Can humans manage risk?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, welcome back to the show. Scott, it's good to be back. It's been a while. Well, you've been traveling. Yeah, yeah.

Chris We've been base camping.

Scott I'm on a borrowed computer today. Mine is in the shop.

Chris Is it a Mac?

Scott I mean, I don't want to get consumer electronic political, but I'm a bit upset with Apple at the moment.

Chris Well, it's interesting because... We've all been there.

Scott I know that there's a shared experience here.

Chris I think that with Apple, the pandemic hurts you because it's better when you can go in the shop. Could you go in the physical shop?

Scott I didn't go to an Apple store because that would have taken forever. So I went to an authorized repair shop. So here in London, I could go in. You have to book an appointment. One person in the shop at a time. And I'm sure I'll get it back next month sometime.

Chris Yeah, but we're so dependent on technology, right?

Scott And this tends to show. Well, we are, I mean, especially now, right? Everybody's working from home, or a lot of people still are.

Chris So let's talk a little bit about risk today, shall we?

Scott I never would have guessed that my American co-host would have risk on his mind. Right, exactly, exactly, right? How are you guys doing, like where you are? Because it is such a local question now. How safe do you feel?

Chris How secure do you feel where you are? I've talked to several Canadians last week and this week, and they were all just like, we're so sorry for you. Like watching what's going on. Now, I feel personally like, you know, I'm being pretty careful. I'm wearing masks. I'm not going out much. I'm kind of trying to be safe. And I think in the Northeast, it is much more... I love it. I read this article that was talking about how you look at the different settling patterns in the United States, and they were saying that basically in the Northeast, you have this kind of traditional religious WASP, Protestant, Presbyterian, communal morality group. And so that leads to sort of, okay, we'll comply, right? And then in the Southeast and the West, you have this rugged individualism, like we're kind of, don't tread on me. And they're looking at these certain states where people are just not being compliant, and the article is kind of arguing, look, this is... It has to do with deep cultural patterns in American history and life. In the Northeast, people are pretty compliant and pretty open to what restrictions are laid down or offered by government. Again, other parts of the country, not so much. And then you have this really interesting dynamic in the United States, because we've politicized every single square inch of life in the United States.

We have these Republican governors who will not let Democrat mayors in their states pass mask ordinances, right? So the people that are in the most densely populated parts of these states who are really facing the worst of the virus are wanting to impose additional restrictions to protect people. And a lot of times the governors are saying, no, you can't do it. So again, mostly this is happening in red states. It tends to be these red state governors, but their big cities tend to be governed by Democrats, even though the state by and large is Republican. It is kind of shocking, astounding, actually, how poorly we're dealing with this. We had 65,000 cases yesterday. 65,000.

Scott Before we go deep down the rabbit hole of what's happening in your neighborhood, just to pull back for a moment. You know, the general observation, it's really interesting how cultural differences have become so concrete through this crisis. And I think this is kind of a general insight. There's a lot about the world that is true but often abstract and therefore kind of hard to see that now has been made very clear and concrete. And another one of the things on that list is cultural difference. This is a great time to be a social scientist who is trying to identify and articulate to the world how Eastern US and Western US are in some ways different, how Americans and Canadians are different, how Australians and Kiwis are different, how Emirati in the UAE and Saudis are different. How Chinese and Koreans are different. There is so much to see tangibly in how we respond to living under lockdown and going back to work. I was doing a workshop with a group of senior government officials in the UAE yesterday, actually. And as we're all doing, we're talking about how life is different now. And one of the One of the things they talked about is how, you know, up until this point, they've had a strong culture of, you know, showing up for work, that the way to demonstrate to anyone that you were being a productive worker was to show up in the office and, you know, checking in, checking out is a big part of work-life culture there. And that was just a given. And now, of course, everybody's working from home, so you can't watch over everybody's shoulder. And everybody's discovered that actually we're all more productive working from home.

So there have been these very clear and concrete, just sort of coming up against How we behave culturally and then having the opportunity to kind of step back and question it, which is pretty extraordinary. I don't know if you heard it, I was telling you about some work I was doing in the Middle East yesterday. And there, in that country, you know, a strong culture of showing up to work. That's how you kind of demonstrate that you're being productive, is by being there. And, you know, kind of that given, that strong assumption that you've got to show up to demonstrate you're productive was just, you know, reality completely flew in the face of that when everybody was forced to work from home. And people felt like they were getting more stuff done because, you know, less time in the commute and for all of those reasons, right? Easier to schedule meetings and things like that. And I think that that is one of the big opportunities in this moment to really notice some of the things we took for granted.

