#105. Jamie Dixon: The Dark Forest
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What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Honest Drink. I'm Justin. If you've been enjoying this podcast, go ahead, give us a rating, like, and subscribe. All right.

My guest today coaches effective communication and is the author of Shaping Paths, Overcome and Get It Done, and his latest book, The Story Habit, which talks about how storytelling drives actions and shapes behaviors. So we talk about beliefs and how our beliefs are formed and how they can be changed or manipulated. We talk about how we are influenced and how we can influence others. We talk about the narratives that drive conflict among us.

We talk about productive ways to try to change people's minds. We talk about choice and free will. And we talk about how the stories we are told or the stories that we tell ourselves shape our decisions, behaviors, and relationships. This applies to all contexts and facets of life. It was a truly fascinating conversation. So without further ado, please give it up for Jamie Dixon. Don't die. She'll love us as we know.

Welcome to the show, man. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I love that conversation we were having before we started recording about you feeling the same as me being kind of very reclusive. Hmm.

Yeah, the term I've heard for it is asocial as opposed to antisocial. Antisocial, I think, is where you go around throwing feces at people's faces. And asocial is where you just don't make eye contact with people on the subway. And that sounds like... Well, that's me, basically. I like to spend a lot of time on my own and it sounds like you're the same. I'm exactly the same way. Yeah. I don't do a lot of socializing. And if I am...

Like I kind of view socializing almost as a cost. It expends my energy. Unless it's something meaningful like a nice deep one-to-one conversation like this. It's...

that kind of energizes me but going out to bars and hanging out with lots of people i i find that really really draining i'm probably in the wrong line of work actually my work is with a lot of people yeah so how do you how do you juggle that how does that work is it does it conflict i with you being a coach i i i think like for example with coaching um

Yeah, coaching sometimes is really intense. And sometimes it really drains me. Sometimes I come out really energized. When I get home, I have two young kids and I sometimes don't feel I have enough energy to give to them. So I think the way I manage it is to try to do less work. I think it's a big motivator for me because I know...

In my industry, there's people who like to just be busy and they'll do like 10, 15, 20 days of training a month, which for me would be insane. I don't like to do more than like six to eight days a month.

And so that motivates me to create my own intellectual property, my own courses, my own materials, and to just do a really, really good job. So it kind of works as a motivating factor for me. And it can sometimes take me years to create a methodology. And it'll be years of reading and thinking of questions and going off and searching for answers and then

I'll come up with some ideas and then I will turn them into some kind of model or tool or technique and then I'll try them out in the training room and then you know sometimes they just fall flat but other times people are like wow that really works so at the moment my work is shifting more towards I'd say shaping minds like how how do we shape the stories that other people believe in and

On a side note, this is something that motivates me a bit because in the field of leadership development, there's a lot of different methodologies and tools out there. Things like the seven habits of highly effective people. And I'm a really critical person. I'm a bit negative as well. And so when I see things like this, I think, oh, that's a load of crap. I can do better than that. And it takes me a long time to figure out something better than that.

But when I started writing this book, it was because a few years prior, I'd had a few clients reach out to me and ask me to do storytelling training. And I didn't really understand why they wanted storytelling training. And, you know, these clients are a lot of high tech clients and they've got a lot of engineers who every month they go up and they deliver reports and they're really boring and they're full of all these technical details.

So you want them to take these technical details and say, once upon a time, there was a man who blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was thinking that that's overkill, surely. And I was looking at other storytelling training courses on the market, and a lot of them seem to kind of take their...

And methodologies from the field of like screenwriting, script writing and screenplays. The hero's journey, right? Yeah, the hero's journey. And that's really great if you're writing the next Game of Thrones. But to turn your monthly report into the next Game of Thrones is just ridiculous. And I've come to the conclusion that it's not so much about telling stories and there's nothing wrong with telling stories. It's more about...

shaping the stories that everyone believes in because we all believe in different stories. And I think that's a really important thing for leaders to do because leaders

No leader becomes a great leader just through their technical skills or operational skills or service skills. They become great leaders because they can shape minds. They can say a few words and inspire a whole nation to travel to the moon or something like that. And so that's a lot of the focus of the work I'm doing right now. And if I give an example...

There's like a fable that I wrote for this book that I'm writing at the moment. And it really kind of encapsulates everything about what I'm talking about here. And the fable is like, you can imagine you were born in this small village and

and it's surrounded by a forest and you've grown up your whole life in this village you've never left the village and it's got everything you need there's a stream with water for everything you need there's uh you know one family has chickens another family has pigs another family makes cloves so you've never had to leave this village ever and uh at the same time uh every uh

Every evening when you go to bed, you pray to the village and you thank the village for letting you live another day. And when you wake up in the morning, you pray to the village and please let me protect me for another day. And so you really, really worship this village. And

At the same time, the elders in this village have told you that the forest surrounding this village is really dangerous. If you go into this forest, dragons will eat you, eagles will pick you up and take you away, and you will never come back. There is nothing good in this forest. And so they call it the dark forest. And when you were a child, one of your friends went into the dark forest and they never returned.

And so you have lived a fairly safe and protected life in this village. You've never dared go into the dark forest until one day a man walks out from the forest and says, hi.

30 years ago, I left this village and I got lost as a child. And now I'm back. And I want to share with you that I discovered a really beautiful world out there. And please come with me. And so the fable kind of ends there. But it's a metaphor really for the different stories that we believe in. Because that man has been, you know, he was the child that disappeared. He's

He's been out to the bigger world and he knows that the dark forest is actually not the dark forest. It's just a forest and there's a lot out there. But the villages, they're trapped in this story of the village in the dark forest. And as a leader,

I think a leader's role is to really help people navigate the boundaries of the stories that they believe in and try to give them a better story to believe in as well. Yeah. I mean, as you were telling that story, I was thinking it kind of feels like my first thought was,

breaking out of your comfort zones. And we think anything outside of that is unknown and it's scary. And so that's one thing. But another thing was also, it's also goes ties to, I feel like the narratives we tell ourselves, like what you've been saying.

And that's what I think really makes what you do, I think, really relatable. And I think this whole conversation is a really interesting conversation to be had in terms of what are these narratives that we believe? Why do we believe the things that we believe? I mean, this can go from personal things to stories to talk between friends to even headlines you read, like whatever in society. And all that...

in one way or another is going to shape our behavior. It's going to shape our decisions. And so I feel like there's no more relevant time, at least it seems to me almost. I mean, this could be due to recency bias, right? But I think there's no doubt that the last few years, it seems it's a really strange time. And it seems that everything, almost every event that's been happening recently kind of underscores this idea of

There are certain people who believe certain things and there are other people who believe different. And the information's all out there. And I think more of it is like when we digest the information we're given, we're

what lens and what filter are we putting it through? And that filter is the narrative we tell ourselves, right? So if we believe strongly in our own story or this particular story, we're going to digest and filter all the information we receive through that filter. And it's usually we're going to cherry pick and pick the things that are going to support our narrative and not kind of contradict our narrative, right? And that's a really fascinating thing.

And I think it ties into the whole storytelling thing. So what is your book called? The Story Habits? Yeah, called The Story Habit. And when is that going to come out? It'll be out around July, if everything goes according to plan. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So what area of life, I guess, are you really targeting this towards? So for example, the Dark Forest Fable. It's a metaphor for, just as you described, the village is the comfort zone, the dark forest is the unknown. Yeah.

And at work and in life, we meet people with, like you were saying earlier, different beliefs, different narratives. And we need to kind of find our way of, we need to find a way of working together. And this is especially relevant at work.

So I think the story habit helps in three areas in particular. One is helping people understand things. You know, I'm this man who's come from this outside world into your village and there's all these beautiful things, but you have no clue what I'm talking about. Or if you're even telling the truth. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I could be, yeah, I could be a bad guy here to kill you and burn your forest or something. So that's one part of it.

How do I help you understand things? Another thing is changing people's minds, which is something we have to do at work a lot and in daily life also quite a lot as well. Especially if you're married or with kids. God, with kids especially.

