Build back better

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, my friend, happy Saturday. Dude, it is, wow.

Chris Is it Saturday?

Scott It is Saturday, and it's so funny because as you have moved and you were kind of setting up your gear and you were humming the A-Team theme song. And I was like, I love that song. It was such a great show. Build Back Better is what we're going to talk about today. Could you build that back and better? Because they did a movie out of it.

Chris They did. Did you think the movie was better than the original television show? No. Well, the thing is, I don't know. I was a while back, I had the, just by coincidence, I happened to see it on TV. Must have been on some cable channel. And it wasn't as, I'm not sure it was as good as I remembered it as a kid, frankly.

Scott Yeah, television was so... This is what's interesting. It kind of gets into our topic. I think about this, that we're in the golden age of television. I mean, there's just never been a time where it's... Like, the kind of serial dramas... I mean, I'm sure... I mean, I know that you and Maxie binge-watch stuff, because you'll tell me, oh, we're watching this or watching that. Like, you can binge-watch these amazing shows. that are coming out all the time. But it doesn't seem like, I mean, but I remember shows like Knight Rider or The A-Team or The Incredible Hulk on a Friday night when they were gonna come out. These shows were not anywhere near shot on the level of quality or the level of actors, or there was not. Now, a television show is shot on the same kind of film as a movie is, right? Whereas back when you and I were kids, television looked a lot different than a movie, right? Which is why you wanted to get from the small screen to the big screen. Which now, the small screen is where the action is.

If you're going to really be an actor that's involved in something artistically that's got massive cultural appeal, it's not going to be a movie. It's going to always be some sort of serial, either a comedic one or a kind of dramatic one. That's where all the action is now.

Chris It would be interesting, I mean, if we wanted to explore that topic someday, to talk to somebody who is on the business side of the television industry, because it would be, I think, a good example that a lot of people could relate to, because we all consume the content of that industry. It would be a good example of how changes in a business model And in kind of how the market forces work can, you know, have a strong impact on our lives in society. And, I mean, I think that that person would probably start by saying, like, it's not even, like, the reason that it's changed is that it's not TV anymore. If television used to be, and even cable television used to be, the idea of basically we fill airtime. That is what we are selling. And we fill it once for whoever consumes it. And the economic model of streaming on-demand services, where you have people subscribing to multiple different streams of content, It just means that the economics are completely different. And so you're looking for, and now you have all of these streaming services that are starting up, and they're all looking for that kind of, that must-see episodic thing that will be the tent pole that people will be coming in to their streaming service to see.

In the same way that it used to be in the movie theaters, you had these blockbuster movies Which are kind of like the tentpole that would get people coming in and then also seeing some other movies or at least buying the popcorn. And that was always the economics for why would we spend so much money making a single movie because these tentpoles keep the whole industry working.

Scott The theater will be done once we can replicate what carbonated beverages taste like, because they do taste better from the fountain. I read an article, it's temperature. No, it's temperature. It's something to do with temperature and how they're kept cold, so they taste really refreshing. Microwave popcorn is not yet to the place where it replaces movie theater popcorn, but it's getting better. Because that's the only thing that keeps... Maybe after COVID, there will be a slight tick back up in going to the movies because people are just going to want to be back. Or maybe they won't because they'll just be wary of viruses. But I also think that the development of... The temperature, it's always either too hot or too cold. You're paying exorbitant amounts of money. You pay like, what, $13 for a movie ticket now? So let's say a couple of Ghosts of the Movies, and then you buy popcorn and a soda and Twizzlers. You're at $50-some. For a viewing experience, I don't think you can compete with what you can do at home.

Chris Well, so I think that, you know, probably a lot of the industry is not going to try to compete with what you're doing at home, but to distinguish between them as very different experiences and say like, yeah, like watching TV at home is great for the, you know, the safety, the warmth, the convenience, the comfort. of being at home, you know, as populations are able to get together in groups, the big ad campaign is going to be about, you know, don't you want to get out of your home now that you can? And, you know, I think that, you know, and not just in the film industry, that's just maybe the one that everyone will be able to relate to, but so many industries like travel, for example, or concerts or music festivals, a lot of them are not going to come back. And the ones that do are the ones that really make a strong case for it's worth it.

This experience of getting together with other people, what happens here that you can't get at home is worth paying for and is worth coming to. And I think a lot of industries that were strongly, were just shut down by the pandemic. If they're wise, they're thinking They're thinking in those terms like trying to really, okay, let's be hard on ourselves and try to understand what is most compelling that we can offer, that we can add to people's lives or to the community.

Scott Which brings us full circle to our topic for today. Build back up. You saw what I did there, did you? You did a nice move. You set me up. You set me up. The audience here, they saw it. They saw a wind up. It was a nice wind up and a pitch. Because, yeah, I mean, it's something so trivial. Well, entertainment's not trivial, but theaters and thinking about how they go forward. But this idea of build back better, which is the Basecamp February 2021 Basecamp theme. For our listeners that don't know, we'll put links in the show notes. Basecamp is... An intergenerational, interdisciplinary group of people from all over the world that get together to talk about big questions in the world. And if you are not connected to it, we can tell you how to get connected if you think you're a potential camper. And this month's issue or topic is Build Back Better.

Chris Which I think is a great, you know, at some point we had to give all of us a space to explore this. Because as I think about, sort of add to your description of what Basecamp is about, I think of it as really trying to help us see what we don't see. I kind of have this bias that we're just not getting it. I mean, I think to you and me and all of us who come together for these conversations, we understand that there's a lot that is important that is happening in reality that we are not seeing. And some things we can only see together, right? Get out of my head, try to understand the world from Scott's perspective. And that helps me to see into my own blind spots and kind of put the full picture together. And I think that, you know, there is obviously, you know, because there was such a disruption of kind of ordinary life due to the pandemic, it's quite natural that a narrative emerge about, you know, when we are able, To go back to the way things were, do we want to take this opportunity to go back to a different way of things, whatever the area might be?

