PNTV: The Seventh Sense by Joshua Cooper Ramo

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in Less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, the Seventh Sense by Joshua Cooperamo. The Seventh Sense Subtitle Power, Fortune and Survival in the Age of Networks. This is not like all the other books I typically cover. It is not a self help book per se. It is more like a nation help book looking at optimal politics on the highest level. War and Peace and how it's affected by the incredible network. The great connection that we're going to talk about in a moment. But the fact that all of our lives driven by networks, we're more connected than ever to everyone and everything around us and that has significant impacts in how we show up in the world. Now I'm not going to focus on the high level global political issues as much as I am on the personal. Joshua talks about the personal a little bit in the book, although he focuses on the high level. I'm going to drill in on how we can apply these ideas to our lives as I do in all of these episodes as we optimize and and actualize. Philosopher's note, bunch of my favorite big ideas, five of them here. Before we jump in though, Joshua is an extraordinary guy, fascinating human being who has spent years living in China, fluent in Mandarin, was the youngest senior editor and foreign editor at Time magazine where he wrote something like over 20 cover stories earlier in his career. He's now the co CEO of Kissinger Associates. Very, very smart human being and a lot of big ideas here. So let's start with the great connection. The point of the book is that we're living in revolutionary times. And he says that this is as revolutionary as the Agrarian Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, et cetera. He says when we fast forward and our great great grandchildren are looking back on today, they're going to have a name for it. And he says it's going to be something like the Great Connection. And the Seventh Sense is all about helping us see that, to see that we're living in revolutionary times. And the aspects of the Seventh Sense include a sense of the fact that everything is networked together, not just the Internet, but all financial networks and everything is running through a networked system of connectivity. And then you merge that sense of seeing that with history, seeing how things have evolved over time, with politics, how everything is interrelated and how we can create an optimal environment for ourselves in the future. And with philosophy, a sense of moral meaning that we can bring to our world. So that is the basic idea of the seventh sense integrating a sense that an ability to see that everything's interconnected. We're going to talk about the pros and cons of that in a moment. The historical significance, politics and philosophy, and this idea that we're living in revolutionary times, the great connection. It's easy to take it for granted, but things are changing radically. When I, the day before I read this book, I interviewed Pulitzer prize winning Charles Duhigg about his new book, Smarter, Better, Faster. And he made the same point. He said, look, this is a different world. And when we look back on this, it's going to be as revolutionary as the agrarian revolution and, and the industrial revolution. Things are changing. Things are moving faster than ever before. We're more connected than ever before. Joshua shines a spotlight on the underlying networks and our need to understand that. Here's what happens if we don't. He talks about one of his mentors, the great Master Nan in China, who was one of the most revered thinkers in modern China. He recently passed away. His books have sold millions of copies. I ordered the cornerstone, his core book. I can't wait to feature it. But Master Nan, he shares a story of how Master Nan was basically the master and mentor for many of China's elite. And Joshua was at a dinner, small, private dinner with Master Nan and a number of other people. And he asked him, well, Master Nan was talking about. I'll get to what he asked him in a moment. But he was talking about the fact that our current era has a sickness. And if you look back historically and you look at the industrial revolution in the 19th century, for example, you saw urbanization and everyone started moving into closer and closer quarters, right? The illness of that era was pneumonia. Then you fast forward to the scientific revolution where we created all these new things that had never been tested. And Master Nan said the illness of the 20th century was cancer. Then he says the illness of the 21st century, when we have this hyperconnectivity and we're consuming more information than our brains and our consciousness were ever evolved to manage, is insanity not just within our individual psyche, but within politics and economics and everything else in our world. So there's all the unbelievable benefits we get being connected via these networks and, and there's also the insanity that can be created if we don't properly manage it. He references a French philosopher who says, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. When you invent the