The art of shaping a conversation

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, my friend, how are you? There's the man. I'm good. I had a conversation with a friend, a journalist, a couple of days ago, and he commented, it was a Monday, he said, but have you noticed that every day feels like Tuesday?

Chris Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott And I thought, wow, that's really right. And you know what, today really feels like Tuesday to me.

Chris Yeah, I mean, that is the feeling. It's interesting how you think about the relativity of time. And with the whole world kind of shut down, time seems like so meaningless now, right? It doesn't seem like it matters what day it is.

Scott It has a lot less meaning than it used to. I mean, you think of people who work nine to five in an office. The divide in how you... How you just go about between the weekend and the weekday is so stark. And there is this kind of accumulated exhaustion of moving yourself in space, home to work, home to work, groceries and stuff like that. And then the weekend being a break from that. And that's just completely gone.

Chris Yeah, yeah, it's kind of obliterated. It's an interesting phenomenon.

Scott Which is why, and this is not all where I thought we'd go. But I'm pretty confident that the taboo against working from home is totally broken. And I think that most office environments To the extent when they go back, there's going to be, you know, it's going to be routine for people to spend some days each week working from home just because of this discovery of how much time and energy you can kind of, you know, both drain in that commute and save if you don't have to make it.

Chris Well, yeah, and I think the big thing for me with the pandemic, with the whole corona phenomenon, is the big question of the asymptomatic carrier, right? We know there are people that are testing positive that are not symptomatic, right? And so this is... The challenge, I think, is I think people are going to get better about not going to work sick now. That's something that a lot of people were kind of careless about and would go to work sick. But what happens if you don't know you're sick? So you go to work, you're an asymptomatic carrier, but you're like a typhoid Mary and you're infecting everybody in the office. So I just think for a while... People that can work from home, it's going to be a new normal for a long time just because until we figure out what we don't know, until we get to the bottom of the things, the known unknowns, which again, for me, the big one is the asymptomatic carriers. There was a meat plant in Missouri three weeks ago or something. 339 asymptomatic, non-symptomatic positive tests. That is insane. I mean, it's just like, I don't even know how you begin...

To contain a virus when we don't... And again, we don't have enough tests, right? We're not going to have enough tests possibly. That's not going to come about for a really, really long time. And it's just going to... So yeah, I think you're right. I think working from home where it can be done will become the new normal for the foreseeable future.

Scott Well, you know, so if I think of what I just thinking, listening to you of the conversations I've had with my friends in Asia the past few weeks about how you kind of they returned to work and what that looked like. And although I think like Europe and North America is still, you know, quite a quite a ways behind in that in figuring that out and implementing it, I think that we're probably going to follow some kind of similar paths, which is. It's going to be at, you know, a kind of sector by sector, industry by industry level. Policymakers are going to make judgments around how how safe is it for this industry to return to work? Right. And so you think of industries, you know, working in a meatpacking plant that might be a highly unsafe industry versus I don't know what would be a good example, you know, but. It doesn't come to mind. But there are other industries where, yeah, that's relative.

Chris Designing computer games from home.

Scott Yeah, sure. Sure, right? And so there's going to be, at that level, you're going to start to see distinctions being made between what are relatively safe and what are relatively unsafe industries and jobs just based on what the risk of physical proximity and transmission. And then the other thing, really interesting, and you saw this throughout China as it went through the opening. So at a company, at an office-by-office level, at a workplace-by-workplace level, audits get performed. And so auditor comes in and evaluates what you are doing for your organization to minimize the risk of transmission. And they either give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down. So at a kind of local level, particular to that work environment, you've got to demonstrate that you've taken some steps and that you've taken seriously these risks and mitigated them somehow. And that's how you kind of minimize that risk on the front line. There's actually a whole industry of sort of workplace safety auditing that is booming right now because every workplace is going to need this.

So that's going to be, I think, part of how we go from this quite blunt instrument right now, or basically like nothing happens, to a much more kind of refined, almost like street level, office level analysis of can you guys go back to work or not? Whether or not there's testing, there's still going to be a kind of risk assessment.

