Who are the innovators?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, how are you, my friend?

Chris As always. So it's my fault. Everyone who's like, when is the next episode of the Atlas Project coming out? Why hasn't it come out yet? I take full responsibility.

Scott No, no, no, no.

Chris No, give me the blame.

Scott I'm Canadian. Let me apologize. There's a great English clergyman, John Stott, who I think he was one of the Queen's chaplains at one point. And he's just giant of this British, Anglican evangelical tradition. And I actually knew a guy. He was a legendary guy, a sweet guy. What's his name? I knew a guy that worked as his assistant and called him Uncle John. Uncle John. What was his name again? John Stott. John Stott. He was kind of like a Billy Graham finger in England. He was just huge. But my friend Corey, who was his personal assistant for a couple of years, said that Uncle John would always tell him, no false guilt, no FG, no false guilt. So no FG, Chris, no FG, no false guilt. It's no one's fault. We're kind of pressing on together.

Chris I agree 100%. I don't like false guilt. For me, it's all about true guilt. It's the search for true guilt. Exactly. That's my mission.

Scott Exactly. No false guilt. No FG. No FG. I like that. No FG. So here we go. We're back more into the breach. I am, quite admittedly, a little tired. I schlepped across Manhattan to meet with some friends who just got married. It was second marriages for them both, and they're just this delightful, happy couple. And he actually... I do a podcast with the groom and I slept around and I just, it was hot, you know, and you have a couple of drinks and you walk back and you're dehydrated. It's like humid and hot. And I was just like, I felt like Lawrence of Arabia walking through the desert, except not that dramatic. Where are my Bedouin companions?

Chris Such a great movie. You know, it's interesting. You talk about a second marriage and they're both really happy. And I know this isn't all marriages, but given the rates of divorce, I wonder if it would be a gross simplification, but if a lot of people would nonetheless find it true for them that your first marriage you marry for society. Yeah. And the second marriage, you do it for yourself. And again, I say gross simplification, but I think that for some people that's probably been the journey. And in fact, you know, one of the modern features, I don't know how to put it, but the whole status of the institution of marriage has become much more malleable than it was in the past. And one of the positive consequences of that is that there's a lot more opportunity to learn from your experiences about yourself.

Scott It's interesting because there's a Christian psychologist who taught an institution called Fuller Out in California and pretty prominent guy named Louis Smedes. He's dead a little while now, but I remember hearing him say in a talk, he's been married seven times to the same woman. And he's like, well, you know, our first marriage we're like newlyweds and then we're, you know, young parents with young children and then this and then this and then we're empty nesters and retirees. And he's like, the successful marriage is all about death and resurrection where one thing dies And gives birth to a new thing, right? And I think when people get divorced, it's because there's no room for a new beginning. And somebody starts over and finds someone in the new stage of life that they can enter into that stage of life with and I think I think if you find long-term marriages that are healthy,

like where people actually still can stand each other and they still are, you know, bringing a smile to each other's face and, you know, they're still enjoying sharing space, it's because they're able to recreate. The relationship around new circumstance and new realities. And I think that this, you know, it will be relevant to our topic today.

Chris So, to bring it back to John Stott, who I'm now reading about, quote from John Stott, Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love. I love it. That sounds like a great dialectic for any married couple.

Scott Oh, absolutely. And Stott was a lifelong bachelor. Although, my friend Corey told me there were no shortage of women from the Church of England that wanted to make him not a bachelor. Like, they would invite him on vacations.

Chris And he was just, I don't, like, and I don't... I feel like these are the stories that Corey, if he was like his personal assistant, were not supposed to tell you.

Scott Exactly. But he was just this lifelong Anglican. It wasn't Catholic. He could have married, but he was a lifelong bachelor. But these women from the Church of England would just be like, Oh, Reverend Stotlick, would you like to come to my, you know, beach thing or come to the Isle of Jersey? The guy was like, you know, he was, you know, but he was not, again, he never dated. He was a really interesting, deep spiritual guy who wrote a lot of books, was a deep reader. And by all accounts that I know, like just as very, almost like a medieval kind of figure. He was very the spiritual guy who... I could only aspire to that level of spirituality, but you and I both know that is not me. No FG, no FG.

Chris No FG, I'm aspirational. That's so useful. No, that's true. No, you and me, we can both aspire to some true guilt, but I don't have an assistant that can tell those things to you who can then relay it on a podcast.

Scott Exactly. Exactly.

Chris But this, you know, I feel like we, yeah, you're right. I think we're circling nicely around what felt like the meta question that The times, especially in the last couple of weeks, and there's so much to talk about. We'll have to get into the Olympics at some point, but there is so much strain that society is under right now. Yeah. I mean, marriage is just one example of it, this pandemic and what we're all psychically Having been put through over the last year and a half, and now with this heat wave across most of the global north, there is this kind of, I think, almost an edge of panic. Do you sense that over there in New York? Uh-oh, okay, it's really starting to happen now. And we've kind of heard about this, we've known about this, this is gonna get, there's gonna be this change, but we're starting to feel like, oh, so if this is what you mean, I don't like this.