And I think that there's going to be so much energy around that narrative. And it means, you know, the idea of let's build back better. I think it means something different to everyone, which is kind of part of the evil genius of the phrase, right? You get everybody to agree with it. But until you kind of get into, but what does it really mean to you? It's not clear if that definition of better is one that's going to be better for you, one that aligns with your values or your sense of what needs to change in the world. And so I feel like we can learn so much from one another just by kind of hearing one another talk honestly about, well, what does it mean to you? Because I think it reveals a lot of our own sense of, you know, what is going right? What is going wrong in the world? You know, what do I feel about the direction we've been on?

You know, what do I think some of the changes in direction need to be? It's kind of it's all in how we hear that phrase and what it means to us. So, yeah, so I'm really excited to just get a global group of us together. And just honestly share with one another. What does build back better mean to you?

Scott Yeah, and I think this is where things like commas and punctuation are incredibly powerful and instructive and revelatory. Because if we're saying build back better, like we're just gonna build back in a better way, or are we going build comma back comma better or something? So when we're saying back, I think that the origin of Build Back Better comes with the UN, right? It came out of a Japanese delegation or something to the UN during some kind of disaster reconstruction kind of things.

Chris I have no idea. That's interesting.

Scott Yeah, in like 2015 or something.

Chris It started with you.

Scott Yeah, exactly. It started there. Because I even think of the way I've been processing the concept a little bit in the past few days leading up to our conversation. And I think as an American who just lived through this epic defining kind of election, and Biden had this build back better, So you hear it in political terms. Yeah, because for the past, you know, unlike the UK, where you're located, which, oh my gosh, if we could do stuff like this, I mean, I think you can't have paid TV ads and stuff for elections in the UK, right? There aren't TV ads during elections.

Chris I'm not exactly sure. I'm sure there must be. I think it's more that there are quite tight limits on the money that can be spent in election campaigns and who can spend that money. And that's really where the difference is.

Scott So I was bombarded with the message.

Chris The message that we were going to build back better. Vote for me and we'll build back better.

Scott We'll build back better. Biden wasn't the most charismatic of candidates. I think he's a really good guy. I voted for Biden. I think he strikes me as a person that is really a decent human being. But he's not the most charismatic guy in the world. He was kind of campaigning on a return to normalcy. So on one level, build back better was we're going to rebuild the economy, we're going to do this. But also the back was a return to normalcy.

Chris Or to be blunt, like world pre-Trump, right? What that word, parsing each word, build back better, to your ears, going back to sort of a world before Trump. Sort of saying that... I guess that in a political campaign, his argument being basically that things were better back in 2015. So I'm going to take you back to there, and then we're going to build from, you know, to sort of how things should be. Whereas, you know, if you were a strong Trump supporter, you probably hear, you might disagree with the whole concept of, you know, going back to 2015. If you feel like we've been on a path, on a positive trajectory for the last few years, I don't want to unwind that progress that we've made.

Scott Because imagine if the state, if the UN had done rebuild better. That would be a completely different grammatical construction as to build back better, right? And so I think the back, it does something really different than if it was rebuilt.

Chris I guess if you think about it, like if you parse those three words, what's interesting is that each of them, you know, like both supports and does violence. To your position, whatever it is. The idea of building. Let's say you're an environmentalist. Build Back Better means we need to invest billions and trillions of dollars in basically post-fossil fuel energy production, so solar and wind, tidal, things like that. To someone in the fossil fuel industry, what you're hearing is we need to destroy existing fossil fuel infrastructure, like coal mines, for example. And so one person's building is another person's tearing down, right? and then and then back is kind of this word like you know we all have we all have a sense it's an interesting word because like you heard it as a kind of looking back to the past right like i feel like we've been on the wrong road so i want to kind of go back to To a world that feels, maybe not a world, but to a pathway that feels more progressive to me.

Scott And as an American, the past four years, and the world followed this, because we have ripple effects. I mean, sometimes I think other countries should be able to vote in our elections because we influence the world so much. The last four years were really disruptive to global norms with Donald Trump. I mean, they were really disruptive and unsettling. And I think the backness is something that people that were opposing Trump said, look, can't we just go back to some sense of normalcy? But that prioritizes, I mean, it's so prejudicial, right? Because people were complaining about the norms before Trump. But now all of a sudden with Trump, there was this sense of the normal, which the normal is always a construction, right? Like the good old days or something. That's always nostalgic and constructed.

Chris Yeah. So, you know, back does a lot of work. I think some people hear it as like a return to some previous normal, which even that, you know, there are some people in this world who like, you know, what is normal? I haven't had a normal day in my life. You know, people who People who, you know, people who tend to be seen as on the margins of society, you know, might live in that narrative. Say like, you know, as soon as you talk about normal, I feel excluded because you're not getting it. But that's part of back is for some people it's, I want to return to a sense of To a sense of normal. You know, for some people, it's maybe a return to a past. I think that was a lot of, you know, to reference your country's politics, a kind of, you know, like, make America great again. There's some kind of mythical past, and back is about an energy to returning to that. Whereas, you know, for, again, staying in your political frame for, you know, Democrats and Biden supporters, you know, it's probably more not going back to a certain point in time, but going back to a certain experience of change.

you know which you understand and maybe feel like you have some influence over as opposed to being a victim of forces whether it's populism or um you know technological transformation that you just feel like is has taken control and influence away from you going back is about trying to recover David Pryor

Scott Yeah, I mean, better is interesting, right? Because it plays on the capacity of us to improve and what is better. I mean, I think it's very interesting because you wrote a great book, which was the occasion for our first ever talking. And it's called The Age of Discovery. It's a book that if our listeners haven't read it, I'd really encourage you. I love the book. It's fantastic. And you're talking about the parallels between the Renaissance and our own contemporary age of both progress and chaos. And one of the things that I remember I love about the book is you say, look, we've got the same three problems they had in the Renaissance. How do you get the aggregate gains to more particular people? Right now in the West, it's the best time to be alive. I mean, life expectancy, income, things like this, progress on racial discrimination and stuff. It's not perfect, but it's grown a lot. And just like then and now, but how do you get the aggregate gains particularly?

