The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Living Your Questions: A Pathway Through the Unanswerable with Krista Tippett

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

(Conversation recorded on May 16th, 2024)   Show Summary:  At the intersection between science and spirituality lies some of the most profound questions we can ask ourselves about the future - the answers to which could mean the difference between humanity's mere survival or a flourishing.  Today's episode with Peabody-award winning broadcaster Krista Tippett is an exploration into what it means to be human in our modern world and engage as individuals in the inner work required to create outward transformation. What does it mean to ask questions that include the layer of a "Deep How", and how can we learn to hold, love, and live into the questions themselves when their answers may not exist yet? How could 'moral imagination', intentional conversation, and slowing down the pace of change lead to a longer lasting, sustainable evolution in human society? What would it take for us to finally grow up as a species and step up to face some of the most existential challenges in the history of our existence?    About Krista Tippett: Krista Tippett is a Peabody-award winning broadcaster, National Humanities Medalist, and New York Times bestselling author. She created and hosts On Being, which has won the highest honors in broadcast, Internet and podcasting. Her newsletter, The Pause, and On Being Project are  evolving to meet the callings of the post-2020 world — and to accompany the generative people and possibilities within this tender, tumultuous time to be alive.  Her most recent book is Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on Youtube  

We are called by the magnitude, the existential magnitude of the challenges before us, to really expand our imaginations and the analysis we apply when we ask a question like, what is the impact here? What matters? What you and I are talking about here doesn't lend itself to measuring in terms of something so reductive as a number or monetary value. whether we just develop the capacity and the vocabulary and the stamina and the ways of speaking together to ask those questions and then live by the answers that they yield. It's the difference between merely surviving or the possibility of a flourishing. You're listening to the great simplification.

I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Joining me today is Krista Tippett, the host of On Being podcast. Krista is also a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster. a national humanity medalist and a New York Times best-selling author. Emerging from all that in 2003, she piloted her idea for OnBeing with the National Public Radio to fill the gap she saw for intelligent public conversation about the religious,

spiritual, and moral aspects of modern human life. Later in 2013, she and her team turned On Being into an independent nonprofit production. Christ is currently at work on a new book about moral imagination and the human challenges and promises of the 21st century. I've talked about how true change for the great simplification must come from an inner shift in values. That is exactly Christus point two. In some ways, we've converged on the great simplification from vastly different perspectives,

but ultimately, we must each do our own individual. inner work to find a pathway forward for humanity by generally updating how we measure success instead of valuing things through numbers and dollars and growth. Chris and I both think we can only do this when we work on ourselves and live into the questions, many of which are unanswerable. Krista speaks about a necessary maturing of our species in order to meet what the great simplification will require of us. I hope you enjoy and are inspired by this conversation with Krista Tippett. Krista Tippett, great to see you. Welcome. Thank you, Nate. So you have hosted a hugely successful show on NPR, On Being, covering the intersection of spirituality and science.

It's taken me a while to realize this, but the core theme. of your show, for example, what does it mean to be human? How do we want to live? And who will we be to each other are really at the end of the day also at the root of our coming energy and economic transition. We don't so much face an energy transition as a transition in our relationships, values, and what it means to be part of humanity during this time. So let's start with this. what was your thought process leading up to the focus on these topics and these questions as the conversation of our time? I don't know how much of this history you know, but I originally pitched a program for public radio, as I like to say, at the turn of the century, about 24 years ago. about, you know, it ended up being called Speaking of Faith,

but what I was really interested in is this part of life, which we use many words to describe, a place where religion, spiritual life, interior life, moral imagination, all these things reside in us. And the conversations we have about religion in the public sphere are very diminished, right? So I wanted to open that up.

And what I stopped, What I started to realize over five or six or seven years, which is when we changed the title of the Shotuan being, is that in this culture, when you say you're going to talk about these things, people assume that you're talking about answers and beliefs. And also we're just in general so skilled at arguments and opinions. And I realized that what I was interested in tracing, even when I was talking with somebody who was profoundly religious, what I'm interested in the animating. questions that gave rise to these traditions. And they, you know, they do start with, they are actually the ancient enduring human questions. What does it mean to be human? How do we want to live? And I think for me, an evolution has been in more recent years, and maybe this parallels your realizations, that in this century, the question of what it means to be human is really in from the question of who we will be to each other. And I believe that that question of who we will be to each other, and this is me saying what you just said in my language, whether we rise to that challenge in how we stand before all of our crises and all of our reckonings will really, for me, be the difference between whether we survive or whether we have a possibility of flourishing. Yeah, when I saw you speak last month in person, it struck me that we are saying a lot of the same things, just using different language. And that was quite an aha moment for me. So when I saw you speak, you mentioned the poet Rilke as someone who inspired you to focus on the questions as opposed to the solutions. Can you unpack that a little bit?

I spent a lot of time in Germany in my 20s in a different world, you know, in the Cold War years. And so I've been in conversation with Rilke for a long time inside myself. And what also has become more meaningful to me as we lived into this age we inhabit now is that he also was writing from the last young century, which had so much tumult. ahead, which was already fermenting. And what he identified, in these letters that he wrote to, they're called letters to a young poet, but actually the young man he was writing to was a military officer who wanted to be a poet, and who remained a military officer. So a human being.

In those letters, he coined this. He exhorted this young man to learn to love the questions. And so he said, don't try to rush to answers that you couldn't yet live. learn to hold and love the questions themselves. And then perhaps you will live your way into the answers. And what has come to me in our time, but I feel like the wisdom there, that is so important in a culture like ours,

which is so desperate to rush to fixes and closure and answers. And we waste so much. much time when we rush to fix us in answers that do not meet the complexity of what is before us. And I think what Rilke was saying, what I understand now is when to rush to an answer would be to deny the gravity of the question before us, then what we're called to do is hold and love and inhabit that question itself and have it be our teacher and our guide. And I just feel like, you know, any of the areas that you mentioned, you know, all of the realms of our life of being human and our life together, whether they are political or social or economic or spiritual, we're pretty much living vast, aching, open questions right now. We have very, very few answers.

Had you told me that or had I heard you say what you just said a couple, three years ago? I kind of would have, it would have been over my head. But since I was in India and since I've been reflecting about the predicament we're in, it totally makes sense to me. It doesn't make sense that bioa Kumalafe says the world is urgent, we must slow down until you actually feel what you just said. And I do think the questions are, are hugely important. So let me ask you this.

