374 The Viking Code: Redefining Leadership for the Exponential Age with Anders Indset

In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli is joined by Anders Indset, a renowned business philosopher, leadership thinker, and author of The Viking Code. As organizations navigate the rapid rise of AI, economic volatility, and shifting workforce dynamics, Indset challenges leaders to rethink how they lead, make decisions, and create value in a world that increasingly rewards speed over wisdom.

Drawing on insights from The Viking Code and his broader work on leadership and philosophy, Indset explores why many leaders today are trapped in reaction mode—constantly responding to crises instead of shaping the future. He argues that leadership must evolve beyond traditional models of efficiency and optimization, as AI will always outperform humans in those areas. Instead, he makes a compelling case for leaders to cultivate deep thinking, creativity, and the ability to balance trust with friction—elements that AI cannot replicate.

Indset also introduces the idea of a “Declaration of Interdependence,” where leadership is no longer about individual success but the ability to foster collaboration, challenge assumptions, and navigate uncertainty. He breaks down how leaders can create high-performance cultures that embrace both collective intelligence and individual growth, ensuring that organizations don’t just keep up but stay ahead in an era of transformation.

Throughout the conversation, Indset and Tavakoli dive into how CEOs and senior executives can develop the mental models, frameworks, and mindset shifts needed to lead effectively in the years ahead. 

Actionable Takeaways:

🔹 The Leadership Crisis: Why Most Executives Are Stuck in Reaction Mode – Hear why instant decision-making is overvalued, and why deep thinking and reflection are the new competitive edge.

🔹 The Optimization Trap – Discover why chasing efficiency is a losing game for human leaders—and where real leadership value lies in an AI-driven world.

🔹 Beyond Individualism: The Declaration of Interdependence – Learn why collaboration, trust, and friction are the key leadership forces shaping high-performing teams.

🔹 The Future Won’t Wait—How Leaders Must Anticipate, Not React – Find out why leaders who think in scenarios and prepare for multiple futures will outlast those who rely on past strategies.

🔹 Teaching People How to Think, Not What to Think – Explore how education and corporate training have failed to create adaptable leaders, and what needs to change.

🔹 Trust + Friction = Innovation – Hear why leaders must create environments where disagreement is encouraged, rather than feared.

🔹 How to Become an Uncatchable – Learn how elite leaders and organizations stay ahead by constantly learning, evolving, and thinking beyond their industry norms.

🔹 Why Leaders Must Prioritize Meaning Over Metrics – Understand why purpose, culture, and human insight matter more than data-driven decision-making alone.

Connect with Anders Indset

Anders Indset Website
Anders Indset LinkedIn 

Connect with Mahan Tavakoli:

Mahan Tavakoli Website

Mahan Tavakoli on LinkedIn

Partnering Leadership Website

Transcript

***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:00:00] Anders Indset, welcome to partnering leadership.

I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. 

Anders Indset: Thank you so much for having me Mahan. I'm happy to be with you. I   

Mahan Tavakoli: Look forward to hearing a lot of your thoughts, Anders, most specifically, because your philosophical approach to understanding leadership is really relevant as we go through this exponential age with AI. You've also recently written a book, The Viking Code, which builds on your upbringing and would love to know a little bit more about your upbringing and how it contributed to The Viking Code. 

Anders Indset: yeah, 

As you said, I've been very interested about the development in technology and how that relates To humanity leadership and organizational structures and I was writing a book about capitalism and for many years I've been postulating this development of AI and how that will impact your organization, 

and I realized that basically on all [00:01:00] this pressure and uncertainties, people get tired worn out because we are just reacting to impulses. So it's basically a society of reaction where we try to adapt to new circumstances. Which kind of takes out the agency or what it means to be a mensch or a human being.

I was very curious about that. And all of a sudden , I glanced to my home country of Norway. I live in Germany. But , my home country of Norway, which only 5. 5 million people. All of a sudden had produced all these athletes that were phenomenal in their particular areas. They were at the pinnacle of tennis and soccer and golf and all these sports that had nothing to do with snow and the cold north.

So I was very intrigued by that to see, is there a magic sauce, like a recipe behind this success? And I started to dig into that with a good friend of mine who has been a trainer in athletics over the years. [00:02:00] I realized that the fascination was not only that they were good, but also that they were very loved by competitors and media, they were popular.

They were practicing team spirit, the values, the ethics, and that to me was a very interesting narrative to see how you could build a high performance culture that is. Deeply rooted in values how you can unite Individualism and collectivism and that was basically how it related to my upbringing coming back to your question Growing up in a small village where to me, it was all about going to biathlon cross country skiing Soccer all these various sports because I lived in a small town with only 3, 500 people and if I didn't show up for the other guys They would never show up for me.

