Good a team. It's Harps, it's Melissa, it's doctor Bo, who you'll meet in a minute. It's the You Project. It's bloody Thursday night at eight seventeen, Melissa, what are you doing?
You know?
I'm old. You know that I peak at about nine am and it's a spiral after that. What are you doing to me?
I reckon, you've come back to life. I can tell you're a bit excited about this.
And I may or may not have had some kind of neotropic at about ten No, not ten to five. I may or may not have. I don't know if that's ethically gets the tick from the dock, So I'm not going to commit either way. How's your day been, Melissa?
It has been good. Thank you very good? And yourself well.
I lifted heavy stuff and I had a miracle happen today. I might well with my eyes. Remember I told a miracle. Yes, I had a miracle. Maybe the doc can explain to us why. And I don't want to tell my two minute story with him sitting in the wings, So let's say, hi, Hi, doctor Bo, how are you.
I'm well. I love the fact that I'm talking to someone who had a miracle.
Yeah, miracle. I don't know. The Vatican haven't ticked it off yet. It's a matter of time.
Okay, the sainthood is in your future.
Well we discovered before.
Do you do the miracle? Or was it done to you?
It was done to me?
Or were you alone? Was this like too much sort of intimate detail?
Well no, it was. Hang on, I'll give you the story. Now. I know this is unorthodox and you've never started a podcast ever like this. Oh good, so we'll feel free to chop it out. So my eyes have been I'm fifty eight, so my eyes started going to crap at about early forties, just started wearing most people. When I
was it was literally I was overseas. I was in Colorado when I was doing some gigs, and I was at a place called Breckenridge, and I was trying to read, and I'm like, what's wrong with what's wrong with this book or screen or whatever? And then I realized anyway, so I went and bought myself. I think they were reading glasses, and they were just like a one, you know, one magnification. Anyway, I put on them and everything was clear, and I went, well, I'm getting old. My eyes as shit.
And then I went eventually to one half, then two and you know the deal. And then I got some proper glasses which are kind of multifocals, so I can look up here and see long distance, look down here, read anyway. I I feel like lately reading through the same glasses my vision's gotten worse, or looking through the same glasses. So I went and got the old number twos out of the desk, the reading glasses to you know what it's like when you're doing a PhD. I'm
reading one million bloody research papers. And I thought, oh, maybe somehow these will be better. I put them on and they were souper for blurry, and I went, my eyes, I'm almost blind. And then I thought, I'm going to walk up to the pharmacy chemist. What do you call it over there? What do you call a pharmacy or chemist?
Well, in the States is a drug store, but in Britain, as you know, it's chemist or pharmacy. And where am i I'm in ib it's a pharmacy here.
Cool anyway, I went up there when I'm going to just get some off the shelf, and I went, I put on the twos, which is where I stopped last time, and I couldn't see shit. I put on two and a halfs. I'm like, oh god, I must I'm going to have to stop driving soon. I must be legally blind. Then I tried threes. It was still blurry, and it only goes to three and a half and I'm like, if these don't work, I'm not sure what I'm going
to do. And they didn't work. Everything was blurry, but it was almost like the higher the number, the blurrier it got. So, being the scientific genius that I am, I went, why don't I tried less than two th thinking there's no way, but you know the evidence so far. So I tried one and a half and it was pretty good. I'm like, what is this? And then I tried one and that was it And now I'm a one, Like my eyesight is better than it used to be. What is that about? Neuroscience? Man? So that no pressure?
That's a good question. I mean, let's see, first of all, how far away were you holding these things your face? Because if you're holding like a five meters away, then you know.
Maybe fourteen or fifteen inches.
Okay, you know it is possible for your I is to get but I mean, it's there. There's a there's research suggests that as you sort of let yourself go to more and more mag magnification, your brain will then adapt to that. So I personally try to keep it a low modification in order to have my eyes work. So I'm about your age. I'm only a few years younger than you, and like you, my eyes, like most
people start going at forty. It's remarkable, like clockwork. Yeah, and then you sort of work to keep your eyes working. And I'd say this is true in life, right, because your brain, you know, evolved to adapt, and so we're constantly your brains like a muscle, you use it to lose it. It is your your eyes. The muscles of your eyes. You know, they're getting weaker, stronger depending on how you work with them.
Well, right, I'm going to call it a miracle. You can call it science. I don't care.
Miracles. But isn't science like the study of miracles. I mean, it is quite miraculous the world, isn't it.
I think everything is miraculous. I think humans miraculous. I think you know I like, I mean, I'm sure you like when I did first time round at UNI, when I did anatomy in physiology to reasonably, I'm like, how how on earth is all this stuff in here and it does what it does? Like, I mean, I know there's so many things, but just the body is ridiculous.
It's absolutely true. I mean we share that passion. I was my background as an undergrad at Berkeley back in the eighty six to ninety one, and the so as anatomy physiology major. So we'd have average out on the out on there and you know, of course you treated everything with respect and everything, but it was it was just remarkable looking at the body and thinking that this even works, and then when you literally get to understand it. And this is why, you know, I think the Romantic
movement is a wonderful thing. But of course they were sort of anti science because they found by explaining something it became less beautiful. But doesn't it actually just increase the beauty because it just increases the wonder of how this thing even worked. I mean, just thinking about the nephron of a kidney and how you get the filtration. Quite apart from this ultracomplex structure that we most possibly the most complex structure we have sitting on top of
our shoulders, right. So I was actually a developmental My PhD was a developmental neuroscience. So I used to study how the brain grows, because just development is itself inherently fascinating. How do we go from a cell to billions and billions of cells and the thing works incredibly remarkable, right, And each of those cells has the same genetic information, but it gets specialized and then and then how it
all interacts. And then what's also I find remarkable, And what science has actually been not so good at, you know, over the years, is that, you know, science and the reductionist method actually eliminates the very thing that biology is trying to understand, which is life. And life has actually lives at the interactions between stuff and the stuff, but interactions with But the reductionist method gets rid of those interactions, gets rid of the very thing that we actually have
passionate about about emerging. How does this stuff emerge from interaction? Yeah, yeah, it's remarkable.
All right. Now, before we get too farther further in, let me just.
We're going to cut all that out.
Now, we're keeping all that that was great. I just feel like I feel like I better tell people who they're listening to Melissa, you will love this. So Bo is the founder and CEO of a lab or it's just called Lab of Misfits. I can't tell you how much that name appeals to me because I've made a misfit my whole life. So I definitely belong. I need at least an honorary membership. So that's gorgeous, Bo says, what yep, I'll tell you what. I'll follow up on
that very insecure. You don't know how much that would help. Once you understand how works, you can't but see yourself in the world in a different way and engage in it a different way. I want to talk to you a lot about perception. I'm sure you actually I do, and I don't because I feel like you must get sick of banging on about the same stuff. Here's a little bit of your bio. Doctor Bolotto is a neuroscientist
and world renowned expert in perception. Is research explores the way in which we experience the world through our own versions of reality. As both says, the brain never sees the world as it actually is, only the world that is useful to see. By illuminating these principles, the perception has helped individuals and companies transform their approach to create
creativity and innovation. All right, my first real grown up question for you differentiate and this is a bit of a naff question, but what's at the intersection of the brain and the mind or are they intertwined or they tell me that just what you know, we don't see things as they are. We see things as we are. Which is that often quoted idea that's been accredited to
different people. But is it? Is it? Are we recognizing and perceiving and downloading and storytelling through the mind or through the brain?