I think it's happening. Yeah, nobody's going to get it perfect. There's going to be kind of, we've got to open up and we think we know, you know, what's relatively unsafe, what's relatively safe, but we're always going to kind of maintain the surveillance to see, is it getting to a point where it's going to overwhelm our healthcare system again? And as soon as we think that it might, that's when we're going to shut things down again until we get under control again and try to figure out what, you know, what weren't we paying attention to that time and try to get, you know, try to get better at it.

Chris Right, right, right, that we've counted. Right, right, right, right, exactly.

Scott One of the things that's interesting, a little tidbit I did not know about your country, but I now have some more understanding of, is anybody can become a coroner in the United States. It's like becoming a notary public. You can kind of run the test and you can become a coroner. But, you know, the people who are writing out the death certificates and making decisions about, you know, what was the cause of death for this corpse have a fascinatingly wide range of qualifications, let's say, to actually perform that task.

Chris Yeah, no, and this is the debate. I mean, like, because there are some people that think... You should be a corner. I would love to be a corner. There's some... There's a great show, Quincy. It was a show when I was a kid about... It was... Who played Quincy? He's a famous actor. It was great. But he was a corner. It was like a crime corner. But, you know, some people are thinking that we're over-reporting deaths, and some people think we're under-reporting deaths. And, like, this is the thing. It's crazy. And we're just so ill-equipped, I mean, for handling this in the States. And, again, it doesn't seem like we're getting in much better of a place. You know, like when Trump says, everybody that needs a test can get a test. No, we can't. That's just a complete fallacy. It's just a crazy, crazy thing.

And a lot of these states that are opening up have not met the guidelines of the two-week decline. I don't think any of the states that have opened back up have met the two-week decline, which they said. They basically said it would be safe to start opening up when you saw a two-week straight consecutive decline of cases. I don't think any states have met that.

Scott Yeah, so there's a lot of threads where we could go with this. One interesting thing that I wanted to share is, I mean, we are so consumed with what is happening in our own countries. It's also, I think, just really interesting and important to recognize how wide-ranging the experience is kind of across countries. So, you know, a country might have a pretty good grasp of the virus itself. I was just on a conference call earlier today with a bunch of people. One of them is sort of senior advisor to the government of Morocco. And interesting to think about, you know, how Morocco is very different from the U.S. when it comes to COVID-19 in one respect that, you know, the U.S. as an economy Thank you very much. Thank you very much. That, you know, we haven't even had the time to properly pay attention to, you know, so there are so many export economies, you know, in Kenya, for example, communities that basically their sole export is flowers, fresh cut flowers that get flown to Europe, none of which is happening at the moment.

And so kind of the knock on consequences of trying to freeze everything in place, we're just beginning to We haven't even really begun to understand that. At the same time, we're still trying to figure out how do we open it back up. But all of that, I guess that was just our sort of 10 minutes of COVID conversation that we had.

Chris Right, right. It's a fascinating thing to think about because, again, it just shows societally. Well, again, it shows income inequality. It shows inadequate public health systems in certain countries. It's a crazy thing.

Scott Anyway, I really wanted to pick your brain about something. And so if we could turn to that. Let's do it, my friend. Let's turn. Selfishly, let's focus on me for a moment. So, okay. So I've got an event coming up. Next week. Which I am registered for. Are you registered for it? Okay, thank God. Because I'm going to have to ask you to help me out with a couple of things. But we'll talk about that offline. This is yet another social experiment. I'm calling it The Great Pause. And basically the idea is, you know, like our audience is a pretty diverse audience. I think everyone shares something in that we're all kind of unusually thoughtful people. I think that's fair to say. Anybody who's listening to this is a bit strange in how thoughtful they are about the world we inhabit. And yet, we pay attention to so many different aspects of the world. And I thought, let's get some of us together in one virtual room to basically talk about two things. First, what have we discovered? Okay, so we're in this great pause, this extraordinary moment of stillness. So first, what have we discovered, which is kind of like looking back, you know, to our conversation, the Atlas Project, like, you know, what's been missing from the maps that we've drawn of the world? Okay, so what have we discovered? And then second, sort of looking forward, so what do you want to explore?

