This podcast discussion represents two people from different parts of the globe with different backgrounds looking for common ground.
As you listen you can initially hear different perspectives and perceptions. It felt that we began to synchronize at some point and eventually arrived at the same place. It should not be surprising. There are 8 billion of us on the planet. While we all may look completely different; we are designed exactly the same.
When we move to defend our belief’s, we often sacrifice the ability to move forward and seek the learning that is necessary to raise the discussion to higher understanding. Curiosity initiates logic, reason and intuition. Defense moves us to justify and rationalize a belief or an action in the past. Forward is the future we are trying to shape. Backward is the past we cannot change.
We own our belief’s. There is no reason to defend them. Someone with different belief’s is not a threat to ours. Someone else cannot steal our belief. However, if we are curious and listen to others, we can then decide for ourselves if new information somehow may shape our change our current belief. We don’t have to like another’s perspective or their idea. We just have to listen.
As you listen to this podcast, see if you can hear how the different perspectives begin to align. We can release and discover potential in each other, or we can suppress it. We have that power.
The question is, are you willing to walk through the door?
SPEAKERS
Nippin, William Martin
Nippin 00:01
Welcome to another episode of embracing differences with me. Nippin Anand. Anand a podcast aimed at understanding and promoting transdisciplinary ways of living and thinking, meaning, assimilating different viewpoints, different subjects, different disciplines, but focused on a very simple question, how do we human beings, learn, unlearn, relearn and make decisions, and how can we tackle risks in an uncertain world?
Nippin 00:37
Hello. Welcome to this episode embracing differences with me. Nippin Anand, and I’m joined with Billy Martin. So Billy, maybe we start off with a light introduction about yourself, and then we will slip into the discussion.
William Martin 00:54
All right, sure, I’ve done a lot of things. Nippin Anand, I grew up in the electric utility industry. I’ve done a lot of the jobs there, including 20 years as a lineman, but simultaneously I became a paramedic. So while I was a paramedic and a lineman, I flew on a helicopter as a as a flight paramedic, and in the meantime, I also got a diploma in mountain medicine, which basically means I learning medicine in austere environments. So I’ve been to Everest Space Camp, climbed Kilimanjaro this past February, I was at Mount Kenya in Africa for the third time. And then when I retired, I went to nursing school and flew for another six years as a nurse, registered nurse, paramedic. And interestingly enough, in that short time, I also ran a pacemaker clinic, was a cardiology nurse per diem home infusion nurse and an orthopedic nurse. So somehow, I’ve done all of these different things, but in all of them, especially in medicine and in our industry, you run across these incidents or near misses or accidents, if you want to call them, that that are just it’s awful to see the tail end of them, the result of what happens. Not only there’s a there’s a ripple effect to what happens to the family and to the children and all these family members after somebody gets hurt. And I couldn’t help, I can’t help but see that every incident has a whole list of things that occur in front of it that are totally visible but invisible at the time. And that’s, that’s kind of what I that’s, that’s, that’s where I am, that’s what brought me here to talk to you. And
Nippin 02:36
I think that’s a really interesting paradox or dialectic to explore that things are both visible and invisible at the same time. So Billy, maybe talk a little bit more about this. Let’s see where this goes.
William Martin 02:53
So this, this idea that so so right now, we seem to be obsessed with stopping things from ever happening again. Nippin Anand, you know, I mean, 911 in the USA, when that happened, the twin towers came down. That was an awful thing and and what we’ve decided then we had layers and layers of protection to stop that thing from ever happening again. You know, in in the meantime, we there’s a war in Iraq, and there’s all kinds of other things occurring. And then now, in order to fly, we’ve got Homeland Security, and I have to take off my belt and my shoes. But when I look at the odds, the odds of being killed by by a foreign terrorist before 911 was about 50 million to one, and it’s still about 50 million to one. So my started looking at this. So are we spending all of our energy trying to prevent that thing from happening again, rather than changing the timeline and having looking what happened? What could we what small thing could we change so it never happens at all, and when it doesn’t happen at all, we won’t know it. So, so let’s, let’s, let’s stretch that a little further so you’re familiar with if I’ve heard this, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Have you heard that? Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. So, so I like that, because we really should measure and do lessons learned from all these incidents and try to figure out how not to let that happen again. But if you and I are working together and you raise a concern to me, and I say, well, that’s interesting. I didn’t think of that. And what do you think we should do to mitigate that? And we talk about it, and then that thing never happens, because we had that conversation. How do you measure or manage that? And then so so my whole my focus is kind of on the other end. We, I don’t think we need to change anything we’re doing. We can’t, because we we don’t know. We don’t really have good data to know how many injuries were stopping as a result of investigating and all that. But I think we can use the word and here, and we could spend a little more time. In front creating the environment that allows to raise concerns in a larger pool of predictions. That’s the word prediction that we talked about earlier. I know you’re I don’t think you’re fond of the language of prediction, but that’s, this might be
Nippin 05:15
a good discussion, absolutely. And I think that’s a great discussion. And I don’t think the concept is new, Billy, because there is a lot of frustration in the Risk and Safety world that all the good work that is done is never acknowledged, because we are so focused on on things going bad and pear shaped and whatnot. So is that what was what you’re saying? Is that, is it any different from from this discourse.
