Sarah van Gelder | The Revolution Where You Live - Rebuilding Community in an Isolated World

Autogenerated Transcript

Jesper Conrad: 0:10

Today we're together with Sarah Van Gelder and first of all, sarah, wonderful you could take the time and welcome to our little chat.

Sarah Van Gelder: 0:18

Well, thank you so much for having me.

Cecilie Conrad: 0:21

Very nice to meet you.

Jesper Conrad: 0:22

Yeah, for the people watching then it is wonderful weather in the UK where we currently are, so we are outside in the good weather. I hope there's not too much wind. But, sarah, I mentioned it briefly before we started recording, but we are actually here because I asked Chad GPT, who could be an interesting guest to have a dialogue with about how society has changed in terms of our households getting smaller and smaller and family units getting smaller and smaller, getting smaller and smaller and family units getting smaller and smaller. And you came up as an example of one that could be interesting to talk with, because you have a big yes hat on in many ways, and if we should go into that first, then you have created what was called the yes Magazine. Can you bring us back in history and tell me why did you create something with such a positive name? It is not normal journalism to be positive.

Sarah Van Gelder: 1:26

Yeah, it's a little complicated. So we started back in the 90s and the basic idea of yes Magazine is that the current way that we're living and the ways our societies are structured is not sustainable, and we were looking for what people are doing to create something different. So when we talk about not sustainable, what we mean is, even back then, the evidence of climate change and other ecological issues was very evident. We knew that we couldn't keep up this level of a consumer society and still have a habitable planet. We were also very concerned about inequality and how there are enormous numbers of people who are suffering from both not having enough and from relative inequality, in the sense of feeling powerless compared to other groups in society who seem to have or do have the power. So inequality was a second major concern, and what kind of economic system it is that creates inequality and creates a problematic situation for the environment.

Sarah Van Gelder: 2:29

And the third one was the inner experience of living in a world that, despite using up the world's resources so rapidly, was still not really creating happiness and satisfaction for many, many people. So that doesn't sound very positive. The positive part we were looking for is we figured if this was not working for so many people. There were probably a lot of folks out there thinking about and creating different ways of life, different economic systems, different ways of relating to the environment, and we set about as journalists to discover what they were creating, because we didn't want to sit in our little offices and figure out well, a better world would look like this and that, because who are we to say? But we were interested in who is voting with their hands and voting with their feet to create something different. If we report on that, maybe that can help those experiments be successful and spread and we can learn from one another and create a different kind of world.

Jesper Conrad: 3:30

First of all, thank you. That's a good initiative and I hope and believe it has helped a lot of the projects out there. Before we started the podcast, I looked into some numbers from Denmark and the story or the backstory to this is some years ago. We visited Cecilia's cousin who had a newborn and, as you normally do, you go there, you see them, you see the baby, and on the way down the stairs from the apartment, Cecilia said to me oh man, nobody should have a child alone, Meaning that Mind you, she was not alone.

Cecilie Conrad: 4:09

Her husband and other child was there.

Cecilie Conrad: 4:11

Yeah so they were what we normally consider full family, but this woman is very close to me. She's more like a sister and my impulse really was to stay, just like when my actual blood sister had her baby. She came move in with me and I could help her. I'm much older than her, I'm 12 years older than her and my children are there, so I had experience and our mother, unfortunately, is dead, so I could help her. I'm much older than her, I'm 12 years older than her and my children are there, so I had experience and our mother, unfortunately, is dead, so I could help her out.

Cecilie Conrad: 4:41

And that was such a deep impulse in me. It's not right that I walk out of the door right now. I'm the oldest woman in my family. I'm the one who's supposed to stay. Just stay, just have enough time and with no agenda, like not not just have enough time and space so that they can be around. Their newborn and their older child will have someone else to lean on and no one has to think about the cooking and the cleaning, which is actually a big fat nothing when you don't have small children. But when you do have small children, it's just overwhelming to even just cook a pot of potatoes when you just gave birth. So that was just a really deep feeling of why is she living in that unit? And I'm living in that unit and my sister is in the other unit, because if we were all together, this would be easy and beautiful. So, yeah, and we had a conversation about that. Yeah, and you're still thinking about that conversation.

