Reflecting on Basecamp’s Build Back Better conversation

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, how are you?

Chris Oh, you really went that question. I thought this was just you with your niceties. And I have a good answer for you. I was doing a workshop a couple of weeks ago and interviewing a leader of a team. And we were talking about the value of being of leaders who stand up and kind of proclaim that I don't know and how that enables people and is actually reassuring. And so I said, so how are you doing? He said, fine. And I said, no, I mean, you know, in the context of what we just talked about, how are you doing? And so he paused and he thought about it and he said, fine, but not fine all the time. And I thought that that was just such a stunning summary. I think what is both true for many, many, many people around the world in this moment,

I guess those of us who are lucky to be fine some of the time, but also for someone in his situations, sort of in a professional world where you often keep a lot of things private. That additional clause, but not all the time, is the growth, is the opening that has been happening over the last year. So I'm going to plagiarize that. I'm fine, Scott, but not all the time.

Scott I had an experience like that several years ago that completely changed my life. I was speaking at a church, which I often do, and I saw a couple that I hadn't seen in years. We'd known each other from some conferences and stuff. And they were visiting that church that day. It was totally random. We would not plan to be there together or something. And they asked me the same thing, how are you doing? I was like, oh, I'm great. And they're like, really? I was like, no, I'm doing terrible.

Chris No, I just lied to your face.

Scott Yeah, that's what I did. I actually said, yeah, I'm totally lying to you. I'm doing terrible. I'm really depressed and I'm really struggling, but I got to put my game face on. And they opened up to me about the struggles they were going through in their marriage and they didn't know if they were going to make it. So after I spoke and I totally changed what I talked about that day. Like I kind of just did an impromptu, complete change of the talk. And we went to this brunch spot and spent the whole day together and wound up talking about their life. And now they're still together. They've adopted several kids from high risk communities. They're doing great. And it changed my career trajectory. I actually wound up doing stuff at that church for a few years. I think the power of actual Being present and being vulnerable when someone asks you a simple question like, how are you, is pretty remarkable.

Chris And you know what's interesting about just... We haven't even gotten to the topic and we're already off topic. I guess that's what we're good at. But what I appreciate about just that phenomenon you describe is how... I guess I have confidence in things that are true from multiple perspectives. And so there's a lived, experienced truth of the value of being more open and vulnerable around how I'm really doing. You end up in more authentic and meaningful conversations and relations with people, and there's a relationship capital. That is formed, which I guess is sort of how the social scientists might explain why that's a good thing. And even, you know, like an information theorist would say like, yeah, of course this is better because you just, you enrich the information that you have to work with. If you think about sort of the quote unquote traditional workplace of how much How much information we don't bring to that team, to that collaboration.

It's like information poverty and you expect it to be high performing and effective and productive and all these things that rely upon good information. So there's something about this sort of behavioral shift that I think a lot of us are just experiencing in our own lives that makes sense, sort of, From whatever perspective you look at it. And it's those kind of things that I have a lot of confidence in, like, okay, well, there must be something true there.

Scott I mean, David Brooks in his great book, The Social Animal, talks about this, like, because it's a great book that's all about how basically... David Pryor, and so on. Jared Polin And most of you is the tip of the iceberg. The you that's thinking about your outfit and the pleasantries you're exchanging and the agenda for the meeting on that stuff. But really who you are is everything that has to do with your grandparents and stuff that happened zero to two and cultural influences that are not present to you most of the time unless you're really reflective. And this is part of why I think one of the things that we'll talk a little bit about today, but Basecamp and its emerging kind of connections with things like the New Geographical Society and things, these are things that are, they're spaces I think where you're trying to... As you have said, make new maps or see bigger pictures or get to what's under the surface with the iceberg. Because I just think most of...

I was going to say Western culture, because that's what I know. I mean, you spent more time in places like China, so I couldn't speak to that in meaningful ways. Although I know a little bit from friends and stuff that have been there and are Chinese and stuff. Happy New Year, by the way. I don't know if you've had it since the New Year.

Chris Or if you're really hit with it, Happy Niu Year, because Niu is cow.

Scott Oh, so you're the cow? In those places that are hard to talk about.

Chris So maybe put it this way, and I like the iceberg metaphor. I was doing some visioning work with, well, you were there with our own team and trying to figure out where does all this go and why are we doing it? And what's the impact that we can have in the world by creating these spaces? And what's interesting is when you talk about vision and vision statement, it feels like the world is full of beautiful, inspiring visions. And yet, I think it's also full of a sort of cynicism or doubt that we're going to get there. And I suppose the question will be, well, of course, how can you expect us to get there when we're not allowed to bring our whole selves? If it's just a piece of myself that is going there, how am I ever going to arrive? And it's kind of when you think about it, yeah, of course it's absurd. If we are going to arrive at these beautiful visions that we described for our team, our organization, ourselves, whatever, we got to bring the whole self along.

