Suzanne: Welcome to Third Things First. I'm Suzanne Ross, your host for Conversations with Peace Builders who have learned from long experience how to free communities caught in conflict for something better. Now, in today's episode, we're going to try something a little different. We have just finished our eighth interview. And Lyle Enright, who you have not really seen in front of the camera yet. He has been behind the scenes and producing all these episodes and watching them with me and reflecting with me on what we've been learning ⁓ as we've talked to these amazing peace builders. And so Lyle suggested that eight interviews was a good time to pause and to reflect on a season's worth of guests and to review our first season together with you. And I thought that was a great idea.
Lyle: Yeah. So
Suzanne: So Lyle, good to have you on.
Lyle: Thank you for letting me out of the closet. I appreciate it.
Suzanne: Yeah, the closets right behind you there, I think. ⁓ but yeah, no, we we were ⁓ just really reflecting together and thought this was a good time for us to not only reflect with our audience, but also to start to think about how what we learned with our guests this year is going to influence what we do in the next season. So I'm very excited to talk to you about that.
Lyle: Right.
Suzanne: ⁓ we had also, Lyle, there was it was sort of this natural break for us because we had just finished the draft of the revision of The Wicked Truth for the new edition. And you are my editor. Again, behind the scenes, but man, nothing happens good without you, Lyle.
Lyle: We did. My ⁓ in a lot of ways my life is is taking things that people love and trying to make them as good as possible. So I I appreciate getting to do that work with you.
Suzanne: That's brilliant. That is brilliant. You're reminding me of something that we learned actually again from David Hooker at ⁓ he was our first guest of the season and we had him at the launch party and he said that the best thing peace builders can do is learn to recognize when they just need to sit back. and not be the focus of attention. And so Lyle, you're you are you are a peace builder by nature. So I I l I love it. I love it. and so I did want to just like let's talk about the first season and what we were trying to do. You know, what we had set out to do because you and I had just come out of our work at Unrival. ⁓ where we were serving the needs of local peace builders. and sort of we we just had a wonderful time connecting and talking with leaders around the world, but leaders in local contexts. So they were very working in their own communities and often feeling. Isolate it from other people doing similar work. So it's sometimes hard to keep your energy up and your hope alive ⁓ when there's setbacks, ⁓ when things don't go according to plan, if you don't have others to talk to about it and to and to share with. And we were ⁓ man, it was a time of real lot of discouragement on the global stage for anyone who cares about peace, right? We were and still are witnessing wars around the world in Ukraine and Gaza, ⁓ humanitarian and and ⁓ in ⁓ what is it called displacement of people and populations around the world from Syria and Sudan and Congo and Then there's just a lot going on in our country here, Lyle. You and I talk a lot about how to handle the polarization ⁓ and the anti immigrant sentiment and the the ice raids and the deaths that those have caused. So you and I get discouraged. ⁓
Lyle: Yeah, one thing one thing that really struck me from our work in Unrival was just how fragile the progress feels most of the time. Even when it feels it's going well, the patterns of othering. I mean, our our conversation with Andrew Descort defined that so well, right? It's it's not just a pattern, it's a a habit. Of of solving my emotional problems or my my feeling that I don't have a place in the world. I solve that by identifying someone else who is the problem, who's in my way. And even when you're in the middle of changing those attitudes, changing those habits, when a new crisis hits, you everyone falls back into that pattern. And so you can undo years of work and built up trust. Or or someone else, someone who wants power and knows how these triggers work can set them in motion and undo the work that you've done. And so sitting with people who regularly encountered that experience of one step forward, four steps back, ⁓ was was hard and it was difficult work.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it was so it was so valuable. because you know when we we recognize going into it that part of the ⁓ gathering people together like this ⁓ to to renew hope and and to create a sense ⁓ of possibility might be that you decide you know what this I'm done. I've done all I can. It's time for someone else to take the reins and That was just such a wonderful thing to learn and to be honest about that we all have limits to what we can do and sometimes it's okay to let someone else take the lead, you know. You don't have to do it all yourself, right?
Lyle: We actually had the privilege of of kind of seeing in motion at least two people who actively made that choice while they were in cohort with us, who basically said, I've I've learned that I can do better work if I unplug from the thing that's been my whole life up to this point and and try something new. which fits a little bit with what David Hooker describes as as being an understudy, right? What you said at the beginning of knowing when to recede into the background. That's essentially what that choice is, is to step back from this thing that's that's made me feel alive, made me feel like this is my work, to set that aside and disappear for a moment or at least do something new for the sake of doing something better or finding a a new place in which to do that work that needs you just as much. And it's a hard choice. It's a it feels like a a a death moment in some ways. And there's a lot of trust that goes into that choice to say, no, life life doesn't only continue, but I thrive in a new way, and maybe I open up a space for things to transform in my old context that wouldn't have happened if I'd stayed.
Suzanne: Yes, it it's that sense of possibility where you think you ⁓ know what your path is and suddenly it shifts and and and it it's not necessarily ⁓ for you to know where it's gonna lead and that's okay. And so this idea really governed what I was thinking about for the first season, Lyle. What you and I both were just thinking about really ⁓ allowing people to tap into that sense of of possibility, ⁓ of of the joyfulness of not knowing. I mean, sometimes not knowing is very scary, but there can be a certain joy and sense of wonder and excitement. when things open up in a new way. And so I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have Jim and Sally on the show. Jim Warren the magician and his wife Sally, who is a tarot card reader and and self described mystic, Christian mystic. I just felt like I wanted them to be part of this season because they both see their their ministry really. it is to create to to break through certainty in a joyful way, to see it as opening up possibilities. And so we had them on on the podcast and we also had them at our launch party ⁓ for the new edition and they they just made the room feel joyful. The energy was just amazing that they brought into the space.
Lyle: I admit to being the most skeptical of them of all of our guests, just because I had that sense of how does this really fit? Are we shoehorning something? Are we are we forcing a connection that isn't really there? and I enjoyed being joyfully wrong about the fit. ⁓ just because I it it did become really clear how ⁓ Jim as a magician uses surprise to kind of suspend that.
Suzanne: Yeah.
Lyle: Those those feelings of conflict that can be generated or just kind of exist ambiently in a situation. He talks about, I think, being in a Burger King, ⁓ in a rough part of town, and he just feels that ambient sense of conflict and mistrust there, and he interrupts it with a magic trick. And he everybody else is like thrown off the rails, ⁓ in a way that was really helpful and and Sally too, using tarot, which can be something Is mis something mysterious, can be something scandalous. it interrupts your normal train of thought. And both of those things I've learned ⁓ from watching them work, but also seeing how it applies to others, how they were received, I think, at the book launch by people who do similar work and care about these things. ⁓ I I saw a lot more clearly how that act of of interruption or surprise or weirdness. ⁓ is so important to peace building in the same way that play is. In fact, like strangeness or interruption might be a form of playfulness. ⁓ but they're certainly doing similar work, I think.
Suzanne: Yeah. You d did you have time to get a reading from Sally? ⁓ Was it a good experience?
Lyle: I did. I did, yes. It was a really good experience and honestly I felt more uncomfortable than I expected to. I think because the i it was a very like ritualized experience, which I think surprised me. and I I found myself treating it with a lot more gravity or sacredness, maybe, than I would have expected. I I I was surprised to find myself pulled into the ritual of it. In a way that surprised me.
Suzanne: Yes, well, you know, Sally talks about what she does is helping is using tarot readings to help people connect with where the spirit is active in their lives. And I think that's a theme we're gonna come back to and really dive into more in the next season. She just sparked me ⁓ to recognize that when when we let go of our certainty, we have to. Let something else in. And something else is is the thing that we can't control with the spirit moves. You know, we can't control it. So anyway, I was ⁓ really thinking about that for our next season. ⁓ but first finish reviewing this one. we did begin the season with David Hooker because ⁓ I had really wanted to include a study guide component in the new edition because, especially because we had worked with these peace builders, Lyle, and I wanted to include their perspective in it, in the book, not just in the body of the book, which I did. I think with your help, we did a pretty good job representing that perspective, but also to. Create a vehicle that communities and small groups could to talk about these big questions together. So that's why I wanted to create the study guide for small groups. And I relied on David Anderson Hooker's process because it impressed me so much. And the thing that drew me in immediately. was that he talks about ⁓ that the key to change is changing narratives. And when he's when I read that in his book, I realized that was language, gave language to me, but what I was doing with the wicked truth, which is I gave a name to the prevailing narrative, which other people have named maybe better than I have. But in my book, I call it the myth of good violence, as the narrative that governs how we interpret the world, what's happening to us, how to solve problems, and that what I'm inviting People in to do is recognize that they're living within a narrative like that and that there are other narratives available that will lead to better outcomes. And so that just really helped me even understand more what I was doing, right? And that ⁓ I realized that image of ⁓ of Dorothy wearing the of of green glasses, you know, that tint the color of the world. That's what a narrative does. And I hadn't really ⁓ thought about it in terms of you could wear tinted glasses when you can take them off and put on a different pair of tinted glasses. ⁓ so he really I definitely knew we were gonna launch the season with him and he is a very generous spirit and and loves not only to teach but to learn. I mean he was just really a fun guy to ha to be around and to engage in conversation.