William Martin 05:43
So there’s, I have a I have a couple couple things to talk to that, nippin Anand, so we’ve, we are really focused in industries on trying to prevent serious incidents from happening. And that’s really good and, and you’re 100% right, we do really good work, and we don’t get credit for things that don’t happen. There’s no parties for that, right? You know, it’s almost no no good deed goes unpunished, because you don’t ever get credit for the things that don’t happen. You just get beat up for the things that happen. But on the same sense, how much do you think the environment plays a factor in making things safe? For example, culture, or I don’t like the word culture, we use it too often, but, but we when we create an environment at work that’s toxic, for example, or that’s command and control, as opposed to environment of team and coach and team. Do you think one makes it safer than another? That’s my question.
Nippin 06:42
Now, this is an interesting thing, because there are no, there are no guarantees in life that once you have invested in in in making a making a better culture, that you will not have accidents and you but, but, but, yes, there is a lot of there’s a lot of science to suggest that the results are more or less positive. I would say Billy, and I was actually intrigued by one thing you said that, which is that let’s not talk about culture. Let’s stick to the word environment. And I wonder why you would say that? Why should we why should we not use the word culture? What’s wrong with it?
William Martin 07:21
Well, I don’t think it’s definable. I think that everybody, every company, seems to have a safety culture, but I don’t know what that is. I mean, I might I understand trying to grow a culture of safety, but to define a safety culture, it might be different in your definition than mine.
Nippin 07:43
This is the other interesting things. So, so, yeah, sorry, yeah, please go ahead.
William Martin 07:49
Well, well, no, I you can interrupt me anytime I’m this is I just appreciate this discussion, because I think this is a discussion we have to have more of so. So if you look at the biology of us, there are things that enhance our potential and things that suppress it. Would you agree
Nippin 08:07
absolutely
William Martin 08:10
Nippin 11:54
It is that’s a really good point, and maybe there’s another way of looking at it, Billy, let’s just talk about the assumptions that we are making so far. I think, from what I understand from the discussion so far, is that people would know what’s going on in their organizations, but they just don’t feel safe to to express their their their concerns or ideas. Am I right? Is that? Is that a fair assumption?
William Martin 12:24
Yeah, so not feeling safe to speak up is different than getting connected. Yes,
Nippin 12:29
yeah. So, but So my problem with this whole narrative around speaking up and to an extent, psychological safety, is that somehow we are assuming that people are aware of the concerns, and you know when you and this is why I was saying that it is so important to take the discussion into culture and not environment. Because what happens when you look at culture is that now you talked about the idea of, let’s say, defining culture. My starting point is you cannot define culture like you, cannot define love like you cannot define truth that you cannot like you cannot define creativity, like you, cannot define imagination. The trouble is that these are things that are felt much before they can be realized much before Absolutely. So, absolutely so. So you know for sure that your wife loves you, or you love your wife when the love is there, when it’s gone, you know the moment it’s gone. You can feel it, but you cannot put your fingers on it. You cannot prove it through a certificate that your wife loves you, a marriage certificate, or whatever you want to call it. So we bring it back to culture. Now, a lot of culture, or almost all of culture is lived in the unconscious space, totally in the unconscious. So in order to understand culture, we have to feel the culture. We have to live the culture. And that applies as much as understanding human culture as it applies to other creatures, even plants and animals have a culture. And so the early anthropologist, even now, a lot of anthropology, which is a study of culture, is actually devoted to what we call field work. Field work is where you go and live and eat and dance and even even shit with people whose culture you want to understand and become part of their culture. So it’s through participatory observations, through those through those conversations, that as an anthropologist, you learn to distance yourself from the familiar and make the familiar strange, and so you can experience the culture. So it’s very, very important to understand what is culture? Now, the culture, all of culture, is lived in the unconscious. Which is, what is it that a group of people share unconsciously between them? This could be metaphors. That could be language. This could be behaviors. This could be slogans, symbols, stories that they share about success and failure and so on. Now, bringing it back to the idea that because all of life is lived in the unconscious. Most of life is lived in the unconscious. How do we now situate this whole idea of of articulating our concerns to people? You know, when we have a concern in an organization or as a community or a society, how do we raise those concerns? The trouble is that most of the times, we are not even aware of those concerns because they are in the unconscious. They are they. You can only articulate them when you start to get in touch with your feelings and emotions. So we are, we are emotional beings. We are, we are, we are. We are very and actually, when you read some of the the the literature or the science around feelings, almost all of culture came from our feelings. And feelings is something which is very, very unique to to primates and to creatures who are more sophisticated, like black human beings. So when we talk about feelings, feelings are a representation of emotions, and the difference between emotions and feelings is that your face might turn