And then the second point you make is, how do we create new wealth into real well-being for people? So new economic opportunities and new industry, new things actually make people's lives better. And the third thing you talk about is, how do you deal with new social realities? In the Renaissance, it's guilds and monasteries and convents breaking up. In the West, it's different kind of social organization via social media and these sorts of things. And that's where I think the whole... The tension between back and better, because you kind of point out in the book, even our looking at a term called the Renaissance, it's kind of retrospective. We kind of named it that retrospectively, right? The way we look at what's back and what's better are always kind of really situated in our current desires and what we're pining after now, right?

Chris I'm supposed to say something profound right now, aren't I?

Scott You're on for profound. Like this is your cue card. I'm holding up a cue card right now for our audience that says, Chris, profound. I'm quoting you to you.

Chris I feel like, you know, so if what we've, you know, just in 10 minutes, you know, we've looked at this phrase, which on the surface, you know, feels like a compelling narrative for the now to kind of, you know, bring people together. I think the other, just briefly on it, like the other, I say evil genius, I'm not saying it's evil, but the other kind of twist of the phrase is it kind of implies that we've hit rock bottom. And so now, you know, so yeah, so that's, things are bad, but they're gonna get better. So now it's time to start thinking about how are we going to rebuild? You know, what are the choices we want to make? And all of that implies that we kind of bottomed out when, you know, in fact, that's probably hopelessly optimistic. You know, maybe, you know, for many countries around the coronavirus, there's definitely the light at the end of the tunnel. You know, things could still go sideways there even. But there are all sorts of implications of the last 12, 15 months that are still going to take time to even be recognized. You know, pandemics and mental health and just the sheer devastation of small and medium businesses across so much of the world.

There are whole countries whose economies have been completely crippled by the coronavirus. I think of, for example, any small country whose primary industry is tourism from the rest of the world, it's going to take a long time to even just count the consequences of that. And then there was all of the stuff that we were worrying about before the coronavirus became the main thing we were worrying about, whether it was climate change or social inequality or political populism. All of these things that so many people were arrested by have only been strained further by the past 12, 15 months. So in some ways, the whole thematic, I get it how someone running for high office in the United States would pick up that narrative and deploy it because you want to be associated with hope. Right? Elect me and we will shift from a season of despair to a season of hope. We're going to start building back better. So that's my first reflection is that even the narrative does violence in the sense that it says it's time to stop accounting for the costs and it's time to start building back.

And when in reality, there's still just a tremendous need in society to just continue the project of compassion and empathy and exploration of what is happening and learning from all that the past 15 months have kind of revealed to us. But the other thing that just for us, just the two of us, and we probably look at the world in In many ways, in very similar ways. And we can hear that phrase so differently. It really just does, I don't know, it just sort of emphasizes to me how, in terms of better, if we could just understand one another better, I think that would do the world no end of good. Because, you know, there are going to be just so many agendas this year. I think leveraging this narrative, leveraging the sense of things broke and now we get a chance to put them back together how we would prefer them to be.

And this is an opportunity to really get curious about one another and the different ways that you would reassemble it, Scott, right? And you would reassemble it, Hannah. But, you know, perhaps more likely it will just be I'm going to get people behind my vision of how things should be reassembled and try to rush into the breach and fill it in with the future that I prefer, with the better that I prefer.

Scott Yeah, I think this is also the difference between the way politicians and sloganeers and marketers use things versus people at the UN. Like when they come up with this phrase, they think about disaster relief and very concrete. I mean, this is a phrase that they adopt, but they're thinking about very specific disasters, right? And the idea of... So it's not a campaign speech that gets adopted by the UN. It's a summary for an approach to disaster relief. That is attempting to say that this disruptive thing that's happened, despite the tragedy, can offer us an opportunity to possibly move forward. And it was very specific around, well, here's how we do land usage, and here's how we do... It was not this kind of vacuous thing that became in American politics. And I think about this book that was written a few years ago, The Great Leveler. Violence in the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st Century by Walter Scheidel. Princeton University Press publication, by the way. One of my degrees, Princeton. Love Princeton. Go Tigers. But basically, Scheidel argues that things like...

Mass violence and pandemics are actually the things that promote income, that actually disrupt income inequality because wealth begets wealth, right? And so if you have disruptive events, like the plague or something like that, where all of a sudden... I mean, you've written about this in your book, in The Age of Discovery, right? You get something like the plague that kills a bunch of people and there's a labor shortage. And all of a sudden, there's a bunch of people that have all kind of power in the guilds and things like that.

Chris Right. Or even power over the landholders who need people to work the land.

Scott To work, right.

Chris Right, there's a scarcity of labor and so we have more power, yeah.

Scott And so is that gonna kind of be one of these things where, are we gonna look back and is, and this is so bizarre and it feels morbid to think about this, but is the COVID phenomenon gonna be something that's actually gonna mitigate income inequality? Or will it exacerbate it because there are certain people that can work from home and these sorts of things? There are certain people that can't work from home and certain people that really can do all their economic functions from home. And so does it make inequality better or worse?

