In this episode I speak with Candice Ammori, founder and CEO of Climate Vine, a professional networking organization for climate tech professionals. Candice brings a unique perspective as an Iraqi-American from the Chaldean Catholic community who has navigated data science, international development, and now climate tech community building. We discuss:
How her upbringing in a close-knit Chaldean Catholic community of 60+ first cousins in Metro Detroit shaped her approach to building communities in climate tech.
The parallels between AI and climate change as systemic disruptions that capitalism in its current form may not survive.
Why 80% of successful community building is about filtering and selecting the right people, while only 20% is programming and events.
Her journey from studying AI ethics and biostatistics to focusing on climate after the 2018 IPCC report.
The importance of breaking down silos between technologists, activists, policy makers, and Global South perspectives in addressing climate change.
How accepting reality rather than fighting it has become central to her spiritual practice and approach to climate work.
David Valerio: How would you describe your spirituality and the way it impacts how you engage with your work?
Candice Ammori: I would describe my spirituality as both ever-changing and intentionally at the core of my life. Well, aspirationally at the core of my life. I don't think it's quite there yet.
I was raised Catholic in a Catholic Iraqi family, so being Catholic was pretty core to our identity. I went to Catholic middle school. I've always thought that Jesus seemed like a really good person. I wouldn't say that I totally resonated with the larger Catholic Church, but I always held onto that. I think that experience formed a bit of the spirituality that's emerged from there.
David Valerio: I would love for you to expand on the community you came from. I'm personally a Ruthenian Greek Catholic which is in the Slavic tradition, but your particular church is very interesting. Could you expand on your family history and background?
Candice Ammori: I'll try to be as historically accurate as I can. My family comes from a small village called Tel Keppe in Northern Iraq, which is a bit north of Mosul. It's not too far Kurdistan. We were a religious minority in Iraq for a very long time. Ethnically, I believe we're Assyrian.
From my understanding, a couple hundred years ago, there was a group of these Assyrians who decided enter into communion with the Roman Catholic Church. We then became called Chaldean Catholics by the Roman Catholic Church. My brother has his DNA tested and and we're 99.98% Middle Eastern and 0.02% Asian. So we really have come from that land and stayed in that land for a long time.
In the '60s and '70s, some Chaldeans migrated to Detroit which was booming at the time. Some went to San Diego. There was a bit of chain migration where one person would come over, often start their own small business because they didn't have an American education, and then be able to bring over a sibling or parent. They had to vouch for them in the American immigration system, saying "We will take responsibility for this person for the first two to ten years."
That allowed a lot of people in the community to come over. Migration sped up during the Gulf War and after ISIS took over. At this point, Tel Keppe itself is pretty devastated. That happened in my 20s, so I'm really bummed that I wasn't able to see it before then. But there are some people in my community who go back to see parts of Iraq now that it's a little more stable.
David Valerio: How did that community shape you growing up?
Candice Ammori: Both of my parents are one of ten, and most of their siblings had on average three to five kids. I'm one of five, the youngest. I have over 60 first cousins who all lived within 20 miles of each other in Metro Detroit. Most of those cousins have had kids. The extended family keeps extending, and it's really awesome. We've actually held a lot of those family ties together
I don't live in Michigan right now, and I'm one of maybe 5% of this large extended family that lives outside of Michigan. Once you're there, it's a center of gravity that's really comforting. It's really nice to have so much community, especially in the American context where it's not super common to have giant families or built-in communities the way we do.
It definitely was central to my upbringing. Sometimes people who've met my parents have been like, "Oh, I didn't realize that they're so foreign." Because I'm in some ways very American. I look pretty Anglo-Saxon. When I lived in Cambodia, they were like, "But you're not American-American. Where are you from?" They could tell I wasn't European-American. But pretty often, people just assume I'm a white American with a white American experience. That's how I get treated and that's very much part of my identity too.