Lyle: He really is. Every everywhere he goes, like the the sense of i he it's it's fun in a room with him in a way that I can't quite put my finger on, but that's exactly what it feels like. ⁓ and the the idea of the lenses it it's interesting. I I grew up in a context where we talked about worldview all the time, and the metaphor of the glasses ⁓ showed up a lot, but I didn't fully appreciate until I talked with David, that when he makes this distinction between a narrative and a story, and how often in dialogue it's just us telling stories to one another, you don't learn someone's worldview through the stories they tell. You assume you do, but you really don't. And a lot of stories can be told from within the same worldview, or you can within your own worldview or your own set of glasses, your own narrative. Interpret someone else's story in a way that fits it into what you already think about the world. The work of taking your own glasses off and letting your own narrative, your own worldview be changed by the perspective of the other person is a much different kind of work. And I didn't I didn't fully appreciate that until talking with David. To see that I I'm often in a position where I'll hear someone's story and fit it into what I already think is true. or I'll tell my story and see someone else trying to fit it into what they already think is true. And I'm like, that's not the point. The point is I'm trying to get you to think differently. ⁓ and I should be letting you do the same thing to me. So how do I position myself to be receptive to that?
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and the other thing he brought to us, Lyle, was this idea of the third thing as a way to create a space where we can actually ⁓ approach each other differently and hear differently.
Lyle: Or name a podcast.
Suzanne: Yeah, or name a podcast. Yeah. Would you like to talk about that third thing idea that David brought to us?
Lyle: Sure. Well, and especially since I ⁓ you know, I I love to to write fiction or or deal with fiction, deal with ⁓ literature and stories and and games in my own time. And ⁓ the the idea of the third thing as a work of art specifically really resonated with me. And it gave language for something we saw people doing at Unrival. too where they would introduce a work of art, ⁓ a curated exhibit of photographs or stories, ⁓ movies, introducing anything into a conversation that again does that interruptive work. We're no longer thinking about the conflict, we're no longer thinking about the polarization just for two hours. And we're gonna think about this other ⁓
Suzanne: Mm-hmm.
Lyle: Carefully something carefully crafted, right? Something made. that gets us thinking about something else for a little bit. And it can't just be anything else. It has to be something that's also telling a story, that's also presenting a narrative, that invites us to see a little bit of ourselves inside of it. And once that happens and people are doing that together, it becomes a lot more easy and and less scandalous, less frightening.
Suzanne: Mm-hmm.
Lyle: To say, ⁓ okay, then how might each of us be telling our own stories and maybe missing each other in this narrative clash that we've gotten ourselves into? so that that strategy that he proposed really resonated with me as something really practical that can be done and replicated all the time in work that otherwise feels very abstract and kind of.
Suzanne: Mm-hmm.
Lyle: ⁓ we're just we're just wishing we're just hoping for this all to work.
Suzanne: Right. Yeah, because with the third thing, ⁓ I I love it. I loved it because obviously wicked is a but I think is a brilliant third thing if you want to raise awareness of the narrative that we're living in ⁓ of good violence. And so but I also loved it because in my family and family and friends, we love to go to the movies and then talk about it. And we often do not agree on what we saw or whose character we liked or whatever. And so it the the way David Hooker and other peace builders use a third thing is to create a space where differences are okay. Like it's not the end of the world if someone saw a scene differently than you did. And in fact, maybe listening to them shifts what you thought you saw in that scene. And so it's a way to make difference and different points of view become less fraught ⁓ because we're just talking about a movie or a play or something. It's not the issue that we're all arguing about. ⁓ So it's less fraught, but it also allows us to see how we can learn from one another by allowing differences to surface.
Lyle: Yeah. And one of the reasons I was so interested in this project was because it wasn't just a a new book, right? You were relaunching or or doing a new edition of a book that you'd written about 20 years ago in circumstances that were very different, but also weirdly similar to what we're experiencing now. And now in 2026, a lot of those things have been intensified. Really, and it comes off the heels of of the movie version of Wicked being released. And I I've always been curious. I we've talked about this a lot, but I'm always interested in the new layers of what work you see Wicked doing now in our culture that might be similar or different to what it was doing in culture 20 years ago.
Suzanne: Yeah, that's so interesting because I think when it first appeared on the scene, it was such a pop culture phenomenon, ⁓ that the deeper themes were often overlooked.
Lyle: Mm. ⁓
Suzanne: And even though, you know, hilariously enough, ⁓ there's a talking goat giving a lecture on scapegoating, and somehow the fact that this show is about scapegoating ⁓ wasn't really discussed. If you read reviews of the of the show back then, ⁓ The themes are overlooked and often thought about the show as being sort of confused a little and misguided. And I think because Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman were writing about an a narrative that people are unaware of that they're even living within, things got missed. And I think it's become more and more obvious to us that.
Lyle: Mm-hmm.
Suzanne: Our leaders are c can and often are corrupt and we decide whether they're corrupt or not based on our worldview, whether we've already decided we like them. ⁓ and so corruption gets ⁓ overlooked. ⁓ scapegoating is happening so obviously right now with this anti-immigrant sentiment that it wasn't happening. It you know when I wrote the book we in 06 and published in 07, we were in the shadow of 9-11. ⁓ the bad guys were terrorists and we were trying to root out terrorists and it seemed like a something we could do. But and now we're the bad guys are each other and w we can't root each other out. ⁓
Lyle: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Suzanne: What I don't even know what the approach is there. We're trying to silence one another. So the this intensity around ⁓ scapegoating and othering it has just become so problematic. It's just gotten worse, Lyle, which is why I thought. It's worth taking the time to revise this book to reflect the current circumstances because it's even more relevant than ever.
Lyle: Yeah. I feel that too.
Suzanne: Amaz Yeah, I feel it too. And it's still such a wonderful third thing because it's still very popular. ⁓ and the movies brought more attention to it. And I thought, well, it's a very valuable third thing for what the kind of ⁓ partisanship and hyper antagonism that we're trying to break through. So
Lyle: Mm-hmm. And it was a great launch pad for our conversation with Brian Ammons, right? Where we I think he's one of the only interviews we did that was mostly about Wicked. Most of our conversations have been about peace building broadly, or about the use of the third thing, or use Wicked as kind of a framing device. And Brian really wanted to talk about the show and about the story and about the narrative ⁓ that's present in there and how it can get read through our own narratives in a way that might cause us to miss all those things that you were talking about.
Suzanne: Yeah, yeah, he certainly brought a new perspective to define gravity for me. Is I had seen it as most everyone had seen it as this anthem of i individual ⁓ rebellion against the powers, you know, alphabets now.
Lyle: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Suzanne: Completely disappointed. The wizard is not who she thought he was. He's not a heroic figure. She's gonna be the hero. And I saw it as this how everyone was reading it. And Brian was like, Did you notice what happened just before she sings Divine Gravity? I'm like, Yeah, what do you mean? You know, and so he talked and and that was one of the ⁓ values of the movie. Was that that grimmery moment where she reads the grimmery? Was able to be ⁓ spend a little more time with it in the movie, and you could actually see the grimmery open itself up to Elphaba and show her how to read it. And Brian pointed out that Alphabet is not acting alone when she sings Define Gravity. She's giving voice to a community that's calling her, and that's giving her sharing its wisdom with her. And so she is acting for and on behalf of the community. And that just sort of blew my mind. It's completely, I think, aligned with how Peace Builders see their work. ⁓ they may be personally affected by it, obviously, and be angry like Elphaba's angry. ⁓ but they're acting not on their own behalf, they're acting for others. And maybe, yeah, could you talk a little bit because Brian touched on that, and then Andrew and Gena both connected for us this theme of anger in the face of injustice, which is really what Elphaba ⁓
Lyle: Right. Well, and I think that for first off, Andrew's interview was a great reminder to me of how important it is to bring your feelings to these conversations and to not be ⁓ to not treat it as though I have to check my feelings in order to have a rational conversation about these things. That a lot of the times the the feelings are what generates the sense that something's wrong and I need to give them space and sit with them. And he's he's amazing at doing that.
Suzanne: acting out of.
