ANGUS FLETCHER: Our Uniquely Human Contribution

20:28You start out with an outlier, an exception. That exception is called the hero. They're different from everyone else in their world. What does the exception do? Do they give up or back down or compromise? No, they double down. They do more of what they were doing. That process of finding an exception and then doubling down on it, that's what computers can't do because they can't think in terms of exceptions. They can only think in terms of patterns, whereas we can find the outlier and then tell a story about it into the future, which is, again, something that computers can't do because they can only think in language, not in stories.

21:09You talk about in the book, quoting Kahneman, intuition is pattern recognition. You say it's the opposite. It detects breaks in patterns. Could you elaborate on that?

21:20Michael:Yeah, my head exploded when I read this. I was like, wait a second. Yeah. I have so many questions. So Daniel Kahneman, very famous, famous for thinking fast and slow. And the basis of that book is his theory of intuition, which is actually a theory of intuition he took from computer science. And the theory of intuition is that intuition is a pattern match. And the idea is that whenever you go, aha, or you have an intuition, it's because you're matching a pattern. Well, we know that this is wrong. How do we know that this is wrong? Well, first of all, we know this is wrong because computers have terrible intuition.

21:52They have terrible intuition. And they're much better at pattern matching than humans. You would think that if pattern matching was intuition, AI would have already intuited all the possibilities for the future. But it can't. It's actually trapped in the past. Children have very high intuition. That's why when you're a young person, you're able to see styles that emerge before your parents. So if you have younger kids, they're always seeing what's going to happen in the future much faster than you. They have these intuitions. It's not a pattern match. It's actually the opposite. it. It's the human brain's power to see something that does not fit a pattern.

22:24And so where computers are obsessed with finding correlations, humans are obsessed with finding anomalies, singularities. And that's how every great entrepreneur works. It's like, whoa. And then they see something and it's so obvious to them. They're like, oh my goodness, everybody else must have seen this already. Nobody else has seen it because you're not seeing a pattern. If you were seeing a pattern, everyone would be there already with you. And so that again is why so much of the power of the human brain is basically the opposite of the way the computers work. At the same time, the computers are trying to predict the future.

22:57That's essentially condiment's whole model of cognition. As you're taking all this data and you're using it to predict, predict, predict the future, humans don't predict the future, we make the future. The way that we make the future is we see a possibility that no one else has seen before, and we move faster to make that possibility happen. That is unpredictable because it relies on the ability to spot exceptions faster. Tell me if this relates or not. But one of the things I've noticed, and I'm 70 years old, so I've been around for a few decades. And one of the patterns I've seen is we've had a series of prognosticators prophesy doom.

23:34You know, it was like, you know, there's giant population explosion, there's a food crisis, there's the AIDS epidemic. And the list goes on and on. I myself wrote a book on Y2K and what a showstopper that was going to be. And none of that comes to pass. And it seems like the problem is the people that are making those prognostications are thinking like computers. All they have is the past. They see a trend. And they don't allow for the X factor, which is human innovation that saves the day. I mean, can we just stop this podcast now? That's like literally, if everyone could just think that one thought, we would be so much happier.

24:13And what you've just uncovered there is actually the secret to optimism, which is what we've lost in the modern world. So the modern world is afflicted with basically what we would call psychologically catastrophizing. Yes. Catastrophizing is when you see something bad and then you think to yourself, bad things come from bad things. Therefore, things are bad now, they're going to make more bad things, and then everything's going to be bad. And this is a well-known kind of pattern thing that computers get into. That's why they get into these deaths, I've heard. Whereas what is optimism? Optimism is often misunderstood as thinking, oh, the future is going to be great.