Obviously, you've done hundreds, thousands. of interviews. Were you ever trained in that, or did you just self-trained? And where I'm going with this is we have these unanswerable questions for society. What does it mean to be human during these times? But you also ask your guest questions and you craft the language. And did you change that over time? Or how do you craft your questions in your interviews?

I wasn't trained in it. I it is something I learned and um you know I would say sometimes I don't know are you a science fiction person I am I love science fiction so sometimes I say that I think about my interview preparation model as the Vulcan mind milk model of interview preparation so what I mean by that is um what I mean by that is um what I try to do when I prepare is actually see how much I can dig in to understand not just what somebody knows, but how they think. So that when I get into conversation with them, we're thinking alongside each other. And maybe they even put words around something that they've

never quite put words around in that way before. And then that's a moment of discovery and revelation, and then everybody listening gets to participate in that. What I came to understand over time about how that changes my questions is that I, you know, if I'm thinking about an interview I'm going to do, I obviously have questions I think I might ask, things I am curious about. But what I find is if I dig in to understand how somebody thinks, what I end up with are questions that are going to be interesting to them and not necessarily what feels obvious to me. But if I, if I ask you something that's really interesting to you, then you're really in conversation. and not responding and it's interactive and it's intimate and it's revelatory for everybody.

So, yeah, but, you know, what I just described to you was just absolutely evolved over 20 years. I, as you know, have a list of questions that I want to ask you because I think they're relevant, but I'm not sure just thinking about it what question would be interesting to you. I don't know how to do that sort of prep, but I've got a bunch here. So yeah, yeah. No, it's a whole different way of thinking your way into it. And at this point for me, it's muscle memory, but it, you know, I can't even tell you exactly how I set off down that path. So on this theme, what, what do you think are some of the sorts of questions that are foundational to our industrial, ongoing ecological damage post-capitalist or not post-capitalist, late stage capitalist society? And how can, could we alter the questions themselves to perhaps create awareness and a change of consciousness and alter people's values who listen to the questions?

Yeah. I mean, obviously that's a huge thing to ponder. I find myself these days a lot looking for what is life-giving. In contrast to what is death dealing, what is humanizing, in contrast to what is dehumanizing, I think even though those might sound, they might sound abstract, but, you know, the question of whether this is life-giving or death-dealing, if you apply it to a specific situation, pretty quickly gets quite specific and tangible. I think we have to totally re I mean we have ways we have very we're in deep grooves of well-worn ways of how we how we ask and apply the question of what matters right of how we measure what matters and we tend to do that in

you know, you could say the most simplistic ways, right? Like, we like to measure impact or value in terms of numbers and, right? Numbers and dollars. And I think that we are called by the magnitude, the existential magnitude of all the challenges before us. The fact that getting a lot of these wrong is the difference between life and death. We're called to really expand our imaginations and the analysis we apply when we ask a question like, you know, what is the impact here? What matters? How do we measure it?

What are we measuring? Right. And a lot of what we, what you and I are talking about here doesn't lend itself to measuring in terms of something so reductive as a number or monetary value. But I think those, you know, again, whether we just develop the capacity and the vocabulary and the stamina and the ways of speaking together, at least enough of us speaking together in these ways to ask those questions, and then live by the answers that they yield. You know, again, I'm going to say it's the difference between merely surviving or the possibility of flourishing.

So when I saw you speak at Bioners, you mentioned the importance of generative inquiries. And you were kind of, when we've spoken in the past, you're not dismissive, but you're cautious about people using two. negative or too doomy certain language. So let me ask you this, if we consider a spectrum and nihilism and certainty and everything's going to be a mad max on one end. And then in the middle, we've got some generative,

interesting, alive questions that you mentioned. But on the far end of the spectrum, we could go too far and get to a point of toxic positivity where we brook no reality discussions about how tumultuous and chaotic our world is. What do you think about that? Where's the sweet spot? Yeah, well, I talk, yeah, generative to me and generativity is useful, useful vocabulary. And I bring it forth a lot really intentionally.

And I do so because we are just incredibly fluent. the language of what is destructive, catastrophic, dangerous. And what I'm about is not idealism. I don't do wishful thinking. I don't think I do idealism. I don't actually like the word optimism. I do believe that hope is a muscle that we must flex. But to me, it's a very, it's a fierce hope.

And hope looks reality. in the face and works with what is. And to the extent that it says that we can do better than this and understand it has to, you have to throw your life behind that, your mind and your life. It's not an idea. So for me, invoking what is generative is really just inviting us to take as seriously, as we take what is destructive and failing,

to actually attend to the fuller picture. And you and I know, and, you know, you are a very astute analyst of ways, you know, ways in what, of our crises, right? And you also know, because you also have visibility to this, precisely because you are so thoughtful and a leader in articulating all that, you also know, as I do, that there is also this abundance of creativity and social courage. Now, because of the way our world is structured, it's all too siloed, right? It's not all in conversation. This picture of what is failing doesn't sync up with all the innovation and all the will and all the social creativity that is rising up to meet it. So that is a crisis, you know, in and of itself. But all of it is true.

And what is, I don't want to even say what is going right, but I want to say like the, you know, like this phrase of Lincoln, right, the better angels of of our nature. It's interesting how a phrase like that, we all know what that is talking about, right? Like that, again, that could sound like poetry, you know, we all know what that's invoking. There's a reality to that. There's a fundamental reality to that. And there's a fundamental reality to the generative story of our time. And I just want us to work. with the full set of reality and data. And it's harder than it sounds like it should be for us to see and act that way,

especially when we are living in a world of danger. We are. That's true. So on that thread, you emphasize the importance of living the questions. So what does this mean to you? And have you practiced living the questions in your own life? Yeah. Yes, and I wanted to, I'm glad you brought, I'm glad you circled back to that because, you know, holding the questions is not about, is not about saying, okay, well, I'm, there aren't any answers. I'm going to, I'm going to sit back and enjoy life or put my head in the sand. It's not about being passive. It's not about being in active. It's not about giving up. It's not about being in denial. It is also an active way of being. it is about letting the questions be companions and guides and teachers on the way to discerning deeply, meaningfully, substantively, what is my best effort here. I think everybody I know in every field of endeavor or every organization and institution is in a kind of existential crisis.

