The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Nora Bateson: "Complexity Between The Lines"

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

On this episode, we meet with award-winning filmmaker, writer, educator, and President of the International Bateson Institute, Nora Bateson. Nora brings us beyond the descriptions of the physical science that underpins our predicament to the nuance and perception of the complexity that we live within. How can we improve our relationships with others, as well as the broader world? Nora helps us understand how systems dynamics inform our predicament. How does an ecosystem develop and mature through mutual learning? What are ways we can apply this thinking to our profit-focused superstructure? About Nora Bateson Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute, based in Sweden. Her work asks the question "How can we  improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?" An 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 in ecology of living systems. Her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, released by Triarchy Press, UK, 2016 is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/10-nora-bateson

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Today's guest is Nora Bateson. Nora is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and educator, and is the president of the International Bateson Institute based in Sweden. The followers of this podcast know I am keenly interested in systems and how we can understand

the human ecosystem. Nora's work goes beyond the physical descriptions of the science underpinning our predicament the nuance and perception of the complexity that we live within so that in addition to knowing facts, we can improve our interaction with others and with the world. I hope you enjoy my conversation with my friend and colleague Nora Bateson. Let's start with the importance of systems, thinking in systems, seeing the world in systems. What does it mean to see things through a systems? and complexity lens in order to understand how the parts integrate and shape how things work.

I just love that we're starting here. This is good because it's really far too easy to throw around the vocabulary of things like systems or complexity. And in fact, those words are used too frequently in ways that don't really get to what I think they mean to me. I'll just say that. So, especially living systems, become viable, not really because of their parts, but because of the relationship between them. And so it's important to recognize that our whole culture, really, in every possible way, we identify the nouns, the parts, the bits.

We name the parts. We identify, we define, we measure, we can describe the parts. And we're much less adept at actually describing the relationships between the parts, if you will. Why do you think that is, first of all, why do you think that is? Yeah. I think, first of all, part of it is that it has been, you know, several hundred years at least of mechanistic and more instrumental thinking. The industrial mind is a mind that is looking at the components and how the components

fit together to make a product. We talk about function, right? How does it function? And function is something that is produced by parts being in some sort of process together. And so it's a habitual and deep down, it's a presupposition that if the parts are working well together, whatever it is will work. Now, this is true when you're talking about a pickup truck. And it's not nearly as true when you're talking about a family. Okay, when you're talking about a family, you can't just replace a part.

You can't say this kid doesn't work right. Let's get a new one. this partner isn't isn't functioning properly. I need a new one. In the same kind of way, what you're doing is you're looking at relational processes that are constantly compensating and responding in multiple directions. So your relationship with your children and your partner and your parents and your job and your own health and your idea of success and your, right, in all these different directions, you are constantly making responses. And so are they.

So are there two things going on here. One is that we in modern world have parsed all the complexity and nuance of our evolutionary existence into a single metric, which is a dollar or the croner or the euro or whatever. And so the way we make a living defines our values. And so we've parsed all these very disparate and soft connections between things and relationships and the processes into a single variable, which is our cultural goal, which is profits and the dollar. And then there's the second component that you just said is we have nouns and words. but I think they're related because we're optimizing for what our culture chooses, which is profits. So ecology or the study of relationships isn't rewarded in our current culture.

So it's been kind of suppressed. Does that make sense? It's not only not rewarded. It's hardly even perceivable. It's really at the level of perception. And I think that's where I feel my work has. has been most focused is toward how might we actually begin to enhance our ability, which we definitely have, of perception of relational process. Now, it's not that we don't see relationships.

We do. The question is which relationships. And so it's kind of tricky, actually, because on the one hand, you know, why would Prada, for example, have any value if you weren't able to perceive it in relation to other things in our cultural spectrum of products? Right. So we're looking at things through a relational lens, but which relationships. And it's a strange irony that we live in a context that seems to be allergic to context. Can you explain that? So it's not easy to, in order to succeed in the world in which we are living, when I say we, I could mean Western culture, but unfortunately I think this is pretty much everywhere at this point. So it's difficult to succeed if one doesn't learn how to be

in their world in the way in which the world wants you to be. What that means is we got to succeed at school. We have to do well. We have to understand the importance of the role of the teacher in algebra class, the depths of the ways in which we are learning to cut out those perceptions that would give us the systemic view. It starts very young in learning how to talk, learning how to identify things, learning what's good, what's bad, what's approved, what's not approved. And in that those processes all the way through school, one of the things that's happening is that the world is being compartmentalized. It's being chopped into bits and named and labeled from your psychiatric evaluation to your grade,

to your gender, to your nationality, to your blood type, to your, okay, in all these different ways, we have, we have chopped things apart. And inherently, there's nothing really wrong with chopping things apart. It's just that we don't put them back together again. So in growing up and learning to be a participant in the world in which we live, one of the key things that we have to do is to learn not to see those systemic processes that would give us a very different insight on life if they were priority. Let me go down a little rabbit hole here.

So is in our ancestral time, 300,000 years as a species, we could label the things around us. Our lives were complex, but in the natural world and in the social interactions of the people we lived with. Now the world is so horribly complex on multiple different levels. labeling things the way that you just described, is that a way that we can cope and reduce uncertainty? Because if we didn't label things, it would just be this maelstrom of inputs that we wouldn't have the ability to process. And this gets to another aspect of your work. You and I agree that humans need to better embrace uncertainty because uncertainty is going

be the name of the game. But humans inherently abhor uncertainty because uncertainty feels crappy. It feels anxiety and a boost in cortisol, et cetera. And I think people when they hear the story about limits to growth and some of the things that you and I work on, the common reaction on all my YouTube channels and other presentations and discussions is kind of binary. Half the people are like, this is delusional. Technology will solve it. The market will always come up with an innovation or we're screwed. There's nothing we can do.

