Modern Wisdom - #376 - Beau Lotto - The Neuroscience Of Awe, Distraction and Anxiety

Episode Date: September 25, 2021

Beau Lotto is is a professor of Neuroscience at the University of London and an author. Beau is the founder of the Lab Of Misfits which he describes as "lunatic fringe neuroscience". He's created nightclubs in his lab where every action people take is measured, he's locked people in dark rooms and waited to see what happens and he's got actors to have a fit on the floor to observe how people respond. Expect to learn the neuroscience of why awe makes us feel so connected to the world around us, how donating a lot of money to charity can turn off that girl you're trying to impress, why unanswered questions cause so much anxiety, how distraction occurs in our brains and much more... Sponsors: Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Follow Beau on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/beaulotto/  Buy Beau's book - https://amzn.to/3zvYISb  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Bo Lotto. He's a professor of neuroscience at the University of London and an author. Bo is the founder of the Lab of Misfits, which he describes as lunatic fringe neuroscience. He's created nightclubs in his lab where every action people take is measured. He's locked people in dark rooms and waited to see what happens, and he's got actors to have a fit on the floor to observe how people respond. Today, expect to learn the neuroscience of why or makes us feel so connected to the world around us, how donating a lot of money to charity can turn off that girl that you're trying to impress. Why unanswered questions causes so much anxiety, how distraction occurs in our brains, and much more.

Don't forget that the Modern Wisdom Reading List is now live, you should take your face to chriswilex.com slash books to download your copy now. There is a hundred books that you need to read before you die waiting for you. chriswilex.com slash books. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful bow lotto. Bow lotto, I'll come to the show. Thank you very much Chris, look at the show. Thank you very much, Chris. Good to be here. We were just talking about what happens if you can hear your own voice,

briefly after you say it. So it's like your mum's old phone on loudspeaker and you're speaking and then her microphone catches the audio out of the speaker and sends it back to you. What happens with your brain? What were you talking about there? Well, if you're If you actually hear your voice a fraction of a second after you've spoken Your brain doesn't know what to do and eventually if it keeps happening you'll just stop talking You're literally your brain just says shut up. You just stop talking and not just because of the content I mean

You're what you actually say. So you actually bore yourself. But it's more than that. It's actually the, it just can't cope with that. Because of course, we are used to hearing our voice immediately. So now if I hear it almost I can echo, your brain can't deal with it.

And so it just stops. That sounds to me like the audio version of when you see a face that's got two sets of eyes on it. Have you seen this where they stack two eyes over each other and when you look at it, there's a skull on a wall on my drive to the gym in Newcastle and there's a skull with two sets of eyes, two eye holes, perfectly done. And even looking at that, my brain just isn't quite happy. It knows there's something amiss. No, just there's something wrong. Absolutely. I mean, people don't realize, of course,

how strongly we'll get into this. I'm sure how strongly we're wired to see what's familiar and how, in that sense, sense were actually wired to detect the unfamiliar because your brain is constantly adapting to what's average. And there's a really good reason why that's true, but also there's some really strong consequences to that from political onwards. How do you describe what you do for work? How do I describe it?

How long do you have? Oh wait, we haven't. What do I do for it? So I'm sort of like professionally a neuroscientist. Okay, so I study perception, I study how the brain makes meaning, how it makes meaning of itself, how it makes meaning of the world, of other people. So that's what I, in some sense, I am. But we're kind of like lunatic fringe neuroscience. And the sense that the world becomes our lab. So what I do is we, me and not just me, my lab,

where I call the lab a misfits. And what we do is we basically try to understand the principles by which we see, the prints ends here and touch, the principles by which we make perception. And then we try to give people insight into those principles through immersive experiences, so they can actually embody it. And then through that, hopefully give them understanding, which then gives them freedom to then do something about the perception. So, I mean, you do amazing things in nightclub immersive experiences. For us, that becomes a lab. The world is effectively, the world isn't a stage for For us, that becomes a lab. Right. The world

is effectively, the world isn't a stage for us, the world is a lab. Literally. You started a nightclub in one of your labs. Yeah, yeah. So we turned, we've, we actually have turned the lab into a nightclub. We booked an underground Victorian prison in Clark and Will and East London is absolutely brilliant space. And we sold out within minutes on time out, we had the people come and they come, they're separated from who they came in, they're met by this person in a B outfit, as in a caretaker,

not like dressed up as stripes. So the space is filled with actors and everything. And then the first thing they do, they have to spit into a vial because we're gonna measure their cortisol levels before and after and everything in the space becomes measured. People know this is not an act and it's not done surreptitiously. I mean, they know that they they're being measured. Even from the way they dance, we have primatologists watching people dance, the way that the food that they eat, how they eat, whether they eat by how they eat, whether

they eat by candlelight, everything. We had them going into prison cells and then we had someone going into a panic, but they didn't know it was an actor who was going into a panic and then we're measuring to see how people respond or just stint other participants. Yeah. And then we're measuring everybody's heart rate, how they respond. But then also the personality profiles, who steps forward to help, who starts panic in themselves, who gets contagied

Or you just stick 20 people into a dark room and shut the door and then just wait Amazing how long people will just sit there and the eventually you start like now what and they don't Often don't occur to them. Well, maybe we should just leave and So we're sort of measuring the sites of things All that kind of stuff. It's brilliant. It's wonderful. How many people went? In this instance, so that one was 75 people, so sometimes they're very intimate, so they sometimes they can be massive. But for us, it's these experiences. They're not just an attempt for us to bet, understand the human mind

But for people to better get a better understanding themselves So our my personal deeper motivation is to give people a sense of agency and humility and compassion and creativity But you don't have a choice unless you know you have it and choice begins with awareness So we also give the data back to people. So they walk away with a deeper understanding of themselves. And that's really what I'm after. We don't then say what to do with it, because that's up to them.

If you tell people what to do, you've actually taken it from them. But you give them the agency of choice, but you give them the information from which to make a decision. And how you do that reveal can actually be really challenging because if you tell someone something different from what they think be true about themselves that can actually be a real challenge for them. They could actually completely resist it in fact you can make them go in the opposite direction. Like a reverse self-fulfilling prophecy. like a reverse self-fulfilling prophecy? Well, in a way, so if I tell you something about you, or if you tell me something, right, and we're seeing this all over the place right now, we've seen it for years,

but we're seeing it very strongly in politics, especially in the US. But if I tell you something about you tell me something, right, and I show you, give you all kinds of data to show that you're wrong, right? There's a very good chance you'll actually hold stronger to your view than you did before. Why? Well, it depends to the extent that you've actually identified with the thing to which I'm now contradicting. Well, the data is contradicting. So you'll hold stronger because actually to doubt that piece of information is actually doubt who you are. And that is possibly the strongest system, the strongest context for uncertainty.

And we, as we'll talk about, we hate uncertainty. We know we love it often, not in all situations, but in almost every situation we hate uncertainty. What was some of the best things that you learned from your nightclub experiment and the most interesting things? Well, a couple has just come off tough in my head. First of all, that people are promiscuous in their dancing, right? But they dance in the same way they have conversations. So you dance with the same number of people

as you do when you have conversations, but you switch your partners more often. So it's as if you're having a conversation with someone through the physical movement, which is kind of cool, I think. Another aspect is this was a great experiment. I thought, I love designing experiments. It's, to me, it's like an art form.

I think it's a beautiful thing. And so, but this one actually had to be designed because we're trying to get it around alcohol licensing. So, we couldn't actually serve alcohol. We couldn't get a alcohol license, right? You'll know all about this, right? So we couldn't get an alcohol license We couldn't get alcohol license, right? You'll know all about this, right? So we couldn't get an alcohol license, but turns out you can give alcohol away for free.