Lyle: But he also ⁓ raises this distinction that I'm still puzzling through about speaking on behalf of your anger rather than letting your anger speak through you. And I think that was a great distillation, too, of what Brian was doing in his interpretation of Defying Gravity, because Elphaba has a choice then. She can either speak on behalf of the community with the voice of the community. Or she can fall into this lie that she is doing it herself. And the song kind of names like this choice between doing one or the other. And for a portion of the story, she does treat it like she's all on her own. She does fall into this illusion that she's doing it all on her own, and it's her against the wizard, and it's all just head-on. And the the reminder that there's a community behind her giving her. It's wisdom that's asked her to speak for it is what opens up the new possibility that I could do this differently, that there could be another way to solve this problem. And I think that's present in part of what Andrew is saying, that to speak from your anger is in a sense to say, I stand alone in defiance against this unmovable thing. Which tells one kind of story, but to say I speak on behalf of not only my own anger, but of this community that is supporting me. it doesn't sound like it's different, but it is. It's the just the act of having a community that is pooling its wisdom creates new opportunities and new possibilities that we're open to seeing. And we we forget that. We become a bad representative, in fact.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah.
Lyle: if we let ourselves believe we're doing this all on our own. ⁓ we be we become a bad spokesperson, a bad ally, because of who we become if we imagine that we are alone facing this horrible thing.
Suzanne: Yeah. Well, yeah, and both you know, Gena spoke on about that too, about ⁓ when you feel ⁓ that something is very urgent and you have to act. ⁓ she she said, you know, things are often as serious as they seem, but not as urgent. And she sh both she and Andrew said that When you're feeling that anger, you need to take a moment to grieve the injustice that you're facing, to grieve the fact that you might be powerless in this situation to stop it. ⁓ and so Andrew spent a lot of time talking about anger and how to move through it. And and Jenna said that unless you move through it,
Lyle: Yeah, it's
Suzanne: you won't find the energy, the nonviolent path forward, what you were just saying. You will not find the alternative to mirroring, you know, Alphabet mirrors the wizard ⁓ and uses his same methods. They're both out to destroy one another, you know. Unless we grieve, ⁓ we won't find that capacity to remain calm. And which brings us to ⁓ Julia's work.
Lyle: Mm-hmm. Thanks. Mm-hmm.
Suzanne: with healing the racial divide in Charlotte. Julia Robinson Moore does this amazing work with building the capacity for people to engage in conversations where they might feel shame or anger or resentment and ⁓ gather them in a way that builds their capacity to stay connected with. what both Gena and Julia talk about staying connected with your upper cortical regions in your brain. You know, ⁓ they both talk about new the neuroscience of of conflict and peace. And ⁓ Julia's doing amazing work with churches in Charlotte that have ⁓ graveyards that have both the burial sites for
Lyle: Right. Yeah.
Suzanne: The slaveholders and whose descendants still go to church there, and ⁓ part of the graveyard that is neglected and not marked very well, where the enslaved people were buried, and their descendants also still going to church there. And how do you create a space where ⁓ people can come together to say, you know what? The sign, that sign.
Lyle: Yeah.
Suzanne: Of the neglected graveyard is a sign that we still have a lot of work to do, that there's healing work we need to do. And she brings people together around that shared project. And it's stunning what happens. ⁓
Lyle: Julia's work synthesizes so many of the insights we've gotten through this season and before. ⁓ in my own reading, I I found this interesting distinction. It was really helpful between feeling and emotion. I think, you know, people can be, especially when they're activists, can be criticized for being too emotional, you know, being driven by their emotions and not by reason or whatever. ⁓ But this distinction I ran across is ⁓ emotions are the fleeting sensations, right? The things that come on really intensely and then go away. Feelings are what stick around, is essentially what's being said. When an emotion leaves, what's the feeling that stays behind and keeps working on you long term? And I'll since I have it by I'll I'll plug ⁓ Gena's new book, ⁓ The Nonviolent Brain, where early on she talks about.
Suzanne: Mm-hmm.
Lyle: Out sitting with a feeling, giving it space, is what leads to new questions. The grief that she and Andrew both talk about is a version of sitting with those feelings and letting them give rise to new questions. And that's essentially what Julia does with people in these churches or with her students, is she creates this kind of little laboratory. She pulls them out in nature. She brings them together. She she takes them to the grave site. She very intentionally leads with her faith, but gives people permission to fit these faith practices into a different or more secular narrative if they need to. But the the work that she does is to position people to, I think, make those distinctions, to have the very intense emotions that are brought up by this experience, let them happen.
Suzanne: Mm-hmm.
Lyle: Let them dissipate and then sense, okay, what feeling, what what is left over once I've let the big emotions happen, sat with them, let them have their say? I'm left with with something else. And that deeper feeling is giving rise to questions. What do I really think about this? What do I really want to do? What's really true here? And how am I going to be responsible for it? Right.
Suzanne: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Lyle: And the work that she's managed to accomplish, I think, is because she brings people to that space where the emotions get to fry and leave behind this feeling that brings people together because it is what David talks about: the new imagination of a future together, where this reality of the grave behind the church. doesn't scandalize us anymore to the point where it's something we're so ashamed of, we have to bury and forget about, but we can unearth it, we can face it together. And doing that lets us think, okay, how are we going to be a new community together going forward?
Suzanne: Yeah, you named it perfectly there, Lyle, because That's what David's process does, and Julia's is a lived example of that, which is getting in touch with the fact of that there's something about the present that is ⁓ I don't want to live with this anymore. And until you can get in touch with that feeling, you can't start to ask, well, is there a better future for us? And how would we get there? And that's what she does. And it it When I heard about her project, ⁓ I've known Julia for years through the mimetic theory Girard community and got and kind of watched as this project grew, and I see it as one of the most hopeful, pot filled with possibility. For how we can actually approach healing the racial divide and the legacy of slavery in this country. I haven't heard of a process like hers that deals with the legacy of slavery in a way that allows by using this third thing of the the graveyards and the project of of of. restoring the the the graveyards she allows what you're saying is those deep ⁓ emotions that make us not want to engage she finds a way to let them be present but without derailing the conversation so I I think Julia's project is the most there there's hope that that we can you know as a nation, deal with that legacy of slavery in a productive, hopeful way and come to a vision together for the future that is not on the table at the moment, unfortunately.
Lyle: Well, one of things one of the things she does that I think is so radical is in a in a culture that really looks to cultivate emotion, right? It's it is we won't get into it now, right? But it is useful to have people feeling things intensely all the time, right? And what Julia's work does is it it puts people in a situation to recognize the really intense emotions don't last forever. And once you've let them do what they're gonna do.
Suzanne: Yeah.
Lyle: And and they aren't there anymore, what you are left with is the material from which you can build something better together. It will still hurt, but to to act out of those first initial really intense emotions ⁓ will keep you derailed. It will keep you in the cycle. But if you let them end and and leave behind something more.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Lyle: solid, more true, now you really have something to work with.
Suzanne: Right. Absolutely. Yeah, she's a she she's doing amazing work. I'm I'm honored to know her and call her friend. so that brings us, Lyle, to our last interview of the season. We ended in an in a unexpected way.
Lyle: Me too.
Suzanne: by we had been talking with people about their work in peace building, you know, from a ⁓ emotional work, practical work, and then we decided to talk with a quantum physicist. And I did
Lyle: Yeah, talk about talk about taking the very like down to earth, very concrete material stuff that Julie is doing and then shoot it right back up into like the quantum cosmic perspective. ⁓
Suzanne: Yes, and and but what Pablo brought back into is a real practical way to talk about uncertainty, ⁓ which which had been kind of popping up throughout our our season as a conversation and
Lyle: Mm-hmm.
Suzanne: He is, yes, someone again I've known for years through the ⁓ mimetic theory community, and he has a a little book that I've read multiple times called Reflection in the Waves, and I still not sure I completely understand it. However, what I grasp from Pablo is that quantum uncertainty, you know, apparently the theory that that the world
Lyle: Mm.
Suzanne: is an inherently uncertain, unknowable place. It's just filled with probability. And you can never really quite know what is actually true until someone observes it. So there's this weird well people who are interested in quantum physics know the problem of of uncertainty or the what they call the measurement problem.
Lyle: Mm-hmm.
Suzanne: But anyway, Pablo takes this wonderful mimetic insight that humans are mimetic, that we are created in relationships with one another, and who we are is the product of all these influences, what we call models in mimetic theory, models for how we think and feel and desire, especially what we desire. And that the uncertainty. ⁓ in these quantum measurement problems has been the uncertainty of the human observer has been ignored, as if there's no uncertainty, ⁓ no probabilities present in the human observer. And he brings that back in and says, you know, we are unique individuals. And every time we make a choice or a decision, it's just one, our oneness making that. But that decision is shaped by all of these influences that have created a worldview, a narrative through which we act. And our action is our free choice, but that multiplicity of influence is always present.
Lyle: Yeah. We've talked about this interview a lot, and I didn't fully appreciate this element until you brought it up right now. It's almost like the the first off, what I think is most helpful in Pablo's interview is the the emphasis he puts on humanity again, right? He he gives some language for that sense that there is something unique about humanity in the the the cosmic stage, or I suppose anything with conscious with ⁓ consciousness or sentience, right? That there's something about our way of perceiving the world that that is interactive with it in a way that we tend to downplay. ⁓ and I think an essential part of our dignity as human beings, our spirituality, is that effect we have on things that might be very tiny, but it's also incredibly unique and and shouldn't be ⁓ shoved to the side too quickly.