And both of those polls obviate the need for any personal response. And so they make people feel confident or certain of a certain path. But you're talking about uncertainty. That was a big mouthful there. But do you have any opinion on what I just laid out? It's a tricky one because, you know, the certainty that you gain is paid for by the consequences of not having understood the systemic process. And so like I said, there's nothing wrong with naming and labeling. What there is a problem with is that we forget.

that we made the name, that that isn't actually the edge of the system. So a system can be defined as something that is made possible through the interaction of multiple processes. And like your body is a system, your family is a system, a society is a system, a forest is a system. In particular, I'm talking about living systems here. And the mistake that we make is thinking that we can fix the system by fixing the parts, like we would a pickup truck.

When something goes wrong, you can fix it by fixing the parts. And you can't do that. And the consequences of that take much more time and get things much more muddled up than might have been possible had there been, a greater perception of the system from the beginning, but in order to do that, you're going to have to blur the edges, right? And so I start to see Nate, not just as the outline of you in your skin, in your name, in your profession, but as also trillions of organisms, as your culture, as your culture, your world of ideas, your family, there's a lot of complexity that is the complexity

of you or me as. And so in order to to respond to you in a way that isn't super costly in terms of damage to you and your family or your system, I need to have some humility toward the ambiguity of what I can see. So the problem with the ambiguity is actually the humility that it requires. So could I paraphrase that by saying we need to understand systems and the parts and the processes of living systems to better understand our challenges and the path that lays ahead. But on another meta level, we have to have the psychological wisdom to realize that these are just models and these are just nouns that we've ascribed to it. And there's a wider boundary perspective laid on top of that that we have to be humble about because we don't fully understand it and et cetera. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. That makes sense to me. That makes sense. And, you know, I'll give you an example of that I have given before, which is it's easy to look at a problem and not realize that that problem is actually produced. in the relationships. So we have, for example, a lot of single moms that don't have homes in the city of Seattle. And they live in their cars with their kids. And so the social services is not able to, are not able to really give them a lot of the help

that they need because they can't. So when the women come in, they get diagnosed with depression and they go out with pills. for depression. And the reality is they don't have money or heat to stay warm. Exactly. And they don't have, they might have a job. They might still be working, living in their cars, but they don't have. So the problem is not that the women are depressed, even though they might, you could probably

click the boxes that would identify them as having depression. Obviously, that's not really the issue. And so if you can't respond systemically, then what happens? well then these people are they get given these drugs that then make it even more difficult for them to be emotional contact with their kids. And so the children then suffer and start misbehaving in school and so on and so forth. And so you get you get another problem, which is the child is misbehaving. And there's no way to actually track that back into. the causality is not linear.

And so it's very difficult without being able to perceive and to really work on that perception systemically, how to respond to the situation in a way that is going to create healing and learning and vitality and life. And unfortunately, this is what we're seeing in many directions right now of if you have a problem, you start to try to fix it in whatever context you first see it in and not recognizing that problem is located across and through multiple contextual parts of our lives. This is true from poverty to education issues, to climate issues, to gender issues,

to food production, economics, etc. They can't be extracted from each other. Well, this gets back to what I said before. Our system optimizes for profits, tethered to energy, tethered to hydrocarbons, which are finite and polluting. But that's what we're focused on. So this contextual looking at the broader system, which involves especially our environment, other humans, other generations, other species, other boundaries of analysis isn't recognized or rewarded by our current cultural value system.

Could that ever happen? Does it start with education? How do we get more systems thinkers to look at when some woman comes in to the hospital in Seattle looks at the broader context of what's going on? and embraces and responds in that way. Yeah, I think that we can't depend on the individuals for this. This is a shared learning, a shared cultural approach. I sometimes say we're holding each other hostage.

And so, you know, if I were that social worker in Seattle, I would have a real problem on my hands because that social worker can't change the economics of the city of Seattle, right? What are they supposed to do? Well, all of us are kind of hostage to this system in that way. Exactly. So your grandfather, William Bateson, coined the word genetics, as far as I'm aware. Your dad was a famous anthropologist, Gregory Bateson. I have several of his books downstairs. So growing up, Nora, in a science-heavy family, what do you think is the role of science generally in our current and upcoming cultural challenges? To explore, to be curious, to be humble, to imagine, and actually I think to

invite curiosity. So I think one of the things that we've lost with the idea of the expert knows all, which is, you know, that serves in a way, but is the curiosity of what it means to be human. How do we figure out how to live in our world in a way that is less damaging to each other and the environment? And I think that science, what's great about science is that it's rigorous and it asks questions. And, and, then more questions come. You know, the scientists are always wrong eventually. That's part of the deal. You discover something and then you discover something else. It keeps moving. And that ongoing discovery is an attitude that comes with a lot of rigor and exploration. But I think that if I were to give

criticism there, I would give the same criticism that I think my grandfather and definitely my father gave, which is that science has become too compartmentalized, just like everything else. And you can't actually siloed, yeah. Siloed, however you want to call that. But breaking things into parts and studying the parts does not show you how life is produced in the whole. Right? You can study all the organisms in the meadow, but which you'll never see,

is how they are in relationship to each other. And what is happening in those communications between butterflies and earthworms and grasses and insects and mosses and bacteria in the soil and so on. So each one of those organisms is fantastic to study, but they are all completely interdependent. And in order for that life of the meadow to continue, those relationships are needing to change.

They have to shift. They have to respond. They have to calibrate to each other's responses. And so, you know, again, we're looking at this habit in the culture of wanting something that's freeze-framed information instead of allowing it to keep moving, keep changing, keep growing, keep responding. Because that's what life does. It's no surprise that we're friends. I don't know if you ever read my superorganism paper, but in the introduction, it says this paper provides a brief overview of the relationships in human systems. A coherent description of the global economy requires a systems view, describing the parts, the processes, how the parts and process interact and what these interactions imply about our future possibilities.