24:44It's going to be amazing. No, no, no, no. Optimism is realizing that in the past, you were able to achieve something that startled you, that surprised you, that amazed you. It's realizing that if you did it once, you could do it again. Are you definitely going to do it again? I don't know because we're going to have to work. We're going to have to access our human ingenuity. We're going to have to try. It's not going to be a machine process. Unlike a computer, or you can't just plug it in and trust that it's going to work, but it could happen. And that's really the kernel of optimism is realizing that we've done it once, we can do it again, but we've all got to pull together and we've got to activate our imagination, our trust, our curiosity, all these human powers and make it work.

25:26Wow. That's why I don't get so ruffled when I hear about all these things, whether it's climate change or whatever. I mean, it's not that I'm not taking those things seriously or think that they're not serious problems that need to be solved. But I'm just saying, we're going to figure it out. And I can't remember who talked about sort of this phenomenon of a slow-moving catastrophe like climate change. There's a lot of time to figure it out, I guess is what I'm saying. And so is it going to happen without human effort? Probably not. But at the same time, there's no reason for despair.

25:56Michael:Yeah. When you despair, it's over. When you despair, you've already told yourself the end of the story, and so you've given up. Yeah. Whereas what you've always got to realize is that you're still in control and you can still write the last chapter. Have you ever heard this saying, it all works out in the end. And if it hasn't worked out, it's not the end. I love that. That's great. That'd be my new favorite saying. I love that. That is great. Okay. I have a question for you about intuition. I have considered myself to be a person with high intuition since I was a kid. I can think back to being a young kid and I would have a sense about something and it would turn out to be right.

26:31Michael:Oftentimes, you know, my dad kind of kids me sometimes and he just says like, you get to clarity very fast. You know, like it's easy for me to get to clarity usually. Sometimes I really don't like the clarity that I get to because especially as a CEO, oftentimes that means a hard decision. You know, sometimes it's a personnel decision. Sometimes it's a financial decision. Sometimes it's a vision, you know, decision, something like that. Sometimes it's great, but sometimes it's really hard. I would describe what I experience as just a knowing, like there's a situation that comes up and I just quickly know like what I need to do.

27:11Michael:And I, it takes me a while to talk out why that is. Usually there's somebody I have to justify it to, you know, get aligned or whatever. And usually if it's a, if it's a hard decision, there's some kind of price tag attached to it that, that I then want to talk myself out of it. Right. You know, because I'd really like to not know what I know because the check literal or figurative that I have to write is going to be high. What's happening in that process? Like, is that intuition? Why do I know things quickly? Like, should I trust it? Like, what should I do with that? Well, if it's worked for you in the past, you should trust it now.

27:43Michael:Yeah. And so I can tell you what's happening there is that the way that a computer makes decisions and the way that people are taught to make decisions now is to gather all of the data and then make a list and then you put a pro column and then an against column and then you kind of weigh all the stuff and then you end up just totally confused. The way that humans evolve to make a decision is we identify the most significant piece of information. One piece of information. That's what we're looking for. We're looking for the most significant piece of information. And then the moment we identify that, the decision is made for us because we've spotted of it.

28:19People who have high intuition like you're talking about have a double kind of intuition. You have clearly some intuition about the world and the way the world is working, but you also clearly have very high intuition about yourself. And what I mean by that is you have clarity about what it is that you want and you have clarity about the direction that you're going in. And when you put together those two types of intuition, it makes for very fast and effective decision-making. And we find that people who are bad decision-makers are usually behind in one or the other. So they know themselves pretty quickly, but they can't read the world or they're pretty good at reading the world, but they actually don't know themselves.

28:53And so as a result, they're not able to kind of connect those two dots. When you connect two dots, you have a line. That's what an action is. And so it sounds to me like you're very good at both.

29:01Michael:So can people develop this? Like if people say intuition, I don't think I'm that intuitive. Is this like an innate talent or ability or is it a skill or both? So first of all, we've already, I think your dad has tipped us off to the fact you didn't spend a lot of time in school. So that is one of the key things is to get yourself out of school. If you've got low intuition, school is probably beating it out of you. And if you want to increase your intuition about the world, what you want to do is you want to go back to your child self because your child intuition is the highest because that's when you're noticing what's special about everything.

