Speaker 1: Good a team. It's Harps, it's Melissa, it's doctor Bo,
Speaker 1: who you'll meet in a minute. It's the You Project.
Speaker 1: It's bloody Thursday night at eight seventeen, Melissa, what are
Speaker 1: you doing?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: I'm old. You know that I peak at about nine
Speaker 1: am and it's a spiral after that. What are you
Speaker 1: doing to me?
Speaker 2: I reckon, you've come back to life. I can tell
Speaker 2: you're a bit excited about this.
Speaker 1: And I may or may not have had some kind
Speaker 1: of neotropic at about ten No, not ten to five.
Speaker 1: I may or may not have. I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's ethically gets the tick from the dock, So I'm
Speaker 1: not going to commit either way. How's your day been, Melissa?
Speaker 2: It has been good. Thank you very good? And yourself well.
Speaker 1: I lifted heavy stuff and I had a miracle happen today.
Speaker 1: I might well with my eyes. Remember I told a miracle. Yes,
Speaker 1: I had a miracle. Maybe the doc can explain to
Speaker 1: us why. And I don't want to tell my two
Speaker 1: minute story with him sitting in the wings, So let's say, hi, Hi,
Speaker 1: doctor Bo, how are you.
Speaker 2: I'm well. I love the fact that I'm talking to
Speaker 2: someone who had a miracle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, miracle. I don't know. The Vatican haven't ticked it
Speaker 1: off yet. It's a matter of time.
Speaker 2: Okay, the sainthood is in your future.
Speaker 1: Well we discovered before.
Speaker 2: Do you do the miracle? Or was it done to you?
Speaker 1: It was done to me?
Speaker 2: Or were you alone? Was this like too much sort
Speaker 2: of intimate detail?
Speaker 1: Well no, it was. Hang on, I'll give you the story. Now.
Speaker 1: I know this is unorthodox and you've never started a
Speaker 1: podcast ever like this. Oh good, so we'll feel free
Speaker 1: to chop it out. So my eyes have been I'm
Speaker 1: fifty eight, so my eyes started going to crap at
Speaker 1: about early forties, just started wearing most people. When I
Speaker 1: was it was literally I was overseas. I was in
Speaker 1: Colorado when I was doing some gigs, and I was
Speaker 1: at a place called Breckenridge, and I was trying to read,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, what's wrong with what's wrong with this
Speaker 1: book or screen or whatever? And then I realized anyway,
Speaker 1: so I went and bought myself. I think they were
Speaker 1: reading glasses, and they were just like a one, you know,
Speaker 1: one magnification. Anyway, I put on them and everything was clear,
Speaker 1: and I went, well, I'm getting old. My eyes as shit.
Speaker 1: And then I went eventually to one half, then two
Speaker 1: and you know the deal. And then I got some
Speaker 1: proper glasses which are kind of multifocals, so I can
Speaker 1: look up here and see long distance, look down here,
Speaker 1: read anyway. I I feel like lately reading through the
Speaker 1: same glasses my vision's gotten worse, or looking through the
Speaker 1: same glasses. So I went and got the old number
Speaker 1: twos out of the desk, the reading glasses to you
Speaker 1: know what it's like when you're doing a PhD. I'm
Speaker 1: reading one million bloody research papers. And I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe somehow these will be better. I put them on
Speaker 1: and they were souper for blurry, and I went, my eyes,
Speaker 1: I'm almost blind. And then I thought, I'm going to
Speaker 1: walk up to the pharmacy chemist. What do you call
Speaker 1: it over there? What do you call a pharmacy or chemist?
Speaker 2: Well, in the States is a drug store, but in Britain,
Speaker 2: as you know, it's chemist or pharmacy. And where am
Speaker 2: i I'm in ib it's a pharmacy here.
Speaker 1: Cool anyway, I went up there when I'm going to
Speaker 1: just get some off the shelf, and I went, I
Speaker 1: put on the twos, which is where I stopped last time,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't see shit. I put on two and
Speaker 1: a halfs. I'm like, oh god, I must I'm going
Speaker 1: to have to stop driving soon. I must be legally blind.
Speaker 1: Then I tried threes. It was still blurry, and it
Speaker 1: only goes to three and a half and I'm like,
Speaker 1: if these don't work, I'm not sure what I'm going
Speaker 1: to do. And they didn't work. Everything was blurry, but
Speaker 1: it was almost like the higher the number, the blurrier
Speaker 1: it got. So, being the scientific genius that I am,
Speaker 1: I went, why don't I tried less than two th
Speaker 1: thinking there's no way, but you know the evidence so far.
Speaker 1: So I tried one and a half and it was
Speaker 1: pretty good. I'm like, what is this? And then I
Speaker 1: tried one and that was it And now I'm a one,
Speaker 1: Like my eyesight is better than it used to be.
Speaker 1: What is that about? Neuroscience? Man? So that no pressure?
Speaker 2: That's a good question. I mean, let's see, first of all,
Speaker 2: how far away were you holding these things your face?
Speaker 2: Because if you're holding like a five meters away, then
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: Maybe fourteen or fifteen inches.
Speaker 2: Okay, you know it is possible for your I is
Speaker 2: to get but I mean, it's there. There's a there's
Speaker 2: research suggests that as you sort of let yourself go
Speaker 2: to more and more mag magnification, your brain will then
Speaker 2: adapt to that. So I personally try to keep it
Speaker 2: a low modification in order to have my eyes work.
Speaker 2: So I'm about your age. I'm only a few years
Speaker 2: younger than you, and like you, my eyes, like most
Speaker 2: people start going at forty. It's remarkable, like clockwork. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and then you sort of work to keep your eyes working.
Speaker 2: And I'd say this is true in life, right, because
Speaker 2: your brain, you know, evolved to adapt, and so we're
Speaker 2: constantly your brains like a muscle, you use it to
Speaker 2: lose it. It is your your eyes. The muscles of
Speaker 2: your eyes. You know, they're getting weaker, stronger depending on
Speaker 2: how you work with them.
Speaker 1: Well, right, I'm going to call it a miracle. You
Speaker 1: can call it science. I don't care.
Speaker 2: Miracles. But isn't science like the study of miracles. I mean,
Speaker 2: it is quite miraculous the world, isn't it.
Speaker 1: I think everything is miraculous. I think humans miraculous. I
Speaker 1: think you know I like, I mean, I'm sure you
Speaker 1: like when I did first time round at UNI, when
Speaker 1: I did anatomy in physiology to reasonably, I'm like, how
Speaker 1: how on earth is all this stuff in here and
Speaker 1: it does what it does? Like, I mean, I know
Speaker 1: there's so many things, but just the body is ridiculous.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely true. I mean we share that passion. I
Speaker 2: was my background as an undergrad at Berkeley back in
Speaker 2: the eighty six to ninety one, and the so as
Speaker 2: anatomy physiology major. So we'd have average out on the
Speaker 2: out on there and you know, of course you treated
Speaker 2: everything with respect and everything, but it was it was
Speaker 2: just remarkable looking at the body and thinking that this
Speaker 2: even works, and then when you literally get to understand it.
Speaker 2: And this is why, you know, I think the Romantic
Speaker 2: movement is a wonderful thing. But of course they were
Speaker 2: sort of anti science because they found by explaining something
Speaker 2: it became less beautiful. But doesn't it actually just increase
Speaker 2: the beauty because it just increases the wonder of how
Speaker 2: this thing even worked. I mean, just thinking about the
Speaker 2: nephron of a kidney and how you get the filtration.
Speaker 2: Quite apart from this ultracomplex structure that we most possibly
Speaker 2: the most complex structure we have sitting on top of
Speaker 2: our shoulders, right. So I was actually a developmental My
Speaker 2: PhD was a developmental neuroscience. So I used to study
Speaker 2: how the brain grows, because just development is itself inherently fascinating.
Speaker 2: How do we go from a cell to billions and
Speaker 2: billions of cells and the thing works incredibly remarkable, right,
Speaker 2: And each of those cells has the same genetic information,
Speaker 2: but it gets specialized and then and then how it
Speaker 2: all interacts. And then what's also I find remarkable, And
Speaker 2: what science has actually been not so good at, you know,
Speaker 2: over the years, is that, you know, science and the
Speaker 2: reductionist method actually eliminates the very thing that biology is
Speaker 2: trying to understand, which is life. And life has actually
Speaker 2: lives at the interactions between stuff and the stuff, but
Speaker 2: interactions with But the reductionist method gets rid of those interactions,
Speaker 2: gets rid of the very thing that we actually have
Speaker 2: passionate about about emerging. How does this stuff emerge from interaction? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's remarkable.
Speaker 1: All right. Now, before we get too farther further in,
Speaker 1: let me just.
Speaker 2: We're going to cut all that out.
Speaker 1: Now, we're keeping all that that was great. I just
Speaker 1: feel like I feel like I better tell people who
Speaker 1: they're listening to Melissa, you will love this. So Bo
Speaker 1: is the founder and CEO of a lab or it's
Speaker 1: just called Lab of Misfits. I can't tell you how
Speaker 1: much that name appeals to me because I've made a
Speaker 1: misfit my whole life. So I definitely belong. I need
Speaker 1: at least an honorary membership. So that's gorgeous, Bo says,
Speaker 1: what yep, I'll tell you what. I'll follow up on
Speaker 1: that very insecure. You don't know how much that would help.
Speaker 1: Once you understand how works, you can't but see yourself
Speaker 1: in the world in a different way and engage in
Speaker 1: it a different way. I want to talk to you
Speaker 1: a lot about perception. I'm sure you actually I do,
Speaker 1: and I don't because I feel like you must get
Speaker 1: sick of banging on about the same stuff. Here's a
Speaker 1: little bit of your bio. Doctor Bolotto is a neuroscientist
Speaker 1: and world renowned expert in perception. Is research explores the
Speaker 1: way in which we experience the world through our own
Speaker 1: versions of reality. As both says, the brain never sees
Speaker 1: the world as it actually is, only the world that
Speaker 1: is useful to see. By illuminating these principles, the perception
Speaker 1: has helped individuals and companies transform their approach to create
Speaker 1: creativity and innovation. All right, my first real grown up
Speaker 1: question for you differentiate and this is a bit of
Speaker 1: a naff question, but what's at the intersection of the
Speaker 1: brain and the mind or are they intertwined or they
Speaker 1: tell me that just what you know, we don't see
Speaker 1: things as they are. We see things as we are.
Speaker 1: Which is that often quoted idea that's been accredited to
Speaker 1: different people. But is it? Is it? Are we recognizing
Speaker 1: and perceiving and downloading and storytelling through the mind or
Speaker 1: through the brain?
Speaker 2: Uh? Through the brain? I mean, I'm materialist, I'm not
Speaker 2: a duellist. So the mind is the function of the brain.
