Heroic Interview: The Seventh Sense with Joshua Cooper Ramo

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This is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Joshua Cooper Romo, who is a fascinating individual who wrote a great book called the Seventh Sense, subtitled Power, Fortune and Survival in the Age of Networks. Joshua is on the board of FedEx and Starbucks. He is the co, CEO and and vice chairman of Kissinger, Kissinger Associates. And he's also in his past lives, the youngest senior editor at Time magazine where he wrote over 20 plus cover stories, lived in China for years, fluent in Mandarin and a bunch of other things that we will leave it at that for now. But I am just really thrilled to chat. Joshua, I appreciate you taking the time and I'm excited to explore some of your big ideas.

Absolutely. Brian, it's great to be with you. Totally inspired by what you're doing. So it's really an honor.

Right on. Thank you. Let's start at the top. The Seventh Sense. What is it?

So the idea of the Seventh Sense came actually from something I was reading about. The last really titanic change. They had, civilization, which was this kind of combined force of the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, which, you know, really began with the Reformation over a period about three or 400 years, sort of wiped out every institution in Europe. All the king, the alchemists, the people who controlled power, before there was democracy, before there was capitalism, were all washed away by that tide. And in the middle of it, Friedrich Nietzsche said, there is so much uprooting going on that our five senses are not enough to make sense of it. We need a sixth sense. By which Nietzsche meant a feeling for history. He kind of thought if you had an understanding of kind of where all this turmoil fit in the grand human narrative, that it would give you something to hold onto. So that was sort of its sixth sense. One of the things I noticed as I looked around our world today is I saw example after example of things that were happening that none of us had really predicted and few people were capable of managing well. And I began to feel that underneath all of that there was a kind of underlying logic that was apprehensible to some people. There were some people who kind of see how the world was changing and why. And that's why I called it a sense. And it's a seventh sense. And it turns out it's this ability to understand how connected systems of all kinds of, by which I mean terrorist organization, networks of Bitcoin traders, the Internet, networks of DNA information, they have laws and rules that are different from systems that are less connected. Think about what we're doing right now, which is a podcast, that was something that never could have existed in the apps of a connected world. And so there's an underlying logic to connected systems. It's different than the logic that came before, different than the Industrial Revolution logic. And some people have this new instinct that I call the seven sense for seeing how that works. So the. The guys who are capable of looking at an empty car seat and thinking uber have the 7 cents the rest of us look at. We see an empty car seat, we just don't have it yet. You know, I think it's that skill that I'm trying to get across, the idea that people who will succeed in the future, and really the people who are succeeding now are people who understand this one issue. How is it that connection changes the nature of our lives? How does it change the nature of any object from a share of stock to your car, to a voter? There are people who understand that. And trust me, in a hundred years from now, there'll be a lot of people understand that. But right now, knowing that, having that new sense for that, that new instinct, that's the seventh sense. And I think it's a marker of future success.

That's awesome. Let's just go straight into what are some of the top ways to cultivate that. Then I want to circle back and talk about what happens when we don't have that and kind of the insanity of our age. But can you share with us some of the things we should be thinking about?

