The One You Feed - Jonah Sachs on Unsafe Thinking

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

Jonah Sachs is an author, speaker, and viral marketing trailblazer who helped spur the 21st-century values revolution, which brought the ideas of social change to the forefront of business and popular culture. Jonah’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, NPR, and many others. He also pens a column for Fast Company, which named him one of today’s 50 most influential social innovators.  In this episode, Eric and Jonah talk about the ways he encourages and challenges us to think differently in an effort to bring forth important social change.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Jonah Sachs and I Discuss Unsafe Thinking and …His book, Unsafe Thinking: How To Be Nimble and Bold When You Need It MostHis organization “One Project” and its important missionHow his unique storytelling approach creates a compelling narrative for important social changeWhat individuals can do to contribute to changeThe radical act of volunteering more and working for pay lessThe safe thinking cycle is relying on your old patterns of thinkingWhat fear and stress do in our brainLearning to use fear as a way to empower yourselfHow stepping out into the uncomfortable zones is what leads to changeMotivational synergy is about focusing on both the intrinsic motivational factors and extrinsic motivation to keep it goingCreative work and understanding the trap of intuitionCultivating intuition by continuing to explore new ideas and ways of thinkingHow redefining problems can lead to new solutionsJonah Sachs Links:Jonah Sach’s WebsiteTwitter If you enjoyed this conversation with Jonah Sachs on Unsafe Thinking, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Effectively Thinking Ahead with Bina VenkataramanLessons About the Brain with Lisa Feldman BarrettSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series. Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kick-starting your personal growth. If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If in your spare time, you're exposing yourself to new information, new of people, and new situations, your intuition is going to get better. If you're stuck in the same kind of environments, your intuition is going to get worse and worse and worse. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.

We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Jonah Sachs, an author, speaker, and viral marketing trailblazer who helped spur the 21st century values revolution which brought the ideas of social change to the forefront of business and

popular culture. Jonah's work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, NPR, and many others. He also pens a column for Fast Company, which named him one of today's 50 most influential social innovators. Today, Eric and Jonah discuss many things, including his book, Unsafe Thinking, How to Be Nimble and Bold When You Need It Most. Hi, Jonah. Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Eric. It's great to be here. I'm really excited to talk with you about a couple different things. We're going to talk about your organization, One Project, and a book that you helped put together called The New Possible. And we're also going to talk about a book you wrote called Unsafe Thinking, how to be nimble and bold when you need it the most. But before we get into all that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and

love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops, thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I'll start by saying that I love this parable. I've done a lot of teaching about storytelling, and I think this is one of the best examples of how a simple story can access so much innate wisdom inside of us. So I've thought about it from many angles, and there's many obvious angles. But the one that comes up for me that I think is maybe a bit more unique is it points to the enormous creative potential in each of us to decide what we're going to bring forth in the

world. And I have a golden retriever, so a kind of a wolf, you might say. And the more that I feed her, the more she comes up to the table expecting more and more and more. And so what I think is that it's not just about the good and the bad. It's about the habits that form as we feed parts of ourselves. As we engage in those habits, they get easier and easier because they're coming up to the table. And the part that we're not feeding is, you know, often the distance or cowering because we're not feeding it. So it's not just about good and bad. It's also about the unexplored parts of ourselves and really thinking about that automatic feeding that we're doing of certain capacities and the capacities that maybe we're not feeding as much as well. I believe that our

creative potential comes when we start also feeding the capacities on that kind of shadow side. So it's a simple morality play on one hand, but also talks about the incredible inherent capacity within all of us holistically from feeding all of our abilities. I love that. I think that's a really good interpretation. And I agree. I think so much of this is about recognizing what our habitual patterns are and becoming more intentional about them. Yeah. I mean, engaging in habitual behavior feels really good. It's really easy. And you feel in that kind of groove when you're doing it. But like when a groove becomes a rut, that's always the hard thing to figure out. And doing anything outside of your comfort zone takes a huge amount of effort and work. And it's always uncomfortable, but it's

kind of over there that the growth really happens. And that's been a lot of my struggle and my work in my life is to figure out how to access outside of that zone of comfort. Yeah. So I'd like to start by talking about the organization that you're currently involved in and running, which is called One Project. Can you just tell us a little bit about what One Project is? Yeah. So One Project is a kind of startup venture. My partner in the venture is Justin Rosenstein. He's the inventor of the like button for Facebook and inventor of Google Drive. And he's been creating all of these tools to help humanity collaborate more. It's like, what are we collaborating on? We can use the like button to share love with our friends, but we can also use it to create all these terrible unintended consequences of surveillance capitalism. So he stepped away from his work and joined up with me to try to figure out how to use human collaboration to address those root causes of global crises right now. And we see those as a broken democratic system and a broken economic system.

