The power of doubt

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, good day to you.

Chris Scott, making copies.

Scott So it's interesting because we're recording on the 4th of July and you scheduled our recording time. And I said to my wife, this guy is totally a Canadian that lives in the UK because the 4th of July, like, what does that mean?

Chris It's Wednesday. Hello? Yeah. And, you know, I guess that we must have some kind of deep romance thing happening because I think Fourth of July, you would have been, you know, that's like within your rights to say, yeah, I mean, we reschedule, got sort of other things going on. But no, here you are. Here we are.

Scott What's Fourth of July like in England? Michelle Wolf, the woman who did the White House Correspondents Dinner, she has a great show on Netflix, which I started watching. It's hilarious. It's fantastic. She's like, you see people and you broke up with them and then they gain weight and you're kind of happy. I feel like that's how England looks at America. Hey, America. You look different. How's math and science going? So it's 4th of July.

Chris Now that we've broken up with me.

Scott Yeah. I mean, I do feel like are people like walking around like, hey, they should have stayed. I mean, like.

Chris Oh, boy. I mean, so first off, yeah, no, the 4th of July is Wednesday here in London. That's about it. And, you know, frankly, you know, like the Brits, they've got all sorts of national angsts, you know, they're grappling with. I mean, everything from never really accomplishing anything in the World Cup of Soccer, despite the fact that they originated the sport. And this whole Brexit thing, which, you know, is just a constant thing every day. And, you know, India leaving the empire. There's a long list of grievances and things that people here are bitter about before you get all the way back to the American War for Independence. So they're having a really dark day when they upload that one. There's a lot to feel gray about.

Scott They did pretty good against the United States in the War of 1812.

Chris Yeah, you know, sometimes Canadians like to feel like that was us, except when, you know, Trump tweets about it. Hey, didn't you burn down our White House?

Scott And then we're like, no, that was British.

Chris Burn the White House. So, yeah, Canadians are good at playing both sides of the War of 1812. It was like, yeah, that was us. That's when we burnt down the White House. And then Barack Obama reminds us, yeah, isn't that? But didn't we bomb Toronto first and reduce it to rubble? Yeah, something like that. Anyway.

Scott America has been in existence, what, 200 and some odd years, like 220, no, almost 250 now, right? Like, we're getting close to our 257. Let me do the math. So 300 would be 2076 and 18, so now we're coming, 220, like our 220-something. We're getting close. And like for over 200 of those years, we've been at war. At what point do we say, look in the mirror and say, maybe the problem's me? You know, like at some point, like, hey, like, I don't know. There are lots of countries that aren't at war all the time. You know, especially because, you know, for America, you've got to go and find war to get it. Yeah, like Luxembourg is like never at war. Belgium, never at war. Denmark, never at war.

Chris You've got to pack up your bags and travel.

Scott Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, because we have Canada, our quiet neighbor to the north, and Mexico, who really is a blessing to us economically, but we like to demonize because it's hard to deal with creative destruction in a global capitalist world. So, yeah, we have to travel. Have military-industrial conflicts. We'll travel.

Chris Yeah, but, you know, it drives innovation, man. It drives innovation.

Scott This is true. So, speaking of innovation, you wrote a fascinating newsletter, Map, so to speak. Map 33, this is one of my favorites of your maps, The Power of Doubt. Doubt may be the key to innovation. Well, that's deep.

Chris I mean, you know, so I guess to get into the topic and, you know, my background for delving into this and say, you know, hey, yeah, this is a good topic for the Atlas Project, you know, because what we're trying to do here, you know, is kind of like see deeper. You know, see the subset of issues beneath the just endless torrent of noise and news that's out there. You know, what are the few things that if we understand that, we kind of see the source code of what's going on in the world.

Scott Like Neo in The Matrix. Remember when Neo sees The Matrix?

Chris Totally. You know, follow the white rabbit. So the white rabbit led me here.

Scott And by the way, let's take a moment to toot your horn. You were asked to open up the Oxford Symposium. Some of our listeners will have heard of this little school, little trade school over in England there, Oxford. You were asked to open up the Oxford Symposium for Comparative and International Education. So they want you to give 10 minutes that the young people will enjoy. And your topic is, right, it's the worst acronym I've ever heard.

Chris It's Oxy, which I think is some kind of like skin blemish cream. Yeah, exactly.

Scott As a teenager, I seem to remember using it. And you have beautiful skin now, so no one would ever know you needed it. Well, thank you. And you had the best topic. This is my dream topic. Talk for 10 minutes around the question, what is uncertainty?

