Three best questions for 2022

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Exactly, happy holidays. I'm not a war on Christmas person in the least, but I always just feel like there's so many holidays.

Chris There are so many holidays. And I feel like, I mean, in my mind, happy holidays is a shorthand. Right. The long form for me is, Is this time of year a holiday for you, and what holiday is it? And then they wish that holiday. I think it's totally fine. I grew up, for me, this is Christmas. And I think it's totally fine for me to wish people a happy Christmas, because that's the frame that I view this time in. The struggle in the modern... It's the medium's fault. I'm so interested and fascinated. I mean, all of my Chinese friends, like Christmas is just like, you know, it's just another office party, but it has no special meaning for us. So it's relative. Merry Christmas. Not quite yet.

Scott Yeah, no, Christmas is, you know what I look forward to every year? I watch it every year now. I watch The Queen's Christmas Address.

Chris You've only recently started this?

Scott Yeah, it was, you know, I... You've been bereft for years. I know.

Chris She's been doing it for a while, just so you know.

Scott I know, I'm a cultural Philistine, but I think I started watching it when The Crown came out. And she does this powerful Christmas address, and I started, and I went back, and I started watching her old ones, and I'm like, wow, this woman... It has a real degree of religious and theological sophistication. The things she says in these addresses are pretty profound. And I think it's a wonderful... Again, I think it's one of these advantages folks in the UK have when you have this nonpartisan head of state that can come out The President of the United States delivering a Christmas message would not have the same sort of effect or appeal that the Queen does.

Chris It is interesting that there is this figure here who can speak to the nation and everyone, well, that's maybe too strong a statement, but most people see it as an apolitical act. It's the ability to speak from a kind of head of state voice to the country. You know, a couple of things about those Christmas addresses. One, I mean, she mastered the art of kind of the short keynote long before Ted made it the normal. And then made it popular because they're nice, tight addresses. The other thing that's immediately coming to my mind was, was it last year when she wore a green dress and then there were all of these internet memes of using her clothing as a green screen to put on? Did you ever participate in that?

Scott I did not participate. I'm not a big memer.

Chris See, what's interesting is that you as an American, you see it, oh, it's kind of interesting to see the Queen of England give her talk to her subjects. As a Canadian and a member of the Commonwealth, what's also interesting is that when I watch the Christmas Address, I feel like she's speaking to me. As Queen of Canada, as sort of the Queen of the Commonwealth. So it's quite, and she does, you know, speak in that register, if you will, in the address itself. It's not quite the, what is the Pope's address? The Omnus Ordobe, is that it? You're the Latin speaker.

Scott Are you talking about the most recent one?

Chris No, no, no. It's the name in Latin of the address that the pope makes to the world.

Scott I mean, there's when the pope speaks ex cathedra, but I'm trying to think. Our listeners are going to ask.

Chris The Urbi et Orbi.

Scott Oh, the state of the world kind of thing, right?

Chris To the city of Rome and to the world, a papal address, an apostolic blessing given by the Pope on certain solemn occasions. Doesn't he give the Urbi et Orbi during Christmas as well? One of your followers is going to rant it up.

Scott Well, I mean, he usually, his Christmas mass is usually pretty well televised, but I don't think he consistently gives the Urbi, Orbi, like all that. Like, I don't think it happens. I don't know, though. I don't know. I shouldn't say, but somebody email us if you know the answer. I mean, we could just Google it right now, but we're not going to do that. This is the Atlas Project. We don't do this for you. We do it with you. So we're in interesting times right now. We're coming into the holiday season, and in both... New York and London, the pandemic is kind of rearing its ugly head. It's a weird kind of time to be celebrating the holidays.

Chris There is a real sense of deja vu in that respect about right now, because I remember 365 days ago, London was in lockdown last year this time. It's not in lockdown now, but there is a kind of elevated level of Of care and a reduced level of personal freedom, I actually got a notification on my NHS app today, notifying me that I had been in close contact with somebody who has been found COVID positive. So I raced and did my lateral flow test and still negative. Remarkable, but it is really a sense of deja vu because it feels like a year has passed, and in that respect, not much has changed.