I didn't know this, right? You know this, right? It's the worker I'm, I'm the only worker of the license. Just give it away and put it into the ticket price. It's a good way. Yeah. Well, in our case, we said, well, how do we

turn this into an experiment? So we decided to turn into an experiment on donation. So people could donate publicly, or they could donate privately. And if they donated privately, again, we turned it into a theatrical experience. The creative director of my lab was a previous artistic director of Cirque du Soleil. So we can turn these things into wonderful experiences, or she can. But in this case, you went and you crawled to the saying there's a punch and duty thing and you, you know, so it was all theatrical

and it was very, very secret how much you donated, right? And then you got a raffle ticket and with that raffle ticket you could then get a drink. Or you donated publicly and if you donated publicly, you went to this wonderful, massive photo booth with a very well-known portrait photographer, and you got your picture taken with how much you donated. And then you got projected 10 foot by 10 foot above the dance floor, with how much you donated, right?

So it was really public, okay? Turns out men donate more publicly than they do privately. Maybe you're not a surprise. Wouldn't then don't. They donated just as much. Okay. Then all those photographs of the men got sent to a bank of computers. And women rated the physical attractiveness of the men.

And in half the pictures, they could see the donation in the other half they don't. So they weren't asked to make any comment about the donation, but how attractive, physically attractive for these men. And what do you think, who is more attractive in terms of donation? What do you think?

Man with more resources. So it turns out the more you donated, the less physically attractive you appeared to be. Interesting. Why do you think that is? Showing off. Too much conspicuous consumption. Or yeah, and also just one of the most attractive features of another person

is their authenticity. We're highly wired, highly tuned to detect someone's authenticity. Why? Because to to be lied to, to be tricked during evolution was a really bad idea, right's why. Also, the authenticity of a company. It's why, in fact, the Lavamistics works with brands to say, it's not enough just to have a purpose. You know, you can have these wonderful purposes, but unless you're authentic in it, it's just a slogan. And people will detect that in authenticity. Think of that Pepsi advertisement a year or two ago, you might be from there. This was in America where I forget the celebrity that they had come and it was on Black Lives Matter. It was building basically very opportunistic on the current cultural climate at the time. And they created this sort of extravaganza music video type thing.

It completely black backfire. And a factor took them over a year to get back to where they were simply because they were detected to be inauthentic, but opportunistic. So when a guy is actually donating, and we're not talking about some money, you know, 10, 15 quid or something like that. The women are detecting this like, so what are you trying to compensate for? You're being inauthentic, you're trying to show off. And it literally manifests in being less physically attractive.

Fuck. So authenticity is super important in personal one-to-one relationships, but also corporate relationships. All these guys trying to get pussy by doing philanthropy, they've got it the wrong way around, be a cheap skate. Well, not necessarily, right? Not necessarily, because actually if you think

that five quid or something like that, it's not a huge cost. Okay, to you. Now, if on the other hand, you donate you your time, or you donated all your money, so it's not just how much money. It's whether to what extent is actually a real cost. So a sign of authenticity is that you're spending effort on something for which you're not going to gain. Okay. And so or at least not directly.

And so you know I'm the these guys were looking to gain something. But if they gave all their money, well, that's a huge signal. That means you really care about something. You're really taken a hit. It's a bit like when I was growing up, my mom said, you know, gift isn't a gift unless it costs you. If I just found something and say, well, here you go, Chris, you'd be like, that's great, but was it really a gift for me? It didn't cost me anything. And your brain detects that. Yeah, skin in the game is a measure of authenticity.

You can't fake effort in that way. In many, in many sense, yeah, which is why often in startups or whatever, they want to see, they want to see the, you know, the founder has skin in the game, the different people have skin in the game, or why you actually would give equity to the team so they all have skin in the game, and then reduce their salary. So everyone is working for the same cause. You see this in startups that are growing as well, that the founder often gets kept on. So Buddy of mine who I had on the show recently, Aubrey Marcus, his company on it just got

purchased by UniLever for an incredibly large undisclosed amount to take it global, but he's been kept on. Why? Because that's a very public show of authenticity that if you just get bought out by some huge big corporation and then you rip the figurehead out of the company, it's a lot harder to find that authenticity as opposed to perhaps step-by-step slowly pull all-braise face away from the branding and blah, blah, blah, I don't know what the plan is, but that seems like a plan. Yeah, so that's part of it. So I actually have two startups myself and the historically,

what often happens is that these big companies would buy up a startup because they're buying They're trying to bind the creativity and then they break up the startup What they don't realize is that's the team is the group of people and the culture that actually Often enabled that success. So you get a lot of less VC investors But a lot of angels and super angel investors. They're investing not in your idea There's a there's a very significant significant investor I know out of Israel. He's got 80 different investments. He doesn't care what your idea is.

He invests in you. And so that's one aspect is that these large companies are realizing that it's actually that team that made it successful. If they break up that team and they dissolve it, and they sort of bring, you know, defuse it into the company, they've lost the actual beauty that was creating the first place. So there's one of the reasons why you could argue what's that, Instagram, et cetera.

They've remained teams within Facebook. That's one point. The other aspect is what I call the host effect. So you put on dinner parties, right? So when you go to dinner parties or the nightclubs, right, the personality of the host infects the party, right? If you're a quiet host and you're like this, very introverted, the whole party is quiet. But if you're an extroverted host and you're sort of celebratory, the whole party is extroverted and celebratory, right?

So the group takes on the personality of the host, okay? And as soon as the party becomes about the host, you're no longer hosting. It's now about you, okay? So a brilliant host infects the party with their own energy for better or for worse. Well, what's true for the party is also true, I believe, for a company. The personality of the founder, the personality of the people who run the company, but in particular, the founder will infect the whole company. So, which is one of the reasons why you see Facebook the way it is.

It is, in some sense, the manifestation of the personality of its host. A classic, a very good example, I know of a classic, between Target and Walmart and the States. There are two companies that were formed around the same time and the same part of the States in Minneapolis. One of them was the host, the founder was a Nicklin dime corner store, as cheap as possible, right?

The other one was founded by a department store. We're service that mattered, the customer mattered, right? They both started in same place. Both of those hosts are now dead. The companies live on. Target has one of the highest loyalty of any other store in America. It's like 80% outrageous, right?

Why is because of that personality of that host continued well beyond? Think about New York. New York was not founded by the British and the Puritans. It was founded by the Dutch. It was New Amsterdam. And at that time, hundreds of years ago, Amsterdam was the place that people went to for religious freedom. So if you, as long as you profess loyalty to Amsterdam, you could practice whatever religion you wanted. So it was a real place of freedom, which is still kind of true for holding an Amsterdam in general. Think of New York.

New York is not like America. It's not like anywhere. New York's New York. I used to live there for the last five years, right? And it still has that personality of its founders of its host. So I think that's the other reason why they keep on the founders because they want to maintain or they should at least maintain that personality, maintain that host effect. What about all?

I know that you've spent a lot of time looking at that. Oh, so all is a wonderful thing. I think all is possibly one of our most powerful perceptions. So what is all? So other people have defined all to be that moment where we think a surprise, we can't understand it, but then to understand it means I probably have to shift my current understanding of myself in the world. So surprise is surprise.

Wander is, that's amazing, but I bet this fits with Winnard already knows. So a magic show gives Wander, right? I bet if I understood the trick, it would still make sense to me, right? But awe is something else. It's like, that's amazing. I don't get it, and I'm going to have to shift my view. So that's kind of like a formal thinking about all. But what does it do is really powerful.

