Welcome to the first part of our conversation with former California Governor Jerry Brown. Governor Brown is a planetary visionary, activist and elder statesman whose wisdom, wit and insightful perspectives on what are the challenges of our times and our most important priorities make this a must see, enlightening, inspirational and in depth conversation. Welcome to Deep Transformation, Self, Society, Spirit, life enhancing, paradigm rattling conversations, cutting edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists with Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuy.

I'm Roger Walsh and our co host is John Dupuy. And today our guest is in some ways the easiest to introduce, in some ways the hardest, both easiest and hardest because he has had a remarkably rich and contributing career. And, and so there are many things that can easily be mentioned. On the other hand, if we covered them all, we'd be taking up most of the time of the podcast. I'm speaking about Governor Jerry Brown, who among other things has been the longest serving governor in California history and in modern times, both the youngest and the oldest. But in addition to his political career, which is stellar, in fact one of the most outstanding in American history, he's unusual in multiple ways. Having been deeply influenced by his Jesuit background and training, and also having been way ahead of his time in introducing ecological concerns, alternative energy, having had a deep spiritual side to him, having studied Zen in Japan, working with Mother Teresa directly in her home for the dying in Calcutta, and having been deeply immersed in cultural and educational issues as well. And he now lives on a ranch in Northern California. And I think certainly one of the most unusual things is that at his ranch he supports ecological research and recently had a beetle named after him, Bembidium brownorum. That's one of a kind. So, Jerry, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. It's really a gift to be with you and to have you with us today.

Well, it's a pleasure to be with you and to speak and converse and think about transformation. It's a topic under different names I've thought about for many, many decades. Back in the Jesuit life, which I pursued from 1956, in 1960 in a seminary that was very, very different than today, almost medieval in silence, the speaking of Latin, following very close regime. Anyway, one of the goals, if not the key goal, was what they call the life of perfection. And perfection sounds like transformation or maybe the word conversion. So my thought just title of your show, transformation. It's a term that I've heard many, for many, many years. But personally I find am I transformed? What would transformation look like? That is a more haunting question that I don't have a ready answer to. So I'd say that the transformative process and the life and perfection are not free of ambiguity or question. That doesn't mean they're not worth pursuing. But what it is you're pursuing, I think should be a matter of continuing reflection.

Yeah, kind of on. So you're pointing to the value of ongoing inquiry into both oneself and into life and into what one can be. And it feels like those have been some of the values that have inspired your work in so many areas. Of course, you're best known for your political work. How would you describe the values that have most powered your life and your career and your contributions?