So the whole essence of, bringing it to the table for the other ones and uplifting them led to me having a career that I could reach out. So that [00:03:00] was my youth in terms of sport. And it had followed me throughout my life that investing into the common good, into the collective, if you uplift everyone around you and you have an aspiration to grow as an individual. , you're better off if everyone around you is doing better. So it's like a reinforcement learning model, if you like, you buy into the collective and you can grow as an individualism. So the unification of individualism and collectivism, that was what the Viking Code was all about.

And I liked that. So it was a very quick right for me because it felt very natural. 

Mahan Tavakoli: It is a beautiful perspective, Anders. Now one of the things I was wondering as I was reading your book is that I traveled a ton globally, including to Norway, love the Norwegian culture, have to give a shout out to Ellen, Christine and Greta, who are dear friends there.

I have a lot of dear friends, but one of the things I was wondering as I was reflecting on some of [00:04:00] your thoughts is, are there cultural differences that make Some of what you talk about easier in certain countries than others , for example, in the US people are a lot more individualistic than some of the East Asian countries or cultures.

Are there cultural elements that are specific to the Norwegian culture, enabling some of that teamwork and collaboration, or are there transferable elements in your view.   

Anders Indset: That's a beautiful question, Mahan I think, if you see the Declaration of Independence, the strive for individualism and the agency of striving as an individual in the world it was a beautiful model.

But today we realize that, in a global village. We can only do this together. , it's not that we should have . That spiritual movement of sitting in awe that everyone within an active society, [00:05:00] it's okay that we are different because if we don't understand that artificial intelligence or technology in general is a machinery of optimization that will eventually lead to one lucky winner.

Be it in biology, chemistry or whatever. If we optimize the world to the maximum of what we think is the best, there will be one standard. So everyone will be the same. We could hack biology and build children and have, DNA sequencing and upgrade. The beauty of the individual and having that in relation to the collective is a very powerful idea.

And I think that, the Declaration of Interdependence , as the antidote to the Declaration of Independence to say that I am because you are, that we can only be successful in relation to other human beings. Makes that very clear [00:06:00] that we're up for a collective right, right? In the moment when we start to compete and, compare ourselves to AI or humanoids or robots, we will not be at that level. I call it the final narcissistic injury of mankind. So you come back to the three narcissistic injuries that Freud wrote about. So he said that, okay, we have the essence of believing that we are at the center of a gigantic universe. And you have Copernicus coming in and saying no.

We are an insignificant, significant planet somewhere at the outskirts of an infinite universe. And that was the first, injury, a narcissistic injury. And after that followed was scientific progress. We discovered the universe and so on and so forth. Then we had Darwin, we are not God's creatures.

We are part of an evolutionary chain. And you had Freud himself saying Free will is, free is free and we'll want something. We are not the agents controlling all of that. Led to a lot of progress in psychology and neuroscience. , this is the essence of the [00:07:00] journey that we need to keep that individual part of it to be a mention, be different.

But we also need to understand that, in terms of resources to planet and ecology, we're a part of a collective system. , this is a part of the Norwegian culture. And I think on a general note that if everyone around me are uplifted, if everyone is performing better and I want to perform and have an aspiration to grow as an individual, wouldn't I be better off if everyone that I play against are better?

So in sports, it becomes self evident, if the team players are better, you go to the practice field every day and you practice against better players. It's not so evident in the organization, in politics, where you try to out compete everyone else because there's a hierarchical structure. But if you understand that the general notion of growing as a human being, to learning something new and experiencing the path of [00:08:00] growth, it is in relation to other people.

I think that's a beauty and that's, as I said, it's a reinforcement learning model. You tap into the collective, you grow as an individual and you're turned back to that model. So this is something that was deeply ingrained in the Norwegian ethos. And for many years, it was all about staying, small and not believing in yourself.

And over the past year, Norwegian have said, okay we're good. We can do something. We have self confidence. But without leaving that spirit of the collective. So I think that's a model that could be adapted to the U S and on a global level and would do humanity good in the long scheme.

Mahan Tavakoli: And I do want to better understand how we can balance that individually and within organizations. But you mentioned something about us being in a society of optimization and. That is Anders, what everyone is looking for. When you look at social media, the memes that get traction, the posts [00:09:00] that get traction, the books that get traction, everything is about.

Optimization, but you also mentioned that in the age of AI, pursuing that optimization doesn't make sense. 

Anders Indset: Yeah, I like that you went there because that's one of the core challenges of our time to grasp that we have created a mechanism or a machinery Or you could even see a monster, of optimization, we have started to communicate on a thumbs up, thumbs down level.

