The D2Z Podcast
Gen Z entrepreneur and DTC agency leader Brandon Amoroso talks with some of the best in the marketing world. Brandon and guests reveal their top business-growth strategies for anyone in the online space–whether you are a brick-and-mortar business looking to scale or an established online business trying to grow. Consumer marketing is under constant and dramatic change, so Brandon aims to tackle new problems with a fresh Gen Z mindset. The D2Z Podcast delivers insights, strategies, and tactics that you can use and aims to shift how you think about business and your relationships with your teams, partners, and customers.
The D2Z Podcast
Finding Meaning Beyond Financial Success - 134
Discover the incredible journey of Anders Insett, a Norwegian-born keynote speaker, author, and former elite athlete, whose diverse career path spans from tech-savvy entrepreneurship to global philosophy discussions. Anders shares how his early curiosity in technology and his experience as a semi-professional Olympic handball player paved the way for a career that now bridges business and philosophical thinking. Learn how his insights into the popularity of European sports like handball in the U.S. and the influence of global sports icons have shaped local sports culture.
Join us as we explore the philosophy of progress and success with Anders, who believes that true fulfillment comes from focusing on the process rather than the outcome. He shares how intrinsic motivation and a love for learning contribute to the surprising success of Norwegian athletes across various sports. Discover his perspective on reframing goals, finding happiness in small, incremental progress, and eliminating inefficiencies to concentrate on what truly matters in life.
We also venture into the future landscape of innovation and education, examining the evolution of breakthroughs from AI and quantum technology to scientific advancements emerging from the corporate world. Anders and I discuss how these shifts impact the balance between academia and industry, emphasizing the need for education systems to adapt to the modern job market. With an increasing focus on generalist skills, critical thinking, and soft skills, this episode offers a compelling look at how to navigate a rapidly changing world with vitality and insight.
Here's what you'll learn:
❗ Success is often defined by external metrics, but true fulfillment comes from within.
❗ The journey of entrepreneurship is about progress, not just outcomes.
❗ In a rapidly changing world, learning how to think is more important than what to think.
❗ AI and technology are reshaping the landscape of education and business.
❗ The process of building is often more rewarding than the end result.
❗ Organizations should focus on activating human potential rather than punishing mistakes.
❗ Innovation today often involves optimizing existing ideas rather than creating entirely new ones.
❗ The future will see radical breakthroughs in science and technology driven by AI.
❗ A culture of performance is essential for organizational success.
❗ Understanding the underlying problems is key to finding effective solutions.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction to Anders Indset
02:37 The Journey of an Entrepreneur and Athlete
06:32 Finding Meaning Beyond Success
11:52 The Process of Building and Growth
17:17 Innovation vs. Iteration in Business
20:51 The Future of Education and Learning
32:12 The Role of AI in Shaping the Future
39:05 Activating Human Potential in Organizations
Anders Indset
Website - https://andersindset.com/
Brandon Amoroso
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/
Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/
X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon
Scalis.ai - https://scalis.ai/
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, former founder of Electric and now the co-founder of Scaless, and today I'm talking with Anders Insett, who's an internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, norwegian-born author, deep tech investor and also a former elite athlete. Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Brandon, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:So before we jump into things here, can you give everybody just a quick background on your rather diverse sort of history and career up until this point?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I was always very curious, a learner in all paths, I think. When I grew up in Norway and did very different sports and we were very active that was our youth we participated in multiple sports because that was in a small village, small city, so we had to participate in other sports in order for them to have a team, so they would show up in my team Fairly early. I got into the whole aspect of business and entrepreneurship. I was curious about technology, started the internet wave really early. I was a nerd, programmed websites and learned the first HTML, got the image tag and started at a terrible bandwidth to upload some kind of media data onto the then new fancy thing called the internet, and it was always about that discovery and about progress and learning.
Speaker 2:I had a background as a hardcore capitalist, built some companies, had an agency, founded an online print house and, as you said in the beginning, I have a background as a professional athlete.