Scott Yeah, and you and I were talking a little bit before we started recording about what are, it's interesting because I've been spending way too much time on Clubhouse, the app that's, it's the crack of the internet now for many people. I think, which I attribute my addiction to it to you, because you kind of really were like, hey, check this app out. I really wasn't on it. You're not really on it. Our mutual friend, Roy Field, who, if he listens to this podcast, hey, Roy Field, I hope you are well. Our mutual friend, Roy Field Brown, was big on it, and I got sucked into a vortex. And you managed to stay out of the vortex. You poked your head into the vortex and then pulled your head out.

Chris I'm very good at staying, yeah. There's something in my, just the way that I interact with people so much every day that I don't need more people. I really don't. It's not something I go to seek when I'm done talking to people for the day. But I love that you can cover that space. You can bring to the Atlas Project everything that's worth bringing up from the universe inside Clubhouse. But so you were saying, so there's this long, giant... This is the serpent of a conversation going on right now and has been for hours and hours and hours about COVID.

Scott 18 plus hours. I mean, there's a room and the title of the room was... And so this is how Clubhouse works. There's a room title and you get notified if your friends are in the room. So if you have like one friend in the room, you'll get notified and you can kind of pop in and whatever. And the thing was, should non... I think they were talking in the US context, although there were people there from the UK, there were people there from Australia. I think whoever framed the room was thinking in the US, should non-vaccinated people be imprisoned or fined?

Chris Of course, this set like... By now, people on Clubhouse have learned how to frame the name of the room in order to spark a debate. Oh, yeah, it was totally- Because is anybody having that conversation until somebody created that room? Like, seriously?

Scott Well, yeah, well, you know, it's interesting. There is a precedent. In 1905, there was a Supreme Court case, Jacobson versus Massachusetts, where the guy Jacobson did not want to be... He was protesting... The smallpox inoculation in Massachusetts. And the court found against Jacobson, and they said that municipalities They all have the prerogative to mandate vaccines in a health crisis. But he just paid a $5 fine and he got vaccinated anyway. But that is kind of an interesting debate right now because people... And it's become completely partisan in this country. There's very little room for nuance. And what you and I were saying is, I'm sitting there in this room, I popped in and out a few times. And I just didn't hear any interesting questions raised, really. I mean, you had the kind of libertarians and the kind of contrarians, which is really common in American culture. I'm sure you have it in the UK, but I think we probably have it more in the United States, where people that just have a kind of reflexive All of these people protest to mandates and things like that. It's the nature of American culture. And they're versus the people that really are generally trusting in government and think institutions... It's not that they don't have their problems, but you can really kind of rely on them.

And in full disclosure, I would kind of put myself in that camp in general. I think I'm a person that generally thinks, okay, we live in a really complex and diverse society. This is why you get out of hunter-gatherer society, so that everybody doesn't have to do all the same things. But that requires us to trust experts to some degree. It's not that we can't... Interrogate them or ask critical questions because we're a democratic society. But at some point, though, you have to have some deference to experts, I think. And so it's the kind of expertise deference people versus the people that are suspicious. And it just was, I can't believe. That a conversation could go on that long without anything interesting being said.

Chris Really? You can believe it.

Scott Well, yeah, that's true. That's hyperbolic.

Chris I actually can believe it. Right. But I think that's also why, I mean, well, especially conversations like that right now, I have no energy for them because without listening to it for a moment, I think we and anyone could map out the landscape of the conversation and the questions being asked inside it. And so there's nothing generative about that conversation. It's just regurgitative. It's just vomiting it and eating it again. And there's something just fundamentally not nutritious, I think. about rehashing the same pathways over and over and over again. It's like wearing grooves in the... In the walking park of our mind, and it's just trampling the grass that doesn't have a chance to grow back. If anybody could follow that metaphor, it was very clear in my head. Which I suppose is a good segue into what we both thought would be a good conversation worth having. And maybe a good topic of conversation at any holiday Christmas party, which is what are the good questions that we should be talking about?

Scott And we are going to make you stars, by the way. If you want to support us, if you want to give a contribution to the Atlas Project, because this is what is really going to... We're going to make you the star of your holiday party. We're going to give you some good questions.

Chris I mean, it is nice to be kind of the conversation setter. Was there – I think it was an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David – like they're at some kind of dinner party. Have you seen this? They're at some kind of dinner party and the people in the middle are not doing a good job. He's not a middler.

Scott Larry, what's going on? He's not a middler. He's a bad middler.

Chris And then they deliberately reseat people. They put a couple of good conversations in the middle.