And I suppose sort of, as you said, we think that there's a real opportunity for us With these conversations you and I are having to connect with and feed into some of these broader public conversations that we've been a part of and been helping to convene each month. And so last Sunday, we took part in the most recent of these Basecamps. And the question that we all gathered around was, so this phrase that's getting bandied about everywhere, Build Back Better, what does that phrase I personally just really connected with people's sense that if we're going to get anywhere better, I want my whole self to be there.

Scott Yeah, that was true for me. And by the way, for people who are new, like if you're just listening to this podcast or it's maybe your first or second episode, the Basecamp community, it's really simple. It's a community that meets monthly right now online virtually through Zoom. And we gather around a big topic or question. Chris kind of frames the question for us. We do a kind of grounding exercise to get us reflective. Chris does a framing. And we spend a huge chunk of time, like 45 minutes in small groups with people all around the world. And so you don't know who's going to be in your small group. It's wonderful. And I had that experience that so much of Build Back Better, which is this kind of phrase that's... I think we talked about in the last podcast, it started from the UN around disaster relief and a way to think through infrastructure projects post-disaster relief, like with earthquakes and hurricanes and stuff. And now it's, of course, been everywhere. I mean, it's ubiquitous.

Chris I mean, it becomes... It's funny to do like a Google search and just see, like do an image search and just see how many different organizations have put that phrase on kind of the cover image of their web page, of their latest report, because it's such a... I think it's felt to be a great mobilizing phrase to get energy behind whatever your agenda is and you think that the world needs more of it.

Scott So when we do these meetings, Chris then collates, or collates is the wrong word, that sounds like you're in a back room in Staples or something, but kind of integrates.

Chris That's usually where it happens, yeah.

Scott Exactly, you're just back there. Creates a kind of output document that tells the story. It's a logbook. A logbook, yeah, a logbook. Excuse me. A logbook. Where you kind of bring together some of the best insights from all around the world. And again, it's a global community, so you're quite literally bringing in insights from all over the globe. And you send that to all the participants, so you get actually a snapshot. So what we're going to do on this podcast with some regularity, like monthly, is after these monthly global meetings, we'll spend some time just reflecting on that big question and the logbook and what we learned.

Chris And learn is the word. I mean, there's something about, sorry to interrupt you, but there is definitely something about when you can sit in a room with a diversity of people who just, you know, who frankly come from different worlds. I mean, we live in the same world and in some ways we do not live in the same world. Without fail, at least my own experience of it, it awakens depth of understanding. If we could all just understand one another and the world a little bit better, I'm sure it would do the world no end of good. But I experience it each month, like, wow, I just wasn't thinking that way. And now I see it. Inevitably, I think at the end of these conversations, we realize that the question we should have been asking is dot, dot, dot. You just can't get there without going through the journey.

Scott And there's something you said which I really like. That we seem, with technology and mass culture, we seemingly live in more and more similar worlds. But we really don't, right? I mean, that's a veneer, right? Because we all use the same apps to connect to a meeting or we're all on, you know, there's only several options for social media. Like, we have the shared reality. It is really shared, but it's not the same. And I think oftentimes you need space and time to dissect what's really still incredibly particular despite the shared world we live in.

Chris This word shared, I think we'll keep coming back to it because I think a lot of what, and I think we all kind of know whatever sector we're in or however we're kind of tuned into the world, that there's not as much shared meaning. We often start the journey much too far down Now, I see this problem, hey, let's get together and solve it, not fully appreciating just how much of what we understand the problem to be, of what we understand impact to be, is not shared. And we really do kind of, if we want to get far together, if we want to arrive at a substantially better vision of something, you can't skip that beginning of the journey where you figure out what What meanings do we share? And so this conversation, so that's kind of a very high abstract thought, but we live in this moment where there is this broad public slogan around building back better, which actually begs exactly that question. What does that mean? Better for whom? Better for when? Better for what? And if we start the journey together at, yeah, we should build back better. Without going back up the trail and asking, yeah, better for whom? Better for what? Better for when?

Back to when? Like, what's your reference point? Are you thinking back to, you know, as we said on Sunday, you know, for you, was it better before Trump or before Biden? If you're American, right? And you're into politics and things like that. So there's so much to explore there that if we did, then maybe things like Build Back Better would be more than a phrase and would be some kind of common understanding of where we are and where we want to get to.

Scott Yeah, and it's interesting is even when you reference my own American context... I can't help but sometimes do that. Exactly. You know, I lived through the political campaign here in the States, which was, you know... Again, its presence is ubiquitous in global media, I mean, because it's just the nature of the United States. But I don't think I heard a good conversation on Build Back Better In media. I mean, nobody sat and said, what the hell does this mean? Nobody stopped and said, could we just take a half hour and ask what this means? It's interesting because we did do it with Make America Great Again. There was a lot of ink spilled and a lot of time spent talking about what that meant, the whole MAGA movement. But again, I can't think of, and I watch a lot of cable news and PBS and things like that, and I just can't think of a time where I heard some people sit and pull apart a phrase like that.