It's an optimization game.  It's rewarded. The reaction, the instant reaction is at the core of the reward system. It's not about reflection. It's about reaction. So we try to have a perfect solution, even if it's the wrong answer, but we have to have a reaction. And then they wonder how we turn into a divided world.

It's obvious, right? It's like your [00:10:00] opinion, my opinion, it's a binary way of looking at the world, the world is not binary. The world is full of gray areas and dynamism put that on steroids. And that's where we are today. So you see it in the U. S. You are seeing it more and more in Europe.

It's a divided world, and if you play with knowledge, You have to know your assumption because you are not on solid ground. And that's why science to some extent is at crisis. We cannot explain the underlying foundation of our perceived reality. So that's why the reaction, the quick thing, the tweets, the likes, the headlines, It's an economical model, but it's not a foundational model, so it leads to division.

I really that you went there because that is one of the challenges of our time. It's to understand that with AI, we have an infinite, almost free access to knowledge. And it's [00:11:00] not about a knowledge society or being an expert and transporting some kind of, data. Because then we're just slow weird interfaces for technology.

It makes no sense, right? So it takes us back to 250 plus years to the foundation of philosophy of Hegel and Kant and, the understanding of that striving for a society of So the essence of being a mensch, a human being, is not about knowing, but it's about striving for wisdom or progress or learning.

And that is why, the educational model of teaching people what to say, what to think, is flawed. That's Twitter. That's X, it's that you have to think that you have to think that but it's the essence of learning how to learn, teaching people how to learn and experiencing progress and a deeper understanding.[00:12:00] 

So if I postulate something, I have an opinion about something. I know all the underlying mechanisms of my assumptions. And I know somewhere there is a default, but I build on that. So I think that is, one of the challenging parts of our society. If the will to truth. Basically saying that I listen to you and there is some kind of dance and we can progress.

If that gets lost, it's a binary wave and the machine will always win that game. It's a very beautiful question. I like that you went there. 

Mahan Tavakoli: It is. Really important , Anders, to keep what you just said in mind. I've studied potential implications of AI and I've had lots of conversations.

And I think many people societally haven't come to grips. Leaders, whether government or business have not come to grips with its implications and therefore doing more of what you are talking about. [00:13:00] Now one of the challenges is you talk about that need for therefore marrying individual excellence with collective success.

It's not just collective success. There has to be individual excellence. From an organizational perspective, organizational leaders now have individuals who, in their daily lives, are used to being taught in school what is right and wrong, are used to interacting on social media and getting thumbs up and thumbs down, the winner take all mindset, that come into the That's it.

organization and have to operate as a collective more effectively. So how would you look at it from an organizational leader's perspective to be able to marry some of the individual excellence with the collective success? 

Anders Indset: It's how we do education, right? We teach people what to think, not how to think.

 Basically we educate [00:14:00] experts, but this thing is not a good storage device for data. We have much better computers on a global scheme that our brain, the brain is beautiful. It's very energy efficient. Can do a lot of things. It's failtastic. In terms of doing wonderful mistakes, but it's not a perfect storage device.

And if you look at it we could theoretically today validate everything that we talk about. I can have a glass on, that's , linked up to some kind of foundation models like GBT. And I can have a red light. On the inside of the glass, everything I'm talking to you about, I would have a validation mechanism saying green, red, green, red.

This is wrong. You wouldn't see it, but I would see it. I could. Continue to spit that crap, right? And you can do the same, but eventually, we are at a time where we could validate everything we say in real time, it's just about because we're too lazy to pick up our device or the, division between our brain and device is [00:15:00] still given, we cannot do that.

But imagine if we wire up our brain in real time or we have an online mechanism to validate, that would be given with today's technology. And What follows of that is obviously that educating people on knowledge makes no sense. I just recently visited Göbekli Tepe a place in East Turkey on the Syrian border in the midst of Mesopotamia.

And in 1994, there was a German archaeologist that went there and he found some tools on the surface of the ground and he started to dig. And now it's the World Heritage List and I've discovered foundations of humanity that dates back 12, 500 years. Everything we were taught in school, everything archaeologists in their expert field of knowledge would teach us would be that, Stonehenge.

was the first time that people got together and started to build [00:16:00] civilization. That's 6000 plus years ago. And this is twice as old in a region where only 10 percent have been dug out. And there are 60 similar foundings in the area, each of them equivalent to, 1020 soccer fields, huge area, six meter pillars, finding calendars and the foundation of a lost civilization, if you like.

