The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Inner Development Goals: Cultivating Change from the Inside Out with Erik Fernholm

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

(Conversation recorded on September 5th, 2024)   The deeper we dive into the complexity of the metacrisis, the more it becomes apparent that the changes we desire in our communities, governments, and societies must start with individual mindsets and behaviors. But what practices can help us cultivate this shift in consciousness? Today, Nate talks with Erik Fernholm about The Inner Development Goals, a framework designed to foster the skills and capacities needed to tackle the existential challenges we face. Erik unpacks the nuance and complexities of creating such a massive project, and discusses how he's used them in his own life to foster personal change. How can we shift from dominant societal values, like individualism,  towards ones rooted in complexity and contextual awareness? Why is it important to share these journeys of personal development and grow together as communities? How can each of us make inner changes in our own lives to reflect a more interdependent and resilient outer world?    About Erik Fernholm: Erik Fernholm is a father, an award winning global speaker and bridge builder. Through his background in cognitive neuroscience and happiness research, he has spent the past 15 years exploring which fundamental shifts in relationships, skills, and worldviews are needed for us to become sustainable and generative at an individual and collective level. Erik's work mainly focuses on communicating the link between inner development and outer change as well as creating spaces for it to unfold.  Erik is the co-founder of The Inner Development Goals, a communication framework mapping what inner shifts are needed to reach the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, implemented in corporations, governments and through its 750 hubs globally. Erik is the Chair of the Ekskäret Foundation where he co-founded the 29k Foundation/Aware platform, which has scaled inner development processes to over 100,000 people in 160 countries.    Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on Youtube   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners    

the system that we have created. It has been hijacked and we're caught in this trap and we are worthy of so much better. This is not what we're here to build. And I think everybody on the planet can come to that conclusion if they just have that scaffolding and that support and then you'd want to empower them to drive the change. But I think that's actually the core of rediscovering what it means to be human and changing that story. And the rest I think would actually sort itself out. You're listening to the great simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this, This show we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification.

I often say that it is an unusual time to be alive. and for many of us, the places we live and the problems we deal with were ones that the human brain evolutionarily was not meant to hold. Navigating the challenges ahead of us will require a change in consciousness for many humans, which of course is much easier said than done. Joining me to discuss this topic today is Eric Fernholm. Eric Fernholm has dedicated his career to unraveling how personal growth connects to building a sustainable society. He's a philosopher, social entrepreneur, and has an academic background in cognitive neuroscience and happiness research. Eric's been involved in launching a variety of initiatives to create forums for inner development, including

the co-founding of the 29K Foundation, which has a mission to democratize inner development by building the world's first scalable platform making mental health and inner development tools available to millions, free of charge for the users. Eric has since helped in founding the Inner Development Goals Initiative, which offers a framework to assist individuals in navigating and developing their inner lives to catalyze outer change. In today's conversation, he and I unpacked much of the nuance and complexity that goes into creating and working with such an ambitious project alongside the importance of offering just one way

that people can approach personal growth and mental health within the broader human predicament. I will also point out because it is often forgotten that every episode, including this one, has a very long and thorough list of references and show notes, which can be found both in the description and on the site, a link at growth. The Great Simplification.com.

With that, please welcome Eric Fernholm. Eric, welcome to the show, my friend. Thank you so much. Great to be here. Great to meet you in your country last year. Was it last year? Yeah, I think so. I have to admit, I quite like Sweden.

It feels like it's a merger of what's been, what is, and what could be in ways that the United States is not. Yeah, it was great. you hear. Really appreciated it. And Sweden, the Scandinavian countries are, they're an interesting place to be in troublesome in some ways as well, but interesting. For sure. I only saw Stockholm and then I went up to visit Pelotil on her farm. So I can't say that I saw much of the country. So finally, we have you on the show. And for those who are unaware, of your work. It spans a lot of areas, which I described in the intro, but you've spent much of your career studying the psychology of happiness, eventually leading you to your current contributions

in developing the inner development goals, the IDGs. What are the inner development goals? And how can they inform and midwife the creation of better, more sustainable societies? Yeah. So the inner development goals is a communicative framework, basically, trying to map out that, I mean, the context is basically that we know that, you know, more than half of the time has passed for reaching the SDGs, the sustainable development goals from the UN. And we're getting more and more information that things aren't progressing in the right direction. And we aren't adapting to that information. So we're more or less kind of immune to that change that we're, that we're getting more and more. we are the ones causing the problem that we're trying to fix. So what we can oppose... We being the humans on the earth. Yeah, exactly. Yes.

And accepting that this is not just an information or technical challenge, but this is an adaptive challenge where we are, you know, the way that we are solving problems is the problem. Then what we're exploring in the IDGs is what shifts, what inner shifts in culture and individuals, are needed for us to actually achieve the SGs, like to unlock this situation and to build the capacities not only to process the information and to take that on

because that is an emotional quite heavy thing to do. You have a lot of psychological immune systems as well within the individual that will kind of try to stay away from that or try to neglect it. But then not only to take it on, but then to, you know, take in the complex view of that and to care for the entire system and act for that system in a more,

in a better way, basically, that is more generative. So what are they? What are the inner development goals? And I have lots of questions. Yeah. So what we did was that together with this huge network of researchers, we kind of pose the question, what inner skills, capacities and qualities

are needed for us to reach sustainability and have a thriving future and planet. And what we got back from that huge amount of data, like 4,000 experts on the topic, was five categories and 23 skills, indexing really kind of like these are the core things, at least at a first iteration, that can point us to kind of where we're lacking

or the skills that we need to build and enhance so that we better can act on, driving sustainability. And really it opens up a different type of conversation saying that there's this inner dimension of sustainability. It's not just this external systems change that we need to fix out there, but there's an inner aspect of psychology and culture that we need to change. And it's also saying that the inner and the outer are interconnected, but it's also a story

of a more hopeful narrative of saying, you know what? humans and cultures can develop. And that means that the system that we have created is not the only system that we can create. We have created this one, but it doesn't mean that humanity is destined for unsustainability, but that we actually can develop past this and create better systems. So it's natural that someone would eventually be working on this because we have a supply problem. which is where our culture is based on fossil carbon and fossil minerals. We have a waste problem that emanates from that.

But then there's a demand problem. What is it that we want? What is it that we need? How do we relate with each other? And I've been saying for quite a while and a lot recently that the real energy transition isn't really about switching from dirty energy. to clean energy, it's changing the relationship we have with energy, which gets to some of these inner development goals, like what's it all for? How do we relate with each other and with the natural world?

So you're looking on that, on the demand side and presumably how we cope and presumably how humans can measure our success in things other than material throughput. it. Yeah, I mean, so as soon as you open up the box of the inner dimension, you really come down to kind of like the demand side or what do we really value, what is truly important for humans, and how do we build the sustainable system around those needs. And here, I mean, research is quite clear that for one, I mean, human beings are hackable. So we are shaped by social norms, but we're also hackable from, you know, the dopaminergic system of effective forecasting and stuff like that, but we can be fooled into thinking that if I get what I want, then I'll be happy. If I get X, then I'll be happy. Then I'll feel this. And within the interdevelopment goals, it really kind of invokes and invites this conversation, really, of what is truly valuable, what is a life well-lived, really. and I mean

it may be surprising to some people I don't think the audience of the podcast would be surprised by it but from the from at least in Scandinavia I mean there's this individualistic

very kind of top down approach to happiness that if I just get more optionality if I just get more freedom and so money and power will give me freedom and if I get freedom

then I can do whatever I want and then I'll be happy because I won't be limited. And that presupposes that you know what you want and that aligns with what you need. And it doesn't unless you're very wise and have had a great childhood where you really are aligning what you want and what you need. But for most people,

those things don't really point in the same direction. So exploring that is, and the research on that topic I think is fundamental where nobody wakes up in the morning hoping to have a meaningless day. Even though we're all individuals, nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to be controlled by other people or wanting to feel less competent or wanting to be excluded of their social group. We all have these basic human needs.