Yeah. No wonder we get along. So while this is what I'm trying to do, right, is we don't know. I'm much more confident, much more confident about what won't happen in the future and have very small idea about what will. And these conversations with cultural and thought leaders like yourself are meant to educate and inform about what's going on. because I do think science has a critical role. We have to understand that energy is the currency of life and that without energy, your heater doesn't work and you're in a very cold downstairs right now. Energy is central to human history and human futures.

We are evolved organisms trying to get the emotional states of our successful ancestors. We're having a massive impact on Earth's ecosystems, et cetera. I mean, we have to look at how all this fits together in the world. order to know what we, a desirable future might look like and how we get there. So I think science has a critical role as opposed to, you know, right now the main two religious beliefs in our culture outside of actual religion are, you know, technology and economic theory that we will grow for centuries. It'll just look different than today.

And so I think science is important to couch our reality in a biophysical view. But I think you are right that science tends to be overly hubristic and siloed. So we live in a sea of complexity and there's islands of expertise and very few people are flying up high enough to look at how the pieces fit together because that's not what our culture are. But hopefully conversations like this, I mean, it's starting. Systems, complexity, ecology, overshoot, even. These terms are making a comeback because people are starved for an explanation and a destination kind of of what's happening and where we're going. Let's hope so.

We'll get to that. So getting to your work, Nora. So can you explain what is warm data? Where did the name come from? And what does gathering warm data look like? Warm data. The name came from a phrase my father used to use when he would talk about warm ideas. And a warm idea was an idea that was actually not isolated from its relational process.

Right? So he asked the question, what is the pattern that connects? And that's a warm idea. What would be a cold idea? A cold idea would be a compartmentalized deliverable definition that isolates something from its nest of relational process. Right? So a cold idea is one that it separates. And when that separation happens, it actually leads to more. more separation, which is sort of different than when you are looking at a warm idea is going to invite you into exploring relational process. And that just leads you to more relational process. So it's a study of relationships that lead to more relationships instead of divisions that lead to more divisions.

And how do you use that in your work? You run something called warm data labs? Yeah. So I started to, after years of trying to teach systems and complexity as a sort of, you know, a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world. And it was sort of, you know, me in front of a group of people talking blah, blah, blah, and here's this part and here's this part. And let me illustrate how they're connected. And truthfully, Nate, I wasn't getting anywhere. There were folks in the room who already understood that. And for them, they just, they got it and that's that. They already had it. But for the folks who weren't really inclined toward taking that leap of jumping out of this sort of hard and fast parts that are in mechanistic holes and into this, you know, wild living system, I wasn't getting anywhere. And I started to feel actually kind of anxious because I felt like we don't have a lot of time. and there's not really enough time to get 8 billion people to be able to suddenly do systems thinking. And just as I say that, I want you to know that I recognize that most cultures in the world, you know, in Asia and in Africa and India have other forms. It's certainly in ancient cultures.

The systems were implicit. They were always looking at things in relationship. So it's not something new. It's just something that has gotten overrun by industrialism because industrialism worked. Industrialism outcompeted relationships and warm data. Exactly. It just overtook it. And if you're dealing with warm data, you're going to take the time.

You're going to be looking for ways of responding that connect to more than one context, right? Like the single mom in the car. This is about economy. This is about emotion. This is about the kids. It's about an education system. It's about the culture. So I started these warm data labs, and it was just kind of an invention of, I wonder what would happen if I just let people go through an hour of conversation with each other in which they were asked a question, like, what is health?

Okay. What is health in a changing world? And then people will be, there'll be lots of contexts, like little stations. You could have a family context. What's health in a changing world through the context of family? And they have conversations. They talk about stuff. They tell stories.

And then people move and they move to different contexts. And one might move to economy. And they talk about what's health in a changing world through the context of economy. And then they move whenever they want and they go somewhere else. It could be what's health in a changing world. world through the context of technology or culture or education or ecology. And every time they move, they take that conversation they had a minute ago with them. And so the conversations start to make this kind of, you know, what's called a moray phenomenon

where there's like one conversation overlaps and interlaces with another in a way. that we don't really very often get a chance to do. Usually, if you get into a conversation or a debate with people, you are down a rabbit hole. We're talking about energy and we're talking about money and that's all we're talking about. And the family and the culture and the history and technology and all these other contexts get kind of thrown in as, well, you're not thinking about this or you're not thinking about that, but the actual exploration isn't given time to, what I would call intersteep. Okay, so with the warm data labs, what I'm seeing is that within about an hour,

a group of people has a sense of complexity and systemic thinking. They might not have the vocabulary of the complexity, discipline, or systemic theory. But better than that, they have actually perceived that systemic process. that systemic process and that complexity through their own lives and the memories, the details of their own lives. That was the part for me where I realized, oh, this is significant because no longer are we talking about having somebody, you know, look at the perfect map on a board, on a whiteboard, or the perfect model. It's not a model because it's actually completely different for each person.

And when people come out of the Worm Data Lab, they have all had very different conversations and what it has connected for them in their lives, their memories, their understanding of who they are in the world is very different. It's completely unique to each person. And that, of course, it should be so obvious, right? If you're going to teach complexity, the complexity itself has to be in each person. And it takes complexity to perceive complexity. So your particular nateness needs to actually be what is perceiving this wild world we're living in, not some top-down model of it.

And that was interesting. So that's what the warm data labs do and why I love them is because I never know what's going to happen. I never know what conversations are going to come out. I never know what people are going to leave with. Sometimes they leave and they quit smoking. Sometimes they leave and they call a friend they haven't talked to in 12 years. Sometimes they leave and they go into their next conversation and, wow, they can see things they never saw before. But it's always after the lab.