So what I want to say with that is that there are so many things that we do not know when we progress and we tap more into the unknown. And therefore, as I said before, if you play with knowledge, we best be aware of our, assumptions. Otherwise as the late great Stephen R. Cowie postulated with one of his seven habits, Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

So I want to have a dance with you. I want to understand where you come from, and then we can have a reasonable conversation. And if we do we have some friction, [00:17:00] and we have trust, then we can generate progress. And the dynamism of progress, to me, is the essence of life. Tapping into the unknown. , Coming back to your social media relation, we have moved into a society where we have maximized the art of being right, as in comparison to the art of being wrong, which is basically saying that, wow, I realized that I learned something.

Now we have progress. And having no progress turns humanity into a state of homo obsolete, which is basically Which would make the computer right and we would be some kind of, philosophical zombies walking around just projecting some kind of data onto reality, which I think would be a very sad state of being.

Mahan Tavakoli: What you said, though, Anders, is such A big shift in thinking you mentioned our optimization for being right in leadership, in organizations, [00:18:00] we do want and reward being right, even though Silicon Valley and a lot of organizations, they fail fast. A lot of organizations, the measures, the metrics, the performance, the promotions typically are based on people being right.

So what you're talking about is a very different mindset. , 

Anders Indset: I like where you're going with this. And I don't necessarily think so. I think it's more of an understanding. So if you say. You're a pilot and , I just, landed in Abu Dhabi. I don't want to pilot to fail fast.

I want it to work, so there is an optimization game of management. So management used to be. The expert postulating truth and showing power, teaching the hierarchy, how to act and do things, right? This is now about technology, if , doing an open heart surgery, you don't want, [00:19:00] someone practicing failure culture or doing that , fail fast type of thing.

So there is a foundation where you perform, like in sports, if you're playing the NBA finals or whatever sport, you don't want to practice a lot of new things and do a lot of failures. You have your mechanisms and you have stars rising above, right? And then you have the playing field, the pitch, the ground, the training ground, where you can dance and you can , tap into the unknown.

And I think that is, the essence of the challenges that organizations face today is that, when are you like in the optimization game, which is important management technology. And when are you a leadership game, an infinite game, where you tap into the unknown, where you go beyond.

And I think this is what, human beings can do. And that requires. Complete different skills, being a leader facilitating for an environment of two things. Trust and friction. So if you can build trust, people can talk [00:20:00] about opinions founded, rooted in truth and values. And you can have, friction, 

and we can dance and we come to a conclusion that there is something new that happens, or you're right. And I'm wrong or whatever, and we can move on and we can generate actual project. And that is. The game of organizations today that understanding when am I in a finite game of absolutism and winning or losing where there is no, time and when am I in the infinite game of playing, which is basically related to growth.

 Speaking from my own personal experience. . I had a professional career as an athlete. I built companies and I never experienced success. I was always in that, next level and, the optimization game to get on and move on. And I think there's something fundamental to that, what it means to be a mensch, a human being that is related to experienced progress.

And when I say so, I mean that the [00:21:00] actual experience of having learned something new or having experienced your own experience. So today I would consider myself highly successful to me. Because I get up in the morning and I can learn something and I experience progress. And I think that's a beautiful thing in terms of realizing, I would say this wonderful journey to nowhere, that we put some kind of meaning to life and we experience progress.

And if everyone would do that put in the effort and work hard, but also have an experience about that small, step, you would understand that all these small steps compounds into something greater, like an Olympic gold medal and Nobel Prize or what have you, so it's always about that micro ambition that you can put into the daily tasks that you do to have a high quality of input.

Continued over time that will [00:22:00] lead to a high quality output as in comparison to seven had the goal. I have the target of the KPIs and everything else, just have to push for it. You're right. It's a different way of looking at life and success, but I think that's the essence of a philosophy of living a life where , you fill life with things that come from you as an intrinsic motivated task, as a comparison to reacting.

impulses, which is very exhausting and you have to go on sabbaticals and retreats and what have you not. So you have an intrinsic motivation to act, to be active, and then you can grow as an individual and then you fill life in order to have a fulfilled life. 

Mahan Tavakoli: How can leaders of teams or organizations make that part of the culture of the organization? 

Anders Indset: Yeah, I think that is a challenging part. We talk about culture. What do we mean by culture, right? Basically it's what we cannot grasp, but we can [00:23:00] see it and feel it. So it's something that cannot be copied and put into a, consultancy model that you can just adapt to an organization.

And where does that come from? I think it's come from the agency of leadership in terms of trusting yourself. Enough to enable other people to grow. So if you put in, the effort to make everyone around you better, it's what I talked about in the beginning about the reinforcement learning model.

It is about self trust. It's about that awkward feeling that you have the vulnerability as a leader. when someone pops up with a question or in front of everyone that you cannot answer. As a comparison to being dominant and, hierarchical, you would say okay, you caught me off guard. I have no idea what you're talking about.