That now that we have to, we have the chance to re-evaluate. And I think one of them, so what I suppose is kind of marvelous if you're a political scientist about the United States is really is demonstrating how your one country is in some sense actually an amalgam of many different cultures.

Chris It makes it almost ungovernable sometimes. It's just so large. I mean, and there aren't really many examples of countries that are as large and diverse as ours that are functionally really robust, healthy democracies. I mean, usually they're more autocratic. I mean, I think you think of like, Russia, China, Brazil. When you're looking at countries that get to the big scale that we are and have so many diverse populations, it tends to not... So I don't know, it's an interesting kind of factor. And one of the things that makes us perhaps struggle with things is risk, right? So we want to talk today about risk a little bit. Risk taking and risk sharing. Because this is sort of what happens after the total lockdown, right? Like we are in a situation where... When there's a stay-at-home order in place, you don't have to think much about risk, right? You stay home. You stay the hell home. You don't have to process or think that much.

But this woman who I saw interviewed on MSNBC, I think, she's from Penn, and she teaches law and psychology there. She wrote this great piece in the Atlantic Ideas section saying, Our minds aren't equipped for this kind of reopening. As states ease restrictions on business, individuals face a psychological morass. And basically, she's just saying humans aren't really good at risk assessment and risk and figuring out which risks are healthy to take and which ones aren't. And we have all sorts of cognitive biases. And she points out six feet means something different. I'm more sure I'm six feet away from a friend than a stranger. I'm more likely to judge someone else's risk taking if they're a different race than me. She goes through all of these cognitive biases and This is an actual psychology judgment experiment before the pandemic. They talked about a hypothetical Asian disease that comes to the United States. This is just like an actual hypothetical.

Scott It's funny that that hypothetical question they've been using for years.

Chris Yeah, to ask participants to choose between two public health policies. And option A, one-third of the population survives for sure, but no one else makes it, right? Two-thirds die, one-third survive. And option B, there's a one-third chance. What's that?

Scott Certainty, right. You get the certainty. Option A, certainty, two-thirds of everyone dies and a third survive.

Chris Yes. Option B, there's a one-third chance that I'll survive, but a two-third chance that none do. So what she's found is that participants, when they chose, saw it in one of two ways. How many lives would be saved? Some people saw it in terms of it. Others, how many would die? So people consistently chose option A, which offered certainty if they were thinking in terms of potential gains, saving lives. But option B, which involved more risk if they were thinking about potential loss. So a weighty decision was swayed dramatically by semantic framing.

Scott Okay, wait, so I'm being a bit dense this morning, let me think. So I know you just want to get to the implications, but I need to understand the question first. So you're saying, okay, so you're a psychologist, you're coming to me, and you're basically interested in, like, how, Chris, how do you evaluate risk? Chris, okay, what do you make choices? Okay, and you're telling me I've got two options. Option A, and there's, you know, let's take this improbable case. Let's suppose there's this dangerous Asian flu that comes into the country. It comes over here. Right, okay, so, you know, never going to happen because pandemics are things that happen in other places, but let's play the game. I'm a researcher. I'm trying to get my PhD, and I'm going to give you two choices. Okay, choice number one, and let me see if I got this right. A third of... You can choose option A. One-third of everybody dies. And that's just it. So basically, we do a call- Wait, no, no.

Chris One-third. Option A is one-third survive.

Scott I'm such a bad research subject.

Chris Right, right, right. Well, one-third of the population survives for sure, but no one else makes it.

Scott Okay, so option A is that a third survives and two-thirds die. Okay, and there's no ambiguity about that. Basically, 200-some million people are gonna die. There'll be 100-some million of us if we're in the US left. Okay, that's clear. Okay, I hope I have another choice.

Chris So option B would be, option B is there's, in option B, there's a one-third chance that everyone will survive, but a two-thirds chance that no one survives.

Scott Okay, so option B is basically how much risk do you want to take on? Because option A, two-thirds are guaranteed to survive.

Chris No, option A, one-third is guaranteed to survive. Two-thirds are going to die. In option B, everybody could be saved, right? There's a chance... There's a one-third chance that everybody... There's a one-third chance that everyone survives in option B. But a two-third chance that no one does. That everyone dies. Yeah, so they're saying, like, if you're looking at it from the potential gain saving lives, people chose option A, which offered certainty that we're saving lives, but option B with more risk if they were thinking about potential loss. So if they were thinking more about the fear of lost lives than more about the potential certainly saving lives. So it's like, are you kind of, are you thinking about the people that are saved? Do you think about the people that are dying? And if you're thinking primarily about the people that are dying, you'll choose option B, even though there's a risk everybody dies, because you could, by chance, save everybody. No one's going to die.

