Brené and Barrett reflect on the "Living Beyond Human Scale" Podcast Series

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1:17Hi, everyone. I'm Brene Brown, and this is a crossover Dare to Lead Unlocking Us episode. Hey, Barrett. Hi. I'm excited about this episode. We're coming to the end of an eight-episode series called Living Beyond Human Scale, The Possibilities, The Cost, and the Role of Community. And the whole kind of driver for me behind this series was trying to step maybe, I don't know, back or up and look at what's going on around us. It feels, do you agree, it feels untethering? It does. Yes, I agree. Yeah, I think the velocity of change, social media, shit show, AI conversations in every nook and cranny of every organization we're doing work in.

2:10What stands out to you as the most disorienting, if anything is disorienting? You know, I think it's interesting because between the podcast episodes that we've done and then the events that we've been doing over the last several weeks, I think it's just the uncertainty that everybody's in and not really understanding what's next. And then you said something the other day at an event that really has stuck in my head that we're already not on solid ground and solid footing. So we don't have a real foundation to even start to build and understand what's next. Yeah, I mean, I think that's true. By the way, if you haven't guessed yet, this episode is going to be just me and Barrett But reflecting back on these episodes and what we've learned and kind of what our go-to plan is from what we've learned and what we're still confused about, which is the biggest category maybe.

3:03I mean, I think this is the point. Like you have AI, social media, an election year, absolute devastation and violence and tragedy all over the world right now. And it's important to understand what's happening. and it's more than I think we're neurobiologically wired to handle. Right. And so the point that you just brought up is like, it's not like we're, hey, shit's getting ready to get real. So make sure you're grounded. You're feeling good about yourself and well rested, well fed, well moved, you know, well connected. Let's go. It's we're on the ground and the whole room spinning up and down and we're trying to get on our hands and knees and climb up.

3:48And then all the shit's coming at us at the same time. Because we're not okay. People are not okay. Mm-hmm. Do you think that talking about the human scale metaphor or story is worth repeating? I did it on Astaire's, the first podcast in the series. Yes, I totally do. Okay. So if you haven't listened to Astaire's, the podcast with Astaire, which we did live at South by Southwest, which kicked off this whole series, the idea came to me because maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I was getting my hair done. and the stylist at the salon looked at me at some point and I had like all those foils in my hair and I had my phone against my ear talking to somebody at work and then I was also on my laptop and he goes, man, you are like shot out of a cannon.

4:36And I was like, dude. I'm working. Yeah, you do your focus, I'll do my focus. I got shit to do here, I'm at work. These appointments take 90 minutes to get to my natural color. And so you focus on you and I'll focus on me. And I just kind of looked at him and I'm like, I don't know what that means. I'm shot out of a can. Anyway, I got shit to do. And I'm on my laptop. I'm on my phone. And he came back and he goes, wow, just really living beyond human scale. And I was like, okay, enough is enough. What the hell? So I got off the phone. I closed my laptop. And I said, what do you mean? because I knew when he said, you're living beyond human scale, what I looked like with a hundred foils in my hair and a phone tucked under my ear, my laptop open.

5:24I knew that I looked like a maniac. And so I was like, what do you mean living beyond human scale? And he said, well, I'm a private pilot. And he said, when you first get your pilot's license, it's really amazing. And I related to this because as you know, I took flying lessons in a two seater Cessna when I was in high school as a way to bond with my father. And so he's like, you know, you take flying lessons and you're in these little two-seater planes. And it's really amazing because you take off and you're flying. And, you know, as he said it, I could feel it. And if the wind blows hard, the plane moves.

5:59And if you throttle down, you can kind of feel it in your stomach. And if you do this, like, you are in a plane that's built completely at human scale. It seats two people. It goes fast, but not super fast. And he's like, but you get tired of that. And so then you want to fly a jet. Well, I never got there because I never even did my solo on the two-seater human scale plane, let me just tell you. At some point, my flight instructor was like, I really can't in good conscience keep taking your money for these lessons because you have so many hours now, we've done all the stuff, you just got to go up by yourself.

6:32I was like, well, this is where our story ends. Because if you think if I'm going to get up in this damn thing by myself, you are not okay. So he said, then you get the jet. And he said, when you get the jet and you start flying the jet, you can't feel anything. And it's not built to human scale. It's going beyond human scale fast. And now you're not in the moment at all. Now you're thinking ahead 30 seconds or a minute. You can't be in the human moment. Because if you're in the human moment, you die. You've got to think way out ahead. So you've disembodied and your body is in this moment, but your mind is in this moment and you're thinking ahead.