Chris You know it's interesting like the and I can't wait to get into some you know just some conversations with with people who are in different life situations around what does this phrase mean to you because um you know I can see if you're asking about people's incomes you know I for a lot of people I think that coronavirus has had a devastating impact on their incomes. If the patterns of behavior in society from which they got their livelihood have been broken, So, you know, I think obvious examples, especially in the early days of the pandemic when everybody was just shut down. You know, if you had started to build a kind of nice income for yourself as, you know, an Uber driver, and suddenly nobody is... Nobody is going to the airport anymore. Nobody's taking taxis into work anymore. I remember talking to some in the early days and income falling by 20x, just completely devastated. Now, do you switch into ferrying packages for Amazon? So there's an awful lot of disruption to individuals' livelihood when society switches its patterns.

It's also true that, you know, long term, yeah, maybe you do see, you know, positive impacts as well, where, you know, just the kind of acceleration of virtual employment, of working from home, of contributing solid economic value without having to be there personally, in person. You can quite easily imagine how that could improve the incomes of single mothers, for example, for whom the cost of childcare means that it's very difficult for them to work outside of the home. And now if the universe of jobs that you can do from home expands, if the opportunities to advance And that can be a liberating experience. I just think of myself as someone who, in 2019, spent a lot of time flying around the world, consulting and speaking and running workshops and things like that. And in 2020, discovering that I can do all of that work without leaving home. For me, I experienced an expansion. In just my overall quality of life, let's say.

Scott But don't you think that's also because you have an entrepreneurial personality? And so you tend to look at the world in terms of creative opportunities. You're a kind of risk taker. You talk to risk takers. So I wonder how much...

Chris I also went into the pandemic with a lot of advantages, right?

Scott Yeah.

Chris Yeah. Yeah.

Scott But even the advantage, I think there's something about creative thinking that advantage, because I think most people aren't entrepreneurial thinkers, right? Most people. And that's not like a dig on... I just think most people, like most nurses, I know a lot of nurses. They're one of the hardest working group of people. They're amazing. Most of the nurses I know are just fantastic people. But you don't go into nursing because you want to disrupt some kind of system. You go in because it's... You can really make a lot of money doing something meaningful without going to med school or something like that. So your income possibilities with relative modest education compared to a doctor or physical therapist or something. But most nurses I know, they have opinions about the healthcare system, but they're not motivated by changing the engine and the delivery stuff. They're motivated by being in a system that compensates them well, takes care of them, and where they can give quality services.

So I wonder how much of the kind of thing we're thinking about depends on the creative class. To kind of think through things in ways that most people in the economy don't have the time to think through. Because they want to get paid to do something meaningful.

Chris I'm not particularly, I don't know why, I don't have a well-reasoned argument for this, it's just more intuitively, I'm reluctant to kind of put too much weight upon entrepreneurial ability. I know that, you know, that's a very kind of, I don't know, sexy trait to promote, but I think it's more the case that I feel like if you've got a lot of advantages, it's maybe easier to figure out the new configurations of work earlier. But the configurations that work then become normal. And it's not about having the entrepreneurial talents for it. It's just sort of, it literally is just going with the flow. I mean, there are so many, I mean, God, I mean. Who's not an entrepreneur these days in some capacity, right? There are just so many ways to create income streams for yourself outside of like a formal full-time work contract. I don't know what the statistics are, but to my mind, this is just kind of part of society's broader transition from a kind of industrial age mindset, kind of the factory, the supervisors, the line employees. To an economy where so much of the value that is exchanged is dematerialized, and it's working with information, and it's working with ideas, and I wonder if, I feel like my computer has just frozen, so I wonder if you can still hear me. Can you still hear me? I can totally hear you. Huh, okay, well then it's just me, it's frozen on my end.

So for me, I'm more worried about the capacity of individuals to shape what words like better mean. So I think one thing that a lot of people can relate to is working from home. They've actually, they're working more than they were when they were working in the office. So I'm less concerned about as an individual, what's our capacity to be entrepreneurial? And I'm more concerned about how do we really influence a societal understanding of what is better? um you know and you know that kind of that mythical 10-hour work week that technology was meant to enable for people um just seems farther away than ever now that people have the technology to work from home and you know as much as it's been enabling and i think there's been A sense of an expanded quality of life, the flexibility to negotiate the complex demands of the modern world upon being a parent with children and their schooling needs and your own health and fitness and wellbeing needs and work. You know, the whole idea of like the eight or nine hour work week, five days out of seven, just isn't compatible with those competing demands. And so, you know, in 2020, people felt a lot of just, okay, the ability to kind of reconfigure my time to a more sensible and sustainable combination of where I spend things. But what also ended up happening is, you know, Suddenly the barriers between work and home are completely eliminated. And if you're not careful, you end up working even more hours.

So what is better? What is a better future of work? And at what point is more technology not making our lives better? Because it's filling us with things that aren't necessary and crowding up the things that How do we as people in this age where there is so much energy and resources and frankly capital invested in a narrative that more technology makes us better? How do we bring a kind of a personal and a social and a psychological and a cultural and a spiritual reality to weigh in shaping what better means? I think that's gonna be a huge, huge just, I don't know, confrontation, but certainly area of work for every society.

Scott So you brought up an interesting example about the Uber driver. And so I'm a chatty guy, so whenever I take an Uber or a Lyft, and I live in a major city, I don't have a car, so I can use public, or if I need to quickly go somewhere, I'll use Uber or Lyft. And I always talk to the drivers, and I'm really curious about what they're doing. This one guy was making a pretty decent living, but then when you look at his, how many hours he's working, And I'm wondering, on one level, the driver looks like they have more entrepreneurial agency, because they don't have to clock in to the factory and then clock out. They have some agency. And yet, to make a decent living, he's got to basically work all the time. And the people that profit the most are still the people that own Lyft and Uber.

