The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Insanity Of Ideas: Why ideas are now leaving human control and developing minds of their own by Mr Matthew Godfrey

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

The Chris Voss Show Podcast - The Insanity Of Ideas: Why ideas are now leaving human control and developing minds of their own by Mr Matthew Godfrey A mind-blowing examination on what ideas our society is attracted to, where ideas are going and why things today seem increasingly insane. The game changers are exponential changes in population growth, technology and social interaction. It is a provocative exploration of both the innovators, such as Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg and others and the methods that have used to create the transformative ideas, that frame our world. As the speed of our ideas infinitely accelerates, and the impact of them becomes increasingly powerful, it asks whether we are best placed to make the right choices for future generations or whether we should hand the responsibility on to Artificial Intelligence. Will our ideas fail, create confusion and drive division? Will emerging artificial intelligence ultimately, generate its own independent ideas, and then action the ones that will govern the future of humanity. Will ideas evolve to not obey our commands and live completely out of our control, and what are the alternatives? Chapter 1: What is an Idea? Chapter 2: Evolutionary Ideas. Chapter 3: The Idea Explosion. Chapter 4: Cities. The Idea Hives. Chapter 5: The Dopamine Apes. Chapter 6: Misleading Ideas. Chapter 7: Idea Oralces. Chapter 8: The Idea Economy. Chapter 9: The Idea Illusion. Chapter 10: The Idea Colony. Chapter 11: The Augmented Ape. Chapter 12: Artificial Ideas. Chapter 13: Whats Next?

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here go to youtube.com to see the video version of this go to goodreads.com for just christmas see all the books we're reading

and reviewing over there go to all the groups we have on facebook linkedin twitter instagram tiktok all the places those cool kids are playing and we just try and i don't we just try and keep up with wherever the hottest new thing is today we, we have an amazing author on the show. His book is called The Insanity of Ideas. Why ideas are now leaving human control and developing minds of their own. His name is Mr. Matthew Godfrey, and he's joining us today to talk about his amazing new book. He is a highly awarded and entrepreneurial CEO and author. He's published his first non-fictional book, This Insanity of Ideas, as I mentioned before. The new book covers the evolution of ideas from Elon to Einstein, from Neanderthals to Neuralink, and why thousands of people follow insane miracle cures, oracles, leaders, and influences. It also offers the positive and negative. I'm thinking of America in the last five years.

It also covers the positive and negative influence from social media and where our society might be headed, which probably is off the cliff. He'll tell us. He's also the CEO of a food technology company, Nutrition Innovation, which in 2021 has recently been awarded as one of the best small business in the world by United Nations. That's pretty awesome. Welcome to the show, Matthew. How are we doing? We're doing really well. I'm coming for you from Singapore. It's bright and early in the morning, so I'm really happy to spend some time with you, Chris, and connect with you. It's wonderful to have you as well. Sorry for giggling there during your bio, but just start all these moments of the last five years of America started going through my

head and I'm like, wow. Yeah, that's a couple volumes of books. It's a wild time out there around the world. It's not just America. Everywhere's got some degree of... I'm American. We're assholes, so we only care about us. That's how that works. Welcome to America.

Give us your plugs where people can find you on the interwebs and learn more about you and order up your book. Yeah, so pretty easy. You can find the book at theinsanityofideas.com. It's there. Of course, that will lead you to the Amazon page. So that's a pretty easy place to go. That will lead you to Instagram. It will lead you to Facebook.

So that's all easy. So one place will hook you all up. And of course, if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, Matthew Godfrey at Nutrition Innovation. There you go. What motivated you to write this book? And of course, I love some insight into what were you thinking of when you wrote the title? So I've been in the ideas business for about 25 years. And so every day is either making ideas, processing ideas, or selling ideas to people in marketing communication so it's an insane industry but i was looking across the world as you said and particularly places which seem to be in turmoil between positive ideas and bad ideas and trying to ask what are the evolutionary consequences to that

what are those cultural consequences to that and what role technology has been playing in that? And then trying to map that both past, present, and future to ask, where are we today? And what's going to be like in maybe 50 or 100 years? And are we on the right track with processing? Fundamentally, will we still be selecting the best ideas in about two or three or four decades to come? So it seemed the right time to ask those questions. What is an idea? Let's lay a foundation for that. And I believe that's your first chapter too. I just saw that as I said it. I'm just following right along at this point. So what do you define an idea? So people have about 60,000 thoughts a day. And so many of them could be ideas, might not. I define the idea in the book

