 If you have somebody who habitually looks for what's wrong and tries to fix it, they're going to organize their personal life very differently from someone who makes ideas of what could be and pursues those. And, you know, again, people don't necessarily think, oh, am I moving away from unpleasantness or am I moving towards things that are awesome? To the extent that you can start to understand your behavior patterns and where which behavior patterns and which thought patterns give you what you want and which ones get in the way of what you want, there is a degree to which, and I don't believe it's as malleable as some people believe, but there's a degree to which you can rewire how you approach certain things so that you can make up for your natural deficiencies or if you know where your strengths are and actually even getting into the idea of what's a strength and what's a deficiency is a whole other question because something that can be a strength can also be a weakness. It just depends upon where you're applying it, what you're trying to do. But knowing those things about yourself, you can either partner with people who compliment you or you can seek to develop the other side of the coin. Boom, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the beautiful Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are now going to be talking about turning your big picture into action. We have Steve Robbins joining us on the show. Hello. Hello. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me here. I'm super pumped. Also, very grateful to Luke Saber for introducing us. And I'm so pumped because Steve's background is epic. He's a Renaissance man, executive coach, author, speaker, and veteran of nine startups and four IPOs. He co-developed the Foundations module of the Harvard MBA program. You can find SteveRobbins.com, link in the bio. Also, iTunes.com for slash get it done guy, his podcast. And you can find get it done guy on Facebook and Twitter as well. All those links are in the bio. Steve, let's start things off with one of our favorite questions to ask. We love asking people about what their thoughts are on the direction of our world. Oh, I'm afraid I'm a cynic. I'm a very happy cynic, but I'm a cynic. I think we, on many, many fronts, are headed in a bad direction, frankly. We're doing well. The human race is in many ways. By many measurements, we have never done so well as a race. We have less violence. We have more health. People are living longer. It's certainly an aggregate. We have more prosperity. We have fewer people living in poverty. A lot of indicators are really wonderful. Unfortunately, I, and I figured this out actually just a couple of days ago, I tend to look much less at where we are than where we're headed. And I do this pretty much everywhere. And in terms of the human race, I look at things like, how are we doing with respect to the environment? Do we have an economy that is sustainable? Are we making progress on things like human rights, which we are at the moment? And where do I think we're going to be 10 years from now? And one of my big worries, my big concerns, is that some of the biggest problems we have, things like global warming, things like income inequality, and in particular wealth inequality, necessarily income inequality, although obviously they're tied, I think these things are reaching a point and a direction where they're going to be big problems. And we can predict now that they're going to be big problems. It's just if we predict it and don't act on it, they will be even bigger problems. And we are not acting as hard as we can. So unfortunately, that's my, on the other hand, we have some great, at least in America, we have some great social movements. We're becoming healthier in many ways in terms of accepting diversity more and so on and so forth. So some of those, some of the social trends I think are positive and I hope they continue when I hope that we can reverse a lot of the other ones, right? Global warming is probably my number one bugaboo because if it turns out to be as bad as a lot of scientists are predicting and if species extinction continues the way that it's going, we're going to be dead. It doesn't matter how good everything else is because we're dead and dead is bad. You can quote me on that one. There's a lot there. We do frequently visit this conversation of how well things are going across so many markers at the same time we know that there is so much old code that needs to be archived and that we need to put the new codes in and the millennials and Gen-Z have the responsibility to take the burden on their back and put the action forward and get out of some of the old archaic ruts. Can I talk to them directly for a second? Please. Okay, millennials and Gen-Z people listen very carefully. In my parents' time they said, oh, our children are going to have to bear the brunt and fix what went on. In my time we're saying, oh, our children have to bear the brunt and fix what's going on, et cetera. But why didn't we, why didn't my generation fix all of this? And the answer is that systems lock you in. If you decide, oh, I want to change the way the system works, understand that it's really hard to change a system from within because, for example, let's just use, let's say that we decide that money needs to stop being a thing and we need to find ways to distribute resources to people who need them, whether or not they have the money to pay for them. As you are starting that movement, you need to eat. And since the movement hasn't happened yet, you need to work to earn money to eat because without money you can't eat. What happens is, great, you get a job, you start earning money and before you know it, you're 40 years old and you have spent your entire life trying to build a career and now you possibly have a family and you might have children and now you can't afford to just give all that up and go live in a cardboard box because, etc. What happens is when you're trying to change a system you actually have to give up the old system and you don't necessarily have the new one in place yet. And I don't know that it's possible to change a world system. I'll just give one example then we can get back to... I'll let you drive again. But the one thing is that right now virtually all of our definitions of wealth and success are growth measures, right? It's, oh, I'll get a 10% return on my investment. You want to hear something insane? Here's something insane. They say that the population of Japan is going to decrease by 30% in the next 30 years or so. And they're saying, oh my God, this is going to be an economic catastrophe. Forget the economy for a minute. We have a situation where we have enough infrastructure to feed and clothe a certain number of people. In 30 years, we're going to have that same amount of infrastructure but we're only going to have two-thirds as many people. So in a sane world, we would be celebrating. We would be saying, look at this, we don't even have to do any extra work and suddenly everyone will be able to have 50% more than they have now if you do the math that comes out to 50% more, right? Like isn't that awesome and amazing? But the way that our economy is set up where everything depends upon growth and this, that and the other, we actually are saying this is going to be a catastrophe. That's insane. That's seriously insane. But that's the way that our system works. And Gen Zs and Millennials, because I'm still talking to you, you're going to need to find ways of breaking that at levels that are so fundamental you may find yourself asking questions like, does ownership at a distance even make sense? Like once upon a time, people only owned the stuff they could carry with them. And now we have a person like a Jeff Bezos who can own $160 billion or whatever his net worth is up to by the time this airs. And in a sustainable society that's a healthy society, does the notion of ownership include this ownership of some abstract thing thousands of miles away? Because apparently he owns most of Texas. And that's a really important question that you're going to have to ask and you're going to have to grapple with if the answers know how do you overturn the people like Jeff Bezos who really, really care and they own all this stuff at a distance. Anyway, good luck with that. Yeah, this speaks really deeply to how it can be tough to dig out of that that rut of old code and the system that we're birthed into is difficult to augment because we have to abide by so much of the code in that old system. And one of the keys here is to create a new mental map, create new code that absolutes the old code and keep coming back to this example of whoever, whatever Satoshi Nakamoto is and blockchain technology just coming in and just completely flipping over centralized systems onto their heads and inspiring people to care more about decentralized technology, about cryptocurrencies, about the potential that that has. So we need young people to decide to make new codes, bring them in that are so powerful that they just inspire and engage so many people to obsolete the old systems and go with the new ones. That's so, so well said and we have a lot more to unpack on even just that subject, but let's keep that. Oh yeah, I could jump in because by the way, blockchain still assumes ownership. There's still an entire set of underlying economic assumptions to the notion of wanting any sort of currency because currency has been one of