29:32A child can be fascinated by everything because a child can always see what's special about the world. And what a child has to develop is their sense of what's special about themselves. That's why children kind of drift through life because they don't know what's special about themselves yet, but they can see everything that's special about the world. How do you reawake that in yourself? Well, the simplest thing to do is to travel because when you travel, you're immediately immersed in a new world and everything comes back to you. That's why when you come back from a trip that's been a good trip, you see everything in your home life with fresh eyes because your intuition has been revived.

30:04If you're not getting that from travel, you're probably on a packaged trip and you need to really travel. You need to go somewhere that They put you a little bit out of your comfort zone, eat a little bit of different food. And if you can't afford to travel, have a conversation with someone who's different, who thinks differently than you, because that will have the effect of travel. That will have the effect of moving your culture. So that's how you develop intuition about the world. How do you develop intuition about yourself? You've got to start leaning into what is special and unique about yourself.

30:34You've got to have confidence in that. What we find is that when people go through their teenage years, they become increasingly self-conscious and they start to feel shame and anxiety about the things that make them different. But we find that people who have high levels, like you do, of intuition, they have something that we often call dumb pride. And dumb pride is when you do things that everyone else is like, that was the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. And you're like, I'm pretty proud of myself for doing it. What are you talking about? And you're like, yeah, I'm pretty proud. And you're like, and in fact, I do it again.

31:03I do it again. I'm going to double down on that. And dumb pride is your brain's way of saying that everyone else thinks it's stupid, but you don't because that's what's different about it. And so if you have low intuition about yourself, really starting to embrace and emphasize what's unique, special, different about yourself. If you can't see it in yourself, your friends probably can. They probably know that and they probably love that about you and they probably wish you did more of that, but you're silencing it because you're embarrassed.

31:28Michael:Well, and this kind of goes back to the whole, what can humans do that AI can't? I mean, I think the future is so much about clarity on what makes you you, you know, like what you uniquely bring to the world. Your unique contribution is your currency in the future. It's not going to be the thing that's replicatable, you know, because that's a commodity. What gets me excited is the thought that maybe our educational system is going to change. Yeah. Because the people that think like machines are not going to survive. They're going to be replaced by machines. Right. People that can think uniquely in uniquely human ways are the ones that will survive that.

32:04That is the transformation that we're trying to make. I mean, I've bizarrely been asked to run my university's leadership initiative at the business school. We have 9 ,500 undergraduates who are trying to help them rediscover their intuition and their imagination and their common sense and their emotions and all these kinds of things. That's definitely where education is trying to pivot, but it's really challenging because we don't have a great track record of encouraging people to be individuals. We have got a great track record of forcing them all to take the same tests and then ranking them based on how they do on these tests.

32:33And so that's one of the reasons why we're trying to learn a little bit from the U.S. Army and from special operations and some of these other communities that have developed these other ways of training. But I appreciate your confidence in us, and I hope that we can live up to that here in the university sector. I'm confident you can. Okay, I want to talk about a related issue. So you took a group of failing salespeople into a museum for a 10-minute exercise, and two months later, 60 % had dramatically improved. Is that related to what we've just been talking about? That's exactly related to what we've just been talking about.

33:07What we help those salespeople do is find their intuition. And we did that in a couple ways. The first way we did that is by putting them in art. So what art does is art is made by innovators, by original seers. Every artist sees something in the world that no one else has seen before. So you and I look at the sky. We just see the sky. A painter sees a new way to paint that sky. You and I think the word love, you know, we think, oh, the word love. A poet figures out a new way to make us feel that love again. And so the whole purpose of art is to rediscover what is special, what is exceptional, and things that seem familiar.