Chris And so, yeah, yes, yes, yes. And I think, I mean, I think if you kind of Google online, you can find really interesting thought pieces that critique. Of course, there's going to be all sorts of critiques out there, but what does this mean? I mean, if you write opinion columns for a living, that's a freebie. Let's critique what that means. But what you don't find is the conversation that invites society to get together and explore together. And what seemed resoundingly important to me or clear to me from the last Basecamp, where we did exactly that, was it wasn't so much the outcome that was important to people, it was the conversation itself. There was a yearning for a conversation to ask what do we mean by these words that we use and to be a part of that conversation. And it's actually not that surprising. I mean, any organization that has ever done a kind of a visioning exercise, they come up with their vision statement and that kind of stuff.

If they're good, they know that it's not the sentence we come up with that's important. It's the process that got us there that really helps us to feel and to be in some kind of deeper understanding, a relationship of deeper understanding with one another, because we've gone through that process. I loved, there was a woman around our campfire from Australia, Josie, and she said, I'm quoting her now, don't use words that have been debased. Use words that have meaning to people. And we need to reclaim language. And that was kind of a common thread that a lot of people expressed. You know, we need to use different words, words that somebody said, Aki in the Netherlands, words that are not hijacked by false promises in the past. And Jeff in Wishart, he talked about You know, this conversation around what does it mean, it should involve everyone, not be a kind of top-down global narrative.

And so I left the conversation just wondering, like, of course it's a clever slogan. And it makes sense that that kind of would come out from a marketing exercise. It's alliterative, it's clever, so let's use it. But when you step back and just think about where society is at, what we need to move forward, I couldn't help but feel I couldn't help but ask myself the question, what opportunities have we missed to have that conversation that the world is yearning for? Just be asked, what does this mean to you?

Scott It's interesting that there's a great Thornton Wilder quote. I used to do a podcast called New Persuasive Words with a Friend. And I think we got to 200 and some episodes and just kind of stopped doing it. But the title was based on a Thornton Wilder quote that said, the revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem. New persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones. Is he in the beginning of that again, about the rhetorical problem? He says, the revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem. New persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones. That's just so right, because I think any kind of revival in intellectual... All of that stuff, I think, will be figuring out. On one level, people say things like talk is cheap, which there's a truth to that. If talk is... It's basically meaningless and it doesn't have integrity with action or communal solidarity or the vast majority of things that make human flourishing possible.

Sure, okay, you can say talk is cheap, but talk is priceless. I mean, words create reality, right? And when we get in conversation and when somebody comes across the right turn of phrase or the right metaphor, right, or the right verbal picture, new worlds can be born. Yeah.

Chris Talk is cheap. Meaning is priceless. How do we get to meaning without talk? And I guess the question is, how do we get to more meaningful talk? The talk that helps us to infuse words with new meaning, the sort of rhetoric that Cicero would appreciate, where it was an important act. And I guess that's what we're trying, I guess that's what we're all about, is trying to explore that. Yeah, but I think you're totally right. It's interesting how, you know, rhetoric has sort of in, I guess, modern just usage become a kind of, I mean, it's a bad thing, right? Just being rhetorical. It's kind of, you're sort of speaking without content. And that's exactly to your point and to that quote. Probably a big mind shift we need to make. And then people wonder how has the meaning of words become so corrupted, is one word, but becomes so plastic, so pliable, you can make it mean anything.

And well, of course, if you don't pay any attention to the value of language and the value of talk, then it's going to be very easy to do that. Not my most insightful digression, but we're definitely on something.

Scott And also, you need spaces where language is treated differently. When you go to, say, a poetry reading or something, the way people treat language is very different. There's a sense in which speaking has a different... And the term critical and criticism... I mean, criticism has this really kind of freighted... But A.O. Scott, who's the New York Times film and TV critic, he wrote a book on criticism. And basically he's like, what criticism does at its best is brings together the objective and the subjective. That we know that the experience of beauty and aesthetics is something personal and subjective, but what criticism does is help ground it in a more communal sensibility. And I think getting the right kind of people And the right kind of conversational culture to cultivate a certain reverence for conversation and words and connection and human meaning. I mean, that's priceless.

Chris What else sort of was unearthed for you, bubbled up for you from the conversation on Sunday? You know, when we did get a global group of people together who believe in the meaning of words and conversation.

Scott Yeah, for me, it was all about unknowing. Hmm. Say more about that? I mean, like you, I've spent time in graduate school and doctoral programs. And when you're in doctoral programs and things like that and in intellectual circles, the value... I remember sitting in a seminar in Princeton and a guy... This one guy from New Zealand said to this other colleague, this humble Midwestern guy, he said... Is this a joke? No, no, it's a real experience.

Chris And he said... A guy from Princeton in New Zealand walking into a bar.

Scott Right, right. So we're sitting in this beautiful seminar room in Princeton, and this New Zealand guy says, have you ever read Christopher Dawson's works on intellectual history and the philosophy of science? And this guy Kevin goes, I've never even heard of Christopher Dawson. And my advisor was leading the seminar and he stopped and said, see what Kevin just did? Watch that. He's like, everything in this culture that we live in will push you against saying, I don't know. I've never heard of. I'm unfamiliar, right? Everything pushes you to basically lie, right? Or say you know, or say you know more than you do, right? And I just think what was really, what's refreshing to me was we were just talking about what we didn't know and all these kind of uncertainties that a phrase like build back better. I felt like I was in a safe place to do something brave, to say, I don't know. I don't know about this. I don't know about that. There was a comfort in ambiguity, ambivalence, wonder. Again, it's really hard to find those spaces.