the most amazing conventions of all of human history. It's been unbelievably powerful and it's been unbelievably destructive, both. And we may have to give up some of the power if we want to avoid the destruction. And again, you know, it's, I wish it were my job. I'd fix things. There's quite a bit that we can also learn from the understanding of just slowing down and thinking and not rushing and just wanting to make sure that the children that are born into the world don't have any rotten roots within the nutrients of the tree so that they can blossom fully. A lot of the malevolences and violences and issues that we see that happen in the world today are a direct representation of our just rush and urge to want to, you know, populate with people no matter what kind of an education system that they get at their roots. And also just quickly on the Japan example, I think this is a very profound way of seeing things that we're so in the old way of thinking that we can't even see something like a population stabilization where we have ownership of, like you gave an example of people that are very wealthy that own so many properties that they don't even use at times, but they're still people that sleep on the streets. How does that work? And then also, yeah, if we have the infrastructure in place well, even if the population stabilizes and slightly declines in the developing world, it's also nice that we don't necessarily need to be sometimes constructing so much of property. There's so many interesting points to go off of that and I also just I really want to hit on Steve's journey because you are a very fascinating multi-disciplinary polymathic thinker and you're going to be unpacking tons of these interesting strategies for us but I want to know how you got to where you are today. I'm going to give you the highlights and then I'm going to let you delve in. I grew up in many different places. My mother and father were sort of new age hippies and for a while we lived in a 23-foot trailer with seven people kind of bouncing around the country in public centers. I call that my traveling new age commune days. We settled well, my parents got a divorce I settled with my mother then decided to move out to live with my father. My father did not however want to have me living with him so we rented an apartment for me I was 14 at the time we rented an apartment for me right next to his house so his house and little apartment next to it and then he moved away and I decided to stay so I became an emancipated minor put myself through high school programming computers went to MIT and got a computer science undergrad which was very cool went out into industry worked as a programmer then shifted into working as a trainer for a software and hardware company because I figured out that I did not have social skills and that I did not have communication skills and I said I must develop these things to be important and what better way to do it than to teach people things so did that then the company I was working for which had the best product on the market started to go under and I went to my manager and I said how is it possible for a company with a product as good as ours to go under and she said ah to understand that you must understand marketing strategy and I'm like marketing strategy what the heck is that and she said well actually what I said was how do I get to understand that and she said well for that you need gray hair or an MBA and I lived walking distance from Harvard Business School so one day I just wandered down and said hi guys I want an MBA and they said okay much to my extreme surprise so this little kid from the literally from the wrong side of the tracks remember those kids that your parents warned you about that was me and my sister we were the ones who they were warning you about I got in and I still remember to this day holding the acceptance letter to Harvard Business School and because my boss had said she said you can always apply and if you get in you don't have to go and I remember sitting there looking at the acceptance letter thinking she's wrong like I freaking got into Harvard freaking business school there's no way I can say no to this so did that for a couple of years when I graduated moved out to Silicon Valley worked for Intuit the people who make quick end and quick books anyone out there if you have the quick end visa card my project after Intuit my mother came down with colon cancer and I took care of her for the last several months of her life that was a rather taxing experience at the end of that I had moved back to Boston spent a year playing and I remember thinking many times man I have to write down all the things I did this year this is such an amazing year forgot to write anything down so I know I had an amazing year I don't remember doing what then I was asked back to Harvard business school to help them redesign part of the MBA curriculum and I spent two years doing that really delving into what are the skills that make leaders what are the skills that people need to be able to think strategically and then furthermore how do you teach those because a lecture isn't going to do it so I spent two years studying everything the human race knew about human learning theory how people learn things and how do you learn emotional things ask me later about the design of my ethics program the faculty took one look at it and they were like no absolutely not no way lawsuit city better to do this in an academic environment where no one will get hurt we're going to talk to people about ethics we're not going to do this design so anyway did that for a couple years then spent a time as the chief operating office moved from there into organizational learning consulting and transfer of best practices so if you have a big company and you have two units one is doing really doing stuff well the other one isn't how do you model that and transfer it then joined another start up then was dissatisfied with that start up and through a not particularly interesting story became an executive coach because it became apparent by that time that I naturally sort of everyone around me I made my mission to help them be more awesome and be more incredible and develop their skills to the max and get what they wanted out of life so like why not do this professionally and had a coaching practice which I've had for a long time now which has been broken up by a few different periods of employment I was the president of a friend of mine's company for a little while I also went back to Babson College and helped with they were doing a strategy redesign when they changed president several years ago and I got involved with that that was right before the 2008 bubble burst I also did a three-year journey here where I tried I hit a certain age which we don't have to talk about and I said you know I now have enough data to help figure out what makes life amazing because I'm a certain age I went to Harvard Business School and MIT all of the people who I went to school with if anyone should have amazing lives it should be those people so I just called them all up and I said where are you in life how did you get there did you get there the way you thought you would and what were the key things and I basically came up with a list of things that seemed to correlate to having an amazing life put these into a TEDx talk gave it at TEDx Mill River in I think Connecticut they screwed the video up so unfortunately it's not on the the TEDx site however I turned it into an hour long presentation and I gave it at Harvard Business School like eight or nine times to standing room only it was very cool it's a great speech and it is online on my website somewhere I'm not sure I'm not sure how easy it is to find but it is there but I did this three-year experiment in that three-year experiment I changed the rules of how I made decisions and I did some stuff that even to the today to this day I'm kind of like wow that was really cool so I started a little podcast which became the number one business podcast on iTunes for many months it has since dropped down to the ratings but I've been doing it for eleven years now based upon the podcast I got a book contract this is going to be weird based on the book contract I was joking with a friend for some reason I just developed this spontaneous interest in musical theater and I was talking with a friend as I was getting ready for my book tour and I said you know I'm really bummed about this book tour and he said why and I said because I suddenly want to be doing musical theater and instead of me going around talking about my book which is a book on personal productivity I said like wouldn't it be cool if I had a one-man musical that was based on my book and it was like the world's first musical that's so dramatic that people cry but so informative that people take notes and it would all be about personal productivity and he just kind of looked at me and he said you do know what I do for a living don't you and I was like yeah you're a journalist because I thought he was a journalist he's like no I teach musical theater composition and writing at NYU and I was like you do and he said yes a week later I finally got the courage to ask him do you want to do this I have no prior musical theater experience I have never sung a song in my life I don't know how to write a script I have no idea how to write dialogue well unfortunately it wasn't done in time for the book launch however so the first five