as a thought which actually has consequences. If you think about a memory, you're thinking about back in time. So you can think about all you want, but you really can't change anything. It doesn't affect anything in the past. So an idea is some sort of creation in your mind, which if you act upon it, it'll change your future outcome. I think I unfriended somebody today who has about five thoughts going on a daily basis. That might be too much. It might be a negative at this point there yeah i got about 50 000 but maybe one of them is good so the rest i'd like to see a curve or a test for this can we put a test to people that finds out

how much stuff is really going on upstairs or whether or not they're just walking brain dead because we have a few of those it's that simpson character where he's just got just a conval playing in his mind yeah there's just like drool coming down the side of his mouth in fact i have two dogs that are that way so that explains everything husky and that was me about 20 minutes ago that's me every day when i'm not on the podcast i'm pretty much sitting in the corner in a straight jacket so you know the rest of your title is why ideas are now leaving human control and developing minds their own what is that the first ideas on the planet you can track back around about 3 million years ago

where a whole bunch of hominids were making stone axes. So you can trace ideas back on the planet quite a way, and they predate actually the human species. And a lot of other ideas sort of popped up, predates human species. Even art apparently comes from Neanderthals at this stage. So you can track ideas back quite a long way way and the pace of them you can track back but we're all now playing with a new idea which we've decided to invent to help us process thoughts which is artificial

intelligence as we move along we're programming that to not only have intelligence but have its own ideas it'll have its own thoughts and consequences what's next that's great yeah and so this is live it's ongoing it's a billion dollar industry there's there's thousands of people engaged in it so it's got a trajectory of its own and so we have a whole industry which is trying to invent technology that will have ideas in the future so if you track back in time you'll have neanderthals and humans all debating ideas together you know what happened to them But if you go forward 100 years, 200 years, 300 years, who will be creating the ideas in the future

and who will be better at selecting which one's the best for us? Will that be after we're extinct as humanity and Skynet has taken over from Terminator and basically is running everything? Is that basically it? It depends which way you go. If you then look at Neuralink, which is the idea to integrate technology with humanity,

and it starts off in very altruistic terms about helping to repair damage, helping to optimize people. But if you look at all the mission statements in that whole industry, in that augmentation industry, it is moving towards an area which is trying to perfect humanity. And so it depends who wins the race. If it's the augmented industry, then they'll have a viewpoint on how humans will operate. And of course, other people will have. And of course, that business is booming.

I think now, obviously, America leads the way with about 30,000 people employed in the AI industry. But China's not too far behind. China has now 20,000 people employed in the AI industry. So it's also a question of not just where does it go, but who's driving it and what agenda are they driving behind, which is also interesting to unpack in the book. Now, China's AI is, correct me if I'm wrong, is mostly designed to create that social credit thing they have where they know what everyone's thinking, doing, basically the big brother concept is yeah that that is expansive and horrific and i think we're just at the tip of the iceberg there's

a i read an interesting book the other day about looking at how pervasive that is in terms of even putting monitoring devices and cameras inside people's homes to distract their behavior not only socially online but in real time in in as they go about their daily basis so there are really terrific examples of using that type of technique what's funny is amazon right now i'm looking at your page of your book on amazon and it's serving me alexa by the book 1984 on kindle isn't that funny we're talking about this i just i just read the ad that was up above your book algorithms are also partly to blame to the insanity of it is. So algorithms, there's an old advertising meme, which is if nobody loves you and nobody hates you,

then nobody knows you. This sounds like the story of my first nine ex-wives. Yeah, it's absolutely true. And one of those worlds, which is if you provoke a response from somebody in your audience, you're going to get a connection and it's either going to be hate or kind of love. But if you're in the middle, there's no response.

You're going to be ignored as a brand. And social media algorithms work basically on this principle. They're looking for content that's going to provoke a response, and they're looking to feed you both ideas and suggestions and viewerships on things that actually they'll get a buzz out of you and feed you dopamine. Particularly a lot of the insanity and ideas is actually driven by a lot of the platforms looking to provoke you with stuff that you either love or hate. And so it feels like there's more intensity in the world simply because that's the content

that bores your blood. There you go. Did you see the recent thing over the weekend with 60 Minutes and the whistleblower of Facebook over the algorithms? Did you see that? it on a number of occasions, speaking to the same topics and speaking to the same areas about how the social media platforms across the board are really twisting behavior. To their own device, I don't think anybody should be surprised. I think 98% of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising, 80 odd percent from Twitter, 80 odd percent from Google. So when they make extraordinary amounts of money from advertising, they're in their business of marketing themselves and getting as much viewership as possible. Look, it is pervasive.