Suzanne: Hmm.
Lyle: But that idea that when I go and I observe when I I collapse something just by being there, that idea that there's still an open part of me, right? Or many open parts of me, ⁓ if you want to call it like zeros and ones or something that's open and closed, whatever it is, you know, I am still not fully collapsed into reality except by my relationships with other people. And the effects that they have on me. And so my capacity to have a a good or authentic effect on the world around me is entirely dependent upon the the quality of the the models around me, the quality of the influences that are are building me as an observer, as someone who interacts and has an effect on the world, who who contributes to this big thing that we call truth, right? And to put myself in a position where I'm I'm making choices about who who am I gonna become. I've I've I've curated the influences ⁓ that are going to make me who I am. And I wonder if, you know, as we enter into an a new phase of technology with social media and AI and and more and more reactions against those things or voiced discomfort with a lot of those things. I wonder if it speaks to a growing awareness that we are cobbled together people, you know? and and if if that is the case, if I am the sum total of my relationships with other people, then I do need to be really careful about w who I let into my life and what the nature of those voices are. And I think the the growing exhaustion with social media is maybe ⁓ an infant form. of of an awareness of that, of of what we would call interdividuality in our in our mimetic theory circles, right?
Suzanne: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so true because he he points out this paradox that as soon as you let go of this insistence that you are autonomous and that your desires are your own and no one is in charge of me, you know, this very ⁓ Western way of thinking about our individuality. As soon as you let go of that, you become more free than you ever were. Because what you just pointed out, if you deny the influence of your models, then you're not free to choose different ones. And you're not free to recognize that who you are now is contingent. It can change.
Lyle: Yeah. Yeah.
Suzanne: And so the he he does such a good job of thinking in paradox, which ⁓ is always a good thing to do when you're you're thinking about human behavior and and what the what are the things that make for peace. I'm thinking now, Lyle, that we could talk a little bit about how we want to keep this conversation going next season. it
Lyle: Yeah, I we've brought up these themes of uncertainty, of emotion, of I don't know. When we've talked about this before, we keep coming back to this phrase by James Allison, which I guess it's just the title of one of his books, right? But the the joy of being wrong. And I think that in this first season. We were asking, where are you finding hope? Right. We'd we'd been really in touch with the the difficulty, the danger, the violence that's going on right now, the sense of of peace having taken three or four steps back. And in the midst of that, where are you finding hope? Where are you able to sustain yourself? What are the the practices ⁓ or the work that helps you? Keep the world in perspective. And one of the things that came up over and over again was that sense of uncertainty and also that sense of possibility. And I might be wrong. I might I might be wrong about what's coming next. And that can be scary, but there's also something that's I feel like everyone we talked to had the experience of learning they were wrong about something, and it was like a moment of salvation. Right. and I can't help feeling like that is the attitude that's gonna pull us out of whatever moment we're in right now. The the ability to face the fact that you might be wrong.
Suzanne: Mm. Yeah.
Lyle: And see your own joy, your own salvation, your own future in the possibility that you might be wrong. Not the fact that you're gonna fall apart and your worldview, your narrative's gonna fall apart, and you won't know who you are anymore. That might happen. But on the other side of that, you are a new person with new possibilities, more free than you were before, as you put it. And and I don't know. I just wanna I wanna find.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah.
Lyle: More of those stories, more of how that happens. How can it happen for me? How can it happen for my family? For my the people at my church and in my county, you know.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah, because it's it's letting go letting go of this certainty that you know ⁓ that you know what the problem is and it's not you letting go of your certainty around your own goodness and who the bad guys are is a is a scary feeling. And I think all of our guests have learned to live with the idea that You have to make decisions about injustice and systems that need to be changed. You need to make those decisions and confront evil where you find it, but you always have to hold the possibility that you could be wrong. And that will change how you approach everything you do. And I think that ⁓ one of the things that we learned through this season is that as as you say, you all the feelings about that have to be allowed to have space. Because I wanna continue next season to talk about shifting this narrative that we're living within about good violence, but to do it in a way that acknowledges ⁓ the challenges of doing that even at a very personal level. And it one of the themes that is coming up for me and ⁓ is this idea of falling is you know when you l lose your grounding in in what you know to be true it when that
Lyle: Mm.
Suzanne: falls away, you have this feeling of falling and you don't know how it's gonna land. And it there's Renee Girard uses at the end of his very first book around ⁓ novels called Deceit Desire and the Novel. He he looks at ⁓ narratives at s at at
Lyle: This is all right.
Suzanne: novelistic stories that either tell us the truth about who we are, and he calls it novelistic truth, or hides it, which he calls the romantic lie, you know, where we think we're autonomous and that we're you're the boss of me, as your toddler would say. but he he uses this
Lyle: Ha ha ha.
Suzanne: I just want to read this quote because it's an image that I'm kind of wanting us to hold in front of us as we think about who our guests are for our next season. Rene wrote, The conclusions of all the novels that are telling the truth are reminiscent of an oriental tale in which the hero is clinging by his fingertips to the edge of a cliff, exhausted.
Lyle: ⁓ plus Okay.
Suzanne: The hero finally lets himself fall into the abyss. He expects to smash against the rocks below, but instead he is supported by the air. The law of gravity is annulled.
Lyle: Okay.
Suzanne: And that just captures for me the all the themes we want to talk about. letting go of certainty, the fear of that, and also the mystery and s and sense of the unexpected happening, and that there's a spirituality to all of this. And
Lyle: Okay.
Suzanne: Maybe that's where we're gonna go too into spiritual practices. I I don't know, Lyle, but I think as we we have a list of like guests enough for you know three seasons worth of of shows, but where we want to focus this year, a feeling like this sense of falling and how do we find ⁓ the practices to hold us hold us up? It may be our theme.
Lyle: Yeah. Well, I think the the framing works, right? 'Cause for for everyone listening, what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a couple months off ⁓ to have a lot of these conversations all at once and and put ⁓ together and and prepare a lot of those. We'll actually be back in November with our new episodes. And we're gonna we're gonna start posting again right between Thanksgiving and the November election. So there's going to be a lot of uncertainty, probably a lot of sense of free fall going on. And a lot of us are either going to be still in the middle of it or we're going to be coming down from it. Who knows? ⁓ but there they're we're all gonna be feeling some emotions of of uncertainty, of free fall, of ⁓ where if if we were wrong, where's the joy in it? If we were right, ⁓ what do we do in the future? ⁓ and And I mean, we're gonna be right on the cusp of a time where we usually set aside to to be thankful and enjoy what we have with our families, right? So how are those emotions all gonna stick together and work in this theme of free fall, and and allowing yourself to hope that the law of gravity will be annulled, that the law of violence can be interrupted. ⁓ with something that's more real and more true. ⁓ I I feel like we're we're planning to tackle these questions right at a time when everybody's going to be asking them in new and very intense ways. And I'm really excited to give ourselves space to have conversations that might anticipate that, be ready to speak to it, and also ⁓ to see what people are feeling and thinking ⁓ as the new year rolls around.
Suzanne: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. ⁓ it it's a break because people won't be hearing from us, but we'll be working. We'll be working during our break and we'll continue to post. ⁓ and also please, you know, if you're not already signed up for ⁓ our newsletter, ⁓ please do because then you'll be ⁓ kept up to date on more launch events that are coming up around the book. ⁓
Lyle: We're gonna be working pretty hard.
Suzanne: and when when the new season is gonna start. So where can they where should they go to do that, Lyle?
Lyle: ⁓ just go to the wicked truth.com. We'll take you to everywhere you need to go. ⁓ I'll be building out the pages there so it can be a hub for everyone who wants to find these YouTube episodes, who wants to ⁓ click on our newsletter button, which will actually take you to sign up on Substack, where we're leaning into the community that we have over there and seeing what we can build over there. ⁓ trying to make the algorithm work for us instead of us working for it, right? ⁓ but that's the the easiest to remember. Just go to the wicked truth.com. ⁓ we'll take you to everything that we do.
Suzanne: Thanks. Thanks, Lyle. And thanks to everyone who's been listening and following along this season. I hope you take some time for a break too and reflect on what you've learned ⁓ with us or in other places. And if you want to share that with us, we're like always excited to get feedback and comments. ⁓ on our post. So thanks again everybody. Thank you, Lyle, for being behind the scenes, but I'm just really excited to have you more present ⁓ next season as we go forward. So thanks everybody.
Lyle: I'm excited to be here. Thank you. Remember to always mourn the wicked.
Suzanne: It's what good people do. Thanks, Lyle. I almost forgot my own sign off. There we go.
Lyle: No.
Suzanne: Yeah.
Lyle: Is that does that feel good? Do we want to stop the recording? Anything else you want to do?