And I feel like that's a great kind of balance of conversation about looking back to what we've learned and then looking forward to the implications of that. So, yeah, OK, so I've discovered this and I want to explore that. So in my head, this all makes perfect sense. And the question is how to set people up, diverse people, to have insightful, good conversations around these two topics. And so I thought, okay, so we're gonna have, I've limited the number of people who can come onto this thing, so we're pretty much full, but we're gonna have, let's say, 50 or 60 people, and we're gonna run this twice, so on two separate calls. But you've got 50 or 60 people on a call. We gotta get into small groups. That's the only way that we can really start to have a conversation with one another. So we're gonna break up into groups. Now, here's how I've thought about it. What occurs to me is that what have you discovered depends on what you've been paying attention to. Does that make sense? Like what you notice is going to depend on what you've been paying attention to. Yeah. Okay. So my thought then is, okay, so to start things off, I want to divide us into several groups and I want my principle of division being like sort of different ways of attending to what's been going on in the world. I mean, I really, I spent half a day yesterday trying to think of, okay, let's say I needed to break people up into seven groups or several groups. What's the right way to break people up?

So what I want to do is share with you how I decided to break it up and then kind of tear that apart. Because I think it's a really interesting question. Like how do you, what's your, how do you, yeah, I don't know how to even describe it. Anyway. So I thought one thing I didn't want to do was make it too obvious for people so that like, oh, you know, all the investors go into a circle over there. All the unemployed go into a group over here. All the teachers are going to go into a group over there. I wanted to make it somehow a less obvious typology, if that makes sense. So. Basically, my seven groups are, if you want to talk about what have we discovered about self or systems, those are two groups. The next two groups are work and life. The next two groups are community and world.

And then my last and seventh group is laughter. I like it. I don't know. Do you? I had also thought, because I guess the question is how to divide people up as a starting point. You know, they move around and stuff like that, but it becomes a really interesting question. How would you divide people up into distinctive conversations about the now?

Chris Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, so I was part of, we talked about this a little bit, I think, since the meeting, but I was part of the Basecamp gathering, and I had a, one thing that was interesting is almost all people, all the people in my group were from Phoenix, which I don't know why that was, but... That's because that was a newcomer event, and the convener was from Phoenix. Okay, gotcha, okay, gotcha. Okay, so...

Scott So the newcomer events are going to be kind of like that. There's going to be some kind of organizing principle around which they're brought together.

Chris So I really had, and I guess I was the veteran camper too. Like I was the person that had been to Basecamp before, so I was sort of helping to facilitate my group. You knew where the outhouse is. Right, exactly. I know where the campfire is, everything. Don't mess with that girl. I had such a positive experience. It was a remarkably good conversation. And again, the interesting thing to me, I think I brought this up in the group discussion was, I saw a really good connection between the self and the systems. It's interesting because we had a sort of equal and ultimate conversational energy around both, around the systemic stuff. What are the pressures on school systems, on someone who runs a theater? Really interesting systemic questions. And then questions about just self and how people's own personal existential kind of journey in the midst of this. I have to say, it's an interesting question about how you... I mean, I like your... I mean, I like your topology. I mean, I think it's an interesting way to break it down. And interdisciplinary people... First off, I think one of the things that is going to relativize the need to have really sharp topologies are...

What's going to bring these people together in this kind of Basecamp community mindset are people that like interdisciplinary conversation and people that like talking about the world. So there's going to be a kind of ebb and flow in any of these conversations, I think, just because that's the great thing about the community. And that's one of the reasons I'm glad to be a part of it. I find it gets me out of my own head, my own world. This is one of the reasons I love doing my interview podcasts. I'm constantly talking with people that are doing things Not directly related to anything I've trained in or studied or done professionally. And so that kind of, it's always keeping me thinking. That's part of what I think is invigorating about the culture you're creating is that you're getting, we see so much more together, right, because of this vast array of people that, even though they're different, have this kind of DNA of a common concern, which I think is helpful and, again, energizing.

