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And so by learning Mandarin, you created, like you said, a whole new landscape, a whole new map of information and frames from which to draw to help you understand something else.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today we re talking with my friends Judah Pollock and Olivia Fox Caban.
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You might recognize her name from her earlier book and her earlier appearances on the show, namely The Charisma Myth.
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Today we re talking about breakthroughs.
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We re gonna explore some famous breakthroughs from some famous people, of course.
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We ll talk about the default mode network
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and what s called the genius lounge, which is the subconscious part of your brain where very complex problems are solved, otherwise known as breakthroughs.
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And in true AOC fashion, we re going to talk about how you can use modern brain science to have more breakthroughs of your own when trying to solve complex problems and access different types of breakthroughs as well, and how to cultivate habits to activate our genius network
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so that our brain is primed for better breakthroughs moving forward.
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There are a lot of practicals and great habits here, so enjoy this episode with Judah Pollock and Olivia Fox Caban.
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I was thinking about my introduction earlier when I was driving up here and I thought, OK, I just have to talk about what these guys do.
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And then I thought, I don t really know exactly what you guys do.
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You know, I know what you say that you do.
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You know, I m a writer and a consultant and a coach.
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And I thought, OK, back when you guys started saying that, that was a thing that you could do.
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And people went, oh, now it s so vague.
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Because everybody s a thought leader and that is a big circle in the Venn diagram of coach, consultant, writer.
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I do want to start with you explaining exactly what you do, even though that s the cardinal rule of not asking your guests when they show up.
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So Judah, he comes under the radar, but you can think of him as Gandalf.
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He s the eminence grise who will stand behind the powers that be and advise them.
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Is the guy behind the guy?
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Yeah.
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Is that fair to say?
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Judah looks at the organization.
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He looks at systems and he looks at what dynamics happen within teams and he looks at what is not being said under the culture.
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That s really fucking up everything.
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Right.
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Sure.
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And so that s why we say he s an advisor.
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He s a strategic advisor.
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He s, he looks at culture.
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I m a coach.
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I focus on one person, one person only.
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That s it.
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And I would just add to that, that what comes along with that advising is having to look at a team and look at those teams dynamics, or especially if that team is an executive staff, and then look at how those dynamics spill out across the organization.
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We like to say culture is fractal.
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And so you get one piece of the culture and you realize it repeats itself throughout the organization.
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Like a molecule or some kind of crystalline structure.
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Yes, exactly.
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A crystalline structure.
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And it actually goes up.
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You can learn it from the executive staff or you can learn it from just like a rando team within the org because that team is actually going to reflect the dynamics of the executive staff.
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This is kind of like when you walk into a restaurant and the staff is really rude and you go, man, the manager here must be such a dick.
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And then you just keep expanding that.
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It s not gonna break at any point.
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The influences are gonna keep going down.
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By really understanding what the dynamics are between all these people and between the hierarchy, the power, you can then understand what behaviors need to shift and that s how you can actually move an organization or just a team into a different space.
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So bad cultural practice, or whatever you would call it, right?
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That s almost like an infection then, if it s inside your company.
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Ooh, nice!
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That s exactly what it is.
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And that infection will also fight off your attempt to change.
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It s very much an infection then.
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It resists even the white blood cell types who get called in to fix it.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, interesting.
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Nicely done.
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There s only one thing I m good at, and it s making really weird metaphors or analogies and not knowing which one is which.
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Doesn t matter.
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They both work.
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So I like the book, I ve read the book, or I listened to the book.
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Thank you for getting that for me, by the way.
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It s decent.
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You re on it.
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You made it.
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Yeah.
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The Net and the Butterfly is the title of the book.
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This obviously means something that I sort of is coagulating in the back of my brain, but I d love for you to explain what it means and why.
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He s the metaphor guy.
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I m the metaphor guy.
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And we can actually talk about how the metaphors work in the brain as well, the breakthroughs.
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But so the net and the butterfly refers to the two networks in your brain that you re accessing in order to have a breakthrough.
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And butterflies, they have very erratic flight paths.
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They re hard to catch.
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They sort of flit around.
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And they re very beautiful, and you want access to them.
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But it can be hard to sort of predict where they re going to go, where they re going to land, what they re going to eat.
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And that very much is how breakthroughs work in our brains.
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They re not something you can predict, and they re not following a linear path.
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And they re very often popping into your head based off of something that you re not going to be able to see a direct connection to.
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And so you re trying to figure out how do you induce these, right?
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Everybody wants to hear one, two, three, breakthrough.
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Breakthrough, right.
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And hypnosis, that s why that silly kind of stuff is really popular because it s instant.
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It s the magic pill for some sort of innovation.
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And we ve tried to be really, really clear so that we can be as helpful as possible that there is no one, two, three, breakthrough.
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But there is a series of steps you can take to highly increase the chances, to set the conditions that you re gonna have a lot more breakthroughs, that you can induce them.
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There s this mythology that breakthroughs only come to very special people.
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They come randomly, just whenever.
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And there s nothing you can do, right?
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It s the domain of the geniuses and the rest of us just don t have it.
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That s kind of what I thought before I d read the book.
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I m thinking of Eckhart Tolle who s like, oh, I was just hanging out in my dorm room one day and then I woke up on a park bench fully enlightened.
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Enlightenment happened.
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And 30 years later, I m still this Zen guy who happens to market really well on Oprah.
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Yeah.
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And I mean.
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Just calling it like it is.
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Just leaving that there.
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The thing is, is that breakthroughs actually, they belong to all of us.
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We all have the ability because we all have the same brain architecture for it.
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We are all born with a breakthrough engine.
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Every single one of us.
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And what happens is, is we just kind of get out of shape.
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Our brains are actually structural.
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So it s our ability to build physical new neural connections that enables us to have more breakthroughs.
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And we get out of practice at doing new things.
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When we re kids, we re imaginative, everything s new that we encounter.
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And as we grow up, things start to get more repetitive for a lot of us.
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And so we literally get, our brains get physically out of shape.
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And so if you, saying that you re not able to have breakthroughs or you re not creative is kind of like sitting on a couch for a year, total couch potato.
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And then somebody s like, go do 10 pushups.
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And you can t even do one.
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And you re like, well, that s that.
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Guess I m not wired for pushups.
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I can t ever do pushups.
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It s like, no, you just need to build yourself up, work out, get fit.
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It s the same thing with your brain and being creative, having breakthroughs.
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If you re not in the flow of it, your brain is kind of out of shape.
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I realized, well, I left college, I got out of law school, we started the business, and this is a constant learning curve, but there s been a point at which things started to get a little bit more stable, and I can t remember exactly what it was, but I was trying to learn or read or do something, and I remember thinking, this was so much easier when I was younger.
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And it wasn t just a language thing, oh, I m too old for this, it was just some skill that I thought, man, I would have picked this up like that in my 20s, and I just knew that I was so much better, so I thought, I need to figure out how to,
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expand the reaches of my brain and go do some spring cleaning in the corners or, you know, fix some roof shingles or whatever you want to do in there that have been leaking for a while.
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And I started to learn Mandarin because I thought symbolic stuff that we don t use in America, you know, looking at different things that are supposed to have sounds that aren t letters and tones and things that we don t use.
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And it was really interesting and it got really hard.
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But now I realize, after still doing it for so long, not only is it
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not any harder than any other language in many ways.
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It s hard for English speakers, of course.
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But now, when I look at different things, I ll often use, oh, like in Chinese, how it has this and this and this, and it s just this map of terrain that would not have existed in any other way in my brain other than knowing a language, which by definition has gotta be somewhat intuitive for humans and brains, right, to learn, otherwise it wouldn t be a language in the first place.
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That may or may not be super true scientifically, but I figure if people invented it,
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when they invented other language and it s their primary mode of communication, it s gotta be somewhat intuitive.
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It s just that it s using different areas of our brain that maybe an English-speaking person would use.
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And it s been super useful, not just for speaking Chinese, but for mapping things.
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You just find tools there and things that you re using in that language that don t exist anywhere else to analogize something that you re looking at or seeing or learning or plugging two ideas together.
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Is that what a breakthrough is?
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I mean, what is a breakthrough actually?