At the same time, growing up was different in terms of the food I ate, the language we were spoke at home. We spoke Chaldean, which is modern-day Aramaic. All these things were pretty different compared to the people around me.
David Valerio: Tell me about your journey to where you are now. You have a diverse background: data science, startups, sustainability. Now you're working on climate.
Candice Ammori: When I was younger, I loved the environment and animals. My mom was like, "You're gonna be a doctor, because you're smart and you like science." And I was like, "I don't know about that." She was like, "Oh, you like animals. Be an animal doctor." I was like, "I still don't know if that's quite it."
In undergrad, I viscerally remember my sister Lavonne being like, "You should be an engineer. You like science and math." And I was like, "It's on North Campus." So I didn't do engineering because it was too far away. I wanted to play rugby and hang out on central campus, so I studied environmental science.
Then I got involved in a business school because I thought social impact businesses were really interesting. I ended up graduating with a policy undergrad, because I was thinking about multiple pathways to having an impact.
I ended up going to Singapore after that as part of Princeton in Asia, where I taught business communications. I went to Cambodia and worked in microfinance, to test out this social impact business question. Can this make an impact? Can this be what I really focus in? For community reasons, really, I went back to Michigan. Got involved in tech, but also thought I might be a business professor and did some case studies with a business professor for a bit.
I moved to New York and really got into tech because it was there. Everything was tech. That wasn't as thoughtful of a reason, honestly, but it worked out well and allowed me to be in New York. I learned a lot about AI during that time. There are actually a lot of similarities between my understanding of AI and my understanding of climate. What I noticed back in 2015 was that AI was rapidly getting better, and it was only going to keep doing so, exponentially.
I got really interested in the ethics of AI. I wasn’t necessarily thinking that it was gonna take over and kill us all, but there was definitely an obvious issue in that it takes observational data, which is as sexist, homophobic, and racist as the general population, and puts it through a feedback loop that can sometimes make it more of negative qualities. There are many case studies of judges saying, "Well, we're gonna use AI to make objective decisions on someone's sentence."
That term "objective" isn't necessarily correct when you're using observational data that's not objective; it's subjective. Then it might even be more biased than the original data given the algorithms. I got really fascinated by that. I ended up deciding I was going to go back to school for a statistics PhD to understand the math and algorithms side of AI so I could understand what to do about the ethical questions surrounding AI.
But then the 2018 IPCC report came out and indicated the world was going to hit multiple tipping points if incredibly quick changes weren’t made before 2030. That report really shook me because, going back to my childhood, I was always interested in the environment and was very conscious of it. It was mind-blowing to think about these tipping points and how now is the time to do as much as we can to avoid them so we don't get to a place that we can't turn back from. I've been in the climate space squarely since that time.
David Valerio: That's such an amazing and interesting background. A tying thread here is positive impact for people and planet. Where do you think that grounding comes from?
Candice Ammori: I think it has always been there. My dad passed away, but my mom is still alive. They were both really good-hearted people. I think that was probably a really big grounding. My four older siblings also are really good, solid humans, which I think does so much as the youngest child. Our community really took care of each other. I think that was a core thing I took away from my community.
But I would also think in these ways of "How do we help the poor? How do we make everyone around us happier and better, and have the core needs that they need?" I grew up in metro Detroit, and by the time I was around, my parents had some stability in their professional and financial lives, which was great. My older siblings didn't have as much, but I was like, "Well, great, what about everyone else?"
When I was young, I remember my parents would say things like, "Yes, but you also have to worry about yourself. You also have to take care of yourself," which I think is still a lesson that I'm learning these days.
I don't know if that's the best or healthiest way to live. I don't know if always wondering how we can "change the world" and thinking in these larger systems that are so complex and that one person can't shift is the healthiest way to live. I think small groups of people can actually shift it, but I don't want to come across as sounding like I think that's actually the healthiest or best way to live.
