Secret #53: Biological Empathy with Alex Graybar
Are you feeling overwhelmed by modern life, increasingly stressed, isolated, or disconnected from the natural world? This enlightening episode uncovers the hidden crisis at the heart of our well-being—how today’s hyper-connected, fast-paced society is fundamentally at odds with our biological and emotional needs.
Join us as we dive deep with entrepreneur, writer, and systems thinker Alex Graybar, founder of the civic tech platform Votr, who champions a bold new philosophy he calls “biological humanism.” Discover why ancient social instincts, evolutionary drives, and our need for nature still rule our behavior—even as technology, capitalism, and urban life pull us away from what truly makes us thrive.
From the dangers of relentless striving and screen addiction to the profound healing power of a simple walk in the park, we explore eye-opening research, the down-to-earth wisdom of the biophilia hypothesis, and real-life strategies for restoring balance and community. Plus, learn how everyday choices, biological empathy, and reconnecting with nature can break the toxic cycle of stress and disconnection.
Whether you’re a city dweller yearning for connection or a changemaker passionate about sustainability, this episode will challenge the way you see society, and inspire you to rediscover the simple (and often overlooked) secrets to a life in harmony with the world around you. Don’t miss this transformative conversation—your well-being (and the planet) may depend on it!
Highlights:
Biological empathy and human connection
Impact of modern systems on well-being
Biophilia hypothesis and restorative nature
Individualism versus collective well-being
Technology-driven stress and social isolation
ORDER Justin Case Sits with Anxiety: An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Workbook for Ages 8-12 (ACT Workbook Series for Kids)
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 "Anxious Apes: Our Forgotten Truth"
04:20 Biohumanism and EO Wilson's Insight
09:19 Exploiting Primal Instincts for Profit
13:47 Nature's Calm Amidst Digital Chaos
16:52 "Toxic Striving and Overachievement Culture"
18:15 "Unraveling Through Biological Humanism"
23:21 Individualism's Impact on Society
26:10 Culture of Hyperindividualism Critiqued
30:34 "Embrace Long-Term Thinking"
34:16 Biodiversity Protection and Legal Rights
35:22 Global Insights from Early Travels
40:16 "Embracing Human Connection Over Anxiety"
44:31 "Biohumanism: A Compass for Life"
46:00 Biological Empathy Unites Humanity
More about Alex Graybar:
Alex Graybar is an entrepreneur, writer, global traveler, and systems thinker dedicated to exploring creative, grounded solutions that bring people, nature, and progress into harmony. After several years in enterprise technology at Adobe—where he launched social-impact initiatives such as Tech for Good and mobilized global volunteer efforts—Alex earned his master's from The Fletcher School at Tufts University, focusing on sustainability, societal systems, and power dynamics. This academic and professional journey culminated in the founding of Voter, a civic-tech platform designed to bridge the gap between citizens and their elected representatives.
Today, Alex champions a philosophy he refers to as 'Biological Humanism,' an urgent recognition that modern systems often conflict with humanity’s innate biological and emotional needs, resulting in many of the issues we see bombarding our news headlines and social media feeds: societal imbalance, polarization, isolation, environmental degradation (to name a few). He believes reconnecting with these fundamental human truths is critical not only for addressing the pressing crises of our moment, but also for ensuring long-term prosperity for both people and the planet. Through curiosity, compassion, and a systems-level approach, Alex seeks to foster a world rooted in equilibrium, innovation, and genuine human connection.
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Emma Waddington [00:00:01]:
Welcome to Life's Dirty Little Secrets. I'm Emma Waddington.
Chris McCurry [00:00:05]:
And I'm Chris McCurry. And today, we are we are very thrilled to to have Alex Graybar with us. Alex is an entrepreneur, writer, global traveler, and systems thinker dedicated to exploring creative, grounded solutions that bring people, nature, and progress into harmony. After several years in the technology world where he launched social impact initiatives. Alex earned his master's from the Fletcher School at Tufts University focusing on sustainability. So so excuse me. Let me try that again, Ashley. Alex earned his master's from the Fletcher School of Tufts University focusing on sustainability, societal systems, and power dynamics.
Chris McCurry [00:00:50]:
This academic and professional German one more time. This academic professional journey culminated in the founding of Votr, a civic tech platform designed to bridge the gap between citizens and their elected representatives. Today, Alex champions a philosophy he refers to as biological humanism, an urgent recognition that modern systems often conflict with humanity's innate biological and emotional needs, resulting in many of the issues we see bombarding our news headlines and social media feeds. Societal imbalance, polarization, isolation, environmental degradation to name just a few. Alex seeks to foster a world rooted in equilibrium, innovation, and genuine human connection. Wonderful. On this Earth Day, welcome, Alex Grabar.
Alex Graybar [00:01:44]:
Hello. Both are here. It's great to be here. And what serendipity that happens to be Earth Day? I think we chose this date arbitrarily several months ago, and it just landed on the perfect date.