And so changing people's minds is taking them through the dark forest because you're trying to change their current position. They're in the village and you want to take them to somewhere else. And if you want to change people's minds, you have to understand that the position they're at right now is serving them in one way or another.

So that's another application. And a final application is inspiring action. So changing people's minds and making them willing to go into the dark forest is one thing. Actually getting them to take the steps into the dark forest is another thing. So there's three applications, helping people understand, changing people's minds and inspiring action. So how do you, yeah, because as you were saying that, I'm nodding my head, I'm thinking,

Yeah. The village is serving them right now. At least for them, they feel that way completely. It's security, it's comfort, whatever. How do you break down the methodology, I guess, in terms of convincing people to take action, to step foot into the dark forest in the first place? So there's several things here. I mean, the three key words, relate, challenge, resolve.

If you want to help people understand, you need to relate to them. You can't talk from outside of the village. You have to get into their village first. If you want to change their minds, you have to challenge them. You have to point out that the position you're in right now, there's a better position for you. And if you want to resolve things, you have to give them a path. How do you change your position?

Now, I give an example. This was a really awkward situation that happened for me a few months ago. And it shows the importance of relating. Because one of the assumptions we make is, I need to change their mind. And we don't, that's not always the best thing to do. Actually, sometimes the position they're in right now, there's good reason to be there. It's actually us that needs to change our mind. Yeah.

So I was having, I was catching up with my friend. We were having coffee outside Starbucks and he'd just brought his new Chinese girlfriend. And so we were catching up and he was asking me, how are you doing?

And I was just kind of ranting about kids because there's so much hard work. I was like, oh, my God, they're relentless. They never leave me alone. Wait, how many kids do you have right now? I have two. I have two in-laws as well who take care of them most of the time too. But Jesus Christ, there's so much hard work. So I was ranting about them. I was like, oh, just don't get a break. I love them, but oh, my God, there's so much hard work.

And his girlfriend, like we hadn't spoken much beforehand, but his girlfriend just directly said to me, having kids is an honor. You should be happy. It's a privilege.

And I'm not one of those people to tolerate excessive levels of positivity. I'm a realist. And so I'm like, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. It's yeah, okay, yeah, it's on and on. But it's really exhausting as well. And she wouldn't back down. She was like, no, you should be happy to be a father. This is an honor for you. It's an honor to raise a human life. And I didn't want to back down either.

And thankfully, my friend, he kind of wised up to what was going on and he changed the subject and we moved on. But an hour later, his girlfriend left. She had to go and do something. And he said to me, you know, Jamie, so when she was a baby, she was abandoned as a baby. Yeah. I was like, oh. And I was so caught up in my story of...

Having kids is hard work and we should be able to rant about it. That I completely ignored that, you know, to her, parents should really treasure having children and they shouldn't complain about it. It's a positive thing because of her story. And I, that's a really important thing about relating because, and, you know, what's started in the world at the moment in Europe with Ukraine, for example, is, you

One person believes in one story, a bunch of people believe in another story. And conflict arises from having two different stories clashing with each other. And we are forcing our story onto another person or they're forcing their story onto us.

And I really can't think of any other solution to conflict than for at least one party to relate to the other story and to sit down and say, so tell me what you believe and why do you believe that? And, you know, unfortunately with situations like what we're watching at the moment, that's not always practical. But in a lot of daily conversations, especially with family, especially with coworkers, it's

Whenever you have a strong disagreement, that is a sign to just stop and say, okay, okay, I'm going to let go of my story for the time being. And I want to understand what your story is. And like, if we go back to the village and the dark forest example, so that man, he left the village when he was a child. And 30 years later, he stepped out of the dark forest and said, it's a beautiful world out there.

And he assumes he understands the villagers' story, but he hasn't been there for 30 years. There's a lot he doesn't understand. And so if you ever want to change people's minds, you have to start by relating to them. And if you don't relate to them, they're going to be very, very reluctant to go with you. And sometimes it's better to wait until the right time when they've changed their mind.

There was one example that during my research for this book, I actually came across on a Reddit forum. And I was looking into flat Earthers because it's really interesting how they believe so strongly that the Earth is flat. Oh, yeah, they do. They do, yeah. And there's a lot of evidence that says the Earth is not flat. And they're looking at that evidence in a different way.

And there was one really interesting example of a guy who joined the Navy, the US Navy, to see for himself if the world was flat or not. And he was like plotting their course on charts and stuff. And at first, like when he first joined his LPO, I don't actually know what an LPO is, but

His LPO, I guess it's like his leader or something, took him on deck and said, look out over there. If the world was flat, we'd be able to see all of these things, but we can't see them. And he wasn't in a position at that time to be open to that way of thinking. And so at first, his LPO failed to persuade him. But after he had spent some time plotting all these courses and then going,

If the world was flat, it would be impossible to travel in the way that we've just traveled. And after quite a few times of realizing this, his mind finally opened. And one day his LPO went, okay, let me show you again. If the world was flat, we would be seeing this right now. And we're not. And in that moment, he changed his mind. And so change definitely has to come. Well,

It's not all from within. Context is also really, really important. But the context kind of starts the change. The words you say are not going to be enough to change people's minds unless they're already ready to go with you. Yeah, like you can't or you shouldn't or you can't use brute force, right, to change a person's mind. Well, you could, but...

For example, when I've shared the story of the dark forest and I've asked people to brainstorm ways of how would you persuade the villagers to go with you to the dark forest, some of them have said, well, instead of just turning up in the village, you could...

first set fire to the village and then turn up the next day and go, Hey, what kind of psychopath are you talking to? And in that moment, they're like, okay, we'll go with you. So you can, you can, uh, change people through brute force. Um, and I'm, I'm sure that happens in the real world too. You know, examples of that. Yeah, it does. And I, I think the, the best way of thinking of it is there's, uh,

there's compliance and there's commitment and slaves are compliant and the you know as a leader I think being a leader of slaves must be pretty exhausting because the moment you stop looking at them they run unless you chain them up

And so I think as a leader, it generally makes your life a lot easier if you're depending on commitment for change. Yeah. It goes back to, I think, your idea when you were talking about leaders is the idea of galvanizing people, right? Inspiring them through story. And we're all creatures that absorb information much better through story. I mean, it's evident in almost every facet of our lives that we...

are inspired by stories more than actual data, just plain facts. Yeah. And there's one interesting thing that you said earlier on that was really interesting to me and was this idea of conflict. And you're saying that conflict is when two narratives clash with each other. Mm-hmm.

And I really agree with that. I really, because if we look at a lot of the conflicts, and I don't want to linger on conflicts in this conversation, we don't have to, we can make it more positive later. But me and you, we're both realists. I am too as well, so why not? Like, if we look around, a lot of the conflicts that arise is really between two competing people.

- Ideologies. - Yeah. - And seldomly, I mean, to certain groups of people, it has directly affected them in their physical environment, right? They've been in towns ridden with war and violence and whatever horrible things that have come their way, sure. But if you look around, the majority of the actual people are not really directly affected by the events.

And they're more buying into certain beliefs and ideologies. And they butt heads with people who don't. And that's where bigger populations of people start coming into conflict with each other. And that's when it really starts getting out of hand, a lot of these conflicts. When in actuality, it's the few poor souls that are really affected by it physically in the physical world and not just the ideological part of it. Yeah. Yeah.

Earlier you asked, why do we believe in certain narratives? And as I was researching this book, that was also a question that started to come up. And that's probably going to be the spark for researching my next book. But I think there's a general mechanism that creates narratives, right?

And if I start with an example, like imagine you go on holiday to the English countryside and you stay in this old house and it's really, really old. And as you're checking in, the landlord's like, oh yeah, this house is like 500 years old and all these different people have lived and died in this house.

And, you know, you check in and then every so often you hear these weird, these weird noises in the house. And then every time, you know, you go to the bathroom, you come back into your bedroom and you're like, huh, have things moved around? And at night you hear, oh. And then you hear, you know, you search for this house on Google and you read all these ghost stories about it.

You've seen a lot of signs. And when there are signs, it's really easy to start believing in things. And signs, I think, are what causes us to believe in certain narratives. And yeah, different individuals interpret the same signs differently. But generally speaking, you get enough people to see enough of the same sign, then most of them will believe in the same thing.