33:43And so if you have an artist you like, it could be a visual artist. It could be a painter. It could be a musician. but art, music, all these activities start to reawaken your brain sense of what is special. And that's why your brain usually feels both so alive when it's experiencing art or going to a concert, but also it feels so exhausted afterwards because it's been using all this brain power. And so that's what we did with those sales folk is we dragged them into a museum and we didn't say to them, hey, you need to understand this art. Instead said, hey, what's something that surprises you about this art?

34:16You don't have to explain it. There's no test here. We're not going to do what they do in school, which is to say that there's a right interpretation of this painting. We're just saying, we want you to walk through the gallery until you see something that blows your mind. It makes you go, wow, what's happening there? Then we just want you to dwell in that sense of curiosity and surprise and discovery, and then feel that reactivating in your brain. Then when you reactivate that in your brain, take that same power and apply it to every person you meet. Because by seeing every person you meet, like you saw that painting, you're going to treat that person like they're unique, like they're exceptional, like they're special.

34:48And then you're going to be able to make a special connection with them. And hey, that's how sales works. So instead of, I think the prior path for them and for a lot of salespeople, and I spent a lot of years in sales, is you basically go in, quickly assess, slap some labels on the person, and then pivot into any number of pitches that you're going to make. But it feels like it's very formulaic, very deterministic, and it just sort of happens based on the range of options. You don't go in open-minded with curiosity and just kind of into a mutual exploration of what may be possible in terms of their problem and your potential solution.

35:27That's right. Look, sales is based on trust and listening. And that's very hard in the modern world because everyone is so busy. And so as a salesperson, you feel like, I've got to get and I've got to work really quickly. Your job as a salesperson is actually to make that person you're talking to feel like time has stopped. Not to be really respectful of your time and move as quickly as possible. That's just reactivating all their productivity anxieties. Instead, you want to make them feel like, I want to spend a little more time in this conversation because I'm learning about myself. What really is effective sales?

36:00Effective sales is helping that person discover something about themselves and their company, not selling them. And in order to help them discover, you've got to be able to get inside a little bit the way that they're thinking and then detect what they haven't thought yet and then help them see that other thing. And then you don't need to make a sale in that exact moment because you've already built that person's trust that you can think like they think. They start to trust you. They come back to you. You build that relationship. And that's how you make the sale. And so all of these things are developed through relationships and relationships are developed by treating the other person as unique.

36:33Michael:Angus, how much of this is kind of our over-reliance on the left side of our brain and the underdeveloped right side of the brain? Does that factor into this at all? Because I'm a neuroscientist, I have to be honest, the left right brain thing is total bunk. However, it is true that there are ways that our brain thinks analytically and the ways that it thinks creatively. So that's totally true. So it's just a kind of a way of kind of explaining how the brain works. And yeah, absolutely. We've leaned far too much into optimization, efficiency, all these computer ways of thinking. And we've now developed these machines that can do it for us.

37:08So it's time to let that go. And the reality is, is that the more you think in terms of optimization and productivity, the more you get caught in something known as the hedonic treadmill. I don't know if you guys have talked about this a lot. But basically, you're always optimized. You're getting better and better and better. And you're getting less pleasure out of it. And so you're not actually getting anywhere. And so productivity is a trap. The reason that the hedonic treadmill exists is because once your brain has automated something, it wants you to move on from it. Your brain actually doesn't want you to take pleasure in automated activities because your brain wants you to automate something and then grow.

37:40Growth is what your brain takes perpetual pleasure from. Anytime you're engaged in a growth activity, which is why anytime you meet a new person, you're growing. The whole point of automation from your brain's perspective is to get rid of it and not provide any pleasure. There's a real opportunity, I think, ahead of us to get rid of some of these productivity hacks, optimization hacks, or at least stop making them the focus of so much of our lives, and instead get back into growth. You know, for years, the two of us and other of our family members wore an aura ring because we were able to discover different metrics about how our biology worked and to optimize it.

