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foreign adaptive system and in complex adaptive systems all emergence comes from below not from above and we seem to be in a moment in history where we're rewarding people who have very big Egos and who say you know I can do anything we keep
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rewarding the bravado we keep rewarding the push for total control but I want somebody who's certain and and so it's always a challenge right because the the certain person is many times certainly wrong we love to choose leaders for crazy stupid reasons one of
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them is human beings still think the tallest person in the room should be the leader the higher you go on the hierarchy the less good your information and Gollum lives above the door of the Oval Office and he jumps on your shoulder when you walk in that room and
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says don't say what you think say what you think he wants to hear it's it's really hard to come up with an escape plan if you don't know you're in a prison currently we live in a world where we say if someone doesn't agree with me they're either stupid or evil
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well there's no way to begin a conversation someone makes you upset and angry it's because it's something already in you foreign with another infinite Loops I finally have one of my favorite people as a guest on this podcast I have been on
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many other podcasts and panels and all sorts of things with Dr Pippa melgren who is the best-selling author of the infinite leader balancing the demands of modern business leadership as well as two other best-selling books the acolytes are surrounding you Pippa are
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amazing one commentator said essentially you are digitally divining the future I love that one and you have advised U.S presidents on uh Enron oh fun topic 911 another not fun topic uh as part of the National Economic Council you've been a
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founder of companies I mean is there anything that you haven't done welcome pipa thank you so much for having me and I'm so psyched to be on this you know I just I love the quotes that she put up on Twitter you know I just think it's it's a sign
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of such an educated mind and you've clearly read such a breadth of material and look you know me I just I'm I'm a bookaholic so I'm delighted to be on with you Jim and thank you for having me and I'm delighted to have you I'm uh also a fellow bookaholic
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um let's Dive Right In uh because your your book is really amazing in many respects because what you're saying is leadership currently has gone badly wrong tell us about that well I think everybody knows this um we've had so many leadership failures
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and the question that I and my co-author Chris Lewis were asking is why is this so why is it across so many different sectors as well why is it you know the Catholic Church having um an issue about dealing with pedophilia well it is a German car
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companies lying about emissions it's political leaders lying about you know how decisions got made I mean the the list is endless so the question is how is it we've gotten into the position that this is persistently and consistently occurring
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and we concluded that a lot of it is about the ego driving leadership and we seem to be in a moment in history where we're rewarding people who have very big Egos and who say you know I can do anything and I would even go into geopolitics
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with this this wasn't in my book but I would say now looking at the state of geopolitics today how do we keep ending up with heads of superpower Nations um saying you know it's my way or the highway which we kind of have in most of the superpowers right now so what is it
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about our society that we keep rewarding the bravado we keep rewarding the um push for total control um and that leadership fundamentally really isn't about the leader anymore it ought to be about the ship right it ought to be how do you get the best out
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of the people and it's about bringing from the bottom up not telling from the top down and yet we have this inclination to keep supporting people who um don't express those qualities so it's still a conundrum you know so much to unpack there I uh
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you I agree with you on so many points and one of them is I think a result of our top-down uh nature of both thinking and society as opposed to listen Society is a complex adaptive system and in complex adaptive systems all emergence comes from below not from above and so
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trying to dictate a very unnatural uh hierarchy if you will uh we we see this happening and I absolutely concur that this this is not just a business problem this is a problem across the leadership spectrum and and you make an interesting
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point in the book that essentially people are educated and optimizing for management not for leadership talk a bit about the differences yeah uh and I would extend this by the way into AI where we're optimizing for cost and efficiency but none of the
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things that are important for human flourishing and so you end up with a particular angle if you're optimizing for management you're optimizing for quarterly performance you're not optimizing for building a company that can truly you know move people and in
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fact I've I've written about a concept uh called which I call cosmopoasis which means the act of World building and just for background you know my mother worked very closely with J.R.R Tolkien um because she spoke Middle English and
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how that happened in the late 1950s in La no one can explain but nonetheless she ended up get Oxford and working effectively as his assistant because she spoke that language now Tolkien was all about creating a world and it sounds like it's far away from
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leadership and business but no this is exactly what you do in business as well so for example Phil Knight when he created Nike right he always said I'm not Bill creating shoes I'm creating a space where you can be a weekend warrior
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where you can be a hero not for winning but for just entering the race or Steve Jobs who said you know I'm not making computers I'm creating a world where bright people don't have to think about their computers I'm creating a world where you can think different so this
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business of world creating that's leadership the business of getting the right quarterly report numbers that's management they're profoundly different things um and I think we've become way too focused on the getting the number right instead of
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getting the story straight wow I love that quote um at my firm O'Shaughnessy Ventures we actually just hired an intern who pitched us on World building that's what he's going to do he is going to to build out uh a complete world and we're really excited about it on the AI
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I also agree that you know to use the geek speak of AI uh we don't have to maximize the objective function for profit we can maximize the objective function for human flourishing and yes or learning and for understanding ourselves as a species even because AI
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has the power to look into the liminal spaces that we humans can't do so I'm involved in AI as you know and one of the reasons I is because I want to be able to push it in that direction as opposed to some panopticon you know
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controlled by a few that tells us how we can and can't use it so we're very much aligned there you you had another thing that I love and I I call it the George Costanza effect you say sometimes the best thing to do is study the worst leaders so you know what not to do
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expand on that a little if you would well yeah you can see if you do study you know leaders who get into trouble there's some consistency there um you know one of the mistakes leaders almost always make is not leaving the stage soon enough