It's been going on for a long time. There's people been calling out at the U.S. Senate. But one of the biggest contributors and beneficiaries of these platforms is political advertising. And so you got the people who are benefiting from these platforms the most setting the rules for the platforms as well. It seems like the whole thing is really messed up when it comes to, there should be some third party oversight or something like that. It'll take us certainly a while to unpick. And the question I think there is, let's say it takes five years to unpick.

If you were to go back to, not too far ago, but I hate to go back too far in time, but let's say you and I were living in the 1880s. Feels like it sometimes. Yeah, it took 72 days to get a letter from Australia to, to London. So if you want to communicate somebody really what you had to wait, you know, two or three months for a rat round trip.

Wow. But now you can't like a letter. Hey, this is Bob in Australia. I've got COVID. Oh, well, this is it.

So, so up until about 70 years ago, maybe even less, maybe 20, 30 years ago, ideas spread slowly. So good ideas and bad ideas were focused around a location. And even up until the First World War, the fastest way to get messages around was carry a pigeon. And apart from that, you really didn't have a lot of chance to spread your thoughts but now obviously with with 50 i think 4.7 billion people connected to the internet a good idea and bad idea can be globalized instantly and so with as the power of ideas increase as the consequences of those ideas increase five years in in 1880 to sort something

out might not have had bad consequences, but five years in, in canal world is like dog years. A lot can go on. Is it more amplified? What's that old rule? A lie tends to spread around the world in seconds or something. According to research, fake news moves about six times quicker.

Wow. And so if you think about, think about kind of the socialization of ideas and all, all the platforms that exist on. And if you have, if you just argue that bad ideas, let's assume that fake ideas are bad ideas, they are moving six times quicker than good ideas,

and probably balanced ideas, which don't provoke response, aren't moving at all. And so it's not just bad ideas or fake ideas. The platforms are promoting ideas which provoke response. So balanced, neutral ideas, which everybody goes, yeah, I agree with. They just don't get the momentum or the traction. So not all ideas are shared equally. And so that's why you get this dichotomy and spread, because actually the platforms are incentivized by the algorithms to spread the ideas which

monetize themselves quickly. And that's obviously the stuff that's provocative. You just made me realize something there. Maybe that's the reason we've become more and more polarized. It's because those middle centrist, let's all get along ideas, they aren't as exciting. They don't provoke as much emotion, rage, and passion as everyone else. Getting along, that's boring. Fighting, and over here and over here, let's go.

Cage match. You're bang on uh chris i think there's there's two things one it's an explanation of why they feel there's more tension but there is a potential there that it just appears that way because that's what we see that's what's fed to us we're actually the underlying base there's more commonality there's more agreement there's more harmony but you don't see that i don't see that because it's not fed to us so to to move forward a little bit, as you say, which is rather mean, what are some of the good fixes? Some of the good fixes going forward is to bring equality to ideas.

And if the platform is incentivized and monetized and paid to spread the worst ideas, then how do you flip that switch and say, well, actually, let's neutralize that. All ideas are equal. And I think that would actually bring a little bit more balance into people's lives. Actually, there is a neutral view which i can accommodate and other people think like me it's not like it's two prize fighters in the corner coming out to fight there is a there is a middle ground yeah but i think facebook and those have people have found that that takes people off the platform doesn't it's not quite as engaging it's not quite as

it does two things it it reduces time on the platform and also makes you less predictable and the ability to predictable is probably equally as valuable because if i'm gonna if i'm a platformer i'm gonna sell chris voss to a brand to market i need to be able to predict which brands is gonna what content is he gonna like and i need to be able to do that efficiently and effectively otherwise i'm not going to monetize you. And so predictability to behavior is almost as important as time on the platform. So that's how they're engineered and geared. And so the whole model of monetization is geared around those two things, which means it's always going to, if you get provoked at a video,

I'm going to feed you more of that. So it's just built into the monetization system of the platforms, and they're insanely wealthy yeah the world's burning and genocides in miramar and and i've seen what's her face the his coo who's written memos yeah we don't care if the third world country wants to go kill its people we'll get along and bend bend around them and whatever they do is their business not a problem these guys are pan pan-globalists. They don't care about democracies or anything else. All they care about is making billions of dollars of money.