You know, one of the things I really wanted to do in the book was really develop a very practical guide, so it was clear you could look all around and see so many examples of things that were kind of going off the ra, Right? We're in the midst of the most expensive war on terrorism in human history. Terrorism is ultimately a network phenomenon. And not only is it not going away, it's actually getting stronger. It seems like our economic policies, if anything, not strengthening the middle class, but kind of gutting it. And what I kept asking, what could we see differently about this? And so the first thing is, I think, understanding the nature of how linking things together changes how they interact. And so one thing I think all of us can do very practically, is just make a survey of your life and ask yourself, what is it exactly that you're connected to? Because we're all parts of these connected systems and have an influence on us. Right? The reason terrorism is so effective now is not that it necessarily has the ability to wipe out a country like the United States. But it lives on a network system where information spreads very rapidly and it impacts the way people think and how safe they feel. All of us are connected to things, and we have to ask ourselves, what is it we really understand? You know, Brian, one maybe useful way to think about it that's very practical is for a long time, most of us determined our careers or would mark out our careers based on our resume. Well, first we did this, and then we did this, then we did this. Well, think of how little our resumes actually tell us about who we really are. I mean, look at your resume, right? I was fascinated by what you built and the kind of business and inspiration environment you're creating. And so I went online and I sort of looked up, okay, what's this guy's resume? What your resume is compared to what you've actually built is completely different in a sense that what's captured on paper doesn't capture the dynamism and the strength and the energy of what you've done. It's certainly true for me and almost everybody I know, their resume says nothing about them. It's just a list of various things that you've done. What really matters is what are you connected to? And when you sit down and think about what ideas are you connected to, what people are you connected to, what future dreams you connected to, what experiences are you connected to? You get a much better map of yourself as a person. And so that's the very first exercise I would recommend to people, which is sit down and make a little map. Just draw a little chart of who are the people, who are the experiences, who are the idea, what are the ideas, and what are the dreams that I'm connected to and how. And in that kind of living mesh of people and passions, I think you'll see a lot about yourself that may surprise you in terms of how powerful the decisions you've made are, and also may remind you that, oh, hey, this connection's really important. I need to figure out how I can strengthen that connection.

That's awesome. Super inspiring. And then Wit would step back and to the early part of the book and you talk about your work. Is it Master Nan? Is that you properly pronounce his name?

Yes, Master Nan, yeah.

So many amazing stories that you shared in the book. And I'll just step back even further and say the book reads like a. Like a kind of like a mystery novel or fan. Just a quick reading fiction, but just grounded, strategic thought. So I read it in close to one sitting. It seemed. I mean, it was just awesome. You begin the story with your work with the Master and kind of his perspective. One of the things that really struck me was his discussion of the kind of illnesses of the various eras and particularly the illness that we are in right now as a society. Can you talk to us about that?

Sure. So by way of background, the guy you're referring to is this incredible Chinese, really enlightened Buddhist master named Nan Huai Chin, who I was lucky enough to study with before he passed away a few years ago. And I remember there was this moment that I had with Master Nan, which I describe in the book, that really was one of these kind of, you know, something. Sometimes somebody says something, it just reshapes the way you think about the world. And Master Nan sort of looked around the world that we were living in, we were entering into, and he said, you know, the 19th century, the great problem of the 19th century is you were packing people into cities, into these urban centers, and nobody was really prepared for that. And that created all of these contagious diseases that went around and would wipe out populations in these cities. He said, in the 20th century, people were exposing themselves to all kinds of chemicals, all kinds of plastics and other things they'd never been exposed to before. And sure enough, the disease that emerged as a result of that was cancer, that the human body was just not prepared for these artificially created things. And Master Nan said, In the 21st century, the age we're entering into now, the disease that will mark most of society is spiritual illness. Jing Sheng Mao Bing is how you say it in Chinese. And he said, that will come because we are all connecting to these networks right into our brains in ways that we're just not prepared for, that human beings were not engineered for a life of constant connectivity like that. And it's going to trigger a kind of madness in a way that being constantly connected, facing things that are happening instantly, that in the past you might have had hours or years to contemplate, is something humans just aren't engineered for. And unless we make dramatic changes to our lives, it's going to really be as devastating as those earlier cancer or the dramatic infectious diseases were.

That's just stunning. So let's pull that thread. What do we do to deal with that potential insanity?