So we did an experiment with Cirque du Soleil, which is a wonderful group to of course be working with. And we measured people's brain activity and we measured what changed in their perception and behavior of themselves in the world before and after their experience of all, because who better to work with in Cirque, circulate, to tray all, right? And what we found, well, actually,

we found a couple of things what other people found, which is your pro-social behavior increases. So you look after other people, you're more likely to open a door for someone else, you're more likely to listen, et cetera. But also what happens is your tolerance to risk increases. You're more willing to take risk

and you're better able at taking it. You're a need for what's called cognitive closure. You're a need for certainty decreases. You're more willing to sit within uncertainty. And even your whole perception of yourself changes. So when asked afterwards, are you someone who is more likely to experience all in the past? You're more likely to say yes. In other words, you start reframing yourself

as someone who experiences all. Your ego diminishes. You feel small but connected to all those around you, including nature. And I would argue that in some sense, that's what people are often referring to when they think about being in the zone, being in the moment, you're actually getting yourself out of you. And in some sense, this is what psychedelics are all doing. This is what Silasai had been in Ayahuasca, it's getting you out of you. And I think in some sense, that's our most powerful perceptual state, ironically, is not thinking of yourself. But in a world where everyone's far more neurotic, spending too much time in their heads, a lot of time, you know, what we celebrate is cerebral horsepower, you know, sort of along

with the scientific method and rationality and utilitarianism and a meritocracy comes everyone thinking more IQ points more time inside of my head is the solution to me getting more of the things that I want in life, you know, love money, status, whatever. And all of that might be true depending on the context that you're in. So if you're in a society and a culture where that's actually celebrated, yeah, you will be more successful, will the society itself be more successful in long term? Possibly not, right? So if you create a society where it says that's a good idea, well, then that is a good idea, at least for the short term.

It works on the collaborative upholding, right? If everybody considers it to be prestigious to have these things, then by its very nature, it's like a democratically elected set of status metrics. But what about, so let's say that someone is spending a little bit too much time inside of their own heads, they're being too neurotic and they really are just too appear. What are some of the things I'm going to guess that trying to find an experience of all would be one of them, things to take them out of their heads? That'd be one of them, things to take them out of their heads. That'd be one. There are also other examples that I would say, call being a sandbar. So being

a sandbar is to be there, to enable someone else to step into uncertainty. So for instance, there's increasingly, you know, the meditations are wonderful thing. Yoga is one of all these things are wonderful things. But often they are taken out of the context in which they actually, in some sense, evolved. Meditation, mindfulness, for instance, comes out of a Buddhist tradition. Okay, and the Buddhist tradition comes out of a culture that was actually very socially oriented. And one of the reason is because it comes from a certain physical environment in

which that arrives, monsoons, et cetera. So social is very important. And we've done experiments where people who from the far east actually look at images differently than people from the west, their eyes more likely look at the background, whereas your eyes are more likely look at the foreground. The illusions that I make are stronger for people in the east than they are for people in the west because they use context, social context, and actually physical context more. So a recent study has shown that if you practice mindfulness within a context of being more socially and oriented towards others, it increases your generosity. If however, you practice

mindfulness in a context of individualism or your focus is yourself, it actually decreases your generosity. So it would have at least in terms of generosity, it would have been better not to be mindful. It actually makes it worse. Because what's happening is you become more and more focused on self. And often with anxiety, that is where it's coming from. It's that constant focus on yourself. We're often, and we all experience that, as soon as you get yourself out of it, and you start thinking of someone else, you start giving.

Suddenly things become a little bit better, right? So in some sense there is not a solution, but there is a strategy and I apply it myself. When I'm feeling pretty rubbish, I will purposely go out of my way to, sometimes you have to force yourself to go and do something that's useful to someone else. Do something that's kind. And it maybe sounds like a cliche, but it actually is shifting your attention away from yourself. Because I can get you, I mean, you know, you think about pain and chronic pain, and you know, I could put a piece of sand in your hand,

and if I got you to focus on that piece of sand as much as possible, it would become eventually very painful. So which means the whole of my skin, the sensation of my skin, it becomes focused on this tiny little bit, right? And that can be what starts happening to people. And yet it's all in the guys, and I don't mean intentionally intentionally but it all feels like it's in the guys of in service of a larger sense of self or larger world. So there's this alignment between what we say, our intentions and what we do. What about Dredd? Have you looked at the other side of all?

Dredd, oh, I haven't but I like that idea. Oh, I haven't, but I like that idea. What would you say is polar opposite? The opposite of all would be in some sense what we were, I think the opposite of all, in some sense is narcissism. Right? Because, say, I have a particular view of all, which is people think that it diminishes your ego because you feel connected. I think in some sense it expands your ego. What I mean by that is now my ego, if I define my ego, and you can define your ego in some more formal ways, more sort of cookie ways, but if I define my ego very loosely in terms of that to which I identify, if I start identifying with nature, with the animals that are around me, or with you,

then in some sense my ego has expanded, and it's expanded to include things that aren't just within my own skin. Right? So, in some sense, I think it's expanded. So, the opposite of that is contraction, where you're completely self-focused, completely focused on yourself. Lack of generosity, not wanting to take risk, completely fearful of uncertainty. That's where we get anxiety.

That's where anxiety lives. That's where depression lives, which doesn't say that they're the opposite, but in a formal sense, but in some sense, in a behavioral sense, in perceptual sense they are. You mentioned about focus, focusing on a grain of sand specifically, but focus and distraction are just two of the most common desires and ailments, I think, for people at the moment, smartphones and social media and too much electronic devices.

Have you ever done any work on focus and distraction and attention? We're actually in the middle of the study of that just now we're actually focused ironically, are coincident to be on on silence and the power of silence and it's a fascinating topic, it's a fascinating topic and I can't go into necessarily all the findings that we have so far but from what we already know, from other people have done, silence is one, an understudied phenomenon, but it's also a deep human need,

but it's also something that people are thinking of the word used before dreaded. So there's a study, friends, showing that, at least for this group of people, they study it in a young group, people would rather be physically harmed than sit in a room for about 16 minutes and do bugger all. So they had to do that once and when asked to do it a second time, they said you could do it a second time or you could shock yourself. They chose the shock, rather than sit and not meditate meditate just sort of sit and do nothing.

Right? And yet we know you get increased neurogenesis. I brain cells start being born if you're in silence. We know that your heart rate goes down. There's some estimates from the European Union that literally millions of years of well-being have been lost across the European countries. It's even more recently being associated with the potential for Alzheimer's disease, the lack of silence.

And of course, it's very interesting, what is silence? Because there's no such thing as silence. Right? And what's more, your brain is super active when you're in the dark or when you're in silence. And in fact, I went, I did a dark experience for four, four days, um, uh, last month, and that was a fascinating story to talk about.

But the, uh, and so to your, you have cells that are active when the lights go on, but you also have cells that are active when the lights go off because your brain, you know, darkness is not the lack of light, it's, or lack of activity. It's your brain saying, things are dark, it's telling you, things are dark, and then when things are light, it's another set of cells saying things are light, right? So things are very dark, it's just that different parts of your brain are active. And we are underusing those. When you were talking about silence, is it, have you defined it as complete silence, or have you looked at things that are undecidable noises, like white noise or driving in a car without

music or podcasts on, for instance? So it's a difficult question to answer. I can give you some aspects of insight into this. So the most, and when it comes to, say, urban spaces, the most important noise that seems to impact people is not your neighbors. It's the industrial noise. It's transportation, it's airplanes, it's cars, it's building works. In terms of decibel levels, those are the sources,

those are the noises that are actually causing the most challenging. And yet, the ones we spend most time focused on are the neighbors, right? And it's like, why those? They're actually doing less for you. And it's shown that it is. Lean out of your window and scream at the people driving past the car. That's what you should be doing. Yeah.