Well, first of all, I wouldn't use the term values, term that I. I'm not quite sure. Values. It tends to be an economic term, a value valuation. Valora, property tax, Advaloran property tax. So what I do in responding to that term or that idea, having substance, word orientation or one's how one's shaped in life. And of course, we're all shaped by our upbringing, by our bodily DNA and other hormonal influences that we barely understand, but which shape our lives. So for me, the key factor is. I was born in 1938 in San Francisco. San Francisco, very different than the one today. We had a Republican mayor, we had. Roosevelt was president. In fact, we had a Democrat as governor that nobody knows about, Colbert Olson. But growing up in San Francisco, it was a very different place, totally calmer, really a Leave it to Beaver kind of situation. Middle class. The eruptions of the 60s were 30 years in the future. So I think that growing up and unquestioning, we said the Pledge of Allegiance in school, put our hand over our heart. No one challenged. Well, wait a minute. What are we doing this? There was no challenge there. I was a Boy Scout. I just went to the hundredth anniversary of the camp, Camp Roya, where I stayed near the Russian river and gave a little talk there. So. But I think that upbringing in a. We call it conservative today. I just thought that was reality as I experienced it. And my father was a lawyer. My mother, of course, was just a homemaker. Well, I wouldn't say just because that's quite a job. And I had two older sisters and my father ran for District Attorney of San Francisco in 1943. So he was campaigning when I was five years old. I was in kindergarten in San Francisco at a place called West Portal. And he was elected DA. And he was sworn in on January 8, 1944. I have a picture of that event at The San Francisco City hall, the mayor, my father, and all the digitaries, mostly men that were involved in that. But that's the world. So I've reflected on the fact of how different that world is. So there's an orderliness, there's a lack of ambiguity. This is the way the world is. That's the way it is everywhere. And we didn't think about the Holocaust. In fact, with a nuclear bomb, I can remember kid across the street, Brian Daly, telling me, this atomic bomb is really something, but I didn't quite know what it was. I know it was a big bomb. So that's a level of innocence that very much at variance with what you think of as San Francisco today. Also, when I think of being influenced, my grandmother would read me Bible stories. Bible stories, you know, Moses and the bulrushes, Sodom and Gomorrah, Cain and Abel. And at the same time, she told me about her upbringing at the Mountain House. And the Mountain House was a stagecoach stop where she was born, right near there and grew up. And that's where I live today. That land is still in our family. And I built a house there and restored the barns and. But the point was, she said the Mountain House was a very special place and that that left an impression on me. So when I had the chance, well, number one, I got my father's interest in the land given to me, and then I decided I would build a house there and I would move there after the governor's office, after my term, which ended in 2019, January. So those are influences, and I'm saying regularity. You know, there's a right and there's a wrong. America is a great country. Our leaders are, you know, a great people. Roosevelt was great. You know, that's how I grew up. Very different than the post colonial, postmodern skepticism about truth, about values. The whole question about, you know, what's really going on, the epistemology that we all. We see in the world very different after a Foucault or after the influence of Nietzsche and others, it's a totally different world. I grew up in a very stable world order. You know, in my block, we probably had maybe there's 15 houses, 20 houses. And maybe I once chatted once. There were 60 kids. And of all the people I knew, all the families there, there was one woman who'd been married before, and so she was a divorcee, and that was a big deal. Everybody else, his mommy and daddy. And it was all, you know, we had one Jewish family, no Mexican American, no African American. So it was a fairly homogeneous, clear world that I came up in. So that is an anchor point that I view. The. The more chaotic, unpredictable, deconstructive sense that we now inevitably share in the world of 20 and 25.

Yeah, definitely the world that I grew up in, Jerry.

And.

And then the 60s happened, but things were squared away. My father was a veteran from World War II, decorated, a good man, Catholic. I grew up also, and there seemed to be a lot of stability and right and wrong and decency, and my parents would never think of cheating on their taxes. And, you know, it was just. It was such a stability there, and I really value that. And then the world changed, and I lived in San Francisco also, and I. I'd love to hear what you think about San Francisco today as opposed to when you were there, and the transformation and change that we've been going through so, so incredibly quickly, and how to ride that wave, how to be present with that.

Well, I am somewhat, I certainly anarchist perspective, certain predilection, certainly, to question authority. What I will say as I look at the chaos, as I walk from my apartment where I am now, down toward Martin City hall, you see people yelling on the street, people sitting, smoking or dealing dope or acting very strangely. So it's a chaotic world. And that chaos, I think, spread throughout the whole country is one of the contributing factors to the presidency of Donald Trump. He enjoys a widespread support, certainly among Republicans throughout the whole society. It's not 50%, but it's above 40%. And I think he's phenomenon, and the way he's tearing down institutions and so transactional, doing whatever he feels like that is perceived as fighting this chaos, whatever the. This different modern world for a lot of people is something they don't like. And they're perceiving Trump as an avenger, somebody who's going to bring back the America that they knew. So I think while static or stultified or not changing is bad, but a heightened tempo of change that is perceived as chaotic or as contrary to what people learned when they're growing up, that is very unsettling. And that unsettlement, I think, feeds Trump to the point where, I don't know, 10, 20, 30% believe that Trump is actually sent by God to correct all this chaos, this work of the devil, as it were. So we're in a clashing civilization here with contending forces. And so that's the way I see it. Very hard to govern, very hard to earn respect. And there we are. So it's an exciting period. There's a lot of openness, there's creativity, there's the Silicon Valley, the world of art learning. It's all very vibrant. But like the Weimar Republic, this level of freedom also can be associated with such fear and trembling and chaos that then people seem look for the strong leader, the strong man, fascism, to calm the waters and to reduce their anxiety and insecurity. So that's where we are. It's a tale of two cities, very exciting, but very dangerous.