38:19And I think all of us got to the place where we said, we actually hate this. There, initially, it was fascinating. But the more we did it, the more it felt like -

38:30Michael:It was making us neurotic. It was making us neurotic, you know, over-metricizing everything. Right. And so we just did away with it. And I find that I'm happier - I've never slept better. And I've never slept better. Yeah. Well, you know, one of the few things that modern psychology has discovered is that neuroticism makes you unhappy. And so, and in general, so much of these tech things we put in our life just add to our level of anxiety. Everybody gets so anxious the moment they have to interact with technology, you know, especially if it involves any kind of function that involves your work.

39:01And we're just so much happier when we're dealing with people because we trust other people to fix it. You know, we're so relieved when the tech guy shows up to fix the tech, like, oh, thank goodness, you know. And so all of that, those aura rings, all the rest of it, they're kind of fun at first because you feel like you're learning something, you feel like you're growing, you feel like you're discovering. But then once you got there, you're like, okay, like, I don't want to then allow this to tell me what to do. Like, I don't want to all of a sudden be programmed by this thing on my finger to optimize my day because then why am I alive?

39:28Michael:Exactly. And it makes you feel less alive. You know, it's like you wake up and you think I had a pretty good night's sleep. And then you look at your sleep score and it's, you know, it's a 75 and you're like, Oh, I guess I had a terrible night. You know, your day spirals from there. It's, it's, it's awful. So yeah, forget that. That's also the way that we develop dependence on technology, even when it's nuts. So one of the things that I'm always talking about with employers about is how kids say have no common sense. This is the number one thing I hear all the time from employers. They have no common sense whatsoever.

39:56Why? Because they rely so much on technology to tell them what to do. They lose their own sense of, wait, this is totally nuts. You know this as a leader. Your job is to be the person in the room to be like, this doesn't make any sense at all. Everyone around you is like, oh, yeah, but the numbers say that it's the thing to do and everybody else is doing it and all the metrics. You're like, well, that may be the case, but it's nuts. To the point about you and your sleep score, obviously, the technology was wrong. You did have a great night to sleep. What's going on? But then you start to question yourself.

40:23You're like, oh my goodness, I must be wrong. And that's how these machines destroy our common sense and our just ability to function without them when we're really a lot smarter off on our own. Funny story. So I had an Oura ring and it was good, while it was good. And then I bought, because I listened to a podcast where a guy talked about it, I won't name the name, but about the Eight Sleep, which is basically this thing you put on your bed and it regulates your temperature and it can accommodate sort of your personal variations and all that. And it texts you in the morning, your sleep score.

40:56So now all of a sudden I'm getting one sleep score from Aura and one from Eight Sleep and they do not match. They're not even close. One's telling me I had a great night of sleep and I said, you know what?

41:08Michael:Get rid of all this stuff. Get rid of all this stuff because it doesn't even know what it doesn't know. If you want to make yourself instantly happier tomorrow, just take all that stuff and put it in a bag and go stick it in your garage somewhere. You'll wake up tomorrow. I can't wait. Great. Send us the email. Declutter your life. Less is more, but I mean, really, really, really. Yeah. Yeah. Become self-reliant. Nothing will make you happier in life than self-reliant. And that is true. And you can bank on that. And all of these technologies are just taking you away from that and making you think that you need them, which is another reason why it's great.

41:39I mean, go camping for once, you know, the first couple of nights like, oh, this is awful. I hate it, you know, and then you'll get back into with nature and you'll love it.

41:52Michael:You said something a minute ago about relationships. And before we started recording. I was really about to go there. Okay, great. The mind melt is complete. The half of the genetics that we share is clearly evident. You told us something very surprising, which is that you work with military couples and do marriage counseling. And I was like, I'm sorry. Special forces. Special forces, people in special forces. And I said, well, that makes sense because I'm sure, you know, they're under so much stress. And you told us the statistic of the divorce rate. And I want you to tell us that again for our listeners to hear.