Chris McCurry [00:01:55]:
Well, that is that is synchronicity. Sure is. It's wonderful. So before we hit record, you were telling us a bit about your journey and, which I thought was fascinating. But before we get into that, can we define what the the dirty little secret is here that we're that we're gonna talk about and to help people understand.
Alex Graybar [00:02:21]:
Yeah. I think, you know, I thought about this a lot when preparing for the podcast. You know, what is the secret? What is the secret? And I recognize that the dirty little secret isn't exactly a secret. It's more so a reality that we've seem to have forgotten. And it's that among all of the different things that are vying for our attention today, you know, the poly crises that we like to talk about, isolation, polarization, climate urgency, you name it. We're probably worried about it. But through all of that noise, you know, we've forgotten the simple truth that through it all, we are still animals. We're apes with anxiety, basically.
Alex Graybar [00:02:56]:
We're multicellular organisms that can tell stories. So to put it simply, to answer your question, the dirty little secret isn't that the world is broken. It's that we're not built for the world we've created. We're animals. We're ancient tribal social creatures trying to survive inside systems that are designed to override our biology. And frankly, it's driving us nuts.
Chris McCurry [00:03:18]:
Well, I was I was reading about the the biophilia hypothesis. You're familiar
Alex Graybar [00:03:24]:
with that. Eo.
Chris McCurry [00:03:26]:
Yes. Tell us tell us about that.
Alex Graybar [00:03:29]:
It's really funny that that's the first thing you bring up unprompted because that it it is a quote from EO Wilson, who's the father of the biophilia hypothesis that actually got me started down this journey from an academic lens. So, again, before we were recording, I mentioned that all this started intuitively through me. Sorry, Ashley. Let me try that again. All of this started intuitively for me through my travels and recognizing that it wasn't the differences that brought me into harmony with the place that I was, but it was the similarities, the human connections such as laughter and awe. And it was through that that I started to think that there was more to let me start that over. Because I'm trying to answer it with a story, but at the same time, I also am there is a point here. So, Ashley, I'm trying this one more time.
Alex Graybar [00:04:20]:
So it's funny that you bring up EO Wilson just to start things off because it is actually a quote from him that got me started down this journey of biohumanism. And it is that we have these paleolithic minds, medieval institutions, yet godlike technology, and that is incredibly dangerous. And that is a quote that solidified something that I'd intuitively felt throughout my entire life. Starting very young, my folks got me out traveling internationally. But when I was seven years old, I think was the first time I I went to Poland, which is where my my heritage is and and and my ancestry. But that kick started a lifelong desire to recognize the differences that we have as being beautiful, but that the sameness underlying it is through our shared foundations in biology. That at the end of the day, we are still animals. And so we're driven by those emotional functions as animals, things like love and purpose and shelter.
Alex Graybar [00:05:16]:
Even if our religions and our stories that we tell ourselves are different from Vietnam to to Krakow, the the mechanisms behind them are one and the same.
Chris McCurry [00:05:29]:
Excellent. And so there just seems to be this innate drive for us to be connected with nature and that there's something very restorative about that. And there's a lot of interesting research that's gone into this.
Alex Graybar [00:05:44]:
Exactly. So I think that what's important to remember is that we have we haven't been around as long as we think we have. So the Earth, it's 4,600,000,000 years old, but our minds have trouble comprehending that. So if you try to scale that to something that we can understand, like, forty six years, Humans have only been around in the last minute. And in the last thirty seconds of that minute, we have had two industrial revolutions, and we're in the middle of a third technological revolution. But our systems, the things that we have created such as governments and capitalism and and all of these different things that have brought us into the twenty first century are at odds
Chris McCurry [00:06:29]:
with what actually drives us as those 300,000
Alex Graybar [00:06:29]:
year old, you know, actually drives us as those 300,000 year old Homo sapiens. And there's a very distinct moment in our history that severed us from that history, and it's during the enlightenment when philosophers like Rene Descartes gave us that that irrationality that I think, therefore, I am sense. And and that mind body dualism, that separation of us as parts of nature caused us to go down this path as separate entities above extractive from nature as opposed to being inherently a part of it. For the majority of our history as humans, three hundred thousand years ago is when humans as we know them today were roaming through caves and savannas. And then it wasn't until the enlightenment that we decided to take our separation from that that existence. So what I mean by that is we used to think of ourselves through religion, through philosophy, through behaviors as stewards or participants in the natural world. But through enlightenment thinking, as a response to many different things, we decided that we are above that through rationality. Like, again, I think, therefore, I am.
Alex Graybar [00:07:43]:
And so to trickle down from that thinking, what we have are systems that are built on false premises. So they're built to elevate us from the natural world and not to harmonize with it. So I I mentioned capitalism, for example. The the notion of capitalism is built on infinite growth, yet the reality is that we live on a finite and the the in the interest of, you know, GDP as a measure of prosperity as opposed to, you know, wellness or or happiness or fulfillment. Bhutan, for example, measures gross national happiness. But GDP, though most of the Western world still uses as its barometer for well-being, doesn't take into account things like inequality or the fact that 1% of the world's wealth is aggregated among, I'm sorry. Ashley, let me try that again. 1% of the world has more wealth than the rest of the 90% combined, And that amount of inequality is just counter to what we see as as these human animals.