red when you see me because you don’t like me, and that’s your emotions. That your bodily emotions. You cannot hide that from me, but how you articulate it, how you express it, will be very subjective. You can hide it from me. You can use certain words that, that would, that would, that would have a very subjective meaning for you, which would be so different from mine. And this is precisely the idea of feelings that when we felt something went wrong, when we felt created, threatened, threatened, or we felt that there was an opportunity. As as we progressed through our human development, we started to to become a cultural species. You know, we started because there was rain and we could not explain it, and we felt threatened, or there was fire, or somebody, somebody who was very close to us, died and and we felt threatened, and we felt we felt something, the word here is the key word here is felt. And so we came up with all sort of rituals and symbols and myths and beliefs that started to shape our cultural being, and that is precisely the origin of all gestures, which is pre verbal language and language. Now when we come back to the idea of sharing our concerns, raising our concerns, it is so important that we situate that within the biological context, which is that we are unconscious being. We are mostly unconscious of ourselves. And people struggle to articulate themselves. In your words. People struggle to even knowing that there is what the other person is saying could be a dangerous thing. It’s just something we need to do something about. People struggle because nobody listens and nobody listens, and so those feelings remain within us, and sometimes those feelings are suppressed back into emotions. So the the progression of emotions to feelings to knowledge and into memory happens only through social interactions, through conversations, when, when we feel that we are it’s okay to express ourselves and hence and from there on, once we develop a sophisticated sense of you know, what is it that we the language and the memory and what lies ahead and our past experiences, we are better able to predict What lies ahead in your words, or anticipate in my words. So that’s something I wanted to just put it on the table.
William Martin 18:27
So I love that. So I love that you brought up the unconscious because so I spent quite a bit of time with John barge out of Yale and Gary Latham out of Canada. John barge wrote the book before you know it, the unconscious reasons we do what we do. And Gary Latham wrote a bunch of books on conscious goal setting. And what happened was, I was doing these mental rehearsals with crews to subconsciously prime them to be more aware of an incident. So for example, you and I are working together. We’re on a four man crew, and I would say, let’s just see if we’re mentally prepared for this. You two people are in a bucket truck, because I work in the electric utility industry, two people on the ground and nippin. You hear an arc. You look over, I’m I’m screaming. I’m unconscious in the bottom of my bucket. Go and I just stand back. And then I run the simulation. It’s just, it’s just a mental simulation. And they have to figure out who’s going to call 911, how are we going to get the guy down? Where’s the AED? And they run through this whole process. So what that does is create a circuit in your mind that that thing is possible. So let’s go back to your story about the unconscious. When, when we realize something’s possible, our unconscious, our unconscious selves, goes to work on it. Right? You’ve read Daniel Kahneman probably Thinking Fast and Slow and and we can’t not think of something. So if, if I say, don’t think of a white bear. You know, that’s one of his things. You laugh, because you have to think of a white bear, right? So what I’ve noticed is, when I get these, these workers, I say, look at the end of. The job. Brief, just stand in a circle, share your just re, identify your role, which is really good, because having run crews before, it’s three way communication to really make sure the person understands what you told them. Because what happened someone would go to work and say, is that what I told you say, Well, that’s what I thought. I think you said, you know, but, or I think I thought you said, but when you when you restate your role, that confirms everybody’s on the same page, then when you say a concern, that concern becomes a possibility if he doesn’t raise the concern. And in that group, what? What’s what? I’m really fascinated. For example, I did it with a group of tree tree tree trimmers recently, and there was a three wire secondary. One of the wire had grown into a tree, and they had to cut it out. And they’re like, Well, you know, I’m a little concerned, because I’ve had the insulation where often that thing blow up in my face when I’m trying to cut it. The other guy says, Yeah, you know what else? He said, it’s only one phase when we cut that that’s going to cross phase them, because it’s going to fall so it’s like, when I we when I say to you, in our country, we have Kentucky Fried Chicken, and if I say finger licking, you’ll see the word good and a chicken. But that that isn’t something you write down as a concern, that’s something that rises up as a concern. So when we share concerns in a group, we’ve now, we create an interaction that creates an unconscious circuit for that thing, right? When, when you start thinking, so, so this is, uh, I call it a, you know, we can call it whatever word we want, because the words we use are a social construct, also, right, but, but 8 billion people experience life very similarly. Would you agree? I mean, we have different experiences, but the experience of life is pretty much, we’re all born, we all die. It doesn’t matter what color, religion, race, creed, what. It doesn’t matter if, if, in my world, if I picked you up on my helicopter, you had a broken leg. It didn’t matter what gender you were. None of that matters. It hurts the same. So, so this is kind of where I’m going with this, and it’s a little, we might get a little bit off on the edge here, nippin, but I’m gonna do this with you. Can you predict your future?