And if we could focus more on experiencing a fulfillment of those needs instead of getting X. I think that's a really it's a fundamental conversation to be had in the realm of sustainability at large of course. So what are the five categories? And if you want to list the 23, that's fine as well. Yeah, I'll stay with the five. So it's so what kind of from a Delphi process of the data,

so just a statistical analysis of kind of grouping that. What we found was that The first one was the being category, basically, of understanding who I am, what is important for me, the story of my identity. For me, that kind of pulls into where do I think that I end, and expanding that really shifts what I want, what I need, what I focus on. Second category is thinking. So I'm thinking in a kind of simple linear way or I'm thinking in a system. and I mean, there there's a lot of different types of research from Peter Seng, Gailotr Sarm, that we pull in on. Then also relating. So how do I relate?

Third category is like, how do I relate to myself, others in the world? And then the second two categories is collaborating and acting. So that's much more outward oriented, getting things done, moving. People are more comfortable in those categories because we have, of course, a culture that's built on getting stuff done. And the first three being thinking and relating are a little bit more about, you know, slowing down and reflecting and maybe changing these deeper narratives that we have of who we are, what is valuable, what is really important. So you said you had 4,000 experts contribute or you looked at their research. Is this like when we talk about climate change and oil depletion and those things, there are check marks. Like we each need 2,000, 2,500 calories a day.

And there's a CO2 footprint from flying a plane and things like that. But the list of things that you just said are not so discreet and they might be applied in different contexts to different cultures. So is it a checklist or is it more a directional aspiration, some of these categories? Yeah. So I wouldn't say it is a checklist at all. So I mean, within each of the five categories, we have, you know, a couple of skills that came out of the data. but like empathy and compassion and stuff like that or systems thinking or courage

but I would say it's much more a way to start a conversation about what is really needed for us to take in care and act on these really complex challenges like the multipolar traps or stuff like that It really needs you to kind of move away from a simple way of looking at the problem. And it invites a lot of more perspectives where there are interventions then that the IDGs points towards like programs or tools, evidence-based processes that we know will actually build these capacities and cooperations in a lot better way. So are these IDGs inner development goals from the perspective of the dominant global culture,

which is the economic superorganism spurred by the global north right now? Or are they also applying to cultures that aren't the dominant cultures that are pulled into what's happening right now and integrating those perspectives? Or how do you even manage such a thing? There's 8 billion people in wildly different contexts in the world. Yeah, and this is this has actually been one of the big things that we've been working on and struggling with because, you know, we started the framework of saying, like, how could nobody have not invented the inner development goals? Like the inner side, the inner shifts of motivation and care and systems thinking towards the SDGs. Like when we registered the domain, we're a little bit sad because we're like how like inner development goals.

And then you found out why. that we found out of way. It's a really complex task. But I mean, doing it with some of the top thinkers in the world within this field, really, I think that enabled the project to take off. But what happened was once we released the framework, it just exploded. We had people all over the world reaching out saying, like, we are starting an IDG hub here, completely emergent organic. And now we have 700 plus hubs around the world, more in, I think, Brazil than we do in Sweden.

So per capita. And it just took off. And then as a kind of consequence of that, this topic kind of came up. Is this just representative of the, like a small group of like northern European thinkers? Or is this representative of the global movement? and like this conversation is not, is not ours to dominate or to, to, you know,

have a veto on. So now what we're doing to kind of integrate all these perspectives of, you know, native wisdom and all these different ways of thinking is expanding the survey again, not going for, you know, four thousand thinkers or expert,

but actually inviting two million people to respond. Of course, that takes a lot more time. But it is really something that kind of has happened as a bottom up process. But what we're seeing also in the dominant culture is kind of a longing for this type of conversation. Because we've been looking at, we've been fighting for the people who have intrinsic motivation and really care about these topics. They're not seeing the results that they want and the years are passing and they're starting to feel it. Like unsustainability is now touching us, right? And for those people to have a completely different level of conversation has really been inspirational, both on the corporate and governmental level.

So what happens at these inner development hubs? You said there's 700 of them. What are those about? Yeah. So the barrier to entry to start a hub is really low. And I think the limit is like you need to be three people who join together and want to work on the, topics in a systemic way, right? And spread those types of interventions. And we try to stay very close to the science of what actually is, what drives these types of skills and capacities.

But then there's the possibility to start a center as well. So some hubs like the one in Barcelona, I think it has like hundreds of members. But then a lot of them are just a few people who really care about the topic. But we're also seeing is governments even coming on board and saying we're starting a, we're not starting just a hub we want to be the representative for the entire country and the nation. So in Costa Rica, the Costa Rican government for the second time in a row, like going, they changed the election shifted parties, but they're still implementing the IDGs centrally in the

government into all of their institutions. and agencies educational system because they said, you know, we are pioneering sustainability, but we know that we are the ones getting in our own way. So how do we even start exploring how we can get unstuck here, which is really interesting. So I know, you know, when I met you in Sweden, we talked about human behavior quite a bit. I'm not sure I knew your role in this org. Like, what, what are you doing now? Are you running this IDGs? Who else is involved? Are you doing this from Sweden? What's the structure?

Yeah, so no, I'm not running it. We're a big team. I mean, I was one of the co-founders. But we've been extending the co-founding team because really now it's, I mean, a lot of top researchers have joined. So I think the context of it was really the Oak Island Foundation with Thomas Bjorkman. And then I was working a lot with 29K Foundation, which is basically Wikipedia platform for scaling everything. space processes for inner development for free.

So it's really a true Wikipedia open source project with Nicholas Adelbert, founder of Norges. And in those conversations, I met a lot of philanthropists. And I had to spend, you know, maybe you get 45 minutes, maybe you get 20 minutes with them. And I had to spend the first, you know,

80% of the meeting trying to explain why building the capacity to even care for the system that you're part of and to then build the capacity to act in that for the greater good is something that's important. And that's where, for me, at least, the inner development goals, kind of at least frame came from. So I imagine you have some examples of how inner development creates outer change in service of the larger good. Do you have any you could share? Yeah, of course.

So the one closest to heart is actually my co-founder, Niklas Adelabat, who founded Klona, the Payment Service. So he's a high net worth individual who, when he was younger, he took part of this training, leadership training, an experimental program. And he said that I think like by day two, he completely pivoted in his identity and how he saw himself and how he saw society. and he really made one of these developmental leaps. And that changed his way of thinking about his own ownership and where that comes from and how he is part of the society and where he's not, you know, if he's successful, it's not because he's amazing.

It's actually because he was really lucky and has had all this support throughout the years. And he says explicitly that that's why he started Norheim Foundation, which is now, you know, shifting the entire norm in Stockholm and Sweden, where we are now at the point where we have 38 times the global average of VC capital going into impact. And if you ask people at the business school, the top business school in Stockholm, most of the students now, in contrast to a couple of years ago, say that I don't want to go into just building a company, earning a lot of money and making an exit,

but I actually, the majority say I want to go into creating a better world, which is amazing. So one person's shift trickles down has these huge cascade effects. It's, I mean, maybe you can't say

that he wouldn't have done it anyways. But his narrative, at least, is that this support has enabled him to see himself in a system instead of separate from it. You said when he was younger, like in his 30s,

or is this when he was like a teenager? No, I think this was probably when he was like 19-20, something like that. Wow, beautiful, beautiful. Yeah, and he always says that, like, he held this perspective, even though he started Clana, which was the payment services, but he always knew kind of that he was going to do something else with it, right? And this you see again and again and again, and Thomas Bjorkman, co-founder of the Oak Island Foundation, same story.