Chris I think it's hard to, as a kind of convener of them, I would say it's also really hard to create them. I mean, I'm glad you had an unambiguous experience of kind of we're all in the tent of not knowing, which for those who weren't there, a few of us were. Before COVID, we did a physical base camp outside of London. We had 100 people flying from all over the place. And playing with the exploration theme, we had some tents. And I encourage people to set them up if they want to. And somebody set up a tent there in kind of the middle of our floor and took a big poster and wrote on it, Tent of Not Knowing. And he stood up and said, so I'm going to be holding office hours in the Tent of Not Knowing. What are we going to talk about? Don't know. What are you going to get out of it? Don't know. When are my office hours? Don't know. And there was a line outside that tent for the entire gathering because I think everyone intuitively felt, yeah, I need more of less. I need more of that kind of space. And in my experience, counting on Sunday, it is difficult. And you talk about, I went.

I am an academic. I have a difficult time staying in that tent. And I think we all do, and we all bring... You talk about we live in a world where it is hard to say, I don't know. And that world doesn't just fall away when we arrive at Basecamp. We have to work at it every moment, kind of reminding ourselves that this is a space where I can... Not only can I not know, but I can explore the stuff, the perspectives that maybe make me uncomfortable. And that's part of not knowing. It's not a kind of meditative calm of living with ambiguity. It's a kind of bravery to explore what might feel like unsafe territory. And my experience is that it is incredibly powerful, because I think these spaces are hard to find. I think you're right. I think the world is trying to kind of close them down. And it's a lot easier to hang out in a group of people who are affirming of everything you say and nodding their head all the time. And you walk out of there feeling affirmed.

Scott Yeah, I mean, Jonathan Haidt, the great moral psychologist, he talks about this in his book, The Righteous Mind. He said, morality binds and it blinds. And he's like, look, basically what we do evolutionarily is we develop moral codes that bind us together in tribal society. And then some of that evolves into great cultures and things like that. But the binding comes at the cost of blinding. And you can't live without the binding. The blinding is not necessarily a nefarious thing or bad, but it's necessarily a human being can't see everything all the time. But is part of our evolutionary journey the capacity to do some more unblinding, to see more? And can we actually get into non-tribal spaces Is that part of the evolutionary journey where, like, hey, tribe was really important to get where we are, but is the next thing non-tribalism? And that just takes, I think, psychologically, a lot of capacity for dissonance.

Chris Right. So, okay, so can I, so on this, and going back to our earlier conversation with the word, so, you know, one of the challenges of when we get together is people start to self-describe what together is. Is it a community? That's a word that you've used. Is it a tribe? I'm starting to get really a lot more comfortable with the word society. And you've just helped me understand why. I think part of it is the space for dissonance. In a tribe, and I might be doing injustice to the meaning of the word, but I think in popular parlance, I feel as a tribe is a quite close-knit group who think very similarly. I think that's how it's often used. Finding your tribe is finding people who agree with me. All these people who are interested in very much the same things, who see the world the same way I do.

Scott And you think evolutionarily, the tribe, basically everybody, and generally there's a gender breakup, but basically... Everybody does the same thing, too, and has the same skills, right? There's hunters and gatherers and things like that. And everybody's a hunter or a gatherer. There's not space for— There's not a lot of free time for other things to differentiate.

Chris Right, right. Kind of like we spend all of our time surviving. Yeah. Yeah. And a very, very few of us, you know, we managed to have just enough surplus for a couple of people to be a shaman or, you know, to kind of create some, some rituals around the tribe. But otherwise I'm, I'm mainly out hunting and gathering and sleeping. So for me, this word society maybe just creates a bit more daylight from that and kind of consciously says that I don't expect consonants.

Scott And your relationship to the superstructure can be really varied, right? You could be in the middle of a metropolis, right? At coffee shops and on the subway or the tube or whatever. Or you could be like an American author like Wendell Berry living on a farm in rural Kentucky who's still in the society and contributing in ways. So I think that that's a really helpful way of framing it because it allows for a really complex and diverse set of social relationships within the whole.

Chris Right. Yeah, I found it so interesting you talk about not knowing. I found that, I mean, that tension between sort of knowing and not knowing, I think, is alive when a group of people with some dissonance get together around a big question like what does Build Back Better mean to you? And then I think when you get people talking about it, we all kind of live in a tension of, What I know and I think I should hold on to, what I know and I think I should challenge or maybe let go of. And I just think there's so much interesting work for us each to do. I don't know how to finish that sentence, but I'm thinking of that classic sort of wisdom. There's what you know, and there's what you don't know, and there's what you don't know that you don't know, right? So if you imagine that pie, and there are those three sections to it, it seems to me that that's interesting, that picture of that pie. But it seems to me that the more interesting thing now is to sort of play with where we've drawn the sections. So there's this stuff that I know, but actually that's probably the thing I need to work on the hardest. How much of what I know is actually blinding me? Yeah, from seeing other things. And how much of what I know should I rely on? Because it is, if you will, enduring knowledge or good knowledge.