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You just hit upon two of the major points that come around to being good at having breakthroughs.
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The first one, going back to the idea of being fit or not in the process of learning Mandarin, is what we call plasticity, which is literally your brain s ability to form new neural connections.
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So as you forced yourself to learn Mandarin,
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you re forcing your brain to get in shape at forming new connections.
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So it gets easier and easier because your brain is getting more and more in shape, no different than running five miles every day.
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And it gets easier and easier.
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The other thing you pointed out was this idea of associations.
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And so by learning Mandarin, you created, like you said, a whole new landscape, a whole new map of information and frames.
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from which to draw to help you understand something else.
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And so one of the examples we use in the book that s really interesting is that the Ford-Bloomfield, West Bloomfield Hospital in the Detroit area was looking for a new CEO, and they chose the
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former head of Ritz-Carlton Hotels.
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And at first you re like, why on earth would you hire the head of a hotel chain to run a hospital?
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That doesn t seem to make any sense whatsoever.
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Until you take a look at the underlying pattern.
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And it s the underlying pattern you were describing in Learning Mandarin.
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The underlying pattern is hotels and hospitals are both in the business of taking care of people.
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Hospitality, if you will.
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Yes, they re both in the business of seeing that your experience is a good one.
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That you feel held.
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Whether you feel held because you re on vacation, a business trip, or you re sick and need to heal.
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Either way.
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He brought the concept of customer service.
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to the hospital.
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So suddenly it wasn t just, you re a patient, be quiet, we know better.
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There was an element of respect.
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He brought the idea of checking in.
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So you came to the hospital and you were checked in like at a hotel and taken to your room quickly.
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There wasn t a lot of waiting.
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There were fold-out chairs against the walls in the room so the doctors would sit down and be at eye level with the patients.
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The patients felt more connection and the doctors got higher ratings because there s a higher EQ assumed by sitting like that.
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They also integrated the hotel into the local community.
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excellent organic cafeteria that people would come to who weren t sick.
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They were just like, let s go have lunch at the hospital.
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Because it was such a good thing.
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So the hospital won awards bringing in a CEO from hotels.
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So there s a way in which when you can associate from one landscape to another, you can have breakthrough ideas that ordinarily you wouldn t see.
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There s a third point actually that you brought up and I just want to clarify.
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There are some activities that are really good for when you have set your brain in the right conditions, inducing breakthrough.
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So you mentioned putting up roof shingles and doing the laundry.
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Those are precisely because they don t use up a lot of brain power.
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They won t make you more plastic.
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They won t make your brain more agile.
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putting up roof shingles, doing the laundry, doing the dishes.
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These are kind of doorways into your more creative associative space.
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And the reason they are is because when you re focused on a task, like you re focused on a task right now, listening to us.
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In theory, focused on you guys.
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You re trying to sound like you know what you re doing, right?
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You re putting it across the right way.
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And we re focused on a task.
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We re trying to communicate the book.
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And so we re all using the executive part of our brain up here in the front of our brain.
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That s very task-oriented, goal-focused, gets things done on time, keeps things in a linear fashion.
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Go, go, go, go, go.
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This part of our brain, though, can get in the way of the part of our brain that s going to make the grand associations that lead to breakthroughs.
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We call that part of our brain the genius lounge because it literally, it s about 10 different regions of our brain.
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It s a big network.
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And what it does is it looks at things like error prediction, it looks at future forecasting, it looks at our own personal memories, it looks at the environment and determines should we change our behavior.
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It takes small amounts of information and infers conclusions from them.
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It does a whole wash of things.
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And basically, when you take your executive and give it a task that s just enough to keep it focused, like the laundry.
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Shower, right?
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Shower moments, right?
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To shower, putting up roof shingles, whatever your random hobby might be, taking a run.
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watching a stupid movie, it doesn t matter, it s like whatever yours happens to be, what happens in your brain is all the power reroutes out of the executive office to the genius lounge, and suddenly the genius lounge is just racing, it s running, it s going.
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Because you ve given your immediate processing power just enough to do that it doesn t start interfering with what s going on in the background.
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Exactly, it doesn t get in the way.
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But here s the thing, this executive is not absent at this point, because the executive has to focus the geniuses on a problem.
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So when you go to take a shower, it s very good to focus on what is this thing that s blocking you, what is it you wanna have a breakthrough about?
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And by doing that, you focus the genius lounge.
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And then you take the shower, the genius lounge starts doing its thing.
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And it starts seeing what s going on.
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So you can load up the brain with a bunch of stuff to then chew on later.
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Perfect.
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Yes.
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And you want to add in the new.
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The reason Mandarin is so helpful for you is because you also have to create a new store of information that act as catalysts to the Genius Lounge.
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Think of it as Legos.
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They have new Legos to add to the different things they re trying to build.
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So you have to keep new information coming in, then focus from your executive, and then the geniuses can really operate at full power.
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What are the geniuses doing the rest of the time that I m awake when I m not experiencing anything creative, useful, or interesting whatsoever?
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You ever been in a chill lounge?
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Like a hookah lounge?
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Or like a cava lounge?
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It kind of is like that.
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They re operating, and they re still taking a lot of energy, but the lights are low, they re kind of chill, they re not really going, the espresso machine s off.
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Right?
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They re not really operating at full tilt.
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And what the Genius Launch tends to do a lot of is self-referencing thought.
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So you tend to think about yourself a lot.
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You tend to kind of like tell me about it.
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You build the narrative of your own life a lot.
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And so what s interesting about this is you know how there s a connection between creativity and depression?
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Yeah, I ve heard that, but I don t know about that.
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It s just something I ve observed in creative people.
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So here s one of the reasons.
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It s not that being depressed makes you creative.
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That s the false correlation that people create.
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And so in high school, you have these kids like, I m going to wear all black.
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I m going to sit in the corner and just like dower.
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And that s going to make me the next Hemingway.
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Right.
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And there s this misunderstanding.
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Not that I know anything about that high school experience.
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I never did anything like that.
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No, you were clearly a jockey.
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reading my Gandalf.
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The genius lounge is actually the same brain network that gets you caught in depression.
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How is that possible?
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So if the genius lounge never turns off, if it stays on all the time and all you do is think about yourself, and then you add a negative tilt to that, like your inner critic comes in, and you can t get out of that network, like the lounge just overtakes all your thoughts, you spiral down into depression.
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And what can happen is, is that s the same lounge that s very creative.
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So when you kind of pop out of it now and then, you can have bursts of creativity.
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Oh, interesting.
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But you don t have to be depressed to access the Genius Lounge.
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That s good news.
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There are very healthy ways to access the Genius Lounge and be very creative and have breakthroughs without being totally depressed.
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That s good news, right?
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Because of course we do hear the cliche of every writer ever drinking whiskey in the morning and smoking unfiltered cigarettes and trying to kill themselves.
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Well, okay, let s separate.
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because the whiskey apparently is a separate matter.
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You ll often hear, write drunk, edit sober.
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One of the biggest inhibitors of the geniuses is our internal critics, the prefrontal cortex, when it goes into critical mode.
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Ooh, I know where you re going with this, yeah.
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Alcohol quiets the PFC.
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The primary reason we like alcohol is because it lowers our inhibition.
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And that s exactly what you need to be creative, is to no longer have the inner judgment on your own creative process.
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The real-time editing of everything that comes up.
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Yeah, exactly.
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I like the way she did that, quiets the PFC.
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PFC, yeah.
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I taught her that.
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Yeah, the PFC.
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PFC s a football term from Judah s football team in college.
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I know the other day I was like, oh right, it s the Super Bowl Sunday.
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Oh, that s right.
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All of us are clearly, really into professional sports.
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He s in the party ready.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Time to get out the nachos.
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Can we give examples of breakthrough processes in famous people?
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You had a lot of cool ones.
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Oh, no, no, no.
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He s giving one.
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OK.
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Keith Richards.
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Oh, the Keith Richards one.
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OK, so.
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It s my favorite.
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All right.
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So Keith Richards.
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It s 1965.
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The Stones have their fourth album out and they re touring the U.S.
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for the first time.
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And they re in Clearwater, Florida.
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And they are not the Rolling Stones as we know them.