Well, the irony is that there could be a massive building site where Jackhammer is going across the street, but the person is going to open up their curtains and tell their neighbor to turn down their music, right? And yet, desk full-wise and continuous-wise, it's actually across the street. Maybe it's partly because it gives you that sense of agency that you're in control of something. And how am I going to stop this construction site? Sniper Island.

Sniper Island. Sniper Island with sexy. Yeah. Well, that's one source. Sniperize with fixing. Yeah. Well, that's your idea. So, that's one source of noise. But actually, it might be far more important noise is internal noise. What I mean by that is the jitter that's in your head. And so, that's one point is that that noise that's constantly I can't focus on that's possibly a more powerful noise than the other.

So you could imagine, for instance, those remarkable meditators, Buddhist monks, whatever. I'm sure they could sit on the middle of an airfield and feel no sense of lack of distress by the noise coming past, whereas you are I would. So what's interesting is that our sensitivity to noise varies depending on who you are, your state of mind, and the noise that's going on inside your head, but equally for silence. What is silence? I think silence has something to do with unpredictability, lack of agency, someone just suddenly comes in and interrupts you in your mid thought, right? This type of stuff. And there's also an element of nature. We do,

we have evolved to be in nature as well. Which is quiet. But it isn't, is it? I mean, I mean, if you go camping and up on the hill here in is it? I mean, it's, I mean, if you go camping and, you know, up on the hill here in Ibiza, I mean, there's this, it's not a cricket, it's not a cicada. I don't know what it is, but at 4 in the morning, it's basically saying, my house, my house, my house, my house, my house, over and over again. And it's like, on the one hand, I'm taking, this is beautiful. It's nature.

On the other hand, I was like, shut the fuck up. Right? And it's really annoying, but it's nature on the other hand, I was like, shut the fuck up. Right? And it's really annoying, but it's nature. So, you know, not nature isn't actually that quiet, but we find it peaceful. What's happening inside of our brains, if we are used to a high level of input, who are used to a high level of stimulation?

Yeah, we adapt to it. We adapt to it. So it's what we're referring to in the very beginning, redefining your normality. Your brain is constantly redefining your normality. So you go into You go into a cinema. Everyone will know this experience. You go into it once upon a time Actually, I don't in Britain. Can we go into the cinemas yet? Yeah, I can't remember. Okay So you go into a cinema and initially, you know the the the lights are off You know, you can't see the

steps. You can't see anything. And you're like, shit, and you sort of pause there and you're waiting for, what are you waiting for? You're waiting for your brain to redefine your melody. And others, they're set itself to the average level of illumination. And then if it's a matinee, for instance, and you walk out, and now in your brightness, it's like, well, that was overwhelming.

And then you're getting your brains resetting. Why? Because we can only be sensitive to a small range. Your brain cannot be equally sensitive to the massive range. Illumination in terms of intensity varies a billion to one. We can't be sensitive to that whole range simultaneously, equally. So we have to pick our windows and we're constantly adapting. Why? Because we want to, what we really want to detect is change.

So if I reset myself, then I can detect change around that, around that average. Okay. So if you have lots of noise, lots of things going on, you will reset yourself and that will become an expectation, which means that if you, you need to keep that level of noise in order for it to be normal. But this is also true in terms, if you think about not just say the physiology of brightness, but also the physiology of ideas. One of the, you could argue, one of the most challenging consequences of what's happening

in the state, so not to go political, but in terms of, say, neuroscience, in terms of dafty normality, is that your brain will reset itself. It will say, ah, this is normal. What was previously not normal, what was previously, like, I can't believe this is happening, will eventually say, oh yeah, this is normal. And so the whole of society will shift to that new normal, and then we'll have fluctuations around that. Now, if that shift is in a negative direction, it will then become normal. And so the whole of society will shift to that new normal. And then we'll have fluctuations around that. Now, if that shift is in a negative direction, it will then become normal, and it will no longer be seen as negative. Right? And then it will take another shift down and another shift down. Right? Because to not adapt requires energy. So my point to people often is, decide beforehand if you want to adapt to this thing. Whatever that thing is, a relationship,

a level of light, a level of sound, a political situation, whatever it is, decide beforehand if you want to adapt to it because you will. Because to not do it is hard. And that's, you could argue, what a protest is. A protest is the energy required to not adapt. But you also see this in complex systems, it literally requires energy to not change to the common average.

Think of people who are eccentric, who rebel. It's very costly, emotionally, socially, but also physically, to not adapt in some sense. I saw a study about people who usually live in the city and then move out to the country and people who live in the country and move to the city. And both of them said that it was pretty unbearable in terms of the amount of noise. You think, well, we surely one of them has to be better than the other one. You know, there's got to be a more optimal. And it's like, no, no, no. No. No. No. The issue is this sort of over to the window

of normal experience. And then somebody's being picked up and moved outside of that and change, change requires energy, adapt. Yeah. And we find that really challenging because we love familiarity. Why do we love familiar?

Because it's predictable. And even when that familiarity is awful, we will often go for the familiar as awful, then the unfamiliar that we don't know. All that age, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. And fact, that is not necessarily literally true. But we find that even to the extent that when someone has a physical element, so lots of studies have looked into this, we haven't, but lots of say you've looked into this. You have a physical element.

You don't know the cause of this element. It's massively uncertain what this cause is, what the cause is. You finally get in, you know, you're feeling awful, you're mentally feeling awful, all this kind of stuff. Then you're given the diagnosis. That diagnosis is a terrible diagnosis. There's this element of relief. It's like, oh, well, at least I now know. Even now, what I now know is an awful thing. That's how much we want

and need that sense of knowing, that sense of uncertainty. What did you do? I mean, uncertainties like your specialist subject. What did you look out to do with this? Everything. Everything we look at is about uncertainty. In fact, even my studio, when we design, we only have a design along a single axis, which is the axis of uncertainty. Sometimes we want to increase it, sometimes we want to decrease it. Almost every one of our behaviors, almost every one of your behaviors is an attempt to decrease uncertainty, except in one context.

Okay, so I would argue that, you know, in some sense that's why Uber's successful. Uber's successful not because they tell you when they enable you to get a taxi easier faster. You know, that's true, but it's because they tell you when the taxi's going to arrive. Right, and to the extent that they get when the taxee is going to arrive. And to the extent that they get that wrong, people will stop using Uber.

And this is actually started happening in some South American countries where you order your Uber, it says eight minutes, five minutes, four minutes, canceled, 12 minutes, then people are all right. And then they just order a tax, you're waiting for a taxee, right? But if I say, you know, it's, you know, it's five minutes, I'm going to show you where it is even. Your cortisol levels stay low, right? You're no longer stressed because you have certainty. It's why in Britain, we people, they put the time that bus is going to arrive up on the bus schedule, even though it says 45 minutes, right? It's like, that's a pain a pain story, but at least I know. Right? So everything that we, almost everything we do is attempt to decrease uncertainty and then we apply that in business and in all kinds of aspects of our lives.

And we can actually even use that to people use it to manipulate as well. So both in a positive and negative sense. So in the positive sense, it's why cliffhangers work. It's why Game of Thrones works. Because what they're doing is they're building up on certainty. And at the end of every episode, they finish on a minor chord. And you're like, I mean, you know what it's like, right? Well, I work with DJs here in Ibiza. And you know, they call it dropping the beat.