He had a transformative experience when he was even younger at a youth camp that changed his entire perspective and he accredited that to him starting the Oak Allen Foundation later on. I mean, you have Rosa Parks. She even went to the Highlander Folk School. And there's a quote from her saying, you know, I wouldn't have had the courage to sit still on that seat on the bus if it weren't for the support and the insights I got from the Highlander Folk School. So inner development for teenagers is really a high priority in our culture right now, I would say. Yeah, I mean, for everybody but but yeah i was in california last week at a staff retreat and i met with some friends and uh we sat uh and talked for 10 hours about related topics uh on a friday um one of the projects

that i have in my bend versus break uh list i call the 1500 which is the 1500 elite humans on the world some of them need to have a consciousness shift Um, and it's almost like they, uh, had traumatic childhoods or, or whatever and go through the world as if it were a video game, amassing digital wealth and like hungry ghosts. And so my, my question to you is do these inner development goals apply equally, if not more, to the philanthropists that you're seeking and the elite, um, you know, billionaire class? do they need to take these courses and experience this as much as they need to donate their dollars? I mean, any movement of a powerful player that would support them to move towards wisdom,

that would help them thinking generationally and whole system. So including externalities, creating more externalities to increase speed would be a win, I think. And there's different theories of change. It's like what we've been talking about in the Oak Island Foundation for 15 years is basically, you know, if you could create a tipping point of enough people who start seeing themselves as, you know, tethered to society, who care for that, who think about its longevity, they will automatically move towards creating sound systems that regenerate.

themselves. And that could be the bus driver. It could be the teacher. It could be the parent. It could be the farmer. It doesn't really matter. But eventually that narrative would be self-empowering and could hopefully tilt the system. I wasn't being critical. I just, I really think we're out of time. Our cultural runway is quite short. And I think we need everyone to play a role. urgently in these issues. So I do think a shift in consciousness from those riding high on the superorganism is one of the things that's necessary. Yeah, I mean, that's my take as well. Like with my background in cognitive neuroscience and just the understanding of how these types of changes happen.

I mean, some people go to cognitive route to understand how. systems work and how their actions impact that system. I mean, there's even psychopaths who stopped manipulating people because they understood how that affected their relationships long term, which is really cool. So I've seen interviews with people who have actually concluded this for themselves, like people who are diagnosed and working with ways to cope with their own illness, basically.

and I think that unsustainability is now becoming real. A felt sense for a lot of people really creates the kind of conditions for a different conversation to be had. And if that conversation is only about technical means and technical solutions, we're not really solving the root problem, which is the type of deep disconnection that we have in our culture. I can already predict that we're going to run out of time because I have so many questions I haven't even gotten to really the IDGs. But let me ask you this. So my my coach and I need, I have several coaches because I'm carrying a lot here keeps telling me,

Nate, you need to stop thinking and start feeling because I do like you just said, I process all this by thinking. And I did a frankly a while ago that we think. that there's the cognitive mind on top of the limbic system, on top of the reptilian system, on top of the enteric system. But in reality, it's not a straight thing. It's a, it's a pyramid. And those underlying systems are much, much stronger than we give credit to.

So I'm just wondering in all this work, is it educational that people think about these five categories? Or is there an experiential way that people feel? the relational quality. Can you tell us about that? From neuroscience, what we know is that, you know, 0.5% of your decisions are cognitive, rational. The words in your head do you associate with, the conscious choices that you're making?

And even a lot of those are very biased. I didn't know that, but that makes sense. It makes sense. I mean, we don't know how we use language. We don't know that we're, you know, all the biological processes going on in our bodies right now. And usually when I work with leaders is like just getting people to acknowledge that they don't know why they trust people. They just got a feeling for it.

They don't know why they feel, you know, trivial example. It's like, who do I feel attraction towards like a romantic partner that I met? The first time we met, I felt something first. Then I found maybe later cognitive reasons for that. And I put words on it. But who sent me the emotion? What process in me sent that to me? And as soon as you start looking in, you start realizing that, wow, something below the surface is actually directing me and telling me what in this conversation is interesting.

What kind of has this emotional salience to it and not? And that invites a lot more humility to any human system of saying, you know, the agents, the first principal agent in the system is not a rational mind. running around controlling top down. So why would we build systems like that? And if we want to create change, it's not about understanding the IDGs. Like you reading up on the 23 skills will do nothing. If anything, it will actually make you maybe less humble because you'll be like, yeah, I'm good at these five skills.

And it'll also create a story that you know, that you are good at leadership. You're good at sustainability, which makes you, you know, it's an attractive hero story. but it won't make you curious and make you want to explore where you're lacking or where you need to learn, right? So breaking the kind of rational myth is a fundamental piece

and that also plays into any of the developmental processes. So this is where the IDGs is this neon sign telling people, you know what, the reason why you're seeing these outer symptoms that you're not being able to cope with that we're not adequately responding to is because

we're lacking the conversation about the inner and the tools for that. So then direct them to these processes that are much more embodied, relational, experiential, where people uncover these experiences about themselves. It's not that they read up on them. Does the 3,000 or 4,000 contributing experts to your IDG framework, is there an evolutionary psychologist or evolutionary biologist informing what these five categories and 23 subcategories are from an evolutionary perspective where we for, you know, 20 to 290,000 years of our modern species, we lived in small

hunter-gatherer bands on the Pleistocene and what was conserved in what drove us and made us satisfied and motivated us, um, rhymes in a wildly different environment today with technology and super normal stimuli and all that is that, does that map to your, your framework or is that tangential? I mean,

I would say that it maps, but not directly. Like we, the way that, that the process was done to distill the 23 skills was not through the evolutionary lens. That was just the statistical analysis of what the expert on aggregate thought was, was kind of needed, right?

But when looking into how do you build perspective taking, when do you build these thinking capacities or relating the capacities, the interventional programs that research has shown are effective. I mean, they're running on that substrate, right? So if they have an effect, they're really developing these capacities within the individuals. So just one example is we ran a program for leaders in six different countries with support from the Templeton Foundation. And what we found was that the majority of them afterwards

had started new initiatives for sustainable growth, sustainable development, just because they had been in any process that really supported them taking on the seriousness of the situation and then being able to have that kind of communal support to actually drive that change forward. So you mentioned communal support. I've recently intuited that healing and growing largely doesn't happen at the individual level that someone heals and grows in relation to someone else or to nature or a group of people or you and I have a relationship and we have a discourse. And from that I heal and grow.

So how much of the inner development goals are at the individual level? or how much happen in relation to other humans in a context? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, at face value, people usually think that the IDGs, because it's skills, is this individualistic framework, but it's actually not at all. Most developmental processes are relational. And as you said, we develop in relationship to others, communities, or relationship to the world. and when looking at all the different types of programs that really have an effect,

they usually have three components. One is great evidence-based tools. Two is that you practice over time. It's not this kind of one-off firework. I went to the jungle and I did the cool thing where I had the off-side team leadership stuff, like a week or two weeks. But it's actually a continual practicing in your everyday environment because you need to be working down the stack from the rational

into the embodied and the social way of relating to each other. So you're actually working on changing within and with your context. And the third component is this safe and trusting relationship where you feel that you can be at home. And by me just putting words on and sharing with you, the kind of messy inner workings of my emotions and thoughts and reflections. And I mean, it's not super clear why I feel the way I feel the way I do, why react the way I do. We are not transparent for ourselves, but by putting words on it,

we're actually making sense of the chaos that we're in. And that creates agency, it creates sense making. So we want, like a really powerful exercise that an intervention program is the Pennebaker paradigm, basically, where you write down 20 minutes a day for four days in a row, the worst things that you've ever done, the worst things that has ever happened to you. So it's just free writing. You don't have to think about grammar, editing. You don't show it to anybody. Just by putting your inner world into words, the positive effects on mental health were, they were insane. Like two years later, they were still having positive effects from this thing that basically took them, you know, an hour or two. Why would that be? So one way of thinking about

it is that so if we have this rational mind the metaphor that I usually use is the rider and the elephant it's from Jonathan Heights his metaphor of the brain right and the rider is not cognizant

of the elephant but it's getting all these emotional signals they'll tell it like stay away from that situation or in this situation you have to take control here and it's basically all these past memories that the elephant is telling you what to do how to react

and sending you these emotional signals right And by never working on the stuff that you've been through, the disconnections that you've experienced, what your self-worth is, how you work with shame, what is shameful and not. By never making sense of that,

you're not re-learning. You're just replaying that old memory or that old sequence, right? But by putting words on it, what they found also in the research was so cool was that the amount of causal words was highly correlated with the positive effect afterwards. So the more causal... So A happened because of B.