And it's just extraordinary. So- According to reports to meet shareholder expectations and they're driving forward. Yeah, capitalism is great. Ruins everything. Let me rephrase that. Unfettered capitalism ruins everything.

There's a reason we used to restrict monopolies and do all sorts of things back in the day. It's because capitalism was good. But when it's just unbridled and it doesn't matter who you put through the meat grinder, such as our health system. So you talk about the dopamine apes. I think this is really important because that was one of the things she talked about, the whistleblower and what it's doing to these young girls. And I know a lot of these girls these days I see have become validation dopamine addicts. And women have always, they like validation. Hey, you look pretty. Hey, you're good looking. That's always, I think, a part of their nature. You have people now that they can't live or they can't function. Or a lot of these teens

were struggling to compete with other people that were maybe better looking than them. And they live for that dopamine hit where it's, I post my picture. Did anybody like me? Anybody like me? Oh my God, no one likes me. And tell us about the dopamine apes. So dopamine can track back in kind of human evolution up to 4.4 million years. So it's a dopamine can track back in in kind of human evolution up to 4.4 million years so it's quite an old mechanism inside of our genetics and it was it was most likely originally involved to promote good social behavior and also anticipate reward social behavior so if you're in a tribe and you want to survive that tribe obviously if you do something good for that tribe you want to get a reward and dopamine works very well for engineering sociability until it stops until it doesn't and

a good example is our close friend chris charlie sheen so the drug cocaine interrupts dopamine so when you get a dopamine response it blocks the passage to the synapses so dopamine all builds up the synapses and it gets a release and that's the cocaine hit that charlie sheen is so keen on winning dopamine is is can be interfered with to increase the pleasure reward principle which is why some compounds become so however there's been a lot of research i think it started with harvard back in about 2016 which was looking at how people interacted with social media and and getting likes getting views getting interactions was actually feeding dopamine systems. And actually then both predicting and rewarding kind of intense behavior on a platform and repeat behavior on a platform. Dopamine systems, which was designed for apes 4.4 million years ago, was a design for an online socializing, TikTok-ing, Kardashian world. But that's what we're doing with it.

Now, our friends at Facebook, I think think when asked about this in a 2019 senate inquiry i think mr zuckerberg said and i would want to paraphrase this rather than quote i think he said um he's seen no internal evidence that that any of the platforms are addictive and internal evidence is one thing and also secondly i've not seen could mean nobody's ever showed it to him but the other thing is jack dorsey from Twitter said something like, which is, well, all things in life can be addictive. So he now the terminal of the knife. We just amplified. That's like a drug dealer.

Because I was really thinking after watching the whistleblower interview on 60 Minutes, and I'm like, really? If I had kids and my kid was like, hey, dad, I'm going to take some cocaine. I'd be like, no, you're going to get addicted to that. It would be bad. But then I'm like, yeah, here, go on Instagram. You're like, wait, this is really a drug. This is really a drug you're giving your child or allowing your child to do.

So if you unpack human genetics, and this is why it's interesting, which is we've got this ape biology engineered and evolved for a certain type of world. But if you look at our biology, it hasn't had a good upgrade for about 300,000 years. I mean, we're basically the same for quite some time. But our ideas are moving faster than our biology can. So that's when you then have this crossover point, which is when does it get too much? How much are we looking at in terms of different ideas which will drive human evolution and our ideas moving faster now than evolution in fact the answer i think primarily is yes our ideas are now up pacing our ability to evolve to catch up

with them at a rapid pace so that's also an interesting dichotomy to think forward for the next 100 200 years because we won't evolve at all, but our ideas will. Our ideas are evolving super fast. I don't know about the gold ape behind you. I don't know if he's on dopamine, but he sure is pretty peaceful. I think he's on something else. I'd like to say solid gold, but he's not.

He's a lovely character. He's probably smoking whatever in the bowls next to that. He's pretty chill. Yeah, so this is really important. So where do you think our biggest problems you write about in the book are? Is it the social media stuff? What else is there? Two things, I think, to hop onto the problems.

