Curtis Chang of Redeeming Babel

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. We can open our doorway to relationship, to spiritual relationship in some way.

We will discover hidden amazing untold depths within us. And why I wrote the anxiety opportunity is I believe paradoxically anxiety actually is a doorway into that. On this episode of the Puck, I have the honor of talking with Curtis Chang, a theologian and the host of the Good Faith Podcast. We discuss his new book, The Anxiety Opportunity, where we dive into his ideas about the intersection of anxiety and loss. Curtis also shares his insights into how a dysfunctional relationship with anxiety affects our democracy and the ways we can help the next generation channel these effects into opportunity.

So, Curtis, let's jump in. Welcome to the Puck. And I have to tell you, I am a big fan of yours, and I'm also a big fan of the Good Faith podcast. So before we jump in and discuss your new book, The Anxiety Opportunity, tell us a little bit about yourself and what led you to write the book. Well, what led me to write the book is that, one, the need in the world and my own personal experience.

So the need in the world is that we are living in the midst of an anxiety pandemic. It is everywhere. To take just one, you know, piece of data, the CDC released that last year. Sixty percent of all teenage girls were suffering from anxiety or depression, and thirty percent had contemplated suicide because of the distress. Thirty percent.

So that's one data point, but behind that data point is an even greater pandemic because behind every anxious daughter are at least two anxious other adults and so you know and then you see this in statistics that at all age ranges we're seeing a sharp increase in anxiety that certainly you know the pandemic probably helped catalyze some of the rise but it was already rising even before then so we're in the middle of a profound sense of mental distress in our society, and I wanted to write about it because I have experienced profound mental emotional distress. I'm a lifelong sufferer of anxiety and probably of the generalized anxiety disorder type. Also suffered a fairly catastrophic loss in my own life of my career as a former pastor of a church because of a an anxiety breakdown. So I know anxiety pretty well from the inside, and I felt like how, we as a society was constructing our response to anxiety was actually deeply flawed. And so I wanted to write write about that.

So that makes sense. And a lot of people, when they have anxiety, they wanna get rid of it. Right? And they see, take a pill. It's a bad thing.

It's negative. You talk about it from an optimistic perspective that I think your term is worrying is the doorway to your best self. Yeah. What do you mean by that? Well, I wanna first say that I don't I'm not saying that anxiety is, not a problem at all, that it's, you know, it's just fine.

Don't worry about it. As somebody, like I said, who has suffered it, who has suffered catastrophic loss of a career, I know it is suffering and and therefore is painful and it is a problem and it can be a severe problem. What I'm arguing for is to not construct it solely as a problem or even ultimately primarily as a problem. And the reason for that is because once we construct mentally some reality as a problem, we immediately set ourselves up for well what's the what's the response to a problem it is a solution right and in our late capitalistic western technocratic society what defines an effective solution what defines a solution that will be satisfying What must it do to the problem? Well the answer is it must eliminate the problem.

So once we've set up a problem solution elimination mental construct around anxiety we've set ourselves down the wrong path and this is precisely what you see in both some spiritual traditions mistakes that spiritual traditions make but also our mental health profession makes that we have overly pathologized either spiritually or medically all anxiety that it must be something that is a problem and which the solution is to eliminate it. And once we are on a path where we feel like we must eliminate anxiety, we've eliminated a, one, a really important part of just normal human reality that is just basic to the human condition. We're we're basically trying to eliminate some some human part of ourselves and it's sets us up for a futile quest because it actually turns out the harder you try to eliminate anxiety, the worse you make it. And that makes total sense, which is again, you know, when you focus on something and then you start shaming yourself because you shouldn't be feeling this way, You're anxious about being anxious, so to speak. But you also talk about again, everyone has their own approach to their spiritual practice, and you do talk about how having anxiety can lead to a type of spiritual growth.