Scott And then Larry David, he becomes the middler and brings up a stage four cancer patient. She said this, and the best thing was they start taking, well, you would take any advice from a stage four cancer patient. And then Jeff says, but a stage three, you couldn't pay me to take advice from a stage three. No, stage three, no way.

Chris Irreverent, I think, is a good label for the brand of Larry David's humor.

Scott Oh, it's amazing.

Chris It's amazing. But if you want to be a good middler at a holiday dinner party, you need to be able to put provocative questions. On to the table. And so that's the challenge, I think, with something like COVID is shut down the conversation immediately because there's no provocative question. Like that clubhouse, but that's like cheap. That's not provocative. That's like agent provocateur. Like that's just, you know, how can we say this? It's not a real question. Nobody's throwing somebody in jail. I have no time for it. But I do think that around the holidays, What is a really valuable question, like a genuinely worthwhile question for people to be thinking about that serves a number of purposes is to kind of think back on the year that's been and ask of the year and ask of the events of the year and like your personal journey of the year, what are the questions that 2021 As we look forward to the next year, what does this year that has just happened sort of demand that we inquire into more?

And I think that that is so much more interesting a question than, you know, what were the top 10 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's the kind of question that a middler would ask.

Scott A middler, that's good middling. That's middling, it's very quality middling. There's this great guy, I might have mentioned this on the podcast before, I'm not sure, but a guy, Paul Tripp, who's a therapist here in America, and he said, in my experience as a counselor, most people in crisis don't need information, they need imagination. And I think the top 10 reflection in the data point things are... I'm writing that down. That's good. Yeah, no, it's great. I remember the first time I read it, and I thought, wow, this is one of the best sentences. Things I wish I would have written, kind of thing, or said. And I think that, how do you move from the informative zone to the imaginative zone? I think that you're right. Inevitably, the top 10 lists, which every media outlet does, those things are not imaginative at all. They are mildly informative in that they're archival, they're data collection, they're click-baity kind of things, but I think it's a much harder task What's the imaginative space we're invited to in light of the year we just lived? I think it's hard, too, because we've been in crisis.

Many of us, these lockdowns and just this yearning for business as usual and just this kind of year. And there's been other, we can get into this, there's been other tumultuous things. I mean, it's been a really... Challenging year in many regards, I think. But the question is, how does the challenge move us to the imaginative space instead of just the informative data collecting space?

Chris So can I start us off? Yes. So the first question that's burning for me... And I really do feel, and this links back to our discussion of kind of the sense of deja vu, December 2021, December 2020, feeling very similar. It links into the whole COVID experience. But I really feel like a big question that 2021 is just screaming at us to ask is, what is the right Thank you very much. This has been set and reinforced by the horizon of public pronouncements. We need to get through this wave. We need a circuit breaker here. We need to lock down, but it's just going to be for two months and then we'll see, and then we'll see, and then we'll see. So that, you know, one of the consequences has been that, you know, now here in the UK, as it looks like, okay, maybe we need to ask people to, you know, lock down further anymore. There's just such an exhaustion of participating in that short-term narrative.

It kind of, you know, there's something that feels sort of like, you know, being inside that fairy tale of, you know, the boy who cries wolf. And okay, and now you want me to believe that we need to do this, and we're going to stop it by doing this. But at the same time, so I feel like... Okay, so for 2022, like, should I still be thinking in three-month increments? And then, so other data points, COP26, this environmental summit happens here in Glasgow, you know, a month ago, which is saying, like, you know, we're thinking about this crisis in two-month, three-month terms, but really over a two-year period, three-year period, five-year period, ten-year period, what is happening to nature is And even bigger crisis. And we need to be taking that seriously. We need to be thinking urgently about that. Okay, so I've also got to think about the future in that time horizon. And then this other part of me...

Who is the political scientist and the China scholar, you know, looking at sort of what's been happening in China and its relative economic and military and technological development over the past 20 years. You know, they've definitely got a lot of things together in terms of where they want to go over the next 10, 20, 30 years. And I've got friends at Stanford who are, you know, tearing their hair out saying, oh my God, I mean, we're falling behind China. In our national innovation capacity, we being the United States in that statement. And so they're saying like, we've got to be thinking like 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 50 years about our national competitiveness because authoritarianism versus democracy, all this stuff. All different time horizons. And I think that that's kind of a question that 2021 has just put in front of us like no other year I can think of.