Basically, the capitalism that we engage in right now and the type of representative democracy we use are kind of like 18th century technologies. And all of the technologies for communication and for consumerism have grown incredibly quickly while we're still going to the ballot box using pretty much the same tools that we used the founding of our nation. And so we think for democracy to survive, it needs to upgrade itself. For this planet to survive, we need a kind of economy that's not just based on profit, but based on human goals. Now, none of that was really possible to do a couple hundred years ago. Like how are you going to figure out what human goals are when you can't even communicate with

someone who lives five miles away? But now that humanity is kind of global, we're looking for ways to move beyond capitalism to think of ways that humanity can achieve its goals in a sustainable way that drives equity and drives the kind of outcomes we want. And so that's a giant mission that we have. But what we're specifically doing is working in communities who are trying to manage resources, trying to manage themselves in new ways to be more equitable, more just, more sustainable, studying what their problems are, and seeing how our donations and money and also our technologies that we're producing can help them step outside of those traditional models and do things in a better way. Yeah, I first became exposed to your work through a book that you guys put together called The New Possible, which I really loved because so many of the books about these topics that you're talking about are, at least to me, they're very problem focused,

right? A lot of us, I think, understand some of the current problems, what's broken. It's pretty clear. I think democracy is not working very well. The economy is only working well for very few. And so pretty clear problem statements, but not a lot of solutions. And I love that this book put together some of the best thinking on solutions that I had seen in a while. And I found it a really inspiring read. Thanks so much. We try to pull together global leaders to provide a kind of sense of what could be. The whole world got shaken up by coronavirus and what we've been through over the last year. I think we all learned that different ways are possible when foisted upon us and that we actually can change as communities. It's brought out some of the best in us and of course,

some of the worst in us. But I think it's brought out a lot more good than it's brought out some of the best in us and of course some of the worst in us. But I think it's brought out a lot more good than it's brought out bad in the human condition in terms of what we're capable of. And so we wanted to put forth some visions of like what a food system could look like, what community-based economic systems could look like, what systems of collaboration might look like if we decide to go forward instead of going back to the old way. And I think that window has opened up where that discussion of how to do things differently is pretty alive in us right now. What we want to do at One Project is not just provide that vision of like, oh, wouldn't it be great if we had local food systems? We want to figure out how do we make local food systems

economically competitive with global food systems? How do we build tools so that any farmer can team up with 50 other farmers and get their produce to market and maybe eventually not even sell that produce for cash, but sell it for some other kind of credits that are more collaborative than we currently use? So we're looking 15, 20, 50 years into the future, which again, seems crazy at times, but I think scientists are telling us that we have 15 or 20 years to turn this thing around. And if you really look at it, our current systems do not offer a credible path to a sustainable future at this point. I believe it's an essay

in the book, and it's on your website called The Architecture of Abundance. And I love the way you go into it, because you're basically telling the story from somebody who is 30 years in the future. And this woman, it's from a woman's perspective, is sort of looking back at our time today and thinking, how was life like that? And it paints this really great picture of what could be. It's a really compelling way in. Well, thank you.

Again, my background is in storytelling and in turning social change into compelling narratives. I was an experimenter in the early days of the internet, spreading stories about factory farming. I had a spoof of The Matrix called The Metrix about the harms of factory farming. I did a movie called Story of Stuff about the problems with overconsumption.

And by telling these kinds of stories, I was getting tens of millions of people to engage with these somewhat dry social messages. And learning how story-based communication can really activate someone's imagination on these tough topics is a kind of superpower of mine or a super belief of mine, I'll say, like, this is how you do it. So what we tried to do was say, imagine you're living in this future. You know, what does it feel like to participate in setting goals for saying, you know, I want to see nature come back. I want to

see global levels of equity increasing by 5% every year. And what if we all got together and really talked about what mattered most to us instead of this myth where if we all just pursue our own self-interest, it'll all sort of work out. I mean, that produced a lot of abundance for a long time, but we're hitting up against limits that we can no longer ignore. So what we try to do with that essay was show how satisfying, how lovely, how exciting it might feel to be part of a global effort that's actually working, not just shaking your fist at the establishment, but being a citizen that is engaging with those solutions. And as a far off ideal, we're actually trying to build software and trying to build interpersonal social technology that lets communities do exactly that.

Instead of having a profit-based economy, start to build goals-based economies. And maybe just doing it a small community at a time, but that's what we're experimenting with. We're brand new. We're just starting out, but we're already making our way pretty well in the world. And this isn't exactly what your organization does, but I'd like to at least get your insight on it, which is what can individuals who want to see change, what are places that people can get involved? Because I feel like there is a tremendous

untapped desire for change. And yet there's a lot of of I'm not really sure what the heck to do. And I know that there's not simple global answers for what everybody can do. I'm not asking you to be like, well, you just do these three steps. But I guess I'd be more interested in the way you might think about, okay, people who care, what are ways that they can start thinking about how they can contribute? Yeah, I think that the way that we're taught to make social change is in two spaces, essentially. We'll call it three. So one is the most obvious, you know, get out there and vote every four years or every two years and express your voice at the polls. And that's just kind of like, that's like showering once a week. That's kind of the minimum hygiene you need to do to be a citizen. My friend Annie Leonard from Story of Stuff taught

me that. That's just the most basic. We got to do that. The second is, you know, giving money, right? The redistribution. If you have money, you know, give some of it away. Totally agree. I talk to a lot of people who don't really realize that there's been this sort of time honored tradition in many religions and cultures of giving 10% of your wealth away every year. That seems like a lot to many people. I think that's kind of the second minimum is to really give back if you have it. And if you don't, of course you can't. So that's the second. The third is, you know, to see what's wrong and raise your voice out in the world. You know, get out there and protest. Stand out in the streets or write a letter and engage with the political process in that way. That, obviously, we've seen around the country that can make change as well. But that's a sort of sporadic

kind of thing that we do. It's performative. It's exciting. It's not really building the new. It's kind of trying to tear down the old. Also important. There's a fourth thing that I think we don't think about enough because it sometimes feels too small. And it sometimes feels like it's just a drop in the bucket. But it actually is how we begin to build those citizen muscles that make us more and more effective as change agents and really demonstrate the new. And you're seeing it a lot around COVID right now with these kind of mutual aid societies is one example, which is like, you don't need a big theory of change to change the world. Go out in your community and see what's not being done.