And that would be seen as a weakness. But if you follow with, I'll go home and I'll read about it. Let's meet tomorrow and we can have a healthy discussion on this. That [00:24:00] enables trust because you're honest, you're authentic. And I think that is something that organizations need to learn today. Because as we talked about, we have infinite free access to knowledge.

You're just too lazy to look it up, right? And therefore being authentic, meeting people on eye level, talking in a physical space to enable, to grow beyond the sum of the parts of the people that you work with, become a foundation for a successful organization. And I think that's culture. I think that's whatever you want to say.

It's the USP of an organization tomorrow is not about the product and the knowledge, it's about the capability to adapt rapidly so to new circumstances. The dynamism of an organization to anticipate Future scenarios. One of the highly underestimated leadership skills that I [00:25:00] see lacking in very many regions of the world.

What do you think will be a plausible, realistic scenario that could happen in the future? Africa is growing from 1. 5 to 4 billion people. What does that mean? All of these things about, exponential technologies over 80 years. Do you think it will continue or will they go backwards and play snake on our Nokia 5110 cell phones in five years?

And everyone would say it would continue because we are an exponential development. But what does that mean? And everyone could tap into that. But we're not doing it because we're so busy reacting to the latest thing that we did not see and missed out. So we are trying to optimize and react to the past as in comparison of being leaders of change and shaping tomorrow.

Mahan Tavakoli: , I see what you just mentioned  on a consistent basis with the executives. I interact with and there's so [00:26:00] many of the executives are overwhelmed, drained, therefore they are not spending the time doing what you just said, which is projecting into that future. They're barely keeping up with the present.

Anders Indset: Yeah, but I can make a bet. The future will come. , I think, most likely it will happen and future is a verb. It's too future. But if you're so busy reacting to the past, looking at studies of past technologies and trying to put a line near progress into the future about that, you will always be, overwhelmed.

You will always be late. Of course, we have the Gardner hype cycle, which says, , first you hype it and then you are disappointed. And then there is an inflection point where you have breakthrough, right? And it happens over and over again. The challenge of polarization today is not high energy prices, but the fact that it will be low energy prices everywhere else because we're building all these solar things, fusion, whatever.

So in the next 10 [00:27:00] years, the marginal cost of energy would drop towards zero. If not, we will be doomed. So most likely we'll figure it out. Most likely we'll have progress. The efficiency of a solar will, will increase batteries. Capacity was increased. AI will lead us to new breakthroughs in material sciences.

We will grow the periodic table out of the 118 elements, 230, 140, whatever. This is what happens. And what does that mean? So it's not like we couldn't see it. And I always go on stage to look at the slides and look at, I'll talk about it. Whoa, you are a futurist. Not at all. It's like you have radical theses and ideas.

No, not at all. I'm really boring. I'm most of the time. I underestimate the implications and the speed of change in the now it seems overwhelming. So that's the thing that I. Think about a lot is how like how could you as a leader in today's world not see the evident? How could you not [00:28:00] see?

You could start with like geopolitical tension post war scenarios. You could look at Structural changes though in Europe Every country is down to 1. 4 children Which is not sufficient to have a society, right? First of all, we are living much longer. So if we're going to take a pension, like 67 or whatever, the systems are not.

created like that. And then we are not getting new young people, paying into those systems. So it's going to implode unless we have a lot of migration or we replace every human labor with robots. And these type of things are very simple to just think about. And when you look at Africa, as I talked about before, like it's 1.

5 billion people, but they're still, at six, seven children per family. The only difference [00:29:00] to 20, 30 years ago is that now they have vaccines and they have Medicare and whatever. So they survive. So it's not that they're not stable. They're growing like crazy because the children survives, which I think is a good thing, right?

So the population will grow to 4 billion people. It's not something like a less. You have all the Europeans sitting at the shores of France drinking Chardonnay and eating canapés and seeing how hundreds of millions of people drown trying to swim over to Europe. I don't think that will happen.

So it's very plausible to think about future scenarios. What does that mean for my business, for our society? It's not easy. So the challenge is more that we are not taught how to think. We are taught what to think. So we are in that reaction is, so everything is about the reaction and not about the reflection.

If I talk to people about these scenarios, they are nodding, they are agreeing, and they're seeing the self-evident truth of where [00:30:00] we are heading. Yeah, but why don't you act like this? Why don't you take that into your daily life? Why do you see me as a provocateur? I'm really boring. I'm dull, and and that's, I adapted this from a very inspiring thinker Professor Hans Rosling of Sweden.

He passed away way too early at 60 something, and he founded a foundation called the Gapminder Foundation. And I think it's 10 plus years ago, he had all these TED Talks about what he called not a, utopian positivism, and of course not a destructive pessimism, but he called it possible ism, where he used a fact based reality to project into the future.