Speaker 2:As you said in the beginning, I have a background as a professional athlete, so it was always about the active part of life. But I never really felt success. To many from the outside world it probably wasn't like a successful career or people would say that you know you're good at sport, you're good at some decent things within the business field, but I never felt that it was all about just chasing goals and dreams the next thing. So I let go of that. I sold my company and I started to write. I was always very interested in philosophy and I saw that on the plates of leaders around the world, philosophical questions was a part of the daily business. So I decided to just unite two of them, the art of doing business and philosophy, and that took me to the speaking and writing, having now finished my sixth book. So that's a very short, rapid walkthrough of my youth and my professional career.
Speaker 1:What sport did you play as an athlete?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this is the thing in the US. You know, I came, I lived a year in Nebraska and I came there back in 1994. And I said that play handball. And they resonated with that as a prison sport. You know, you kick the ball with your hands. But I've learned that this is not the sport that I did and I played over Europe. It's the team handball. That was the first thing I learned, but now I refer to it as Olympic handball. So there is even an Olympic team from the US.
Speaker 2:It's for the people that don't know the sport, it's a very fast-paced game, kind of like basketball, but instead of shooting hoops you're throwing the ball into a goal, kind of like soccer. So you have a goalie and you have defenders and you have you run plays similar to football and there's like a very rapid pace to it, kind of like ice hockey, going back and forth high scoring games. So it's a. It's a very interesting sport, very popular in Europe, draw crowds similar to some of the NBA matches in the US. So it's a. It's a very interesting sport. I played, not at the very highest level, but I had a almost 10 year career where I semi-professionally played it alongside building my company, so it was a juggling training and workouts with uh, building tech companies and and being an entrepreneur that's awesome, though, and I feel like more and more entrepreneurs are also very active outside of you know, business.
Speaker 1:It seems to go with the personality, whether they're professional or not professional the weekend warriors even. It sort of goes hand in hand with entrepreneurship, but I've seen more and more sort of sports from overseas starting to make waves in the US, like at least here in Miami. Padel has blown up over the past year, year and a half, and I had never even heard about it before I moved to Miami, and you're starting to see some other sports that are making their way here.
Speaker 2:It's funny. You say that. I mean the paddle tennis part. It just went past me. I have a friend of mine, I spoke at his conference and I meet him a year later and he has literally just rolled out, together with some, you know, investors and former professional athletes, a network of pedal. You know courts and I go to the uae and I see the hotels haven't rebuilt the tennis courts to have it sounds like whoa, where did this come from? Right, it's just a huge industry overnight, very fascinating, uh.
Speaker 2:And of course, in miami you also, uh, drew messi, so it was a lot of attention to soccer. That is, you know, made that popular. So, yeah, I, I, I hear you, and uh, uh, the same things for some in europe, some of the us sports have also caught some interest. But I think you know, in general, the, the football, basketball in particular haven't really, you you know, made the next level. I think basketball in Europe. Now, if you look at the NBA, there are a lot of European superstars, so that's something that's established. But as for football, there is, like I just spoke with one of the former professional soccer stars, oliver Beerhoff, and he was with the management of the Soccer Federation and he's very curious about football. So they're doing some events, playing some games in Germany. But I like football personally, but it hasn't really caught on in Europe. But I see the same. I see that some of these European sports are now making it to the US. So where there is money and marketing value, it's obviously something for the US market.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you've seen more NFL games being played in, like Mexico, london, I want to say. They even played it somewhere else as well. They're definitely trying to expand it, but it is very much so a US sport and a little bit of Canada as well too. But that'll be interesting to see how it progresses.
Speaker 1:But you mentioned one of the reasons you sold your business is because you were looking for I think you mentioned trying to find not necessarily meaning, but you were struggling with feeling that sense of accomplishment that others who were looking from the outside in might say, oh, this person is very accomplished, oh, this person is very accomplished. How have you worked to overcome that and be more comfortable with not necessarily who you are, but what you've done? Because this is a common theme that I hear from entrepreneurs ranging from small exits to giant exits it doesn't really matter. There's this common theme of, oh, we really feel like we haven't done that much, whereas everyone else would think, oh, you've done so much, you're haven't done that much, whereas everyone else would think, oh, you know you've done so much, you know you're so accomplished, everything should be perfect for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, probably you can resonate with this because you have done some amazing stuff. But I think to me, seeking that finite answer to a question, you know you spoke about meaning and purpose in life. You know the one one you know thing that you're made for, you know who you are. I think it's the other way around. I think you know you cannot make yourself happy, but you can make yourself less unhappy. So if there are things that you don't like or that are holding you back, you don't have to have the answer, what is right. But you can figure out that this is something that I do not want to do.