Chris Yeah, well, so I mean, it was a great conference and it was literally, it was a, it was a room of the who's who in global education. So like Aga Khan Foundation was there, UNICEF was there, Ford Foundation was there. Basically everybody sort of on the ground and, you know, in the, in the rooms with the money who are investing in and trying to solve, you know, how do, how do we educate the world? And the theme for their conference, Uncertainty Society and Education. So it's basically a conference about everything and education. And yeah, they said, you know, Chris, could you do just a 10 minute on so like, what does uncertainty mean? Which I thought was cool. That's really why I said, okay, I don't know really anything about your topic, but I like, you know, these like big, deep questions.

To me, it's related to this word disruption, which if you spend any time in the business community now, you cannot speak to a business leader for five minutes without using the word disruption because it's the language they use to explain everything.

Scott Have you ever challenged yourself to do that at a bar after the conference? Like, I'm going to go five minutes. I'm not going to say disruption. I'm not going to say it. I'm not going to say it. And then at 4.32, you're like, disrupt!

Chris Actually, what I'd like to do, I thought of doing this, but then I thought, you know, it's probably just going to end badly. You know, have everybody like crumple up a piece of paper into a paper ball. And, you know, whenever I use the word, you can throw it at me. But I think I would probably just get buried on stage with this stuff because like, yeah, so we, it's hard to not use. So I looked into this word uncertainty, which is kind of part of everyday discourse, especially if you have any kind of decision making role in the world.

Scott And you said to these Oxy people, right, you said, look, I'll see your bad acronym and raise you a bad acronym because you open up with VUCA.

Chris Yeah, well, that's not mine. So VUCA, again, it's like if you're in like a decision-making world, you talk about this acronym all the time. It stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And VUCA actually is an acronym that came out of the U.S. military, out of the Army War College in the 90s.

Scott And you actually link in the letter to the actual photocopied document, which is so fantastic. I just love the format. I feel like we should write a book together with this format, like exactly this format.

Chris You know, like those, like, yeah, it's like those photocopies that were then scanned where there's, you know, there's sort of, there's some black spots and there's even, like, parts that are, like, censored out because they're not for release. And then there's this, like, old colored stamp on the front page that says, like, this is the best available or the best condition copy of this document that exists. Oh, it is so fun to find these nuggets on the internet of, you know, artifacts from the analog age when things were physical before they became digital and they've passed through many hands. And this is one of them because in the early nineties, you know, like kind of roll the clock back to then sort of, you know, Berlin Wall has fallen down, you know, Soviet Union has collapsed. And if you were in the military, you're trying to figure out the US military. So where does the world go now? And what's going to happen? And what's our role in that? And so this idea of the VUCA world, that it was volatile and uncertain and complex and ambiguous, was their language to figure out this sort of interrenium between the Cold War and whatever the fuck was going to come after that.

And, you know, fast forward to today and, you know, the wider sort of community of people in authority have said like, hey, that's actually, that's exactly how we feel. That everything we thought we knew, the system conditions that we've been operating in for however long, it just seemed to be collapsing around us. We've got to figure out something new.

Scott Yeah, we just tried to, like, two and a half decades later, this is filtered to the general public. And you could argue, right, that across the world, globally, the rise of a new kind of populism is... Part of the reaction of the VUCA world, right? Like people, in your book, The Next Renaissance, right? I mean, The New Renaissance, you talk about how, you know, the aggregate gains of the original Renaissance and today are both, you know, unparalleled. And yet, you know, what does the person say? Ronald Reagan used to say, if your neighbor is unemployed, lost their job, it's a recession. You lost your job, now it's a depression. You know, like, so that's kind of, you know, like, this is so much of the rise of populism is this, even though the aggregate gains are so much, are, you know, indubitable. Like, I mean, there, but lots of people are left out. Yeah, they're losers, yeah.

Chris And I guess that's kind of the thing that... Somehow, naively, we didn't understand that both those things can be true, right? Like, we can be better off as a country, as a society, as a humanity, and a lot of us can be worse off. G.K.

Scott Chesterton said that the brilliance of premodern wisdom is that premodern wisdom would rather take two truths, intention or paradox, than settle for a half-truth. Whereas I feel like we're like, hey, just give me the half truth, please.

