The limits and possibilities of storytelling (and some other big questions)

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, my friend, happy Friday. It's Friday. It's not Hanukkah. It's Friday today. You are in London. I'm in Greater Philadelphia, and the weather here is very British. It's overcast. It's been overcast for days. It's been raining, and I was walking in Center City, Philadelphia, in the rain, and a car drove past me and splashed If you had five words, how would you encapsulate Philadelphia in five words? Five words. It's big, small town. Yeah, big, small town. Fun. And the fifth one would be character. It's got a lot of character as a city. It's like the fifth largest city in the country now, I think. But it's sort of, it's an old city. I think I said this before, the guy who wrote this book, Hidden Cities of Philadelphia, it's an accretive city. Thanks for watching! Like, police were greasing the lamp poles so that people couldn't climb up them. It's crazy. It's awesome. Philly's great.

Chris There's a vibrancy to life in America that one does need to respect. There is a kind of... You know, enthusiasm for tribalism in a lot of aspects of American culture, right? I mean, you see it in the politics, obviously, but you also see it in the sports. And there's something to be... I guess it does go back to sort of de Tocqueville and democracy in America. And I think that he was basically trying to articulate the same thing in a kind of classic work of political nonfiction that, boy, these people are just very energetic about what they do.

Scott And associations, they're always associating, and they're always in these, yeah, it's very, yeah, there's this sort of like, they learn these sort of democratic skills through all these associations they form, and yeah, he talks about how you can't convince an American you're done talking with them. Even if you disagree with them, they'll try to convince you Thanks for watching. It becomes harder, I think, to figure out a shared identity, especially as we have more and more resources and ways to self-identify in more splinter groups.

Chris I think that's right. It's probably, it's a subtlety, well, it's more than a subtlety, but it's a dimension that is often lost when we kind of, you know, do comparisons around the world of, you know, oh, they do that over there. Yeah, well, why can't we do that here? You know, I think of, you know, having lived in China and one of the just dominant truths of China is it's kind of, you know, and yeah, there is regional variation around language and stuff, but it's still kind of like 90% Han Chinese, like one broad ethnic grouping, sort of 1.1 billion out of 1.4. And so growing up in that environment where everybody looks like me, It both reinforces a sense of us and also reinforces a sense of them. And it becomes a kind of important factor around what is politically possible, right? That's a giant tangent. We don't need to explore it here. Is a one-party state more viable where there is such a strong homogeneity in just the ethnic identity of the state? Another thought that comes to mind is, I guess about a year or two ago, being in Estonia. And I was taking a delegation of Middle Eastern government officials to the capital Tallinn to meet with various executives. And Estonia is like one of the most digital societies on earth. You wrote about this? Yeah, yeah. So I mean you can vote by like plugging in your ID card into your laptop and... Thanks for watching!

You know, their story is, well, we had to be because in kind of like post-Soviet era, we're basically, you know, completely starved of wealth and there were just no capital to do anything any other way other than this way. You know, we couldn't afford to open government service offices in all the towns. In this big country of only 1.5 million people. So we had to do it digitally and blah, blah, blah. But the other thing that you recognize is that there is just profound homogeneity in that society. And is that kind of a precondition to being able to trust the system? Is that an enabler in a way that trust maybe just doesn't come as easily?

Scott These bold legislative ideas are just never going to get through. And so I think of the two big legislative things that have happened in the past two administrations, Obamacare, the health care reform, which got through in a technicality and reconciliation where through certain budgetary shifting, you don't need the 60-vote majority. So there you go. That's slightly cynical without becoming a cynic. I'm not a cynic, but I do think that that aspect of American government right now is challenged. I mean, they don't even pass budgets. They just do continuing resolutions. The one thing in the constitutional structure, the basic thing that the Congress should do, pass budgets. We can't do it.

Chris It's interesting because, you know, so I grew up and now live in parliamentary democracies where, you know, if you get a majority in one house, then you can do what you want to do.

Scott And if people can evaluate it, like, OK, they did this stuff. That's right.

Chris OK, that's what they were doing. OK, now we like that or no, we don't like that. The American system, of course, is one where you need to have pretty dominant performance in several different elections over a two-year period in order to be able to have the legislative authority to just try what you want to do. I've got a buddy in Montreal. I wouldn't say an expert, although he is an expert in US politics, but he's more just intensely curious. He's worked on multiple campaigns for parties on both sides of the aisle. He takes busloads of his students down from Montreal to work on campaigns. He's just in love. With American politics and American history. And he's a strong advocate of it. He would say like, yeah, no, I know that you, you know, everybody pooh-poohs the gridlock and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But actually that's the genius of the system. That this kind of strong antipathy and anxiety about government action and the system is designed to make it really hard. Andrew Sullivan wrote about it.