So it's like a second order process, something that happens after. That makes sense to me because as a college, teacher and as a public speaker, I have countless, of course, we all have an understanding of the world and all of our understands are different. I have to, I naturally, implicitly, wrongly assume that other people will react to the facts and inferences that I'm giving them the same way that I do. And I have found that that's absolutely wrong. So you have to change how you present to different audiences. As a teacher, I've learned that. that. So how can we use warm data or this idea? It sounds to me that as societies, I don't know

much about Sweden, but in the United States with social media and politics right now, the polarization is off the charts. It sounds like warm data processes is a little bit of an antidote to that polarization. How could we use this better if something like this were to scale? And I'm just waiting for the day when somebody actually gets that because there's nothing that actually can be done in the world right now with the level of division between people in communities. And the way I see it, no matter what happens in the next 10, 20 years, we're going to need to be in communication with each other. We need each other. Absolutely. And right now, we're not in a process.

position where we can need each other because people are busy hating each other. And it's, you know, a fate worse than death to get caught with three hours of, you know, being in relationship with your neighbor who has diametrically opposed political outlooks to you. I mean, I could see that I have this dream of doing just as an experiment. What happens if we do warm data in 10,000 communities? Just what happens? and the way that they overlap. And what will they be able to do that we never thought of because they think of it themselves? And in places where I have done communities where warm data has been used,

the responses and the learning that happens so quickly on the ground produces interest in doing in doing projects like this refugee camp in Uganda started to make a permaculture garden. And then they started to make tools. And then they started to think about women's health and how they were going to. And then they started to do intergenerational teaching. As a byproduct of your warm data lab. Exactly. So if you came in there from above and said,

these are the, you know, sustainable development goals. You must respect to the ecology. Here's how you do a permaculture garden. They would have rebelled against that. So it's got to be really open-ended. Right. And then in other communities, they didn't start with a permaculture garden. They started with wanting to have a community center where they could, where they could spend

more time together and to begin to help each other's kids with homework and help each other's elders with food delivery. And but that's a, the same process produces very different things in different places because you know what? That's complexity. That's how it should be. So there is no top down solution. There could be a top down story that then creates emergent solutions and emergent conversations that lead to all the things you just said, which is another core part of your work. Maybe you could define emergence and why emergence.

is so relevant today. One of my favorite topics as well. I mean, emergence is what we're talking about. It's basically consequences of things that have been brewing. So you have these situations and they get into various configurations and then there's consequences and they are emergent. And so things happen. But that knowing what's going to happen is nearly impossible because,

you can't actually see all the ways in which these relational processes are going to come together. And so you get surprised by emergence. And some of those surprises are, you know, like life. A forest is in an ongoing state of emergence. It's constantly responding in all from the trees to the ferns to the forest floor to all the beasties and birds. Everyone is responding. and creating an emergent, ongoing process of life that's different yesterday than it was today. In order to continue, things have to discontinue, right? So emergence offers this wildness of life. Now, that's the romantic version.

Okay, emergence is also the root word in emergency. And emergence is not always pretty. and you can see, you know, the opiate crisis as an emergent situation that has been brewing through the conditions of all sorts of things, from economics to relationship to pain, to the cartels, to notions of what it means to be healthy and happy and successful and how people are responding to that, to the increase in use of Adderall in universities and high schools to sports injuries and so on and so forth. So you get these conditions and then you get emergence that comes out of it.

So is education a way to change the odds that future emergence might be on the positive side as opposed to the negative side? And I noted in a recent paper you wrote, you used the concept of the word pre-emergence. Can you tell what that means? Yeah. And I think for me, this pre-emergence is what I'm really interested in. Because by the time something has emerged, it's been cooking for a while. And so pointing to things that are emerging and saying, look, this is emerging and that is emerging, is kind of late to the story.

to the story. What I think is interesting in right now is to ask the question, what about these past couple years of being in pandemic world? What is submerging in us? What habits have changed that we're not noticing? What ways of being? What sorts of things have shifted that we may not be paying attention to, but then those things will later turn up as emergent situations in other ways. And I think that's a question that gets right at the heart of, well, it's kind of two things, isn't it? It's what's in the presuppositions. What are we assuming is true. And therefore, our actions become a direct product, our decisions, our way of approaching a problem is already prescripted in our assumptions about what's happening.

Isn't that what you and I are trying to do with our work as pre-emergence in our conversations and our discussions with people is to change the initial conditions of emergence that will occur in the future? Precisely. But we're not with a whole lot of company because most folks are looking at the problems and saying, hey, we have a problem with education. Let's fix the problem in education. But the problem in education systems is not in education systems.

What is it? It's in culture. It's in economics. It's in what the older generation expects of the younger generation. Right. So the education system is downstream. of our cultural values and goals. And so we just can't change that without changing the rest of it.

And you could actually point to any part of this and say it's downstream. So, you know, this is why for me it keeps coming back to this notion of what got into the water with industrialism. Energy surplus is my answer. Energy surplus is a drug that we got really high on. Yep. And it actually infiltrated absolutely everything from language to education. I mean, the education system is like a little factory.

It is. It's a miniature superorganism. And my hope, I do not think we will change en masse until we have to. And that will happen when our energy surplus shrinks and it will still be quite large. And so all of what I'm trying to do is do pre-emergence towards that situation with individuals and groups of individuals and communities and maybe change the thinking and the action towards that moment, which I'm referring to the name of this podcast, I call it the Great Simplification.

Our system is stuck and it's tethered to growth, tethered to monetary creation, tethered to energy and with lots of negative downstream consequences. So another part of your work is you've often referenced how a system is, you've often referenced how a system gets unstuck. So how does your work at the Bateson Institute to offer any examples or ideas in this realm? How would a system become unstuck and how would our current system become unstuck? Just a little easy question for you, Nora. Yeah. Well, I want to take a tiny re-step on it. Okay. So we entered this, we being the researchers in the Bateson Institute, this question. And it is a compelling question. We thought this is the one. We need to ask this question

because we are stuck. Every time we try to work on something, it's stuck. And so then being a group of people who were pretty used to thinking in terms of systems, we started to ask the question, wait a minute, actually, what is a stuck system? Can a system be stuck? And the more we ask the question, the more we realized that in order to hold something stuck that is in a living process, there has to be a lot of compensation around the edges. So even though it may look like something is stuck, in order to keep it that way, it's taking a lot of change. So it takes a lot of change to keep something stuck.