Uh? Through the brain? I mean, I'm materialist, I'm not a duellist. So the mind is the function of the brain. If we see something or hear something or do something different, that's your brain doing doing what it does. Yeah. And what's more is the brain we so often forget is the brain is embodied. You know, brain is part of a body of body is in our world. Uh. And
you know Silicon Valley keeps forgetting this. You know that, you know, trying to do everything virtual, but you know it's we make meaning and all that by physically engaging with the world, in which case it also means that we have kind of an extended feenotype. We're also again getting back to that interaction. Your brain doesn't exist in isolation,
in interaction with other brains and so perception. That's why we have a T shirt that says, you know, be in between that in some sense, that's where your brain lives. It's constantly in between. It's constantly making things.
Yeah, right, by.
Interaction in whiskeys, you can't really understand the brain outside of its interaction with the world.
Understand the idea, the idea of the brain analyzing itself.
Isn't it though, I mean it's it's uh. I mean, that's one of its remarkable capacities and capabilities, right, But but yeah, it is, uh, it is the brain. But we could celebrate that's.
The idea, like the it. I mean, I love innovation, and I listened to a little bit of a guy called Alex Friedman, who you may or may not know from M I T. Who's like a real pioneer in AI and a bunch of other stuff that I don't really get, but there are they're talking about, you know, machine learning and autonomy and machines, robots, AI or whatever
that will think, I just I don't. I mean, I guess it depends on how you define thinking, but thinking, cognition, creativity, decision making in interpretation, like my version of cognition and metacognition. I don't think a machine can do that. What about you?
Well, right, not right now, but in principle I think it could. I mean, my lab has been doing artificial intelligence for about twenty twenty five years. We have the first artificial networks that saw that see in some sense the same illusions that humans see.
Wow.
And because the neural networks, basically if we unless you think there's something inherently special about the connectivity of the brain, as opposed to special something special about networks. What's important about networks is interaction, and then you get emergence as a consequence of those interactions. Think about the metaphor I like using is the whirlpool. So whirlpool is a function
of the interaction between water molecules. Without an interaction, the warlpool doesn't exist, right, But the whirlpool does physical stuff in the world. You know, it can sink ships if it's big enough. Yeah, right, you get rid of it. But you couldn't predict a whirlpool by studying any individual water molecule. So the mind, you could say, is a
consequence of the interacting between neurons brain cells. Brain cells are like water molecules, right, and so in some sense information comes in and it generates different kinds of warpools in your brain, and those warpools are what you see.
Yeah, incredible, what I was thinking. Also though, with humans, so our thinking is intertwined with emotion, with feeling, with previous experiences, with memories, with Does that not differentiate us between artificial intelligence?
No, because not necessarily, well at the moment, yes, right, Well, it's one way of differentiating us. But the point is that artficial neural networks, for instance, are also networks. So in theory they could also generate emergent patterns, and those emergent patterns have consequence. One consequence for us is that the consequence is to see red or to feel a
certain thing. Right, in principle, there's no reason why they couldn't generate similar consequences from the interaction between artificial neural networks, because again it's a network. So for me, what's inherently important is the interaction between things. Now, those things, right, and and the interaction with john brain cell seems to generate the stuff that we're experiencing. Clearly, why couldn't that also be happen through the interaction between artificial systems artificial elements.
What about the individuality person and person of how I think and perceive and process the same stimulus. Like ten people go through the same thing event, situation, circumstance, conversation, but they all have a different experience.
Yeah, where they're not all going through the same thing. Well, they're not going through.
The being subjected to the same stimulus anyway.
In some sense yes, and in some sense no. Okay, good, So if you walk through let's say, okay, we both walk let's see how could we would be an example? I mean, even if I show you a picture, we're not all at the same picture because it depends on where you look. Yes, right, So you have a phobia, which is a very highly sensitive part of your retina,
and it's really quite small. Right if people hold their handout and you know at arm's length, the sensitivity the fobia is about the width of the thumbnail at arm's length. You know, that's where we're particularly sensitive. And that's what we call foviation. That's where we're sort of really attending and that's where your brain's really processing that information. Now if we but an image is much bigger than that, So you could actually be looking in the upper right
and it might be looking at the lower left. We're getting very different experiences. And what if I go from the lower left to the upper right, that might change my interpretation, whereas you're going from the upper right to the lower left right. If you meet one person before another person, right, it's going to change the person you first meet, it's going to change your perception of the second person. But you could say we both met two people, we both met the same people, So our experiences are
always different. What's more, the history that we're bringing to this experience is different.
Yeah. Yeah, So excuse me for asking a dumb question, what's an experience?
What is an experience? Well, I suppose it really depends on what it is in some sense that we're measuring. So you could say, so, what do you mean from the individual person?
Well, I'm thinking there's so much subject there's so much subjectivity and assigning everything. Yeah, and assigning it, you know. So one of the things I say when I'm talking to a big group. Right, So I do a lot of public speaking, and I talk about, you know, not to the level you do, so feel free to correct me. And Melissa take notes because I can use this man's
brain and take all the credit. I talk about, you know, the reality that we're all in the same room on the same day, listening to the same dude say the same words with the same intention. You're all sitting in identical seats and same lighting. Everything. All these stimuli are the macro of what we're in right now, but the
micro is the way that you process everything. So we're in the same room, we're in the same workshop, but we're not in the same experience and so so, and then I talk to them about so, you know, is it possible that right now, some somebody finds what I'm saying fascinating. Therefore their experience is fascination. Somebody finds me boring the experiences boredom. Somebody finds me offensive, their experience
right now is offence, and so on. And then we go, well, where is that experience that version of your reality coming from? Is it about me? Or is it about your response to me? And we kind of hope where and Now this kind of opens the door a bit anyway in my space on metacognition is starting to think about why we think or respond the way we do.
Yeah, thinking about thinking. So the the experiences are different, that's for sure, to you for your audience. In fact, when I do like you, I do quite a bit of public speaking or professional speaking, and at one point in my talk I'll say everything I'm saying to you right now is meaningless.
Yeah. I saw you say that on a Ted talk and I'm like, that's so brilliant but fucking confusing, because.
It literally is right, Because I mean, if we didn't exist, these these sounds that we're making have no meaning. Yeah, there's no inherent meaning in any of these words. Right. This is not laws of physics, This is not gravity. Yeah, right, there is no meaning in these utterances. No one but us understands them. So for not here, they don't make you know, there is no meaning. Your brain's not interested
in data, right, your brain gets information. So if you're giving a talk, if I'm giving a talk, people are you know, they're geting sound waves that's vibrating in the ear drums, right, that's not actually what they're hearing. What they're hearing is the meaning of that data. They don't hear the data, They're not seeing the data, right, And what their brain is doing is they're making a meaning of it. And the reason why they have to do
that is because there is no inherent meaning in that data. Now, data exists, right, the physical world exists. And like I like to say, you know, if a tree falls in the woods, doesn't make a sound, and the answer is no, But it makes energy, sound vibration, right. The sound is a function of our brain. The brain then turns out of information into the perceptual experience that we become aware of. What is that perceptual experience? It's a meaning. It's a
meaning that isn't inherent in the data itself. Where does that meaning come from? It comes largely from our history of what that information meant for a behavior in the past. Right. So if someone hears here's me say a word or not a word makes here a sound, it means something to them because in the past it meant something before, right, and then they generated behavior. It's like that worked, okay, brilliant, I'll keep I'll stick with that meaning. Or that didn't work. Huh,
maybe I'll change that meaning. And we're constantly doing this all the time, and this is what evolution's doing, right. We're constantly changing the structure of our brain according to trial and error experience, whether that be over millennium genetics or over a second in changing the connections between our neurons. So we're doing that all according to feedback.
Yeah, straight up, smarty pants. And I thought my eye story was fucking fascinating. That was a yawn fist.
I like your eye story.