And I'm talking about weather and climate change and the forest fires, the flash floods. Did you see some of the videos of these flash floods in China? I mean, people almost drowning In subway systems, just like the tunnel, they flooded so fast that people were still inside them as the waters rushed to fill them. Here in London, it is beautiful. And you know there's something deeply wrong in the world's weather patterns when it's nice.

Scott If London is good.

Chris And not just for one day.

Scott You move to London if you have a grey disposition, right? Because it's grey. It's not dark. It's not black. It's not awful. And it's not sunny. It's grey. Like Earl Grey tea. You go to London because you don't want extremes.

Chris But you know who is moving to England is French wine growers. Because a lot of... No, seriously, because a lot of the varieties, we're not going to be able to grow these. Already now or in the future, we can see we're going to have to move north if we want to keep our production up. But I feel like... What's that technical term in literature where nature behaves in sympathy with what's happening with humanity? Is that a pathetic fallacy?

Scott No. I don't know. I don't know.

Chris I think it's pathetic fallacy is what it is.

Scott It's not onomatopoeia.

Chris Onomatopoeia is the one where like... Onomatopoeia.

Scott That's when something sounds like what it should sound like.

Chris Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's pathetic fallacy. So, I mean, the kind of strain that nature seems to be under right now I think is a great analogy for... The strain that society with a capital S seems to be under right now. So, with my historical mindset, I thought, what are some great ways to think about strain? I had my assistant Google do some research for me. It's also wonderful, by the way, one of the great joys of being an alumnus of a university institution is that you get lifelong access to academic journals, which is, and a lot of people, a lot of my fellow, they don't take advantage, it's amazing. Did you ever read these things? So, you know, going into the academic archives, just fascinating to go into like the sociology journals and see like, you know, so what else have people been writing about strain? Newsflash, we've been writing about strain and kind of the pressure that society is under for a long time.

But no surprise, there was a lot of really interesting thinking done about this and a lot of thinking about how to make sense of this in the 1930s during the Great Depression. It was a huge growth industry for people trying to make sense of just a time and a stress that It was just astonishing to read these dusty papers from 90 years ago. Like, oh my God, this is so relevant to us today.

Scott It's funny, because I was talking with someone who was, we were talking about COVID stuff or something, and they were saying like, well, the D variant, and we're not safe. And they were saying like 30% or 30-some percent Of the people that got sick or are vaccinated or something like that. The D variant. Right. It's kind of the you know, the. And so it is it's it goes back to that strain and anxiety that we're like in New York. It's like it's almost back. Everybody feel it did feel like walking around today. It felt like, you know, most people are not wearing masks. Some people are. I mean, but some people are. It's probably 50 50 like. But it does, and all of a sudden, people are just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, the D strain. And it becomes another kind of thing, like, whoa, we're not out of the woods yet, the D strain. And it's like, oh, my gosh. It's like... Dun, dun, dun, duh. Dun, dun, dun, right. But it is this... I mean, and I wonder how much psychologically we can take, right? When you're talking about, like, climate change and flooding of subway stations and redwood fires. It's funny because I...

So that's like happening in the other end of the country. But the ecological effects affect air on the eastern seaboard, right? And so it's like, it is a very like, fragile, like, there is a sort of inner, you know, kind of connectedness in a way that is tough to sort of get your mind around on an everyday basis. You can think about it intellectually, but you don't really think That when you're watching forest fires on the other side of a continent that's as big as North America, that actually your breathing could be affected or something. It just boggles the mind.

Chris So, you know, think about, so let's hang in that space of your mind being boggled, because I think that that space is I think it's a space from which we can emerge with great insight. If you think of, what is the most unsettling thought that one can have inside that space where your mind is boggled? And I think it might be Are we going about all of this the wrong way? So in 1938, there was an American sociologist, Robert Merton. He published a paper, he published a lot of papers on what he called strain theory. He was a fascinating guy who I'd known nothing about until I read these papers. He was actually the founder of the focus groups. If you've ever heard of or been in a focus group, he started all of that. But he was interested in the context of the 1930s and the Great Depression. People whose minds were boggled, you know, just felt like, oh my God, like this box is, what is going on? And he tried to define the box. And he said, okay, what is boggling you is two things. You're questioning the goals of society and you're questioning the means, how we go about achieving those goals. So the goals are get rich, get famous. And in the midst of economic collapse, you're asking yourself, is that what our goal should be? And the means are, you know, get a good education, get a good job, and you can't get an education and jobs are disappearing. And so you're asking yourself, how on earth am I going to achieve these goals?

