Mapmaking and making meaning in a pandemic

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, my friend, welcome back to our podcast. We've been on a hiatus for a while. Much of the world has kind of been on hiatus. Scott, I've missed you.

Chris I don't know what your excuse is, but it can't be good. Exactly. Exactly. It's been crazy. Our life's been a little crazy. I mean, parts of my life have been simpler. I haven't gotten onto a plane in a while. And although there were some places I was really hoping to get to, a large part of me was pretty happy to be sedentary for a while.

Scott Well, Gallup has a new poll, and this is, I don't know how this would gel with the UK, the observations in the UK, but that Americans are right now, as many states have begun to reopen their economies, many Americans are reporting improvements in their emotional health, that coronavirus, even though it persists, Less than half of U.S. adults say they're worried a lot, 47% worried a lot of the previous day, down from 59% in late March, early April, when Gallup reported an unprecedented increase in worry. And in addition to the 12 percentage point drop in worry, boredom has dipped five points to 41%, and happiness has edged up five points to 72%. Loneliness has held steady with about a quarter of Americans saying they're continuing experiencing a lot of it. I can relate to that. I'm shocked about those numbers that people are... Maybe Americans are just optimistic when they take these things and want to seem happier than we are.

Chris Actually, I'm really happy that you shared those numbers. I've increased your happiness just by sharing the numbers. I think, for me, the big takeaway from coronavirus is it should be clear to all of us that we've been missing something big. Right. And I actually think there's two levels to that sense that we've been missing something. I mean, clearly, you know, a lot of us were missing something big when it came to kind of understanding and solving the world's problems. Right. Most people, I mean, well, people like me have written about it. You know that pandemics are a fact of life, that nature never gives up, that there's going to be another one so that there is another one. It isn't in itself surprising. But I think honestly, you know, there were a lot of warning signs that were ignored and there were a lot of people saying for a long time

that, you know, there are just systemic risks that are accumulating, that aren't being well understood, that we aren't taking seriously enough. So clearly we've been missing something big when it kind of comes to like the world out there.

Scott I think it's like a stress test, right? When you go to the cardiologist and they put you on the treadmill to see what kind of shape your heart and body are in. It seems like in lots of parts of the Western world, we've kind of failed the stress test. There's some systemic stuff underlying societal norms that this has revealed.

Chris And it kind of reveals the conditions under which the system works, right? And so you suddenly change some of the system conditions and you realize that, oh, a lot of things just don't work. Yeah. I mean, yeah, especially, you know, one of the big ones in the economy is just the movement of cash in society. Like suddenly I've got a small business. I can't pay this rent that I'm committed to if my customers don't show up and put cash into my cash register. Right. And and it kind of but before going too far down, down that rabbit hole. So, you know, clearly we're missing we've been missing stuff about kind of the health of the system, let's say, and where the real risks lay. But I think that we've also been, like a lot of us have come in touch with the feeling that we've also been missing something big about kind of our personal well-being. And this is the sort of ironic discovery of social isolation is that, you know, so much personal freedom has been taken away from us. And yet through that experience, like a lot of people have the sense that I've rediscovered something. I've found something that I had lost. So I've lost a lot, and that experience has helped me to recognize some of the things I had lost before. And I think in that context, everything you've told me about those statistics, that people feel less worried, that they have less stress, I think it relates to a kind of Thank you very much.

My own personal experience in this, and I admit that ever since the iPhone or smartphones came into my world, I think I had fallen into this pattern of feeling like any moment of the day, there was a chance to make it a little more productive. And so it kind of became this imperfect contest I had with myself about, like, what should I be doing now while I am waiting for the bus? What should I be doing now while I'm on the subway? What should I be doing now at the cafe while I'm waiting for somebody to show up? Because there was always a list of good answers to that question. And I never really managed to feel that I was optimizing my time as well as I possibly could have. But you know what? This whole experience has helped me to just get in touch with... There's more daylight between the self I am and the consumer that the world is constantly trying to turn me into. It's just more time to be myself and not be a consumer of things, I think, has... It's tough to consume when there's no economy. That's right. And, you know, the terrible phrase, the fear of missing out. We all deny it. But, you know, here I am living in London, and there is always so much on offer in this city that, you know, you do kind of feel it's very easy and normal, I think, to feel a bit of guilt. about not sort of eating at that banquet every day or every weekend. It's a kind of wasted opportunity to stay in when actually that's where you can spend time with yourself. That's when you can spend time with your family.