I'm working on a transition myself where I'm thinking through local impacts I can make where I live right now, instead of these really large change-the-world, change-these-larger-systems ways. I’m wondering if focusing on the local can actually do a little bit more and push a little bit more, maybe make that bigger ripple effect than constant focusing on the larger picture.
David Valerio: That makes sense that your family and community would shape you that way. I've been going through a similar transformation, re-evaluating my values and approach. I've also always felt like I wanted to have an impact, make the world a better place. But likewise, I've had those grandiose visions of "if I can do X, Y or Z, then the whole system changes."
I think partially from being married and having two kids now, I've become more grounded in the real day-to-day, everyday things that I do. I've come to realize that system-level change for the good has to include the local bottom-scale effort as well. You can't force good from on high. Improvement come from our daily interactions with the people around us: with my wife, with my kids, with my community, with my church. Then like you said, there's that ripple effect that spreads outwards
I'm not saying higher-level problem-solving isn't useful. But maybe there's a synthesis here, a balance where in your overall career arc you're striving to solve larger-scale problems, but also recognizing you have a lot of work to do at your very local, smaller scale.
Candice Ammori: Yeah, I think so. I think the smaller scale potentially scales up better than some of the larger scale.
David Valerio: Tell me more about getting involved with On Deck, starting their climate tech fellowship, and now founding Climate Vine.
Candice Ammori: In 2018, I read the report. I had just started grad school, and I ended up doing a two-year master's instead of finishing with a PhD, mostly because I was like, "I need to get into climate now." There's no time to waste. I learned some great skills in the grad program.
In 2020, I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew it was going to be in climate. Everything was an option. Activism was an option. Policy work was an option. Starting a company, maybe a local business or something was an option.
I had known On Deck's founder, Eric Torenberg, from Michigan. We met each other in our first class. It was called Global Change, actually, which is funny. It's a class about environmental change. They were starting to grow. He just texted one day and was like, "Hey, I know that you're focused on climate now. Do you want to start our climate fellowship? We're gonna expand into different areas. Climate could be one of our first verticals. What do you think?"
I chatted with him and was like, "Why not?" It just landed in my lap. I was intrigued by the idea of being able to build something from the ground up. When I joined, I think I was number 10. On Deck grew to like 350 to 400, some huge number during the year and a half that I was there.
I got to spend the first couple of months setting up the playbook for how On Deck would grow different fellowships and what they would look like. Then I got to create the playbook for what vertical fellowships would look like. What was really important for me in the climate one was that it was a place to break down silos.
What I knew about climate so far was that it was incredibly complex. It's a complex system. It touches everything, and we're not gonna solve it through tech alone. On Deck was a very technical fellowship. It's a tech startup. The grounding of it was in helping tech people find co-founders.
For the climate fellowship, it was incredibly important to me that we had policy, activism, entrepreneurship, investment, Global South, frontline workforce people. All these different people in climate talking to each other, and sure, talking about solutions, but also diagnosing the problem in really smart ways that any one of those types of folks wouldn't be able to do alone. The policy folks wouldn't be able to totally diagnose a problem in the same way that they would if they have the input of the investors, the tech people, the Global South folks.
In that first iteration, it was also 2020 when the pandemic had hit and a ton of people were trying to get into climate, reevaluating their own impact, their own life, their own professional trajectory. Climate was hot. Chris Sacca, who's a big-time tech investor, started Lowercarbon Capital, and I think that was one of the major signals to the tech community that climate is a real vertical. It's a real space that has real money and real interest and real potential
We ended up, over the two years of the climate tech fellowship, having over 650 members. We had dozens of companies start, hundreds of millions of dollars raised. The thing that was really important to me was that we had people in the room who were climate experts of all kinds alongside people who could bring in expertise from outside climate that would be helpful. We had billion-dollar founders who had exited companies and knew how to scale. We had really impressive hardware and software engineers. People who knew what they were doing and could scale up companies in important ways that I thought would be helpful in the climate space. But also activists to ground some of those things in what's actually happening in communities.