And you're pointing to one of the great characteristics of our time, Jerry, and that is the extraordinary rate of transformation and the destabilization of everything from supposedly bedrock institutions to cultural ways of understanding, of making sense of the world. It's been called a crisis of sense making, an epistemological crisis. I mean, so many names pointing to the fact that there is a dramatic reduction in instability and the ability to make sense of what's happening. There's just too much happening for most people to be able to comprehend. It results in a sense of confusion and a grasping after the idea or even the myth of a golden era in the past. Make America great again, or of someone who will get us back to this old way of being. And clearly, I think one of the implications of what you're saying is there's no way back. How do we manage this chaotic process of both positive and negative dimensions and changes?

Yeah, well, it feels like life has speeded up, certainly through the media, through the Internet, to the profusion or explosion of knowledge, of memes, of imagery, of stories. All that is bombarding all of us. Well, the challenge is, for example, in a democracy, you need a consensus. You're going to have we the people. The we has to have some coherence. And we don't have we the people. We have many different subsets. You've got three. You know, the religious right, you have the progressive left, you have many people in between. So getting a stable consensus on which the rule of law can really work and be supported. We don't have that right now. And how we get that remains to be seen. And it's not just America. In Europe, you have far right parties. And I don't want to use the word right because it's a matter of authoritarian. You want a strong person. Some people want not everybody, but there's a vacuum. There was a time in the 30s, Mussolini, you had dictators showing up, different parts of the world, different countries, and that tendency to look for the one man show the one person who's going to Bring order. Could be a woman, too. You have a woman in Italy whose father was a fascist. So the democratic idea when I grew up was unquestioned. Today, it's really up for grabs. Can we run a country with diversity, with checks and balances, with differing opinions being worked out and mediated in society? And right now, we're not seeing that. It's zero sum, it's win. And even in the foreign policy, if you suddenly, one of the biggest, most common, I call it a cliche, is we have to win. We have to win against China. We have to beat China. Well, if you say you want USC to beat Notre Dame in football, you know what that means? Well, when you say the US 330 million people are going to beat China, 1.4 billion people, what does that even mean? I would suggest, and I believe it's not clear at all. And so there we are. We're trying to impose a framework that might fit on the football field, but it doesn't fit in international relations because we're on this planet. We got 8 billion people. We have all these problems with climate getting worse, with biodiversity suffering, weaponry and bio threats and all sorts of things occurring. Lots of power. And it has to be managed with some rules. But in order to have rules, you got to have a consensus. In order to have a consensus, you have to have shared belief, which we don't have. So that's the big challenge. Can we find some commonality, Some things as human beings, we know and we can share. And right now, the, the demagoguery, the payoff for scapegoating is very high. And I would say, and this is a sad report, but just from my understanding of politics, if you say in your mind, well, the problem is unaffordable housing. The problem is homeless and mentally ill people. The problem is rising prices, okay? The problem is too many fires and floods, okay? If you want to give an answer to that, it's going to cost enormous sums of money, and you're going to have to change people's positions in ways that they're not going to let. So actually, solving these problems is, politically, at this point, is virtually impossible. But if you can construct a narrative and a framework that a certain subgroup is responsible. And if we just take care of them, if we control them, we expel the immigrants, if we control the lefties, if we control the DEI people, then our lives will be much better. That scapegoating, which is the heart of what Trump is doing, it works. At least it works for a while, until it finally does. Produce what people are hoping for. So we're in a world where in fact do anything is very difficult. If you want to really get at climate change, it costs money. You got to pay for the transition. You want people to get rid of their gas stove, they're not going to do it unless you give them some money. You give them some money, you're going to have to have money. So that's going to take some taxes or cutting something else. So we're in a land of what I once called an era of limits. You want to do one thing, you got to do less of something else. And we need more resources. On the problem for the government, that's called taxes and that is not something that is acceptable because people don't believe in the government leader, politicians, if you ask what you think of the leaders of California or Congress, people are not going to give you a positive. Well, if they don't have a positive feeling, why would they entrust their hard earned money to you? So we're in a real dilemma that we can't convince the people to pay for what they need. So the attractiveness of scapegoating to maintain your electoral position, winning is very, very attractive. So I would, I would identify that as a big dilemma right now. And when I read people saying, well, what are the issues? The issues are unaffordable housing. I think to myself, okay, unaffordable housing, what are you going to do? You're going to lower the price of houses? Well, that would lower the value of people's number one asset. You can't do that. Now, recession, big recession or a depression would do that. So if you can't lower the price of housing, maybe you can stabilize it. That's the hope. But then they say, well, let's have affordable housing. Well, affordable housing is unaffordable housing, like all housing is today, but with a government subsidy to give you money in effect to buy down the rent or the price. But then where do you get that money that comes out of the tax dollar? And so we're in a squeeze of things we want to do, but they require a public belief and commitment in order to pay for the what is needed. And that public belief is not there. And because of the tendency to scapegoating and blame just gets harder, we're in a dilemma. And one of the things I hope is that Trump is such a reductio, unabsurative, he's taking positions and pushing them so far, like on his tariffs that make no sense, putting a big tariff on India. He wants India to be a bulwark ally of America in the contest with China, and yet he's slapping them the face. So he's doing that in 50 different ways. That may hopefully come to Quantum and then we can get a change of course. Who's the change to. And as you asked about values, what. What's the program? How are you going to do this? I would say that we're in a real pickle. We're in a real dilemma that we've seen in previous periods of history and how we work out of it, I don't think. I mean, it's worth talking about, but I think it's. It's very challenging. And then on top of all that, we have a doomsday clock, which is ticking ever closer to doomsday, telling us that the danger is not being reduced, but the danger is growing. So there we are. It's a very exciting time.

