Anders Indset :You Winning Life Podcast Ep. 188- Lessons From a Modern Viking

As you know, we're getting closer and closer to episode 200. This has been a labor of love. And as you know, I not only take time out of my week from my therapy sessions and other stuff to do this, but it's become not just something that I'm doing for good for all, but also how much I benefit from getting in front of everybody that comes and shares their wisdom with me. And Anders, today you're no different, and you're bringing some really exciting things, really deep-thinking ideas and thoughts to your community, and I'm really excited that you get to share that with ours. So thanks for spending some time with us today.

Oh yeah, Jason, thank you so much for having me on. I think it's a very important topic to take that time in between your sessions to talk about these themes that you cover. So I'm very happy to be with you.

Awesome. So we can reverse engineer, you know, I, I joke with everybody, um, that the pre-game, pre-conversation is always, always just as good. And I always debate just to record the pre-conversation and see if anything comes out of that, but we didn't do that. Um, and I know we're, we're gonna get into some, some thoughtful conversations. And maybe I'll just start right off the bat that we're now in It's December 9th as the date of this recording, so hopefully this will come out before the New Year. But America just came out of a very, yet again, tumultuous and binary process of having two options. People take sides, people take choices, people go all in and they make their identities, their personalities in relationship to the brand of that political side. And what I was sharing with you was for the first time since I was legally able to vote, I didn't vote for president. And that pisses so many people off. But yet I found two things. One, the phrase the lesser of two evils, right? Vote for the lesser of two evils was what I was told over and over again. But the lesser of two evils is still playfully evil, is one thing. But two, I'm finding more and more and more that there's hills that I'm no longer willing to die on for certain parts of my life as I'm getting older. So just getting into that as far as the illusion of choice, mental health perspectives, the way that we're programmed as a culture, as a society, I would love to hear some of your thoughts on that, especially in Europe, right? There's different styles of government and different ways of believing and looking at things and living life differently than we have set up in America. And I know philosophically you have very insightful perspectives on some of these things that can apply to that conversation. So I'm curious just what some of your thoughts are on that.

Yeah, sure. I mean, that's a— it's a very interesting topic if we look at, you know, the development of our time. If we go back and look over the past 50 years, what have we done? We have created kind of sort of like an optimization machinery where we even now start to communicate in a thumbs up, thumbs down society. So we have kind of maximized the art of being right. And this is, you know, if you look at it, how people tune in and how we have a justified true belief about something or a deeper understanding of a complex topic. We are not rewarded for that. We are rewarded on instant reactions, and we become more and more sucked into that game, that finite game of the technological race to make a decision for or against something. So I think a large part of society then becomes hostage to their own self-evident truth. So instead of having a deeper reflection where the will to truth, namely coming together on a, you know, common ground to stand on, on a base trust where we have frictions of opinion and we can dance into the unknown or come to a common agreement, that seems to to be taken out of that finitude of the game of winning an election. And I think that holds true for many things, and we lose the trust then in institutions and science and society at large because we are always in that game of maximizing and optimizing. And it's very interesting to mirror that because when— if you look at it, at least from a Western standpoint where you and I am, yeah, we never had more time and more power to influence our own reality. And when I say so, you look at technology, economy, and generally how much we work. And but still our agenda is so packed that we try to squeeze more things into it. And, and there's always that, you know, optimization game here to be played where the self-help gurus come in and say, when to slow down, you know, which is a terrible idea if we have too much things going on.. And we could talk about, you know, deciding to opt out on electing a president. And that could be something which organized human life, the model of democracy and the parties and the structures that we have. But if you take that on a meta level and you look at, you know, how do you live a life of agency, we have trained to have that decision to find out, you know, where is happiness, where is purpose to life and What I listen to you, I think more, it's very much aligns with my philosophy to say that I had a background as a professional athlete. I was a hardcore capitalist. For many of them, from an outside perspective, that could be seen as a successful career, an extrinsically motivated drive to perform on a finitude of parameters that you are measured against. I never felt that. And it wasn't until I started to let go and thin slice what I did not want to do and what I did, what was not part of me, that I felt that sense of agency and put myself in a position to be struck by something called happiness or to find paths outside of the reaction mode. So I think there's very much to unpack in what you just said. And looking at life as a journey where, you know, every one of us could write down at least one or two or three things that we do do not want to do or that holds her back or sucks out energy. And if we thin slice that and we have a micro ambitious step to improve that in terms of removing it or letting go, we put ourselves in a position that we could be struck, you know, by happiness or some serendipitous moment that will drive our journey. So, I think there is much wisdom to that.

Yeah. It's, it's, And I don't know, again, if it's just me hitting my mid-40s, um, if it's the culmination of— yeah, it probably is, right? It's multiple things. I don't want to— it doesn't necessarily matter what specifically it is. Let's just allow this awareness.

I want to keep the rebellion in you.