See who needs a little bit of help in your community and start just offering that help one-on-one to people. Bring your gifts in terms of volunteering to make a safer space in your community. If you think that there needs to be more equity in the world, figure out who in your community's basic needs are not being met and go out and feed some people. And in doing so, what happens is you get involved in a different kind of economic exchange. You're giving your time, you're giving your resources, but not your financial resources to new systems. And when you do, you start to meet other people who are meeting their needs outside of the traditional methods. And you're starting to kind of build these new economies. A lot of the most powerful, they're multi-billion dollar worker cooperatives

out there in the world, like the Mondragon Corporation in Spain. They produce a huge amount of value and they're all owned not by investors, they're owned by their employees. These companies were built by people in small towns figuring out how to support each other little by little. And in doing so, eventually they started building businesses that they own together. And now they're some of the biggest businesses in Europe, but their whole goal is to help build community health. So as simple as it may sound, it's like, how do you get out there and give your gifts in your community one-on-one?

And when you do, you're going to start joining other communities of change. People also find this on the internet in a lot of ways too. Like the people who decided that they want to help build world knowledge by joining Wikipedia and becoming an editor, people who start to get involved in gift economies where, you know, it's feeling belonging, it's feeling like you're part of something. It's so much better than getting paid for it. We were talking before the show about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Many of the things that we take the most joy in, we never get paid a cent for. And science shows that when we start paying people of the things that we take the most joy in, we never get paid a cent for. And science shows that when we start paying people for the things they love, they stop loving it,

and they stop wanting to do it anymore. So again, can you go out and find a sense of pleasure that doesn't involve economic exchange, that involves service? And that's how we start to build the seeds of the new economy. I think those are great ideas, and I like the idea of here are the different levels and different steps you can take. And I like the idea of here are the different levels and different steps you can take. And I think that idea of just starting where you are in the community you're in with what you can do is so important because I think we get very hung up on having to do something really big. Yeah. You know, we get very hung up in, we've got to make this massive change. And I think what that often does is stops us from making any change. Because massive change is pretty hard to do if you're just a person.

And it's sort of a point we make on this show all the time around slightly different topics. But when you start stringing together little actions, little of this, little of that, it builds and accumulates and it starts to build a momentum. And like you said, you start to meet other people and you're exposed to other ideas and other ways that you can participate. Yeah. And I think that we often get confused because we get burnt out from these little actions that don't make any change at all, that we've been sold as our primary way of making change, which are these consumer actions. Like, well, if you recycle or if you buy kind of better packaging or something like that, you're going to save the world. And that kind of seemed exciting for a minute when we were like, ooh, better packaging. We kind of know that there's no amount of recycling. And then we hear that 80% of recycling is just dumped in the ocean or whatever. And we start to realize that these

little consumer actions or buying the green product is not really making the difference. I see a difference between what I would call kind of planting seeds and just individual consumer actions. When you buy a green product or something like that or try to cut down on the plastic in your house, that is a small piece, but it's not a social piece of what you're doing. I think all these changes are important.

They all have to happen. But what's planting a seed is when you get out again into that community and you start interacting with other people in giving your gifts and you start making it a part of your identity in your social life. That's where you're starting to build community and new opportunities open up and the radical experience of giving as opposed to buying differently begins to transform you. I mean, even if it doesn't save the world, it makes all these happiness studies show that service, direct service makes us happier. So it's like a zero risk thing to do basically, but it points to how we begin to build these new economies of care as opposed to these economies of wealth.

We're also learning so much from this pandemic. I'm learning it myself, that working 60 hours a week doesn't feed our creativity. Just the way that we're on these tracks of working so hard. So we've all been forced to step back a little bit from work and work from home. And many economists think that we'll never have a sustainable economy until we all start working 20 hours a week, consuming less and having more time to do care work, to do community gardening, to be involved in volunteer work. And so in some ways, this radical act two of deprioritizing some of your pay work for volunteer work and community work is also a step towards what has been really studied as a more sustainable economy, which is a whole other conversation we could have. Excellent. I'd like to change directions a little bit here and talk a little bit about your book, Unsafe Thinking, how to be nimble and bold when you need it the most. Because I think that these acts we're talking about are inherently creative acts to some degree, right? They need us to step outside of our comfort zone. And so I wanted to start with some of your work in unsafe thinking and really talk

about what you refer to in there as the safe thinking cycle. Essentially, what feels good is to rely on what you know. What burns the least glucose in your brain is to rely on old patterns of thinking. And we think, well, I've had success in this way in the past. And so I'm going to fall back on that. And in some ways, that makes sense. Like we can't just approach the world as an infant every day and try a million new approaches. But when the world around us changes really quickly, we start to get this sense that like, maybe what I was doing two years ago is not still working. And the first response to that is usually