That was On Deck Climate Tech. Climate Vine is, in some ways, a continuation of the work we did there in the sense that it's really focused on individuals who are climate professionals who are probably in some sort of career transition. It might be that they're working on their company and trying to grow it or get investment. It might be that they're looking to change roles or areas.
It's still got this community, de-siloing, having really raw conversations about climate and going really deep in it. Those are all still core to Climate Vine today.
David Valerio: You mentioned bridging silos a lot. How do you go about doing that, and what have been your key learnings doing this work for almost five years now?
Candice Ammori: At the highest level, it is about resonating with the right people. Not everyone is siloed, actually. Some people totally work across the ecosystem, have all the diverse voices they need. Those are great people, andoften they'll join Climate Vine as well because they're just interested in continuing to grow it out.
The type of person who isn't interested in getting different diverse viewpoints or expanding beyond the network they have right now won't totally resonate with Climate Vine. Step one is just saying, "Hey, this is what we do. This is what we're about. Here are our values." We think about long-term thinking. We think about systems change. We think about how we can actually be helpful to each other. How can you give two times more than you hope to receive?
Step one is really that messaging, but step two is attracting the right people and a big part of that is the application process. Our general acceptance rate has always been about 20%. A lot of that process comes down to, first, experience. We want them to be an expert in something. Once we've hit that level of yes, you're an expert in something, personally I like people who are experts in things that are not super mainstream climate tech. I like the experts in water and experts in biodiversity, because that's not, at least today, core to the climate tech space.
Step three is: are you a giver? Are you open to being in this community and giving back and collaborating? Do you have a really collaborative mindset?
I honestly think 80% of the success of something like Climate Vine or On Deck Climate Tech is really focusing on the expertise of the people that come in, their values, and whether or not they resonate with what we're building and who we are. Then it's about getting the right diversity of people in the group.
When I started On Deck Climate Tech, I was very clear that I only wanted half of the people in each cohort, maximum, to be new to climate. 50% had to have a deep expertise in climate. Then I needed 10% activists, 10% policy, etc. I would go through and search LinkedIn or search MCJ and be like, "Who's a PhD here? Can I reach out to them and tell them more about this?"
I think 80% is getting the right people in the room. It's so rare to have a smallish group of people who are all really engaged, who have such diverse backgrounds, but who are all working on the same thing and all have the same values.
Then I would say the 20% is what do we do from there? We have expert speakers who come in. We've had Jigar Shah, Sarah Carney, Dawn Lippert, and others come and speak to our cohorts. We've had amazing activists come and speak.
We do a lot of community connections. We do these mastermind groups where I try to match people who have slightly different backgrounds but who can help each other move forward. That's another way we bridge the silos.
We also have member-led events, which I think are one of the more important aspects of Climate Vine. Because everyone is an expert and they're all working on really cool things, they can come in and say, "Hey, here's what I'm working on. Here's what I've learned," or "Here's what I'm working on. How can you help?" Usually it's a mix of both.
When you get a small group of people that are really diverse, all working on the same things with the same values, I think there is some sort of magic that can happen that is pretty rare in other spaces. It takes so much intentionality to get that amount of diversity in the same room.
David Valerio: That's an interesting answer. I wouldn't have thought it's 80% filtering and selection for the right people in the first place, and then 20% of the work is all the programming you facilitate after they join. What are the key things you're looking for? How do you judge that in a person through the application process?
Candice Ammori: The day one community that we brought in were really important in shaping the day five community that we have today. I was really intentional about that first group and about who would be in it. I actually remember having conversations with someone who I thought would be a speaker, and I was like, "Hey, do you wanna be a speaker?" And he was like, "No, I actually wanna be a part of this." And I was like, "Great, let's do it." He ended up being an amazing member.