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particularly political leaders I you know and when I worked in the White House you know we always had these jokes about the claw marks on the walls as various political leaders you know come to the end of their term but they don't want to leave the building again so
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they're hanging on and they're being dragged out of the building it's very hard to leave early it's very hard and yet staying too long always ends in tears uh and so you know there's some consistency there to that I think part of its understanding that
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when you are chosen to be for example a head of state this is um you know when you work for the president they give you a a big um framed statement with the president signature and it basically says you work here at the grace and favor of the President
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right this is not a job this isn't Grace in favor in other words you could be gone in a heartbeat right this is just a gift that's a temporarily extended to you but people in the White House think it's a job and so they feel like but if
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I work harder and I'm entitled to stay and same with presidents and prime ministers they too are in a grace and favor position they're not outage it's not a job um it's something that it's a gift that's extended to you for a period of
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time and so understanding that will come to an end and that the gracious thing is that I walk away is really important now I worked for George W bush who was at the time highly controversial you know a lot of people did like him now everybody's like can you bring him
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back because he seems so reasonable compared to what we've got you know some sequeli but I thought it was very interesting that he said to all of us when he became president I'm telling you now that when this ends I am not going to be in politics anymore
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I will not comment on my successor I will be chopping wood or doing something else but I'm I will be out of the game so our only period to do the work is now and sure enough when he left office we didn't really hear a Pips out of him for quite a long time
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um he has weighed in ever so slightly but mainly he has left his successors alone to make their own decisions and I I think that's very rare and it's quite admirable whether you like his policies or not that idea that he understands he's out
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and so this is what I mean by you know watch watch the ones who don't get this yeah I and uh bush is a great example I I was not a particularly fond of him and yet uh as I watched him after he exited this stage I was very impressed actually that he wouldn't make uh you know
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derogatory comments he wouldn't uh try to intervene and you know when I was in Nairobi um I was puzzled because there were uh murals and photos oh they love him there of George Bush there and yeah asked our guide what is going on and he explained
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he gave us the AIDS drugs for free and I I was kind of Blown Away by that the fact that no American Media at least know American Media that I was reading and I read the New York Times The Wall Street Journal Etc uh had had covered that and that kind of
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quiet nature I was very impressed by you know another uh example of that is somebody that I maybe maybe I just don't like any politician but like so so Bloomberg when when he was mayor of New York I learned that he spent uh vast
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sums of his own money without with the direct uh command to his staff don't tell people about this I don't want this to be a press op I do not want any of that and I after I learned that I I my estimation of him really increased dramatically because it gets to
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um now the point of going out on top uh he well he wanted that third term so maybe we won't we won't in that category but it but it also makes me think of the show succession um I I I I think it's a great example of how not two run a corporation but
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something that I thought was very fascinating I I sort of think of it as King Lear meets Rupert Murdoch um but the thing that I loved about the the writers and show Runners there they did go out on a top and you know sort of were done
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are there any examples I I have one but I want to hear yours first uh of leaders who actually did that who actually George W bush being one but other leaders who just were like okay I've done my piece I'm done and there is one and it's super interesting is
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Jacinda Ahern from New Zealand and that is exactly what she did now you know I again we're not talking about policy I have all kinds of you know uh opposition to her policy on a number of things but but as a leader it was extraordinary that she said you know
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I've guided the nation through a particularly challenging period and and I'm I've given it the energy that I have and now it's I recognize in myself my limits and I will move on it's time for someone new with a fresh energy and a fresh Vision to take over and she
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got tons of flack for that and a lot of people became very sexist and said ah women can't take the heat right and I thought how interesting that they turned it into a gender related issue which hadn't occurred to me but I can see why
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it's a kind of you're not tough enough but that feeds into the idea that this is about being tough as opposed to about being able and I think again it's treating that office as if it's some kind of earned prize and I get to keep it once I'm
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there it's mine online nobody else's so because Suddenly It's Gollum right speaking and again I could come back to my um my talking references I remember I was sitting in the I was when I was working for the president I had a very interesting moment where a chief
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executive came in to see me uh and to see the president and he's like oh the president's policies are terrible and he should fire the Secretary of the Treasury and uh he had a super negative position I'm like this is great let's go see the president and you tell him what
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he thinks because he needs to hear your opinion and he's like yeah I don't know we're walking down the long corridors to get to the Oval Office and we literally entered the Oval Office and the guy's like Oh Mr President I am so delighted
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to meet you and I'm like hey wait slap slap come back to me what happened he literally was transformed because he suddenly saw trips on Air Force One and as I sat in that room watching this I realized oh my gosh the Oval Office is
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round and this is the ring and Gollum lives above the door of the Oval Office and he jumps on your shoulder when you walk in that room and says don't say what you think say what you think he wants to hear and most people this according to this because they're
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ambitious and they want to be on air force one and it takes quite a force of character to walk in there and say what you actually think so this is again you know Gollum lives above the door of the Oval Office that's where he lives I love that and uh
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you know we can see historically that uh you know the playbook for leaders as always pretty much included the the Magnificent structure of their offices or their uh you know look at go to the Vatican for example uh you really can't
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help but be overwhelmed when you enter the Sistine Chapel and um you know the uh one of the things it also brings to mind though is the opposite um I'm sure you've toured um uh Churchill's wartime offices and if you haven't been there for those
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listening or watching they're tiny they are in addition to being tiny they are incredibly cramped on comfortable and when I was there for the first time I was like okay this now this guy I love this guy because he didn't run away he he went into a very very unprestigious