airplane, you invent the airplane crash. As well. Well, when you invent hyperconnectivity and the networks that we have driving everything in our lives, you invent to go with that spiritual disease. Spiritual crashing, Right? So we want to recognize that. And then Joshua says, okay. He asks Master Nan, how do we solve this? What can we do to prepare for this and to meet this challenge? And Master Nan is a Zen master, and he unleashes on Joshua, telling him, if you think this is going to be easy, if you think I could sell you these ideas, you're wrong. And he shares a story of an ancient Chinese advisor. I think his name is Su Quin, who failed early in his career to advise kings, and his family basically disowned him. And then he went and he worked as hard as he possibly could. And he said that this guy, Su Quinn, read for seven years everything he possibly could on history to understand his current era thousands of years ago, Right. Whatever it was. And he would work so hard that he tied his long hair to a beam above him so that if he fell asleep, his head would still stay up. If he really wanted to focus, he'd stab himself in the leg with a knife. And Master Nan says to Joshua, do you have that discipline? Do you have that level of discipline? Because if you do, then you can understand this. You can cultivate what Joshua now calls your seventh sense and make a difference in your current era. If not, well, then, good luck with that. We need to have intense effort. And I joke in the note that I don't have any hair, so I can't tie it up to a beam. But I. But otherwise, I'm all in. Let's do this. Question is, are you willing to put in the effort to deal with the insanity in our current culture? Let's talk about one of the things that we need to do to deal with it. Again, he talks about it on a very macro level, how we deal with networks. And he gets into the technology of it and all this different stuff we're not going to talk about now. But one of the concepts is what he calls hard gatekeeping. The basic idea is you don't want to build walls. You don't want to isolate yourself from the rest of the world. You want gates. You want to selectively allow certain information into your network and individuals who are supportive of your network, which requires what he calls hard gatekeeping. Now, from our perspective, what's useful for us is psychological hard gatekeeping. So economic systems and politics and all these other terrorist networks, et cetera, can have insanity expressed. You deal with that Via hard gatekeeping. Well, same with our lives. When you look at the root of our insanity, there's a paradox here. This hyper connectivity to everything all the time instantaneously removes our connection to ourselves. And if we want to reconnect to the deepest within ourselves so we can most powerfully and gracefully deal with life's challenges, we need to create gates. Right? We can't let everything into our consciousness. You can't let all the stuff in, right? You got to be able to decipher. This is worth letting in. This is not. You got to put up gates. Then you need to be a hard gatekeeper. He says you're either a gatekeeper or your gate kept. So for our purposes, that means look at the information you're consuming. How much of it is really helping you is wisdom vis a vis insanity. And you got to systematically remove the toxic stuff. Just like Sue Quinn, who had his head tied, his hair tied to a beam. He was just working diligently. You need to put in that level of effort of gatekeeping what comes in. Now, again, Joshua talks about it on a very macro level, but for our purposes, we need to cultivate that ability and that discipline to protect our consciousness via this type of gatekeeping. Fourth big idea is complex versus complicated. Really cool idea, talking about it on a macro level, but it works for our lives as well. He says there's a big difference between complicated and complex. We need to make the different. We need to make the distinction. Too often we think that politics or economics or our lives are complicated, complicated things. It's like a jet engine, right? Or an artificial heart is very complicated. Your calculator, Joshua says, is complicated. But you know what? Even if there are a billion pieces in there, you can figure it out. You can systematically figure it out. It's complicated, but you can figure it out. And then you can reliably reproduce it and predict outcomes. That's complicated. But economies and politics in our lives, that's complex. That's not complicated. You're never going to be able to figure it out perfectly because they're way too fluid and way too dynamic. And when we approach our lives thinking that they're complicated instead of complex, then we think we're going to figure it out once and for all. If we just work hard enough, we'll figure it out. We'll be able to create a perfect day, and it will just always go that way. But that's not how our lives work. That's not how complex systems work. We talk about the tools, guys. They say that having that attitude is kind of like wanting to be exonerated from all future hard work. Oh, I've done the work. I've figured out a complicated