There's something very strange and interesting about us that we have an experience of reality and we don't factor it into how we expect things to work. I feel like this is kind of a growth edge for our species.
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Krista Tibbett, a Peabody Award winning broadcaster, National Humanities medallist, and New York Times bestselling author. She created and hosts On Being, which won the highest honors in broadcast, Internet and podcasting She leads the on Being project, which produces a second successful podcast, Poetry Abound, and is evolving to
meet the callings of the post twenty twenty world. Emergent in twenty twenty three is the lab for art of living alongside gatherings and quiet conversations to accompany the generative people and possibilities within this tender, tumultuous time to be alive. Christa grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, worked as a journal list and a diplomat in Cold World Berlin, and later received a Master of
Divinity from Yale. Her books are Speaking of Faith, Einstein's God, and most recently, Becoming Wise, an inquiry into the mystery and art of living.
Hi Christa, Welcome to the show.
Hi Eric, so good to be with you again.
Yes, it is such a pleasure to have you on. I was saying to you before we started, you know, about ten years ago, when I really start thinking about doing this podcast. I was out there looking and there were not nearly the number of podcasts there are today, but yours was one of the few where I was like, that's really what I want to do. Like it's been a beacon to us the whole time, So.
Thanks been lovely to watch you grow this too.
We'll start like we always do with the parable. In the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparents. They say, well, which one wins? And the
grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
You know, I was wondering because I was with you once before, and it was years ago, and it was also what feels like eons ago, because it was Pree twenty twenty, and I was wondering what I said before, and I didn't have time to look it up.
You know, I have to.
Tell you that I had this interesting reaction because I started thinking about it last night. So this might be kind of an unorthodox answer, but I feel like right now in my life and in the world. My concern, which is for myself and for the world and for all of us, is that we can be paralyzed by all the choices and reckonings and challenges and callings.
That are before us.
You know that I feel like these years have placed before us, and you know they were there before, but that we've really been given to see in a new way. And my fear is that we just get paralyzed and even if we feel the good wolf right, that we don't know how to nourish in either direction, which ends up being a choice of a kind.
Does that make sense to you totally?
Yeah. I mean I think that there's the sense in that parable that you know which is the right one right, which I think is.
And that you have the energy and that you are stepping into your agency to do that nourishing in a direction. And that's what I think is endangered right now. And I don't say it judgmentally. Right there's a lot of fragility and there is a lot to be reasonably fearful about. It's a different kind of peril that we're in.
I'm curious about that because you are someone I know who tends to think a lot about time, and one of the ways that you think about time is to think about it in the really long view. And we hear again and again and again that these times are worse times, or that they're uniquely bad times. And I'm kind of curious, from your perspective taking a long view of history, in what ways does this feel like a more challenging time than say, fifteen oh seven, or I'm
just making updates. It doesn't matter which, right, No, it's.
A great question. I've thought a lot in this century about how the early twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, sixteen, seventeen eighteen, the kind of teenage years of our century didn't hold a candle to the early years of the twentieth century and World War you know, the deaths of millions and million, millions upon millions, and starvation and a flu that I think was at least more catastrophic than ours, so paled beside the other, or a virus right beside the other
catastrophes of the time that it was barely recorded, and you know, incredible time of tumult socially economically, great drama and heading towards what we know now, you know, looking at it backwards, heading towards another war and holocaust. Right, So, I think it would be hard to argue that our problems are challenges that on some level, that there's nothing special about the gravity and the magnitude of what we
face and of the terrible degrees of suffering. I think what is different for us is that some of our challenges, particularly the ecological crisis, is it's truly, truly existential, and it's an accumulation.
I mean, we've walked into this.
Place over hundreds of years, but I think there is something singular about the plight of our species in this century and the consequences of the way we've lived for a while.
I think that is new.
I think the choice we have to make is whether we can rise to this moment so that we are not at some point merely surviving. I think that's new.