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Place uh and you know who knows maybe maybe that helped uh his people advising him give him true advice because that seems to be another common Pitfall for leaders is you know the Peter Principle right the higher you go on the hierarchy
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the less good your information Robert McNamara when he was literally 100 you know he ended up he thought he was getting good information no he was getting lying to him yeah everybody was lying to him and and I wonder is is there a cure for do you think Peppa yeah
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it's uh it is the single most serious problem problem that all leaders face is they are because it takes also usually um certain age to reach leadership positions as well you tend to develop a coachery of trusted insiders that come with you but that also means you're not
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getting fresh information uh and so you've got to balance the trust versus the truth and quite often trust because it's comfortable and Truth is uncomfortable most of the time everybody leans towards trust and so you get this Inner Circle phenomena and it's
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it's really hard to break it so what I work with with uh corporate and military leaders um startup leaders I'm always like okay where's your fresh information coming from what have you last sat down with someone that's new that's telling you
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something really different from what you've heard before and they're often like oh I can't remember you know and it's because they're not making that effort to to do that Outreach um so I think that's one of the really serious problems and take some effort to deal with that
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but another one is on the other side uh is we love to choose leaders for crazy stupid reasons one of them is human beings still think the tallest person in the room should be the leader you know what is this it's like the limbic brain you know where The
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Reptilian Brain is still like guiding our thought process um or the person with the lowest voice this is why a lot of female leaders will often really work on lowering their voices because they're not taken seriously if they're in the higher
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registers um and it's just it's just an intuitive thing and you can't tell someone well that's not a smart way to judge leadership capability because they're like okay but they still will do it um it's just like you know human beings they actually buy cars based on the
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color like we know this so they can tell you they've studied the car and they know that but in the end they're really driven by what's the color that that's fabulous and and there is a yeah easy heuristic about uh presidential elections if you simply bet
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on who was taller you're cleaning up uh because uh I think Madison uh was shorter than his uh competitor uh but but there there weren't very many of them uh and and the the whole idea of human OS right it we've been programmed
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through Evolution right and we're not often even consciously aware and of course like my good friend Rory Sutherland uh oh I love Murray book Alchemy he he's very aware of that and and he points out all of the ways that you can sort of hijack the limbic system
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yes uh but in in his case he's trying to do it for good one of the things that I did when I was becoming chairman of the Chamber Of Music Society of Lincoln Center was we had had a long serving chairman and it had gotten stale and so
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when they tapped me I said I'll do it on two conditions the first is I'm term limited I can only serve two terms the second is I want to be able to secure my successor ahead of time uh I want input and everything but I want everyone to know I'm limited to
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two terms and then Eleanor Hoover is going to succeed me and that seemed to work really well because I think sometimes you when you when you are doing something and loving it and everything else you kind of forget yeah you know unless you make it absolutely
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transparent and everybody knows right that you're gonna only have two terms uh then then you're free because honestly I think that and the way I put it to them there were a lot of pushback on that and the and the way I put it back to them
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was listen if I haven't been able to accomplish what I want to accomplish in four years I you should replace me right because I I haven't done the job right and and so uh you know I know there's a lot of uh back and forth on term limits
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and you know just kind of seeing I I think they're probably a good idea I haven't really thought about them long enough uh to to have a definitive opinion so I could be swayed uh but then other things like um you know confidence versus confidence another thing
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and I love this I'd love you too I'd love you to to uh Riff on that for a bit because I love what you've said about this when you've written about it yeah there's a wonderful uh psychologist who was teaching at Harvard and then I think he's a head of
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um HR for Man Group uh called Tomas uh tomorrow for music and he's reading this amazing book it's called why do so many incompetent men become leaders instead of slip the most blunt right but what he basically says is um why do we why don't we listen to the
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person in the room who when you say are you capable of doing this that put their arm up and say I definitely am when actually they're probably 40 capable and the people who are 90 capable don't put their arm up because they're not a
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hundred percent capable and this again it tends to fall into a gender issue and people who and I won't say men and women because I think gender we have masculine and feminine and everybody has both but people who lean in the feminine Direction tend to be very reluctant to
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put their hand up and say I can do this because they're like well I'm only 90 and what's needed is a hundred um and the others who are on the other side of that equation are like I'm totally game I can completely do this so how do we distinguish between
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confidence and competence and I think it's again it's a very important distinction and a lot of our accidents in uh business and public policy come from confusing um these two things just like you know skill and luck right we love to confuse
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skill and luck as well so confidence and competence skill and luck same kind of thing how do we keep thinking we're so brilliant when maybe we're not so brilliant so so what are the solution sets there then uh how do we disambiguinate the two
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uh skill unlock competence and confidence again you know these are all hooks into our evolutionary human OS right and uh one of the things that uh you you want is you want somebody you it's human nature to say they're full of Doubt right and and and goodness I don't
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want somebody who's full of doubt I want somebody who's certain and and so it's always a challenge right because the the certain person is many times certainly wrong oh uncertainty is a killer as well we know the minute you're feeling certainty
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you're toast um and even if it it works for a while that's lucky that's not you know necessarily knowing um and this is one reason I make a big distinction between prediction and preparedness and in markets you know you and I have been in markets for a long
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long time everybody loves predicting right dollar Yen up or down stock market up or down and actually preparedness for a range of outcomes or a range of volatility is a smarter way to think about how to allocate Capital than the