Suzanne: Well well we went longer, but I think it was good.
Lyle: I think it was good. I think there's there's little spots that I was noting as we went that I could probably trim out, maybe about five minutes worth, maybe. but I thought it was good, yeah.
Suzanne: Maybe, yeah. I thought it went really well.
Lyle: Yeah. So
Suzanne: So Lyle, good to have you on.
Lyle: Thank you for letting me out of the closet. I appreciate it.
Suzanne: Yeah, the closets right behind you there, I think. ⁓ but yeah, no, we we were ⁓ just really reflecting together and thought this was a good time for us to not only reflect with our audience, but also to start to think about how what we learned with our guests this year is going to influence what we do in the next season. So I'm very excited to talk to you about that.
Lyle: Right.
Suzanne: ⁓ we had also, Lyle, there was it was sort of this natural break for us because we had just finished the draft of the revision of The Wicked Truth for the new edition. And you are my editor. Again, behind the scenes, but man, nothing happens good without you, Lyle.
Lyle: We did. My ⁓ in a lot of ways my life is is taking things that people love and trying to make them as good as possible. So I I appreciate getting to do that work with you.
Suzanne: That's brilliant. That is brilliant. You're reminding me of something that we learned actually again from David Hooker at ⁓ he was our first guest of the season and we had him at the launch party and he said that the best thing peace builders can do is learn to recognize when they just need to sit back. and not be the focus of attention. And so Lyle, you're you are you are a peace builder by nature. So I I l I love it. I love it. and so I did want to just like let's talk about the first season and what we were trying to do. You know, what we had set out to do because you and I had just come out of our work at Unrival. ⁓ where we were serving the needs of local peace builders. and sort of we we just had a wonderful time connecting and talking with leaders around the world, but leaders in local contexts. So they were very working in their own communities and often feeling. Isolate it from other people doing similar work. So it's sometimes hard to keep your energy up and your hope alive ⁓ when there's setbacks, ⁓ when things don't go according to plan, if you don't have others to talk to about it and to and to share with. And we were ⁓ man, it was a time of real lot of discouragement on the global stage for anyone who cares about peace, right? We were and still are witnessing wars around the world in Ukraine and Gaza, ⁓ humanitarian and and ⁓ in ⁓ what is it called displacement of people and populations around the world from Syria and Sudan and Congo and Then there's just a lot going on in our country here, Lyle. You and I talk a lot about how to handle the polarization ⁓ and the anti immigrant sentiment and the the ice raids and the deaths that those have caused. So you and I get discouraged. ⁓
Lyle: Yeah, one thing one thing that really struck me from our work in Unrival was just how fragile the progress feels most of the time. Even when it feels it's going well, the patterns of othering. I mean, our our conversation with Andrew Descort defined that so well, right? It's it's not just a pattern, it's a a habit. Of of solving my emotional problems or my my feeling that I don't have a place in the world. I solve that by identifying someone else who is the problem, who's in my way. And even when you're in the middle of changing those attitudes, changing those habits, when a new crisis hits, you everyone falls back into that pattern. And so you can undo years of work and built up trust. Or or someone else, someone who wants power and knows how these triggers work can set them in motion and undo the work that you've done. And so sitting with people who regularly encountered that experience of one step forward, four steps back, ⁓ was was hard and it was difficult work.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it was so it was so valuable. because you know when we we recognize going into it that part of the ⁓ gathering people together like this ⁓ to to renew hope and and to create a sense ⁓ of possibility might be that you decide you know what this I'm done. I've done all I can. It's time for someone else to take the reins and That was just such a wonderful thing to learn and to be honest about that we all have limits to what we can do and sometimes it's okay to let someone else take the lead, you know. You don't have to do it all yourself, right?
Lyle: We actually had the privilege of of kind of seeing in motion at least two people who actively made that choice while they were in cohort with us, who basically said, I've I've learned that I can do better work if I unplug from the thing that's been my whole life up to this point and and try something new. which fits a little bit with what David Hooker describes as as being an understudy, right? What you said at the beginning of knowing when to recede into the background. That's essentially what that choice is, is to step back from this thing that's that's made me feel alive, made me feel like this is my work, to set that aside and disappear for a moment or at least do something new for the sake of doing something better or finding a a new place in which to do that work that needs you just as much. And it's a hard choice. It's a it feels like a a a death moment in some ways. And there's a lot of trust that goes into that choice to say, no, life life doesn't only continue, but I thrive in a new way, and maybe I open up a space for things to transform in my old context that wouldn't have happened if I'd stayed.
Suzanne: Yes, it it's that sense of possibility where you think you ⁓ know what your path is and suddenly it shifts and and and it it's not necessarily ⁓ for you to know where it's gonna lead and that's okay. And so this idea really governed what I was thinking about for the first season, Lyle. What you and I both were just thinking about really ⁓ allowing people to tap into that sense of of possibility, ⁓ of of the joyfulness of not knowing. I mean, sometimes not knowing is very scary, but there can be a certain joy and sense of wonder and excitement. when things open up in a new way. And so I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have Jim and Sally on the show. Jim Warren the magician and his wife Sally, who is a tarot card reader and and self described mystic, Christian mystic. I just felt like I wanted them to be part of this season because they both see their their ministry really. it is to create to to break through certainty in a joyful way, to see it as opening up possibilities. And so we had them on on the podcast and we also had them at our launch party ⁓ for the new edition and they they just made the room feel joyful. The energy was just amazing that they brought into the space.
Lyle: I admit to being the most skeptical of them of all of our guests, just because I had that sense of how does this really fit? Are we shoehorning something? Are we are we forcing a connection that isn't really there? and I enjoyed being joyfully wrong about the fit. ⁓ just because I it it did become really clear how ⁓ Jim as a magician uses surprise to kind of suspend that.
Suzanne: Yeah.
Lyle: Those those feelings of conflict that can be generated or just kind of exist ambiently in a situation. He talks about, I think, being in a Burger King, ⁓ in a rough part of town, and he just feels that ambient sense of conflict and mistrust there, and he interrupts it with a magic trick. And he everybody else is like thrown off the rails, ⁓ in a way that was really helpful and and Sally too, using tarot, which can be something Is mis something mysterious, can be something scandalous. it interrupts your normal train of thought. And both of those things I've learned ⁓ from watching them work, but also seeing how it applies to others, how they were received, I think, at the book launch by people who do similar work and care about these things. ⁓ I I saw a lot more clearly how that act of of interruption or surprise or weirdness. ⁓ is so important to peace building in the same way that play is. In fact, like strangeness or interruption might be a form of playfulness. ⁓ but they're certainly doing similar work, I think.
Suzanne: Yeah. You d did you have time to get a reading from Sally? ⁓ Was it a good experience?
Lyle: I did. I did, yes. It was a really good experience and honestly I felt more uncomfortable than I expected to. I think because the i it was a very like ritualized experience, which I think surprised me. and I I found myself treating it with a lot more gravity or sacredness, maybe, than I would have expected. I I I was surprised to find myself pulled into the ritual of it. In a way that surprised me.
Suzanne: Yes, well, you know, Sally talks about what she does is helping is using tarot readings to help people connect with where the spirit is active in their lives. And I think that's a theme we're gonna come back to and really dive into more in the next season. She just sparked me ⁓ to recognize that when when we let go of our certainty, we have to. Let something else in. And something else is is the thing that we can't control with the spirit moves. You know, we can't control it. So anyway, I was ⁓ really thinking about that for our next season. ⁓ but first finish reviewing this one. we did begin the season with David Hooker because ⁓ I had really wanted to include a study guide component in the new edition because, especially because we had worked with these peace builders, Lyle, and I wanted to include their perspective in it, in the book, not just in the body of the book, which I did. I think with your help, we did a pretty good job representing that perspective, but also to. Create a vehicle that communities and small groups could to talk about these big questions together. So that's why I wanted to create the study guide for small groups. And I relied on David Anderson Hooker's process because it impressed me so much. And the thing that drew me in immediately. was that he talks about ⁓ that the key to change is changing narratives. And when he's when I read that in his book, I realized that was language, gave language to me, but what I was doing with the wicked truth, which is I gave a name to the prevailing narrative, which other people have named maybe better than I have. But in my book, I call it the myth of good violence, as the narrative that governs how we interpret the world, what's happening to us, how to solve problems, and that what I'm inviting People in to do is recognize that they're living within a narrative like that and that there are other narratives available that will lead to better outcomes. And so that just really helped me even understand more what I was doing, right? And that ⁓ I realized that image of ⁓ of Dorothy wearing the of of green glasses, you know, that tint the color of the world. That's what a narrative does. And I hadn't really ⁓ thought about it in terms of you could wear tinted glasses when you can take them off and put on a different pair of tinted glasses. ⁓ so he really I definitely knew we were gonna launch the season with him and he is a very generous spirit and and loves not only to teach but to learn. I mean he was just really a fun guy to ha to be around and to engage in conversation.