And I think developing a healthy curiosity around that, to stop growing what we know, which I think is implied with the pie. There's what you know, don't know, and don't know that you don't know. And the goal is to fill the whole pie with what you know. That would be like omniscience. And what I'm saying is, well, hold on. I'm not so sure that that's what we should be trying to do. I think we should be taking the part that we know and start interrogating it and say, do we?

Scott Do I? Well, and if you were omniscient, you could never have another relationship in your life.

Chris Oh, that's interesting.

Scott I always think, I would do this exercise with undergrads where I would say, when I tell undergrads, I would ask them, all right, what's your name? What's your major? And what superpower would you have? And whenever anyone said telepathy or mind reading, I'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's think about what that means. Because if you had omniscience, You couldn't relate to other creatures anymore. And part of the joy of being a creature is discovery and exploration. And if you were omniscient, there'd be no more discovery ever.

Chris Are you saying because there's just nothing in the relationship for you?

Scott Yeah, well, part of the beauty of relationship and being in the world is discovery and disclosure and learning things. And the omniscience kind of... It's interesting too, the other thing I was thinking about knowledge was... Aaron Ayers was the second century Christian thinker in Lyons, which I guess is in France.

Chris There you go, name dropping again.

Scott Yeah, well, he was a genius, second century. I mean, he was an early, like... You and Aaron Ayers, hey? Yeah, Aaron Ayers. I don't know if I would have liked him or not, but I mean, he was... And he didn't write that much. We don't have much that he's written, but... Well, why'd you bring him up? Because he has this great phrase. Exactly, exactly. He has this great phrase where he says, God is light. Thank you. How all knowledge works. Everything is through analogy. There's always similarity and dissimilarity. And it's often the mystery that outweighs that. And so I think what you're saying about the knowing and the unknowing, that the more you know, the more you know you don't know. And so the more pictures you draw... Right. But isn't that always the thing, right? Like when you're a sophomore in college and you sit there and you hear your first lecture on Plato, right? And you really feel like you're smart. You go home to Thanksgiving and you say, oh, you guys are in Plato's cave and you guys are all just idiots. And then you do graduate work and you realize, I don't know anything.

Right. So the more you know. Right? Or there's this great phrase that says, a saint is someone that confesses more about less. So the idea is, ideally they're sinning less, but they spend more time in the confessional because they realize the impact of even their little venial sins, right? Like this kind of thing where... And I think there's something about once you get a little knowledge... You think, oh my goodness, man, I really know something about play. I'm gonna go teach my family in Regina or South Jersey about what I've learned at university, right? And then you get a different part in life and you're like, oh my goodness, do I know anything? And you're always, and I think that's part of the beauty of... Some of these cultures you're convening, it's a place where that sensibility is not shunned, which I don't experience very often in most of North American culture.

Chris I love that stark phrase that you began with, what you do with your students around. If you knew everything, then basically relationship would be over for you. And it makes so much sense in the experience of when you get together with a diverse group of people. And sometimes it's a great conversation and sometimes it's not. And I think there is a really strong correlation with how much you're willing to disclose that you don't know. And if you can come with that sense of, I am going to find something to disclose that I don't know, Then that creates the opening for the connection, for the relationship to begin to form. But if it's just transactional around kind of everybody putting on what, you know, well, this is what I know, it's somehow there's, and somehow it's informative, okay, that's interesting, but I don't feel closer to you.

Scott Yeah. I wonder how often we sacrifice relation for information, on the altar of information. It's interesting because when you have information, you don't necessarily get relation. But if you have relation, you get information. If you have real relationships, you get knowledge and data and you know more about the world. But it doesn't work the other way around necessarily. You could sit in a library on the internet and get a lot of data outside of the context of relationship. I think it's an interesting thing that doesn't go two ways.

Chris You say library, and library for me is an interesting case study at the moment in In asking, is it better for the world to come at a place of knowing or not knowing? We've been doing Basecamps for libraries and more and more library systems. It seems like kind of a marriage made in heaven because libraries are these revered public spaces, sort of gateways to new knowledge and learning. And Basecamp is trying to be a space for people to gather and learn from one another. And most libraries, let's say, I know for sure in North America and Western Europe, I don't know about the whole world, are really struggling right now with this, what feels like an existential problem around who are we for. As a public forum, we think we're committed to both free speech and inquiry and inclusivity. And a lot of the social contests underway right now put those two things in opposition. So concrete examples that libraries now are coming up with policies around one way or the other is our Are, you know, groups that say, you know, deny the existence of transgender individuals, are they welcome or invited to speak at the library? And, you know, like great example of free speech, inclusivity.