How do you bring the two together? Well, it's important to first define what is anxiety. And so first of all, I would it's important to find the difference between anxiety and anxiety disorder. So anxiety is a natural normal human reaction, which I'll describe its essence in a moment. Anxiety disorder is a dysfunctional response to that anxiety, and one of the fundamental aspects of anxiety disorders is called avoidance.

Various ways we are trying to avoid anxiety actually causes an anxiety disorder. So it's important to distinguish those two. Anxiety itself as a natural normal human condition, it's really what we feel physiologically, what we feel in our body in the possibility of future loss. You know, one way to think about is anxiety equals loss, if you want to boil this down to an equation. Anxiety is the fear of some future loss And when we recognize that that's what anxiety is, it's a fear of some future loss, that shows us why we have to actually make space for anxiety in our life.

Because if anxiety equals loss, if you believe I must eliminate anxiety, what you are essentially saying is I must eliminate all possibility of loss in my life, all possibility of future loss in my life. And that becomes you are setting yourself up for a futile quest that actually generates more anxiety if you've set up your life such that you cannot tolerate loss in your life. Right? That I can I must eliminate all possibility of loss in life? Then you're going to mentally and emotionally and behaviorally go into all of these practices and that actually end up kind of getting yourself tied up in knots so my example for this is my way that I try to avoid loss is rumination.

Perhaps some of your listeners are familiar with this. This is where your mind turns over and over a scenario and what's going on in rumination is you're turning over a situation in a desperate attempt to find some way of thinking, being, talking, acting that eliminates the possibility of loss. That's what's going on. We're we're thinking with one more final turn, then I will uncover the thing I should say or the way I should feel that eliminates that feeling of loss that we want to avoid, but it doesn't happen. It doesn't come about.

We never discover that one final turn so our hands, our mental hands if you will, keep turning over and over and that's when we get stuck we get tied up in a knot thinking about a situation because really what's going on is we are trying to avoid loss because we're trying to avoid loss because we don't like feeling anxious we can't really feel like we can tolerate that feelings. So instead, we engage in these practices that paradoxically lead us to more anxiety. So I would say about this myself because I you know, we live in this competitive environment and and I am prone to anxiety like the next person. But I have to somehow be able to tolerate that unknown Right. And not catastrophize it.

But a lot of that seems to be unconscious. How do we learn not to catastrophize it? I think there's a lot of great practices that a range of spiritual traditions as well as you know psychological wisdom tells us so in my own tradition one of them is learning to get present because what anxiety is it is loss it's the fear of loss the key is fear it's a fear of a potential future loss it's not something that's happening to us right now it's something that we fear could happen in the future so one another way to think about anxiety is it's a mental hijacker and it is hijacking you to the future. It is taking you out of your present reality into some imaginary future reality where it can torment you, where it can it can taunt you with all sorts of losses and precisely because it's in the future in some imaginary future because it does not exist in concrete reality. Anxiety has complete freedom and room to generate all sorts of scary scenarios of loss, and this is what happens when with an anxiety disorders is we start catastrophizing like you said we start actually escalating all of these imaginary losses they pile up one on top of another so one way or one kind of I would say mistake that people make is to think well if anxiety is hijacking me to a scary future, then what I need is a secure future.

And this is exactly what I'm talking about when we are fighting anxiety as an enemy, we think we have to fight it on its own terrain, which is the future, and then we are busily trying to live in the future, trying to secure all sorts of scenarios that will guarantee against loss, which is impossible to get. A much better way to actually respond to anxiety is to actually resist the hijack by staying in the present, by refusing to get absconded into the future. And there's a variety of time tested traditions that help us anchor ourselves in the present. They range from mindful breathing, you know, paying this Christian contemplative tradition to current secular mindful, you know, practices all emphasizes. And the reason for that is when we are mindfully breathing, we're anchoring ourselves on some present current reality in our body.