minutes or you can see a five-minute teaser for work less and do more the zombie musical which is the world's only musical that is so dramatic that you might cry we actually toned that part down a little bit and so informative that you'll take notes and it is about a zombie a general of a zombie army who's a human his name is Steve Robbins and he general Steve Robbins of course and he went to Harvard Business School and at Harvard Business School he had an MBA so all the other kids would have parties where they would eat Oreo ice cream cake and they wouldn't invite him so he decided that he was going to get back to them by raising a zombie army and cornering the world supply of Oreo ice cream cake so if they had parties in the future they would have to invite him that's what the musical is about I mean as musicals are right that's just one of those standard tropes I mean everyone writes the zombie general Oreo ice cream cake musical and and he ends up boy I don't know how much I don't want to get deeply into the story but basically things don't go the way he planned and it becomes both a very human story about how do we know what we really want and what do we really want as well as a very informative story because it teaches you several productivity tips from my book I think that is the the thing I'm proudest of out of everything I've done in my life was that musical because it was so far outside anything I had ever done it changed my image of myself in a very major way and then since then I went back to executive coaching I did some development of a workshop based on the Living Extraordinary Life series which ended up not coming to market for various reasons and then I've currently been doing something called Get It Done Groups which are communities that help people finish things and develop new habits and there's also lots of other stuff somewhere in there there were six or seven other startups that I was involved in at various times yeah it all runs together what a story especially nuts all the way from being a kid and traveling with your parents to the different, what was it, psych so we started Psychic Growth Centers Psychic Growth Centers and then by yourself as an emancipated child and then you can imagine how popular I was since I had my own apartment and all of my friends could use it to bring their dates over I'm just saying I learned about the real world early in life I can see that so it's also interesting that you ended up teaching yourself how to program computers and going to MIT and learning that oh wow, I should learn how to talk to people and I should learn more about humans and behavior and cognition and all that good stuff and so then that whole transition with marketing strategy and how you ended up realizing that you could kind of gave a nice little merger of those two worlds in a sense of the heavy programming side of things with a business side of things with Harvard Business School and you made it clear too with Harvard, with Babson with these different institutions if you're actually able to put together programs that get people to understand that a lot of the business skills the social emotional skills that we learn are through experiential learning a lot of entrepreneurship is through experiential learning so how do you make curriculum for people out of textbooks and into eye to eye contact into relationships into the nuts and bolts of that type of stuff and all the way to the 550 episodes that you've done get it done guy get it done guy and just the 7 to 9 minutes that you have to synthesize of how to best be productive, be able to put things together that you want to get done where all this type of stuff is just so critical and it's not just like the sub part of our lives this is immediately applicable to every single part of our lives family, our friends our coworkers our customers and just every the way we vibe even in the general public all these things come together they coalesce this is not just something about how to use a certain tool on a computer no no no definitely in fact one of the things that I feel fairly strongly about is is right now you know the there's an app for that concept there's not actually an app for human relationships no matter how much people want them to be I find I find it hilarious that like all these dating apps what do you enter you enter things like what's your hair color how tall are you how much do you weigh what maybe what are your measurements you know whatever why do you enter those because engineers the least capable people in the world of forming relationships generally speaking do understand how to do numeric comparisons those are very easy to do in code so of course they have you fell out a profile that's basically all the stuff that's easy for them to program however we actually know a lot a whole lot about what makes people bond what makes people fall in love what is what goes for a compatible relationship and let me tell you it's not hair color it's not how high it's not how tall someone is it's not what their measurements are it's all kinds of other things none of which any of the apps deal with except maybe I mean there's like some match.com that does psychological things yeah the psychometric profiles being able to know someone better than the spouse of that person knows them based on their Facebook likes this type of stuff is nuts building on the psychometric profiles let's go ahead let's go ahead and start diving deeper into all of this so your fascination with how people think how people reach their full potential and actually realize that by working with you that they see themselves actually oh I used to not like to try and call people to build a customer relationship management funnel oh all of a sudden 12 weeks later oh I love calling people I love building out this it's like hold up hold up just three months ago you hated this stuff so these types of realizations are actually really important for us to slow down and realize yeah I've grown quite a bit like if you look at any of the episodes from you know a year and a half ago it was gobbly goop you know and now yeah now it's gotten a little better it's like kindergarten interviewing class like I got a little better it's it's only so it's not good to slow down and reflect on that but yeah so this is everything from the organizational level to the people level this is another critical thing that you help all the way from executive CEOs all the way to other people like in just their normal everyday relations to me it's all tied together because human so so people and it's this is one of the things that always amazed me about organizational a lot of the stuff in the organizational development and organizational change literature is people treat the organization as if it is somehow separate and divorced from the people it's not I mean people want to believe it is and in terms of performance it sort of isn't but if you want to change an organization what it means to change an organization is it means there are human beings inside that organization who are going to have to behave differently when they come into work tomorrow that's what it means to change an organization it means you have to change the components and it's made up of people so to me there's a very clear link between organizational process and big picture and how does an organization get where it wants to go and the micro things about people let me give you a specific example let's say that you have someone who's running a big company and human beings have a tendency and I'm going to say tendency because it differs per person and it differs according to context but some people are highly motivated towards a grand vision other people are highly motivated to fix things that are broken and again it's contextual in one context it may be another let's say you have a CEO who is highly motivated to fix things that are broken what they're going to ask for the kind of information they're going to collect is how many errors are we producing what's going wrong what are the solutions you have to fix what's going wrong but their whole orientation is going to be around finding errors and fixing them which means they're going to hire people who can find errors and fix them and which means their direction the other side of the coin is you can have someone who's very much a visionary who says oh there's this giant castle in the air let's go there and everyone says oh we can't go there it's in the air and they say that doesn't matter build a ladder and they're like you can't build a ladder that tall and they go do it anyway and sometimes everyone crashes and burns and sometimes they make it there and which of those two people you have heading up your organization and you're going to determine who you hire how you organize them, what things you measure what things you manage what do you even consider a threat in the marketplace and what do you not consider a threat and what I've found in startups at least and I suspect it's similar in big companies although you know maybe less so is most well most of the CEOs I have direct experience with they tend to build an organization which as an organization is a psychological mirror of them as a person and if they are good at to view, at hearing bad news, at fixing things and also at being a visionary or whatever you can build an organization that's well balanced like that even if they're not like that if they understand the importance of that they'll assemble a team that has all