Scott Yeah, and I think the challenge too, I think, as you think about the context of the holiday party, as we were just joking about, but I mean, I think if you're thinking about this stuff, I think the challenge is where do you find spaces to talk about it? Like, where do you find, you know, you have some colleagues at Stanford, you know, that probably have a little context to talk about it. And, you know, people in certain kind of professional associations and things. But, you know, there are a lot of people who are reflective and concerned, right? Just concerned citizens. And where do you go to get past The kind of echo chambers, because it's not that you can't talk about the headline events of the day. I mean, that is not hard, right? Again, my clubhouse experience today was an illustration of this. It's not like, you know, there's going to be more and more context, especially given the...

Expansive things of things like social audio and other sorts of things where you can get on and you'll be able to process things. But is that processing helpful? And how do you cultivate spaces where actually you can cultivate good questions and actually get back from a reactive state to actually a kind of reflective state?

Chris So you haven't answered my question.

Scott Okay, reframe the question, because I just went with another question.

Chris What is the time horizon for the future? Yeah, I don't know. And I feel like, okay, so like the cocktail party version of it is like, so how far ahead are you looking?

Scott Right, right. Right. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think... So it depends what lens I'm wearing on a given day. Existentially, it could be, ah, man, what am I going to do? I've been kind of living a traveling... I've been living the kind of digital nomad lifestyle, which has been kind of interesting. I've kind of... Enjoyed it on one level.

Chris You've definitely grown this nomadic beard over this year.

Scott Exactly. I look very Semitic. I look like I'm ready to walk across the desert with a spirit. Yeah, so I think on one level. But the person in me that thinks about... Broad ways of living is probably, I think, the future looks like... The short-term future is probably the 50-year horizon. That's your short-term? Yeah, 50 years, yeah. Because 50 years... What's your long-term? A couple hundred. A couple hundred years is a long-term. Because you think about something like... You know, the printing press. It takes probably, I mean, the short-term impact was like in the 50-year scale, right? It really shook things up, you know, in the short term, in that, you know, without the printing press, Martin Luther dies just like John Huss, essentially, before, you know, like, but... Right, right.

Chris A lot of people who are railing against the authority of the church and...

Scott Right. So in the 50-year thing, it just shakes the political and social horizon up. But then you think, what does it do over long term? Like literacy, you know, like the capacity for mass literacy. That's kind of the longer term, like couple hundred years sort of thing. So yeah, I don't know. My short term is sort of... It's a couple decades.

Chris You're really intimidating at that cocktail party, by the way. I hope, because if I had gone before you and said, I don't know, a couple of weeks, and then you go, suddenly I look like this daft, shallow, oh my God, who let Chris into this party?

Scott But don't you think, I mean, in some ways, despite all- And then the person after you goes, oh yeah, a thousand years.

Chris That's how I'm thinking of the future. 2022 is the first year of the next millennium in my books. I've got it all planned out.

Scott But that's a great question. What is the future?

Chris And when do we end? In the context of this ongoing pandemic, which, if you think at the start, was... Almost the only thing that was real. There was nothing, in I think a lot of our lived experiences, there was nothing to contemplate beyond getting a handle on this thing. And so the future was kind of, you know, had been interrupted. There was just a wall. Yeah. And gradually we sort of pushed that wall farther and farther back and then started to perceive once more the flow of time. To where now I think people have maybe fully recovered the sense that time flows, events continue to move on, and the pandemic is less walling off our perception of the future, and it's more anchoring us into the past, or like some kind of Sack full of stones that we have to drag with us. But it's kind of, you know, it feels like societies and us as individuals, we're in the process of adapting to carrying that weight rather than waiting to drop it. That's a nice metaphor, actually.

Scott Yeah, and time is relative, right, in the sense of 60 minutes on an early date with a really budding love interest who you're thinking about all the time. That goes by in a heartbeat. 60 minutes in the dentist's waiting room is an eternity. And it's the same 60 minutes. I mean, it really is. We can look at the metric, but the way we experience time feels very, very different. The same 60 minutes can feel massively different. And that's, I think, one of the things that Something like a pandemic really messes with, as you're saying, your experience of time.

Chris Right, yeah, yeah, that's it. So I think that's one. I think that's a good holiday conversation to take to the party. How far ahead are you looking, are you thinking?

Scott Yeah, what are you thinking in the future? How far ahead do you look? What's your future?

Chris So I'm looking at you. It's your turn. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Questions that 2021 begs us to consider. Yeah, I think, you know, so... And you can take as long as you want because we can always edit out the long pause.