Alex Graybar [00:08:51]:
We seek belonging, and we seek community. And when we see that there is this massive disparity between the haves and the have nots, that festers at an emotional and spiritual level. And so the examples are countless in terms of what you can point to today that feels like it's wrong. And that feeling, it's not out of nowhere. That is biology. That's evolution. That is a signal. It's a sign that something is out of sync with the way that it ought to be.
Alex Graybar [00:09:19]:
And the unfortunate part is that we've designed these systems to capitalize on that for lack of a better word. We design foods to be addictive and satiating, tapping into the primal need for sugars and fats. Things that used to be hard to come by are now manufactured, and we can get them for a dollar 50. And the issue with that is that we are using capitalism and industry and all of these different mechanisms to tap into primal behaviors, but not the full scope of those behaviors. And what I mean by that is that we have used capitalism and this drive for infinite growth to tap into the short term survivalist parts of our brains, the fight or flight, the fear of of going hungry. The social media taps into our fear of not being accepted in our social bands. But we are also just as wired for compassion and connection, but our systems, we we haven't designed in a way that that is incentivized. We don't get paid a lot of money for cooperation, but we do for alienation and tribalism and gathering attention and intensity through headlines and and all of these different mechanisms again, which tap into the primal fear and the short term need for survival rather than the more long term cooperation and collaboration that is what got us to survive for three hundred thousand years before we decided that we didn't need it anymore.
Chris McCurry [00:10:53]:
And when you say we, obviously, we're talking about, you know, European culture because certainly other cultures
Alex Graybar [00:11:01]:
in the
Chris McCurry [00:11:01]:
world, you know, have not gone down this path or not quite to the same extent. But, yeah, that seems to have been the dominant, what would we call it, script, you know, that that we're all following that competitive scarcity model that at least all this craziness that we're experiencing. And yet a walk in the park can rebalance that almost immediately. So that substrate is still there to connect with that
Alex Graybar [00:11:38]:
stuff. Yeah. I think you bring up a really valid point, and it's evidenced by a ton of research that even five minutes outside can recalibrate your nervous system, that the cortisol that spikes from all of these manufactured stressors, things like email notifications, social media feeds, the the deadline on on a project, all of these things release cortisol, which back in our ancestry, our actual evolutionary needs, it it it it was a a response to a threat that was immediate. But these are manufactured today. The stresses of today would be unrecognizable to our our our caveman ancestors. And to to reconcile that, stepping back into nature where the rhythms are still natural, where the birds don't care what the stock ticker says, where waterfalls are still gonna cascade even if there is a downturn in the market. You are primed for that. That's what biophilia talks about is that we have this innate sense of attachment to nature that when we step into it, it it it really fixes all of these chemical imbalances that are being brought forth through that are being brought forth through, again, these manufactured stressors.
Alex Graybar [00:12:55]:
So, truly, I I actually sorry. I'm mumbling through this, so, hopefully, Ashley can can fix it. But, basically, I wrote an article this week about how stepping outside is an inherent way to tap back into your sense of peace that you can really train your nervous system that there are no immediate dangers. There isn't a panther in the grass. You're not gonna get eaten by going on a walk. And the feelings you have when you're in your office, whether you work from home or or whether you're in the office, these, again, twenty first century manufactured stressors that we've created have us feeling like there is a panther about to consume us. The headlines, the polarization that we see, that we think that we're on the brink of a civil war with the way that our social media feeds curate these aggravating headlines, and that is very real. The emotions there are real.
Alex Graybar [00:13:47]:
But when you step outside, when you go for that walk in the park, when you just inhale a few times that fresh air and listen to the birds, it really centers you in that fact that you are safe. You are secure. And when you feel that, you're you you think slower, you can become more generous and compassionate, and you're more grounded in the present moment realizing that these things you can actually tackle. So a lot of my friends are doomsday scrollers or I'm sorry. I'm trying to a lot of my friends think that it's doomsday, that we're around the corner from literally a civil war, but that's because all they do is they wake up in the morning. They plug in their headphones as they they go take the train into work or they drive in their car alone on the highway, and then they spend ten hours in an office on a screen. And then they go back home, and then they open up their social medias, and they scroll, and they see all of the disasters in the world at once. And then they rinse and repeat that.
Alex Graybar [00:14:48]:
And that's the daily existence for a lot of people in the world today. And to break that chain, to break that cycle, to break that feeling of constant stress all the time that we are surviving this moment, it's broken when you step out into nature and tap back into those primal needs, the things that you actually, as a human, fundamentally need such as, is there a roof over my head? Do I have a sense of purpose? Am I loved? Am I hungry or not? And once you recognize that those things are in fact taken care of in this moment, you become much better equipped to navigate the complexities of the real crises that we are facing. But you can do so with a clear mind and a better sense of of your space and all of that. And simply, like you said, by going for a walk in the park. This isn't three day darkness retreat that Aaron Rodgers would take. This is simply going outside and breathing the air that's already there. There. We're interconnected with it naturally.