I think how excited we generally are to militarize ideas is probably our biggest problem. I picked up an example, which is in about, I think, 1890, the U.S. Census got to a stage which was there were too many people in America to manually count the census. And there was, I think, 5 million people in America in about 1890. And it was taking 7 to, sorry, 50 million. So it was taking 7 years to count the census. So it was too long. So they needed an automatic tabulation machine to help with the U.S. Census.

And so, long story short, the punch card was invented. And that was evolved to, invented to help the U.S. centers. And so, long story short, the punch card was invented. And that was evolved to help the U.S. government really try to manage population growth. And that was in 1900. By the time we got to 1946, that punch card was being used in ENIAC, the first computer designed to do a few things. It was commissioned by the U.S., but it was designed, amongst other things, to do the calculations for the nuclear bomb drops. And so we're taking punch card technology and we move that through to militarizing them to help better efficiently kill people and so with that you go okay what are

we doing now in 2017 vladimir putin announced a new arms race on artificial intelligence and a goal to to transform the russian army into one that's built on ai in the in the chinese political political platform they have a 30-year plan to militarize ai and i think in 2019 the u.s state department came out and said this is a new new arms race and we have to catch up and increase funding i think funding is probably about four billion dollars into militarizing ai wow so you i think vladimir pluton said whoever controls ai will control the world to militarizing AI. Wow. So I think Vladimir Putin said, whoever controls AI will control the world. Wow.

So while we're all focused on AI in various areas, there is a stealth war going on already on militarizing AI. And this is quite, I think, a challenge because the United Nations have come out and said AI should not be used in warfare and they're called lethal autonomous weapons. And of course, many countries have just ignored that so the Russian the Chinese have ignored that that that kind of and so they're rapidly developing it what the US has said is we won't deploy AI into the battlefield but doesn't stop us developing it and already you can buy there's

a company in China that makes a predator drone called the Blowfish. It's about the size of your Labrador, and it's already billed and advertised as being fully autonomous, can operate in swarms, you can attach grenade launchers to it, you can attach machine guns to it. Ready for sale now, fully autonomous drones made from China. So that's where we are today. And that's in the white world. What's in the black world that's coming? And particularly China has no restrictions to trying to integrate AI that's been developed in the corporate world. What's in the black world that's coming? And particularly China has no restrictions to try to integrate AI that's been developed in the corporate world back into their technology, which is a bit of a restriction in America.

So you've got this stealth arms race, which is going on, which is akin to the development of the nuclear weapon, all being done virtually in secret. And that's going to be interesting over the next 10, 20 years. Now, how long will it take? It's going to take more than a year. Is it going to take more than 10 years maybe will it take 20

years i don't know but if you just think forward and say let's go 50 years then highly probable i think most um scientists estimate 50 years is highly probable which in terms of is within human lifespan so that's a bit of a worry that is a bit of a worry geez i could have a whole mess of drones come and kill me we have those big u.s drones but imagine a whole i've seen those flights of the little drones that fly around and they make images in the sky and stuff yeah wow that would be so imagine those imagine a thousand of those imagine a thousand of those programmed to to to to target something deciding autonomously they have ranges of about 80 to 100 miles wow imagine you could just let them loose somewhere so the theater

of warfare would change the theater of warfare could be anywhere so that i think is and that is not necessarily ai doing it so the hollywood scenario of ai doing it that's not nothing to do with that that's governments saying we're in a race we're doing that now so we're designing that so in the same idea is you don't need to wait for the robots to decide it we're already figuring that out ourselves we have billions of dollars now engineered and figuring out how to do that to ourselves and that can be only a human idea one of the interesting and crazy ideas that i thought was in the book was it was scientists during the manhattan project worked out two things the first they worked out which was if you drop a bomb from, I think,

1,700 feet, so it explodes at 1,700 feet, it kills more people than if it hits the ground. Yeah. So therefore that was the optimal distance for killing. And secondly, they had debate on location. And one of the debates for location was Kyoto. And the reason Kyoto was there was it had some really good universities and some of the best scientists were there. And so the idea was, look, if we wipe out Kyoto, we're going to wipe out scientists, which will actually impair the ability for retaliation and new ideas to come through. So you had scientists discussing ideas to just kill other scientists to stop their ideas. And you don't need robots for that. You got people doing that everywhere today. So those are the things that I think should be