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First of all, they re staying in a motel.
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Right.
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Second of all, they re like a mid-level band.
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It got compared to Herman s Hermits for people out there who are rock and roll fans and know.
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But the fact you haven t heard of Herman s Hermits gives you an idea of where the Stones are at.
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Right.
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You only know them if you re into the genre.
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Exactly.
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Can we please establish this?
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I mean, Americans, seriously.
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Genre.
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SPEAKER_02
Because she s French, we have to say genre.
1
SPEAKER_02
I know.
1
SPEAKER_01
I can drive her into destruction if you want right now.
1
SPEAKER_02
Get that PFC out of here.
1
SPEAKER_01
Croissant.
1
SPEAKER_01
Croissant.
1
SPEAKER_00
I am going to kill you.
1
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so Richards is in this motel in 1965 in Florida, and they need a hit.
1
SPEAKER_01
They literally need a breakthrough.
1
SPEAKER_01
They re ambitious.
1
SPEAKER_01
They want to become the Rolling Stones.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he s sitting in his motel room.
1
SPEAKER_01
He s just playing on his guitar.
1
SPEAKER_01
He s got a recorder there, and he falls asleep.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then when he wakes up in the morning, he notices the recorder is on and it s gone all the way to the end of the tape.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s an hour-long tape.
1
SPEAKER_01
Doesn t really have a memory.
1
SPEAKER_01
So he rewinds the tape and turns it on, and it s got 59 minutes of him snoring.
1
SPEAKER_01
But the first minute are the opening eight bars of the song, Satisfaction.
1
SPEAKER_01
He just played them or he was singing them?
1
SPEAKER_01
He played them and sang the line, I can t get no satisfaction.
1
SPEAKER_01
He said, you can hear the pick, the guitar pick drop out of his hand and hit the floor on the recording and hear him start to snore again.
1
SPEAKER_01
He literally just woke up out of his sleep with the opening bars of satisfaction.
1
SPEAKER_01
just because his brain was like, look, we re gonna record this before we shut down, or what?
1
SPEAKER_01
He s focused, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
We talked about the need for the executive to focus the Genius Lounge.
1
SPEAKER_01
So he s focused on this song, and then he falls asleep.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now falling asleep, as much of a cheat as it sounds, is actually a classic tactic of creative people.
1
SPEAKER_01
to access their genius lounge.
1
SPEAKER_01
Scientifically, it s known as hypnagogic state, which is as you re falling asleep, and the hypnopompic state as you re waking up.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then, of course, there are dream states in the middle.
1
SPEAKER_01
Is this like lucid dreaming stuff?
1
SPEAKER_01
Can be lucid dreaming.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s a twilight area.
1
SPEAKER_01
You know when sometimes you just wake up in the morning and you re just very clear?
1
SPEAKER_01
Right.
1
SPEAKER_01
And you re thinking really good thoughts.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then by the time you make it to your computer, you ve forgotten them.
1
SPEAKER_01
Right, yeah, all the time.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s why you need to keep something by your bedside so you can grab those thoughts.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s the time space we re talking about when the genius lounge is kind of talking directly with the executive.
1
SPEAKER_01
And they re kind of having this conversation.
1
SPEAKER_01
The executive goes quiet as you start to fall asleep.
2
SPEAKER_03
quiet as you start to wake up, which gives the Genius Lounge all that power.
2
SPEAKER_03
So Keith Richards was focused, his Genius Lounge, on the need for a hit.
2
SPEAKER_03
As he fell asleep, or maybe while he was dreaming, we don t know, the Genius Lounge kind of put this together.
2
SPEAKER_04
Imagine this.
2
SPEAKER_04
You know you have a goal.
2
SPEAKER_04
In his case, his executive is thinking, we need a hit song.
2
SPEAKER_04
So imagine his executive as a person in a suit who s in the front office.
2
SPEAKER_04
And then he turns off the light in the front office, walks to the back to the genius lounge, turns on the light in the genius lounge and says, all right, guys, we need a hit.
2
SPEAKER_04
And then he leaves.
2
SPEAKER_04
And that s important.
2
SPEAKER_04
The executive leaves the room.
2
SPEAKER_04
He goes to knit a sock, to take a shower, whatever.
2
SPEAKER_04
So he s just busy enough not to fuck things up.
2
SPEAKER_04
Meanwhile, in the genius lounge, the lights are on, the espresso machine s cranking, all the geniuses are interacting.
2
SPEAKER_04
The guy in the suit, he comes in from time to time to check in and the geniuses tell him, all right, we found this, we found that, we found that, we think this is good.
2
SPEAKER_04
And, you know, he ll come back and go away and come back and go away.
2
SPEAKER_04
And what s really important is to realize that it s not a question of the executive does purely linear thinking in the words of Andy Hunt and the genius lounge does purely creative.
2
SPEAKER_04
It s a back and forth switching between the default mode network and the executive network.
2
SPEAKER_04
work.
2
SPEAKER_03
The default mode is the genius lounge.
2
SPEAKER_03
Right.
2
SPEAKER_04
Sorry.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_02
a lot of geniuses.
2
SPEAKER_04
Clearly, at one point, the geniuses have found a couple of ideas and the suit comes back and the geniuses say, listen, we ve got this thing and says, yes, that s it.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s it.
2
SPEAKER_04
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_04
And he takes it back.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right.
2
SPEAKER_02
Let me bring this up top.
2
SPEAKER_04
Let me bring this up top, meaning let me wake the body up so he can write it or sing it or whatever before he falls back asleep.
2
SPEAKER_04
He made sure that he woke up enough.
2
SPEAKER_04
That was it.
2
SPEAKER_01
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2
SPEAKER_02
Where do the pieces come from?
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, is the executive throwing a box of Legos into the room and saying, here s what you got to work with?
2
SPEAKER_02
Or are they just already there?
2
SPEAKER_02
Both.
2
SPEAKER_03
So your entire life, basically, all of your life experience is accessed because all your memory circuits are a part of the Genius Lounge.
2
SPEAKER_03
So everything you ve ever experienced.
2
SPEAKER_03
And Frank Gehry tells a great story of trying to figure out how to create eight spruce in New York.
2
SPEAKER_03
which was the first really box building he d ever done.
2
SPEAKER_03
And he wanted to create that same silky, flowy feel that he does.
2
SPEAKER_03
And he couldn t figure it out.
2
SPEAKER_03
And he suddenly had a memory at like three in the morning when he was spacing out, but stuck on this problem.
2
SPEAKER_03
He had this memory of being in a church in Italy and leaning over to try and see this famous statue.
2
SPEAKER_03
I can t remember the name of the sculptor, but he was famous for the way he could make marble look like it folded on the robes of the statues.
2
SPEAKER_03
And he had this memory of the way the robes folded and suddenly realized what he had to do on the building was build a square building and then put a face on it that folded like those robes.
2
SPEAKER_03
And so it was the memory that gave him the breakthrough to the problem he had.
2
SPEAKER_03
So we re holding all of that.
2
SPEAKER_03
We re also, this part of our brain, it just looks into the future and infers like what might happen.
2
SPEAKER_03
Scientists call it thin slicing.
2
SPEAKER_03
You have a small amount of information, but you take it and you imagine out what are the possible ways it could go.
2
SPEAKER_03
Now, part of this is also reading science fiction.
2
SPEAKER_03
or watching science fiction, so you see possible futures, so you have other frames in your head.
2
SPEAKER_03
Part of it is just imagining futures on your own so that you actually do the thought experiments.
2
SPEAKER_03
And then on top of that, there s the taking in of new information, which we talked about earlier, the constantly filling the vault so that there s raw material for the genius lounge to play with.
2
SPEAKER_02
So are breakthroughs in some ways a function of the amount of stuff that you re putting in, the amount of input that you re getting, or is there a different overlaying set of skills that you can acquire in practice?
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, so it s not just about accumulating knowledge, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
If you just accumulate tons of data.
2
SPEAKER_02
I know a lot of creative people or non-creative people, I should say, that have tons of useless knowledge that s not interesting or assembled in any meaningful way whatsoever.
2
SPEAKER_03
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_03
No different than if you re trying to build a team and you just get all the best people on the team, but they hate each other.