Chris McCurry [00:15:45]:
Well, we'll have a link to your essay in the show notes that people can can read. I appreciate that. I think they will they will fairly much enjoy. Well, it it really doesn't take very much. I was reading about an Australian study where they put some some folks on a computer doing some very dull, repetitive task. And about halfway through, they had half the group look out over a flowering green rooftop. And then they went back to the task, and they had another the other half of the people doing it look at, like, a concrete roof. And the people that looked at the flowering groom green roof forty seconds had fewer mistakes in the second half of the dull tasks.
Chris McCurry [00:16:30]:
Forty forty seconds. You know, that was enough to just, you know, recharge things.
Alex Graybar [00:16:37]:
Yeah. It can be very simple thing. It's just looking into the eyes of the person you're with and do the same thing. There's a really fascinating study. Not even study. Sorry, Emma. I saw that you came off mute. Ashley, maybe you can scrap that, and, Emma, you can say your piece.
Emma Waddington [00:16:52]:
No. I was well, I was just listening to you again. I was I'm loving this conversation. The what I was thinking as you were talking about are kind of default at the moment that we've got ourselves into this place where we're operating a lot from that fight or flight system and that. We've had a few conversations with we had one with Ross, White about, you know, the well, essentially, we've had a few conversations about this overachievement culture that we're stuck in, that we're constantly striving. And we have one coming out, I think, tomorrow on this concept of toxic striving that is relentless. And Ross White talks about needing to relent more. And it sounds like listening to you describe really well how that system sort of perpetuates by what we consume, and I'm doing air quotes, be it sort of social media, be it, you know, whatever we're watching on YouTube, but this this narrative that we need to do more to be more, that, you know, we have demanding roles that we need to keep, you know, striving greater and further.
Emma Waddington [00:18:06]:
And, you know, many of these conversations has kind of reinforced this narrative that, you know, it's very hard to get unstuck from that.
Chris McCurry [00:18:15]:
Yeah.
Emma Waddington [00:18:15]:
And listening to you, I'm thinking that, you know, we often try to get unstuck from that by yet more thinking, like using narrative. And, obviously, the work that Chris and I do, we use language in therapy to get us unraveled from things that are not working. But today, we're talking about a different way really to get unraveled, which is coming back to some of that biological humanism, which is this just connecting with the fact that we are inherently well, we are not inherently. We are animals and that we are connected in with our world in many ways that our day to day living kind of denies us from. And I think I hadn't sort of I I like the way it's it's you're simplifying it. We we we have a tendency as humans to be really quite complicated and try to overcomplicate things. And thinking about, like you're saying in that study, Chris, like, how basic, how simple is that? Forty five seconds, forty seconds of looking at green. Like, that is totally doable.
Emma Waddington [00:19:30]:
I can see how our brains wouldn't like something so simple. Like, it has to be much more complicated. But it's this I'm I'm loving this invitation to really sort of yes. To simplify our well-being into connecting more with nature, connecting more with other humans. And so it got me thinking. Yeah. Go ahead.
Chris McCurry [00:19:49]:
No. I was I was just gonna keep talking. I'm just gonna do something while you're chatting.
Emma Waddington [00:19:55]:
I was just wondering, is it that we struggle so much to do this? As in listening to you and thinking, gosh. Yes. Of course. You know, when I go out, I I I love to run. For me, running, is my one of my favorite things to do. It's my favorite way to to visit new countries and new places.
Alex Graybar [00:20:16]:
Oh, okay.
Chris McCurry [00:20:17]:
Trees outside.
Emma Waddington [00:20:19]:
Yeah. Beautiful.
Chris McCurry [00:20:21]:
They're out there.
Alex Graybar [00:20:23]:
This is an individual medium, but I was gonna point out that there's a bald eagle circling right there, and it just again, this is, like, three times serendipity for this conversation. Yeah.
Chris McCurry [00:20:32]:
Yeah. Yeah. So beautiful. I should keep these open more because there's green and blue Seattle sky out there. So, anyway, sorry to interrupt. Please continue.
Emma Waddington [00:20:42]:
You really should, actually. I actually have a chicken coop in front of me, so not quite as. Still them. Still. Still, it's nature. And, actually, now and again, they do sort of come in and make a noise and tell me off for being in their space. Well, very close to their space. But, yeah, we kind of reject the simplicity of this.
Emma Waddington [00:21:02]:
Like, we want to make it more complicated, and I wondered if you have any thoughts on that. Why is it that that despite it sounding quite simple and despite the research pointing on its benefits, it's something that, you know, we choose to live in cities. We choose to live in skyscrapers. We, you know, like you described, you know, your friends' lives. That's the life of many, including, you know, me and my children many days, partner.
Alex Graybar [00:21:29]:
Yeah. Well, in many ways, it's unavoidable. That's why I keep talking about these mechanisms, these systems. And it it might sound heady, but what I'm really talking about is that we've lived a life of luxury post enlightenment because we we improved on medicine. We created prosperity through through liberating markets and and free trade and cooperation. And so you take a walk through any major city today, New York, Mumbai, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, and you'll witness these achievements. And, again, I'll allude to our cavemen ancestors. It would astonish them.
