Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

Thank you for joining me.

I'm going to get right in because, well, I'll tell you in a minute.

During the hiatus, one thing I realized a month ago, I realized,

number one, everything is different. We've been talking about this ever since the global pandemic started,

but I didn't really know how many things would change or in which direction when it started.

None of us did. I did know that there would be big changes, and I think

everybody expected that too, but the interesting thing about exponential change is you can't

predict which direction it will go and what will happen as a result. You just can't know.

So what I realized about a month ago is I don't actually know much about my own society. Like I've been living in a fairly

sequestered corner of it and thinking that I had a pretty good grasp of things because I read

the papers. You know, I read two newspapers in the morning and I go online and I see people that I know on Instagram and Facebook and it gives me the feeling that I'm out there, right?

But the feeling that we're out there has gone down significantly since the global lockdown and I started to realize what I'd known in my head all along,

which is that we're all in kind of an echo chamber consisting of ourselves and the people we actually follow on social media and the TV shows we actually watch.

And everything's become so departmentalized, compartmentalized, that when you go in to talk to your people you're

talking to your people and you're not talking to a broad span of people. I read the other day

that something bad had happened to the reputation of a kid who's got like a 190 million

followers on Instagram and it was a big scandal. And I had never heard of this person.

And there are a lot of people who are super famous in events that are really important that

I don't know about.

So I said right at the beginning of the protests about systemic racial oppression and police

...