focused on more. We'll enjoy TikTok and some other things today, but I think the world needs to focus a little bit more on the militarization of ideas, because we're exceedingly good at it. We do it quickly. We usually do it first. It was, if you look at nuclear war we obviously dropped bombs in 1945 but the first time was used for energy utilization was i think in pennsylvania in 1952 57 so it was 12 years later before we actually did just the energy we managed to militarize the idea for yeah there's no more war we don't have anybody kill i guess we should use this for something good things are good so in terms of optimism there's so many good things so to argue with the other front which is our friend elon and a few other people are

championing the use of artificial intelligence to to take away death and destruction there's 1.3 3 million people killed a year in road deaths and 90 of them are due to human error and so most estimates by even the u.s department of transport say that that fully autonomous driving models will reduce human deaths by 94%. So that's over a million people saved a year. That's a kind of a noble effort. And put aside the debate, should we do it? But just on paper, handing over responsibility to artificial ideas could save a million lives.

So you might argue we should try and explore that. Additionally, you've got just today, you've got every year, there's about 3.3 million people die of starvation around the world, and about 3,500 children die a day from starvation. But yet, there's enough food waste on the planet to feed another 800 million people. So we already make enough food for these people to save these lives, but our issue is about how it's distributed, how it's made, how it's grown. And the United Nations in 2015 started a new goal for 2030 to solve this particular problem and their latest nutrition report says we know we're close. I think four out of four countries

are kind of 40% of the way and the rest of the countries are not even there. So what happens if we handed like autonomous driving, we said look there's better ways to distribute risk so let's hand it over to things that are smarter. What other things can we hand over to solve human suffering, to improve living conditions, and say, look, actually, let's find smarter ideas through artificial intelligence to actually solve problems? So I think we have choices to make as society because the idea that we will have no decisions made by artificial intelligence

hasn't been true for decades already. And the idea you're going to hand all of them over is equally perhaps risky. But they're clearly just as autonomous driving is an idea where you go, we could save a million people, food distribution, starvation, poverty. There's a whole range of ideas where actually maybe there's some more intelligence out there that we could use. I think Steve Jobs was famous. And part of my success, I just hire smarter people and let them go. And so Steve Jobs, one of the most influential people and the smartest people on the planet, said, actually, I just want to find smart people. Why don't we just find smarter technology and give them briefs? Because we're heading that way anyway.

So there can be quite an optimistic view of this technology. And I think that needs to be unpacked and discussed quite openly rather than just the negatives. Let's touch on another chapter you wrote in the book called The Idea Economy. Is that the future of where we're heading, where we won't be a manufacturer, we'll just be ideas? The idea really looks at the ecosystem that's built and designed to fuel and fund ideas and looks at a lot of the entrepreneurs which are trying to drive them.

Now, one of the things which I thought was really interesting when you look at the world's leading entrepreneurs is Richard Branson is one I picked out. And there's a number in the book is they pride themselves on failure. And so there's this mantra of now, which has emerged through Silicon Valley and beyond, fail fast. And so make mistakes, break things, get it out and go. And I think the idea economy has grabbed this as an ethos. It's okay to be wrong. It's okay to be wrong. It's okay to have bad ideas because don't worry, we'll correct them. And don't worry, that's how we work in beta. In fact, it's cool to be wrong because that's how we work in the

new economy. And I think that's dangerous as an ethos. And I think although most of the world's leading entrepreneurs use it as a badge of honor, I've failed many times, and that's why I succeed now. The issue is we have to live with the consequences of that. And so I unpack some of the failures, some of the heartache, and some of how many people lost their money, lost their jobs. Because every time an idea goes wrong, there is consequences of fallout. One of them I like to go back to is in 1900, two thirds of the cars in America were zero emissions. And so only one third of the cars were on gasoline. And so for a whole bunch of bad ideas, which was just the easy ideas, the market economy ideas, we decided that the

electric cars and steam powered cars were bad and we went with gasoline. And we are where we are now in terms of pollution and carbon emissions. We had the right stuff. And so the arc of the economy is getting there in terms of looking at zero emission cars and getting back to a non-polluted world. But it's taken 100 plus years. And so what are the consequences of getting it wrong in a world where technology is much more powerful than it was 100 years ago? And so getting it wrong 100 years ago, you go, actually, what risk was still quite systemic.