Speaker 2: If we see something or hear something or do something different,
Speaker 2: that's your brain doing doing what it does. Yeah. And
Speaker 2: what's more is the brain we so often forget is
Speaker 2: the brain is embodied. You know, brain is part of
Speaker 2: a body of body is in our world. Uh. And
Speaker 2: you know Silicon Valley keeps forgetting this. You know that,
Speaker 2: you know, trying to do everything virtual, but you know
Speaker 2: it's we make meaning and all that by physically engaging
Speaker 2: with the world, in which case it also means that
Speaker 2: we have kind of an extended feenotype. We're also again
Speaker 2: getting back to that interaction. Your brain doesn't exist in isolation,
Speaker 2: in interaction with other brains and so perception. That's why
Speaker 2: we have a T shirt that says, you know, be
Speaker 2: in between that in some sense, that's where your brain lives.
Speaker 2: It's constantly in between. It's constantly making things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, by.
Speaker 2: Interaction in whiskeys, you can't really understand the brain outside
Speaker 2: of its interaction with the world.
Speaker 1: Understand the idea, the idea of the brain analyzing itself.
Speaker 2: Isn't it though, I mean it's it's uh. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's one of its remarkable capacities and capabilities, right, But
Speaker 2: but yeah, it is, uh, it is the brain. But
Speaker 2: we could celebrate that's.
Speaker 1: The idea, like the it. I mean, I love innovation,
Speaker 1: and I listened to a little bit of a guy
Speaker 1: called Alex Friedman, who you may or may not know
Speaker 1: from M I T. Who's like a real pioneer in
Speaker 1: AI and a bunch of other stuff that I don't
Speaker 1: really get, but there are they're talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: machine learning and autonomy and machines, robots, AI or whatever
Speaker 1: that will think, I just I don't. I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess it depends on how you define thinking, but thinking, cognition, creativity,
Speaker 1: decision making in interpretation, like my version of cognition and metacognition.
Speaker 1: I don't think a machine can do that. What about you?
Speaker 2: Well, right, not right now, but in principle I think
Speaker 2: it could. I mean, my lab has been doing artificial
Speaker 2: intelligence for about twenty twenty five years. We have the
Speaker 2: first artificial networks that saw that see in some sense
Speaker 2: the same illusions that humans see.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And because the neural networks, basically if we unless you
Speaker 2: think there's something inherently special about the connectivity of the brain,
Speaker 2: as opposed to special something special about networks. What's important
Speaker 2: about networks is interaction, and then you get emergence as
Speaker 2: a consequence of those interactions. Think about the metaphor I
Speaker 2: like using is the whirlpool. So whirlpool is a function
Speaker 2: of the interaction between water molecules. Without an interaction, the
Speaker 2: warlpool doesn't exist, right, But the whirlpool does physical stuff
Speaker 2: in the world. You know, it can sink ships if
Speaker 2: it's big enough. Yeah, right, you get rid of it.
Speaker 2: But you couldn't predict a whirlpool by studying any individual
Speaker 2: water molecule. So the mind, you could say, is a
Speaker 2: consequence of the interacting between neurons brain cells. Brain cells
Speaker 2: are like water molecules, right, and so in some sense
Speaker 2: information comes in and it generates different kinds of warpools
Speaker 2: in your brain, and those warpools are what you see.
Speaker 1: Yeah, incredible, what I was thinking. Also though, with humans,
Speaker 1: so our thinking is intertwined with emotion, with feeling, with
Speaker 1: previous experiences, with memories, with Does that not differentiate us
Speaker 1: between artificial intelligence?
Speaker 2: No, because not necessarily, well at the moment, yes, right, Well,
Speaker 2: it's one way of differentiating us. But the point is
Speaker 2: that artficial neural networks, for instance, are also networks. So
Speaker 2: in theory they could also generate emergent patterns, and those
Speaker 2: emergent patterns have consequence. One consequence for us is that
Speaker 2: the consequence is to see red or to feel a
Speaker 2: certain thing. Right, in principle, there's no reason why they
Speaker 2: couldn't generate similar consequences from the interaction between artificial neural networks,
Speaker 2: because again it's a network. So for me, what's inherently
Speaker 2: important is the interaction between things. Now, those things, right,
Speaker 2: and and the interaction with john brain cell seems to
Speaker 2: generate the stuff that we're experiencing. Clearly, why couldn't that
Speaker 2: also be happen through the interaction between artificial systems artificial elements.
Speaker 1: What about the individuality person and person of how I
Speaker 1: think and perceive and process the same stimulus. Like ten
Speaker 1: people go through the same thing event, situation, circumstance, conversation,
Speaker 1: but they all have a different experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, where they're not all going through the same thing. Well,
Speaker 2: they're not going through.
Speaker 1: The being subjected to the same stimulus anyway.
Speaker 2: In some sense yes, and in some sense no. Okay, good,
Speaker 2: So if you walk through let's say, okay, we both
Speaker 2: walk let's see how could we would be an example?
Speaker 2: I mean, even if I show you a picture, we're
Speaker 2: not all at the same picture because it depends on
Speaker 2: where you look. Yes, right, So you have a phobia,
Speaker 2: which is a very highly sensitive part of your retina,
Speaker 2: and it's really quite small. Right if people hold their
Speaker 2: handout and you know at arm's length, the sensitivity the
Speaker 2: fobia is about the width of the thumbnail at arm's length.
Speaker 2: You know, that's where we're particularly sensitive. And that's what
Speaker 2: we call foviation. That's where we're sort of really attending
Speaker 2: and that's where your brain's really processing that information. Now
Speaker 2: if we but an image is much bigger than that,
Speaker 2: So you could actually be looking in the upper right
Speaker 2: and it might be looking at the lower left. We're
Speaker 2: getting very different experiences. And what if I go from
Speaker 2: the lower left to the upper right, that might change
Speaker 2: my interpretation, whereas you're going from the upper right to
Speaker 2: the lower left right. If you meet one person before
Speaker 2: another person, right, it's going to change the person you
Speaker 2: first meet, it's going to change your perception of the
Speaker 2: second person. But you could say we both met two people,
Speaker 2: we both met the same people, So our experiences are
Speaker 2: always different. What's more, the history that we're bringing to
Speaker 2: this experience is different.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, So excuse me for asking a dumb question,
Speaker 1: what's an experience?
Speaker 2: What is an experience? Well, I suppose it really depends
Speaker 2: on what it is in some sense that we're measuring.
Speaker 2: So you could say, so, what do you mean from
Speaker 2: the individual person?
Speaker 1: Well, I'm thinking there's so much subject there's so much
Speaker 1: subjectivity and assigning everything. Yeah, and assigning it, you know.
Speaker 1: So one of the things I say when I'm talking
Speaker 1: to a big group. Right, So I do a lot
Speaker 1: of public speaking, and I talk about, you know, not
Speaker 1: to the level you do, so feel free to correct me.
Speaker 1: And Melissa take notes because I can use this man's
Speaker 1: brain and take all the credit. I talk about, you know,
Speaker 1: the reality that we're all in the same room on
Speaker 1: the same day, listening to the same dude say the
Speaker 1: same words with the same intention. You're all sitting in
Speaker 1: identical seats and same lighting. Everything. All these stimuli are
Speaker 1: the macro of what we're in right now, but the
Speaker 1: micro is the way that you process everything. So we're
Speaker 1: in the same room, we're in the same workshop, but
Speaker 1: we're not in the same experience and so so, and
Speaker 1: then I talk to them about so, you know, is
Speaker 1: it possible that right now, some somebody finds what I'm
Speaker 1: saying fascinating. Therefore their experience is fascination. Somebody finds me
Speaker 1: boring the experiences boredom. Somebody finds me offensive, their experience
Speaker 1: right now is offence, and so on. And then we go, well,
Speaker 1: where is that experience that version of your reality coming from?
Speaker 1: Is it about me? Or is it about your response
Speaker 1: to me? And we kind of hope where and Now
Speaker 1: this kind of opens the door a bit anyway in
Speaker 1: my space on metacognition is starting to think about why
Speaker 1: we think or respond the way we do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thinking about thinking. So the the experiences are different,
Speaker 2: that's for sure, to you for your audience. In fact,
Speaker 2: when I do like you, I do quite a bit
Speaker 2: of public speaking or professional speaking, and at one point
Speaker 2: in my talk I'll say everything I'm saying to you
Speaker 2: right now is meaningless.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I saw you say that on a Ted talk
Speaker 1: and I'm like, that's so brilliant but fucking confusing, because.
Speaker 2: It literally is right, Because I mean, if we didn't exist,
Speaker 2: these these sounds that we're making have no meaning. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's no inherent meaning in any of these words. Right.
Speaker 2: This is not laws of physics, This is not gravity. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: there is no meaning in these utterances. No one but
Speaker 2: us understands them. So for not here, they don't make
Speaker 2: you know, there is no meaning. Your brain's not interested
Speaker 2: in data, right, your brain gets information. So if you're
Speaker 2: giving a talk, if I'm giving a talk, people are
Speaker 2: you know, they're geting sound waves that's vibrating in the
Speaker 2: ear drums, right, that's not actually what they're hearing. What
Speaker 2: they're hearing is the meaning of that data. They don't
Speaker 2: hear the data, They're not seeing the data, right, And
Speaker 2: what their brain is doing is they're making a meaning
Speaker 2: of it. And the reason why they have to do
Speaker 2: that is because there is no inherent meaning in that data. Now,
Speaker 2: data exists, right, the physical world exists. And like I
Speaker 2: like to say, you know, if a tree falls in
Speaker 2: the woods, doesn't make a sound, and the answer is no,
Speaker 2: But it makes energy, sound vibration, right. The sound is
Speaker 2: a function of our brain. The brain then turns out
Speaker 2: of information into the perceptual experience that we become aware of.
Speaker 2: What is that perceptual experience? It's a meaning. It's a
Speaker 2: meaning that isn't inherent in the data itself. Where does
Speaker 2: that meaning come from? It comes largely from our history
Speaker 2: of what that information meant for a behavior in the past. Right.
Speaker 2: So if someone hears here's me say a word or
Speaker 2: not a word makes here a sound, it means something
Speaker 2: to them because in the past it meant something before, right,
Speaker 2: and then they generated behavior. It's like that worked, okay, brilliant,
Speaker 2: I'll keep I'll stick with that meaning. Or that didn't work. Huh,
Speaker 2: maybe I'll change that meaning. And we're constantly doing this
Speaker 2: all the time, and this is what evolution's doing, right.
Speaker 2: We're constantly changing the structure of our brain according to
Speaker 2: trial and error experience, whether that be over millennium genetics
Speaker 2: or over a second in changing the connections between our neurons.
Speaker 2: So we're doing that all according to feedback.
Speaker 1: Yeah, straight up, smarty pants. And I thought my eye
Speaker 1: story was fucking fascinating. That was a yawn fist.
Speaker 2: I like your eye story.
Speaker 1: So he's he's one of my questions. Doc. So you
Speaker 1: are a really good science communicator, which there are not
Speaker 1: many people. Andrew Huberman's pretty good. You're good, You're great. Okay,
Speaker 1: so let me paint this picture. You're in front of
Speaker 1: a thousand people. You're in an auditorium. They're not you.