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black and white you know up or down and but it's funny how people love to get into this one way or the other thinking I've found it a lot in recent years you know I wrote back in um 2016 or so in my book signals where I said inflation is coming because we've
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made decisions that tell us it there's no other way out we're gonna get inflation uh and inflation began to pick up from that point gradually and then we got jumps and I said geopolitics therefore will also come back uh and at the time people
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like inflation is dead and we're in a peace dividend forever right like geopolitics is finished and I got so much clutch back at the time and but I thought instead of trying to predict yes or no am I right or wrong wouldn't it be wise to spend some time thinking through
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what would happen to my portfolio if this other option turns out to be true why don't we prepare the portfolio for that possibility and look what's happened in recent years every single thing that people said was impossible has actually happened right I
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remember I said Donald Trump was going to win which was not a preference it was just a an observation that it was clear to me that this was a real possibility I feel like that'll never happen um you know so many things we could name
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the state we're in with China oh that'll never happen we'll never decouple in that way inflation where it is never happens so instead of my favorite problem with our leadership is us because we keep seeking someone who will give us certainty when in fact no one
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can deliver the certainty and we have to improve our capacity to deal with ambiguity and with uncertainty and great strength comes from that preparedness it makes you more resilient it makes you more robust so why are we afraid of this approach
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yeah I'm always on the soapbox saying that we are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic world that uh hilarity or tragedy often ensue and and uh you know it's very difficult to get people to think probabilistically it's not natural
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and one of the things that um has it's certainly been very useful in my career uh because when when you have the agility the flexibility to change your mind and and look at things directionally as opposed to X will happen by white time um maybe not
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um and and always sort of being open to the to the range of possibilities as opposed to this is the one or two things that are gonna happen you know one of the things is I was rereading your stuff um is as you were describing the ideal
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leader words you use were like fluid agile activist I really felt like I was reading Lao Tzu's The Dow dejing are you heavily influenced by taoism Buddhism definitely in my co-author too yes and I come at it from a different angle my angle is surfing because I grew up
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surfing every summer in La where my grandmother lived and um the thing is I find people when it comes to the world economy whether you're talking about a Trader an investor or somebody building a company they tend to take this approach of like
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okay I'm here and I want to get to the top of Mount Everest so I just have to assemble the team we got to get the right equipment we're gonna pick the right time of year and then we're gonna go and I'm like but it's not a fixed Target the world economy is this super fluid
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constantly moving so it's a lot more like surfing than it's like mountain climbing and I've done both right I've been to the top of the Himalayas this is not mountain climbing it's surfing and when you're surfing the weather is changing the waves are changing each
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wave is individual and if we treated our work in the markets as an exercise in surfing I think you'd get much better outcomes uh I think people would get more comfortable and they would stop thinking like I have a model and it works and
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you're like yeah but the the ground underneath the model is keep it keeps moving around so the model doesn't work I remember learning that when I was a banker's Trust and you know we Pioneer in value at risk and I remember you know and I'm Bill
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mathematician right I'm compared to those guys oh my God and I sort of remember noticing like but wait a minute a core element of the model is the volatility number and volatility is changing second by second by second and you guys are only
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updating the Vault number once a year so isn't the model gonna give you the wrong answer for most of the time and they were all like oh shut up and actually that was the thing that led to the whole uh collateralized debt crisis it was
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literally that we thought we had this model and it was sitting on concrete when in fact it was sitting on moving water yeah it makes total sense that was another one of my hobby horses I would tell anyone who would listen to me when value at risk was uh the rage I was like
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that is going to do so much damage because it is giving people the illusion of certainty the illusion of control it is breaking down an incredibly complex uh system to a single number and I said we will rule the day that uh we uh in any way said hey we've got the answer
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the VAR on this particular portfolio is whatever percent and and literally the reactions much like you the reactions that people had to me were shut the [ __ ] up O'Shaughnessy just shut up because because they thought they really thought
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that they had a an incredibly useful thing that to my mind was static from the get-go uh as you put actually yeah it's really important and interesting uh and it gets to a much more profound issue I think I'd love to test this idea out on you which is
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throughout the course of human history we've had two primary Technologies for imposing order on chaos and one is numbers and the other is stories and between the two stories are much more powerful and you know we remember the oldest story of the Universe from the
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rig beta right there's stories stay with us and we buy and sell and act on the basis of the emotional response to stories but we're in a period of History since Renee Descartes where we've separated the body from the mind and we've said you know only science counts
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so it's got to be numbers or it's not real and so we've dismissed everything we can't quantify which I think is a tragic error in human history um and we have learned a lot by saying what we do what we can quantify has given us answers that's true
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but I feel we're on the brink of reintegrating the two and this is a profoundly different way of processing reality than what we've had since Descartes and I remember Arthur Kessler the philosopher uh always said he talked about the Cartesian
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catastrophe which was this splitting apart and so when you split things apart and you're doing science it's like dissecting right you chop things into ever smaller bits trying to understand what it is with stories you go back to looking at holistic the holistic picture
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and I think that is what humanity is starting to do as we find the connections and we go ah well actually the bacteria in your gut is influencing your behavior right it's not disconnected it's not all some separate thing and I'm convinced that there are
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two big events happening right now that are truly historic that are pushing us much more back into that holistic approach where we take we we allow the stories because they have truth even if we can't prove it and one is that we're returning
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to the Moon uh we are in my opinion at a once in a species moment where we are not going back just to step on the moon we're going back to stay and to build and to Launch uh and this is an extraordinary moment in human history um and second is actually what's all in