Scott If I choose option B, there's a chance that we're all safe. And if that's what I'm concerned about, I'm going to roll the dice on maybe none of us get hurt. So basically, okay, so I get it.

Chris By the way, this exercise... We've earned one of the experimenters the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Scott Ah, well, that makes sense, because it's not a very simple exercise when you really... Right. Okay, no, let me just try to get myself... Because I think, I mean, if I can't really grasp the experiment, there's no point going forward. But basically saying, okay, so we've got a pandemic coming, and basically two choices. Either... So let's say you're God, okay? I know it's easy for you to imagine. You're God and you're saying to Chris, Chris, you've got two choices. Give me a third of your souls and I'll let the other two thirds survive. That's your first choice. But you've got to give me a third of your souls. You've got to sacrifice a third of your people. Or I'll let you roll the dice. And let's say it's an ordinary six-sided dice. I'll let you roll the dice. If you roll a one or a two, then you're off the hook. You don't have to give me anybody. If you roll a three, four, five, or six, then you have to give me everyone.

Right. Wow. You are exactly in the right ballpark of the experiment. So, okay, so let me, before we even get into her complicated and Nobel Prize-winning research, what would you do in that situation? Okay, so here's your choice, and I'm sorry to put you in this position, Scott, but you can choose one of two possible futures. Future A, you've got to give me 100 million people now. Right. I'm going to kill 100 million people. Future B, here's a die, and if you roll a three, four, five, or six, you have to give me every one. You roll a one or a two, then I'll just go away and play this game with somebody else.

Chris So how would... I don't know. It's interesting. I think I would tend to choose B, because I'm thinking in terms of lives lost.

Scott And the potential that we can all just get away from this.

Chris Right. We can all get away. I think that that's what I would choose. It's interesting. But the stakes are so high, right? They are high. They are high. The stakes are high because we could all die. Maybe that's irresponsible. But this is the great thing. This is what I really enjoy about her piece because it gets you thinking. Also, she talks about how the cognitive researchers have something called declining marginal disutility that people associate with others' deaths. So the feeling that no deaths and one death, between one death and no deaths, is really, really bad, right? But the difference between 110,000 and 111,000 deaths is like negligible people. Like they don't... Right, stop making headlines, right? Right, that's an extra thousand deaths. It doesn't, like, one person dies, it's really bad. But if you're, you know, 110, 112, people don't process it the same way.

Scott People do not process it the same way. When you really put yourself in positions of ambiguity about risk, if the advice you're giving people is do what you think is responsible, you're going to get a wide range of behaviors as a result.

Chris Yeah, and she thinks that's part of the problem. She says, you know, during a disease outbreak, vague guidance and ambivalent behavioral norms will lead to thoroughly flawed thinking. If a business is open, but you'd be foolish to visit, that's a failure of leadership. She's saying, like, basically, we all make such skewed decisions and we've all got weird psychological presuppositions. And so she's talking about, you know, if you're staying at home and you're seeing people, you know, at rallies or protests and you're just shouting at them, you're not social distancing on this stuff. She's saying that basically we're not very well wired to individually assess risk very well. So we need a sort of more collective, you know, she talks about how it's really helpful for government or a store to mark out six feet because I don't measure that very well myself. Or the fact that, again, you're more likely to think you're standing the appropriate distance with a friend than a stranger and all these things.

She's saying that we are so poorly wired to assess risk and figure out which risks we should take together that we need kind of more of a collective approach to it where government would help give us more guidelines. You know, and I think as you and I were talking earlier, we'd also probably want a sort of shared public conversation so people will own the risk taking and sharing. Because I think if people, we had a guy on Harry Pierce a couple weeks ago, you can go listen to the episode, but he talked about how people, if they're not shaping the norms in a pandemic response, they're more likely to flout them. And I think that's happening all over the country in the United States. I mean, you can see these regions where people are just completely flouting them and being completely irresponsible. But this is where, you know, she's saying that

as we are wading back into some sort of phased re-engagement with society, we're not just at the strict stay-at-home phase, right? I assume in London, right, you're wading back in, right? I see you got a haircut, so you're...

Scott Yeah, I'm actually looking at your hair too. I assume that you got a haircut too recently.