So he's he's one of my questions. Doc. So you are a really good science communicator, which there are not many people. Andrew Huberman's pretty good. You're good, You're great. Okay, so let me paint this picture. You're in front of a thousand people. You're in an auditorium. They're not you. They're not neuroscientists. They're maybe not even scientists. Most of them. They're people who work for the XYZ Foundation or organization, and they sell widgets and you're there talking to them
about whatever, how do it? They better think better, do better, produce better, be happy and more fulfilled whatever. So you are sharing thoughts and ideas that you fully understand and concepts that a lot of people wouldn't understand unless you've found a way to disseminate it in a user friendly manner. But you're up the front, You're in your own experience, and there are a thousand people in their own individual experience. How do you in real time navigate that? And I
know this masking this because I want the answer. How do you in real time navigate that realizing that no one including you is in the same experience? And how do you build rapport and connection and engagement and career ID right experience? I now you can't control all of that, but how do you do that knowing that there's such so many different experiences happening.
While there's different experiences, we all have commonality, so we also have it. We were also looking at the world through an evolved brain. So when we think about experience, most of your life happened without you even there. What do I mean by that? So the immediate answer your question is, I try to speak to commonalities, sort of human truths and values, things that are common to all of them. Okay, seeing red is common to all of us, or I can't be inside your head and know whether
your quality of red is my quality of red? It is called the inverted spectrum, right, because I can never be inside anyone else's head, but we will behave towards red in exactly the same way. So by assumption that it's like presumably you're you know, at least behaviorally, we're behaving towards something exactly the same way. Why, because we came into the world being evolved brain Right, you're looking through the eyes of your ancestors. So why is that?
Because you know, the only reason why you're here is because your ancestors did stuff that was useful, right, Rather, they didn't die. So evolution works not by success, it works by failure, so you know, and in fact, this is a really important point and it's kind of a bit of an aside, but there's something called form from failure rather than form from success. So we evolve because we didn't die, not because we are successful. We typically engage with the world to not die rather than to succeed.
They are not symmetrical, right, And it's also really important to become aware of that. And this is one of the reasons why news tends to be biased towards the negative, because we tend to avoid not dying. We don't go towards success. So negative stuff is far more salient to us because die ying during evolution it was easy. It's really easy to die, right, there are billions of ways of dying, not so many ways to survive. M Okay, So we typically tend to buyas towards safety, towards not dying.
So what's the point. The point is that the functional structure of your brain is a history of experience. Most of those experiences were not yours. It could be evolved experiences. So you come into the brain with a functioning, structured brain. Then during development, it then starts refining itself. But that's an environment. It could be a culture environment, a familiar environment, a physical environment that other people also are developing in,
and then you have your nuanced individual experience. So in some sense, you could say, we're all kind of like living in the same suburban house. It's just that our furniture is in different places. Yeah, right, But we make a big deal about the fact that our furniture is different places without realizing the fact that we kind of are all in the same house. Right. What would happen if we actually focused on the house right than the friends. Maybe we'd have a bit more commonality.
Yeah.
Yeah, So to me, this is what's important. The whole reason why I do any of this work partly is because I'm passionately interested in understanding stuff. But once you understand that this is the case, you can't help but have humility.
What's something that you, as a researcher and scientists had, like I'm sure there were many, but maybe one or two epiphanies or aha moments where you something absolutely confounded you or shocked you, or something that you realize you've got terribly wrong and had to let go because you know, we like, as you say in your talks, we like certainty, we like predictability, we like familiarity, we like knowing, and we become very attached to what we think is our
knowledge and sometimes it's erroneous, you know, and we've become very attached to our ideas and beliefs. What was something you needed to unlearn or peraps something that for you was a massive lock bulb? M Well, tell me if I ever got anything wrong? Come on, No.
On the contrary, I get things wrong all the time. But that's what I actually like. Yes, right, so you know, maybe it's a pathology, But what I find beautiful is realizing that shifts not quite what I thought. I love having my assumptions and biases contradicted, not for the sake of it, because now suddenly I understand more so by the irony is that you own I mean, think for your audience, yourself. Have you ever done anything interesting from the position of knowing? Right? Why you do it from
the position of not knowing right? Which is why on my wrist I have a tattoo that says I don't know. Yeah, because you only do anything something. You only do something interesting from the position of not knowing. By definition, if you already know it, how can you do anything right? It's always from the position not knowing. In order to not know, you have to be willing to let go of what you thought to be true before.
Yes.
The problem is we hate doing that because that's to step into uncertainty. Uncertainty again, coming back to evolution, was a really bad idea. If you didn't know, you kind of died. Yes, right.
If you didn't.
Yeah, If you didn't know, I could eat this fruit or that fruit, you died. Right. We evolved to know stuff because it kept us alive, and we evolved to predict because you know, if the food's not coming to me, I got to go to it. But it's unfortunately doing stuff that seems random until I can predict it. Now I know where to wait for it. Now I can capture it, right, So we're constantly so when we can't
predict it's like shit, I don't know what to do. Now, I'm scared because I'm looking at it through my evolved ancestors. That was a moment of potential. That's why our cortosol level goes up. We get stressed, all kinds of things happen. Your brain cells start dying, your immune system degrades. As I mentioned in my talks, you become a more extreme
version of yourself. If you're liberal, you become more liberal if you're conservad Why because you go into familiarity, which is one of the reasons why we get polarization right now. You become more gullible right because you're just trying to find any associations to explain. So, which is why we're getting so many conspiracy theories right now. In this sort of incredible time of global uncertainty, I mean uncertainly always existed, your brain will evolved to deal with it, so we
hate that. But in my case, and not just in my case, in your case, doing your PhD, you're being trained to not know science is nothing but basically increasing uncertainty, the role.
Of exceptional not knowing. Just so you know, yeah, brilliant.
I'm a huge celebrator of being naive. Naive tea is a beautiful not ignorance. But naive tea is a beautiful thing.
But ironically, bo we we I'm generalizing. But we seem to get our sense of self and our identity from what we think we know or our beliefs.
Is that a silly idea?
Yeah, our identity is tied to our beliefs. So when who I am is, oh, i am a vegetarian, or I am a I am a Christian, or I am a Buddhist, or I am an atheist or I am a.
I'm a we tire ourselves Now we identify with nouns, right, And what a silly idea because nouns are necessarily transient. Because okay, so you know, I tie myself to this thing. Then science comes through or someone says that's a bad idea. It's like shit, and I've got to rethink my whole identity. What if we tight our identity of verbs?
Yeah, but do you know what I reckon? Though? We don't go now I've got to change my identity, we go fuck that research at floor.
Well, that's usually what happens right now. But what really depends on whether or not we do that is how open someone is. So people who are more neurotic or less like are more willing to do what you just It's like, screw that. People are more open, are more willing to do that. It has to do with ego. I'm not interested in small or large egos. I'm interested in whether or not your ego's fragile, right, And so if you have a fragile ego where you're gonna you know,
you're not gonna you're not gonna challenge it. But if you have a strong ego, it's like, okay, I don't define myself. I'm willing to define myself in a different way. Let's go for that. It's amazing how narrowly and superficially we so often define ourselves, not only by nouns, but by pretty superficial nouns as well. Yes, why don't we define ourselves in terms of someone who's you know, I'm someone I'm not. I hope to be this person, but in general, as an example, to define myself, I'm someone
who's resilient. I'm someone who's adaptable. I'm someone who's generous. Right, I'm someone you know, a verb, someone who is defined by a process. In fact, in some sense, you could argue Buddhism does that, right, whereas you know I don't necessarily want well, I'm very happy to get in revigion. Whereas Christianity is defined by a noun, Buddhism is much more about a process. I'm someone who's willing to evolve.