And so I think that... I think that that would be my hypothesis anyway. Behind the numbers of this Gallup poll is, I think, the opportunity to, whether we've been doing it consciously or not, separate the self from the consumer a little bit more and just identify a bit more with what are the things that give us, that feed us energy, strength. Because a lot of the extraneous stuff is just sort of out of our reach at the moment.

Scott It's interesting too that one of the highlights from the research is that in the United States, Democrats, lower income adults, single adults reported more negative emotions and women were more likely than men to report daily worry and loneliness. So just even demographically, it's kind of spread out a little differently, I guess, if you... I mean, this is the thing, right, that I think what pandemics also reveal about stress tests in society, right? The inequality that has been on the rise in the United States and other parts of the world, it gets exacerbated by a pandemic because you see, like, if you're a blue collar worker, you just can't work. If you're a white-collar person and you can telecommute and you're not getting a pay cut, it didn't really affect you as severely, right? In six months or whatever, if things slide back to a new normal, your normalcy hasn't been as disrupted because you're still working, you're still... It's interesting too, even the way the different states in the United States have dealt with it. If you have...

That are opening back up largely because they don't have income taxes. So all they have is sales taxes and things like that. So if you're in New Jersey or New York or Pennsylvania and people are still doing telecommuting stuff from home and all this, they're getting paychecks. And then from those paychecks, taxes are getting taken out and put into the coffers. So it's just interesting, even the way that different states react to the pandemic and the issues involved. I think it shows the inequalities and massive cultural differences that maybe make us, especially the United States, particularly ill-equipped to deal with this thing nationally together.

Chris It's so interesting. How the tax system is structured really does affect the incentives for whether you're comfortable sheltering at home or whether you really need to get everything moving again.

Scott Yeah, because none of the states that are opening back up have showed the flattening out of the – like the decrease in like whatever has been two weeks. I think they want you to have like a steady decrease in cases for two weeks or whatever. None of those states have met that requirement.

Chris And this is – I mean, it kind of relates back to this other – I guess what I've just been strongly – what the world has taught me the last few months is how – You know, and you talk about stress tests, but, you know, systems are kind of, they adapt to their environment, you know, just like populations, just like creatures. And when the environment suddenly shifts, that's when you realize that, you know, you're either caught on the right side or the wrong side of that shift. And I think one of the great lessons from this is, you know, to kind of, we got to figure out, because, you know, this isn't the first shock, it's not the last shock. How do we develop the capacity to shift culture, shift how we operate when suddenly the environment changes? I spent a lot of the last couple of months helping friends in some of the world's big bureaucracies to source medical supplies out of China and India.

Some people were on the front line and I was in the back office, is how I like to think of it. And what I discovered in the back office is you have bureaucracies that, for good reasons and normal times, are well adapted to have pretty Pretty thorough procedures before decisions get made, because that's how you kind of minimize the number of bad decisions. And it's like a death grip in sometimes. It's like you kind of see the iceberg coming, but you cannot turn the ship until we have this meeting and that meeting and that meeting and the other meeting. By the time you get to a decision, you've already hit it. In the US, just an anecdote, it wasn't one that I was personally involved in, but a friend of mine in Boston was describing how, you know, the rollout of these bailout funds, $3 trillion, which took about a week to agree to do that, but then it took about three weeks to figure out how to start to send it out to people, because the initial solution was, you

know, let's set up this portal, let's ask these applicants for all sorts of information. So you need a whole different process. It's like, what are the three basic data points I need to know that you're legit?