Chris Well, I've been cutting my own hair during the pandemic. I always cut my own hair. So pandemics doesn't stop me. But I think her point is that when there's these choices that are, again, I like that she said, if a business is open, but you'd be foolish to visit it. Like bars, right? I mean, bars are a great example, right? Bars are a disaster. Bars and church services are the disaster areas, right? For people, I mean, these are places because churches, because of the singing and things like that, and bars just because you're talking and you're drinking, you're not wearing a mask, you're not doing all that stuff.

Scott So the fact that we are... And what she's saying is that we are not psychologically equipped for this kind of discretionary choice.

Chris Yeah, all the time, like all the time, discretionary choice, all the time, all the time. You know, risk assessment, risk assessment. I mean, we do it all the time to some degree, and we don't do it well normally, but she's thinking in a pandemic, we are so poorly suited as individuals to make decisions that are good for the public good and public health. That we're just so fraught with ambiguity that we need more government leadership. And as you and I were saying, we need more of probably a public conversation so that you and I feel like we're in this together. So that you and I feel as though that we have some collective agency and ownership of whatever we're agreeing to to keep each other safe. Because I think that the more that we agree on that, the more that we agree to that, the more... A chance that we're actually going to be more responsible.

Scott The other thing that I think comes out of the ambiguity is it does actually make it harder to come together and talk about these things. Because there is such a, you know, there is this psychological hit that you get, this like, you know, little bite of sugar when you get to sort of like shame someone else. For not abiding by the rules. This country is classic for that. I mean, standing in line is a national pastime, or in normal times is. And so anybody who doesn't get the social conventions of waiting in the queue immediately gets from people. And they love to do it, right? There's a making myself bigger by calling you out for not obeying the norm. But in a moment like now, where Thank you very much. In London, people go to the parks. You're encouraged to go to the parks to exercise and stuff like that. You can't go to gyms yet. I go up early in the mornings. There's very few people there. In the park, I don't have my mask on, and I'm on this hill doing some calisthenics. This woman at the bottom of the hill, so we're like 25 yards away, walks by wearing a mask. She calls me out in the middle of doing my jump rope, like, where's your mask? Everyone walks on, just a couple inches taller for a few moments, having been the voice of authority, claiming that social authority to police the world around you. I feel like that's part of what this article you're talking about was going to. There is this psychological strain that is put upon society. Thank you very much.

I find in my head right now I have the metaphor of a trombone somehow. It's really easy to know when it's all the way in or all the way out, that slide, but to find the right point along the slide. So everybody stay at home and everything back to normal. People understand that. But anything other than that is a very ambiguous kind of in-between space where it takes considerable skill to know what the right position ought to be. And none of us have experience with this.

Chris Yeah, yeah. And she even says, it's interesting because she says that individual citizens, citizens facing a range of permissible options, receiving confusing public health messaging, triaging competing ethical commitments are not the best targets of our practical and moral concerns. You know, she thinks this idea that this tendency to shame and to judge and to kind of look at people making suboptimal choices. She said in the pandemic, this urge is a red herring. It is too easy to focus on people making the bad choices rather than on people having bad choices. People should practice humility regarding the former and voice outrage about the latter. And I think that's interesting because she's saying, like, look, with all the ambiguity, we should be a little less judgmental and more humble about people. But then with what we can actually shape, the collective response, that's where we should focus our

frustration and outrage, where if public policy is becoming irresponsible and then you're actually putting people in situations where they don't have as much of a chance to make healthy choices because it's just too ambiguous and people are just too messy.

Scott Hmm. So, okay. So I like this distinction between the choices we make and the choices we have, you know, making bad choices and having bad choices. And that does seem to capture a lot of what we've just been talking about, that what we should get outraged about, what we should really be focusing on is what is the menu of choices? Yeah. And I guess her point is that be careful about being the police of the choices we are making because we all have very skewed ways and unreliable ways of measuring risk. As you said, her earlier point that if you are a friend and we're standing four feet apart, in my mind, that's at least six feet. So we're usually standing close to one another. If you were a stranger and we're standing eight feet apart, I'm like, dude, you're getting way too close. Absolutely, yeah. And that has nothing to do with the actual distance and has everything to do with my perception of it. So let's be careful when we're policing one another. So that all makes sense to me. I think if we're really trying to get seriously into this question of risk and how we take risk and how we share risk and what a pandemic tells us about that.

I feel like there needs to be a next chapter in her argument because the choices that we have, the menu that is set, I think itself is a big... Big question. And also like our willingness, this is to your point about the conversation we had a few weeks ago with Harry Pearce at the Center for the Future of Democracy. You know, our willingness to accept the menu, I think really does depend on how we got to that menu.

