Jonah Sachs on Unsafe Thinking

you are what you think, ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life

worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Jonah Sachs and authors, speaker, and viral marketing trailblazer, who helped spur the Century values Revolution, which brought the ideas of social change to the forefront of business and popular culture. Jonah's work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, NPR, and

many others. He also pends a column for Fast Company, which named him one of Today's fifty most Influential Social Innovators. Today, Eric and Jonah discussed many things, including his book Unsafe Thinking, How to be nimble and bold when you need it most. Hi, Jonah, Welcome to the show. Thanks Eric, it's great to be here. I'm really excited to talk with you about a couple

of different things. We're gonna talk about your organization, one project, and a book that you helped put together called The New Possible. And we're also going to talk about a book you wrote called Unsafe Thinking, How to be nimble and bold when you need it the most. But before we get into all that, we'll start, like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of

us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the grandson stops thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that

you do. Well, I'll start by saying that I love this parable. I've done a lot of teaching about storytelling, and I think this is one of the best examples of how a simple story can access so much innate wisdom inside of us. So I've thought about it from many angles, and there's many obvious angles, But the one that comes up for me that I think is maybe a bit more unique is it points to the enormous creative potential in each of us to decide what we're

going to bring forth in the world. And I have a golden retriever, so a kind of a wolf, you might say, And the more that I feed her, the more she comes up to the table expecting more and more and more. And so what I think is that it's not just about the good and the bad. It's about the habits that form as we feed parts of ourselves, as we engage in those habits, they get easier and easier because they're coming up to the table. And the part that we're not feeding is you know, often the

distance are cowering because we're not feeding it. So it's not just about good and bad. It's also about the unexplored parts of ourselves and really thinking about that automatic feeding that we're doing of certain capacities and the capacities that maybe we're not feeding as much as well. I believe that our creative potential comes when we start also

feeding the capacities on that kind of shadows side. So it's a simple morality play on one hand, but also talks about the incredible inherent capacity within all of us holistically from feeding all of our abilities. I love that. I think that's a really good interpretation, and I agree. I think so much of this is about recognizing what

our habitual patterns are and becoming more intentional about them. Yeah, I mean, engaging in habitual behavior feels really good, it's really easy, and you feel in that kind of groove when you're doing it. But like when a groove becomes a rut, that's always the hard thing. To figure out and doing anything outside of your comfort zone takes a huge amount of effort and work, and it's always uncomfortable. But it's kind of over there that the growth really happens.

And that's been a lot of my struggle and my work in my life is to figure out how to access outside of that zone of comfort. Yeah. So I'd like to start by talking about the organization that you're currently involved in and running, which is called One Project. Can you just tell us a little bit about what One Project is? Yeah? So One Project is a kind of startup venture. My partner in the venture is Justin Rosenstein.

He's the inventor of the like button for Facebook and inventor of Google Drive, and he's been creating all of these tools to help humanity collaborate better. But in each of those inventions, he's found that the world doesn't necessarily get better just because people collaborate more. It's like, what are we collaborating on. We can use the like button to share love with our friends, but we can also use it to create all these terrible, unintended consequences of

surveillance capitalism. So he stepped away from his work and joined up with me to try to figure out how to use human collaboration to address those root causes of global crises right now, and we see those as a

broken democratic system and a broken economic system. Basically, the capitalism that we engage in right now and the type of representative democracy we use are kind of like eighteenth century technologies, and all of the technologies for communication and for consumerism have grown incredibly quickly, while we're still going to the ballot box using pretty much the same tools that we used the founding of our nation. And so we think for democracy to survive, it needs to upgrade itself.

For this planet to survive, we need a kind of economy that she's not just based on profit, but based on human goals. Now, none of that was really possible to do a couple hundred years ago, Like how are you going to figure out what human goals are when you can't even communicate with someone who lose five miles away.

But now that humanity is kind of global, we're looking for ways to move beyond capitalism to think of ways that humanity can achieve its goals in a sustainable way that drives equity and drives kind of outcomes we want.

And so that's a giant mission that we have. But what we're specifically doing is working in communities who are trying to manage resources, trying to manage themselves in new ways to be more equitable and more just more sustainable, studying what their problems are and seeing how our donations and money and also our technologies that we're producing can help them step outside of those traditional models and do

things in a better way. Yeah. I first became exposed to your work through a book that you guys put together called The New Possible, which I really loved because so many of the books about these topics that you're talking about are, at least to me, they're very problem focused. Right, A lot of us, I think, understand some of the

current problems. What's broken? You know, it's pretty clear, you know, I think democracy is not working very well, the economy is only working well for very few and so pretty clear problem statements, but not a lot of solutions. And I love that this book put together some of the best thinking on solutions that I had seen in a while, and I found it a really inspiring read. Thanks so much.