Nippin 22:09
I actually, when you sent that message to me, I You got me thinking. My answer to that is, no, I cannot. My wife is going to pick my daughter from the school in the next half an hour, and I don’t know whether she will come back home or not. All life is live as if we will leave home and we will come back. So that’s my answer to your question. It’s in the ads, all
William Martin 22:36
right. And what you just what you just described, is the future, not your future. So the future we are not in control of, because we are only so my question is this, are, and I might have written to this, but I’m going to do it anyway. Are we in the present moment right now? You’re you’re in England, and I’m in the US, and it’s two different times, right? But we’re in the present moment, and we, I would believe that 8 billion people have different experiences by the moment, but the moment is the same. Would you agree? Right? And then this right earlier, before, before we started, was the past, and after we complete, will be the future, right? But we aren’t there. We are here in the present. So this is, this is, I’m just trying to understand how 8 billion people experience the world, and if we are experience, everybody’s experiencing life in the moment, isn’t every decision a prediction into the future, because every decision is about the future. We don’t move backwards, we move forwards. And when we spend a lot of time looking in the rear view mirror, we crash. Because that’s why the mirror, the windshield is bigger than the rearview mirror. So, so why? Why that’s important to me is if we don’t think that we have control over our next decision, we’re wrong. Because our brain does exactly everything we tell it. It’s designed to do everything we tell it, and not only that, our subconscious is designed or unconscious or however. You know more about this than I do, but Andre viscontis wrote the book brain myths exploded, and she said, behind the veil of our consciousness, our body budget, our body processes 11 million bits of information a second, and our conscious only 40 or 50 a second. So when that thing comes to our consciousness without without our permission. It comes from there, right? And that thing. So, for example, you just went on quite a tour, I believe, didn’t you? I did you just feel like all over the place? Yes. And did you plan? Did you plan way ahead? For that
Nippin 24:39
was my life. My life is not so structured and planned. I just go with the flow. Yes,
William Martin 24:44
that’s awesome. So you decided to go and you went. Everything we decide happens. That’s kind of what I’m trying to get to. So, so how do we raise that? So when we’re staying in circle and I say something that raises something in your thought. Right out of your subconscious that comes to you without your permission, it changes an outcome. So if we create an we can call it culture, but if we create an environment where and psychological safety is maybe, I think it’s, it’s just my own opinion, it is one small piece of a huge puzzle, right? I i We can call it psychological safety. All I know is, if we’re operating as a team and synchronized, we operate at a higher cognitive level than we do if we’re not synchronized. It happens with an orchestra, with a football team, with a Navy SEAL team.
Nippin 25:37
So I think, sorry, I’ll let you finish. No,
William Martin 25:41
well, so the question, the question, I don’t hear a lot of discussion about improving that connection to synchronize, and then starting to focus on recognizing disruptions, like, if you’re my boss and you come in, you’re mad and you’re yelling, you just release the wrong chemicals in my team. And I actually had a team do a safety stop after I taught them, they said we, there was we. We call us called all stop to allow us to to resync because we are in a heated discussion about management, and we took a pause to resync so we could focus on the task at hand. So tell me, nippin Anand, what event didn’t happen because they did that we won’t ever know.