Scott So, yeah, listening to all of that, you know, so the event that we did last week, yes, people broke out into groups and we just did it randomly and kind of relying upon, like, let's take a general question and and let's make the richness be about hitting it from a bunch of like from whatever perspective we want to bring this this this event that we're doing next week. It's kind of playing with, not being overly prescriptive, but exploring what is different in what emerges. It is always a good idea to just do it randomly. There's always a kind of quality and a value to that experiment. But it doesn't mean that it's not interesting to experiment with other ways. Thank you for having me. Or maybe your personal sphere, or maybe community, or maybe kind of economy, or nation, or international. Like, I had this kind of hierarchy in my mind. But then I realized, well, that's difficult because if you're trying to be sort of mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, I think is what the philosophers talk about with these kind of systems. Then you get into all these questions about, well, what about the academic who wants to talk about education, right? Is education, if I want to do that, is that the national group or is that the community group? And you get into all of these terrible,

And then people can just, whatever those words mean to them, they will gravitate. Self-system is kind of a tension, right? Community versus world, work versus life, that work-life balance. And then I thought, the other thing that maybe is neat about actually labeling the conversations that people would start off with is it gives you a chance to choose. Do I want to be part of a conversation about what I've been particularly paying attention to? Because I feel like I might have discovered something that I really, you know, that other people should hear. I've been thinking a lot about myself and what this all means and I've discovered something. I don't want to share that. Or do I want to use this as an opportunity to kind of... So I thought, yeah, interesting dynamic.

Chris Yeah, it's interesting because I felt like when we had Sophia Ikura on the podcast last time, that was an instance where I probably am not paying attention to healthcare policy at the intersection of social welfare. And I learned a ton. I mean, in just a short conversation, I learned a lot from her. I mean, I thought it was a really good conversation. So yeah, I think there's merit in both approaches, right? Like either can be helpful or useful probably. I feel like I'm not being incredibly helpful here because I'm saying it. I like the way you've done it. I think stick with it. I think let's stick with the way you're doing it.

Scott Then we're going to run this experiment and we're going to see what's happening. I think that some people will be uncomfortable with it. I think some people like to know. There's definitely going to be some type A's in the room who want to get together with people who are doing very similar stuff and kind of use the space as an opportunity to get shit done, seize on opportunities. And I think if they find one another and they want the room to do that, then we'll let them do that. No point standing in their way. But I feel like the bigger opportunity. And maybe that kind of, you know, like you talk about podcast interviewing. I feel like, you know, this whole moment is a big argument in favor of having a wide range of kind of perspectives to enrich our own thinking about what's going on. Because, you know, The things that we need to pay attention to, it's really hard to make those decisions cleanly in the real world. And we kind of pretend it all the time. Like, who paid attention to healthcare? It's just this thing we took for granted, right? And yet, we all depend upon it now. All of us are at risk from it.

And so, somehow we have to, somehow, so, you know, that's going to be difficult because we're not very good at Well, to bring it full circle, at making time to roam, you know, intellectually, you know, with our curiosity, with the people that we hang out with, there's so much incentive and pressure to kind of, you know, make our workflows as efficient as possible. And there is a terrible inefficiency about diversity. Even though there's also, you know, one of the gains is resilience. And, you know, I feel like that's something that we haven't, there is this, I don't know if you've noticed it, but, you know, certainly in kind of organizational leadership businesses, there's this giant narrative right now about resilience. Okay, resilience is this word that you basically, you feel better about how we are, you know, what we're doing as a business, what we're thinking about if resilience is on the agenda somewhere. Right now. And yet I don't know if it's really set in for people how inefficient you need to be in order to be resilient.

Chris Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott Yeah, that's interesting. It's the opposite. We're more and more data-driven. We have more and more artificial intelligence that is understanding our patterns of what we are consuming, what we pay attention to, and helping us to attend to that more to get more efficient at finding the stuff. That is relevant. And by relevant, it really means that is somehow similar to what you've done in the past, right? I guess in your case, you know, I imagine every time you go into YouPorn, it's kind of all the same stuff.