those perspectives and they will kind of allow it to do the things that is not in their normal personal style but so that's organizations and individuals and within individuals you actually have the same kind of thing if you have somebody who habitually looks for what's wrong and tries to fix it they're going to organize their personal life very differently from someone who makes ideas of what could be and pursues those and again people don't necessarily think oh am I moving away from unpleasantness or am I moving towards things that are awesome or choose your favorite adjective I always wanted to be enlightened I've solved that one I don't want to be enlightened anymore too boring not really but if you to the extent that you can start to understand your behavior patterns and where which behavior patterns and which thought patterns give you what you want and which ones get in the way of what you want there is a degree to which and I don't believe it's as malleable as some people believe but there's a degree to which you can rewire how you approach certain things so that you can make up for your natural deficiencies or if you know where your strengths are and actually even getting into the idea of what's a strength and what's a deficiency is a whole another question because something that can be a strength can also be a weakness it just depends upon where you're applying it what you're trying to do but knowing those things about yourself you can either partner with people who compliment you or you can seek to develop the other you know the other side of the coin so I always thought that I was kind of a visionary I'm not when I look empirically at my life not a visionary I care a lot about the future projecting trends than I am at coming up with a whole new vision of something that doesn't exist and saying let's strive for that the thing that motivates me is fixing problems so interestingly enough most of my Get It Done Guy episodes 550 episodes all of those episodes are how do I solve problem X because that's my skill set that's the way that my brain thinks and knowing this is really important for me to have people around who say hey we're going to build this wonderful tower because then I can say oh well we're not there yet the problem is we're not at the tower yet and therefore my brain just kicks into high gear and says well we have a problem we must fix the problem the problem is we're not at the tower we need to build a really tall ladder so I can still get there I can get to the tower but my brain gets to the tower by noticing that we're not there and fixing that problem whereas someone else's brain might get to the tower by looking at the tower and they want to be in the tower and they're being motivated as they pull towards something positive and both of those thinking styles have different pros and different cons I think I'd be happier if I were the other kind because I'm always dissatisfied with the status quo In both scenarios what's key is to know what the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, tenth, twentieth steps are these milestones of building the ladder to a vision whether it's solving a problem or living in a great world that has that update it's just actually executing is worth so much more in the world ideas are everywhere Every idea has to turn into action or else what's it good for frankly On a personal level too there's so many skill sets that need to be better understood with psychology and behavioral analysis how our brains work the way that we socially and emotionally relate to each other how we build rapport with each other and doing things like neuro-linguistic programming NLP, this is fascinating stuff so yeah walk us through all of these unique ways that we engage with each other on a human animal ah that's a pretty tall order do you want me to talk about NLP or do you want me to talk more more generally and systemically give us general systemically and then boil it into some NLP too from what I've been able to tell of the way human beings behave first of all we're animals and we behave like animals I woke up one day and suddenly started seeing it I read a book on primary behavior I was like oh no this explains far too much and we are social animals and we are animals who have a lot of our brain devoted to connecting with and being part of the social tribe because at least according to the book sapiens which I'm about halfway through right now the thing that made homo sapien sapien a successful a successful animal and now at the top of the food chain was our ability to organize in groups that is our survival advantage it's not an individual survival advantage it's a collective survival advantage which by the way and we didn't even talk about politics is one of the things that we're going to talk about today so I'll just say one sentence which is one of the trends I think is incredibly dangerous right now is in many different places we are driving towards a very individualistic mindset like in the gig economy everyone is expected to both do whatever their gig is but also market themselves and also have a personal brand and get their name out there and all this thought leadership and all this other BS power that the corporations have a lot of problems but the power of a corporation the reason that we have this globe spanning economy and iPhones and delicious foods that you used to not ever be able to get because there was no way to get them from here to there the reason we have that is because we are much more powerful together than individually and we're like deliberately dismantling that it is I think it's just bizarre people are saying oh well now you have to be good at all these things I'm like no I don't want Rembrandt to spend his time building a website and trying to market himself and establish a personal brand by writing thought pieces I want Rembrandt painting that's the contribution Rembrandt can make to the world so I like the idea of a world in which Rembrandt can spend all of his time painting because that's the thing that he can do that no one else can do and like I said we're kind of going in the opposite direction and we're doing that politically as well where we have the whole sort of neoliberal philosophy which is well you know if you're not rich or whatever it's because you're a bad person as opposed to having this understanding that maybe but maybe it's also that there are systemic effects that the roots have certain malnourishments and this is as you were just explaining the code here is that it is different for these seeds they're fruits that they actualize into the world it's not putting everyone in the same need to develop your personal brand need to build a website you need to have a CRM with a certain amount of people and a certain amount of revenue and a certain picket fence and a certain car we need to get past that and it's also a DNA that's not just about the individuals but it's about our communities it's about the cultures we live in you know one day I was at a business networking meeting there were 14 of us all men and as we were getting up to go I looked around every single person in that room was wearing a powder blue button down shirt and khakis and I burst out laughing and they said what's so funny and I said did you notice that we're all dressed identically and we went downstairs and stood on the sidewalk and looked around to downtown Boston and basically every guy who came within who we could see who walked down any of the streets they were all wearing a powder blue shirt and khakis and I look at this and I go we live in the richest most successful society in all of human history in terms of our material standard of living in terms of the options that are available in terms of the technology we have and we use it to produce a level of conformity and uninterestingness in our lives in our clothes like it's really kind of amazing how completely bland we've made our existence and I this was really this really got pounded home to me three years ago and I went to Burning Man for the first time and I looked around and I was like oh right it doesn't have to be that way there are actually all kinds of dimensions of interestingness if we can just kind of get out of our little shell of believing like one of my favorites is you know when people say well I'll just give you a real example I was on Facebook one day and there was a Harvard Business School alumni meeting that was going to go on and I posted a thing to Facebook saying I'm thinking of wearing jeans and a t-shirt to the alumni meeting tonight should I do that or not and people were like oh my god if you don't wear a suit people will never take you seriously they'll never do business with you you'll destroy all this stuff I was reading this I was going people are describing life destroying consequences because I choose to wear one piece of fabric rather than another one you know what I wore jeans and a t-shirt to that meeting I was the only one who wasn't in a suit no one cared the people who normally talked to me talked to me the people who ignored me continued to ignore me the people who didn't hire me continued not to hire me the world did not end and I was like how is it possible that we have created a world in which wearing a t-shirt instead of a buttoned down shirt has any consequence at all much less terrorizes all of these people who are you know keep in mind I was raised in a traveling new age commune you know wearing loincloths so I'm not exactly a