Speaker 2:So that sense of agency in a world where we have all become very reactive, so everything we define as success is in measurement to something else. So when I wrote the Viking Code, my latest book, it was about figuring out how did my home country, norway, bring out all these superstars in disciplines that have very little to do with snow huge sports tennis, golf, running, soccer. We have the two best beach volleyball players in the world coming from way up north in Norway, and that was to me very fascinating. So I thought how can you build that success, high-performance culture. And when I started to dig into that I realized that it wasn't about the finitude of results, so much more the outcome of the process, the path, if you look at it from an Eastern philosophical way, was what was the magic of their success. So I think the experience of your own experience, the experience of learning, the experience of progress that is fully detached from an extrinsically motivated definition, that becomes a part of the liveliness. In Germany we say lebendigkeit, you know the vitality of life and that, I think, is a very successful way to live for yourself. So today I consider myself highly successful.
Speaker 2:To me, because I'm privileged that I get to get up every morning and learn, I get to experience progress, and that is, you know, the quality of the input of a process like running the marathon. You don't look at it at the end goal, you look at it in the perfection of your next step. So the reflection of perfection is a quality of the small things that you do that accumulates into results, into whatever that is, and if you look at that, you're always in comparison. Everyone alive is poor in comparison to Elon Musk right now, right. So if that is the measurement, you will only have that one lucky smart monkey that made it all the way to the top.
Speaker 2:So if you play that optimization game, the maximizing, the art of being right and that is a definition of what it means to be you as a man, as a human being then you're always going to be bad off, because it's always a binary way of looking at the world, as in comparison to looking at the path or the progress or the dynamism of life that we are always in the becoming like a wonderful journey to nowhere but filling that with substance from an intrinsically motivated action or activity. I don't know if that makes sense to you, but this is how I look at life that you free yourself from the things that you are holding you back and then you put yourself in a position to be struck by something called happiness, because you're aware, because you are present, you are tuned in or whatever you want to call it, without necessarily having taken that spiritual path, but just resonating with what do I not want to be?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think the reframing of the mindset is really important as well, and asking yourself what are the goals? Do these really actually matter to me? Or is it this binary one or nothing that might be easy to latch on to if you look at the media or the news headlines or things like that, but what do you actually care about? Is it really just money and trying to make as much as possible, because you're still going to end up not in first place, as you mentioned earlier with somebody like Elon? And I think the process of building is the most exciting part of entrepreneurship and, sure, sometimes it culminates in an exit, sometimes it culminates in the business failing too, but the process of actually building is the most exciting and is something that I think we all just need intrinsically as well, because I've met people who have tried to take a step back from that and then they're sort of lost and they don't have that same purpose or passion because they've let go of the process of building.
Speaker 1:And it doesn't have to be. You don't have to build to be the next Facebook or the next LinkedIn or whatever it may be. I think that there's an over-glorification of these unicorn exits, which is not the norm, it is the outlier, whereas there's tons of small businesses that are very successful, that produce a lot for not only the economy but the people that work for them, and also that happiness factor that I don't think is highlighted enough, because not every business has to be a billion dollar business.
Speaker 2:No, I totally agree. But again, there is nothing wrong with big visions or goals I mean, I think that's good. But the problem becomes when it defines you. You know when you become the vision or the goal. So that is your definition of success, so that is where you compare to others. So you know, if you sell off a company, you're never fulfilled to that extent. So you know, if you sell off a company, you're never fulfilled to that extent.