Well, I mean, I think there's kind of like with anything, there's sort of the inside path and the outside path. I think the inside path very much is, you know, what Master Nan would tell you as much as this is a shocking new phenomenon. The ancient tools of cultivation. That's meditation, self wisdom, understanding the laws of nature are the most important thing you can study in this situation. Right, because whatever technology you think you're trying to master is going to be outdated in five years. You've got to really get at the root of what is going on in the world. And Master Nan came from a tradition that believed there was a certain underlying energy of humanity, that life was moving in a certain direction, just like a river might move in a certain direction. And it was an understanding that deeper flow that you could find, sort of how to get through a crisis like that. But to feel that flow, you needed to unpl yourself from all of these stimuli you were getting, whether that was some webpage or Twitter feed or your latest interesting Snapchat video, and really settle down into this question of what are the underlying movements? And so that, very practically, is things like meditation, studying philosophy. These are the kind of things that a cultivated individual will need in the next century and developing the kind of intellectual ideas around it. So, you know, three or 400 years ago, there were an awful lot of people who didn't understand the idea of freedom and liberty. Right? If you were a king, if you were a peasant, the idea that people would vote to decide their future was just kind of nuts. But there were a small group of people who understood that and figured it out, and they were the ones who were successful. Well, today, people themselves need to begin to develop some sort of intellectual framework for what is happening and why. How is it that a world of constant connectivity exposes us to great risks, exposes us to great possibility at the same time? And in the book, I really try to give some tools for that. So that's sort of the inner cultivation. How do each of us prepare ourselves for this? How do we each analyze what are we connected to and what does that mean? And then I think there's the outer question, which is, what does a world of connection mean for national security? What does it mean for economics? What does it mean for businesses? There are so many problems in the world today that we can see, but we don't seem to be able to solve. And so I think the task that we now face in this generation is to actually go out and try to work on those problems in a way where we can really make progress. You know, if you look around the world today, there's not a single institution that is more respected than it was a decade ago. Not the Congress, not the press, not science. And all of that is a sign of a really deep crisis of Legitimacy. But part of that crisis is because they're facing problems that they just can't solve. We need new solutions. And I think the real challenge is to kind of get ourselves into the mindset of understanding. This is honestly a huge historical problem that we're facing, but it's an incredible opportunity to really live meaningful lives as well.

Again, stunning and inspiring. And I want to bring it from the inner to the outer, back to the inner. And just when I hear that, when I read the book, it was okay, well, we each need to optimize our lives and our connection to ourselves. In the midst of this hyper connectivity to everything else, we become disconnected to ourselves into that energy, to that life force, to that sense of perspective. The seventh sense, really. Right.

Yep.

So just if you're, if you're open to it. And I, as I was reading the book and I shared in the note, you know, this is that you're a strategist, not a self help guy, you know, per se. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you do, like what are your practices that you engage in to remain connected to that, that deeper wisdom. The seven sense. Personally, if you're open to sharing, sure.

You know, I think one of the things that can happen to anybody is I think people can often get overly connected to a particular facet of their identities. I'll give you a very interesting. That was when I first met Master Nan. You know, I think most of our experience in the west of people who are spiritually enlightened is that that's all they do. Right. They're monks or they're priests and that, that is the dominant focus of their life. And that is true for some people. But it is also true that there are people of incredible level of spiritual accomplishment who also are successful in business or politics or engaged in community service, but actually live in the world. And one of the things I find, and also the other thing I'd say is it's different for every single person. I mean, everybody's personality is different. So they need for me at least trying to maintain a really balanced and well rounded approach to life has been the most important. So making sure that as hard as I'm working at work, I'm also taking the time, for instance, to write books. Then I'm also taking time to travel the world and study art and poetry and philosophy and the things that are interesting to me. We were talking earlier about life in the mountains. You know, I'm from New Mexico and I think when you grow up in the mountains, it kind of changes the way that you live your life forever. So it's very important for me to be in nature. And I think that's sort of, well, roundedness. It gets back to that point I was making earlier about kind of making a map of what are all the things you're related to or connected to somehow and asking yourself, you know, is that the right web of connections to have? And so if you make that map and you find out all your connections are around your work, you know, I think that's. That's too limiting. And part of the reason for that is when you're really going through a revolutionary period, which is, I think what we're going through now, everything is changing so quickly that if you do just tie yourself to one thing, you'll miss a lot of what's going on and you'll be very be exposed from a risk perspective because you're not going to have a feeling for everything that's happening. But you're also going to miss a lot of the wonder and the joy of keeping current and in the revolution that's going on around us. So that might be the second thing I would say, which is just really always trying to make an effort to keep up with whatever is new and innovative and exciting that's going on. I wrote a very interesting study recently about the importance of constantly exposing yourself to new and complex things for brain health. And I just think that's true in general, which is you've got to put yourself in situations that are new and even uncomfortable sometimes because. Because that's where you really learn things.