I'm someone who's willing to expand right as opposed to I am X. And then if I show you data to show that X isn't valid, more likely, if you've tied your identity to it, you're going to hold yourself even stronger to that, which means I've now pushed you to faith. And the whole point of faith is to believe in it despite the evidence, and we celebrate it so much. Think of every hero you know, they go against all the odds because they just know, you know,
they're completely anti evidence driven. Right heroes right and ironically now that kind of also works the best things in life makes sense.
And also you bring emotion into these beliefs or faith, and now people are defiant and angry, and we have echo chambers, and we have people screaming at each other, and we have people absolutely like people willing to kill each other over things that they can't even prove it like at all. You know, Like I got raised in a really a religious environment, and so I'm a minor expert on religion or my religion anyway, and it's it's we spoke about this recently. You know just how how
discouraged I was. And this is many people's experience, not even discouraged, but condemned for thinking, for thinking for myself and for questioning. You can't question, you conform. You don't question, You don't think yourself. You can't. In fact, if you do that, you're sinning. What sinning? And by the way, I got told this when I was eight.
Bo.
By the way, if you die with a mortal sin on your soul, you will go to an eternal lake of fire and you will burn forever. I'm like, oh, well, that's good news. Thanks for telling me that, father, I mean, fucking hell, who tells a child.
That millions and millions of people tell each other that. So, but it's not just religious education as well. So I like you. It sounds like we came from the same place and I was an altar boy.
Wow, dude, yeah, wow. It is a podcast all by itself, but let's leave it alone.
But and I mean, with that said, there's some really really interesting in some sense truths that exist within all these religions. I was a religious studies miner when I was at Berkeley as well as my because I'm very interested in how people think, how people adapt. There's and there's some really valuable insights there. The problem is thinking about what the source of that is and whether or
not it shouldn't be self evolve and be questioned. I would argue that one of the most dangerous things you can do is not an action, it's a word. And the word is why, right, which is one of the reasons why institutions like governments, especially totalitarian governments, education systems, religions, not all religions, are set up to block that one word because if you ask why, suddenly it's like, wait a minute, you mean it could be different. Well, if
it could be different. Well, now suddenly you've lost a little bit of control over me. Yes, But the way I keep control over you is by saying, look, you don't need to worry about these questions. Come on, you don't like uncertainty anyway, Let's just all be let's just all be certain in the same way. Then we'll all be happy, won't we.
Yeah?
Right, Which is why there's a wonderful phrase which I quote in the book, which is, you know, all revolutions begin with a joke, or rather every joke is a small revolution, because it's to say it could be different. And for me, questions are wonderful. But we don't even educate children to ask questions. Most questions are rubbish. Your questions, of course brilliant, but most questions, most questions are rubbish, right, Which isn't say that they're bad to ask. It's because
asking a good question is really, really hard. It's really hard. It can take fifty years. Think of Einstein. It took years and years and years to ask the brilliant question that he was able to ask. But it's asking questions in the empirical process. To me, science is about asking brilliant questions. Is not about answers. Finding those grilliant but brilliant questions are challenging, right because they challenge our assumed beliefs.
They challenge what we assume to be true already, it requires us to let go of identity, right, which is why my lab works on we're creating an education. We've created an education system resulting the youngest published scientists in the world at eight to ten years old, right, and we're creating now a whole education program around this because our argument is that science is nothing other than play with intention. It's a mindset that says, actually, not knowing
is a brilliant thing, questions are wonderful. It's literally a mindset that enables you to go to the very place we evolved to avoid.
Melissa was telling me about that study before you came on and correct me if I get this wrong. Apparently, because they are all so young that the boffins wouldn't publish the study. But then some other people quoted their research and that got published, and then is that right? Then they ended up getting published.
So what happens? First of all, we couldn't we couldn't get funding for it, ironically from the Welcome Trust, which is supposed to be in public engagement of science because we're doing actual science, like you know, you're supposed to be talking about science, not doing science. And my point is, well, the best way to communicate science is to do science, right you just in the public.
Stop making sense though, will come on the company line, bro stop fucking thinking for yourself.
As opposed to you know, do science and then you know, talk about it. But you know, actually, let's let's get people to truly engage and actually have them walk away with a deeper understanding themselves. Anyway, so we couldn't get the funding for us. We've self funded it, and then we couldn't get it published because not you know, not surprising that the kids didn't have access to the references. They didn't have the history, so we had unique insights
that no one else had known. It was his research done on bumblebees, and the kids design an experiment around whether bumblees can solve a complex problem if then that you know, go to the blue it's surrounded by yellow, but yellow is surrounded by blue. It's a complex problem. And they found the answer. But because they didn't know the history, they couldn't write the introduct to the paper, we can get it published, which creates some really interesting
is science about history or science about new insight? And so that's why I loved about it is it was also challenging science. You know, what is science?
Then?
So then what we were able to do is we we then brought in other scientists. Uh, doctor Maloney wanted a wonderful, wonderful scientist n y U and he then contextualized it because and then and then the paper was published, and then they become the younger publish scientists. But it took two years to get it published. And uh, and now I want to do another study where the kids actually communicate it in story form. What would happen if we had a science paper that it was actually a
children's book? Right, wouldn't that be wonderful? It's still be presenting them, but that's how kids talk. Why would we want to have them talk to each other via science paper? There's nothing wrong with science?
What's I think the same? I think? What is literally? What is wrong with writing? Even stuff that's complicated or deep or not easy to solve, but write it in a way that the general public or the general population can understand. You know so much if you handed you know, like I've been reading today and yesterday one paper. It's forty five pages, right, but it takes takes half an hour to reach one read one page and absorb it and figure it out sometimes, you know, I mean it
wouldn't take it take you one minute. But and I just think this stuff, some of it is so unnecessarily verbose in a way that is difficult to process. And then by the time I figure out what they're saying, I go, oh, okay, well they're just saying that. What didn't they just write that?
You know, yeah, there is that right there, there's you know, you also see this in art as well. You know, by writing it in a very complex way, it gives the illusion of it actually being much more important than it really is. With that said, science papers are also such that they're written, in my view, so that the
scientist is not relevant. Right. You think about when you have someone giving a science talk, they almost never say, or if they're a good speaker, they're not going to say, I I did this, I did that, right, because you're not relevant. What's relevant is the finding. If you're relevant in the finding, well then it's not a good study because it can't be reproduced. So the science paper needs to be depersonalized. It's like, this was discovered, it was observed.
But if it's if I'm relevant in the observation, now, well that's that's an issue. Whereas an artist will say I did this, I did that. What's interesting is when brilliant artists like a friend of mine, Olifar Ellison, I suddenly disappear, right because now they've realized that actually it's something that transcends them, right, and science is about stuff that transcends us. Yeah, yeah, it goes beyond the individual. But then how do you communicate it to people who
are not scientists? And we worked with the UK government with the White Paper for how to communicate climate information to the public. It's you don't present more data to convince people. You have to make it relevant and make them part of it. Yeah, right, say, why why does this matter of team? What can you do about it? What's the meaning of the data, not just the data? Yeah, because your brain works the level of.
Meaning, yeah, and the level of your understanding. Right.
Well that well, it's a really inching question. What's the difference between knowing and understanding? And it's something that the lab's actively pursuing. To me, there's a fundamental distinction between knowing stuff and understanding stuff. Education tends to be focused on knowing stuff. It's on answers. It's uncertainty, right, not ununderstanding, But understanding is actually what your brain wants, because if you understand something, it means you can generalize it. If
I can understand you, now, I can predict you. I can understand what your needs are, what your wants are. That's where love lives. Love lives and understanding someone not to knowing someone. So and that's true in nature. If I understand something now, I can predict to a new experience. But if I just know it now, I'm just stuck to that experience. Now I have to relearn a whole new experience.