Alex Graybar [00:22:05]:
You know, skyscrapers are are stabbing the skies. Right? And and that would be mind boggling, you know, 300,000 years ago, of course. And we've got vehicles that are are speeding by faster than any horse could even dream of. All of these things are fantastic, and and it's happened in the blink of an eye. And so we're waking up. You know, a lot of us I was born in 1992. I actually have the the beauty of having a view into sort of both existences pre and post Internet, and even that has catalyzed a lot of these ways that we just take for granted that this is the way that life is. It's that severance from nature.
Alex Graybar [00:22:43]:
Right? This was a philosophy that was ingrained generations ago and then has just been compounded upon itself. So there's people everywhere, millions, like you mentioned, living in closer proximity than ever before. So on the surface, it's a testament to human progress. Right? Progress is this great beacon. We've literally bent metal and glass to our will. We've created these vast networks of trade and communication. We've lifted billions out of these agrarian existences into urban industrialized existence. But all of that is met also with this this split.
Alex Graybar [00:23:21]:
Again, that modern capitalism and enlightenment individualism together have produced societies that prize personal freedom and mobility. So a lot of that complexity or that drive or that that workaholicism, it's based in that individualism that was birth and seeded through that enlightenment thinking of I think, therefore, I am separate from nature. And in many ways, again, that is positive. We're more free to choose our paths than our ancestors were under those rigid traditions. But there is that flip side. There's the erosion of things like community. You have to work so hard as an individual because you no longer have a backstop of of a family or of a close knit group or a neighborhood. And for most of human history, we did have that.
Alex Graybar [00:24:04]:
That. One's life was enmeshed in this tight web of family and community ties. You had an identity and support as someone's daughter, someone's son, a neighbor, or a member of a tribal clan. Modern life, especially here in the West, Chris, you make a great point. A lot of this is very western centric. It puts the individual on a pedestal, individual rights, individual achievement, which are all great, but less attention gets paid to collective well-being. And there's a there's a very correlated conversation to be had around the plague of loneliness and social isolate social isolation that's taking place, especially in wealthier nations. I I gotta think of his name, Ashley Gibby a second.
Alex Graybar [00:24:45]:
I think his name is Vivek Murthy. Former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy talked about loneliness as being an actual public health crisis that we're seeing in an epidemic in isolation, and that the health effects of that are comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And the reason we got so lonely, earlier we touched on urbanization and technology both as progress but also pulling people apart. Under a typical scenario like we mentioned, a young adult grows up. They go to college in another city. They then move to where a job takes them. This is me to a t. And in that process, they leave behind their family, their extended family and immediate family, their hometown friends, and they arrive in a new city where everyone else is also a transplant.
Alex Graybar [00:25:27]:
That's very much Seattle, and they work long hours. Back when I was at Adobe, I would easily work fifty hours a week and sometimes sixty if it was towards the end of a fiscal quarter. And oftentimes, especially people my age are doing it to pay off debts. And so this is a a very modern burden. Debt is completely foreign to somebody prior to the the middle ages. And so social life gets squeezed into maybe weekend bursts or a happy hour here and there, and those are often broken up into, you know, I'm gonna look at you now, but then I'm gonna check my phone. And these tools can help but often deliver shallow interactions. Right? So we're talking about social media that feels like interaction, but all it is is really dopamine hits.
Alex Graybar [00:26:10]:
And so we can maybe get to that in a bit, but there's this culture of hyperindividualization or hyperindividualism. The idea that needing others too much is a weakness somehow and that we need to be self sufficient in this world, and that can make people hesitant to reach out or admit loneliness or to to feel like they they are enough as they are. It's this it's this mentality that we've we've birthed again through the seeds of separating ourselves from our animal nature and the cooperation inherent in that. I don't know if that answered your question about complexity and why, you know, we seek if something seems too simple, it must be wrong. I don't know if that answered your question there, but it truly in my opinion, it it it boils down to the fact that we create the complexity by nature of what we spend our time doing, which is scrolling complexity, which is, you know, inundating ourselves with every single crisis that exists all at once every day as opposed to in the past, it was, oh, Nana is a little bit sick. Let's make her some soup.
Chris McCurry [00:27:18]:
Yeah. Or we gotta get the crops in. Or Exactly. Yeah. I I don't know how this fits in, but BF Skinner years ago talked about how one of the problems of modern society is that we've been cut off from the immediate consequences of our actions. Like, we do things now and, you know, either there are delays or, you know, it it affects somebody on the other side of the world. Look at tariffs and what have you, but but it seems like, you know, ten thousand years ago, if you messed up, you knew right away. And, you know, they're they're just things just wore a little bit more immediate, and you got feedback that we just don't get now.
Chris McCurry [00:28:10]:
I mean, we can put stuff out on the Internet and, you know, a hundred people might come back with comments or, you know, emojis or whatever, But that's different from, you know, I'm out in the natural world. It's starting to get dark and cold. I need to do something. I I don't know if that fits in with what your experience has been or what you've read.