So you wind up, it looks, and I'm sure because of the relative newness and novelty, Of the gig economy stuff, we'll be thinking this through for decades. But on one level, it looks better to me, and on one level, it looks bad to me. And this guy just looks like another factory worker who's doing overtime. It doesn't look easy.

Chris With arguably even kind of less power than you had in the factory, where you could physically mobilize, and you could physically interrupt the production of wealth in that factory system.

Scott And the factories gave birth to unions, which I think the gig economy will kill. There's not going to be an Uber driver union in all likelihood. Maybe there will be. Maybe that will be part of the better moving forward. But these entrepreneurial kind of streams for the gig worker tend to be anti-unionized. They tend to be very individualistic. And how much real agency and power do you have In the gig economy. Other than setting your hours.

Chris So I think in my mind, listening to you there, like the big word screaming in the back of my head is institutions. And I think for me, a lot of building back better in a kind of way to meaningfully influence some of the big categories of risk to sort of broad... To a broad-based increase in well-being, you know, risks like environmental risks, inequality, you know, misinformation and, you know, bad uses of technology and politics, health. A key element of making improvements in all of those dimensions for me is probably going to be institution. You know, so you talk about, yeah, like in a gig economy, what is the institution? That serves to help the labor inputs to kind of recognize and kind of fight for a piece of the pie that is adequate or more than adequate for them. And it's complicated because then you have a global pandemic and you realize that if people don't have the adequate means to be safe and be secure and be resilient To have resilience, then they put everybody at risk, right? If it would be better that I be at home, but I can't afford to be home because I don't have the savings to fall back on. I have to go out and be a vector for the spread of a disease in order to earn an income.

That doesn't necessarily lead to society as a whole being better off. So this is just a giant topic that we can't finish. But I think of so many examples over the past couple of years where what's going on to me just screams, oh, we need better institutions for this. I mean, so right now, in the context of what's happening in your country with a presidential impeachment proceeding in I think we've talked about this in the podcast before. I'm not sure, but I think we've talked about it.

Scott I remember seeing Mark Zuckerberg before the Senate, whatever, some Senate committee talking about Facebook. And Orrin Hatch goes, he's an older guy from Utah. I think he died a couple years ago. No, maybe he's still alive, I'm not sure. But it's this old senator from Utah who says, you offer all these services to your clients for free. How do you do that? And Zuckerberg just goes, we sell ads. And just thinking, there's no possible way The United States Senate, one of these great deliberative institutions, could possibly regulate a corporation like Facebook.

Chris It's impossible. It just seems strange that it should be the responsibility of men and women in their 80s to hold to account 30-year-olds for the impact of technology when in that 50-year gap there have been Multiple giant waves and technological transformations. I mean, you're living in different universes of awareness of the roles that these technologies play in society and the roles that these people play. And it is an institutional failure that it is the responsibility of those people to be the regulators. You need a different institution that's able to do so.

Scott And I love that you're saying this because I think it's not a sexy term, right? It's not when you're thinking about the future and building back better and you're thinking about with creatives and you're thinking about things that are exciting and generate energy and imagination. One of the words that's not on the top 10 list is going to be institutions. But they are where the action is. And the biggest thing you can do, probably for a lifetime legacy in human history, is if you create a sustainable institution. Because those are things that we live and die by and through. Institutions are incredibly powerful. But maybe we need, in the whole build back better moment, maybe we just need a healthier and more imaginative way to talk about the power of institutions.

Chris I think yes. I think probably somebody needs to come up with a better, a sexier word for institutions. That means institutions, but somehow doesn't evoke the same kind of marble, columned, ineffective, slow grinding, all of that conceptual baggage. That the word institution evokes. Institution feels like where positive energy goes to die. And it also feels like it's where motive energy goes to die. And just kind of like the, I don't know, the popular kind of association with the word. I wonder what would happen if I go into Google Images right now. And I type in institution. What do I see? I see... I'm going to do the same thing. Okay, I see, like, I'm like in ancient Athens. I see the temple with its marble pillars and a drawing of a building with marble pillars and another building with marble pillars and another building with marble pillars. I see... There's bad PowerPoints. And I've got like a wide second screen and my screen is just full of triangles supported by marble pillars. Right? Isn't that fascinating? So that's what we think an institution is, and that picture is 2,000 years old.

And that's why, well, that's part of why it's hard to get people excited about, like, yeah, if we really want to build back better, if we want that slogan to mean anything, or if we want to even explore what it should mean, what it could mean, We need to build better institutions. Like, really? You want to reassemble the ancient Rome?

Scott Like that? But it's funny, though, that we say this, because I was thinking, I don't know why this popped into my mind, but I was thinking, what's the opposite of the non-sexy pictures? And I was thinking, I love the Daniel Craig, James Bond films. And this is heretical, but I think he's a better James Bond than Sean Connery, even. And those films are... Yeah, it's out there now. I'm not erasing. I said it. I'll stand by it. But he's this radical individual, right? But that's only sustained by an institution. His whole ability to save the world is because he's part of a stodgy British institution that knows how to... James Bond looks like this radical individualistic hero, but he could never be James Bond without the institution. I guess it's MI6, right? Like the foreign service. So his whole life is so institutional. But it's very exciting. You don't watch those films thinking, oh my God, institutions are so boring.

You're kind of into it, like, oh my God, he's got Q, and he's getting the car, and he's getting the communication devices. But that's institutional reality, right? These are people that have built an institution. They're thinking, oh my gosh, the world's a scary, dangerous place. And we have to build institutions, organizations, communities that pass on knowledge. So that that guy is not, Daniel Craig's not on his own. He's actually, everybody, when he's in the field doing these things that are, you know, virtual eye cocaine on the screen or whatever, they're only made possible by these, by this whole complex array of networks and with people that will never go do something dangerous or sexy or exciting in a kind of casino in Montenegro. But the whole capacity for that is institutional.