Yeah, it's funny like knowledge is. It's almost like something that sits on a shelf in your brain, or it can be, but exactly right. Understanding is a different thing. And I my knowledge and understanding obviously can go hand in hand, but not always, you know. And I used to have friends when I was at school, you know, in high school, and who could literally memorize big chunks of crap and pass an exam and you'd ask them
two days later. They not only wouldn't they know it anymore, but they couldn't explain things to you because they just had basically short terms, like a brilliant capacity to store short term information, and then it was gone. But they didn't understand it, but they could memorize things.
Yeah, that's right. Then we reward that behavior in our society.
Yeah.
Well, that behavior then becomes successful and it perpetuates itself. The reason why that's useful is because it's efficient.
Yeah.
Right, So coming back to you know, you talked on the very beginning about innovation, and innovation has two sides, efficiency and creativity. Were educated to be efficient, Yeah, because victorians. It was a good idea. Things were pretty chaotic. Let's try to make things a bit more efficient. It's not a bad idea. What we've also abandoned is creativity. You have to have the both to be innovative, not just one or the other. Right. But the problem is we
then try to make things creative in an efficiency model. Right, that doesn't work. We need another model that subsumes both creativity and innovation. That's you know, that's what we're focused on. And to me, that's what science is. Yeah, you still got to make findings, you still got to write the paper, you still got to get grants. But I can't say to my PhD sudents, I like that discovery by Tuesday.
Please you could sign that.
I could say that, yeah, but you know, but we still got to try to make discoveries.
So, you know, I feel like there's a place in science for creativity because you you know, you've got to solve problems, and you know that that's a creative process. And even with my research is on a thing called external self awareness, which is your ability to understand that you experience for others. So your ability to accurately represent the way that people you know experience you. It's more than that, but that's the kind of easy route to it.
And it's funny when I ask CEOs or managers or leaders like one simple question that there's many of them never thought about. I go, what do you think it's like being around you? Like some of them are quite uncomfortable, And I go, because I can guarantee you that your version and understanding of you is no one else's. The way you think you are is like nobody in your
organization thinks you are right. And the quick example I give I say to an audience, I say, put your hand up if you've ever heard your voice recorded on audio. Everyone goes, oh god, they put their hand up, and I go, now put up your hand if you think you sound shit, And everybody puts up their hand, and I go, well, here's the news. How how you sound on audio is how the rest of us hear you all the time. And they hate it. And I go, you don't know what you like. You only think you
know what you like. And not only not only not like how I see you, you're also something different for every person in this room. And so we think we get ourselves, but we only get our cells from an introspective space.
That's right. And in any interaction there's about sixteen different In any interaction between two people, there's about sixteen people there, right, correct, correct, there's me that's perceiving me, there's a me that's perceiving you, there's the me that's you know, there's a you that's
perceiving me, the you that's perceiving you. But what's more, I'm also contextual, So there's a certain aspect of me that I'm bringing out with you when there'll be a different aspect that's brought around in a different context with a different person, right, So you know we're a collection of people within as well. We have this illusion that were one thing, and then it's amazing that we can even get on.
It all right, and then you get sorry, dude, go on no.
I mean, that's why I'm a huge fan of naivete and humility because once you if people truly understood, then just know this stuff right, truly felt it, which is why in my own public speaking, I try to get people to feel what I'm saying. Now hear what I say in some sense, as soon as you said it
to them, you've taken it from them. So I get people standing up, I get people interacting because I want them to embody it because as soon as it becomes embodied, now you're shifting it to understanding, even if I even if I can't explain it.
Well, I love the way that you with that musical piece. Was it Tchaikovsky or Strauss or someone? Yeah, and you like that really well known symphony piece and it's just about coming to the big musical crescendo, and I'm listening to it I'm like, this is all right, yeah, and then you just stopped it and everyone's like, oh fuck exactly.
Because if I say your greatest need is closure, it's like, oh, that's interesting. But if I don't say it and they feel it's like, ah, yeah, now I get what you mean.
I'm gonna tell you how that annoyed me. That example. Fuck your example.
Yeah, someone said I should actually give people closure after that, because you know, we so need it, and I would argue that, I mean, just you know, going off on a bit of a tangent. Is people ask how can we help people deal with uncertainty because uncertainty is we hate uncertainty, right, We evolved too, except that in that mindset of play with intentionality science, which is closure, right, we love closure. I love closure. I hate uncertainty. I
would hate to be uncertained all the time. Right, But I love closure so much that I'm willing to get through uncertainty because you can't get closure, you can't get understanding if you didn't have the question beforehand. Yes, right, uncertainty by itself is pretty meaningless. Closure doesn't exist if you didn't have four you know. I love the example of an orgasm an orgasm is closure, but it doesn't exist without the stuff that came before.
Yeah.
And what's more is you get the intrinsic An orgasm is an intrinsic reward. It's evolution said, well, that's a good idea. Let's keep them from that again, because if we don't get that, we're going to get selected out. But what's fascinating is we get the same type of reward stimulut reward activation in our brain with an orgasm we have food. With understanding understanding, you get a similar
kind of like mini orgasm. Yeah right, because evolution said, whoa understanding is a good idea, because now these people are going to be adaptable. Let's get them doing that. Ironically, we almost design our whole culture to prevent the possibility of understanding, much less understanding another person, because we try to stand still. When the world changes, we try to stand still even more. Imagine you're in Australia. Are you a surfer?
I have surfed? I wouldn't call. All my listeners are falling off their chairs. Hi, you can all get fucked, I can serve.
Well. Imagine okay, imagine the waves coming in. You're standing on your surfboard. Imagine trying to just not fall. Okay, you're trying to keep your surfboard steady. The waves are coming and just not going to fall. Imagine the energy required to do that, Yeah, as opposed to just surf. Yes, right to go with the waves. Right, our education, our lives are set up to sort of bob in the water with all these waves coming in and making sure we don't fall. Yeah, why don't we actually create an
environment where we can actually surf with the waves. The amount of energy required goes down, the risk that ironically goes down. But we think the risk is in movement, when in nature, life is movement. You stand still, you get selected out. A relationship that doesn't move dies Love that doesn't move deteriorates.
We need to give ourselves permission to fall off that wave and go, ah, that wasn't too terrible. You know, when you're talking about orgasms, I thought, and how you know, orgasms trying to happen without all this lead up? Because I'm essentially four nine years old.
It sounds like you're not celebrating the lead up bit.
Yeah, no, the lead up spain a while, spin a while, But I was thinking, imagine if if we were designed or we evolved to have spontaneous idiopathic orgasms and you just be.
You've just been in a business meeting, and you'd be like, oh my god, no, no, no, anyway, that's just how my mind works.
Some people do, and they actually have done experiments when youre stimulating.
That's right, isn't it? That actually happens, doesn't it?
That actually happens, And there's you know, and you know, they stimulate rats in that part of the brain and they'll just you know, they hit the levity, stimulate that part of the brain. They'll just keep stimulating and eventually they just die of dehydration.
Wow.
So it's pretty active rewards. Yeah, but my appoint is actually what's called an intrinsic reward, right, Right, It's something we do for the reason for doing it. Thinking about surfing, what's the reward of surfing? When the hell would we surf? What's the reward of surfing? It's surfing?
Yes, do we need to explain it?
Right? But that's what evolution is like. Ah, because play with intention, asking questions, not knowing is actually a good thing. That's what kept us alive during evolution because that means we could change with.
Change interesting thing with I mean, there are many interesting things. But the irony is that most people, as you pointed out, hate the unknown, the unfamiliar, the uncertain, and the uncomfortable. But all of that essentially is life or periodically like it's like, dude, that's lot. Have you have you been anywhere?
