Melissa Hui (The future of human interaction and learning)

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In this episode of the Judgment Call Podcast Melissa Hui and I talk about:

• How 'depression culture' took over our cities.
• Does money make you happy? Why are poor countries seemingly so much happier?
• Why we think of technology as our new 'hyper-religion'?
• Where do we come from and are we in a simulation?
• Is 'free will' actually real? And why it seems that we imagine it (for our own good)?
• What will education in the near future look like? How can we overcome laziness?
• How the modern state (and religions) institute the 'self improvement lifecycle of humans'.
• Why the unequal distribution of motivation is leading to outsized gains with modern technology.
• Can we trace the current depression back to the extreme deflation of 'Likes' when Facebook started to change how they give out 'Likes'?
• How Melissa discovered a crisis was in the making before COVID was around.
• and much more!

You can also watch this episode on Youtube - The Judgment Call Podcast Episode #43 - Melissa Hui (The future of human interaction and learning).

Melissa Hui is an innovation and transformation strategist and she is the founder of context leap.

Welcome to the Judgement Call Podcast, a podcast where I bring together some of the most curious minds on the planet. Risk takers, adventurers, travelers, investors, entrepreneurs and simply mindbogglers. To find all episodes of this show, simply go to Spotify, iTunes or YouTube or go to our website, JudgementCallPodcast.com. If you like this show, please consider leaving a review on iTunes or subscribe to us on YouTube. This episode of the Judgement Call Podcast is sponsored by Mighty Travels Premium. Full disclosure, this is my business. We do at Mighty Travels Premium is to find the airfare deals that you really want. Thousands of subscribers have saved up to 95% in the airfare. Those include $150 roundtrip tickets to Hawaii for many cities in the U.S. or $600 life lead tickets in business class from the U.S. to Asia or $100 business class life lead tickets from Africa roundtrip all the way to Asia. In case you didn't know, about half the world is open for business again and accepts travelers. Most of those countries are in South America, Africa and Eastern Europe. To try out Mighty Travels Premium, go to mightytravels.com slash mtp or if that's too many letters for you, simply go to mtp, the number four and the letter u.com to sign up for your 30 day free trial. I hope this is going to be good. I can see you clearly now. And what about my video? Can you see me? I had trouble yesterday. I don't know what's going on with Comcast here. Maybe you have the same issue. The upload speeds are really tanked. I think that I've been having issues with Comcast and I've been having, I've heard like from at least 10 people this week that Google Meet is having some issues as well. That might be it. Yeah, that might be it. I have, like, it works and then the next meeting it's terrible and then it's crystal clear again and then it's terrible again. So if it depends on the server, I haven't figured this out yet, but I had two podcasts yesterday. One was perfect and the next one was horrible. I don't even know if I can use it. So I can just use the audio. The audio at least worked. Yeah. The audio is good now too. Yeah, sorry about to hear about your family. Did your grandma die or your grandpa? No, my mom's sister's, my aunt died. Oh, okay. Sorry about that. Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you. She was kind of the remaining matriarch of the family after my grandmother passed. So she's kind of the oldest relative we have. And it just within a week had come up and she like, you know, she just, she told us, you know, this is it. I'm ready to go to the other side. And so that was that was the own process. But yeah, she's in a better place now. Were you able to see her before she died? I don't live near her. She lives in New York. So it was family zoom calls, as best as they could with the medical staff. Oh, did she in the hospital? No, no, she was in, she was in ICU. And then we really only had like one, one call. It was like 45 minutes. And then about 10 hours later, she passed. So yeah, well, that's what I said, I find that that I find that really devastating that relatives are not able to to visit their family members. I don't know where this comes from. And there's obviously a risk involved. But you know, it's it's one of those things that I felt they're so core to human behavior and to do human experience. And they're so important. Just coordinating people often not allowing any visitors. You know, obviously, it's a risk right and the visitors need to be ready to accept that risk. But if they want to accept that risk, they should definitely be able to visit. I've seen cases in the UK, where they were not allowing any visitors. I didn't know that's a policy in the US. I think it varies from potentially even like state to state or region to region. I think certainly in this case, it was mostly the hospital kind of in the risks associated with like bringing non like COVID negative people into these spaces. And they're just like, we can't afford that. Like we already have patients that have other concerns, and we're trying to protect them from it and just having family in those spaces. So like, even from the point of my family who is in New York, they're like, we couldn't even step through into the hospital. It was all, it's just such a strange, it's a very strange experience to it's just Well, there's there's something going on. And I know you're a local in in San Francisco and the area too. What I feel there is this, the sense of of detachment, I mean, the sense of we want to stay away from other people as much as possible. We want to we kind of treat children like like a biohazard. We, we did this all kinds of I don't know, people's eyes look to me that they're when I look into them, they're scared that they're there. They're trying to detach themselves from from society and other people as much as possible. And you can you can make that argument. This is about COVID. But even COVID is a thing that affects mostly elderly people, right? So my my grandmother died really early in the pandemic last year. And it was sad, but you know, that's, you're 105 years old at some point, you got to accept that that that that fate, right? And she was definitely not healthy. So she was kind of, she wasn't really conscious for quite some time anymore. Anyways, but it's really, I don't know how you how you how you see your environment changing. But I see the social environment that was already a little shaky out here in San Francisco, I felt because the way it morphed the last five, 10 years. But I see when I look at the people's eyes here, and those are, you know, well of people, none of them is poor. They're all, you know, seemingly making $100,000 at least a year or more. They seem struck by fear. I don't know if they want to shake that feeling or if they kind of they, they really want to embrace it so much. I feel like we've entered like a Russian society where everyone like embraces their depression and kind of just just wants to cry out how terrible they feel. And that's kind of if the most the person who feels the most terrible is a famous author, right, is a famous intellectual. That's a sign of your life is great. If you feel depressed, I feel like something, something similar is happening here now, but it's more fearful than it is depressed or through that also plays a big role. And yes, these factors, we all are part of this, this bigger society and what's going on and these they affect clearly they affect all of us. But sometimes I feel people in San Francisco, they, they, they embrace it so much, they kind of swim in these feelings, and they really want to, they want to tell everyone around how terrible life is, and that they are the most terrible, the most oppressed, so to speak, oppressed is now gotten a political sense. I don't mean that in a political sense, they just, they feel really terrible and everyone should know that. I don't know what your observations are in the Bay Area, but I feel that's, that's, that's quite stunning to see. And I don't see this when I go to Miami, right, or I don't see this when I go to Texas, for instance. Yeah, no, I completely agree with you. I think there's a, I don't remember when it was, but it was a few years ago and they were talking about Stoicism and, and sort of the celebration of that sort of, I don't know if you want to call it culture per se, but it's that sort of mentality, that mindset, that suffering and suffering in silence in a lot of ways is kind of a trophy prize or it's a badge of honor or it's something that, oh, look at you, you've done such a great thing in bearing such a burden. But when you think about a lot of that is kind of exactly what you said, it's, sometimes it's quite self inflicted. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's something that in some ways we're manufacturing this as well. And, you know, and I think especially to your point with, with COVID, that fear, you know, when we, yes, it's a terrible pandemic. Yes, it's a, it's a difficult time for everyone and then some significantly more than others because lack of resource or support systems. But I think that the, if you look at sort of the gradient of who's really sort of impacted by this in a negative way and the folks that are like, oh, you know, woe is me, look at how difficult it is when in reality it's like we're working from home, you know, you still have a job, you still can take care of your essentials, you've got all these apps to help make your life like magical. Yet there seems to be this very pervasive, again, self inflicted thinking around life is so difficult, life is so burdened. I am, I am oppressed, I am this and it's the reality is, you know, in relative comparison to the rest of the world, many of us are living quite well and taking the opportunity and the time to recognize that as privilege or even being grateful, having a practice of gratitude. It's just not baked into the culture here. Yeah, there is something bigger at play that I always feel and I really wanted to have you on the podcast because we had so many topics that we, you know, last conversation that we kind of just skimmed through them and some of them, I think, have a lot of meat to it, not just about the future, but also in terms of how humans behave with each other and what's going on in society. And so one thing that's kind of a theme of me, and sometimes I'm still figuring out how this actually works, but I feel there is an adverse relationship between the amount of income you have and the happiness. And it's not, there's a lot of studies that being poor in this society, it doesn't matter what society, but just being poor and living in that society is bad for your health. It's bad for, there's a lot of factors, you can count them, people make hasty decisions, people make bad decisions. So you can say, oh, being poor is really bad. And I think that's true if you say that our yardstick is the United States, for instance, but then you go to really poor countries. And we're individuals that we would classify you as as poor just by sheer like the same amount of income that the UN counts as GDP per person, we would consider them poor. But since they live in a different environment, they actually well off rich middle class, whatever class or whatever bracket you want to subsume them under. But what's stunning is when you go to poor countries is that the amount of happiness, and that's a pre COVID observation, I think it still holds true to an extent, but they obviously also shaken. But the amount of happiness is poorer you get as more the stronger the sense of community, stronger the sense of we have, we are all in this together. And I feel there's a lot of happiness in individuals. And I see this, obviously it depends on the country and depends on where you go and their culture. But in general, I feel there's a relationship for me holds true as poor the country has better the sense of community, and that's better the individual happiness. And I can't really put my finger to is why this could be the case, because obviously there is there is a sense of we live in a better society, we have higher living standards of better medicine. But strangely, it seems to have also skyrocketed our anxiety or a negative feelings. And this seems to have taken away the enjoyment, right? So it's, it's, it's almost like it was often not like we have all these achievements, and they are absolutely there. I mean, I don't want to diminish them. But they seem to have reduced the amount of happiness we can actually experience kind of taking away the greatness of this technology and end to you stay privileged. I think this is also political work. But the amount of good things that we have in our disposal, we have, we are not able to enjoy them anymore. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think it kind of comes to some sense of consciousness and connecting to one's own station in life and what, you know, what does one have like access to, whether it's support system, its resources, its knowledge. I don't, I think we live in a society where we're just going through the action. We don't have time to recenter. We don't have time to check in with ourselves, take stock of what we do have in our life. And exactly to your point, I think even the, the sort of like diminishing pool of support that we have or community or connection that we have has a, I mean, some of it may be caused by technology. You know, we think that technology is a replacement for, you know, viable, supportive, healthy relationships in community. But some, I think a lot of it is just people not realizing or taking the time or having a practice of reconnecting to what they do have. We're just in this perpetual rat race where we're just going through the motions, going through the day. What's the next big thing? There's rarely a process of celebration. There's rarely a process of connectedness and sort of completion of phases that we go through. And without those sort of grounding practices, I think we perpetually live not in the present, not in what we are and the reality of it. We're always living in some future state, which is in a lot of ways is very helpful because we are able to connect to something that's not yet existent or not yet tangible. But there's also a really important thing in recognizing the now and celebrating the now. And without that, we become quite disconnected from ourselves and from each other. And frankly, just the state of mind that is necessary for us to exist and be content. And I had heard a stat. I can't don't quote me on this, but it was the thinking was, you know, the amount of happiness you can have, you can't increase it. There's no, there's no sort of cap on this. But you can have more frequent happiness. And people who are happy, they have more instances of being happy, even if it's small bursts. And I think that when you are able to get grounded, reflect on things, have a meditative practice, you're able to engage that process of more frequency. And I think that's an important thing. People who may not have that practice for themselves, or don't, you know, are kind of striving to get like this happiness, which is virtually impossible, but you know, instead of looking for something a little bit more sustainable, that helps, I think, connect to well being, it helps connect to a more grounded sense of reality, and, and a more appreciation of the current state. Yeah, as part of your work, you, you, as far as I know, you, you think about a lot about the future and how it connects to individuals or a community. And one thing you just mentioned, I think that's, that's, that's absolutely true. We, we, we think of technology as this, this, super new religion, right, this super new community. So it fulfills all these things that were a little clunky in the past, but we, there were