Yeah, exactly. Without having to be rebellious and without having to stick it in somebody else's face. And I'm realizing, like, just like how set we are on having identities that are so, like you said, finite, that are, this is who I am, this is what I stand for. There's no openness, there's no commute, there's no willingness to be curious. And I'm finding that curiosity just in the world is diminishing. I think why people go to a good therapist or a good mentor is because that person is not stuck in that person's belief system. And they can ask questions from outside of that framework of thinking to allow them to open up. But I'm wondering, you know, the note that I, that I wrote down was, what would happen if we tried to squeeze less out of life? Which is kind of like you were saying, like these gurus are saying, like you have to slow down or you have to kind of micro-focus on certain things. But I'm wondering just this idea, and, and we can play with this and you can also say, Jason Wasser, that's just a stupid idea, but why was it What would it be like if people tried to squeeze less out of life? Well, just that mentality, will that, like you said, allow you to find more things in the moment, to be more serendipitous, to be more present with things when we're not trying so hard to put our fingers and hands and knowledge on every single thing that exists and the new YouTube video and the new cryptocurrency and the new AI and the new— right, we have to know it all, as opposed to Squeeze less.

I mean, I think, you know, if you look at my last book now, The Viking Code: The Art and Science of Norwegian Success, it is about building a high-performance culture that is rooted in values. So, and people think that that's like the maximization game of how to, you know, reach the pinnacle of some kind of discipline, or, um, but it's, it's actually, it's not about necessarily having less output. But it's much more about focusing on the input. So I work as much as I've ever done before. I consider myself today highly successful because I get to get up and learn, and I love that, right? So it's not about the outcome. What do I want to become, or what do I want to achieve or be? I don't— do not measure my success on that. I measure my sense of success or experience of my own experience of having progress. So if you imagine a toddler, you know, is per se, we come to this world with an empty storage, more or less, and we start to navigate and we are active and we are creative and we are fired on by our parents for the first step, for the first word, and so on and so forth. And then we get into those, you know, institutions called schools and universities where we train how to be something, to have a fixed way of looking at a category. I am This is who I am. But is this who you want to be? Is this what you are and who you want to be? Is life arriving at a role, a function, or is life a becoming? And everything in life seems to be a part of a compound interest rate. That it's just compound into something greater. So if you emphasize input consciously so that you have agency and you act what you do. So instead of reacting, which makes you tired and exhausting, and then, okay, we should suck out less, you act intrinsically. Then I think the output of that, if you have most of the things that you are doing are actively put into life, So you fill your life in order to have a fulfilled life. Then I think there is very much output and high-quality output. So, and therefore, when you have that analogy to sucking things out of your life, you actually put more into life, but you do it from an agency perspective where you experience it as in comparison to being reactive. And this is why we have to have a sabbatical and a retreat and a therapist and all that because we are reacting. To the outside world. You talked about, you know, YouTube. It used to be, dear Jason, this could be of interest to you. Pick a new video. Now it's just said, this is up next or next video. Like you're just being sucked through life.

And you have to turn that setting off, right? It automatically goes into the next one. And it's right. It is a rabbit hole. It is right. There is the algorithm of that. And as I'm just thinking about what you're saying, what we're talking about is really what is the concept of free will. When you're saying agency, but right, is such a powerful word, um, agency and empowerment and self-awareness, all these right wonderful buzzwords. But you're— but I think what I'm hearing you, or at least what I'm interpreting this as, is how much we, we are born with free will, but do we realize how much of our free will we're willingly giving up?

Hmm. I think free is free and will want something, and there is a willingness to that. And, and we could always argue there are many stands on, on taking on the concept of free will all the way down to, you know, deterministic future views or some kind of simulation hypothesis and so on and so forth. And there is much plausibility in a lot of these theories, but it seems as if I have some kind of agency to influence at least my own reality. And I think, you know, are we, you know, driven, led by algorithms, by lust, by dopamine, serotonin, endorphin, and all of that? Yeah, definitely. So looking at the brain as a computational functionality, the neurons fire and we project it onto the world. The actual firing in itself, you know, the emergence of a thought or a decision We don't seem to hold a lot of power of that. So once it's programmed, we can observe the reaction, we can think about our thoughts, but what sparks the magic of the arising of a thought, getting behind that process into realms that we can call subconsciousness or various definitions of mental states that we can refer to but not really understand, you know, what they are and how they are. It seems to be that we are also very much, you know, projecting some kind of happening onto what we call reality. So there are many ways to unpack that and play with that. But it seems as though that we can have, at least have some kind of, you know, control to influence at least how we see our own reality, which is also then, you know, what follows then is that we have some influence to how we react to various things around us. Coming back to your, you know, optional reaction not to vote, right? So there is some kind of agency there to be achieved. Do we live by that? Certainly not to the full, some more than others. Probably. So we are probably moving more now towards what you can refer to as some kind of philosophical zombie, where we're just walking about and just the light seems to be on, but there are no one home to perceive them. So the perception, the consciousness, you know, our sensory experiences, the experience of our own experience, is probably what we have in terms of what it means to be a Mensch, a human being. And, and that is a very beautiful, romantic way to look at us as individuals. Not in relationship to all the other human beings there might be around us. So that is something that I think, you know, there are ways to relate to that, it seems. So the concept of free will has some, you know, substance to it, at least. Um, I, I consider that as many times where I have that experience where you, you know, you seem to just be in the moment. You can call it whatever you want to use in terms of spiritualism or, or conscious state. But just the fact that you observe yourself laughing into the mirror when no one is looking, you know, that's a very human trait to have that observation of that, um, action, you know, and to define that or to call it something.

Oh, that's what I'm doing, right?

Yeah.

And I'm curious, just in your own journey, when did you, you know, when did this thinking start showing up for you in your awareness? When did— what was going on in your life where you started being more conscious or more curious or starting to question these constructs and start saying, wait, this may be— there is a different way of looking at this, or there's a different way of thinking this, or maybe this thing that I've kind of inherited, right, a thought or belief, isn't really the only way. Was there some defining moments where this started kind of having a fork in the road in your life for you?