That's life? I mean, life is you know. But also the other irony is that we'll me way and most people I've worked with, where I've grown and learned and evolve and gained insight and skill and awareness and competence mostly is in the middle of all of that shit. And so you know, you go where you grow, and it's like also in the middle of that knowing that you know that life is difficult, that that bad things happen to good people, that the world I love it.
How people say the world's unfair or whatever, well, you know, it just is what it is. But nonetheless, you know, kids get cancer, wars happen, poverty happens, like terrible things happen, and of course we don't celebrate any of those, but
we need to. I feel like we do ourselves a disservice when we always take the easy option when we always when we we always give in to instant gratification, and there's so much great stuff when we say no or no for now, and when we say yes to something that is not fun, quick, easy, sexy or painless.
You know it's so true. I mean, And of course we should be saying no, and we should also be saying yes. The question is what are we saying no? One yes too? And I don't want to reduce things to rules. When I do my toxic I say, I'm not going to give you any rules. We all want rules. I'm not going to give you any because rules are biased towards efficiency and their fragile. With that said, one strategy for thinking about no one yes is is the thing expanding me? Or is it contracting me? So if
I say no to something, am I being contracted? Am I reducing? If I say yes to it? Am I expanding? With that said, we can also say yes to things that actually contract us, Like yes to anger can contract us. Which isn't to say anger is a bad idea. Sometimes it's really important to be anger if something terrible is happening to you. Anger can be a wonderful motivation, wonderful using a sort of most literal sense wonderful in the sense of wonder to actually motivate you to action. Okay,
And it's the action that follows it is meaningful. It's not the thing itself, because, as we're talking about from the very beginning, there is no inherent meaning in the stuff that's happening in the world. Stuff is happening in the world, it's just it has no meaning. Light exists, but it has no meaning. It's not red, it's not green, it's not blue. In fact, we're sensitive to a very
small range of electromagnetic radiation. Right, So at the beginning of the Bible, you know, it should have said God should have said, let there be electromagnetic radiation, not let there be lighted, because.
I say it, that'stid style.
So it's what you actually do with the information that matters. And are you doing it in a way that expands you or more importantly expands someone else, or is it contracting you? And that's where the yes and no come in. And that's maybe a principle as opposed to rule, that people can use for thinking about their yeses and nos.
And that's adaptable in that right, can they change with that because someone whenever I'm in conversation, someone says, you know, there are two types of people. I'm going to explain to the rest of the evening, proving that there's more than two types of people. Right, Any absolute statement is almost always, at some point not correct, because everything is contextual.
I'm with you. I fucking hate that generalized science. Like there's an ad on TV at the moment in Australia and it says from the age of forty you will lose one percent of your muscle mess per year. And I'm like, hang on, hang on, Like every single person in Australia, all twenty six million of us, all of us, are losing the same amount of muscle at the same rate. And it's like, I go, that's absolutely not true. But no one, no one says anything. No, there are so
many variables around virtually everything. But we make these categorical statements as though they are fact, but they are so far from a fact, you know where, because people don't. If somebody in a white coat says something, people go, oh, okay, yep, well I'm going to die in five years, all right, then I best get ready.
Yeah, And why is that ironically comfortable is because it's very certain. We love certainty so much, so much that people will actually choose predictable pain over uncertainty.
Yeah.
If I say you know it, I'm going to shark you from time to time in a predictable manner. It's going to hurt or I'm not going to shock you. But there's going to be some uncertainty. So give me the shot the shop. And you see this in people's lives all the time, in my own as well. I mean, it's not like I escape from any of this. I'm just as human as anyone else. But learning, of course, is learning that you're trying to find those certainties that
actually aren't serving you. But to do so means first you have to know that that's actually how it's working in the first place. If you don't have understanding, if you don't know why you see what you do, how you're ever going to see differently. Which is why I study perception, because the perception underpins everything it is to be you, right.
So much great stuff. I want to ask something I was thinking about. I've lost it all right, let's go with Oh, no, that's right, you're talking about people would rather deal with something that's painful but familiar. Then step into uncertainty and whatever I was thinking. I've had that conversation with people about They're like, why do I stay in this shop relationship? And it could be a friendship, it could be a romance, it could be a marriage,
it could be a business partnership. And my answer to that is, because you would rather the predictable, known, certain three out of ten that you're in, then stepping out of the three out of ten, and who knows you might end up in a one out of ten. So I'll stay with the three and you know, keep the door closed, because you're right, people would rather be in something that they know, they know what's coming. It's not great,
it's periodically horrible, but I can cope. And but if I walk out on this, then my life could go to total shit and I'll regret what I did. So and now I'm fifty five years old.
That's right. That happens all the time. That's happened in my own life. That's probably happened in everybody's life, right. Yeah, And with that said, even that's complex because you know, some people say we stay too often? Do we too often stay in bad relationships? Too long.
Right.
With that said, sometimes the greatest relationships, you know, if you get through struggles, that getting through process is actually incredibly bonding. So we can equally give up on things far too quickly. I mean, a really really challenging question, maybe an impossible question to answers, which I actually asked my mentor and ask the number of people I ask you, is how do you know when to stop? How do you know when to stop anything?
Right?
It's a really difficult question to answer.
I think that question, I think that answer is different for different people and.
On different context, different situations. Right, and knowing why we're stopping? Is it self hard? Am I stop me because I just can't be bothered because I've never learned how to work hard, or because I'm just I just love just new bodies or new Ever, then you know I'm a novel seeker, and I'm afraid of commitment, you know, all kinds of reasons. So that's why the greatest pursuit in life,
I think, in some sense is the pursuit of self honesty. Yes, it's really really hard to achieve it, so it requires a lot of questioning of oneself.
There's a model I forget I should know who it is. But it's in psychology and it's it's kind of four stages. And stage one is self it's self reflection, and then so reflection reflecting on who we are, how we are, why we you know, just just reflecting on the self. Number two is self awareness, when we realize certain things and we acknowledge certain traits or behaviors that generally might
not be so great. Then there's a self evaluation stage, which is number three, which is where we acknowledge where we are and we compare it to where or who we would like to be. And then number four is self regulation, is being able to change it and the process of like real self awareness. It is very difficult because again everything for me is subjective, like there's you know, it's like I everything that I evaluate, I'm evaluating, perceiving
processing through the craigfilter. Like I've got fifty eight years of programming that I've got to deal with and acknowledge and be aware of and try and work around. Like you think, every person listening to this has in some way, shape or form been program condition told train their whole life without even being aware of that conditioning and programming.
And now they sit listening to this twenty thousand or so people having twenty thousand experiences, and some have already turned off, and some are leaning in, going this is fucking ace, and some are like, yeah, maybe I could implement that. But the commonality of you and I and this conversation the same stimulus. But you know that it's a really it's a very difficult to become fully aware and to have a level of consciousness of who you
are and how you are beyond the programming. It's a I think it's it's not impossible, but it's very hard.
It's not impossible, and it's I think that at least my aim in life is to have that and rather to pursue it, not to have it constantly changing. So that's why I suggest people defining themselves in terms of a verb rather than a noun. Yes, it's defining oneself. Is I'm in the pursuit of that? Well, if you're truly in the pursuit of that, then you have to
engage in every conflict in a different way. You have to engage in every conflict with the possibility that you're wrong, knowing that you're engaged with that conflict, with the assumptions of the other person with your history, et cetera. Then knowing actually that's what that person is doing as well. Now only then do you ironically conflicts is a beautiful thing. It's a wonderful thing. The problem is not conflicts how
we engage in it. But instead we try to, you know, engage in conflict with the need to convince to not move, to be on that surfboard and still have the waves coming in and not move. What if you actually engaged conflict with a question, you know, engage with the aim to understand another person, not to not to validate them. Too often we confuse those two things. We think to you know, if you agree with me, well then you must have understood me right looking for validation. What they
really want is to be understood my view. So yeah, so this pursuit opens up possibility. The other strategy closes possibly coming back to that, you know, yes and no question, is it opening or is it closing? And then is my response opening me or is my response closing me? And if it's closing me, think about my emotions. Your emotions are sort of they're telling you, not about the world,
they're telling you about you. If I'm afraid. It's like, Okay, it's not that this thing has an inherent meaning of afraidness. It's I'm afraid of it. So why am I afraid of this? What's that telling me about me? What's that telling you about my expectations assumptions in the situation? What's it challenging me? Now, maybe those challenges are a good idea. It's not like it's a bad idea. Inherently, yes, but now it creates opportunity for a question.