Chris I completely agree. That's the hole in her argument. She's sort of contrasting the public individual decision makers and then the public good or government and government administration. I think you're right that those things need to shape each other, mutually condition each other. Otherwise, people are not going to feel ownership.

Scott Yeah, you're right. Ownership is the key word. I'll be more generous. I don't think it's the hole in her argument. It's the missing piece.

Chris This one guy who's a pretty accomplished science writer, he'll text me every day these awful articles about how bad Phoenix is. He'll text me, we're number one, we're number one. He's like the citizens of Phoenix right now. He's like, we're extras in a dystopian film. But you think, though, you think like, okay, kids are packed in bars, right? And a lot of the age is dropping, infection rates in places like Florida and Arizona, like the median age is really going down and he's getting infected. Well, kids think they're invulnerable, right? And we are telling people we have... I've told people, like, oh, the risk is very low if you're not old. But, I mean, 21-year-olds are getting hospitalized for this. So we've given people this kind of information that it's not that unsafe if you're a kid. Then we've opened bars, which, again, bars and churches are the two most risky indoor things you can go to, or synagogues. So we've put these young people who, you know, again, when you're younger, your frontal lobe is still forming, decision-making risk, and you're giving them this option, right? So how are you not surprised that, and again, we're probably telling them that the risk is a little more minimal than it is. And so, of course, they're going to go pack into bars and drink because they're stir-crazy.

I saw pictures in London. When I called you the other day, I was like, wow, man, I saw some wild pictures from London where all these kids, and it's mostly young people, are going out and they're stir-crazy. And you get it, right? You get it. So it's like, you know, the proper thing is she's saying, I don't think it's to shame them. It's to think, okay, well, what have we gotten wrong here that we're creating this much problematic risk?

Scott So I would say, and I think the answer that she has kind of set up is this distinction between asking people to make choices, the choices people make and the choices they have, and that maybe people were given too much responsibility to make choices about risks that are very hard to perceive when if you're a scientist, a psychologist who studies it, you know that we are setting ourselves up for failure. I also think that it relates to... Okay, so going back two minutes, this distinction between asking people to make choices and setting the menu of choices people have, the more we talk about it, the more I think is, while it is so appealing, it is also a bit of, what's the word? Is it a red herring? I don't know. If you make the distinction that clear, then it won't work Thank you very much. I think. Or at least that's the part that needs to be figured out. And there needs to be a societal perception that we have accepted this limited menu of choices. Yeah.

Chris And that's hard right now because the way, and at least in the United States, the way things are structured, it's kind of top-down. And it's governors and it's administrators. There's not even, the response to this stuff is not even legislative by and large, right? I mean, it's executives saying...

Scott We're locking down or we're not. And maybe the original sin, at least in this society here, maybe in the United States, was... Okay, I don't quite know how to say this. What I'm thinking about right now is how when lockdown happened, there really wasn't... Okay, that was very clear. We've got to flatten the curve. Everybody understood that. There was a pretty broad level of public... And I wouldn't say obedience. I would say adoption of this social objective. But at the same time, there was really no longer story told about, and then what? And so people are like, oh, okay, we got to do this thing. And then once we do this thing, I guess, then we're done. Then we've won. And so without some kind of broader narrative of, no, we got to do this. And then we've got to stay huddled up for several months while we reconfigure all sorts of the ways things happen, the ways schools work and the ways that offices work and stuff so that then we're going to come back into a very different configuration of behaviors for six to nine months to minimize spread while we wait for a vaccine. So everybody, this is going to be like the next 18 months. are going to be like this. This whole flatten the curve, this is just like chapter one of the story. Because I think without any kind of understanding of the choices that need to be made over the next 12 to 18 months, the default narrative would be, okay, we did what we were told, we all adopted this goal, so now we're done, right?

And that somehow was the, I think the, sorry, I can't find the words on a Friday afternoon, but I feel like that was the piece that was missing. Continuing to renew kind of public commitment to the menu of choices we have.

Chris Absolutely. And giving people a clear goal, like this is why we're doing it. Because I think even some people I've heard saying, well, I thought we were confused that we were trying to flatten the curve to stop the spread of the disease. Other people are saying, well, it's so that the healthcare system doesn't get overwhelmed. And all these, like there are these different kind of narratives that get told for why we're doing these things, right? And I think you're right. Like the more clear we can get about the goals and get it kind of shared. I think you're going to have, again, a greater chance of compliance. By the way, for those who are listening to the podcast, we've been Facebook-living this now. I just noticed Gary Werner, the guy I was talking about, who's the science writer from Phoenix, he's watching the podcast. Gary, hello to you, my friend. Thank you, because I've been sharing your stories. I've been sharing how you text me saying, we're number one. We're number one.