And so, interestingly, he said, so this box, this black box that you're in is actually quite clear. It's sort of like a two-dimensional square. One side of the square is labeled goals, and you can either reject those goals or you can accept them. And the other side of that square is labeled means. And you can either accept the means or you can reject them. And so what he did is he actually figured out the map of, what's the noun of being boggled, mind boggled? Mind bogglement. He mapped mind bogglement. It's totally fascinating, totally fascinating. And then you look at his map. Which I dusted off, I sent you a copy of it. And you look at it and you're still like, oh, this makes total sense. This explains a lot of the different kinds of relationships that people have with the mainstream today. Where, whether we're looking at, you know, just our physical environment, our natural environment, this doesn't make any sense anymore. Or we're looking at this pandemic, we're like, dear God, I mean, what are other things?

Are our coming that we are not seeing and we're filled, a lot of people, not everybody, there are different species of being mind boggled, but we're kind of filled with this sense of, are the goals the right goals? Are the means the right means?

Scott By the way, I will just say, I have found a couple versions of the chart you sent me online, so I will try to put this in the show notes if I can get something that's a very helpful chart. Are you saying that my scribble isn't helpful? No, no, I'm just saying, I don't know how I would put that in the show notes. Maybe I could. I mean, there might be a way I could use your, because I like your, but I would just say, like, if you're listening right now and you're a little confused, because we might refer to this chart a few times, we will provide some version of the chart so that right now, you're only in minute 17 or whatever, and we'll probably talk for another 40 minutes or so. We'll get you some kind of chart in the show notes. Oh, yeah, totally. So you can play along. Bingo. Exactly. And now it's like, oh, no, the chart is there. It's like in real time. No, but I think that's really right. And I think that, you know, the chart you sent me is really interesting because it... And I love just like for a practical example, right? Like you can... Like, let's say the goal is sort of...

Yeah, like get rich, have the 2.5 kids and suburban home or something. And you reject the goal. Let's say you accept the means and, you know, like, okay, go to Harvard or Penn or, you know, some good state school. Then you're a conformist. But it's interesting if you reject the goal, but you still go to Harvard, you're going through the motions, right?

Chris Yeah. So maybe back up a step. So he drew a map with four boxes and he said that, you know, in a moment of being mind boggled, You've basically got four choices. Option number one, you can conform. So, yeah, the world doesn't make any sense, but I'm going to accept the goals, I'm going to accept the means, I'm going to continue to play along and do my best. Thank you very much. Oops, that seemed totally outdated and slow and anachronistic to me. Why would I do those things anymore? I'm going to figure out a whole new way to get educated. He called those people the innovators. And I think that when he wrote about innovators, he was thinking much more broadly. We think of innovators in a very narrow way today. It's kind of like tech innovator. We can all be innovating if we are rejecting the means that we're kind of grown up with and figuring out new ones. So we can conform or we can innovate if we accept the goals. And then our other option is, well, what if you reject the goals? Like, you know what, society, we are on the wrong, that we've got the complete wrong destination. Well, then if you're still going to go along with things, then that's going through the motions. He actually called it ritualism. Yeah, that's actually a better word, but maybe a less accessible word. I feel like going through the motions is something that I can make a lot of sense of.

And then what's really interesting, he says, well, what if you reject both? What if your view is that society, like we are clearly on the wrong path? Um, and I'm not going to go through the motions. I'm not going to play along. This, this just makes no sense to me. Then the option is to retreat. He called it retreat from everything that is around you. You know, your mind boggled and you don't want to be a part of it anymore. So you try to step inward or step away. And in the context of the 1930s, you saw a lot of people who became disenchanted, listless, felt lost. What is the point of all of this? Nothing makes sense anymore. But out of those people who retreat also come the rebels, which was kind of like his fifth box. People who say, you know what we need? We need new goals. And we need new ways of getting there. He called those people the rebels. So that's the picture that we're looking at. Okay, I've painted it. Now go. Apply.

Scott Yeah, yeah. And I wonder, like, are those the revolutionaries, too? Like, when you have a revolution, is it where people... I don't know. That's interesting, because how many revolutions... Are really goal and means upending movements or are they, do they start that way? I mean, I think it's actually hard to be a rebel or revolution. Like it's hard to get in that fifth box. I think most people don't get to the new box unless they're forced to. Because we're social creatures and it's so hard to get off the current social grid and map. To get into the rebel revolutionary thing, you've got to be in such a space to be liminal.