Nippin 26:29
No, Billy, I think you as I’m listening to you, I’m coming to understand where you where, what’s what is driving your thought process and correct me if I’m wrong I think. And you use the words Synchron, synchronicity. You didn’t say synchronicity, synchronize. Yes, you use the word synchronize a lot. So first of all, we have to you. You talked about Daniel kahneman’s kind of work, and I would like you to take to another journey from this point, I’d like you to just forget Daniel kahneman’s work, which is still very brain centric, very brain centric, and take you into another space, which is that the brain is not the mind. Your body. Entire body is a mind and kahneman’s work. You know, Kahneman, being an economist and a hedonic psychologist, does not ever get to that level of understanding. So we are embodied beings. We are we have an embodied mind, like every other creature, like a bee that comes in, a bumble bee enters into your house and struggles to kind of get out of the space, and tries to find a window or a space, and off it goes out that sophisticated level of mind you cannot replicate it even with the Most Powerful drones in the world, because the drone clearly separates the brain from the body, the computer microchip from the body of the drone. And a lot of discussion around human brain is centered around the idea of human brain as as the metaphor of the brain is understood as a control tower for the body, which is fundamentally flawed, completely flawed. Every part of your body has its own mind, and your brain is not a control tower. Your brain is basically a warehouse that coordinates between those different minds. But your whole body is very intelligent, extremely intelligent. And what you talk about the idea of synchronism is basically that, you know, there are to just for the sake of simplifying things, we operate from three levels of being, or three levels of mind, or three levels of thinking, the brain, the heart and the gut, right? So it’s the conscious and the unconscious mind, the conscious, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, which sits in the gut, which is your culture. When they work together, you are the most sophisticated person on this planet. You can predict, you can anticipate everything that lies ahead. The trouble is, in the Western world, we deny the idea of the embodied mind. We deny the idea of the personal, the collective unconscious, and we treat human body, the anatomy of the body, as brain centric, rational being so and the moment you start to experience the embodied mind. Now, whether you take a theological perspective to it, or you take a biological perspective to it, or neurosciences, it still comes to the same thing that the more you live as an embodied person, as a full person, the more you become better at understanding what lies ahead, whether you call it prediction or anticipation. Let’s not get into that discussion. But I think the key but. See the key to risk intelligence to the key to understanding yourself and the other person, is living as a full person. I think that’s the key to it. And I talk about it. I saw it in my book,
William Martin 30:13
so I’m going to love your book. So so I don’t know if you’ve read it. Annie M Paul, the extended mind. Really good book. She refers to to Andy Clark’s work. Have you read Andy Clark from Sussex? I have the experience. So, so, so Andy did a paper in 1997 Where does, where does the mind stop in the world begin? And and, I think they talked a little bit about kids in elementary school had him having them sit on their hands while they do math. And they couldn’t do math, because when they start moving their arms and hands around their mind goes into their hands. And then the standing joke is they learned for sure that your mind goes wherever your attention is in 2007 because that was the invention of the iPhone. And now we know of your your iPhone reduces cognitive load because you store some of your mind in your iPhone. And we know that when you lose your iPhone, you lose your mind because you can’t find your iPhone. It’s interesting
Nippin 31:13
you say your iPhone and not the iPhone.
William Martin 31:17
Yeah, so, so, so like your our biological I really like what you’re talking about the so this whole thing, I asked a physicist recently, we had the Eclipse here in the US, and I ended up, a friend of mine invited two friends, and one was an astrophysicist. The other taught, was a physicist that taught at a university. And when I asked him, was this question, and maybe you’ve heard this before, but I said, I’ve been waiting to talk to a physicist, because now that we know about quantum physics in this quantum entanglement, how everything’s vibrational, everything’s at a frequency. I said, Does that prove the 100th monkey theory to be true? Are you familiar with the 100th monkey? No,
Nippin 31:56
I’m not, but I love to hear from you. I have something to say, but yeah, please. I’d love to hear that
William Martin 32:01
story. So in 1950s they were doing a study of, I’ll paraphrase this, and to make it quick, they did a study of macaque monkeys on an island. And they really loved sweet potatoes. And they would dig them out of the sand and eat the sweet potatoes, and then you could see them spitting the sand out of their mouth. One of this macaque monkeys learned that he could put it in the stream, wash the wash it. And then the rest of the community learned to wash their their sweet potatoes somewhere on another island where they were studying these other monkeys. They started simultaneously washing their, their their their fruit before they ate it. And the question is, how did that information travel for and since then, the researchers, back in the this was in the 50s, believed that a monkey swam and taught them, but quantum entanglement might disagree with that, that that when we reach a critical mass, that information travels much like Are you familiar with quorum sensing bacteria? Have you ever heard of that? No,