Speaker 1: They're not neuroscientists. They're maybe not even scientists. Most of them.
Speaker 1: They're people who work for the XYZ Foundation or organization,
Speaker 1: and they sell widgets and you're there talking to them
Speaker 1: about whatever, how do it? They better think better, do better,
Speaker 1: produce better, be happy and more fulfilled whatever. So you
Speaker 1: are sharing thoughts and ideas that you fully understand and
Speaker 1: concepts that a lot of people wouldn't understand unless you've
Speaker 1: found a way to disseminate it in a user friendly manner.
Speaker 1: But you're up the front, You're in your own experience,
Speaker 1: and there are a thousand people in their own individual experience.
Speaker 1: How do you in real time navigate that? And I
Speaker 1: know this masking this because I want the answer. How
Speaker 1: do you in real time navigate that realizing that no
Speaker 1: one including you is in the same experience? And how
Speaker 1: do you build rapport and connection and engagement and career
Speaker 1: ID right experience? I now you can't control all of that,
Speaker 1: but how do you do that knowing that there's such
Speaker 1: so many different experiences happening.
Speaker 2: While there's different experiences, we all have commonality, so we
Speaker 2: also have it. We were also looking at the world
Speaker 2: through an evolved brain. So when we think about experience,
Speaker 2: most of your life happened without you even there. What
Speaker 2: do I mean by that? So the immediate answer your
Speaker 2: question is, I try to speak to commonalities, sort of
Speaker 2: human truths and values, things that are common to all
Speaker 2: of them. Okay, seeing red is common to all of us,
Speaker 2: or I can't be inside your head and know whether
Speaker 2: your quality of red is my quality of red? It
Speaker 2: is called the inverted spectrum, right, because I can never
Speaker 2: be inside anyone else's head, but we will behave towards
Speaker 2: red in exactly the same way. So by assumption that
Speaker 2: it's like presumably you're you know, at least behaviorally, we're
Speaker 2: behaving towards something exactly the same way. Why, because we
Speaker 2: came into the world being evolved brain Right, you're looking
Speaker 2: through the eyes of your ancestors. So why is that?
Speaker 2: Because you know, the only reason why you're here is
Speaker 2: because your ancestors did stuff that was useful, right, Rather,
Speaker 2: they didn't die. So evolution works not by success, it
Speaker 2: works by failure, so you know, and in fact, this
Speaker 2: is a really important point and it's kind of a
Speaker 2: bit of an aside, but there's something called form from
Speaker 2: failure rather than form from success. So we evolve because
Speaker 2: we didn't die, not because we are successful. We typically
Speaker 2: engage with the world to not die rather than to succeed.
Speaker 2: They are not symmetrical, right, And it's also really important
Speaker 2: to become aware of that. And this is one of
Speaker 2: the reasons why news tends to be biased towards the negative,
Speaker 2: because we tend to avoid not dying. We don't go
Speaker 2: towards success. So negative stuff is far more salient to
Speaker 2: us because die ying during evolution it was easy. It's
Speaker 2: really easy to die, right, there are billions of ways
Speaker 2: of dying, not so many ways to survive. M Okay,
Speaker 2: So we typically tend to buyas towards safety, towards not dying.
Speaker 2: So what's the point. The point is that the functional
Speaker 2: structure of your brain is a history of experience. Most
Speaker 2: of those experiences were not yours. It could be evolved experiences.
Speaker 2: So you come into the brain with a functioning, structured brain.
Speaker 2: Then during development, it then starts refining itself. But that's
Speaker 2: an environment. It could be a culture environment, a familiar environment,
Speaker 2: a physical environment that other people also are developing in,
Speaker 2: and then you have your nuanced individual experience. So in
Speaker 2: some sense, you could say, we're all kind of like
Speaker 2: living in the same suburban house. It's just that our
Speaker 2: furniture is in different places. Yeah, right, But we make
Speaker 2: a big deal about the fact that our furniture is
Speaker 2: different places without realizing the fact that we kind of
Speaker 2: are all in the same house. Right. What would happen
Speaker 2: if we actually focused on the house right than the friends.
Speaker 2: Maybe we'd have a bit more commonality.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So to me, this is what's important. The whole
Speaker 2: reason why I do any of this work partly is
Speaker 2: because I'm passionately interested in understanding stuff. But once you
Speaker 2: understand that this is the case, you can't help but
Speaker 2: have humility.
Speaker 1: What's something that you, as a researcher and scientists had,
Speaker 1: like I'm sure there were many, but maybe one or
Speaker 1: two epiphanies or aha moments where you something absolutely confounded
Speaker 1: you or shocked you, or something that you realize you've
Speaker 1: got terribly wrong and had to let go because you know,
Speaker 1: we like, as you say in your talks, we like certainty,
Speaker 1: we like predictability, we like familiarity, we like knowing, and
Speaker 1: we become very attached to what we think is our
Speaker 1: knowledge and sometimes it's erroneous, you know, and we've become
Speaker 1: very attached to our ideas and beliefs. What was something
Speaker 1: you needed to unlearn or peraps something that for you
Speaker 1: was a massive lock bulb? M Well, tell me if
Speaker 1: I ever got anything wrong? Come on, No.
Speaker 2: On the contrary, I get things wrong all the time.
Speaker 2: But that's what I actually like. Yes, right, so you know,
Speaker 2: maybe it's a pathology, But what I find beautiful is
Speaker 2: realizing that shifts not quite what I thought. I love
Speaker 2: having my assumptions and biases contradicted, not for the sake
Speaker 2: of it, because now suddenly I understand more so by
Speaker 2: the irony is that you own I mean, think for
Speaker 2: your audience, yourself. Have you ever done anything interesting from
Speaker 2: the position of knowing? Right? Why you do it from
Speaker 2: the position of not knowing right? Which is why on
Speaker 2: my wrist I have a tattoo that says I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because you only do anything something. You only do something
Speaker 2: interesting from the position of not knowing. By definition, if
Speaker 2: you already know it, how can you do anything right?
Speaker 2: It's always from the position not knowing. In order to
Speaker 2: not know, you have to be willing to let go
Speaker 2: of what you thought to be true before.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: The problem is we hate doing that because that's to
Speaker 2: step into uncertainty. Uncertainty again, coming back to evolution, was
Speaker 2: a really bad idea. If you didn't know, you kind
Speaker 2: of died. Yes, right.
Speaker 1: If you didn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, If you didn't know, I could eat this fruit
Speaker 2: or that fruit, you died. Right. We evolved to know
Speaker 2: stuff because it kept us alive, and we evolved to
Speaker 2: predict because you know, if the food's not coming to me,
Speaker 2: I got to go to it. But it's unfortunately doing
Speaker 2: stuff that seems random until I can predict it. Now
Speaker 2: I know where to wait for it. Now I can
Speaker 2: capture it, right, So we're constantly so when we can't
Speaker 2: predict it's like shit, I don't know what to do. Now,
Speaker 2: I'm scared because I'm looking at it through my evolved ancestors.
Speaker 2: That was a moment of potential. That's why our cortosol
Speaker 2: level goes up. We get stressed, all kinds of things happen.
Speaker 2: Your brain cells start dying, your immune system degrades. As
Speaker 2: I mentioned in my talks, you become a more extreme
Speaker 2: version of yourself. If you're liberal, you become more liberal
Speaker 2: if you're conservad Why because you go into familiarity, which
Speaker 2: is one of the reasons why we get polarization right now.
Speaker 2: You become more gullible right because you're just trying to
Speaker 2: find any associations to explain. So, which is why we're
Speaker 2: getting so many conspiracy theories right now. In this sort
Speaker 2: of incredible time of global uncertainty, I mean uncertainly always existed,
Speaker 2: your brain will evolved to deal with it, so we
Speaker 2: hate that. But in my case, and not just in
Speaker 2: my case, in your case, doing your PhD, you're being
Speaker 2: trained to not know science is nothing but basically increasing uncertainty,
Speaker 2: the role.
Speaker 1: Of exceptional not knowing. Just so you know, yeah, brilliant.
Speaker 2: I'm a huge celebrator of being naive. Naive tea is
Speaker 2: a beautiful not ignorance. But naive tea is a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1: But ironically, bo we we I'm generalizing. But we seem
Speaker 1: to get our sense of self and our identity from
Speaker 1: what we think we know or our beliefs.
Speaker 2: Is that a silly idea?
Speaker 1: Yeah, our identity is tied to our beliefs. So when
Speaker 1: who I am is, oh, i am a vegetarian, or
Speaker 1: I am a I am a Christian, or I am
Speaker 1: a Buddhist, or I am an atheist or I am a.
Speaker 2: I'm a we tire ourselves Now we identify with nouns, right,
Speaker 2: And what a silly idea because nouns are necessarily transient.
Speaker 2: Because okay, so you know, I tie myself to this thing.
Speaker 2: Then science comes through or someone says that's a bad idea.
Speaker 2: It's like shit, and I've got to rethink my whole identity.
Speaker 2: What if we tight our identity of verbs?
Speaker 1: Yeah, but do you know what I reckon? Though? We
Speaker 1: don't go now I've got to change my identity, we
Speaker 1: go fuck that research at floor.
Speaker 2: Well, that's usually what happens right now. But what really
Speaker 2: depends on whether or not we do that is how
Speaker 2: open someone is. So people who are more neurotic or
Speaker 2: less like are more willing to do what you just
Speaker 2: It's like, screw that. People are more open, are more
Speaker 2: willing to do that. It has to do with ego.
Speaker 2: I'm not interested in small or large egos. I'm interested
Speaker 2: in whether or not your ego's fragile, right, And so
Speaker 2: if you have a fragile ego where you're gonna you know,
Speaker 2: you're not gonna you're not gonna challenge it. But if
Speaker 2: you have a strong ego, it's like, okay, I don't
Speaker 2: define myself. I'm willing to define myself in a different way.
Speaker 2: Let's go for that. It's amazing how narrowly and superficially
Speaker 2: we so often define ourselves, not only by nouns, but
Speaker 2: by pretty superficial nouns as well. Yes, why don't we
Speaker 2: define ourselves in terms of someone who's you know, I'm
Speaker 2: someone I'm not. I hope to be this person, but
Speaker 2: in general, as an example, to define myself, I'm someone
Speaker 2: who's resilient. I'm someone who's adaptable. I'm someone who's generous. Right,
Speaker 2: I'm someone you know, a verb, someone who is defined
Speaker 2: by a process. In fact, in some sense, you could
Speaker 2: argue Buddhism does that, right, whereas you know I don't
Speaker 2: necessarily want well, I'm very happy to get in revigion.
Speaker 2: Whereas Christianity is defined by a noun, Buddhism is much
Speaker 2: more about a process. I'm someone who's willing to evolve.
Speaker 2: I'm someone who's willing to expand right as opposed to
Speaker 2: I am X. And then if I show you data
Speaker 2: to show that X isn't valid, more likely, if you've
Speaker 2: tied your identity to it, you're going to hold yourself
Speaker 2: even stronger to that, which means I've now pushed you
Speaker 2: to faith. And the whole point of faith is to
Speaker 2: believe in it despite the evidence, and we celebrate it
Speaker 2: so much. Think of every hero you know, they go
Speaker 2: against all the odds because they just know, you know,
Speaker 2: they're completely anti evidence driven. Right heroes right and ironically
Speaker 2: now that kind of also works the best things in
Speaker 2: life makes sense.