Chris Yeah, I don't put myself in that box. Remember a couple episodes ago when we talked about alignment? And I kind of confessed that while I want to be good, I think I'm moderately evil. I like that about you. And I feel like part of me, I want to be a rebel. I do. I think it's cool. I do know a few people who are legitimate rebels. And it's incredibly inspiring because there are so many opportunities. Interestingly, I'm not sure. I'll have to see how to draw the picture. But the thing that is wrong with this picture as we're looking to it now is Merton has drawn the rebels as adjacent to the people who choose to retreat, right? It feels like that's the nearest thing. Whereas I would say that – and that may be true in the mind of the – That's who they feel closest affinity to. My choice is either to retreat from this world or to overthrow it. But for the rest of society, the adjacent box is conformity. Because these rebels who get energy and followers, there are so many people coming to them who are saying, come on, sell out. I will give you money, I will give you fame, I will give you power if you just...

If you exercise some of this stuff that you have, we could really do some great shit. You know what I'm thinking of in my mind at the moment is Jesus Christ Superstar. Tell me that you've seen the music of Jesus Christ Superstar. So when, I forget which one of the bad guys is telling Jesus, you're so good at this stuff, but just add a touch of hate at Rome. I think it's true. And then you'll be powerful, right? Saying, hey, you rebel Jesus, come conform, and boom. Yeah. Because we've got the real power. So anyway, don't ever go in with that, but that's... So, oh, I know. So, you know, I want to be a rebel, but... I have some character flaws. That means I'm so curious about the invitations to conform. Come speak at our corporate events and help us to greenwash ourselves.

Scott So greenwash is like you feel better that you take an environmental shower or whatever? Do you talk about sustainability?

Chris I'm not an eco-warrior, although I'm... I'm on this journey, as so many of us are, to reorient my understanding of my place in the world in a radically different way, where the environment is the context that enables everything to happen. But my totem animal is, I don't know, my totem spirit is the scholar, not the warrior, put it that way. Mine is the platypus. Interesting. What are the celestial attributes of the platypus?

Scott It's so weird and it's so hybrid. I think it's native to Australia, right? And I think when people were first discovering it... I feel like that's wrong. Keep going. Yeah, it might be. I'm very well could be wrong there. But wherever it was native to, or maybe New Zealand or something. You're totally right. I'm wrong. So when they discovered it, they sent it back to people in England, and the people in England thought it was a joke. They thought the explorers sewed all these animals together.

Chris Yeah, we've seen those mermaid skeletons. This is another one of those things.

Scott Exactly. But the platypus is so great because it's this weird mammal with a duck bill. And it's just so curious. It's just this hybrid kind of creature that evolutionarily looks so weird. But yeah, it's... It can live in many different spaces and inhabit many spaces, and I feel like that's my spirit animal. It's neither the warrior nor the scholar. It's the platypus. Not the best-looking animal, though. I wish it was better-looking.

Chris Oh, you're so anthropocentric with that judgment.

Scott Exactly. I am anthropocentric. I am so anthropocentric-adjacent. I love that term, adjacent. So I've been hanging out in Clubhouse a lot. It's useful. In some of these leftist rooms, everybody is like, well, you know. So my own racial identity is sort of complex. My mother, birth mother, I'm adopted. My birth mother was Jewish and my father is Puerto Rican. And they're like, but you're white adjacent or white presenting. And presenting and adjacent. And there's all these like words. I'm like, what does that mean? I'm white adjacent? Oh, okay. Like, does that mean I sound white? Why don't you just say I sound white? Like, well, you're white adjacent or white presenting. I just love this vocabulary that we're developing. And they're kind of like, you know, sort of technological cosmopolitan world where they're all these geographic, we're using geographic metaphors for things that are audio. It's fantastic.

Chris So to bring it back to- So I'm platypus adjacent. So you're platypus adjacent. And no, I don't greenwash, but you know, what I'm often invited to do, and so this relates to, you know, do you want to be the rebel or do you want to conform? What I'm often invited to do is to cloak executives and their employees in the sacred garments of purpose. Right? To kind of, let's elevate what we are here to do and what we are doing here to another level. I mean, there is something Something stunningly impactful about what we're doing. And it's interesting that it's kind of like motivational speech, but I'm not a motivational speaker. I try to go for like, let's just understand what is real about what we're doing here in a totally different way. And it is fascinating. I mean, you talk with a pharmaceutical company, you can easily... Wrap your head around how you have this extraordinary role to play in the world today. I mean, you think about it, there are very few communities of people who can span kind of the microscopic scale. All the way up to kind of the macro public policy. But you guys can. So what are you going to do with that rare power in a world that is so often struggling with trying to understand how the systems relate? You're one of the few groups that can do it. And they're like, wow, this is great. And then they are happy if they make more money at the end of the quarter. So it's that kind of conformity.

Right? If you're really listening to this stuff, then you should feel deeply disturbed. You should be really unsettled. And it's that next step of being, you know, the rebel who is willing to keep going down the path of being more and more unsettled is the one who never conforms.

Scott But when you give that talk, when you do the Greenwash talk, Are you in quadrant one? Are you accepting the goals and the means? Are you accepting like, so the societal goal is we'd like to be a capitalist institution endeavor that is more ecologically responsible. And the means are, we kind of bring in thought leaders and experts to help us think through how could we do that. So are you in the kind of most conservative box in the quadrant when you do that? You know, I would say it's actually... No.