42:28Michael:And then what have you learned about marriage from people that are so likely to fail? And what do you do to help them? Yeah, this is a great question. I was like five questions. The statistic is that in the units that I work with, the divorce rate is over 90%. And many of these couples have been through multiple divorces. So they might've been divorced two, three, four times. And it's very kind of you to say that it makes sense for me to work on them as a marriage counselor because my own wife was stunned when this happened. She was like, you don't know anything about our marriage. Like, why are other people asking you for marriage advice?

43:02Like, what's going on? And I myself, I mean, you know, I never wanted to be, I'm not a marriage counselor, by the way. Please don't anyone listening to this podcast call me up for marriage advice. But the reason that this happened is because I was working for so long with special operations. We built this real trust, this real bond between the two of us. And I didn't get this phone call one day from an operator who remained nameless. And the phone call basically goes something like, Angus. And then I'm like, Tom. And he's like, Angus, we're having a problem. A problem with our wives. Or maybe our wives are having a problem with us.

43:38It's unclear, but there's a problem here. And that was when he told me that there was this divorce rate. And I was like, oh, he's like, Angus, we need your help. And so I was like, all right, totally. I'll look up all the best marriage counselors for you. I'll get on this. And he's like, no, Angus, we don't want you to bring in a marriage counselor. We trust you. We want you to help us. And this goes back to this whole thing where you start working with these teams because they're very secretive. They're very classified. Once you build that trust in with them, they trust you for everything. So I'm pretty sure that a couple of years from now, I'm going to get a phone call from One of them being like, Angus, I need open heart surgery.

44:10I've got a can opener. You can come around my house. I know you can fix it. So next thing I know, I get taken to an undisclosed location. This large field. In the field are about 300 operators and their spouses. Tom comes up to me and he's like, Angus, all these people are about to get divorced. Unless you say something to them. Go say something to them. No pressure. And I'm like, what do I do? And so the only thing I could think to do was basically stall for time. And the way that I stall for time is I thought about the way that operators themselves develop relationships. And so I started basically giving these couples in the field all these basic tips that operators themselves use when they go out on missions to build trust and build bonds.

44:54And what I discovered is as I was feeding these tips out to these couples, they started talking. And then they kept talking. And then eventually I didn't need to do anything. And they were just talking and talking and talking and hanging out in this field talking. And Tom came up to me afterwards. He said, these are people who haven't had a conversation in more than 30 seconds in years. Wow. And now they're all talking. And then he was like, what did you do? And I was like, I just told him to do what you told me to do. When we were talking about marriage, we were talking about operations. And so I can give your audience if they want, like the three main tips that I make in special operations counseling.

45:28So the first is I tell them to shift your relationship to gratitude. What I mean by that is people now think that gratitude is about being thankful for good things. And that's totally fine. You can be thankful for good things. There's nothing wrong with that. But you'll discover that when you're thankful for good things, it doesn't really last that long. And that's because the purpose of gratitude in the human brain is actually to give thanks for hard things. That's actually why it evolved in the brain. And that's because your brain grows the most from hard things. all the wisdom, all the emotional strength you have, those come from moments in your life when you struggled, when you failed, when you experienced setbacks, maybe even tragedies.

46:04And so really what you want to do is you want to start being thankful for those hard times because you realize those were a source of growth. And the more you get inside that mentality, the more you start to realize that when things are going wrong in the moment in your marriage, that's a source of growth too. And you can start to activate gratitude for that. And that starts to shift your psychology. So that's the first thing, shift your relationship to gratitude. The second thing is start having real conversations. And what I mean by real conversations is that most couples, they're basically trying to tell their partner to do something like, go do this thing.

46:36I'm trying to give you some information. And most couples also feel like they know their partner totally. So there's nothing there for them to discover. So they're not interested in having a real conversation where we share things and we learn about each other. They're just interested in passing on their information as quickly as possible. And so what we teach the operators is to use a trick that we use to help with conversations, which is to ask the other person who, what, when, where, how, but never why. Because the moment you ask why, you service a judgment and the conversation is over. And what you notice is you start asking those other questions like, you know, who are you out with?