Jesper Conrad: 5:40

I'm still thinking about it years after. No, because it helped readjust my worldview. To look at, there's something weird going on with our society, but at the same time I don't want to be on the oh, everything is bad. I'm more looking at how can we help change it. And the numbers I looked up before recording with you is that in Denmark, 44% of the households are single-person households. But we also move away from home earlier.

Jesper Conrad: 6:14

There's a tradition that you move out of the house when you are around 18, 19. So of course, there's a group of them that haven't had children. And then I tried to find the numbers from US about how many single parents' households is there. And again, I chatted a little with Cecilia about it before and she said but we shouldn't blame single parents because there's often a reason for living alone with your child if it's a bad relationship or everything. Yes, but how can we make it more normal to live more together? So that was why I invited you on, because I was thinking, with all you have done, of the articles and research, maybe you have some good example or some ideas and just hear your thoughts about it.

Sarah Van Gelder: 7:01

Sure, I thought a lot about those questions too, and one of the inspirations for me it comes right from Denmark, which is the co-housing model. So my family was among the families that started one of the first US co-housing communities, and we were after the very same thing that you're talking about. In fact, I went to my first meeting when I was pregnant with my second child, and so both of my kids were raised in a co-housing community, and now that both of them are adults, they both desperately want to live that way. Still, that co-housing community is still going. I don't live there, but my son is living in a communal household in Seattle. My daughter is saying you know, we need to start a co-housing community because she now has a two and a half year old and she wants her daughter to have that opportunity.

Sarah Van Gelder: 7:47

So yeah, so that's the same kind of idea.

Sarah Van Gelder: 7:49

It's not necessarily an extended family, but it's a neighborhood and it's a place where people take care of each other and the children are safe.

Sarah Van Gelder: 7:57

There's no cars allowed with it except at the very edge of the community, which makes it safe for the kids, as well as the fact that we all know each other. All the adults look out for all the kids there's just a sort of a joy in their everyday life that they run out the door in the morning and they know they'll find people to play with and warm reception. And the parents know that they're going to get support from other adults both elders like myself, who are well past child raising age now but who absolutely adore hanging out with little kids as well as from other parents. So that's co-housing is one part of my experience on that, and the other is that my daughter and I decided we needed to live close to each other when she started a family. So we are half a mile from each other and I take care of her and her husband's two and a half year old every day, just about for a couple hours.

Jesper Conrad: 8:52

So what a gift, what a gift in the world.

Cecilie Conrad: 8:55

It's one of our big, big things. If I can speak a little bit. So we just turned 50, both of us. We have four children, the oldest being 26. And she's had the same boyfriend for now nine years. So it's coming.

Cecilie Conrad: 9:12

She's not pregnant and it's not coming right, it's on the horizon that we will become grandparents, but we're also fully nomadic, so we've been traveling all the time for seven years and it will be a game changer when these children arrive, and I just our daughters is in a quite serious relationship with a guy in England, so we have one in Copenhagen and we're most likely going to have another one in a different location maybe.

Jesper Conrad: 9:44

And with four kids, with four kids who?

Cecilie Conrad: 9:46

grow up on the road.

Jesper Conrad: 9:49

Yeah, it's interesting how that will look.

Jesper Conrad: 9:51

Yeah, I hope some of them will take us out on Europe so we can have some good winters. But it sounds really wonderful with the co-housing and I've seen some of them in Denmark, but there's also a lot of cities with a lot of apartments. Have you on your travels, for example and we should also talk about your book on your travels or in all the things you have written for yes magazine have you met good solutions for people who live in apartments, where it is not so easy maybe to make a co-housing?

Sarah Van Gelder: 11:06

Well, there are apartment buildings that have been converted into co-housing communities, but that does require a commitment to co-housing communities. But that does require a commitment that our culture really reinforces the idea that everybody really wants their privacy. They don't want to be bothered by their neighbors. So we've really reinforced this super individualistic ethos that I think is creating a mental health crisis. And the Surgeon General of the United States has basically said the same thing that loneliness in the United States has become a mental health crisis. And you see that among again, among elderly people who can spend almost their entire lives alone. You see it among parents who desperately need some help. You see it among children who now aren't allowed to play outside. In many cases, their only time with other kids is in very structured settings, in schools or in you know, planned play activities, and they're desperate to be able to hang out with other kids in an unstructured way. And that's so.