Right? Like we're just not, the forms that we inherited just don't quite make sense. We know that all of this tumult in our world that somehow we're also not structured to meet it. And so in some ways, I feel like without calling it that, a lot of us even collectively, communally, are living the questions of, of what we don't know how to do, like of where we kind of know or a sense that the way it's functioning now isn't the way, isn't, isn't life-giving and isn't sustainable, and yet we can't quite see how we get to where we want to be. And so you have all this kind of experimentation and innovation all over the place. But none of it has, adds up to an answer, it's searching. I really, a word that I love from spiritual tradition is discernment. I think that is also active, right? But it's like being in discernment about something

is a different state from what I think really Americans get trained to do, which is to get mobilized and come up with an action plan and skip over the why and the how, the deep how, you know, and also the question of who are we going to be and who are we going to be to each other as we enact this change? So one of the core goals of this channel is I'm not trying to be prescriptive because I really don't know what to do. I have some general directions, but I'm trying to change the initial conditions of the future. Do you have evidence or an inkling or some anecdotes or feedback that you in your efforts have changed the initial conditions and that people are thinking the deep how and who we're going to be to each other? And have you

change the initial conditions of kind of the foundational population that listens to your show? When I talk about that discernment step, something even more elemental than that is the inner work that I think is essential if our outer activism will be sustainable and actually amount to transformation as opposed to mere change. I think that this is an important thing for us to be thinking about in this generation, and I mean in this generation of our species. because across time, and the 60s activism is a great example of this, you know, there's a well-worn path of great idealism that rises up, of activism, of big ideas about changing the world, followed by total exhaustion and depletion and, in fact, moral decline and cynicism. And the cynicism and apathy that can be. kind of follow the 60s generation

is really haunting us, right? Like those, that created the conditions that are, that are so, so deteriorating now that don't allow us to rise to this moment. I mean, I, and I've talked to a lot of, you know, some of the people who were civil rights elders and around the civil rights elders, you know, of those generations.

And one of my, one of my really important teachers, And let me just say one more thing about that. You know, somebody who's another good friend to me is Isabel Wilkerson, who I think has done such important work, you know, with her cast work, on, you know, even saying, is racism a big enough word for what we're talking about? And really looking deeply at the human experience across space and time. And what is it, what is it in us that takes different forms in valuing different lives differently and devaluing. some lives. And one of the things that Isabel and I have talked about is how, you know, in that the generation of the 1960s, on race and other things, had this really deep faith that if you change the laws, you change the society. And the truth is that laws can be undone. And it is only

really when we change ourselves, that there is ongoing transformation, yeah, again, as opposed to as opposed to mere change. And the challenges and reckonings before us are existential, and they demand nothing less than transformation. And that needs transformed human beings. Can we change? our laws to be commensurate with what's going to be required in coming decades without changing ourselves first, at least a little bit? I think we have to be doing both at the same time. And I think that that just that needs, I think, so, you know, back to your question for me, I think what, what my work does is it helps people be working on themselves as they are doing.

And, and what, you know, whatever else they're doing, whatever else their contribution is. also in this century where everything, you know, everything you and I are talking about, everything everybody listening is working on, we have no illusions that we probably in our lifetimes will see whatever resolution is going to look like, right? How this is going to end. There was an illusion in the late 20th century that you could be working or changing the world and you would see a change in front of you and you would take credit for it and get awards for that. even 21-year-olds right now, you know, that I talk to, they understand that whatever they do is the work of the rest of their lifetimes and that they do it, you know, a lot of, there's a,

there is a beautiful, you know, what did Jonas Salk say? Are we being good ancestors? I think there are more and more people, modern people, thinking like that, understanding that whatever the best we do and offer up, the best service we give, you know, whatever our intelligence, or gifts it is to bring, we're offering them up to people we may never know, to a world we may never see. I wonder when Jonas Salk said that if he meant only ancestors to humans, because our actions now make us de facto ancestors to lots of other creatures on this planet. And that's a, that's a consciousness shift. Yeah. Yeah.

So on that theme, as I mentioned, you've, been active in journalism and podcasting for many decades, most recently covering the issue of religion and spirituality. What have you learned covering what ostensibly is kind of a contentious topic? The way it's gotten covered and the way religion has been, has entered the public and political sphere has been contentious. Religion and religious traditions and practices as a part of human societies have been elemental and they've had, you know, it's been bad and ugly, the whole spectrum because it's all things human beings. That's a good, good clarifacified point. Yeah. So what I wanted to do was actually shine a light on how

this part of life actually works and the richness and breadth of it and diversity and depth and, you know, the intellectual and aesthetic aspects of it, which, and really actually I feel like when religion enters politics. And when it, when it enters public life, even really the spiritual dimensions of it are misrepresented or fall away entirely. So, but if you think about this, as I do, as the part of the human enterprise, where across time and generations, human beings have really followed these questions that you and I started out with. Because religions have never just been about talking about God or the divine or what is transcendent. This has been the place also where we pursue, like, what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to lead a worthy

life? And who will we be to each other? And put ritual around that and text and teaching and song, you know, and arts and contemplative practice. And these have also been the places for primary places for moral deliberation. Something, if you ask me, you know, I'm answering this question really differently now than I would have imagined 20 years ago. but what I've watched happen in the U.S., but I, you know, and this is an uneven picture, this is not true everywhere, but in the U.S. And to a different, in a different way in Europe, in Northern Europe, you've had the fact that these, that religious identity used to be inherited just fall away in a very short period of time. I think that religious tradition is going to have to be remade just like all of our disciplines, just like politics and economics and prisons and schools and everything we do is going to have to be remade. I am something that concerns me, and is a big question for me right now in our world, is if these have been the repositories where people just got some kind of moral formation and some kind of moral vocabulary, even if they rejected it, they had something to work with, right?

And in a very short period of time, you have people who are really being raised in kind of a vacuum that's very unusual in the history of our species. at a moment when there are so many, where all of these crises that we face have huge moral deliberation attached to them, right, in terms of how we come out of it, who will be what we want. And so we're poor, we're a bit impoverished in our ability to be articulate and speak together in that way.

That feels like its own kind of crisis to me. My temple is the forest where I have contemplation and bird song and nature's art. But I agree with you that some grounding like that, whether it's a church or a synagogue or a temple or a forest, grounds us in a way that our frenetic supernormal, stimulus, schmorgasbord culture doesn't allow us that space. So the further we get from that ancient tether, and I don't believe in the stories so much in religion, but I do believe in the benefits that groups congregating,

singing, sharing meals, and uniting, has on our psyche. You know, whatever you think of sacred text, call it stories or poetry, and it is all those things. It's wise about the fact that stories and poetry are a way that we have made meaning and transmitted meaning,

and somehow I don't feel like this can just abandon us, this capacity for moral imagination. Because that's what I'm interested in. That's what we need. We need moral imagination. And religion has not always Right? That's not always what gets transmitted. But it carries some of the seeds that are not carried in other places in our common life.