Yeah, I would tend to sort of agree, you know. To me, it feels like human suffering for all intents and purposes has always been almost infinite. And by infinite, what I mean is more than any one human could ever begin to comprehend. Like, I think that's just the nature of life, and it's always been there, and I do think in many, many ways, the world has become
a better place. You know, we can just look at all sorts of measures of well being out there and see that, like, it's good that we have less children and slavery than we used to, we have higher literacy rates, less infant mortality. All those things seem to be good news. But I agree with you that climate crisis does seem to be sort of like our car is looking good in some ways as it's getting ready to drive off a cliff.
Yeah. I never know what to do with those kinds of comparisons. You know, everything is relative, and everything is being compared from a certain perspective. But there are things I also feel impatient with in some of the catastrophizing, Right, I'm impatient with Like I know that the young and you know that the whole matter of education, that there's been incredible disruption with the pandemic, and that that's fallen harder on some children and in some places than others.
But when I hear people talking about just in the context of having some years of school disrupted, of the lost generation, I mean, if I think about all the children across time who've lost a school or right, I mean, so there's some ways in which I.
Just I don't know.
I think it's hard for us to comprehend the ecological moment we're in and to actually take it seriously, even though it may make everything that we actually obsess over just pale in comparison eventually.
And then there's.
The way in which we will catastrophize about school being disrupted for a couple of years. And again, I know there has been a real cost, and I also think that I trust the resilience of our young to recover from not having what we think of as the way education should be.
Yep, yeah, I'd love to turn to I'm sure we talked about this when we talked before, because I think it's probably somewhat of an obsession for people like us who do this for a living, which is asking people questions. And I know that you love the idea of questions. And there's something that you wrote that I saw and I don't know where, but I loved this line and you said, if you are faithful to living a question, that question will be faithful back to you. And you say more about that.
The context of that thought is this advice, this counsel that rein or Maria Rilka gave to a young person, a young poet in the early twentieth century, and this was a young person who was full of despair about all the answers that they didn't.
Have and all the things they weren't sure about.
And Rilka said, you know, you should love all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. And that has come back to me in this century where I think, and this was true, you know, pre COVID in our lives.
I think on some level, all.
Of the great challenges before us are just vast, aching open questions that are not going to have answers anytime soon. And so this wisdom comes to me that when this is the situation we're in, then what we're called to do is to love and told and to live the questions themselves. And this way of thinking has been with me for a long time and accompanied me. And you know, because we're so in love with answers, and we do crave them, and we understandably crave them, but answers are
not really a feature of the time. We live in a time of evolution and disruption and upheaval of things that whose time needs has come to an end. But it's very, very stressful for us as human beings to live with uncertainty. And yet this counsel that when what we're given is uncertainty, when to rush to an answer would be to deny the gravity and the importance of the questions. Then we live the answers. And I've actually, across the years, really like taken that up as a practice.
You know, when I find myself personally at those junctures, or even as I think about questions of you know, this world we inhabit and what is my place? You know, standing before these challenges, all I have to work with is uncertainty. Then I really turn to this work of crafting a better question, a question that can keep me company, a question that can point me to what I need to be seeing or moving towards or moving away from.
And I have had this experience over and over again that if I hold a question, if I live a question, if I'm faithful to it, it will be a guide.
I love that idea. You say, commit to having it over your shoulder, in your ear as you move through life.
And it's not just for a day or a week.
I have to say it's we have this American way of thinking, Okay, I'll do that, do that until next Monday. It's a longer term commitment.
Well, And I think a lot of the most important questions, if they ever get answered, they are answered in a temporary sort of way. Yes, Like I mean a question about like what's important to me and what matters is a question to me that if I'm not asking it frequently, then I'm not doing it right. Because what mattered to me two years ago was very different than what matters to me today. I mean, I guess I shouldn't say
very different. There are some core similarities there, but you know, there's a lot that Bear's looking at again and again. We interviewed a poet recently. I don't know if you're familiar with it, Rosemary Watola Traumer.