2
SPEAKER_03
You re like, well, that s not a high-functioning team anymore, is it?
2
SPEAKER_03
So it s a similar thing.
2
SPEAKER_03
It s about the dynamics inside.
2
SPEAKER_03
So you want that information.
2
SPEAKER_03
You want good data, but the data can t just be completely
2
SPEAKER_03
random, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
You want it to be what we call adjacent.
2
SPEAKER_03
And that s where the patterns come in.
2
SPEAKER_03
So we re looking for the head of a hospital.
2
SPEAKER_03
Ooh, hotels are adjacent.
2
SPEAKER_03
We re looking for a breakthrough in tattooing.
2
SPEAKER_03
Oh, look, I just noticed Edison s electric pen, which is a true story.
2
SPEAKER_03
The electric pen was not one of his better sellers.
2
SPEAKER_02
Well, I read the story.
2
SPEAKER_02
It was in the book.
2
SPEAKER_02
Edison invented electric pen.
2
SPEAKER_02
It wasn t very useful.
2
SPEAKER_02
Some guy wanted to put ink on skin.
2
SPEAKER_03
There s this way in which you re pulling information, some of it s random, some of it s adjacent, some of it s connected, and then focusing yourself around it and then pulling out again.
2
SPEAKER_03
So there s this constant going into the genius lounge and then coming back out of it and then going in and coming back out.
2
SPEAKER_04
And just so to be clear, it s adjacent can be very useful.
2
SPEAKER_04
Sometimes you also get a breakthrough from something that is completely opposite.
2
SPEAKER_04
You ll have a breakthrough about molecular biology because you ve just participated in a roller derby.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right, right.
2
SPEAKER_02
I ve got a good one for you.
2
SPEAKER_03
Here we go.
2
SPEAKER_03
OK.
2
SPEAKER_03
Early 1900s.
2
SPEAKER_03
There s this guy up in the North Pole, and he s on a scientific expedition, and he notices how the icebergs look like jigsaw puzzles, like as the ice breaks up.
2
SPEAKER_03
And it just, it s an image that stays in his head.
2
SPEAKER_03
Goes home, little while later, he s looking at a globe.
2
SPEAKER_03
He notices how the iceberg images of jigsaw puzzle remind him of the continents.
2
SPEAKER_03
He starts doing research.
2
SPEAKER_03
This is who creates plate tectonics, who figures out that the continents are moving.
2
SPEAKER_02
Oh, wow.
2
SPEAKER_02
From something that s maybe only similar when you really look at them side by side,
2
SPEAKER_02
Still not as far afield as my roller derby exam.
2
SPEAKER_02
Oh, is that a real one?
2
SPEAKER_02
I thought you just pulled it off.
2
SPEAKER_02
No.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s not real at all.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s not real.
2
SPEAKER_02
I was like, let s get into the roller derby.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s just fascinating.
2
SPEAKER_02
The book was really interesting in that it could have just been brain science.
2
SPEAKER_02
It could have just been a bunch of like, by the way, this is how this works.
2
SPEAKER_02
See you guys later.
2
SPEAKER_02
But it s a workbook in many ways that is apparently designed to be practiced and applied.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s a toolbox.
2
SPEAKER_02
It really is a toolbox.
2
SPEAKER_02
All Olivia s doing.
2
SPEAKER_02
There s coachy stuff in there, which I dig.
2
SPEAKER_02
Breakthroughs seem to be coming from different angles.
2
SPEAKER_02
Are there different types of breakthroughs?
2
SPEAKER_02
Let s go over those maybe.
2
SPEAKER_03
Yes, there are different types of breakthroughs.
2
SPEAKER_03
We identified four.
2
SPEAKER_03
We re not saying there are only four, but we identified four that we tended to see in history with people that we know in Silicon Valley.
2
SPEAKER_03
The first one is the Eureka breakthrough.
2
SPEAKER_03
This is sort of the most well-known, named for Archimedes.
2
SPEAKER_03
What it is, is you just, you suddenly know the answer.
2
SPEAKER_03
It s a concrete answer.
2
SPEAKER_03
It can be applied immediately.
2
SPEAKER_03
There s no interpreting.
2
SPEAKER_03
There s no question.
2
SPEAKER_03
It s just there in front of you.
2
SPEAKER_02
This is the kind of breakthrough I think people are thinking of when they go, have I ever had one of these?
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I remember I had one of these at some point.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s that aha moment, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
And going back to Eckhart Tolle, he s like, I just woke up and there it was.
2
SPEAKER_02
And there it was, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
No process.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right.
2
SPEAKER_02
It just happened.
2
SPEAKER_02
And this I thought was a misleading if we only look at this one type of breakthrough, because with them we go, well, I ve only had like one of those in my life or I ve only had two of those in the past year in my field.
2
SPEAKER_02
So this is,
2
SPEAKER_02
impossible or it s too much to work for this or... They can also be about small things, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
Archimedes, all he had figured out was how to figure out if a crown was pure gold or not.
2
SPEAKER_03
Displacement, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
Right, displacement.
2
SPEAKER_03
So it wasn t like Archimedes had figured out the nature of gravity.
2
SPEAKER_03
So Eureka Breakthroughs can be about very small things as well and wonderful because they can move you on, but they don t have to necessarily change your whole life.
3
SPEAKER_00
They tend to be very concrete.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Eureka is kind of a finality.
3
SPEAKER_00
You ve arrived at a solution.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s an immediately applicable solution or idea or process.
3
SPEAKER_00
Whereas the next one.
3
SPEAKER_02
Metaphorical breakthroughs.
3
SPEAKER_02
These are very often you hear stories of people having dreams, but the dreams are not specific to what they re working on.
3
SPEAKER_02
So Elias Howe of Singer Sewing Machines had a dream.
3
SPEAKER_02
And in it, he was being chased by cannibals.
3
SPEAKER_02
Cannibals show up in dreams a lot about 100 years ago, 200 years ago for some reason.
3
SPEAKER_02
I don t know why.
3
SPEAKER_02
Maybe big in the fiction of the time or something?
3
SPEAKER_02
Something like that, but they re definitely up in the lexicon.
3
SPEAKER_02
He has this dream and the cannibals are holding spears at him, but he s looking at the spears and they have holes in the tip of the spears.
3
SPEAKER_02
And he just notices that in the dream.
3
SPEAKER_02
He s like, that s a little weird.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s all that happens.
3
SPEAKER_02
He has to interpret it.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s why we call it metaphorical breakthrough.
3
SPEAKER_02
He has to interpret the meaning of the dream.
3
SPEAKER_02
He has to interpret the meaning of the image.
3
SPEAKER_02
He has the dream a couple of times and he s trying to figure it out.
3
SPEAKER_02
And suddenly he realizes that the clue to the breakthrough of his sewing machine for the lock stitch is to put a hole in the pointy part of the needle instead of the back of the needle where it s always been.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s what the dream was showing him.
3
SPEAKER_02
But he had to interpret it.
3
SPEAKER_02
So we had to move through.
3
SPEAKER_02
So when you said you re very good at making random metaphors, one of the reasons metaphors are wonderful for teaching and understanding is because they re interpreted by the right anterior superior temporal gyrus.
3
SPEAKER_01
Boom.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was going to say boom, but I was like, I don t want you to feel self-conscious.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I m wondering how many times that s gotten flubbed.
3
SPEAKER_02
So it s interesting, this part of your brain, it will light up shortly before you realize you ve interpreted a metaphor or had an insight.
3
SPEAKER_02
So neuroscientists can actually see you figure something out before you consciously know.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s cool.
3
SPEAKER_02
You figured it out.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it s this part of your brain that interprets metaphors.
3
SPEAKER_02
So the metaphor, insight, breakthrough part, they re all connected deeply.
3
SPEAKER_01
So sometimes when we have these metaphorical breakthroughs, it s a genius lounge that s using dreams to kind of project something to communicate something to us.
3
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_01
Not always, of course.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s a favorite communication method of the default mode network.
3
SPEAKER_02
And why it can t just tell us, we don t know.
3
SPEAKER_02
Why it can t just be overt, we don t know.