You know this better than I, right? What's the power of dropping the beat? Well what they've done is they've built up uncertainty. They've built up expectation. That's expectation. Your door for meaning levels are going up and all this kind of stuff. And what's the brain's greatest need? It's for that closure.

It's for that uncertainty to be resolved. And then they drop the beat and your whole body starts moving. You've seen it. The whole rhythm of the whole room, everyone goes crazy. But then sometimes the DJs will play with you, right? And they'll drop it to a minor chord and be like, oh no, and then they ramp it back up and they drop it right.

And they're waiting, and then they finally drop it, right? Game of Thrones is the same. What they're brilliant at is knowing which minor chord to finish it at, so you have to get that closure. But personal relationships will also do that. So if I create a sense of uncertainty in you and I'm the only source of resolving that uncertainty, I now have a power dynamic over you because I'm the only one who can give you closure.

So you'll find that often people will even purposely create this. You see this in corporate so they'll say, I don't know if you're going to buy, you know, you have a job for now. I don't know about next week, you know, they're constantly creeping that uncertainty. And they're the ones that now have a power dynamic over you. I think about the worst message to receive from your partner, we need to talk. Yeah. Dot, dot, dot, right? Just ring me. Like if we need to talk, then fucking ring me, don't tell me that we need to talk. Yeah, dot, dot, dot, right? We'll just ring me. Like, if we need to talk, then fucking ring me, don't tell me that we need to talk. I'm just going to wallow in this anxiety for the next hour.

Yeah. You've got those messages a lot. And I'm an ascended being now. That's not happened anymore. Well, no, I, we all get them, right? We all get them. And it's possible, in fact, that we've all delivered them to. Because in some sense, we all kind of do this. The question is, because in some sense, it's natural, right? But this is why what the lab is trying to do is give people awareness. And we call it perceptual intelligence. Once you're perceptual intelligence, once you have an understanding of how and why you see what you do, now you actually have agency over that because otherwise you're just

behaving reflexively and then you're telling yourself post-hoccarationally for why you did it. And usually that post-hoccarationally puts you as a hero or puts the responsibility on to someone else. But now as soon as you realize, okay, everything I'm doing is grounded in my assumptions, my bias, et cetera, many of which I've created, many of which I've inherited, now you actually have a choice. The natural response is to do X, that's fine.

But now I actually have a choice to not do X. Right? So that's the power of knowing because otherwise you're also going to create this power dynamic on people. And you're not going to know that you're doing it. There's a quote I love from one of the Buddhist masters and he says, the choice in life is between becoming, the pain of becoming aware of our mental afflictions and the pain of being ruled by them. That's the choice.

Yeah, that's the choice. Yeah, that's right. Now that awareness is only a first step. Actually, there's something that comes before awareness, which often people don't talk about, which is the desire to have awareness. Right, so we have an education program. We're creating a school in Budapest with them, some wonderful founders. And it's a primary school that's turning into

high school. And the first thing we focus on is care. I want the kids to care. Because if they don't care, in some sense, I don't care what they care about. I mean, I do as a personal one, what I really want them to just care because they don't care, they're not going to ask a question, they're not going to be willing to doubt, right, etc. So as soon as you have value, now I have the desire to have awareness because awareness can be a bit of a pain because you might become aware of things that you didn't want to have awareness of. You might become aware that you're bit of an idiot or you're bit of an asshole. That can be hard, and we all have those elements in us. The question is, do you have the desire to look?

Now once you've looked, the next step is do you have the desire to act upon it? Because that's where you can get to stress coming back to something we were talking about earlier. The alignment between my intentions and my words, my intentions, my actions. When they're out of alignment, we feel distress. But when they're in alignment, we can feel that sense of solidity. Whether or not my intentions and actions are good or bad is almost irrelevant. It's that there's an alignment that matters. whether or not my intentions and actions are good or bad is almost irrelevant. Is that there's an alignment that matters? That's more certainty, right? It's the only difference is that this uncertainty

we're culpable for it. We've created, look, this is the narrative that I'm telling myself or the world about. I will not cheat on my boyfriend. I'm a loyal girlfriend and I'm going to do this. And then you cheat on the boyfriend. And the girlfriend goes, well, I'm going to second, I said this with the narrative that I told myself, there's no uncertainty because it's not in line with my actions. That's right. But then the fact is that almost everything is contextual. As we've been kind of talking about, context is everything when it comes to the brain. Hence, the reason why it has to redefine normality. It's constantly changing its perceptions of behaviors according to context.

So it's possible for her what happened is that the context changed. Right? Now the context could be an internal context. She herself changed it as a person, right? Or the circumstances changed. Or she just wasn't, didn't have the awareness of who and why she did what she did or, or he. Right? Now she has awareness because that's the beauty of action. Behavior, there's truth in behavior. Right? So often I'll create a situation and I've done

this in my personal life. Right? It's like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to create a context. Now, how you respond to it will then tell me what's true. Because words are easy. We all know what we're supposed to say in some sense. But now, and you can say, all these wonderful things, but the question is, what are you going to do now? And what you do, whatever you do, it's not good or bad. But what I'll have is truth. I'll now know what's true. If you want to step whatever you do, it's not good or bad, but what I'll have is truth.

I'll now know what's true. If you want to step towards, well, that's true. If you step away, that's also true. But you can't speak to stepping forward while at the same time stepping away. The stepping away is what's true. People make mistakes though, or they miss judge. All the time. With their miss judge all the time with their actions all the time does that still make it true? What I mean by that is what's true in

that moment for them as far as what their truth is right now a mistake is I mean mistakes are wonderful things in my view conflict for me is a beautiful thing, to be in conflict is a wonderful thing. To be in a situation is different from you expect. That's a wonderful thing, because we can only literally learn through mistakes and through conflict. You can never expand from a position of knowing. You can only ever expand from a position of not knowing.

This is why I have, on my wrist, I have a tattoo of knowing, you can only ever expand from a position of not knowing. This is why I have on my wrist I have a tattoo that says, I don't know. Right? To celebrate, I don't know. Right? That's a beautiful thing. The problem is that we so often engage in a situation where we think we're supposed to know. Where knowing and intelligence is, is where the cash is. But I would argue that actually it's not knowing where the cash is. It's in the beautiful question, is where the cash is. But to ask a beautiful question means you have to engage in situations in the humility that says, I don't know in the first place. I mean, going back to the dinner party example, everyone's around the table, People are giving lovely insights.

Did you know X? And people are asking, oh, that's interesting. What happens when someone asks brilliant question? The whole table stops. And they almost all say the same thing. Ah, I never thought of it that way. And yet the question didn't give any insight. It didn't give any answer.

Suddenly, it revealed to people an assumption that none of them knew they had in the first place. And people love that. Why don't we love it when you're an iron conflict or in two political parties are in conflict because we don't want to move, because to move is to step into uncertainty. And yet the only way to learn is to move. Life is movement. If you don't move, you die. It sounds like an equivalent between optimism and pessimism here that you're talking about. We often tell ourselves, we rationalize that we were either the victim or the unintended criminal perpetrator in a situation. A lot of the time, if we do something that is good,

it's because we hold ourselves up high, and if we do something that is bad, it's because the world forced it upon us somehow. Is there an inverse of that? Because I have a bunch of buddies who seem to self-barate, or they attribute their successes to fluke, and they attribute their downfalls to themselves. Yeah. So there is a space that's in between those two. So the first one you're describing is

ironically the measures that we use for that that that Seligman and others have devised for the measurement of optimism. So optimism as measured, I would just argue against this, but optimism is measured is when something good happens, you think it's going to last forever, it's going to affect the whole of my life, and it's largely because of me. When something bad happens, it's going to be very specific, it's not going to affect the rest of my life, and it's kind of your fault anyway. Right? That's an optimistic person. And we know if you're optimistic that you're light, you live longer, you're happy, you're not like I said, well, who wouldn't be? Because all the good things are for me and all the bad things are because of you.