No.
She's a beautiful poet. I think you would like her. But she has a poem called the Question. I'm not going to read the whole thing to you, but the basis of it is, is this the path of love? I ask myself as I rise, as I wake my children, as I do the dishes, as I follow too close behind the slow blue subaru, right like this idea. But that idea of a question like that is not a question you ever answer. But it is a question that guides your life, right.
It is a question that orients and reorient It shows you what to see and what to pay attention to.
Yeah, yep, I find questions like that to be really really helpful, as like you said, orienting questions ways of consistently asking you know, what matters here, what's important?
Yeah.
So you talk about something, and you may have recently just given a TED talk on this topic. I'm not entirely sure, but that you call the generative narrative of our time.
I have been talking to that while and I did give a TED talk. It's not in the world yet. I don't know when it will be well, and.
I don't know when we'll release this, so it may be in the world by that or not. But what do you mean by that, the generative narrative of our time?
Well, I definitely use that language as a contrast to the narrative of our time, the story of our time, you know, the story of what happened today that is worth our attention. You know, the narrative of what is important, which is how these things get translated in our minds, and the narrative that we're just really familiar with and that we consume thousand ways in the course of a day tends to be this narrative of danger and destruction and what is failing and what is going wrong and
what is corrupt and what is catastrophic. And as you and I have been discussing, there's certainly reality to that story, but it's not the whole story. So there is also as part of the whole story, there is this story of what is generative, of what is good, of people feeding the.
Wolf of kindness and love and care. Right.
That is ordinary, it's quiet, it's happening all around us all the time. It's happening in moments, it's happening in all kinds of lives and all kinds of places. And although it is ordinary and omni present, we don't tell ourselves that story to be as fining or as serious as the things that do get reported right and that
we do dwell on, which is what goes wrong. In wanting to talk about this and just wanting us to have more of a consciousness that we let infuse our presence in the world and our sense of what's possible and our sense of who other human beings might be in their complexity. I'm not talking about this in order
to deny that we have problems to grapple with. I am talking about it for us to claim the agency of our possibility for goodness and for making better decisions and for building and repairing and healing and just seeing that we actually know how to do these things and we see people doing it around us all the time, and let's start factoring that in.
Yeah, I mean, I think the word there that well, I guess both those words, generative narrative both mean a lot to me. I mean, the generative part, I think is exactly what you're saying, which is, is the story the narrative that I'm telling myself one that is actually useful or leads to something good or positive? Like is it doing that? And the recognition that it's a narrative means that we are always telling ourselves some story about
the way things are. And those stories, you know, none of them are accurate, right, none of them are complete, none of them cover everything. Yeah, So knowing that, you know, I've often thought to myself, like, if I'm making so much of this up? Like or I'm giving the meaning
to all these different things. Doesn't it make sense to give meanings to them and versions of them that are actually empowering to me, that are actually going to make it more likely that I'm going to solve the problems that I see, that I'm going to embody the goodness that I want to put out there. And I do think it is a narrative that is complex, and as we said earlier, we don't tend to like that.
What we're talking about. You know, the power of the stories we tell is about a lot more than story, right. It is about how we are interpreting the world. It is about how we are deciding what matters, and it is about the conclusions we're drawing about what's possible and what agency we might have to be part of generative possibilities.
And I think what's interesting about this is that what I just said may be something that people are aware of or not, but the fact is that all day long, we're taking in stories, and we're taking them in sometimes taking them in in the form of what we call information or what we call news, and they are absolutely shaping the way we are not just thinking about the world and ourselves, but walking through the world, and so part of this is just getting conscious of what is,
which I think is also a definition of spiritual life.
That's a little bit of a transition there that might be interesting to go to. Which is that phrase you just use, spiritual life? What does that mean to you?