We try to pull together global leaders to provide a kind of sense of what could be the whole world got shaken up by coronavirus, and what we've been through over the last year, I think we all learned that different ways are possible when foisted upon us, and that

we actually can change as communities. It's brought some of the best in US and of course some of the worst in US um but I think it's brought out a lot more good than it's brought out bad in the human condition in terms of what we're capable of. And so we wanted to put forth some visions of like what a food system could look like, what community based economic systems could look like, what systems of collaboration might look like if we decide to go forward instead

of going back to the old way. And I think that window has opened up where that discussion of how to do things differently is pretty alive in US right now. What we want to do at one project is not just provide that vision of like, oh, wouldn't it be great if we had local food food systems. We want to figure out how do we make local food systems

economically competitive with global food systems. How do we build tools so that any farmer can team up with fifty other farmers and get their produce to market and maybe eventually not even sell that produce for you know, cash, but sell it for some other kind of credits that

are more collaborative than we currently use. So we're looking fifty years into the future, which again seems crazy at times, but I think scientists are telling us that we have fifty or twenty years to turn this thing around, and if you really look at it, our current systems do not offer a credible path to a sustainable future at

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

a really compelling way in well, thank you again. My background is in storytelling and in turning social change into compelling narratives. I was an experimenter in the early days of the Internet, spreading stories about factory farming and the spoof of the matrix called the Metrix about the harms

of factory farming. I did a movie called Story of Stuff about the problems with over consumption, and by telling these kind of stories, I was getting tens of millions of people to engage with these somewhat dry social messages and learning how story based communication can really activate someone's imagination on these tough topics. Is a kind of superpower of mine, or a super belief of mine. I'll say, like, this is how you do it. So what we try to do is say, imagine you're living in this future.

You know, what does it feel like to participate in setting goals for saying? You know, I want to see nature come back. I want to see global levels of equity increasing by five percent every year. And what if we all got together and really talked about what mattered most to us instead of this myth where if we all just pursue our own self interest it will all sort of work out. I mean, that produced a lot of abundance for a long time, but we're hitting up

against limits that we can no longer ignore. So what we try to do with that essay will show how satisfying, how lovely how exciting it might feel to be part of a global effort that's actually working, not just shaking your fist at the establishment, but being a citizen that

is engaging with those solutions. And as a far ideal, we're actually trying to build software and trying to build in our personal social technology that lets communities do exactly that instead of having a profit based economy, start to build goals based economies and maybe just doing it a small community at the time. But that's what we're experimenting with. You know, we're brand new, we're just starting out, but we're already making our way pretty well in the world.

And this isn't exactly what your organization does, but I'd like to at least get your insight on it, which is what can individuals who want to see change? What are places that people can get involved? Because I feel like there is a tremendous untapped desire for change, and yet there's a lot of I'm not really sure what the heck to do, and I know that there's not

simple global answers for what everybody can do. I'm not asking you to be like, well, you just do these three steps, but I guess I'd be more interested in the way you might think about. Okay, people who care, what are ways that they can start thinking about how they can contribute. Yeah, I think that the way that we're taught to make social change is in two spaces. Essentially, we'll call it three. So one is the most obvious.

You know, get out there and vote every four years or every two years and express your voice at the polls. And that's just kind of like, that's like showery once a week. That's kind of the minimum hygiene you need to do to be a citizen. My friend Annie Leonard from Story of Stuff taught me that that's just the most basic we got to do that. The second is you know, giving money, right the redistribution. If you have money,

you know, give some of it away. Totally agree. I talk to a lot of people who don't really realize that there's been this sort of time on a tradition in many religions and cultures of giving ten percent of your wealth away every year. That seems like a lot too many people. I think that's the kind of the second minimum is to really give back if you have it, and if you don't, of course you can't, so that's a second. The third is, you know, to see what's

wrong and raise your voice out in the world. You know, get out there and protest, stand out in the streets, or write a letter and engage with the political process in that way that obviously we've seen around the country that can make change as well. But that's a sort of sporadic kind of thing that we do. It's performative, it's exciting. It's not really building the new, it's kind

of trying to tear down the old. Also important. There's a fourth thing that I think we don't think about enough because it sometimes feels too small and it sometimes feels like it's just a drop in the bucket, but it actually is how we begin to build those citizen muscles that make us more and more effective as change agents and really demonstrate the new. And you're seeing it a lot around COVID right now with these kind of

mutual aid societies. Is one example, which is like, you don't need a big theory of change to change the world. Go out in your community and see what's not being done, See who needs a little bit of help in your community, and start just offering that help one on one two people bring your gifts in terms of volunteering to make a safer space in your community. If you think that there needs to be more equity in the world, figure out who in your community is basic needs are not

being that and go out and feed some people. And in doing so, what happens is you get involved in a different kind of economic exchange. You're giving your time, you're giving your resources but not your financial resources, to new systems, and when you do, you start to meet other people who are meeting their needs outside of the traditional methods, and you're starting to kind of build these

new economies. A lot of the most powerful they're they're multibillion dollar worker cooperatives out there in the world, like the Mondergone Corporation in Spain. They produce a huge amount of value and they're all owned not by investors, they're owned by their employees. These companies were built by people in small towns figuring out how to support each other little by little, and in doing so, eventually they started building businesses that they owned together. And now there's some

of the biggest businesses in Europe. But their whole goal is to help build community health. So um, as simple as it may sound, is like, how do you get out there and give your gifts in your community one on one and when you do, you're going to start joining other communities of change. People also find this on the Internet in a lot of ways, to like the people who decided that they want to help build world

knowledge by joining Wikipedia and becoming an editor. People who start to get involved in gift economies where you know, it's it's feeling belonging, it's feeling like you're part of something. It's so much better than getting paid for it. We were talking before the show about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