Chris And the half truth is a really uncomfortable place for people. And, you know, so from this VUCA acronym to the people who promoted it, the people who use it today, what they're really trying to do is find a language to capture their sense of unease, to capture their sense of doubt about, am I going to be able to make the right decision? I've got important choices that I need to make, but I can't see where the world is going. I can't see where this choice might go. And so I hesitate to act. I miss the opportunity because the world is just too uncertain to act. And so that's kind of where I think most people are today. And those are the feelings and anxieties they're connecting with when they talk about doubt, when they talk about uncertainty.

Scott And you have great, like, four particular examples that I think are just, like, great for people that are thinking and reflecting about global trends. I mean, you just, you tick them off urban unknowns. We got urbanization. So we've got all these people in cities, which leads to demographic doubt, right? We don't, like, you know, like, we've got increased diversity. We've got population waning, though, in industrialized societies. Birth rates are down. We have environmental iffiness, right? Like, we don't know what the future of climate change will yield, and it's mostly... And if technology's going to solve those things, or... Yeah, and it's mostly settled science, except the United States. It's funny because there's no, like, industrialized nation that has an anti-climate science party except the United States, I think. I mean, major party. Like, I mean, you know, like, if you're the Tories in England, the conservative party, you're still...

You don't doubt climate science. I mean, you might say, hey, we should economically... Yeah. And the last is, you know, economic and political insecurities. You know, the whole, you know, geopolitics, globalization, old alliances, you know, being questioned and, you know, Brexit, all these things.

Chris So we live in this moment where there are umpteen engines of doubt. And not little doubts and worries, but is the world going to be fundamentally kind of picked up and thrown to the ground and broken into pieces and have to put itself back together again? And if it's true that uncertainty is this force, is this condition that makes us hesitant and makes us miss opportunities, then there Therefore, follow to the conclusion that, well, I guess it means that we're going to be a hesitant generation that misses a lot of opportunities because uncertainty is like, it's the soup that we're swimming, right? And, you know, I think that that's where there's this big lever for us to like kind of hold up and say, well, wait a minute, maybe that's bullshit, right? Maybe there's a more empowering way to think about uncertainty. Maybe, actually, if you think about it, uncertainty is what keeps us flexible, keeps us asking good questions, keeps us humble, keeps us searching. And aren't those some of the big, big traits that we really need in a rapidly changing world?

Scott I like that you said maybe there's a different perspective on uncertainty. So imagine like a sort of X, Y axis, right? And at the vertical, the vertical line is at the top is fearlessness and at the bottom is anxiety. And then the horizontal or left-right line on the left side is not knowing and on the right side is knowing. So like you could plot all these things on some kind of like graph like you did in geometry in, you know, middle school or high school, some part in primary, secondary education. So you say, if you're fearless, right, if you've got fearlessness and you know a lot, you're pretty educated and you're fearless, the sin is myopia. If you know a lot and you have high anxiety, you're angsty. It's just like, you know, it's just like there are a lot of sort of blue state urban coffee shops filled with these people in metro-urban United States.

If you are largely not full of knowledge and you're full of anxiety on the sort of bottom quadrant, you've got paralysis. And if you're fearless and know nothing, you've got hubris. And so what if it didn't work for any characters in a Greek tragedy? F Greece. We're America. I'm the best. Making America hubris again.

Chris Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. I put that map together and I tried to think of who are who are sort of world political leaders today who, you know, have made each of those mistakes, each of those species of mistake around being too certain. And I figured out three of the four. I feel like the myopia was David Cameron, who was so sure that he understood British politics and the British people that he could offer a referendum on EU membership and it would go his way. So he was the myopia.

Scott Do you think if he were a little less good-looking, he would have done better? He just had that sort of aging Bond look. I feel like if he was a little less good-looking, he would have been more insecure. I thought he was not bad-looking. He's no Tony Blair, but...

Chris Yeah, so he was classic myopia, right? And how did he get there? By being way too certain about the world. Hillary Clinton, I think, is classic angst. How does she get there? By just being way too certain about how badly they blew it and the consequences of that. And I think that The current British Prime Minister, Theresa May, you know, is a great example of paralysis, right? Like, you know, she's full of anxiety because getting this Brexit thing right, I mean, it doesn't just make or break her job, it makes or breaks the country. And yet she's paralysed because, you know, fundamentally she doesn't know what's going to happen, she doesn't know what Europe's going to decide, you know, so she's just stuck. And hubris, yeah. Like, hubris is not knowing anything. And knowing that that doesn't matter because, like, knowledge is for wimps.

Scott Who could we put in that category? It's so hard to find. I was thinking... Obama. It's Obama. He was very hubristic.