And libraries feel like, and we need to answer this question. We need to know the answer. And I'm starting to wonder if maybe that's the mistake, is to say we have to know the answer. Maybe it's more valuable, more helpful for society, which is struggling with these questions itself everywhere, to say we see the question. This is an important question. And we are a space that is going to provide a space for society to explore this question. We don't know the answer.

Scott And that hits me so personally, your example. And people that have listened to this podcast would have a sense, but if you're new... I'm a Christian, religiously. I check a box. If there was a demographic form, I would check a religious box. And you probably wouldn't check an explicit box. That's true. And so I'm somebody that, you know, supports transgender rights and has lots of gay and trans friends and stuff. But some of my best friends in the faith are Roman Catholics. And whatever their own views on these issues, they're in an institution that a lot of people would view as regressive on this stuff, even though the current pope has been lauded in many circles as Somebody that's opening doors to LGBT people and doing a lot of good in the world for human rights. And so it's just so messy and complex. And even that example, which I think you didn't mean to trigger something personally in me, but as a Christian, I feel like, ah, it's so messy. Because how do I... Because I'm on the side of...

Liberative kind of inclusion of LGBT folks, and yet I don't wanna, but yet I can't say that the people in the Roman Catholic Church are not part of my family. And I don't know how to negotiate all that.

Chris Right, and then, so hanging in that space, I like we can go to sort of unsafe spaces together. Do you yearn for the answer Or do you yearn for the conversation?

Scott The conversation. Because there's not an answer. There's not an answer.

Chris So why do we have libraries? We need to give society the answer to this question. Going back about 20 minutes, we live in this whole edifice of knowing. And you've got to know. And if you're a manager of something, you've got to know the answers. You've got to make these decisions. And it's causing us to miss some of the biggest and most obvious opportunities for growth. And especially if you think of public institutions, on one side, libraries are wondering, what is our role in the world where everything is digital? It's to be the public space where these kind of explorations around meaning And the development of shared meaning can happen. But we're not going to see that opportunity if we're stuck in a space of we've got to know. We've got to know the answers. And to me, maybe it's only in my head, but I see the relationship between the conversation we had on Sunday around what does building back better mean? And it's not the answer. That people yearned for, that people find meaningful. It's the conversation. It's the opportunity to unpack the different values at stake.

The struggle to resolve the tensions between what I, what my community, what the world needs now, what I know it might need in the future, what I need versus what you. These are the things that we know. We need work. Why can't we find spaces to work on them?

Scott Do you remember the Covey 7? What is it? Oh, the seven habits of highly effective people.

Chris Highly effective people, right? I am not one of those people. I'm pretty sure.

Scott No, but here's the thing. So he has these quadrants, right? There's the unimportant and the unurgent. Like, that's like, you know, playing video games. Oh, yeah, okay, yeah.

Chris The two-by-two matrix. That I understand. I was a consultant.

Scott Right, so he's got the urgent but unimportant, right? Somebody's, like, screaming, you've got to return my voicemail. You've got to... Right. There's the... But the prize quadrant is the... The important but not urgent, right? Like important and urgent is, oh my gosh, I just got shot in my kneecap and I gotta go to the hospital, right? But the important but not urgent is, oh my gosh, we've gotta figure out ways To have more meaningful conversation around dissonance and ways to inhabit unknowing so that we can have better approaches to a complex world that really needs healing and wholeness. So that's really important, right? But it's not gonna clamor for urgency. It's not gonna like jam out your inbox or jam out your voicemail. And so that's, I mean, part of what I think You've done remarkably well with Basecamp and some of these new initiatives we're both involved in.

I feel like you're clamoring for the important, not urgent. And saying, let's give a little more urgency, in the best sense, to these things that are normally important but not urgent. Oh, let's get around to that. Yeah, that's great. How many times have you been in organizational meetings where somebody raises the question that the organization or community or society should be dealing with? And somebody says, yeah, yeah, yeah, we definitely got to get to that. And then the next thing just clamors for the attention and it just gets buried.

Chris Yeah, I like that. I think another way I'd put it is, does it have to take a pandemic for us to get real about what actually matters? Which is the experiment, right?

Scott Which it did for Basecamp, I think.

Chris Well, that's a beautiful irony, is that until the pandemic, we thought, oh, we're trying to figure out so hard, how do we... How to do this stuff that feels important. And, you know, tortured planning and planning and planning for the next time we're going to do it and get together. And then we realize that, well, you can't do that. Well, let's just do what we need. Let's create the space and figure it out from there. Laura, and I forget where Laura was joining in from, but in the logbook, she described it as a culture of investigation. Which I think is beautiful and kind of this urgent versus important. I think on the important and the extremely not urgent but most deeply impactful is when we think at the level of culture. What does the culture have to be in order for us to be Spending more time, spending less time being the language police and more time doing the hard yards of creating shared meaning in words. Spending less time growing that piece of the pie which is what I know. I'm spending less time doing that and more time discovering, revealing, disclosing what I don't know because it's a way more powerful project for me to connect up with Scott and other people and kind of create these interlocking circles of Like an ecosystem of knowledge than it is for me to have it all. We're going to have to go deeper into this whole idea of like the omniscient person is totally alone. It kills the ecosystem. And then to think about it, so it's like go the other way.