Many of the things that we take the most joy in we never get paid a sent for and science shows that when we start paying people for the things they love, they stopped loving it and they stop wanting to do it anymore. So again, can you go out and find a sense of pleasure that doesn't involve economic exchange, that involve service, and that's how we start to build the seeds of the new economy. I think those are great ideas, and I like the idea of here are

the different levels and different steps you can take. And I think that idea of just starting where you are in the community you're in with what you can do is so important because I think we get very hung up on having to do something really big, you know, We get very hung up in We've got to make this massive change, you know. And I think what that often does is stops us from making any change, because massive change is pretty hard to do if you're just

a person, you know. And it's sort of a point we make on this show all the time around slightly different topics. But when you start stringing together little actions, little of this little that it builds it and accumulates, and it starts to build a momentum, and like you said, you start to meet other people and you're exposed to

other ideas in other ways that you can participate. Yeah, and I think that we often get confused because we get burnt out from these little actions that don't make any change at all that we've been sold as our primary way of making change, which are these consumer actions like well, if you recycle or if you buy kind of better packaging or something like that, you're going to

save the world. And that kind of seemed exciting for a minute when we were like, oh, better packaging, we kind of know that there's no amount of recycling, and then we hear that of recycling is just dumped in the ocean or whatever, and we start to realize that these little consumer actions are buying the green product is

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

to happen. But what's planting a seed is when you get out again into that community and you start interacting with other people in giving your gifts, and you start making it a part of your identity in your social life. That's where you're starting to build community and new opportunities open up, and the radical experience of giving as opposed to buying differently begins to transform you. I mean, even if it doesn't save the world, it makes you. Know.

All these happiness studies show that service direct service makes us happier. So it's like a zero risk thing to do basically, but it points to how we begin to build these new economies of care as opposed to these economies of wealth. We're also learning so much from this pandemic. I'm learning it myself that working sixty hours a week doesn't feed our creativity just the way that we're on these tracks of working so hard. So we've all been forced to step back a little bit from work and

work from home. And many economists think that we'll never have a sustainable economy until we all start working twenty hours a week, consuming less and having more time to do care work, to do community gardening, to be involved

in volunteer work. And so in some ways, this radical act too, of d prioritizing some of your pay work for volunteer work and community work is also a step towards what has been really studied as a more sustainable economy, which is a whole other conversation we could have excellent I'd like to change directions a little bit here and talk a little bit about your book, Unsafe Thinking, how to be nimble and bold when you need it the most, Because I think that these acts were talking about our

inherently creative acts to some degree, right, they need us to step outside of our comfort zone. And so I wanted to start with some of your working and safe thinking and really talk about what you refer to in there is the safe thinking cycle. Essentially, what feels good is to rely on what you know. What burns the least glucose in your brain is to rely on old patterns of thinking. And we think, well, I've had success in this way in the past, and so I'm going

to fall back on that. And in some ways that makes sense, Like we can't just approach the world as an infant every day and try a million new approaches. But when the world around us changes really quickly, we start to get this sense that, like, maybe what I was doing two years ago is not still working. And the first response to that is usually not, well, who, I'll go try some new things. It's a certain amount

of fear and stress. You see, you're heading for that cliff. Now, what happens in the brain when we get fear and stress something called cortical arousal. Cortical arousal starts to send stress hormones to your brain. It's really good for giving you energy and giving you motivation and drive, but it also does something kind of strange and not helpful in

a world where change is important. So when we evolved on the African savannah, we would get a lot of cortical arousal when a lion would jump out at us, right, and the lion jumps out, and what happens is your peripheral vision shuts down, all your bodily systems shut down, and you get into this kind of stress response where you gain power and energy to do what you know will work, what you've done before, to fall back on instinct.