And I don't know if you've read Yuval Noah Harari's book. Sapiens? Yeah, Sapiens. Yeah. And that book really opened my mind to this. It's a classic. Yeah. It's a really good book. All-time classic. Yeah. Because it just makes you realize that everything is a narrative. You know, countries don't exist. It's a myth, right? Yeah. Nationality. I've been on, we're taking a tangent, but I've ranted about this, about the artificiality of nationalism. Mm.

But that's also goes back to you. It's a story. It's a story. National pride is a story we tell ourselves. Yeah. And we fall in love with this idea. Yeah. And that's where people have, you know, a lot of pride and this or that. And it's,

It's just, it's the story you tell yourself. The ironic thing is that the more real it is, the more convincing the story is, even though it's not real. So for example... But what do you mean, even though it's not real? So for example, a country is a myth. It doesn't exist. But everywhere you go, for example, we are in China and...

Everywhere we go, we'll see the Chinese flag. We'd see Chinese ID cards. We see Chinese police. We see Chinese borders. We see the Chinese government. And these are all signs convincing us that this exists. It's the same with any country. It's the same with money as well.

You know, we take that 100 renminbi note, which we see less of these days and so don't believe in paper money as much anymore. But we believe that if we go to the bank, they will exchange it and they will take it in. And that's another sign convincing us that this thing is real. The moment those signs change, like, for example, I go to the bank and they're like, oh, we don't take paper money anymore. That moment...

100 Remembrance Day note suddenly loses all of its value. It's a QR code now. Yeah, it's a QR code. Yeah. And so it's, for example, if you are a leader, I mean, let's take a really fun example. Let's say you find this remote island with a tribe that's never had contact with people before. And you think, oh, okay, cool. I want to go in there and convince them I am a god. Right.

And what you would do is you would try to collect enough signs to prove that you are a god. And so you might wait until one day when there's a massive thunderstorm. And then just as there's a flash of lightning, hey, show up in the village. And then you're checking your weather app on your iPhone. You're saying it will rain tomorrow.

tomorrow and do some strange dance. And if you put enough signs out there, people start to believe in things, even if it's not real. And so as a leader, if you are, for example, you, you want your, your company to believe in the value of safety. We're a manufacturing company. It's important that we don't, you know, we don't injure anyone. And so safety is one of our values.

And if you want people to believe in that story, then you need to put signs all over the place. Not just paper signs saying, be safe, but other ways of them to experience the reality of that story. You know, you can have rituals where at the start of every meeting, everyone has to stand up and do a safety check of the room or whatever. Or you can get featured in magazines saying, safest company in the world. And that's another sign convincing us that safety is a value.

And so these are all, you know, mythology is so powerful because it's connected to reality. It's not reality, but it's connected to reality. You put enough signs around and people start believing it.

Like the Pledge of Allegiance at school. Yeah. Growing up in the States, you know, in the morning we had to stand up and say that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, my granddad, I'm British, my granddad was actually born in India. His dad was a general in the army. And funnily enough, like when he was young and when he was a child,

their babysitter was actually a murderer from a prison and they'd hired this person to look after him. Wait, is this real? Yeah, this is real. Yeah, this is some crazy things. But he believed seriously that Britain was good for India and we civilized them and so on. And those are the signs he'd seen. And, you know, we see different signs now. So...

So it's, yeah, it influences everyone. Well, in this example that you've illustrated, would signs be, would the word sign, is that interchangeable with propaganda in that example? I think propaganda is a type of sign. And propaganda, you know, there's propaganda in every country. Yes. And...

The US has propaganda. The UK has propaganda. China also has propaganda. I would say some propaganda is a lot more subtle than we realize. I think the propaganda in our countries is a lot more subtle than people realize. The propaganda over here is maybe a bit too in your face, and it doesn't have as much of an impact anymore because you see these strange signs saying,

passionately celebrate the 100th anniversary and so on. And I think people just kind of filter it out. Well, I have a thought about that and about what you said about, like to us when we're in China, we feel like, oh, there's propaganda, but the propaganda from our home countries, it's a lot more subtle. I don't think it's a lot more subtle. I think we perceive it as more subtle because we've desensitized to it growing up there. So,

As an outsider, when we come into China and we see the Chinese flag, right? We see symbols of government institutions. We notice, we pick up on that right away because it's kind of foreign to us. Growing up in America, like if you were a foreigner going into America and you saw trucks with the American flags on the back of them and bald eagle signs everywhere and all these things,

You would pick that up immediately as propaganda. But me growing up there, I've desensitized to that where I just think that's like, it's normal. Like everyone has American flag. Like I don't, I wouldn't think twice about that.

But a foreigner coming in would. And so to them, they would see, they would notice a lot more signs of that propaganda than we would because we're so used to it. And same with Chinese people living here. I think they don't see that as propaganda. They just see that as, of course, Chinese flag. Like, you know, it's normal. To us, even though we've lived here for a while, but we've grew up in a completely different country. So we pick up on these signs a lot more immediately.

immediately. So I feel like it's just a matter of our perspective and not that it's more subtle or less subtle in different countries. And I think, you know, from what I see, I think one of the most powerful forms of propaganda is the media, which I have become very, very skeptical of in recent years, living in China and reading the Western news about China and going,

what this is this is so different to the life that i'm experiencing um it's it's quite crazy the influence it has but it has such a powerful influence on people i i don't think people realize it and and just just one point about the media that i find quite interesting is um

In the West, our media... So everyone criticizes the Chinese media because it's state-owned. In the West, our media is business-owned. Who do you think is more likely to take your interests into consideration? The government, who really need to make sure you're satisfied, otherwise you'll overthrow them, or businesses who are looking to exploit you and...

Have you listened to my latest episode, our latest episode, by the way? Oh, not yet, no. Okay. Because good, because I want to assure any listeners that...

That I did not plan this out for us to talk about this stuff because our last episode of The Honest Drink, we just went in deep down a rabbit hole talking about that exact issue of what you're saying now about Western media and how they report on China. Yeah. And the kind of bias and double standards that occur there. Yeah. So I was just like, I'm just like really...

excited that you're talking about this because we're talking about like our ideologies and beliefs, right? And exactly like in this day and age, where do most people get their information from? Through media. I mean, that's just, I mean, I don't think anyone can really disagree with that, that we get, whether it's intentional information or just like periphery information we're getting or ambient information, it's all through some sort form of media. Yeah. And, and,

As you were talking, we're talking about like, okay, well, how do you convince people? How do you take people to take a foot into, take a step into that dark forest? And I'm doing some self-reflection now and I'm thinking like, I feel like I always try to do that

But I get very preachy. I get very preachy on the show, especially when it comes to these kind of topics that we were just talking about when it gets politicized in a way. And

I'm trying to figure out, okay, well, how do I become less of a preacher? Because to me, that's kind of like that brute force analogy almost, like where I'm just like trying to like scream down your throat and believe me, it's like this, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I'm not really taking into account the way other people are feeling and their ideologies and I'm not empathizing in that way. Mm-hmm.

And who am I to assume that I'm the right one? You know, I could be wrong. And, you know, why would I want to convince them? You know, there's a really interesting statistic that I find incredibly humbling. Okay.

It's about the electromagnetic spectrum. And I don't know a lot about the electromagnetic spectrum, but I think pretty much any matter that can be perceived in the universe would be perceived somewhere along the electromagnetic spectrum. And see if you can guess what percentage of the electromagnetic spectrum do you think we humans can perceive? What percentage? Yeah.

Like through our eyes or through machines? Through the human senses. Through the human senses. I would think very little. I would think 20%.

Okay. It's 0.0035%. Goes to show how much I know. It goes to show how much anyone knows. No one knows anything. And I think a good analogy is like, imagine you go into a library and there's all these books, but you can only read one single pixel. I think that's how much of reality we actually understand. And I find that so humbling. And I think...

Like, sometimes I watch people like, for example, Jordan Peterson, who is very, very charismatic, very articulate and very confident in what he says.