Sarah Van Gelder: 12:02

There's so many reasons why that individualistic ethos is really undermining our well-being. I think it works really well for big corporations who would like to have workers who will pick up and leave and go to another place to get a job without thinking about the implications that has. That's just considered a smart career move, but when it results in people living far from their family and far from people that they have grown to know and love, there's real price to that. Know and love there's real price to that. So I think there's a certain amount people can do on their own and their own choices that they make about their own families and their own commitment to communities. But it's also a culture-wide issue that the importance of connections. That's just something that we need to keep coming back to over and over again. If you look at popular culture, for example, all the emphasis is on romantic relationships. Well, that's part of life, but another part of life is all the friendships and intergenerational relationships that are also so meaningful to people.

Cecilie Conrad: 13:06

I have two questions how did we get here? And another thing is what can we do about it If we're not moving in? So let's say we're not. It's radical to move or to become nomadic, or you know, if you're anywhere, you are. What can we do about?

Sarah Van Gelder: 13:24

it. So intentional communities doesn't necessarily have to be a community that is built like a co-housing community, that is built to be a community. An existing town or city or neighborhood can become an intentional community if people choose to do things like have potlucks, like have block parties, like have mutual aid networks, tool libraries where people share tools. There's so many very simple ways that people can create those kinds of connections where they live. I personally think it's really difficult to create as a nomad, but you know more about that than I do. What I found is that it takes time to build trust and for people to get to know you and know who you are, and for you to feel seen and to feel understood and to build those community infrastructures that can help keep people linked together. It means overcoming that kind of reticence because again in our culture we keep reinforcing how important privacy is, but also we have a lot of media that creates a sense of there being a mean and scary world out there that if we reach out to people, if we let our kids play outside, they're going to be kidnapped. If we reach out to people, they're going to turn out to be, you know, violent and scary. We reach out to people, they're going to turn out to be, you know, violent and scary. And when people actually reach out to each other, they often find the opposite is true that there's actually an emphasis in the media on all that scary stuff because that sells advertising. It sells, gets people to pay attention, it provokes that sense of fear that makes people really watch longer. But in reality that's not really what most of our world is like, and when people have a chance to actually meet each other in person, they often discover that. So that's a lot of it.

Sarah Van Gelder: 15:25

And Rebecca Solnit wrote an excellent book called Paradise Built in Hell At least I believe that's the name of it. But she basically looked at the question of what happens when there's a natural disaster and people come together to help each other out, and almost inevitably it's not what the media says, which is that everybody's out. You know, looting and bashing in windows. It's the opposite. Everybody's looking for ways to help each other and they're filling sandbags to keep the floods out, they're getting food, they're giving away their time, they're giving away resources to each other, and many of them describe it as the most meaningful experience of their lives.

Sarah Van Gelder: 16:00

It's just a joy that comes with being able to connect with a lot of other people around a very clear common purpose. That kind of joy is perhaps easier to evoke during a natural disaster, when the urgency is very clear, but its potential is there all the time. To do things like that, to be involved with one another. It means again taking that risk of stepping outside your comfort zone to get to know people that are different than you and that you may or may not agree with on all sorts of topics you may or may not resonate with. But what I found in co-housing is sometimes the people who I thought I wouldn't have very much in common from. I would learn so much from my relationship with them and it became such an enriching part of my life.

Cecilie Conrad: 16:46

That resonates so deep. We do a lot of co-living, but not on a permanent basis because we're nomadic. But we go and live with people, sometimes in bigger groups, sometimes in smaller groups, for up to six weeks, something like that, and sometimes I drive away from an experience like that. I remember the castle in France. Thinking about it when I left, it was really surprising which of the women I had spent the most time with. Had you asked me on day one, when I had just briefly said hello and had a first impression and knew who they were, I would not have said that one's going to be my new best friend, that one is going to visit on the other side of the planet, that one will have my full trust in two weeks.

Cecilie Conrad: 17:30

It's so funny how we actually don't know, we actually don't know. It's very interesting and I also think about, so I agree that the negative stories they sell and they keep people glued to maybe the screen or the media. But I've also put another thought into why are these stories so frequent? Why do we keep hearing these negative stories and I actually just wrote a longer thing on the blog called Beware of the Big Bad Stories because they kind of penetrate our concepts of reality, yet they are not real. Reality is that we do spontaneously help each other in an emergency situation. Reality is that people are innately good and want to help and want to have community. So why are we so interested in it when there is this rare lunatic, this egotistical, maybe narcissistic behavior going on, or the crimes?