Chris He was a reader, right? I thought he was kind of fearless. But he liked to know stuff. Maybe W. George W. But no one comes to mind.

Scott No one's more hubristic than me. I'm the most hubristic. Is hubristic a word?

Chris Oh, there is now.

Scott I mean, I don't know.

Chris I can admit it. We're going to have to keep a running list of words that you invent on this podcast.

Scott It should be a word, but I mean, I don't know if it is.

Chris Yeah, it might be a word. If it isn't a word, I think we have to use it three times and then the Oxford English Dictionary will pick it up and put your name beside it.

Scott So here, then, you follow this up with something I find fascinating, because you don't just offer a critique, you offer some positive ways forward. You say, for the myopic person, right, they need challenge, right? Like, they probably need to be, they need their sort of insular, maybe elite worldview, you know, the fearlessness-knowing person, they need challenge. For the person that's knowing and anxious, they need some validation. If the myopic person needs some challenge about what they know, the angst-ridden person needs validation of what they already know. And then the paralyzed person just needs to learn. Actually, you're not knowing your anxiety. The more you know, the less scary. It's not like the world will instantly become a completely safe place, but it's a lot less scary once you know the lay of the land.

Chris Yeah, you've got to separate the things you can know from separate things you can't, and then focus on the former.

Scott And for the hubris person, you've just got to prepare. You've got to read a book. You've got to Google a little bit.

Chris Well, you've got to prepare for what they're going to do, right?

Scott Oh, you're saying prepare. Yeah, okay.

Chris Well, I mean, yeah, ideally. I mean, if you're suffering from hubris, you're probably not going to prepare yourself. Because you think, oh, you know, I just follow my gut.

Scott That's what's interesting, right? For the other three... They can do something. They're curable.

Chris It's interesting because actually, I think they're all curable, but they all require more than the person who suffers from certainty. If I suffer from myopia, I need other people to challenge my views. If I suffer from angst, I need other people to validate me and say, yeah, you've made these mistakes and they're big, but those losses don't say everything about you, Hilary.

Scott Even you could put Obama somewhere in between the myopic and the angsty. He used to say, we had the best policies, we just didn't message well enough. It's funny because they said Valerie Jarrett would censor what he was allowed to see because Obama always wanted to read the critical op-ed pieces and think pieces about it because he was obsessed on his critics. And now, in a way, like, he was like, he needed more validation. He kind of needed more like, hey, we're doing some good things here. Like, he probably was too angsty about criticism.

Chris And so, you know, and I think that, so, okay, step back a second. So, you know, I think of uncertainty not in one dimension of, you know, what do we know, what don't we know, but in two dimensions. You know, what do we know, don't know? And then how do we feel about that? Confident or anxious? And when you give it this two-dimensional space... This is like the IQ-EQ thing, right?

Scott IQ is what we know, and EQ is our emotional intelligence. So we've got to have a two-factor kind of theory.

Chris I like that. Yeah, it's a two-factor theory. And when you map out that intelligent and emotional space that way, I think it becomes really glaringly clear that the danger zone is... To a kind of, you know, middle zone of, you know, and this is sort of where the Japanese koans come in, right? It's sort of like an uncomfortable comfort place where, yeah, okay, I'm going to hang with the half-truth and figure this stuff out because that's the productive space, right? And I think when we think, when we start to reflect upon that and look out at the world around us, You know, that's kind of one of the big problems. You know, we talk about sort of post-truth and fake news. But, you know, another way to think about it is what society is really suffering from is a crisis of too much truth, right?

Of too much certainty that this is right and that's wrong. And, you know, especially in a democratic society, it kind of just stops to function if we don't have that kind of curiosity and openness to help us navigate. All of this shit. So, yeah. So this is, I think, there are all sorts of, and I know a lot of the work that you've done in sort of the spirituality dimension of this, but I think this is a big virtue that we need to recover. And it's a big narrative. This, this, this narrative today of all this uncertainty paralyzes us and makes us hesitant that we need to flip and start to welcome The confusions, because I think that that's how we protect ourselves from the mistakes of arrogance and moving too fast on some things.