Yes.
And we also have in our brain kind of an intrinsic understandtrinsic knowing or feeling that when we know we're being dishonest. And what's interesting is that there will be a part of your brain that gets active when that happens. And when we then lie and we get away with it, the next time, the amount of activity that part of the brain goes down, and then it goes down again,
and then goes down. And every time we win with a lie, we lose that sense of guilt, which is a real problem because guilt is a wonderful thing in some sense. If you didn't have guilt, how would you know that you did something wrong? How would you have the motivation to do something. It's like the opposite of an intrinsic reward.
I wonder if people can become sociopaths, because when we talk about sociopathy we talk a lot about genetic disposition to that. I wonder if people, via the process you just spoke about, can actually become legit sociopaths who like basically don't feel bad about anything.
Yeah, but then in some sense, it's that what you can argue again, I think everything comes from uncertainty ultimately is ultimate driver because think about how certain that person is. Yeah, it must be a wonderful feeling that you knew everything right, everything you say is truth. My god, I must feel great right. So and so we can engineer our lives around that. We can engineer our decision making around that, how we interact with people. But it's not such a good person to be around.
Yeah, Hey, when we talk about I just want to kind of take a left turn for a minute and then come back to where we are a version.
I love turning left. I have whole blogs it's about turning.
Left cold it So, as I told, I set up the first personal training centers in Australia. So I was the first trainer. I employed five hundred trainers in my time. I had four gyms and or four PT centers, and we did really well. We had a really great little business, and I you know, taught exercise science and all the courses and all those things. And so we talk about progressive overload, or we talk about progressive resistance. It's training. And the idea is that, you know, we do something,
we lift something, move something, we work against resistance. We do something that's hard, and we do ten of them and we do three sets of ten or whatever we do, and then next week we do the same and we go it's a bit easier when we do three sets of twelve with the same weight. Then eventually we lift the weight, move the reps. We more volume, more sets, more reps, more intensity. But over time the experience is well, this thing that was really hard is now literally physiologically
really easy. So my relationship and my perception and my ability around this task with this weight has really changed. And so by working against the resistance, literally resistance training progressive resistance, by working against the resistance, I adapt. I am now stronger, I'm more capable, I'm more competent with this thing. I'm more powerful, I've got more speed, and I can create better performance outcomes as an athlete because
I went through this thing that was hard. So too, when people go to me, how do I, craig, how do I overcome my fear of public speaking? I say by public speaking? Right, Because we can't get good at what we won't do, and we can't master what we avoid. So my long winded segue your honor is, do you think we should train for the unknown, the uncertain, the unfamiliar, and the uncomfortable? Do you think we should train ourselves to be better in that space?
Absolutely? And that's actually that's in some sense the whole point of my work is your brain's like a muscle. You use it to lose it, right, And you know this This has always been an inherent passion of mine, but not inherent, but a passion mine for a long time. And Marion Diamond, my one of my mentors at Berkeley, wonderful on erful woman, and she showed how actually, if you raise rats and enriched environment, the brain will actually increase and its complexity, and if you raise rats in
a deprived environment, they'll decrease their complexity. Right, And a more complex brain is a more open, more agile, more adaptable brain. It's a stronger brain in some sense. But you only get that by effectively putting yourself in complexity. But initially, when you do that, it's like lifting a weight. It's like, wow, this is more complex than I had before. Now I've gone from ten kilos to fifteen kilos. But now I can live in that complexity and I'm figuring
it out. Okay, now let's increase. Now I'm going to twenty kilos. I am more complex. And each time you do that, your brain is becoming more complex itself. And the reason is because the amount of energy required for your brain is massive relative to in your muscles. So at one statistic is twenty percent of the energy we consume goes to two percent of our body mass, which
is your brain. So thinking is really expensive, which is again why I say so few people do it because it truly costs energy to think, and it literally costs even more energy to think differently, because you're literally growing
brain cells, you're growing connectivity, you're growing tissue. Right, and during evolution, spending energy was a bad idea, right, I mean, how many how many chips do you see going out on a jog for the sake, right, I mean, like, come on, we're eating lettuce here, you're going for runs. I mean, what a stupid what you know, Charlie was great shape, but you know, so he's dying of exhaustion because you know he can't he can't take in enough
calories to support his lifestyle here. Yeah, which is why you go to Safari. If the cheetah, if she doesn't catch her prey by the fifth go, she's dead. So she's going to consider her energy and tell she has
that sense. So we evolved effectively to be sort of like couch potato, Facebook, watching McDonald's eaters right, kind of our peak, right, because we're massively conserving energy, we're taking them in as many calories as possible, and we're doing sort of social but it isn't social, right, And so each of these industries like Facebook sort of triggers on sort of the our need for social and McDonald's on our need for fats and sugars and you know, and
the television our need to sit still. Energy is hard, and so thinking is hard takes energy.
So it's funny because when you said that, this is what's sprung to mind. This is not a word of a lie. Last week outside my gym, not I don't own it, but the gym I try that. They had like an a frame board and it said making said the excuses don't burn calories, and I went in and corrected them. I went it depends on the excuses. But like sometimes coming up with a great excuse, it's there's quite a cost.
Well, but that's actually a long term cost. But what's interesting is actually we get a trin we get an intrinsic we get a reward from procrastination.
Yeah.
Why because we conserve energy. So we wounded for that conservation of energy. Yeah. So so it's really difficult to to uh uh, you know, to that's you know, one of the one of the biggest challenges, you know, of all this conversation. And let's hope that some of it,
you know, maybe a piece or two of it. It was at least from Mina said, you know, everything that you said is deeply but you know, from my straight let's you know, maybe they takes something away, but unless they actually want to, no one's going to do anything.
Yeah.
So you can have all the gym, you can do the training all this information, but the fundamental point is you have to want to, because if you don't want to, you're not going to apply it.
I think there's another part to it, and my part too, is it because I've been talking to people who want to get in shape for forty years literally, and people who want to change their body, habits, behaviors, outcomes, look, feel, function, performance, diet, blah blah blah, right, and even athletes that I work with, I go don't. I don't care so much what you do when people are watching you, when you've got, you know,
a round of applause, or you're motivated. I care what you do when you can't be fucked and you don't want to do it, and it's not fun, it's not quick, it's not sexy, it's not painless. I care what you do then, because like everybody's a champion when they're motivated, when you're in the zone, everyone's a champion. But I believe the make or break is what you can do when you really don't want to do it, while knowing that you need to do it to create that outcome.
Absolutely, I couldn't agree with you more. I have three gremlins. There are twenty twenty two and twenty three beautiful people. And I said to them that you will when things are When things are easy, you actually don't have much choics. You don't have much freedom when things are when things are happy, what are you gonna do. You're gonna keep doing what you did before. There's really no choice there, right, unless you're a nihilist. When you actually have choices when
things are hard, that's actually where freedom lives. Yes, Because when things are hard, you can do reflexively what you've done before. Yes, And those might be a good idea, right, it might be a good idea to go to anger or something like that. But you can also not do what's obvious. You can also look away from the obvious. You can also do something different, right, And when you that's when you actually both reveal yourself and you create yourself.