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the news this week which is suddenly out of the blue and talk about a leadership issue of Epic Proportions um we suddenly have the Pentagon and NASA saying that what we see is real that these orbs in the sky that the possibility of Life
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Beyond humans is real and suddenly you have a whistleblower from the Pentagon right who the Pentagon has approved to say this and this is God everybody in a Twist because they're like no no no no this can't possibly be right but if it
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is right then we have a real leadership issue on our hands I I think the two aren't coincidental I I I think that I I have kind of two views on it I think of emmers I think it was Emerson who said that numbers serve to discipline rhetoric he said uh they
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they keep us uh on on a path that we would diverge from uh and make uh our path closer to the human heart um but I also 100 agree on the power of stories um you know when Kennedy gave his famous speech in the early 60s saying that we
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were going to put a man on the moon all the engineers in the United States were like oh we have no idea how we're gonna do that yeah and and so stories are wonderfully motivating I think in in opening up the aperture of people's uh view on things and and think oh I never
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thought about that maybe we should start thinking about that so I love the power of stories married to numbers as far as the UFO thing I'm I'm still uh in the skeptical Camp of that um in that uh well it was totally open to it and uh would would love hey like
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if I could be alive when we met other sentient beings like talking about being the cosmic lottery winner um but uh you you know if I always try to put myself in well goodness uh if if they had this inner uh uh Stellar ability to travel all this way
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um and they're gonna crash when they get here okay this kind of like hmm there's another theory there that's interesting that I was just reading about which actually is consistent with string theory uh from quantum physics which
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essentially is what we might be seeing is inter-dimensional riffs yes other words uh they're they're the the world is a lot Stranger Than many people think it is and and maybe uh this idea of string theory where everything is connected right and that all the various
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dimensions are connected and there are many of them and and maybe what's happening is other dimensions are glitching in and out of of our our reality in quotes I'm a huge fan of of Robert Anton Wilson who I'm re-reading right now thank you me too and and and
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like he's just got so much gold in in what he's talking about um and and actually that's where where I saw that again and that feeds into uh another part getting back to uh your work on leadership uh that I completely agree with and that
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is Tim Leary uh coined the term reality tunnels um and and Wilson did a great job of highlighting them popularizing the term he also came up with or popularized the term consensus reality and consensus reality is basically what all sentient
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beings on this orb were sitting on happen to believe at any given time and if you think about it that way wow consensus reality like 500 years ago was very different than consensus reality today and and how how do you get how do you how do you like if I were to ask you
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Pippa all right I'm gonna put you in charge of a Leadership Academy what would the syllabus look like what would the coursework look like oh that's so interesting um let me before I answer that come back to this uh notion of reality belief
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systems because this is so so powerful we don't even realize that we have inbuilt belief systems um and how long it takes for Humanity to break and recreate a belief system so you know from the time we discovered that the you know sun doesn't evolve
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around the Earth but vice versa that took about a hundred years before people really understood that and bought into it and that changed the way we were able to think about many other things um or quantum physics the wonderful line I'm trying to remember the physicist who
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said it's not only Stranger than we think it's Stranger than we can think I think that was fine I was not spine but I don't think it was Simon but but maybe it was anyway then this and look at from the time David bong wrote the implicate order
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um and you're back in what was that the 30s to the time the Nobel Prize is awarded saying well actually this is true which is last year you know again okay it's less than 100 years but not much uh so we're really slow when we come to breaking and
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reconstructing belief systems and I'm seeing it now as somebody who works in technology and I'm spending time with startups and seeing you know talking towards universities um militaries like where do you guys devoting time and energy what's The
44:47
Cutting Edge and things like space-based solar power and it's fascinating you know this idea that you can literally take the sun's Rays from uh beaming it off a satellite in space convert it to either radio waves or microwaves and beam it to Earth safely and convert it
45:05
into the electricity Supply she sounds total science fiction and I'm you know on Twitter and people are like this is a crazy idea and it won't happen for years to come and I'm like I'm sorry but Caltech just did it this week like it's
45:20
done it's not a question anymore and Airbus has already proven that the tech works in the Saudis have already announced massive Investments with the British to build and the European space agency has just said we're going to build these physical in orbits
45:36
space-based solar power stations like I'm sorry this is already happening and the issue isn't that they can't read that it's their belief system is so frozen into place that this can't physically happen or that it's like a vision of you can't be empowered Earth
45:56
safely or whatever the rigidity of that belief system is they can't allow it to be broken by the facts that are right in front of them but eventually they will either you know as a Feynman said the way science progresses is the elderly
46:14
wander off and die and they stop being obstructive right and the younger people come along go yeah oops do that yeah I did it as you say with JFK he said we can do it and then a whole bunch of scientists actually we can and they did so how much of our economy and our
46:33
reality is driven by our own fragile limited fixed belief systems that if we adjusted them if we could change them what extraordinary things would suddenly become obviously possible yeah the the uh bit about David Baum uh also uh illustrates uh human OS again uh
46:59
because Oppenheimer and others uh were instructed uh by the government that uh they were to he they were to unperson bomb and uh when the implicate order came out uh they and they were to do that because of politics uh somebody
47:16
alleged that he was a member of the Communist party and and so uh there's actual writing from Oppenheimer that I've seen that basically says to his fellow scientists if if we can't attack and disprove his theory we must ignore it and yes and you know it's just I I
47:38
did a threat on Twitter and at the end of it I said uh the easiest way to understand all this is to watch the movie Mean Girls uh because that's so true that that's so here's a key Point again we're talking about this core idea of dealing
48:01
with reality again Feynman said science is not a body of knowledge it's a way of asking questions right but we've come to treat it as a body of knowledge and if anyone challenges the body of knowledge there's something wrong with them
48:19
and this has put a limit on what we're able to talk about what we're able to address it's again a belief system we already know the answers we have certainty thank you very much no need to challenge any of this but is that right and a lot of you know
48:38
investing is built on the same kind of thought process one way or another yeah and you know that's one of my favorite topics belief systems and and how they can be limiting and or uh push us forward and um you know I I wrote once that it's
48:59