Lyle: He really is. Every everywhere he goes, like the the sense of i he it's it's fun in a room with him in a way that I can't quite put my finger on, but that's exactly what it feels like. ⁓ and the the idea of the lenses it it's interesting. I I grew up in a context where we talked about worldview all the time, and the metaphor of the glasses ⁓ showed up a lot, but I didn't fully appreciate until I talked with David, that when he makes this distinction between a narrative and a story, and how often in dialogue it's just us telling stories to one another, you don't learn someone's worldview through the stories they tell. You assume you do, but you really don't. And a lot of stories can be told from within the same worldview, or you can within your own worldview or your own set of glasses, your own narrative. Interpret someone else's story in a way that fits it into what you already think about the world. The work of taking your own glasses off and letting your own narrative, your own worldview be changed by the perspective of the other person is a much different kind of work. And I didn't I didn't fully appreciate that until talking with David. To see that I I'm often in a position where I'll hear someone's story and fit it into what I already think is true. or I'll tell my story and see someone else trying to fit it into what they already think is true. And I'm like, that's not the point. The point is I'm trying to get you to think differently. ⁓ and I should be letting you do the same thing to me. So how do I position myself to be receptive to that?
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and the other thing he brought to us, Lyle, was this idea of the third thing as a way to create a space where we can actually ⁓ approach each other differently and hear differently.
Lyle: Or name a podcast.
Suzanne: Yeah, or name a podcast. Yeah. Would you like to talk about that third thing idea that David brought to us?
Lyle: Sure. Well, and especially since I ⁓ you know, I I love to to write fiction or or deal with fiction, deal with ⁓ literature and stories and and games in my own time. And ⁓ the the idea of the third thing as a work of art specifically really resonated with me. And it gave language for something we saw people doing at Unrival. too where they would introduce a work of art, ⁓ a curated exhibit of photographs or stories, ⁓ movies, introducing anything into a conversation that again does that interruptive work. We're no longer thinking about the conflict, we're no longer thinking about the polarization just for two hours. And we're gonna think about this other ⁓
Suzanne: Mm-hmm.
Lyle: Carefully something carefully crafted, right? Something made. that gets us thinking about something else for a little bit. And it can't just be anything else. It has to be something that's also telling a story, that's also presenting a narrative, that invites us to see a little bit of ourselves inside of it. And once that happens and people are doing that together, it becomes a lot more easy and and less scandalous, less frightening.
Suzanne: Mm-hmm.
Lyle: To say, ⁓ okay, then how might each of us be telling our own stories and maybe missing each other in this narrative clash that we've gotten ourselves into? so that that strategy that he proposed really resonated with me as something really practical that can be done and replicated all the time in work that otherwise feels very abstract and kind of.
Suzanne: Mm-hmm.
Lyle: ⁓ we're just we're just wishing we're just hoping for this all to work.
Suzanne: Right. Yeah, because with the third thing, ⁓ I I love it. I loved it because obviously wicked is a but I think is a brilliant third thing if you want to raise awareness of the narrative that we're living in ⁓ of good violence. And so but I also loved it because in my family and family and friends, we love to go to the movies and then talk about it. And we often do not agree on what we saw or whose character we liked or whatever. And so it the the way David Hooker and other peace builders use a third thing is to create a space where differences are okay. Like it's not the end of the world if someone saw a scene differently than you did. And in fact, maybe listening to them shifts what you thought you saw in that scene. And so it's a way to make difference and different points of view become less fraught ⁓ because we're just talking about a movie or a play or something. It's not the issue that we're all arguing about. ⁓ So it's less fraught, but it also allows us to see how we can learn from one another by allowing differences to surface.
Lyle: Yeah. And one of the reasons I was so interested in this project was because it wasn't just a a new book, right? You were relaunching or or doing a new edition of a book that you'd written about 20 years ago in circumstances that were very different, but also weirdly similar to what we're experiencing now. And now in 2026, a lot of those things have been intensified. Really, and it comes off the heels of of the movie version of Wicked being released. And I I've always been curious. I we've talked about this a lot, but I'm always interested in the new layers of what work you see Wicked doing now in our culture that might be similar or different to what it was doing in culture 20 years ago.
Suzanne: Yeah, that's so interesting because I think when it first appeared on the scene, it was such a pop culture phenomenon, ⁓ that the deeper themes were often overlooked.
Lyle: Mm. ⁓
Suzanne: And even though, you know, hilariously enough, ⁓ there's a talking goat giving a lecture on scapegoating, and somehow the fact that this show is about scapegoating ⁓ wasn't really discussed. If you read reviews of the of the show back then, ⁓ The themes are overlooked and often thought about the show as being sort of confused a little and misguided. And I think because Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman were writing about an a narrative that people are unaware of that they're even living within, things got missed. And I think it's become more and more obvious to us that.
Lyle: Mm-hmm.
Suzanne: Our leaders are c can and often are corrupt and we decide whether they're corrupt or not based on our worldview, whether we've already decided we like them. ⁓ and so corruption gets ⁓ overlooked. ⁓ scapegoating is happening so obviously right now with this anti-immigrant sentiment that it wasn't happening. It you know when I wrote the book we in 06 and published in 07, we were in the shadow of 9-11. ⁓ the bad guys were terrorists and we were trying to root out terrorists and it seemed like a something we could do. But and now we're the bad guys are each other and w we can't root each other out. ⁓
Lyle: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Suzanne: What I don't even know what the approach is there. We're trying to silence one another. So the this intensity around ⁓ scapegoating and othering it has just become so problematic. It's just gotten worse, Lyle, which is why I thought. It's worth taking the time to revise this book to reflect the current circumstances because it's even more relevant than ever.
Lyle: Yeah. I feel that too.
Suzanne: Amaz Yeah, I feel it too. And it's still such a wonderful third thing because it's still very popular. ⁓ and the movies brought more attention to it. And I thought, well, it's a very valuable third thing for what the kind of ⁓ partisanship and hyper antagonism that we're trying to break through. So
Lyle: Mm-hmm. And it was a great launch pad for our conversation with Brian Ammons, right? Where we I think he's one of the only interviews we did that was mostly about Wicked. Most of our conversations have been about peace building broadly, or about the use of the third thing, or use Wicked as kind of a framing device. And Brian really wanted to talk about the show and about the story and about the narrative ⁓ that's present in there and how it can get read through our own narratives in a way that might cause us to miss all those things that you were talking about.
Suzanne: Yeah, yeah, he certainly brought a new perspective to define gravity for me. Is I had seen it as most everyone had seen it as this anthem of i individual ⁓ rebellion against the powers, you know, alphabets now.
Lyle: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Suzanne: Completely disappointed. The wizard is not who she thought he was. He's not a heroic figure. She's gonna be the hero. And I saw it as this how everyone was reading it. And Brian was like, Did you notice what happened just before she sings Divine Gravity? I'm like, Yeah, what do you mean? You know, and so he talked and and that was one of the ⁓ values of the movie. Was that that grimmery moment where she reads the grimmery? Was able to be ⁓ spend a little more time with it in the movie, and you could actually see the grimmery open itself up to Elphaba and show her how to read it. And Brian pointed out that Alphabet is not acting alone when she sings Define Gravity. She's giving voice to a community that's calling her, and that's giving her sharing its wisdom with her. And so she is acting for and on behalf of the community. And that just sort of blew my mind. It's completely, I think, aligned with how Peace Builders see their work. ⁓ they may be personally affected by it, obviously, and be angry like Elphaba's angry. ⁓ but they're acting not on their own behalf, they're acting for others. And maybe, yeah, could you talk a little bit because Brian touched on that, and then Andrew and Gena both connected for us this theme of anger in the face of injustice, which is really what Elphaba ⁓
Lyle: Right. Well, and I think that for first off, Andrew's interview was a great reminder to me of how important it is to bring your feelings to these conversations and to not be ⁓ to not treat it as though I have to check my feelings in order to have a rational conversation about these things. That a lot of the times the the feelings are what generates the sense that something's wrong and I need to give them space and sit with them. And he's he's amazing at doing that.
Suzanne: acting out of.
Lyle: But he also ⁓ raises this distinction that I'm still puzzling through about speaking on behalf of your anger rather than letting your anger speak through you. And I think that was a great distillation, too, of what Brian was doing in his interpretation of Defying Gravity, because Elphaba has a choice then. She can either speak on behalf of the community with the voice of the community. Or she can fall into this lie that she is doing it herself. And the song kind of names like this choice between doing one or the other. And for a portion of the story, she does treat it like she's all on her own. She does fall into this illusion that she's doing it all on her own, and it's her against the wizard, and it's all just head-on. And the the reminder that there's a community behind her giving her. It's wisdom that's asked her to speak for it is what opens up the new possibility that I could do this differently, that there could be another way to solve this problem. And I think that's present in part of what Andrew is saying, that to speak from your anger is in a sense to say, I stand alone in defiance against this unmovable thing. Which tells one kind of story, but to say I speak on behalf of not only my own anger, but of this community that is supporting me. it doesn't sound like it's different, but it is. It's the just the act of having a community that is pooling its wisdom creates new opportunities and new possibilities that we're open to seeing. And we we forget that. We become a bad representative, in fact.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah.