Cecilie Conrad: 18:32

And I think actually there's a deep. It puzzles us because it's wrong. It puzzles us to understand it, because we can't understand. It's not hard to understand A little boy. He falls over on his bike, his knee is open, he's bleeding, he's crying. His mom is maybe not right next to him. Everybody's running there, an elderly tripping in the street, you see it. Cars stop, people run over, try to help the person get up, call the 911 if that's necessary. You see all that help happening spontaneously. People are not obsessed with themselves. People will happily stop what they're doing if someone needs them. It happens all the time because that's who we are as humanity. So maybe part of this crime and riots and all the negative stories, part of the reason we keep looking at them and read books about them, all the crime novels and stuff, maybe it's because it's really hard for us to understand.

Sarah Van Gelder: 20:16

Yeah, that makes sense. I hadn't thought about that before, but I think that's quite likely.

Cecilie Conrad: 20:19

I just had that on my run two days ago. It's like I think that's quite likely. I just had that on my run two days ago.

Jesper Conrad: 20:26

It's like, hmm, maybe there's something there, yeah, because we keep returning to it. I have friends on the. If you have like this picture of where you are on the conspiritual line, c line, then I have people who are like way off the spectrum, yeah, yeah, c line. Then I have people who are like way off the spectrum, yeah, and they would say it's all orchestrated and they want us to just consume and sit alone and I'm not there. But it puzzles me that we actually like to there and not daring to go out and meet people Every time. I myself have broken that barrier of meeting a stranger. How can it be? I have had wonderful experiences.

Sarah Van Gelder: 21:12

I think the inequality is also part of that. There's a really wonderful book called the Spirit Level that shows how much inequality permeates every aspect of society. And you know, there's a certain amount of people who feel shame because they're not living the kind of lifestyle that they believe everybody else is living but few people actually, yeah. So I think there are many forces at work that I don't believe anybody's out there planning it to be that way. I think that too much of our economy is just founded around profit and greed and that has all these ripple effects. I don't think it's a plan. It takes a bit of conscious effort to choose to do something else against that dominant culture.

Cecilie Conrad: 21:59

Yeah, and I think one part of that effort really is to be aware of the stories. What stories do we tell, what stories do we read, what stories do we repeat, what stories do we dive into and what stories do we believe to be true?

Jesper Conrad: 22:13

Yeah, but bad news travel fast and everyone loves a good negative gossip story for some reason.

Cecilie Conrad: 22:20

Everyone loves a love story.

Jesper Conrad: 22:22

Yeah, I would like to talk about your book. Can we go into how that came to be? Sure, I start with the title, because it's so long that I tried to remember it for the podcast and I was like no, I give up.

Sarah Van Gelder: 22:36

Title is the Revolution when you Live and the subtitle is Stories from a 12,000 Mile Journey Through a New America. So I've been at YES for I don't know 15, 16 years, maybe longer, and was still feeling like all of these solutions we were talking about, they existed in small numbers, but I didn't feel like most of them had the momentum to become the new mainstream culture and you know there are a lot of forces that were getting more troubling. This was the mid around 2016. Just get out of my office and go learn from people, especially in the parts of the country that I hadn't been to before. So I live on the West Coast, I live near Seattle Washington and I've spent most of my life in the Northwest, and I come from the East Coast, from upstate New York, so I'm sort of familiar with the coast, but not so much with the interior. So I decided to get a pickup truck and camper so I could go to the places that are harder to get to. So I ended up going to five different Indian reservations.

Sarah Van Gelder: 23:52

I spent a lot of time in the Rust Belt, what they call a good chunk of the Midwest, where big factories have closed down and moved overseas and communities have been left impoverished. I spent time in Appalachia where the coal industry had kept people in basic jobs that provided a standard of living, but of course many of them were also very sick from black lung disease and so on. But the coal industry having having shut down had left a lot of people in a lot of these communities very impoverished, and spent some time in the South and the Southwest. So these were all areas that I hadn't spent a lot of time in before. I'd been to in many cases and what I found was that the level of impoverishment and hopelessness was much greater than I thought. In places like the Midwest, the communities or even the neighborhoods where there seemed to be prosperity seemed to be the ones that either had a hospital or a university, but as far as other forms of economics it was pretty bleak.