Yeah, I love it. And you just planted a seed for an idea I want to chat about in a moment. The complicated versus complex. But before we go there, let's talk about gatekeeping and specifically hard gatekeeping. And then I want to talk about that on the outer and the inner as well. So kind of the system side then, the psychological side of hard gatekeeping.

Sure.

Can you give us a take on that?

So again, one of the things I try to do in the book is really sort of explain what's actually going on on these networks and what are the various dynamics at play, what happens when you connect something? So one of the things to discover is that connected systems, we think of them as just being connecting points, whether that's people who trade a certain currency or people who use TCP IP as a protocol. And it's true that networks are made of connected points, but also that act of connecting people draws a line between in and out. So you can sort of think of big connected communities as being gatekept in a way, right? There's an inside and an outside. If you're in Facebook, if you're on Facebook using Facebook, you're inside the gatekept community of Facebook. And Facebook is the gatekeeper, and then other people are on the outside of that. And that turns out to be a very powerful dynamic in an age of networks. Not least for one of the other reasons I discuss in the book, which is one of the things I try to do is explain some of the actual power dynamics on networks. And one of the interesting phenomena of these systems is unlike traditional systems, you have very, very high concentrations of power in certain nodes. So you can say that a place like Facebook or place like Google, these may be the most powerful companies in human history, given the fact that they have so much access to information. And interestingly, there's no competition for them. Right? It's a winner take all business. There's one Facebook, there's one Google. It's not like the car business, where Ford might have a good year and then Chrysler also has a good year. Google had a great year last year. What kind of year did Yahoo have? So that winner take all dynamic, which has its roots in the way that networks operate, does mean that there are certain gatekeepers with unbelievable amounts of power. And really, the core question of our age, whether you're thinking about it from a business perspective or a commercial perspective, is our business or political perspective is, are you the gatekeeper or are you the gatekept? And if you're the gatekeeper, what are your obligations? And if you're the gatekept, on what basis are you permitting yourself to be gatekept? And I think those are a lot of questions we've sort of stumbled into without yet knowing the answers to.

Yeah, I think that's powerful. And again, the book is basically about how do we set that up on a super high level. And one of the things in terms of optimizing our individual lives that I found fascinating is looking at our own lives and our own connection to the networks we allow into our lives, Whether it's that Twitter push notification or whatever. Right. The constant stimulation, are we the gatekeeper of that information or are we the gate kept? Are we even aware of that? Right. And stepping back and having that seventh sense to see, wow, perhaps I'm addicted to this and I'm simply being moved around and whatever way others who have more power in this sense want to move me around, or can I disconnect and actually See that? So I saw the connection of that psychological hard gatekeeping. Right. Of us being able to put up strong gates in our lives if we want to actually be part of the revolution rather than puppets in the revolution.

Right. I think it's a great point. It's a great point. I think all of us, once you're inside these gatekeepers. Gatekeepers world.

Right.

You, there's a temptation to let your defenses down and just to be connected to what you're connected to as opposed to being really thoughtful and understanding how each of these things lands on your life. I don't think there's any of us who grew up in a pre Internet age who haven't really noticed a change in our cognitive patterns as a result of constant connectivity.

Yeah. And for me it's fun to play on the edges of that and really kind of deliberately, consciously disconnect and kind of see it more clearly than I do when I'm constantly hopped up on one dopamine hit after another, you know? Yeah.

You know, I try to spend the mornings email and computer free and I find that's a very good, good habit. If you can, if you can possibly do it.

Yeah, I do as well. And that's, it's a great, great perspective to go back to the personal habits that allow you to maintain and cultivate that 7 sense. Talk to us about complicated versus complex.