Speaker 1: And also you bring emotion into these beliefs or faith,
Speaker 1: and now people are defiant and angry, and we have
Speaker 1: echo chambers, and we have people screaming at each other,
Speaker 1: and we have people absolutely like people willing to kill
Speaker 1: each other over things that they can't even prove it
Speaker 1: like at all. You know, Like I got raised in
Speaker 1: a really a religious environment, and so I'm a minor
Speaker 1: expert on religion or my religion anyway, and it's it's
Speaker 1: we spoke about this recently. You know just how how
Speaker 1: discouraged I was. And this is many people's experience, not
Speaker 1: even discouraged, but condemned for thinking, for thinking for myself
Speaker 1: and for questioning. You can't question, you conform. You don't question,
Speaker 1: You don't think yourself. You can't. In fact, if you
Speaker 1: do that, you're sinning. What sinning? And by the way,
Speaker 1: I got told this when I was eight.
Speaker 3: Bo.
Speaker 1: By the way, if you die with a mortal sin
Speaker 1: on your soul, you will go to an eternal lake
Speaker 1: of fire and you will burn forever. I'm like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: that's good news. Thanks for telling me that, father, I mean,
Speaker 1: fucking hell, who tells a child.
Speaker 2: That millions and millions of people tell each other that. So,
Speaker 2: but it's not just religious education as well. So I
Speaker 2: like you. It sounds like we came from the same
Speaker 2: place and I was an altar boy.
Speaker 1: Wow, dude, yeah, wow. It is a podcast all by itself,
Speaker 1: but let's leave it alone.
Speaker 2: But and I mean, with that said, there's some really
Speaker 2: really interesting in some sense truths that exist within all
Speaker 2: these religions. I was a religious studies miner when I
Speaker 2: was at Berkeley as well as my because I'm very
Speaker 2: interested in how people think, how people adapt. There's and
Speaker 2: there's some really valuable insights there. The problem is thinking
Speaker 2: about what the source of that is and whether or
Speaker 2: not it shouldn't be self evolve and be questioned. I
Speaker 2: would argue that one of the most dangerous things you
Speaker 2: can do is not an action, it's a word. And
Speaker 2: the word is why, right, which is one of the
Speaker 2: reasons why institutions like governments, especially totalitarian governments, education systems, religions,
Speaker 2: not all religions, are set up to block that one
Speaker 2: word because if you ask why, suddenly it's like, wait
Speaker 2: a minute, you mean it could be different. Well, if
Speaker 2: it could be different. Well, now suddenly you've lost a
Speaker 2: little bit of control over me. Yes, But the way
Speaker 2: I keep control over you is by saying, look, you
Speaker 2: don't need to worry about these questions. Come on, you
Speaker 2: don't like uncertainty anyway, Let's just all be let's just
Speaker 2: all be certain in the same way. Then we'll all
Speaker 2: be happy, won't we.
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Right, Which is why there's a wonderful phrase which I
Speaker 2: quote in the book, which is, you know, all revolutions
Speaker 2: begin with a joke, or rather every joke is a
Speaker 2: small revolution, because it's to say it could be different.
Speaker 2: And for me, questions are wonderful. But we don't even
Speaker 2: educate children to ask questions. Most questions are rubbish. Your questions,
Speaker 2: of course brilliant, but most questions, most questions are rubbish, right,
Speaker 2: Which isn't say that they're bad to ask. It's because
Speaker 2: asking a good question is really, really hard. It's really hard.
Speaker 2: It can take fifty years. Think of Einstein. It took
Speaker 2: years and years and years to ask the brilliant question
Speaker 2: that he was able to ask. But it's asking questions
Speaker 2: in the empirical process. To me, science is about asking
Speaker 2: brilliant questions. Is not about answers. Finding those grilliant but
Speaker 2: brilliant questions are challenging, right because they challenge our assumed beliefs.
Speaker 2: They challenge what we assume to be true already, it
Speaker 2: requires us to let go of identity, right, which is
Speaker 2: why my lab works on we're creating an education. We've
Speaker 2: created an education system resulting the youngest published scientists in
Speaker 2: the world at eight to ten years old, right, and
Speaker 2: we're creating now a whole education program around this because
Speaker 2: our argument is that science is nothing other than play
Speaker 2: with intention. It's a mindset that says, actually, not knowing
Speaker 2: is a brilliant thing, questions are wonderful. It's literally a
Speaker 2: mindset that enables you to go to the very place
Speaker 2: we evolved to avoid.
Speaker 1: Melissa was telling me about that study before you came
Speaker 1: on and correct me if I get this wrong. Apparently,
Speaker 1: because they are all so young that the boffins wouldn't
Speaker 1: publish the study. But then some other people quoted their
Speaker 1: research and that got published, and then is that right?
Speaker 1: Then they ended up getting published.
Speaker 2: So what happens? First of all, we couldn't we couldn't
Speaker 2: get funding for it, ironically from the Welcome Trust, which
Speaker 2: is supposed to be in public engagement of science because
Speaker 2: we're doing actual science, like you know, you're supposed to
Speaker 2: be talking about science, not doing science. And my point is, well,
Speaker 2: the best way to communicate science is to do science,
Speaker 2: right you just in the public.
Speaker 1: Stop making sense though, will come on the company line,
Speaker 1: bro stop fucking thinking for yourself.
Speaker 2: As opposed to you know, do science and then you know,
Speaker 2: talk about it. But you know, actually, let's let's get
Speaker 2: people to truly engage and actually have them walk away
Speaker 2: with a deeper understanding themselves. Anyway, so we couldn't get
Speaker 2: the funding for us. We've self funded it, and then
Speaker 2: we couldn't get it published because not you know, not
Speaker 2: surprising that the kids didn't have access to the references.
Speaker 2: They didn't have the history, so we had unique insights
Speaker 2: that no one else had known. It was his research
Speaker 2: done on bumblebees, and the kids design an experiment around
Speaker 2: whether bumblees can solve a complex problem if then that
Speaker 2: you know, go to the blue it's surrounded by yellow,
Speaker 2: but yellow is surrounded by blue. It's a complex problem.
Speaker 2: And they found the answer. But because they didn't know
Speaker 2: the history, they couldn't write the introduct to the paper,
Speaker 2: we can get it published, which creates some really interesting
Speaker 2: is science about history or science about new insight? And
Speaker 2: so that's why I loved about it is it was
Speaker 2: also challenging science. You know, what is science?
Speaker 1: Then?
Speaker 2: So then what we were able to do is we
Speaker 2: we then brought in other scientists. Uh, doctor Maloney wanted
Speaker 2: a wonderful, wonderful scientist n y U and he then
Speaker 2: contextualized it because and then and then the paper was published,
Speaker 2: and then they become the younger publish scientists. But it
Speaker 2: took two years to get it published. And uh, and
Speaker 2: now I want to do another study where the kids
Speaker 2: actually communicate it in story form. What would happen if
Speaker 2: we had a science paper that it was actually a
Speaker 2: children's book? Right, wouldn't that be wonderful? It's still be
Speaker 2: presenting them, but that's how kids talk. Why would we
Speaker 2: want to have them talk to each other via science paper?
Speaker 2: There's nothing wrong with science?
Speaker 1: What's I think the same? I think? What is literally?
Speaker 1: What is wrong with writing? Even stuff that's complicated or
Speaker 1: deep or not easy to solve, but write it in
Speaker 1: a way that the general public or the general population
Speaker 1: can understand. You know so much if you handed you know,
Speaker 1: like I've been reading today and yesterday one paper. It's
Speaker 1: forty five pages, right, but it takes takes half an
Speaker 1: hour to reach one read one page and absorb it
Speaker 1: and figure it out sometimes, you know, I mean it
Speaker 1: wouldn't take it take you one minute. But and I
Speaker 1: just think this stuff, some of it is so unnecessarily
Speaker 1: verbose in a way that is difficult to process. And
Speaker 1: then by the time I figure out what they're saying,
Speaker 1: I go, oh, okay, well they're just saying that. What
Speaker 1: didn't they just write that?
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, there is that right there, there's you know,
Speaker 2: you also see this in art as well. You know,
Speaker 2: by writing it in a very complex way, it gives
Speaker 2: the illusion of it actually being much more important than
Speaker 2: it really is. With that said, science papers are also
Speaker 2: such that they're written, in my view, so that the
Speaker 2: scientist is not relevant. Right. You think about when you
Speaker 2: have someone giving a science talk, they almost never say,
Speaker 2: or if they're a good speaker, they're not going to say,
Speaker 2: I I did this, I did that, right, because you're
Speaker 2: not relevant. What's relevant is the finding. If you're relevant
Speaker 2: in the finding, well then it's not a good study
Speaker 2: because it can't be reproduced. So the science paper needs
Speaker 2: to be depersonalized. It's like, this was discovered, it was observed.
Speaker 2: But if it's if I'm relevant in the observation, now,
Speaker 2: well that's that's an issue. Whereas an artist will say
Speaker 2: I did this, I did that. What's interesting is when
Speaker 2: brilliant artists like a friend of mine, Olifar Ellison, I
Speaker 2: suddenly disappear, right because now they've realized that actually it's
Speaker 2: something that transcends them, right, and science is about stuff
Speaker 2: that transcends us. Yeah, yeah, it goes beyond the individual.
Speaker 2: But then how do you communicate it to people who
Speaker 2: are not scientists? And we worked with the UK government
Speaker 2: with the White Paper for how to communicate climate information
Speaker 2: to the public. It's you don't present more data to
Speaker 2: convince people. You have to make it relevant and make
Speaker 2: them part of it. Yeah, right, say, why why does
Speaker 2: this matter of team? What can you do about it?
Speaker 2: What's the meaning of the data, not just the data? Yeah,
Speaker 2: because your brain works the level of.
Speaker 1: Meaning, yeah, and the level of your understanding. Right.
Speaker 2: Well that well, it's a really inching question. What's the
Speaker 2: difference between knowing and understanding? And it's something that the
Speaker 2: lab's actively pursuing. To me, there's a fundamental distinction between
Speaker 2: knowing stuff and understanding stuff. Education tends to be focused
Speaker 2: on knowing stuff. It's on answers. It's uncertainty, right, not ununderstanding,
Speaker 2: But understanding is actually what your brain wants, because if
Speaker 2: you understand something, it means you can generalize it. If
Speaker 2: I can understand you, now, I can predict you. I
Speaker 2: can understand what your needs are, what your wants are.
Speaker 2: That's where love lives. Love lives and understanding someone not
Speaker 2: to knowing someone. So and that's true in nature. If
Speaker 2: I understand something now, I can predict to a new experience.