And so what you do when you get stressed is you double down on that same thing you were doing before and you say, Okay, I'm gonna change. I know I'm gonna change, but WHOA not today because this is really crazy. This is just what I better take the safe fruit and you know that sort of works because

it feels comfortable. But you know, you repeat that cycle five hundred times and now the world has changed around you so much at what you did before was irrelevant and your left clinging to this branch that is, you know, swiftly cracking and you can't let go of it. So that's what I call the safe thing cycle. You get stressed, stress makes you act in stereotypical ways. You get more stressed because you're not changing, and there's really no way

to avoid that. That That is a physiological response. So I studied a lot of the science like, well, you know, how does anyone ever get out of this? And what it turns out is the only way to get out of it. And I use the story of Mahatma Gandhi, who you know, was incredibly shy, incredibly had no ability to speak in public. He got thrown out of being a lawyer in Indian had a runaway because he couldn't even speak up in court, and when that fear would

rise up in him, he would shut down. And on a train trip across South Africa, where he had fled after failing in India, when he was kicked off a train for being a person of color freezing on the platform, he felt that fear and that shut down, and he promised himself that in that moment he was going to take that sense of fear and use it as his

kind of power. He was gonna say, from now on, when I get stressed, I'm going to see that that means that I'm on the edge of some potential creative breakthrough. And he spoke about how he used that then to keep putting himself in the most risky situations he could and build more and more personal power. And so the way out of this. The more that we try to press down feelings we don't like, the more those feelings tend to well up. So you can't stop your stress.

But if you start to reframe stress, take that moment when you're feeling that arousal and say, oh, this is a sign that there's an opportunity opening up for me here when I'm outside of my comfort zone. This is a moment for creativity. And you start to reinterpret those signals, you can get out of that safe thinking cycle. So basically, now, whenever I feel stressed out and overwhelmed, I pause and asked myself, am I feeling stressed out and overwhelm because

I'm trying something new? And if I'm trying something new, I'm in a situation that demands newness from me. I can use that as energy to get into what I call unsafe thinking, which yeah, does involve more risk, but also gets out of that stereotypical cycle that kind of tends to break us down. That story of Gandhi is so inspirational to think of somebody who became so influential as starting from being so afraid. And he said he never lost that fear, he never got rid of it.

He never liked to go to parties. He was still afraid that he would be rejected. But every time he felt that fear, it kind of doubled down his resolve to treat it in a way that was productive for himself for the world. Yeah, and you talk about Steven C. Hayes in that section of the book. He's been a guest on the show several times, and you know, you talk about his idea of how we think that we have a way of dealing with things in the external world.

If there's something in the external world and we don't like it, if we can, we try and change it, but that when we apply that internally, we get stuck. Yeah, that's right. There's all these great studies that I quote, and you know, Steven Hayes's work is really influential in my book. But they put participants in a study, they

cause them pain. They put their arms in ice water, and they some of them they said, try not to feel this pain, and for the others they just said, you know, breathe and let it go, and the people who tried not to feel pain felt way more pain than the people who just kind of went with it. And so he uses that as a kind of an example of the more that you resist that fear. And

this really is true in so many ways. Like I use this idea in the book, like what if Gandhi had said, every time I feel that fear, I'm gonna do my best not to feel it. Right, he already tried that he ran away from India to South Africa. He would have just kept going smaller and smaller until he was a shut in, and then, you know what, he probably wouldn't feel that fear anymore until he realized that he was never leaving the house and his life had fallen apart. And then you have all this other

kind of fear. So no matter how small you make your life, you're never gonna stop feeling that fear. And no matter how successful you are, I think you're still never gonna stop feeling that fear. But if you you know, interpreted as your friend essentially, which is you know it's hard work, uh, then your personal power starts to come out, your creative power. I guess that goes with feeding right, like, what are you going to feed? Right? Yeah? Right, And

it's really that you said it. They're sort of accepting the fear, the anxiety, whatever the uncomfortable emotion is as being part of it and then reimagining it as fuel for creativity. We are not too long ago interviewed a woman named Lisa Feldman Barrett who has done a lot of really interesting research about how we construct emotions. We're taking bodily signals, were taking other cues, and we construct

an emotion. And this is really powerful work in that it says, hey, we can choose to interpret these signals that our physiology is giving us in different ways. And I think it's that idea of oh, if I'm feeling afraid, that's a good sign. I'm pushing myself somewhere, that's good. Yeah, and you're adding another level of clarity to it for sure that I hadn't quite thought of before. But yeah, it's like my hands are clammy, my heart's beating fast,

I'm sweating. Those are all physiological signs of fear. If you can step back, you know, through meditation or just through awareness or studying heroes of yours like like Gandhi and seeing well, what's the step between that feeling and that reaction? Do I have agency between the feeling and the reaction? And the truth is that yes, we do. The problem is the safe thinking cycle, you know, puts these ruts in our brain where we skip over the

agency part and just go right to reaction. And again it goes to the parable we started the show with. You have a choice of what aspect of this you feed, and that's where the power lies. But you know, it's certain they're not simple. We're not all going to become GANDHIA overnight. Not simple nor easy at all. And back to what we talked about earlier about how so much of life becomes habitual. These reactions are become entirely habitual.

Fear turn away, anxiety turn away. It becomes so habitually, don't even know it's happening, you know. I write in the book also about this kind of idea of expertise, and I think it's really related to this, where you know, people try to stay in their zones of expertise, They try to stay where they think they know what they're doing.

And I just studied all this great research on the people who create the biggest creative opportunities are those who intentionally do things that they suck at, things that humble them, that they feel that they're bad at, they have nothing to prove. We make all these neurological connections where we're in that space where we're failing constantly, those early phases of learning something new outside of our zone of expertise.