Yeah, there were some moments that I think influenced it more than others. There were times where I realized that, you know, having spent the career path to just let go, that I started to see that this is not what I want. I don't know what I want. There was like a radical change, but I want to leave this behind. So those were like things that I very much realized. I think what I always had was I have a genuine interest to the, you know, foundation of reality and the science of consciousness. And I was always curious to very many disciplines. So I'm a true generalist in that sense. And it helps you see a lot of things that are like interwoven or related. So I have never been about a lot about, you know, finite solution, more as to understand underlying mechanism. When it's about improving things, I don't look for solution, look for better problems. First, I have to understand the problem. And I always taught like that. And I think today what I see more and more is that these interdependencies become crucial because if you can listen to various definitions of quantum mechanics or spirituality or theology or whatever, you have those plausible stream of thoughts, people presenting them in an appealing way. But if you listen to the other part, with a very open mind, you see that they contradict, they don't fit together. It's kind of like monotheism. We said, okay, I'm an agnostic atheist, you know, I'm open to believing. I don't need that in my life at the moment. But if you have monotheism, agree on one and then present it to me. Right. So there are implausibilities. And, and I'm very like resonate very much with Søren Kierkegaard, the existentialist Danish philosopher, um, who famously wrote about the paradox. So he wrote that a thinker without a paradox is like a lover without passion, uh, as a fault of mediocrity. And this is where life becomes static, where we cannot tackle, you know, the ambiguities and also be open to the unknown. And this is very much, I think, um, to put that together, um, to to have that feeling of what it means to be alive. And this is very much the book that I just wrote, The Viking Code. It's also very much about— in German, we have a wonderful word called lebendigkeit. It's very difficult to translate. It's the vitality of life, the totality of the experience of what it feels like to be alive. And I think in relationship to all the technology that we created, This, whatever it is, qualia, consciousness, whatever, that is probably the only thing that distinguishes us from technology. And it only does so until we discover what it is. So the romantic idea here is we build artificial general intelligence and humanoids, and we know that they are different. We just don't know how, because that leaves the realm for the unknown. For something romantic that could be the Mensch, the human being, that outside of a computer or a physicalistic creation that is just simply a process of information. So this is speaking as a romantic to the Mensch. But then we should hold on to that. That's the Lebendigkeit, the liveliness of life itself.

It's interesting, as you were describing that, I'm picturing just any any parent, any healthy parent always wants the next generation to be better and achieve more and to have just better outcomes than they do. And I'm wondering just from an unaware and, you know, maybe to— how do I say this— what might be unconsciously being put on AI and technology is that we as humans are creating something that on twofold, uh, on one side is, is, is smarter, faster, more efficient than us, but two, it's still something that we created. So we have a little bit of an investment of, look what we did as humanity, look what we did as, you know, as, as data scientists or technology experts, whatever. We look what we did, we created this. And two, this will also— we're proud of this, right? Look what we did, we added to this to the world. But on the other side, look how we're benefiting "Look what this is going to be doing not just for me but for humanity as a whole." And I'm wondering if there is a sense of duality with that where on one side there's the fears of what AI can, hence the whole Terminator movie and that perspective. And then the other side is how can we use this to better humanity with better medical imaging to find and detect things even, which they're finding already years before things become something they're finding to help with. Medical treatments and so forth. But then you have the negative side, right? We have people who are being denied medical insurance because it's being run through AI instead of humans. And health insurance companies, can't remember which one got sued for hundreds of millions of dollars because they were denying claims that were used through AI. I'm a big fan of trying to be an early adopter to learn as much as possible without judgment on things. And I just hear Again, people go back to that binary. It's either good, it's bad. It's either all this or it's all that. And we don't stay curious. But just taking that step back, do you think that there's some type of intergenerational parent-child theme with this creation of AI, where the people who are at the leadership or they're doing or they're involved with it feel like that this is a child, they're creating a new species, they're creating a new humanity? Through this, through this new era that we're in right now?