Chris I'm just incapable. It's actually, interestingly, I would say that I'm probably invited to come speak and help them to be in the innovate box. Don't question the fundamental objectives of society. I mean, we're not going to overthrow the structure of our organization. And we haven't brought you in in order to tell us that that's what we should do. But they do want me to say we're looking at things the wrong way entirely. You gotta stop doing what you're doing and seeing what you're seeing. And we gotta see a whole new picture. And in that picture we're gonna start doing some different things. So it's kind of like innovate, right? They want me to come in and help them innovate. Where the tension often is for me is that often I don't fully accept the goals. Right, right, right, right. And so, actually, I'm trying to bring them in to retreat with me. I remember I gave a talk at Singularity University at some Californian thing.

Scott And anyway... That sounds so California.

Chris Oh, totally.

Scott There's no Singularity University in Glasgow or Rhode Island in the United States. That's only California.

Chris Yeah, straight out, exactly. And giving a talk, and this is a couple of years ago now, so I'm a bit dim on the details, but I remember very specifically this one point in the talk where it kind of got to the implications. And I said, you know what, leaders are lost. And unless you realize that, You're not going to find the path forward. There was one person in this crowd of maybe a couple of thousand people who clapped when I said that leaders are lost. I think she even whooped. That's the kind of, you know, the sort of the truth to power, the unpopular thing that actually I think that we will get farther ahead if you retreat with me, if you reject the goals and come with me into this unsettling box, but it doesn't always go over well. And I think that that's, you know, if I can then sort of bring that around to

Sort of looking out at the world today and the range of relationships that we have, that different people have with the status quo, with the mainstream, I think that this picture from 1938 is incredibly helpful in just stimulating us to be asking good questions about that relationship and about the different The different deviants, the different ways of deviating from the norm that we are seeing emerge right now.

Scott When you said that, I wanted to ask you something. And before we go into the meta, I'm really curious, like when corporate people bring you in and you take them to the retreat phase, what are the conversations like after the talk? I mean, do they, like, because I'm sure you spend time, you know, you give the talk and there's the applause, there's the reception, and maybe there's the after party. The people that have brought you in, what are those post-game conversations like? How do those go?

Chris Well, so first of all, what I would say is It's very dangerous when you do public speaking to judge the impact of your words based on who comes up to you afterwards, because it's always the people who loved it. So it's a very skewed sample. A much better way to feel humble is to slink out and go to the men's room, kind of hide in the stall. And to hear people in the toilet talking about that last session and what that person said. But the people that bring you in, you must talk with them, like the people that sponsor the talk. So often it's a lot of energy, right? If somebody comes up to me, it's usually with a lot of energy. It's like, oh, wow. Now I just realized there's so much good work to do. that that we just haven't even thought about that that like it's kind of like our whole agenda needs to be rethought we and you know we all spend so much time doing and and getting things done we were talking about this the the other day with the mutual friends Foday and and Michael i mean there's almost this fetish to to get things done it completely crowds out the time and and and especially our best time and energy To explore without the burden to complete things.

So what I try to do is make that time to be an explorer the imperative and really help people to recognize how mismatched their balance of execution Versus exploration, how completely out of kilter with the time we live in, that balance is in that they're spending 90% of their time on execution and 10% on exploration and probably we would all be better off and you would have a lot more fun if you flipped it. And that's, again, it's very scary. But when you find partners, and those are the people that I then work with on a deeper level. We incubate dangerous experiments inside their organizations that have real I mean, that for me make the word disruptive actually do use. Like we know that if this catches on, it's really going to change things around here. And we're excited about it.

Scott Do you aspire to go beyond innovation? I mean, do you kind of want to be in the rebellion box more? Or do you like the innovative box?

Chris So help me out with this. And I wonder if, I wonder what, you know, kind of Jesus Christ would say. That's why I ask you. Part of I mean, I'll work with anyone. I have the feeling that we all have a part to play. There's a kind of an extreme version of the belief in our equality that I read about years ago in this 1950s book, Gene Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, translated from the German. I do not recommend this book, by the way. It is a really dense read, but I love it. So I'm going to quote from Gene Gebser. He says, Each attempted and successful clarification of the confusion in our daily lives Each interception of anxiety, each achieved grain of new certainty, each distancing from oneself regardless of house light, each discarded prejudice and resentment. These are necessary achievements in order to establish a new reality and to obtain for each and all of us a sense of meaningfulness. So this guy had a radical thesis that we live, our reality is this field of consciousness that we all generate. And we can only change it if we all change it together. And what's radical about that is to say that it doesn't, we're all necessary to the kind of improvement. When we look at something like climate change and we think that the solution is big government action and different incentives and innovation for clean tech and batteries and all of that kind of stuff. And yeah, that is a part of it.