Speaker 2: But if I just know it now, I'm just stuck
Speaker 2: to that experience. Now I have to relearn a whole
Speaker 2: new experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny like knowledge is. It's almost like something
Speaker 1: that sits on a shelf in your brain, or it
Speaker 1: can be, but exactly right. Understanding is a different thing.
Speaker 1: And I my knowledge and understanding obviously can go hand
Speaker 1: in hand, but not always, you know. And I used
Speaker 1: to have friends when I was at school, you know,
Speaker 1: in high school, and who could literally memorize big chunks
Speaker 1: of crap and pass an exam and you'd ask them
Speaker 1: two days later. They not only wouldn't they know it anymore,
Speaker 1: but they couldn't explain things to you because they just
Speaker 1: had basically short terms, like a brilliant capacity to store
Speaker 1: short term information, and then it was gone. But they
Speaker 1: didn't understand it, but they could memorize things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. Then we reward that behavior in our society.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, that behavior then becomes successful and it perpetuates itself.
Speaker 2: The reason why that's useful is because it's efficient.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Right, So coming back to you know, you talked on
Speaker 2: the very beginning about innovation, and innovation has two sides,
Speaker 2: efficiency and creativity. Were educated to be efficient, Yeah, because victorians.
Speaker 2: It was a good idea. Things were pretty chaotic. Let's
Speaker 2: try to make things a bit more efficient. It's not
Speaker 2: a bad idea. What we've also abandoned is creativity. You
Speaker 2: have to have the both to be innovative, not just
Speaker 2: one or the other. Right. But the problem is we
Speaker 2: then try to make things creative in an efficiency model. Right,
Speaker 2: that doesn't work. We need another model that subsumes both
Speaker 2: creativity and innovation. That's you know, that's what we're focused on.
Speaker 2: And to me, that's what science is. Yeah, you still
Speaker 2: got to make findings, you still got to write the paper,
Speaker 2: you still got to get grants. But I can't say
Speaker 2: to my PhD sudents, I like that discovery by Tuesday.
Speaker 1: Please you could sign that.
Speaker 2: I could say that, yeah, but you know, but we
Speaker 2: still got to try to make discoveries.
Speaker 1: So, you know, I feel like there's a place in
Speaker 1: science for creativity because you you know, you've got to
Speaker 1: solve problems, and you know that that's a creative process.
Speaker 1: And even with my research is on a thing called
Speaker 1: external self awareness, which is your ability to understand that
Speaker 1: you experience for others. So your ability to accurately represent
Speaker 1: the way that people you know experience you. It's more
Speaker 1: than that, but that's the kind of easy route to it.
Speaker 1: And it's funny when I ask CEOs or managers or
Speaker 1: leaders like one simple question that there's many of them
Speaker 1: never thought about. I go, what do you think it's
Speaker 1: like being around you? Like some of them are quite uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: And I go, because I can guarantee you that your
Speaker 1: version and understanding of you is no one else's. The
Speaker 1: way you think you are is like nobody in your
Speaker 1: organization thinks you are right. And the quick example I
Speaker 1: give I say to an audience, I say, put your
Speaker 1: hand up if you've ever heard your voice recorded on audio.
Speaker 1: Everyone goes, oh god, they put their hand up, and
Speaker 1: I go, now put up your hand if you think
Speaker 1: you sound shit, And everybody puts up their hand, and
Speaker 1: I go, well, here's the news. How how you sound
Speaker 1: on audio is how the rest of us hear you
Speaker 1: all the time. And they hate it. And I go,
Speaker 1: you don't know what you like. You only think you
Speaker 1: know what you like. And not only not only not
Speaker 1: like how I see you, you're also something different for
Speaker 1: every person in this room. And so we think we
Speaker 1: get ourselves, but we only get our cells from an
Speaker 1: introspective space.
Speaker 2: That's right. And in any interaction there's about sixteen different
Speaker 2: In any interaction between two people, there's about sixteen people there, right, correct, correct,
Speaker 2: there's me that's perceiving me, there's a me that's perceiving you,
Speaker 2: there's the me that's you know, there's a you that's
Speaker 2: perceiving me, the you that's perceiving you. But what's more,
Speaker 2: I'm also contextual, So there's a certain aspect of me
Speaker 2: that I'm bringing out with you when there'll be a
Speaker 2: different aspect that's brought around in a different context with
Speaker 2: a different person, right, So you know we're a collection
Speaker 2: of people within as well. We have this illusion that
Speaker 2: were one thing, and then it's amazing that we can
Speaker 2: even get on.
Speaker 1: It all right, and then you get sorry, dude, go
Speaker 1: on no.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's why I'm a huge fan of naivete
Speaker 2: and humility because once you if people truly understood, then
Speaker 2: just know this stuff right, truly felt it, which is
Speaker 2: why in my own public speaking, I try to get
Speaker 2: people to feel what I'm saying. Now hear what I
Speaker 2: say in some sense, as soon as you said it
Speaker 2: to them, you've taken it from them. So I get
Speaker 2: people standing up, I get people interacting because I want
Speaker 2: them to embody it because as soon as it becomes embodied,
Speaker 2: now you're shifting it to understanding, even if I even
Speaker 2: if I can't explain it.
Speaker 1: Well, I love the way that you with that musical piece.
Speaker 1: Was it Tchaikovsky or Strauss or someone? Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: like that really well known symphony piece and it's just
Speaker 1: about coming to the big musical crescendo, and I'm listening
Speaker 1: to it I'm like, this is all right, yeah, and
Speaker 1: then you just stopped it and everyone's like, oh fuck exactly.
Speaker 2: Because if I say your greatest need is closure, it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's interesting. But if I don't say it and they
Speaker 2: feel it's like, ah, yeah, now I get what you mean.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you how that annoyed me. That example.
Speaker 1: Fuck your example.
Speaker 2: Yeah, someone said I should actually give people closure after that,
Speaker 2: because you know, we so need it, and I would
Speaker 2: argue that, I mean, just you know, going off on
Speaker 2: a bit of a tangent. Is people ask how can
Speaker 2: we help people deal with uncertainty because uncertainty is we
Speaker 2: hate uncertainty, right, We evolved too, except that in that
Speaker 2: mindset of play with intentionality science, which is closure, right,
Speaker 2: we love closure. I love closure. I hate uncertainty. I
Speaker 2: would hate to be uncertained all the time. Right, But
Speaker 2: I love closure so much that I'm willing to get
Speaker 2: through uncertainty because you can't get closure, you can't get
Speaker 2: understanding if you didn't have the question beforehand. Yes, right,
Speaker 2: uncertainty by itself is pretty meaningless. Closure doesn't exist if
Speaker 2: you didn't have four you know. I love the example
Speaker 2: of an orgasm an orgasm is closure, but it doesn't
Speaker 2: exist without the stuff that came before.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And what's more is you get the intrinsic An orgasm
Speaker 2: is an intrinsic reward. It's evolution said, well, that's a
Speaker 2: good idea. Let's keep them from that again, because if
Speaker 2: we don't get that, we're going to get selected out.
Speaker 2: But what's fascinating is we get the same type of
Speaker 2: reward stimulut reward activation in our brain with an orgasm
Speaker 2: we have food. With understanding understanding, you get a similar
Speaker 2: kind of like mini orgasm. Yeah right, because evolution said,
Speaker 2: whoa understanding is a good idea, because now these people
Speaker 2: are going to be adaptable. Let's get them doing that. Ironically,
Speaker 2: we almost design our whole culture to prevent the possibility
Speaker 2: of understanding, much less understanding another person, because we try
Speaker 2: to stand still. When the world changes, we try to
Speaker 2: stand still even more. Imagine you're in Australia. Are you
Speaker 2: a surfer?
Speaker 1: I have surfed? I wouldn't call. All my listeners are
Speaker 1: falling off their chairs. Hi, you can all get fucked,
Speaker 1: I can serve.
Speaker 2: Well. Imagine okay, imagine the waves coming in. You're standing
Speaker 2: on your surfboard. Imagine trying to just not fall. Okay,
Speaker 2: you're trying to keep your surfboard steady. The waves are
Speaker 2: coming and just not going to fall. Imagine the energy
Speaker 2: required to do that, Yeah, as opposed to just surf. Yes,
Speaker 2: right to go with the waves. Right, our education, our
Speaker 2: lives are set up to sort of bob in the
Speaker 2: water with all these waves coming in and making sure
Speaker 2: we don't fall. Yeah, why don't we actually create an
Speaker 2: environment where we can actually surf with the waves. The
Speaker 2: amount of energy required goes down, the risk that ironically
Speaker 2: goes down. But we think the risk is in movement,
Speaker 2: when in nature, life is movement. You stand still, you
Speaker 2: get selected out. A relationship that doesn't move dies Love
Speaker 2: that doesn't move deteriorates.
Speaker 1: We need to give ourselves permission to fall off that
Speaker 1: wave and go, ah, that wasn't too terrible. You know,
Speaker 1: when you're talking about orgasms, I thought, and how you know,
Speaker 1: orgasms trying to happen without all this lead up? Because
Speaker 1: I'm essentially four nine years old.
Speaker 2: It sounds like you're not celebrating the lead up bit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, the lead up spain a while, spin a while,
Speaker 4: But I was thinking, imagine if if we were designed
Speaker 4: or we evolved to have spontaneous idiopathic orgasms and you
Speaker 4: just be.
Speaker 1: You've just been in a business meeting, and you'd be like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, no, no, no, anyway, that's just how
Speaker 1: my mind works.
Speaker 2: Some people do, and they actually have done experiments when
Speaker 2: youre stimulating.
Speaker 1: That's right, isn't it? That actually happens, doesn't it?
Speaker 2: That actually happens, And there's you know, and you know,
Speaker 2: they stimulate rats in that part of the brain and
Speaker 2: they'll just you know, they hit the levity, stimulate that
Speaker 2: part of the brain. They'll just keep stimulating and eventually
Speaker 2: they just die of dehydration.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So it's pretty active rewards. Yeah, but my appoint is
Speaker 2: actually what's called an intrinsic reward, right, Right, It's something
Speaker 2: we do for the reason for doing it. Thinking about surfing,
Speaker 2: what's the reward of surfing? When the hell would we surf?
Speaker 2: What's the reward of surfing? It's surfing?
Speaker 1: Yes, do we need to explain it?
Speaker 2: Right? But that's what evolution is like. Ah, because play
Speaker 2: with intention, asking questions, not knowing is actually a good thing.
Speaker 2: That's what kept us alive during evolution because that means
Speaker 2: we could change with.
Speaker 1: Change interesting thing with I mean, there are many interesting things.
Speaker 1: But the irony is that most people, as you pointed out,
Speaker 1: hate the unknown, the unfamiliar, the uncertain, and the uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: But all of that essentially is life or periodically like
Speaker 1: it's like, dude, that's lot. Have you have you been anywhere?
Speaker 1: That's life? I mean, life is you know. But also
Speaker 1: the other irony is that we'll me way and most
Speaker 1: people I've worked with, where I've grown and learned and
Speaker 1: evolve and gained insight and skill and awareness and competence
Speaker 1: mostly is in the middle of all of that shit.