Yeah, I think if you look at leaders, politicians, I don't think that's, that's the level. I think they're very opportunistic. I think some of these engineers that has a deeper understanding of the exponential curve of technology that can extrapolate or anticipate future scenarios. They would probably go down that path and resonate in the same way that we, my colleague and I, have done in a forthcoming book that is coming out in March titled The Singularity Paradox. The single is found under singularityparadox.com. It's about bridging the gap between humanity and AI, and we argue that we should create artificial human intelligence because it seems to be that we will hack biology, chemistry, and we will have all these possibilities. And probably already next year we will see humanoids and automation waves hitting like crazy. And, um, of course there are horror scenarios to, you know, weaponizing and automated, but you know, the battlefields of future wars will not be about human beings. And no one will go on— like, a human being will never go to war in, in a technological sense. If you look at powerhouses like with Israel, Singapore, and Asian countries, and the US obviously leading, China, you know, that makes no sense, you know, because autonomous drones and all these entities that we have going all the way up to planes that could fly very much faster because they don't need a pilot. You could have an F-16. So there are obviously these scenarios, but that seems to be kind of like the scenario of nuclear war where we have that red button and we always keep pulling ourselves together not to hit the button because we know it's like an endgame scenario. So I'm not so much worried about Terminator and calling Arnold Schwarzenegger back and all that. But I am very worried about technology becoming too good. And this is about like the agency that we talked about and these type of avoiding the zombie apocalypse happens on multiple level. One is the natural part that we talked about before about reacting to impulses and getting sucked into that social media whatever game of virtualizing everything. Uh, and then there is like the physical, um, part of it where we merge with the, with the brain and, and the computer, and we wire up our brain. So you could ask, you know, yourself, is there a point where we lose the agency, the consciousness, the conscious experience? If you take 100 neurons, 100,000 neurons, 100 million neurons all the way up to 83, 84, 86 billion neurons, is there a way along that merging path that the lights go off? So, we have the same conversation, you and I, but there will be no one home to perceive it. And that is something that I'm more worried about, these type of scenarios of the optimized human being. So, we have put out some arguments and observation drawing of math and quantum physics and philosophy. We call it Sci-Fi, Science Philosophy. BHI Sci-Fi. And we argue that maybe it's one path is that we create artificial human intelligence. So we create an enhanced intelligence so that we can remain conscious in that human sense and just enhance our capabilities to that extent. Because we want, you know, also then to know how we could create humanoids and robots that behave in a similar sense like 8 billion people that By all due respect, they're not good or perfect, but they have managed to, you know, get themselves together to grow the population to 8 billion and still have the, you know, capability to feed most of them, reduce poverty, um, you know, taken down a lot, you know, less people are dying in wars than ever, even if you look at a terrible situation in Ukraine, Gaza, or Syria. But so we have the path is, is, is, is, is on the right direction. Um, so therefore I think Coming back to your question on that future of technology, I lean into exponential developments, but more in the sense of reason. And when we do that, we have to think about the consequences because the risk that I see is that throughout history, we have our two disposable thumbs that we can build better tools. We could always error correct. This seems to me like one of those things that we create where we will not have a lot of opportunities to go backwards in terms of security. We are playing with, you know, kind of moving from what I call, you know, the divine creationism into a humane creationism. So everything you can imagine, you can create. So the question then becomes, you know, just because we can, should we do it? You know, what kind of future is worth building? If we can have everything, what kind of future would you build? What kind of future is worth striving for? And that is a big challenge because it requires a deeper understanding of all implications. And we will never solve that alone. For that, we need AI to anticipate future scenarios. What should we do? Right. And that is the big question that I spent a lot of time thinking about.

Yeah, and I think it taps into the difference of us as humans versus other species on this planet, that where we have this consciousness of where we can add and create things outside of just creating more humans, right? Other animals can only create their specific species of animals. They can't create any other type of entity that's outside of what their genetic predisposition is. That's just the programming, right? And humans, with our level of, you know, the fact we have this added extra cons or different type consciousness, we can create things that are very different than just us. And I just find that, just that insight alone is just so fascinating to the responsibility that we have as humans, where even in day-to-day relationships of how mindful we should challenge ourselves to be, not just with, with, with animals and inanimate things, but also to just other humans, of we have this consciousness, we have this thoughtfulness of this will have direct impact, not just on maybe this person we know, like intergenerational trauma, right? When we think long term, and I think maybe that's what's so cool about AI, right, with predictive models and, and statistics and all the things that are just above and beyond the, you know, in the world of quantum computing, right? I'm thinking back to mainframes, right, when they used to have like rooms that were just mainframe computers just to do one math thing. Now we can do that on our, on our iPhone. But do we even take into consideration the idea that if I make this decision, that can negatively impact someone else? Could that negatively impact multiple generations down the road as well? And, and just plugging that into AI to give us feedback, to say, hey, don't forget about this, take this into consideration when you wouldn't take this into consideration, becomes a really fascinating— I'm like goosebumps right now thinking about this, of the impact of Even talking to clients in my therapy session of like, yeah, we know that if you're a parent and you don't do this well and you don't have good boundaries and you don't create good structure, that this can affect your kids. But imagine using AI with plugging in that scenario, plugging in maybe some genetic— right, having genetic data, having situational data and plugging that in and then having that feedback. Here's what can happen in your, you know, to your grandchildren that aren't even born yet based on this information of what you're dealing with today. It's fascinating if that could be our future.

Yeah, I mean, I'm invested in a company that is building a $10 human genome sequencer. So you can sequence any genome for $10, you know, and then you can get in and manipulate and you can build, you can create, you can shape. And it's an optimization game, you know, we talk about, you know, enhancing functionalities or restoring functionalities, you know, site hearing, whatever. But if you understand the mechanism of that, and if you're plugging in your vision and you use, you know, some kind of goggle and you tap that into the brain and you, you know, you kind of bypass the retina, you don't figure out the eye, but you can tap into the sensory experience in the brain, which is something that seems to be solvable, you know, why should you stop at human sight? You know, if you have those glasses, you can watch infrared, infrared, you could zoom out, zoom in, you could, you know, do all kinds of stuff. You know, you could smell like a dog or, you know, hear like an eagle or whatever. So all these type of things become, you know, functionalities that you can have with an app. You can upgrade your brain. And that is something that I think is not too far away, at least in some, some of these functionalities. And what do you want to do then? You know, how far do you want to go? And that's— I think that is the question that we need to figure out because the implications generations down the road Who's going to answer that? And I think, why, why live in this? What Stephen Hawking called chemical scum, then, if it's all about experiences, you know, the brain and all that. And there are so many things philosophically here. And I think also in looking at the very simple ethical challenges that we are faced with, you know, the various, all the various reflections on the trolley by example, where you have to take a decision on, you know, You know, if you look at that 2, 3 generations down the road, you know, if you have to kill someone today because you know there'll be something happening that will be disastrous in future or have implications, you have to make some, you know, conscious decision on something that is bad today but has a huge upside in the future. Where is the threshold? Where is your level of, you know, what would you do? And if we are confronted with these type of ethical decisions to be made for humanity humanity at large, you know, how do we cope with that? And, and these are interesting things that might become very, very practical because they are so well documented and helped by AI. This is what's going to happen. Do we want this? And that is a very different, difficult thing to look at because that was never the case. We didn't know the outcome. You know, we strive for progress. Something terrible happened. We changed. We got up some rules and regulations and so on and so forth. Moving forward, that to me does not seem to be so trivial and clear that we can error correct. More so, we probably have so much data, so much knowledge that we have to consciously make decisions that can be painful. And I think also with the pace of things at the moment, there'll be a huge gap between the ones that are connected and the ones that are not, whatever that means, you know, going to some kind of new conscious state or longevity or whatever. But there will be a huge gap between those who are connected and those who aren't.