Chris Yeah, Howard Stern always says he's consistently always looking at stepmom porn and babysitter porn.

Scott That's really disturbing.

Chris Yeah, you know, the stepmom and these are very... Yeah, no, no, no. It's an interesting question.

Scott So we know it's good for us, right? We know that diversity is good for us. We know that being open to a wider range, period, like without qualification, is probably beneficial purely because of how far the pendulum has swung the other way. Thank you.

Chris Right. And I think the specialization is an interesting phenomenon, right? Because you have these people like, you know, could we have a Max Weber today? Right. Like just, you know, that great, the great social theorist Weber. I mean, that guy knew like everything you could know, basically, about religion, economy, society, social theory that like he just like it because, you know, because he had like, you know, Even though there was still specialization in his time, it wasn't to the degree there is now. In the age of specialization, could we produce a Weber anymore? Is that even possible? The thing about Weber, it's interesting when you read him, he just makes so many connections. He's a non-reductive kind of thinker, quite consciously. He's over and against someone like Marx, who he thinks... Thank you for having me. You open yourself up, right? Because it's kind of a generalist sort of approach to... Oh, yeah.

Scott Every specialist around the world has a reason to knock you down.

Chris Right.

Scott So everybody just takes pot shots. You've misrepresented either the history or the technology or the science or the economics. Yeah.

Chris And so what you wind up is these kind of conversations that are... That are specialized with lots of data, but part of what we want to do is we want to make wider connections. This is Aristotle's point. We're rational animals. So part of what we want to do is we want to make big connections. We want to connect this to that, to this to that. And that's the nature of just like, existentially, I think we want that. Thank you for having me. But he sure felt less alienated in it, right? He's someone that is able to connect ethics to rhetoric to politics to logic in ways that makes for an integrated human experience. And I think the degree that we don't do that is the degree to which we will find ourselves, while we might have more knowledge of the world, we'll be more alienated from it at the same time.

Scott I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it. Fast enough for you. I might have to... Chris has his iPad out. Yeah. You know what? Give me a moment. You can edit this part out later. No editing. I'll just talk.

Chris We don't edit this podcast. No, you have to edit it. We don't edit. Editing is for losers. It is funny, though. I do think I spend less time doing editing largely because I think you get more content out. If people are into podcasting, it's better to prepare and put your time in there than put it on the back end of editing. What are you looking for?

Scott Okay, so I'm going to read. So this is a book by another sort of very synthetic author called Ian McGilchrist. And the book is called The Master and His Emissary. And I just thought of it because in his sort of introduction to the book, he writes this terrific sort of disclaimer. To all the specialists that he's going to be offending. So he says, you know, he's talking about the book is talking about the brain. So he says, you know, this book, I'm going to get into neurology and psychology, but also philosophy, literature, the arts, archaeology, anthropology. And I hope the specialists in these areas will forgive my trespasses. Every realm of academic endeavor is now subject to an explosion of information that renders those few who can still truly call themselves experts, experts on less and less. As partly for this very reason, it nonetheless seems to me worthwhile to try to make links outside and across the boundaries of the disciplines.

Even though the price may be that one is always at best an interested outsider, and at worst, an interloper condemned to make mistakes that will be obvious to those who really know. My hope is only that what I have to say may resonate with the ideas of others and possibly act as a stimulus. Anyway, yeah. So I've often felt like an interloper into other areas of expertise, and yet...

Chris I've had a guest on the Give and Take podcast before, Tom Nichols. You see him on American Cable News a lot and Bill Maher and stuff like that. He's a really bright guy. He teaches at the Navy War College, I think, in Rhode Island or something. But he wrote a great book called The Death of Expertise and sort of concerned about, rightly so, that Americans are a little too dismissive of expertise and data and... And things like that, which obviously, I mean, this is how you get the age of Donald Trump, right? Trump's not the illness, he's the symptom, in many ways. So I wanna say, expertise is important, right? And yet, at the same time, I wanna also say, we don't wanna be limited by the prison of expertise, right? So that nobody's thinking about anything in an organic, whole way, right? Because we want a picture of the whole. That's the purpose of the data and the expertise, Get an emerging picture of the whole.