Right? And that's the other aspect is bodily practices, going for a walk, going into natures, and experiencing the present reality of nature through our senses, through our bodily senses, because anxiety is a mental hijack. It's where we takes our mind into this imaginary future. When we can get anchored into our body into it helps us get anchored into the present. So those are some sort of common practices to simply at a very immediate level resist the hijack and get present and why I think this is a this is a great an example where anxiety is an opportunity and not just a problem because anxiety essentially is a sign.

It's a signal to you saying, hey, you're getting hijacked into the future. You're not living in the now. Anytime we are feeling anxious, that should be a signal to us. I'm living in the future. I'm not living in the present.

Because, actually, when you get present, when you feel your present reality and are living in your concrete bodily experience, it's actually physiologically, neurologically, it is impossible to feel anxiety. Anxiety is a phenomena when we have left the present and gone in the future. If you're just completely living in the present reality, you can't actually feel anxiety. Now the problem is we're easily, as mental beings, easily hijack, so it's hard to do that. But the few moments you do are able to do that, if any of your listeners were able to just, like, I'm just gonna, like, completely feel the temperature in my room, the clothes on my body, the my breath expanding in and out, you know, any other physical sensation.

If you can really lock in on that for those five seconds you do that, you actually can't feel anxiety. Now it's at least an immediate way that is it's a that's why I think it's an opportunity. It's an opportunity for all of us to get more present to our current reality and, you know, life is lived in the present. The life of the future is an imaginary life. If it's not actually real, if we want to live fully with the actual people in our lives and the actual experiences that are real, that matter, we have to learn to get present.

And so anxiety is like a signal to us to say, hey, you're living in the wrong time frame right now. As you talk about this, because I had a mindful practice and it started out years and years ago when I was a young lawyer and I did TM, and there was no spiritual component. It was just quiet the ocean and feel that peace. And, you know, then the meditators keep that place of peace throughout the day. And I'd be like, okay.

The world's burning down. You know, it's effort tools, the power now. It's easy to say be present. And yet, my body was releasing, you know, the fighter, you know, the hormones that you The fight or flight something. Yeah.

Right. And so it's like I would lose that place of calm. And and so how does reframing the future potential crisis? Because we're smart enough to know that bad things can happen. Right?

So somehow you have to be able to be in the present recognizing, yes, that tomorrow will take care of itself. Right? That if you have faith, the man will move. We know the intellectual things we can say to ourselves, but how do we reframe that fear of the future so that we can tolerate it? Right.

Well and this is where, Jim, I think it does start pressing on as an anxiety starts pressing on as an opportunity for spiritual growth because, really, it begins to press on you. Okay. You're exactly right. I can break kind of the hijack in the moment by getting present, but the future is still there and future loss is not only still possible, it's inevitable. I mean, any of us who has lived life at any length knows that the pursuit of a loss free life is truly futile.

We can still get caught and fooled in it, but if we just take a step back, we just know looking back at our lives, our lives are filled with loss. It's just nature of human experience. And so this is the next deeper opportunity for anxiety. It's it also once we can, like, not get caught in the dysfunctional ways of living in the future, we are then invited to think more deeply, contemplatively of, like, wait. How do I want to hold loss?

How do I want to actually hold the possibility of loss in the future? And there's a variety of different ways. You can, you know, you can go the stoic way, the stoic philosophy way, which is simply to say, yep. Loss is gonna happen. So just, you know, live a moral life as best as you can right now.

Do good to others and live by your values as best as you can. And yes, it's all gonna burn, it's all you're gonna die, you're gonna be pushing up daisies and that's just reality. You can do the Epicurean route which is, yep, you're all gonna you're gonna lose all of this so enjoy it while you can, smell the roses while you can because ultimately you're gonna be pushing up the roses as a decaying corpse and and so forth so or there's the platonic way which is a little more akin to kind of the current Buddhist, you know, sort of model which is to say loss is not real, you know, it's not really real. The real is the spirit and so you can kind of float above it all. So those are all possible ways and and if those are your traditions anxiety actually is a signal to you, hey, lean into those traditions because what you're feeling is loss and you need to lean further into how do you hold loss.