So I'm very curious to see how this will arise, where it will arise. Because I believe that it will. Do you have suggestions on how we might better foster moral imagination? Obviously, one big suggestion would be listen to the On Being podcast. That's right. Listen to our podcast. I mean, you know, just what you just said about contemplative practice, about silence. Like, again, you know, I think the 20th century would have just said silence is over. It's not productive. You know, what is time is money, right? You know, who's that? Ben Franklin. I mean, that's the American faith. But, you know, if you don't have a capacity. quite apart from the fact that being at home inside yourself is being healthy. If you don't have a capacity, a tolerance even, for getting quiet, for settling your mind, for having a sense of spaciousness to reality, and I would say even having these little inklings

of how time really works because it actually is not about, you know, clocks. That's also what we've done with. We turned time into a bully and we turned it into productivity. But, you know, that move of discernment, there's no space for discernment if you're on a clock. So it gets back to slowing down again. Yeah, slowing down and I want to say trying to inhabit time as it really is. What does that mean? We have this sense of hurry and deadlines.

Just think about that language, deadline. I never thought about it until you just said it. Think about it, the way we live. Yeah. Time is, you know, as Einstein said, it's relative now. That's a heart, you know, it's not being true to the physics to think that that's a simple idea. But it is, it's not a. linear progression. What did I and say that it is a stubbornly persistent illusion that our bodies

create for us because they really want to have a sense of momentum and moving forward and just having order to it all, right? Like we really, and I get that because reality is so complex and time is so complex and our bodies need to have a sense of order and progression and sense. But in fact, and I think this is so helpful right now with all these huge, I don't want to keep overusing the word crises, like crises, reckoning, possibilities, shifts, technotic shifts that we're in the middle of. It is actually true, as we know in our personal lives, as we know our families, and as we can see in history, which is always all around us, you know, that the past is always ricocheting into the present, the future is making itself

felt, even just in our bodies. It's a much more creative, generous elastic thing and then then then we've been given to believe and if we can and you know transformation for example so again so you know one of my great teachers i almost mentioned him a minute ago is um john paul letterock who's who works on conflict transformation and he's really he's one of these people who um like every discipline has these giants who who if everybody in the field knows them and worships them and if you're outside the field you've never heard of them right so john paul is one of these people in the field of conflict resolution but he stopped talking about he stopped he says he says now any conflict can be resolved but if you don't transform the conditions and this gets

to your calling right if you don't transform the conditions that gave rise to the conflict it will reinvent itself and um so and he's He stopped at some point when he realized that. He won't take on any project where people aren't willing to devote a minimum of 10 years because that's what it takes. And he's been working, you know, in Columbia for 30 years on this fragile but stunning transformation that's happening there and in Northern Ireland and in South Africa. So I think the way we've been, you know, like in the West in America, like we think, well, if you can resolve the conflict this year, we do it, right? But think about the difference between spending the 10 years or the 30 years to something that is enduring and transformative and where the conditions themselves have been

transformed and something truly new in the long view is possible. That's what we have to be working for in our time. And so it's not being passive and patient to step back and say, we're we are taking a different time horizon because we are truly investing in the future and not our sense of accomplishment tomorrow let me ask you this um i've noticed i've been doing this two and a half years and i've actually been transformed by my guests by the conversations i've had with people that there are facts but there's uh call it spiritual or fierce hope or some pro-future emergence in the 130-odd guests that I've had on this show. Have you been transformed beyond your coaches that you mentioned?

But the actual conversations, I mean, you've talked to the Dalai Lama and other people. Has it changed you and your inner being? Yeah, absolutely. This wonderful civil rights elder Vincent Harding, who I interviewed, reviewed before he died. You know, he helped King write his Vietnam speech, and he was really there at the formulation of the philosophy of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, which was more than a philosophy, right? It was actually an incredibly pragmatic and successful, uh, enacted strategy. Um, and he taught, he used to talk about live human signposts, right?

And I feel like what you get to see, what I get to see and what we get to engage are these live human signposts that show us that hope is not just an idealistic, wishful thought, but that there is a way of living and being. And, you know, one of the things I think I'm also always out looking for wisdom as opposed to mere knowledge. I mean, a wise person can be knowledgeable. They can be accomplished. But I think that the definition of a wise life, if any of us think of the wise people we've known, is it as a, is what we think about is the effect that that life has had on other lives around it. And so when you find these live human signposts, you also find these ripples and these worlds where you just get this glimpse of how we could be living. I understand that. I've seen that. So further on that question, in your time interviewing people, lots of people, are there any things you've come across that felt immediately or over time like deep truths about our world that have fundamentally altered the way you move through life? You know, let me start with the notion of deep truth.

because in physics Niels Bohr was the one who articulated this so wonderfully that the definition of a deep truth as opposed to a trivial we're dealing in trivialities is that its opposite is also likely true so

the world is going to hell in a handbasket there's never been a more creative, thrilling time to be alive, right? I mean, I feel like it's actually nonsensical, but, you know, I believe in God. God is an, you know, the whole idea of God is an absurdity. I think my conversations with physicists, I think where my mind goes with that about deep truth is actually very embodied and it's all about physicality, right? So I think the things that I learned that I think we, and in the West, in the post-enlightenment West, to some extent are relearning. I mean, it's not like people haven't known these things,

but it's all, so, you know, it's like how, what we're learning about how vitality functions, you know, what we're learning about how we've always looked at, how we've always looked at a forest and for the longest time you know forestry was about cutting down the old growth trees because we had this we had this idea of competition and individuality and so we you know we had this very simplistic like we were very

focused on what was obvious and what our eyes could see and we thought that the taller trees were blocking the light from the younger trees like it's a competition for sunlight. And we, you know, now we're learning that what is happening below the ground, like what was happening below our level, below the ground of what we could see, is this magnificent universe that is so completely antithetical to all of the values that led us to cut down the taller trees. Or what we're learning about our brains and our bodies, how these, ideas we've had about, you know, these compartments we've had for mind and emotion and spirit

and it's just also utterly interactive and symbiotic, right, like that I'm actually made of more probably at any given moment, I might in my body have more non-human, more macrobial cells than human cells, right? So I feel like everything we're learning about how reality is, works, how vitality functions is so fascinating and so different from the way we structured the world, the human world, the built world. So building on Niels Bohr's, a definition of deep truths have an opposite. So one might say that we potentially are nearing the, end of a species or at least a civilization because of all the chaos.