You know, the word spirituality is not a word that I use a lot. I try not to overuse it because I think it can be very meaningful in any you know, given in the life or in the imagination of any given person who's using it. But as a kind of general word, it's vague. But spiritual life or the life of the spirit, to me is really, you know, a very basic way to talk about what we're talking about is, you know, interior life in our life, and
it's getting reflective as opposed to merely thinking. It's being in discernment, as opposed to merely deciding. You know, it's how we think about who we are and what matters, as opposed to merely the action will take.
You know.
This is a similar point to the one I just was kind of making about the destructive narrative and how it shapes us. Now, that's a very active thing, even if we're not conscious of it. We actually get a lot of active formation in our world in education, outside education, in culture, we get a lot of formation of our exterior presentation, right We get a lot of training in things we do and in ways to behave, and in ways to present, and in fact, in ways to be
successfully performative. And we get so much less formation in that experience inside ourselves, that possibility that we have to be at home in ourselves, those internal muscles of making sense and making meaning, and in that setting priorities and shaping not just what we're going to do, but the quality of our lives and the quality of our presence to other people. So all of that, to me just starts to point out what spiritual life is my favorite
definition of spiritual life at its best. And here I want to know, really point at what the great traditions offered to us in the human enterprise is really befriending reality in all its complexity, walking into the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, and making a home and making sense and making beauty and finding courage and being of service.
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It's called Habits that Stick, How to be remarkably consistent no matter what goal you set. You can grab it at oneufeed, dot net slash habits. Again, it's free and you can watch it whenever it works for you. Go to one you feed dot net slash habits. I love that last part about befriending reality in all its forms. I've used the term spiritual for a program we've got called Spiritual Habits, but I've used it reluctantly. In the
longer I've used it, the more reluctantly I've gotten. And yet I can't quite find the other word, because again, when you're trying to name something you can't have, like a seventy four word description is that, like, it's not psychology, but it's similar. It's not philosophy, but it's similar. If I were to sort of try and describe it, it would be about meaning and connection, you know, what matters to
me and what am I connected to. But again, there's not a good word for this, you know, deeper than just psychological, because you could say, well, the interior life. You know, psychology covers the interior life, And yes it does, but maybe not in the same way. And I love that you said sort of the difference between discernment and decision making, right, because decision making is very much something that psychology spends a lot of time on, but discernment is a slightly different animal.
Yeah.
Yeah. Part of the problem is that all of these words are inadequate. They will never touch or encompass what you and I are wanting to point at. And of course you could make the distinction that, you know, psychology is dealing with the psyche, and when we talk about the life of the spirit, we're dealing with the soul. But you know that's another word that kind of dissolves
even as we say it. You can't define it right, And it's a mystery, right, we can't try to talk about it, and it's something that we experience that it's ultimately in that realm of mystery. These most important things at the intersection of interior life and lives in our bodies, and our lives within ourselves and our lives in the world. We just have to keep reaching for words that can only get proximate to those larger truths, much less when we're talking about things that are transcendent.
Yep ineffable.
Yeah.
One of the things you've done over the last I think it's in the last year. I'm terrible with time that I saw you do as sort of a project that I really loved was contemplative reading.
Yeah.
Can you share a little bit about kind of what that phrase means to you and what you did, and then there might be a few points within that actual work we could dive into.
Yeah, well, this might sound familiar to you. I have just started to realize more and more in recent years that conversation is my medium, and by which I mean, like, I love being on either side of a conversation, and I think conversationally and I learn conversationally.
There's no better.
Way for me to kind of clarify my own thoughts than in in exchange with someone else. In addition to there's no better way for me to really have my mind opened and take in new knowledge than in a conversation with someone. And last summer, the summer of twenty twenty two, I went away. You know, we had had a big year, we'd made a big change, and I we'd ended up our weekly radio show that I've done for twenty years. We're still in production on the being
but we're doing seasons. So we did two seasons a year, and we just did the first one. But that was a big transition out of that life of fifty two weeks a year. And I'd just been running hard for a long time. So I add some time away as kind of a sabbatical, and I had a lot of resting to do, but I felt like I had a lot of thinking to do too, and I kind of wanted to write, but I also felt at a loss
about where to begin. And I started getting up in the morning and reading books that were interesting, and you know, that stretched me. And actually, I know, given my work, I don't know if you're like this, but I do read a lot of wonderful stretching things for work. But when I'm not working, because that's what I do for my work, I read a lot of fiction. I want to take my mind away, but in this instance, I was away and I was able to kind of read things.