But I really don't like how certain he is. I have the exact same criticism of him. Yeah. I feel like he's too self-assured about his point of view. Yeah. He's human as well. He can only perceive that 0.035%. So no one knows anything. And on top of that...

Not only is there so much information around us that we're not taking in. I mean, just take, for example, the situation we're in right now. We're sitting in this room, we're talking to each other. In reality, there's the feeling of my jeans on my legs. There's any kind of smells in the room that I'm not aware of. There's the feeling of the headphones, which I've already filtered out. There's a lot of detail that just doesn't make it into our awareness.

But not only that, once it makes it into our awareness, it's then completely filtered. And one way it's filtered is through culture. And there's something really mind-blowing that I read in a book called The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lin. And he gave an example of how Western culture is so different to Chinese culture, that

And I think one result of this difference is I find a lot of people in China

Most topics, they're quite humble and they're quite open-minded, I find, unless you talk about politics. Just don't talk about politics. Well, that's anywhere. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. But most topics, I find that they're genuinely curious and they're not so arrogant. And I find in the West, maybe this is just my perception, but I find people are really aggressive sometimes and they're really...

self-assured. And this difference, I think it comes from, I think it started with ancient Greek culture and around that time. So you can see it in language. In English and a lot of European languages, we have a word for the, T-H-E. And the function of the is to take something from out of its context and isolate it and just look at it as it is. So it's not

It's not this bottle or that bottle. It's the bottle. We're completely ignoring the context and we're focusing on concepts. And I think in ancient Greece, they were looking, they were trying to find the truth, the truth, something that is always true.

And this has given rise to, in a lot of Western thinking, a lot of black and white thinking, I think. People are very certain. They look at certain things the Chinese government has done and they say, you did this, that's bad, so you're bad.

And the Chinese way of thinking is completely contextual. Everything has to be in context. And so, yeah, maybe that's bad, but doesn't mean that person's bad. That doesn't mean that organization is bad. Maybe that thing's bad, but you have to look in the context.

And so this is something I really appreciate about Chinese culture. It really encourages us to just look at the context of what's happening and really think about what's influencing our perspective as well. And yeah, just not feel so certain about things. That's really, really interesting. I've never thought about it that way before.

It makes sense. And it's this idea of thinking in absolutes, right? Instead of contextualizing things and thinking with a nuanced kind of mind, like a framework, I guess. Yeah. And so I think there's a big problem of the West. We get really, and even the West is such a...

Such a generalization. We get really caught up in our narratives and we think this is it. And, and we, we've learned to value assertiveness. And I, you know, sometimes I train assertiveness communication skills. I discovered there's not actually a word for assertiveness in the Chinese language. There isn't? I don't think so. There's some close words. Okay. Like 果断, 有自信的. But not really an equivalent. It's just not something that exists. But,

But we think that if we believe in something strongly and we're forceful enough in our communication, other people will believe. And we...

We learn to debate, although I don't actually think we learn to debate. I think we learn to argue and we encourage debate, but it just turns into argument. There's no discussion. It's just who is better at shouting and coming up with really cool reasoning. It's not productive at all, the way we learn to do it.

Yeah, I don't think it's productive at all. Well, you see it in presidential debates. Like, there's no actual work being done. Yeah. It's just who's shouting more. Yeah, exactly. Who's insulting the other person better. Who has the better jokes, I guess, the better punchlines. Yeah, there's no discussion. And I think that's a...

you know, I don't want to say flaw. It's just a trait of Western culture, which creates some problems, I think. I find people over here, maybe I'm, well, I am biased. I'm a human being. Maybe I'm just focusing on specific experiences, but I feel with a lot of conversations with Chinese people, I feel they're generally more curious, more open-minded and

less attached to their beliefs and less forceful of their beliefs. I don't know. I don't know. I could see how that is true, but I could also see that I feel Chinese people are not there just as...

they can just as easily entrench themselves in certain ideology as anybody else. - Yeah, yeah. - But in your experience, do you feel like, okay, like if we're talking about the idea of changing your mind, because that's a big thing. I feel like that is a very understated thing. Like everyone wants to believe that they're open-minded people, that if the facts change, so were their opinions change. But,

I don't see that happening as much. And I feel we tend to want to entrench in our opinions and defend it till the death, no matter if the facts change or not, because we've kind of invested in that line of thought and put our ego, our credibility, our face on that. And then, so we don't want, it's like almost a ego, a hit on your ego, or it's shameful to admit,

admit that you were wrong and have to change your mind. And I think we're all guilty of that. Do you find that people here in China are more easily, are more easily, more easily changed their mind than people out, let's say in the West, or do you feel it's just a human thing? I mean, there's a, there's a reason for that, which we can talk about in a moment. But in, in China, I feel like,

Yeah, this is a triggering point for me because I have actually felt quite frustrated in the last year or so. I feel there's an increase of closed-mindedness in this country. As the borders have closed down, yeah, I feel it's kind of

It's gone in the opposite direction. I've spoken to several people who feel the same way. Yeah, yeah. It's actually quite concerning for me. I wonder where it could go, what direction it could go in. Yeah, I don't know. I feel...

Maybe there's certain age groups, kind of maybe around our age group, people who have a bit more international experience, a bit more exposure to the rest of the world and still connectivity to the rest of the world. I feel they are more likely to be open-minded, but the younger generation in particular, I am quite concerned. Well, I know what you're alluding to, referring to, at least I think I know, is

I have friends who are here as Americans as well, and they feel the same way. Honestly, this is going to sound bad, but I blame that on the media and particularly the US and a lot of its Western allies. Because the way I see it, because that didn't, I mean, you've been here for 15 years, so you've been here long enough, I'm assuming, to know that that wasn't always the case here. And there was a time when that kind of sentiment was,

I don't want to go as far as to call it, it is sort of a closed mindedness, but to be more specific, at least in my example, I could be maybe just assuming too much on your end. But in my example, it's almost kind of like there is a subset of people here. It's not the majority, but there is a group of people here that I feel are growing a little bit more and more anti-Western. And I see it as a reaction.

Because things don't happen in a vacuum. So I see it as a reaction to the media they're digesting. And it's hard to blame them. I am very concerned about it. I hate to see it happening, and I am deathly afraid of what the future holds in terms of what that may progress to. But

It's hard to blame them because if I have to practice any sort of empathy and put myself in their shoes, if I'm growing up here,

And I'm reading the media that I am already reading, which is like all like anti-China, anti-China, everything's blame on China, all this stuff. I'll be like, hey, wait a minute. Well, fuck you then, you know? And I'm going to grow more and more national. Yeah. And I'm going to entrench into my pride and beliefs about this country. And I will lash out and probably very easily have more of an anti-Western mindset given my

I feel like all the fear-mongering, all the hateful energy that the media is protruding, the Western media at least, is protruding towards China. And I feel like that is a reaction. Because this sentiment doesn't just happen out of nowhere in a vacuum. There's a catalyst there and there's a reaction to plant this kind of seed in the minds of people. I think there's... One thing I...

One criticism I might throw towards Chinese people is I find they're quite China-centered.

Like when they talk about foreigners, they say, ah, why go to Miao? They don't ask you which country. They ask you, what's foreign land like? You're from foreign land. They don't ask you which foreign land. And they don't, they just think of, well, maybe I'm making assumptions here. It seems to me that they think of the world as China and China.

And it actually feels like that right now. China does seem to be closing off to the rest of the world. So there's that. I think, you know, as you were talking about that earlier, I was thinking every so often I go for a foot massage, the place where I go for a foot massage, everyone's sitting in a row right in front of us is a TV and the news is on. Every time it's the news and every time the news is on,

There's some report about, you know, there was a mini outbreak and then look at us. We're really strict and we're managing it really, really well. Everyone's queuing up and getting their COVID tests. And then the next report is, oh, in the US there's been 2 billion deaths or something like that. And I,

Yeah, I get quite frustrated about the COVID situation because I think they're really misinterpreting it. Everyone I speak to over here, it really seems like everyone I speak to over here, Chinese people, they think it's really dangerous. And maybe I'm also flawed in my thinking here. They think it's really dangerous and we need to have these protections.