But the opposite of that is, and I'm going to pose this as a question to you, is it possible that we're finally growing up as a species? You mentioned the change in viewing the old growth tree cutting and the soil. There is an acceleration of a recognition of the interconnectedness of everything on Earth and the ecological science. we're the first generation of our species at this 11th hour to be able to figure all this out and have it impact us in an embodied way. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I guess what I feel like for the rest of my time, I want to help cultivate and nourish is this idea of wholeness. I feel like especially in the 20th century, we've felt so grown up, you know, especially in this country. I mean, we had figured it out. We were the pinnacle. We would save the world. And, you know, I think the enlightenment, right?

I mean, modern science in the last few hundred years. It's like, you know, there was this idea in the 20th century that there were just a few more things to figure out in physics, and then we would have cracked it. We would have cracked the code of how the universe works. Little did we know that we were on the backs of the carbon pulse at the time. Oh my gosh. Keep going. So much. So much we weren't. And you know, so much the ethos of modernity has been really separation, kind of in the name of something very, of this dignity of individualism and individual happiness. And everything we did was about separation. So, you know, but like, Even in medicine, even, you know, when I talked about the interactivity of our bodies, the reason that comes as such a surprise is because modern medicine was about taking things apart. And, you know, we now are seeing organs, naming things as organs that we didn't see because we decided that organs were these things you could put on a slab and cut up and dissect.

and the entire, you know, medicine and all of our disciplines was, you know, turned into these subcategories that then stopped speaking to each other. And then I started, I've started thinking, you know, that's actually what, that's what toddlers do. Like, that is actually how we learn. You know, we take things apart. We put them back together. And so I think for a few hundred years, and it's simplistic in a way to say that, of, you know, how our intelligence and science and scholarship was applied. But at some level, I think that we've been in the taking things apart phase,

even if we did that in really sophisticated ways. And now, and we did a lot of damage to ourselves because we didn't just take things apart. We built a whole world around that as actually a value. And so if we're going to grow up in this century, we really, right? Like, you know, we really have to start putting things back together in very, very deep ways. We have not yet lived up to our namesake, Homo sapiens, wise man. I know. No.

Creatures who are wise. Yeah. Yeah. So getting to the modern day, how have you on being and in your work navigated addressing important topics and conversations which are polarizing or divisive, which are acceleratingly polarizing and divisive due to social media? And soon AI is going to play a role in that. How have you navigated that? we spent a lot of time and a certain amount of experimentation actually kind of after 2011, which is not a milestone most people remember, after Gabrielle Giffords was shot in 2011, which was, you know, she was an American congresswoman. And I think I started realizing then, I started just being really attentive to the polarization and the dehumanization that was happening.

And one of the things, you know, I would say the last few years, both kind of post the 2016 election and through the pandemic, and now, you know, there are a lot of things going on at once, right? So there is polarization, there is division. I feel like in these more recent years, below that, there is a distressed nervous system at a species level, which to me, the wars and, you know, the kind of metastasized hatred and violence are in part manifestations of human distress, right? So I do, and when that's where you're working with,

better dialogue is not an answer, right? Like then I think there's some work. There's work to do in just calming, calming our communal nervous system and one person at a time. And so I'm just kind of letting you into my thought process. So I think there are a couple of things going on. They're interconnected. They're enmeshed.

I think that nervous system piece for me is more the crisis now. But when you're working with people who are not totally living out of their amygdalas, which I think about 50% of us are, and maybe most of us some of the time, where it is really too much to ask, right? It is too much to ask of a person living out of that fear place, which our bodies, you know, again, I want to always give credit to how our body, how this, this, this, this, this part of. of us, which is the animal part of us, which is part of the natural world, which is there to keep us safe, right? Our bodies really are working so hard to keep us safe. But when it gets ratcheted up so that all you, when you are totally motivated by this fear of danger, then you stop being able to rise to your higher human capacities. I totally agree with that. And you're like the ninth person that is mentioned, we need to calm our nervous systems down, including my coach.

And that's why I went to India. So let me ask you this. For the moment, set aside our ecological and economic overshoot problems and our political problems. What sort of pathways could we heal our depleted nervous systems and our overanxiety and some of the things you've just mentioned? If we could do it in the coming decades, what sort of practices or institutions could heal broad swaths of society who act out of their amygdala's, etc? That's a big question. I mean, I think, I think just to return to something that you brought up a while ago that we touched on the ability to get quiet and to get settled in this, in our. age is something you have to work for. That's, that's unnatural. I mean, you know, when I was growing up, when you're standing in a line, you're standing in a line.

You know, and you might stand in a line for hours or... Little did we know that that wasn't bad for us. Little did we know it wasn't bad for us. So now you had to seize time and space carve out the possibility. of silence. So, you know, that is an endangered species. So we have to make that, I think we have to work to make that more possible for ourselves, for children. I think something really important that's connected to that, but not exactly the same is just naming this. And, you know, I have actually talked to people who work with the nervous system. There is actually an agency that comes with just naming something. So just naming and letting it kind of creating space for people to name this. And I'm not, you know, you could say that we're talking a lot about mental health crisis, right? So on the one hand, we're talking all the time about mental health crisis. But that's different from this, right? From just saying it is hard to be alive right now. It is a stressful time. I'm not giving myself a diagnosis when I say that. I'm saying as a species, it is a stressful time. time to be alive. It is, it is, it is excruciatingly complex. There are all kinds of really good reasons to live in fear. And I think this individualism, this separation that is such a core value in American society, becomes just critically problematic.

in a situation like this, because what we also need as we start naming this is we need to be there for each other. You know, I like to say the great virtues and hope is a great virtue, right? I mean, in religious tradition, in philosophical traditions, you know, virtues like hospitality, patience, all of these qualities are implicated in the things you and I have been talking about. standing before the crises. None of those things are supposed to be something you do as an individual, like you, you know, you armor up with hope, patience, and hospitality. These things are supposed to be held and cultivated and supported in community. And so, you know, I want to say none of us can be hopeful alone now. And that's not how our bodies work and it's not how these virtues work. So I also think, you know, again, this flies in the face of how I've been trained.

We have to really very intentionally surround ourselves to people who say, like, I may have days, weeks, years where I'm not going to feel hopeful. And, you know, this word accompaniment is another important word to me. So how do we accompany each other in also holding, you know, resilience sometimes when, you know, on behalf of each other. And I guess the final thing I want to say is some of us, and I think you and I probably count, I mean, I have my certainly fair share of despairing days, and I'm sure you do too. Some of us have more solid ground under our feet. I mean, my nervous system is distressed, but I've also got a lot of, I've got a lot of support and I have more, more awareness and more care in terms of

these things. And so, you know, you don't need everyone. You don't need 100% of the population to be engaged for real change and transformation to happen. And I think those of us who are able to engage our higher cognitive faculties, which is no small feet these days, have a certain kind of responsibility. And again, not as saviors or lone warriors, but together, like, that we have to, we need to step up and we need to step out.