But it's also that fundamentally we would all need to establish a completely different relationship with one another and with the natural environment that we just haven't had for tens of thousands of years, that kind of sense of oneness with nature. So that leads me to like, I can't, so you say like the rebel, like I wanna work with everyone at some level. And I'm fascinated to explore what is necessary about Scott's journey? What is the stuff that Scott is going through and processing that unless he does, none of us can move forward? And I just like approaching people with that attitude. I admit it does mean that I spend so much time on the phone because, you know, I'm changing my flight tickets. I'm flying back to Canada to visit my family in October, fingers crossed. In lovely Regina. In Regina, thank you. Actually, we're going to go outside of the city and get away.

Scott Which is the provincial capital, right?

Chris It is the provincial capital, yeah.

Scott I've studied a little bit of it, just through our friendship. You know, I've gotten to know a little bit of Regina. You and I, we will do Regina right. I would love to do it. I would love to do it. You think New York is great? Regina is to die for. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Yeah. My point being, I forget what my point was. I killed your point. You did.

Scott But it had something to do with the necessity. So, yeah, I mean, I'm really interested in... Accessibility. I mean, you want to be accessible to lots of journeys for individuals and corporate and communal entities, it sounds like.

Chris No, it's not... Well, I don't know. Maybe... For me, I'm not interested in being accessible. I'm interested in being a part of I feel like the relationship is very different. It's not like I'm saying, oh, is Chris accessible?

Scott Jesus Christ. You want to be able to go on lots of different journeys with lots of different sorts of folks. Sure. Is that more helpful? Sure.

Chris Yeah.

Scott Yeah.

Chris And I think we do. So let me turn this box to you. You know, how are you? Your mind is being boggled. How do you find yourself? By the way, I love it that Robert Merton called this his deviance typology. I love deviance. Yeah, yeah. So which deviant are you? How do you think, how are you coping? What is your strategy? How are you adapting? What relationship are you creating with the mainstream, with the goals and the needs of society?

Scott Yeah, I'm not sure. So on some level, if we're talking like mainstream North American society, I probably feel The goals are quite off, or at least there are some problems with the goals, I think. I mean, I think, but I'm not like a radical. I'm not living like, I mean, I think I'd be open to, like, I have some friends, and they're these kind of radical Christians, and they're Protestants who live in monastic kind of communities, and some of them are single, some of them are married, and they live on farms or communes, and I think that's really interesting. That they've come to embraced this sort of alternative community fashion of living. And actually, I can think of a friend I went to college with who does this in one of the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia. And they have this kind of urban compound. And I mean, it's, you know, they're on a drug corner, one of the most dangerous corners in Philadelphia. And I think that's really interesting. I think I'm imaginative, but not radical. So I think I'm somebody that likes to think through different possibilities. But in my life, I'm sort of just very ordinary. And I don't know if that makes me a conservative. I mean, certainly politically, the way we graph things on electoral politics, I wouldn't map as a conservative.

But I think that the way I approach life is I don't rock the boat that much. I mean, I've been in parts of protest movements and stuff like that, but like, I don't really, I live in a way, maybe like ritualism is where I'm at. Maybe I have some critical feedback on the goals, but largely I don't really, I don't think I do things That are really provocative in relationship to those things. So I might be in part of the just, you know, it's interesting ritualism. It might just be sort of like broad small-c conservatism. I don't mean political conservatism. It just might be conserved in the sense of you're kind of, you know, you're hoping for things will evolve and, you know, like evolution's okay. We don't need revolution kind of thing. I think, yeah, I just don't think I'm a very interesting person on the map. I think the interesting people are the rebels. The way the map goes, I think the really interesting people are the rebels. The people that are able to...

If they can do it sociologically and with a meaningful impact, because you can be a rebel and just be like on the street corner or something and be, you know, just be, what do they say? What's a leader with no followers? Just somebody taking a walk. So I think that like, you know, but I think that's actually, if you can be in a, inhabit the space, Where you reject the goals and the means. I mean, that's so interesting. But if you get too many of those, can society even function?

Chris Listening to all of that made me realize that so again this typology 1938 and it's interesting I think interesting exercises to imagine what other labels might one use for the boxes in this picture Because, yeah, you know, and I didn't know Robert Merton, but obviously, you know, when you say it's, you know, your choices are conform, innovate, go through the motions, retreat, or rebel, you might have thought, well, rebel sounds pretty interesting. My rethinking of, you know, if I were to redraw this typology today, how would I label it? The first word that I had trouble with was retreat. That somebody who rejects the goals and rejects the means of society today has chosen to retreat. And I kind of struggle with that because I do, I don't know if, I definitely spend time in that box. And I don't feel like I'm retreating when I do. I think that that box would have a lot more appeal for me if I called it searching instead.