I'm a Christian so the way I hold loss is through the promise of the resurrection in Jesus which is the promise of restoration of loss and so you know that's my that's my tradition this is in my book I'm especially writing for folks who are interested in that tradition and might want to explore how what is the connection between that spiritual tradition and anxiety. But ultimately, I think for anybody, whatever your spiritual tradition is, anxiety is an opportunity for spiritual growth because it it does press in on the question, how do you hold loss? How do you hold future loss, especially? What is your vision of the future? It it forces a clarity on that, And that ultimately, I think, is the great opportunity in anxiety.

Yeah. It makes sense. And you you also, again, in terms of the degrees of this, you talk about worrying about things like whether or not you're gonna have food or good health, and then to worrying about the who. Can you explain what you mean by the blueprint versus the architect? Yes.

So again, when we refresh ourselves that anxiety is the fear of some future loss, and it's future and it's imaginary so it's a blueprint it's a scenario right but it's ironically it's a scenario or blueprint of loss so when we think about the blueprint that we have that we get from an architect it's a blueprint of gain it's a some house or some building or some construction that does not currently exist but could exist in the future that's what a blueprint is it gives us a blueprint of the future now what anxiety is is a perverse blueprint of loss. It's it's depicting some scary drawing, the blueprint that says you're gonna lose these things. Now again our natural reaction is gonna be, oh, if I'm confronted with anxiety with this blueprint of future loss then let me scramble for some alternative blueprint that is gonna be insure me against loss and again I'm trying to tell people that's a futile and counterproductive method that actually kind of traps you into furiously grabbing for all these other blueprints that we think are going to ensure us from loss and don't actually do that trick it leaves us crack continually grasping and ruminating or other kind of anxiety disorders.

So what I'm inviting folks is to say actually get present and again I'm speaking from my own spiritual tradition as a Christian that we are invited to actually not have just blueprints of our lives but actually be in a present current relationship with the architect with God himself the architect of our lives this is in the Hebrew scriptures the the builder of our of all things right so that is in my spiritual tradition is this great opportunity involved in anxiety it's again a signal telling us you're not only going to the future, but you're going to the impersonal. Right? Because a scenario is an impersonal reality. It's not a person. And we are instead invited to actually relate to God as a person, as a personal reality in the present.

And that's the key thing with relationships, with human relationships, but also spiritual relationships, I believe, with God is they exist in the present. They are we can only relate to each other as we in the here and now. Parents who know, who are distracted by what they need to do with for work tomorrow, you experience this when you're raising your kids. You it's really hard for you to be present to your kids like that Saturday or Sunday night. Right?

Because you're thinking what you all you need to do, all your scenarios on on Monday morning. It's hard to be present. It's the same way with any other relationship including a relationship with God is that that relationship happens in the present. And this is really important because I think people who are spiritually seeking of some sort, it's important that anxiety is actually an opportunity to help clarify what they're seeking for because a lot of folks enter a spiritual quest because they're actually seeking a blueprint. They're actually seeking if I go on some of this spiritual journey, I will get a more secure blueprint for the future that secures me from loss.

And I think it's fine to begin a spiritual quest that way. What you will find, and anxiety will be the signal, anxiety will be the guide because you'll you'll be going down your spiritual tradition, whatever it is, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity. And by the way, many Christians fall into this trap where they engage in Christianity thinking that if I do this, God will ensure me from all loss in the future. Right? And then that they go they eventually get disappointed and they're faced with a choice.

Do I continue down this journey? Do I reject God because God's let me down because I'm now suffering loss? And by the way, wasn't I supposed to be insured from loss if I believed in God and all that? Or they can press further and say, wait a minute. There's something more to this God relationship than just blueprints that I get scenarios I get guaranteed from loss.