Can you give an example of that? Well, yeah, I mean, let's look at the economic system. In order to keep an ongoing gradient of an increasing GDP, there is all sorts of change all over the place. We're doing artificial suppression of interest rates, too big to fail guarantees, quantitative easing. We're changing the rules on what's included in GDP, all to maintain this system. And the requirements of growth, like you just said, is so powerful that it's suppressing any alternative paths of wisdom or constraint. Not to mention all of the ecosystems, the forests, the natural living systems that are

in wild. Those aren't even factored in. Right. And the people whose lives are in wild upheaval. That's not stuck. It's super stuck. Right. So what we started to realize is it takes a lot of change to keep something stuck.

And so we wanted to look at what the best kind of stuck system we could find. And the example that we chose to study was paralysis. And because of paralysis is actually a living system that's stuck, right? It would appear to be stuck. And so we went and we were working with this really incredible clinic. in Italy. And through a long story short, what we realized is we were asking the wrong question. And the question we thought was how does systems get unstuck?

And what we realized was that watching what was happening with the body becoming unstuck, these people coming out of paralysis, was that the real question was how do systems learn? and that when there is systemic learning, the stuckness, it just kind of vaporizes. It's just not really the issue anymore. And so that became another whole trajectory of exploration. What does it mean to actually look at systemic learning? What am I even talking about? We're so used to think of learning being in the individual or in the individual part, right? But, I mean, we do it all the time. I think about if you're learning to play violin, okay, where's the learning? Is it in your muscle?

Is it in your intellect? Is it emotional? Is your communication with the music? Is it your relationship to your teacher? Is it in the history of the formation of the instrument? Is it in the genre of the music itself? Is it, where's the learning? And of course, you know, I know, we know it's in the way those things come together.

And so that's an example of the way in which we are learning to be in our world right now. How are we learning to be in our world? And one of the things that we started off with, you know, just 40 minutes ago, half an hour ago, was what is the child learning in algebra class? what are we learning about what it takes to be successful, to be loved, to be likable, to be to be productive, to be respected? Okay. Ultimately, as living organisms, the most important thing is to be in relationship. So we're learning how to be in relationship in ways that actually undermine relationship. So I realized that this was a really interesting thing. And I, I

I actually made a word because I felt like the world of systems needed to have a way to talk specifically about this kind of systemic learning. And so I made up a word and it's impossible to say, but it's actually a really great word. And it's sim for learning and the Greek for learning is Mathesy. So it's simathasy, samathasy. And a samathasy is transcontextual mutual learning. So all the organisms in any kind of an ecosystem, like a family, for example, or a forest, have to mutually learn and be an ongoing mutual learning of how to be together. I love that you create words like that. That was in your book that I read. But let me ask you a really hard question that just came to mind.

So the fourth law of thermodynamics unofficially is the maximum power principle. that organisms and ecosystems self-organized to maximize access to an energy gradient. And so I think in nature, systems learn in the way that you're saying, in order to get energy per unit time, an oak tree could have a million leaves on it, but then a lot of them would be shaded and wouldn't optimize. Or they could have one leaf, that one leaf would be super efficient at getting energy from the sun, but it wouldn't be enough to power the tree. So the amount of leaves it as is intermediate to maximize the daily in take of sun

for photosynthesis. So human systems are like our exactly biological systems. So our metabolism has been growing similar to organisms. Kleber's law is a organism's energy use is its size to the two-thirds power. And our global economy is almost exactly that. So the question with learning then and systems and humans and relationships, ultimately the million jewel question or whatever is how can human systems learn, knowing everything that we've learned these past couple hundred years in the Industrial Revolution, 10,000 years

in the agricultural revolution, 300,000 years as a species, with all the access to the science and the wider boundary, warmer thinking in between the lubrication between the silos that you're advocating for. How can we use that A, to learn how to navigate less energy surplus, and B, and ultimately, more importantly, how can we learn to have a culture that isn't stuck on? on optimizing profits, turning billions of barrels of ancient sunlight into microliters of dopamine with nothing much else to show for it. How can this learning apply to that problem?

And that I don't expect you to have an answer because that is a gargantuan question. But do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I guess we kind of touched on it a minute ago that in order to continue, things have to discontinue. So for me, it's about, you know, this word optimizing. Okay? And efficiency. Mm-hmm.

And product. Mm-hmm. I use those three words a lot, but I don't like them. And no, but I think it's good to use them and because they are actually at the forefront of these presuppositions that we live within. And, you know, I see it all the time that there is a need to optimize that we have to you have to, you know, become a better person and embark on all sorts of personal development to optimize who you are, right? To be a better person, you have to optimize. And so, but this, this concept is caught in a linearity that is, is, is really a problem. And I guess the

question for me is, at what point do we start to realize that, that optimization or efficiency is not possible in linear process. So it may appear so in the short term. But, you know, if there's a path up the hill and it goes straight up the hill and there's another one that goes around the hill and up the other side and you think I just want to go straight up the hill, but that path is completely covered in dog shit. And if you get to the top of the hill, you're going to be totally covered in dog shit.