Yeah. Well, that's a. It's a great summary, Jerry, or a great overview. And I really appreciate the fact that you're pointing to. Pointing to the fact that the issues are so complex and so interconnected and that at depth, they are fundamentally questions of values or meaning and trust and a variety of psychological issues in many ways that aren't usually spoken of. And in the face of the enormous complexity and multifactorial nature of the threats we're facing, the simplistic answer is to look for a very concrete us versus them scapegoating approach, which is what we're seeing now. And yet, as you point out, it's certainly not going to solve the problems, in some ways going to make them worse. So, anyway, thank you for bringing in that the pointing to the complexity and what I sometimes speak of, what I think of. I think there are a number of fallacies, or isn't even easy to fall into them, like single focus fallacies. One is that there's a single issue fallacy, thinking there's just one issue. Second is single response fallacy, which is there's just one particular kind of response that's, that's appropriate. And clearly we need much richer understandings. There's a lot of ways we could go here. Something you would like to respond to there. Before we get into one of the points you raised about the doomsday clock and the nuclear issue, I'm not sure.

What did you want to.

Well, I just laid. I just kind of riffed in response to your. In an acknowledgment appreciation of your bringing to the foreground the complexity of Multiple factors and involved in our current political, social, global situation. It's what technically it's called a wicked problem. A problem which is so interconnected and so complex, you try to try to solve one thing, in some ways, it can often make other things worse. So we really are facing a wicked problem with our social.