Scott And do that instead. And the other thing is it was structured in a way that big corporations were able to take advantage of the money and just kind of use it as a cushion.

Chris Because... Do you have the capacity to work that process? Yeah.

Scott Right. It was not disincentivized to do that. And this is the thing. It's like... The big corporations have big teams of accountants and lawyers and can do it faster and more nimbly than a small business person. So ultimately, all these people that needed the funds the most didn't get them. So you had this weird thing because on one level, if you're too regulatory, you can't get the money out fast enough. On another level, we've seen the failure of inadequate regulation in this thing because a bunch of people got the money that didn't need it as much. And so just kind of lined their pockets and use it as a buffer and a cushion financially, as opposed to really bailing out businesses that are hanging by a thread. So, yeah. So here we are in pandemic. Here we are.

Chris You know, if I could step back, because you talk about that forever, right? And this is what everybody's talking about. What strikes me, and it's good to see you again, man. It's been a while. It's been a while. But I understand. I mean, it... Both of our lives were kind of blown up by this. That, you know, a year ago we said, let's call this the Atlas Project. And, you know, our basic thesis was that we need new maps because the maps that we're navigating by that we are holding and that people pretend tell them where to go and how to get there, they aren't doing either of those two things anymore. So we need to tear those up. And that leaves us with a problem because without any maps, we're totally lost. And so we need to start drawing new ones. And you can't start drawing new ones until you first notice what's missing from the maps you had before. So, you know, that was our Kool-Aid that we drank copious amounts of it and said like, yeah, this is totally, you know, so we need to figure out how to start noticing what's missing from our current maps so that we can draw the next one.

And then this event arrives at the beginning of 2020. And yeah, for me, the most significant takeaway from it is how it has made plain many of the things that we've been missing. So this is a golden moment for map making. It's a golden moment for map making. There's so much that's just obvious now. Oh, we were missing that. We were missing that. We were missing that. We were missing that.

Scott And on the societal and the personal level, like on the communal and personal existential level, I think they're both there. You're right. I mean, they're both, you know, the maps are shared maps and also individual maps of people on the journey in this strange time. I think that's really well said. So we have a new kind of, we have a new... We've got a kind of new plan for this podcast, right? I think we're going to try to, for our fans that like the show, all three of you. Now, for our fans that like the show, I think we're going to try to put it out a little more frequently as many. It's interesting. I noticed a lot of podcasts have done that during the pandemic time. It's like, this is one thing you can do. You can work on digital media and it's pretty, you know, we don't have to leave the comfort of our own homes to do it.

So we're going to try to do that. We're going to try to make it a little shorter, do it a little more frequently. And we want to use this as a vehicle, right, where if you want to just not listen to this podcast, if you're looking not just to get ideas about mat making, but you actually want to join some mat makers, that we're going to convene something where people can do that, right?

Chris I love the idea. I think that's right. And I think that, I mean, you and I, I think we needed the time. to understand what did we mean when we said a year ago that we need new maps. And it's almost a disservice to just start inviting the world into the room, into conversations, and then broadcast those without a really clear, yes, this is what is needed. This is the distinctive question that we want to help with. And I think for a lot of people, you know, this pandemic experience has been, you know, one of the gifts has been clarity in so many dimensions. And I think that now we have the clarity to be able to invite people into the map room. And get somewhere great together with each conversation. Get into the clarity, oh, yeah, this is what we were missing.

Scott There are some possibilities, too. I mean, I think one of the things that's interesting about this is that, so the past few weeks, a friend of mine who lives in Arizona, she goes to a really interesting church out there, and she's kind of invited me to join in their adult Sunday school kind of education forum on Sunday mornings. And I've done it. And I've really liked it. They've very enlightened group of people that are talking about interesting issues. But I would have never, without the pandemic, I would have not signed up to go to adult faith forum in Phoenix. I had no connection to that. But so, it's interesting. I think one of the opportunities that this moment presents is that you might not know how many people out there are... Want to be in the base camp with you, right? Want to be in that bivouac, in that encampment at the bottom of the mountain as we're hiking together.