Scott So one of my favorite thinkers today, these days, is a guy named Tomas Halik. And he is a Czech Roman Catholic priest, but he became a priest in a secret seminary because he was friends with Vaclav Havel, right? When the Iron Curtain was still, had not fallen. And the fact that he was with Havel, he couldn't get into the, you know, sort of state-run BS seminary. So he had to go like, and they had the Charles Taylor and all these like amazing philosophers teaching in this underground seminary. They would smuggle them in and stuff. But he wrote this great book called, it's all about like, it's called Patience with God. And he said that what this kind of new atheism, the radical sort of Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, what that has in common with fundamentalism is they're both sort of impatient worldviews that have little tolerance for ambiguity or mystery. And so it's funny because I think you, I think like in the American context, when I look at American fundamentalism, I don't see people full of faith as much as I see people yearning for certainty. And so a book that, you know, has been huge for me on this is by a missionary to India, Leslie Newbigin, who, it's interesting, when he went to India, he was like in his 30s, he retired in his like 60s. And I think he was blind when he wrote it. It was written in 97. It was called Proper Confidence, and it's all about faith, doubt, and certainty.

And he talks about how the dark side of the Enlightenment Project, and he's not an anti-Enlightenment guy, but he says this, you know, Cartesian, you know, Descartes, the old, you know, sort of mythical version, he sat in this oven, not while it was on, but, and sat there, sat in this, like, cold stone fixture and said, what could I know with absolute certainty, right? And this famous in Latin, the cogito, I know, I think, therefore I am, I know I'm a thinking substance. I might not even have a body. I might be code or gas, but I can at least know that. And so I'm going to start from the indubitable spot of what can be certain. And I'm only going to believe things if they can be sort of axiomatically worked out from certainty. And it's amazing. Newbegin, I'll just read these eight sentences at length here. He concludes, I mean, the first three chapters of this book are faith is the way to knowledge, right? So Newbegin's point is, you don't walk into a physics class in a ninth grade

Who, at the end of the 19th century, drew with inescapable clarity the necessary conclusion of the method of Descartes. For the reason already given, the critical principle must necessarily destroy itself. Rational criticism rests on beliefs which are, for the moment, held acritically. But these beliefs are themselves liable to critical questioning. If the critical principle is exalted to the supreme place in the enterprise of knowing, The 20th century has learned the lesson. Claims to speak meaningfully about right and wrong are discounted. Instead, one speaks of values. These values are a matter of mere personal choice. They express what the person who holds them wishes to see enacted. They are precisely expressions of the will. Albeit, he says in parentheses, in a less brutal form than suggested by Nietzsche, because Nietzsche was a humanitarian. But that's a fascinating analysis of Western culture.

Chris Wow, there's so many places to, there's so many jumping off points from that. You know, one thing that I'm thinking as I listen to you give that passage is, you know, a lot of the anger that animates, what do we call it on this podcast, sort of, you know, populism in the world today is, you know, I mean, you know, we need to kind of unpack that for people, like, oh, okay, I see what you're saying there, but... There is a sort of sense that, you know, people were saying, OK, this is truth and therefore this is what you have to do. And a sense that, well, but actually what's going on is you're not you're not sort of giving truth. You're cloaking power in the in the word truth and telling us this is what we have to do. And really, this is a power play.

Scott And it's interesting how this has shifted because conservatives in previous recent decades have accused the sort of multicultural elite left of sort of decrying and debunking every truth claimed by, well, you're a white guy, you're in this institution, and so you're so perspectival. Now in the American context... You're a white guy wearing a white shirt right now. The conservatives have become the relativists, right? Like, well, it's like Kellyanne Conway, like, well, these are alternative facts. And Chuck Todd is like, you know, well, that's an alternative fact is a falsehood. I mean, this is, but it's conservatives who are saying, well, everything is so editorialized that you can only trust. It's just, it's funny that like the people that have become the heirs to a kind of radical perspectival thing are not the left anymore. It's the right.

Chris Yeah, yeah. And I mean, radical, perspectival. Several maps ago, we talked about, you know, that really, I mean, the locus of truth in society today is your group, because all these other truth machines have been broken by sort of everybody deploying them for their own agenda. That now we're like, well, I don't know what to believe. I just believe what the people around me believe. And that's my reference for what's true. I haven't sorted it all out, and it'd be great if in the comments people can help us sort it out, but there seem to me there's a few really closely and powerfully related notions at work. You know, one is sort of this certainty and uncertainty thing. Another is confidence, right? And another is strength. And it seems to me that, you know, to hang in uncertainty, to hang in uncertainty, you need to have a certain degree of confidence about yourself, that I'm okay in this space.

Scott I mean, that's the title of Newbegin's book, Proper Confidence. The interplay between faith and doubt is what gives you this kind of proper confidence that gets you out of this sort of nihilistic quest for certainty. That ultimately you need something emotionally, psychologically that can give you both roots and wings. This is what good parenting does, right? It gives kids roots and wings.