So just causal links, right? So I'm trying to make sense of like sequencing what happened first, what came after, what was in effect. And the more they had those types of causal words, the higher the positive effect was. And you can see this in other research as well, like in soldiers coming on from PTSD or having post-traumatic stress basically is that people who share, more about their experience, they have a lot less PTSD and they even live longer. Of course, I mean, because they're going through this process of making sense of the world. And in some sense, on a bigger level, I think that that's really what we need to do right now is to make sense of where how did we get to a place where we are not proud of the world that we've created.

And how do we get out of that, right? Here's a thought. Let me replay that. back based on some recent experiences. So what you're saying is by by writing down the worst things that happened in the last couple of years, what you're doing metaphorically is showing elephant footprints to your cognitive brain. There's an elephant here. And that opens up a portal to dispel the ginormous cognitive dissonance that many in our culture are feeling. And I, I, I've recently been in some groups, as I mentioned earlier. And it strikes me that a lot of people in the peak oil and early climate change and the systems collapse framework, a lot of them. And I think there is some evidence here.

And I'll have to ask my friend Tom Murphy to find it have a depressive realism personality and certain Myers-Brigg categories. And some of the people I've talked to had. recently like philanthropists that totally shifted their worldview, had a tragedy in their family and such. So I wonder if you need to have some piercing of the consensus trance of our cozy fossil carbon pulse reality to be able to emotionally process these things are actually bio physical reality that is staring us. You and I are fluent in it, but a lot of people, it's too scary to touch. So the mnemonic, the tool that you just mentioned is one way of accessing that.

What do you think about that? I think that that would be, I mean, that's mainly about mental health and processing kind of my own emotions, but it's also listening to them and giving them the right place. And so the research and kind of adult development theory shows that, We all go through a first phase of socializing where we're actually downloading the culture. That's why, you know, you have the ash conformity studies where people really are shaped by their in-group. And it's an evolutionary adaption. If you did not do that and you're a 15-year-old and you actually are completely self-directed,

but you don't know the language, you don't know the norms, you don't know how things work. It's too risky. So you download first as a young person, right? And you can see this either as a life arc or you can see it as a domain-specific thing. So first you download, how does this game work? How does chess work? How does monopoly work, right? And once you understood it, and once you found your place in it, once you found your way to kind of master the game,

you're not that interested in becoming maybe just a little bit better. You have diminishing returns on that from an emotional perspective. And what starts being invoked, unless you're traumatized, really, because then you just want more, more, more, more, more, more, is you start listening inward. You become more. So moving from the socialized mind to the self-authoring mind of kind of, so the ladder that I was received that somebody put up against a wall, if I'm just climbing up to the next rung and I'm not feeling more, maybe it's pointed towards the wrong wall. And then I myself grab it and I start thinking about what values do I want to lead my life by,

taking back a lot of my direction, right, my ability to self-direct. So first I can gain agency in the socialized mind. I can be an agent of this current system, but I'm not holding the system. I'm not seeing it. And that's the self-authoring move. Instead of being inside the current pyramid, I'm actually moving outside and thinking, yeah, this is just one of many pyramids. So where do I want to live my authentic life?

So that's the self-authoring, right? And it doesn't really end there. self-authoring can also be quite self-centered. It's about being authentic, it's about being true to your emotional systems. You kind of discover the elephant, right? But you're still part of a context, and that's usually what dawns on people when they move away from the self-authoring, is seeing myself in a system where I actually have to honor other norms

and other people being authentic for different reasons than I would, and to act for that whole. So that's a self-transcending perspective. And these individuals, they can really start moving systems because they're very few. They're like 5% of the population. And they can start seeing not just the norm, not just my will to be authentic and to lead my, you know, real life. But then I can also start seeing myself in this context and starting to act for that. What type of individuals are 5% of the population?

The self-transcending ones. so people who I mean and if we could increase that way of it so I mean saying that people are on one stage I kind of want to avoid that way of thinking about it

I mean you could I have one of my oldest son sometimes he's really acting for the whole of the system the family system in a way that's extremely wise maybe more wise than me a lot of the time so it could be a state, but it can also be a stage way of thinking about it. But like, how am I acting for

what other people have told me is good and true? Am I acting for what I feel is good and true? Or am I acting to, I mean, we could put it in like the monopoly frame, right? So I'm trying to be the best player I can and win the game? Or am I trying to be myself as a player? Or am I trying to create a better game? So we, at least in the U.S., on social, media and just traveling around, there's so much advertisement and buzz around personal development. How does the inner development that you're discussing here differ from personal development? Is there an overlap? Are they quite different?

Or what are your thoughts? Yeah. I mean, I spent most of my professional life in this space. and I'm really a disillusioned of the kind of market version of a lot of these self-development programs, personal development courses. First of all, they're usually based on the development I can sell you. And they're built off of this individualistic frame. So you take a course, you buy the book, you go to the keynote, you do the thing. And then they drop you back in the exact same context, the exact same situation.

and your conclusion of why you're not integrating and changing is because you didn't try hard enough. And then you have a recurring customer, come back. It's because you didn't take step two, right? So there's a lot of that with people who are really struggling and who really need support who aren't getting it. So a lot of it is good. A lot of it are people deeply caring about supporting other people's growth

and development. But there is this, tricky part of it being captured into kind of market incentives that optimize for recurring customers instead of actually honestly helping people. And in some cases, the people who design the programs or buy the programs in the corporate setting, for example, if they are only saying, like, how can I, what can I get out of this? What does the corporate win out of this? The program will be very directed towards the metric

and it'll maybe increase people's capacity, right? And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it's not. But the deeper programs will usually help people, you know, mature the entire system so that it maybe takes on more responsibility, longer time horizons. And those are, I mean, I really have an, an amazing privilege position because I have the opportunity to work with some of those who are

usually self-owned so they don't have external fiduciary responsibility on a quarterly basis, but they actually have, so one of the corporations that I'm really, like I was working with them in Austria last week, it's an 11th generation family business and they have a seventh generation perspective, at least into the future. So in their boardroom, where they have some of their boardrooms, they have a glass wall where they see the employee's kindergarten. So they see the kids that they will take decisions that will shape their future. And just the amount of care that some of these organizations have.

So I'll just give you another example from them. Like the people who can train the trainees in this corporation, it's the top skill from the from their factory floor. Like, you get nominated. It's the biggest privilege you can have in the entire corporation is to train the next generation of, you know, 15, 16 year olds. And that's not, if you have a short-term incentive to really, you know, win, you wouldn't do that.

But they're really building generationally here. If they're really thinking seven generations ahead, I hope they have ecologists on staff. I mean, they should be hell of worried about climate. I would think. Yeah. And this is where, this is where, you know, a lot of these individuals that I work with, they start seeing that they are part of the problem.