Sarah Van Gelder: 25:04

Where I went I found people were also working on creating solutions and some of the solutions were quite inspiring. They still were mainly at the smaller scale, but one example is a factory in Chicago where the owner planned to shut it down and move production abroad and the workers were able to form a cooperative and take it over. It took some doing, it took the involvement of the labor union to support them. It took the occupation of the factory for some time, but in the end they were able to buy the factory. Now they're running it as a cooperative.

Sarah Van Gelder: 25:34

They're successful, and these are people who otherwise would have been paid minimum wage or a little bit more, but never had any power, never had any say over how the workplace runs. And now they're the bosses and they realized they could actually run the place. They knew what they needed in order to do that. Yes, maybe sometimes they needed a little consulting help, but basically they could do it, and it was so beautiful to see their empowerment, to see how they felt.

Sarah Van Gelder: 26:03

You know what it meant to be owners and what it meant to be managers together, rather than being told all the time oh you couldn't possibly do this. And of course, there's the prosperity that goes with it, because now they know that they have the ownership stake, which means that they're going to be the ones that make the profits. So that's just one example. I could tell you all sorts of examples, but my main three things that I was looking for were people who are creating a different kind of more just economy, people who are working on environmental solutions and people who are looking for solutions to the country's long legacy of racism and found great stories in all cases.

Jesper Conrad: 26:56

We have four children One is 13, another soon 17, one is 19, and one is 26. The three youngest have never been to school and they have, very early on, the two in the middle ended into being taken care of at home by my wife, and the youngest one have never been to any daycare or anything. And now here, 15 years down the road, one of the things I've started to ponder is if the breaking up of the family, the separation in the family, is part of causing the future loneliness. And I'm not clear on these things yet.

Jesper Conrad: 27:31

But when I look back to my own childhood, then around 71 in Denmark I'm from 74, so a little earlier it was around 5% only that was in nursery or in daycare up to three years old In Denmark. Now it's 95%, which made me question what does this do with people's feeling of community if they have been separated from their cause so early on? So part of me is considering and at the same time not trying to say to everybody you just need to have your children at home, then the world would be a better place. But there's also this dialogue inside me going on where I think that we send our children away too early for them to have a good, stable connection to their family, and I think it's from that that they grow into being strong members of a community. I'm not done thinking about it, but I would like to hear your thoughts about it.

Sarah Van Gelder: 28:35

Sure. So my overall feeling is that different families are very different and it's very hard to make one statement about how every family should function, but what I do believe is that families need to have enough support so that they can make decisions freely, because I believe in most cases, parents will do the absolute best thing they can for their children, and when you see parents sending their kids to daycare too early, often it is because that is the only way they can make a living.

Jesper Conrad: 29:07

Yeah.

Sarah Van Gelder: 29:08

There's just no choice. And now in the US, with the policy of the Trump administration, they're putting even more pressure on families. They're saying you can't get medical assistance if you're not working or if you're not in school instance if you're not working or if you're not in school.

Sarah Van Gelder: 29:25

Why so? That means that the choices that were already limited for families that are middle class and poor are even more limited than they were before. So my feeling is that if families get to decide because they have enough security, that means both economic security but also means social security. I mean in the sense that they know that there are other people that will look out for their kids in the neighborhood, for example, that the kids can run out the door and they'll be safe, that there are social opportunities for kids, because a lot of families only have that opportunity for their children when they're in daycare. The spontaneous ones are just not anymore available. So my own sense is that if we have enough support.

Sarah Van Gelder: 30:13

Another example is that, because the US is cutting Medicaid funding drastically, a lot of rural hospitals are going to start shutting down. It's going to mean that a lot of people do not have a safe way to have a child, because if they do, and even if they want to have their child at home, they need a hospital as backup in case things don't go well. But those hospitals will be so far away that there will not be a safe way to do that. So there's just one way after another that families under this tremendous pressure, and if you want people to feel the safety and the comfort and the support they need to have children, which is the most vulnerable time of your life, I believe, then the whole culture, the whole community has to be there to help make that happen.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:02

But in a way, I mean I totally agree that there's a lot of extreme pressure from inequality, poverty and now these governmental pressures of taking away basic shared right If you choose to do things with family rather than depend on institutions provided by the community. Of course it's true. But then, on the other hand, if we compare to Scandinavia, where we come from, one of the safest places, probably maybe is the safest countries on the planet, with the most welfare and healthcare, and you know, know, it's free for everyone it's available daycare is almost free, very, very cheap.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:52

Everyone has the right to the health everyone can have what's that called like. If you don't make money, the state will give you some Social security.