Nippin 32:59
no, but I have another explanation for it. But please, please keep keep going. Yes. So
William Martin 33:04
quorum sensing bacteria. There’s certain bacteria in your that get in your gut that are dangerous, but they they don’t release their toxin until they reach critical mass, and then they all release their toxin. They they sense a quorum, a certain population, then they all release their toxin at the same moment, and I don’t know if they call each other up on this. Other up on the cell phone or text each other. I’m not sure how they do that, but that’s kind of a model for the for this whole idea of the 100th monkey, and, and, and are we on a vibrational if we’re on the same vibrational plane, how did fire travel around the world when somebody learned did we send a committee of people to teach people fire, or did it just happen? I don’t know the answer,
Nippin 33:41
and this is a fascinating thing, because we come from different perspectives, but we reach the same conclusion. So not we, but somebody else has worked it out for us. We’re just exchanging ideas here. But you know, if you read the work of Carl Jung, for example, he talks about the idea of collective unconscious, which we have already kind of discussed slightly, and the idea is that, how is it possible that so many different cultures, across geographies and across times, have come up with the same symbols, exactly the same symbols. Let me show you one. I
Nippin 34:23
This is the Indian Goddess Kali, right? And you can see the goddess standing right on this statue, on this, on this, on this devil, right? Yeah, this is Saint Michael. This Saint Michael. And exactly the same thing. Exactly the same thing, yeah. And my point is this. My point is this, and the central message remains the same, that the devil is not outside, the devil is within us, and the devil is what we call ego, unless you’re willing to. Crush this ego, there is no way you can learn. And how can it be possible that these two cultures that have never met in time and space never share the common symbols? And Jung would call it collective unconscious. Same thing goes for mandalas and many other cultural symbols and across time, across geographies. How do you explain these things and the origin of all this, both in neuroscience as well as in depth psychology, is the same, which is the unconscious, which is the dreams, which is the source of all imagination. All imagination comes from dreams. And it’s so fascinating. Today we teach leadership courses, which is basically how to become better managers, and there is no real mention of dreams and imagination. And so we talk about visionary leaders, but we never talk about the unconscious, the dreams and what motivates people. It’s fascinating. But these are so important things, such important things to discuss when it comes to understanding the source of all human decision making, and by default, the discussion for this topic, how do you know what lies ahead if you don’t know where you came from
William Martin 36:20
that? So that that’s true. I guess what I’m looking at, I think we are, we’re talking about the same things. And maybe I’m confusing environment and culture as being similar, and they’re not, but, but when what I’m witnessing is if I can remove, if I can get people to interact in a, in a, in a way. So I’ll give you an example. I just taught a workshop, and I had everybody go around in a circle. There’s only a small workshop, 16 people, and I had them all identify, you know, tell us your name and what you do. And they did and I said, Can we do that one more time? They said, Sure. I said, this time I’d like you to tell me your first name and something you are. And then it completely changed the dynamic in the room, because now they’re, they’re looking up to the left and the right, trying to think, what, what do you mean something I am? And I said, Well, you guys are a lot of things. I just want to know what rises to the top. And this person who said that what his job was now says, Well, I’m a father of eight. Next person says, Well, I’m a guitarist, and it goes around the room. And they all started, Momma, mom, and it goes around the room. And now everybody knows everybody to a deeper level. And to me, the collective unconscious, as Carl Jung would talk about, we now know each other at a deeper, sub, deep, unconscious level. And when I’m working with you, you’re not just another worker. You’re a mom of you’re a dad of eight of eight children, or you’re, you’re you’re working with your fingers and you’re a guitarist, you know what I mean? And the associative availability to identify risk may have something to do with our ability to collectively, in my opinion, collectively, connect with each other at a deeper level. And that’s that’s kind of I’m not trying to make it. I don’t believe at all that we are our conscious selves. I mean, I tell people that you are not your emotion, your emotions a biological response. You are not the voice in your head. You are the one that’s aware of the voice of your head. You’re the you’re the observer, as I believe Buddhists would say, so. So in Viktor frankl’s words, that space between stimulus and response. If I can create that space, I have time to respond as me, not as my biology, right? If I make you angry and I respond and I respond, that’s not me, that’s and I it kind of lets people off the hook that that wasn’t you, that was your biology. And now you’re feeling a little guilty, and you’re saying in your head, gee, I should head, gee, I shouldn’t have said that, but that’s and they say, Well, what do you mean? I’m not the voice in my head. And I said, Well, you know, next time you’re driving down the road in deep, conscious thought, and you’re find yourself two miles past your exit, the one who is driving, the one who is aware you were driving, is who that is. So if we can learn Mel Robbins says the five second rule. She’s got some TED Talks. I really like that too. Unhack your biology and be you, not your biology. And that talks to ego,