We are gaining all these lessons both about how to fail and how to be humble and how to take chances that are low risk. But then also we start building up these analogous ways of thinking. So if you've never done ballroom dancing before and you're a computer programmer, in those first few months of ballroom dancing, you're gonna get all these analogies. Your brain is gonna make all these weird connections across different domains, and your computing programming

will get better. You've gotta get away from that idea that you're ever going to like win a ballroom dancing competition. You know, Like I've been taking singing lessons, you know, my teachers like you're never to perform, and I'm like that, that's cool. I'm never but I'm I'm terrible at it. But like you know, those small incremental improvements that you make, and then also the metaphors for my own creativity are huge.

The other, you know, hilarious thing is that this great body of research shows that the more you think you're an expert, the more likely you are to be wrong. The more highly rate yourself, the worst you're actually doing in the world. So these are all kind of related ways of just you know, getting into that humble, bold, but bad zone and you know, starting to build up new skills as opposed to constantly picking away at those skills that you really baby can incrementally improve but you're

not really making progress with anymore. Right, A lot of this ties back to how do we make change in the world. You know, these things of going out into our community and doing something is something that for most of us is going to feel uncomfortable and we're probably not going to be great at it first, or not quite know what to do, or not know how to do it, And this willingness to step into that is

really an important part of the equation. In my first book, Winning the Story Wars, I focused quite a lot on Joseph Campbell in The Hero's Journey. The reason that that story of a very ordinary person making extraordinary change, which is, you know, the foundation of Star Wars and the foundation of the Matrix, and the foundation of million other things, the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and all

that stuff. The reason that that myth has lived on for so long is it reminds us that the things that we think we can't possibly do, because the hero in those stories is never someone who's big and strong and powerful. It's always the weakest, smallest, the little hobbit. You know, Moses is eighty years old with a list

been before he goes back the face Pharaoh. We look at characters who say, oh, I couldn't possibly do that, and then they through the mentor and through some magic gift that they get, they step out into past their comfort zone and they figure out they suddenly get a new look at why the world was broken. And in taking that adventure, they don't get rich and famous and get all the great stuff in their lives. They heal the world. And so I think this story of stepping

out of the known. You know, in Star Wars, he steps into that creature bar in the episode four, he steps onto the edge of reality and just embraces the weirdness of the world he's stepping into and get so far out of his patterns that you know, he accesses this internal force. And so I think we tell those stories and we love those stories because it's the constant reminder that staying in the world of the known, there's really not that much for us there anymore. But we

can actually be world changing. We change the world if we step into the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable. That's a lot harder than picking up the phone or getting on a website and donating ten bucks. You know, that means coming to contact with people that are different than you. It means hearing other people's stories that may be uncomfortable to you. It may be confronting people who who you don't know how to deal with. But when you get

out into your community, that actually starts to happen. Yeah, in the book Unsafe Thinking, as you're talking about this becoming a beginner again or being willing to venture into these uncomfortable zones. You've got a phrase that I love, which is to try and be an explorer, not an expert, And I think that ties to the hero's journey a lot, right, This is exploration, you know, we're going out to see

what's there. Yeah. I like that explorer idea because it's not like the idea is to be a dilettante, where you just sort of like float through life trying everything with no steaks and not caring. The explorer is somebody who is off in the unknown, but is there to really learn. They're there to learn, and so when someone sees themselves as an explorer, they don't take their mistakes as failure, and they don't give up when things get

really difficult, which they always do. Is you kind of move up that learning curve someone who's explorers on mission, but at a stage where they actually don't know what they're doing. And that's the kind of place that I like to be. Again, I often fall back into doing the things I know really well because it's just so much easier. But I get my energy from getting out

into those zones. I want to back up in the book a little bit and talk about motivation, because you brought up some really interesting ideas, and I told you, you know, I've read hundreds of these books, and there were some some studies in there that I had not come across, and it's really talking about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, and we tend to say, hey, intrinsic motivation is a lot better do something for the love of it, right,

that's the best way to be motivated. And we hear these studies that say, like you said earlier, well, if you start giving somebody money for something they might like to do, sometimes it takes the joy out of it. And yet you make the point that I thought was really good, which is life's not that simple, right, Like, you're doing the work that you're doing because a you love it, you care about it, you're interested in it, and you're making a living doing it. Intrinsic and extrinsic

motivation get layered over each other. But we've often been told that the minute you put extrinsic motivation and you ruin the thing. And I really wanted to talk about an idea in the book that you had called motivational synergy. Yeah, it is true that the things that we most cherish we don't do for extrinsic rewards, and especially the creative things that we do we don't do for money or fame or adulation, etcetera. Is well known. I guess that

perspiration one percent inspiration. We've all heard that. We know that it takes a lot of slog work in order to bring something creative into the world or to you know, do the hard work on ourselves. You come up with an idea and then you've got to go and execute and it's really hard. So what the actual science And you know the problem with pop science obviously, like we