Then I spoke to someone else who I thought would make a great member, and she was like, "No, I should be a speaker." And I was like, "Okay, let's figure this out and bring you into the room." Part of my filtering was for humility. Are you willing to be a member with everyone else and know that everyone is in this together and we're doing this together? It's some of those subtle things that I would watch out for and look for in different members.
I have a very unique perspective on the types of people and the types of work and the types of personalities that mix well with something like Climate Vine, and I can't outsource that. I've tried so many times to just write down on a piece of paper "What are we looking for so that someone else can do it?" We've had great people on the team and they've done great work, but because I've been in climate so long, I can see things that they've done where I'm like, "Oh, that's unique, that's interesting, that points to some depth there and some expertise that someone else might miss."
I don't know if that helps, because it's hard for me to articulate it even though I've tried to do so for so long.
David Valerio: No, I think that it does help. One key thing it sounds like is humility, willingness to give, and being charitable, but then the second part of the answer is even more interesting where it's about tacit knowledge. It's your curation skills. It's the embodied experiences you've had interacting with all these people and seeing what's worked and what hasn't worked that can't really be formally turned into a set of rules that someone else can apply.
Candice Ammori: Good. I'm glad. It's haunted me at times. A lot of this work, I think, I end up having to do, and that makes it in some ways more special. Not because I'm special, but because it's all through one lens and it's all cohesive, and I have a certain vision. If someone else had a different vision, that would work really well for their project.
It haunts me a bit how involved I have to be and how unscalable some of this is, but I think that's actually part of the magic of what we're doing.
David Valerio: It doesn't seem scalable and I think that's a good thing. Obviously from a tech startup mindset, everybody's thinking about exponential growth. But there are plenty of businesses out there that are not scalable in the tech sense but they're still very good businesses bringing value to the world. I find it more interesting that you can't scale it.
Candice Ammori: No, I think it's totally right. This is one of those businesses that loses the magic when it's scaled inappropriately. There are probably some ways to scale it appropriately, but inappropriately it really loses its magic. I come from a community of mostly small businesses, so I think there's something there that makes sense too.
David Valerio: I would love for you to lay out the parallels between how you think about AI and climate that you alluded to earlier.
Candice Ammori: Fundamentally, I think my grand theory is, and I shy away from saying this because it's a pretty big statement that I've felt since probably 2015: Capitalism in its current form will not survive both AI and climate change. It might not have survived either one alone, but the confluence of both of them makes it seem like systems will have to shift because people need to survive.
I sort of pause in saying that because it's such a big statement. Who knows when it will happen, but my sense of it was that things were going to start moving more quickly than is comfortable. We often talk about these things impacting our kids. I just had a sense that once they hit some sort of tipping points, whether it's the technological advances in AI or the very physical tipping points in climate, things would start moving really quickly. That would require changes at a systems level that might be really uncomfortable for everyone.
David Valerio: I like that. I'm a guy who likes big ideas and hot takes. I likewise am noticing some sort of system change and sensed it for a while.
From my own perspective, it seems like we’re just gonna ride this tiger until it dies. The only way out is through. I've come around to hesitant eco-modernist view on the subject, even though I used to be more attracted to degrowth as an option.
Candice Ammori: What does eco-modernist mean?
David Valerio: It's associated with this organization called The Breakthrough Institute. Essentially, they think we need to innovate our way out of resource constraints.
I'm less progress for progress's sake, because what is progress? That's a value question, and plenty of people have different values about what constitutes progress. But I don't see humans or society deciding to stop consuming things anytime soon. If that's true, what does that mean we need to do?
Candice Ammori: I would consider myself to be attempting to bridge the gap myself also. I contain a lot of contradictions. Being Catholic, Iraqi, and queer, that's a contradiction in my community. Being a biostatistician who runs a community. Being very white American, but also having this not super white American experience growing up.
I can get along and agree with both the most radical activists and the most radical technologists. I’m not onboard with Elon Musk’s go to Mars push, as I don’t think that’s going to work. But for the most part, I can really understand both sides of this and empathize. I think there's truth on both sides.