Chris So as I think of Basecamp in some ways as playing... In some ways playing the role of an institution, if the role of the institution is to be a space to explore with greater breadth and greater depth the topic of its concern. And to me, that's kind of an accurate working definition, right? Like if you are, say, a legal institution, you're trying to kind of be a steward of your topic, of your area of concern with a greater depth and a greater breadth, maybe especially breadth, then Then the individual agents within that area of concern tend to practice. I think that's what we're reaching for when we talk about we need an institution for this. If we want to prevent the next pandemic, we need to look at our institutions of public health. We need to have some part of all the activity that is really advocating and exploring how does all of this connect.

Be more farsighted both in time and in kind of space to help bring that perspective to all of our individual agency. I think that's kind of what we're saying institutions are about. If we're gonna regulate technology, it's like we need, and that's what you kind of, you look to the Senate, but they're not able to bring the greater breadth and depth to... The topic, that topic is so fast changing and so rich that it needs its own Senate in a sense. It needs its own institution, but really what we need, what we're saying is it needs a locus where we can go for breadth and depth.

Scott And also, I'd want to know if we could relate these two words that you're like, because constitution, because we think of people, we use the word constitution, or he's got a strong constitution, or she's got a strong constitution. And we're talking about bodily integrity, that they're going to weather some kind of health crisis or something, because their constitution is strong, their bodily integrity is strong. Or when we talk about it on governmental level, they have a strong constitution. We're saying they have this kind of body politic integrity that will weather the storms and the ups and downs. And I wonder, what's the relationship between strong institutions and strong constitution? So to have a strong constitution, what seems to be fundamental, just like a quality healthcare system is required for people to have bodily health, I wonder, to have strong constitutions, individually and societally, do we need strong institutions?

Chris Yeah, I don't know. But listening to you, I don't know why what you said was making me think about, you know, the Constitution. Is it something static? Is it something living? And I think that, again, in sort of popular, just unreflective thought, institution is something static. And maybe that's what's got to change. If there's going to be a kind of, you know, a vibrant agenda, like, yeah, we're missing some really good institutions here. And again, you know, do the Google image search. It is overwhelmingly our visual concept of the institution is something that is immobile. You build things out of marble with a kind of triangle plinth on top when you want to demonstrate stability and permanence. This is the most stable way to build something. This thing is going to fucking be here forever, is I think what we associate with an institution. Rather than a sense of a kind of a constant exploration. And I think maybe those are the kind of institutions that we need. Not ones that say like, right, we know what is, and everyone's got to listen to us. But ones that say like, right, we are resourced to explore. And that's our permanent project.

We're exploring into a far future that maybe not everyone has time to consider, but we're considering it. And we're exploring kind of horizontally in terms of how does this stuff relate to all this other stuff to help bring those perspectives that we don't have time for. So I feel like it seems to me that both constitution and institution should be healthy. And I think you're right, there's some relationship there. But I think it's also like a living relationship, right? How does this living constitution is enabled by living institutions? And maybe both of those two concepts are too static in just popular imagining.

Scott And once something starts happening, I think one of the things that's interesting about Basecamp is it's such a dynamic, organic community organization. But it's still an institution in some level. Once you start meeting regularly, and people have responsibilities, and you're meeting at the same times, and you're regularly gathering... It becomes kind of institutional, and that's not a bad thing, right? It becomes something that is taking on a social reality for some arc, for some period of time, and who knows how long.

Chris So there's an interesting tension there, right? One of the core values of Basecamp that I think, well, that we have all distilled from the experience of the last couple of years is that everything is provisional, right? If we are a global society of explorers, Fundamentally, we're all coming together to try to see what I'm not seeing so that I can discover better ways that are out there, but I just can't see them. And there's so much that we just can't see, right? So a society of explorers looking for what it's not seeing is always, you know, kind of in a scientific way, always open to revising what I understand. You've got to have that openness. You've got to have that sense of everything is always in draft because there's always more to discover. So we have that value, and yet we have it as a value. So the institutionalization is to recognize that there are certain values in our practice, in our community of practice, that are probably maybe permanent. Even if it's a value of holding things lightly and holding things to be provisional and open to constant revision as we just continue to learn and grow, because we're a society of explorers.

I think that's the, you know, probably you would look at any good institution would, I think, instantly relate to that. You know, to say there are these constancies that we have, you know, discerned over time that they just don't change given the nature of what we're doing. You know, if we are some institution for health, then we've got certain ideas around, you know, at first do no harm, for example. Even as the topics of the day change, those values are constant. And maybe that's a good sort of place to bring people around to is to say like, look, when we say institutions, we mean values. What are the constancies? Not in terms of like particular practice or procedure or regulatory red tape, which is what people associate with institutions now. But what are the values that we are— And I like the constancy term.

Scott I like the term of constancy. Because it's interesting, too, you look at the American Constitution. Theoretically, everything is up for grabs. If you get a two-thirds majority on a constitutional amendment, you could abolish the presidency. You could do—I mean— There's nothing sacred in the American Constitution if you could get enough votes, right? You could amend the whole thing. You could get rid of the Senate. You could make Lady Gaga the permanent head of state. I mean, you could do if you could get the votes. I mean, the founders built in something that would allow perpetual change, but they made it a little hard so that you would have to get enough buy-in for there to be constancy. And I think I like that term of like values and constancy because I mean we need, I think we need, if we're thinking about building and back and better and the whole idea of this dynamic dance between these words and trying,

especially in the time of a global pandemic, to think about how we really do build back better. I mean this is the the interesting dynamic that probably needs to be How do you have dynamic organic values and real lasting constancy?