Meanwhile, I'm speaking to people back in the UK, like, I had COVID last week, and I'm all right now. And I know so many people who have had COVID and have recovered, and the country has opened and everything is back to normal, and they're traveling, and they're not afraid. And over here, they're afraid, and it's more and more closed.

And I know there's different reasons for it over here, but I just see a lot of closing down over here. Yeah, the COVID thing, the COVID one is a really frustrating one. And I think everyone's frustrated no matter what country you're in with this whole thing. And yeah, it's just two different tactics and strategies of how to deal with it. China obviously has...

a kind of zero COVID policy from day one. That's what they've had. And they are still holding onto that policy. Whereas other countries,

not to give credit to other countries, honestly, because it's more that they've given up on hope on that rather than it was just a decision they made. It was like, oh, well, that's never going to work for us. So there's no point. We just better just open up. It's gotten so terrible that they just had to give up. Right. But at the same time, I get what you're saying too, because like you, I've,

Look, every... I'm not exaggerating. Every single person I know directly, every friend, every relative in the United States that I have has gotten COVID. Every single one. Yeah. I don't know a single person in China directly that has gotten COVID. Yeah. I don't know anybody. Yeah. But they're all fine. Like, they...

It's not like, obviously it's still in the ether there and still on the headlines and still a problem. It's definitely a problem there, but it's more like, yeah, I had COVID and I got sick and now I'm over it. You know, it was just kind of like having the flu. And I know one person that has died, but he was of older age and had a lot of other underlying health conditions to begin with. And COVID probably just put them over the edge.

But everyone else, I know, it was kind of like, it wasn't a big deal. Like they got it, they got a little sick. Some didn't get sick at all. Some were asymptomatic and they're done with it. And now they're just going about their lives and you know, whatever's to them now. Meanwhile here, it's still kind of like this eminent threat that we're afraid of. And at a certain point in the beginning,

you know, had everyone kind of responded like China did, then we would have been over this pandemic way earlier. That's my belief. Like we would have crushed this thing and everyone would have been good. But I feel like China responded the way they did and they did such a great job, but around them, except for a handful of other countries around them, everyone just kind of like really fucked up. So it kind of makes what China did

kind of useless almost because everyone, the whole rest of the world just kind of let it spread. So if you're the only one that has a zero COVID policy, unless you remain a bubble forever, what you're, there's, there's no kind of really path for you because everyone else fucked up so bad and it's all around us. Yeah. And I, I think, you know, going back to what I was saying earlier about signs, I think that,

the Chinese people may start to see signs that change their beliefs maybe within like the next year or so because

Like, I remember about a year ago, the Western media were kind of praising the Chinese government's response. Were they? I didn't see any praise. Oh, really? It's a lot of criticism. I didn't see any praise. I think they was, well, maybe they weren't praising it, but they were saying, yeah, Chinese government's been very strict and they're managing it very effectively. That seemed to be what they were saying.

And it seemed to be kind of owning up that, yeah, we'll kind of fuck things up over here. And that seemed to be the narrative. And it was the narrative I was into at that time. My narrative changed over the last six months. And I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago with...

If I read something, Zakaria or something from CNN. Oh, the CNN. Yeah, yeah. I've only ever listened to that podcast once, by the way. But it just so happened that on that episode, he was saying that the Chinese government's approach is too rigid and it shows a flaw in their whole political system of rigidity.

And that's what I was starting to think at that time, because the signs were starting to show me that overseas they've opened up. And I do wonder how that's going to impact Chinese people's thinking, because as they start to interact with their colleagues overseas who are traveling, they're enjoying life as normal. And their colleagues and their friends are like, I had COVID, I'm fine. And we're still terrified of it over here.

I do wonder if that's going to start to change their beliefs. You know, it's interesting for me because I see how my beliefs have changed. Because actually, to be honest, I've already decided I'm leaving China next year. Oh, okay. Yeah, this is going to be my last year in China for a lot of different reasons. And I think I'd rather live in a country now where there are more frequent changes and

somewhere that's less rigid um the rigidity concerns me a bit it hasn't become a problem so far but uh you know it feels like there's potential for things to go go in that way yeah well do you think um now i understand where you're coming from do you think that

that is also maybe part of the story you're telling yourself because you are, you are projecting into the future, right? So there's, it's not an issue now, but you're concerned with the future and the possibilities of what it might be. And I think that's a common theme with myself and the way everyone thinks is,

You project in the future and you project these kind of slippery slope scenarios or worst case scenarios. And that becomes like the narrative. It's things that haven't even happened yet.

Do you think maybe this is also an example of maybe the story you're telling yourself? Absolutely. Yeah. I, yeah, I, I'm telling myself a lot of stories about this. I know. And I, I kind of know what's influencing me. And I, I, I kind of know that,

I kind of know some of it's bullshit. Like for example, um, the zero COVID policy. I know the, there's been statistics saying that if they opened up, there'd be like 630,000 hospitalizations every single day. And that would be a complete disaster. And I kind of know that in my, in the back of my head, but at the same time, it doesn't really change my thinking that much. Um, which is interesting to observe, right? I think probably I'm fatigued. Uh,

I'm really tired of the situation because my mom passed away last year and I haven't been able to go back and see her. So I'm sure that's affecting me in probably quite a deep way, probably in ways that I'm not completely aware of. And

not being able to leave the country and go traveling, which is something that I would do normally. I think it's probably affecting me. And I think these are things that also kind of influence the stories that we create in our minds, really. Well, my condolences for that. So when she passed, you weren't able to attend her funeral or anything like that? No, I had to attend her funeral online.

And, I mean, it was a difficult decision because I have two young kids. One's three, one's two and a half, two, almost two. And I just don't want to risk leaving the country and then being completely separated from them. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, I had to attend a funeral online in the recent years as well.

And yeah, it really, it sucks. It really just sucks. But it's also that

I mean, if we really want to try to be objective and balanced to our approach, it's, I think everything we're talking about is this, the difference between our own kind of personal conveniences and personal lives and when things directly affect us personally versus, I guess, the bigger picture. And that's also kind of,

a balance that I think is less often struck. And I mean, understandably so, I think we're all selfish creatures, human beings in general. We're all gonna be self-centered and why shouldn't we be, right? Like we have our own lives and problems to deal with. But that's usually the lens we see everything in is through how it affects us, how it affects our lives through our kind of self-centered approach. And I feel less often does the big picture impact

seep into our decision-making and our behaviors and what we believe. Yeah. I don't think it's natural to step back and look at the big picture. And I think even when you force yourself to, and I consider myself relatively, well, relatively objective. I don't think you can be completely objective, but I

And I can see that I'm still ignoring some of this big picture. We all are. We all are. I can see that I'm just creating this story in my mind, and it's having a really strong influence on me. And yeah, there's stuff that would discredit that story, but nope, the story is still there. Nope, no, I'm not sticking on to that one. I'm going to let that one go. Yeah, that could go away. Thank you. So,

So I want to get back to your book for a second and going back to this idea of, you know, we've been talking about beliefs and we've been talking about kind of the human psychology and how we believe in ideology, our behavior, which has been a truly fascinating conversation. What are the lessons to be taken away here? And what are the approaches and applications associated with what you're trying to get across with, with storytelling in general?

Well, if I can break it down into a few, and I'll go through the categories of relate, challenge, resolve. I think around relating, which is all about helping people understand, but a big part of that is learning their stories. So if you ever want to change people's minds,

Just shut the fuck up. Is it the idea of just listen first? Yeah. Yeah. Listen to them and listen to what they believe about the situation. Listening is hard. It's, yeah. It really is hard. Yeah. And you know, the ironic thing is that listening is the exact opposite of telling stories. Because when you listen, you, like, if you want to truly listen, you have to shut off the stories in your mind. Yeah. Yeah.

Because we're listening and we're using our stories to interpret what the other person is saying. Exactly. Or we're listening, but we're not really listening and we're just waiting for our turn to speak. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Because like, say your piece, but I have my point already locked and loaded that I'm going to get you with right after. Yeah, yeah. Instead of really listening to somebody. Yeah. And...