That there's an urgency and a lot of our politics, and not just in the US, but maybe most starkly in the US, is kind of designed around the assumption that time is a kind of infinite resource. And that may be far too strong an assumption for the world we live in now. And it's also kind of designed around an assumption that if we just talk Andrew Sullivan, who was a Thatcherite kind of conservative, gay, Catholic, you know,

Scott You know, writes, prolific writers all over the commentary. But he finds himself kind of in the American center, voted for Obama, even though he used to sort of, I mean, he still identifies as a conservative small C, but now if you're a conservative small C, you find yourself often in the center, sometimes slightly center left. But he wrote this book recently about the conservative mindset or something a couple years ago, and he was saying that part of what American government, the constitutional system does is it's resistant to ideology, you know, to quick ideological turns. And I think you could argue that's a strength. And the other thing, I quote you often on this, to you and to others, in your book, The Age of Discovery, you talk about how we ought to just sort of let the social media and the technology revolution kind of take its course. See you next time. We sell ads. Sometimes I like the gridlock. I'm with your friend. At other times I think, gosh, I'd like more efficiency. Let's maybe pivot from there to...

You were not giving us a finished product. You were sort of giving us your thought development on paper, which I found helpful and engaging. It was a different sort of writing style from what you often send out.

Chris Yeah, maybe looser and so kind of more obvious places to hook into it and build upon it. You know, so you think people tune in and listen to sort of, you know, sort of watch us explore together? I wonder if it's more like to watch us careen into the sides and smash into the walls.

Scott Yeah, yeah.

Chris This chaos is amazing. It's so entertaining to watch these people get lost in the maze of their own mind palaces.

Scott Well, yeah. But, you know, it is interesting. I mean, I think if there were more conversations that I knew of at a local pub or coffee shop like we're having, I would go there. I mean, I would... Again, I don't think we're the only game in town. I mean, there are...

Chris And I feel that those kind of three questions or topics that I threw up, they all relate in a meta way to this question of sort of, you know, what do we do when we're stuck? And how do we kind of get unstuck and find ways to move? You know, sometimes it's about... Because if we don't know what the solution is, if we don't know the way forward, then are we hopeless in the face of these challenges? Or are there ways to nonetheless move usefully and move meaningfully, even if we are in some way stuck? And I felt like the three topics in those field notes kind of related to that. One is this question of, so where are the artists? Are there new people that we can bring into what we're stuck with that can kind of create new paths, new pathways of action?

Scott And the second one being... This came about, you were sitting in a room, right, with people... Yeah, so it was... You actually referenced the Basecamp thing. That was actually, that question was from the Basecamp thing that we did in Toronto, right?

Chris It was, and so for me it was a kind of, you know, connecting dots in my own life that I was in this meeting of people. Well, first of all, I was at a conference on what's called the circular economy. It's sort of... Thank you for your time. And it was the CEO of Condé Nast who was there, this guy named Wolfgang Blau. And he asked that question. He's like, where are the artists? We need artists in public discourse to help crystallize the longing that people feel and to turn what are otherwise kind of diffuse anxieties and feelings and needs Thank you for your time. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. The present moment, something tangible that we can, that the rest of us can work with.

Scott Yeah, and I think of, you know, I remember back, Jerry Seinfeld is on Howard Stern now and again, and they're good friends, and he was asking, Stern was asking him about comedians, you know, in cars drinking coffee, and he said, how'd you come up with the idea? And he said, you know, McCullough, you know, the medium is the message. You know, he said, yeah, I was looking at my kids and everything is on smaller screens. So I thought, well, what kind of show would be on a small screen? All right. How about short, shorter in format and lots of faces and talking and short? Like he thought of the whole development of the show, looking at his kids and what they were doing. And the medium is the message kind of thing. And I think we're so connected to the medium now, you know, to these shared kind of mediums. And what does that do?

And he had Conan O'Brien back on the show to talk about that. And they talked about how just this medium, like what you and I are doing right now, right, in this podcast, there wasn't a medium like this to just for two people that were smart and kind of funny, like Stern and Conan O'Brien, to have this kind of long-form, 80-minute, wandering, insightful, interesting, funny conversation. You couldn't do that in terrestrial radio. You couldn't do it. So there are these mediums that often, and I think you're right, we often don't think... I think sometimes we're too instrumental in the way we think about the medium and not thinking about how it's shaping reality as it represents it.