That makes sense. And I see that— I just had multiple conversations over the last week, and this is a common thread. And I live in South Florida, and I remember years ago, in my, uh, two offices ago, one of my clients said that, um, South Florida is a, is a, is a sunny place for shady people, right? And, you know, and, and I always hate bashing on South— there's lots of wonderful people here, but, you know, you go to other parts of the country and people read more, they do more, you Nature here is going to the beach and going to, you know, going to a clubby, you know, type of thing. So, you know, I think certain cultures, certain societies breed certain things. And, you know, when you talk about consciousness or connected, I do see it. I do see it. People who are like you, you know, who are doing work with themselves, on themselves, who are connecting to people that think differently, that are open to hearing, you know, things outside of their little algorithm or their bubble. Taking relative influence from others and saying, "All right, I'll do some reading on that. I'm open to hearing something different." AI, I do believe, is exponentially shifting that gap between those who are open enough, even a little bit, that will separate that space between those who are and they're not. That gap will become much bigger. And I'm having Conversations already about that, that people are seeing a shift where even if they thought they wanted to live in a certain place like South Florida, uh, for certain reasons, when they get to a certain place, they're like, oh, but what about— but I didn't think about these things, and now I'm noticing how much things are changing and shifting in different cultures and different communities, different societies, by consciousness, by curiosity, by investigation, by being more open to hearing, uh, others. And I, and I think that ties into one of the original chapters of your book. One of the first chapters of the book is, is this idea of humility and, and some of the rules of humility that you talked about. Um, and I, and I think this does go tap into every single thing we've already talked about before, is in order to be a leader in any new emerging thought process, whether it's philosophy or tech or business, there has to be a pause on some level of humility. And yet at the same time, there has to be the willingness to ask for resources, to ask for help, to collaborate, because 50% of something is better than 0% of nothing. So I'm curious, one, just some of the things that you've talked about in the book about humility and And there's a law or rule that you share about, that you talk about that mirrors, so to speak, the Ten Commandments but escalates up. So I'd love to hear the audience hear a little bit more about that. But I'm curious what your thoughts are just on the pushing the gas pedal and the brake balance of humility and humbleness and saying, "Nope, I'm going all in on this." Yeah.

No, I think I write about something called the Law of Jante, Jante-Loven. And there was a Norwegian author back in 1932 who wrote a sarcasm of the Ten Commandments. There were like an exaggeration of the same saying, you should not believe in yourself, you should not think that you are something, you should not think that you're better than anyone else. And this was me growing up in a Norwegian small town and also the whole culture. If you mentioned the Law of Jante, everyone in Norway knows what that means. So there was a very strong sense for having everything on the collective level, uh, the commune, the communal service, uh, you know, there are Eastern concepts of this from New Zealand or Australia where they cut the flowers the same size, you know, and keep people grounded, so to speak, in the same condition. And we shouldn't— we, we were not told not to stand out, we shouldn't believe in ourselves, and, and so on and so forth. I think this this is wrong. I think, you know, you should believe in yourself. You should have self-trust because only if you trust yourself to the full can you also start to trust other people and build relationships. And we know that I can have this conversation with an AI or someone, but it seems as though that you have some kind of consciousness and you're probably a human being. So I can only do this conversation.

We're assuming.