it's really hard to come up with an escape plan if you don't know you're in a prison and yeah and that's so true that that's kind of like the core of these belief systems uh we we take what we believe as real and as factual and no matter how many times you disprove this
49:20
no matter how many times you like say historically look at what they used to believe and none of it was true and why shouldn't that apply to us why shouldn't we also be wrong wrong the whole point as Feynman points out uh is about asking
49:39
the right questions it's not this body of knowledge and and I think that again that we come back to we humans the the the need to sort of for the sacred as it were what we see today with scientism which is the opposite of the scientific method scientific scientism deifies
50:00
science and makes it an Orthodoxy and if you go against it you are a heretic it seems like we've got this real thing for Heretics we love burning them stoning them TK Chesterton has a wonderful little book called Orthodoxy um and you know I can't remember when he
50:22
published that but but yes we we buy into these orthodoxies and I I actually think it's very interesting since you've you know you mentioned Leary before you talking about Robert Anton Wilson and these guys were were thinking in
50:36
radically different ways um on on many levels philosophically but also practically I always thought it was so interesting that uh a decision was made to administer LSD to the members of the Manhattan Project because there was fear that they would potentially give away
50:59
the nuclear secrets if they were ever drugged and if they were ever captured and so they were given some quantities of this um at that time which is where Feynman developed the taste for it and he did that the rest of his life which is you
51:15
know well documented now and did Feynman see the worlds differently because of those experiences um did that impact like I always when you when you read his piece um there's always there's plenty of room at the bottom and I don't know if you've
51:33
ever seen his video on the daisy I think it's on a daisy and he says my best friend is an artist he says I destroy the daisy because I don't talk about the petals I start to go into the atomic substructure of the daisy which is actually more beautiful than the daisy
51:50
itself and you're kind of like uh I think he's he has been tripping out a little bit there but how did that inform the reality box that he was in it it changed his understanding of science um and I think it's super interesting that today that there's this
52:09
legalization of hallucinogenics there's this movement where people are experimenting with these kinds of things and having a different understanding of reality as a result um this has become a thing and Modern Life uh and I think it's influencing
52:29
how we talk about what is reality yeah I'm I'm very Pro uh the use of psychedelics uh in the correct set and setting uh very supportive of the work that Johns Hopkins and others are doing with our vets uh treating specifically post-traumatic uh stress syndrome
52:54
um but you know Tim Leary back to Leary he he believed that psychedelics opened the door to reinprinting and by that he meant you know we all get these imprints when we're born and and many of the big ones happen before we have any choice in
53:11
the matter and the two and obviously the language he used was archaic and so I'll probably hear from people uh about using it but he said the first two in printings uh was in Leary's words listeners viewers not mine lyrics words or Top Dog bottom dog
53:31
winners losers script and and he said you are imprinted with those two things before you even have a choice in the matter and and he believed that uh psychedelics offered a path to reinprinting to be a meta programmer if you will um and what I find interesting about
53:56
Larry is that if you look at his testimony in front of Congress uh he was to the opposite of the radical that he was painted in his testimony to Congress he is like I believe this should be regulated I believe that this should be
54:12
medically supervised he was the one who came up with the whole idea of set and setting but the other point that I would offer there is that there was all sorts of psychedelic research going on unfortunately it was being done by German scientists and then World War II
54:30
came along and we paint it with a broad brush anything German bad and of course the great irony is that many of these German scientists were Jewish and and that they burned the work not because of their uh religion or their cultural heritage but rather because they were
54:50
Germans and and I think that you know the stupidity has I I it's it's wiped out more progress It's wiped out more advancement than than any other single factor and and it comes back again to belief systems and cultural lag and all those things but I
55:12
want to bring you back to the leadership academy because yeah I think you probably have some great ideas there so so let's talk about what what would the courses look like what would the cylinders look like well I've been doing
55:26
some for uh some of the world's biggest banks um and working with their rising stars and um and rather than do a syllabus which I haven't done uh what I've done is to start with examples um examples of of things they're going through so like the last couple years
55:47
we've had so much um surprise and Trauma and young people you know you and I again we've been around in the markets right so I've been through the Asian financial crisis my career started with the Savings and Loan crisis now is it as in financial crisis
56:03
you know I remember all of these waves of catastrophe again you know Enron the.com bubble verse and Enron so now when and I was in the White House on 9 11 right so now when people say we have an emergency I'm like okay just walk me through it because I
56:26
suspect it's not as much of emergency as you think it is right because I've been like tempered by my medal of my character has been tempered by those very violent moments of dealing with chaos and so what I learned is that when this
56:42
chaos happens buckle your seat belt and be grateful because this is the education that money cannot buy you cannot learn this in a classroom you can only learn it by being chucked into the deep end of a catastrophe and I'm not saying you know we want more
57:00
catastrophes we don't but if you have the chance to be in the front line of one and it's your job to get us through it then instead of going oh my God it's terrible on how we're ever going to handle this just be like great and thank you for giving me this privileged
57:16
position to be here where I can observe how things really work um and so it's a blessing it's not a disaster in other words and that mindset that attitude changes how you handle it it really does um so that I start with an example like
57:36
that uh I also say listen you need to do leadership well it requires mental bandwidth and so I think there are lots of lessons to be learned from Formula One and people like what formula one well in Formula One I've been very privileged to
57:54
meet with a bunch of the you know best Minds on that subject and they operated about 80 percent of their mental bandwidth because they know they're gonna have an accident right obviously there's going to be an accident at some point um and so they've got to have the space
58:12
to deal with it when it comes now what do you work in the White House you're at a hundred percent all the time which means you're being burned out your brain's fried and then an emergency happens and everybody goes to about 120
58:25
which is totally impossible uh and it's fascinating what starts to happen to people they literally stop eating properly they stop sleeping they get very um sort of breathing in a shallow way right because there's so much pressure and they start to get jittery you can
58:47
actually see Hands start to shake right like you wouldn't let a pilot fly an aircraft with so little sleep and so little food but you let them Drive the future of the nation's policy like really um so when the crisis is happening for
59:02
leaders to look at their team and see is everybody okay or not is are people showing signs of this horrible fatigue and pressure and physical stress and you could tell in the in the language as well is everybody jockeying to interrupt everybody else is there a sense of
59:27
urgency that you're everybody's speaking faster than usual and what can you do to slow it all down right it's a it's a leadership skill take a even to open the meeting with and I've seen people do it it works you open the meeting with let's
59:45
take a deep breath and be fully present now in this moment which you know 10 years ago if you see that in a meeting people would be like this person has totally lost their marbles today you do that in a meeting and particularly anybody under 40 will
1:00:00