Right? Whereas the more so is stoic, the more the more sort of realist is like, actually, this good thing that happened is kind of not just because of me, it's also because of you. This bad thing that happened is not just because it's also because of circumstance. So the concept of the demon was actually, which then became a familiar and was actually the basis of the news. So the demon was like this thing on your shoulder

that sort of, in some sense, took some responsibility for the bad things that happened, but they also took responsibilities for the good things that happened. So it kind of diminished your ego. It kept you humble. So that engaging the world with that humility and openness to the possibility that you had some agency in whether it went wrong or whether it went well. Is actually I would argue that one of the things from being wisdom and intelligence, wisdom to me is far more interesting than say intelligence.

Dig into that form, what do you mean? Well, first of all, wisdom, in my view, you can't get it from a book, it comes from experience, it comes from realizing that the world is contextual. This is what I would again equate to say perceptual intelligence. It has humility, it has compassion in it. It engages with in conflict with desire not to win, but with the desire to understand. And we can come to the distinction between understanding and conflict. Whereas intelligence is different. It can be, we often teach intelligence in school.

We don't teach wisdom. In the school we're trying to create, we're looking to teach wisdom. I seeking understanding rather than seeking knowledge, rather than seeking knowing, X and X happened on this date. It's, why did that happen? What was the significance of that? What was the context in which that can then generalize? Right?

So that to me is loosely a distinction between them. But when we enter not knowing with either a desire to stand still, or even worse with a desire to validate. So if you are in conflict, often what we do is we're seeking validation. I want you to agree with me, or you want me to agree with you. And so I need to validate you. But what you really want is to be understood.

And so often when people are dealing with conflict management, they often psychologists will say, what you wanna do is find a common ground. Oh, you like football? Oh, I like football. That's great. Now, I know that actually what I'm trying to do is convince you on something else. So I'm trying to get you to,

oh, what kind of buddies? Are you both like Arsenal? Well, you probably like Newcastle. I used to like Newcastle. But anyway, so we're trying to find that common ground. And then it's like, now, let's talk about politics or something. Well, actually, this is called manipulation.

But if I went to you and said, you know what Chris, I disagree with everything you're saying. But I truly want to understand why you feel this way, because I truly think that I might learn something. But what I really want is to understand you, because everybody makes sense to themselves, just not to other people. There's an internal law of physics inside you that is the basis of your rational decision. want is to understand you because everybody makes sense to themselves, just not to other people. There's an internal law of physics inside you that is the basis of your rational decision.

It's just that your physics are different from mine. Your data is different from mine. And so often I come to the point that it's like, oh my goodness, if I had that data, I would have that view too. Well, everyone's convinced of their own view, right? Like nobody's fighting the corner of a view that they don't believe in. For the most part, there are some people

that are misaligned or sort of willfully ignorant, but even the people that are willfully ignorant, like they're ignorant. If they were convinced of something else, if I convince you, if I'm actually convinced you that two plus two equals five, you are now convinced of that until somebody convinces you a different way.

Are you familiar with Chris Vossi's work, the FBI's ex-head negotiator for kidnapping? Oh, no, I know I've it, but no, not in detail at all. So his book, Never Split the Difference, is you would, I would recommend it's super accessible, read, you'll you'll chew through it. And he does a lot of the things that you're talking about here. So one of the key tactics he has is called a that's right. So you steal man to your decides position as obsessively as possible, painful, second by second, the most detail that you can get every single thing, and what you're aiming for. So this is what I think is happening, and you are this way because of this, and this

is your view, and this is your view, and this is your view. That's right. That's what he wants. That's the response that he wants. He tells this story about a guy that was a kidnapper that was holding a bunch of people in Vietnam hostage, and this had been going on for months, months and months and months and they just, they couldn't make headway and the guy that Chris was there coaching the actual negotiator himself, Chris said, look, we need to get a that's right out of this

guy because we're not getting anywhere and we're worried that he's going to kill the people that he's with. So he says, we need to get out of that. That's right. Today. So this guy takes two hours of explaining, I understand that you believe that Vietnam was taken over by imperialist powers. I appreciate why this is coming for all this is why you think this is why you think two hours. That's right. The next day, all of the hostages were freed. This guy, it completely done. And another one, the other one that he does that I thought was interesting is a lot of the time when people notice an issue with the other side, they'll say, what's wrong?

Two words. So much assumption. So much assumption in the sentence, what's wrong? His suggestion and he, I can't remember all of them, it ascends. So you can ascend the intensity. But one of the first ones is, it feels like there's something on your mind. It seems like there's something on your mind. And then another, sorry, another final one, is when somebody wants to suggest something to you in a deal and you can't make it work,

just cannot do it. His first response is, how am I going to do that? How am I going to make that work? And what you're seeing with a lot of these is it's trying to find that bridge. How am I going to do that? It opens it up to the other side. It seems like there's something on your mind. It invites somebody in. It's not judging what's wrong. It's just such a disgusting thing to say. I mean, we've all done it in relationships, the person's quiet, and you go, what's wrong? You shout it at them, and you're like, oh yeah,

because that's really gonna encourage the other person to tell you what's wrong. And then that's right, steel man the other side, make them feel understood, genuinely, and validated. Yeah. That's right. Well, so I would make a distinction, I absolutely agree with all of this.

I would make a distinction, I absolutely agree with all of this. I would make a distinction between the understanding and validation because I don't think it's you need to validate. I don't think I need to say you're right. What I think I need to say is I understand. Ah, that actually makes sense. Given what you think, given the data, given the information that you're using, given your aims, that makes, in fact, I'd probably do that too. But now let's talk about your assumptions that underpin that. So I don't need to validate you, and I don't need to be validated, but people want to feel like they're understood.

So I make a distinction between those, because if you can only talk to people, you can validate. Well, there are very few people you can talk to. It's only people whose positions you agree with. Yeah, that's right. But if I'm seeking understanding, I can talk to anyone. Right. And also in doing so, often you learn, but what's also really important is often, I'm not saying he does this at all, but that people give rules or steps to these processes. My argument is that these steps aren't enough. They are very important, they're very insightful, but the most fundamental step is to want to.

Because if you don't want to, the steps are irrelevant. When I talk to the businesses about innovation and leadership and things like this, they say, you know, what are the five ways to become, you know, five? What are the five ways to become a good leader? It's like, okay, we'll lead by example, admit mistakes and all this kind of stuff, right? But my argument is that you can't apply a formula, right? What you have to, it's a way of being in the world. Because if you don't have this way of being, and it's not a way of being that you switch on when you walk into your office, right, this is a way of being in which you engage with everybody.

And it's that way of being that says, I want to understand, I want to expand my perception, but to expand my perception requires not knowing, requires, requires embracing uncertainty, requires realizing uncertainties. An essential step. It's the ramping up of the music. The closure, the dropping of the beat is a relevant. If you haven't ramped up the music first, an orgasm is irrelevant. If you haven't had the build up first, literally, the orgasm is the dropping of the beat. But it's a cycle. It's a spiral. You have to go out and then you come back, you go out and you come back.