Chris So I think you've nailed it in terms of if trying to articulate why is it worthwhile for diverse people from around the world to come together and talk about what does building back better mean to you? Because this year, I think probably the next several years, there is just going to be a lot of Agenda building and agenda advancement that is packaged as building back better. Whereas I think my view is that the most impactful thing to do would be to make that kind of universe like, yeah, we want to build back better. Make it the starting point for an inquiry into How we see things differently and what the points of constancy are. And then if we could kind of... If we could clarify those, then that kind of becomes a common foundation upon which to make some difficult choices about different agendas. Because without those constancies, it's just another power struggle in a different form, right? So let's take, you know, I think of a lot of friends who work on either side of sort of the environmental agenda.

You know, for climate scientists, and I'd include, I guess, myself and the people who believe this, I mean, building back better probably means a lot of short-term pain. A lot of things get worse in the short term if we take kind of the trajectory of where climate science tells us that we're going to.

Scott For long-term health, we're going to have to take a lot of short-term pain.

Chris Right, right. Whereas there's going to be so much conflict over that agenda. Unless we have some kind of shared constancy around what better means. What's our time horizon for these things? Are we talking about collective? Are we talking about individual? Sorry, now I'm rambling. But do you know what I mean? I feel like the more important work... is exploring the different values that are at work that I'm bringing to the table when I say, this is what Build Back Better means to me. It's not so much the answer as the process is the thing, if that makes any sense.

Scott Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the amount of things you need to think through this. So I was thinking, just as you were saying that, I was thinking about instances where let's say you're playing rugby or something.

Chris Well, I'm really interested to see where this analogy's gonna go.

Scott Let's say you get a sprain in your leg or something. Sometimes the sprain is such that they'll break the bone to set it. The physician will actually break the bone. So it seems worse, but they're saying, look, we cannot heal this unless we have to do... Sometimes physicians actually have to do a break in the bone because the sprain is so serious it will never heal. And a break... And so sometimes there are instances where you have to break a bone to heal a sprain. And I think about that. That's just a fascinating thing. As you were talking about climate stuff, what is our horizon for how long could we not walk? Or if you're the patient, are you thinking, I don't want to break. But I think that's the interesting thing. If you think in a clinical conversation, you've just been wounded from the rugby field and you're thinking, Well, I could, man, with the sprain, it'll kind of heal in three weeks and I could play rugby again. But then the doctors, well, you know, it's going to be worse if you do this. And actually, you're probably not going to play rugby for a year. But if I do the surgical break and cast it... and put the bone back together the right way, in a year you could play rugby for several years. And these kind of, how you frame these kinds of, and I just think this is what I like about Basecamp a lot, and what I like about what we're doing in this podcast, because you need every word, every analogy, every story, every image we can get, right?

I think there's not, I mean, there's a real value in phrases like build back better, right? Because they're quick and they're helpful and you remember them in your mind and they're accessible. And yet also, to complement that, you need all kinds and all manner of words and stories and images and interlockers because these things are really complex and every analogy Every story, every picture is really helpful. That's why it's great to have a global community of people from all sorts of disciplines and walks of life, because we need every story, image, voice, word we can get.

Chris So I'll be very interested to see in February's Basecamp, and we can kind of reflect on it afterwards. You know, how much, because, you know, I guess I'll be interested to see how much of the conversation that convenes around this question, what does Build Back Better mean to you, how much of it will kind of, you know, sort of devolve into competing visions of the good, right? Competing values. Well, for me it means this, and for you it means that, and we're just kind of in conflict over that. And how much of it discovers, I guess, both the curious questions and exploration of how you see things versus how I see things, what building means to me, what I associate with back, what I articulate as better. How much of it becomes a kind of curious search into the other to understand better? And how much it becomes a discovery of these points of constancy upon which maybe we can build? Because I think that, you know, and those can be, and it's not like everybody agrees that, oh yeah, that's it. But if a few people agree on a point of constancy, But they had different agendas. You know, actually I thought, I think of going this way and you think of going that way, but we both agree that this needs to change.

Then those points of constancy, even if the particulars are different, they can become a kind of ongoing conversation and exploration into each other, where maybe both of them then come with a, you know, modify what they're intending to do based on what they've learned from one another.

Scott And I think of the great painting, The School of Athens, right? Where... I have that poster. Yeah, you have... Have you seen it?

Chris Oh, I love that. Have you seen it in real life?

Scott Yeah, I've never seen it in person.

Chris I've seen it in person. It's beautiful. Oh, wow. Yeah, in the Papal Apartments in the Vatican. Live in Europe, man. It's not that far. Well, I can't go see it this year, but... I could get over there. I'll bet they've done some amazing cleaning. I bet a lot of museums have done some amazing cleaning over the last year. I would hope so if they have the funding to do so. It'll be like 2021, there'll be a great year to be visiting museums, I'm sure. The walls and the floors will be so squeaky and shiny. Sorry, you were saying?

Scott You look at that painting, though, and you have the cynics here, and on the corner, and Pythagoras over there, and in the middle are Plato and Aristotle. And Plato is pointing up, because his philosophy, he thinks the real truth is in this kind of realm of forms that's non-physical, right? Like, you know, a real triangle is not the triangle you draw, it's the triangle in your mind, where you know all the angles and stuff. And Aristotle is pointing outwards to know, Plato, the real truth is the forms are in the world. You can't escape the world. You've got to get into the world, which is where Aristotle is saying horses and flowers. But the beauty is they're both in the school of Athens. So it seems like this fundamental conflict is the real eternal truth in the immaterial, or is it really in the nitty-gritty? But in the middle is this, they're in the middle of an institution where all the philosophers are gathered around them. And now, you know, we couldn't think about Western ideas without Plato and Aristotle in conversation.