Scott We can always edit out the long, long pauses. This is where podcasting time is also very, very relative. You know, I think there is a really good question around like what we... Who is the we? You know, what does it mean to be us? I think, you know, that in a time of a pandemic, the kind of who is we question is interesting to me in the sense of, you know, because there are people that I think there are good faith actors on all sides of this kind of thing where you're thinking, look, the answer to this is personal responsibility. Basically, this is something that we have not successfully kind of fared it out. I think things like vaccines and other things have mitigated it. You know, people ultimately, you know, there's a group of people that said, really, it's all on you versus the people that think it's an us problem. You know, like we've got to kind of hunker down and be an us in this context. And I think that's a really intriguing question because it's not something where, it's not like it's a question of flat earth or six-day creation or something like that. Like, I think that, A lot of the people on both sides of the question are really good faith actors.

They want to get us through a tumultuous year, but there's radically different orientations. Again, if you have a big family, you'll probably see these orientations at your holiday parties. There are going to be people that are It's interesting in the States. I don't know if it's like this in London or not, but I'm sure there's similar things. It is so primal the way people judge people based on how they're responding to the pandemic and how they respond to Government measures and stuff. And so, I mean, I think that it's an interesting question, like how much are we a we in this? You know, what does it mean to be an us or a we? It's not very grammatically elegant, but phrasing of the interrogative. But I think, you know, who is the body politic? Who are we? And how much are we on our own? And at what point are we a we that can only really dig our way out of kind of meta problems like this when we have a concerted collective effort?

Chris Well, so now I have question jealousy, because I think your question is even better than mine. Who is the we? And can immediately think of, you're in New York, I'm in London. You can immediately think of, if you want to think in the vaccine context, those who have been vaccinated, those who have not. In your own country, in your own nation, I'm looking at this great visualizer of the earth at graphics.reuters.com on vaccine rollout and access. It's a globe and you can spin it. It's got vaccination rates by country. If you spin to Africa, I think the lowest rate in the world. This is probably central. Democratic Republic of the Congo, 0.2% have received at least one dose. Did you say 0.2%? 0.2%, yeah. Wow. In Nigeria, let's see, Nigeria, 4.1%. Mauritania, that's better, 24.5%. South Africa, 31.9%. And Omicron originated in South Africa. And then it spread to the United Kingdom and into Europe and now in the United States and back home in my Canada.

Could there be a better time to ask, like, could there be a more appropriate question for 2021 than who is the we? I mean, that really is the question at the heart of what we're going through Right now, the World Health Organization, I haven't checked in the past couple of days, but as of a few days ago, it was still like their official advice was not in favor of administering booster shots. Not because they aren't effective, but because there are other, so many other people in countries that haven't even had their first dose. And I just had, full disclosure, I had my third dose two days ago. Who is the we?

Scott Yeah, and also, you know, even from a less than altruistic perspective, I think one of the things you're alluding to is like, look, South Africa, everybody has international airports. If you're at 30% vaccination rate, this is going to be... I read a study this morning that they're saying 40% of adult cases right now are asymptomatic. So you might be in South Africa on business. You go around, you hang out, you go to some business parties or whatever, you have no idea you're infected. You don't get a test, because you don't feel sick, right? You feel fine. You get on a plane, and then all of a sudden, you do a layover here, then you get back to London. I mean, this is the we. The world that we live in is an incredibly permeable membrane.

Chris Right. Yeah. Because from the vaccines perspective, we are all part of the we. Yeah. That's the thing that makes this so difficult, is even if everybody accepts that vaccines are effective, if everybody was pro-vaccine, you would still have the problem That the vaccine looks at humanity as one species, as one we that is adapted to colonize. And we don't look at ourselves that way. And again, this is why I applaud your question because I mean, if not now, then when? There's never gonna be a better time to ask the question, who is the we, precisely because, you know, the one global event with all these different experiences of it, it just betrays how we do actually look at... At one another. And this has sort of been playing out since my days two years ago, helping to To move PPE across, you know, kind of across the planet and, you know, working for my friends in government in Canada and the United States and here in Europe. And I remember being interviewed on, I think it was Canadian radio, CBC radio. And the interviewer asked me, you know, so like, how do you feel about like what you're doing? Like moving, you know, product, like sort of it's needed everywhere, isn't it? And it was a great question because I had been grappling with it a lot and also just recognizing that... And I was just doing this pro bono. I was just trying to help friends out in government.