Speaker 2:And that's why I think that you know, as we have those goals and visions and the finitude of those measurements, the finite games of life, there is no idea where I'll be heading in life, you know. But I think one thing is for fact is that we could say that never in human history have we had more time and more potentiality to influence our own reality as our generation. Or just now. We have technologies that never before. We have, at least in the Western part of the world, wealth like never before and we literally have more time than ever to be active. But we fill it with a lot of crap that takes out our energy and sucks us out of that realization of the normality of life. And I think if you could just thin slice a lot of things that you don't like, at least just I think everyone could write down three things that they would like to remove or don't do or find as inefficient. If you could take out one of those, you know, you're one step closer to be in a position to see something new, to experience something beautiful to experience or be struck by happiness. So if everyone is trying to solve that one, you know, billion trillion dollar question, you will, you know, most people will be miserable, miserable, miserable, off. But if you're trying to solve progress, you can have the smallest progress. You know, if I can continue that over time, everything is life is compound interest. So if I could, just, you know, thin slice that and continue those small steps. And I think that's what you talked about before the beauty of the building process, the achievement.
Speaker 2:I always like to draw an analogy through the Statue of David by Michelangelo and he was asked how could you produce, create this masterpiece? They were looking for the answer Right, and he said, very beautifully, so that I just cut out everything. That was not David, you know, and I think this is a very good way of looking at life and looking at progress. So you don't necessarily know where you're going, but you can figure out where you don't want to go, and the better you are at doing that and the quality of the input that you then put into whatever thing that you are doing then accumulates into something successful, and I think you as an entrepreneur would resonate.
Speaker 2:The business at the end is very different than where you started off. The business at the end is very different than where you started off, and that holds to be true today much more than ever in human history, because every product needs to be world-class and everything can be copied literally within seconds. So the pivot that you do with the business over and over again becomes your identity. So there is nothing solid, there is nothing of static or balance. It's a continuous dynamism, and I think to understand that is a deeper way of looking at the world as a philosophy, more so as an answer was day one versus year four when we sold.
Speaker 1:It could not be further from where we started in terms of the markets that we were working for, the services that we were providing, the team structure. Just everything was completely different. And the same would be said even for the new company, which hasn't even publicly launched it launches in about a week here but we've been researching and building for almost two, two and a half years now and through that arc of research and development, so many things have changed from what the original vision was. As we've gotten closer to, you know, the customers, to the pain points, et cetera, et cetera. And if you know, if you were to say, oh, you could go back and you back and fast track some of these things. Some of these things just can't be fast tracked. It is an evolution, and part of what makes it so exciting is the constant changing, and when you wake up, every day is different. It's not the same, monotonous over and over again, and I think that's what keeps things exciting too 100% and I don't like to talk about solutions because the finitude of things.
Speaker 2:We don't solve problems right At the very fundamental part. The only thing we do is progress, so we create better problems. We are trying to find the perfect answer very quickly. So we're trying to find the perfect answer to the wrong question because we don't understand the underlying problem. So, if I play with what you just said, you got closer to the actual problem of the clients and therefore could figure out how to monetize or to implement or to launch something that improves the state of this problem. That is a better problem than it was, you know, just a while ago. And that holds for all things in life. Because if you play with knowledge, you know you have to understand your underlying assumptions Because at the core, you know the foundation of reality. We are not standing on solid ground, so everything we know has some kind of underlying foundation and I think, coming back to elon musk, this is his magic, this is what he's really good at.
Speaker 2:The first principle thinking just to you know, cut out everything and just drill down to the actual problem you know, and then to anticipate if this is the problem and we have had exponential growth in technology for the past 80 years. Where will we be in 5-10 years from now? And you can add some hype to it, some marketing to uplift and get some money and all that, but in general you know, this is what entrepreneurs also should be looking for. You know how can I get a better understanding of the complexities, interdependencies and spend more time on the problem? And I think many people today jump into a quick solution and want to monetize that and realize, well, this didn't work out because I didn't get the problem. So I think it's a very healthy path. How do you describe and I think many entrepreneurs and startups can learn a lot from that as, in comparison to trying to build the next ABC exit, where they feel miserable because they're just trying to hype something that will never launch? So, yeah, I think that's a very good way of looking at business.
Speaker 1:What do you think of? And there's a term for it, but I'm forgetting what it is exactly, but it refers to the concept of, you know, from like the let's call it the 1920s to like 2000,. You know, most of the things and businesses that were being created at that time were totally net new. Like this is a first of its kind. You know, for example, to use a more recent one, like the iPhone. When the iPhone came to market, nothing like that had ever existed before.