And then we're not limited by geography, right? We're not limited by profession, like professional associations where you're not limited to just a group of lawyers or a group of tech startup people or a group of nonprofit activists or things like this. And you're not limited by being in England or Canada or... Thank you for having me.

Chris And I feel like this is a moment where a radically diverse group of people can share one realization, which is that we don't know as much as we thought we did. And that, I think, is the opening for real listening, real conversation. There has been so much. If you think about the last 25 years, just an explosion of content. You know, inhuman civilization. And yet, we still arrived right here to this moment here and now, where the recognition is that hasn't helped us with what we don't know. And, you know, I think that, you know, expertise coming out of this pandemic, I mean, it won't, that's the cynic in me, but it ought to be understood differently. Because the real expertise now is the public health expert who can look at this, all of this and say, you know what, what I can say with kind of my, not from a place of ignorance, but with the naivete of real expertise is that we have no idea what health is.

And all of our systems for healthcare, they clearly haven't been focused on health. They've been focused on disease or illness and finding that and treating that. But the larger questions of wellbeing, I think this is the moment for that. This is the moment for the expert in, let's say, fund management, investment banking, to say, you know what, and I'm saying this not in ignorance, but with the real learned naivete, we have no idea how to measure value. Yeah, no, I agree. How much value has been destroyed by all these highly paid professional executives that are working on my behalf, the shareholder, to create and grow value. And they've done a really shitty job of it lately. We don't know how to create value long term. And then that becomes the invitation. Okay. So if the experts don't know. It's not like, ah, you know, like, you know, poo-poo all the experts. It's like, no, this is the opportunity then for us all to contribute to that search and bring the pieces that we have to offer to that invitation. Because it's pretty clear, like we all, you know, we need to widen the signal that we're hearing.

We're all tuned in to kind of our own wavelength and there's strength and there's value in that. But sometimes we need to kind of find a place where we can just listen to the whole signal, put the message together.

Scott Yeah, and I think that what is going to come out of this pandemic, I think there will be businesses, nonprofits, religious institutions, colleges that I think go under because the maps are just inadequate and they don't have a map for the way forward. Then I think there are other ones that will be strengthened because of...

Chris It's like UFC is going to rent a private island and do a lot of testing and basically host fights on the island. They should reach out at this point. They should reach out to us. The link will be in the show notes. And say, yeah, I hear the call to Basecamp, and I want to accept that invitation. And then we'll let them know when the next call is going to be.

Scott Yeah, and it'll be a time of... I think it's going to be great. I think it's going to be a time... It'll be fun. It'll be a chance to be reflective and make meaning together as we're drawing maps together.

Chris Well, I mean, it seems pretty clear that if we're not... Well, so this is going to be my final rant. Okay. And it's on the theme of making meaning together. Because what I think is really funny is everybody wants to think differently. There's such an appeal to being able to kind of see things that other people don't see. And yet everybody is trying to figure out how to, everyone's trying to think differently the same way, which is as individuals. Okay. And that I think is kind of the fundamental missed opportunity. If we really want to think differently, then we've got to learn how to think together, how to really tune into the perspectives that we aren't tuned into, which, you know, begins with you to capture that value. You have to come from a place of there's stuff I don't know. Yeah. Right. And that's why I need your help, Scott, because

I just can't form the whole message unless we have a conversation together. And figuring out how to do that, how to have that kind of, yeah, figuring out how to think together. It sounds easy, but I don't think we really know how to do it.

Scott I completely agree. I'll tell you one of the things that's transformed my life over the past few years, and this is how you and I met. I had this interview podcast. And I've had lots of interesting guests from all different fields. We've had you on to talk about your great book, The Age of Discovery. And I've found I've grown so much around these questions of seeing a bigger picture of the world, seeing opportunities to make different kinds of meaning and draw different kinds of maps, just because I'm regular conversing with people that are asking great questions and thinking interesting things. And so it's been one of these things where just a simple thing like doing interview podcasts Thanks, Scott.