not, woohoo, I'll go try some new things. It's a certain amount of fear and stress. You see you're heading for that cliff. Now what happens in the brain when we get fear and stress is something called cortical arousal. Cortical arousal starts to send stress hormones to your brain. It's really good for giving you energy and giving you motivation and drive, but it also does something kind of strange and not helpful in a world where change is important. So when we evolved on the African savannah, we would get a lot of cortical arousal when a lion would jump out at us, right? And the lion jumps out and what happens is your peripheral vision shuts down, all your bodily systems shut down, and you get

into this kind of stress response where you gain power and energy to do what you know will work, what you've done before, to fall back on instinct. And so what you do when you get stressed is you double down on that same thing you were doing before and you say, okay, I'm going to change. I know I'm going to change, but whoa, not today. Cause this is really crazy. This is just, well, I better take the safe route. And, you know, that sort of works because it feels comfortable, but you know, you repeat that cycle 500 times and now the world has changed around you so much. And what you did before was irrelevant. And you're left clinging to this branch that is, you know, swiftly cracking and you can't

let go of it. So that's what I call the safe thinking cycle. You, you get stressed, stress makes you act in stereotypical ways, you get more stressed because you're not changing. And there's really no way to avoid that. That is a physiological response. So I studied a lot of the science like, well, how does anyone ever get out of this?

And what it turns out is the only way to get out of it, and I use the story of Mahatma Gandhi, who was incredibly shy, incredibly had no ability to speak in public. He got thrown out of being a lawyer in India and had to run away because he couldn't even speak up in court. And when that fear would rise up in him, he would shut down. And on a train trip across South Africa, where he had fled after failing in India, when he was kicked off a train for being a person of color, freezing on the platform, he felt that fear and that shutdown. And he promised himself that in that moment, he was going to take that sense of fear and use it as his kind of power.

He was going to say, from now on, when I get stressed, I'm going to see that that means that I'm on the edge of some potential creative breakthrough. And he spoke about how he used that then to keep putting himself in the most risky situations he could and build more and more personal power. And so the way out of this, the more that we try to press down feelings we don't like, the more those feelings tend to well up. So you can't stop your stress. But if you start to reframe stress, take that moment when you're feeling that arousal and say, oh, this is a sign there's an opportunity opening up something new? And if I'm trying something new, I'm in a situation that demands newness from

me. I can use that as energy to get into what I call unsafe thinking, which yeah, does involve more risk, but also gets out of that stereotypical cycle that kind of tends to break us down. Thank you. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love.

So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future all in one idea. Soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

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Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That story of Gandhi is so inspirational to think of somebody who became so influential as starting from being so afraid. And he said he never lost that fear. He never got rid of it. He never liked to go to parties. He was still afraid that he would be rejected. But every time he felt that fear, it kind of doubled down his resolve to treat it in a way that was productive for himself and for the world. Yeah. And you talk about Stephen C. Hayes in that section of the book. He's been a guest on the show several times. And, you know, you talk about his idea of how we think that we have a way of dealing with things in the external world. If there's something in the external world and we don't like it, if we can, we try and change it.

But that when we apply that internally, we get stuck. Yeah, that's right. There's all these great studies that I quote, and you know, Stephen Hayes' work is really influential in my book, but they put participants in a study, they cause them pain. They put their arms in ice water and they, some of them, they said, try not to feel this pain. And for the others, they just said, you know, breathe and let it go. And the people who tried not to feel pain felt way more pain than the people who just kind of went with it. And so he uses that as a kind of an example of the more that you resist that fear. And this really is true in so many ways. Like,

I use this idea in the book, like, what if Gandhi had said, every time I feel that fear, I'm going to do my best not to feel it, right? He already tried that. He ran away from India to South Africa. He would have just kept going smaller and smaller until he was a shut-in. And then, you know what? He probably wouldn't feel that fear anymore until he realized that he was never leaving the house and his life had fallen apart. And then he'd have all this other kind of fear. So, no matter how small you make your life, you're never going to stop feeling that fear. And no matter how successful you are, I think you're still never going to stop feeling that fear. But if you, you know, interpret it as your friend, essentially, which is, you know,

it's hard work. Then your personal power starts to come out, your creative power. I guess that goes with feeding, right? Like what are you going to feed, right? Yeah, right. And it's really that you said it there, sort of accepting the fear, the anxiety, whatever the uncomfortable emotion is as being part of it, and then reimagining it as fuel for creativity. We not too long ago interviewed a woman named Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's done a lot of really interesting research about how we construct emotions. We're taking bodily signals, we're taking other cues, and we construct an emotion.

