Žižek vs Peterson: our thoughts on the debate

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, my friend, happy Friday. It's not Hanukkah. It's Friday. 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. 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, said it's an accretive city. Thanks for watching!

Chris God is an Eagles fan.

Scott The downtown, no matter what. Like, people did still destroy stuff, flip cars, but, like, at least I'd like them to be happy when they do it. It's just, like, police are greasing the, like, lamp poles so that people couldn't climb up. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's crazy. It's awesome. 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... David Pryor 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, oh, you really see, like, yeah, it's very, like, it's... It's fascinating. The other thing that I think is interesting about the United States right now is for a big country that is a liberal democracy, we're so diverse in so many ways, which is why in political debates today, everybody lifts up the example of Scandinavia, which I think is a great example, especially Sweden. Sweden has 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 splintered 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, 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. 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, so I mean you can vote by like plugging in your ID card into your laptop and And so they're at the forefront of like, how do we secure our public networks to the blockchain and stuff like this? But they're really digitally intensive. And, 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 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 in more complicated demographic spaces? I think there's really something there.

Scott There's research on this. Yeah, there's research. We talked about this a couple weeks ago, I think, this study where they've done on these Italian townships.

Chris I can't remember what we talked about two weeks ago.

Scott Yeah, exactly. Neither did I. But I remember there's this study, and I heard it on Freakonomics, where Italy notoriously has, you know, The presidential debate is next week. And I thought if I was a moderator, I'd almost want to say, all right, that's a great idea, but I'm dinging you because that could never make it with 60 votes in the Senate. And the odds are the Democrats are not going to take 60 seats. So, you know, you can't... These bold legislative ideas are just never going to get through. And so, you know, I think of the two big legislative things that have happened in the past two administrations, Obamacare...

Chris And 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. So I've got a buddy in Montreal and he's sort of a... I wouldn't say an expert, although he is an expert in US politics, but he's more just intensely curious about... He's worked on multiple campaigns for parties on both sides of the aisle and 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. Yeah, and Andrew Sullivan wrote a— You know, that we live in a moment where, in a lot of domains, it seems that time is precious, 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 at each other long enough, then we're going to come to some kind of either consensus or compromise. And it seems that that is too strong an assumption as well. And I think it's those two things put together that lead a lot of us to kind of wring our hands about our political systems.

Scott You know, Andrew Sullivan, who's, you know, was a Thatcherite kind of conservative, gay, Catholic, 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 of 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, to quick ideological turns. Thanks for watching! Thanks for watching! And I'm thinking, yeah, I don't want the Congress to act quickly on this, because most of them don't know enough. But most of them just don't know. I mean, I remember one of the senators when Zuckerberg was like, how do you provide all these services for free?

And Zuckerberg's like, we sell ads. And like, you know, so the idea that like, sometimes I like the gridlock. I'm with your friend. And other times, I think... You know, at other times I think, gosh, you know, I'd like more efficiency.

Chris So let's maybe pivot from there to engaging on some of the questions that I had posed in... It wasn't a map. It was my first field notes that I put up.

Scott Yeah, I love this. Did you like that idea? Yeah, you kind of like, look, I'm just... Here are some raw thoughts.

Chris What do you guys think? Help me... Thanks for watching!

Scott And I thought, that's one of the things I like about our conversations is kind of we're exploring out loud. And I love the way you wrote in this field notes because you were sort of, 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 I liked it. 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. Yeah, yeah.

Scott I think that's true, too.

Chris It's like, oh, 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... Interdisciplinary people that like to connect things and big ideas to the world and things like that. It's not that I think that, but it's a tribe that can be hard to find. I mean, it can be hard to find locally, you know, just a group of people that can connect in that way. And so, yeah, I think that, you know, I think for some people we're probably some kind of proxy. Yeah.

Chris But, you know, because we're talking about sort of gridlock. And I feel that those three questions or topics that I threw up, they all relate in a meta way to this question of what do we do when we're stuck? And how do we get unstuck and find ways to move? 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... And this came about, you were sitting in a room, right, with people.

Chris Yeah, so it was...

Scott You actually referenced the Basecamp thing. That was actually, that question was from the Basecamp thing that we didn't try.

Chris 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 thinking, you know, what's beyond concepts of recycling and sustainability? And it's actually around, you know, how do we design our economic systems to be sustainable by design? And it was a pretty powerful room of people, but a large conference. And it was the CEO of Conde 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. And to turn what are otherwise kind of diffuse anxieties and feelings and needs of the public moment into more concrete ideas and images and movements. That we can all get behind. And as soon as he said that, I was careering back to, you know, we had a whole table of artists at Toronto who, you know, basically came out of their conversation with the idea that, yeah, exactly what we need to do. Thank you very much.

Some of the latent needs of the moment that we're in, but I think also, too, to kind of be the mirror back to ourselves, because I think that's something powerful that the arts do, is they show us our fixations, and they show us our blind spots, especially contemporary art, right? It's a representation of the now. And once somebody represents it, then we can kind of step back and walk around it like, yeah, that's crazy or that's beautiful. It makes the present moment something tangible 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, I was looking at my kids, and everything is on smaller screen. So I thought, well, what kind of show would be on a small screen? All right, how about... Thanks for watching! You know, to these shared kind of mediums and what does that do? You know, and I think artists are generally much more reflective about how medium and representation shapes reality. And I think that that, you know, that is, I even think of like, you know, Conan O'Brien was Howard Stern's favorite guest, he revealed in his book, his best interview ever did. 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 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. 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 maybe that's why we kind of crowded the arts out of serious business of life, because it's not seen as instrumental. So this kind of thread got a lot of reader reaction. And one of the people who wrote back to me, I mean, We got like some submissives, some real rants came back, like in some pretty long form. But one was this artist... Pretty significant artists I know quite well and wrote, and obviously cares a lot about the arts as an artist, but he wrote, 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.