But it was the demand in different parts of the world that was also doing it. Like we were all doing it. It was the fact that the Canadian government had basically set up a temporary airport in Shanghai with its own military airplanes and was kind of extending these. In every country with the capacity to do it was building these supply chains to kind of grab what they could. And take it back to their people because in their countries, everybody was saying, why don't we have masks? Why don't we have ventilators? And I remember working with some friends at the World Bank and we were trying to set up funding facilities so that countries in Central and Latin America could access this stuff too. But the prices that these cheap little paper things had once been cheap were now going for. It was only the Americans and the Canadians and the Brits

who were first in line and could pay for it. So who was the we then? And that was before vaccines. And then with the vaccines, it's the same thing. And with whatever comes next, it's going to be with the reconstruction, with the recovery.

Scott It's interesting. You tell a story. In your book, In the Age of Discovery, where you talk about, I'm trying to remember, there's kind of like a witch doctor or something that comes and does like an incantation in light of the ships that are pulling up on the shore or something. I'm trying to remember this story in the book. And you talk about, I think, in the book, that this form of magic actually works. I mean, it emboldens the people, right? If you're a Westerner, you look at this and you think, oh, this is superstition. And you kind of actually say, no, it's really magical. I mean, what happens there is magical. Do you remember the section I'm talking about?

Chris I'm flipping through the book now. I can't remember if I can... If I can find the exact passage. But what I remember was, and I think it was like an encounter, like a Spanish encounter with the Aztecs. And Montezumo sent his priests to curse the invaders. And what was interesting was kind of in anthropology, The power of a curse. If we live in a society where we all believe that when I mark you as cursed, you are cursed, so that you then feel as if you are cursed, and everyone in the community acts toward you differently now because you are cursed, then that is totally real. You accept the change. Everyone enacts the change. We all enact it. And so something has changed. A ritual has been performed and we all behave differently. So the magic is real. And it's only when you try to kind of act that magic on people who have not been socialized at all in this ritual and what it means. That it's just comical. Like, what are you doing? So that's the story I remember.

Scott Now, how does it connect to... Well, I was just thinking about the power of the magic, and I think about akin to the curse. In the biblical tradition, there's this idea of the blessing, and there's this really interesting story where this character, Jacob, who is one of the bigger characters in Genesis, he... He does this machination. His father, Isaac, has gone blind. And it's kind of hard of hearing, but he's dying and he needs to give the blessings out. And clearly he's going to give... The bigger blessing to Esau, to the older son. And Jacob does this. His mother helps him. He's his mother's favorite. She makes his father's favorite dish. He puts animal skins on his arms because Esau was a hairy man and he knew he would touch, that Isaac would touch his arms, but couldn't see him. And Jacob even said, Isaac even says this weird thing, the voice, Jacob, but the man is Esau. And Isaac blesses him and he gets the older son's blessing. Like he gets the blessing of the firstborn as someone who was the younger son.

And that changed his life, the blessing, right? This performative act. And I wonder what is it in our polity, in our public life, like what blessings could we give? What stories could we tell? What ways can we, as we move into a new year, what better questions can we ask that become blessings for people, that become reframing of narratives, right? Where I think bad questions, or at least, or that may be kind of more, or at least reductive questions and reductive conversations can really curse us, right? They can really lock us into dead-end conversations and just be, And really good conversations. The kind of stuff that you've kind of given your life to over the past few years, cultivating, convening conversations. When they're good, they're really good, and they can be a real blessing. And I wonder how... As we move into a year that's going to be tumultuous,

clearly, we face geopolitical issues all over the globe. The pandemic is not going away. Supply chain issues, just mental health, all these things are really there. How can good questions and good framing and good storytelling be a blessing?

Chris I like that a lot. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Scott No, no, I was done. I was done. I was landing the plane, as they say.

Chris You totally landed that plane. So the question I heard, well, the form of the question that I love in what you just said is, what blessings can we bestow on other people? And I like how you talk about reframing as a form of blessing. I think that's quite profound. I talk about reframing things a lot in the work that I do. And often, we're not talking in an emotional or spiritual way or in a kind of mental health way. We're talking about a kind of cognitive way. Is that a good concept or is that a different concept? I had an interesting conversation as an example with Very fastly, rapidly adopted, and then the next thing, and then the next thing, and then the next thing. So that's an example of a reframe that's just, it's interesting, it's helpful, like, oh yeah, it's not a world of S-curves, it's a world of J-curves, great. It can help me think about different, help me understand better what might happen with different technologies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a very intellectual exercise. But to think of, A reframe as a form of blessing, as an opportunity to, you know, exercise the faculty of imagination in a crisis and to help other people to reframe, which, you know, that goes back for me to the magic.