Chris And I think that's, you know, maybe that's why we, you know, we kind of crowded the arts out of, you know, serious business of life, because it's not seen as instrumental. So, you know, this kind of thread got a lot of like reader reaction. And one of the people who wrote back to me, I mean, We got some missives, some real rants came back, and some were pretty long form. But one was this artist, pretty significant artist I know quite well, and wrote, and obviously cares a lot about the arts as an artist, but he wrote that I'm quoting him here. These profound human expressions of what it means to be truly alive are taken as frills nowadays and are not counted nor as they valued in, for example, modern school curricula. And their diminishing role and in some cases extinction in many jurisdictions of society enrages me and deprives students of the chance to be fully rounded human beings.

Facts and data are good but they are only part of the answer. We've sat in too many meetings where nothing new is ever postulated because there is nothing that acts as a catalyst to move minds outside of the quote-unquote the box. And so round and round We go. Yeah.

Scott Yeah, no, I think that's, yeah, I mean, the things aren't meaningful. And, you know, there's Alistair MacIntyre, right, famously said, before I ask what must I do, I must ask of what story am I a part? And, you know, oftentimes you thought like ethical, the way we teach ethics and say college classes are like, it's like moral calculus. Well, X plus Y equals, you know, then, okay, you save the baby or don't save the baby. It's like the quadratic equation, as opposed to thinking about what story am I in? What do I think is the true, the good, and the beautiful? And how do I live in accordance with that kind of reality? I think, yeah, it's the arts. It's in representing the beautiful and how we tell our stories and things like that, that we find what data sets and things like that mean. How does that shape who we are?

Chris So that's really interesting because that was another part of the field note, right? We talked about what are the limits and the possibilities of storytelling? And the reason that I asked that question is, you know, and this seems to happen in every meeting nowadays. This word narrative gets used all the time. And it's become such a – I think it's become a word that helps – like my hypothesis is because there's a sense that it kind of helps us find some sticky footing in an otherwise slippery moment where it seems that – That, you know, you can tell any story you want. And so what's real? It's like anything you want is real and it's just total chaos. But the narrative, the kind of the consistent story then becomes something more stable that people can hold on and get behind. And it also – so it becomes a kind of

defense mechanism against the maelstrom of chaos, but it also becomes the solution, the tool of how do we get anything done? How do we get anybody behind us in this maelstrom? We need a narrative. We need a story to kind of organize the facts.

Scott So I think that story is like, who's the guy that wrote Sapiens? Uval. Harari. Harari? Is it Harari? Harari. Harari, yeah. I mean, he talks about one of the most powerful things about human being is the ability to tell stories and make meaning that way. And I think that there is something instinctive that we do that way. But I think when we're too self-reflective, like when I hear in the commentary, oh, well, who's controlling the narrative? Yeah. I just hear bullshit. It's like after the political debates. Well, all right, let's go to the spin room. And spin is meaning bullshit, right? All right, what's our spin on it?

Chris Right, what's your bullshit story going to be?

Scott Yeah, and so I think sometimes the word narrative is almost the opposite of the... Chris Kutarna, Slavoj Žižek, Jordan Peterson.

Chris We need stories. If I can't hear your story and you can't hear mine, then I don't know you and you don't know me. If we don't know each other, are we going to create a story together? I thought, hmm. So stories are part of how we understand ourselves and each other. And that does seem true. And I guess it's Harari's point as well, that it's kind of an indispensable, just part of our sensemaking of reality and of each other that we exchange these stories. But then, you know, you talk about the bullshit in the spin room. And I guess what we really need to do, if we're going to use this word all the time in society now, then maybe we need to unpack it a bit and recognize that, you know, narrative storytelling is a process. And at the beginning, there's a quite creative and porous process around figuring out the narrative, and you're still doing a lot of listening there. But then kind of towards the other end, it's just sort of pure proselytizing, right? Here's our story. We're sticking to it. No deviation from the story because that's just going to derail us or derail public attention. And we don't want that. So just stick on the message. And at that point, the story no longer has any role in a kind of...

At that point, there's no longer a kind of creative mutation aspect to it, a learning aspect. It's almost a tool by which we shut down conversation and we shut down possibilities. And so I think that as we use this word more and more, we have to kind of recognize that There is this journey of narrative that takes us from, on one end, listening and hearing each other, to the other end, finish it for me. Like a deafness to each other.