Perhaps I'm actually invited into a relationship in the here and now with the very architect himself. And so that's the opportunity for growth and and that's the, you know, for all folks out there who are on some spiritual journey or quest, I think, actually, anxiety is a signal and an invitation to you saying, are you looking for some scenario? So essentially, in personal reality that guarantees you something in the future, or are you actually looking to relate to a living spiritual being that we call God in the here and now? Yeah. And it's fascinating.

You know, I talk to a lot of young people and in the tech space, for instance, one of the things going on right now is a lot of microdosing and a lot of experimenting with psilocybin. Yeah. And people are really experiencing the dissolution of the ego and this kind of oneness. And they come out of it, and they're using it at John Hopkins for people that have fear of death and for people that don't have a real spiritual practice. And they kind of experience that here and now.

Then the question is, can you come out of that? And then from a relational perspective, learn to, again, whether commune with the divine, commune with the mystic law, whatever your spiritual practice is. You don't have to concretize it, but recognize that we do have more control over what we think about than we realize, and we can focus on the light versus the darkness once we understand that we do have that ability to witness ourselves. Yeah. I think that's right.

And that that of our capacity for spiritual experience is profound and deep. I mean, maybe, you know, I've never done that. Maybe that microdosing opens somebody who previously thought that they didn't have any capacity for that. Right. You know, okay.

But then that's think of that as a doorway as a doorway to actually depth. A depth that does not require a chemical dosing to access, but actually is in you, is within you. I mean, again, in my Christian tradition, we believe that God actually longs for, desires, is constantly reaching out for relationship with human beings, and it's just that we have our we are distracted, closed off various dysfunctional ways closed ourselves off from that. So if we can open our doorway to relationship, to spiritual relationship in some way, we will discover, hidden amazing untold depths within us and again why I wrote the anxiety opportunity is I believe paradoxically anxiety actually is a doorway into that if we can enter that experience of anxiety not as something that is a patholog something to pathologize, something to make to eliminate and go away, but actually as an experience that within it contains all of these things, this imitation to get present, this question about how do you think about loss, how do you think about God, that, it's actually a doorway to walk into to your best self. You know, it's funny.

We can we can talk about your project Redeeming Babble, but when you go back and you look at that story about the 70 languages and the splitting up of people and the inability to communicate, you could basically say it's polarization on steroids because Yeah. It's the inability, right, for people to come together and hear each other. And what I by talking to humanists or Buddhists or Muslims or Christians or Jews, is you realize people are using different words to describe an experience that I've experienced without, as you say, chemical substance, where you do something bigger than yourself, you experience a oneness, and then you come up from that. And then the question is how do you talk about it with the other in a way that's not alienating, but realizing that there is a certain internal piece that we have, that the fruits of the spirit that we can unlock. But sometimes it's just taking the plunge and having that mindfulness.

I remember when I studied for the bar, I thought all this was mumbo jumbo, and the guy took us through self hypnosis. And I thought, what the heck is that? But you visualize colors and you sat quietly, and it was like, wait a minute. Where's the anxiety? I'm experiencing some peace.

And so once you even have that experience, then you can come up with a dialogue and an ability to talk to people and realize that you're not alone. Right? That there is the other people have gone down this path as well. And that's right. And I think, you know, anxiety, again, this is where it can be an opportunity for actually connection and empathy with other human beings, or it can be something that's divisive that we actually mobilize anxiety against one another.

And, in some ways, this is really what's happening in politics right now is politics is the mobilization of anxiety to actually further divide us from one another. And this is actually one of the reasons I wrote about anxiety. I mean, some folks who know me most from my hosting of the Good Faith podcast that I started originally with David French. We talk a lot about culture, politics, society. I'm working on a project right now with David Russell to address political polarization in the church among Christians among the evangelicals especially it's called the after party and so I I'm a little known in the public space more in the political cultural space so people were a little surprised when I told them that my next book was on anxiety and they were asking why are you writing on anxiety?