Lyle: if we let ourselves believe we're doing this all on our own. ⁓ we be we become a bad spokesperson, a bad ally, because of who we become if we imagine that we are alone facing this horrible thing.
Suzanne: Yeah. Well, yeah, and both you know, Gena spoke on about that too, about ⁓ when you feel ⁓ that something is very urgent and you have to act. ⁓ she she said, you know, things are often as serious as they seem, but not as urgent. And she sh both she and Andrew said that When you're feeling that anger, you need to take a moment to grieve the injustice that you're facing, to grieve the fact that you might be powerless in this situation to stop it. ⁓ and so Andrew spent a lot of time talking about anger and how to move through it. And and Jenna said that unless you move through it,
Lyle: Yeah, it's
Suzanne: you won't find the energy, the nonviolent path forward, what you were just saying. You will not find the alternative to mirroring, you know, Alphabet mirrors the wizard ⁓ and uses his same methods. They're both out to destroy one another, you know. Unless we grieve, ⁓ we won't find that capacity to remain calm. And which brings us to ⁓ Julia's work.
Lyle: Mm-hmm. Thanks. Mm-hmm.
Suzanne: with healing the racial divide in Charlotte. Julia Robinson Moore does this amazing work with building the capacity for people to engage in conversations where they might feel shame or anger or resentment and ⁓ gather them in a way that builds their capacity to stay connected with. what both Gena and Julia talk about staying connected with your upper cortical regions in your brain. You know, ⁓ they both talk about new the neuroscience of of conflict and peace. And ⁓ Julia's doing amazing work with churches in Charlotte that have ⁓ graveyards that have both the burial sites for
Lyle: Right. Yeah.
Suzanne: The slaveholders and whose descendants still go to church there, and ⁓ part of the graveyard that is neglected and not marked very well, where the enslaved people were buried, and their descendants also still going to church there. And how do you create a space where ⁓ people can come together to say, you know what? The sign, that sign.
Lyle: Yeah.
Suzanne: Of the neglected graveyard is a sign that we still have a lot of work to do, that there's healing work we need to do. And she brings people together around that shared project. And it's stunning what happens. ⁓
Lyle: Julia's work synthesizes so many of the insights we've gotten through this season and before. ⁓ in my own reading, I I found this interesting distinction. It was really helpful between feeling and emotion. I think, you know, people can be, especially when they're activists, can be criticized for being too emotional, you know, being driven by their emotions and not by reason or whatever. ⁓ But this distinction I ran across is ⁓ emotions are the fleeting sensations, right? The things that come on really intensely and then go away. Feelings are what stick around, is essentially what's being said. When an emotion leaves, what's the feeling that stays behind and keeps working on you long term? And I'll since I have it by I'll I'll plug ⁓ Gena's new book, ⁓ The Nonviolent Brain, where early on she talks about.
Suzanne: Mm-hmm.
Lyle: Out sitting with a feeling, giving it space, is what leads to new questions. The grief that she and Andrew both talk about is a version of sitting with those feelings and letting them give rise to new questions. And that's essentially what Julia does with people in these churches or with her students, is she creates this kind of little laboratory. She pulls them out in nature. She brings them together. She she takes them to the grave site. She very intentionally leads with her faith, but gives people permission to fit these faith practices into a different or more secular narrative if they need to. But the the work that she does is to position people to, I think, make those distinctions, to have the very intense emotions that are brought up by this experience, let them happen.
Suzanne: Mm-hmm.
Lyle: Let them dissipate and then sense, okay, what feeling, what what is left over once I've let the big emotions happen, sat with them, let them have their say? I'm left with with something else. And that deeper feeling is giving rise to questions. What do I really think about this? What do I really want to do? What's really true here? And how am I going to be responsible for it? Right.
Suzanne: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Lyle: And the work that she's managed to accomplish, I think, is because she brings people to that space where the emotions get to fry and leave behind this feeling that brings people together because it is what David talks about: the new imagination of a future together, where this reality of the grave behind the church. doesn't scandalize us anymore to the point where it's something we're so ashamed of, we have to bury and forget about, but we can unearth it, we can face it together. And doing that lets us think, okay, how are we going to be a new community together going forward?
Suzanne: Yeah, you named it perfectly there, Lyle, because That's what David's process does, and Julia's is a lived example of that, which is getting in touch with the fact of that there's something about the present that is ⁓ I don't want to live with this anymore. And until you can get in touch with that feeling, you can't start to ask, well, is there a better future for us? And how would we get there? And that's what she does. And it it When I heard about her project, ⁓ I've known Julia for years through the mimetic theory Girard community and got and kind of watched as this project grew, and I see it as one of the most hopeful, pot filled with possibility. For how we can actually approach healing the racial divide and the legacy of slavery in this country. I haven't heard of a process like hers that deals with the legacy of slavery in a way that allows by using this third thing of the the graveyards and the project of of of. restoring the the the graveyards she allows what you're saying is those deep ⁓ emotions that make us not want to engage she finds a way to let them be present but without derailing the conversation so I I think Julia's project is the most there there's hope that that we can you know as a nation, deal with that legacy of slavery in a productive, hopeful way and come to a vision together for the future that is not on the table at the moment, unfortunately.
Lyle: Well, one of things one of the things she does that I think is so radical is in a in a culture that really looks to cultivate emotion, right? It's it is we won't get into it now, right? But it is useful to have people feeling things intensely all the time, right? And what Julia's work does is it it puts people in a situation to recognize the really intense emotions don't last forever. And once you've let them do what they're gonna do.
Suzanne: Yeah.
Lyle: And and they aren't there anymore, what you are left with is the material from which you can build something better together. It will still hurt, but to to act out of those first initial really intense emotions ⁓ will keep you derailed. It will keep you in the cycle. But if you let them end and and leave behind something more.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Lyle: solid, more true, now you really have something to work with.
Suzanne: Right. Absolutely. Yeah, she's a she she's doing amazing work. I'm I'm honored to know her and call her friend. so that brings us, Lyle, to our last interview of the season. We ended in an in a unexpected way.
Lyle: Me too.
Suzanne: by we had been talking with people about their work in peace building, you know, from a ⁓ emotional work, practical work, and then we decided to talk with a quantum physicist. And I did
Lyle: Yeah, talk about talk about taking the very like down to earth, very concrete material stuff that Julie is doing and then shoot it right back up into like the quantum cosmic perspective. ⁓
Suzanne: Yes, and and but what Pablo brought back into is a real practical way to talk about uncertainty, ⁓ which which had been kind of popping up throughout our our season as a conversation and
Lyle: Mm-hmm.
Suzanne: He is, yes, someone again I've known for years through the ⁓ mimetic theory community, and he has a a little book that I've read multiple times called Reflection in the Waves, and I still not sure I completely understand it. However, what I grasp from Pablo is that quantum uncertainty, you know, apparently the theory that that the world
Lyle: Mm.
Suzanne: is an inherently uncertain, unknowable place. It's just filled with probability. And you can never really quite know what is actually true until someone observes it. So there's this weird well people who are interested in quantum physics know the problem of of uncertainty or the what they call the measurement problem.
Lyle: Mm-hmm.
Suzanne: But anyway, Pablo takes this wonderful mimetic insight that humans are mimetic, that we are created in relationships with one another, and who we are is the product of all these influences, what we call models in mimetic theory, models for how we think and feel and desire, especially what we desire. And that the uncertainty. ⁓ in these quantum measurement problems has been the uncertainty of the human observer has been ignored, as if there's no uncertainty, ⁓ no probabilities present in the human observer. And he brings that back in and says, you know, we are unique individuals. And every time we make a choice or a decision, it's just one, our oneness making that. But that decision is shaped by all of these influences that have created a worldview, a narrative through which we act. And our action is our free choice, but that multiplicity of influence is always present.
Lyle: Yeah. We've talked about this interview a lot, and I didn't fully appreciate this element until you brought it up right now. It's almost like the the first off, what I think is most helpful in Pablo's interview is the the emphasis he puts on humanity again, right? He he gives some language for that sense that there is something unique about humanity in the the the cosmic stage, or I suppose anything with conscious with ⁓ consciousness or sentience, right? That there's something about our way of perceiving the world that that is interactive with it in a way that we tend to downplay. ⁓ and I think an essential part of our dignity as human beings, our spirituality, is that effect we have on things that might be very tiny, but it's also incredibly unique and and shouldn't be ⁓ shoved to the side too quickly.
Suzanne: Hmm.