system. It should be easy now. And he makes the point. No, no, no. This stuff that we really need to solve is complex. You never figure it out. You just develop the seventh sense and all your other assets, psychological and otherwise, to deal with that complexity more and more gracefully. Big difference. So if you constantly beat yourself up for thinking that you haven't figured it out yet, you might have an attitude of complicated thinking that your life is complicated and you can someday figure it out. And you might benefit from seeing the nuance of complexity that you're never going to figure it out. But you can get more powerful to deal with the inevitable challenges life will throw at you. That's our fourth big idea. Fifth Big Idea is another way to deal with the insanity. He talks about the fact that time is actually one of the most powerful things for those of us who are aspiring to create more power in the world, to be able to affect more change in the world. Time is very, very important. People want things in a very quick fashion, right? Being able to deliver that is key. And to be able to respond to challenges in a timely manner is key. But we've become overly obsessed with short term horizons. He uses the clock that Jeff Bezos and his friends are building, the 10,000 year clock, which by the way, needs to be hand wound. Generation after generation after generation is going to have to show up and wind it up, right? 10,000 year clock, that's a symbol, a physical symbol that they're creating to point to the power and importance of long term thinking. We can't be thinking about this quarter or this election cycle or whatever. We've got to extend our vision up to and through our lifetimes and beyond that. 10,000 years. What role can you play today and in that broader arc, or is all you care about the latest Twitter trending information or the latest fashion or whatever? We gotta extend our horizon over the long run. And the final big idea I talked about was that a revolution calls us to, Joshua tells us a revolution calls us to give our gifts and service to the world. We have an opportunity to make a mark over the long run. So imagine on that 10,000 year clock an alarm going off right now for us to step up and to do our best to work in complexity, to put up these hard gates, right, that don't allow the things that aren't serving our optimization actualization into our lives as we put in a ton of effort to deal with our culture's insanity. How do you deal with insanity? You cultivate wisdom and presence. One thing I wish the book had more of was Joshua's own story talks about Satori, but only very briefly and I'd love to hear more and I look forward to interviewing him to talk about more of his own practice that he engages in to deal with this on a personal level so we can see everything on a higher level and then remember we're entering a revolutionary time. The Great Connection the Seventh Sense integrates a sense of interconnectivity and the networks driving it with history, politics, philosophy, etc. This is a more abstract episode than normal, but I hope you enjoyed it and if you're into this sort of thing, I think you'll enjoy the book. It read like kind of quick reading fiction. It was so compelling and super powerful, inspiring and for me it shines a light on my own work. I'm more committed now than ever before to create a network of individuals passionate about optimizing and actualizing their lives as a force for good in the world. A place where we can connect, tap into wisdom, tap into the highest within ourselves and inspire one another to do the same and meet our challenge of our era. More on that in the months and years ahead. I appreciate your support and look forward to sharing more soon. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that Philosopher's Notes TV episode. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson me two basic things one our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. Over 50,000 people start their day with it and they tell us it's pretty awesome. And 2 our optimal living Membership program. This is where I put all my best stuff. 10 bucks a month for a ton of wisdom. Two primary things in there philosopher's notes plus optimal living 101 classes when you sign up, you'll get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes, which are basically six page PDFs and 20 minute MP3s where I capture my favorite big ideas from great books. The PNTV episodes are kind of a mini version of all that goodness. You'll also get instant access to all my Optimal Living classes. This is where I take all the ideas we cover in the Philosopher's Notes and and boil it down to the most practical stuff you can apply today. Classes include Confidence 101, Getting Stuff Done 101 Relationships 101 Habits 101 et cetera you'll also get access to what we call micro classes that I think you'll love. We aim to astonish, and we're blessed to have thousands of members telling us we're helping them change their lives and that this is the best 10 bucks they invest in themselves every month. Go to BrianJohnson ME membership to learn more. Thanks for your support and have an awesome day.