Scott And there's two contexts for retreat. Go ahead. Like one context could be a military Like, withdraw. Like, you're on the run. But the other thing could be, like, when you have had Basecamp meetings, retreat, where you go to the mountaintop, or you go to a secluded place with people to do discernment kind of work. And so, that's, the retreat there is not... It's not removing yourself from society. It's stepping... It's disengage to re-engage.

Chris Right. Right. You're right. And that's already better. I can also see someone who is kind of, let's say, a full-blooded... I'm not sure what language to use, but just completely... In the game, sort of playing the game as it's been said, instead of someone who accepts the goals and the means isn't conforming, they're a winner. Someone who rejects the goals and the means, I can tell you already, they're a loser. Someone who accepts the goals But hasn't embraced the means. They're a failure. And somebody who rejects the goals and accepts the means is a team player. Winners need people like that to do the work for us. So there's a lot of hidden ideology, actually, in the language of this. There's a hidden theory of how people ought to be in the time we're living in, in some sense.

Scott It brings me back to an episode we did, oh my gosh, a while back, where we talked about framing things. And this is kind of a frame, right? Right, what does the frame make you see? Yeah, and it's really helpful. It's really helpful. And yet, it kind of, I don't know, it's interesting because it does lock you into quadrants, right? And then maybe the option, I mean, maybe it's more fluid than that, though, because just geographically, too, can you inhabit different quadrants and different contexts? Do you play conformist or whatever? Or do you play like one role in one part of your life and another part in another part of your life? And what does it mean to inhabit different quadrants in different roles in societal life? I mean, can you imagine that you could be, you know, let's say you're part of, let's say you work for Penguin Random House in New York City.

And you're pretty much just, you know, in the corporate kind of your cog in the corporate machine. And then let's say you're also part of a Catholic worker house movement where you're basically a socialist and you're pretty like, you know, you're bordering on revolutionary kind of ideas. You know, like these things could both be true at once. Now, your life could be kind of almost schizophrenically divided between the places where you have to live in one quadrant and the place where you want to live in another one.

Chris Oh, I think absolutely. You think of, you know, personal life, you might be conforming in your relationship. Okay, I understand, like, the goals in society wants me to be married and so I'm married and, you know, how we do that is we maintain this home and so I'm conforming. And then in my work, you might be a total rebel. We're going to burn down this industry. We're going to build a new banking system with cryptocurrencies and iPhone apps or something like that. So you cover the terrain by having different parts of yourself are kind of occupying different Thank you very much. Do you own any crypto, by the way?

Scott Do you have any cryptocurrency? I do, yeah. It's interesting. How do you know you have it, though? Do you get a certificate when you buy it? How do you know you have it?

Chris I feel like that's a different episode. Do you get an email? No, you don't get an email. What there is is a... How do I explain it without using the word blockchain? There's a long sequence of numbers.

Scott That you put in and that's your code.

Chris Basically, there's a public proof of that transaction. So do you want the brief one-minute digression?

Scott Yeah, oh yeah, because I just want to know. That's very cool. This is very neat. I don't know anybody. Well, I'm not sure I know people. I've never asked. You're the only person I've ever asked about cryptocurrency.

Chris I mean, the classic example, and so I'm not being very innovative by using this example, is to talk like the function of cryptocurrency. Is to use the example of a land registry, right? So if you own land somewhere that needs to be registered, right? Scott Jones bought this parcel of land from Jane Doe and it was hers and it's now his, right? So if you own that land, how do you know that you own it? You've got a document, but also there's basically there's some book There's a log somewhere that is written down. This parcel of land and your name is next to it, right? It's kind of like a centralized registry. Well, the basic question was, could we find a way to make it possible for that land to change hands without having to use a centralized registry? Maybe a better analogy now that I think about it is bingo. You ever play bingo? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go to a bingo hall, right? So, you know, what were, if somebody says, I've got a bingo and, you know, let's say I go into the bingo hall and say, I've got a bingo.

Then, you know, do I? Is it true? Well, you can kind of look at the numbers that I'm sitting down and look at the numbers. Everybody's got a copy of all the numbers that were called out. And so it's very difficult for me to walk into that hall and fake the fact. that i have a bingo right even if even if the person at the front of the room who's like keeping track of all the numbers if they are not there doesn't really matter they're just there for convenience the fact that there are so many copies of all the numbers that have been called out means that unless i can convince 51 of the people in the room to to lie with me If I'm the liar, then my bingo isn't going to be accepted. Does that make sense? Wow. So blockchain is bingo. That's a good way to explain it. So yes, I own some cryptocurrency. And the way that I know is everybody's got a copy of this ledger that says that I do. You're an innovator.