Scott Yeah, I think Thomas Merton, the great 20th century spiritual thinkers, the guy became a monk, Trappist monk, amazing. His words there have helped me immensely in my life. And I think there's a parallel with story. I think that when it's at a meaningful level, it's less self-reflective about how it's being heard or told. It's the difference between being the story or seeing the story, pitching the story or trying to use the story to control reality as opposed to the story helping us indwell and live in reality.

Chris So that's very interesting because I think it relates to this idea of the story helping us to dwell in reality. So one person of, let's call it our learning community, got back to me and said, I thought it was really intriguing that That perhaps what we need, perhaps what is needed when we talk about the need for narratives and new narratives is actually new metaphors. And that a metaphor is a powerful thing.

Scott T.S. Eliot said after he sort of rejected philosophy, you know, after he basically earned a PhD at Harvard then didn't defend his dissertation, he said the problem with philosophers is they don't understand the metaphors they use. It's like a poet would never use a metaphor without understanding it.

Chris And he went on to say, but when we use metaphor, we're touching upon this mythic aspect of ourselves, which hungers for intelligibility and meaningfulness. And I don't know exactly, that feels like it's over my head or above my pay grade, but where my mind goes to when I think about what would happen if we kind of shift the language from narrative to metaphor. is is metaphor occurs to me as a kind of as a more open form of story right as a kind of frame that isn't like it isn't total vapor like there is a substance to it there is a shape to it but it's not a hard edge thing that only this fits into the box of the story we're telling metaphor to me suggests that I can I can bring my own stories and my own examples and my own identity and circumstances to it and make sense of it for myself and also help you to make sense of it and so it kind of serves this mutual understanding each other aspect without demanding Thank you very much.

She talked about her role, the role of her organization as holding the frame and not like squeezing it tightly, but just kind of holding a frame, holding a story, holding an agenda rather than owning an agenda and the sense of creating some meaningfulness and some mutual understanding and at the same time allowing for a kind of openness. And I feel like what I really need is a concrete example here. But I've got a hunch that he's onto something there, that the shift from narrative to metaphor could be a really helpful one.

Scott It's interesting. Hans Frey, who was a theologian at Yale University, was a significant kind of... ...thinker in a lot of academic circles, both theologically and to some extent philosophically. But I remember hearing him in a lecture say once that for the Christian tradition, the point of the doctrines is the story, not the other way around. And what he was saying is that there's the story of God, Israel, Jesus, the cosmos, that's being swept in it. And when thinkers have engaged in sort of philosophical and theological speculation and things like this, it's for the purpose of finding out what the story means in this new time and place. It's not to replace the story, it's not to control it, it's to enable it to sort of keep being a living story. And I thought that is very... There's something to that. McIntyre also has written about this, how traditions that are living are able to retell their story and reinterpret it in light of new realities. And traditions that die are ones that can't do that, right? They can't be porous and they can't have...

And that's helpful evolutionarily, right? Because you need cohesion. But the challenge is for that binding thing to not be totally blinding, that you're able to sort of... And you can't sort of... Right, there is this balancing act, isn't there?

Chris It is similar to the conversation we had about AI, that if there's just a constant sort of invasion of alternative ideas... Then does it just become chaos? And so what is the balance between the story that is so inflexible that it is fragile and the story that is so amorphous that it doesn't help us to make sense of the chaos? And so that's us just sort of almost thinking in a very abstract, intellectual way. And then on the other hand, you have another reader who wrote to me and said like, you know, I share the discomfort around the overuse of narrative and it does seem rather shallow and kind of the spin room thing. But, and this is somebody who knows what he's talking about and knows what she's talking about, but quote, narratives win elections. And in a world where Twitter soundbite media dominates, a narrative need not

be much more than a group of well-aligned and well-prosecuted slogans. And the most effective slogans tend to tap into human fears, not hopes. And so I think that is kind of part of one of the big challenges. Stories can be weapons.

Scott Stories can be weaponized.

Chris Stories can be weaponized. And also, the weapons are effective, right? And so there is this, I think, terrible fear. And you see it in the kind of, you know, hand-wringing that, you know, maybe Democratic candidates do in the US when they're thinking about how to, you know, if we want to win the next election, what's the right? Thank you very much. You see a lot of that tension. I mean, I saw it, again, going back to the meeting that inspired me to kind of put out these field notes. You know, I saw it in the kind of classic tension you see in the meeting between the value of thought and action. And, you know, I'm the ideas guy in the room. I'm just curious and watching it. And I believe... And it's probably an irrational belief, but I have a real belief that just thinking about how do we frame this and how do we understand and how is sort of grown-up corporate Europe and corporate America thinking about the economy now?