Is, you know, the priest who instead of giving a blessing, instead of giving a curse, gives a blessing. And then you feel blessed. And so you walk around as if you've had like, what was the magic potion that Harry Potter drank in one of the Harry Potter movies and he could do no wrong?

Scott Right, right, right.

Chris You're not the Harry Potter trivia expert. One of our listeners knows, is screaming into the air right now, it's the something potion, Felix something. Right? And everybody believes that, oh, you're specially charmed. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could do that? today. It's irrational, but things must be so much better now because I've been blessed by that person. And everybody else is acting around me as if I've now been blessed. Oh, that would be such a wonderful, wonderful feeling.

Scott Yeah, it's the power of... There's this great 16th century term called imputation. That's not a word. It is a word. But it's funny, we only use it negatively now. You imputed bad motives to me. Nobody uses it positively. Like when people use the word impute, it's categorically negative.

Chris But in the 16th- I am so going to the Oxford English Dictionary right now.

Scott It's a word, it's a real word. Imputation, imputes. It's a great word. No one uses it anymore, except in negative context.

Chris You're right, you're right. Yeah, to represent something, especially something undesirable as being done or possessed by someone. The crimes imputed to Richard. And so tell me about the original meaning.

Scott Well, I mean, it had this religious meaning where Martin Luther said that what happens in salvation is the righteousness of Christ is imputed to you. So you might have a real messy record. And then basically he's like, when God looks at your record, he sees the record of Christ. Not your mistakes. And the biggest, the most powerful image I can think of with this, and it's the power of the blessing, is in the opening of Les Miserables, when Jean Valjean gets caught stealing- The candlesticks, wasn't it? The candlesticks, yeah. And he says, the priest comes out and says, Jean, Jean, I'm very angry with you. I told you to take the silverware as well. Right. And, you know, Jean Valjean is undone. You know, and the priest just hugs him and says, I've bought your soul. You're a new man. And at that point, there's this, that's the power of the blessing, right? Where Jean Valjean can't see himself. As anything other than this desperate kind of criminal. And he does become a new man. Who's the bad guy?

Chris Dude, Javert.

Scott Javert, and Javert is the opposite. Javert can't hear a new story. He's bound to an exacting code. That is so limiting and unimaginative and he just can't get out of it. And ultimately, he knows it doesn't work anymore and he has to suicide. You know, he can't live in a world where this code is crumbling. And I think that's the, I mean, at what point the blessing, like how do, you know, what stories can we tell? And what questions can we ask? That are the blessing, that rename situations and contexts so that people all of a sudden have some hope and all of a sudden can get out of the cul-de-sac of the self-defeating narratives and the kind of blame games and things and get us to a place where we can gather around, and one of your favorite metaphors, gather around a campfire and see possibility and promise. As opposed to peril and just blame. Dude, that's beautiful.

Chris I have this strong urge to go to London's West End right now and get a cheap ticket to see Les Miserables tonight. And if not for COVID, I might do that. Yeah, exactly. I think they might have been shut down again. That's great. I've totally got to watch Les Mis over the holidays, even though the Hollywood production wasn't that great, I think. I've seen that musical a couple of times, but you've just encapsulated the core of the story more beautifully than I've ever heard it or perceived it myself. And that's exactly it. You're right. The blessing is real. Upon the character of Jean Valjean, and it totally changes his life.

Scott And there's nothing more real than that. I mean, it is a completely life-changing event.

Chris Because he believed it was real. Yes. And there was also, I mean, it was this wonderful, also like concrete act that had a manifestation to it. I mean, the priest was in a position to have him sent off to jail by these police who had caught him and really did believe that he was He was a criminal, who he indeed was, and kind of felt angry at the priest for letting this guy off the hook. We wanted to capture this guy. We're police officers. That's what we like to do. So there was a real concrete reality to the blessing. It had an immediate practical impact on his life. And maybe that's one of the challenges for us in addition to, you know, we just don't give one another enough blessings. But also you have to believe in its power for it to manifest.