3
SPEAKER_01
Since we don t know how long dreams last, maybe the default mode network needs like six hours to tell you something that could be said in one sentence, but since it doesn t apply to necessarily language.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think that probably has a lot to do with it, is it s trying to translate into your conscious awareness, and it s like, uh, not quite sure how to do it.
3
SPEAKER_02
Sure.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, if it s not a eureka breakthrough, then maybe it just happens at a slower pace.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
The third type of breakthrough we discovered is called intuitive.
3
SPEAKER_02
And this one is much more vague.
3
SPEAKER_02
Olivia gets these a lot where you just sort of know something.
3
SPEAKER_02
They re not vague.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, not to you.
3
SPEAKER_02
You just know something, but you re not quite sure how you know it.
3
SPEAKER_02
You re not quite sure why you know it.
3
SPEAKER_02
Blink.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yes, but you just kind of know.
3
SPEAKER_02
And these are the hardest to move forward with because we live in a very scientific age.
3
SPEAKER_02
We live in an age of reason, of data, of proof.
3
SPEAKER_02
And to turn around and say,
3
SPEAKER_02
This is going to work.
3
SPEAKER_02
I know this.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think this Greek statue is fake, but I can t figure out why.
3
SPEAKER_02
Right.
3
SPEAKER_02
In the book.
3
SPEAKER_02
And this is very being in the heart of Silicon Valley under the grand mythical shadow of Steve Jobs, as everyone in the valley is.
3
SPEAKER_02
This is the break everybody wants.
3
SPEAKER_02
Right.
3
SPEAKER_02
The kind of I can t explain it, but I know like somehow in Silicon Valley that actually holds more weight than data.
3
SPEAKER_02
sometimes, because people assume the breakthrough is going to come from that intuitive place.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so one of the examples we use is of Chuck Yeager, who just sort of like, he s like, I think it s going to get easier to break the sound barrier the closer I get to it, even though everyone had crashed before him, because it got so difficult to control the plane.
3
SPEAKER_01
Ah, yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then, of course, as he approached it, everything stabilized.
3
SPEAKER_01
And this is all based on stuff that was floating around.
3
SPEAKER_01
He just knew.
3
SPEAKER_01
And part of it comes from expertise, too.
3
SPEAKER_00
Different people have different kinds of breakthroughs, or rather there s different styles that are more natural to some people than to others.
3
SPEAKER_00
Judah, he s the metaphor guy, so he ll have metaphorical breakthroughs.
3
SPEAKER_00
I have yet to have had ever a youthful dream.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you just maybe not remember them or you re just sure?
3
SPEAKER_00
No, no, I remember them.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re just, they re super, they re so complicated.
3
SPEAKER_00
I can t be bothered.
3
SPEAKER_00
But my wheelhouse is the, I get two kinds and here s the difference.
3
SPEAKER_00
I get eureka breakthroughs about concrete solutions, usually in the physical world.
3
SPEAKER_00
And a Eureka breakthrough, there s a concrete problem, concrete solution, and you can explain each step.
3
SPEAKER_00
Intuitive breakthroughs is when you have spent so much time in this field, in this discipline, in this whatever, that you know when you move from conscious competence to unconscious competence?
3
SPEAKER_00
You ve heard of that one?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s when you arrive at that level that you don t even know how you know.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
But that s because your default mode, your genius lounge, who is holding so much, has bubbled up the solution to you.
3
SPEAKER_02
If you remember, if you ever listened to Car Talk and Click and Clack from Boston, they were masters of the intuitive breakthrough because they d worked on cars so much.
3
SPEAKER_02
They lived and breathed it and talked about it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And some would call it like,
3
SPEAKER_02
I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_02
If my car s on a hill, it makes this funny noise.
3
SPEAKER_02
It goes, whee!
3
SPEAKER_02
And the clicker guy could be like, well, is there any white powder around anywhere?
3
SPEAKER_02
And they re like, actually, there is.
3
SPEAKER_02
It comes out of my vents.
3
SPEAKER_02
And then they nail it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it s like they ve just been so enmeshed in the world that they re just creating connections.
3
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On the radio, diagnosing a car problem.
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Unbelievable.
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Yeah, those guys were always kind of like, is this real?
3
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Yeah.
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It s impressive.
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I was listening to them when I wasn t reading Tolkien.
3
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Yeah.
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Slash playing quarterback for high school team.
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So we ve got different kinds of breakthroughs.
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Okay.
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And you said we have different native breakthrough styles.
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Well, what do we need to spot ours and cultivate it?
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Or do we not need to worry about that?
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The most important thing is to realize that no one style of breakthrough is better than any other.
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So the fourth type is paradigm breakthrough, where it can come on like any of them.
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It can come in the form of a eureka, of a metaphor, or be just an intuitive knowing.
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But it s huge, right?
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So relativity, this is a paradigm breakthrough.
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Quantum mechanics, it s a paradigm breakthrough.
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People really want to have these and very often they associate paradigm breakthroughs as a synonym for breakthrough.
3
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Just be very careful.
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Paradigm breakthroughs are literally one or two in a generation.
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They re as much a part of luck as they are anything else.
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Timing, happenstance, all kinds of things.
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So they exist.
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It s wonderful that they exist.
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It s chasing a dragon.
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You will go down a rabbit hole.
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So if you re lucky enough to have it happen to you, we re going to put your face on a coin or a stamp and that s awesome, but don t chase it.
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Right.
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Otherwise it s a waste of your time.
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You could be doing 10 smaller things with your legacy than chasing the one that millions of people cannot catch.
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Exactly.
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So don t undervalue whatever your native breakthrough style, which is a fantastic term, which will steal.
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Sure.
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The chances are, having just heard us lay them out, people are probably being, oh, you know what, I tend to X, Y, or Z, just having a frame at all.
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But then also just pay attention, just notice the next time you kind of have a breakthrough, like how did it come to you?
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I was thinking about this because I was like, what s mine?
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And because I don t have a whole lot of that s it, eureka moments.
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And I don t really remember decoding any dream ever and thinking that was clearly the answer to this.
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I m hoping that it s intuitive.
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Otherwise, I don t have one.
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I think I m out of luck.
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I remember from our very first interview, you do tend to have an intuitive sense of what s going to work for your audience and what won t.
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You can break a lot of things down, but you seem to have an intuitive sense for what your people needed.
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So I d say intuitive.
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And also, I have the impression that it happens often that your intuitive breakthroughs are about your work.
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So I get eureka breakthroughs about the physical world.
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I have never.
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You saw me in the physical world.
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It doesn t work that well.
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But I ll have intuitive breakthroughs about my work because I ve spent so much time that y all just know.
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I think that s your style.
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You ve been doing this for how long?
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Ten years.
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Yeah, there you go.
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Ten years.
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Definitely the first six or seven were not that good.
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I mean, I feel compared to what we re doing now, I should say.
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But I think, yeah, it s got to be the intuitive thing, because there are certain topics where I go, that s going to be so good.
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There you go.
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It s like cooking, though we never talk about.
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And I m like, but this guy s going to be good at explaining it in a way that my audience is going to like.
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Listen, trust me, if ever you ve said that, intuitive breakthrough.
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My producer has the same thing.
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He s the guy who goes, this is gonna be a good one, and I go, I don t get it.
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But then we do the show, and it s great, and I m like, I don t know how you knew that, and he s like, I just, you know, because.
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Right, I just knew.
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Because we get a lot of email, or because this guy s cool, and it fits with what we do in some way that s nebulous and vague.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it works really well.
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And just to be clear for anyone out there who s sort of feeling like they do metaphorical breakthroughs, it doesn t only happen in dreams.
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Dreams are the easiest example we have, so we use them, and sleep is a very powerful mode of having breakthroughs.
3
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But the example I gave of how plate tectonics was discovered, that s a metaphorical design, right?
3
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You saw icebergs in the shape of jigsaw puzzles, and it sort of metaphorically then reminded you of what you saw with the continents.
3
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Sure.
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So he was just kind of daydreaming on this boat and then saw a globe later or a map or something and went, wow, you know what?
3
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These metaphorical breakthroughs can happen in that way where one thing is reminding you of another.
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The connection is the breakthrough.