literally like straighten up and come to attention because they understand exactly why it's important the older people in their 60s will snigger but the younger people will be like yes let me ground let me let me pull myself back into a place where I can think straight
1:00:17
before we try to do something serious right so these are some of the things I would put in my Leadership Academy you know you you've also written uh uh first off the uh my career uh is sort of similar to yours I remember the Savings
1:00:37
and Loans Fiasco and and one of the things that I speculated about with the great financial crisis was uh the authorities came in and fixed the saving and Loan uh situation but there were consequences people went to jail and the terms that were offered were
1:01:00
Draconian they were ground down and like nobody who was mismanaging those Savings and Loans if they avoided jail they went broke so the the litmus test of that when compared to the global financial crisis I think is one of the things that
1:01:21
that made the public and Society much more jaded in that the global financial crisis essentially proved the contention that many held that you could socialize losses and uh I think that's a really bad idea because you know uh I I know
1:01:43
that one person two people went to jail but they were minor characters in in the global financial crisis and and so it leads me back to some other requirements that I've seen scene that you've written about for leadership which are one must have balance one must be unselfish
1:02:05
um in terms of the way they uh they bring uh their thoughts and ideas to leadership the ones that I love that you've also listed curiosity humor uh I think they're really important really uh don't understand the power of humor because basically it's the it really
1:02:28
what our comics of today are are the ancient Court fool really definitely right so yeah the jester was there originally because he or she could tell the king the truth the truth yes true humor through humor humor and and like I love this list the
1:02:50
other one on there of course which I'm huge on is curiosity do you do you think that part of the problems with leadership today and I'm not just talking in business as you opened our discussion with we're talking about the way the world responded to the covid
1:03:08
thing the way that the we are responding to the Russian war with the Ukraine uh not great really that's great not great what what what what are your thoughts is is there incremental change that we can make or or do you see this as needing a
1:03:28
needing a Quantum Leap so to speak well let me just hearken back to something you said earlier about the bailouts because I always thought there's a Swedish Economist called knut wixel uh who everybody's forgotten now who is writing in sort of the 1880s and
1:03:48
he described the situation for central banks is that basically they're a keeper of the Justice between the speculators and the Sabers and that's why we talk about price stability because then you're you're keeping the balance of interest
1:04:05
between these two groups even the minute you step in in favor of one or the other you tilt the balance of power in the society and what we did in the financial Market bailout was we intervened on behalf of the speculators at the expense
1:04:21
of the Sabers and now we see the Sabers you know they're like wait my grocery bill is higher and they don't know why and well that's because we chose and to inflate rather than to say to the the bankers yeah basically go to jail and you know Bill seedman who
1:04:41
handled the Savings and Loan crisis who who built the whole resolution trust Corporation was a mentor to me and he walked me through why had to happen I remember he said we had to hire you know literally a hundred thousand accountants from all over the country to come in on
1:05:00
a temporary basis and go through every one of these portfolios and figure out you know how do we package it up and sell it to somebody for a few cents on the dollar and um that whole business of bringing the private sector Minds in to solve the
1:05:18
problem is very different from we the government have the solution and we'll do the bailout without the private sector being involved at all right or or the calm or citizens being involved in the process I think that's a radical change so so that's one thing but then I
1:05:34
also want to go back to this belief systems and one of the most important and I know I'm talking I keep taking us back to finance because that's our roots and I think your audience is you know in that space one of the belief systems
1:05:49
that I see today being on the brick of a radical transformation and a lot of people haven't clocked it yet is the shift from traditional monetary policy to what happens if we end up with digital currency if we end up with cbdc because everything we know
1:06:08
about monetary policy doesn't apply anymore and people like wait no it's my whole life studying this day of course it must apply I mean supply and demand and yeah no because you can double or have the money supply with a single keystroke when you have
1:06:26
digital currency and you can allocate it not to the banks but to individuals and two individual businesses and you can allocate it based on their behavior so you could say if somebody's like buying cookies and candy that you're not going
1:06:44
to give them Capital but if somebody's buying healthy stuff you will so it becomes a tool of social engineering and I think this is one of the reasons certainly the American public are very uneasy about cbdc they see this they intuitively understand that there's a
1:07:02
social engineering component to it but I think in markets people haven't even begun to really think through what's your belief system about the relationship between the money supply and inflation and is it true if you enter this new digital space they talk about uh
1:07:24
you know a new reality box you're gonna find yourself in so these are some of the things on my mind uh I'm reminded of uh Douglas Adams who masquerade as a humorous science fiction writer but was actually a profound philosopher and at one of his bits that
1:07:43
I loved was uh when a particular Planet decided to replace their currency with the leaves from trees and he goes the immediate effect was that everybody became enormously rich and and then of course inflation devastated the currency so the top-down
1:08:04
solution the social engineering solution uh they brought the consultant in and and the consultant said well this is an easy solution we're just going to Deforest the planet I remember that yeah exactly so these are wonderful mind-bending stretching
1:08:22
exercises which is yeah totally and I I sort of look at at money and currency as Information Systems yes and um that when you look at them in that regard um and then you look or you believe as I do that the market is a better allocator
1:08:43
of that particular Capital than some down social engineering committee uh it finds it Finds Its levels so to speak much like the water in uh my beloved uh Lao Tzu which he uses water quite a bit as uh as the example um so what what right now what do you
1:09:05
what are you thinking about what what are you seeing coming that other people uh say pipa come on don't really you're going to be giving the keynote please please don't talk about X what's yes oh well I I've already raised one of
1:09:26
them with you and your reaction is don't talk about that I don't buy into it yet I do think um there was a whole bunch of things uh I think the war in Ukraine which is not actually just about the war on Ukraine I've I've described it as a symptom of a larger problem
1:09:47
and what we're in is a hot war in cold places particularly space the Arctic and the high north um I would just say also it's a naval fight between the superpowers not a territorial fight and the oceans are cold uh and we're in a cold war and hot
1:10:04
places meaning Africa and the Pacific and general Millie you know terminal Joy Chiefs recently said there is an underreported military buildup in the Pacific which I wholeheartedly agree it's completely not understood we are edging into
1:10:22
the real potential for proper kinetic conflict which I think has already been happening in space but there are no journalists there it's all classified you get hints of it but the fact that people keep cutting the internet cables around the world is a symptom again of
1:10:39
something that's much larger than Ukraine so on the one hand I've been early to say and I said I wrote a piece in October 2021 where I said we already all are in World War Three it's just that this global conflict which involves by the way more
1:10:58
countries than we had in World War II the fight is occurring in ways the public doesn't see it's occurring in space it's occurring with subsea internet cables it's occurring with cyber attacks so it's not humans having bloody conflict on a battlefield and
1:11:17