Speaker 1:But now, fast forward, whatever it is, 20 years later, we're just getting different iterations of what is the same underlying concept, and there's not, I mean, outside of some of the stuff that Elon is doing, and now AI is complicating it a little bit, because that's obviously net new, but, like most things that are coming to market, they are just better versions of what already exists versus being a completely new something, if that makes sense. Um, do you see that path continuing or do you think there will be another period where, I don't know, there's like flying cars and there's like other things that you know have never been done before, Because the last 20 years really has been just iterations or improvements upon what already exists?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I see your journey here and I used to tend to call that. You know, innovation is packed knowledge. You know that's the action economy, that's the optimization game, right, that is, do more with less. And this is basically what you're referring to. First, you had a period of time where you had true foundations of a product. So you have a lot of that in Germany and in Europe, companies called hidden champions that are world market leader in their industry. So instead of melding the airplanes because of the pressure, they created a super glue, so they have like 90% market share. You know, even going all the way to. You know, the Flexi line yeah, so there's the dog leash. Yeah, so they have an insane market size.
Speaker 2:And it came out of a chainsaw company that had free capacity and the guy that founded FlexiLine he fell in love with a woman who had five dogs, so he took the dog for a walk. It was just chaos. So he decided to use that free capacity to build that mechanism and he went to his boss and he said you know, I think I'm onto something here, because everyone keeps asking me and he wanted to have a small profit and he said, well, that's too much. So he decided to set up his own company and he built this huge global brand with Gucci and Versace, with leashes and everything. So that was a part of that product economy. And then there was a phase where you have that optimization game and obviously we enter into a making money with money kind of economy. You fuel a value-driven organizations and make more money outside of products and services, just to digitally influence the market and make money with money. So we have gone from that optimization game where we now have entered a point where everything that you can optimize is a part of AI or an automation game that we cannot compete with. There are huge investments where we have to do and what I think will happen is that will obviously continue. You see, you're fueling the LLMs with more training data.
Speaker 2:You might have the argument now that it's kind of sort of reaching its limits, but I think there will be breakthroughs in other ways to do this. One could be in the realm of quantum technology, where I've also invested. I see some opportunities here. But what I think will happen is that, yes, we will have breakthroughs. Where do I think they will come? We will have a huge disruption on health and finance and education in terms of decentralization, especially now with the new president coming back or coming in, who will be very opportunistic on the economy, having teamed up with all the tech companies I think you know the Fed, the whole structure of having that national economy and economics of the dollar, the euro, the European Central Bank. That is something that is very risky at the moment because if the decentralization is faster than that they can digitize their currencies.
Speaker 2:Then we're up for a decentralization. The same you could do for health. I think the health systems will be data-driven, measurable things that young people will drive the change. So these are radical changes to old structured systems. You could also have the argument for organized human life altogether, a young generation opting out in some kind of network states and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2:But I think breakthroughs in science will be much more radical in the next year than they were the past 20 years. Why? Because of computation and AI. We will drive material sciences in a completely new way. Other things in research that would have taken 20, 30 years and billions of billions of dollars can now be run on hybrid computers or quantum computers or through some kind of AI models, and you will discover new materials within the periodic system. So today we have 118 elements, probably go up to 130, 140, which will then again open up for new ways to do batteries, efficiency on solar and so on and so forth, which will eventually lead to the marginal cost of energy plunging towards zero, because we will have an abundance of energy, and that will, of course, make a radical shift to how we do business and how we live.
Speaker 2:So I think we're up for some radical changes to the realm that you just mentioned. Will it be small startups or a part of those huge conglomerates? That I can't answer because a lot of these things will take a lot of money and probably, coming back to Elon, he will probably be the first trillionaire. If you look at Nvidia, if they make some kind of switch towards some quantum chip or whatever you know, they would just have insane access to growth, and that probably makes it even harder for young startups and companies. So I'm not quite sure how the structure will be.