Again one because it's a subject I happen to know a lot about from the inside and I think that our society has constructed it poorly but the other reason is that I think anxiety is everywhere is it behind it's the emotional driver behind so much of what ails us and in politics you cannot understand political polarization if you don't understand anxiety. You can't understand Trump if you don't understand conservative evangelical anxiety that causes them to go to Trump. You know, I like not to be flippant, but, like, you know, Trump is like Xanax for conservative evangelicals. It's their way of trying to make anxiety go away thinking this was the thing, this is the movement or the person that will prevent me from experiencing loss. And regardless of what you think politically, where you are politically, the reality that underneath our politics and frankly on the left and the right, the left has its own version of this, right, of actually looking to forestall loss by thinking some political means will save us from loss and also fearing if the other side wins that all, you know, all loss, you know, untolerable loss will entail.

You can't understand any political dynamic right now without our anxiety and that we need as a as a society a better way to hold our anxiety because, again, going back to because anxiety equals loss and if we think the answer is to get rid of anxiety, that means we are thinking we must have some way to forestall and avoid any possibility of loss. Now think about this for a moment democracy democracy is based on loss democracy is based on the reality the expectation that no one side will win and gain all the time that every side every party every faction will experience loss periodically regularly oh you know maybe not regularly in terms of predictability but almost at some level you will lose right and if you can't hold loss you can't tolerate loss, you can't actually participate in democracy because that the the system is built, that every everyone is going to experience loss. And this is, again, why the more that we have a dysfunctional relationship with anxiety, that dysfunction is going to creep into all aspects of our society, including our politics. Yeah. And I I couldn't agree more.

Giving people the tools to deal with their anxiety and to transform it, I think, is amazing. And one of the things, though, that I do think I love reminding people about is that even with these tools, you have to realize that in our system right now, social media and these algorithms make more money by triggering us and making us anxious. And so, yes, having these tools, I think, are great. But also realizing that you are being made to worry about the future and learning to turn it off a little more and creating that safe space. I mean Yeah.

When you're talking about doing breath work, for instance, and mindfulness, but people are checking their cell phone every five minutes. Right? Right. It's like the two go together, don't they? In terms of turning off, I think so.

I you know, Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, two sociologists have done a lot of research to show that you can trace the epidemic rise to teen anxiety, I think, pretty persuasively to the introduction of smartphones. It's right around 2012 when smartphones gain mass adoption where we see this massive rise in anxiety for a variety of reasons. You know? One, it immediately bombards us, like you said, with messages of loss, a fear of loss. For teens, it may be something as simple as a scene of a party that they are not a part of, and so they are they have lost out.

Right? Or to more global social issues that before might have been they might have known about theoretically, but now they're seeing images of that kind of, you know, loss happening across the country, across the world. So for sure, I think there's a way in which we have to detach ourselves at least periodically to get present, to not get hijacked in the future, which is what so much of our devices do is they get us into our mind and get us into the future. So I think that's absolutely right. And I would also issue the call since a lot of your listeners are people who are at the vanguard of where technology is going, is to encourage technologists to think about the human dimension of anxiety because I think I was just at a dinner by my birthday party last night with a bunch of VC folks and folks in VC and technology were my friends and I was so struck by how the sort of technocratic mindset can screen out really human emotions like anxiety and loss and so you know the conversation was around AI and there was you know sort of enthusiastic like oh it's gonna gain this productivity this unlock this and unlock that.

It's also gonna entail a lot of loss. There are going to be people who lose because of AI and so that needs to be factored into the equation I believe I'm not this is not my field I don't know how one does that but to pursue something without the realization that this is gonna create anxiety in the world. We lost that moment of recognition of wisdom with social media and smartphones. Let's not blow that with AI and that's my my request to all of your listeners who are working on that frontier is there's a human dimension that we can unleash a great deal of anxiety and all of its accompanying dysfunctions in the world if we're not careful about how we introduce and then use new technology. Look.