better, there was no alternative. So we would just start to it. And then technology is maybe our savior, so to speak. But if, if, if that's a guide, you know, and I'm curious if you think that's temporary, because there's going to be a huge wave of technology that seems to be even, that seems to be really strong in terms of how our brain is going to be reshaped. So AI is already doing this, but AI is going to be really powerful, really cheap. It already is that, but it's not applied that, that far, but it's going to change in the next five years. There's going to be tons of robots and things that look like humans or behave like humans, but they are not humans. So there's a lot going on. Do you think we will, we will, we will go back to a happy face? Like we, we go back between these manic depressive faces and everyone's going to be joyful for whatever reason, right? All the happy people, there were happy people here at San Francisco, but they might have left, they have left a couple of years ago and definitely nobody, nobody is left who's happy now. Do you think we go through these phases or have we entered like a, like a secular shift where, where all these advances in technology and they will only speed up, they actually make us more depressed? That's an interesting question. I think that I think we're going to have more perhaps fracturing of things. Like, and what I mean by that is, I think that current belief systems or, you know, secularism versus, you know, some of the world's religions or even just sort of ideology, we're seeing the emergence of new thinking and secularism and, you know, you know, thoughts around even what does it mean to be human beyond, so transhumanism, transhumanism, which produces a completely new field of thinking about like who we are, you know, agency, control, creativity, all these like very meaningful things that I think are a really big part of human spirituality. But I also think that for other parts of the world where there's more of a cultural root for certain spiritual practices or religious practices, those will either strengthen or splinter or become completely different things. And so I think it's kind of hard to say from, you know, will there be a natural convergence of all these things? Yes, to some extent, but I also think that things will also take on their own life. And what I mean by that is technology is, technology is interesting because it is a tool from a, you know, anthropological perspective. It advances culture. It is a vehicle for cultural practices for rituals. And yet it can also be culture itself in a lot of ways. If we look at things like social media and influencers and even very iconic things in the AI world, it does become its own thing. But how it gets integrated into, if you will, like the greater human culture, sort of the big cloud that oversees all human culture, I think we're not necessarily as a society moving towards greater convergence or sort of resonance between things. I think we're actually creating smaller, for lack of a better word, like privatized cultures that are kind of splintering off. And you don't really, some of them, you probably don't see them see the light of day. They exist in Cognito. They exist kind of in the shadows. And it's maybe enjoyed by only a select few people. I don't think we're coming to a time in society where mass experiences are necessarily what we've experienced in mass in the past. I think it's a number of people experiencing smaller things, but together, if that makes any sense. So it's kind of like these things are happening. It does. I think that's absolutely, that's absolutely how the future will look like. They'll be splintered off because it's more customized. So it looks more customized with our DNA or psychology suggests we would enjoy. So I think this is actually good development technology makes us very cheap. So we don't have to go with like the big overarching theme and then labor under it for 40 years. That's how we see our ancestors. I'm actually not sure that's true, but that's how I think the modern mind looks back to the ancestors. And then you have a violent death at the age of 45. That's kind of what we think. I think things must be different because when you read the old Greeks, at least some people in old Greece had a good life. I don't know if this applies to 99% of the population. Probably it doesn't. But I think what the risk is obviously is that we lose this connection to humanity. So we come up, we forget all the old rituals, but we still don't really understand why we behave the way we behave. So why do we do things when we are one year old? We have no clue. Our DNA does preprogram it. How does a character actually develop? We don't know. Even psychologists, they can barely describe a character. There's a big five and every five years there's a new model, how to describe a character or character traits. But they keep changing and we don't really have a good language for it. That's the first problem. We have no idea where it comes from. Does it is a preprogrammed? Does it is shaped by the environment? And there's a lot of good theories on it. But in the end, we haven't really figured this out and we don't know how the brain works. So I feel like we have these stone age tools in terms of we don't really know why we are who we are. We are building the next generation of AI. They could be conscious beings. They're not yet there, but they will come. Before we even understood ourselves, we are already going to the next generation, creating them. And they will have the same problem. Maybe they also don't know why they act like they act. And I often ask myself the question, when you think of criminals, why we've been shaped by so many generations of domestication, so to speak, so only the successful DNA has survived. That's hundreds, thousands of generations back. But we still have people who are intrinsically, I don't know, they're 10 years old and they want to be criminals. That's their career, not necessarily violent, but their psychopath, their sociopath. They manipulate other people for their own personal gain. Shouldn't we have left those people behind going through all this genetic selection over hundreds of years, thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years? And my theory is, well, we should. But actually, those influences that we think are troublesome, they actually make part of the society. So they keep everyone honest. If we wouldn't have crime, maybe we wouldn't have even violent crime, if we wouldn't have that, then people wouldn't be scared. They wouldn't follow in order to make everyone better off. So I feel like, strangely enough, civilization follows rules that, on first glance, seem counterintuitive, but they actually seem to be encoded in something. I don't know whoever designed this whole game, the simulation, right? It seemed to have known about these rules and put it in place so that it works sustainably. And this leads me, this is already a lot of ranting, but this leads me to the obvious question that I always ask. Do you think, where do all these things come from? Do you think we are in a simulation? Do you think it is something that kind of happened completely by accident or it's completely random, but it seems there is some cloud storage of knowledge that we sometimes access, but it's definitely not a conscious access. So we download stuff, but it's not conscious. Yeah, I think that, you know, and I kind of go back and forth on this a little bit because I was raised with a particular ideology and some of it, which I carry on into adult life and some of it, I assessed in a different way. And so I think a lot of human, well, if we look at even just humans as a species, and we look at the architecture of the world we live in, the biology of it, the physics of it, the chemistry of it, each sort of way of breaking down how we study human, the human species, human culture, human civilization, I think is a natural progression of systems. So my father was a physicist and the way that he had always thought about