So only with data we could see all of these things happening. What do you think if you see this data? A, B, or C, whatever you think, one is a scenario that you can relate to. You might be wrong, but not having an opinion or looking at the [00:31:00] past, that's something that I think is very exhausting and also very dangerous for our species.

Mahan Tavakoli: It is. And as you mentioned Anders, whether for individuals or organizations, that becomes even more critical at this time because of. Some of the impacts of exponential technologies, such as AI. Now, I would love to get back to some elements of the Viking code and their application and implications and organizations.

You talk about producing environments that create uncatchables how can leaders replicate that uncatchables concept within their organizations? 

Anders Indset: . That's a beautiful question, Mahan so when we're born , we seek progress. You got the parents, clapping and say you stand up, it's like you're moving on.

You constantly have an incentive for progress. You get up, you want to move like my daughter this morning just got up at 530 because [00:32:00] there was this small little creature that moved into our house. And she wanted to check out what kind of, stupid thing he had done over the night.

So there is a curiosity, there is a lebendigkeit, as you would say in German, the liveliness, a wonderful word that we cannot translate into English. It's vitality of life itself. So we have that. As an essence, I think there's a base core of what it means to be a human. And then we get into school and, jobs and we become something and we have categories and so on and so forth.

So I think, this very essence of that is what it is all about and in the Viking code, I write about it and The progress, the part of the progress is the foundation of what I think lacks in today's society, lebendigkeit. And there are many things that I talk about on the factors of of the Viking Code, but I would say that, [00:33:00] Maybe this is the most fundamental part of understanding how we can relate to the complexities of life today.

So I would say that, if you look at How athletes have been been working on progress. You have that essence of experience and how you move on and you come up to the pinnacle. I think in today's world that in business, just moving out of that reactionism and into that creationism and that lebendigkeit, as I said, that liveliness of experiencing progress becomes very crucial and fundamental.

And I think that in, in with its rise of AI and also like the technology now, it's not like it's something that we should strive for success, but it's much more fundamental. Just experiencing progress and this lebendigkeit, it is the [00:34:00] foundation of what it means to be alive, to be a human being.

It's probably the only thing that distinguishes us from technology to, to experience our own experience, the consciousness. And therefore I think, it's very fundamental. So yeah, it's something that, the book is, the first part is lebendigkeit. Athletes and sports and optimization, but I'm glad tapped into that because it's much more, to me, it's much more deeper in the philosophical thinking.

This is about the actual, what it means to be alive and to experience progress. 

Mahan Tavakoli: To be able to do that Anders, I know you're a big fan of deep thinking. So how can we rediscover or establish the space required for progress? That deep thinking what are the disciplines? What are the approaches?

Anders Indset: That enable us to do that and be able to connect with our humanity 

 In today's world if you're [00:35:00] more interested in trying to grasp what other people are telling you.

Anders Indset: Talked about the headstart or becoming an uncatchable, right? So going back to your previous question, it's like that ish kite, get a headstart. What does that mean? It means basically that if you are interested in someone or something you automatically become interesting.

 We like interesting people, we share with interesting people. We, want to work with interesting people because they are interested. And I remember I think it's probably 12 years ago, 13 years ago, Stephen R. Coey, that went on his last trip to Europe before he passed away.

And I met with him just months ago. Prior and he took my hand and he had his Indian talking stick and he held my hand, which felt like an hour. Probably was a minute and a [00:36:00] half or two, whatever. And I resonated. We talked about a different topic, but I resonated with what he said. Had written in his seven habits of highly effective people.

I think it's habit five. Seek first to understand then to be understood. So the interesting part of building a relationship with someone puts you in the space of being. And interesting people get all the new data, all the information, so they get a head start. If you get up early in the morning, you get to it, right?

That's the part when I write about also in the book to get up early, right? It's a metaphor for tapping into the unknown, being curious about the new things, being open to new things. If you do that, you will have a head start advantage and you will become an uncatchable. And I think that's coming back to your question right now.

It's about the leadership part, that's where you can be relatable. You can be authentic. You can tap into other people's, core competencies. You can learn. [00:37:00] And that learning is good for you, but it also built a relationship to others. Which forms a team and obviously we know today we can only do it together.

It's, the one single point of truth, the one, the superstar, it's not like that. There's too much to cover and we live in a area of generalists. And we have no idea what kind of jobs there will be in 10 years from now, so the high level of adaptability working with people and being curious and learning becomes a foundation which comes back to our question about culture and I think that's the only USP or distinguishing factor that we can focus on.

Mahan Tavakoli: Those are powerful foundations. Now, I know you also emphasize , ethical Considerations human values and their importance as we're going through these technological advancements would love some of your thoughts and perspectives of both their importance and how to approach [00:38:00] it.