Yeah, I never know though. You can never speak for someone else's consciousness, but I am because you are. And this was basically, you know, we grew up and I did a lot of various sports, very simple. Here was I had to go to biathlon and cross-country skiing and soccer because if I didn't go to the other guys' training, they wouldn't come to mine. So, we were like all, you know, and how does that apply in society? In a team, it's obvious if everyone around you is practicing at a higher level and you have an aspiration to stand out as an individual, you are obviously better off to practice at a higher level. It's not that evident in, you know, organizations because people seem to be fighting for the role at the top. But also here, if you have that aspiration to grow, you know, wouldn't it be better if you have had a training field, a pitching ground where you could have talents around you, people that are smarter than you, so that if you are— have that intrinsic motivation to grow, then you are in a good place. And this is basically individualism and collectivism coming together as some kind of reinforcement learning model where you, you know, pay into the common good and the collective to uplift them in order for you to grow even more. And that is a dynamism of life that I think is important, a lesson to be learned. I write about the Declaration of Interdependence, you know, where you sign off the understanding that we can only do this together. And I think this is something that many then realize. And, you know, what are the challenges? You know, isolation, uh, the pandemic obviously played a big role to speed it up. Algorithms— it used to be like this: you went to a company where you had some kind of base trust because you worked for the same company, called it culture. And there was a trillion-dollar industry that got lost when we started to work from home. Um, it found place at the coffee machine. So people bumped into each other. They had base trust. They had different views, or they talked about things that were outside of the Zoom session. So they had friction. So if you have trust and you have friction, then you can start to play and dance and move on and have progress. And so I think, you know, that the will to truth, the genuine interest to learn and not to have an ego where you have just the binary way of optimizing and having the finitude, I think that's the essence of understanding the relationship to two things. One, that we cannot do it alone. And two, that everything is life. What I think human beings are born to do is to build better explanation, come up with better explanation to create progress. I think progress is all we have. And that's the dynamism of life. To experience progress is fulfilling because you have learned something. And if you take out that learning aspect of life, the journey, then it becomes static, a homeostasis. And a static life is a dead life. And this is very much where we have been moving on towards. I call this in new existentialist terms, a state of being undead. So we are not, you know, we are not fighting the anxiety of the finitude of life itself. We're not fighting death. We are up against the state of being undead, or, you know, kind of the philosophical zombie that I referred to before. So we go about and just spit out our self-evident truths and we react and we function, but we are not really lebendig or like alive to that extent, right?

Yeah, I see this like it's kind of like a feedback loop because every time you share these comments, I mean, right, in my mind they're stacking upon each other, right, as, as maybe developmental stages or peeling away of old ways of doing things. And it still, to me, keeps coming back on the simplest level, right? There's many ways we can go into this, but on the simplest level, it still goes back to self-determination and autonomy and agency. And really, and this is what I love about the therapeutic process is that I'm not really here to help you with the issue that you think you're coming in for. I'm here to help you figure out how that belief assumption expectation got put there in the first place, which then eventually led that to becoming an issue. And if we can unpackage that, we can figure that out, then we might realize that the thing doesn't have much power anymore. And I'm wondering, just in your own personal journey, obviously you're sharing all this wonderful, this wisdom that you've gathered, is there any moments where there was those ahas for you that you're like, okay, this was a defining moment, this was an awakening. This was a, oh, I'm not playing by that rule anymore.

No, I think one thing I read a book called, uh, I can't remember the author's name, Bloom something, uh, Against Empathy. And I had all this, you know, conversations on, you know, uh, AI, you know, they cannot have the human skills and we are different and everything. What, what do you mean by that? How are we different? You know, what are the things that— and I said, you know, to me, empathy is a hard skill. You know, it can be— and I was provoked by that. And that goes back to that experience that I had. So I've spoken at all these conferences over the years in front of thousands and thousands of people. And when I do that, I go on, you know, and it's very exhausting because it's a lot of energy because I don't practice, like, do a setup and have these structures every time. So I just go on an intellectual dance and think out loud. So it's a beautiful, for me, a conversation with one person. If there are 10 or 5,000 or whatever, how many people are in the room, I have that intensive conversation and it's a monologue, but it feels like a dance, right? And to many, that's also very inspiring. So when I go off stage, people come to me and a lot of people that have had very, very radical experience in their life, you know, really life-changing experiences, being coming out of terrible, you know, traumas or just bad situations that have happened, crisis through life. They come to me and I have, you know, the sensors that I can have a notion of energy and that sense of feeling of the person. But sometimes when I'm tired, I'm just cognitively there and just say what I think is right. The person across me who themselves say they are very spiritual or energetic or whatever kind of school you have trained, they say you are very empathetic. And I say, well, in my own mind, I'm saying I didn't feel anything. I just, you know, I just, it was just a computer in that moment. I have a lot of feelings and emotions and I'm very passionate about many things and I can be sad and all that. But in that particular moment, I am in that what Bloom also describes as that state of, you know, acting with, with a rational compassion, which basically saying, okay, I know that this is the right thing to do so that this person feels better. And that's not manipulating or using cognitive experience. It's just common sense. It's reason. Because I say, no, why should I feel bad if this person is feeling bad? I don't have to be in the same shoes and feel the same thing. I just have to make this person feel better. So I feel good and we have a net sum plus on both sides out of irrational compassion. And that is to me like one moment that I, I thought a lot about it and I found that backed by science and theories and I resonated very much so with that, which again obviously takes us back to the AI computer and say, you know, if an AI makes you have goosebumps, you know, you cannot goose it away, so you cannot argue against it. Right. So that The question becomes very, very real. Like, what is it that a computer cannot do? I'm not saying it does it the same way. It's just that if you can have lust and orgasms and laughter and goosebumps, what are the limits? And therefore, this was to me a very practical experience where a lot of the thoughts to me came into play, where I just clicked together. And this is where I also then challenge people that come with the human skills. I say, what do you mean by that?