To kind of pat myself on the back for a second. Yeah. Like that's something that's, I feel like I've improved at. I used to be terrible at it, but I feel like I've gotten a lot better at actually listening through doing this podcast because I really want to listen to you and to anybody that's sitting across from me here in the studio about what they're saying. And,

And it's hard to keep going, keep a momentum with a podcast conversation if I'm not listening too. So that's also something intrinsically with this platform, as part of this platform that has really forced me to also listen as well. But it is a hard habit, you know, outside of this podcast to truly listen, especially when you are really passionate about a certain topic or subject. Yeah.

and you're very committed to that belief, it's really hard to listen to people. There's a lot of energy involved in truly listening. Yes. But like, I think we're all guilty of not listening enough. Everybody is. Yeah. And actually I can feel, I can notice that as well because you don't, you know, you don't disagree with,

And even if you might disagree with some of the things you say, some of the things I say, you show curiosity and you want to learn more. And that's a sign that you are able to control the stories in your head and overpower them. Or at least- For the time being. Yeah, for the time being. Yeah.

And also the fact that you've done this kind of podcast so much, you've practiced that. And, you know, it's really the only way we get better at doing those things. Well, it goes back to even the title of your book. It's the habit piece. Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the first habits is when there is a conflict...

I will learn their story. I will listen to them. I will ask them questions in order to learn what their story is. And that's one of the habits. It's just stop talking. The cue is that conflict. That is a time to shut up. If you don't shut up in this moment, the conflict's going to get worse unless they're willing to back down, which is not a good thing to assume. Yeah. Yeah.

So the habits make it a lot easier to practice. Yeah, the listening piece is important. And building it into a habit, obviously, is the only way you're going to really be able to apply that, I feel. And I feel it's highlighted in a lot of our knee-jerk reactions to respond right away or to criticize right away or to lash out right away, whatever your response is.

As a small example, like going back to what you said earlier about you feeling like, you know what, it's time for me to leave China. I want to leave next year.

I feel it's too rigid here. Whatever your reasons are, I'm sure there's a multitude of reasons leading to that decision. But I bet some listeners are going to listen to that who are Chinese and be like, well, fuck you then, get out of our country, right? Like they're going to just have that knee-jerk reaction to respond that way. But instead of maybe taking a breather and being like, okay, well, why? And coming from his perspective as a foreigner here,

Why, what are the things that will, might be accumulating in society that might lead them to think that way? What are the circumstances? What are the context? What is the context here? And really listen and try to understand why you're thinking that way. Yeah. Instead of just be like, well, fuck you. We don't want you. Anyway.

And it's a really important thing for resolving any kind of conflict. It's just before you have your idea and want to force your idea out onto the world, stop and ask other people who would be affected by this idea, you know, what do you think of this and how would this affect you? And then see if you can find a way of adjusting it to them. Do you see that as...

a rare thing in the, in the workspace, I guess. I think. Or just in life in general. Or do you feel a lot of people are able to do that now?

You know, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, and actually I've done this before with my first book, we get into our house and we decorate our house and we think my house looks really pretty and everyone else is going to be really impressed by my house, but we don't realize no one else is in our house. They're just walking past the outside. I think wannabe entrepreneurs have this idea of what they want to do, but

And they think it's a really cool idea, but they don't check with people. And so, for example, of my first book and actually, what's your first book called? So actually, I bought this as a gift. Oh, we got the hard copy. Yeah. This is my first book. Shaping Paths, How to Design and Deliver Practical Training. That's awesome. Yeah. So I spent six years writing that book.

It's a big book. It took me a long time to write. And six years of my life invested in that. And when I launched it, I was like really looking forward to just putting it up on Amazon and having it sell.

it's not relevant to everyone. And I just wasn't thinking about that. And that's okay. It's benefited me in lots of other ways. This third book is for a much broader audience. And I've actually...

I've written it and I've actually just sent off to several beta readers who are reading through first and giving me feedback. And one just gave me some feedback on the way here, actually. So I know what other people are thinking before I launch it out into the world. So I think getting those stories from other people is a really good idea if you're about to launch a product or a book or something. It makes a lot of sense for sure. Yeah.

I know from personal experience that, and this could be a flaw of mine, is that I'm sometimes very reluctant to ask other people's feedback. Not that I don't value their feedback. Well, maybe there's a little bit of that, but I get on my high horse. And I can only say it's a high horse now as I'm reflecting about it and talking to you and I'm trying to stay humble about it and self-critiquing here.

But like, it's the, it's like the saying, and I, someone posted this the other day that I thought was like, oh yeah, that's kind of how I think too. But it might not be the most healthy way to think is that,

if you want to kill a big dream, tell it to small minded people. Right. And it's, it's this idea of like going back to the entrepreneur example, and you can apply this to a lot of facets is if you have this, like what you think is this great idea and you think you have this bigger vision, like this dream, this bigger vision, and you can see it,

It's just that no one else can see it the way you see it because you're so special. Yeah. And then when you tell it to other people and when they start giving feedback or criticizing it in a certain way, you get very defensive automatically. And you're like, well, you just don't get it.

You just don't get it. You just don't see the bigger vision here. You're small minded, blah, blah, blah. And you get very defensive about that idea. And I think the idea of getting feedback is it's not that you have to base your decisions solely on that feedback, but it's kind of collecting all the feedback as an aggregate and like kind of

trying to decipher what that feedback is telling you or if there are patterns, if you ask a bunch of people, are there common themes that people are bringing up about your idea or what your work? Interestingly, when I published that book, the year...

uh that i published that book in was the worst financial year i've ever had because it made me so arrogant i was exactly like what you were describing in what way though i'd get customers with requests and i like so so to get really specific this book is about how to design and deliver practical training and my goal is i want to design training that people go away and use and

And that involves doing certain things. It involves, you know, making sure you have the right people in the room, making sure you're doing things for the right reason, making sure you're doing it in the right way. Was this kind of like...

- Your kind of response to, because I'm feeding off of a comment you made very early on this conversation, which I relate to myself, is that a lot of these kind of like self-help books and stuff like that I read and I'm like, it's just a gimmick. It's just so fluff. And it's just a catchy title that's their self book. But when I actually read it, I'm like, this is stuff like I could have told you this. - Yeah, exactly. When I was reading books about training, like I really wanted to know how do you change behavior?

and that's actually what this book is about, which I'll talk about in a while. Because training, the goal of training is to change people's behavior. And I would read books about training and they'd be like, how to engage participants? I'm like, okay, that's great, but how do you change their behavior? And I didn't find anything in any of the books I read about training about how to change behavior. I actually had to go to like the

the fields of product design and marketing and behavior science and so on to find out how you change behavior. And that's why I wrote this book. And I came up with some really good ideas. The challenge I had when I published it was not all of those ideas every client can do. Like, for example, one of the things is you want to make sure you have the right people in the room.

but then not every training is for the right people. And so I was telling clients, no, this would be a waste of time. I don't want to waste your money. I don't want to waste my time. So I won't do this. So arrogant. I know. You're not good enough for this book. You don't qualify. Yeah. So in the end, I had to realize, okay, yeah, I also need to be realistic sometimes. Yeah.

Yeah, it talks about what conditions to aim for, but they're not always realistic. You have to sometimes flex. Sometimes you can get them, but sometimes you have to

do your best. Yeah. Yeah. What's this other book you got? So this, this book I'm really proud of actually. And this book, so this book is called overcome and get it done. And this book actually sold more copies than shaping paths.

within just a day, actually. And the thing that I'm really proud of with this book is I wrote it in 24 hours. So I wrote, edited, and published it all in 24 hours. January last year, I went to, I think it was the Park Hotel in People's Square. I locked myself away for two days. And it's all about how to manage your motivation and behavior and so on.

And basically you just locked yourself in a hotel room until you got it done? Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah. And you can notice, you know, for the listeners, the book that took me six years to write sounds like this. And the book that took me 24 hours...

I was going to say, you're very bipolar with the way you publish books. One book is huge, like physically, and like, it's huge. And the other is like the smallest, thinnest book compares. It's like you're very bipolar with the way you do it. But hey, like 24 hours, like that's awesome.