Scott You are an innovator. If you're owning crypto, you're an innovator. And you can explain it. You're innovative. I didn't explain it very well, but that caught me unaware. We're not talking about cryptocurrency today. I know, but that was a really good explanation. It is very interesting. I was really impressed with it.

Chris It's actually very interesting when you talk to people who are deep into the crypto space and like, you know, we're going to overturn the banking system because we're not going to have to deal with banks anymore. We'll just deal with one another and the smart contracts and stuff like that. They, in this box, you would say that, you know, they're Well, I guess you'd say they're innovators. A lot of the goals of the system, right? We need timestamped transactions that cannot be changed and can be audited. We just don't think that it should be banks and governments that do that on our behalf. We think that that should be something that we can just use math.

Scott So, largely, they're not rejecting the kind of Western monetary kind of... They're just like, this is a better kind of currency. Like, if we did this and freed... So this is where that word they really needs to be broken down, because the crypto space, if we want to wade into that,

Chris I think one of the big things that makes it at least possible to separate people out is why are you doing this? I mean, a lot of people are just doing it to try to make money. There's nothing more than that. Like, oh, this thing is going up in value, so I'm going to throw money into it, and apparently I'm going to have more money afterwards, and then I'll get rich. That's total conformity, right?

Scott Right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Right, and in fact, you talk to people who are like, you know, in there from the beginning, like those ancient days in like 2009, 2010, they were, you know, a much more rebellious crowd. You know, they're like, oh, this is so cool. Like, we can make these things happen. We have this vision. We should live in a world where it should be as easy for the poor person on some farm in Sub-Saharan Africa to operate in the financial system as a billionaire. Why is it that the billionaire can move money around so easily, but for that other person it is so expensive that they basically can't afford to have a bank account? We're going to completely democratize access to bank accounts, access to banking. As a service like those are at the beginning. Now, you know, you go to the annual Bitcoin conference and it's just people like, oh, my God, look how much money we have now. And they're selling like old watches and things like that. It's just completely changed because of the if you were kind of the corruption of some of the some of the original inspiration that was That was driving a lot of the interesting math.

And a lot of it at the beginning was just fascination with math. The capacity to sort of write these equations and calculations that would use all sorts of different computers to both kind of calculate and protect the integrity of this distributed, you know, all the bingo cards. But somebody still has to call, does somebody still have to call bingo in the analogy though?

Scott There have to be numbers. There's a lot. Okay, so we'll have to have a separate call. We'll do a whole episode. There's a lot of interesting stuff. I'm just so curious. I love that you're invested in this.

Chris I think it's amazing. It's almost like at the level of you need a constitution for this stuff.

Scott Yeah, we're going to do a whole thing on cryptocurrency. I think that would be a good episode because it would educate me because I know like very little other than like what I occasionally read about, you know, in popular sort of periodicals and things like that. So here we go. We're back to the beginning of the quadrant and Robert Merton, which is so interesting. And I think, you know, we've You know, it's interesting because we are, it's a great topology to figure out. And again, I think what we kind of came to at the end of our conversation was, topologies are interesting, right? Because they can be prescriptive or descriptive, right? Like I think topologies function at their worst when they're prescriptive and saying, what are you? Like you're this, this, this. Versus when they often are just good maps, like, which is kind of part of what the inspiration of this podcast is. It's a new world, we need new maps.

And they often can be descriptive, right? Where it's just helping you map out your reality. And I think this is a great topology because it helps us figure out where we're at in relationship to society. And I think as we've discovered together, we can be at multiple places and multiple times. And that's really interesting.

Chris If I could add my little bit of, you know, kind of going back 45 minutes ago, you know, when you talked about the mind-bogglement And my observation, how generative and productive a space that can be to hang in. And I think it's interesting that, you know, yeah, 90 years ago somebody said, you know, sitting inside this scary space where everything is in flux, Can I actually become comfortable in this space enough to understand? Yeah, there are different ways that people are responding to this time of flux. I mean, it's both simple and profound because you realize that when you just sort of understand those couple of dimensions, yeah, what are society's goals? What is the organization's goals? What are my goals? And what are the means for getting there? You end up with these kind of four or five different relationships that you can choose, that organizations you're a part of, you can see the history, how we've moved from one box to another.

We are so much in it all the time. That anything that helps us to kind of just, you know, even if it's just like stand on a footstool and get a bit more perspective on what is it we're in, what is the journey that we've been on, you know, what are some of the Some of the paths that we might choose ahead I think is helpful. We might have to dig up more of these. It was also just a lot of fun to go into the history archives and find some models of making sense of things from 100 years ago that work really well today. Yeah, absolutely. It's a lot easier than coming up with your own. No, absolutely.

Scott This was fun. Thanks, my friend.

Chris Scott, it has been fun. Good to see you again. And again, no false guilt, but I feel like it was on me.

Scott We'll do this again soon. Crypto. Okay, we'll do it. Crypto. I'm into it. See you then.