But you have to have the desire to move in the first place. Otherwise, no matter what strategy or formula you give me, I'm not going to engage in it. Which is why that's what I focus on is that desire. Can you cultivate that desire? What we're talking about here is that a lot of the time people want the Can you cultivate that desire? What we're talking about here is that a lot of the time people want the five minute booty blaster shortcut to getting whatever being a good leader, having company culture, getting more performance out of my staff. And that needs to, it's much more embodied and scalable if you have someone that genuinely

wants that. Now, presumably there's absolutely still a place for the tactics because somebody that has desire, but no, tactics is just spraying into the dark with their bullets. Absolutely. As opposed to, yeah, so you need direction and speed. But how can people develop the desire, or do you have ways for people to do that?

We do. And so when I do the corporate talks and everything, I speak to them personally, first of all, about how what we're doing here can actually be relevant to the whole of your life. But also you speak to people's fundamental desires are, which is to have a meaningful life, to be happy, etc. And in the case of business, to be successful. So you say actually, and you have to show that this is actually a more successful way of being in the world. It might be a harder way. It might require you having awareness that you maybe don't want, etc., etc.

But actually, you show how it's in some sense self-serving. And I don't mean that in a negative sense. I think in some sense, every behavior is in some sense selfish. Right? Every behavior is in some sense trying to increase my perceived value of myself. The question is, how do I increase my perceived value? Is it by screwing as many people as possible? Is it by having a maximum bank account? Is it by adding a smile to as many the faces

of as many people as possible? Where do I get that value is fundamental? But the consequences all the same. I get a stronger sense of value of myself. So but similarly, actually with the monetary value of a company, to show that actually, to be authentic in your purpose, will make you a company that has higher loyalty,

both internally and externally. That will affect your bottom line because you will become a more resilient company when things go up and down. So you show how actually this is not just philanthropy, this is not just a nice way of being. It actually has real impact on your life, but it's also a harder road. But then the things that we put more effort into, we tend to perceive those things to have higher value as well. It's called that key effect. Right? So that that's I remember a general the strategy.

I spoke to Rory Sutherland about this and he. Yeah, Rory is great. He's fuck me. What a guy. He's just a force of nature. And we were talking about the fact that pick your own strawberries is very different to cheap strawberries because cheap strawberries sound cheap.

But these strawberries are so cheap because you have to go pick them yourself. different to cheap strawberries because cheap strawberries sound cheap, but these strawberries are so cheap because you have to go pick them yourself. There's justification in that and it's the Ikea effect all over. Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. I mean, the end of course there's a sense of ownership, etc. All kinds of wonderful things, which is why often when we create our physical environments and these immersive experiences, what we're also trying to do is have people come to their own insights, because often as soon as you tell something to someone, you've actually taken away from them.

So what we want is we call it creating parallels. We create parallels in the experience and then enable people to find the connections between the parallels, and that's then now they own it. Now, if you then find connections between parallels that we didn't anticipate, well, that's a discovery, that's science. So we also then have within our experience making true discoveries that no one's known, not just you or I didn't know. And then you suddenly have ownership of that,

and you behave very differently towards it. Talk to me about leadership. You have an interesting framework for how people can be better leaders or the fundamental elements of leadership. Yeah, so leaders, leaders effectively, as we were talking about before in terms of the host effect first of all, you know, they determine the, not just the culture is such, but almost the hard to measure aspects of a company that sort of enable people, for instance, to be uncertain, to ask questions. So often leaders are thought they're supposed to have the answers. And this is where we're going, where in fact, the best leaders lead others into uncertainty, as opposed to create uncertainty, or think that they themselves have to solve the uncertainty. What they do is create an environment in which others can actually ask questions and then we can prosecute those questions.

So I'd argue for instance in terms of science or laboratory, science is not about iterating to better questions. It's about iterating, sorry, iterating to better answers. It's actually iterating to better and better questions. It's about iterating to better answers. It's actually iterating to better and better questions. But you need an environment in which you can actually have that iteration process where not knowing asking questions is celebrated. We also know, for instance, that there are three qualities of a leader that

our associate is obsessed with anyone in company. It's lead by example, admit mistakes, and see qualities and others. So lead by example is a space that creates trust. Now you can't engage in uncertainty outside of space that is trusting. So that's lead by example, admit mistakes is a space that says, hey, not knowing is good here. And see qualities and others is a space that celebrates diversity. But what's interesting, there's

a lot of talk about diversity. Diversity by itself is not necessarily a good or a bad thing. What often people forget is you also have to integrate across that diversity. It's not just having a lot of different stuff. So this actually comes down to physics. So in some sense, science, what your brain is constantly looking for it. Understanding is finding a principle that transcends context. So, when you understand something, you actually understand it at a deeper level, where now you can apply that understanding to multiple environments. And that's because you've been able to integrate across the diversity of those environments.

You've been able to find something common, so whether it be talking to a woman or a man or whatever it might be, and then of course you're trying to find what specific to that person, for instance. But what you're trying to do is find the thing that integrates across diversity. So E equals MC squared. It doesn't care if it's a planet or a bowling ball or a chicken. It's gravity.? Doesn't care. It doesn't depend on all that. So you're trying to find those principles and that's because you're integrating across diversity. So in terms of a company, you're trying to not just have diversity, you're trying to find how these different people of different kinds of backgrounds wherever can integrate, can communicate, can share. It makes me think a lot about the way that leadership works,

about the way that companies are very effective. They're asking questions thing and the... What was the first like competence? What was the first one? How did you frame that one? So lead by example. Lead by example. Yeah.

So I had Will saw on the show recently talking about the status game. And in that he said that there's three primary routes, this one technically two, but three kind of three primary routes to status. And one of them is fear, basically, kind of force. Another one is trustworthiness and the final one is sort of usefulness or competence or virtue, something along those lines. And these are the three fundamental ways in which people find status. And the reason for this is, it makes a lot of sense. Like Those would be three ways that somebody could become renowned, powerful, admired, whatever you want to call it within a tribe.

It makes me think about the person at the top of the tree that there is a requisite amount of competence that's needed. For instance, we use in our events company, we have quite a vertically sort of stratified company in terms of managers. We have junior managers and event managers and then senior event managers and city managers and then we have directors. It's not a tremendously big company, but we draw these guys out so that it gives them this sense of progression and it also allows us to pay packages efficiently.

The guys that have the most respect from the team below them often have a number of different elements together. But one of the ones that they almost always do is that they have the biggest guest list totals. So if these guys are regularly putting in the hard yards, this is the fundamental thing that everybody does. It's the sales, right? It's let's say that the director of the sales company

still does sales. And you can see him on a board. And yeah, maybe he's got more experience than everybody else. And yeah, maybe his contact's about the never reals, but he's still got to put the sales on the board. Right. And his board's the same as your board. And he makes, you know, that's the way it works.

A lot of the guys that have been our most successful managers throughout time have been the ones that have displayed competence that are seen by everybody else. Everybody else gets to see it on the same score sheet that they're on. And they can compare their performance with theirs. You'll see this in CrossFit as well. This is one of the reasons I think that the CrossFit open

has had so much uptake. It's the first fitness competition ever where the world champion, you get to compete against him. You do the same workout with the same weights, the same movement specs. And you get to go, oh my God, he did it in nine minutes and 40 seconds, I did it in 20 minutes. How stupid am I? I'm so blah, blah, blah.