47:14What were you doing? What were you buying? And then your wife might say what she was buying. You might want to be like, why did you do that? But instead, you're like, what were you planning on using it for? What other things did you buy? What happens is, is you start servicing more information. And then that information starts to surprise you because it's not what you expected. And then you start to re-engage your curiosity. And the truth is, is that the moment you've made a judgment, your relationship is over. You've fallen out of love. Love is about mystery. It's about not being able to judge.

47:41It's about always feeling there's something else to discover. So we encourage them to have real conversations. And the simple trick there, if you don't want to do that whole thing is ask more what questions and less why questions. And the more you do that, you'll find yourself having real conversations. Then the final thing is we tell them, you got to have a plan. Your marriage has got to have a plan. And they say, okay, because in special operations, everything's got to have a plan. If something goes sideways, it's because it wasn't a plan. And then we say, well, to have a plan, what do you got to do?

48:09You got to have your priorities. Got to figure out what your priorities are, right? And they say, oh yeah, yeah, we've got to figure out our priorities. And so I say to them, okay, I want you and your wife to each sit down apart from each other. And I want each of you to write down your three top priorities in terms of what you want the other person to give you. What are the three critical things you need from that other person? What are the three things you absolutely need to get from this marriage or it's not going to work? And they say, oh, okay. And they go off and they write down the three priorities.

48:33And then I say to them, you know why I asked you to do that? And they kind of look at me and I say, because it's a trap. Can you have three top priorities? can you have two top priorities you can only have one top priority and the reason that your relationship is failing is because you're expecting your partner to do multiple things for you and those things all conflict your partner spending her time doing this right you know she's taking care of the kids or whatever and then you're angry at her because dinner isn't ready or you're angry at her because she's not romantic enough you know or she's focusing all this time on being romantic and being thoughtful then you're angry at her because she's not earning enough money you know what I mean?

49:05And it's like, each of you gets to pick one thing, one thing that the other person gives you. And then you can hold the other person accountable for that. But as long as they give you that thing, right, you keep investing in the relationship. And the more that the two of you are good at giving each other one thing, the more you can start to give each other two things and three things and four things, right? You don't have to be limited to one thing all the time. But if something isn't working, you've got to go back to basics. And basics is establishing your top priority and being clear with your partner about what is the one thing I need from you and what is the one thing I can give to you.

49:37That cycle will kickstart every relationship.

49:40Michael:Wow. This really resonates with my own experience. So in three months, I will have been married 48 years. Congratulations. Thank you. And I think if there's one thing that has been true in our relationship is your second point. We've just sort of been super curious about the other person. and both of us came to the conclusion that, you know what? We will never plummet the depths of who this person is. There will always be an element of mystery, which is kind of the foundation for attraction. You know, it's just like, what can I learn and explore? Well, especially if you're always growing and changing.

50:16Michael:Yes. It's not like a static thing. You know, it's like you're always becoming somebody, which means you're never going to run out of things to discover. True. That is beautiful because that's exactly right. The more that you grow, the more there is for your partner to discover. And the more you can encourage your partner to grow, the more you can discover in them. And that's what keeps your relationship going, is that sense that both of you are growing and both of you are discovering. And I think the tragedy of a lot of marriages is that people end up getting stuck, and then they end up getting stuck.

50:45They get caught in judgment. Yes. Well, listen, we've only scratched the surface.

50:50Michael:It's really true. This is probably the fastest hour we've had in some time. It is. But thank you, Angus. It's been great. If people want to engage with your work, if our listeners want to kind of explore more with you, where would you direct them? I mean, honestly, probably the best thing is just my book, Primal Intelligence. It became a national bestseller, so it's all over the place. And if you want to get closer to me, you can Google me. I'm just about the only Angus in Ohio, and my email is publicly listed. So I get a lot of emails every day from people looking me up. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for being here.