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I m sure that that happens to me a lot.
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I don t even think about it.
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I just can t even think of an example now because it s never registered as this is so useful.
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In fact, it s probably not usually about something useful in the first place.
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It s probably like this team maker could be improved with this little thing, but I m never going to do it.
3
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I have that happen all the time with things that I use.
3
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I sent an email to a blender company and
4
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said, you need little vents on the bottom because always when I pull it off, there s suction and it splashes.
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And they did it.
4
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Blendtec.
4
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Wow.
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Well done.
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Yeah, it was kind of cool.
4
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That never happens.
4
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You should complain about something.
4
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Well, clearly that does.
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They go, great.
4
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OK, thanks, buddy.
4
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Don t forget to buy another blender next year.
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Delete.
4
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You ever see those websites that are like 50 life hacks?
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Do this with an egg carton.
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Do this with your hangers.
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Those are all in many ways metaphorical breakthroughs, right?
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This is used for one purpose.
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And then you re like, oh, it could actually be used over here.
4
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That s interesting, good point.
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All those things you see that s not sold in stores, and you re like, but it s so simple.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s the Swiffer or something like that, right?
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Why not wet it to pick up the lint?
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I mean, you re on your hands and knees with a rag doing the exact same thing.
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Put a stick on the end of it.
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Genius!
4
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Ten million dollars later, or more, I m sure.
4
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You talk about breakthrough blockers as well.
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These were kind of important because I feel like tons of entrepreneurs and people solving complex problems run into these problems all the time.
4
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And they end up having these same breakthrough blockers cause them problems.
4
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And then they get stressed out about that.
4
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And then they enhance these blockers get even more powerful in the first place.
4
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Can we talk about these, what they are and how to break them?
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The three biggest.
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are fear, failure, and uncertainty.
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And to be clear, the fear of failure is different from the experience of failure itself.
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And you need different tools for each.
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Also, one of the things we hadn t mentioned is that you could, you can, separate breakthroughs into intentional breakthroughs.
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For example, a business innovation, I want to solve X.
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and unintentional breakthroughs, oh shit, I need a divorce, and fear comes in at different stages.
4
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It ll still happen, but for an intentional breakthrough, it happens on the way to, and it could stop you from taking the risks you need to take.
4
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For an unintentional breakthrough, it happens after, it s for the implementation, and it stops you from taking the implementation action that you should be taking.
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And uncertainty just
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fucks things up in a general way.
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It s our ability or inability to handle fear, failure, and uncertainty.
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So those are the three big categories of things that stop us on the road to breakthrough.
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People right now are like, okay, got it.
4
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This is how it works.
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These are things that mess it up.
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I want to do more of it.
4
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And taking naps, great.
4
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We heard about Salvador Dali, I think it was, who puts like a pencil or a spoon or something in his mouth or his hand.
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He puts a metal key in his hand and puts a metal plate on the floor and he would start to fall asleep.
4
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And as he actually fell asleep, entered the hypnagogic state, he would drop the key, it would hit the pan, it would wake him up, and he would start drawing whatever was in his mind right then and there.
4
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Clock melting on a table.
4
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Yes, exactly.
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If any of your listeners do get the book, if you have the fear of, I m not a creative person, jump right to page 100 or something like that, because that s where this is.
4
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It is critical that you dismantle the imposter syndrome of, I m just not a creative person.
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You know how the science of small wins, which has now become really popular, how our brain isn t great at understanding scale.
4
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And so a lot of small wins can feel the same way.
4
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It can feel more powerful than one big win, the same way that sometimes it s easier to handle a day when you ve had one big shitty thing happen than a day when you had tens of, right?
4
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Right.
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What you need to do is to change your self-image and you can start that with really small things.
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So one quick example is you look at the objects around you and you start creating backstories for them.
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You give them a name, you give them a location they came from, and that s a good way to start changing your own subconscious view of yourself as a creative or not creative person.
4
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So you basically force yourself to be somehow creative in this really almost mundane way in a very deliberate way.
4
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And then all these small acts of creativity can start changing your mindset about who you are and what you can do.
4
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If you do that enough, you re saying it sort of shakes the rust off the creative part of your brain where it s OK to be this ridiculous.
4
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The constraints go out the window.
4
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Correct.
4
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And bigger things start to happen.
4
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It s like those first pushups we were discussing earlier.
4
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You should also use, and I know you talk about this fairly often in the Art of Charm programs, the impact that authority has on the human brain.
4
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And so, for example, when you learn to handle the fear of failure, de-stigmatizing failure is self-referent, but having authority figures telling you whether it s real or not.
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Remember, your brain isn t great at differentiating between imagination and reality.
4
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Having authority figures telling you that it s okay to fuck up, that can really help in changing the way you approach failure.
4
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There is no innovation without failure.
4
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If you re not willing to fail, by definition, you re only going to do things that have already been tried and proven, right?
4
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So you ll never do anything new.
4
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You cannot demand innovation without the risk of failure.
4
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Plus, you know, you re going to fail in your life at various things.
4
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You might as well get good at handling it.
4
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Yeah.
4
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All the time.
4
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Unless you re not doing anything at all.
4
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That makes sense.
4
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There s so many practical things that I really want to get into.
4
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I mean, you talk about touching things for texture, looking for colors, different hand movements.
4
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Can we explain some of these practicals?
4
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Because I d love to help people get more creative over like the next 20 minutes.
4
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Some of the tools are literally directed to connect straight into your Genius Lounge.
4
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So, touching for different textures, your inferior parietal lobes, boom, are going to... Less impressive than the first one.
4
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I know.
4
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That s a smaller boom.
4
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Smaller.
4
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They interpret sensory information, and they re also a part of your Genius Lounge.
4
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So, if you start touching, like, the brick wall on the outside of your building, you just feel all of that.
4
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That is a direct line into your Genius Lounge, and it s pumping information into your Genius Lounge.
4
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and sort of waking it up and bringing it to life.
4
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Same thing if you re just like looking at all these colors, you re just paying attention to them, so you re forcing yourself to kind of build neural patterns that connect to these different colors, like learning all the new different colors, seeing, really differentiating the shades of blue as the sun goes down, and trying to create those gradations.
4
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Each gradation forces a new neural loop in your brain, which makes you that much more powerful at creating another breakthrough.
4
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The book is just full of this stuff.
4
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I mean, we talked about creative walking.
4
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Have you seen this graphic where it s like Einstein, Edison, and all these genius people that have created things, and it shows the time they ve spent during the day.
4
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And every person has a multiple hour long walk.
4
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And you re just like, why do these guys walk everywhere?
4
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What s the deal?
4
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So walking is a wonderful exercise.
4
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So physical exercise is a bit of a silver bullet when it comes to a lot of things.
4
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And it s also wonderful when it comes to breakthrough thinking.
4
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It oxygenates your brain through movement, but it s not strenuous enough to actually take oxygen away from your brain and put it into your muscles.
4
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So it s kind of the perfect middle ground.
4
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You don t have to pay a lot of attention, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Spacing out while running, maybe not the best idea.
4
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High intensity workouts kind of overwhelm you.
4
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But walking is gentle enough that you can let your mind wander, which, of course, is the door opening into the genius lounge.
4
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Plus, there s lots of things to see, so there s lots of new information coming in, especially if you take walks around places you ve never been, right, taking different routes.
4
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So you start noticing, oh, look at what s on the top of that building.
4
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Oh, look at how that hill does that.
4
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Oh, look at those new birds or that park or that ocean or that tree, wherever you go.
4
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And that newness comes in.
4
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with an oxygenated brain, with a thing to do, which is I m walking, so your executive goes quiet.
4
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So it s kind of like a perfect combination of all these things.
4
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And for people who are much more goal-oriented and are like, wandering around aimlessly until something hits me is not fun for me, like Olivia, we suggest Charles Darwin s approach.
4
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He had something he called the sand walk in the back of his house.
4
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It was about a quarter or third of a mile loop, but what he would do is he would stack rocks at the start point.
4
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And then he d do one loop and he d knock a rock off.
4
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And then he d do a second loop, and he d knock another.
4
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And he would have problems, and he would rate them by the number of rocks.
4
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So he d be like, this is a four rock problem.