So we're stretching my mind for pleasure.
And then I just kind of got in conversation with what I was reading and let that be the springboard for journaling and writing. And I kind of just clearing out my head and figuring out what was in there and what wanted to come out and what I needed to figure out. And it felt like prayer, It felt like a form of meditation. It was very pleasurable and grounding, and so I just started calling what I was doing,
you know, contemplative reading conversational reading. I have actually thought about so, you know, in my kind of mourning practice, which has varied a lot across the years, sometimes what I do is just read just a little something and really save or something, you know, a poem or some kind of spiritual text, and I've always thought of that as contemplative reading. This was just kind of a step farther.
It was reading contemplative and then really getting into conversation on the page with what I was reading, and it was just a beautiful experience. And I came home and started talking about it, and maybe this is where you heard about it. I started writing about it and kind of shared some of the fruits of this contemplative reading in this newsletter.
We have the pause.
Yeah, I mean, there's so many things that you said in there that resonate with me. Since this is what I do for work. When I'm not working, I like, you go to fiction. I'm going to be taking a lot of June away from interviews, and so now I'm like, Okay, now I'm going to read fiction. And it's almost an existential crisis as to what to read because I don't get to do it that often. And I'm like, oh
my god, this is a big decision. Yeah, you know, I love that idea of having the chance to, you know, read something that stretches you and taking it much more slowly, you know. I know, in my zen practice, you know, with my teacher, I began reading, but unlike my current pace where I'm reading like a book a week or something for work, I might read the same thirty pages for six months, and it was just a totally different
way of engaging. But I love the way you sort of took it one step further, which is the conversational element, because I've learned the same thing that you're sort of saying. I've realized, like I'm working on a book, I'm a first time writer. I don't have the chops yet. I've said to my partner a couple of times, like, I wish I could just record me responding to people's questions, because like, yeah, that's where I feel like I'm mad
that way very best. I know in my mind, I can pretend I'm talking to somebody else, but there's something about the actual element of it that is special. But I love that idea of writing back and forth with what you're reading and asking those questions, and what came
out of it was really lovely. And you did it with a book by someone that I was not familiar with, James Bridle, and the book is called Ways of Being Animals, Plants, Machines, the Search for a Plan Panitary Intelligence, which sounds like a fascinating book, And so I thought maybe we could pull just a couple of things out of there that you wrote that we're intriguing, and we could talk about.
Yeah, that would be fun.
I mean the first one was this general idea, I'm summarizing Bridle in this case instead of resolving into order and clarity. Ever, closer examination reveals only more and more splendid detail and variation. And you followed that by saying, isn't that true in life as well as in science?
Yeah?
I mean it's true of a person when we come to know them. It's true of ourselves that the closer you get, the more you're able to see, the picture always gets more complicated, right, Yeah, it doesn't get simpler or clearer. And in that complexity, and even in our contradictions, is such richness and all of our opening for growth and for prizing each other and for continue to evolve. And what I just said is something that we all
experience all the time. But we walk around, you know, with our ideas about how things should be, how my life should be, how I should be, how that other person should be, how much less complicated our organization should be. I don't know, there's something very strange and interesting about us that we have an experience of reality and we don't factor it into how we expect things to work.
I feel like this is kind of a growth edge for our species, and I feel like, you know, people like James Bridle and all the kind of new science and understanding of the natural world that he was kind of looking at in a very holistic way is giving us the language for making this move.