suit kind of guy these are the new codes though again is being able to obsolete the old codes see the new codes put it into the old system the new codes this is so critical can you take us into more on the social emotional intelligence the NLP yep yeah yeah alright so I figured out when I was I figured out actually in college that I didn't really have great social skills because I didn't have any friends right other side of the tracks all that stuff so I read so I took every psychology course offered in MIT thinking oh because I was a little nerd right I'm like oh well you know they must surely know how to make friends maybe there's a course on it so I took psychopharmacology and I took this overview course where we learned about Jungian therapy and object relationship and Freudianism and transactional analysis and you know all these different things and I had one very simple criterion which is that I wanted to be able to use what I learned to make friends with this person who we had established we wanted to be friends but for some reason it just we just didn't click but we knew we kind of both wanted to be friends none of it worked none of it gave me anything useful and then I read this book on early linguistic programming and I thought this sounds so bizarre I couldn't this could never really work and then I took a class in it a weekend workshop and it taught just enough of it because it's taught experientially it's not taught you're not lectured you actually do exercises and I learned enough of it and I went back to school and I was able to sit down with that person and talk to them and what I was using was a technique called predicate matching which is a fancy way of saying if someone uses visual words use visual words back if someone uses auditory words like they say oh that sounds like a good idea use use auditory words back and if they use feeling words they say wow I'm having trouble getting a grip on this use feeling words back and say wow that's a really hard problem we just began to scratch the surface of it and that was enough once I realized that I was mismatching the person I was talking to I just switched into his sensory modality and boom we became friends and I was like oh this actually works unlike all of the other stuff that I had learned about and that was the beginning of my foray into NLP and I started training in it NLP is rooted in hypnosis and by NLP I mean neuro-linguistic programming not natural language processing it's rooted in the study of a hypnotist named Milton Erickson M.D. who I think is I don't know if he's widely considered but certainly he's considered to be one of the best hypnotists of all time if not the best and I gradually learned this and I kept taking classes because I kept learning stuff I could really use like when you take a class and how to change a belief well that's actually useful as long as you take the time to notice which beliefs you have that are dysfunctional and if you realize wow I've been sitting here believing that I'm bad at math this is actually a true story I met somebody who clearly thought like a mathematician but he was horrible at math because he believed he was bad at it and I did the NLP belief change with him and all of a sudden he could do math like it was just like boom and what did that look like? the belief change? oh I don't want to go into that sometimes we sit down with scientists or entrepreneurs usually not entrepreneurs sometimes we sit down with scientists entrepreneurs typically have confidence because they have to be willing to be called insane for pursuing what they're doing in a marketplace scientists sometimes aim to become communicators from the edge of their field and they sometimes lack that that confidence and so I would say more than sometimes and we desperately need them to become communicators and get the objective reality down to more people well and also actually I would suggest it's not just about objective reality it's about understanding if you want people to change their behavior scientists don't do it and this is one of the things I find hilarious about scientists there's a lot of research showing that facts don't change people's minds and so scientists who aren't interested in that particular fact because scientists want to believe that facts change people's minds scientists demonstrate the fact that facts don't change people's minds by refusing to use anything except facts to try to change people's minds and I'm like dudes do you understand that you are literally demonstrating that facts don't change people's minds because you scientists are ignoring scientific facts but in any event that's one of my pet peeves because I think with respect to global warming for example I think scientists have done an unbelievably bad job of communicating this because they are so concerned with saying well you know there was a 98.3872% chance that this could be caused by anthropological excuse me by anthropological global warming warming with a 70 to 80% confidence interval and maybe there is a range of outcomes which might include bad things happening 45 years from now and I'm like wow I feel so persuaded I'm like dudes look in the camera and say we're going to die Miami is going to be underwater the food chain will collapse you will go to the grocery store the shelves will be empty except for the zombies which will be singing songs about personal productivity as they eat your brains I mean scientists don't know how to communicate but to get to the question about fear let me tell you one of the basic tenets of NLP and by the way NLP is considered a pseudoscience let me be very clear about that the fact that I can use it to produce reproducible results does not mean that science has embraced it interestingly enough but what I'm going to carry in is the results piece I think neuro-linguistic programming is going to benefit greatly from our ability to create better neuroscience tools and then be able to literally map neural activity and be able to show reproducibility and then it is blatantly obvious that it is actually about seven or eight years ago I read this article in technology review MIT's science magazine it was talking about memory formation and one of them one of the theories is that when you remember something you can actually modify it while it's in short term memory and the modifications get written back to long term memory and the article ends with this thing saying you know the authors theorize that perhaps someday this could be used for the treatment of trauma in 1978 the guys who created NLP put out a book called frogs into princes in which they had a technique called the fast phobia cure or maybe it's the trauma cure I forget which at this point it's called visual vk dissociation is the other name they use for it because it involves doing some fancy stuff with visual and kinesthetic stuff in your brain and it works now we've never known why it worked but as soon as I read that article about how memory was formed I'm like oh this is the technique that operationalizes this the problem is the scientists who figured out how memory works have never seen the technique and the people who developed the technique the people in NLP knew nothing about the science they weren't looking at the underlying science they were just saying what seems to work and they kind of figured it out by trial and error so I've made a bunch of these connections I'm not holding my breath for the rest of the world to make them but in the NLP model of how people think and there are other psychological models too it's pretty much accepted that people you have thoughts and then you react to the thoughts as if they're real so my friend had the thought I'm bad at math and as a result he didn't even try to do math because he knew he was bad at it he already had that belief your belief takes a certain form in your brain it's either pictures that you're making or a voice where you're talking to yourself so maybe he actually was saying to himself I'm bad at math maybe he was making a picture of that math test that he got back in third grade with a big red X on it but he had some mental thing going on that was the representation he used to know that he was bad at math the NLP belief change is first you have to understand and discover what that person's representation is and a lot of times people aren't aware of what their representation is because it comes and goes so quickly you're not aware of what your beliefs are constructed but when you're working with someone doing an NLP they can actually say stop what are you picturing right this instant and it goes oh I see this picture of my second grade math test with a big red X through it alright wonder why that could have popped up when we were talking about being bad at math coincidence probably not and so then there are techniques in NLP for actually changing that image if you're dealing with trustful people I know they're one of those things it's very important to get people to open up about their vulnerability and it should use the word vulnerable people but sometimes people will lie blatantly to not show their vulnerability and so rather than saying that I'm getting extremely furious and angry right now wait why are you feeling that way oh well you know it's probably because I was beaten by my parents right rather it turns into because you're an idiot that's why I'm behaving this way and so it's really difficult for even people to reflect back and even realize that something between