Speaker 1: And so you know, you go where you grow, and
Speaker 1: it's like also in the middle of that knowing that
Speaker 1: you know that life is difficult, that that bad things
Speaker 1: happen to good people, that the world I love it.
Speaker 1: How people say the world's unfair or whatever, well, you know,
Speaker 1: it just is what it is. But nonetheless, you know,
Speaker 1: kids get cancer, wars happen, poverty happens, like terrible things happen,
Speaker 1: and of course we don't celebrate any of those, but
Speaker 1: we need to. I feel like we do ourselves a
Speaker 1: disservice when we always take the easy option when we
Speaker 1: always when we we always give in to instant gratification,
Speaker 1: and there's so much great stuff when we say no
Speaker 1: or no for now, and when we say yes to
Speaker 1: something that is not fun, quick, easy, sexy or painless.
Speaker 2: You know it's so true. I mean, And of course
Speaker 2: we should be saying no, and we should also be
Speaker 2: saying yes. The question is what are we saying no?
Speaker 2: One yes too? And I don't want to reduce things
Speaker 2: to rules. When I do my toxic I say, I'm
Speaker 2: not going to give you any rules. We all want rules.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to give you any because rules are
Speaker 2: biased towards efficiency and their fragile. With that said, one
Speaker 2: strategy for thinking about no one yes is is the
Speaker 2: thing expanding me? Or is it contracting me? So if
Speaker 2: I say no to something, am I being contracted? Am
Speaker 2: I reducing? If I say yes to it? Am I expanding?
Speaker 2: With that said, we can also say yes to things
Speaker 2: that actually contract us, Like yes to anger can contract us.
Speaker 2: Which isn't to say anger is a bad idea. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it's really important to be anger if something terrible is
Speaker 2: happening to you. Anger can be a wonderful motivation, wonderful
Speaker 2: using a sort of most literal sense wonderful in the
Speaker 2: sense of wonder to actually motivate you to action. Okay,
Speaker 2: And it's the action that follows it is meaningful. It's
Speaker 2: not the thing itself, because, as we're talking about from
Speaker 2: the very beginning, there is no inherent meaning in the
Speaker 2: stuff that's happening in the world. Stuff is happening in
Speaker 2: the world, it's just it has no meaning. Light exists,
Speaker 2: but it has no meaning. It's not red, it's not green,
Speaker 2: it's not blue. In fact, we're sensitive to a very
Speaker 2: small range of electromagnetic radiation. Right, So at the beginning
Speaker 2: of the Bible, you know, it should have said God
Speaker 2: should have said, let there be electromagnetic radiation, not let
Speaker 2: there be lighted, because.
Speaker 1: I say it, that'stid style.
Speaker 2: So it's what you actually do with the information that matters.
Speaker 2: And are you doing it in a way that expands
Speaker 2: you or more importantly expands someone else, or is it
Speaker 2: contracting you? And that's where the yes and no come in.
Speaker 2: And that's maybe a principle as opposed to rule, that
Speaker 2: people can use for thinking about their yeses and nos.
Speaker 3: And that's adaptable in that right, can they change with
Speaker 3: that because someone whenever I'm in conversation, someone says, you know,
Speaker 3: there are two types of people. I'm going to explain
Speaker 3: to the rest of the evening, proving that there's more
Speaker 3: than two types of people. Right, Any absolute statement is
Speaker 3: almost always, at some point not correct, because everything is contextual.
Speaker 1: I'm with you. I fucking hate that generalized science. Like
Speaker 1: there's an ad on TV at the moment in Australia
Speaker 1: and it says from the age of forty you will
Speaker 1: lose one percent of your muscle mess per year. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, hang on, hang on, Like every single person
Speaker 1: in Australia, all twenty six million of us, all of us,
Speaker 1: are losing the same amount of muscle at the same rate.
Speaker 1: And it's like, I go, that's absolutely not true. But
Speaker 1: no one, no one says anything. No, there are so
Speaker 1: many variables around virtually everything. But we make these categorical
Speaker 1: statements as though they are fact, but they are so
Speaker 1: far from a fact, you know where, because people don't.
Speaker 1: If somebody in a white coat says something, people go, oh, okay, yep,
Speaker 1: well I'm going to die in five years, all right,
Speaker 1: then I best get ready.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And why is that ironically comfortable is because it's
Speaker 2: very certain. We love certainty so much, so much that
Speaker 2: people will actually choose predictable pain over uncertainty.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: If I say you know it, I'm going to shark
Speaker 2: you from time to time in a predictable manner. It's
Speaker 2: going to hurt or I'm not going to shock you.
Speaker 2: But there's going to be some uncertainty. So give me
Speaker 2: the shot the shop. And you see this in people's
Speaker 2: lives all the time, in my own as well. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's not like I escape from any of this. I'm
Speaker 2: just as human as anyone else. But learning, of course,
Speaker 2: is learning that you're trying to find those certainties that
Speaker 2: actually aren't serving you. But to do so means first
Speaker 2: you have to know that that's actually how it's working
Speaker 2: in the first place. If you don't have understanding, if
Speaker 2: you don't know why you see what you do, how
Speaker 2: you're ever going to see differently. Which is why I
Speaker 2: study perception, because the perception underpins everything it is to
Speaker 2: be you, right.
Speaker 1: So much great stuff. I want to ask something I
Speaker 1: was thinking about. I've lost it all right, let's go
Speaker 1: with Oh, no, that's right, you're talking about people would
Speaker 1: rather deal with something that's painful but familiar. Then step
Speaker 1: into uncertainty and whatever I was thinking. I've had that
Speaker 1: conversation with people about They're like, why do I stay
Speaker 1: in this shop relationship? And it could be a friendship,
Speaker 1: it could be a romance, it could be a marriage,
Speaker 1: it could be a business partnership. And my answer to
Speaker 1: that is, because you would rather the predictable, known, certain
Speaker 1: three out of ten that you're in, then stepping out
Speaker 1: of the three out of ten, and who knows you
Speaker 1: might end up in a one out of ten. So
Speaker 1: I'll stay with the three and you know, keep the
Speaker 1: door closed, because you're right, people would rather be in
Speaker 1: something that they know, they know what's coming. It's not great,
Speaker 1: it's periodically horrible, but I can cope. And but if
Speaker 1: I walk out on this, then my life could go
Speaker 1: to total shit and I'll regret what I did. So
Speaker 1: and now I'm fifty five years old.
Speaker 2: That's right. That happens all the time. That's happened in
Speaker 2: my own life. That's probably happened in everybody's life, right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And with that said, even that's complex because you know,
Speaker 2: some people say we stay too often? Do we too
Speaker 2: often stay in bad relationships? Too long.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: With that said, sometimes the greatest relationships, you know, if
Speaker 2: you get through struggles, that getting through process is actually
Speaker 2: incredibly bonding. So we can equally give up on things
Speaker 2: far too quickly. I mean, a really really challenging question,
Speaker 2: maybe an impossible question to answers, which I actually asked
Speaker 2: my mentor and ask the number of people I ask you,
Speaker 2: is how do you know when to stop? How do
Speaker 2: you know when to stop anything?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: It's a really difficult question to answer.
Speaker 1: I think that question, I think that answer is different
Speaker 1: for different people and.
Speaker 2: On different context, different situations. Right, and knowing why we're stopping?
Speaker 2: Is it self hard? Am I stop me because I
Speaker 2: just can't be bothered because I've never learned how to
Speaker 2: work hard, or because I'm just I just love just
Speaker 2: new bodies or new Ever, then you know I'm a
Speaker 2: novel seeker, and I'm afraid of commitment, you know, all
Speaker 2: kinds of reasons. So that's why the greatest pursuit in life,
Speaker 2: I think, in some sense is the pursuit of self honesty. Yes,
Speaker 2: it's really really hard to achieve it, so it requires
Speaker 2: a lot of questioning of oneself.
Speaker 1: There's a model I forget I should know who it is.
Speaker 1: But it's in psychology and it's it's kind of four stages.
Speaker 1: And stage one is self it's self reflection, and then
Speaker 1: so reflection reflecting on who we are, how we are,
Speaker 1: why we you know, just just reflecting on the self.
Speaker 1: Number two is self awareness, when we realize certain things
Speaker 1: and we acknowledge certain traits or behaviors that generally might
Speaker 1: not be so great. Then there's a self evaluation stage,
Speaker 1: which is number three, which is where we acknowledge where
Speaker 1: we are and we compare it to where or who
Speaker 1: we would like to be. And then number four is
Speaker 1: self regulation, is being able to change it and the
Speaker 1: process of like real self awareness. It is very difficult
Speaker 1: because again everything for me is subjective, like there's you know,
Speaker 1: it's like I everything that I evaluate, I'm evaluating, perceiving
Speaker 1: processing through the craigfilter. Like I've got fifty eight years
Speaker 1: of programming that I've got to deal with and acknowledge
Speaker 1: and be aware of and try and work around. Like
Speaker 1: you think, every person listening to this has in some way,
Speaker 1: shape or form been program condition told train their whole
Speaker 1: life without even being aware of that conditioning and programming.
Speaker 1: And now they sit listening to this twenty thousand or
Speaker 1: so people having twenty thousand experiences, and some have already
Speaker 1: turned off, and some are leaning in, going this is
Speaker 1: fucking ace, and some are like, yeah, maybe I could
Speaker 1: implement that. But the commonality of you and I and
Speaker 1: this conversation the same stimulus. But you know that it's
Speaker 1: a really it's a very difficult to become fully aware
Speaker 1: and to have a level of consciousness of who you
Speaker 1: are and how you are beyond the programming. It's a
Speaker 1: I think it's it's not impossible, but it's very hard.
Speaker 2: It's not impossible, and it's I think that at least
Speaker 2: my aim in life is to have that and rather
Speaker 2: to pursue it, not to have it constantly changing. So
Speaker 2: that's why I suggest people defining themselves in terms of
Speaker 2: a verb rather than a noun. Yes, it's defining oneself.
Speaker 2: Is I'm in the pursuit of that? Well, if you're
Speaker 2: truly in the pursuit of that, then you have to
Speaker 2: engage in every conflict in a different way. You have
Speaker 2: to engage in every conflict with the possibility that you're wrong,
Speaker 2: knowing that you're engaged with that conflict, with the assumptions
Speaker 2: of the other person with your history, et cetera. Then
Speaker 2: knowing actually that's what that person is doing as well.
Speaker 2: Now only then do you ironically conflicts is a beautiful thing.
Speaker 2: It's a wonderful thing. The problem is not conflicts how
Speaker 2: we engage in it. But instead we try to, you know,
Speaker 2: engage in conflict with the need to convince to not move,
Speaker 2: to be on that surfboard and still have the waves
Speaker 2: coming in and not move. What if you actually engaged
Speaker 2: conflict with a question, you know, engage with the aim
Speaker 2: to understand another person, not to not to validate them.