And how is that whole framing different from how Indigenous cultures do? And if we could kind of understand those differences and create some kind of dialogue between them, that would be enriching and interesting and open up new possibilities.

Scott I completely agree. This is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, right? Just observing phenomena changes the phenomena. I think that's true, and I think that just understanding something changes, like, the idea and the formulation of it and the understanding changes the world we live in.

Chris So you and I are on that page, right?

Scott Yes, very much.

Chris You get diverse people around a table with a big problem, and, you know, half of the room It's going to be so frustrating with us. Expletive, there go Chris and Scott again. Their words are no more helpful than air. They're just sucking air together. Meanwhile, the world is burning. Or, you know, meanwhile, you know, we've got to turn around this crisis in whatever it is, right? The action-oriented people in the room have very little patience for, you know, introspective reflection and thinking about... How should we be thinking differently about things that the imperative to do is so strong? And I think it's pretty uncontested in a lot of those contexts. Somebody, especially in the position of authority, says, right, we can't just sit here, we've got to do something. Everyone thinks, oh yeah, that's right, we need to be doing something. I can't think of ever being in a room Where somebody has kind of thumped the table and said, we can't just do something, we have to sit here. And yet, I want to believe that it's not that simple. That like you say, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that there is, there is, there has to be, right, a synthesis of ideas and action.

And that was kind of what I was exploring in my letter. I mean, if you think kind of long-term in things, like actions too are just air, right? So someone does something, but what, You know, I mean, time and space and scale are so giant. I mean, the doing of any one thing just can be sort of lost. It doesn't have any permanence to it. And sometimes it seems that ideas are actually much more permanent than actions. If they enter the language, if they enter the culture, if they enter the society, then they continue to inform and shape action and action.

Scott I mean, we're still playing out Plato versus Aristotle in some ways in contemporary political discourse. Like, that's still a live debate. I mean, it doesn't always look the same, but sort of, you know, how much can you have a state sort of more top-down kind of system versus one that's a little more bottom-up and flatter? I mean, these are, you know, 10th century B.C. kind of arguments that are still playing out. There's, really interesting, there is this exchange in the Christian century in the 1930s between... H. Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr, who were brothers, who were two prominent Christian public intellectuals. And it was over whether America, the United States, should get involved in China, because Japan had just made excursions into China. And Reinhold Niebuhr was very much the activist. We need to get involved. We need to do something. And H. Richard Niebuhr's response to his brother was called the grace of doing nothing.

And in the conclusion, he says the inactivity, which he's talking about, is not the inactivity of those who call evil good. It's the inaction of those who do not judge their neighbors because they cannot fool themselves into a sense of superior righteousness. It is not the inactivity of a resigned patience, but of a patience that is full of hope and is based on faith. It is not the activity of the noncombatant. For it knows that there are no noncombatants, that everyone is involved, that China is being crucified, though the term is very inaccurate, by our sins and those of the whole world. It is not the inactivity of the merciless, for works of mercy must be performed, though they are only pallets to ease present pain, while the process of healing depends on deeper, more actual and urgent forces. And I love—the whole essay is beautiful, but this sort of deliberate inactivity, it's not a sort of inactivity of sloth or resignation, but it's— It requires a kind of imaginative patience. And I think we could use more of that, but not less.

Chris So where my mind goes listening to that, and I think this is a very productive... So what is the way to complicate the binary of ideas and action? Ideas versus action. And I think you can do it both. You can interrogate both of those. But one way, it seems, is, well, what counts as an action? And to recognize that, you know, sitting and thinking, right, us reflecting, reading, you know, listening, questioning, these are all also actions. But we, I guess somehow, and it probably is, you know, Then it doesn't count as action. And so I think that it is another example of the kind of measurement fetish that we've narrowed down our understanding of what makes something an action, that we've brought our measurement fetish. I remember a few months ago, in one of my most ambitious talks, I tried to talk about, and I think we maybe skimmed it briefly at some point, but I tried to talk about the history of human consciousness.

You can imagine a time at the dawn of human consciousness where thinking and acting were both just aspects of being. And I think that everything that we've done since then has given us so many ways to kind of compartmentalize being into what look and feel to our modern minds as discrete categories. But maybe, yeah, I think part of the way...