Scott To your point about... I'm not quite sure where we're going with this yet, but it'll be interesting to see where we land. To your point about the burden of asking individuals to make Which, I mean, I never lived in Arizona, but that sounded right to me. I mean, I can't imagine anything surviving on the handle of a shopping cart in the burning heat of an Arizona summer. But apparently, there are more things to consider than that. I suppose it's managed to live in my body.

Chris Right, right, right. And that's the thing I think she's getting at, that we're kind of, you know, we are so... And a lot of this, too, is like, you know, the guy who did Thinking Fast and Slow, right? What was that? Kahneman. I forget their names. Kahneman and the two Israeli scholars. But they would do these studies like this. These are the kind of studies they would do, right? And they would do these studies where they would ask people to spin a wheel, graduate students, right? Ask them to spin a wheel with numbers on it. Maybe it hits like 15 or 82, 2 or 3 or 4. Then after they spun the wheel, they'd ask them to name how many countries were in Africa. And correspondingly, people would guess more the higher they spun on the wheel. Things have nothing to do with each other. So that's the kind of way we just have this strange psychological web of...

Decision-making influences and things like that. And I think that's where her point is well taken because people, it's just not, and it's not a shaming thing. It's a thing, look, we're just not really well-wired for this kind of responsibility as individuals.

Scott It's not who we are. What's interesting to me, and maybe we can design an experiment and get our own Nobel Prize for this, is we... There is also something in how we are wired. Maybe this is a kind of, you know, Western civilization, Cartesian thing. But we do tend to think in terms of, you know, dialectics. It's one or the other, right? We are not well wired as individuals for this. Therefore, we need some kind of social or state kind of, you know, agenda setting to help us have a safe menu of choices in front of us.

Chris It seems to me that there's kind of a middle layer missing, which is... Yeah, I think the Cartesian problem, too, is the subject-object dichotomy. Like, I'm the subject here, discrete from the object that's the world, right? So, like, I'm here distinct from what I'm trying to know. Instead, I'm embedded in it. It's not there. I'm not here. I'm part of a whole complex bio-social-psychological matrix that you can't take me out of. I think that kind of approach helps us more accurately to see what reality is like. I'm not this distinct individual knowing subject over here. I'm embedded in a huge web of things that affects how I perceive the web of things in myself.

Scott And I feel that web is why, you know, some of the really strange outcomes like, you know, spin a wheel and how many states are there in Africa. I think that we insulate ourselves somewhat from those mistakes in judgment by being in a group of people.

Chris Right, or maybe the group says, oh, wow, I noticed the pattern here as we're spinning together.

Scott Right, right, right, right, right. And so we always kind of set up these experiments in a way of saying, like, you know, the individual is really not equipped. And that is kind of the takeaway. When actually I feel like the takeaway should be, you know, one step further. The individual, yeah, you know, because there are some things we function much more effectively, much more intelligently. Thank you very much. I would think that we would go another way. And then people are like, oh yeah, upon reflection, you helped me get outside of myself so that we can kind of look at my response and me too, I can give it a more thoughtful evaluation.

Chris In the last Basecamp we did, I had a friend invited who's a Republican lawyer from Alabama. He loved it. Very reflective guy. But he was just saying it was so helpful to talk about the us versus them thing and what's going on in the world with people that weren't American, that just processing with them was so helpful for him to get out of the American story. And I find the same thing. I've spent a lot of time lately talking with Canadians, and it's just really interesting talking about how These things are being processed differently. So I think, yeah, you're right. And you're right, it's not groupthink because the groupthink thing is what's going on right now. MSNBC or Fox News or whatever in the United States, and you get a narrative, right? And that narrative, I mean, and it gets parroted. I mean, it's like everybody's on the same talking points. And that doesn't lead to, it's one big perspective, blindness. It's not a kind of exchange of people trying to sort of paint a fuller picture together.