But now it's even worse. And so I don't think we can be living in a world where ideas are so powerful and run an ethos as it's okay to get it wrong all the time. Don't worry, the market will correct it. Now, part of the argument is people didn't know about electric cars and emissions back in 1900. But in the same year, there was a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, who put out a research paper and quite a number of published reports

predicting that if we follow the way of burning carbon fuels, we will heat the planet. So we had the data as a civilization that this is the bad idea. We actually had the start of electrification of cars, but because of simplicity and easy use of market forces, we went the wrong way. And so the idea of economy is looking at kind of the pace of the stock market, the pace of innovation and the selection criteria. Now, even I think 70% of well-funded venture capital ideas still. So nine out of 10 businesses fail anyway anyway but even venture capital funded ideas seven out

of ten fail and for all various reasons and good and bad ones so it just explores the consequences of getting it wrong it's to this point of we need better systems for picking ideas and finding not just the good ones but looking out for the bad ones and the bad ones hidden in the noise so facebook and and we've talked about which is is sociability, connectivity. You could say that's arguably a fantastic idea to democratize the world. But the business model that's underneath it, is that a bad idea? And some bad ideas are buried within good ideas, and they only come out later on. And if you're globalizing ideas quickly with immense capital and scale,

you've got to pick up the pieces later on. And unfortunately, we'll all be picking up the pieces. That totally explains social media, because when social media started out in 2008 i was one of those people like it's a brand new world it's yeah we're all gonna come together and the borders and everything will all be more one and now it's just turned into it's like that yeah and i'm glad you brought that up because you and i will remember the cheering of the 2011 arab spring where dictators were toppled through social media and there were totalitarian governments who were caught off guard by this movement but if you look now they they have turned these tools and technology back against the people so we talked about the social

credit system in china but no matter where you go increasingly the these tools which were meant to liberalize people and democratize people have been turned against them to as a system and it's pervasive it's spreading and yeah even amnesty international called out facebook and in vietnam to say you're bowing to government pressure for blocking things and and so these reports are endless they're everywhere and it's a real watch out. And it's happened quickly. And this is the point. The pace of ideas, it can go from 2011 to the savior of the world to 2021. Now, wind that back, quite difficult now.

We're 47, you know, 4.7 billion people connected. So that's why the ideas can be insane. They can drive people insane. And the human genome, a lot of research shows that we don't function well with too many choices a good american professor called i think professor schwartz did a lot of research on what he called the paralysis of choice and actually too much choice causes discomfort too much choice causes confusion oh yeah i i refer to to to when you when you go onto netflix and there's 10 000 things but nothing to watch there's too there's too many choices.

And another university in the UK did some research and they looked at restaurant choices. And the optimal happiness was seven appetizers, 10 mains, seven desserts. More or less than that, people were unhappy. So we are engineered biologically and through evolution to deal with a finite set of choices. You give us too much, we actually don't get happier. We get unhappier. That's true.

I learned that in sales. You give an either or. You want A or B or maybe C. You don't give them the alphabet. And when you get B, when somebody says, I'll take B, you're in the meeting and moving away. What you don't go is, I've got seven other things for you to pick from. You just create confusion and choice.

But that's what's happening in our world. Even if you wake up one morning, you might see something. I think that's true. By the time you got past your coffee, you've got 12 other things to deal with. Yeah, that's the problem. I've had some of my favorite Mexican restaurants, you'll open up their menu and they have six pages it turns into. And you're like, I was just thinking about tacos, but now I'm confused. Yeah, there's a restaurant near me which is which has got half half mexican half indian and i always find it confusing it just drives me crazy but chris you're right this paralysis of choices is built into who we are as a species but which is why i think it

long-form content is taking out because it allows you to sit down and listen there are some benefits from trying to take less ideas in. And so I think one other piece is people need to be more careful about what content they soak in, how often they soak it in, manage their time better. Because all these tools are at disposal. So if you're an alcoholic, you better manage your exposure to these things. That's a good point. I like that analogy. Yeah, you've got to manage your exposure. So a part of this exercise about a year and a half ago, I pretty much turned off the news channels. So just working out what in your daily business you can focus on and what you can go and you can

actually get happier as a result. You definitely can. I got happier since the news changed over last year or eight months or 10 months i don't know so matthew this has been a great discussion we want people to go chris get of course get your book uh anything you want to touch on before we go out oh look let's maybe just talk a little two minutes on the company i work for and uh so it's founded by two scientists who approach life as a food as medicine point of view they're absolute geniuses i'm i'm honored to to work for them and help them lead their ideas. We have a number of innovations about solving the sugar problem,