And that also means that we, who are safer, also need to be the ones to step out into these kind of messy, ugly places. I don't think any of us is called to put ourselves in physical harm, but there's, you know, there are extreme places of violence where you might be endangered in moving, you know, in being present to that. But there's a much, much bigger space of people who might disturb or offend or unsettle us, but who have some curiosity alongside their convictions,

who, who, if they are invited to step forward as human beings, as opposed to representatives of their position or their identity, would be so glad to engage that. So I think some of us, yeah, I think there are all these callings, there are lots of callings to create and fight and build, you know, take,

tear down and rebuild. But, you know, to be a calm or a fear is an incredible civilizational calling now. To be a bridge person for those of us who are able to have, you know, one foot in two different worlds that are speaking to each other and be that conduit, these human callings. Well, I don't listen to podcasts much, partially because I'm too busy and partially I don't really have the attention span, but of the 12 or 15 I've listened to, four or five of them were yours, and they had a calming effect on me. So in the lack of cultural institutions in this individual time is money culture, maybe on being and the billions of downloads, maybe that is acting also as a way to quiet people's nervous systems in our culture in a way that our institutions. We're

couldn't. Well, I would, I would be very happy about that. That would be impact to me. That would be plenty of impact. I don't know that you would see that, though. I don't know that you would get that knowledge, but I think it's plausible. There's no data. It's not a data point. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So speaking of on being affiliation with NPR, NPR recently suffered from significant funding gaps, downsizing efforts, cancellation of popular shows and accusation of bias. Not speaking of NPR in particular, but do you think unbiased public media is a thing of the past, especially with respect to our ongoing and accelerating crises that we've been talking about? I think the pretense of objectivity is a thing of the past. And I think it was an illusion that

somehow in the very homogeneous world of the 20th century, you know, it was a noble attempt. And I was trained by journalists who believed that they were objective and who were striving at every moment to be objective. But, you know, when we were talking a minute ago about what are the deep truths? I mean, another deep truth that is scientifically, like, I mean, science. has also had to acknowledge that there is no such thing as objectivity, and that not only are you not objective as an observer, you are, you become a participant and you change things, right? So I think the world and our understanding of reality has just outgrown that value around which the institution of journalism revolved as we've, as we've inherited, it revolved. And so the whole thing is in disarray. And the question is, what follows it, right? How does it? And right now we're in this messy period where what was is in tatters,

but there's no sense of what will follow. And, you know, you can analyze the crisis of journalism and media in so many ways. You can analyze the issues of the business model, right? I mean, you can, you know, you can come out. it in so many ways, but I, you know, so I want to, just one thing I want to throw out here, it's like I'm thinking a lot about the difference between facts and truth. And there is a difference. And one thing I think that went wrong that I don't think gets named with, with journalism. And this was, this was also one of the, this was part of the, of the, this ideal of objectivity.

is that if you could just get the facts straight and present them like that was your job and that the facts would be persuasive and the assumption behind that is that human beings are rational creatures and we're not we're not

but we have to live in reality right so we have to create new ways of being that work with irrational beings, right? I mean, this is also our entire economic system is, you know, the whole, you know, capitalism in the 20th century also assumed that, you know, not that everybody was a rational economic actor in every minute, but that basically the whole balanced in, you know, people making decisions based on that it would all balance out to the good

of the whole. There's just no truth in that. And, you know, facts alone were never enough, never convey truth. This is a huge factor in this total breakdown of trust and then this isolating and dangerous phenomenon of entire swaths of the population working with different sets of facts, right? Because truth is not just about the fact you're working with. It's about how information or ideas are metabolized in a human life,

and, you know, through the mind, through the emotions, through the body, whether trust is present. What precedes, you know, what ground they landed on in a human person. And so somehow what we have to find our way back to, and it's not going to be objective journalism, is how do we speak about truth? two follow-up questions to that. One, can a human being have fertile enough ground to take in facts or truth if their nervous system is untethered? Number one. And number two, as a journalist, how worried are you or what are your thoughts about artificial intelligence impact on facts and truth and marketing to the brainstem in a way that's not?

in our best interest, but is in the interest of whoever is operating the AI. It's true at the best of times that we are not rational creatures. And when we are living out of fear, all bets are off in terms of what we're taking in, how we're metabolizing it, and what we're going to do with it. I don't easily catastrophize, right? I think AI has a lot to teach us. I think we could take AI as a challenge to get a whole new level of clarity about what actually makes us special as human beings, about what intelligence is. And thinking a lot these days about embodied intelligence, which I think is the better part of human intelligence.

Can you briefly define that? All the things that we know and intuit, you know, there's so much, there's incredible language, like how we've always, you know, what we call gut instinct, right, knew it in my gut. And now we're learning that the gut is, you know, now it's being called the second brain. Right. Right. In this new science. That's where most of our serotonin is generated. It's where most of our serotonin is, I'm fascinated by that. I'm fascinated. with how in language we've carried knowledge that science, you know, all these centuries then later shows us what we were talking about. I find that absolutely fascinating. And somehow that gives me hope. I feel like we know things and we may even be living things that we don't know we know. You know, our emotional, right, the intelligence of relationship, the intelligence of that question, of who it will be to each other.

It's about care, right? And care has its corollary and vitality in the natural world. It's mutuality, it's reciprocity. It's in the forest, you know, when all the nutrients flow in this direction because that's where the nutrients are needed. That is intelligence, right? the intelligence of love, which is actually not soft. It is actually the hardest thing we do. It is not about feeling. It's about it's about acts. It's about action. And all the different

kinds of love, right? I'm not just, you know, we're so focused on like romantic love, but just, and I'm, and I know, practical love, right? And the Greek, in the, in the biblical Greek, In Greek, in other languages, aside from English, there's so many different words for love. And, you know, there is Eros, but there's also Philia. There's friendship. There's Agape, which is practical love. And these are the things that make the world go around, right? These are the things that are present when conflict is resolved, when human beings become whole, more whole, when healing happens.

And also when creativity happens, even social creativity. So none of that is available to AI. And maybe AI relieves us of the illusion that we've had that our brain, that our cognitive and computational powers are the most powerful things about us. Because in fact, we look pretty puny. Like those things look pretty puny now compared to this. mega brain that is a large language model. I'd like to think that my own embodied intelligence would feel the truth of AI's impacts on me,

but I don't know that that's true. It may trick me into finding out the things that I like and tweaking my emotions some way. I'm quite worried about it. I'm worried about it too. But I guess I just, I also, I'm really being cognizant of the fact that there reason it may trick us is because it is a student of us. Right. Right?