things was that the language of all things, you know, whether it's humanity by other organisms is math. And math, if you boil it down as physics, and physics, if you boil it down as chemistry, and chemistry, if you boil it down as biology. And so there's a natural sort of order to these things, more or less, give or take. Okay, yeah. I would have thought if he's a physicist that the physics would be at the top of this, this hierarchy. You would think that, you would think that, but the mathematics is more altruistic. Yeah. So essentially everything in the world is math. And everything at, you know, the building blocks of it is biology. Yeah, but so we are by quantum computer, right? So the universe is a quantum computer, right? So it goes back to basic rules, and they seem to be extremely basic. It takes us a while to discover, but then, you know, even, you know, Einstein's equations are easy. I mean, so many equations up until 50 years ago, everyone can learn this so easy math. But that kind of would lead us, I mean, that would lead me to the, that's a simulation, right? The rules are too simple. If it's so simple, then someone basically designed that in his little PlayStation. That's kind of the fear I have when other people think of it. The other way to say, no, no, no, this is really simple, because the simplest solution always wins. And this is what has won out over, you know, so many millions and hundreds of millions of years. But to me, I mean, myself, and this is obviously a hypothetical argument, I'm really drawn to the simulation theory. As far as I think about it, and it's been popularized now for a couple of years, it more makes sense to me, but there's probably no way to prove this ever. Yeah, it's probably not something we can prove because probably the parameters of it are probably imperceptible to us. You know, we only have so much sensing capability. Anything that moves beyond the sensory is either it must be intuitive, or we have to infer, or we have to use some sense of imagination. But there is a limit to what we as humans can perceive. And I do think that a lot of it's interesting, because I wonder how much of this is pre programmed, and we're just sort of running the natural path of programming. And how much of this is more generative? How much of this is more emergent behavior? So it's the, you know, the alchemy, or the synthesis of tossing together a bunch of different things, and then seeing new behavior come through. And like, in this case, is it a fully autonomous program? Or is there someone, or some entity, or some thing in the universe that holds these sort of puppet strings, or tweaks things, or, you know, kind of plays with this dynamic? I think that's left to be, that's left to be kind of quantificated on by society, and everyone will have their own interpretation based on the fact that we as humans are, like from perception perspective and sensory perspective, not able to sense or discern. Unless we leverage technology in a meaningful way, maybe then. But I think it's quite difficult. And, and it's fascinating to think about, but at the same time, I think, maybe it's not always the most fruitful, fruitful thing to think about, because it is difficult. Right. When I think about it, you know, and when you think about new psychology, the idea of free will goes out the window relatively quickly. When you run these experiments, I mean, for us, free will exists, right? Of course. But when you run experiments, when you when you read the literature, it's basically, it's gone. I mean, there isn't much how you, you can manipulate people relatively easily. And it's, it's not, it has been done for forever, I guess. But what's interesting for me is that it seems the people, when we are ancestors of theirs, who held up that idea of free will, so against all the facts, right? So it's almost like a self fulfilling prophecy against of all the facts that they knew, they held up this, this, this, this prophecy of free will, and it can, it can happen, but it's not impossible, but it almost never happened. So it's, it's almost like this was the, the selected program that helped people survive better, just believing in something that seems idiotic. If you actually go down to science, there is supposed to be no free will. I mean, there's not a lot of psychologists who will, if you press them, say that is really free will, depending on definition. But in most cases, you can actually talk it away. And so, so what this leads me to is we are actually a self delusional species. So we ancestors of even more self delusional people, or maybe slightly less, but we, we, we drown in these self delusions, just like the COVID epidemic. I'm not saying it's, it's, it's, this virus isn't real. It is real. But the extent of what we made out of it and how we drown in this, this negative feelings, they have other origins and we, we make this happen. So that's, I think maybe it is well understood, but I feel like the, the, the impact of these huge civilizations and the amount of people and how they are connected and how they influence each other, it's, it's not very well understood. Like the old Greeks didn't have much of this because the communication channels were just not there. You know, circuiters have to talk to every single person to influence them, which took, eventually happened, but took them 30, 40 years. But now with one tweet, you can influence humanity. I don't know if you, what, what do you feel is the future of this, this mass communication? Do you think we'll, we'll get this under control and we get tired of all the tweets, things that, that, that kind of, and it seems to be Twitter seems to be cooling off as a star. And do you feel we learn how to deal with this? Or it's just going to bring us into really negative rabbit holes and things we, we have trouble getting out of. I go back and forth and I do agree. I think Twitter, Twitter is definitely, I wouldn't say necessarily going away, but I do think that the way it's used and, and the frequency it was just used is changing. My personal observation, just to kind of pick a quick side, side tangent with Twitter is that it's becoming more, again, kind of these like closed off communities or these fragmentations. And it's not even like, Oh, this is marketing Twitter or this is design Twitter. It's like, this is a very specific sliver cross section of this. And it's just, I don't want to use the word echo chamber, but I'm going to use it because it's the only thing I can think of. It's just resonance within that chamber. And there's rarely sort of connectors, bridges, there's no seeking behavior. It's like, I am here, I am going to engage in this cross section, that is it. And I think that there's some fatigue associated with that, which is why I think the move has been and largely it seems like Clubhouse and similar platforms have been kind of the exodus for some of the Twitter conversations and communities. But I do think that even some of the common sentiments within Clubhouse and other platforms like that is that it takes even a smaller subsection of things, and it like magnifies into this big topic. And like, isn't this interesting? Oh, how about we talk about this thing? I'm not saying it's a bad thing. And I'm certainly not saying that it is necessarily a future of mass communication. But I think we are in a in an age where people are, you know, they're taking the tweezers and they are cherry picking. You know, it's not and we think about mass media in the past. It's a it's a one way broadcast. You get what you're given. We look up, we look at mass communication now. We're not talking about it in terms of directionality. We're talking about it in terms of like audience sides. And so I call it self propaganda. You know, when you when you think about I grew up with propaganda, so people had a political idea, and they pushed it down on you. And if you didn't conform, you were in prison. But now we seek out these these these things that that we know might not be 100% true, but they make us feel comfortable. And