It's nothing new. People throughout human history have faced problems. They're different. You know, the tribes have been warring with other tribes. Monsoons and catastrophes and tsunamis and earthquakes and war. That's the history of humanity. So we, we're the only different now is, well, we got 8 billion people. That's a big, big difference. Number two, we have a lot of technology that we never have before. So we have a power. We have powers, right? And when I say we, certain people, certain, you know, Palantir or Google or the Defense Department food. There's power that resides in certain places and in certain individuals. And that power can make things happen, they can destroy things. So. But I don't think that's anything unusual. We personally, we have our own dilemmas, our own life. We can get hit by a car, get cancer, get a heart attack. So life is on the edge. We don't always know we're on the edge, but we are at any moment. So society's on the edge and we can't become paralyzed because life is what it is. We've had, I think, a rather protected world in America, separated by the oceans. Certainly growing up I was very calm and very secure. And I think to myself when I read about World War II and what was going on in Poland, Eastern Europe and, and Russia in 1943 when I first went to kindergarten. I think of my birthday party when I was 4 years old, which I can remember, and 5 years old. This is, this is 1944, 43. What the horrors that were going on. So that's the way it is now. Some of those horrors are coming home. And that's what the Doomsday Clock is all about in nuclear, bio climate and also disruptive technologies like AI, the satellites, the pattern of satellites, what that all can be used for and weaponry. So with all this power, there's two big things we need which we don't have anywhere near enough of. And one of them is a sense of wanting to work together, a shared sense of common danger, common fate, which we don't have. And if you think of Xi Jinping and Biden or Trump or Putin, they talk, you know, like one could win and maybe one might under certain circumstances, but there's A great danger that we all lose if we don't control climate, if we don't find ways to minimize pandemics, if we don't find a way to reduce some of the inequalities that will foster terrorism. And terrorism plus artificial intelligence linked to genetic engineering could result in man made pandemics of a horrible character. And that's why the bullet of atomic scientists puts out this doomsday clock. And I participate in the hearings, they decide, they go over a couple of days each year. And so we have these big issues and what they all come down to is we have this incredible power that can destroy all of us. So we have a mutual, a common vulnerability. But we don't have a common politics. What we don't have and what we need is what I would call planetary realism. The realism of traditional realism is hard boiled, real politik. I've got the power, you got to do what I want. Okay, that's traditional realism. Romanticism is, oh, we're all going to make the world wonderful and pretty. The truth of the matter is we're on the brink. We're on the brink. Bill Perry, former Secretary of Defense who's still alive at the age of 90, almost 97, he wrote a book called My Journey at the Nuclear Brink in the Present Tense. So we're at this brink and the big guys, the big power, people should collaborate to protect themselves. But the old historic egotism, nationalism, this power of believing in the state that gets people to go to war, that's so powerful. And what is needed is this bigger picture of common endeavor, of shared vulnerability. So it gives rise to shared interests. But that, that is still very obscure now. Can Trump figure that out? Trump seems to be, I mean, he's talking to Putin. That's more. Biden was not inclined to do that. But where is. But there's seemingly no principle. And this idea of transactionalism or Trump, let's make a deal. The mantra of Biden and few people before him was we need rules, we need norms that we all agree on. We need the World Trade Organization, wto, we need nuclear arms agreements, we need trade agreements that we all agree to. There was rules that we all governed by. Now the dominant political thought rhetoric is, no, it's my country and you got to be strong, you push the other guys aside. That's kind of a 19th century view of colliding powers. And what is needed, given the planetary threats I've just mentioned, is a common endeavor to deal with climate, to deal with pandemic, to reduce Nuclear danger dramatically reduce it. So those are big problems. But in America, deportation and immigrants is a more exciting problem. Homelessness in the streets is a big problem, but it's not as big as these global threats that our leaders ought to be viewing. So I just say, to summarize it all, there's nothing different in the sense that we're on the edge of dying or destruction. That's where we are. By the way, there was A great Baron McGuire tune, 1960, on the eve of destruction. Okay, we've been on the eve of destruction for a long time. But the challenge is, can we push our politics in a way that will allow the obvious, the common threats, to be responded to in a common way? Even though China has a different view of human rights than the United States, Putin has his view of Ukraine. We've got a lot of profound differences, but we can all agree we don't want to have nuclear bombs flying around. We don't want some terrorist group to engineer some kind of new agent that could spread around the world, kill half a billion people. We all agree we don't want to see the climate. Well, we don't all agree on the climate. So there we are. These are the big issues. But when you come right down to it, you know, walk outside your door, you got problems right here, and people can't afford to buy a house. The college graduates can't find a job. 40% of the people live hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck. So there's a variety of problems. And I'd say if you're thinking about transformation, that's a good thing. And I think you got to work on that. And to the extent we can figure out how we do that in common for the society, for our community, that's very important, too. And it's a continuing challenge. Not something to get. Pick up a formula and just apply it. It's something we. We have to, as we're doing on this show, you have to talk about it, think about it, and the answers out of that process will emerge.