And this is really powerful work in that it says, hey, we can choose to interpret these signals that our physiology is giving us in different ways. And I think it's that idea of, oh, if I'm feeling afraid, that's a good sign. I'm pushing myself somewhere that's good. Yeah, and you're adding another level of clarity to it, for sure, that I a good sign. I'm pushing myself somewhere that's good. Yeah, and you're adding another level of clarity to it,

for sure, that I hadn't quite thought of before. But yeah, it's like, my hands are clammy, my heart's beating fast, I'm sweating. Those are all physiological signs of fear. If you can step back, you know, through meditation or just through awareness or studying heroes of yours, like Gandhi, and seeing, well, what's the step between that feeling and that reaction? Do I have agency between the feeling and the reaction? And the truth is that yes, we do. The problem is the safe thinking cycle,

you know, puts these ruts in our brain where we skip over the agency part and just go right to reaction. And again, it goes to the parable we started the show with. You have a choice of what aspect of this you feed, and that's where the power lies. But it's certainly not simple. We're not all going to become Gandhi overnight. Not simple nor easy at all. And back to what we talked about earlier about how so much of life becomes habitual, these reactions become entirely habitual. Fear, turn away. Anxiety, turn away. It becomes so habitual, we don't even know it's happening. I write in the book also about this kind of idea of expertise, and I think it's really related to this, where people try to stay in their zones of expertise. They try to stay where they think they know what they're doing.

in their zones of expertise. They try to stay where they think they know what they're doing. And I just studied all this great research on the people who create the biggest creative opportunities are those who intentionally do things that they suck at, things that humble them,

that they feel that they're bad at, they have nothing to prove. We make all these neurological connections where we're in that space where we're failing constantly. Those early phases of learning something new outside of our zone of expertise, we are gaining all these lessons, both about how to fail and how to be humble and how to take chances that are low risk. But then also we start building up these analogous ways of thinking. So if you've never done ballroom

dancing before, and you're a computer programmer, in those first few months of ballroom dancing, you're going to get all these analogies, Your brain's going to make all these weird connections across different domains and your computer programming will get better. You got to get away from that idea that you're ever going to like win a ballroom dancing competition. You know, like I've been taking singing lessons. You know, my teacher's like, you're never to perform. And I'm like, that's cool. I'm never to perform. But I'm terrible at it. But like, you know, those small incremental improvements that you make. And then also the metaphors for my own creativity are huge. The other, you know, hilarious thing is that, bold, but bad zone and, you know, starting to build up new skills as opposed to constantly picking away at those skills that

you really maybe can incrementally improve, but you're not really making progress with anymore. Right. A lot of this ties back to how do we make change in the world? You know, these things of going out into our community and doing something is something that for most of us is going to feel uncomfortable. And we're probably not going to be great at it first or not quite know what to do or not know how to do it. And this willingness to step into that is really an important part of the equation. In my first book, Winning the Story Wars, I focused quite a lot on Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey. The reason that that story of a very ordinary person making extraordinary change, which is the foundation of Star Wars and the foundation of The Matrix and the foundation

of a million other things, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and all that stuff, the reason that that myth has lived on for so long is it reminds us that the things that we think we can't possibly do, because the hero in those stories is never someone who's big and strong and powerful. It's always the weakest, smallest, the little hobbit. Moses is 80 years old with a lisp before he goes back, the face pharaoh. We look at characters who say, oh, I couldn't possibly do that. And then they, through the mentor and through some magic gift that they get, they step out into past their comfort zone and they figure out, they suddenly get a new look at why the world was broken. And in taking that adventure, they don't get rich and famous and get all the great stuff in their lives. They heal the world. And so I think this story of

stepping out of the known, you know, in Star Wars, he steps into that creature bar in episode four, he steps onto the edge of reality and just embraces the weirdness of the world he's stepping into and gets so far out of his patterns that he accesses this internal force. And so I think we tell those stories and we love those stories because it's a constant reminder that staying in the world of the known, there's really not that much for us there anymore, but we can actually be world-changing. We can change the world if we step into the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable. That's a lot harder than picking up the phone or getting on a website and donating 10 bucks. You know, that means coming into contact with people that are different than you.

It means hearing other people's stories that may be uncomfortable to you. It may be confronting people who you don't know how to deal with. But when you get out into your community, that actually starts to happen. Yeah, in the book, Unsafe Thinking, as you're talking about this becoming a beginner again, or being willing to venture into these uncomfortable zones, you've got a phrase that I love, which is to try and be an explorer, not an expert. And I think that ties to the hero's journey a lot, right? This is exploration. You know, we're going out to see what's there. Yeah. I like that explorer idea because it's not like the idea is to be a dilettante where you just sort of like float through life, trying everything with no

stakes and not caring. The explorer is somebody who is off in the unknown, but is there to really learn. They're there to learn. And so when someone sees themselves as an explorer, they don't take their mistakes as failure and they don't give up when things get really difficult, which they always do as you kind of move up that learning curve. Someone who's an explorer is on a mission, but at a stage where they actually don't know what they're doing. That's the kind of place that I like to be. Again, I often fall back into doing the things I know really well because it's just so much easier, but I get my energy from getting out into those zones. I want to back up in the book a little

bit and talk about motivation because you brought up some really interesting ideas. And I told you, you know, I've read hundreds of these books and there were some, some studies in there that I had not come across. And it's really talking about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. And we tend to say, Hey, intrinsic motivation is a lot better. Do something for the love of it, right? That's the best way to be motivated. And we hear these studies that say, like you said earlier, well, if you start giving somebody money for something they might like to do, sometimes it takes the joy out of it. And yet you make the point that I thought was really good, which is life's not that simple, right?