Scott And I think that this is part of where we need to go with the direction of the interviews that we try to bring into this space, into this kind of safe intellectual space with us, is experts who understand their domain well enough and have the courage to declare what they don't know. And not from a place of ignorance, but from a place of expert naivete, which is to really understand that, yeah, these are the things that we have a strong understanding of, and this is the stuff that we don't know. Because I think what you've described is right. The kind of destruction of the legitimacy of the expert has happened because we gave the expert a halo of all knowingness. Right, right. And that was the mistake, right? Right. Expertise, especially going forward, like expertise can't be about knowing it all. Expertise has to be about stuff that we know and stuff that we know needs to be explored, needs to be challenged, needs to be questioned so that everyone who claims expertise is also clearly opening doors, clearly creating hooks Thank you for having me.

And kind of both speak and question from that stance, then I think we're really on to something because then it's all about, again, it's about trying to help us all to see the stuff that we aren't paying enough attention to, the stuff that we aren't noticing. And I think there always needs to be that other side to the coin of expertise. I didn't say that very well, but I feel like you know the gist of what I'm trying.

Chris Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we need people that are integrative thinkers. I mean, these are where people like someone like Hegel or somebody who's really trying to get a theory of everything I think is valuable. Even if you don't agree with the particulars of all of it, although I do think Hegel's probably right about more things than he's wrong about. I once heard a philosopher who was a Hegel scholar say that one of his colleagues said, taking logic lessons from Hegel is like taking culinary lessons from Jeffrey Dahmer. But I do think that we need big, bold thinkers that help us. And again, this is sort of the Basecamp idea, right? Getting people that can come together to try to see the whole together. Because you're right, we'll see it better together. I mean, we'll always see it better together.

Scott Maybe let me put it this way. Maybe this is a more poetic expression. I think that we've grown up in a culture where the... The ideal notion of the expert is the person who stands on a stage and speaks with such authority that the only response can be total silence. It's the expert who, by speaking, silences everyone who hears. That is the truth. And I think we need to get to a notion of expert where the best expert is the one who creates the most conversation. And even that needs refinement, like good conversation. But it has to be the best expert, the one who invites people into an important conversation, but speaks in a way that gives others voice. Thank you for having me. You know, figuring out how to handle this phenomenon of populism and fake news, I think also involves figuring out how to handle a transition from expertise as dominating you with the authority of my words This is the problem. Thank you for having me.

Chris And so that means your system has to be over against my system. If the purpose of the system is coming up with an explanation, then necessarily my system's adversarial to yours. But if description is the goal, they're not opposed. If you're looking at a statue... From one end of the museum floor, I'm looking at it from another, and we're both seeing different things. They're not mutually exclusive. In fact, we can fill out what our perception and experience of the statue is better by multiple descriptions, right? As opposed to saying, well, prescriptively, my explanation or your explanation, my solution or your solution, right? And that's, I think you're talking about the dominating or domineering authoritarian effect of expertise, where it becomes prescriptive. Explanation, solution-oriented, as opposed to descriptive. We're around the campfire, and we're describing what we're seeing, experiencing, feeling in the world we're walking in.

Scott Okay, oh my God, so brain flash. So make it, couple of things. Make a note, philosopher and the poet. That's, we gotta write a book on that at some point. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a great book in there, although you're probably going to tell me that T.S. Eliot already wrote that book.

Chris T.S. Eliot took his dissertation to the Harvard Philosophy Department. I don't want to hear it. Turned it in and didn't defend it and left and went to England. He turned it in and didn't defend it.