Alex Graybar [00:28:38]:
Yeah. I mean, to tie it to experience, a lot of what we're talking about here, what the beauty of it is that it can be scaled to any dimension. It can be at the individual level, or we can be talking about government policy. We could be talking about international agreements. And when we're talking about it at the individual level, basically, when you tap into the fact that you are a biological specimen, that you aren't a special higher being, you can actually extend empathy across all of these different barriers that we've created through stories such as religion, such as, you know, history and tradition, all of these things could be bridged through that that shared understanding of what's driving us at the human level. Again, we alluded to those those needs. Often, that's referred to as Maslow's hierarchy of me is, but, basically, it's that love, purpose, shelter, satiation. And when we find ourselves looking at things from an immediate lens, it's because of that survivalist feeling that is manufactured.
Alex Graybar [00:29:46]:
Things like climate change are slow. It takes a long term orientation to feel like your actions will manifest as helping a future generation or helping a forest. The immediate the immediacy of the moment is designed. It is in the interest of incumbent power of incumbent wealth to keep focus on this moment because they're doing great. And so a lot of the power structures, they want us to see things in a short term lens that the world is on fire with all of all kinds of crisis. Pick your crisis. There's a reason to freak out about it. But a lot of that is distraction when you really strip away and and focus back on those needs.
Alex Graybar [00:30:34]:
You recognize again that there is no panther in the grass, that a lot of these things that feel like emergencies are very short term. How often have you read a headline that lit your hair on fire, but then five days later, you thought nothing of it? And that's by design. You're inundated with this so that way you don't focus on the things that do have a long term effect, such as voting in somebody who has a long term orientation themselves, somebody who actually wants to see policy enacted that doesn't benefit themselves but benefits their grandchildren. There's a a very famous story or maybe it's even a quote about planting the seeds of a tree under whose whose shadow you'll you'll never sit. And I'm butchering it and paraphrasing, but, ultimately, the idea is that doing things not for yourself but for future generations is actively against the interest of the incumbents of today of today's sort of western structures. And at the broadest level, biohumanism really entail the shift in in our own self perception. Rather than rulers of the planet, we need to become stewards of the planet. And that, to your point, necessitates this long term thinking.
Alex Graybar [00:31:49]:
And back in in, you know, prehistoric times when we're what we're talking about, when we're just biological homo sapiens, the threats were immediate. But when they weren't, all we did was cooperate and spend time. We we played. We told stories to help younger generations gain wisdom from the older generations, and that's a whole another conversation. But our modern society, it it it gates by age. Children are in school, adults are in the office, and and seniors are in homes. But that that was never the case. We always used to have that interplay of generations so that it meant something to think of your children or grandchildren and what you're handing down to them.
Alex Graybar [00:32:29]:
Carl Sagan actually once noted that with our powers, like nuclear, these climate altering technologies that we have, we've basically become somewhat like gods with what we can actually do at a planetesimal level. And so we also need to have the wisdom and the care of gods. There's an awesome quote by Einstein, actually. You we all think of him in terms of math, but he was also very spiritual. And, what he said was in regards to again, I'm gonna paraphrase. I don't have the quotes right in front of me, but widening our compassion to all life or else being trapped in a delusion. And that's where we find ourselves. That if we truly internalize that we're a part of an interdependent web, then things like nationalism become crazy because it ignores these global impacts or short term exploitation of resources without thought of future generations.
Alex Graybar [00:33:18]:
It becomes unthinkable. So we almost have to shift gears into this long term thinking because we no longer have actual short term threats. And that again, I'm speaking generally. Obviously, there are real threats to a lot of people in the ways that decisions are being made on behalf of folks without them actually wanting it. I'm thinking specifically of folks that thought that they were peacefully protesting something on a college campus and are now in in holding cells in Louisiana. So there are very real threats out there, but even that is not as short term survival fight or flight as where's my next meal, is there a predator in that bush, or is it just a fruit that fell? So our brains are still wired that way, but we need to decouple our systems from wiring us that way. And we see glimmers of this, things like the Paris Climate Accord. Right? Although The United States has stepped aside from that, but nearly every other nation acknowledges the common responsibility for climate.
Alex Graybar [00:34:16]:
There's treaties out there to protect biodiversity. So it is out there. And the fact that countries are discussing the rights of future generations, there's even some amazing things such as, in Ecuador, they've got the rights of nature where you have rivers, mountains, forests that get the same legal protections as community members, where you can actually sue for harm of a natural entity as if it was a human. And that's not to get into you know? I don't wanna get, like, bleed into sort of, like, the spiritual side of of animism or anything like that, but really that if we start creating the structures, the policies, the laws, the carrots, and the sticks to force these structures like capitalism and infinite growth to to recognize the long term, the long tail of their decisions today, then we actually have have a way to reconcile the damage that we've done in the in the short span of a hundred years. Hopefully, that that answers your question. Kind of a circuitous path towards it.