So which path are you going to take? Well, it depends on if I live in a culture that where time is money. And if I have a little dog shit and I get there faster, then I might be able to use my time more efficiently to make more money. But unfortunately, our culture saves time and then goes on Instagram or plays Candy Crush or something else with the extra time. Exactly. Yeah. So it's just kind of like at what point will we be able to see the cost, I guess? is my point. Well, we're seeing a lot of the costs now, I fear. And there's, there's a bill coming due for our culture that has not been paid. And we've been kicking the can for 50 years, which is, which is the work that we do. So I have a lot of questions left. We are having a beautiful conversation. Let me get to one of your core phrases. I believe your father invented this term. I'm not sure. But what is schismogenesis? And how is that relevant to our current

cultural situation. Schismogenesis. Okay, schismo is to break. And Genesis is to make, to, to become, to birth. And so schismogenesis is an important study of how systems fall apart. And we've been talking mostly about how systems come together. But I think at the edge of our conversation this whole time has been the threat of system collapse, system breakdown, system destruction. And so my dad talked about two different kinds of schismogenesis.

And what's important about schismogenesis is it's a way of looking at patterns of relational process that lead to things falling up. part. Okay. It's always in relationship. Even when we're breaking relationship, we do it with relationship. So what are those kinds of relationships that break relationship? And I think this is a very important question right now because it's what we're seeing all around is, is things coming to pieces. So let me give a brief description. This is not easy stuff. So, I'll just try to, you know, take it easy on it. But there's two kinds that my dad talked about. One was complimentary. And complementary is where you have a relationship that is complement. Right. So one party, it might be more dominant. One party might be more submissive. One party might be authoritative.

One party might be more demure. One party is more. And that kind of relationship could be parent teacher, could be employer employee, could be in a marriage, could be parent-child, could be, right, all sorts of relationships, you know, person and dog. And that you could perceive that because of an understanding of the way in which the relationship is different, it's very creative. All sorts of great things can happen in that relationship. But over time, the one that is more authoritative or dominating or influential becomes more so. And the one that is more submissive or more demure or more compromising becomes more so.

And pretty soon the gap between them grows to the point that there's actually no more relationship. So a positive feedback loop squeezes out the lesser of the two, so to speak. Well, it squeezes out the actual relationship itself. The second version is symmetrical schismogenesis. And symmetrical is where the parties are at the same. They're more equal and they're in competition. So you would get symmetrical schismogenesis in, you can have it in a marriage, right? So, you know, you get a new book deal and your partner needs to get a new job.

And then, you know, they get a new job. And so you have to get a new, get a TV show. And then, you know, you get into a competition. It could be an arms race. It could be a, you know, sibling rivalry. So you get into a symmetrical schismogenesis. And that, again, can be very creative. All sorts of good stuff can come out of that.

So the first kind was called what? Complementary. So complementary. schismogenesis results in the relationship actually disappearing. But symmetrical actually is a positive feedback on the relationship itself. So the relationship has an arms race and there's creativity. Could be good or could be bad. But the two still coexist.

Yeah. It might start off good. And then over time, there's nothing left but the competition. All the other aspects of the relationship that may. made it juicy and wonderful and fun and playful get lost and you just get caught in the competition in the one-upping and then you lose everything else that you have to be in relationship about so again it gets it gets lost and the third kind is really interesting this was developed by a finish group not my dad and it's called systems holdback and systems holdback

is where I don't put into the relationship what I could put into the relationship because I know that you're not putting into the relationship what you could put into the relationship. You don't put in what you could because you know that I'm not. And so eventually you get the relationship becomes devitalized. There's nothing there. There's nothing there to make relationship with because we're holding back everything. And this, again, you might see with employers and employees. You could see it in a marriage.

You could see it in a friendship. You could see it in all sorts of ways. And I want to be clear that all three of these forms of schismogenesis can absolutely coexist in the same relationship. So how is the term schismogenesis relevant to our current cultural situation? The possibility of recognizing these types of patterns are. relationships that are actually devitalizing relationship itself are critical because they give us a way to recognize when we're destroying the possibility for further life. And I think that's, that's absolutely essential to be able to notice those patterns that, that undermine. So the thing about

all of these forms of schismogenesis is that, do systems end? Or do they break and then reform? Maybe that breaking is necessary. Maybe that divorce that comes from the competitive relationship ends up in a friendship and another, you know, another marriage to someone else that's actually beautiful, that there was learning that came from the breaking of the system. So far be it from me to say that schismogenesis is in the end bad because I can't actually say that. But I will say that it's important to recognize those patterns because they are a possibility for learning and for perceiving. Again, we're talking about perceiving relational process. And we just don't have very many ways of learning about that.

So, yeah, now you're going to hit me with a Zinger question. I feel it coming. Zinger question. Given the diverse, and one could argue, schismed online and real world tribes and different demographics in the world, how do we breathe life into an ecology of conversation that helps these challenges that we're talking about? Warmly. And I think, you know, Nate, I think you're just.

doing it here. It's the ecology of conversation or of communication is a term that I use a lot. And I, for me, this is, it's about paying attention. What is it that you're putting into an existing context. So how do my words or my gestures, my way of being, how does, what does, what does it bring into the existing communication in terms of possibility? And so, you know, we're living in a world that is spending really a lot of flexibility unnecessarily. We're spending the flexibility of our relationships on the possibility of being right or having the right political, the correct political stance or having this one-upmanship. I mean, the, the, the, the, internet is just a big giant mess of one-upping and holding back and also dominating, right? So all

three forms of schismogenesis are readily visible there. And the only way to really deal with that is to come in from another context with another tone and open a new realm of possibility that hasn't been shut out. That makes sense to me. You recently wrote, perhaps no stable solutions exist in entropic contexts except flexibility. So that's kind of what you were saying there, right? Yeah. In the piece that you were referring to that's dealing with pre-emergence, there's one little sentence in there that I would bring up here, which is the question of how do we nourish

flexibility that we don't even know we're going to need. That's what I'm trying to do with my students because we are captured by this economic system that is not our fault. It's no one's fault and it's emergent institution series of relationships that happened before we were born that we've arrived to. So hopefully that will change. But how do young people especially become flexible to respond to a variety of future events? I think is really important.