actually maybe this is a better way to have our Wars right it is in Ukraine that sort of thing but it isn't elsewhere so in my viewers we are already in it and now that people are starting to say oh my God I think we might be in World
1:11:31
War III I'm like yeah now my position is and what is coming is a resolution because you can see Xi Jinping as jockeying to be The Peacemaker you can see that he's going to tell President Putin what to do fundamentally the US is trying to negotiate a deal with Xi
1:11:50
Jinping and my question to your audience is are you prepared for the peace because when the peace dividend comes when we do reunite the American and Chinese economies when we get this deal the opportunity is going to be massive and are people ready for it and of
1:12:11
course they're not because they're mentally in a space where they want to exclude the Russian economy from the world forever they want to cancel the Chinese economy and I'm like you know we know from history that you can't cancel a country right you have to
1:12:27
reinvite a billion Chinese and however many Russians back into the world economy because if we don't we will be at War again and since none of us want to be at War how do we create the conditions for peace to persist almost no one wants to have that conversation
1:12:46
right now right if I say we're going to need a Marshall Plan not just for reconstructing Ukraine but for Russia because if Russia doesn't stabilize will end up with worse in charge and then we'll be back in a disaster again so how do we create the conditions where the
1:13:06
best can arise out of the you know many brilliant people in Russian and I would personally hate to be held accountable for all American presidents and their decisions right how could we hold the Russian public accountable for the fact
1:13:20
they've had somebody who's creating some problems so this is a hard thing to be the first not the first but to be early to say we are already in World War III and everybody's going no no no no no no no and then finally they go oh yeah it
1:13:34
might be and now that they're finally getting it I'm like okay now we need to prepare for the piece and they're like what no we're at work right it's a catch-up exercise the whole way so I guess that's my thing is trying to be on the Crow's Nest
1:13:47
to see what's coming on that landscape before everybody else recognizes it because they're so busy doing what they do all day long they don't have time to look up and my whole job is to look up so um that's that's maybe what's the main thing on my Horizon how do we contend
1:14:04
with geopolitics heading towards a real problem but having real possibility of a fantastic resolution as well um I'm also very interested in space and I'm working on a documentary on the new space race um and I think there is same thing we
1:14:22
are heading for abundance we could have unlimited energy from space and unlimited resources from space that mean we don't have to rip Earth up anymore or use hydrocarbons solve all our ESG issues but that very abundance may be a
1:14:37
thing that triggers real conflict amongst the superpowers because whoever gets to that abundance burst wins so then how do we manage that process is another thing on my radar I I love that one I'm absolutely we invested in a company uh that essentially is doing
1:14:56
space tugboats that that move uh satellites around that could be an integral part of the energy generation uh from space I'm fascinated by by that entire uh idea uh in terms of the Marshall Plan I I I'm a inveterate Journal keeper and and so I'm able to
1:15:19
keep myself honest as best I can uh to find out what Jim was actually writing when the Soviet Union collapsed because our memories are unreliable and they betray us endlessly uh but when you have it in your own handwriting when you get
1:15:34
called the liar in your own handwriting enough times it keeps your mind flexible and open and and one of the things that I did confirm was that at the time I I was pounding the table that we should be doing a Marshall Plan for Russia then
1:15:50
I want to fix this problem now yeah we didn't do it uh because probably because of these constraints of belief systems right they were the bad guys they were the uh you know and and we should take great pleasure in watching them collapse no no the most brilliant thing we did at
1:16:10
the end of World War II was recognized the way we handled the end of world war one was horrible and created Adolf Hitler and so George Marshall comes along and says wait a tick left maybe rebuild Germany let's maybe rebuild Japan and of course the results spoke
1:16:30
for themselves so I know that you are time constrained because you uh have an airplane to catch um I could go on talking to you for hours this has been absolutely fascinating I love it it's wonderful um at the end of all of our podcasts we
1:16:46
we asked our guests uh we we give you a proposition and the proposition is that we are going to make you the Empress of the world for a day you can't kill anyone you can't put anyone in a re-education camp but we're gonna hand you a magical microphone that
1:17:05
you can speak two things into and here's the thing those two things are going to incept the entire population of the world all eight billion of us so the next time they wake up in the morning whenever their morning is they're gonna think to themselves I
1:17:23
just had these two brilliant ideas and I'm gonna go at them right now right today no delay what two things are you going to incept in the world's population I would love to create a movement and I would call it the hug movement because I think when human beings put
1:17:48
their hearts together you literally create a massive electromagnetic field and if we were to say to humans you should find it's not just someone you like it's hug each other because if we have physical proximity and we are close together
1:18:11
our empathy goes up our willingness to tolerate that someone else may think differently currently we live in a world where we say if someone doesn't agree with me they're either stupid or evil well there's no way to begin a conversation so would I create a
1:18:29
universal hug movement oh yeah I would I do that and I do think that even and to say to hug the person you find most objectionable right it's it's the Harmon Hess idea if there's something that may someone makes you upset and angry it's because it's
1:18:49
something already in you right and I think that that would go a long long way to solving almost every other problem we have it's the the cracking open of the heart and I know it sounds so corny but love is the answer it is I love it so that's number one and
1:19:11
now everyone's bugging each other what what's the second thing you're going to incept he's ah you know I think that first one's pretty good to be honest it really is pretty good like I don't know if I wanna if I want to expand on that you know
1:19:30
the second one is this idea of cosmopoasis and no one knows this word I found it in a dictionary it it means the active World building it is to say to everyone it's it's you may have an idea you may have a vision but to create a world means to extend an
1:19:51
invitation to others when they can become something bigger and better than they ever imagined before it's the act of creating a space for another one another to individuate to their fullest and that approach to life what am I building for someone else's benefit not
1:20:14
my own and if we think this way I mean our vast institutions are based on this our best companies our best performing companies all based on this um you know like I said you know Phil Knight with Nike when he's pouring the rubber into
1:20:32
the waffle iron in his wife's in his kitchen and his wife's waffle iron to build the new running shoe again he's not thinking about a shoe company he's saying how can I create a world where others can win at racing this mentality is I think where we need
1:20:49
to be going I love it I love it I love the idea of World building and and getting closer and increasing empathy Pippa this has been delightful tell our listeners and viewers where they can find more uh of your stuff absolutely so I write a column roughly once a week on sub stack
1:21:09
you'll find it under Dr pippa's pen and podcast I have a lunch podcast part yet because I'm so busy traveling um but I try to hit big questions in the world economy um and I love to interact with people on the substance there and I get in a lot
1:21:25
of very edgy issues I'm also very active on Twitter and I'm on LinkedIn and I'm always very interested in having a conversation about what you think is important and what ideas I've spurred with these things we've talked about today fantastic well thank you so much
1:21:42
we finally got a chance to get our schedules to coordinate we listen we've tried very hard so I'm abs absolutely delighted that this worked out thank you so much for being on infinite loops and I hope to see you soon absolutely bye