One side, the activist side, says we need degrowth, we need to break apart capitalism. The tech side says we live in capitalism, so let's continue doing it and we need to innovate our way out of this. Both sides are like, things are so bad that we need to move quickly, but they pproach it in different ways. Breaking the system versus working within the system.
Where I've landed, coming from 2008 when I started in environmental science and the professors were pretty clear that we've had the climate science around for decades and no one is doing anything about it... They were really pessimistic. It just got really negative. I was like, "Cool, but what can we do?" Business, policy, engineering, where can we go?
Today, I look at the charts and our progress to date. Even just from 2020 to today, we're using more fossil fuels than ever. We're more entrenched in the systems that climate people are trying to get out of than ever. Trends are not looking good, even in the last four years when climate tech has been everywhere. We've had more climate disasters.
I think I've probably had a similar shift to you, which is that we have to go through, and some breaks are going to occur. Until then, we have to do what we can. Build community, focus on local action. Continue to talk about the big ideas, but understand that we're set up for some tough times.
It feels similar to AI actually. We're not gonna stop building it. We're in a race to keep building it, and maybe there will be a breaking point. Maybe some of that breaking point will be that enough people's jobs have been taken away that they can't support themselves, then the economic paradigm will have to shift.That's how I see those things coming together.
David Valerio: What's your vision for AI going forward? Are you a doomer? What's your P(doom)? Or are you an optimist?
Candice Ammori: I think some of the super doomerism actually plays into tech's hand. Whether or not it's true, it can be helpful as the CEO of OpenAI or any of these AI companies to say, "This is so powerful, they might just destroy us all." So don't pay attention to the fact that there are no laws today on how to use AI. Let's focus on the doomerism.
I think there are compelling arguments that AI might do that. But I also think that climate change is coming for us in a way that might make it impossible for AI, unless we have fusion or something, to get all the energy that it needs.
The core fear is that AI will need so much energy that, in the same way that we have made so many animals extinct or endangered because we just want the land... It's not like we hate these animals and want to kill them all. It's actually just we need all these resources and unfortunately we're taking it from these other animals. A byproduct is that they become endangered or extinct. For the most part, it's not malicious.
In this case, there's an argument that maybe AI will end up doing that because they need so much energy and there are eight billion people that have energy in them. We're like their dinosaur fossil fuel source.
I think that's really interesting. Because I'm so focused on climate change, that's where I land. What I'm trying to parse through is where does AI intersect with climate? We understand the climate impacts of one ChatGPT prompt. Maybe DeepSeek makes that a little less, but it might not. There are all these nuances of actually how much energy and water use it requires. That's obviously one big downside.
Then there's the other big upside of how AI could help us make the grid more resilient, speed through the interconnection queue, and help get a bunch of off-grid microgrids that actually could connect to the grid? Can it help us think through these complex systems that are really hard for one individual to think through, but maybe a bunch of LLMs can?
My take is I'm waiting to see, but I think when it comes to the human side, things are going to change so quickly. They already are changing so quickly. Whether AI is going to kill us all or not, it's still going to dramatically shift our social structures, same with climate change. I don't think either of them will kill us all.
David Valerio: That's basically my view as well. I think of AI as another general-purpose technology that humans have created, similar to agriculture, metallurgy, whatever. But the closest analog to it I think about is the printing press and the newfound ability for humans to transfer the written word to a lot more people.
That was really cool and does tons of great things. I'm glad the printing press exists. I like to read, I like learning. But then you also recognize that after the printing press, there were the wars of religion in Europe, and those were brutal. One might say the printing press allowed the Protestant Reformation to really take off because Luther's ideas and others were able to spread so much faster than they would've in the pre-printing press era.