Chris McCurry [00:35:16]:
It a a journey well taken. So
Alex Graybar [00:35:22]:
I will admit that a lot of this, like I said, it it it comes from my experience abroad. It comes from the fact that I've been I I've had the privilege, frankly, to to live and work across five five continents, 30 plus countries before I was 30. And that is a privilege, but it was a very intentional privilege that my folks raised me in in Reno, Nevada, which when I was young, it's it's bigger now, but it was a very small town, and it was pretty homogeneous. And they took me abroad at a young age to show me that there is diversity, that there is a humongous planet out there. And I am so grateful for that because it did give me that itch to go find out what can I learn? It can't all just be in this biggest little city in the world, which is what Reno likes to call itself because I knew from seven years old that there's something called pierogi. And that's fantastic, and I wanna sink my teeth into that. But I also wanna know why pierogi. You know? What about your history made this the national dish, etcetera, etcetera.
Alex Graybar [00:36:25]:
But my point is that throughout my life, I've gone on these experiences. I've been to all these places, and there isn't a single one where I haven't been asked to come back and stay under somebody else's roof. And it's not because I was an expert in Poland. I was seven. And most recently, Rwanda. And it's not because I I deeped over the culture of Rwanda and went in there as an expert. No. What I did is I went in as a human, and I went in with curiosity.
Alex Graybar [00:36:51]:
And I let my my my wonder around the the beauty of our differences color the interactions, but the shared humanity, the foundational layer of we are all driven by those same basic mechanisms, that was the common ground. That was the bridge that linked us, that it didn't matter who was Vietnam, if it was Peru, if it was Scotland. Everybody wants to laugh, and everybody wants to know that the person they're interacting with is humble and can be open to differences and that they aren't correct all the time. There's no more boring conversation than somebody who has every single answer. It's it's it's we'll bring Star Wars into it. Only Sith will in absolutes. But anyhow, so I again, I I feel like it is this natural shared foundation in biology that we can leverage to empathize across cultures to then come together to galvanize real systemic change. We cannot patch up our ozone if we're in our little tribes with tariffs and and calling every immigrant the enemy.
Alex Graybar [00:37:56]:
No. It is the shared differences that incubate innovation and new ideas and enable us to to create the the beautiful progress that we've had the luxury of of benefiting from until now when we're starting to realize that it may not have been totally in our best interest. And so it's not that we're trying to break all of this. It's that we need to reframe it, understanding the full scope of our biology and not just tapping into the short term fight or flight part that pays a lot of people a lot of money. Spreading that back out and recognizing that we can form these systems in a cooperative lens just by remembering that we're firing on the same cylinder when we peel back all of the noise.
Emma Waddington [00:38:39]:
I'm I'm loving this and thinking about I'm having so many thoughts, and I'm gonna try and say it in a way that makes sense. Because I'm thinking, like, as I'm listening
Chris McCurry [00:38:51]:
In the in the few minutes we have.
Emma Waddington [00:38:53]:
In the few minutes we have. Yeah. This is, like, classic forty minutes. This is when I come in and have an enormous question. The so I'm I'm listening and thinking, absolutely. We have come to this place in in in as a society because, you know, our brains are incredible machines that want to find answers and want to solve problems. And even when there isn't a problem, our minds have a tendency to find one. And, you know, we've we've created, like you said, systems that have been phenomenal for the human race.
Emma Waddington [00:39:31]:
You know, we've got medicine. We don't die at the age of, you know, 20 from childbirth anymore. Like, we're in a place where our brains and our minds have served us incredibly well, and and there's been other costs to getting us to where we are today. And you you spoke to, you know, this sort of loneliness, this isolation. We we see sort of mental health. We talk about mental health epidemics. You know? Especially, we're talking a lot about mental health crisis in young people, especially young men. And I think of the communities that we've created where we are quite isolated even though there's lots of people.
Emma Waddington [00:40:16]:
We we spend a lot of time, you know, on devices, working really hard, thinking that we need to do the next big thing in order to survive. So it almost calls for yet listening and thinking about this biological humanism. We're calling for for even greater sophistication to be able to see the systems that we've created with their limitations. That's quite complicated because it's easier to sort of go with the flow, isn't it, in a way, and follow the narratives that we're given and buy into a lot of the anxiety that you know? If I think of conversations that I'm having every day, not just with my clients, but with my community, there's a lot of anxiety. There's a lot of worrying. There's a lot of catastrophizing, be it, you know, about, you know, where is my child gonna study? What kind of job is he gonna have? Are they gonna be okay without us in this world? It's like there's a lot of preoccupation. And how do we cut through that and come back to some of the things that are inherent to us as humans that are good and important to us that actually will do us good? And and it brings me to think about a conversation we've had very recently, but really this idea that there are so many ways to come at this inherent problem that we have as humans, which is our tendency to be divisive and tribalistic and see each other as different. But, ultimately, a lot of the answers that we we need for for the future of our planet, the future of our communities is to cut through that, to see the similarities and that interconnectedness.