And when we marvel at it, we're marveling at ourselves. And I think, you know, some of the science that I'm very delighted by now is the science of awe. Have you followed this at all? No. No. He might be a great person for you to interview. Science of awe.

Like awe is this, they've done these studies in many, many cultures and all the different ways awe manifests, I think. So, you know, to me, there's something important about this as a companion to the quiet that you and I've talked about, to the settling and getting quiet. Because I think in our time of distress, these contemplative technologies, are finding people. You know, they're really there for the 21st century. And they're often being used as kind of first aid, right? Like, I need to get through the day. And that's actually not what they were supposed to be most of the time

in their original crucible of the spiritual traditions. What I love about the science of awe is that it is saying, this is this capacity we have as human beings to to be in wonder, which is also a primary value of science, I think. You know, Einstein said that the thing that unites science and religion and the arts at their best is a capacity for wonder.

And what the science is learning, and so this happens in many ways. It happens in the form of what they call, collective effervescence, which is when just when we're together with other human bodies, you know, and it can be at a sports activity or or a worship service or just like, you know, and, you know, we're learning that when we get together with other human beings or, you know, dancing, like your breath starts to sink up, your heart, you become this superorganism, right? Like, we haven't even begun to tap what that means, what that potential is.

And it happens in music, and it happens, as you said, in the forest, right? In the natural world. And what the science is showing is that this, that awe, it doesn't just feel good. It has immunological benefits. It has like measurable health benefits. And another form of awe that they, that they, that they discovered all over the world is what they called moral beauty. So basically, when you ask human beings all over the world, what they are in awe of you ask them to talk about times

that they've been in awe, the most frequent answers to that question has to do with what they have seen other human beings do, right? With the beauty of other human lives with courage or sacrifice or love, that's not the story. that the newspapers will tell us about our species today? It kind of comes back to, like, what is the false story? That too is true. And so I think we have to, you know, moving into something, like, you know, and awe is something you can practice. You can decide just that you're going to get more conscious of it when it happens.

And, you know, Dacker Keltner, who's a scientist who works on it, who is really not a very, not a spiritual person in any kind of overt way. He has something called awe walk. So it would just be you doing what you do in the forest, feeling what you feel in the forest, and getting that much more conscious about it. And really, isn't that what we're talking about with everything? If we're going to grow up our species this century, we are going to live more fully into our consciousness. And does that start from a person and a dozen people and 100 and 1,000 and upwards? Does it start from the ground up? Or is there an institutional vector that could set us on that path?

So I will give you an image that is important to me in thinking about impact. And also, I think you asked me a question about this. You asked me recently, like, how can you know, like, how do we measure these things? So my John Paul Lederach, the conflict transformation person I mentioned, says that he has literally been. there in many cultures, in many countries across the last 40 years where societies moved from, you know, from war, from total conflict to, to a transformed state where the conditions were transformed.

And what he says is always present. He says that what we focus on when we later tell the stories of these kinds of things is we focus on critical mass. Again, numbers, we see the numbers, right? The count the bodies on the street, you know, the march on Washington. But he said, that's critical mass, but he says what is always present before the critical mass, making it possible eventually, and after the critical mass, so that the change still suffuses what comes next is what he calls critical yeast. And I like that that's a metaphor from the natural world, right? And that he describes as small groups of people, of unlikely combinations of people in a new quality of relationship.

And he says that this starts very small. And the quality of the relationship is really important. And then that, like yeast, grows. And again, you have to have the right time horizon because it's not, it's not a five-year plan. And I do, if I look at our world. And if, you know, you and I are, I think you and I both see this very yeasty landscape, even as we see, even as, even how we found each other, right? You and I weren't talking a year ago.

And now our work has been talking to each other. And I'm finding that happening everywhere. So that, that's a good enough way for me to think about, you know, measuring impact and thinking about, thinking even about how something like collective consciousness shift will actually grow. Do you think we can find our way back as a culture? And what would you think it would take to enact true, potent, lasting, cultural change from this moment forward? As much as we want something completely new and renewed, it's going to be a whole new paradigm, right? All of the spheres are going to be none of it is going to work the way things work now. And so we don't know. It's hard to say,

like, I know we can get there if I don't know what it is. But the good news about that is that we it's calling forth our imagination and our courage and our creativity and our robust active living of the questions of what it might be and setting into motion what comes to us and and I am I'm thinking so much about how in history so you know what I just see what we're doing with the climate, I'm going to say the climate apocalypse, right? Like, it's just so easy to tell the story that way, and it actually makes for great stories. And it feels that way, and there's truth to it. But if that's the way we tell the story, that's the story we're living. And that's the story, and we're writing that, that's the ending of the story we're writing.

and it has been true across history in every sphere that things that were unimaginable came into being because somebody dared to see them and see them and walk towards them when most other people couldn't. So I think that's what those of us who have some courage and some stamina are called to do and call to do together, not as rugged individuals, but to pool our creativity, our imaginations, our ideas.

Well, the world seems to be, at least in my sphere, converging on this story. And I feel what you just said is true. Let me springboard from that into the closing questions that I ask all my guests if you have a few more minutes. Do you have any personal advice to the listeners and viewers of this show at this time of of global upheaval and climate worry and our reptilian systems are activated during the time of what I call the human predicament. What sort of advice would you offer? Something that compounds the sense of fear and despair and powerlessness that we can have is also that we live in this time of a saturation of media that is making very intimate and immediate the worst things that are happening at a civilizational level. and that can just paralyze us. And so I feel like a lot of people wonder understandably, you know, how could I possibly make a difference?