Anders Indset: Ethics is a difficult topic, obviously. And, the whole essence of what is right and what is wrong in the economy and in capitalism, it's easy to preach about, what is wrong today. But if you look at Europe that has had 150 years of industrial revolution and have built their wealth basically on a country that went to South America to, take all the resources and had some kind of luck that the rivers could be tamed based on the technology back then as a comparison to Asia, where you have all the, snow coming down from the Himalayas, you couldn't tame the river.

So it was a timing and a technology, not a competence thing that led to the industrial revolution and the, rise of U. S. and European economy. And therefore ethics is a very difficult topic. You have the whole, essence of various religions, that have been been a [00:39:00] part of our upbringing.

And you have these type of things that have shaped the people within their culture. So it's difficult today to preach what is right, what is wrong. But I think the foundation that I have found, I've been raised on is to have a general respect for other people and what I have lived by.

And I think this is a role that I think applies today more even than in the history. But today, it seems like a rule that we can follow. We're always taught to adapt to new other cultures in order to respect other cultures. I don't necessarily agree with that. I try to behave the same all over the world because it gives the person that I'm interacting with a sense of authenticity towards me.

So this person then respects who I am and I respect who she or he is. And that gives us a dance of mutual agreements. And I think that on [00:40:00] the foundational level children are not born to kill each other. I've never seen a toddler, that is, there are psychological damages, but it's very limited.

I think the essence of humanity is good, but we are, brought into these systems and cultures and all these structures that takes on these detours of a I would say a path that Does not prohibit us to have a common truth, common ground to stand up and that leads to all these conflicts.

So I think, but general humanity is good. And I believe in the good in people, but we have some challenges and religions and cultures are difficult structures that leads to division. Poverty, that is the foundation of strive towards resources. If everyone would not be. Or and how this access, why would we try to conquer land like these type of things?

So ethics is a very difficult topic, but I think in general [00:41:00] nature, people are good. And if we could work on the educational part society of understanding and bringing a global educational access to humanity, I think it would be in a much better space. But that being said, we are 8 billion.

Mahan Tavakoli: We have moved quite a It's not perfect, but it's been a decent journey. We have progress maybe we can continue. We are doing some stupid things nowadays with wars and stuff, but, maybe we can figure it out. 

I have no doubt that we can to the reference you made on the possibilities, it's.

Mahan Tavakoli: Not naive optimism, but having hope with the possibilities. Now, You had a book, Wild Knowledge. What is wild knowledge? And I want to connect that to the Viking code as well. 

Anders Indset: , that was my first book. I've written six books now and I had my forthcoming book next year will be the Singularity Paradox Bridging Humanity and AI with a quantum physicist friend of mine.

It's [00:42:00] at singularityparadox. com. It's a very technical book. So as in comparison, Wild Nudge was a very simple book. It was a very straightforward, startup business book, how to watch two. And it basically takes on that challenge. way prior to the rise of AI about, how knowledge through AI will be tamed and how it's essential to have that tap into striving for new knowledge as something wild, something untameable and not put into structure.

Because if we put it into structure, it becomes binary or technological, it becomes an optimization game. So as long as there is an infinite capability to create better explanation coming back to a very inspiring person, David Deutsch who has written about the topic also, that we human, as a human, as a species, humanity has an infinite capability to come up with better explanations.

[00:43:00] That is the essence of the wild knowledge as a comparison to tame knowledge, which is the data driven static optimization game. And it was an intuition but it's interesting you turned out to a very foundational part of how LLMs and AI now has led us. When I wrote back in 19 the things also in the quantum economy was about the implications.

Of course, I did not foresee a war or a pandemic, but I think, many of the things that I wrote about turned out to that data game of AI which was to me back then, even a very clear path. And more so will it be 10, 15 years or will it be five years? And again, here, it turned out had been faster than I even had anticipated.

But I know walking on stage, talking about it, people thought it was radical. Today people would say it was really boring and it was underestimating the power. So [00:44:00] that's how we are operating. , even today, the predictions that I make people. Think that's radical. I think it's really boring.

Mahan Tavakoli: Your intuition was right with respect to that. Now you're writing the book on singularity and AI, Dario Amadei DeepMind, Then went on to Google open AI and now Claude had a conversation with Lex Friedman and he says by 2026, we can achieve artificial general intelligence.

We'd love to know. Your thoughts on not necessarily the timing, but the implications on humanity and organizations when we get there and approach that.

Anders Indset: Yeah, and I think that's the right question to ask, there are a lot of discussions on the limitations of induction in terms of, can you just scale things?