Cecilie Conrad: 32:01

Social security. Yeah, we all have that and I think in our country it's very equal between the genders and I think there's a lot going on in that. And people are rich. People are wealthy. Maybe some of them don't know that they are, but really they are and they think they need two incomes. But they also think they need to live in big houses and have a new wardrobe twice a year and have two cars and all the things you know.

Cecilie Conrad: 32:32

And so we've created a reality where it looks like you need two incomes, where it looks like you have no choice, where it looks like it would be so hard to do it from home. And we've also created a reality where we somehow and I'm no historian, I don't really know how it happened but the community of the neighborhood they're looking out for each other is kind of gone. So if I want my children to not be in a daycare, I'm looking after them every day of the week, every hour of the day. There's no neighbor, no grandma, no church, no, nothing. To just give me an hour here or there to do the groceries or the laundry or whatever I need to do sleep maybe. So it has become a very lonely choice and it's also become a choice in the context of the idea of equality. I mean, we had that when I wanted to look after our children at home. You were against it.

Jesper Conrad: 33:34

Yes, you just go to work, make some money you need to have a career, you will not be a fulfilled human being.

Cecilie Conrad: 33:39

You have a good education. You'll be sad. You can't be happy if you don't.

Jesper Conrad: 33:43

That was the story. I know it's a long time ago and you were just repeating the cultural stories, but they are out there.

Cecilie Conrad: 33:49

So even in a country where you have all that, you don't have financial pressure or the laws pushing you in any way or you could actually do it. Most people don't 95% of the children in daycare when they're nine months old, which is sad.

Sarah Van Gelder: 34:08

When they're nine months old. That is young.

Cecilie Conrad: 34:10

Yes.

Sarah Van Gelder: 34:11

Well, I think that isolation you're talking about is probably part of it, right? I mean, I think it is overwhelming to be alone with a small child, day after day, hour after hour.

Cecilie Conrad: 34:22

Well, especially because you've seen no one do it. You know you didn't grow up with a neighbor who was having one on the hip and one in the tummy and one by the hand and look happy. You've never seen it. It's not part of reality. You've never looked after someone else's kids for a while. You've not sat in the park and realized, oh, that mom has to run after that child. So I'm looking after that child and whatever. All those situations don't arise because they don't happen, because all the kids are in these boxes and we all keep ourselves in the boxes of not being a community for each other.

Jesper Conrad: 35:01

So I'm asking myself what should we do? What of this? Start a revolution. Start a revolution. Write about it as in yes Magazine.

Sarah Van Gelder: 35:24

Start a revolution, write about it, as in yes Magazine, about yes Magazine, you things.

Sarah Van Gelder: 35:29

But it did close and part of what the board and staff arranged was for the archive to stay alive. So another organization, another nonprofit called truthoutorg, has agreed to take on that task of making sure the archive remains available because a lot of people still use it as a search, a place to search for solutions. So that's very helpful. And they're also planning a newsletter where they will produce new content that has a yes focus and send it out to people who are interested in doing that. Their content generally is more sort of traditionally a critique of what's going on and reporting on it and less about the solution. So they're working on sort of integrating that within their organization via that newsletter. So I'm working on an article right now for them which is not particularly yes-ing but it's something I've become very interested in how artificial intelligence is going to be affecting our lives and our society. So I'm writing an article on that topic right now for them and I'm hoping that I'll get to work with them somewhat on their new emphasis on Yessi content as well.

Jesper Conrad: 36:53

One fun thing about AI, which is it's actually the reason we're talking because I asked Chad Gibbett this question and it led us to you. I have decided to be very positive around the future. Of course, the fire inside of you as a person can be stronger if you're against something, but you end up burning out quite fast where I believe if you stand for something and have a strategy and a mission in your life, you will work for it longer and harder. And with AI, I personally use this chat activity every day in my work as a tool to research, work with words, figure stuff out. I love it and it had made me think that we as people, actually, because of AI, will try to find each other more as people, because it is so easy, it is so fake, but it really lacked the personal connection, and maybe it's just me, I don't know but I believe that we will see more people try to gather together and create happenings and events, because the need for connection feels stronger somehow relationships with chatbots.