7:14And this is where very few people crash in those little planes, but in those big planes, he said, it's controlled flight into terrain. Meaning as a pilot, you think you have control of the flight to the minute you're dead. You just fly into the side of the mountain and you're like, oh, I wasn't far enough out thinking. And he said, so I think it feels like you look like you're living beyond human scale. I was like, why? Because I'm on my phone, my laptop, and I'm trying to get signals from out of space with my foils in my hair. Shut up. You don't know me. But did he? But he did know me. I never went back to that guy again.

7:47I was like, you got to leave me alone. But I thought about it ever since. So I wanted to do this series on living beyond human scale. We're disembodied. We're not tethered in our bodies. We're not grounded. And we're being swept away by change. And so that's what this was. So we start on Unlocking Us with Esther Perel, which is great. What were your big key takeaways from the podcast with Esther? Well, number one, I just thought it was really fun to be at South by Southwest for that conversation and to have the live audience. But I think the conversation just about social media and comparison and the connection is not really real.

8:30And I love how you kind of frame it sometimes about social media is not a tool for connection. Yeah, it's a communication tool. Yeah. And so I think for me, that's where I kind of sat in the conversation with this there. I think my big takeaway from her is when the image for the podcast on social media said, I have a thousand friends, but no one to feed my cat. And it's exactly to your point, I think. We have 10 or 15 or something million followers on social media. I do. I know 20 of them. Yeah. And then whatever 20 minus 15 million is, that number, 40 % of them are just following, hoping that something really terrible happens to me.

9:11And they've got some good collective schadenfreude material. Yeah, that's true. I think it's true, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Once you get to those numbers, you got like every week on Instagram, I get something that says, you have a hundred and something thousand followers that we believe are spam. Yeah. I'm like, well, if they're nice, they can stay to balance the people who are actually real or who are hateful. But it's just, I don't know. I don't think we're built for it. Well, and has she framed it as artificial intelligence? The AI is artificial intelligence. I loved that. Oh, yeah. It's artificial intimacy.

9:40Oh, yeah. Artificial intimacy. I love that, too. Yeah, that was so good. And I think, I guess one of my big takeaways that I've thought of a lot is that attention is an undervalued form of love. Oh, yes. Yeah. It's big. Yeah. I highly recommend y 'all listen. I'm going to say that to all of them, though. Okay. Then we talked to William Brady. And so Esther Perel is a therapist. Amazing. Live conversation. Funny, fun, and hard. and really about love. Yeah. It was definitely, there are a lot of truths in that. Then William Brady, who is a scientist-scientist, and he is so interesting because he studies moral outrage on social media and the importance and helpfulness of moral outrage.

10:25I mean, there's a lot of shit we should be absolutely outraged about. I mean, if you look at the treatment of some of the student protesters, if you look at what's going on in Gaza, if you look at what's going on in Sudan, Congo, I mean, like, if the response to that is not moral outrage, then I think something is wrong. What I learned from this, though, was helpful because this was the start of a thread for me of understanding. I mean, talking about an indictment of late-stage capitalism, what happens when you've got technology, including social media, that's built to leverage human vulnerability for commercial gain.

11:16That is my big takeaway from all of this, to be honest with you. What happens when moral outrage, if you study the construct of moral outrage, which I've mostly studied other people's research, I don't study it myself, but you understand that it does serve a purpose. It can be a catalyst for activism and change and wonderful things. It can also lead to dehumanization. Like for me, I just use the student protesters as an example of, you know, the treatment of them by armed, basically military-looking police on campuses, to me, creates moral outrage in me. The treatment of Jewish students on campus also creates moral outrage in me.

11:56And so I think one of the problems is that with moral outrage also comes this self-righteousness that we become the monster we're trying to kill. Yeah. And I think one thing that was so interesting in this conversation for me was kind of the common enemy intimacy and this vicious cycle of connection that's not real, but, oh, do we hate the same people? So you kind of find yourself on the extreme ends of the spectrum because you're so looking to belong to a group of people. Yeah. And when Dr. Brady talked about that, I thought it was really powerful to find yourself just in this vicious cycle of looking for connection, but is that really where you're going to find it?

12:47And is that really what you believe? Are you just so far in now to the connection that you think you have with this community? I mean, I do think that there are people in my life that I'm connected to genuinely. And there is room for disagreement in those relationships. That counterfeit connection around moral outrage is so powerful. And then the social learning of, oh, the more outraged I am. And then his study that shows like they looked at hundreds of thousands of tweets and these things and then talked to the people who turn out to be less pissed off and outraged than what they appear in their social – in their avatars on social media.

13:32But they're trying to belong to a group of people. And the more outraged you are and the harder your comments are, the more the algorithm puts it in front of everyone. This is the bullshit part to me. Yeah. because this is where commerce meets the exploitation of human people because they need us to stay on these platforms to serve us ads and the second we forget that we're just fucked yeah dang i mean we really are because i saw this i will link to this in the podcast page i want everybody to watch it it like was life-changing to me sending it to my kids there was a psychologist from Oxford talking about are some mental illnesses illnesses or a hashtag and what happens when the velocity of messaging around us that if you have these three things, you have this diagnosis.