the ages of zero and six or something could have potentially led them to and they may not even be aware of it they may genuinely be unaware of it the vulnerability thing is interesting I seem to have no boundaries there which is kind of bizarre let's just say this can cause some problems in my relationship because people can ask me what apparently are very personal questions I don't parse them that way if somebody says to me why are you so angry if I actually will stop and think about it my parents used to beat me and this is like reminding me of that situation so I think I'm kind of thinking that you're beating me up yeah that's one of the ways which I would at that point have to literally pause everything and literally talk to you about that and try and be there with you for that experience versus it's so weird that people think that saying when they say something miserable right now and then they're like okay and then that's it also the vulnerability or just sheer openness on things like I don't subscribe to conformist mentality so if I do see everyone wearing a suit I'm going to wear my DNA tree shirt and if I do see that people treat sex as a taboo subject I'm going to walk in there and be like why do heterosexual males not know how to perform oral sex on women properly and so these will literally be the things that I will breach conversations with purposefully because I want to shatter the taboo I want to get there and so some people will say Alan that's not okay for the for the boardroom for the board the suite the sea level suite or whatever but those are sometimes the places the United Nations to be able to dose up on the conversations like that would open people well look I mean if you want to say that's not the place where the boardroom that's not a thing for the boardroom apparently it is if you take a look at the Me Too movement apparently it's been going on people don't talk about it there but apparently there's a lot of not good stuff that happens along those dimensions you know you mentioned the sex thing and I've always found two things fascinating and the first one came to me during Harvard Business School when I was there as a student which is we learned about the entertainment industry right about movies and the entertainment industry is a big industry it's billions and billions of dollars every year and at one point one of the professors commented that the adult entertainment industry was much larger than the traditional entertainment industry and I'm like so how come we have 45 cases on Hollywood and we have none on the porn industry now you know well that's a taboo why wait why is it a taboo we're at a business school that is a business that represents a significant fraction of the economy and by the way drives most technological adoption don't you think we should be studying that shouldn't we be talking about it maybe we should be putting pictures of sex on our washing machines or something it struck me as amazing that this taboo would override the purpose of the school which is to under like the reality is it's an industry and we probably should study it because they have something to teach us very interesting you know when you go outside and look around within a couple of blocks at least in a big city you can find a place to get food prepared according to your specifications of any ethnicity at certain levels of health standards and so on and so forth we can do that with food we don't do that with sex we don't even talk about that we don't do that with intimacy we don't do that with our emotional needs like there's all of these human needs that we have we've got food and water down pretty well and also clothing and shelter we've got those four but there's this entire panoply of interpersonal needs that we have needs for validation needs to feel good about what we're doing I have a great question for this for this segment specifically so then how would one be able to apply something like a neurolinguistic programming in order for them to be able to talk to their boss about how they feel at work how to talk to their spouse or their partner about how they feel in their relationship talk to their parent about something so I'm not going to go with NLP because so just to give you a little bit of context I am now have taken some form of training in 45 different schools of personal change okay so I like it so NLP is one school of personal change yes so out of all of the executive coaching there's 45 plus of the schools of personal change so teach us about how which schools of personal change would you apply to these scenarios it's called the work of Byron Katie and it's marketed primarily as spirituality I mean maybe it's spirituality I don't know I'm not a particularly spiritual person it is definitely the most powerful psychological technique I've ever encountered and again I judge these by whether I can produce consistent repeated results with it and the work of Byron Katie is you identify the internal dialogue and the things that you say to yourself and the beliefs that you have that are driving your behavior so let's say you're afraid to be vulnerable with your boss first thing you would do is you would say why am I afraid and you would write down on a piece of paper I am afraid if I'm vulnerable with my boss I will get fired whatever whatever whatever and by the way get it done guy episode number 15 is the one I actually interviewed Byron Katie in that episode and she did a role play with me but you write down all these statements so if I'm vulnerable with my boss I'll get fired if I'm vulnerable with my boss I'll never get promoted if I'm vulnerable with my boss they'll yell at me whatever these are and you write down the ones like you really identify the things you're really feeling don't whitewash it because you need to get the actual thoughts that are causing you the distress then you do her process which is called the work and if you're interested you can go to thework.com and somewhere on that site there's a actually if you go to steve.me so steve.me forward slash the work that will redirect you to the page on her site for free downloadable resources you can teach yourself to do it the trick is not learning the technique the trick is actually sitting down and doing it and it's not necessarily easy digging into the depths of your own psyche and you have to be honest with yourself so like one of the questions you ask so let's say that the thought that I have is if I'm vulnerable with my boss I'll get fired one of the things you look at is you say when I believe that how do I behave so what are the things that I do as a result of that and that's one of the places that you have to be genuinely honest so well when I believe that if I'm vulnerable with my boss I'll get fired I lie I say things that I think will make me look good even though I know they're not true I try to belittle people around me even if they did good contributions because I want to build myself up and build them down I feel superior to people after doing that like you actually go through all of those things that you would never want to admit about yourself and you don't have to admit them to anyone else but you have to admit them to yourself for this technique to work and then you go through that's one of the steps there's like four or five steps to the technique but I've used it extensively several thousand times because I've actually kept track of my own inner work that I've done and I have found that if you take the time to do it and it can take a while like if you're afraid to talk to your boss you might have 15 or 20 beliefs that are related to that that might take you a couple of hours at night to go through however you take the time to go through them and in my experience the next time you think if I'm vulnerable with my boss I'll get fired instead of having a horrible fear reaction you'll think I wonder if that's actually true can I find some evidence for or against so that I make a wise decision but if I decide to be vulnerable with my boss I'll just go do it you're titrating an honest conversation with yourself about the deepest parts of your own psyche that's a great way to put it even for something that for me it has been really tough to be able to work with some of the mentors that have been helping me and identifying myself as greedy and I'm just like yeah actually I have been acting that way and prioritizing my own desires when I'm attending your organizational events I'm trying to run in there like a kid and gather all of the coolness of the powerful nodes instead of representing someone that is trying to be selfless that is trying to prioritize the needs of other people first of a higher cause than myself you have this type of stuff and there may be a belief under there that being greedy is bad so if I were doing the work I would not only do the work on I'm not greedy I'm not greedy but I would also do the work on being greedy is bad and that won't necessarily make you believe being greedy is good but what it will do is it will remove enough of the chart that you can really sit down and think well is it bad and what the answer you'll probably come to is no and so I want to pick and choose where I'm greedy and how I'm greedy and what I'm greedy about you know and even what it means to be greedy that's all nuance I think that some sort of a self actualization and transcendence it kind of hits all of those things because then it's just the state of flow of just having the new code