Like you're doing the work that you're doing because A, you love it, you care about it, you're interested in it, and you're making a living doing it. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation get layered over each other. But we've often been told that the minute you put extrinsic motivation in, you ruin the thing. And I really wanted to talk about an idea in the book that you had called motivational synergy. Yeah, it is true that the things that we most cherish, we don't do for extrinsic rewards. And especially the creative things that we do, we don't do for money or fame or adulation, etc. It is well known, I guess that 99% perspiration, or adulation, et cetera. It's well known, I guess that 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration.

We've all heard that. We know that it takes a lot of slog work in order to bring something creative into the world or to do the hard work on ourselves. You come up with an idea, and then you've got to go and execute, and it's really hard. So with the actual science, and the problem with pop science, obviously, is we miss the nuance a lot of the time, right? So we hear the first part about how important intrinsic motivation is, and we forget the second part, which is, well, what does it actually take once you've had that creative inspiration? How do you stick with it and keep going? And so the idea of motivational synergy is that if you want to motivate yourself to think

differently, to do big things, to do creative ideas, to make art, to invent, you want to motivate yourself to think differently, to do big things, to do creative ideas, to make art, to invent, you want to really focus on intrinsic motivational factors. You want to do things that feel exciting to you and fun. You want to focus on the impact you can have in the world. You want to focus on just the joy of creation, the actual act of it. That's how you get your great ideas out there. But then when you actually start doing it, you need lots of little extrinsic motivators to keep you going. You know, you need those little pieces of candy along the way to kind of keep yourself committed. paying me or incentivizing me to do it. I just now I do it because I like it. I enjoy it. But what actually keeps me going from like instead of two times a week to six or seven times a week is I've got some app that gives me badges that I feel accountable to. Some algorithm is giving me

little extrinsic motivators to keep me not on the mat every single day. And so I think that's a kind of way that whether we're managing teams or managing our own acts of creation, we have to remember that it's not one or the other. So let's say you're managing a team managing our own acts of creation, we have to remember that it's not one or the other. So let's say you're managing a team. If you say, well, I'm going to give $50 for the best idea, people are going to be like $50 for the best idea. And any good idea is worth a lot more than $50. This is stupid. I'm not doing it. But if you focus that team on the impact they can have on the company and the world for coming up with great ideas, that's where better creativity comes from. But then when it comes to executing those things in which there's no

creative work, it's just kind of like an ongoing measurement, data collection, accounting, that's where fun little prizes along the way will actually keep people going and where you can say, I'll give you 50 bucks if you can collect 500 pieces of data, then someone's actually going to go out and do that. Yeah, I find this such an interesting point because, you know, I started this podcast seven plus years ago simply for the joy of doing it. I had no belief that it was going to be anything but something that was fun to do. You know, I get to talk to cool people and I get to spend time with my producer, Chris, and it would be great. And then over time, it actually started working. We got a lot of listeners, and all of a

sudden, the opportunity to do this for a living became a possibility. So all of a sudden, now I've got intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, although it was there from the beginning, because you're looking at download numbers, how many downloads am I getting? Right? That's not intrinsic, that's extrinsic. And I found it a really interesting experience to try and move between those motivations skillfully and to recognize, okay, it's normal that they're both there, that I have some intrinsic and some extrinsic. And, you know, more often than not, what I need is a reorientation to the intrinsic. That's just, I think, the nature, at least for me, as achievement is I have to reorient away from the next thing and reorient towards the work itself. But I found it a really

interesting dilemma to work through in my own life to try and move between those motivations. Yeah, that's great. That's a great example of it. And, you know, the problem with the internet and the sort of data world that we live in is you get so much feedback, right? You know what episodes are working. If your goal was to get the most listens, most downloads, most subscribers, and you just didn't care what this show was about, it's like, I'm just going to go where the subscribers take me. You could begin maximizing and maximizing and maximizing as the initial mission of this podcast slipped further and further away. And in the end, you would have, you know,

something that you wouldn't recognize anymore. You would no longer be creative. We see this so often. This is why there's so much stupid content on the internet is because not just people, but algorithms are just trying every combination until you get something that hits the part of the brain that says, oh, cool, I got to pass this along or not even pass this along.

This is going to sort of just maximize engagement. You know, we worked on this film, The Social Dilemma, this year, and this really points out how we're living in these worlds of lowest quality content for maximum engagement. And so if you don't have that core and that center of like, what am I doing this for? What am I on this earth for? You will wind up with your million followers and then those million followers will be gone when the platform changes or when people realize how vapid your content has become. But if you're like, no, I'm going to combine, you know, the extrinsic motivation of getting more downloads and subscribers is feedback from your audience about how to better do your mission. Then you've got that synergy, right? Like no one wants you to do your mission if no one's listening. It's not really helping. But if you've got that kind of feedback loop of really

trying to do the most service for the right people, that's where I think the most creativity comes from. But you know, you're the podcaster. You definitely know better than I do, but it sounds like the right kind of story to me. Thank you. We get people who will be like, so-and-so will be a guest on the show. And I'm like, so-and-so is huge. But then I'm like, I don't really want to talk to so-and-so that much. You know, so I've really tried hard to say my criteria. I said this to you beforehand. You were like, how'd you come across me?