And also for like motivation, social media played a big part of it. So in LinkedIn, I was sharing like a month in advance, I'm going to write a book in 24 hours. I had a lot of people kind of excited about it. And on the day I was writing it, I was sharing and sharing, sharing. Does it have to do with the accountability part? Yeah. Because I'm reading your table of contents on this book, right? Overcome and get it done. Yeah.

And I'm just going through the table of contents and there's a lot of principles here that I've always found really interesting. I've always wanted to talk about, but I see one of them is, okay, create accountability. Is that why you were sharing everything on social media? Yeah. Yeah. For the accountability that this actually connects with what we're talking earlier about beliefs. Cause one of the things that makes beliefs so strong is our social network. Yeah.

Like if you are a Muslim, your family members are probably a Muslim. And if you were to give up the Muslim faith, then your family members probably wouldn't be very happy about it. And if you're a child, you depend on your family. So, you know, our social network is really important to us.

And it's actually instinctive as well, because when we were like hunter-gatherers, we didn't exist on our own. We existed in a band of people, and we depended on each other.

We're actually not, earlier on you were mentioning that we're a selfish species. There's someone, I mentioned him earlier, Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct and another book called The Web of Meaning. He actually points out we're not a selfish species. We're actually a collaborative species.

In our hunter-gatherer days, we depended on our tribe. If we go out, I catch a rabbit, I'll share it with you because maybe tomorrow you go out and I didn't catch anything and you caught a rabbit and you're more likely to share with me then. And if we work together, we can outsmart those dumb Neanderthals and that's why we wipe them off the face of the planet. Yeah.

So it's really important to us that we get acceptance from the people around us. Because if we don't get acceptance from them, we get rejection. And then we die because we have to live on our own. And status is also an important thing.

in a tribe of people, if you are low status, you get less food, you get less sex and it's really stressful. That's the big one, the sex part. Yeah, exactly. So yeah. And that's exactly why accountability works because we have this instinct for social acceptance. And so if we tell everybody that, you know, I'm going to write a book in 24 hours and you don't do it,

That's rejection and a loss of status, which is actually humiliation. And that's instinctively, you know, it's a need we have. When you manage to get someone to take their first step into that dark forest, so to speak.

How do you guide them through the forest once they're in it? So one thing is, as I mentioned earlier, people don't do big changes. Going through the dark forest into the big wide world is maybe that's a leap too far for them. But saying, just come with me into the forest, just a hundred meters so that you can still see the village. That is a lot more tempting for people. And

There's a principle I even talk about in Overcome and Get It Done, which is it's easier to continue doing something than it is to start doing something. So when people start doing things, it's a lot easier to persuade them to continue. My wife is a master of this. We'll be sitting on the sofa and she'll say, Jamie, could you get the remote? Like,

fine. I get the remote. And then once I got the remote, oh, by the way, something in the bedroom. Is she, your wife and my wife must've been talking because they do, they have the exact same playbook. Yeah, exactly. They know what they're doing. They're such manipulators, aren't they? Yeah, exactly. But that kind of goes in because that, I mean, someone listening to this might bring up that word in terms of changing people's beliefs and

guiding them, you know, would be, I guess, a kinder word to use. Where's that boundary though with when it comes to manipulation? I mean, it's all some sort of manipulation, right? And it's, I guess, maybe the stigma around the word. Yeah.

In a way, all things are manipulation, right? But, well, there's an interesting way of manipulating people, which is giving them a choice, which I know is not always practical in leadership situations. But the more choice you can give people, the more ownership they will take of it. And actually, if I give an example around ownership...

So there's a tool I created called the Delegatables, which I think I actually talk about in Overcome and Get It Done. And if you want to delegate a task, there's like four components that you can either control or give them to control. One is the why of the task. What's the ultimate purpose?

Another is the what of the task. What is the result of this? Another is the how and another is the when. And if you want people to take ownership, the more of those you can let them decide

the more ownership they're gonna take. Like this is your podcast, for example. So you decide the why, what, how, and when. If you were doing this podcast for a company and they said, okay, this is why we're doing the podcast and this is how we're doing the podcast and this is what we're doing for the podcast and you just decide when, you probably wouldn't feel as much ownership over it at that time. So letting people decide for themselves is a really good way of getting ownership.

Which again is not always practical for leaders because sometimes you have to push people and you have to force them. But yeah. Well, isn't there also a thing about choices? There's the paradox of choice as well. Like in...

And I think in behavioral economics, right? Like the more choice you give somebody, the less likely they are to make a decision. Yeah. And so, for example, there's a great book called Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg, who is a behavior scientist at Stanford University. And I actually got certified in his methodology last year.

He talks, he says that people are not motivated towards the abstract. And so if your goal is come with me into the forest, that's actually kind of abstract. And it's actually, it leaves a lot to be discussed. It's like, where exactly? How far are we going to go?

And it works the same way with the paradox of choice, because there's so many things we have to think about it. The less you can ask people to think, the more likely they are to act. So definitely reduce any kind of thinking and you're likely to get them to act quite quickly. Well, this plays into a lot of psychology too. And it also connects to, I think, a larger philosophical question, um,

about choice in that, you know, whether it's a company, it's a country, it's a group, it's a tribe, whatever. When do you think people in positions of power kind of use the illusion, almost the illusion of choice to persuade people and to make people feel more ownership and accountability about their decisions than they actually have?

I think they can do that. Not necessarily people in power, but people who are really smart as well. I think they can definitely do that. I think apps, for example,

Any app you use is probably doing that. They're making you think it's your choice, but actually all the while they're prompting you into different decisions. Or the choices have already been curated for you. And it's just like, okay, well, out of these choices that we've preselected here now, but you get to choice, you get to choose. And we feel like, oh, wow, I get to choose these things.

But meanwhile, they've already put all the choices up there. So any choice you pick is already something that has been pre-approved and is part of the direction they already want you to go in, I guess. - Yeah, yeah. - And not to get, oh God, I'm gonna rant again. I don't wanna rant. You know, like politics and stuff like that. Like the idea of freedom. - Rant away. - The idea of freedom and democracy, right? And it's this idea that I love a democracy, a functioning democracy.

But what we have, at least in the States, is not a real democracy. And it's this idea of choice, right? This idea of you're free to choose your leader. And that choice is such an illusion because in this particular example, you have really only two political parties that matter. And every four years, they curate a handful of candidates

only a few whom have any real legitimate chance and backing and support to really become the president. And they put these people up on a stage and say, okay, well, you have all the freedom, here, choose who you want. And it's not really a choice. It's not really a choice at all. And so I'm just, that's the more abstract and large big picture thing in terms of

countries and politics and world leaders. But I feel like that example and that sort of almost manipulation is used, can be used at even smaller levels. Yeah. So for example, free will, I was reading a book recently by Anil Seth called Being You, which is all about consciousness, quite a new book. And I'm getting tangled up in the wires.

And he basically summarized that free will doesn't really exist. Sam Harris would make the same argument. Yes. Yeah. I can't remember exactly how he described it. But I think an interesting way of understanding it is about this process called interoception, which I find is a really good way of understanding motivation as well.

So interoception is the idea that, you know, firstly, we understand the world around us through our five senses. And we think our five senses are how we perceive everything. But actually, we've also got senses within us, like our internal organs are telling us things all the time.

And our brain is always trying to balance our body budget. Like it needs energy put into certain places and, you know, my stomach's empty, so I want food and that's going to divert my eyes to looking for where is there food. And so this creates feelings within us which drive us to do certain things.

And the most primal of these feelings is pleasure and pain. And pleasure and pain are completely manipulated these days. But back in our hunter-gatherer age, I mean, just imagine you've gone three days without eating anything. And finally, you find a deer and you spear it and you take it back and you roast it over a fire and then you take a nice bite. Yeah.

That's pleasure. And it's the same with water. You don't drink water for several days and then finally you get a sip and...