14:26Oh, man. If you have these four things, you're probably this. If you have these six, I mean, let me tell you, I'm not even kidding you. Like, I take those tests. I'm Look, I'm a social scientist. I'm like, oh, my God. I know. I have five of these five things. This is my diagnosis for sure. And I'm just not getting the right medication. And if I do get the right medication, my whole life is going to be great. But in the next swipe, you'll exactly see what you need to take for that to be better. I know. And then the next swipe, it'll tell you, whatever you do, don't take that medication. I mean, you're like.

15:05I know. Yeah. So I think William Brady has a lot to teach us about polarization, about, again, if you're not outraged by some of the stuff you're seeing, you're not paying attention. But my whole new thing about advocacy and activism, it's an interesting place where that dissects with my, what's the word I'm looking for? Dissects? Intersects? Intersects. God dang, son of a sea cook. Yeah, that's it. Takes a village. Sorry to scare you. But no, listen. Oh, yesterday. Was yesterday the 12th? Yeah, 28 years of sobriety yesterday. Oh, happy birthday. Thank you, thank you. This is what I think about activism now.

15:48Hey, friend, you take your inventory about your activism, and I'll take my inventory about my activism. You have no idea what I'm doing. You have no idea what I'm giving. You have no idea who I'm talking to, who I'm writing to, who I'm calling every week. You don't know anything about what I'm doing. And if you're going to evaluate my activism from what I do on social, you'll have no understanding of me at all. And I believe the same thing about you. So I'll take my inventory on activism. You take your inventory. And my hope for everybody is that they are as comfortable with their inventory as I am with mine.

16:24Amen.

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17:46You know, he has a joint appointment at University of Texas at Austin, Hookham, and MIT. And I think the big takeaway for me is that when we start unleashing AI in vulnerable industries, like our vulnerable spaces, like policing, prisons, healthcare, and we're not careful. AI is just a machine that people put stuff inside of and will be scaling injustice. And so the examples he gives about that are so powerful. And I love, where is that quote? He taught me the phrase, the alignment problem. I think the phrase is 20 years old, but the alignment problem with AI scientists is, are we building systems that are aligned with our values as a democratic society?

18:34And the answer right now is no. What did you think about this? I mean, number one, I was so grateful that he spoke to us in terms that were so easy to understand. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's so good. Yeah, he's so good. I love that he talked about the right people being at the table to build the AI systems. And I also just really loved, I mean, he really brought into focus for me, AI is just what we make it. Yeah. And we're going to screw it up or we're going to make it great. And the other thing is that he talked about that I thought was really disturbing kind of, but then at the same time hopeful because someone's talking about it, is that we just don't have any guardrails yet.

19:19And what does that mean? Yes. Like he was the first time I understood, his conversation with us was like the first time I understood what the consequences are when tech moves faster than policy. I mean, he said we're going to look back, right? in 10 years and be like, what the heck were we thinking? And this idea that when you're building AI, it's great to have the engineers and the computational mathematicians at the table, but you better have the ethicist, the people with lived experience, the liberal arts folks, like shout out to all the liberal arts people, let's go. The social workers, the humanists, they better be at the table too.

19:59Yeah, and I also just really love and give a shout out when he said, well, so far in this 30 minute conversation, and you said scary six times or whatever he said. I was like, yeah, sure did. You're smiling from ear to ear because you got to talk to him offline a lot, like coordinating. He was so great, right? He was so great, yeah. Yeah, so we love that talk. So thank you to him too. Okay, so Jennifer Valentino DeVries and Michael Keller, both New York Times, just award-winning journalists. They wrote a piece for the New York Times about young girl influencers on Instagram who are managed by their moms and then stalked by men.

20:40And this got a lot of comments and a lot of feedback across social. This was a hard conversation. It really was. Yes. You know, and they're reporting and, you know, not everyone's going to geek out on their methodology, but as a researcher, I thought their methodology was just so elegant and sophisticated and amazing. I thought the article was really disturbing and scary and sad about parents running influencer accounts of young girls, not really often making a ton of money, but getting a lot of free stuff. And then the men who follow those accounts and really They send completely disturbing, lewd, inappropriate, sexualized comments and are scary.

21:27And it was interesting because I think we talked very much about how you're reading this and your focus is just like, what are these moms doing? What are these moms doing? And then the invisibility of the men.