Scott Okay. I did not have the balls to do that. The other thought is we need to get a poet on here fast. We need a poet as a guest. That'd be great. And then the other thought was, okay, so now we come full circle. Because I remember when I was saying, so we're doing this event next week, and I really struggled. I spent a half a day trying to think of what should these starting groups be? And it really was a journey from philosophy to poetry, because I started with trying to think of what is, I was trying to see through the diversity of people who were coming to this, and the diversity of things that they said that they wanted to talk about, and trying to kind of find, you know, in an analytic reductive way, What's the deeper structure here that represents the whole? I was really trying to be a social scientist. You're always trying to reduce the data down to a simpler form that is still kind of efficient. And the place I got to is ultimately a more poetic place. Which is to say, it may not be that the kind of reductive clean system is the right stimulus for people to get into meaningful talk with one another.

Let's think instead about the participant as co-author of what these groups mean. And if it's that, then kind of the lighter the structure, the more room there is to interpret it and to decide for myself what this means, the more enabling that's going to be.

Chris I think that's really good that you're paying attention to these questions because I think that like we... It's so important to realize how the structures we choose for conversations and things like that shape the reality we're experiencing. They're not neutral. Some people call this critically realist epistemology. If you're a critical realist, it's not that you don't think you're really experiencing the world, but you can't experience it apart from the lenses which you bring to it.

Scott Okay, just as an aside, I suddenly had this flash. I really want to get some kind of sound effects board, so whenever you say something like critically realist epistemology, I can push a button. No, no, no, no, I think actually what I would like to do is have a ready sound effect of an audience clapping, going, yay! I think props to you every time you use words and syllables that I have no idea what you're talking about.

Chris If you think about it, it's just like there's two kind of extremes about how we know things. Some people think, oh, we just experience the world as it is. And then other people think, oh, no, we just create the world. We create the world through our mind and our knowing and our experience. And the criticalness is now that both are kind of true. It's not that we really don't have an experience of the world, but that experience of the world is... Thank you so much for having me. I think that's also, you know, there is, so I love this campfire metaphor and, you know, we're gonna have to keep, it's gonna be a big chapter of the next book, I think.

Scott It's a metaphor that can work, you know, when at the scale we are, you know, we get 50 people together and say, okay, let's... Let's imagine we're attending a campfire together. But I think it's also a metaphor that can help us understand at a societal level, at a national level, one thing that becomes clear is how far we are from the campfire. There's not only specialization in terms of what area of knowledge do you work in. But we've also specialized in terms of who needs to be paid attention to. There are leaders with formal authority, and they need to be paid attention to. And then there are people who do various consultation exercises to get a kind of veneer of, well, we asked them what they thought about that, and some people agreed, and some people didn't agree. They're not sitting around the campfire. If they disagree with something, that doesn't have any implications for what is decided was real and the basis upon which decisions were made. And I mean, I guess this is, as a rabbit hole, we'll have to go down another time. But there is this other aspect to everything we are saying, which is, you know, if everything that we are doing is right, and if there is something fundamentally right about searching for stronger truths together, about Compiling a new atlas of the world together, how do we integrate that into our decision structures, into how businesses decide what to do, into how governments decide what to do? I think there's a level, and maybe this has to do with just the level of

It's not something that happens at the mainstream of politics, of big business, which is still, despite all of the gloss and whatever the latest kind of management craze is, is still about formal hierarchy. What would be the alternative to the campfire? So the campfire we get, anyway. Well, think about that one, too.

Chris But, you know, like we're... Yeah, like when you watch a U.S. congressional hearing, you have no... It's like you absolutely know that there's no chance that people are going to discover anything, right? Everybody's just asking their tribal partisan questions and scoring media points. Like there's no campfire there, right? Nobody discovers anything in one of those hearings, right?

Scott Well, that's another topic, but I... I find special amusement in U.S. congressional hearings.

Chris Yeah, they're pretty fascinating.

Scott Yeah, they are pretty fascinating.

Chris Well, my friend, we've said it all once again.

Scott Yeah, it's great. I really just wanted your quick input on... And I'm looking forward to this conversation next week.

Chris I'm pretty pumped.

Scott I'm really looking forward to it too. And yeah, I'm going to have to follow up with you because I'm going to drag you into the control booth to help me actually run it. Sounds good. I love it. Warning you in advance for that. All right, my friend. Thank you. Yeah, enjoy your yet another Tuesday. Exactly. Take care.