Speaker 2: Too often we confuse those two things. We think to
Speaker 2: you know, if you agree with me, well then you
Speaker 2: must have understood me right looking for validation. What they
Speaker 2: really want is to be understood my view. So yeah,
Speaker 2: so this pursuit opens up possibility. The other strategy closes
Speaker 2: possibly coming back to that, you know, yes and no question,
Speaker 2: is it opening or is it closing? And then is
Speaker 2: my response opening me or is my response closing me?
Speaker 2: And if it's closing me, think about my emotions. Your
Speaker 2: emotions are sort of they're telling you, not about the world,
Speaker 2: they're telling you about you. If I'm afraid. It's like, Okay,
Speaker 2: it's not that this thing has an inherent meaning of afraidness.
Speaker 2: It's I'm afraid of it. So why am I afraid
Speaker 2: of this? What's that telling me about me? What's that
Speaker 2: telling you about my expectations assumptions in the situation? What's
Speaker 2: it challenging me? Now, maybe those challenges are a good idea.
Speaker 2: It's not like it's a bad idea. Inherently, yes, but
Speaker 2: now it creates opportunity for a question.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: And we also have in our brain kind of an
Speaker 2: intrinsic understandtrinsic knowing or feeling that when we know we're
Speaker 2: being dishonest. And what's interesting is that there will be
Speaker 2: a part of your brain that gets active when that happens.
Speaker 2: And when we then lie and we get away with it,
Speaker 2: the next time, the amount of activity that part of
Speaker 2: the brain goes down, and then it goes down again,
Speaker 2: and then goes down. And every time we win with
Speaker 2: a lie, we lose that sense of guilt, which is
Speaker 2: a real problem because guilt is a wonderful thing in
Speaker 2: some sense. If you didn't have guilt, how would you
Speaker 2: know that you did something wrong? How would you have
Speaker 2: the motivation to do something. It's like the opposite of
Speaker 2: an intrinsic reward.
Speaker 1: I wonder if people can become sociopaths, because when we
Speaker 1: talk about sociopathy we talk a lot about genetic disposition
Speaker 1: to that. I wonder if people, via the process you
Speaker 1: just spoke about, can actually become legit sociopaths who like
Speaker 1: basically don't feel bad about anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but then in some sense, it's that what you
Speaker 2: can argue again, I think everything comes from uncertainty ultimately
Speaker 2: is ultimate driver because think about how certain that person is. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it must be a wonderful feeling that you knew everything right,
Speaker 2: everything you say is truth. My god, I must feel
Speaker 2: great right. So and so we can engineer our lives
Speaker 2: around that. We can engineer our decision making around that,
Speaker 2: how we interact with people. But it's not such a
Speaker 2: good person to be around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Hey, when we talk about I just want to
Speaker 1: kind of take a left turn for a minute and
Speaker 1: then come back to where we are a version.
Speaker 2: I love turning left. I have whole blogs it's about turning.
Speaker 1: Left cold it So, as I told, I set up
Speaker 1: the first personal training centers in Australia. So I was
Speaker 1: the first trainer. I employed five hundred trainers in my time.
Speaker 1: I had four gyms and or four PT centers, and
Speaker 1: we did really well. We had a really great little business,
Speaker 1: and I you know, taught exercise science and all the
Speaker 1: courses and all those things. And so we talk about
Speaker 1: progressive overload, or we talk about progressive resistance. It's training.
Speaker 1: And the idea is that, you know, we do something,
Speaker 1: we lift something, move something, we work against resistance. We
Speaker 1: do something that's hard, and we do ten of them
Speaker 1: and we do three sets of ten or whatever we do,
Speaker 1: and then next week we do the same and we
Speaker 1: go it's a bit easier when we do three sets
Speaker 1: of twelve with the same weight. Then eventually we lift
Speaker 1: the weight, move the reps. We more volume, more sets,
Speaker 1: more reps, more intensity. But over time the experience is well,
Speaker 1: this thing that was really hard is now literally physiologically
Speaker 1: really easy. So my relationship and my perception and my
Speaker 1: ability around this task with this weight has really changed.
Speaker 1: And so by working against the resistance, literally resistance training
Speaker 1: progressive resistance, by working against the resistance, I adapt. I
Speaker 1: am now stronger, I'm more capable, I'm more competent with
Speaker 1: this thing. I'm more powerful, I've got more speed, and
Speaker 1: I can create better performance outcomes as an athlete because
Speaker 1: I went through this thing that was hard. So too,
Speaker 1: when people go to me, how do I, craig, how
Speaker 1: do I overcome my fear of public speaking? I say
Speaker 1: by public speaking? Right, Because we can't get good at
Speaker 1: what we won't do, and we can't master what we avoid.
Speaker 1: So my long winded segue your honor is, do you
Speaker 1: think we should train for the unknown, the uncertain, the unfamiliar,
Speaker 1: and the uncomfortable? Do you think we should train ourselves
Speaker 1: to be better in that space?
Speaker 2: Absolutely? And that's actually that's in some sense the whole
Speaker 2: point of my work is your brain's like a muscle.
Speaker 2: You use it to lose it, right, And you know
Speaker 2: this This has always been an inherent passion of mine,
Speaker 2: but not inherent, but a passion mine for a long time.
Speaker 2: And Marion Diamond, my one of my mentors at Berkeley,
Speaker 2: wonderful on erful woman, and she showed how actually, if
Speaker 2: you raise rats and enriched environment, the brain will actually
Speaker 2: increase and its complexity, and if you raise rats in
Speaker 2: a deprived environment, they'll decrease their complexity. Right, And a
Speaker 2: more complex brain is a more open, more agile, more
Speaker 2: adaptable brain. It's a stronger brain in some sense. But
Speaker 2: you only get that by effectively putting yourself in complexity.
Speaker 2: But initially, when you do that, it's like lifting a weight.
Speaker 2: It's like, wow, this is more complex than I had before.
Speaker 2: Now I've gone from ten kilos to fifteen kilos. But
Speaker 2: now I can live in that complexity and I'm figuring
Speaker 2: it out. Okay, now let's increase. Now I'm going to
Speaker 2: twenty kilos. I am more complex. And each time you
Speaker 2: do that, your brain is becoming more complex itself. And
Speaker 2: the reason is because the amount of energy required for
Speaker 2: your brain is massive relative to in your muscles. So
Speaker 2: at one statistic is twenty percent of the energy we
Speaker 2: consume goes to two percent of our body mass, which
Speaker 2: is your brain. So thinking is really expensive, which is
Speaker 2: again why I say so few people do it because
Speaker 2: it truly costs energy to think, and it literally costs
Speaker 2: even more energy to think differently, because you're literally growing
Speaker 2: brain cells, you're growing connectivity, you're growing tissue. Right, and
Speaker 2: during evolution, spending energy was a bad idea, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: how many how many chips do you see going out
Speaker 2: on a jog for the sake, right, I mean, like,
Speaker 2: come on, we're eating lettuce here, you're going for runs.
Speaker 2: I mean, what a stupid what you know, Charlie was
Speaker 2: great shape, but you know, so he's dying of exhaustion
Speaker 2: because you know he can't he can't take in enough
Speaker 2: calories to support his lifestyle here. Yeah, which is why
Speaker 2: you go to Safari. If the cheetah, if she doesn't
Speaker 2: catch her prey by the fifth go, she's dead. So
Speaker 2: she's going to consider her energy and tell she has
Speaker 2: that sense. So we evolved effectively to be sort of
Speaker 2: like couch potato, Facebook, watching McDonald's eaters right, kind of
Speaker 2: our peak, right, because we're massively conserving energy, we're taking
Speaker 2: them in as many calories as possible, and we're doing
Speaker 2: sort of social but it isn't social, right, And so
Speaker 2: each of these industries like Facebook sort of triggers on
Speaker 2: sort of the our need for social and McDonald's on
Speaker 2: our need for fats and sugars and you know, and
Speaker 2: the television our need to sit still. Energy is hard,
Speaker 2: and so thinking is hard takes energy.
Speaker 1: So it's funny because when you said that, this is
Speaker 1: what's sprung to mind. This is not a word of
Speaker 1: a lie. Last week outside my gym, not I don't
Speaker 1: own it, but the gym I try that. They had
Speaker 1: like an a frame board and it said making said
Speaker 1: the excuses don't burn calories, and I went in and
Speaker 1: corrected them. I went it depends on the excuses. But
Speaker 1: like sometimes coming up with a great excuse, it's there's
Speaker 1: quite a cost.
Speaker 2: Well, but that's actually a long term cost. But what's
Speaker 2: interesting is actually we get a trin we get an
Speaker 2: intrinsic we get a reward from procrastination.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Why because we conserve energy. So we wounded for that
Speaker 2: conservation of energy. Yeah. So so it's really difficult to
Speaker 2: to uh uh, you know, to that's you know, one
Speaker 2: of the one of the biggest challenges, you know, of
Speaker 2: all this conversation. And let's hope that some of it,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe a piece or two of it. It
Speaker 2: was at least from Mina said, you know, everything that
Speaker 2: you said is deeply but you know, from my straight
Speaker 2: let's you know, maybe they takes something away, but unless
Speaker 2: they actually want to, no one's going to do anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So you can have all the gym, you can do
Speaker 2: the training all this information, but the fundamental point is
Speaker 2: you have to want to, because if you don't want to,
Speaker 2: you're not going to apply it.
Speaker 1: I think there's another part to it, and my part too,
Speaker 1: is it because I've been talking to people who want
Speaker 1: to get in shape for forty years literally, and people
Speaker 1: who want to change their body, habits, behaviors, outcomes, look, feel, function, performance, diet,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah, right, and even athletes that I work with,
Speaker 1: I go don't. I don't care so much what you
Speaker 1: do when people are watching you, when you've got, you know,
Speaker 1: a round of applause, or you're motivated. I care what
Speaker 1: you do when you can't be fucked and you don't
Speaker 1: want to do it, and it's not fun, it's not quick,
Speaker 1: it's not sexy, it's not painless. I care what you
Speaker 1: do then, because like everybody's a champion when they're motivated,
Speaker 1: when you're in the zone, everyone's a champion. But I
Speaker 1: believe the make or break is what you can do
Speaker 1: when you really don't want to do it, while knowing
Speaker 1: that you need to do it to create that outcome.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I couldn't agree with you more. I have three gremlins.
Speaker 2: There are twenty twenty two and twenty three beautiful people.
Speaker 2: And I said to them that you will when things
Speaker 2: are When things are easy, you actually don't have much choics.
Speaker 2: You don't have much freedom when things are when things
Speaker 2: are happy, what are you gonna do. You're gonna keep
Speaker 2: doing what you did before. There's really no choice there, right,
Speaker 2: unless you're a nihilist. When you actually have choices when
Speaker 2: things are hard, that's actually where freedom lives. Yes, Because
Speaker 2: when things are hard, you can do reflexively what you've
Speaker 2: done before. Yes, And those might be a good idea, right,
Speaker 2: it might be a good idea to go to anger
Speaker 2: or something like that. But you can also not do
Speaker 2: what's obvious. You can also look away from the obvious.