4
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And he d stack four rocks and then walk the loop.
4
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So if you re much more goal-oriented, you can actually time-bound the walk.
4
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Oh, that s interesting.
4
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I never heard that before.
4
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And of course, the modern day rock walk could be, like you d said, watching a movie you already know.
4
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Bouncing a ball, I think, was one of the ones in the book.
4
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Yeah.
4
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Laundry.
4
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Anything that allows you to genuinely space out.
4
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I ll put a caveat on the movie.
4
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Ideally, it would be something without words because evening listening to a song that you really know, it ll still activate the language.
4
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So PFC.
4
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Is it in there?
4
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Boom.
4
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Nice.
4
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I got the abbreviation down, that s important.
4
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Hand movements was an interesting one that I tried while listening to the book, and I didn t know exactly what you meant, but I thought it was just, you know, even stuff like this, I was doing some fake American Sign Language plus gang signs slash nothingness kind of with my hands.
4
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And that s what it kind of came across as.
4
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Changing the soundtrack was interesting with different music, or something I d never listened to.
4
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I looked up some sort of African drum thing, or this guy was playing some roots, I think, literally.
4
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Roots, all the roots.
4
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Sitting in someone else s office was an interesting one that everybody can pretty much access.
4
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You just have to convince them you re not crazy or up to no good.
4
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And you have to ask them first, you know, if you can sit in their office and even dressing in something totally different.
4
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That is a fascinating one.
4
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That one I didn t see coming because I thought, well, you can go as far as you want with it, I suppose.
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But genuinely,
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You probably shouldn t if you re in an office environment.
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But yeah, you could put on something brand new.
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Have you tried this?
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How different are we talking about here?
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As comfortable as you are.
5
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Because empathy is a big part of this.
5
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And so the empathetic part of the brain is also connected into the genius lounge.
5
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And the genius lounge, part of what it does is it assesses how other people are feeling.
5
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And it assesses how you re feeling.
5
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And so by wearing something that s very different, you can determine exactly how different in one moment.
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Olivia s like ready to pounce on me.
5
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But by wearing something different, people react differently to you.
5
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It feels differently on your body.
5
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You re taken in it either seriously or not seriously, depending.
5
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And it ups that empathy quotient, plus creates a brand new experience that you have to create new neural patterns for.
5
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There s been the studies where people wearing white lab coats were both taken more seriously, they were seen as more credible, and they had higher levels of self-confidence during the experiment, but also they actually performed better on tests.
5
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Just by standard white and, you know, it could be... They also did tests where they told some people that it was a doctor s coat, some people that it was a researcher s coat, and some people that it was a janitor s coat.
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Same white coat, totally changed.
5
SPEAKER_02
But in the same vein, you could wear footsie pajamas and roll around on the floor at home.
5
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I mean, unless you have a really progressive office and play with Legos.
5
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You could dress in something that is completely opposite.
5
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If you re lacking ideas, here s how.
5
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You take what you normally do.
5
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I normally wear colors, X, Y, and Z. You re going to do the exact opposite.
5
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Styles, I normally do A, B, C. You re going to do the opposite.
5
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And that s a good way of starting.
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And here s another way to really take note of it.
5
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For men, since we live in a very dressed down culture, chances are you don t wear a suit every day.
5
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Wear a suit.
5
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Wear a suit and a tie and just watch how you get responded to.
5
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Watch how much more seriously you get taken.
5
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Watch how people s attention is different towards you.
5
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And women, wear high heels.
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Or don t, depending on whatever you do more of.
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You re just gonna notice immediately how different people react to you.
5
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I guarantee you women have already run that test.
5
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It s the guys that are thinking, I haven t worn a suit in a while.
5
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Women are like, I know damn well what happens when I wear flats.
5
SPEAKER_01
Things cost more, I don t get any help at the grocery store.
5
SPEAKER_01
Neuroplasticity, speaking of Google X people rolling around on the floor with footsie pajamas, which is what we know they re doing over there, they hire the most plastic people they can find.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think I ve read that possibly in your work, or heard it somewhere else.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s talk about and wrap with neuroplasticity, because I know we ve talked about it on the show, it s sort of almost a buzzword-y thing, and yet no one knows how to harness it necessarily, or how to become more neuroplastic, aside from maybe learning Mandarin.
5
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Yeah, great.
5
SPEAKER_02
We have, what, three chapters on that?
5
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Something like that.
5
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We ve got lots of tools in there just on neuroplasticity.
5
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To give an example of just how integral neuroplasticity is to our brain, every time you build a new thought, your brain physically builds a new structure.
5
SPEAKER_02
And all over your brain, new structures are created.
5
SPEAKER_02
So it s a very physical experience.
5
SPEAKER_00
A Chinese woman, 24 years old, stumbles into an ER room, very dizzy, having a hard time keeping her balance, and they do a CAT scan.
5
SPEAKER_00
And they discover that the back part of her brain is not there.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s full of liquid in her skull.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s gross.
5
SPEAKER_00
And this is the part of your brain that
5
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helps you balance, this is the part of your brain that helps you write, this is the part of your brain that helps you speak, and she s learned how to do all those things.
5
SPEAKER_00
Even though this part of her brain isn t there, she was born without it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Born without it, okay, because if you lose it, I feel like you just fell off the back of your head.
5
SPEAKER_00
No, she was born without it, and literally other parts of her brain wired themselves to take on these tasks.
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The brain literally was plastic enough to reform itself so that even though it was missing a huge part of itself, it could keep functioning, keep her functioning.
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So it s not just about the real estate.
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The brain s made up of parts that can maybe be recruited for different things.
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Well, fundamentally changed.
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So people who lose their hearing, were born deaf, often have much better visual ability.
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And vice versa, people who are blind very often have incredible hearing.
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And it s because your visual cortex, if it s getting no information, gets recruited to do other work.
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And so suddenly you have more neurons being used to interpret sound.
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Uh, because sometimes those disabilities aren t necessarily, they re not brain-based.
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It s just maybe your eyes or your ears or something aren t working.
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So there s just this extra processor in there that s going, Hey, I m bored.
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Throw me some work.
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That s a good one.
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Actually, Eric Weinmayer, who climbed Mount Everest blind, and he s one of the examples of blind people learning to see through their tongue.
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What?
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I ve never heard of this.
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I know, that s crazy.
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Watch that one.
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So he s a dramatic example, but it s a fairly well-established by now.
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He s climbed the seven summits, seeing through his tongue every time.
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What they did is that they attach a tiny camera to their tongue.
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The taste buds, the cells on their tongue, start receiving signals from the camera.
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Now, clearly, these aren t taste signals.
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Your brain reconfigures itself to learn how to interpret these electrical signals coming from your tongue as sight rather than as taste.
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And the tongue, just because it s so sensitive in so many different ways, is that why they connected it to the tongue?
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Yes.
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The same way that your eyes technically don t see, your brain sees.
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Your eyes are just the mechanism to receive the information, to receive the input.
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Your tongue also is designed to receive information.
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We use food.
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but you could actually repurpose it to receive other information.
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And so that s what they did.
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They repurposed it to receive visual information that your brain can actually learn to read.
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I m imagining how this works with some sort of static prickles or something like that.
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And he just happens to be really able to differentiate between one that s in one part or a stronger one in another part.
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And he s like, this means there s something there and this means there s not something like that.
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It s not just that it gets that rational.
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He sees.
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Oh, he does.
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Yes.
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Oh, I didn t realize that.
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I thought he was just like imagining.
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No, no, no, no, no, no.
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He sees.
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Oh, that s incredible.
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Yes.
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And so because as Judah was saying, you don t actually see with your eyes.
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Your brain has zero direct contact with reality.
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All it does is build a picture from what your senses are sending it.
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Technically speaking, if it were only your brain, we could be doing brain surgery on it, you wouldn t feel a thing, right?
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So his brain genuinely rewired itself, so he has a black and white picture, and you ll see blind people navigating the streets of New York without a cane.
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Just with their tongue hanging out and a camera on the end of it.
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Must be hard to date with that.
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How do we become more neuroplastic?
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I mean, using our non-dominant hand, that s a good one, and really hard.
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What else?