sugar reduction, and anti-diabetes problem, and they all come from nature. So using natural bioactive compounds to enable people to have naturally or actually have natural compounds which will slow the metabolism of sugar. So that's what we've been working on with that technology has been retrofits into the kind of existing food and ingredients industry. We've taken that technology from invented in Australia to Malaysia, to Thailand, to Africa, to Brazil, to Central America,

which are the major sugar cane growing crops in the world. So we've already deployed that in multiple markets. And yeah, now it's our first product, which is a product called New Cane Low Glycemic Sugar. Oh, wow. We've sold 11 million kilograms in the first few years of operations. And yeah, trying to give people affordable, healthier, natural choices to highly processed foods.

Yeah, I learned a long time ago how bad some of this high fructose corn syrup and all this crazy stuff that we do man i try and cut as much of that as i can out my diet but it's so pervasive it's everywhere yeah and so it's and the problem it's pervasive is cheap and so a lot of the food companies if you want to get a healthy alternative sometimes it's four times more sometimes it's eight times more so i think they can't afford to buy it so they and they can't afford to sell it on so what we've been doing is asking the question of why are those things so bad so i think if you look at an apple's 10 sugar but if you need an apple wouldn't be bad for you because it's naturally complex sugar cane is actually naturally complex

it's full of antioxidants it's full of calcium magnesium potassium but for about 100 years the refining industry has been taking all that out and putting it as a waste stream. So what our technology does is look for these natural bioactive compounds as sugar is being made, keep them in. So think of it as naturally complex like brown bread, brown rice, brown wheat. We actually keep that to a maximum in our products so that they slow down metabolism of sugar. So quite interesting science founded by geniuses, exciting stuff. And that's why the United Nations single does out as working with the supply chain to fix problems because, yeah, by moving to work, you don't need new factories to be built. You don't need a new crop to be done.

You don't need new food regulations to be done. And you can make quick changes. A lot of other challenges, new chemicals or new products, which will take 10 to 12 years to be regulated and and this is is fast to move so really proud to be working with them on that um and so you can find that at nutrition innovation group.com awesome sauce that is great man that's something we really need because we really have a problem over in here i even love when people are like yeah i drink diet and you're like that stevia is worse for you than just regular sugar honey there's a whole bunch of emerging science about the microbiome and it's i had to say it's also in the book about the

importance of the microbiome to mental health um and the depletion of your microbiome interferes with a whole range of things in fact they've done research and studies which is if you take a species of mouse which is known to be if you take a species of mouse, which is known to be timid, and a species of mouse that's known to be brave, and you swap the microbiome over, their personalities will change. So the microbiome is driving a lot of who we are

as both individuals and as species. And if you deplete that, if you run that down, if you actually destroy that, you actually can increase anxiety, you can increase autism, you can increase depression. And so maintaining a healthy microbiome is important for balance and yeah, just general good health. You need good carbohydrates, you need good foods because yeah, you're feeding 1.5 kilograms of bugs, which live in your intestines, you got to feed them.

So when you eat food, you're not just feeding yourself there's 1.5 kilograms of other animals well other microbes living inside you which are good bacteria if you don't feed them properly they can't help you that's uh in the chapter i think it's called the idea colony um and and how if you don't take care of your internal health you won't actually make the right decisions wow that's amazing there's a connection to those two. So give us your plugs as we go out so people can find you on the interwebs. Sure. Let's interweb me at www.theinsanityofideas.com. That's super simple. You can find the book on Amazon or you find me on LinkedIn, Matthew Godfrey, or for our food tech company, nutritioninvasiongroup.com. There you go. There you go. Thank you very much, Matthew, for coming on the show.

We certainly appreciate it. Chris, it was a hoot, and thank you for inviting me. It's just been an honor to be with you and share with you from Singapore. Thanks very much. Really appreciate it. Thank you. It was wonderful to have you and the gold monkey on. Good luck with your book as well.

Your book works today. Look, I'm sure it'll do really well. I'm going to grab a cup of myself so congratulations enjoy it it'll it makes there's no centerfold in it but it'll make for good bathroom reading or something i don't know i expect a personal instagram centerfold from you all right thank you matthew thanks for tuning in go to youtube.com for just chris voss hit the bell notification button go to goodreads.com for just chris. And you can go to YouTube or Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places to see

what we're doing. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other and we'll see you guys next time.