Yeah. I was just having a conversation with my partner Jenny this morning about how anytime anyone is too certain of anything will argue the counterpoint, even if I mostly believe them, there's something in me that just comes up. We were joking because it's almost just so common in the way I respond that it's almost become predictable. But it ties into that core idea, which is, instead of resolving into order and clarity, right when we work closer,
we only get more detail and variation and complexity. And that just seems to be kind of the orientation that I just naturally kind of have. They go on to say, every time we train our most sophisticated tools upon the central questions of our existence, who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? The answer comes back clearer everyone everywhere I know.
Isn't that fantastic? That's just one of my favorite lines of the book and my favorite thoughts to just walk around with.
Yeah. Yeah, And you have a phrase you use called life together, which I think you're trying to point at the same thing.
Yeah, I guess I am.
I mean, I feel like there's a wildness that is appropriate to the subject, to the way Bridle kind of framed it, and what we're learning about just how entangled and in kinship and inextricable not just from each other
we are, but from all of life. I do always come back to this idea of what interests me is I mean, I am very interested in the human search for meaning and interior life, and I'm very interested and passionate about what is the connection between the investment we make in that, the nurture we get to that, and our ability to participate generatively in our life together, our life with others, with our beloved and with strangers. I guess that's kind of my focal point, is that intersection.
Right right, Because I think one thing that sort of modern again, I'll use the word because I don't have a better or when the modern sort of spiritual movement. I think there's been a lot of really great things about sort of having all these different traditions on the table, and so many different teachers and all these things. But one of the ways that I often feel like it falls short is it almost becomes a narcissistic tendency in
that it's always only directed inward. And while inward direction is half the equation, so is the outward.
You know.
Ideally, the way it works, at least for me, is that that what's happening interiorly finds a way out into the world, you know, that is generative, and then that feeds back and it's a loop. But when it gets stuck kind of only inside, you know, to me, that's when we go from sort of like self awareness to like self obsession.
Yeah.
I think about this a lot. I mean, I hold it with a sense of compassion towards myself and others that you know, it is a time in the life of the world where a lot of times we're just trying to hold it together, right, And I think that spiritual teachings and gifts and practices and certainly meditation there's
a lot on offer, and it's a great gift. But when we're in this kind of survival mode, what we imbive is really a diminishment of how those gifts really right, the context in which those gifts appear, and the fullness of what they're meant to bring, which is not just about holding it all together inside yourself.
I like that rephrasing. Saying that sort of narcissistic is a little bit of a harsh way to phrase the idea.
Yeah, and there's a spectrum, and I think there's an idea that spiritual practices will have the range of human possibility as well. Right, And just because you pray doesn't mean that you are a moral person, and just because you meditate doesn't mean that you are not a great narcissist. Right, These are not silver bullets.
Looking at the number of scandals you see in spiritual communities as a clue to that last one, I've noticed that tendency in myself, right, which is that it becomes just this interior focus, and for me, that tends to be a place where when that goes too far, I find myself in trouble. Because as a recovering alcoholic, I mean, one of the very first lessons was it's by helping
others that you stay sober, you know. And so let's move on from there to a topic that if you'd asked me two weeks ago, I would have said, I don't see this showing up on my agenda to discuss with Christa, which is AI. And the reason is because you said something about it that in typical fashions, you really sort of just arrested my attention, and you said, the bedrock fact lost in all the spectacle and speculation, is that what we are marveling at when we marvel
at chat GPT is ourselves. It is a student of a mirror on all the kinds of intelligence we possess, good, bad and ugly, and all the ways we interact. And that is a fascinating way to sort of think about it.