Emma Waddington [00:41:58]:
And that is quite complicated. Like, I'm I'm reading a book on I've talked about this a couple of times, on conflict resilience. Like, this is a law professor at Harvard that's talking about how we need to get better at having hard conversations. It kind of feels like that's what you're pointing to in a different way. We've gotta get better at feeling some of the discomfort of seeing things from different people's perspectives, being confronted by some of the pain that's happening in the world. I I recognize that I have a huge privilege to not read a news article about what's happening in certain countries or change a program if what I'm watching is too confronting to me emotionally. Like, that's a privilege. I get to say no to that.
Emma Waddington [00:42:48]:
But the apathy that comes with that, the lack of of of a desire to make the world a better place for more than, you know, my little insular is quite dangerous. And
Chris McCurry [00:43:01]:
Yep.
Emma Waddington [00:43:03]:
Yeah. I think, you know, our my conversation today has got me thinking about, you know, how how do we move into this more prosocial, more open openness to other perspectives? You talked about traveling. That's super important, but, you know, not everybody wants to travel. Like, what are some of the things that we need to be doing on a day to day basis to really nurture this interconnectedness with nature and each other?
Alex Graybar [00:43:32]:
That is the best question. And I actually think that this is a great almost this is a fantastic optimistic end to the conversation because it's actually very simple. We all have a cedars influence, and that's what I was alluding to earlier with, you know, biohumanism or whatever you wanna call it, just tapping into our our innate sense of of being natural is that it can happen at any scale. And so I'm privileged enough to travel, and for me, that's what spoke to me. That's what really got this started, and it galvanized my interest in all of it. But for for you or for whomever, it's about what is my immediate sphere of influence. And in biohumanism, you know, I I don't wanna get lost in jargon. It's just, like, the best way I could think to describe what it means to have agency, but also tap into something natural.
Alex Graybar [00:44:20]:
And I'm not trying to create a new human. What this really is is more of a compass. It's creating the conditions for humans to be fully human.
Chris McCurry [00:44:31]:
And so
Alex Graybar [00:44:31]:
when I talk about sphere of influence, it's it's that you have a compass through biohumanism that always points towards life. And what that means is that when you're faced with a decision or a moment or a stressor, whether that's, you know, policy at the grandeur level or if it's personal at the, you know, interpersonal level, the biohumanist compass asks some simple questions. Does this choice reconnect or disconnect? Does it honor nature, or does it ignore it? Does it consider long term well-being of the of the community of life or just short term gain? And and so to articulate the core principles of by the humanism as a guiding philosophy, what you're really doing is just orienting yourself and grounding yourself in those types of questions. Like, you know, Descartes said, I think, therefore, I am, and what I've sort of coined is that we need to move forward with, not under a bridge, but a a revamped version of that, which is, I think, therefore, I am responsible to love and move through life with compassion. And so it's simple in that we don't need to to use a a wonderful phrase from my corporate life. We don't need to boil the ocean. What we need to do is recognize where our influence can be most felt and orient ourselves towards the things that actually allow for that to take place in a positive way. And so, I guess, to put a fine point on it, you don't need to overhaul a government as an individual.
Alex Graybar [00:46:00]:
What you need to do is move through life recognizing that you have biological processes that can clarify your moment for yourself. It can ground you in whatever is happening in your immediate sphere, whether it is open to all of the crises at once, if you are that person who wants to know everything that's going on and you want to combat that by galvanizing a protest or whatever that might be, or if it's just simply treating your partner better because you've got that underlying empathy based in the fact that we're all going through this together. We're the human family on one blue one blue rock. There ain't no other home. Sorry, Elon. We're not going to Mars. We have Earth, and we have each other. And when we use biology to recognize that sameness, the differences become less scary because they're more recognizable, and we can bridge those gaps through biological empathy.
Alex Graybar [00:46:49]:
That helps because it is it can feel complicated, and it can get complicated if you want to. I I like to let it get complicated because it interests me, but it can be grounded as well. So, hopefully, that's actionable for for your listeners is that it's just more of a compass than it is a philosophy.
Chris McCurry [00:47:06]:
Alright. That is just nice to leave it.
Emma Waddington [00:47:10]:
Yes.
Chris McCurry [00:47:11]:
Alex Grabar, thank you so much. And, again, listeners can check out the show notes, read your essay, and and be inspired.
Emma Waddington [00:47:20]:
Yeah. Really inspiring. Thank you so much. I've I've really enjoyed our conversation, and I love this idea of biological empathy.
Alex Graybar [00:47:29]:
Yeah. Thank you very much. This is a fantastic conversation. And, Ashley, you have your work cut out for you. My in my first podcast, I feel like my my brain was scrambled, and I went every which way. So when we run it back in a year or two, maybe it'll be a bit more robust. I am trying to turn this into an actual book.
Emma Waddington [00:47:44]:
Oh, it's amazing. You've got Wonderful.
Chris McCurry [00:47:46]:
Keep us informed about
Emma Waddington [00:47:48]:
that. Absolutely. I will.
Chris McCurry [00:47:49]:
Alright. Thank
Alex Graybar [00:47:50]:
you all so much. This has been a pleasure. Thank you.
Emma Waddington [00:47:52]:
Thank you.