Nippin 39:12
yes. And there’s another way of looking at it, Billy, and this could be a really nice way to close this wonderful discussion with you see, the thing is that there is nature out there, and within the nature, there are predators and there are praise, right? The Nature doesn’t give a hoot to how we think about nature. The nature works with its own rules, with its own principles, with its own randomness, with its own chaos, right? And then came the human beings much, much later in this, in the history of evolution, and wanted to give some sort of meaning to this, you know, to this randomness. So the Greeks gave one meaning, which is, you know, create order out of chaos. The Christians gave another meaning, which is, follow the word of the. God and Indians gave another meaning, which is, you know, Self Realization. And it’s all about it’s all about realizing your full potential through your life, which is from atman to ego, right? And it’s a cyclical way of living. Now, who knows what happens after death? Who knows? Nobody knows that, but we all have our own myths. We all have our own myths to give some sort of meaning to the meaningless, some sort of form to the formless. And this is precisely what you call culture that what is it that you believe in at the very deepest level? But as you go little deeper into it, you’ll realize that all stories of culture are centered around the idea of fallibility and mortality, that because we know that we are mortal beings. So what’s what’s unique about consciousness is that one, you know you’re going to die one day two, it is very, very disturbing to live with that thought. And so we create the idea of culture. Every culture gives some sort of meaning to this, to this randomness. And I think the sooner we come to realize that at the end of it, it’s your myth and it’s my myth, and live comfortably with that idea that no matter what, it’s not so the trouble today is that that my myth is better than yours, the Christian myth is better than the Hindu myth, and the vice versa. The moment we start to realize that a lot of life is lived in the unconscious, and a lot of us are just struggling to give some sort of meaning, through narratives, through language, through experiences, to this, to this meaningless, random world, I think we will start to respect each other a lot more. I think we are so busy fighting with each other that mine is better than yours, and we learn nothing from our differences. In fact, when we go a little bit deeper, there are not many differences. Actually, it’s just myths that give meaning to our lives.
William Martin 42:02
I you know, I love that, and I really appreciate this opportunity. Nippin you so. So what you’re talking about is my is where I am. I’m when we were born, we born. We live a life and we die and we die. Never we fall asleep, never to wake up. But we’re born, we wake up and having never been asleep, I’m not aware of anything before waking up. I’m not going to probably, if I’m not aware of what I will know after I die. So I’d like to tell people I’m either all religions or none. I’m not really sure I I spend a lot of time now focusing on the only thing I have control over is my decision now, and that decision is going to change what my future timeline so, so I was speaking with a very religious person on a plane coming home from Orlando, and he was so what religion I said? I said, I’m not really sure. I said, I’m I’m either all or none. I’ve been several and I said, But he says, Well, how can that be? And I said, Well, let’s look. I said, are you aware of the Do you know the pilot? He said, Well, no. I said, Do you know his name? He said, No. I said, Do you know have you seen his credentials? He said, No. I said, well, that’s kind of how I live my life. I said, I don’t know him either, and I’m okay with it. So I don’t care who’s flying the airplane, and evidently, neither do you. What do you? What’s that? Yes. And I said, and I’m, I’m okay with whoever’s running the universe. I have no control over that. And honestly, in our country, politics doesn’t bother me either, because I get to vote every four years. That’s 10 votes in 40 years, I have absolutely no control over what’s going on in that circus. All I can do is vote so I don’t allow my energy to go in places that I have no control. And if I can create, if I can help other people learn this in a work relationship. I’m thinking we could know each other at a deeper level. It doesn’t matter. I often say this, maybe I could end with this. A Muslim, a Jew, a buds and a Catholic can build a house together with the same pile of tools, because the pile of tools in the house live in physical reality, and they don’t really care what we think we are. We are allowed to, like you mentioned, to have any belief we want, but the objective is what we want to work for it. We don’t have to impress my belief on anyone else. We just have to meet the objective. And I think you said it better than I did.
Nippin 44:15
But and it’s so important, Billy, that as we enter into this house, or we start to build this house with all the tools at our disposal, we never become arrogant that my way of looking at these tools and assembling them is any better than anyone else, just because I have access to science or scientific information, because science has its own myths, just like every other religion,
William Martin 44:43
absolutely, absolutely. So think we’ve gone full circle here. I so I think the answer is us. That’s what I and I’m a little worried about the next shiny idea that comes up, and we all move to it. We focus all our attention on it. And then in my country, the serious injuries and fatalities in my industry, in the electrical industry, haven’t changed in 12 years. No, so it’s been the same for 12 years. So we need to just, I think, I yeah, I’m sorry, we
Nippin 45:14
go ahead. No, no, no, you go first. You go first.