Sarah Van Gelder: 38:13

Wow, yeah, and I also just talked to enough friends who have turned to conversations with chatbots to meet their personal needs in a way that a few years ago we would have turned to another human being. So I'm actually really worried that, between the romantic relationships and these sort of professional consulting or friendships with chatbots, that we will do that instead of the. Sometimes, again, it feels more risky to talk to an actual person. It means you have to be vulnerable. Of course, it's a little bit risky to be putting your personal information into the chatbot as well, because we don't know how they're going to be using data now or in the future. But it feels emotionally, it feels more risky to talk to another human being. But I think it could really make the loneliness crisis even more pronounced if that becomes the way that things go.

Sarah Van Gelder: 39:08

And just one other part about the risk is that I've had a number of experiences. I've used a number of chatbots as well, and I've had a number of experiences where I asked a question. It gave me a very confident answer and it turned out to be completely incorrect. So that means that you have to. You know, if it's something that you're concerned about, you have to take it with a grain of salt. If it's something you're concerned about, you have to. You know, if it's something that you're concerned about, you have to take it with a grain of salt. If it's something you're concerned about, you have to absolutely fact check it and its ability to create context or nuance or meaning.

Sarah Van Gelder: 39:40

It often chooses responses that are the most popular online not necessarily the truest, necessarily the truest and there are forces out there that are making use of that as far as spreading disinformation to manipulate the chatbots into believing things are different than they actually are, just by using multiple domains and repeating them often enough. So, anyway, I think it's a fascinating time and I had a conversation with Claude that made me believe that it was self-aware and sentient, which completely blew my mind. So I'm not saying there is no really kind of amazing, awe-inspiring parts of that, since I just think we have to really go into this with our eyes wide open.

Cecilie Conrad: 40:29

I've been thinking maybe there's a tipping point going on. The internet has been quite problematic for a long time, let's face it, and now we're calling it ai. And I mean the process of arriving where we are now is. It's a process now we call it ai but finding information? I have a classic education from a university, back when you read books and articles you know from peer-reviewed research studies. Order a physical copy of an American study and it will come in the mail and I'd have to pay for the stamp and I'd get this you know grain thing from someone's fax machine or whatever and I'd read it Somehow. The peer reviewed that. I know who the sender is, I know what university this comes from or what newspaper or what magazine and it has some sort of you know the source and I know the source is behind the source.

Cecilie Conrad: 41:36

The internet has become an easy, quick fix to find information on things, but information that are somewhat airy, somewhat not coherent, some short format of all kinds of things, and I find it very confusing. I've found it increasingly confusing. It's many years since I was educated. Maybe 25 years ago I graduated from the University of Copenhagen, so yeah, that's half of my life I've been out from that and the internet has been coming bigger and bigger in those years. And now we have it with AI and people look things up with AI and I already felt when I read something on the internet, that I have to check.

Cecilie Conrad: 42:17

So who wrote this? When did they write it? What are the sources? Is it peer reviewed or is it just someone's random opinion? What's the angle? What's the agenda? And that was hard enough to find solid information, and now I cannot even do that. Let's say it is an information the chatbot has found somewhere on the internet, so I have no way of knowing where it found it. I have no way of validating it. It's completely confusing. And what I'm getting at is, if we use our brains a little bit and most of us can still do that there's a tipping point. Now it's just all hot air. So we have to go back to the reality of primary and secondary sources, of peer-reviewed stuff, of checking, fact checking, things being a little more thorough read books, talk to real people and maybe we're back to actual gatherings actual, I lack a word in english for listening lectures lectures that actual universities, someone with a hat he has the hat because he did study for 30 years, you know it's not just a random hat.

Cecilie Conrad: 43:33

So maybe these extremes that go really the wrong way will push us in the right ways, back to something solid solid. Yes, thank you, that was the word.

Sarah Van Gelder: 43:47

I hope so, and I also feel I mean, I was just going to say I think the notion of actual experience in the real world, in the natural world, in the human world, in the cultural world, those are really important it does create this sense of unreality where one theory can seem as true as another.