to augment civilization just channel through you and not on behalf of you so that you can achieve some sort of a status blah blah well and I'll say keep in mind number one you're still living in a system where status matters and if you want to make the better code update status helps you push out those code updates this is where the nuance really helps and I do agree with where you're going so speaking of status helps here's one of my pet peeves and I have a lot of but one of my pet peeves is freaking billionaires now maybe not in the way people think because I have heard Bill Gates and Warren Buffett both say income inequity it's so horrible that it's happening how can we fix this how can society fix income inequity now both Bill Gates and Melinda Gates have done interviews that I've read I haven't heard them but I've read two interviews with both of them where they were asked do you think we need systemic changes and both of them said no and this was almost like an onion headline man and woman who have benefited from current system more than 7 billion 900 million 999,999 other people think current system is working just fine so to begin with the fact that they said no tells us nothing but they're really benefited from the current system Warren Buffett says oh income inequality this should be fixed gee now this is where we go from the organizational and the societal perspective down to individual behavior when this is what we were talking about before about how we have systems that are made up of other systems it's very easy to use this broad word like income inequality and in NLP that's something we call a nominalization which is we're taking something that's a concept and treating it like a noun but it's not a noun it's just an abstract idea so in NLP what we're taught is when you hear a nominalization it may be useful to say what specifically does this mean so income inequality what specifically is income inequality right and it's like oh well some people are paid more than others so then you can say really how specifically because that's another NLP question is you say how specifically are some people paid more than others here's the answer someone decides to set their salary to a certain rate that's the answer who decides that managers, HR departments the owner of the company that would be Bill Gates and Warren Buffett so when I hear them complaining about income inequality I'm like Warren dude you're the second richest man in the world maybe the third at this point I don't know exactly where he is pick up the fricking phone I know you have one pick up the phone call your 14 operating companies that collectively employ 300 or 600,000 people and say give everyone a raise like you're actually the problem you are the person in the system who can make that happen and you don't do it why? because the system works fine so the idea of examining who in the system is behaving incorrectly doesn't occur to him Warren Buffett believes the system works fine so then potentially one of the solutions is to have a it's a deeper spiritual understanding of the oneness and the unity that way it doesn't feel like there's actually some sort of a top down governmental pressure or a bottom up grassroots revolution but just a really deep reflection on spiritual actualization and transcendence that says hey we have 1500 billionaires maybe if we all just realize that we've benefited so greatly for the system let's figure out how to raise the pay of all of the employees that we employ it's not even figuring out how we just pick up the phone and we say give everyone a raise we also need to run a simulation of what it's like to increase the amount of pay for all of the people except that we don't because we used to have a living wage so to me this makes sense that the sheer amount of out of the total amount of money that the company is taking as profit if that out of that total amount of profit if the company is choosing to pay it's couple owners of the company the most amount of that profit and even potentially an egregious amount of that profit compared to the employees compared to the other staff at the organization compared to redistributing it to its community that it resides in compared to taking on some of the challenges in the world to some of the extra profit buying a fifth boater fifth house etc so these sorts of ways of analyzing what is actually happening to that profit and doing things like if I eliminate two of the boats and I have three boats instead of five I can take that additional money and distribute a thousand dollars per month each to the ten thousand people that I employ so that type of math makes sense if you want to follow math like that because it kind of makes sense and then what we see simulated out is that I continue making enough money to buy three boats and stuff instead of five the people that are making a thousand dollars more per month are able to live healthier happier more effectively in their communities with their children get better educations this type of stuff overall quality of health goes up so it does seem to definitely make sense it's just that we get all weirded out by the grassroots political revolution or the top down governmental pressure it just really does we kind of with the root systems if we could have just gotten it to be a little bit more of a spiritual realization we probably wouldn't even necessarily have the fifteen hundred billion well if it's yeah so I find this notion that the simple fact that someone owns the stock in a company entitles them to everything produced by all the people who do the work like I'm willing to say sure people you know Bill Gates should profit tremendously from creating Microsoft that's reasonable like I have no problem with that even though a venture capitalist is to put up the funding for the organization to scale and one not it still requires the hundreds of thousands of employees and the hundreds of thousands the hundred thousands of customers around the world let's look at the actual math I did this math recently Bill Gates' net worth is about 90 billion dollars the median income for a family of four in America is about 60 thousand dollars do the division and you will discover that Bill Gates has enough money to support a median family of four in America for a million years or more sometimes as long as our species has existed it's really hard for me to come up with any philosophical system of economic justice or wealth distribution that says one man should that one man has somehow contributed as much as a family of four would contribute in a million years like sorry to me that is so far out of whack and again that doesn't mean capitalism is bad by the way capitalism has done some amazing things and does do amazing things but one of the things that doesn't do well is distribute the spoils of capitalism so basically I'm actually a fan of capitalism for the kinds of problems that capitalism solves but one of the things that doesn't solve very well is wealth distribution not in the absence of certain types of government regulation or just a certain moral code and this is one of the things that I love about Burning Man because Burning Man has something of a different ethos it's a gift economy which I think is much closer to how people actually evolved and spending time there really makes you realize that there is a different way of doing things whether it could be scaled up to the size of the world don't know possibly not but it at least opens up the mind enough to go you know what we have alternatives yeah that's so critical that's that new code and being able to have a little simulation of that new code at Burning Man and all these different little mini burns that happen around the world is critical for mind expansion I want to get us into some of these some of these ideas around human behavior cognition around social emotional intelligence as well as even to the way that we need to update some of the old code we've been updating code with technology technology has been this thing that we think comes in and just does everything well all the time then people said no no no it's double edged double edged even though it's always been double edged fire killing fire cooking and providing light right there's always this double edged now we've I think finally awakened to how we are using technology in ways that are completely potentially can annihilate the entire planet mutually shared destruction rampant synthetic biology or super intelligence that is not aligned with the goals of humanity so finally we've learned that we have to test technology so I want you to teach about how you teach people that you work with about how to test the technology because sometimes we confuse hijacking with productivity oh we sure do people the most common thing people say is you know what's the app I can download for x and the answer is maybe there's not an app so let me give a couple specific examples and I'll talk about what I recommend people do so one I love the fact that people prefer to send email to talking on the phone because last time I checked I've never met a person who could type faster than they talked talking on the if you want to be productive pick up the freaking telephone and call someone now people say oh but then we talk for 45 minutes well okay your problem is you don't know how to have a brief phone call the problem is not that email is a better medium email is a great medium for in for certain kinds of information where people