Conversations For Transformation: Essays Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

Conversations For Transformation

Essays By Laurence Platt

Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

And More

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World Records

Cowboy Cottage, East Napa, California, USA

July 7, 2023

This essay, World Records, is the companion piece to

in that order.

It is also the sequel to Recordbreaker.

I am indebted to Reyhan Mehta who inspired this conversation.

Fulfilling a promise I made to Werner in the kitchen of his home, the Franklin House in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco at 2:00am one morning in 1979 over a late night snack of celery spears and cream cheese, I went to South Africa and over the course of a year led the first series of ten guest events around the country in all the major cities, which caused the first thousand enrollments in South Africa, inexorably starting Werner's work there.

What I did in 1979 was lay down track for Werner's work to be offered in South Africa. The way I managed registrations was I invited people to sign their commitment to participate in Werner's work when it became available South Africa, in a spiral-bound notebook which I carried around with me wherever I went. At that time the center offering Werner's work closest to South Africa was located in London England. It was a six thousand mile journey to get there. I wondered: will people get Francis Bacon's adage which says "If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the the mountain."?

And indeed they did. Some of them, inspired, were unwilling to wait for Werner's work to come to South Africa. And they certainly weren't willing to wait for the apartheid regime to be dismantled which would open the door for Werner's work to be available South Africa (you can easily imagine: delivering racially segregated versions of Werner's work in South Africa was out of the question, a non-starter). So they opted to travel to London immediately instead and to participate in Werner's work there. One of them, a guy named Craig Houseman, sent me a postcard from London after he graduated. On it he wrote simply:

Laurence,

I did it.
I got nothing out of it.
It was worth every penny.
Thank You!

Craig

Laurence Platt
2 Kabbelende Waters
89 Kildare Road
Newlands 7700
Cape Town
South Africa

As far as I knew at that time, six thousand miles was the longest distance anyone had traveled anywhere on the planet specifically to participate in Werner's work. It represented a feat of enrollment. At that time, it was a world record. And that world record stood until it was eclipsed thirty four years later. What happened thirty four years later was similar to what had happened in South Africa thirty four years earlier ... except this time it happened in the Fiji islands.

A team on which it was my privilege and good fortune to play, was committed to bringing Werner's work to the Fiji islands in the South Pacific ocean. And again, some inspired people who got its possibility early were unwilling to wait for Werner's work to be offered in Fiji, and so in 2013 they traveled to (get this) Boston Massachusetts on the north east coast of the United States, a distance of eight thousand miles which at that time as far as I knew, broke the erstwhile world record of six thousand miles as the longest distance anyone had traveled anywhere on the planet specifically to participate in Werner's work.

And then ... I was invited by a friend to participate in a seminar in Mumbai India, one of a series of graduate seminars delivering Werner's work around the world. Colleagues of mine had traveled from the San Francisco Bay Area to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates in 2016 to be in one of Werner's courses there: the Leadership Course. That's also a staggering distance of eight thousand miles - it's huge but not a recordbreaker. The distance from my home in northern California's Napa Valley, the "wine country" where I live, to Mumbai India on the other hand is eight thousand five hundred miles. It's the new world record.

But wait! The seminar in Mumbai India in which I'm participating from Napa Valley, California is being delivered online via Zoom, and thus no actual travel is required. So the question I ask myself now is: is Werner's work delivered via Zoom, some digitized form of Werner's work yet somehow not the real thing?

And I've realized it isn't that. The so-called "digitized form" of Werner's work is Werner's work. That tells me that the new world record set in 2023 of eight thousand five hundred miles for the longest distance traveled to participate in Werner's work, as far as I know, stands. And consider this: yes it takes a shift in perspective to see that the digitized form of Werner's work is Werner's work. But look: isn't that what Werner's work is all about? a shift in perspective?

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