21:42And I think that men need to be held accountable. and I don't think there's there again no guardrails no policy the platforms do exactly whatever they want yep it was such an important piece to understand but it was also kind of the underbelly of what social media can be but it's also important to understand you know as moms of kids and understanding what social media is and what it isn't and in the conversation I thought it was really interesting that when they talk because they talked to so many of the people that they were interviewing that it start most of them started off and just like simple ways to really showcase what their kids are doing and then all of a sudden it just materialized into this monster thing almost that they couldn't shut down and so i thought that was really interesting aspect and that's where i would like really pause and double click on the couldn't shut down Yeah.

22:42You know, they can shut it down. They can shut it down, yes. But if you're listening and you're thinking, yeah, you can shut it down. Well, are you listening right now and social media is hurting you, but you're scrolling anyway? I know, yeah. I mean, are you on social media? Yeah. Are you scrolling? Yeah. Does it hurt you? Yeah. Yeah. At 1.30 a.m. when I'm like, damn, I got to be up at 5. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, mentally, all of it. Yeah. Yeah. So. And we asked somebody in our organization the other day, we had this conversation and you asked them, why are you still on social media? And I can't remember what their response was, but it was something along the lines of because this is how we all stay connected and communicate with each other.

23:28I don't want to miss anything. How do I? And I don't know. I got off social media for a year because I just the mental health of it as kind of a public figure. And literally, you know me probably better than you've known me since the moment they brought you and Ashley home. I mean, can you think of anyone who's less cut out to be public than me? No, I can't. I mean, I'm super introverted and I get my feelings hurt. Yeah. And I keep my feelers open because that's what my research part of me likes to do. So I'm terrible at it. And every day I'm thinking, I just shut this whole thing down. I know.

24:06It's such a double-edged sword. And this conversation was really helpful and just kind of like shined the light in some of the areas to pay attention to, I think. It's a good conversation. But I even wrote in the caption, I think, on social media, ironically, that I got really judgy. I came off that podcast saying, I'm going to lock all the men up forever. Yeah. And then I'm going to get the moms into some deep therapy. and then I'm going to enact the rules that they have in France, no one under 18 on social media. Yeah. And you can't even put your kids' pictures up. That's it. We're done. I'm like a closet dictator.

24:50Don't even say anything. I don't want to hear it. It was a really good conversation as hard as it was. It was really good and helpful. Yeah. Okay. So then our crossover episode was Amy Webb and she is incredible. She is, what's the official thing that she says that she is? She says strategic foresight. Strategic foresight. Okay. I just think she's a badass. She's a total badass. Yeah. So this was the crossover episode where it was on Dare to Lead and Unlocking Us. And if you could see the line at South by Southwest every year to get into her talk, and I probably about 20 % will get in and the other 80 % do not get in.

25:29Yeah. And people are in line, if her talk is at 10, at 4 o 'clock in the morning to get in. I know. Because she'll say, here's what's coming. Here's where we are. This is how it's going to go. And it's amazing. And she's borderline prophetic in what she says. I love this conversation. I thought it was so good. And again, she has an incredible way to make really complicated things easy to understand and follow. and she had a really good metaphor in here that I'll let you explain about steering into the oh yeah steering into the turn to the curve or to the ice pass yeah like she's like where we are basically is when you're driving and you hit a patch of ice your human reflex is to slam on the brakes and kind of steer out of it and what you have to do because she grew up in a place where there's a lot of ice is you have to keep your foot off the brake and steer into it a little bit And she said, that's the uncertainty we're in right now.

26:24Like, we're hitting some spinny, out-of-control ice stuff. And we've got to take a deep breath, maintain some composure, and steer into it a little bit until we can gain control of, you know, really, I think the car in this metaphor is our nervous system. You know, like, until we can do that. So I thought the metaphor was incredible. I also thought the information that we're in a technology super cycle, three big things, which is artificial intelligence, wearables, which if you're listening, you're like, oh, my God, I'm not going to be doing that. I'm not going to work with a helmet on my head that casts my thoughts onto a wall.

27:07No, no, no. I've got wearables all over me right now. I've got an aura ring. These are wearables. And then the last one is biotechnology. And that's coming. That's here. Yeah. That's the thing about artificial intelligence that I think, and I'm not saying if you're on Facebook that you're old like me, but the Facebook comments were so decidedly different on these podcasts. They're like, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do artificial intelligence. I don't believe in that. We're losing our minds. And it reminds me of Meemaw at the Piggly Wiggly. like everybody every person in midlife has a line where they're like I don't give a shit whether I'm old or not I'm not doing this part and I think our grandmother's meemaws was like I'm not getting money out of a machine in the wall and I'm not putting any check I'm not doing the ATM but when she went to Piggly Wiggly the grocery store it's really big in this I guess I don't know Texas the south I don't know where it is but I can't imagine the people in the north would have a store called the Piggly Wiggly, but she went and they were scanning groceries and they're like,$2.99,$3.99, 49 cents.