You were going to say something about that? Yeah. I mean, I'm with you. I just think that we don't know what it is that we're coming into, only that so many of the ways in which we have learned to be in our world are not useful. So just to say that, you know, learning to be competitive, learning to be domineering, learning to be in relationship in a way that is about winning and optimizing. Which has been what young people have been taught generally since.

I was born in this culture, which is an anomaly of human and biological history on the planet. I mean, we are living in this moonshot of consumption on the backs of energy surplus. Let me read you a quote written by you and then ask you a question. You recently wrote, the unseen realm is vital, non-trivial and sacred, and it is real. I'm increasingly, I being you, I am increasingly finding that the most fecund realms of change, learning, and evolution are beyond the organism's current capacity to perceive. The flexibility that lurks below conscious perception is like the soil beneath the forest, teeming with relational processes.

While most attention is caught up in what can be perceived, there is a wildness in the the implicit correlations, connections, and coalescing impressions. So Nora, if you were to speculate and perhaps based on your hands-on experience in the warm data labs and all your work, what type of things are lurking now beneath our conscious perception that might lead to a massive change in the coming years and decades relative to our cultural situation? Change. Okay.

So there's things that are lurking in our... our in our unseen realms that will lead to dangerous change, what I would call more insidious problems. And there are also things lurking down there that are inherently organized and moving toward vitality and relationship. So both are there. But what I want to point to here is that you, you know, you can't come at this head on and think you're going to fix it. You can't tell somebody that they have to love you. You can't tell someone not to love you. I've tried both of those. You're right. They don't work. It doesn't work. I mean, you can't make somebody respect somebody else. You can't make someone not be racist. You can't move people around in that way.

And at the same time, I think what is fascinating is that while all the organisms in an ecosystem are doing something, they have a role, somehow evolution happens. Somehow change actually happens. And those things that are most familiar to us get roped into those familiar behavior. So this is one of the things that I'm looking at all over the place is that wonderful people with the best possible intentions to make change are perpetuating all the problems that we have and actually speeding them up. Can you give a little example of that? Well, I'm seeing this certainly with, well, actually, with some of the response to climate change, which is so blind to what is happening at the cultural level. that it's creating revolution. Nothing short, actually, of revolution.

If you start to tell people they can't have their job or be successful or buy a new car or a new iPhone, they're not going to think, oh, well, that's good for the ecology. They're going to think screw you. So it's a siloed approach to climate change or compartmentalized. It's compartmentalized. And they don't mean to do that. Okay. This is just in the presuppositions.

It's in the assumption that. the climate problem is a climate problem. That assumption is not enough. So it's possible that that deep humanity in us. I mean, this is what I see in my warm data work is that when people drop into their, they're just their human beingness, they are able to exchange stories and learn from each other in ways I never dreamed, even when they come in from opposing, political sides of the fence. So that's what we need to scale, is those conversations in a safe, respectful way. And I've tried it in my community, and I've been successful in talking to groups that are

carried about climate change or farmers or different or students. But it's really hard to get them all together, which is why I think your warm data idea, if it were potentially scalable, could be huge. Because we're going to need other people again. And we've been so rich on the backs of our fossil armies that we haven't needed the social networks that our ancestors did. And we're going to need them huge. And so being able to have this wider boundary and deeper psychological level above the systems knowledge, like you say, I think is really imperative. I do too.

I just can't even tell you how imperative I think it is. And having seen it so many times, hundreds of times, I'm so frustrated that I can't figure out who'd bring it before to say, look, this is really important. Please, let's get this out there. If there's some pro-social higher-level wisdom philanthropists listening to this podcast, do you have a plan? mind that if it were executable, you could implement it and have resources to scale these conversations. Because one of the things I'm trying to do is develop just, I have all kinds of videos and stories about how the whole macro situation fits together, how we're headed for probably

wider, financial, at least poverty, and how we're going to have to have more community when the Great Simplification intensifies. And I want to make like a two-hour video series that people in a community could watch together and just discuss. What does this mean? What should we do? And I don't think we're ever going to make major physical changes to our economic system ahead of time, but we can make relational changes and build our social networks.

And that itself would act as a foundation. And Blake agrees with me. Blake agrees. Yeah. Do you have a blueprint and a plan that could scale to get these conversations going? I do have a plan. And I have trained 700 hosts around the world. And they are in Africa.

They're in India. They're in South America. They're in Asia. They're in Europe. They're in the States. Canada. They're all over the world now. And I realized that in order to do this, I needed to have.

the people ready who could hold it because anyone can attend a warm data lab, but not everyone can host one. And so that's, I mean, that's a really good beginning. And then we actually created an online version. And the online version is so wonderful. I had my doubts. But in the pandemic, we had to go online. And I think we've done hundreds of them. We've worked with thousands of people now. around the world. And it's called people need people. So I think that relates right to what you're saying that we need each other. And in order to be able to be together, we have to, and I mean we, as in we, the eight billion of us, we have to be able to perceive the kind of conditions and the complexity that we live within. And it can't be framed as complexity. It has to be framed as just life

because it is just life. So on the complexity question, this is something I struggle with. Do common people like artists, farmers, teachers, builders, do they need to understand complexity and systems? Or do they just need to be inspired and have relationships with each other and given direction, hope, and courage in some broader context? I would say that people actually over. do understand complexity.

They just don't know that they do. And so what they kind of need is permission. And they need to feel the excitement of what happens when they start to ask a question through multiple contexts and have these conversations with people and get all these different impressions and they start to mix together and, who, people get ideas. They get insights. They suddenly understand some aspects. of their life that has been troubling them or holding them back.