I think that's incredibly well said. And my philosophy has been that technology is theoretically neutral. It's how we apply it. So, again, nuclear energy can be used to light cities or can be used to blow things up. And I remember when I was younger, my father-in-law, this was years ago, said he would oftentimes turn off the television or the nightly news because if the stock market was going down or otherwise, it made him anxious.

And so he would Yeah. Control his environment by watching less television. Yeah. I'm not that creative, but when I look at trends and you look at today, the cell phone and the instant messenger and all the news alerts we're getting, the world's coming to an end. That's the the modern approach of your television news.

And each of us has a different tolerance, but realizing the world's not gonna come to an end by putting our cell phone down for fifteen minutes and giving ourselves a little chance to recharge is not a bad strategy. Yeah. And to remind ourselves that what technology can't give us is embodied human experiences and relationships, and all the research shows that those are profoundly powerful responses to anxiety that when we can get present to especially other human beings in actual embodied experiences, you know, there's one study that they did where they put subjects in a tubular MRI machine and then subjected them to all sorts of random small electrical shocks that felt very stressful and anxiety inducing and then they compared it to and because they're in this tubular MRI machine they can actually scan what's happening to your brain the parts of your brain like the amygdala that light up when you're feeling anxious and because you don't know when these you know sort of shocks are gonna hit you they're creating an artificially anxious moment where like in the future you're going to experience some loss and then they did something really interesting where they did this study where showing you know how did people feel if they could have touched somebody somebody else and they ranged from touching a loved one to touching a somebody who you were in a relationship with but you were had some estrangement in the relationship with like you know so a former an ex boyfriend or something like that and then the third is a complete stranger and then the fourth was you couldn't touch anybody at all right and so what they found was the anxiety levels perhaps predictably were lowest with somebody that you could actually touch if a loved one right so you have that reassuring touch what I found interesting was it was actually still better to touch an estranged person somebody like an ex boyfriend it was you felt better to felt lower anxiety than touching a complete stranger but the person who experienced the most anxiety was there somebody who could not touch anybody at all like who was deprived of human bodily relational connection even with a stranger like even touching a stranger you experienced less anxiety.

So we are hardwired I think to live as embodied beings and where most human most are most are true human self when we're in the present with another human being. And this is why I think the rise in anxiety is corresponding with the rise of technology technological devices because they take us out of the body. They take us out of relationships. Right? How many times have you seen in a, you know, Chipotles, you know, a bunch of teenagers physically sort of sitting around next to each other, but they're really not relating to each other at all.

They're all looking at their screens. Right? So we are training our people to sort of lose the ability to relate to one another in embodied form, and, we need to recapture that. Otherwise, our devices are gonna actually make us more and more anxious. Yeah.

And when you talk about the anxiety that teens are feeling and young people are feeling, and then you look at COVID and you look at what we're doing now being on the Internet and not working in at an office and staying home, there is that right brain intimacy that we're missing and that whether it's a pet or otherwise, you're reminded that there is that tactile intimacy that comes from human connection and that text messaging is not necessarily the best best way to really build that sense of feeling safe. So one of the things that I loved a few years ago and and you talked about it in your book was the whole Captain Sully story. And I'm curious about because when I listen I went back and I listened to that cockpit several years ago when it happened. Yeah. And I remember listening to him versus the air traffic controller.

And the air traffic controller was more anxious than captain. So he's like, I'm bringing him back to the airport. Yeah. How did that story touch you and why did you write about it? I wrote about it because it's such a great example of the power of getting present because Sully writes about this.

He was like, I was not thinking about my family. I was thinking about potential catastrophic loss. I was just in the present. And it's an example of where actually that's true when you look at all of these people in paramedics, special forces, emergency surgeons and that they are they're so much of their training is to just get present to get present to the immediate task at hand and because they're so immediately present there they just train themselves to turn themselves off from kind of imagining future loss they're just solving the immediate problem before them they do experience a level of calm that's remarkable when you think of the situation that they're in. And so it's it's an extreme demonstration of the power of getting present.