missed the nuance a lot of the time. Right, So we hear the first part about how important intrinsic motivation is, and we forget the second part, which is, well, what does it actually take Once you've had that creative inspiration, how do you stick with it and keep going? And so the idea of motivational synergy is that if you want to motivate yourself to think differently, to do big things, to do creative ideas, to make art, to invent, you

want to really focus on intrinsic motivational factors. You want to do things that feel exciting to you and fun. You want to focus on the impact you can have in the world. You want to focus on just the joy of creation, the actual act of it. That's how you get your great ideas out there. But then we actually start doing it. You need lots of little extrinsic motivators to keep you going, you know, you need those little pieces of candy along the way to kind of

keep yourself committed. You know, I've just had this experience where, like, thanks to the pandemic, I finally got myself to like work out six or seven times a week. Right, So I have an intrinsic motivation. No one's paying me or incentivizing me to do it. I just now I do it because I like it, I enjoy it. But what actually keeps me going from like instead of two times a week to six or seven times a week is I've got some app that gives badges that I feel

accountable to. Some algorithm is giving me a little extrinsic motivators to keep me not you know, on the mat every single day. And so I think that's that's a kind of way that when whether we're managing teams or managing our own acts of creation, we have to remember that it's not one or the other. So let's say

you're managing a team. If you say, well, I'm going to give fifty dollars for the best idea, people are gonna be like fifty dollars for the best idea, and any good idea is worth a lot more than fifty dollars. This is stupid, I'm not doing it. But if you focus that team on the impact they can have on the company in the world for coming up with great ideas, that's where better creativity comes from. But then when it comes to executing those things, and which is no creative work.

It's just kind of like an ongoing measurement data collection, accounting. That's where fun little prizes along the way will actually keep people going, and where you can say I'll give you fifty bucks if you can collect five pieces of data, then someone's actually going to go out and do that. Yeah. I find this such an interesting point because, you know, I started this podcast seven plus years ago simply for

the joy of doing. I had no belief that it was going to be anything but something that was fun to do. You know, I get to talk to cool people and I get to spend time with my producer Chris, and it would be great. And then over time it actually started working. We got a lot of listeners, and all of a sudden, the opportunity to do this for

a living became a possibility. So all of a sudden, now I've got intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, although it was there from the beginning because you're looking at download numbers. How many downloads am I getting? Right, that's not intrinsic,

that's extrinsic. And I found it a really interesting experience to try and move between those motivations skillfully and to recognize, okay, it's normal that they're both there, that I have some intrinsic and some extrinsic, and you know, more often than not, what I need is a reorientation to the intrinsic. That's just I think the nature, at least for me is achievement, as I have to re orient away from the next

thing and re orient towards the work itself. But I found did a really interesting dilemma to work through in my own life, to try and move between those motivations. Yeah, that's great, that's a great example of it. And you know the problem with the Internet and the sort of data world that we live in is you get so much feedback, right, you know what episodes are working. You know, if your goal was to get the most listens, most downloads, most subscribers, and you just didn't care what this show

was about. It's like, I'm just gonna go where the where the subscribers take me. You could begin maximizing and maximizing and maximizing as the initial mission of this podcast slipped further and further away, and in the end you would have, you know, something that you wouldn't recognize anymore. You would no longer be creative. We see this so often.

This is why there's so much stupid content on the Internet is because not just people but algorithms are just trying every combination until you get something that hits the part of the brain that says, oh cool, I gotta pass this along, or not even pass this along, this is gonna sort of just maximize engagement. You know. We worked on this film, The Social Dilemma this this year, and this really points out how we're living in these

worlds of lowest quality content for maximum engagement. And so if you don't have that core and that center of like what am I doing this for? What am I on this earth for? You will wind up with your million followers, and then those million followers will be gone when the platform changes or when people realize how how vapid your your content has become. But if you're like, no,

I'm going to combine. You know, the extrinsic motivation of getting more downloads and subscribers is feedback from your audience about how to better do your mission. Then you've got that synergy right, Like, no one wants you to do your mission. If no one's listening, it's not really helping. But if you've got that kind of feedback loop of really trying to do the most service for the right people, that's where I think the most creativity comes from. But

you know, you're the podcast. You definitely know better than I do. But it sounds like the right kind of story to me. We get people who will be like so and so will be a guest on the show, and I'm like, so and so is huge, But then I'm like, I don't really want to talk to so and so that much, you know. So, I've really tried hard to say my criteria. I said this to you beforehand.