Yeah. And I'm seeing that. I see that a lot, especially with my couples where, right, one always wants to be right. And, uh, you know, and if only my partner did, didn't saw the world the way that I saw it, then all of the problems that we have in this relationship are going, would go away. And what you just shared there is probably the biggest tool that that, you know, therapists, especially those who are doing couples counseling, are trying to teach or empower that partner who is, you know, maybe by sheer force and will trying to get their partner to be any bit differently than what they actually are versus the radical acceptance and the radical curiosity. And it has to be especially those who focus on, well, but that's not a— they're not giving me a rational response or rational answer. So the person who's the most rational should be winning and should be leading this relationship, except they don't get that that's not how humans work. That's how computers work. And, and, and I think that's where that self-awareness journey, the self-actualization, the understanding emotions better, vulnerabilities, fears, all that stuff— I see it commonly in, in relationships, and I see it very much, you from, from, you know, masculine energy to feminine energy in relationships consistently. Is there maybe a question or a challenge or an assignment, like, especially maybe when you're speaking, that you would give the audience, or you would give someone who's in conversation with you that struggles with that, that doesn't have that ability to go, but no, but this is the practical thing, or this is the most efficient thing, or this is the most least chaotic thing, as opposed to just being in that moment and taking a step into that other person's emotional reality, even if they determine that it's not rational? What would be just a, you know, a tip or insight to challenge that person?

I think you're much better equipped to that than I am. I am, I'm very— to me, you know, ratio cognition just kicks in right off the bat, you know, it's just processing all the way and people open their mouth and I know how the sentence is going to be finished. And so to that extent, in that relationship, even my wife, you know, I'm one of those elephants in the glass house that is just going about, you know, so, so you're probably much better, would be much better answering the question. But, but one thing that I like to play with is I want to kind of sort of push the person that I'm talking to resonate on their own thoughts. So I try to stay away from any guidance or justification. But I say, what do you think? I mean, you talked about it before, the first principle thinking, you know, go down to the basis of the problems to understand the relationship. And what I Very often what would happen with me is that people come to me and say, well, I'm a different opinion. And I say, but I don't have one. I got a philosophical thinking. I'm just, I was just playing with scenarios. So, but I want to understand your opinion. And what I often experience is that they haven't thought about their own experience. So if you go down the layers, so I want to say, how, why do you see that? Why do you see that? You're not attacking the person of correcting. His or her belief or truth, but you just want to have the plausibility in that argument. And if you can take people on that dance, then you never teach them something. You know, they learn how to learn. And I think this is today, AI, at least from a theoretical standpoint, has the power to force us to teach how to think. So you can have, you can envision having glasses on. You know, we have the next version of whatever, Meta or Apple glasses on. And we are talking, and every time we're saying something that is falsified by the AI, which always gets better, I have a red light on the inside. So you're not seeing my bullshit and I'm not seeing your bullshit. How long would humanity go on to just talk crap if that was the case? You know, everything you say is validated. So, so these are like mechanisms, or, um, coming back to your voting, right? We can have instant error correction of everything. So So every time someone would be saying something that is not true, you would have a red light, you would just buzz off, and you would stop and you would pause and error correct. And if the error correction is not correct, it only happens once because the computer never makes the same mistake twice. So we as a humanity said, okay, this is false. Okay, let's error correct then. And for all statements in the future from any human being tapped onto this machine, will never make that mistake again. And we have that today, but we're just too lazy to wire up our phone. But that will not just be this— the interface and the interface will come here and we'll have that error corrected in real time. And then, you know, elections and everything else could turn out, at least in theory, because now you have to consciously vote for falsehood from your own perspective because you could either— this, right? This red light is not correct. Okay, to go after it. Oh, it is correct. Okay, now I have to vote for red consciously. Is speaking. So there is no nuance, there is no dance, it's just fact. And the fact is that we collectively agreed upon. And that's, you know, in theory, that's not very far away. In practice, I mean, sure, that's a different, different, whole different thing, right?

And then the ethics of that, and I can get into like, well, who really has control and power? Is it us, or is it, you know, us having a feedback loop with AI that's now becoming our enslavement to its truth, right? But I'm just also reflecting back on my just experiences and experimenting with, you know, just AI and ChatGPT and stuff like that. And just learning how to prompt better, asking better, thinking about what I'm putting in there versus using it as like most people will go in right now and use it like they're typing into Google, which is not the way to use any of these GPTs. And figuring out what are the semantics, what are the parameters, what are the— what do you want it to think as is one of the first, particularly pretend you are a— think like a, right? And that already sets up parameters that we have to push ourselves out of our comfort zone. Um, and then thinking like, are we— can we think differently than what we think in general, right? Jason the therapist, can I think as Jason the musician? Which is, you know, I've— I'm, you know, when I'm not doing therapy, I'm playing around on my, on my instruments, or you know, going on and saying, just for people who are just curious, like, I don't want to watch what everybody else is watching, everybody else is telling me, or what Netflix is telling me. Okay, well, put in the shows and the movies that you like, and then come up with a list of the things that are like that, that are not commonly watched, right? And we can use that to, to really enhance our— you even with YouTube videos, right? What are things that will help fill in the gaps? And I really do love the direction that that can go. The other side of saying like, well, you're gonna get buzzed. You know, it's kind of like those old, uh, science, you know, the psychology experiments of like if you do the wrong thing, you're going to get buzzed and it's going to condition— classical conditioning. And will AI— will AI get so good that we will classically condition our own free will and our own autonomy and agency out of the process? And that's the— that's a big conversation to have.

That's the zombie. That's the—

that's the zombie.