And yet, you know, 2,500 years ago, they're just in the School of Athens. It looked, I don't know, it probably looked funky and, you know, I'm sure merchants and military people thought, I don't know what they're doing over there. It looks like the Harvard School of Government or Kennedy School of Government or something. It seems abstract. But they were part of an institution that shaped the way we all think. And that institution was just people talking and thinking together. And that was the School of Athens.

Chris I think of, yeah, so that's my hope. You know, we've created this space. I think we create good conditions for people to listen to one another. And in this global moment, you know, What does Building Back Better mean to you? I think it's just a fabulously effective way to get inside someone else's head and inside someone else's heart and just get a sense of where they're coming from and what they see. And both for grand societal reasons, I fundamentally believe that if we all just understood one another better, that would do the world no end of good. I believe that fundamentally. But also in more instrumental ways. I think it is just going to be so helpful to have that kind of information of where different people are coming from. And it's so accessible right now because of the rare shared context that we are all in. We get the relevance of the question. We all do. We can all attend to that question.

And so I have this kind of urgency inside, like before everybody gets Before the shared context disappears, this is the moment to come together and just try to learn as much as we can about how you see things. And I wonder if there was that kind of urgency at the School of Athens. We can get together here. And, you know, do you see in the sweep of history that it wasn't always this way? So we've got this precious space that we've managed to create where we can converse, where we can just talk. We have the luxury of that. And I wonder, you know, it'd be interesting to kind of go into Aristotle and Plato. I mean, of course they had a sense of their own privilege, I'm sure. But I think there is also a sense of, as a society, as a culture, that we are privileged. And so we need to seize upon the opportunity, which in our own histories look to us as extremely rare, what we've managed to build here. So let's leverage it in order to help one another to kind of reach just a higher form of society.

And I guess, now I'm rambling a bit, but I feel like that's part of what we're trying to be a part of. Not to, we can't control that, but we can influence it, I think, in helping to create that space.

Scott No, and the School of Athens didn't control anything. I mean, they were philosophers, and they were thinkers, and describers of what they saw in the world. I think that's, but that is the most powerful influence. The power of conversation.

Chris Right. And then thinking back, one of the big lessons of 2020 was just this kind of visceral, I've used that word a lot, I feel, in 2020, but this visceral experience of connectedness, that we are connected, that it's not just rhetoric, it's real, and that this be a kind of opportunity to, a space where we explore that connectedness, where we can just explore it.

Scott Yeah, and it is, it's interesting, just before we close out, I just wanna say something. I talked with you a little bit yesterday, but I interviewed you on my interview podcast, Give and Take, years ago.

Chris Which, congratulations, 250 episodes. Episodes. And you have interviewed so many extraordinary thinkers. It's been a really fun ride.

Scott What a garden it's been. Yeah, but that's... I had no idea. I know your publicist is a good friend of mine, and she's like, this guy's great. I loved your book. And we talked, and we just were like, we just got to do more stuff together. But the mysteries of the universe, one conversation started this podcast. Now I'm involved in the Basecamp community. These fortuitous moments where you just meet someone and it was great. And you and I just had the sense like, this isn't over. We've got to keep this going. And that's, I've met several people in Basecamp that I have these ongoing relationships with. And so it's just, I'm so grateful because I think about what the nature of Basecamp and just the way our relationship started by an interview, just a conversation. And then you and I became really good friends.

Chris I want to let you have the last word, but I'll just add on that. It's not accidental, if you think about it. I mean, we are a society of explorers. And so, fundamentally, we are looking for the connections to help us see farther. And we know that there is an intelligence in the connections that is non-linear. And so we're kind of open to those non-linearities. And I think that's part of what you experience in many conversations. You know, humanity is a mixed bag, and so frankly, you know, I think some of our Basecamp conversations are a mixed bag too. But there is this sort of, this undeniably present tone that a society of explorers has, that the default is a sort of openness and a curiosity and a... And an intellectual humility that makes it easy, I think, to form vibrant, like a vibrant social brain where there is, you know, as you call your podcasts, where there's a healthy give and take.

Scott And that's why I go. That's why I go to Basecamp.

Chris By the way, everybody has to listen to, have you got like a kind of your top 10 episodes list or something?

Scott I don't.

Chris You would be in them, though. Yeah, sure, you're just saying that.

Scott Maybe I should do that.

Chris You totally should, and then we can put it in the show notes and stuff. Yeah, we can put it in the show notes. I would love, I would appreciate that, because I haven't listened to all of them.

Scott No, I know we'll do that, but I think that's why I go to Basecamp, and that's why I think it's a high probability, if you're a global explorer, if you haven't gone, or if you haven't been in a while, I would just encourage you to come. Also, if you don't come, we lose your voice. If you're there and you have these burning questions or insights and want to engage, if you're not there, we lose your voice. And there's no do-over. We can't get you back in the conversation.

Chris It's one of the beautiful things. It's like ephemeral art. Once it's over, it's done.

Scott Yeah, it's done. Yeah, it was. Thanks, my friend. This is a real pleasure, always.

Chris Yeah, apologies with just COVID and my move in London. It's taken me longer than I wanted to for us to be able to get back into the regular habit of these conversations. But I think we've got a plan now. We've got a plan. So plans are good.

Scott Plans are good. We like plans. We like plans.

Chris Yeah, we do. Excellent.

Scott Both of us need haircuts.

Chris Oh, my God. If you could see us, we need haircuts. Yeah, that's why I said, like, let's not do this live.

Scott Yeah, both of us are, like, sort of, we're in total pandemic. But that's what's great about the podcast, because you can't see us. Yeah.

Chris And I'll see you in real time on the 21st. I love it. Thank you, my friend. See you at Basecamp. Take it easy, Scott.