Scott Yeah, that word together to me is, I mean, it seems to me blindingly obvious that, you know, there is such, there is such a, like you don't have to, you don't have to explain to anyone that there's value in thinking differently. Maybe that's the success of coming back full circle to Apple. Maybe that's the success of Apple's branding power that I think most people just kind of get that, yeah, I mean, thinking differently is valuable, is important. And yet, you know, Most of us are trying to think differently the same way, which is as individuals, which is try to step outside of ourselves, understand how we ourselves process reality, and then have that critical self-reflection to be more self-aware, how we ourselves, what our habits of thought and action are so that we can get outside of them and criticize them. And all of that would be so much faster and so much more powerful if we just, you know, did it together. If we just had honest conversations with one another.

This is how I'm thinking. This is what I would have done. What would you have done? Oh, that's interesting. That's different. I wouldn't have thought of that. Instead of going around trying to put ourselves... I could sit down for an hour and try to meditate and try to think, how would Scott think about this? Or I could go around the whole world, the whole globe, and try to put myself in every perspective of every country. If I'm Chinese, how am I thinking about this trade war, stuff like that? Or I could just go, you know, it's not hard in this world, just call up somebody in China and say, hey, can we talk? Can we just talk? Here's how honestly I'm thinking about it. I'm interested in how honestly you are thinking about it. And then let's just understand one another. But that option, which in some ways is so obvious and the value of it is, I think, so just transparent. This is the whole Basecamp social experiment, right?

Chris This idea, right, is that something like Basecamp, where we're getting people together that are from all different parts of the world in all different sort of disciplines that think that we're going to find more in the questions than in easy, reflective answers or something. You know, snap. I think the idea is that not with pandemics, with climate, with a host of issues, that model is going to do a lot better. It's going to serve us a lot better as we're trying to navigate and make new maps and explore a new reality. That's going to work a lot better than the alternatives, right? Or the individual trying to figure anything out for themselves. It's this community of question askers that's going to get us a fuller map and a fuller picture of reality.

Scott I think it's the missing layer between the individual It's totally real. The public. It exists. But it's hard to hold it. And so because it's abstract, there's also kind of an opportunity to

Chris And so if you're listening to us and you don't know what Basecamp is, it's this community that we're convening somewhat regularly, groups of people around big questions that have to do with... July 25th is the next Basecamp. July 25th is the next one. So if you want, just send us an email through the website and we will get you signed up because we would love to see you there. It's going to be a good one. Yeah, it is going to be a good one. It is going to be an excellent one.

Scott So the question that we're going to ask at Basecamp on July 25th, we're going to ask ourselves and one another is, what will I give up? And it relates to this basic question about... Making choices and having choices. And I think that if we share with one another what we would give up, I think it will help us all to maybe see both the opportunity and maybe the necessity to give some things up and why I think this question of giving stuff up is an important one. It's just because I think it allows us to work with, you know, one of the, I guess, big questions that this global health crisis is inviting us all to explore, which is more better when it comes to consumption. One of the big, I guess, basic assumptions and just basic ways the world works that's been broken right now is that we should all consume as much as we want, whenever we want, whatever we want, within our means. And that's basically how every market economy is set up. What's happened now is that that policy is too dangerous.

Public health must also be considered. So it's not as simple as you can sell anything if you see a market opportunity. You can buy anything if you've got a personal appetite. There is now this other consideration, which is public health. And it's maybe a unique moment in our lifetimes when that basic policy of how the market economy works And so I think we owe it to ourselves and to one another to take this, again, maybe unique opportunity and ask the question, in addition to public health, are there other things that we ought to consider?

Chris It's interesting you say this because I think the only other thing that created this kind of requirement to sort of pump the brakes on consumerism is World War II, right? Where people in England and the United States are rationing and you can't get whatever you want because there's a war effort and consumption changes. And it's the only thing I can think of that's similar, right? It's interesting because it's almost like we're in a war effort and every one of us is a combatant. Because normally how war works is you send off the young men and we undergo certain sacrifices, but the young men go fight the war. And so we ration things like this. But for this kind of thing, it's like we're war over the virus. We're all combatants. Every decision you make will affect everybody else.

Scott Right. Yeah. That is interesting. War where we're all on the front line, in a sense. Yeah. Yeah. Whether we're, again, that kind of making our own risk assessments, whether we're aware of it or not. Right. The enemy is at my gates as well.

Chris Yeah. Is it everyone's gates?

Scott Yeah, that's right. And so you're right. I mean, it is a pretty rare thing where the basic policy of the market economy is suspended. We say, you know, it can't just be whatever, whenever. Up to the limits of your income, we have to consider public health as well. And I think it is important. Well, my hypothesis is there's just so much value for us in asking the question, what else maybe should we consider? Because, you know, I mean, maybe everything does go back to normal. There's two reasons why we might not. One, because we're unable to. And two, because we choose not to, right? Because we choose to make some changes. And would we choose to make some changes? I think a lot of people, I know in my own life I have, I've received hints from this pandemic that if I pruned my consumption in some areas, That might give me new space for new growth. New space to flourish. What was her name, the Japanese woman who went around telling people to throw all your stuff away?