And that's an emotionally heavy thing to hold. But if they can do it within a context that can support that and within other, with other people who are in similar situations, they can really start being inspired by each other and starting to move a completely different narrative. So I totally agree with that. is why I, okay, so here's my question. Is the inner development goals, like, are they actually goals or are they more like, are they approximately goals, but ultimately just a bridge to allow this company in Austria

and the people there to talk and process and get this conversation going to kick up the things that need to be kicked up? Um, you know what I mean? Is it, is it one or the other or both? I mean, the way that I think about it at least is not to say that they are goals as destinations, right? But it's rather this attractor to have this conversation, to find the process and tools and like-minded people that can start moving from the narrative of this inner shift that has to happen for the outer change to take place. I mean, the metacrisis is really deep in the IDGs, I would say. But it is a different way of framing it that'll attract more people to the narrative than, I mean, I've been trying to work with some philanthropists and it took me like three years to get them to kind of get the meta-crisis narrative, sending them, you know, podcast after podcast.

And they're like, it's way too complex for me. Like, I don't understand it. So this is a way of creating a different way of attracting people who sense that there is something more we can do here. We can really build the soil that can be more regenerative. Yes, maybe we are part of the problem, but we could also become agents for the solution. That is an inner journey that has to take place within us and the culture. and maybe also as system movers in the market. So, I mean, we work a lot with IKEA, for example.

I mean, they're a huge player. And they honestly, honestly care about these topics. They're like, Eric, don't sugarcoat anything. We want to hear all the, how serious the situation really is. And we can take it because we really care about this. And we know that we're, you know, producing a lot of furniture. But we honestly want to do our best in this. and we want to see reality and face it as it is.

And that is for me, yeah, I mean, people are great. They can be hijacked into really disastrous stories. But for me, this brings a lot of hope. Give me three answers to this. If you and your team and this effort on developing interdevelopment hubs around the world and scaling this work, not as goals, but as a direction

to get these conversations going. What is a minimal base case and a wildly successful outcome and goal for you and your colleagues with this framework? Okay, so minimum case and then wildly ambitious goal. So minimum case would be, you know, changing the narrative of sustainability to say,

you know what, it is not a technical challenge. It is an adaptive challenge. challenge. So if we're going to navigate existential risk of sustainability but also of AI, like we need to change the narrative of how we think about systems, how we think about multiple traps, how we think about all of this, because reality is a lot more connected than our thinking has been. Therefore, we need this inner shift. Okay, so that would be one. just coupling unsustainability to the inner aspect of individuals, groups, countries. That would be one.

The wildly ambitious case, and I can't speak for the organization, but if you're asking me, that would be having these 700 hubs turn into 700,000 hubs, and not it being a hub, but actually a place where this conversation has turned into developmental processes that are distributed for the many people and where it becomes norm that you go through a process that will scaffold your development where you end up in a place where you see yourself as part of this entire system, you know, warts and all, with this long-term perspective

and where you are in service, like your own conclusion, of course, once you see that, is how can I be in service of life and not of myself? So communities of practice, folk schools, basically, all over the world,

building the wisdom that is needed to tame the technical that we now have. Shouldn't something like this, maybe not this exact thing, be in every freshman college curriculum in the world, you learn about science and chemistry and philosophy, but shouldn't there be some inner development part of a curriculum? Yeah, I mean, school wasn't designed for that. I think that's why, you know, in Scandinavia, I have the history of the folk schools.

that was a parallel system because they were like, if we try to reinvent schools, we're going to get stuck. So let's build a parallel system that is about inner development and technology like buildum. And this is actually what is now popping up in a lot of places around the world.

Like we have one center here in the center of Stockholm that we're now building at the Oak Island Foundation, which would be a type of folk school, which is a combination of latest technology, but mainly these type of interdevelopmental shifts and scaffolding and support for that. So, I mean, there are some things that I think are also hopeful

in maybe shifting at least the conversation at large. So, I mean, we have, so, for example, like in two weeks, I think, roughly, we have a roundtable at the White House where, you know, their chief sustainability officer is inviting IKEA, which is our partner at the IDGs, the IDGs, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Otto Sharmer, to talk about the inner development goals and how we can actually have a conversation about the inner shifts

that are needed in the capacities to actually drive sustainability because what we're doing now is not enough. It's not working. Time is running out. So increasing our speed won't compensate for heading in the wrong direction. So what would a difference, how would changing direction actually look like? And of course it will be uncomfortable. Like, but the feelings don't bite.

So if you're, if you just don't want to be uncomfortable, and that's your reason for not, you know, taking on the meta story and listening to Daniel Schmachtenberger and Sachsstein and Nora Bateson and all these great thinkers, like it is an inherently very uncomfortable process. I mean, I'm a student of these people informally. Like I really have been through years taking on trying to learn from them. And a lot of the time, it's this dizzying experience where I'm like, I'm losing my footing here.

Like, am I even contributing to this movement? I just want to give up, basically. And you can see it. Like, when we do workshops, I work with Indy Johar. And if you haven't had them, you should definitely have them. He's scheduled for two weeks from now. Okay. Amazing.

So, I mean, so we were doing this AI interdevelopment session at the last year's summit. And you could just see that, like, people can hold the narrative for just a while. and then eventually they just glaze over. And I recognize that so well. And I even had to pause the room and say, okay, guys, can you get to see what happened here? Like, 98% of the people are not still in the room. Like they're physically here, but they're not here

because they're so overwhelmed that they're not in the process. And usually my conclusion when I've been in those conversations is, I'm not smart enough for this. This is over my head. This is over my pay grade. I should kind of get out of the conversation. And I think this is one of the key things from a developmental perspective is you being over your head, you feeling that you're losing your footing is not an indication that you're in the wrong place.

It's the indication that you're in the right place. This is the feeling of being in transition, right? And if you can talk about that and share that experience with others, you'll actually stay in it and you'll grow throughout the years. I've found the only, well, the main coping mechanism I have for this is that I have friends like you and Daniel and Nora and Zach and others that are experiencing the same thing. So I processed with them. So that's why I asked you is the inner development goals and the hubs is the sharing and the sitting in a circle in the community. Is that a big part of it? or is it more formulaic?

No, I would say that that is the part. That is the driving force of it. So, I mean, and it's so, it's so sad. Like, I get a little bit emotional with talking about it because, so we had this masterclass and this woman came up to me. This was Peter Senghis masterclass. A woman came up to me and she said, like, this is the first time. She was 45, I think.

This is the first time in my life that I feel at home. Like, no matter I, no matter who I turn to, I feel that we share. so much. And that is, like, it's heartwarming, it's amazing, but it's also so sad when thinking about all the young kids who have never been heard, who never felt that they are really, truly seen because, you know, the phones are there or that they think that they're actually, you know, consumers of the society or that that's their value. And it's just this soul-crushing.

narrative that hasn't been fought off really. We haven't defended the values that are truly important. And I think that one part for me at least of why I care a lot about the inner development goals is that it evokes this question of what is truly important and what do we want to hold sacred? Like what is the thing that is the highest value that we want to sacrifice other things for? I mean sacred means sacrifice, right? So what is the thing that is the most important? Because if if I was a young girl or guy today, I would say that that's money and power.

That's the thing that we sacrifice all the other things for. But it's not. I think if you were a young girl or guy, that would be the cultural context of that question. But I would actually think most people wouldn't think that. Let me ask a follow up to that. And then we can circle back to this. In one of your recent presentations,

you cited, if I recall correctly, that 56% of young people today think humanity is doomed in their lifetimes because of climate change. And climate change, as you know, is just one aspect of the metacrisis. What might a tool like interdevelopment goals offer to these young people who are so worried about their futures and are losing hope of seeing positive change in their lifetime? Yeah, I mean, on one level, we don't know if they're right or not, right? It's a feeling based on science, but yeah, it's a feeling. Yeah. And I think that like no matter, like one thing that I at least lean towards in kind of my darkest hours when actually I feel that, you know, maybe we are doomed, maybe things aren't moving

fast enough is I mean one is like how are we effective in driving these change these changes that need to happen so that we can protect what is sacred and another one is am I showing up

in a way that is actually right now protecting what is sacred or am I still reliving these old patterns from my you know limbic system or my conditioning so there's two kind of destinations, right? One is the destination of the system and this kind of sustainable future, but there's also the destination

in this present moment. And for me, the kind of developmental move or the journey is about definitely both of these. Where you know what, how about

we try to protect what is sacred right now and let's focus on what we have in front of us right now. And like the next step approach of doing the most, the next most important thing. And that for me brings a lot of hope. And it also creates a sense of, you know, focusing on what we can manage instead of this entire overwhelming system shift. So I know what is sacred to me is the natural world that is here now and that will come a generation and a thousand generations after I'm gone. But I think in the 700 and hopefully 700,000 hubs on interdevelopment, what's sacred to the people in Madagascar or Bolivia or Barcelona or Brazil or Stockholm might be different for those people than for me and for you.

