliberately, if you don’t do it through discernment, then it’s still happening. But it might come back and bite you in the button.

Nora Bateson  31:43

And so it’s there, again, you get this trans contextual information, there’s so much different kinds of different ways in which there’s communication taking place, and that we are communicating and we, you know, easy to say, oh, we’re all interconnected. And the world is made of relationships, and everybody’s interdependent. And it’s another thing all together to go deeply into that, and to, you know, be a student of the inter relational, inter steeping, inter ways of learning together. And that is, it’s rigorous, it’s super rigorous. And it’s also beautiful. So you know, I absolutely think that the times that we’re going into right now, are going to hurt, and they’re going to be confusing, but there’s also the possibility of a fantastic beauty, a beauty, unlike anything, we would know now as beauty. Right? So I get nervous about this, you know, kind of, how can we make the world beautiful together is the wrong question.

Nora Bateson  32:59

If you want a beautiful world, you don’t start there. If you want a beautiful world, you start immediately in with what kinds of communication and tones and ways of being together. And if those are beautiful, they beget more beauty in the world, they beget so caring is not like some abstracting thing. It’s something is in the nuance, not just of my actions, but of the ways that my cheeks turn pink or that I get tears in my eyes or that right? Or that I stay up late at night worrying about how to care about how to attend something that I don’t understand. And so that those processes are actually going to go so far beyond the first order of solutions, they’re going to go deeply into relationships that then produce other relationships that produce other relationships. And so, the whole thing about the mechanistic fix it is that you’re fixing something broken, but the broken thing isn’t the broken thing. The Broken thing is an expression of a trans contextual relational processing and mutual learning that is producing this thing that is divine realizing so so how to then be in relationships in such a way that that relationship allows the other relationships and the other relationships beyond that, to have an produced vitality.

Carola Verschoor  34:40

Thank you.

Marco van Hout  34:40

Super important message for all of us designers out there because we always trying to fix things and that’s so much embedded in our mindset. It’s hard to get out.

Carola Verschoor  34:51

Yeah. And to your question. How do we perceive your words, your message, your communication We are also seeing you as you speak, thanks to digital technologies. Personally, thank you, you have spoken to my heart with these words so I can feel the uplift of really a very emotional sense. Obviously I’m Latin America disclaimer there, but very,

Marco van Hout  35:20

Don’t start crying now, Carola.

Carola Verschoor  35:22

I’m very uplifting sense of, wow, yes, let’s build towards that let’s build to something that allows the continuity and the thriving of those relationships. So, to close, we’d like to ask you, you can read it behind us, Dear future, I’m ready to complete the sentence. Dear future, I am ready.

Nora Bateson  35:48

Dear future I am ready. It is very, very strange. The super weird, the kinky the unexpected. The details that don’t make sense the things that happen in peripheral vision that do not land, I have the things I have no words for the ways that I have never been before. The me I have never met yet.

Marco van Hout  36:17

Oh, very poetic!

Carola Verschoor  36:20

We’re ready for that. Nora, thank you so much. It’s been super inspiring you having you on our podcast. So thanks so much.

Marco van Hout  36:30

And we can make like five episodes, I think with Nora.

Nora Bateson  36:37

Thank you so much, and good luck with your project.

Carola Verschoor  36:42

We know that you’re on the rollout of the warm data labs and that you’ve done several, how is that going to continue to evolve? Do you know, does it have some of,

Nora Bateson  36:52

Oh my gosh, this whole warm data world is so incredible the community that this is, you know, my fear was that the warm data lab process is going to turn into a tool, and it was going to be like world cafe or you know, agile or something. And it was going to get McKinsey and it was going to get turned into how to fix, you know, organizations and find solutions. And so that, of course, was the last thing I ever wanted to see happen. Because this process and what’s underneath it is actually based in life. It’s really another thing, it’s really another thing and the rigor and the history and the deep theoretical underpinnings that they are. I mean, they’re beautiful, and they’re my history, they’re my grandfathers and fathers, and, you know, ancient cultures from all over the world. And so, I don’t want to see this turned into some sort of, you know, conference tool for capitalism, like, no, I don’t want that. And I was afraid it was going to happen, and it didn’t happen. And now we have 600 people who’ve been through the course. And they are, you know, engaging in reading salons, and they are taking part in all kinds of community work. And we’re just starting a huge project. That’s about 10,000 communities. And it is like, all I can tell you is that there is a wildfire in warm data right now.

Marco van Hout  38:20

That’s warm our hands there as well, that fire.

Carola Verschoor  38:22

That’s Awesome.

Nora Bateson  38:25

And people are realizing, right? The world is not, it’s not a code to be hacked, not a formula to be gotten, it’s not a puzzle to be fit, you know, produced. This is a dance that you enter, it’s a love affair that you partake in, it’s a, you know, it’s a garden, that you have to be in the soil and change the pH of the soil. If you want to see something else grow, you can’t just start off with a new garden strategy. I mean, the communities that I work with that are the most betrayed, around the world. So we work in refugee camps, we work in, you know, all over the world in different kinds of communities, including very affluent communities and, you know, Parliament’s and so on. There is not one doubt in my mind, where the change is. I mean, the people who are in the worst conditions have an embodied understanding of the complexity and the trans contextual issues and the double bind quicker than anyone at the top.

Marco van Hout  39:33

Thank you so much.

Carola Verschoor  39:34

Thank you so much for your time. We’re one minute to 11:00 o Clock…. (fading out)

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