Lyle: But that idea that when I go and I observe when I I collapse something just by being there, that idea that there's still an open part of me, right? Or many open parts of me, ⁓ if you want to call it like zeros and ones or something that's open and closed, whatever it is, you know, I am still not fully collapsed into reality except by my relationships with other people. And the effects that they have on me. And so my capacity to have a a good or authentic effect on the world around me is entirely dependent upon the the quality of the the models around me, the quality of the influences that are are building me as an observer, as someone who interacts and has an effect on the world, who who contributes to this big thing that we call truth, right? And to put myself in a position where I'm I'm making choices about who who am I gonna become. I've I've I've curated the influences ⁓ that are going to make me who I am. And I wonder if, you know, as we enter into an a new phase of technology with social media and AI and and more and more reactions against those things or voiced discomfort with a lot of those things. I wonder if it speaks to a growing awareness that we are cobbled together people, you know? and and if if that is the case, if I am the sum total of my relationships with other people, then I do need to be really careful about w who I let into my life and what the nature of those voices are. And I think the the growing exhaustion with social media is maybe ⁓ an infant form. of of an awareness of that, of of what we would call interdividuality in our in our mimetic theory circles, right?
Suzanne: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so true because he he points out this paradox that as soon as you let go of this insistence that you are autonomous and that your desires are your own and no one is in charge of me, you know, this very ⁓ Western way of thinking about our individuality. As soon as you let go of that, you become more free than you ever were. Because what you just pointed out, if you deny the influence of your models, then you're not free to choose different ones. And you're not free to recognize that who you are now is contingent. It can change.
Lyle: Yeah. Yeah.
Suzanne: And so the he he does such a good job of thinking in paradox, which ⁓ is always a good thing to do when you're you're thinking about human behavior and and what the what are the things that make for peace. I'm thinking now, Lyle, that we could talk a little bit about how we want to keep this conversation going next season. it
Lyle: Yeah, I we've brought up these themes of uncertainty, of emotion, of I don't know. When we've talked about this before, we keep coming back to this phrase by James Allison, which I guess it's just the title of one of his books, right? But the the joy of being wrong. And I think that in this first season. We were asking, where are you finding hope? Right. We'd we'd been really in touch with the the difficulty, the danger, the violence that's going on right now, the sense of of peace having taken three or four steps back. And in the midst of that, where are you finding hope? Where are you able to sustain yourself? What are the the practices ⁓ or the work that helps you? Keep the world in perspective. And one of the things that came up over and over again was that sense of uncertainty and also that sense of possibility. And I might be wrong. I might I might be wrong about what's coming next. And that can be scary, but there's also something that's I feel like everyone we talked to had the experience of learning they were wrong about something, and it was like a moment of salvation. Right. and I can't help feeling like that is the attitude that's gonna pull us out of whatever moment we're in right now. The the ability to face the fact that you might be wrong.
Suzanne: Mm. Yeah.
Lyle: And see your own joy, your own salvation, your own future in the possibility that you might be wrong. Not the fact that you're gonna fall apart and your worldview, your narrative's gonna fall apart, and you won't know who you are anymore. That might happen. But on the other side of that, you are a new person with new possibilities, more free than you were before, as you put it. And and I don't know. I just wanna I wanna find.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah.
Lyle: More of those stories, more of how that happens. How can it happen for me? How can it happen for my family? For my the people at my church and in my county, you know.
Suzanne: Yeah. Yeah, because it's it's letting go letting go of this certainty that you know ⁓ that you know what the problem is and it's not you letting go of your certainty around your own goodness and who the bad guys are is a is a scary feeling. And I think all of our guests have learned to live with the idea that You have to make decisions about injustice and systems that need to be changed. You need to make those decisions and confront evil where you find it, but you always have to hold the possibility that you could be wrong. And that will change how you approach everything you do. And I think that ⁓ one of the things that we learned through this season is that as as you say, you all the feelings about that have to be allowed to have space. Because I wanna continue next season to talk about shifting this narrative that we're living within about good violence, but to do it in a way that acknowledges ⁓ the challenges of doing that even at a very personal level. And it one of the themes that is coming up for me and ⁓ is this idea of falling is you know when you l lose your grounding in in what you know to be true it when that
Lyle: Mm.
Suzanne: falls away, you have this feeling of falling and you don't know how it's gonna land. And it there's Renee Girard uses at the end of his very first book around ⁓ novels called Deceit Desire and the Novel. He he looks at ⁓ narratives at s at at
Lyle: This is all right.
Suzanne: novelistic stories that either tell us the truth about who we are, and he calls it novelistic truth, or hides it, which he calls the romantic lie, you know, where we think we're autonomous and that we're you're the boss of me, as your toddler would say. but he he uses this
Lyle: Ha ha ha.
Suzanne: I just want to read this quote because it's an image that I'm kind of wanting us to hold in front of us as we think about who our guests are for our next season. Rene wrote, The conclusions of all the novels that are telling the truth are reminiscent of an oriental tale in which the hero is clinging by his fingertips to the edge of a cliff, exhausted.
Lyle: ⁓ plus Okay.
Suzanne: The hero finally lets himself fall into the abyss. He expects to smash against the rocks below, but instead he is supported by the air. The law of gravity is annulled.
Lyle: Okay.
Suzanne: And that just captures for me the all the themes we want to talk about. letting go of certainty, the fear of that, and also the mystery and s and sense of the unexpected happening, and that there's a spirituality to all of this. And
Lyle: Okay.
Suzanne: Maybe that's where we're gonna go too into spiritual practices. I I don't know, Lyle, but I think as we we have a list of like guests enough for you know three seasons worth of of shows, but where we want to focus this year, a feeling like this sense of falling and how do we find ⁓ the practices to hold us hold us up? It may be our theme.
Lyle: Yeah. Well, I think the the framing works, right? 'Cause for for everyone listening, what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a couple months off ⁓ to have a lot of these conversations all at once and and put ⁓ together and and prepare a lot of those. We'll actually be back in November with our new episodes. And we're gonna we're gonna start posting again right between Thanksgiving and the November election. So there's going to be a lot of uncertainty, probably a lot of sense of free fall going on. And a lot of us are either going to be still in the middle of it or we're going to be coming down from it. Who knows? ⁓ but there they're we're all gonna be feeling some emotions of of uncertainty, of free fall, of ⁓ where if if we were wrong, where's the joy in it? If we were right, ⁓ what do we do in the future? ⁓ and And I mean, we're gonna be right on the cusp of a time where we usually set aside to to be thankful and enjoy what we have with our families, right? So how are those emotions all gonna stick together and work in this theme of free fall, and and allowing yourself to hope that the law of gravity will be annulled, that the law of violence can be interrupted. ⁓ with something that's more real and more true. ⁓ I I feel like we're we're planning to tackle these questions right at a time when everybody's going to be asking them in new and very intense ways. And I'm really excited to give ourselves space to have conversations that might anticipate that, be ready to speak to it, and also ⁓ to see what people are feeling and thinking ⁓ as the new year rolls around.
Suzanne: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. ⁓ it it's a break because people won't be hearing from us, but we'll be working. We'll be working during our break and we'll continue to post. ⁓ and also please, you know, if you're not already signed up for ⁓ our newsletter, ⁓ please do because then you'll be ⁓ kept up to date on more launch events that are coming up around the book. ⁓
Lyle: We're gonna be working pretty hard.
Suzanne: and when when the new season is gonna start. So where can they where should they go to do that, Lyle?
Lyle: ⁓ just go to the wicked truth.com. We'll take you to everywhere you need to go. ⁓ I'll be building out the pages there so it can be a hub for everyone who wants to find these YouTube episodes, who wants to ⁓ click on our newsletter button, which will actually take you to sign up on Substack, where we're leaning into the community that we have over there and seeing what we can build over there. ⁓ trying to make the algorithm work for us instead of us working for it, right? ⁓ but that's the the easiest to remember. Just go to the wicked truth.com. ⁓ we'll take you to everything that we do.
Suzanne: Thanks. Thanks, Lyle. And thanks to everyone who's been listening and following along this season. I hope you take some time for a break too and reflect on what you've learned ⁓ with us or in other places. And if you want to share that with us, we're like always excited to get feedback and comments. ⁓ on our post. So thanks again everybody. Thank you, Lyle, for being behind the scenes, but I'm just really excited to have you more present ⁓ next season as we go forward. So thanks everybody.
Lyle: I'm excited to be here. Thank you. Remember to always mourn the wicked.
Suzanne: It's what good people do. Thanks, Lyle. I almost forgot my own sign off. There we go.
Lyle: No.
Suzanne: Yeah.
Lyle: Is that does that feel good? Do we want to stop the recording? Anything else you want to do?
Suzanne: Well well we went longer, but I think it was good.
Lyle: I think it was good. I think there's there's little spots that I was noting as we went that I could probably trim out, maybe about five minutes worth, maybe. but I thought it was good, yeah.
Suzanne: Maybe, yeah. I thought it went really well.