So how, so I assume there's not one answer to what is sacred. It's, it's dependent on the context of the people that are having the conversation. Yeah, I mean, definitely, but to act from your values for the highest good would be the common denominator, right? And what does cognitive neuroscience say about that, just that, that we are able to act for some greater good? I think Maslow's hierarchy, Scott Barry Kaufman wrote some, read some letters that he had written. before his death that said that the transcendence wasn't the top of the Maslow's pyramid. It was there was another thing which was in service to something greater than yourself. So what evidence is there in the literature and what have you seen when people are able to

go from self to we to us and some greater aspiration? Yeah, I mean, so I wouldn't be pulling necessarily on neuroscience for that. Maybe there is great research on it. but for me I mean just the research on the adult development of looking at okay so what does a wiser life look like and it is moving beyond self-actualization

which is self-altering like it's focusing on me and living my authentic life and doing that fully but eventually that usually if you have the right support that moves into how can I be in service of something bigger than myself. And that, I think, from an evolutionary lens is quite obvious that we are both individuals, but we're also part of the whole.

So it does make sense that that would be something that we would, you know, be hard-coded to do. And if you backtrack and look at, like, what do people, you know, regret on their deathbeds or what are the happiest people on the planet have in common. It is not a life that is focused on their own happiness. It's not like, I mean, people who focus on their own happiness are more miserable and more depressed because it's about me and my happiness and how I'm feeling. Does it almost feel in a, this feels like a movie, like a Twilight Zone or a Groundhog Day.

The things you're saying makes so much sense to me. and your colleague Thomas Bjorkman was was on last year, and it was the same thing. It's like at the 11th hour, just before the meta crisis is going to explode, we've had this awareness. Oh my God, how myopic and diluted have we been as a culture?

Do you get that sense? Yeah, I'll fully. I mean, I've had that my entire life. So, so that's, that's, my father was an Olympian. So he was a discos thrower. Yeah,

it was a Swedish discos thrower who moved to the states to try. train in Provo and Utah met my mom who was then Mormon. So I was born into a Mormon family, but with an atheist Olympian father who had the religion of success that was that was killing him. Like he died when he was 37. I'm 38 now. And just like him, I have three boys.

And he passed away due to a pill overdose. and I was there in between these two worlds, right, of like Mormonism, which on one sense it really held our family together and it held it scaffolded the support that we needed both when we were in the States and when we came to Sweden. And then my father being this, you know, hot shot out in society, so everybody thought I was cool because I was his son. But at home, you know, he fell asleep in his food.

Like he almost drowned in his, you know, like old, meal. It was insane to have the dissonance of like, how could that be success in most people's eyes? And even also, like, how can Mormonism be so weird in other people's eyes? Because I was getting that signal as well. But that was something that was, in many cases, healthy for us with family dinners and play nights and, you know, going to church. But I also understood that, like, both of these stories can't be true at the same time. Like, he can't be right about how the universe is sorted and my mom can't be right. I mean, she's not Mormon anymore. We live in Sweden, most of my adult life. But to see that we can be captured by these stories in a way that

makes us blind and makes us sacrifice so many values that we truly hold dear, that's been kind of my core assumption, my entire life, of like, how can we be so captured by something that is so apparently bad for us. That's powerful. And I increasingly think that we have the mother of all cognitive dissonances as our culture. We feel that something is horribly wrong. I refer to people as the walking worried that they know that something isn't right, but they can't articulate it.

But to do the work and to peer behind the curtain to do a Wizard of Oz analysis, is potentially painful and scary. And so it's my hope or it's my recognition in this conversation with you that inner development goals or something like that, anything like that, even sitting in ceremony with with people or, um, just,

uh, Oprah book club, uh, town meeting about climate change in Topeka, Kansas or whatever, act as bridges to get that cognitive, to, to,

to see the footprint. of the elephant and start these conversations. And I think they have to be conversations, not you clicking on the internet in your basement at 11 p.m. Yeah, so really, are you hopeful that it's going to scale? I mean, are things exploding for your org in this effort? Yeah, they are exploding completely.

And like, honestly, I don't care if the IDGs become super successful or not. I just want this topic to be integrated into, society in these conversations to be had. Like the RSA, they've also developed the framework for the inner skills for sustainability and the thriving future. The European Union, they kind of copy-pasted, the IDGs, and now they have the green comp. I mean, all of those efforts are amazing. Like, nobody, there's no winner of this field.

Like, any movement towards this direction is, I think, more apt in solving the complexity of this issue. Short of creating their own inner development hub, how can people listening or watching this show start working on inner development? Are there first steps for those that are recognizing that there's an elephant underneath their cognitive Mahout? Do you have any advice? First is like all of us have an immunity to change, both on a cultural. level and an individual level. So for you to try to decide that you are going to develop yourself and to force yourself

into that, I'd say, I would invite to take a relational approach to that and say, you know, we have to become a community of practice who meet up and practice and talk about this over time. So that's first like input to the process or scaffolding of it, right? Reading a book won't do it, understanding it cognitively. Most likely it won't do. It's a really good first step, but there are several kind of threads that need to be woven here. Behavioral, emotional, social, cognitive.

So do it as a part of a community, but find that tribe where people will be honest to you about your shadows or what they see as your next step. Is there a container or a framework that if someone said, yeah, I have these four. really close friends and we'd like to explore this. Is there a video or some online resource that could get them started? Because of the network asking us for this, we're actually in the process of developing stuff like this. This is also why we built 29K. So the Aware platform, if you download the Aware app, you'll find hundreds of developmental evidence-based tools, which you practice in group, either in a physical setting or online with live video where you see each other. And there's this kind of recurring format where you can come back and meet same or similar

people working on that process. We've had 100,000 people go through processes that we know have an evidence-based effect on their lives that is significant and it's free. So it's actually funded by mainly Norheim Foundation. So there are scaffolding for that, if not reach out to me. And if there's a specific topic, I can point you in the right direction. So getting into practice with others, I think, is fundamental. So building that kind of community of brothers or sisters or siblinghood, right?

So that's one. Another one is actually think about the kind of aims that you have and the goals, what you're striving for, what you're putting your money into, what you're putting your time into. Is it this kind of like, if I reach X, everything will be different? Or look for the lived value of that instead. When do you feel?

Like, what do you think you're going to feel when you reach X? And instead of going for the X, go for the feeling. So try to uncover. Like, when do you feel connection? Instead of posting on social media, when do you, and try to impress people, what you're striving for there is longing for connection, right? That's the need.

That's a deep need. And everybody has the same need. On a need level, we're all the same, right? It's autonomy, it's relatedness or connection, it's competence and it's feeling safe. That's basically the needs that we have, right? Psychologically. So instead of going for the goal, when do you truly feel connection? Like, when do you feel held and seen and okay and feel, when do you feel love?