Speaker 2:But, to answer your question, I think there will be radical breakthroughs in science that will open up for some very, very new ways to do things. I mean wiring up the mind, playing with some kind of upgrade apps to enhance our skills. There are so many things that lie beyond what we would consider just optimization and innovation. But again, if you look at it from a strictly technological standpoint, that is also optimization. It's just much faster and more radical. So we could call it disruptive creation instead of optimization. So however you want to define it, but I think, coming back to your business model structures, I think the next 10 years will be much more radical than the past 30 years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and to your point about where that will come from, I think more and more I've been hearing the term intrapreneur, which essentially is somebody who would be a part of one of those larger organizations, and they don't necessarily want to take the risk, nor do they have the capital, like wherewithal, to pursue whatever it is they may want to pursue. But you know a lot of these larger organizations, whether it's Google, apple they have almost subsets of their company where they're essentially creating companies and you can almost look at it as like an incubator, and I think Google has like hundreds of different companies that are underneath it that they provide investment and runway for. I think we'll see more and more of that as well, because some of these companies are just, you know, they just get larger and larger every year. It just continues to grow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it's even more radical. Like four or five years ago, I was with a group of scientists that was speaking at a science conference and I think I really pissed them off literally, because what I said was in the future, nobel lecturates will come out of corporates, not out of academia, which was a very bold statement back then. Look at the two last Nobel Prizes this year chemistry and physics, both coming out of informatics. So a lot of engineering, like for AI. So it's just and it's obvious, because you have a lag. So when you're in academia, you have to file for a grant, you have to define your thesis. It takes a year and a half to get going, you know, and that's not the speed we're working at. And the second part is why would I, as a quantum physicist, go to a university or an academia today if I can get more money and do the same thing within a corporate? So if I work at a quantum tech startup today, I can work with 100 smart quantum physicists much more you know IP and potentiality than even within an elite university. I get more money, I have completely freedom to do R&D at the same level like a Google or whatever, but it goes down to even the you know the big AI companies. They're doing the same thing. So we are taking the scientists and taking science and progress into the corporate world, which was a very bold statement back then. But we are seeing now how this is evolving and shaping.
Speaker 2:When I predicted this, it was radical To me, it was obvious and that we will see much more of in the coming years. Would mention is that it's not only the Googles but the Databricks or some kind of AI companies from the Valley. You know they are doing a magical new threefold of running a business. I call it like the magical new threefold, but it's actually really old. So one is you incubate your own clients so you see grants and investments in your clients because if the clients are successful, they make more business with you. This is an old model that we use for gastronomy and beverages, so the food and beverages industry, in particular, the breweries and beverages. They sponsored marketing services to set up restaurants and bars in order to have their product within the bar, so they helped the customers of the bars get going. It's an ancient model that was a successful model for our industry. Now you see that with all companies you can take this and find use cases on how you can make your clients successful in every industry.
Speaker 2:So that's number one. Number two is in terms of dynamism of industries and the rapid change. You want to invest in companies. So one is obviously the incubation part that you talked about, the entrepreneurship, but also to take assets, even if they're small assets. So every company has a venture branch that some of these companies could be integrated later as a part of your core business or you can participate on an exit to have some more asset opportunities, to have more buffer for difficult times.
Speaker 2:And the third one is obviously your products and services that you offer. But, as we already talked about here, nothing is set in stone. So you have to have that ecosystem understanding the client, seeing the opportunities being at the tip of your toes to see the next thing in tech in your industry where you have invested. So the investments and the incubation of your clients put you closer to the client and the market and therefore you are in a better position to understand the problems and pivot your product. And I think this is a structure that we are seeing more and more on how to set up a company as, in comparison to build a great product market and sell. You have that dynamism of that. I call it the magic threefold of modern companies or entrepreneurship. So I think that is those two things. The science part, and also the structure, is something that we will see more and more now.
Speaker 1:Back to the first comment on the science part, and this is something that I thought was already happening even before AI. But now it feels like the gap is widening even more between what's actually happening in the real world and what skills are needed versus what is being taught at universities. Where do you think the education around you know the new frontier of AI comes from, because I really don't think it is universities, but there's seeming there's an ever, seemingly like widening knowledge gap between those who are like in the industry and who are at the frontier, versus those who are not. And how do you think that gets addressed? And I mean, where do you think education goes when, to your point, even the grants, you know a year and a half, you know things change in like a week now. So, yeah, where where do you think that education is going to come from?