they they're even in what I already believe I seek that out. And I feel really good when I when I see this on Twitter, not me personally, but I think this is the this is the effect of self propaganda, self propaganda, theization of your media thinking model, so to speak, your mental model. And one thing, and I didn't want to interrupt you, but that what was really interesting, you said that last time, you know, there is, and that's become a rarity, there is a way to make a good living just being curious. And I wonder how you how you feel that fits into because I feel the society has become the opposite. Being curious is like the last thing people want. Yeah, I think it's something that I believe very much in is knowing where your influence comes from. I think a lot of people like to think that they're quite original, and that anything that they've created, constructed, conversed on is, you know, there's, and there's alone, because I've added some unique spin to to something that they had heard, or they've integrated something from a bunch of places. But this again kind of goes back to what we talked about the start of this conversation is how often does do you reflect on a thing? How often do you recognize some of the internal, you know, self talk that you're having, some of the thoughts you're having. And I think it's the same thing when we talk about curiosity, and we talk about some of these echo chambers of communication and community. If we don't know where influence is coming from, and we don't take inventory of it in a meaningful way, and we don't question it with a critical lens, and really sort of bifurcate what is ours, or at least what do we believe is ours versus what are we taking from other places, and we don't have an awareness of that. I think it's becomes, it's like any food diet you have. If you're eating the same thing over and over again, eventually, you know, you either don't notice it, you get bored of it, or something else, I think you need to have a diversification. And so having an awareness of where your influence comes from, who are the communities or the people that feed that influence? And what are you doing to diversify? You know, the common thing I think in nutrition is like, oh, go eat the rainbow, you know, red, purple, green, orange, whatever. If we're looking at where influence comes from, and we're only consuming portions of things, and we're only creating within certain realms, then we have a serious question to ask ourselves, which is, you know, how much of who I am is created by me versus others, and how much of that is expanding versus contracting or isolating? So I think curiosity really comes down to that awareness of where you're pulling from, and what you're actually self offering. I like this view. I'm not sure that's something we can expect from humanity, because I feel this, we do this huge download of culture, right, when we are kids, and I think we keep doing this, because society now we realize that we can take whatever is out there as given, and we can just add like the little tiniest bit of sliver on top of it, and create this either as our own, right? So this is how, for instance, coding works, right? You download tons and tons of stuff from GitHub, but then you have this tiny sliver, maybe just a hundred lines of code that makes it 10 times faster, and that's what people reward you for, right? So your company will reward you for this. If you publish this somewhere else, other developers will reward you for this. But if you're not knowing all the other packages out there, you know, encoding, it's hundreds of different libraries that you have to know. If you don't include them, then you're slow, because someone else already did this task, and you don't have to redo it. So we always fear as humans that we reinvent the wheel, so to speak, and we want to add this tiny sliver. That's at least what innovation has become, adding tiny slivers on tiny slivers, but it's still pretty quick because everyone interacts with everyone in real time. And what I'm trying to say is we don't know these other libraries that we incorporate into our mental model. We don't necessarily know where they came from. I mean, think about math. I don't know about that, that the particular piece of algebra that I learned when I was in seventh grade or sixth grade, someone did it, right? So I made it my own and then six years later, I thought, okay, this is my knowledge, but it's actually someone else's. And I think this process keeps on going. So we learn stuff out there. And within a little bit, maybe just a few days later, I think most people on Twitter, if they even remember what's what they read will be hard. If they do remember, then they certainly don't know where it came from. And I think six months later, they have no idea if this is an idea that was planted by someone, maybe without intent, but just it came into someone's came from someone else. But this is an idea they themselves generated. I think it's really hard. I can I have to say I fail at this task completely. But I feel that is there is always an Alexander Bart gave me that idea. He thinks about the shamans, but part of the society who who's always very curious, who kind of have this as a genetic flaw or as a genetic advantage, whatever that is in that situation, that they are always curious and you're looking for the next thing, the next big thing. And I'm I'm one of those hundreds, hundreds of thousands others just in the Bay Area. And I wonder if this curiosity is something we can, as you say, we can train people and can tell them, you know, you have to look outside of the rabbit hole and there's more for you there. And it's it's good. Or if this is something that only a small percentage of the population will actually ever do. And you know, Socrates was already complaining about most people, they couldn't care less, right? The most people in old Athens, they couldn't care less about what he said. But some people actually got it and they got some satisfaction just talking about these things with them. We're born creative, we lose the creativity because it's either ironed out of us, or we don't have positive reinforcement systems to encourage. And I think, particularly having been born and raised as an American, I don't think that the American education system and a lot of the social systems here value creativity. It's not something that's exercise. It's not something that's encouraged. If you look at the the everyday workplace for most Americans and likely even globally, where is creativity as a requirement? Or whereas, you know, is it protected as a value within the workplace? No, the industrial revolution has made it so that we segment our work in a very specific way. And that that segmentation of work and that's focused on the operational efficiency is such a far departure from what creativity brings. And so I think that when we think about, you know, can we as a society encourage more creativity at scale? Is it something that everyone gets to do? Or is it just for a select few? I think right now the way that our global society is architected. Creativity in a lot of ways is either you have to take a sacrifice somewhere, you know, either you pick a very particular lifestyle, you might not get paid quite a bit for it. And that's sort of the you make a choice or a trade off. It's not something that is readily accessible to everyone. And certainly, I think, unfortunately, that's why many people don't get to participate in that process in a meaningful way. So how much of creativity should be allowed, right? So that's that's in the end the question. I don't know if you have any golden rule there. I mean, I'm very curious to see what Gen Z is going to do. Because they in a lot of ways, they are creator native in a way that like millennials were kind of considered digital black brown. I think millennials are truly digital native. But they're the first generation that can think about creativity. And even the monetization of creativity, which is a kind of an interesting dynamic, in