Scott That would be the really risky holiday party question. To say to your friends, you're sitting around and maybe it's the dessert course and there's wine being handed and you just say, look, you all mean a lot to me. You're my friends and or family or both. How can I be a blessing to you this year? Or if that sounds too sanctimonious, how can I be just more present for you this year? How can I be someone that helps make you more you? What can I do? And I think that's a great invitation. And I think it's interesting because those questions are so awkward. It will seem so weird, vulnerable, and intimate, but my guess is if you did it, it would start a two-hour conversation. Great middling. Exactly, and that's powerful middling. It's a very powerful middling. That would be the middling that people, you know, you'd be looking back two years later and saying, wow.

Chris That was a really great, yeah. That opened something. We went somewhere real. And that's maybe part of these holiday conversations is we don't often have real conversation. It's performative. And what you're talking about is how can we get real? How can we touch one another or feel moved by one another? And I thought it was really interesting and totally true what you said, that it would be really awkward. It would feel awkward to get into this question, which is, to some extent, an indictment of and proof of how performative, even in... Pause there. So anthropologists sometimes talk about sight, ritual, and drama as the constituent components of human social experience. And when you have a site like around the Christmas tree or around that Christmas dinner table, and you do these shared rituals, like whatever your ritual might be, we turn on the tree, we open one gift, somebody carves the turkey, we break Christmas crackers. Every family has its set of holiday rituals.

It is in that context That there is the most opportunity for meaningful drama, which is the unscripted stuff that is nonetheless deeply meaningful and has shared understanding and builds the richness of relationship. That's when the drama can happen. And that we create these sites, we perform these rituals, and we hesitate to be dramatic. With one another is really just a tragedy of missed opportunities because it's our best chance of the year to have that human drama.

Scott Yeah, it is. It's funny because I used to love to host birthday parties for friends and everybody knew if I was hosting the party, what was going to happen. There would be a part like, We're after we had eaten or something where basically everybody had to go around and share a story about the person whose birthday it was. And this is why you have no more friends. And I don't know why people don't show up for the parties anymore. It feels awkward at first. And then by the end of it, everyone loves it. And everyone wants it done for them eventually. And it's funny because I have been on the receiving end of this practice, and it was awkward for me. I didn't enjoy it at first. But then by the end of it, I was right. But these ways of creating practices, like you're saying, these site ritual drama that also, these are, they carry the questions, right? Like these kind of human, they're kind of, Yeah, they're couriers for questions. And I think that's why these things are really important. And it's interesting because I think we're in a rapidly changing... Western culture changes so quickly, faster than most people in world history are used to accommodating change. And maybe that's even more important.

Thinking, how can we create, like you're saying, social spaces to get to these questions and to be a blessing to each other? Like, what can we do? And maybe, you know, and maybe it's a great time to, you know, we've got a couple days before, you know, the holidays hit. Most of you have probably been to your holiday parties and stuff, but probably haven't been to your friends, family kind of gatherings. I don't know, it's an invitation, right, to think, well, what are some ways? TS Eliot has a great quote. He said, we had the experience, but we missed the meaning. And how can we not miss the meaning? That's a great question to enter into the holiday with. How do I not miss the meaning here? Because there are probably lots of moments. Like you're saying, whether you're carving the turkey or sitting around a tree or

visiting with your uncle you only see every once in a while or something, but they're probably pregnant moments. And just inviting yourself to say, what can I see here? Like how can I be here and how can I be a blessing?

Chris High quality. So if you find yourself middling at the Christmas dinner table, So three great conversation starters to make it memorable. One is, yeah, so how far in the future are you gonna think? Two was, who is the we?

Scott Yeah.

Chris And three is, what blessings can we give to each other? And then after you've had that amazing conversation, when you have that quiet moment to yourself, glass of wine, Christmas tree, a fourth question for your own personal reflection, which is how do I not miss the meaning of this experience? I'm so excited for Christmas now. This is great. New year, let's report back. Yeah, we'll report back. Exactly. We'd love to hear from everybody too. Did you actually try it? Did any of these questions work for you? Rate the questions on question meter. Tell us what your top 10 were. Oh no, we're doing it again.

Scott We're doing it. Yeah, if you would email us too, we'd love to hear because that'd be really interesting to hear back if you tried this.

Chris Emails in the show notes. Scott, Merry Christmas. It's been great. Happy holidays.

Scott Yeah, and also to you. All right, my friends, we'll see you in the new year. Looking forward to it.