Sure. You know, so I think one of the, again, I try to kind of sort of chronicle in the book what does it mean to be connected when you connect all the time? One of the interesting distinctions is first of all, just linguistically there's a distinction between a complicated system and a complex system. So a complicated system is like a jet engine. It's got a million parts, but it can be designed, you can build hundreds of them. They'll all work. There's nothing unpredictable about it. A complex system is more like the Amazon rainforest. It's also got kind of unlimited number of parts in a way, but they interact in ways that are always very unpredictable. You never know, you could run the same experiment 50 times to get 50 different outcomes because the nature of the interactions are so complex. Complex the world. Any system that is packed with more and more items and more and more items that are interacting with each other produces complexity. So once you start connecting things together, once you have a connected system, it operates on a different logic than one that is simply a complicated system. So an easy way to think about this is, comes from the field of complexity theory, which is imagine a sand pile. Imagine you had A little pile of sand. And you sort of were dropping grains of sand on the top of that sand pile. Well, at some point you'd add enough additional grains that a bunch of sand would start to slide off that pile and have a little bit of an avalanche. What's interesting about that system is you can't really predict when that's going to happen. You might add 100 grains of sand and nothing would happen. On the 101st, you get a small avalanche, add another 10 grains, nothing happens. On 111th, you get a very big avalanche. And that system is a system that scientists say is organized into criticality, that there are so many pieces of that puzzle, so many little tin grains of sand, hundreds of thousands of grains of sand pressing on each other, that it can't be modeled and it can't be predicted. And so unlike a traditional system where it takes a big force to do something big, on that kind of system, a small force, a single grain of sand, if you hit it in just the right way, can have huge effects. So that's what a complicated system looks like. And today our whole world is sort of becoming complex in that sense. That. That's what a complex system looks like. Our whole world is becoming complex in that sense, which is that we have more people on the planet, we have more financial products, we have more hedge funds, we have more terrorists, we have more Internet of things connections. Our world is just getting more and more granular in that sense. And so the result is all sorts of unpredictable things are happening around the world. And we have to understand that's just a feature of modern life. It's not like it was an engineering mistake or people didn't think about things properly in many cases. It's just the nature of connecting things that you never intended to be connected together produces these unexpected interactions. And that's just true when you're talking about connecting airline networks to parts of the world that don't have good disease control control as it is to connecting, you know, computers to parts of the world where hackers have the ability to sneak into back doors.

Yeah, again, we can talk about that forever. And just the, the application of the systems to the individual again, of, of. I think oftentimes I used to always think that, that solving the riddle of optimizing our lives was complicated. It's not. It's complex. Right. There's that level of, you know, that one little thing you do may have that one conversation you have with master, you know, it's boom, there you go. There's a totally complexity to it.

I think that's a huge insight because. Right. Somebody here. One of the things we know is that what people think is going to make them happy often doesn't when they get there. And part of the reason is exactly the reason you've described, which is there's some. It's not a. It's your brain chemistry, it's the world. It's all these systems that have some.

Unpredictable elements and you're never going to solve it and it's never going to be statically fixed once and for all and you're exonerated from hard work. Which is the one idea I skipped over in the beginning was. And let's wrap up with this. I know we have a hard stop coming, but the going back to Master Nan, the story of. Was it Su Quin in his level of discipline?

Yes.

Can you share that with us? Because I think that's a really important quality and virtue for us to.

This is a famous Chinese story that's told to many young Chinese students of Su Qin, who was kind of a. Came from a relatively poor background back in the Warring States period and aspired to be a great advisor to kings. And he rose and he was successful advising one king. And then he was kind of thrown out because he didn't do such a very good job. And he was humiliated. His family wouldn't even receive him. It was just a disgrace. And so he just locked himself up for almost a decade and did nothing but read books of history to really see if he could learn the underlying currents of humanity in a way so he could then apply them usefully. And one of the famous stories is he studied so hard, didn't want to interrupt his studies, that he tied his long ponytail to a roof beam above him and he jabbed a knife into his thigh so he would stay awake and keep studying. But, you know, he finished up studying, he did master all this stuff and he then ended up becoming actually quite an influential political figure. But he was willing to pay whatever price was necessary to make sure that he absorbed as much knowledge as possible.

That's so good. And if I remember correctly, Master Nan's question to you was, can you be that disciplined?

Yes, exactly. Well, he didn't. He didn't know that it was possible to acquire knowledge much more efficiently. If Suchin had been around today, it would have been on the Internet for a few hours, everything. He wouldn't have had to do anything.

With the knife, although he still would have had to work hard in practice. These ideas. Well, this is fantastic. Get the books the seven cents connect with Joshua JoshuaCooperramo.com Joshua thank you so much.

Hey, thanks Brian. It's really great to be connected.

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