quite a different way from other generations, in terms of like how much people should have, you know, daydream self, you know, imagination. And that should just be a natural part of like healthy mental health. And I think it's a very meditative process as well, because you you understand that you're able to visualize in your own mind, certain things that you you are, you know, quite keen on. If we were talking about society, I think society stands to benefits so much from increased or enhanced creativity. However, that needs to exist, whether it's community, whether it's, you know, the way that we talk about it. And then I think certainly in the workplace, it is something to be encouraged. How do you actually plug that into something like innovation? Or how do you plug that into something like employee engagement or experience? That's a completely different conversation. But all of this is to say that I think that there should be enhanced practices of creativity. And however you need to divide that up in your own life is kind of a reflection of, you know, what do you hope to get out of it? If it's like a, you know, sort of education institute of creativity, I think there's certainly learning opportunities. I think there's positive reinforcement and psychologically safe ways of encouraging creativity. But again, I think some of it's for internal practice, some of it's for society, you know, culture, the workplace. So you kind of have to divide out how much of it you need to keep for yourself, how much of it you need to propel into the world. Yeah, I think it really comes down to what is the future of the workplace and the future of a kid to 12 and also university education. And I had Marcy Powell on yesterday, she's she's been running the United States distance learning association. So she's been preaching distance learning for 20 years and nobody ever listened to her, so to speak. Obviously, people have listened to her. But it's only been a real big recognition in the last two years. How do you see online learning, distance learning, however you want to call it, how do you see it shape the next 20 years and the next generation? My personal model is, though my personal view is that there's so much content out there and education will change completely at these institutions that we built that were necessary a hundred years ago. Now they look like the Soviet Union to me, they're far behind. Yes, they are not terrible and they kind of deliver a bottom line, but they're way too expensive. And they don't really prepare people for what's out there anymore. And that also goes all the way to adult education, right? Education is probably you should never stop. We kind of get a little lazy if you find a profitable niche, but in the end, if you don't have that, then we restart our educational process. How do you see these things work? And I know you've been a mentor for Udacity, one of those trailblazers in the industry. Yeah, I think you're absolutely, I completely agree with you. I think that we're looking at very archaic updated systems for how we acquire knowledge and acquire skills to enter the workforce. I think everything essentially comes down to to kind of preparedness for your job and your profession. I don't think, I think the evolution that's going to happen is that there's going to be less, there's going to be more self directed learning for those who are going to be able to do that and are able to manage themselves in that way. I think a lot, there's a number of sort of online high schools where the curriculum is solely self directed. You have, you know, maybe a mentor, a guidance counselor, teachers, but it's very project based, it's very inquiry based, which I think is a wonderful thing for curiosity and for creativity. Education up to now is very teacher directed, it's very kind of state level focused. And most people haven't learned how to learn through that. It's right now, it's resuscitation. It's just fitting back out what you've already heard. But instead, I think what's really valuable is, you know, critical thinking, learning to author your own thoughts and your own curiosity around this and have it translate into something meaningful as a contribution to society, not a piece of paper that says I did X, Y and Z that all the other students did. And I just happen to remember it better or I just happen to test better on it. Instead, it's like, what is your positive contribution to society? What's the discussion you're trying to have? And ultimately, what outcomes or impact are you trying to drive? I think that one of the things I think this is how, yeah, I think this is so important, what you say. I think school, and I think they do this, but they eventually give up after some time. Every school year, and maybe every day should start, what is your contribution to society going to be? I know you're only eight years old, but give me five things that you think this should be repeated every day. I feel in our school system, it doesn't exist. Even later in universities, it doesn't really exist. Maybe a little bit when some very ambitious people bring out these ideas, but everybody should have them. It should be something that is unique, right? Only one person does it once, and then it's available for charge or for free for the rest of society. I think this is a societal advancement model, right? But this question doesn't even appear for most of schooling and for any kind of education. It's, oh, I do something to improve my job chances, which isn't bad, right? All the job sets of requirement, and you probably do something useful. Otherwise, this job wouldn't exist. But I think people should have this intrinsic motivation. I don't think any day we spend not thinking about this is a day lost in our lives. Yeah, no, I don't think so. I think something that is really critical to this, I think, again, is self reflection, because you go through the day doing the things you do, but then how do you integrate it back in? How do you push it back into some greater vision or strategy that you have? And there's rarely a, rarely, if ever, held accountable to that practice. I think that's why it's fascinating to watch people set goals for themselves and to watch them think about the execution of it. And I think even the way that they structure their, like the relationship they have to their future self, the relationship they have to society, there's, I wouldn't say this as, you know, I'm not saying this like in a very generalized way, but I would gather that the vast majority of people don't have a practice for that. And I talk about practices a lot because I think it's the manifestation of behavior in a intentional, deliberative structure of way. And without that continuous integration, without that sort of taking out the trash of old beliefs or old ways of doing things and installing new ones and running them through their paces, we're just reactive, we're just going to be reactive organisms, whatever pops up on the horizon, whatever strikes our fancy, but the moment that we're able to have a dialogue with ourself through this reflective process, the sooner we're able to recognize patterns of ourselves, patterns in others, patterns in society, and actually have a meaningful path forward in learning to get to there. And there's a fascinating aspect to psychology, which is kind of like autobiographical planning, the ability to think about yourself outside of yourself and how do you kind of connect the dots on your story. And I think most people sort of live in the present, or they live in the past, sure, in extremes both for themselves and for society. And the only difference that I've found within people who are very effective at thinking about the future and creating the future and learning in order to get to the future is that they're able to run that process internally. They're able to analyze themselves and have very critical conversations with themselves. And then they go out and they have these habits of looking for patterns, connecting with a wide range of people, being