51:21Michael:We've learned a ton, and can't wait to learn more from your work. Thank you. It's been an honor.

51:35Well, that conversation was different than I expected.

51:37Michael:Me too. I felt like it lasted five minutes long. I mean, I'm like, gosh, can we just spend the whole day with you? Well, I get nervous when we have professors. You do? I do because, you know, sometimes they can't quite relate or they're a little too cerebral. I mean, most of the time we kind of filter those out. Right. But I'm always a little bit nervous. You're like a little intimidated. But he was like the best of both possible worlds. I know. He was so enthusiastic. So enthusiastic and really crisp in his thinking. I love how contrarian he was in his thinking. You know, the question that is on my mind right now more than anything else is really, what can humans do that machines can't?

52:17Michael:Because I don't think we have a good answer to that question. You know, I think that's a, we know what machines are really good at, but I think a lot of people are asking, well, what is it that humans are going to be good at? If machines can do all this stuff better than us, then what's it going to be that we're good at? This may be an age differential, but I don't worry about it. I know I like, okay, we could end up in the Terminator scenario. I don't worry about that. I just think - Or we could end up being just like massive unemployment and all that. But I keep thinking that's going to be only because we lay down the mantle of humanity individually and decide that we're going to give in to the machines.

52:53Michael:Yeah, I don't think I worry about it like in some apocalyptic way. I just think of it more as like an existential question that is very timely, you know, that people need to have a sense of meaning and purpose. And all of a sudden that's potentially threatened. You know, like there's like another player on the field, so to speak, that I think if you listen to some people, it could sound like you've heard the terrible phrase of, you know, we're just going to be like a meat sack, basically, which I just, I hate that language. You know, like we're basically we're just kind of useless. And, you know, the machines will just sort of pander to us.

53:29Michael:And I don't think that's true. I mean, our, you know, basis of faith, our kind of philosophical foundations. I don't believe that's true, but I but it matters to me to have a really clean answer to that question ultimately and to be able to help our community of listeners and so forth to answer that question for themselves. Because I think it's an important question always, but it's especially important now. And I think he did a good job of helping to bring some clarity to that. Well, I just want to commend you. You know, we had our all team meeting last week and you presented some work that you and Joel and Marissa had put together on sort of thinking through our brand and sort of tweaking our mission for this time that we're in.

54:10Michael:Yep. And I mean, I was so blown away by that because I do think it takes into account all these questions about the role of humanity. Right. What's uniquely mine to do? Oh, it's just so rich. And we're not prepared to reveal it yet. It will be coming. It's coming. And I found that it's already leaking out in different things that I'm doing. Yeah, I think so too. So I appreciated that perspective that he had, that on the one hand, there's so many great things that AI can do for us. And I think you and I are both enthusiastic about a lot of those things and are using them on the daily. and there are also things that AI is really stupid at and really not equipped to do.

54:50Michael:And I love this idea of intuition being one of the things that AI is not good at and frankly decision-making that doesn't follow patterns and doesn't have the benefit of data to draw on. Because I think about my own life and I think about kind of what I bring to the table and I really think that that's one of the things that I bring is being able to get to clarity about something where, you know, you don't have the benefit of pattern recognition and, you know, big data sets and all that. You've just, you've got to make a call and you can't always explain why, but you need to, and it needs to be a good call.

55:27Michael:And I think that's where intuition comes in. Well, we hope you guys enjoy this episode and we'd encourage you to share it with a friend. That's the best thing you could do for us. We We appreciate the reviews and the ratings. Yeah. But if you could share the episode, we're just about helping people and you can help people and be part of the mission. So we could do that. Hey, just a reminder that we're taking the summer off, but come back next week to listen to one of our favorite episodes from the archives. See you soon.