Can we create knowledge ecosystems? And then I don't need to have it all as long as we're connecting and helping each other to see. And in fact, it's gonna be a healthier ecosystem if we think of it as connecting up rather than trying to kind of acquire it all for ourselves.

Scott Yeah, and the joy of real relation and relationship. I mean, two Basecamps ago, It was funny. I think I was with all Canadians. And they were like... And it was said flatteringly. I mean, it was a very nice thing. They were like, you don't sound like a normal American. You're very self-critical. But it was nice because I've become friends... Unfair stereotype of Americans. Exactly. But it is. I mean, but there's enough of it rings true. And I become friends with some people in that group, and particularly a guy who's like a Canadian retiree. Who I talk with probably a couple times a month now. Where he gives me a space where I can say, hey, here's what I'm seeing in America right now. Can you help me unpack it and process it? And he's really grateful to talk about it. And he's really smart. I've met several, it's funny, my new demographic of favorite people is Canadian retirees, because I've met a couple, Canadian retirees that I found really just incredible. One is a classics scholar from Regina.

One is a guy who's retired from Goodyear and has a commercial real estate background. This other guy has a sterling business background. And they're all readers and thinkers. And so you wind up in what context does an American podcast producer Find Canadian retirees to process life with and ask questions.

Chris That is a niche.

Scott I think you've got a whole new spinoff podcast there. I like it. Talking with Canadian retirees. To process life with. To process, not process, process. Process life with. Process.

Chris I mean, there's definitely, you know, it's more than Canadians and Americans. I mean, I remember, so Farid, who was joining from London, you know, for him, the whole narrative of building back better, he went right to the disintegration of society, which was his personal experience. Living in London. That's not a knowledge problem. That's a connection problem.

Scott Because you're saying, because if you're in London, ostensibly you have, London, New York City, these are the places where you have more access to knowledge than most people have ever had in world history.

Chris It's interesting, you know, big cities, and it's one of the fun things, because we can kind of just, your mind can just careen between these dimensions when we're all kind of in the same conversation together. You know, Jeff, who's on the call from a hamlet of 50 people, and Farid, who's on the call from London, talking about the social experience of disconnection, atomization, and It is I think much easier to kind of have a village neighborhood feel when that's all there is. And in large cities, so many of the spaces where a sense of kind of connection with the village forms. Thank you very much. But for the most part, even before living in lockdown, you can exist and you spend a lot more time interacting with people in other parts of the world than you do in your own neighborhood in a city like London. For a lot of people, they're here because they're in a hub industry or whatever, things like that.

For me, the most stunning example of... I feel like we've connected the dots between knowing and not knowing and connection and disintegration and how not knowing and the disclosure of not knowing is the key to creating connection. The most brilliant example for me on Sunday's call of just the power of connection and the kind of relationship capital within connection was in what was for me the morning conversation. So we're doing these twice now on the same day, one in the morning for sort of people in Europe and Asia and Australasia, and then one in what is my London evening for people sort of in the Americas and Europe and Africa. It was this woman from, she's Chinese from Beijing, but actually in a small fishing village. She must have had terrific 4G coverage because her signal was strong. But she talked about the Chinese youth experience of dating men and women and meeting them on an app. Which is very common. And she said, you know, so I live in a life where all of the spaces where you sort of randomly meet people are pretty much hollowed out. You meet people from work, you go home, you connect with people on an app. That's how you find people.

The apps that they use in China, the one that she was using, it shows you sort of like if you have mutual connections with this person before you swipe and when you connect with them. And she says that it is a world of difference, the civility with which you are treated If you have at least one common connection, no matter how distant it might be, than if you have none, that one shared connection is enough to establish a kind of civility. And I wonder if, and I was thinking when I heard it, like, wow, what if Twitter did that? What would that change to the tenor of conversation if you understood the people that were the intermediaries between you and that person? Because it does seem that that's... Anyway, I don't know quite where to go with the implications of that. Just my mind was blown by the clarity of the example. She's like, we're talking about all these big things, and I'm telling you... In my app experience, it makes a difference.

Scott You know, serial drama stuff is all post-apocalyptic, like The Walking Dead or Battlestar Galactica. I can't wait to see where this is going to go. Because here's the thing. Post-apocalyptic, right? It's great because it says, what if we lost everything we knew? Who would we be? And every, whether it's Battlestar Galactic or The Walking Dead, Lost, every great kind of thing that's got a post-apocalyptic element to it. Everything boils down to connection and relationships. It's always people find themselves again. And then there's different answers to how you build back. For those who are Battlestar fans, I'm not going to spoil it, but it's interesting the decision they make at the end. In light of their experience with technology. But then, you know, The Walking Dead is very different in their approach to technology and things like this. But it all comes through building of trust, connection and vulnerability. Kind of necessarily through trauma and dislocation and things like that. But that's where I think it's interesting. I mean, I wonder how much... Build Back Better would be better informed or more robustly informed. Let's use a word like robustly informed. If people that traded around in these phrases spent more time in sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fiction to think about, these are great projections and imaginative laboratories of what these things can look like and mean.