I think we're in for something analogous to that. The specific shape of it will be different. But I don't think it's predictable a priori. There's this version of "Oh, this thing is smarter than us. If it's so much more brilliant than us, then somehow that leads to everything ending." I've never seen a rigorous argument or clear chain of logic showing how that actually works in the real world.
I think that might be because I grew up in Houston around the energy industry. I see how complicated moving atoms around is and how big that industry is. That's embodied work. You have to have a human driving machinery. That's all stuff that has to be moved around the physical world. I don't see how a smarter LLM magically eliminates all those jobs and kills all those people in the physical world by somehow manifesting itself outside the computer.
I do think it's gonna be super interesting and I personally find the tools really valuable. But I view them as just another tool in humanity's tool belt. We're gonna find interesting use cases for it to address climate and other big issues.
But I don't fundamentally see the position of the human person changing. I think this also comes back to my faith. Catholics have a very high view of the human person as being made in the image and likeness of God. There's something special about us, and part of that specialness is our embodied nature. We're not just disembodied intellects.
All that being said, I think we're on the same page in terms of the humility of recognizing that we don't know what's gonna happen in the future, but it certainly seems like there's gonna be some interesting times ahead.
Candice Ammori: Yeah. Going back to the spirituality thing, something I have tried to lean into a little bit more is to just accept reality. Accepting that things are changing really quickly, and that's just the truth. There's no good or bad to it We can prepare and plan and do those things, but ultimately, we definitely can't predict what is going to happen. There's a place for fighting back, of course, there's a place for activism and changing things, but I think it comes after actually fundamentally understanding and accepting whatever reality we're in, instead of consistently fighting against it.
David Valerio: Absolutely. Or envisioning different realities that aren't the true one and then trying to do stuff based off that mistaken assumption.
Final question as we wrap up: What does a good life look like for you and how will you attempt to live that good life going forward?
Candice Ammori: I spent a lot of my 20s and a little bit of my 30s internationally. It started in undergrad when I would get these scholarships to go abroad, because my parents were pretty traditional and wouldn't easily say yes. But I'd be like, "Well, it was paid for, it was a scholarship," and they'd be like, "Okay, you can go."
This one was to Mexico as part of a class about food and global sovereignty. We went to Mexico and hung out with Zapatistas. There was this guy, Marco, who was their commander that had died He was well known in the Zapatista community for fighting against the government so they could have some sort of sovereignty for their indigenous community.
We hung out, without really realizing it until the end, with his driver. At the end, he said something like, "I know that I'm the next target." We ended this 10-day trip with this guy who we all came to love, recognizing that he might be killed not too long after that. I wish I knew what happened. This was more than a dozen years ago.
One thing that he said that stuck with me was, "We care about the good life, and that's not the better life. A lot of you in America or around the world think about the better life, but we just want the good life. What that means is we have enough and we're happy. We do enough and we play enough. It's about enoughness."
I think about that less often than I wish, but often enough to ground myself in the fact that even though I have this pretty negative view of what's to come... I think I'm pretty grounded in the science, the math, the predictions that scientists have made that have been pretty spot on so far and they just continue to probably be pretty spot on. They're not looking good. I'm grounded in that future vision that, at least in the short term, things will get bad. I'm working on that longer term vision of what do we do when things break down or how do we take advantage of those opportunities.
But in that short to medium term, I don't have the best perspective. What I do try to ground myself in is: I have enough for right now, I'm happy enough. I have great community, great relationships, and a great family. To me that is the good life.
One thing I've dug deeply into over last year is this guy named Michael Singer. He wrote this book called The Surrender Experiment. He essentially decided that he was gonna surrender to the flow of life, this life force. I think that life force is God.
Being able to follow where life leads us, and saying yes to that thing that's in front of us, knowing that it's in front of us for some reason.=We all have such different experiences and life paths. To say yes to what's in front of us. To accept reality and serve the moment as well as we can. Serve the people in front of us as well as we can. Let that just be it. If I could lean more into that, which I try to, then I think I'd be really living the good life.
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