Scott Now I feel like I'm— I mean, Nietzsche says somewhere, he says, you know, some pre-Socratic comes up with the mind-body problem, right? And now it's a problem. And now none of us can get through a week without thinking about this mind-body, the duality. But it's not that there's not a duality or something, but, like, why is it a problem? So somebody frames it as a problem, and now it's with us as a problem.

Chris There are these two categories, and I can't straddle them both, and so I'm left with some kind of choice that I don't want to make. Yeah, I'm just skimming, you know, some of the replies that I have. I've never had so many replies to a letter, by the way, I suppose in part because I asked for it. But, you know, this dichotomy and, you know, I think... No thoughtful person wants to accept the dichotomy between thinking and doing. I think that we want to figure out a way of making sense of our intuition that they are both aspects of our being, of our doing.

Scott Yeah, I agree. This is the dialectical nature of it. Even when you bracket it out for the purpose of analyzing it or thinking about it, you realize quickly that

Chris So some of them are like Do Disrupt and Do Birth and Do Breathe and Do Purpose and Do Beekeeping. And Robert wrote the latest one in this series called Do Pause. And the subtitle is You Are Not a To-Do List. So how do we complicate the binary? What blew my mind is he wrote back to me, you know, this distinction between thinking and acting. And we just talked about how, you know, not all thinking is passive. But he makes the point in this book that not all doing is action. And his point that we can be busy and actually not be taking significant action. And I think that is massively true. I think we all have personal experiences of just busying ourselves, filling time with doing stuff.

Scott Not being able to say what it is, not being able to give a meaningful account of what did I just, I just spent all this time, what did I do?

Chris And I guess it's about saying, like, you know, should we kind of raise the status of what counts as an action to embody some sense of meaningfulness and significance? And if yes, then there's a lot of doings that are hopelessly inactive. And I can think of, you know, God, I can think of so many examples from the business world. So there's all this change happening in the world and we've got to change too. We've got to have our response. And so you bring in a consulting firm and you hold a bunch of meetings and consultations and you invest in some technology and you're doing all sorts of stuff. And so you look around yourself and you say, yeah, we're responding to these changes. And then, you know, the company goes bankrupt. And what someone impassively looking at it would say is they were busying themselves and they mistook being busy for doing something significant. They mistook being busy for responding.

Scott Yeah, well, I think it's a way to manage anxiety. I often think that when somebody is in great pain and people often try to give them answers rather than just be present, it's because the person who is suffering in front of them, the person suffering makes the person that's in front of them anxious. So you try to sort of give an explanation or an answer to manage your own anxiety about their suffering. Which is sort of like the least empathetic thing you can do, but it's a natural way to sort of, when we're chronically anxious, we often wind up doing stuff like that.

Chris Yeah, so I think that that's the other side of this whole debate, is that we need to insert a distinction between action and activity. And I think if we did that, then we would start to recognize, you know, the closeness between significant thought and significant action is probably, you know, they are far more tightly connected than the way that we typically throw this dichotomy out when we're in a meeting, you know, or when we're in some kind of public discourse and we say, you know, less talk, more action, you know. And one almost wants to say, like, you know, that's interesting, but, you know, Do we understand the difference between busyness and action? And if we don't, then we need more talk. Because that's really what is meaningful talk here. We all realize that there's a big, you know, we all realize the world is burning and we got to do something.

But do we understand the distinction between busyness and action? And if we don't, then, you know, running out of here is, you know, and picking up a pail is not necessarily going to help. We need to somehow bring the power of this heavy sort of wet matter computer brain thing into our activity.

Scott My friend, this has been meaningful. I think we've been on the border of thought, idea, and action here. Like, we're navigating the border.

Chris No, we're just keeping busy. Let's be honest.

Scott Let's be honest.

Chris We're like, what do I do with an hour? Give Scott a call and just bounce off the walls a little bit. No, thank you. I get so much energy out of our conversations. Me too. And so that's interesting, that it is possible to gain energy by working in ideas and talking about ideas. And that it can be transformative to us just in our kind of personal being without quote-unquote doing. So that's my justification for our habit of talking at each other.

Scott I love it. I love it. It's fun. And may our listeners spend a little more time, I hope, being themselves and seeing themselves.

Chris Listeners and this week contributors. It was, I mean, so many powerful sort of provocations from what people wrote in. So let's do more of that.

Scott Absolutely. Thank you, my friend. Take it easy.