Yeah, I mean, I just think that... But what you can do, like, so you could Basecamp with the Walking Dead scenario, right? Like, we could have no technology, no power, no electricity, right? And we could still Basecamp. There are other things we couldn't do. Right, but faced with a kind of, we're in the zombie apocalypse. Which is so much, by the way, on a different note, is so much more comforting to me than vampires. Because vampires are smart. Like, I mean, we're going to lose to the vampires, I think.

Chris Whereas as long as you can get on top of a tricycle box or some, like, raised platform.

Scott Exactly. The zombies are kind of, you know, their frontal lobe is shot. They're just looking to eat. They're usually not that fast. But in the zombie apocalypse, we could base camp.

Chris Vampires are so misunderstood. Did you not watch the Twilight series or read the books?

Scott It was tough for me. It was tough for me. And when I did the Twilight stuff I saw, I was more with the werewolves.

Chris Okay, I see. I'm just saying, maybe some vampires are misunderstood.

Scott Yeah, I mean, I think vampires are misunderstood.

Chris You've got to challenge what you think you know about vampires.

Scott There's a lot of literature written that vampire stuff is Marxist. And it's saying that they're the sort of capital class sucking.

Chris You've got a lot of time on your hands.

Scott I know. This is why I'm single and you're my only friend. Because really, I don't say that on a date. You don't say, hey, do you ever think about capital and vampires?

Chris But you think about it. So in a post-apocalyptic scenario, when everything's wiped out, and if somebody said, right, we've got to build back better, I think it would be obvious... Thank you very much. I'm not critiquing, I'm just noticing that, you know, are treating language like the starting point of a process to, you know, gain public buy-in and shape the outcomes, when in fact, you know, language should probably be the end result. And it's that kind of language that everyone yearns for. Every single organization and institution that put that phrase on the cover of their report Should have instead say, we should start a conversation around what does this mean for us? What does Build Back Better mean for us, given that we do X? And invite everybody who has a stake in what we do to be a part of that conversation because we're going to learn so much because everybody yearns for the conversation now. Instead, we've got to have the answer. We've got to know what this means and where we need to go and how to get there. So let's put it out there.

And yeah, I mean, that is how the world works. But going way back to the beginning, it feels to me like if that's how we're sort of pursuing visions of the future, then we're going to bring the tips of our icebergs to that process, and we're going to leave the bulk of it behind. So I'm going to get to that future maybe, but I'm not going to be there as my whole person.

Scott And just on a really personal, again, and I think the personal is usually the most prophetic and revelatory. You and I have been doing this podcast for a couple of years now, right? And we kind of stopped and started a few times. Our friendship began around a conversation on your book, which I think is fantastic. And you and I have never come up with a position paper on anything. We've explored some deep questions on this podcast. I don't think we've ever come up with an answer to anything. You couldn't go to the Atlas project or project, as we would say in other parts of the world, and get a position paper on anything we've ever talked about. But we've spent a lot of time together. Talking and thinking through things. And you know what? I think if you and I were pigeonholed and had to solve a problem together, like if we had to do some kind of consulting thing, that really there was some urgency to it, right?

You and I could probably help people figure some things out if we needed to in a pinch. But that would all be because of the time we spent On the non-urgent but important description of reality. You can't overestimate the value of that kind of time. Well, I'm glad you found a way to rationalize this time we spent. Yeah, and hey, wait till you get the t-shirts, kids. I mean, when you get the t-shirts, it's gonna be huge.

Chris Yeah, where my mind went on that is that I feel like people who give answers get followers, and people who ask questions are part of something, something greater. And the latter is just way more interesting to me because to this thing you've described that the more you know, the weaker your connections to other people are going to be in an odd way.

Scott I think I'd want to say the more you think you know because I think the isolated, there's a kind of, All truth is relative. And by that, I mean, I'm not saying whether there's objective truth or not. I'm just saying there's not a truth that's not relative to other truths. If you put a truth out there, Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, so what? Unless it's connected to other truths, there's no meaning there. We could find isolated truths. That doesn't get us to a fuller picture of the world, right? So I think that if you're the kind of isolated person that amasses a bunch of data, you might get some small t truths or facts or something, but you'll never have a picture of the world because you can only have a picture of the world. And the idea of world is a communal reality, right? You're in a world with others and in connection. And the more people you get together in conversation, again, the more you know you don't know.

Chris That speaks to me. So I look forward to next week and the next question.

Scott Yeah. And I think if we were doing infomercials, we would get fired because we would do 15 minutes. And we would have like steak knives and stuff. But this is a long kind of, at least endorsement for, I think, a process that's really worth connecting with. And we'll put, again, if you want to connect to Basecamp and the new emerging, new geographical society, we'll put connections in the show notes. But really, thank you for listening. And we want to invite you on the journey because we need you.

Chris I look forward to it. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, everyone.

Scott Thank you, my friend.