I see it all the time. And so, but one thing I want to say is that there's absolutely no doubt that people who are living in the most comfort have the most difficulty. Because they don't feel the emotional need to go and do these things. Well, I think they think that their comfort was produced by linear means. And so, you know, the ability to perceive that there are existing systemic conditions that helped produce that comfort is less likely than those people who are living and struggling. And they realize that their struggle is not because of one cause. It's multi-causal.

So they're one step ahead because the second they, you know, sort of look at, well, is it, is the problem education? Yes. is it the health care yes, is it the economy, yes, is it the culture, yes, is it the technology, yes, is it the family, yes, is it the religion, yes, right? And so immediately it becomes visible that this, it's fantastic because one of the things that happens is that people who have really experienced a lot of trauma recognize that that trauma is not necessarily just an event inside them as an individual, but they start to see it in the systemic of their world.

And that's a completely different relationship with that event, with that pain. So there's a lot of healing that takes place in that and possible responses. That makes sense to me. Okay. So here's some questions that I've been asking all my guests. What are you most worried about, given all the things that you and I delve into on our daily email list? What are you most worried about in the coming decade or so?

I think the thing I'm most worried about is the divisiveness. People who could care about each other being divided. I don't see how we can do anything when we're dealing with that. I agree with you, which is why I helped Daniel Schmachtenberger and Tristan with the social media efforts. Because if we can't have a conversation, how can we solve the economic, environmental, climate, energy problems? I'm very worried about that. You're right. What are you most hopeful about in the coming decade or so?

I am most hopeful about the weird, the unexpected, the things that we have that are already coming and we're already here and we're not even seeing them, the things that don't look anything like we thought they would, but somehow are shifters. You're most hopeful about emergence? Yeah, and particularly as weird as possible. I'm down with weird emergence because, you know, it needs to be almost unrecognizable. The changes we're going into are not going to be planable. They should be almost unrecognizable to us.

And so that means that there's possibility in the weird, in the thing that is a little bit incoherent, at least a little bit. I like that. I feel that. And I don't know what it looks like, but I guess that's the point. I don't know what it looks like. Right. Yeah. Nora, what do you care most about in this world or what is most important to you? I mean my kids.

And so when I say my kids, though, that includes the world that my kids are coming into and the relationships that they have with other people. You know, I, when I was raising my kids, they're in their 20s now, I really, tried, Nate. I really gave them as much as I could of ways of, you know, asking questions and doing systems thinking and being flexible. And I really gave them so much of what we've been talking about in this conversation. And I, I had an oversight. And my oversight was that I forgot that the other people that they were going to be in relationship with, that they would fall in love with, that would be their best friends, that would be the people they cared about, weren't going to have those skills or abilities. And one of the things that happened was that they

became, they found themselves in roles of being the helper, the healer, the rock, the support. And I didn't, I didn't recognize, you know, when they were so little, I was thinking, you know, as individuals, they need this to go through the world. I was like packing their backpack with systems and complexity skills. And I, I, I really learned a lot watching them have to negotiate and to be in the territory of their peers who didn't have that and who were in a lot of pain. So that's something. When I say that my kids are the most important thing to me, I also mean in the world they live in. Thank you for sharing that.

I don't have kids, but I have cultural kids, the 270 students or so that have gone through my reality 101 course. And I also feel, I understand what you said because they're burdened with all the knowledge of my course that their peers don't have. And that does cast a ripple in the pond of their lives. And I do deeply care about them and their futures. So how do you, in all the times that we've spoken and interacted, you're always the same. You're warm and bubbly and calm and confident. How do you stay that way in the face of the challenges that we're looking at as a culture? And what do you do personally to manage this challenging time?

Well, first of all, I dip down underwater. There were moments of despair. I don't know how I could have warm blood in my veins and not do that. And I've had to face some pretty heavy loss. And I walk my dogs. I make dinner. I care for my family. I guess for me, what I have the most connection to as a sort of lifeline is just, I don't know how else to describe it, but just the fact that life keeps on making life.

And it just does. And Meadows just keep making. meadows and even when human beings screw up, life continues. And it's incredible and beautiful and humbling. So I like to keep learning, keep reading. I spend as much time as I can in natural circumstances. And sometimes like everybody else, I just like look at the whole world. And I think that's just disgusting and I just have a big fat Netflix binge and watch some show from beginning to end and and you know then I liked paint and talk to you and be around people that I'm learning something from I think the the most my dad used to say that the best way to deal

with a loss of morale or depression or pain is actually by learning something really hard to push yourself to really like read some biology from the 19th century that is really complicated or philosophy or to to be in a culture you don't understand and try to learn a new language or just try to learn something so that all that you know, is moving through that other new lens and shifting. That's kind of profound. In my own life, I've always been curious about things. And if I count my 20 or 30 closest friends and colleagues, they're all lifelong learners.

And we know a lot about the natural world and the human ecosystem, but there's so much to learn, especially between the compartmentalized disciplines, as you say. This has been great. Nora, I think we have a lot more to talk about, so you may have to come back for a round two. Are there any other words of wisdom, advice, or warmth for our listeners that you have in closing? One thing that I'm really interested in, in the energy question. On the surface, it's a question of redundancy. Essentially, the way that the grid is set up is set up to maximize the extent.

experience of individuated life. Right. If I want to bake a turkey at three in the morning, I can do that if I'm not sleeping. But why does society need everyone to have that ability? Right. So exactly. So this is one of the presuppositions that's sitting in the energy question. Everyone should have 24-7 to access to energy all the time.

It's a given. That's how our society is organized. And that's because we've been separated from each other. So when we start to think about ways to approach this, I have a friend who is building laundromats. And his approach is people need to do long. They need to talk to each other. And they talk to each other in the laundromat. So I'm going to build laundromats because that's where people talk to each other.

Yeah. Well, it's like a soup kitchen or whatever. You have to center a basic need and make sure that there's a community around it. Every single one of our basic needs should have a community around it. Oh, I love that. Thank you so much, Nora. Thank you so much, Nate. It's been great to be with you.

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