Speaker 2: You can also do something different, right, And when you
Speaker 2: that's when you actually both reveal yourself and you create yourself.
Speaker 2: So you're revealing your past and you're creating your future
Speaker 2: in that moment. And you don't do that when things
Speaker 2: are lovely. Anyone could do that, right, You don't have
Speaker 2: to be you don't have to do all that clever
Speaker 2: and strong and all that to do. You know who
Speaker 2: can't do that?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Right? Yeah? But do what that said joy itself can
Speaker 2: be hard. That also can be a practice and a
Speaker 2: training because we can also become train ourselves to be cynical,
Speaker 2: because cynical is easy. Yeah, you can't stand the pseudo
Speaker 2: intellectualism right finding out what's wrong with something? Who can't
Speaker 2: do that. There's a million reasons why something won't work,
Speaker 2: but we present it if it's somehow intelligent. It's not
Speaker 2: finding out why something will work or piquing the possibility
Speaker 2: of something might work. Like starting your company. You know
Speaker 2: that was a risk. I'm not interested in confidence. I'm
Speaker 2: interested in courage that require courage doing it knowing that
Speaker 2: it might fail.
Speaker 1: You know what's an interesting motivator speaking of starting like,
Speaker 1: I had a really significant awareness by the time I
Speaker 1: was twenty one or two bo that I didn't want
Speaker 1: to work for anyone. And it wasn't because I was lazy,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't because I was a rebel. I just didn't.
Speaker 1: I thought, like I used to watch my dad and
Speaker 1: some of his friends and some older people which really
Speaker 1: went old but to me old, and I thought, I
Speaker 1: can't do that, like I don't want to, like I
Speaker 1: want to work with people. But and so for me,
Speaker 1: starting my company was more about becoming aware of what
Speaker 1: I didn't want than I did. Like, it was what
Speaker 1: I was moving away from, which is sitting in a cubicle,
Speaker 1: working in an office, wearing a suit and tie, belonging
Speaker 1: to a group I didn't really want to belong to. Like,
Speaker 1: So for me, that was the motivation. Was is recognizing
Speaker 1: clearly what I didn't want. Yeah, that's a moving moving
Speaker 1: away from it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and and and in some maybe that's kind of
Speaker 2: life in a in a really beautiful way, which is
Speaker 2: maybe we have much more control in what we move
Speaker 2: away from and not so much control over what we're
Speaker 2: moving towards.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm not a big believer in goals, at least I'm
Speaker 2: not a believer in achieving goals. Yeah, I'm a believer
Speaker 2: in setting or sure, but there should be reasons for
Speaker 2: getting out of bed. Yeah, because if you've achieved your goal,
Speaker 2: you've probably missed so much along the way. What's more,
Speaker 2: you define yourself in terms of the goal, Well, that
Speaker 2: goal is fleeting. Even if you achieved, it's like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I got it, that lasted a second yea, But I
Speaker 2: might have destroyed people along the way. I may have
Speaker 2: destroyed my relationships along the way? Am I destroyed my
Speaker 2: health along the way. It's like, great, you achieved your goal, brilliant,
Speaker 2: well done, but you're living a pretty miserable life. Yeah again,
Speaker 2: thinking about identity and goals, why don't we set our goals,
Speaker 2: are going to the verbs and the process about how
Speaker 2: I'm going to achieve it, not simply that I'm achieving it, right.
Speaker 1: And you know the interesting thing also that's interesting, But
Speaker 1: another interesting thing is so many people have this idea
Speaker 1: of so I talk about external world, internal world scene
Speaker 1: unseen so situation, circumstance, environment, government, weather, money, job, car, house,
Speaker 1: physical body, and then the internal world thought, feelings, emotions, ideas, creativity, pain, pleasure,
Speaker 1: all that, right, and all of the goals or most
Speaker 1: of the goals that we normal people set, all about
Speaker 1: the external world. It's about my house, it's about my income,
Speaker 1: it's about it's about my academic this or that. It's
Speaker 1: about you know, writing a book. And none of these
Speaker 1: things are bad, by the way, but often when we
Speaker 1: get there, like I've worked with so many people who
Speaker 1: wanted to achieve a certain look or weight or size
Speaker 1: or whatever, thousands and we got there. They got there,
Speaker 1: and then they get there, and you know how many
Speaker 1: people are truly satisfied, hardly any Yeah, it's wherever they are,
Speaker 1: it's not where they want to be. Whatever they own
Speaker 1: or have, it's not enough. Whatever their weight, it's not
Speaker 1: the right weight, whatever their strength, whatever they're it's not
Speaker 1: It's like I feel like, and this is maybe another podcast,
Speaker 1: but we try and resolve internal things with external solutions.
Speaker 2: The proxies, the proxies for something else. So often when
Speaker 2: people are working, even on sealves, they're just looking in
Speaker 2: the wrong places. They feel like they're looking, they're looking
Speaker 2: around where they're should look. Because if they're really to
Speaker 2: look in the right place, they would have to start
Speaker 2: admitting certain things. They'd have to become aware of certain things.
Speaker 2: Once you have that awareness, you're a bit screwed right
Speaker 2: with the Once you have awareness, it's like shit, now
Speaker 2: do I do well? There are only a couple of options.
Speaker 2: You either do something right, you actively ignore it, or
Speaker 2: you blame it right. And so often people will go
Speaker 2: to ignore or blame as opposed to actually doing because
Speaker 2: if I'm actually going to do something about it, which
Speaker 2: to me, I'm not in you know, I'm not so
Speaker 2: interested in words you know, people say I love you
Speaker 2: or whatever, it's like, okay, you know some of the
Speaker 2: worst things have done in the in with that name
Speaker 2: or that word in mind, It's like, but what did
Speaker 2: you do? What was your action? Because it's that action
Speaker 2: that reveals truth? Yes, right, because we all kind of
Speaker 2: know what we're supposed to say. Yeah, but from you
Speaker 2: for your brain, if you don't have that alignment between intentions,
Speaker 2: words and actions, you then start feeling stressed. So when
Speaker 2: we were talking about self honesty before and that that
Speaker 2: center of your brain that's feeling that guilt, we kind
Speaker 2: of know when that's not of alignment. And then when
Speaker 2: it's out of alignment, rather than take ownership responsibility, it's like,
Speaker 2: well that was that's kind of you know, it was
Speaker 2: less his.
Speaker 1: Fault, right, But I mean it normally do you know what?
Speaker 1: Do you know how much hate I get? Because everyone
Speaker 1: literally loves Melissa way more than me, which is her. Hey, mate,
Speaker 1: we're going to wind up, and I so love talking
Speaker 1: to you, and I would love it. I know you're busy,
Speaker 1: but gee, I'd love to have you back again in
Speaker 1: a month or three. But how do people how do
Speaker 1: people find you connect with you by what's your what's
Speaker 1: your latest book?
Speaker 2: Called latest? First called Deviate.
Speaker 1: You know when I first read it, I thought it
Speaker 1: said deviate deviant.
Speaker 2: Well, it's kind of that's kind of its point because
Speaker 2: people to deviate, I think everyone everyone's a misfit. Yeah,
Speaker 2: deate is really just to be oneself. Yeah, right, we're
Speaker 2: all feeling misfits. The question is whether or not you
Speaker 2: embrace it. The question is what's a reference point for
Speaker 2: your next step? Is it everybody else? I'm not a
Speaker 2: real believer in rebels because rebels are just as in
Speaker 2: reference to people who are conformists. It's just they're moving
Speaker 2: in the opposite direction. They're still making reference to everybody
Speaker 2: else right where. It's a misfits like I don't know
Speaker 2: where I'm going, but I'm going to take a step
Speaker 2: here because it feels right, and I know where everybody
Speaker 2: else is, but I think I need to go this way,
Speaker 2: and things like that, and they're figuring it out and
Speaker 2: then they look up and they think no one's around me.
Speaker 2: So there's all loneliness with misfits, which is why we
Speaker 2: have the Lab of Misfits. So then you can create
Speaker 2: a community of misfits, like oh, Okay, right, we're all
Speaker 2: in different places, but we're all kind of in the
Speaker 2: different places together.
Speaker 1: So the problem is, once you get a room full
Speaker 1: of widows, there are not widos anymore.
Speaker 2: Well, I s was that Maybe I actually have to
Speaker 2: think about that one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want you to get a room full of misfits.
Speaker 1: Nobody's a misfit a misfit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well maybe that's not a bad idea. But isn't
Speaker 2: that What isn't that where every room is in fact
Speaker 2: people acknowledge it or not, but the so where they
Speaker 2: can find So there's the Lab of Misfits website, which
Speaker 2: is Labmisfits dot com. The relevance there is that people
Speaker 2: can go to blogs, adventure blogs, things about perception. The
Speaker 2: whole website set up to expand people's perception. They can
Speaker 2: take part in experiments and things. The other places are
Speaker 2: are Instagram. So there's a personal Instagram which is my
Speaker 2: name Boloto, and then there's a Lab of Misfits Instagram.
Speaker 1: Do you do a podcast yourself?
Speaker 2: I do, so I do a blog and then I've
Speaker 2: been turning that into a podcast and now we're going
Speaker 2: to start doing conversations. And the conversations are about expanding perception.
Speaker 1: You listen to May telling you what you should do,
Speaker 1: ignore me, but I would. I can't guarantee, but I
Speaker 1: could almost guarantee that if you did a plug cast,
Speaker 1: it would do very very well, very well.
Speaker 2: Oh thank you. Well, there's one out there, but it's
Speaker 2: mainly just me monologuing. But I think it'd be very
Speaker 2: interesting to have. I mean, I love having conversations. I
Speaker 2: find everybody. I find everyone has an interesting, important story,
Speaker 2: and I love meeting people for the very first time
Speaker 2: influence of business, meaning without doing any checks on them. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: Because I am I'm aware of as many biases as
Speaker 2: anyone else, any assumption as well, So I want to
Speaker 2: try to and meet someone without all those bias assumptions
Speaker 2: like okay, who are you right now? And so do
Speaker 2: very little research on it. So I find that interesting and.
Speaker 1: I always but I do the sign but it's driven
Speaker 1: by laziness.
Speaker 2: Or I just have a really good justification for my laziness.
Speaker 2: That's also possible.
Speaker 1: No, I think yours is true curiosity. Let's say goodbye,
Speaker 1: but stay there and we'll say goodbye off here, but
Speaker 1: let's do our official goodbye by lot. I thank you
Speaker 1: so much, much for coming on the new project. We
Speaker 1: love chatting to you, and I'm going to keep I'm
Speaker 1: going to get your book, I'm going to read it,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to follow you, and if I'm going
Speaker 1: to be honest, I'm probably going to stalk you. So
Speaker 1: You're welcome, wonderful.
Speaker 2: I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 1: I'll just for a long, creepy relationship. Melissa. Do we
Speaker 1: get a tip of approval?
Speaker 2: That was brilliant? Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2: I know our listeners are going to love this episode,
Speaker 2: so thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Thanks mate, stay there well, say goodbye. Thanks everyone. So
Speaker 1: yea