Speaker 2:It struck me as one of the absolute elite universities in the world, us-based, that brings out a huge AI study every year, and you have their managing director talking in September, october of 2024, about the trends of 2023.
Speaker 2:And I was like you know the most advancement in this field happened in June, july, august this year. You know what you're talking about is outdated, so it's. It's just that the speed of things is so radical. And it's not that they're not smart people, but they're just don't have that access. They're not in that space. They have a different operating model and this model seems to be outdated.
Speaker 2:You cannot wait two years to implement a new educational model to teach people what to think. So you want to sell a product that you concept today to find a finance, you build a business model for executive education and you're going to teach people knowledge two or three or four years from now. You know what could that be? You know we have an infinite access to free knowledge. So to your question, I think the model of education changes from the old model of educating experts and building knowledge to a radical shift to not to teach people what to think but teach them how to think. So learn how to learn becomes a new model.
Speaker 2:What does that mean?
Speaker 2:It means that we are in an era of generalists, where we have to see the interdependencies and we have to know how to facilitate and navigate and use the tools collaboration, network, experiences in a live environment.
Speaker 2:These are the skills that, at least in the near future, seems to be of advantage, and the knowledge part becomes less relevant because it's just the laziness of not tapping into this thing or having it wired up to our brain. Yeah, I mean, literally, we could be having the same conversation with a pair of glasses and everything. I would say something BS, bs, or you would say something BS. We would have the red lights go on inside because we have something called egos. But, theoretically speaking, we could validate anything that comes out of our mouth today in real time and therefore, I think, you know, the validation part of the realness and the validation part will just, you know, get rapidly implemented, um, at least in a sane way, uh, world, because that is where we can validate what politicians are saying. We could, you know, put them on a blockchain validation criteria and have some kind of realness criteria. I mean that's that would be.
Speaker 1:that would cause quite quite a bit of ruckus, uhus, if we saw that over the period of like 30 years. But yes, no, no, I mean technologically speaking, it's there.
Speaker 2:We can have a sign-off on the blockchain of the realness. We take out all the AI-created content. We can have validation of authenticity. We could tap into a real-time validation. You would have the president speaking and you would have a light where you can have sources in real time.
Speaker 2:Everything he's saying is like this is not true. This is not true, and the only definition of that is we have to have a will to truth, a common ground to stand on, and if there is no common ground to stand on in society, then we have a huge problem, then it's a mad, mad world. But if that is given, that, that would be the intention of humanity. Whatever the truth is, you know, a computer would never make the same mistake twice, because if there is a mistake that is experienced by a human being, it would be corrected Right. Is a mistake that is experienced by a human being, it would be corrected right. So this is the you know.
Speaker 2:So so, theoretically speaking, we're in a beautiful place that we could have that um, practicality and implementation and society in general at large, something totally different, but, uh, at least from technology. We're already there. We drifted off from the education, but I just want to say that I think that this is going back 250 years to Hegel and Kant and the foundation of philosophy. It's about the vernunft and the verstand, the society of reason, and not one of knowledge, that will prosper. So, theoretically, ai is in a position to force us to learn how to think basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I love that because even I mean it's a small example, but as I'm going through a house remodel right now, it's not like I went to school, you know, to learn how to be a building engineer or you know a contractor or whatever it may be. But quite literally any email I get or text I can take, just copy and paste into ChatGPT and it will tell me what. You know what the vernacular is that's being used. I mean even to the little nitty gritty of how to lay certain tiles and what it goes on. And it essentially is like a BS detector for people in the professional services and trade, because you can just say, no, this actually isn't true. Look, people in the professional services and trade. Because you can just say, no, this actually isn't true.
Speaker 1:Look at the internet or chat GPT. I mean 25 years ago that was not possible. There is still some lag and latency in that process. But you know that real time, you know validation, I think, is going to be coming sooner, sooner rather than later, and we'll we'll be better off for it. But you know it's the same way companies are hiring now. They don't necessarily hire for the hard skills, they hire more for the soft skills, because the hard skills can be taught. It's the soft skills that are significantly you know, more intrinsic and also harder to teach.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that is. I mean coming back to my last book, to the Viking Code. It's all about that. It's about activation. You know, how can you live a vital life?