Yeah, Jerry, I feel like I've been sitting at the feet of an Old Testament prophet. You know, you've just been laying it out. Hero Israel, this is it. And I would ask you, what do you think small steps that we can take to nobleize the human spirit so we can begin to see our commonality, maybe just starting with our country and stop tearing each other apart and come back together again and start moving that direction where all of these issues come from, ourselves, in our own spiritual crises. Or lack of spirituality or commonality. How do we begin to see our way through this darkness into a direction of hope?

All right, well, here I have a certain disjointing sense here, because I've done Zen meditation, I've been a Jesuit, I followed personal paths of transformation or serious quest for a higher kind of life. But on the other hand, I've been a politician. And politicians are aiming at winning the next election. And we got this guy Trump, and people who think like I do, like that, get him out of there. Get him out of there. It takes a ballot, takes. You gotta win some elections. Right now, the Republicans are trying to change the congressional lines in Texas. You get another five delegates, five congressmen. They're going to try that. So the Republicans are trying very hard to make sure that there'll be a Trump majority next year, the November election. So people don't like that, are trying to stop. And you stop it with candidates or advertising, with organizing, with raising money, and you raise money from people who have money. So you're talking about vested interests, you're talking about rich people, you're talking about industry, banking, insurance, maybe oil, talking about labor unions, teachers, and you've got to get all that money. So that's the world we live in. Now, as an individual, you can pursue your particular path. That's. And we should, because we're all alive and we're going to have a certain amount of time and that's it. So we want to maximize that. In terms of the. The general politics. I. This is my business. And I can tell you it's. It's not what I'd call a nice business. It's not what you want to discuss on this program, but that's what it is. It's like war. War is not nice. If you look what's going on in Ukraine, if you look at what we did In World War II, World War I, there it is. So you have this problem of evil, and then you have the problem of good. And I remember the movie on Mother Teresa. You saw these starving or vacant mission people looking out a barbed wire fence, obviously some people from World War II, and then Mother. Mother Teresa. But there's a light in the world, and she was a light. And she always said, just find the first person and help that person lift that poor person out of the streets. So I think you have to take the immediate and where you can be helpful and human and responsive, you do that. And where political opportunities come, you got to be part of it. But knowing what I know, I Mean, you know, run for government four times, up for president three times. I can tell you as an individual, you're sitting there in a big stadium watching what's going on in the field, but you are in the stands for the most part. Now there may become opportunities where you can add your voice, your pocketbook, your vote. So do it. But we are very dependent on powers and forces. A, we don't control and B, we don't understand. So that makes life very, very exciting. Gets you up in the morning because it's not clear, not clear what's going on. I don't know whether that inspires you or depresses you, but that's the, that's just the way it is.

Well, it's not just an intellectual journey, which it has been. It's also very emotionally impactful what you've been saying.

And it's like, okay, well said. Well, it's good to have a, you know, an upbringing. I feel very rooted in the land where my grandmother grew up. It was a stagecoach. She was born in 1878, she died in 1974. And so I, I knew her for 36 years of my life and quite a transition. But when you've been on the same dirt, I walked those that land and could look up at the night, at the moon and stars and look at the blue oak trees. I feel the world is in order. There's a stability, even though it's. I'm just describing, it's chaos. So there's many ways of looking at things, but it's hard. I mean, you can't to look at like the Doomsday Clock. Most people don't want to pay attention to it. And even the people who put out the Doomsday Clock, do we really feel. It's 89 seconds, the doomsday. What the hell does that mean? It used to be as far back as 17 minutes. And we thought when the Iron Curtain came down and everything seemed to be getting better. Well, everything seems to get worse. So that's the truth. But you can't get paralyzed by the truth. You have to think deeper about what. What is going on, what are the implications and what I can do, and that's all I can say is the quest, the inquiry, the ever openness of to what is. Try to find and not to try, but to act out of the best sense that you can muster in yourself and to help others and to inspire and be a. Be a force for inspiring others. Very important. We need, we need mutual help and inspiration because we're on we're on a break. And even to use the word, Bill Perry did that book, by the way. I think it's very emblematic. The New York Times didn't review it. And I called up the New York Times and, hey, you have to review this book. It's very important. This guy's. Bill Perry knows what he's talking about. They said, well, it's already out. We don't publish reviews after the book is already on the book stands. I said, well, wait a minute. This is really important. Well, not too bad. So as it turned out, I called the New York Review of Books and I said, you guys ought to review it. Well, they wouldn't. So they said, you review it. And I did. I wrote a review of Bill Perry's book. So I. I'm really very much influenced by his thinking. And his thinking is, we are living on the brink. So that's worth thinking about. But. And thinking about it, realizing most people aren't worried. This is not something people want to talk about. In fact, if you tell them how dangerous it is, they're going to get turned off and tell them, you, boy, you're a wet blanket. I don't want to. Come on, you're really negative. If people want the nice, warm, fuzzy. And so how do you understand the truth? How do you speak the truth? In a way it can be heard and is not demoralizing. That, I would say, is the question, should we have truth but to have commitment and inspiration, dedication to doing everything you can?