Yeah, you know, I was fortunate, and this wasn't very long ago, because I mean we all know now that there have been places in people that were working on this, but I think it kind of really burst into public view very suddenly for most of us. And I was very fortunate in those weeks when this was unleashed to be with some people from the tech industry who kind of just help me understand at a really basic level what this is. And then I have found that to
be lacking. I mean, there's so much to pull apart and react to and on some level, I'm not saying that I understand it, right, I mean, there's so much that is incomprehensible now even to the creators, which is one of the things that's fascinating and terrifying, but just understanding as I did come to do that this would not have been possible without the Internet. This is about kind of unleashing sure that artificial intelligence is not going to be what we call this like five years or
an hour time. I'm so curious to see what we come up with. But it's basically about computers, robots, whatever you want to call it. Artificial intelligence like being able to take in the fullness of human communication and knowledge and interaction as it has become represented on this bizarre canvas that is the Internet, and then kind of giving that back to us. But what AI can do that we can't do is that we all function in our
silos of our passions, our knowledge, our worlds. Right, You and I know about a lot about something and absolutely
nothing about others. What the AI can do, I mean, it's just looking at us, it's looking at human intelligence, it's drawing on human intelligence, but it's able to see all of it at once, so it can work with all of these different ways of knowing and things that we know, and ways that that is communicated, and different ways that human beings relate to it, and it's able to take it out of all those boxes and see
it all together. So, you know, it is an incredible testament to the brilliance of humanity, just as the invention of these you know, these ideas I don't know, like are they device I don't know, or software devices, whatever it is, is also a testament to human brilliance. What that
does is it invites us. I mean, it forces us on some level, but I prefer to say it invites us to get really curious about, precisely about this question of what it means to be human and what intelligence means to us and how we wish to deploy it. You know, you and I were talking about questions a minute ago, and it's very clear to me that the quality of what comes back from AIS absolutely joined with the quality of the questions that are being asked of it and what is being asked of it, and this
ability to formulate a question is a human superpower. And I do think that these technologies kind of invite us to step up to that in a new way.
It's really astounding the quality of the question you ask depending on what you get back. I mean, it is such an almost real time mirror of that in a way that is even beyond what we see when we ask each other questions, because the results range from straight out insane depending on how you answer the question, to
very ordinary and vanilla to mind blowingly. I hesitate to use the word profound, but maybe that is the right word, but I love the idea that you share there of if we step back from the fear and the utility and the I would say certain degree of you know, maybe greed that can come around it when we step back away from those sort of normal human things and we just look. You know, My overall feeling is just one of astonishment, is just like, holy mackerel, How on
earth did we build something like this? Because we did build it. Now I know that its ability to teach itself as part of what causes it to sort of outstrip what we're able to think about. But it also brought me back to align from your contemplative reading with James Bridle, where they say, what if the meaning of ai is not to be found in the way it competes, supersedes,
or supplants us. What if, like the emergence of network theory, its purpose is to open our eyes and minds to the reality of intelligence as doable in all kinds of fantastic ways, many of them beyond our own rational understanding.
Yeah. I understand that there are dangers and that this is something really powerful that's been kind of unleashed on the world that we can't be naive about and that
we have to be responsible steward of. But I don't think there's anything naive about also naming what is astonishing, and you know, to use that word generative, like what it is inviting us to see and to do that is generative, that can actually you know, I don't think improve is a big enough word that can actually bring us to a different level of our humanity, our intelligence.
I love the idea in that bridal quote of the different types of intelligence because I mean, one of my favorite sort of like mind games to play in my own brain is like trying to imagine, like what sort of intelligence might an octopus have? Now, I know I can't do it right, but it's a fascinating way of thinking about the world and recognizing that it has intelligences
that are so far beyond mind. And I think that's the idea of you know, some of the very interesting is to bland a word aspects of AI is that it may discover and be able to convey types of intelligences that we don't have, and that can be very scary, but could also be very beautiful.
Yeah, I mean in the moments in which you can set aside what is terrifying if you think too hard about absolutely fascinating. I think we get to allow ourselves in moments to be in wonder.
Yes, yes, I think that's a beautiful way you think about it. If we go back to the generative narrative of our time, right, AI is a part of the narrative of our time.
Yeah, I have to actually say, you know, they're calling it generative AI, and I'm a little bit annoyed by that because really, I really think this word generative is important and I always hate it when words get captured in a context that actually, you know, really constrained them. I know what the distinction is. It's being made with generative, But yeah, I'm a little dismayed by that.