So you're revealing your past and you're creating your future in that moment. And you don't do that when things are lovely. Anyone could do that, right, You don't have to be you don't have to do all that clever and strong and all that to do. You know who can't do that?
Yeah?
Right? Yeah? But do what that said joy itself can be hard. That also can be a practice and a training because we can also become train ourselves to be cynical, because cynical is easy. Yeah, you can't stand the pseudo intellectualism right finding out what's wrong with something? Who can't do that. There's a million reasons why something won't work, but we present it if it's somehow intelligent. It's not finding out why something will work or piquing the possibility
of something might work. Like starting your company. You know that was a risk. I'm not interested in confidence. I'm interested in courage that require courage doing it knowing that it might fail.
You know what's an interesting motivator speaking of starting like, I had a really significant awareness by the time I was twenty one or two bo that I didn't want to work for anyone. And it wasn't because I was lazy, and it wasn't because I was a rebel. I just didn't. I thought, like I used to watch my dad and some of his friends and some older people which really went old but to me old, and I thought, I can't do that, like I don't want to, like I
want to work with people. But and so for me, starting my company was more about becoming aware of what I didn't want than I did. Like, it was what I was moving away from, which is sitting in a cubicle, working in an office, wearing a suit and tie, belonging to a group I didn't really want to belong to. Like, So for me, that was the motivation. Was is recognizing clearly what I didn't want. Yeah, that's a moving moving away from it.
Yeah, and and and in some maybe that's kind of life in a in a really beautiful way, which is maybe we have much more control in what we move away from and not so much control over what we're moving towards.
Yeah.
I'm not a big believer in goals, at least I'm not a believer in achieving goals. Yeah, I'm a believer in setting or sure, but there should be reasons for getting out of bed. Yeah, because if you've achieved your goal, you've probably missed so much along the way. What's more, you define yourself in terms of the goal, Well, that goal is fleeting. Even if you achieved, it's like, Okay, I got it, that lasted a second yea, But I might have destroyed people along the way. I may have
destroyed my relationships along the way? Am I destroyed my health along the way. It's like, great, you achieved your goal, brilliant, well done, but you're living a pretty miserable life. Yeah again, thinking about identity and goals, why don't we set our goals, are going to the verbs and the process about how I'm going to achieve it, not simply that I'm achieving it, right.
And you know the interesting thing also that's interesting, But another interesting thing is so many people have this idea of so I talk about external world, internal world scene unseen so situation, circumstance, environment, government, weather, money, job, car, house, physical body, and then the internal world thought, feelings, emotions, ideas, creativity, pain, pleasure, all that, right, and all of the goals or most of the goals that we normal people set, all about
the external world. It's about my house, it's about my income, it's about it's about my academic this or that. It's about you know, writing a book. And none of these things are bad, by the way, but often when we get there, like I've worked with so many people who wanted to achieve a certain look or weight or size or whatever, thousands and we got there. They got there, and then they get there, and you know how many people are truly satisfied, hardly any Yeah, it's wherever they are,
it's not where they want to be. Whatever they own or have, it's not enough. Whatever their weight, it's not the right weight, whatever their strength, whatever they're it's not It's like I feel like, and this is maybe another podcast, but we try and resolve internal things with external solutions.
The proxies, the proxies for something else. So often when people are working, even on sealves, they're just looking in the wrong places. They feel like they're looking, they're looking around where they're should look. Because if they're really to look in the right place, they would have to start admitting certain things. They'd have to become aware of certain things. Once you have that awareness, you're a bit screwed right with the Once you have awareness, it's like shit, now
do I do well? There are only a couple of options. You either do something right, you actively ignore it, or
you blame it right. And so often people will go to ignore or blame as opposed to actually doing because if I'm actually going to do something about it, which to me, I'm not in you know, I'm not so interested in words you know, people say I love you or whatever, it's like, okay, you know some of the worst things have done in the in with that name or that word in mind, It's like, but what did you do? What was your action? Because it's that action
that reveals truth? Yes, right, because we all kind of know what we're supposed to say. Yeah, but from you for your brain, if you don't have that alignment between intentions, words and actions, you then start feeling stressed. So when we were talking about self honesty before and that that center of your brain that's feeling that guilt, we kind
of know when that's not of alignment. And then when it's out of alignment, rather than take ownership responsibility, it's like, well that was that's kind of you know, it was less his.
Fault, right, But I mean it normally do you know what? Do you know how much hate I get? Because everyone literally loves Melissa way more than me, which is her. Hey, mate, we're going to wind up, and I so love talking to you, and I would love it. I know you're busy, but gee, I'd love to have you back again in a month or three. But how do people how do people find you connect with you by what's your what's your latest book?
Called latest? First called Deviate.
You know when I first read it, I thought it said deviate deviant.
Well, it's kind of that's kind of its point because people to deviate, I think everyone everyone's a misfit. Yeah, deate is really just to be oneself. Yeah, right, we're all feeling misfits. The question is whether or not you embrace it. The question is what's a reference point for your next step? Is it everybody else? I'm not a real believer in rebels because rebels are just as in reference to people who are conformists. It's just they're moving
in the opposite direction. They're still making reference to everybody else right where. It's a misfits like I don't know where I'm going, but I'm going to take a step here because it feels right, and I know where everybody else is, but I think I need to go this way, and things like that, and they're figuring it out and then they look up and they think no one's around me. So there's all loneliness with misfits, which is why we
have the Lab of Misfits. So then you can create a community of misfits, like oh, Okay, right, we're all in different places, but we're all kind of in the different places together.
So the problem is, once you get a room full of widows, there are not widos anymore.
Well, I s was that Maybe I actually have to think about that one.
Yeah, I want you to get a room full of misfits. Nobody's a misfit a misfit.
Yeah, well maybe that's not a bad idea. But isn't that What isn't that where every room is in fact people acknowledge it or not, but the so where they can find So there's the Lab of Misfits website, which is Labmisfits dot com. The relevance there is that people can go to blogs, adventure blogs, things about perception. The whole website set up to expand people's perception. They can take part in experiments and things. The other places are
are Instagram. So there's a personal Instagram which is my name Boloto, and then there's a Lab of Misfits Instagram.
Do you do a podcast yourself?
I do, so I do a blog and then I've been turning that into a podcast and now we're going to start doing conversations. And the conversations are about expanding perception.
You listen to May telling you what you should do, ignore me, but I would. I can't guarantee, but I could almost guarantee that if you did a plug cast, it would do very very well, very well.
Oh thank you. Well, there's one out there, but it's mainly just me monologuing. But I think it'd be very interesting to have. I mean, I love having conversations. I find everybody. I find everyone has an interesting, important story, and I love meeting people for the very first time
influence of business, meaning without doing any checks on them. Yeah, right, Because I am I'm aware of as many biases as anyone else, any assumption as well, So I want to try to and meet someone without all those bias assumptions like okay, who are you right now? And so do very little research on it. So I find that interesting and.
I always but I do the sign but it's driven by laziness.
Or I just have a really good justification for my laziness. That's also possible.
No, I think yours is true curiosity. Let's say goodbye, but stay there and we'll say goodbye off here, but let's do our official goodbye by lot. I thank you so much, much for coming on the new project. We love chatting to you, and I'm going to keep I'm going to get your book, I'm going to read it, and I'm going to follow you, and if I'm going to be honest, I'm probably going to stalk you. So You're welcome, wonderful.
I'm looking forward to it.
I'll just for a long, creepy relationship. Melissa. Do we get a tip of approval?
That was brilliant? Thank you so much for your time. I know our listeners are going to love this episode, so thank you so much.
Thanks mate, stay there well, say goodbye. Thanks everyone. So yea