Chris Mary Kondo.

Scott Mary Kondo, thank you. She had this very simple but powerful observation, which is that most of us are just accumulating stuff most of the time. And actually, just doing that doesn't necessarily make us happy. In fact, it can literally suffocate our joy. And it maybe is more than just stuff. It's also kind of all of our consumption activities that have... Thank you very much. And it does seem to me that the notion of pruning is a powerful one, that we ought to spend time from time to time and consciously think about what can I prune away in order to create space for new growth. And this might be one of the only times in our life where it will really be easy, I guess, to get a room full of people together who get it and say, yeah, okay, let's ask that question. What will I prune away?

Chris Yeah, it's funny, too, because I found, like, I've made space. There's a guy from Basecamp, he's a retired guy, Canadian guy, retired executive, and he's part of the community. I talk with this guy, like, every other day now, almost. And we just talk about life, and he's got such great wisdom, and he's got really great insights, and it's a joy. Like, it's, I really, you know, like... What I've made space for this stranger in my life had this experience not been going on, and you can't really socialize in the same way and everything. So it's wonderful. He's become a dear friend, and I'm learning so much about myself, about American culture, because we often talk about the news of the day. And of course, because he's Canadian, he gets American news stories and things like that. But his filter, and he's so instructive for me to just chat with him about reality, about life, and I feel like it expands my horizons so much more.

And that's the kind of thing where like, And I'm a pretty relational person. I mean, I was pretty social before this, but a thing like Basecamp offers me an opportunity to invite some new people into my life during a pandemic. And it's been really a blessing in deep ways.

Scott And I think the key word there is space. We do need to create... We do need to create space by pruning some stuff away before we can, you know, bring in something new and expect it to be a kind of a site of personal flourishing. This is the idea. More and more and more and more and more. It's like, what was this? I remember a line in Lord of the Rings and Bilbo says to Gandalf after, you know, centuries of carrying around the one ring that he feels stretched thin, like butter spread over too much bread.

Chris Like two little butter spread over too much bread.

Scott Yeah, yeah. And I think that a lot of people in the immediate days before and then kind of the immediate transition after the pandemic, a lot of people felt exactly they could identify with that. Like, oh, my God, I've just now noticed how thin my life has been stretched. And there's so much kind of so much horizontal and so little depth.

Chris The Christian practice of Lent, right? I mean, the idea is when people give up something during Lent, it's not just sort of to flagellate yourself or something. It's that you take away something that's some kind of delight, and then you replace it with a deeper spiritual practice and presence. So you're not just denying yourself for the sake of denying. You're removing something to make some space for something else. And I think that's it.

Scott Listening to you, that's the thing that immediately comes into mind. A couple weeks ago, I had a chat with a New Zealand friend of mine where, I mean, they're kind of back, right? They're doing mass public gatherings and stuff. And so he talked about going to a rugby match again, which, you know, hadn't done for a long time. He said the match was terrible. His team lost badly. But the experience, I mean, the way he described it was almost spiritual. So the quality of the experience was something completely unlike he had ever had before. And there is this kind of honest, I think, trade-off between quality and quantity in our consumption. And I guess to bring it full circle, so I think that this question, what will I give up, is a more powerful question. So it's not what will we give up, it's what will I give up. But it is a more powerful question to ask in a group, to ask together. Because I think...

I think it will be hard on my own and easier as a group. Going through the experience of Lent within the Christian community I think is easier than a single person deciding for themselves, for 40 days I'm just going to go off into the desert by myself. There's a community to that practice that helps to elevate the meaning of it. But I also think that likewise, if the system comes out of this and says, okay, from now on, everybody's going to give up that, there's going to be a massive resistance to it. But if we're participating in a kind of dialogue with one another and coming to a collective realization that pruning some stuff away is actually going to help us all to flourish more, then that kind of change is much more likely to actually exist.

Chris So we'll see. We shall see. And listeners and friends, you know, take comfort in the fact that you are lousy risk assessors. Yes, we all are. I'm just staying at home. I'm just staying at home. You're not special. Don't worry. It's not a... All right, Chris. Until next time, my friend.

Scott Yeah, Scott. Great to see you. Have a good weekend. You too.