Scott Yeah, no, I think that's, yeah, I mean, that things aren't meaningful. And, you know, there's Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher famously said, before I ask what must I do, I must ask of what story am I a part? And, you know, that oftentimes you thought like ethical, the way we teach ethics and say college classes are like, 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 and what we want to be?

Chris That's really interesting because that was another part of the field note. We talked about what are the limits and the possibilities of storytelling? The reason that I asked that question is... This seems to happen in... Every meeting nowadays, this word narrative gets used all the time. I think it's become a word that helps. 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?

Chris Uvel. Harari.

Scott Harari? Harari. Harari.

Chris contradictory or contesting sort of reader response to those threads I was writing. I mean, one person wrote to me, I love the word narrative. And while I respect your critique, Chris, it's my critique, 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 sense-making 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 is a process and you know at the beginning there's a quite creative and and porous process around you know figuring out the narrative and you're still doing a lot of listening there and learning but then kind of towards the other end it's just sort of pure proselytizing 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, this guy became a monk, Trappist monk, amazing author, thinker. He talks about the difference between seeing yourself and being yourself. He says, you know, when we're seeing ourself, we're projecting. I'm thinking about how am I coming across in this interview or at this party or in this social interaction. And often we're... It's our insecure self. It's our pitch-projected self versus when we feel really secure and able to actually be our, to act from a place that's genuine. I think 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 perhaps what we... 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. He's like, a poet would never use a metaphor without understanding it.

Chris And I thought it was really, so he went on to say, no, no, no, no, but, you know, 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 metaphor occurs to me as a more open form of story, 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 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 that we kind of keep every word, every sentence of that story fixed. So it's a kind of, it's more like I was in a wonderful meeting with a woman yesterday and we were talking about systemic change and how they're creating, how they're trying to sort of catalyze systemic change in the finance industry. And she talked about her role or 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's 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.

Chris 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, 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 don't happen to human fears, not hopes. And so I think that is kind of part of one of the big challenges.

Scott Stories can be weapons. Stories can be weaponized. Stories can be weaponized.

Chris And also, the weapons are effective. 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 U.S. when they're thinking about how to, you know... If we want to win the next election, what's the right approach to take? Because you have the sense that maybe it's bad for society. Maybe it's bad for democracy to kind of oversimplify things into slogans and just keep hitting them and just try to win with our version of the truth. Maybe it is bad, but it's what works. And we've got to do what works because we can't be naive about the world that we live in. And I think 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, you know, how do we frame this? And how do we understand? And how is, you know, how is sort of grown-up corporate Europe and corporate America thinking about the economy now? And how is that whole framing different Thank you.

Scott That's me, right? The other end of the spectrum. This is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, right? That by 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, the understanding changes the world we live in. So you and I are on that page, right?

Chris But you get diverse people around the table with a big problem and, you know, half of the room is going to be so frustrated with us and like, oh, you know, you know, expletive, there go Chris and Scott again, you know, and it's just like their words are no more helpful than air. They're just, 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 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. When 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 and 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 and 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, 5th century B.C. kind of arguments. I'm just 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 are 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 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.

The whole essay is beautiful, but this sort of deliberate inactivity, it's not a sort of inactivity of sloth or resignation, but it requires a kind of imaginative patience. And I think we could use more of that, Ralph, and not less.

Chris So where my mind goes listening to that, and I think this is 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 sitting and thinking, us reflecting, reading, listening, questioning, these are all also actions. But we, I guess somehow, And it probably is economic thinking permeating into all other aspects of life. There's a sense that if it isn't counted and measured in a kind of quantitative value framework somewhere, then it doesn't count as action. And so I think that it is, you know, 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 into it. And I mean, 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.

And, you know, you can imagine a time sort of, you know, at the dawn of human consciousness where, you know, 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... Now I feel like I'm...

Scott 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. 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 why is it a problem? Because 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. 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 This dichotomy, and Ado, I think no thoughtful person wants to accept the dichotomy between thinking and doing, right? 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. I mean, yeah, even when you—this is the dialectical nature of it, right? Even when you bracket it out for the purpose of analyzing it or thinking about it, you realize quickly that bracketing out is often artificial.

Chris And so if I can just—so one of the—give me one second. I've got to pull a book off my shelf for this. Hold on a second. So one of our readers, listeners, he recently came up with a book, and I'm going to give him a brief plug for it. This is Robert Poynton. Of course. And it's called Pause. It's a series of books by a company called Do, the Do Book Company, and they've got a whole bunch of them. And this one is – 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 their series called Do Pause. And the subtitle is, You Are Not a To-Do List. But what is really, 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 mean, I think we all have personal experiences of just busying ourselves, filling time with doing stuff.

Scott But yeah, not being able to say what it is you did, like 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. Where, okay, big crisis, or now it's digital transformation, right? 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.

Chris 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 the closeness between significant thought and significant action. They are far more tightly connected than the way that we typically throw this dichotomy out when we're in a meeting or when we're in some kind of public discourse and we say, you know, less talk. More action. 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. Like we're navigating the border.

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

Scott Let's be honest.

Chris What do I do with an hour?

Scott Figure it out.

Chris Exactly. Bounce off the walls a little bit. No, thank you. I mean, I get so much energy out of our conversations.

Scott Me too.

Chris That's interesting, right? 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.

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.

Chris Thank you, my friend. Take it easy.