What could I do? And I think that the, I think that the, I think it's absolutely essential that, and it sounds countercultural in the face of that to say that the interior work you do on getting grounded and settled inside yourself is a starting point for even having, even, even, you know, with any depth pondering that question of what I can do. And that what we are all called to do, and I kind of take this from the spiritual traditions, but I think it is true wisdom. Like none of us is called to do,

you know, we're called in the first instance to be, to be healers and creatives in the world that we can see and touch. That's not a cop out, right? Like, I can't do anything about the war in Gaza, right? I can't. I can be in pain about it. But, and it can feel really, yeah, can feel really counterintuitive to say, like, that is going, all of those things are happening in the world. What, but to intentionally be present to the world that you can see and touch and ask the question there and live the question there, right? I don't think I

I don't think I fully said this a little while ago. The whole thing about living the questions, I really do take this as a spiritual discipline and at multiple times in my life when I have had a question and I think the question of what is my work to do in this world right now in this time ahead,

I think you can literally assign yourself that question to live with, not to answer, but to live with. I think you can start today. You can write it down. You can have it as a contemplative practice and as a life practice to walk around with that question through the ordinary interactions and see what it, see what directions it points you in, and see what it kind of turns you away from. And don't rush it. Thank you. You mentioned earlier talking to a 21-year-old. I don't know how often you talk to young people, but how would you change that advice for people in their 20s listening to. to this show with 60 years ahead of them,

what sort of advice would you have for young listeners? This is an in-between time where we know the forms that we inherited that are failing us, and we cannot yet see what are the new forms that will be born, that we are the generation given to make up those new forms. That's very stressful. And I think just naming that it's stressful and, like, owning that is actually important. And I feel like every once in a while we should, we need to like give ourselves permission and space also to marvel at what there is to marvel at all that we're learning about our bodies and brains and about the universe and about how, you know, how the forest works. and that we are the generation of our species

that is reinventing, defining marriage and family and gender. I mean, if that were the only thing going on, the root binary of the binary of all binaries, because one thing that we have to outlive if we're going to grow up as a species, as a species is this reductive binary thinking that puts us into these, you know, simplistic opposing camps. And I like to think that this remake, this, it's, you know,

telling the truth about gender is what we're doing. It's a very messy time, very messy, because it's so foundational and so complex. But it is also astonishing that we're taking this on. And so just, I do believe that this, the generation of young people now are an evolutionary generation. And I do believe that if we come through this, it is with an evolution of consciousness. So how extraordinary to be part of that. If you can just muster a sense of that wonder every once in a while, I think it will be fuel. Let me ask a bonus question just because it's you. Do you have any advice for young people who are specifically interested in careers in journalism and communication, you know, given the landscape of our current society.

You know, I was talking to some, a young person recently who's talking about going to graduate school in journalism. And I said, it's such a mess now. And like podcast, it's all so fluid and kind of a wild west. And so I would say really spend a little bit of time observing before you rush into the river. there's also like in every sphere there's a lot of innovation happening that might not be obvious but take some time looking for it I mean an organization that I'm really impressed by is something called the Solutions Journalism Network and even they don't think that that name is quite big enough but it's it's it's really about you know the theory of change of journalism that we inherited out of the 20th century was

of mainstream journalism was if you shine a light on what is most catastrophic and corrupt, that will mobilize people to change it. Well, actually, that's not how our brains work. And it's just not true. It's just a, when in a 24-7 news cycle, it's just demoralizing and paralyzing all of us to have the constant narrative of catastrophe. So there's a beautiful challenge now of, and a lot of people doing interesting work. So look for them. on how to tell the fuller story of our time. And also, I think this is such a creative challenge. How to make the reality of goodness and dignity as riveting as what is catastrophic and corrupt and failing. How to make goodness as riveting as evil.

It's really easy to make evil riveting. So in a sense, with being and your personality and who you are as a person, the facts and the science of your guest are perhaps the proximate thing you're offering to people. But ultimately, you are highlighting goodness and acting as an example of the creativity and positive energy that we need more of in the world. Yeah, but what I draw out the complexity of goodness, it's just as interesting. There's a lot of drama. There's a high drama. Tell me about it.

Tell me about it. To be a good human being. And we need to let that show. What do you care most about in the world, Krista? It's strangely counterintuitive to say that if I care about so much in the world, what I have to invest in at the same time that I do whatever I do about all of that is, what is my presence in the world? What is the quality of my presence in the world?

And that, I need to put, I need to put energy into that. I need to put nourishment into that. I need to give time to that. So that I can be truly listening and truly, you know, I want to be a healing presence. And sometimes, that can be very simple, right? Because we can be a healing presence in moments. I can be a healing presence in an interaction with a stranger at the checkout counter at a grocery store, right?

And that matters. So I guess I'm just saying alongside the question, like what I care about is one question and how I show up for all of that is a question that I equally have to be living to be true to that care I feel. Final question, Krista Tippett, if you could wave a magic wand and there were no personal recourse to your decision, what is one thing you would do to improve human or planetary future? I would get us all breathing together. I would wish that some relief, you know, some magic relief from this fear place in us, that that's the place that's defining so many of us and that we're living out of, that, you know, it could be a capacity but not a home, not a mobilizer. But then if that happened, we'd all have to, we'd have to be worthy of it, right?

And again, I'm going to say those of us who are less captive to it actually have more responsibility to be generous to step forward towards what might seem ugly or baffling. there's my show started or I was very inspired in this work and in the way I do interviews through by this community of Benedictine monks in the middle of Minnesota, St. John's Abbey,

which is a very globally creative place. And they used to, I was inspired that they used to have these these big conversations about huge issues and they would bring together, you know, really interesting group of people. And they would spend the first day and a half just going around the room. And so they would take some big question. It was usually a theological question. But I've done this with, you can do this with any question. Like I did it with a group of journalists, you know, the question will be, what is journalism for? Not like how do we reform it, but what is it for? So if we're even going to think about how to reform it, we have to think what purpose should it serve in our life together. And it's a very different purpose, I think, than in the mid-20th century. And then you have everybody go around the

and answer the question through the story of your life. And what happens is the issue, you go to deep places in the issue, but it is humanized. And you stop being able to see anybody around the table as an identity or a position. You see this complexity. And there's something in there. There's all, you know, human, we're all so fascinating and there's a lot of beauty in us. And there's a lot of softness that we don't care. around on the outside. And if you start to see that in other people, there's all this possibility

that opens up about what can happen between you and what can happen in the world. And I've, you know, I've wished after the 2016 election that we could have sat down the next day and, you know, split about 50-50 in terms of who voted. And that instead of hashing through the election, like we could have sat down with somebody who voted in the other way and said, Who did you vote for? Answer the question through the story of your life. And we would not be able to describe the world in terms of red and blue. And the 2020 election and the 2024 election. Yeah, exactly. I agree. Thank you so much for your time today and for your decades of work in calming people's nervous system and educating them on all the topics that you've done so wonderfully. And I'll see you soon, neighbor. Yeah. Thank you, Nate.

Thank you. Thank you for your beautiful questions and your beautiful work. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform and visit The Great Simplification.com for more information on future releases. This show is hosted by Nate Hagan's edited by No Troublemakers Media in Curitur, and curated by Leslie Batlutz and Lizzie Siriani.