Chris And so, you know, it's, it's, it's, you know, maybe it's just the tragic human condition that, you know, when we, when our fear is activated or our anxiety, we feel weak, you know, that's, you know, then we sort of flee to certainty. We flee to clarity. But actually, you know, that

Scott Or we fight. It's fight or flight. Certainty can be flight or fight. We flee to the false sense of security or attack those that are provoking the anxiety. Trump is the sectarian kind of sociological movements. They do flight and anxiety. If you're a certain kind of...

Chris And so it seems to me, I mean, boy, you know, if we can answer some of these questions, that'd be amazing. But, you know, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable seems to me like one of the critical skills that we need to develop right now.

Scott But I don't know how we do that. The human brain is wired. I think there's a woman I interviewed on my interview podcast, Carolyn Dweck or something. But she wrote a book basically, she's a psychologist about, the book is called You're Wrong. And I forget the subtitle, but basically she studied why we make mistakes and why we hate admitting it. Like she looks at surgeons, the Iraq war, she looks at everything. It's like basically the human mind really hates cognitive dissonance. Like when there are things in tension and it can't be wrapped up in a bow. And so, so many of our mistakes are not being able to stay with the anxiety. It's very interesting. You think about sometimes when you see people try quick fixes for people in pain. It's less about the person in pain and their well-being, and it's more about the anxiety that seeing the pain causes in the person that is the so-called helper,

when really maybe the most helpful thing is to just be present in the midst of the pain and not try to explain it away. So often, so many quick fixes are actually quick fixes for the so-called helper's anxiety and not to actually help the person suffering.

Chris Yeah, as I'm listening to you talk about that, I'm just thinking about the relevance of this notion of doubt, you know, extends from all the way from our personal lives and understanding how do we hang with emotions. In a healthy way, you know, up to sort of the meta level of society, right? And how, because, you know, in a democracy, you know, democracy breaks down once everybody finds truth, right? Because, you know, if I've got the truth, then, you know, having some kind of common political project is unnecessary anymore. There's no point sharing power with people who don't realize the truth, right? And so the only reason for us to be sort of groping toward some paradise democratically is if None of us believe we've got all the answers, right? And so we've got to have, you know, some kind of, you know, democracy is meant to be the crucible, you know, in which we kind of burn away some irrelevancies and get to the meat of, okay, yeah, this is what we can agree on.

Scott And it's the most anxiety-provoking form of social organization. Like, a liberal democracy is, by nature, anxiety-provoking.

Chris So that's really interesting. And, you know, then I think back to... Thank you very much. Michael Garfield, Slavoj Žižek, Jordan Peterson. It seems so compelling versus the Democratic project, which is, whoa, everything is happening and we're just going to kind of muck around and let some kind of compromise emerge. That's maybe the biggest example of this power of doubt. To have certainty, you've got to decide this is the value that is most important. Therefore, we can sacrifice any other value in order to get there. And to have uncertainty is to say, fundamentally, humanity and human society is full of conflicting values. And so the only way to do this in a manner that is respectful to the sovereignty of each person, respectful to that power to choose, is that we deny ourselves

Scott I don't know how to say this in Latin, but if the cogito for Descartes is, I think, therefore I am, maybe we'll figure out, our Latin scholar listeners can give us the Latin here, but something like, I doubt, therefore there's hope.

Chris Or, I doubt, therefore I might be.

Scott Right. Or I doubt, and therefore there might be hope.

Chris Well, you know, it's 4th of July for you. I had my Canada Day, 1st of July, a couple of days ago. And as of that day, marijuana is legal, man. At least where I come from.

Scott And you know what? It's legal in lots of places here. It's legal lots of places here, unless Jeff Sessions has his way. Jeff Beauregard Sessions. I mean, Michelle Wolf said, didn't anybody tell you the Civil War is over and the South's lost?

Chris Uh, well, you know, word hasn't reached him yet. No.

Scott I think he's still living in the file. No. No. And he's, he's, but we can't say his head's in the clouds. I think. Because he's not a very tall man.

Chris But you're right. I, I think that we need to send this letter, The Power of Doubt, to, uh, 1600 Pennsylvania.

Scott This is way, your letter's way too long for Trump. It's 240 characters.

Chris Oh, no, didn't they double?

Scott Well, it was 140, and then it went to 240. Yeah, it's still not going to be enough. Or 280 or something. Well, yet again, we have plumbed the depths of a lot of stuff. And listeners, stay tuned as we continue our search for ways forward navigating the now with these conversations.