William Martin 45:17
I just, I mean, this, this, this kind of represents that whole idea. And have been you in the UK with maybe different ideas than I have in the US. Can have just a nice discussion. We don’t have to agree. But, and I tell people, as soon as we move to defense, we justify and rationalize, and that’s about something in the past, the past we can’t change. But if I’m curious, you know you don’t, I don’t. I don’t know you very well, but I’m just, I’m curious and interested why you might think something I don’t. I It doesn’t detract from anything I believe. To listen to you. And that’s, that’s what I’m trying to sell. I think, what do you think? Oh, absolutely,
Nippin 45:55
I saw so that the discussion started off with the idea that, can we predict the future on can we predict what happens next? I don’t know about prediction, but you know, I sincerely believe in what you touched upon, which is that if we start to realize ourselves better, if we start to become come in touch with our our unconscious. I think the unconscious knows it all. It knows it all. We just live such a brain centric life that even when the unconscious warns us, we just we just disregard everything. Because we’re so seduced by science and data and everything else in the in the outside world, that we we deny the inner world. And I think there is a lot of potential. And you use the word potential, there’s an immense potential in the inner world. It’s just a matter of getting in touch with it. Yes, and I think the Eastern so how do we done a great job in this space? Yes,
William Martin 46:53
yeah. I agree. There was a it was a I watched a debate between academic Budds and a physicist, and it was really well done. And the physicists have written a book. And the academic Buddhist was saying, so, you know a lot about the universe, and you’re looking for intelligent life out there. And he said, Yes. I said, Well, I think you missed it. And they said, Where? Why? He says it’s in the 5000 years of meditation in Asia, and none of it is in your textbook. Yeah. So I really appreciate this.
Nippin 47:26
I’m increasingly becoming convinced that both Buddhism and Hinduism hold something very profound as to how we should live our lives. And I think the commonality between Hinduism and Buddhism, and a stark contrast with the archetype of the West is that everything in Buddhism, Hinduism, is about peace and harmony with the nature, living with the nature, whereas the way we live life in the West is everything is against the nature. And I think that’s something fundamentally wrong here in the way capitalism, which is the archetype of the West, world, survives degradation of human skills and degradation of environment, and both go against the principles of nature.
William Martin 48:07
Absolutely, I this morning. I row every morning. I live on a lake, and I do about a 10k on one of those long, skinny skull rowing skulls. And when I was a coach, I had once told me this, she said, You’ll never be as efficient as the boat. The boat is designed with the most efficiency, and anything, any movement you make against the direction of travel, will slow down the boat. And I think that was a metaphor for life. We can go kicking and screaming and fighting and pushing, or we can move with it. And I think when we learn to move with it, we move smoother, faster and at higher levels. And I think that’s that, I think, is the environment I’m looking for to make, make work safer, is instead of fighting each other, let’s move with each other,
Nippin 48:51
and most and more respect for nature. Because, you know, we can never be more arrogant. We can never be so full of ourselves. We have to respect the nature because, and then, in the words of Kierkegaard, I was just showing it a book, you have to submit yourself to the unknown, which is the nature. I think it’s a very important thing. And we consistently miss this out. We become so arrogant because we have access to data and science and objective knowledge. None of this works against the mysteries of the nature. I think becoming respectful about the mysteries and the mystical is very important to live a fulfilling life. Certain things can never be understood at the rational level. Never.
William Martin 49:37
Yeah, I believe what you’re describing is the world I want my grandchildren to live in. You know, the you’re creating the world that, and I don’t think any parent would argue with that, a world where we will, we collectively work together to a better good instead of and I’m not gonna, I’m not political either, but it’s, it really disturbs me at this time of. Uh, of our, of our existence, that we think the wisest solution is a bomb. I just don’t understand that. I don’t know. I just don’t understand how that it could be any part of any intellectual solution is to blow something up. I But, but I have no control over that either, different, so I try to let it go. But Billy,
Nippin 50:19
yeah, we have been talking about it consistently throughout. And I think the problem is that it is hatred is built on the idea that it is it is so easy to create differences, it is so difficult to understand the source of those differences. And I think that’s where love begins. It is so important to understand the source of differences, because when you start to delve deeper into cultural differences, there aren’t many. There are not many. When you start to understand that all that we are doing is giving meaning to the meaningless, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Christian meaning or a Hindu meaning, or a Buddhist meaning, or a Greek or a Roman meaning. At the end of the day, it’s a myth, and science is so busy debunking myths when it should be surfacing those myths and trying to understand the commonalities, and we’re not good at it, yeah,
William Martin 51:12
now, but all we can do is try, right? I really appreciate you coming across the water to talk to me. This has been awesome.
Nippin 51:20
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