Like, what is that? Because the research here is really cool. And really, it kind of shocks people. But so Sonia Lubamirski wrote a book on this called Love 2.0, where she found that the amount of milliseconds you're looking into other people's eyes where you feel love and connection, you're not talking necessarily, you're just holding each other. The amount of milliseconds was a predictor of mental health, happiness, connection, I think even longevity or sickness. It was just like, it was insane. I mean, so she basically coined the broaden and build theory of positive emotion, and then she double-clicked on relationships,

because what she found was these micro-moments, micro-seconds of connection were a driving force for a lot of health benefits. So instead of looking for the goal, look for the lived experience. Two thoughts there. Number one is I used to live in New York City, and you would walk down the boulevard, six abreast, and everyone was looking down. There was no looking even for one millisecond into someone's eyes.

And that, that itself is a little bit of a microcosm for our current culture. Yeah. And secondly, how do, how do people start on, on that? Like, what's the mechanism of visualizing the feeling? And then how does that change their behavior in the future if they, they play that out in their minds? I mean, so this would be moving towards becoming more self-directed and trying to understand what really makes me come alive, what really makes me feel purpose and, you know, connection, love, autonomy. Like, when do I actually feel that instead of going for the symptoms? So if you experience that a few times in your mind, then little Eric in the future, when you're about to do something on social media in order for you to feel held and respected.

and have status, you're like, ah, but that, that's not what I'm really after. So it informs your future actions of sort? Exactly. I mean, it's like any addiction, right? You don't go for, like, you go for the reason why you're addicted to alcohol. And you try to, to rewire the approach to working with that anxiety or that longing for connection or that feeling of inadequacy. And the thing that you're fleeing from when you go for the alcohol, right?

And it's usually some type of deepening of these needs, right? And I think this is on an individual level, you see this, but also on the aggregate level, where the more needs deprived you are, the more you're chasing for the goal. And I mean, I've been working with billionaires and then philanthropists. And it's really always this huge difference in both how. how they relate to their needs, right? Where, you know, one of them is where I'm talking to them about, you know, sustainability. And I'm like, so what are your goal?

What are you kind of striving for? What is your motivation, right? Why do you do what you do? And they're like, more. I have to have more. And I was like, this is a billion, like, one of the richest people in Northern Europe. And he's like, I have to have more. And then you talk to Nicholas and where he's like, I'm just so lucky that I was born in the right

country with parents and I got so much free education, all of that. So these billions of, you know, dollars are not mine. I just lucked out. So I kind of now have to give back, right? Nicholas is a pretty rare individual. I would love to have him on the podcast, but he's such an introvert that he doesn't like to speak. But I know this and I feel this. I don't know that you know this about me.

But 30 years ago, I managed money for billionaires at Solomon Brothers on Wall Street. They were the same way. They needed more because it was. It was the dopamine and the feeling of status that was the proximate. I mean, the dollars were the proximate, but it was the feelings were the ultimate. And you can never get enough. I mean, I can give you one example that's really both scary and sad. So one very wealthy individual that I was working with, not super in depth, but a bit.

He had, like he couldn't sit, he couldn't sit on a chair. He was laying down on the floor. and eventually like we had a conversation about why he's not you know in the process in the group is doing the sharing and he's like I I have broke

I have a hernia in my disc in my back because all I've been practicing at the gym was my abs up until the point that I broke my disc right and this it says something about the

it's not about this individual it's about the human psyche is that we can get so into the flow channel of getting the metric that everything else. I mean, it's really this left hemispheric way of thinking, right? As long as I get the symbol, as long as I get the token,

everything will be fine. And that is an evolutionary adaptive way of solving problems in some conditions. But if that is the thing that also sets all the goals and sets the direction, then we lose the entire right hemisphere wisdom, right?

That ABS example again for like the third or fourth time in this conversation is a microcosm for our broader cultural um context also renewable energy like renewable energy is the answer for climate change is like lifting weights with your right bicep and getting super buff but you have diabetes and the rest of your body is flaccid or whatever it's that's why we need systems and we need inner inner development conversations. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, um, so honestly, like I, I had a massive burnout like a couple of years ago. So I don't see myself as like a peak sustainability guy. I understand happiness and psychology and all of that. Um, so running 29K, like, I'm not the CEO type, but I was, we were looking for an external CEO for this foundation and we couldn't find one. So I took the job because otherwise it wouldn't have happened. Um, and it was super complex.

and I just, we just had two kids and I was miserable and eventually I was so burned out that I couldn't read, write or count for like 16 months. And my wife pulled the entire like ship of the house. I was only on the property like in our garden 15 months. Couldn't do anything. It didn't meet one single person except my family. So a couple of reflections on that is like Knowing a lot about this is not going to help But having a supportive community that could have

Both we pull each other through Tough situations But we also scaffold ourselves so that you know what Hey Nate you need to take a break right now Or you know supporting each other and seeing ways Seeing the things that I can see myself Because I'm so captured and like this is so important I need to you know deliver the thing

but one thing that I really like I'm so grateful for that experience is two things one is the people who are really struggling in the society who are emotionally cognitively just not where they need to be

this society is so violent for them because when I went to the grocery store when I was kind of trying to slowly get back when I saw the offer like buy two for the price, buy three for the price of two, or get this, or like, have salesmen called me? I couldn't say no to anything. I was just like, I didn't have the emotional, you know, power to self-direct at all. So I was completely following everybody with whatever they wanted with me.

And it just became so apparent that this is a very violent society that we have built. And then secondly, was that I started like a person. because the only thing I could process, the only information I could process was farmers talking slowly. I couldn't even recognize a healthy regenerative system that humans have built if I saw it. I would probably just brush it off and say, that's, you know, BS, or I wouldn't even recognize it. And it became so apparent that of all the work I've done, I didn't really have a clue of what health looked like. I mean, I know it in nature, right, but I don't know it in a human system. So what does a really regenerative, healthy human system look like? And that just has

kept me up since that. It's like, what would the kind of threads that need to be woven that would start, first of all, building the soil for that to take place? And then what would the specific of that look? Because the kind of the dream or the hope, like you asked me earlier, like, if we're aiming really high, what would that look like? I mean, imagine coming to a place. It could be municipality or city or whatever where all these principles all these ways of thinking that we've learned from Daniel and Zach

and all these great thinkers have been internalized where there are lived reality you don't talk about it they just live it differently right I mean they could talk about it but like that would be such an heartening hopeful experience to enter a space where you know it's like wow something's different here

What is that? So let me ask you this. A thought just came to mind because one of the things that I've been asked from our viewers is can you make a two hour video series that gives an introduction to the human predicament and oil depletion and climate and human behavior and debt and the economic system and why it's relevant to our community so that we can start having conversations locally without you there because I can't be everywhere. but I almost wonder if this interdevelopment or whatever it's called about human behavior and our needs, our basic psychological requirements, if something like that were to be able to be seen and experienced with a unofficial city council that starts talking about it in a city, that that would actually act as a gateway to the larger conversation

because the larger conversation is too politically fraught to start unless you have close friends that are already well versed in these things. What do you think about that? 100% is like if you bring people into, so I mean we've been talking about this for a couple of years, but like one metaphor is thinking about it as a temple, a temple experience, but it's not a religious place,

but it is a sacred place where, you know, life is the thing that is sacred and we're actually everything we do here is in service of that. To enter a space like that, I think could be one of the most powerful interventions a person could go through. So I'll give you one example. And it's actually from this organization that I met the other week where when they bring in like the president of Austria or, you know, the ministers or whatever, they don't bring them into through the big entrance they bring them in through the entrance where half of the wall is just a glass wall where you can see into where are the all these 15 16 year olds are going through this trainee program and learning english and learning all the machines and all of it right um because that's what they're most proud of and the cool thing is not that they're proud of the kids and look at what we're doing the signal towards the kids is you are our reason for being. Like, you guys are going to carry this into the future. And this is kind of what breaks my heart today because, like, in Sweden, the average 13-year-old is on their phone

six and a half hours. Whoa. And I think it's actually more in the States. And that's outside of school and not including TV. And the signal for that is like, we gave you to Molok. We gave you to the market dynamics and these things are not good for you. And you know the content that you're looking at is not like if you ask kids uh they don't want to have tictock and instagram a lot of them would say that i i i want netflix but i don't want these other platforms but since everybody else is there i have to be right exactly right worst thing is that we as parents we gave it to them and we did not protect them so the signal is like and this is where i i think it's so i get it's hard to talk about because the last thing we want to tell our kids

is that they are not worthy of protection, right? And this is where I think that the market and protecting the people who are vulnerable, we need to make some big changes here quickly. And that is also moving beyond the postmodern perspective of saying, you know what, everybody can just self-direct and go for their own happiness, but it's actually saying, no, no, no.