Yeah. And you with your Zen background, Jerry, I'm inclined to bring up. You're pointing to the extraordinary complexity of these issues and their urgency and the fact that there aren't simple answers. And it reminds me of a kind of Zen koan, given your background, and particularly what's called a genji kon, a koan which arises out of life itself. And the nature of the con is there's no one final answer. But every. You have to just keep wrestling with it and going into it again and again. And every time you do, there's the potential for taking you deeper into the question, deeper into yourself, and deeper into life. And these issues you're raising are really the cons of our time. And there aren't easy answers. And as you say, it's absolutely crucial that we keep looking at them.

Well, the sauce then, as I understand it, is, you know, just breathe, just focus, and just sitting. Okay. That there's not an answer. The state of emptiness. I can't say that I attain the state of emptiness. But I have a sense that that's not about something. You can use something. I'm going to leverage my sense of emptiness to something. It just is. And trying to get that notion of being without a gaining idea. I've been thinking. I don't know whether it really clarifies anything, but I read a book recently and in the book there was a reference to a man whose name I think was Langdon, but I'm not sure. Anyway, he's a writer. I think he ultimately committed suicide, but he was a writer on the. On the Holocaust. And he criticized the book on meaning written by the logo Therapy Frank of.

Viktor Frank Victor Frankl.

Yeah.

He did not like Viktor Frankl. Trying to derive meaning from the experience in the camps. He said there's no meaning, it just was. He wasn't diminishing it, but he was approaching it in a different way, in a way that said, very honest. Can we accept something? There's just no explanation. There's no. Don't derive any meaning. I remember Warner Erhart once saying that life is empty and meaningless, but don't derive anything from that. You can't derive any conclusion. So just sit. Just be in the face of all that. Now, how you do that or even what that might mean, that's. I think. I don't know if there's any further in that path. But that is the message, I think, of Zen. If you can say Zen has a message. I guess you can't. We have a statement that we made when I was in the Jesuits. It was a Latin phrase that we would encourage one another. It was called age quad ages. It's do what you're doing. Just do what you're doing. And they would tell me that because we, as part of our work, part of our path, we had to pick grapes. There was a winery connected to the. To the seminary, to the novitiate. And so we'd be out during the summer picking grapes. And I'd be talking philosophy or theology. They say, Brother Brown, just pick grapes. Ajay Quad ajit. Now I chart created a charter school in Oakland. I made their motto, age quad adages. So do what you're doing. And that means fully embrace, be present. So there's quite a lot of meaning in that particular Jesuit slogan. I don't even know if they use it anymore. It's one that I continue to refer to. What the hell are we talking about? What is adj quod adis? How do you do what you're doing? I mean, that's a tautology. But as Gregory Bateson said all the big ideas are tautologies.

Well, and there's also the Zen. You. And since we. Since we're in a Zen, there's also the Zen story, you know, facing a wall of stone and just keep going. Yeah.

Not where we are. Where we're only. Yeah, but we got to do something in the meantime. That's what I'm. There's way up time. My life now is I'm 87, so I'm going to die. I don't know when, but not that far off. What do I do in the meantime? I asked some of my contemporaries what's to be done in the meantime? And they say, what are you talking about? I said, between now and death or senility, what's your program? So I think you have to sit on that question because it's something you got to ask yourself every day.

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