How to avoid the zombie apocalypse. That's where we're heading. So yeah, so, so I'm, when I'm speaking now, I'm speaking, you know, as a, as a short-term thinking on technology. And if we are to go down that path, you know, which is also not given, you know, there can be some limitations or whatever. And, but then, you know, if there are limitations to the current approach, maybe there's other ways to rebuild the mind, other engineering forms, compute scalability. We simply don't know. And I think, you know, there are none of these creators of these foundation models really do you understand how these things behave because they are too complex. So we never know where will be the next breakthrough and how it will unfold. But it seems as though that most things that we do and, and how created computers can do most of that better if that is our intention, if there's an economies of scale to build it. So yeah, so you are 100% correct in that resonance. Okay, what then when we go down 10, 20, 30, 40 years down the road? And then there are the views that, okay, now we can fully emerge into some higher state of consciousness and just sit in awe and reach a new level and some kind of super state. We can wire up our brain and be in that spiritual realm.

All possible, you know, we can be in the cocoons like in The Matrix and just become batteries too, right? It's— that's, that's a crazy thing, right?

It's, it's when you wrote a paper about the simulation hypothesis, it's very difficult to argue against a simulation because of this technology. So either, you know, the arguments from Nick Bostrom says that either, you know, it comes to a halt, there is like some kind of, um, distinguishing event that just wipes out humanity. Uh, the second option is is we just simply get bored of progress. So we say, okay, now we have enough, it's going to sit and do other things, whatever that might be. Uh, and the third one, there is progress, and then it doesn't matter how, how slow or how fast it is on the timeline. Uh, you know, uh, then it will evolve eventually, and we'll have this, you know, virtual worlds that become indistinguishable, and we can put some laws into that, we can have agencies, whatever. So if there's kind of to develop consciousness with these entities in the Then obviously a simulation could theoretically be possible. Yeah, but the challenge is then to say, okay, if that is possible, then we most likely live in a simulation already. Because the reason, the chance that, you know, 8 billion simulate a simulation within a simulation ad infinitum, then we, the two of us, are most likely in one already. So those are the arguments that are played with. Sometimes it seems like a simulation. So I'm very sympathetic with the idea and it's very difficult to argue against.

Yeah, makes absolute complete sense. All right. So then as far as, you know, there's so many good resources, but we know you have the book, The Viking Code: The Art and Sciences of Norwegian Success. So that's out. Just maybe share with everybody where they can, you know, hear more, read more, connect with you more, and then we'll—

Yeah, sure.

We'll tie it up there.

Thank you, Jason Wasser. Yeah, I love the conversation. Check out AndersInsitt.com. That's my website. You have a lot of resources that we put out articles and we have a section there called Sci-Fi where my quantum physicist friend and I play with these thoughts. The Viking Code is found under Viking-Code.com or where books are bought. And the forthcoming book, as I said, is Singularity Paradox. That is also under SingularityParadox.com, but also my website. And I'm occasionally on LinkedIn. LinkedIn. So anyone who wants to link up, feel free to do so. Awesome.

And then for everybody who's listening, obviously the Instagram also, right? Anders Insight also on Instagram. And, um, just so many great resources. And, you know, I've spent some time just going through the sections on the website, the essays, and, um, just the different books in different languages as well. How many languages are the books published in?

Um, the last book was published in 12, I think. So they're—

yeah, that's awesome. First of all, congrats. That's, that's really cool, right? What— to even get beyond one book in one language is a big deal, but to get to 12 different languages, to know that people are really hungry for, for, for this information and knowledge is such an incredibly, incredibly special thing. So really want to congratulate you on this and everything that's coming forward. And, and when the next book comes out, we'll hopefully we'll, we'll jump back on and, and do more of this. And if anybody has any questions, or if they want maybe, is there a reading list of like suggested readings in addition to what you have? Is there kind of like, hey, here are the things that inform me? Yeah, the people who want to like, you know, we talked a lot about a lot of big themes and a lot of big topics and a lot of terminology that maybe the average person may not know if they haven't gone down this rabbit hole. Is there a place where you would recommend or suggest, like, hey, here's where to get started, here's what to start looking at and start reading? Do you have that kind of anywhere as well?

I haven't put it together. I thought about it quite a few times, but now you're saying it. I have a new page working on the things that I'm working on right now. This on my website, it's on the navigation, also found at the top. But I should also have one of those set up. So I'll probably do that in the near future. So if someone is interested in that, feel free to subscribe and it will inform as soon as it's up and running.

Beautiful. All right, so everybody else, thank you so much. If you, you know, again, whether you're getting, uh, pleasure from this or you know someone who would be interested in especially in these topics that we talked, talked about today, please, please share the episode out with everybody. And, uh, if you do have time, leave a review, most typically on Apple. That's the one that does the most and easiest reviews, but that does help these conversations get found by, by more people. But it also lets us know that we're— myself and our awesome guests are on the right path, and these are things that you want to hear, and we're just not spinning our wheels. I mean, as much as I'm benefiting and enjoying our time together, I want, you know, I want everybody out there to know that I want— do we— do you want more of these topics? Do you want less of these topics? What other topics do you want to hear? I mean, who would you like for us to, uh, to spend some time with? In the future, especially as we're getting closer and closer to episode 200. So this is, uh, I don't know if you know this about Anders of a Podcast, that the average person who does a podcast doesn't last past 20. So this is, uh, somehow, somehow this is working.

So congratulations.

Somehow, I don't know, somehow they're doing good enough jobs. So I really want to thank everybody else out there and Anders again.

So you're doing a good job.

Thank you so much for spending time, and we'll see you all in the next episode.