You were like, how did you come across me? And I said, well, I must have seen one of your books, because my criteria is do I want to read that book? If I do, then that person becomes a guest because then I get to read their book. And I've tried really hard. I'm not saying I'm perfect at it by any stretch, but I've tried hard to really say, let me let that continue to be the guiding criteria of whether I think a guest is the right fit. Does it interest me? And then trust that if it interests me,

it's going to interest the people who listen. But again, it's an orientation back towards intrinsic. Yeah, and I guess the whole thing is just a sort of interesting world we live in now, where like people try to create art or try to create creativity with these constant feedback loops, how do you manage them productively? Let good ideas? Just to take chances with this, you know, constant minute to minute feedback cycles. It's hard, and it's hard for artists,

right right. You talk about in the book this idea when we're talking about learning of putting off important decisions or leaving your creative options open longer. You talk about a tendency people have two seize on an obvious solution and then freeze on it. Say a little more about that. Yeah, this is one of the things I hate the most about creativity because I move quickly, I think quickly. I like to come up with solutions and try to make

them happen. The problem is this kind of also goes to this trap of intuition that we wind up in, which is like we feel in our hearts all of a sudden, we have these flashes of insight like oh, I get it. I know what to do about this, and that might come from a really deep sense of knowing, like this really good research on how intuition can be this sort of underground synthesis of all you've learned in your life and all these heuristics you're building, and intuition

can also be this just expression of bias. Right, We've seen all this work on how people you know, make snap judgments, how wrong those snap judgments can be. So we don't know. You know, if you've got an idea for a film, is like, I want to make this film. It sounds amazing. That could be because your whole life

experience has led you to that moment of inspiration. It could be because two weeks ago you saw a film just like it and you forgot you saw it, and now you want to make it like that's kind of the boundaries of how this stuff kind of works. So what the recommendation is you're thinking of ideas, the best thing to do is to generate a lot of them and to listen to that voice that says, these are the best ones. I like them. But then also let it just date and try to clear out all the

most obvious ideas. Exhaust yourself by generating as many ideas as you can, and push yourself then to come back for another session where all the easy ideas are off the table, and to try to solve the problem for whatever you're trying to solve with ideas you hadn't thought of as you and your team exhausted all the obvious ones, and then come back and take a look at what's left on the table, and you want to look at

the ones that are resonating with you. You know, I don't believe that the way to get to the great of success is then to immediately go ask a hundred thousand people on the internet what they think. That's not how we really just ate great ideas, look at the ones that appeal to you on a intuitive emotional level, and then do the hard work of asking yourself where is this intuition coming from Is it because I've seen this done before? Sometimes doing things that have been done

before is actually a good idea. But why is this resonating with me? Is it resonating with me because it reminds me of something personal in my life that I've enjoyed, And then would that resonate with my audience or would that resonate with those I'm inventing for. I study a lot of investors in Silicon Valley and how they tend to invest in founders they believe in and that just feel right to them. But it turns out that those people always look pretty much like them, same skin color,

same age, same educational background. So they can't stop. They're never gonna stop feeling it about people. But you want to ask, you know, do I feel it because of past experience with people just like this, or do I feel it because of the actual data and things that they're saying. This is why the Viennese Philharmonic couldn't get any women into the orchestra. And they're like, well, we just can't. We're listening, we're picking the best people and

they're all men. But then they put them behind screens and did blind auditions, and suddenly you know the orchestra is now almost gender balanced because that intuition can be so clouded by those snap judgments. So again the idea is like, get those ideas out there, get the non obvious ideas out there, and then judge all those ideas based on where you think your intuition is coming from, correcting for the biases that you think you have based

on your life experience, gender, class, etcetera. I found that the most fascinating part of the book because it's a question that I wrestle with a lot, and I've thought a lot about. And you could go find fifty people who could tout for us how good intuition is, and then we could find a ton of people who could talk about all of our cognitive biases. All of our implicit biases are heuristics that aren't helpful, but I've very

rarely seen anybody talk about them together very much. Yeah, it was the hardest thing to write, Yeah, because it's not an easy answer, right. I often think about intuition as like, yeah, you have a gut sense of something, But man, have I had lots of gut senses. I mean, I was a heroin addict for years. Like, I mean, you know, I was pretty certain I was always making the right decision, and I could not have been more wrong, you know. So I just always think that question of like, yeah,

intuition is valuable, and it goes wrong so many ways. Yeah, I mean, you can't go out there and convince anybody who's had a good intuitive insight to not listen to their gut. You're not gonna get on any podcast saying don't listen to your gut, because we all know that

it works. And yet the whole field of behavioral economics and Daniel Kneman and the work that Michael Lewis wrote about a moneyball all comes from the fact that, like, our our heuristics and our snap judgments are terrible, and we have to use this kind of medicognition that we've been talking about on this show this whole time, basically, which is like step back from your judgments and step back from your automatic thinking and try something new. And

so balancing those two things is just incredibly difficult. The one thing that I would say really works, though, is if you're working in a space, let's say you're evaluating board games, right, that's your job. You gotta evaluate board games, and you don't know if you should trust your gut because you've been in the business for fifty years. It seems to work, but you've been slowing down lately. You're

not picking great board games lately from inventors. Strange example. Now, but let's say that you're not going to be able to start picking the ones you don't like. That's never gonna work. But what you can start doing is start playing games in your spare time that are very different than the games you usually play. Start talking to people

who are very different than you. Start looking for people who see the world differently, and immerse yourself in unfamiliar experiences and ask yourself, how can I get as much input that breaks my patterns of thinking as possible so that when then I do go into those places where I'm relying on my intuition, my intuition has been shaken up quite a bit, right, So some researchers at Harvard we're able to kind of overcome some of their implicit