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To brush your teeth, by the way.
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That s a really good example.
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Brushing your teeth was a non-dominant.
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I try to do that all the time.
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With the electric toothbrush, though, it s kind of cheating, right?
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That is a little cheating.
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So using a regular toothbrush or even just using a regular toothbrush with your dominant hand, if you haven t used one for a decade like me, would be hard as well.
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I think just to give you the overarching theme, anytime you do something new, it doesn t matter if you re good at it or not or whatever.
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Anytime you re doing anything new, your brain has to build new connections.
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You re increasing your plasticity.
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So Judah can give you some examples and et cetera, et cetera.
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But that s the field.
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The reason it s so powerful, to go back to the Google X example, is they told a great story where they were working on Project Loon, which is these huge balloons that are flying through the stratosphere to give internet access to the third world.
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And they re having trouble with the actual material of the balloon.
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And one of the engineers there one day was just looking at a bag of Doritos.
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And there was something about the bag of Doritos and the kind of half-metallic, thin, foily material.
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He was like, that s what s going to fix the balloon.
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And so that s the plasticity that s able to look at the bag of Doritos and make a neural connection to a giant balloon that s going to float through the stratosphere and bring internet connection to the third world.
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So a lot of people might be thinking, oh, I m gonna join a brain gym, and they re gonna increase my plasticity.
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Like those games where it s like, increase your memory power.
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Yes, and so far, at least, all the research shows that the brain gyms make you excellent at playing their games.
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I believe that, because I ve tried those, and I ve thought, I never see overlap between what I m doing.
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And then, of course, when you ask the creators, they go, oh, no, no, no, it s subtle, it s subtle, it s subtle.
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And then I thought, well, study this for an hour a day, study Chinese for an hour a day.
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It just lost the battle.
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But not because I didn t necessarily believe in the science.
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I just thought learning Mandarin is much more of a powerful neuroplastic activity.
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So learning a language, music, math, and they re all connected, of course, but those three are huge for plasticity.
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I want to be really clear.
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It s not about being good.
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You re not trying to be good at these things per se, but the actual practice of doing them increases your plasticity.
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That s a relief for everybody.
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Yes, yes, exactly.
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You don t have to be good.
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It s just the challenge of engaging it.
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If you want to have fun, we like the thought experiments.
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And actually, I did this at IDEO the other day.
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It was super cool to do it with designers.
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So imagine a world where gravity stops working at 10 p.m.
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So exacting.
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So if you jump at 10 p.m., you just keep going.
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Uh huh.
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Everything just kind of starts to float up at 10 p.m.
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And then it goes back to normal around 8 a.m.
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What does the world look like?
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So going through this, it s like, well, you know, you have to put everything away in cupboards that are padded.
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Otherwise, everything might break.
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Your cat could knock something against the ceiling and it could come down in the morning and there d be glass in the living room floor.
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So everything is strapped down or glued down.
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I mean, so this is a thought experiment.
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Exactly.
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For example, and do people have nets over their beds when they sleep?
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Do you have movies?
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like Sleepless in Seattle, where true love is found because there was a net failure and they collided.
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They collided sleeping, yeah, exactly.
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For example.
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You park your car and you ve got to clamp it down because otherwise it might float away if it gets windy at night.
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Yeah, that s super interesting.
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And it was funny because the designers, they were designing for it.
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So they were like, you d have a round home.
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So when it reversed, it would go up and it d be a mirror of your home.
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So you wouldn t really have to deal with it.
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Oh, so you did the reversal one, right.
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So it s like your bed s on the ceiling.
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Strapped in there, and then your alarm clock hopefully goes off before you fall face first, right?
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So it was very interesting to hear how they started designing for it whereas very similar to you.
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I got very practical about it It s a yeah, that s how yeah, how do you actually approach it?
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But just so cool having to actually think about a world where a fundamental law is different forces you to actually build new connections
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And so do you do this every week or something like that, or every month, and just to get people to shake off some rust?
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What s the practice?
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I mean, I do it all the time, but that s... So you ll be walking around and it s like, what if this magical thing was happening?
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Okay.
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If you just imagine a world where you were allowed to kick somebody, like that was actually socially acceptable.
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And then what are the rules?
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So are there limits to how hard you can kick somebody?
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Are there shoes specifically to allow you to do it?
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Are there pants with like shin guards built in?
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What s going over the line?
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What s not?
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What are the behaviors that create it?
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How do those behaviors change over generations?
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Or something that was like a totally kickable offense?
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Back in my day, you could get kicked just for being late for dinner.
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So you re just kinda doing this just sort of, it just plays, and so at least once a week.
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At least once a week, and play it with people.
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You can do it by yourself if you want, but it s really fun to do it with people, and it just forces that new way of doing it.
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Cards Against Humanity, if you just wanna buy a game, is a great one for this.
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Yeah, and funny.
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I can t stop doing it now that you mention it.
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Remember when you used to get kicked in school when you didn t turn in your homework?
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It s like, oh, I can t do that anymore.
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It gets really fun.
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That s the thing.
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They re fun.
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They stick with you and it s a game.
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And then what you notice is you re like, I m getting more plastic.
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Right.
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Because I just keep doing this.
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I love it.
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I know we re out of time.
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I would love it.
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Is there anything else that I have not asked you that you re like, oh, my gosh, we didn t talk about this.
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We have to.
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The only thing I want to do is reiterate something Olivia said earlier.
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Everybody s capable of this.
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Everybody can have a breakthrough.
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Everybody has the same mechanism inside their heads.
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You are walking around with the same breakthrough engine Einstein had.
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To make that even clearer, you cannot be born without this engine.
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If this engine is damaged, you die.
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So if you re walking and talking, you have the capacity.
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I d say the only last thing is you are going to need new skills because you re going to need to learn how to handle fear, failure, uncertainty and other things.
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But it s just like working a muscle that has atrophied since you were a kid.
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When we re kids, everything s new.
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We re super plastic and we have breakthroughs all the time.
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So all you re doing is building back up a muscle we guarantee you have.
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Perfect.
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Judah, Olivia, thank you so much.
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All right, great big thank you to Judah and Olivia.
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The book is called The Net and the Butterfly.
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That ll be linked up in the show notes for this episode as well.
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There are a lot of, just a ton of practicals.
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I think we covered maybe a quarter of some of the book here.
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There was just too much to cover for one show.
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The book itself is worth having, if not to get the concepts down, but as a reference for a lot of the drills and exercises that you can implement into your life, especially if you find yourself solving complex engineering problems,
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Well, actually, any kind of problem for that matter, but here in Silicon Valley, they seem to be teaching a lot of, not only special forces and those types of people, but the people who solve problems, making the things that we create and use every day, including the thing that you re listening to this show on right now.
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If you enjoyed this, don t forget to thank them on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well.
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And remember, you can tap our album art in most podcast players.
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You can see the show notes for this episode.
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They ll be right on your phone.
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I m also on Twitter, at The Art of Charm, and I post a lot of things there and engage with y all there.
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I m a little bit of a Twitter addict.
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I use it all the time.
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It s a great way to get ahold of us here on the show.
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Our boot camps are live programs that we talk about oh so much.
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Those details are at bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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I love the boot camps.
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They are amazing.
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The amount of change that we see over the next few months and years after boot camp is amazing.
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And remember, we re sold out a few months in advance, so if you re thinking about it even a little bit, you should get in touch with us ASAP.
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Get some info from us.
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You can plan ahead or you can just check out what we re all about.
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I also want to encourage you to join our AOC challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or you can text the word charmed, C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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That challenge is about improving your networking and connection skills, inspiring those around you to develop a relationship with you, and we ll also send you our fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show.
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It includes a lot of practical stuff as well on reading body language, having charismatic nonverbal communication, negotiation techniques, networking, influence strategies, the science of attraction, persuasion tactics, and everything else that we teach here at The Art of Charm.
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I also do regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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It ll make you a better networker, a better connector, and of course, a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text the word charmed in the US to 33444.
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For full show notes for this and all previous episodes, head on over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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This episode of AOC was produced by Jason DeFilippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor, and the show notes on the website are by Robert Fogarty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is really a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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Word of mouth is everything, so stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.