Speaker 2:We have created a society that's a new kind of existentialism that has emerged, various to 20th century, with Sartre and Camus and all the existentialist philosophy from going back to Kierkegaard and talking about that, fighting the anxiety of death. We are now in a world where we are becoming more and more undead, the philosophical zombies walking around where you know. The lights seem to be on, but there are no one home to perceive them. Right? This kind of society, so it unfolds basically also on a biological as well as a technical level. We could theoretically overwrite our consciousness, so I could be a perfect AI. My initials are AI, so there are evidence for that. But I could claim that I would be conscious, but you couldn't tell the difference, right? So there is a technological component, but I also look at the societal component, where we are just reacting to impulses. Go to YouTube and watch a video. It doesn't say these are videos of interest, it just says next video. So you're kind of being dragged through life reacting to impulses, your dose, your dopamine, your ossitory and serotonin, your endorphins, and that becomes us more and more detached from the ordinary wonders, the normality of life, the experience of life itself.
Speaker 2:So I think you know those skills, people that are motivated, leaders that can activate human beings to like to perform, to do something, because I think at the bottom you know the foundation of what it means to be a mensch, a human being, is our capability to come up with better explanation, to experience progress. We are born with kind of sort of an empty storage and we start to navigate. We are per se active, we are per se creative and we are chaired on by our parents that clap their hands every time you make the next milestone right, and this we are trained out of through our systems and our structures in society, holding on to our old, self-evident truths and trying to be something that is solid. This is who I am as a comparison to something in the making right, and I think this is very valid to get out of that undead state and to take back the agency and therefore these skills, people that can support or lead or create an environment, a culture, if you like, to activate and give people back a sense of agency, what it means to be alive. I think that is really, really important and I agree with you, everything else can be learned. So, an active, intrinsically motivated, passionate person, you know if you take away the fire, you know that's the dumbest thing you can do as a leader. They can make mistakes, but you know and this is where I also write about in the book we have had a lot of notion about failure culture, particularly in Europe and Germany.
Speaker 2:Talk about we have to have a failure culture. No, we don't. We want to have a performance culture. We want things to function, to be efficient. I don't want to have a pilot that is trained on failure culture. You know, flying into the airport of Frankfurt, right, we want it to function. So as long as the incentive for progress or for moving on or for change is higher than the pain of a loss, a short-term loss, losing a finite game, you will always get back on your feet and these type of people that's the ones you want to have in your organization. You want to activate and motivate for progress and you don't want to punish mistakes. That's obvious. But it's okay. If you lose, it's painful. If you get slapped in the face, it's painful, all right. But as long as the motivation and the intrinsically drive towards progress is higher, you will always get back up. And this skill to activate that in human beings or the people that bring it to the table, that's what I think you want to have in your organization today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I completely agree. Well, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing all of these insights. I know we only got to touch the surface level of some of them. So for people who want to learn more about you and the work that you're up, sharing all these insights I know we only got to touch the surface level of some of them so for people who want to learn more about you and you know the work that you're up to, could you let everybody know where they can find you online? And we'll make sure to include it in the in the show notes as well.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, first of all, thank you for having me on, brian. I like the conversation and, yeah, my last book is titled the Viking code. It's found under viking-codecom. It's about building a high-performance culture deeply rooted in values, about that dance of individualism and collectivism. I have a forthcoming book coming out in March 2025, titled the Singularity Paradox. It's much more technical, bridging the gap between humanity and AI, where I, together with my colleague, dr Florian Neukert, quantum physicist, do what we call sci-fi, phi, science, philosophy, and we look at creating artificial human intelligence as a necessity for the next path towards AGI or singularity. And most of my work, or references to such, is found on my website, andersinsetcom. I'm also occasionally on LinkedIn, so if you ever want to link up, I'm always happy to grow that community. So, again, thank you for having me on, brandon.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing and again for everybody who's listening, as always, this is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at brandAmorosocom or Scalistai. Thank you for listening and we will see you next time.