need to see a document or they need to have a record of something but if what you want to have is a conversation email suck in fact anything that requires typing sucks I can type 120 words a minute and it still sucks because I can talk 300 words a minute so in terms of actual productivity for example that's a big one now most people are afraid of talking on the phone these days and what anyone under 30 does not remember is there was a time when the only way you had to communicate was by phone there were not internet there were not cell phones so a truck driver would stop at rest stops and actually call in to say here's where I am and that's how they would track their progress everyone used phones all the time and this notion of oh I have phone anxiety no you didn't because if you had phone anxiety you died because you couldn't perform the basic tasks of daily living and now that we have all these other things the problem with a lot of these technologies is their crutches you now don't have to deal with learning how to respond in real time to another human being because you can type and edit and not have to deal with their response if you don't like it you can just delete the message without reading it or you I mean these are these are actually bad things because well they're bad things in the hands of people who don't have the social skills developed and people under people under 25 now don't even know that there are social skills to be developed because they've grown up doing this kind of thing I mean I have I have had I've worked closely with some people who were like like who currently like in their early really early 20s like 21 22 and it's amazing they they've never lived in a world where this wasn't the bulk of a lot of their social communication and they're not functional human beings I hate to say that if you're that age range get a life put your phone down for a year learn how to deal with other people I had to do that I did that at the age of 20 because I didn't have social skills and it was not easy but boy is it worth it because whether we like it or not our brains are hardwired to be social they're hardwired to respond to other people in a way that an app just can't can't do and maybe you know the funny part is people say oh well we'll have virtual reality it'll be just like someone standing there I'm like we already have regular reality we have infinite resolution every color you can see it's available just put your freaking phone down and look around there it is you now have real reality and there's a real live person right there respond to them let's give these examples of the book versus the e-book oh god yes so there's already there's already some a bunch of research on this you remember things better if you read them on a paper book now they don't know for sure why but the current theory is that with a paper book you're not just remembering the content that you read you're remembering where on the page the content was if you're holding the book open like this you're remembering oh this was really thick this was really thin because it was the beginning of the book there's it engages far more of your brain than an e-reader and there's all these things like even just the cover of the book all becomes associated with the content in the book so when you need to retrieve it you can kind of remember any of those things people will even say I remember where on the page it was was like in the upper left hand corner of the page or whatever these are all keyed in to how your memory works and I actually have a there's a way that I understand how memory works that I don't know if it corresponds to what science currently has has proven or has shown but it's kind of what I've synthesized out of all the different self-help things that that I've learned but basically I believe you memory I believe that that when you remember something what you actually remember is everything that was going on in your body and your mind at that moment so you remember the background sounds you remember the color of the walls all of that is in there and that's how your brain keeps it separate because it remembers the stuff that you the stuff that you wrote in your notebook taking notes the day that you wore the blue pants is a separate memory from the stuff you wrote in your notes the day you wore the red pants and you're not consciously aware of that but your brain actually I mean that's part of how your brain tells those two memories apart everything is the same the more that's the same the harder it is for your brain to retrieve the information so on a physical book different physical books are different they're different sizes the different page layouts different fonts etc but it's consistent within that book so all of those things become associated at some level with that book and again this is my theories to why this is the case with an e-book every single thing is either variable or the same as all the others every single book you read is the same frame the same in fact with the Kindle at least with the Kindle app I've never used a physical Kindle you scroll so the same information isn't even at the same place on the screen each time and you might change the font in which case now everything is all scrambled from where it was the last time you looked at it and even when you're watching a YouTube video that the YouTube video is always on a two-dimensional flat surface and that there's never any additional senses that help you with understanding the information that are augmented it's never like now pause the video and go and actually perform this activity in the physical world where you engage your sense of eyesight and smell and touch taste and that way you can better retain the information it's retention it's even thinking ability I mean we think with more than just our abstract thought I think they've shown that your entire body can be involved in the way you store and access information this is probably actually great for the show for people to try as the speaker that we're featuring is teaching things to pause and to reflect and engage on the knowledge that is actually being taught something else I don't know if this works in video so one of the things they have shown is that when two people are talking face to face they are engaged in there's what I'll call kind of big chunk mirroring right like you nod your head I nod my head those are very big mirroring chunks I've also read some research that says that people are engaged in very very rapid like faster than can be consciously detected micro movements and things I don't know if that's I wish I could remember the source of the research but basically that when you're face to face with someone you're actually engaging on more levels and faster with the feedback mechanism than you can even do over video because there's a time lag with video and with things like Skype you have to look at the camera if you want them to see you making eye contact but then you're not looking at them it's actually different and it's not the way your brain is wired to understand it do you know about the multitasking research by the way it teaches basically multitasking turns your brain to mush well one thing that one can say about doing this thing of this task switching is that there's an opportunity cost there's a switching cost there's when you focus on one thing at a time you really get to dive deeper fire wires focus when you switch between it takes you a piece of time to be able to really kind of get into a flow state of doing that other task but this is even different from that this is actually just trying to do multiple things at once like be on your phone while you're carrying on a conversation not only can you not do it at any level of quality but it actually degrades your ability to think it actually makes it shorten to retention span at Stanford this was a few years ago you can just google multitasking what they found was they were asking the question do people raised multitasking do they develop the cognitive ability to do that and the answer was no in fact they are degraded just as much as people who are raised that way so multitasking doesn't work sad but true we have so much more to unpack about all of these things and there's just a lot of wisdom that you've accumulated in your life that I'm just I'm so grateful that we're able to sit down and talk about it now and when we do round 2 we're just going to be able to jump deeper and deeper into all of the nuance here and hopefully have more and more items for people to embody and practice a couple quick questions on the way out Steve first question is what is a skill that you think every child should know going into the exponential technology age how to identify and challenge your limiting beliefs beautiful and succinct I love that are we in a simulation no no we're not I'll ask you more about why next time sure what's the most beautiful thing in the world community and a functioning ecosystem and planet Steve thank you so much for joining us on the show greatly appreciate it thank you for having me huge thank you thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it love to hear your thoughts in the comments below check out Steve's links below as well go and share more thoughts like this around the world with our co-workers our friends our families online go and have more conversations about what we talked about with Steve today and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon see you soon peace