And I said, well, I must have seen one of your books because my criteria is, do I want to read that book? If I do, then that person becomes a guest because then I get to read their book. And I've tried really hard. I'm not saying I'm perfect at it by any stretch, but I've tried hard to really say, let me let that continue to be the guiding criteria of whether I think a guest is the right fit. Does it interest me? And then trust that if it interests me, it's going to interest the people who listen. But again, it's an orientation back towards intrinsic. Yeah. And I guess the whole thing is just a sort of interesting world we live in now where

like people try to create art or try to create creativity with these constant feedback loops. How do you manage them productively? Yeah. Let good ideas just take chances with this, you know, constant minute to minute feedback cycles. It's hard and it's hard for artists. Right, right. You talk about in the book, this idea when we're talking

about learning of putting off important decisions or leaving your creative options open longer. You talk about a tendency people have to seize on an obvious solution and then freeze on it. Say a little more about that. Yeah, this is one of the things I hate the most about creativity because I move quickly. I think quickly. I like to come up with solutions and try to make them happen. The problem is, this kind of also goes to this trap of intuition that we wind up in, which is like, we feel in our hearts, all of a sudden, we have these flashes of insight, like, oh, I get it, I know what to do about this. And that might come from a really deep sense of knowing, like there's really good research on how intuition can be this sort of underground synthesis of all you've learned in your life and all these heuristics you're building. And intuition can also be... Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow.

I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready.

Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's just expression of bias, right? We've seen all this work on how people, you know, make snap judgments, how wrong those snap judgments can be. So we don't know, you know, if you've got an idea for a film is like, I want to make this film. It sounds amazing. That could be because your whole life experience has led you to that moment of inspiration. It could be because two weeks ago you saw a film just like it and you forgot you saw it. Now you want to make it like that's kind of the boundaries of how this stuff kind of works. So what the

recommendation is, if you're thinking of ideas, the best thing to do is to generate a lot of them and to listen to that voice that says, these are the best ones, I like them, but then also let it gestate and try to clear out all the most obvious ideas. Exhaust yourself by generating as many ideas as you can and push yourself then to come back for another session where all the easy ideas are off the table and to try to solve the problem for whatever you're trying to solve with ideas you hadn't thought of as you and your team exhausted all the obvious ones. And then come back and take a look at what's left on the table. And you want to look at the ones that are resonating with you. You know, I don't believe that the way to get to

the grade of success is then to immediately go ask 100,000 people on the internet what they think. That's not how we really gestate great ideas. Look at the ones that appeal to you on a intuitive, emotional level, and then do the hard work of asking yourself, where is this intuition coming from? Is it because I've seen this done before? Sometimes doing things that have been done before is actually a good idea, but why is this resonating with me? Is it resonating with me because it reminds me of something personal in my life that I've enjoyed? And then would that resonate with my audience or would that resonate with those I'm inventing for? I study a lot investors in Silicon Valley and how they tend to invest in founders they believe in and that just feel right to them. But it turns out

that those people always look pretty much like them. Same skin color, same age, same educational background. So they can't stop. They're never going to stop feeling it about people. But you want to ask, you know, do I feel it because of past experiences with people just like this? Or do I feel it because of the actual data and things that they're saying? This is why the Viennese Philharmonic couldn't get any women into the orchestra. And they're like, well, we just can't. We're listening, we're picking the best people, and they're all men. But then they put them behind screens and did blind auditions, and suddenly, you know, the orchestra is now almost gender balanced. Because that intuition can be so clouded by those snap judgments. So again, the idea is like, get those ideas out

there, get the non-obvious ideas out there, and then judge all those ideas based on where you think your intuition is coming from, correcting for biases that you think you have based on your life experience, gender, class, et cetera. I found that the most fascinating part of the book because it's a question that I wrestle with a lot and I've thought a lot about, and you could go find 50 people who could tout for us how good intuition is. And then we could find a ton of people who could talk about all of our cognitive biases, all of our implicit biases, our heuristics that aren't helpful. But I very rarely seen anybody talk about them together very much. Yeah, it was the hardest thing to write.

Yeah. Struggled so much. Because it it was the hardest thing to write. Yeah, struggled so much, because it's not an easy answer. Right? Yeah, I often think about intuition as like, yeah, you have a gut sense of something. But man, have I had lots of gut senses. I mean, I was a heroin addict for years, like, I'm, you know, I was pretty certain I was always making the right decision. And I could not have been more wrong, you know? So I just always think that question of like, yeah, intuition is valuable and it goes wrong so many ways. Yeah. I mean, you can't go out there and convince anybody who's had a good intuitive insight to not listen to their gut. You're not gonna get on any podcast saying, don't listen to your gut because we all know that it works. And yet the whole field of behavioral economics and Daniel Kahneman and the work that Michael Lewis wrote about in Moneyball all comes from the fact that like our heuristics and our snap judgments are terrible. And we have

to use this kind of metacognition that we've been talking about on this show this whole time, basically, which is like step back from your judgments and step back from your automatic thinking and try something new. And so balancing those two things is just incredibly difficult. The one thing that I'd say really works though, is if you're working in a space, let's say you're evaluating board games, right? That's your job. You got to evaluate board games and you don't know if you should trust your gut because you've been in the business for 50 years. It seems to work, but you've been slowing down lately. You're not picking great board games lately from inventors. Strange example I know.