very curious, having a generative process for how do I apply this impact for myself, but also for others. But it all starts with that reflection. And that's the engine that drives whether or not we can think about the future, whether or not we can be creative. And ultimately, the future of learning, you have to have some engine that runs internally. Yeah, I think the biggest problem with this is it's human laziness, right? So we are born very lazy. We just want to do the most minimal thing that guarantees our survival and maybe the survival of our offspring. But that's about it, right? This is what we are programmed to do, because probably for good reason, otherwise we would waste all these calories and we would probably not make it through the winter. So this is our ancestral heritage. How do you get people to motivate themselves? Because I think if you don't preinstall and you know the wider picture, I don't know your age, but a lot of wisdom, I feel, I just wouldn't have gotten to me 20 years ago. Some people are ahead of their time. I definitely wasn't. It took a certain amount of years to get to a certain amount of wisdom. There's no way I could have recognized this when I was 19. I could have had the same conversation or could have listened to that conversation right here. And I would have disassociated myself from it and said, well, this is not important. How are we going to change the world? I'm interested in, I don't know, what's the next streaming service I can sign up for? Or how can I play better at a certain video game, right? So these things I wanted to learn because they were right inside my comfort zone and the knowledge that I was already very proficient in. And I was looking slightly above that, right? But I wouldn't want to be too far out. So this is such a moving target. But even moderating people to just go slightly outside of this comfort zone where they are, I find it incredibly hard. Overcoming this laziness is extremely difficult. Yeah, no, I can completely relate to that. There are many things I'm quite intellectually lazy about. And even just in the everyday life, I recognize that there are things, and some of that actually is, I mean, actually, some of that is quite good because it's an efficiency practice. It's, you know, how can I focus on the things that matter, that have good value or immediate gain, and then reserving sort of a buffer capacity for bursts whenever we, and I think that's essential as a biological organism because we deal with so much uncertainty. But that said, I think motivation is, you know, you have intrinsic, you have extrinsic. Everyone has a different motivation based on the experiences they've had so far in life. So some people can be quite career driven. Other people are quite, you know, I just want to live a good life, you know, slow paced, enjoyable. And so knowing one's self and knowing how, you know, what are you reacting to? What are you responding to? And really like what drives you at the end of the day? I think that's a journey in and of itself. Some of us don't, unfortunately, or fortunately, don't ever get to embark on that journey. Because, you know, for whatever reason, we never discover it, or we just were so busy fighting fires in our life that we just don't have the capacity to do that. But I think again, it's the self discovery process. There's no good as a society. Because even as a society, I don't think we can agree on common motivation. You know, maybe from a, you know, if we're American, we might say like, you know, I want to live the American dream. I want to do this thing. But even the segmentation of that, if you break it down, it's widely different. So I think that in order to motivate ourselves, we do have to embark on some journey of self discovery. Some journey of understanding what it is that we really want in our life. And that can change. You know, what I want now as a, you know, mid 30 something year old is quite different from what I wanted as a, you know, 18 year old in university. I've really embraced that. But there's there's always like the baseline of what it is. There's always something that stays the same. And so we have to spend our time kind of diving deep, and then coming back up to surface what we what we want to live. Yeah, one thing that struck me, and I had this discussion with Nick a couple of weeks ago, and we were, we were stunned by, you know, we take this idea that we just that the two of us now just just illuminated. If you take this out to the wilder public, it wouldn't, I don't think a lot of people would listen to us. Some people would, right, but I'd say one out of 100, maybe five out of 100. But most of them are either too busy, they're not interested in this, it's too complicated. So, and I think this, this, this ratio must have been the same for a long time, because the old Greeks had the same problem. And one solution, I think that we came up with, and I'm not sure if this is true, but that's kind of my theory on this is, you know, the modern state was basically and religion before there's especially Christianity. So the other religions were where you basically the pleasure of allegiance really quick, like Christianity is actually a few sentences and some water and you're good to go, right? That's the new Christian and you don't have to do much as a Christian. I mean, there's certain things you should do, but if you don't do them, it's okay to. Judaism is a little harder and Islam is harder. But what it did, it instilled a sense of ideals, a sense of self improvement in people, right? So it gave a blueprint of this is how you should believe in this self fulfilling prophecy, this illusion, like a free will, we have this illusion of God. Maybe it's not an illusion, but we don't worry about if it's real or not. We just want you to believe in this. And people know or we're critical of it, right? They say, oh, you gave us all these things and do the runny and they all don't nonsense. But what I say is, well, when you think of it, and how the modern state has been developed, and you know, the lock was there were all really into Christianity, they were very devout Christians. What I think they did, they took this religious concept and transformed it into a more secular looking state, but it kind of pushed the same ideas for better or worse. There's a lot of people who were disadvantaged, but there's now fully see that. But what it did is it pushed on this idea that really 100% of population or maybe 99% of population got into the self reflection and figured out what can I do to be a better person, right? So that's a core concept of the Old Testament, but it also shines into the New Testament. So a lot of values, they were not up for debate. They were just, they were pushed out into people's throat for better or worse. And they made a lot of people really angry for good reason. But it reached 90%. And when we have this discussion about self reflection, I think we both understand what that means and lots of other people in Silicon Valley will that will agree with us. But beyond that, it's really difficult to get this in practice and every day and then make this an everyday practice. I don't know if there's a good marketing vehicle, but I always believe religion first. And then the modern state was this marketing vehicle for the self improvement process. Yeah, I think it's, it's the, you almost have to, I think it comes down to, you know, what is someone losing or risking or what's at stake or, you know, like even one's own sense of fear, like a lot of ways to craft or to reflect in the modern society, primarily because we don't have a lot of things that we need to fear. You know, we live, we live good lives, for the most part, is just, you know, the things that happen in and around us, we sort of just pick for, you know, pick with its paces. So there isn't something, we're not in a period of like survival, in contrast to perhaps like, you look at like, we talk about like, world religions, back way back when, thousands of years ago. They were, in a lot of times, in a lot of cases, they were probably dealing with very mortal, mortal risks. It's still 100% of people die, right? Yeah, yeah. It's maybe a little longer, but it's the same thing. So I think we're in the same boat, more or less. It feels different because we can defeat certain diseases, right? And we feel we're a little safer. But, you know, like COVID could have been like airborne Ebola. It wasn't, but it could have easily has half been, right? And now we would, 90% of population would have died. I mean, that would be catastrophic. The whole civilization would have fallen apart. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. I think, again, it's just like fragmenting of things, because everyone's sort of like localizing their understanding of the threat level or, and even like the pervasiveness of whatever is kind of on the horizon. A lot of things that are occurring today, it's here one day gone tomorrow. You know, like, natural disaster, here one day gone to a wildfire here. Like it's just, we don't, we're in such a attention deficit that we don't really have time to realize like, oh, actually, you know, if I keep doing this thing, or I don't institute some sort of vehicle for this belief system, then it impacts this. We're, in a lot of ways, we're just kind of, again, the incremental behavior. So I don't have a good answer for this. I think it's the sort of evolution of how people are thinking about this, and what are the commonalities and how do we design against that, you know, kind of calling into the design thinking of it. But I think we'd be a little bit hard pressed to find like marketing strategies for some of these things until you can get to some dynamic way of like generating the, if you use like A.B. testing, or you like have AI generate things and test it rapidly at scale, as opposed to a top down approach, which is like, here's the thing, let's push it down. I think it's going to be much more emergent. Yeah, I think this is, this is when you, when you read, when you listen to Susan Wojciki, and what YouTube does, I feel that's, that's what they want to do, right? They feel like they have, they have become the new world religion or the new world government. And maybe they have, right? They have that much influence. And they want to instill something better in it. But that's very risky, right? That's extremely risky to do this as a, in a, you know, we just start from scratch. It's kind of like Karl Marx. There was a lot of good things with what Karl Marx defined and that he knew about, right? But his starting from a clean slate and just redefining economics from scratch wasn't such a good idea. We figured out sooner or later, right? So I think that's, that's, those are the, the, these forces that, that currently where people get so anxious because it sounds like the things that we knew that work, they're falling apart and I agree with you, it's more, more, it's coming into these, these smaller pockets of, of, of interaction. And that's probably good because people can specialize more, they can be more creative, all of, all of those things are great. But it also makes it harder to give people this, this motivation for the, for the updraft that we all need. And I think this is maybe also in the answer for, for these, for the, there's other economic answers, but I feel for me, that's an answer for this, for this struggle of, of equality that we have. Like we don't want everyone to be the same, but we want everyone to be similar, right? And that's, I'd have similar opportunities at least. And that's, on one hand, we have all this technology and knowledge is available, but on weirdly enough, we see more inequality. And that's, there's some bad policies behind this, but I think it's this, there's also a drive and motivation. So motivation is not, was never equally distributed, but I feel now, just a little bit more motivation gives you outsized gains. And that's why a lot of, some people work 16 hours, right? And every day, and they're crazy busy. And that's especially in the valley where we're all addicted to work. But a lot of people have nothing to do. And that's really painful. Even if you have enough money to buy food and shelter, it's still really painful. And that's, that's really strange to see that, right? And for me, motivation and the scaling up of what motivation is worth, the value of motivation to yourself, this big factor to it. Yeah. I like, I liked what you said about motivation being not equally distributed. I think that's really fascinating. And I think, you know, if we were to find proxies for motivation, you know, whether it's access to information, maybe it's, you know, access to opportunity. Because if we look at motivation in a lot of ways, it's like, it's like psychological arousal. Something has piqued your interest, something has grabbed your attention is compelling you to do this thing. And people get excited when the value or the payoff is disproportionate. There's some incongruency somewhere. Whether it's them versus society or them versus their own self, you know, so, you know, kind of progressing oneself versus, you know, I can game some system somewhere. And I think, yeah. Yeah, I'm very, you have a very, very important point there. Now it seems like we all just want to game the system before it seems like we did real value. Now, this is obviously there's no real definition for this, right? Or maybe, maybe there is. But it's seemingly like, a lot of people think this is a zero sum game. So I have to, I have to game the system. And I think before, well, maybe it's the good old times, I can't be sure of it, but it's, I have the impression it was more like, we want to increase the size of the pie, right? We that's possible because economic growth was still normal. Now it's gotten so rare in many countries. And there's something weird with this, right? So, so why did we shift? It's probably, it's the right behavior in that situation, right? So people realize this, I have to game the system, this is where the money is, and they're right. But for society, it's a bad idea, I feel. Yeah, no, we completely agree. I think that's, and that's where I think some of the dialogue is, is changing as well. And I think that's why discussions about equity, equality, about access, about opportunity are really important. Because you're not necessarily taking from one group and giving to another, you're creating it in new places. So it's new growth. Whereas previously, you know, you're just kind of allocating things as needed. And I think that's why we're having more conversations, like, you know, whether it's businesses, whether it's organizations, world governments, about sustainability. We're having conversations about, you know, how do you invest in people first? So we're thinking about human capital, human development. We're thinking about, you know, just mechanisms for seeing things as not scarce, but quite abundant. And how do you create more opportunity to, to basically lift the tie for everyone? But I don't know yet, I don't know yet how motivation will look like in that world. I don't know what forms it will take, where it will either be generated. And I don't know if you can spontaneously, I think it's like, it's like laws of physics, you can't just create energy. Or you can't just create something. Yeah, but you can, no, it's like, I think of it like the DNA soup. That's this frameless experiment, right, that you put all the elements on the early earth together and it eventually created something that looks, it's a precursor to DNA. And the certain elements must come together and it must be in the right percentages. I think the same is true for economic opportunity. You can, I grew up in Eastern Europe. I grew up in Eastern Germany. And economic opportunity basically didn't exist because it was not planned for. So nobody needed it. So the idea of economic opportunity was, we don't need it because everyone has enough to eat. So we don't move. But what they, it worked, actually, the Eastern European and Soviet system wo