Yep.
Yeah, personally, have you checked to see whether you have that term train mark?
Even if they don't, I'm sure they'll be able to buy it.
Yeah. Yeah, they have deeper pockets in too. We're nearing the end of our time. But I spent a fair amount of time in your most recent book, which is still I mean at this point, what's seven years old, Becoming.
Wise, Yeah, something like that.
I loved it. And there's a term in there that you use, and I wanted to bring it forth because it's a term I happen to also like and think about. And that term is virtue. Say a little bit about what that word means to you and why it feels important.
Well, you know, it's other language for talking about the wolves, right, it's other language for these capacities that we have and practical capacities that we have to rise to our highest humanity to be good human beings, to lead lives that are worthy and I think also pleasurable. And virtues are you know, there's a philosophical tradition of virtue Jews, and I think that virtues are what our spiritual traditions have,
these spiritual technologies to cultivate. I think that virtues, you know, to be kind, to be generous, to be compassionate, to forgive. I don't know all the ways that we kind of again rise to our best of our humanity. They don't always come naturally. They're not always the reflexive move, but there are things we can practice. They are actually muscles we can flex. And the spiritual traditions have all this sophistication about that, and it happens through ritual, and it
happens through wise community, and it happens through teachings. And then I'm just so fascinated that neuroscience has come along not that long ago and you know, shown that what we practice, we become. And that's also true for just deciding to act like a compassion person and becoming a more compassionate person. And to me, that's really just a beautiful discovery and so emboldening because I think, at least in modernity, there's been this kind of idea that you know,
these are qualities you're born with or not. You know, I'm that kind of person or they're that kind of person, and I'm not like that. And the truth is we can decide what will be like and we can become that and these are better ways to live, and that's why there's so much tradition and thought and reflection and traditions of cultivation around them. But it's kind of an old fashioned word. Having said that, but I kind of like it for that reason too.
Yeah, it is an old fashioned word, but I tend to like it also. And I think when we take it in this phrase that you use, which is moral imagination something that's different than moral perfection, I think that shines a light on them in a slightly slightly different way that perhaps can move Although the fact that we're using the word moral there is going to make some
people again sort of be like WHOA hold on? But I think those words are still really useful because they speak to something important.
Yeah, and I think moral imagination for me is language that I feel for me and for a lot of people kind of helps open it up again.
It's not moralizing.
You know, it is expansive and it is creative, and it is about being centered and grounded and tethered and choosing choosing where we're centered and grounded and tethered. But you know, it honors the life of the mind, and it is creative.
There's a virtue you don't name it exactly, but I would say it sort of sums you up to a large degree. And I'm just going to read a couple of sentences that you wrote and then i'll trot out the potential word. Right, but you're talking about growing older, and you say, as I watched my children move through the primal metamorphosis of adolescence, I made a decision to be fascinated rather than terrified. I'm trying to impose the same discipline on my reaction and myself on this end
of agent's metamorphosis. And I think the virtue there which shows up and I think you know, it shows up in the same way we were just talking about AI, right, which is to be fascinated rather than terrified. Is maybe this is oversimplifying it, but a deep curiosity.
Yes, yeah, I guess that's right. Yeah.
There's hardly anything in human life that is more powerful or more possibility opening than curiosity. And it's something that we, you know, we're basically equipped to be, but it's also something that you know, again very kind of stealthily, is trained out of us. And so it's something that's so natural and so powerful, but we have to relearn it. We have to actively seek it out, and it is liberating and it opens all kinds of space for us to keep growing. Well.
I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Christa, Thank you so much for coming back on. I always enjoy talking with you, and I obviously love your podcast and your newsletter, and it's just always a pleasure to interact with you in your mind. So thank you.
Oh, thank you so much. Eric.
I really appreciate it, and I'm your fan as well, and I'm really honored to do this again and I'm always cheering you on.
Thank you so much. Blessings.
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