But let's say that you're not going to be able to start picking the ones you don't like. That's never going to work. But what you can start doing is start playing games in your spare time that are very different than the games you usually play. Start talking to people who are very different than you. Start looking for people who see the world differently and immerse yourself in unfamiliar experiences. Start looking for people who see the world differently and immerse yourself in unfamiliar experiences and ask yourself, how can I get as much input that breaks my patterns of thinking as possible so that when then I do go into those places where I'm relying on my intuition,

my intuition has been shaken up quite a bit, right? So some researchers at Harvard were able to kind of overcome some of their implicit biases by just flashing pictures on the screen of people of different races in unexpected jobs and life situations. And by just exposing themselves again and again to things that break their stereotypes, their actual implicit biases went down. So if in your spare time, you're exposing yourself to new information, new kinds of people and new situations, your intuition is going to get better. If you're stuck in the same kind of environments, your intuition is going to get worse and worse

and worse. And I guess in some ways, like this whole book is this all the same theme, which is right, like that things work for a while and they stop working. And if you don't expose yourself to new inputs, all those things that worked will stop working. And that's, you know, the same for a safe thinking cycle as it is for how to build good intuition. So you can cultivate your intuition and doing that is a really powerful way. We also do that by creating more diverse teams, right? We don't just trust our own intuition. We share our intuition with diverse people and that creates a way to correct for those biases as well. Yeah. That's such a good summary of those things. And it makes me think about my example of being like a drug addict, right, was that my world was so small. You know, it was

collapsed down to only one thing mattered, you know. So of course, the intuitions were terrible. And I feel like we can't leave this point without at least a brief introduction of the most inspiring mayor I have ever read about. I'm terrible at pronouncing names. So I'm going to let you do it so I don't butcher it. Yeah, his name was Mokas, and he came into Bogota in the 1990s when it was the most dangerous city in the world. It was the worst place to live. The drug wars were raging in Colombia. People were leaving the city in droves, trying to leave the country if they could. And he came in as this really crazy kind of outsider who nobody expected. And the way that he got onto the political stage to begin with was that he was the chancellor of a university and all these young

people were protesting the decline in the services that were not his fault. It was just the city was declining and so was the university. And there was like a protest was raging and he had to get up in front of all of these students and he had to somehow calm them down. And he started talking, but no one was listening. And so he steps to the front of the stage, he turns around, he drops his pants and he moons the crowd and everyone starts cracking up. And it breaks the tension in the room and everyone sort of goes home and they're able to negotiate in a more calm way. And based on this crazy stunt, he winds up getting elected as this independent mayor of the city.

And basically what he thinks is that like the entire population is in this sort of rut of thinking and this kind of loggerhead approach to being at odds with each other. And he thinks that if he can shake people up like the mooning incident, he can somehow start to break those patterns of thinking and find new solutions. So, you know, one of the things that he did was quite famous was there was one of the most dangerous cities in the world, pedestrians being killed all the time, nobody followed the traffic regulations, and putting more police on the streets like did nothing. So he hired 500 mimes. And their goal was just to make fun of and embarrass the people who weren't following the traffic regulations. He actually fired a whole bunch of the police to

hire the mimes. And so the mimes go out there when people are not following the crosswalks, the mimes come behind them and start making fun of them. Or when a driver's being a jerk, a mime kind of pops out and everyone starts laughing and making fun of them. And they found that the traffic fines that you could just get away with or just bribe your way out of, they had no impact. But both the joy and also the embarrassment of being mocked by a mime had a huge impact and the numbers plummeted in traffic deaths.

And in fact, many of the policemen applied to get their jobs back as mimes. And so this was sort of a famous way that he broke those expectations, broke the standard operating procedure and changed the city. But the stories really that come forth from his learnings are not just these cool little novelties. Actually, the city found itself again and became one of the most successful cities in South America on any number of levels. And he did it all with

his purpose. What was really interesting was that he essentially was a clown, but he hired all these behavioral economists to think about how human motivation really works and to break those patterns of thinking and thought in a civic way. So it was very scientific, even though it was also extremely theatrical. You know, I tell that story basically because I want people to think a little bit about counterintuition. If you cannot get down a path straight to your goal, how do you find and take risks to go on paths that are sideways? It seemed to make no sense. But what really happened was he just started a new chain of logic. He didn't say, well, what's a good solution to the same problem? He kind of redefined the problem. The problem is

not that we have too many traffic deaths. The problem is that citizens don't respect traffic laws. And when he took that problem and ran it with his behavioral economists, new solutions started becoming possible. So sometimes just redefining the problem and then being willing to take risks can open up new solutions. Well, I think that's a great place to end, except I did want to circle back very briefly to that simple trick of using a screensaver, you know, showing like black people in very successful positions, or you make the example of short, bald executives, you know, things that break our biases. And I just wanted to hit that again, really quickly, because I found that such a simple and powerful idea for reducing our implicit bias. So you kind of said it, nothing

else to say, but we jumped by it and I wanted to highlight it because I thought it was a particularly important thing. We're at the end of our time. I've loved this conversation. You and I are going to talk briefly in the post-show conversation a little bit about how to work with distraction and ways to avoid getting distracted. Listeners, if you're interested in the post-show conversation, you can get access to that as well as ad-free episodes and a special episode I do called A Teaching Song and a Poem Each Week

and the joy of supporting an independent podcast that needs your help by going to oneufeed.net slash join. Jonah, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Me too, Eric. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support.

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