Sarah Van Gelder: 44:04

There's no experience of our own to back it up. And in terms of just the question of the factual quality of AI responses, if it's something I'm at all concerned about, I check the sources and one of the problems is a lot of people are saying well, now you can find out everything from this incredible intelligence. You don't need any actual journalism, you don't need any actual scientific research. But it's like no, that is the place, as you said, where we actually have people who investigate and find out factually what's going on, and then AI, ideally, is drawing on that. Unfortunately, it's just as likely to draw on a conversation on Reddit with people just spewing their opinions as it is to draw on something that's been really vetted, and that is one of the hazards. But I hope you're right. I hope that people turn away from spending so much time in front of a screen and start spending more time with each other.

Cecilie Conrad: 45:13

There's a lot of talk about it. I feel, and I also feel there's a lot of draw towards in real life things, real life gathering, real life walks, you know, real life meeting people, the online maybe we just also got enough of it during that whole COVID story. People want something, they want connections, and I think we somewhat have it on this Zoom call right now that we meet people, even though there's a computer involved. I'm not saying the computer in and of itself is the devil. I'm just saying we really have to roll back to realizing this is a tool and we choose how to use it and what it's good for, and for some things it's actually not good enough. It's not working. It's working against us, not for us. It's working. It's rolling over us rather than us being.

Cecilie Conrad: 46:08

I want to talk to this lady that this will be an interesting conversation and she happens to be very far away. So if I want that conversation I'll use a Zoom call, but I see how the value of real stuff is coming. I hope. I hope. Maybe I'm just in an echo chamber, yeah maybe we are in a big echo chamber.

Jesper Conrad: 46:29

This talk reminded me again of one of the favorite quotes from an earlier episode we had with a young English dad called Jack Stewart who had tried to turn off the internet. And what he said.

Cecilie Conrad: 46:43

Right, he succeeded for several years. Yeah, and he's still doing it, still doing it.

Jesper Conrad: 46:47

But what he said that he found out when he turned it off was that and I will see if I can get the words right the internet was like a social appetite suppressant for him Not social media, but social appetite suppressant. He found out when he turned it off that just listening to a podcast and I'm at the same time saying don't listen to a podcast, no, just listening to a podcast, watching a video online, made him less feeling alone, made him less wanting to go out and meet people. So when he turned it off, he actually went out, started knocking on his neighbor's doors and said hey, you want to come out to play? I don't know what to do right now. I'm just sitting alone at home and he reads big books, but there is a limit to how many big books you can read.

Cecilie Conrad: 47:40

But it feeds another need.

Jesper Conrad: 47:42

Yeah, the dialogue and the talk about the book. So for people, sarah, who wants to know where to find your writings today, you are on Substack now, and what is the name of your Substack?

Sarah Van Gelder: 47:58

It's called how we Rise.

Jesper Conrad: 48:02

And what do you write about there? How we rise as people or communities. What does the title cover?

Sarah Van Gelder: 48:11

It was really inspired by the election of Donald Trump and the question of how we're, in this new context that we're in in the United States, how we can rise anyway.

Sarah Van Gelder: 48:24

So that was where it started out.

Sarah Van Gelder: 48:26

And then, after I'd been doing that, I had just retired in January.

Sarah Van Gelder: 48:29

So before that I really wasn't free to do my own writing because I was working for a Native American tribe and I didn't want anything I wrote to be confused with their perspectives on things. So I just started in January and once I started on that topic, I also found that a lot of other people were doing really good coverage on that topic, that a lot of other people were doing really good coverage on that topic. So I've been doing a little of this and a little of that, but I think where I'm going to be focusing next is really on these questions around how artificial intelligence is going to be affecting our lives and how we can make good use of it and not allow it to just define our culture, especially not allowing the tech bros, who have, in many ways, very little concern for the environmental consequences and the social consequences and emotional consequences not allow them to just define what happens next, but realize that we, the people, really do have some power to decide what we want Perfect, wonderful.

Jesper Conrad: 49:28

Thank you. It is time to say goodbye, so I will say thanks a lot for you giving your time with us. It has been a good and inspiring talk and I have lots to ponder about.

Sarah Van Gelder: 49:40

Thank you so much for having me.