It's pleasure. And for a few other things that, you know, I won't go into detail about. But that is, pleasure is the core motivator. If we are getting things that give us pleasure, it's telling our body that we are surviving. The opposite is pain. If we're getting pain, it's because we're getting stung by a scorpion or bitten by a snake or falling off a cliff.

as far as our body is concerned. And in today's world, we don't need to worry about survival. Well, most of us don't need to worry about survival. And so it's gone completely the other way around. We have things that give us pleasure. It could kill us. We do things that create pain. It's good for us, but it creates pain, so we don't want to do it.

And that has a really big impact on our choices because, you know, for example, if someone wants to lose weight and they give up 100%,

They give up all the junk food and they decide, okay, tomorrow I'm going to start running. And they start it and they just go cold turkey and they go straight into it. And obviously that's going to fail because their body is not conditioned to that lifestyle. Their body is conditioned to overabundance. Yeah. Yeah. And you have to kind of condition yourself to this new way of living. You can't just do it all of a sudden because your interoceptive process is actually controlling that.

So when it comes to choice, interception is a really interesting way of understanding what influences our choices because we're getting these signals from all around us. But we're also getting signals from within us telling us about the state of our body and I don't have enough sugar or my blood pressure is really high.

And then we're using those internal signals to interpret what's coming in from the outside world. And that's how we make our choices. And we're not even aware of these internal signals as they're happening. Yeah. Yeah. Most of them we're not aware of at all. Yeah. The idea of free will is a very interesting debate. You know, the conversations I've listened to around free will, like I listened to like Sam Harris, right? Yeah.

The way he also argues that, in fact, we do not have free will is that he comes from it from like a stream of consciousness perspective and that, you know, kind of all our decisions and choices are free.

basically from our stream of consciousness. And if you think about it, we do not have control over our stream of consciousness. We really don't have much control at all over what is coming into our minds on a second by second basis. I mean, we can right now stop and just be like, okay, I want to think about a tiger. Okay, a tiger, right? And that comes into your mind. But what made you choose tiger?

And there's so many other things that you can't control that are deciding what pops up in your stream of consciousness. And that's us like being very conscious about it and trying 100%. But in our daily lives walking around, we're not trying second by second to decide what is entering our stream of consciousness. Things just come in, they go, they come in, they go, and we live our lives.

And these are the things that are deciding our behavior. If I tell you to choose three movies right now, you're going to choose three movies that you've either heard about or you've seen that probably most recently or had most impact on you that will pop up right away. But what about all the movies you haven't seen? You didn't have the choice to choose those titles. For example, Lucky Dwarf. Now, think of a number from one to 10. Don't tell me what it is.

it's seven exactly oh my god but that's predictable right because lucky lucky number seven and dwarf the seven dwarfs oh yeah i didn't think about the dwarf part yeah seven dwarfs yeah i no bullshit i was thinking seven yeah that's exactly what i was thinking yeah i i was thinking that as well when i read that in a book yeah yeah but it's scary in a way right um that we don't

really if you believe we don't really have free will i think that would be a scary idea to a lot of people yeah well americans in particular yeah i think it is i think we're not really aware of what's influencing our our thoughts so yeah you really don't know what's shaping the stories in your mind sometimes

Maybe the most obvious example of that is religion. I don't know how religious you are. Obviously, that's a very sensitive topic for a lot of people.

But it's the idea of if we're talking about beliefs and ideologies and especially stories. Yeah. There's a really interesting example. I'm not religious. A really interesting example that, again, Jeremy Lent talks about. He's a really good author, by the way. His book, The Patterning Instinct, it's very similar to Sapiens, but it's so much better. Really? I'm going to pick up that book. I haven't read it. It's a really good book. He talks about how there's...

this root metaphor that comes from Christianity, that everything comes from one place or everything comes from God. And there's so many ways of thinking in Western thought that stem from this. Like there's a lot of scientists who don't realize that their thinking is influenced by Christianity because they're looking for the essence. Like there's a book called How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett, which is a fantastic book.

And she was saying how scientists originally thought that emotions have their mechanisms and they have a specific place in the brain and something triggers them and activates this system and they work like a machine. And what science is showing now is they don't work like that at all. They're completely different for everyone and in different situations. And they use different parts of the brain and actually use the whole body and so on. They're completely organic. Wait, wait, hold on. You're saying that

The science is showing now that emotions, certain emotions are not linked to certain parts of the brain. Yeah. Like the same emotion can fire in different parts of the brain for different people. Yeah. Really? Is that how it is? That's not how I believed it to be at all. Yeah. I mean, she started with that story. I mean, you probably are aware of, I can't remember his name, but there used to be a TV show called Don't Lie to Me.

And he'd read people's micro-expressions. It was based on a scientist who went to different tribes around the world and noted that there's these universal micro, universal facial expressions and they represent different emotions. And basically that had a big influence on people's thinking for a long time, but they don't. It's the

emotions are not universal. They're completely different. Your experience of anger will be completely different to my experience of anger. If you put your brain under an MRI scanner or my brain under an MRI scanner, whilst we're both angry, it looked completely different. It's, it's just, it's organic and it's a concept that we create. And there's some emotions, give some examples. I can't remember what they are, but there's some emotions that are very culturally specific as well. I,

I think it's the same with color. So, for example, color actually doesn't exist. It's a concept in our mind. And I think it was the ancient Greeks who didn't have a color for blue or something like that or green or something like that. Really? Yeah. So it's all kind of, she says, emotions are created. They're not things that are activated. Right.

And going back to what I was saying earlier about the Christianity thing, so a lot of scientists believed that emotions would be activated, which comes from this root belief that it must come from somewhere. There must be some essence, which comes from the Christianity belief that everything comes from God.

And Richard Dawkins, a proponent of evolution, he is actually doing this. He talks about nature as a machine.

And nature is not a machine. It's an organism. It doesn't have individual components. You can't take out the individual components. Everything works together as a whole. But the idea of a machine is that there are these individual components and they have their essence and Christianity again. It has a massive impact on people's thinking. And

And in China, it seems the, and I'm really interested in this right now, it seems Taoism has a big impact on people's thinking. And Taoism, I love.

It's still a belief system because the core belief is that we are subject to the rules of the universe, which I think is a pretty reasonable belief. You might be. I control the universe. But Taoism is like, yo, go with the flow. You can't understand the flow, but go with the flow and try to learn the flow and everything isn't connected and so on and so on. Taoism seems to be

According to Jeremy Lent, it seems to be more of a reflection of how things actually are, much more than Christianity, according to him. Like we're all just floating down this river of randomness and chaos that is life. Yeah. And you can't, like it's kind of useless to try to swim against the current or swim upstream or fight it. Yeah. But work to live with it and in harmony with it, I guess. Yeah. That's exactly it. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, we got so philosophical. Actually, I love getting philosophical because this is kind of my bread and butter in terms of what I like to talk about all the time.

But hey, look, it's been a fascinating conversation. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me. There's so much more to talk about that you've written about, that you've researched about, even just to chat. I need to get you back on sometime. Oh, thank you. I'd love to come back. Thank you. Where can people find you?

LinkedIn is the best place to find me or shapingpaths.com. Shaping Paths, all one word. That's your website? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. If you go to LinkedIn and just look for Jamie Dixon, you'll find me with an orange background. Okay. Yeah. And when is your book going to come out again? Your new book, The Story Habits? I think it'll be around July. July. And where is that going to be available? Amazon? Amazon. And if you're in China, not. Not.

Yeah. If you're in China, too bad. Is that what it is? If you're in China, just mess with me. But yeah. But hey, look, I love this whole discussion. I especially find fascinating the idea of our beliefs. Like I said at the top of the show, I think there's no more relevant time than right now to kind of talk about why and how we believe the things we do, how we can approach things

and even debates with people in a more productive way in terms of trying to get your point across and the idea of just shut up and listen first before you start preaching on, which is definitely a habit I need to take on for sure. Same for everyone. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of self-reflection going on here. There's a lot of growing to be done. But I thank you for such an interesting conversation. Thank you as well. Yeah. Thanks for coming on the show. It was a pleasure meeting you. Let's do this again sometime. I'd love to. I'd love to.

All right. Cheers, Jamie. Thank you very much. Thank you. Peace.