And now, of course, they've received very elite levels of training to do that. The point I'm making in the book is there's though our methods of formation, of routines, of training ourselves, if you will, that aren't as elite as what, you know, hours of pilot training, but actually are based on the very same principles that we've just talked about about getting present, about actually getting in touch with our body, of resisting the hijack to the future. That's available to all of us. Yeah. I urge our listeners to get the anxiety opportunity.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are techniques that you talk about in your book that I think are fantastic, but it also are you telling your story? I mean, it sounds like you haven't eliminated anxiety from your life. Yeah. I'm leaning into it.

Right? So rather than trying to make it go away, I treat it as a doorway. I treat it as, oh, I'm feeling anxious. What could be behind that? What is it signaling me?

What is it inviting? Although ultimately again because I'm a Christian I believe God is behind that ultimately. But I think that same imitation is true for whatever your spiritual perspective is. There's something that your anxiety is inviting you into that if you rather than trying to run away from it to avoid that, if you get curious, if you lean into it, there's some growth for you there. I couldn't agree more, and I think each of us has to come up with our own finding of meaning, so to speak, and how do we do that.

But each of us sharing our story and letting people know that there is an alternative to just shaking, so to speak, and that there is hope available is wonderful. We're creating for our children some future world that is going to either make it easier or harder for them to be living free from anxiety. I will tell you a very humbling thing that happened to me with one of my kids, which was I was on a walk with them at one point. They said, look, I need to spend less time with you because you're talking about all all these things in the future. Who's gonna win the reelection?

What's gonna happen? It forced me to realize that as an adult, as a boomer, I had to lean into my anxiety and realize that there was a time and place and a way in which you share it. But if we dump our anxiety on the young people, it's it becomes a perfect storm. Right? And so it reminded me that I have to do the work Absolutely.

Because I have to first put on that oxygen mask. That's right. And then you can inspire that next generation, but we have to learn to take care of ourselves and then, you know, be that model for the younger generation. Well, this is, I write in my book a lot of examples, anecdotes about parenting because I like I said, we have an epidemic of anxiety among our teens. We're part of that.

We're both have some causal factors in that in terms of the technology we've unleashed in the world, but but also the ways that we are carrying anxiety that feeds over them. But also we're responding to their anxiety. And if we are responding to their anxiety out of this flawed construction of anxiety is a problem to go away, we're kind of telling them some key part of their experience has to get eliminated. It has to go away because we're saying their anxiety is making us anxious also. Right?

So we can jump into we're not gonna tell them to go away mo for most parents, we won't do that. But we may jump into, like, problem solving mode where we're trying to basically engineer their lives so that the possibility of their loss goes away and that doesn't work for them any better than it works in our own lives and they feel it they feel like they're getting engineered and it doesn't work and so so much of the dynamic is learning for if we can come to hold our anxiety not as a problem to go away but as an opportunity, we can then actually approach and respond to our kids' anxiety not as something that we have to engineer and make away, but actually also as an opportunity for curiosity, for growth for them, and also for ourselves. I agree. I do wanna also put a plug in for your good faith podcast because Thank you. I'm Jewish.

I'm not a Christian per se, but I'm somebody that believes in many paths in one truth. And you bring on people to have discussions about, again, how to live an authentic life and how to deal with polarization and dealing with your own spiritual faith and darkness and challenges and stuff. I think we're all in these echo chambers where, oh, no. That's not what I believe. And I think encouraging people to realize that learning from other people that are struggling to live an authentic life and bring light to other people is only a positive thing.

And so I really I look forward to your podcast every Saturday when it comes out, and I encourage other people to check it out. It's wonderful. So keep Curtis, keep doing what you're doing. You're bringing a lot of light into the world, and it's fantastic. You too, Jim.

I'm honored to be here on the show. I'm honored that you're a listener to our show. And, yes, as you said, let's keep pumping the light out there. The Puck Venture Capital and Beyond is produced by CMVG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation today and haven't yet subscribed to our show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

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