You get to, you're right because we can see competence, very, very clearly displayed in front of us. And I think as a small business owner, it's one of the interesting things thinking about as you rise up through the ranks, I'm a big proponent of people earning their bread and butter and really understanding each of the different levels of their business. Maybe when you get to the stage where you've got like board members that are kind of more like advisory or specialized, perhaps this becomes because you're less of a figurehead, you're not actually interacting with the people. But for instance, with podcasting, a lot of guys that start podcasting, if they want to

build a big channel, they'll try and get an editor on board quickly or a video guy. And you'll be like, well, hang on, if they come to you, if you're unhappy with something to do with the audio, and you don't know what you're talking about, if you say it's a bit this and you're just using vague language, that person's not going to have as much respect for you. If you're able to actually really use the correct terminology. And the same thing goes for houses. So if you have a property portfolio, my advice is you should manage your properties.

But perhaps a year or a couple of years and then you can get a letting agency in. Why? Well, because if you need to sit down with somebody in a meeting and have a conversation about why your properties are being mismanaged and you don't understand the process is even at least on sort of a broad level. You have no idea what you're talking about. It's going to be much more difficult to command respect. So yeah, competence appears to be a pretty impressive drug. Very much so, I'd also think about competence in terms of reliability as well, which is hugely important when people are reliable, whether it be at a personal relationship level, or in a corporate and company level, that reliability and competence, you're right, creates a sense of trust.

With that said, and also, because there's a sense of earning it, but it also enables you, I would argue, that the best leaders enable others to become competent. But in order to do so, that's where I think a leader becomes a mentor in more so the traditional sense. Instead of telling what to do, you create an environment for them to become competent and actually it will make the organization more successful. Rather than each individual competing over competence, they're actually in some individual competing over competence. They're actually in some sense competing over the ability to enable others to become competent. But in order to become competent, you have to understand the space in which the person is engaging.

Now, there's also a flip side to that, though, because the leader can also, the person who's very competent can also become an expert. And experts are really, they're very efficient, but they're really bad at asking a good question. Why is that? Because they know what they're not supposed to ask. So over and over again, the experts will say, no, we don't do it that way. No, that can't be done. No, it hasn't been et cetera, et cetera. There'll be no, no, this is the way you do. It's too constricting for the people that are below them because they don't get to learn by failing. Yes, that's one.

And two, that the expert is focused on efficiency, which is why I'm a huge celebrator of being naive, not ignorant, but naive atay. Because people who are naive can ask brilliant questions, but they don't know their great questions. So it's not that they're thinking outside the box, they're just in a different box. The experts in this box, and this is the way we do it in this box, and we're going to be very

efficient. And that's a great idea if the world didn't change, right? But then the world changes. And what the what the leader has to do is change with it, which means they have to actually balance creativity with efficiency. That means balancing naive with experts. So in my own team, in my own work, we try to have a diversity, but that diversity in this, well, we have lots of different kinds of diversity, but in this instance, diversity between naive and expert. Because a brilliant expert can can't ask great question, but they can recognize a great question when asked.

Right? Because they're open. It's like, ah, shit, I thought we should have done it this way. This whole last 20 years, we've been doing it this way. But now that you mention this, I've never thought of it that way, but let's go in that direction. Now I'm enabling you to be competent, right? And that's where the self-awareness comes in, that I have knowing that you have biases, you have assumptions that come from a history and often a history that you inherited.

So it's being also willing to step away from that as well, which is, I would argue, a very strong sense of being competent, because competence is also about having courage. And when, you know, as my mom used to say, a black belt doesn't have to say he's here, she's a black belt. They just are. So when you have that sense of competence, it means you're no longer trying to prove yourself. You're never longer trying to prove your competence. You just are. You just live it. And you enable others to live it. Right? And part of that is to understand that sometimes you get it wrong. And not that you got wrong, but being able to expand your own sense. And that's how you get resilience. That's how you get agility in an individual or in a company. And think about personal relationships. If that personal relationship isn't moving, if a romantic relationship isn't, I would argue expanding, then in some sense it's dying.

But so often the people want to stay still. And initially that's okay. But after a year or two or three years, you're still standing still. It's like, ah, you know? And then eventually one wants to move. I don't mean move on, but they want to expand. And the other's like, oh no, but that's scary because I kind of like it the way it is.

Because that's kind of, I don't know what that's like over there. But now things that don't move, things that don't expand literally just die. What new experiments have you got coming up, anything fun that you can tell us about? So we're doing a set of experiments on, we're hopefully starting a set of experiments on touch, the power of touch, which I think is a fascinating topic. And we're also just finishing a set of experiments on the power of home. All right. Yeah.

And, and I can't go into the details of it. But we're finding some powerful, wonderful insight into the importance of home for your brain and how we feel about home. And so, so touch in home and silence. We're currently working on. And then we're hopefully going to be working with a wonderful person called Perry who also runs a very like yourself an important podcast, et cetera, and he works on chronic pain. So we're going to be doing some experiments on chronic pain.

And then we're also working with another group of war veterans with PTSD and trying to better understand how we can facilitate and help them and measure the impact of certain treatments on PTSD, including eye wasca. Why are you in Ibiza? Atem. It's kind of a short question along, short answer along, and why am I in Ibiza? Because I found myself here and now creating a life here in some sense, but about a year and a half ago,

so the longer, but I'll try to keep a brief answer is that about a year and a half ago, I packed up my living in Manhattan. So I've been in Britain for 25 years, and then I moved to New York. And then, as a second lockdown was about to start, I packed up my house in Manhattan, put everything in storage, rented a rag top,

and what I called Turn Left. And I drove across America. My mom was just diagnosed with Parkinson's, so I went to stay with her, and I cycled down the west coast of the states, and then I drove back across. And basically for the last year and a half two years, I've been living out of one bag.

And why? And then I drove back across. And basically for the last year and a half of years I've been living out of one bag. And why? It's in some sense because, well, I study uncertainty. And I believe in being a trope. I believe you should be the thing that you talk about, or at least try as much as possible. And also it's research for a new book I'm writing. So I've just been movement.

And now I found myself here. And so now that we're doing some wonderful things, we just created a new book I'm writing. So I've just been movement and now I found myself here. And so now that we're doing some wonderful things, we just created a new space here and we'll run experiments and events and things like that here. And so that's why I find myself an abyssa. Is that for the foreseeable now? For the foreseeable, but I travel probably like yourself, I travel a great deal. And so it's a wonderful place to then come back to. And I was in Ibiza and we were gonna do this in person, but then I looked at where you are on the map. And I've been to some pretty wavy afters.

I've been to some naughty aftoparties in Ibiza, but I've never been as far north as you are. You are off the top of the unit. Yeah, but for great amount of foreign north is like 40 minutes away. It's a small island. Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. No, but isn't it funny how relative that is?

It's all the way on the other side. So true. And the north of the island is very different from the South Island. I'm new here. But there's a very different feel. And it's beautiful and all that. So yes, I'm in the north.

But it would have been fun to do it together. Yeah, well next time man next time if you still that if you still that next year then we can do it Look, but a lot of ladies and gentlemen people want to keep up to date with what you're doing where should they go? Well, they should go to the labamisfit.com Labamisfits.com and they can actually find we we like my traveling and I don't know stuff and all that. I post something every two weeks on a blog. We also run experiments on people so they can take part of experiments

and better understand themselves. We also have a lab on this, it's Instagram page and I just started my first personal Instagram. Oh, so I'm doing a foray and sending, descending into the muck and the mire along with the rest of us get down. So maybe, right? Because I'm going to turn it into an experiment. As well as social, it's a personal experiment.

Because I've been resistant. So I want to see what happens. So I'm doing it experiment on myself. So people are welcome to come along on that experiment. What's the, what's your Instagram? It's bullado and the other one is lab of misfits. I love it. Well look yeah until next year dude. All right, brilliant to talk to you you