So are we running out [00:45:00] of data? Can we just put more compute to it? Do we need different foundational models? to simulate your brain and different path to have like areas where you have rapid access and you have deep thinking. But still, there are very many discussions about limitations and also access points coming out of, everything from humanities started from an action and an access point that you can't go from induction.

There are many discussions on that. I am in the field as an observer of progress. So I think, we'll figure out new ways and new models and new structures, and there will be breakthroughs. I think we'll hack biology. And then of course it becomes a question, is the brain. A part of physicalism, of compute, or is there some kind of magic sauce, if you like, like consciousness, something beyond that we can relate to.

So the implications are fundamental. [00:46:00] Even if we don't reach AGI, even in 2025, when we have AGI, AI agents, where we optimize all of this expert knowledge, even then with robotics, Automation if you put all the mechanics that we have created onto robots and combine that with the current AI, even then is it fundamental change challenging for humanity.

I could speculate like everyone else. on AGI and singularity. I think we will hack biology. We will figure out, the human genome and the essence of chemistry and biology. Can we replicate and build the human being? Most likely is that a mensch, a human being with this whole, mind or conscious experience?

I don't know. As anyone else, you could say consciousness is a is at the foundation like Donald Hoffman. It emerges into reality. We can have all this speculation of various theories, even if we [00:47:00] don't grasp it, it still has massive implications. It will tackle a lot of the things that we do, and we see that today.

If we go into that foundation of AGI or even singularity. Then, it raises philosophical questions that are also very fundamental. So if an AI can do anything that humanity can do, but just better and faster do we become obsolete? If we are just reacting to that, do we become some kind of philosophical zombies?

If we wire up our brains to have the access to this part, is there a point where, we have infinite access, But no perception. So the lights are on, but there is no home to perceive them. Do we overwrite the essence of what it means to be a human being or conscious experience, right? So these are questions that become very relevant.

It's something that I've written and thought a lot about and how to avoid this, zombie [00:48:00] apocalypse, if you like. Is something around what I call becoming back to we started in the beginning about the narcissistic injuries of mankind. I wrote about a final narcissistic injury. It's basically saying that if we create the creator, we are created of gods.

It's, deus ex machina, God out of the machine, bliss, divinity, immortality out of the machine. So it's metaphorically speaking. If you would create your own dad. It's good for a physical reality have massive implications, right? So the divine creationism become these kind of humane creationalism. So we simple human beings create something that is much more complex and that God like creature.

It has a lot of implication, the philosophical level. So regardless of the limitations of training data, foundational models, compute and scaling. It will, of course, have [00:49:00] unimaginable impact on humanity labor, our society. If we tap into that, quantum realm of simulations and so on and so forth that's a journey we went down and it's, turns out, it's almost impossible to prove we are not in a simulation.

Coming back to, the simulation hypothesis of Nick Boston 2003. And, that I would relate to and say that then it's likely that we are in a simulation. It doesn't feel like it. But if so, it's a game. It's something that we could relate to. So the, all these type of scenarios has massive implications, but what Florian Neukirch and I wrote and what I think could be a path forward that I want to have challenged is that I think it would make sense to create some kind of artificial human intelligence and to create entities robots that are, have some kind of self perception and consciousness.

even if it distinguishes them from being a human being and we would never know. But it seems like [00:50:00] in a scheme of things, humanity seems to figure it out. So if you're going to create this super intelligent entities and this new species, maybe even, then let's make it conscious. That make it, behave like human beings then maybe we would be in a good space.

Mahan Tavakoli: It is a fascinating perspective. And I am so glad.

People much smarter than me, like you Anders, who also understand philosophy and understand that historical perspective on philosophy are thinking about this and its potential implications, whether societally or beyond. So I look forward to reading that book and learning more from you. You already have, as you said, six books out, including your most recent, The Viking Code, how can the audience find out about The Viking Code and follow your work out there?

Anders Indset: Yeah, thank you, Mahan. Thank you for having me. And the Viking Code is on vikingcode. com. It's obviously in all bookstores. That's a book about, creating a [00:51:00] high performance culture deeply rooted in values. Singularity Paradox is on singularityparadox. com, forthcoming book. And yeah, articles linking up on, on LinkedIn or social media.

It's under my name, Anders Insett, and on andersinsett. com, we have a lot of articles and some publications and papers. My distinguished colleague Flora Neukert and I, we call it sci fi not science fiction, but PHI, science philosophy, where we dance at the outskirts of minor matter. So we have written quite a bit of on various topics.

So that's the way you can link up and follow. AndersInsight. com or on LinkedIn and occasionally, on Instagram and social media, but the main parts are found on my website. 

Mahan Tavakoli: Outstanding. 

Thank you so much Anders Dinset. 

Anders Indset: Appreciate it. Thank you for having me Mohan.