I thought this conversation was going to be about meetings. And it was. But it turned out to be about something much larger: a fundamental redesign of power in organizations.

Sheella Mierson, PhD is a scientist-turned-organizational-consultant whose whole practice is built on a simple, subversive premise: meetings are a window into culture, and if you can fix the meeting, you can fix the culture. Henry Herschel brings a complementary lens — a business background helping packaged goods startups navigate the journey from entrepreneurial chaos to IPO — now applied to the fascinating challenge of governing a Jewish co-housing community in Berkeley called Berkeley Moshav.

And I came to this with skin in the game. I spent nine years in co-housing myself, in a 22-household community in Durham, North Carolina. So I know firsthand how quickly idealistic visions of communal living can devolve into parking disputes, pet policy standoffs, and festering factions. What Sheella and Henry are describing — the governance framework called Sociocracy — is the most elegant answer I've encountered to the question of how groups of passionate, opinionated people (and let's be honest, co-housing and startups both attract people with very strong opinions) can make real decisions together without anyone losing their mind or their dignity.

Sociocracy was developed by Gerard Endenburg, a Dutch electrical engineer who looked at a traditional organizational chart and said: I would never design a power system this way. There's no feedback loop. You can't steer it. What he built instead is a system of distributed decision-making, structured rounds, consent (not consensus), and built-in review cycles that treat every policy as an experiment rather than a decree.

After this conversation, I've been thinking about what a Sociocratic world might look like. The question that keeps haunting me: what could Google or Meta or Microsoft contribute and stand for if all their talented, idealistic people had a real say in what they built?

1. "Show me a meeting and I'll tell you what your culture is like" — why fixing meetings is a route into fixing everything
2. The difference between meetings that drain and meetings that build

1. Gerard Endenburg's insight: a traditional org chart has no feedback loop, so it can't self-correct
2. How distributed decision-making gives everyone a say in the policies that affect their work
3. Why Endenburg built the system to run his own electrical contracting company — and what that has to do with power grids

1. Why Sociocracy doesn't seek agreement — it seeks the absence of paramount objections
2. "Is this good enough to try?" as a more useful question than "Does everyone love this?"
3. How consent decision-making short-circuits faction formation

1. Clarifying questions round → Reaction round → Consent round
2. Why having a proposal that's well-thought-out before the meeting matters enormously

Ohio therapist, EMDR trainer, and consultant Tom Zimmerman is doing something I find genuinely thrilling: taking one of the most promising trauma treatment approaches in recent memory — the Flash technique — and grounding it in a rigorous neuroscience framework called predictive processing.

The result is a model of healing that is both deeply humane and almost startlingly elegant. What if you could help someone process a traumatic memory by barely touching it? What if the brain's prediction machinery — the same system that keeps trauma locked in place — could be gently tricked into releasing it, a micro-slice at a time?

Tom connects Flash to Bruce Ecker's work on memory reconsolidation (which long-time Plant Yourself listeners will recognize, and if that's not you, check out the link to my interview with Bruce below), to the neuroscience of rumination, and to the possibility that modern trauma therapies may be rediscovering what ancient communal healing rituals always knew. And he's building a Cleveland-based nonprofit to study all of this formally.

This conversation left me buzzing. I hope it does the same for you.

1. Why "eye movements" is a misleading shorthand — the real mechanism is present-based bilateral stimulation
2. EMDR's "admission cost": why some clients can't tolerate slowing down long enough for it to work

1. How Flash "micro-activates" tiny slices of a traumatic memory — just enough to tag it, not enough to overwhelm
2. Why immediately pivoting to something pleasant (yes, puppy videos) is the therapeutic mechanism, not a distraction
3. The crucial difference between Flash and ordinary scrolling: one is structured processing, the other is escapism

1. How trauma functions as a very loud, very sticky prediction: danger is real, I am not safe
2. Why precision weighting makes it so hard to stay present long enough for disconfirming experiences to land
3. How Flash creates the "juxtaposition" Bruce Ecker identifies as the key to memory reconsolidation — in micro-doses

1. How internally replayed experiences register as new confirming data — reinforcing trauma rather than processing it
2. The feedback loop that keeps people from getting the sensory mismatch needed for change

1. Why a single powerful disconfirmation often can't unlock a schema built from tens of thousands of hours of adverse learning
2. How Flash targets small representative memories and relies on generalization to update related networks
3. When you'd reach for one approach vs. the other

1. Why the...

Today’s conversation explores one of the most urgent questions of our time: What would our world look like if our economic system prioritized human and ecological wellbeing instead of endless growth?

I’m joined by Omer Tayyab, researcher and collaborator with economist and author Jason Hickel (Less Is More). Omer works at the intersection of economic theory, political ecology, and democratic reform — with a special focus on degrowth, post-growth futures, and how societies can thrive within planetary boundaries.

We met at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where he’s currently based, and this episode turned into an expansive, energizing exploration of how we might redesign the systems that shape our daily lives — from work and wealth to democracy, technology, and community resilience.

If you're curious about how to build a world that actually works for people and planet, this one’s for you.

We cover:

• Why “degrowth” is not austerity or “living with less”—but a pathway toward more wellbeing, more leisure, more connection, and more equity.
• How our current growth-driven system is structurally incompatible with ecological stability.

• The key insights from Jason Hickel’s book and why it resonated so deeply.
• How capitalism’s central goal—maximizing profit rather than wellbeing—creates ecological overshoot and social harm.

• Why the modern economy forces us to produce things nobody needs, simply to keep money circulating.
• Alternatives that emphasize public services, care work, and meaningful contribution.

• How the pandemic revealed the brittleness of global supply chains.
• The risk of collective amnesia now that we’re “moving on” without actually solving the underlying vulnerabilities.

• Why many democracies behave like competitive reality shows—pitting groups against each other for votes.
• How democratic structures might be redesigned to emphasize deliberation, cooperation, and long-term thinking.

• Why efficiency alone cannot solve ecological collapse (“Jevons paradox”).
• Where technology does help—and where it simply accelerates throughput.

• Why a degrowth society is not about deprivation, but about liberation from unnecessary work, debt, and consumption.
• How communities across the world are piloting post-growth models right now.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, by Jason Hickel

The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, by Jason Hickel

Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella Meadows

Omer's LinkedIn Profile

Omer on Twitter

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