biases by just flashing pictures on the screen of people of different races in unexpected jobs and life situations, and by just exposing themselves again and again. Two things that break their stereotypes, their actual implicit biases went down. So if in your spare time you're exposing yourself to new information, new kinds of people, and new situations, your intuition is going to get better. If you're stuck in the same kind of environments, your intuition is going to get worse

and worse and worse. And I guess in some ways, like this whole book is this all the same theme, which is right, like that things work for a while and then they stop working. And if you don't expose yoursel often new inputs, all those things that worked will stop working. And that's, you know, the same first safe thinking cycle as it is for how to build good intuitions so you can cultivate your intuition, and doing that

is a really powerful way. We also do that by creating more diverse teams, right, We don't just trust our own intuition. We share our intuition with diverse people, and that creates a way to correct for those biases as well. Yeah, that's such a good summary of those things, and it makes me think about my example of being like a drug addict, right, was that my world was so small, you know it was collapsed down to only one thing mattered,

you know, So of course the intuitions were terrible. And I feel like we can't leave this point without at least a brief introduction of the most inspiring mayor I have ever read about. I'm terrible at pronouncing names, so I'm gonna let you do it, so I don't butcher it. Yeah, his name was Mochus, and he came into Bogata in the nineteen nineties when it was the most dangerous city in the world. It was the worst place to live on you know, the drug wards were raging in Colombia.

People were leaving the city and droves trying to leave the country if they could. And he came in as this really crazy kind of outsider who nobody expected. And the way that he got onto the political stage to begin with was that he was the chancellor of university and all these young people were protesting the decline in

the services that you know, we're not his fault. The city was declining and so was the university, and there was like a protest was raging, and he had to get up in front of all of these students and he had to somehow calm them down and he started talking, but no one was listening, and so he steps to

the front of the stage. He turns around, he drops his pants, and he moons the crowd and everyone starts cracking up, and um, it breaks the tension in the room, and everyone sort of goes home and they're able to negotiate in a more calm way. And based on this crazy stunt, he winds up getting elected as this independent

mayor of the city. And basically what he thinks is that like the entire population is in this sort of rut of thinking and this kind of loggerhead approach to being at odds with each other, and he thinks that if he can shake people up like the mooning incident, he can somehow start to break those patterns of thinking and find new solutions. So, you know, one of the things that he did was quite famous was there was one of the most dangerous cities in the world, pedestrians

being killed all the time. Nobody followed the traffic regulations and putting more police on the streets like did nothing. So he hired five hundred mimes and their goal was just to make fun of embarrass the people who weren't following the traffic regulations. He actually fired a whole bunch of the police to hire the mimes. And so the

minds go out there. When people are not following the crosswalks, the minds come behind them and start making fun of them, or when when a driver's being a jerk, a mind kind of pops out and everyone starts laughing and making fun of them. And they found that the traffic finds that you could just get away with or just bribe

your way out of. They had no impact, but both the joy and also the embarrassment of being mocked by a mime had a huge impact, and the numbers plummeted in traffic debts, and in fact, many of the policemen applied for to get their jobs back as minds. And so this was a famous way that he broke those expectations,

broke the standard operating procedure, and changed the city. Like but the story is really that come forth from his learnings are not just these cool little novelties, and actually the city found itself again and became one of the most successful cities in South America on any number of levels. And he did it all with his purpose. What was

really interesting was that he essentially was a clown. But he hired all these behavioral economists to think about how human motivation really works and to break those patterns of thinking and thought in a civic way. So it was very scientific, even though it was also extremely theatrical. You know, I tell that story basically because I want people to

think a little bit about counterintuition. If you cannot get down a path straight to your goal, how do you find and take risks to go on paths that are sideways. It seemed to make no sense, But what really happened was he just started a new chain of logic. He didn't say, what's a good solution to the same problem. He kind of redefined the problem. The problem is not that we have too many traffic deaths. The problem is

that citizens don't respect traffic laws. And when he took that problem and ran it with his behavioral economists, new solutions started becoming possible. So sometimes just redefining the problem and then being willing to take risks can open up new solutions. Well, I think that's a great place to end, except I did want to circle back very briefly to that simple trick of using a screen saver. You know, showing like black people in very successful positions, or you

make the example of short, bold executives. You know, things that break our our biases. And I just wanted to hit that again really quickly because I found that such a simple and powerful idea for reducing our implicit bias. So you kind of said it, nothing else to say, but we jumped by it, and I wanted to highlight it because I thought it was a particularly important thing. We're at the end of our time. I've loved this conversation.

You and I are going to talk briefly in the post show conversation a little bit about how to work with distraction and ways to avoid getting distracted listeners. If you're interested in the post show conversation, you can get access to that as well as ad free episodes and a special episode I do call the teaching song and a poem each week, and the joy of supporting an independent podcast that needs your help by going to when you Feed dot net slash joint. Jonah, thank you so

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