There are things that are more sacred, and this is not a matter of opinion. This is a fact about life, that life wants more life, and we're here to protect that process. And that's actually moving beyond the postmodern, and saying there should be a directionality in society that creates more generative life. And anything that is not that is actually bad for society.

And we just went way too far into the postmodern perspective and let the market take over our children's lives, and it's so violent. So what can someone who is listening to this episode right now, and if they're listening, it means they're at least somewhat, if not very familiar with the meta crisis. What is something they can do today this week, this month to help address these broader issues? You did mention how to get started on the inner development goals earlier. But what's your advice to people listening to this podcast to make some changes or? It's all up to leaders and politicians and the post, postmodern removal of marketing and some of the market leading our world.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would say get into practice with others, but not in relationship to just a random, like, inner development. I want to become more perspective taking, more blah, blah, blah. Like, try to take on the most meaningful challenge you can. And when you notice that you need to check out, when you notice your capacities are not. up to the task, that's when you need development, right? So take on the most meaningful change you can drive in your system.

And because it's a stretch, it's the most meaningful, right? Like 10% more than you think that you can handle, that will become a developmental process, especially if you have a supporting community where you can reflect and put words on it and find tools for whatever it is that stopped you, right? So find that edge through caring as an agent in the world. And this is what I said to these corporations as well,

it's like for IKEA. It's like it's not about you guys integrating the IDGs only. It's not about you becoming the best in the world. Like as soon as you have capacity and power, it's about becoming the best for the world. So it's you in the market. How can you shift the entire market and not just try to win and expand, right?

So for any level of the system, How can I act for the highest value? So one intervention that I really love is the question that one of our professors taught me. And he teaches this to add to the astronauts that are potentially going to Mars. And he says, so just one question. It's basically this. It's in this situation, are you acting to avoid discomfort or are you acting for who you aim to be? So it's really pulling on the highest values that you have.

and the higher values are always about purpose and about me in the context and about relationship and about giving. Who I aim to be would not be like self-serving, short-sighted narcissistic. That's not the answer to that question for almost anybody. So it really pulls you away from hedonism and short-sightedness, and it really pulls you towards these values that are higher than you. And it has helped me through many times in my life. Like small things. It's not only avoiding discomfort, I would include seeking comfort in there as well for some people anyways.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And the people who I've seen do this, they move from kind of overwhelm to this kind of sense of hope. Not necessarily because there's more, you know, of a solution. out there, but they're not alone and they're doing something for what they think is really important. I want to be respectful of your time, but you made me think of another question. It so happens that a lot of our listeners are autodidactic looking at how all the systems fit together, understanding that something is not right and wanting to connect the dots, but they don't have a circle or a tribe or a group that they could process these things with.

And I think it's really difficult to handle these as an individual person and you need such a group. But if people listening to this don't have such a group in your lifetime of looking at happiness research and social dynamics, do you have any recommendations for them? Yeah, I mean, of course, it's find your peers, right? It's really moving into these communities where we share these basic axiomatic ideas about the world and the future, and then move into practicing together and then move into building structures together. I mean, this is what we've been doing in Stockholm here for years and where we see that,

so we've been running youth camps for 15 years almost, where people find each other, work through the processes, reflect on who they want to be, et cetera. And the re-feedback from their parents is really like, what did you do to my son? What did you do to my daughter? Now they come home and they're completely contributing to the family system instead of receiving it as passive agents, right? So I think finding people who are like-minded,

who share that story, and online, offline is of course better, but online is a lot better than nothing. IDG hubs could be one of those. If not, I mean... How does someone start an IGG hub? Just go into the website and you'll find the instructions there. It's basically teaming up with a small group first and then you register.

And that becomes an attractor for more and more people who want to have a similar conversation. And then it grows from there. A lot of people are meeting online and really gathering. around this. So that's one way of doing it. But honestly, it doesn't have to be the IDG hub. Like, it could be, it could be your neighborhood talking about how can we create a better, you know, a better street where we, where we're living the values of how we would aim

it to be, right? What do you care most about in the world, Eric? I read this question in the notes that you sent before. and I actually started crying. I didn't know why, and I still maybe don't. But I think, I mean, of course it's love, right? I mean, my kids pop up. I think about myself as a kid.

And it just becomes very apparent that from that question, some things are worthy of protecting. and I can't see anybody regretting working for that on their death bed that that would be probably what they would be what I would be most proud of was you know acting from care and love and compassion and also trying to figure out when do I shut off love care compassion and just working on that healing or forgiving.

So from a place of love, care, and compassion, if you additionally had access to a magic wand, what is one thing you would do to change human and planetary futures for the better? It would be enabling, like all people, maybe especially young people, to discover when they feel the most alive. the most meaning, the most connection, and to really cement that experience

that they decided on, that they found the patterns in. Because if they did, they would not accept the system that we have created. They would say, this is not human. What we've created has been hijacked and we're caught in this trap, and we are worthy of so much better. This is not what we're here to build.

And I think everybody on the planet can come to that conclusion if they just have that scaffolding and that support. And then you'd want to empower them to drive the change. But I think that's actually the core of rediscovering what it means to be human and changing that story. That would be it. And the rest, I think, would actually sort itself out. Well said. I did send you a list of rough questions. and we only got to 20% of them because of all the tangents.

If you were to come back and for a round two and take a deep dive on some topic relevant to the great simplification, the meta crisis that you were just personally interested in, is there such a topic? And what would it be? Yeah, I mean, I think it would be actually like, how can we start integrating the meta crisis? into our lived experience. And how can that process go from, as it is right now,

maybe a little bit of overwhelm and people checking out. And like, this is way too heavy, way too complex. And I hope you guys are wrong, but you sound really on point, but I can't process it. To actually step by step integrating maybe in like a curriculum form that has this pedagogy of integration. So it becomes a lived experience. And how can I then move into an agentic experience?

how can a agentic way of relating to the metacrisis, individually, collectively. Because if we get that right, it'll not be people just talking about the meta crisis while the house is burning, will actually get stuff moving. And it doesn't have to be the right things. It'll just be the point of the projects,

the point of acting in this world, I think, where we are so much kind of interwoven into actually being the problem the point of any project that we think is meaningful is I think equally parts outer system and equally parts

inner system the learnings of us trying to create meaning and trying to change the world for the better will actually uncover where we are kind of off center right yeah so that would be something and if we have 1% or 3% or 7% or 12% of people that have experienced that,

then those are rocks in the river to change the flow of the water that's coming our way. I like that line of inquiry. Yeah, and I mean, and I think that the water that is hitting us, the unsustainable direction of society, is so powerful right now. And people are starting to feel it. that when they uncover, discover something that's authentic and real, the feeling of community is probably beyond what most people have ever felt in their lives.

So it's an equal attractor. Like the kind of chaos is actually calling for humans to step up. This is what Indy said as well. It's like the darkness is not here to scare us or to help us or to make us give up. It's actually a call for human greatness. My cognitive brain hears that and my limbic system and reptilian system feel it as well. So I'm on board with that direction. Thank you for all your work, Eric.

And thank you for your time today and to be continued for sure. Thank you so much, Nate, for having me. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit ThegreatSimplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann, and Lizzie Siriani.