The Imagining
The gift of creators and the call to get off the conveyorbelt: A Conversation with Amul Pandya
Ever think about how creativity, mental health, and our human spirit are connected? Let's explore that together! We'll talk about personal stories, like the joy of being a parent and how tough times can actually make us stronger.
We'll also dive into how our minds work and how the way we think can shape our view of the world. I'll share a story from my job, dealing with tricky situations where money and personal values clashed. And we'll talk about the human side of big business, like layoffs and how people bounce back from tough times.
Lastly, we'll celebrate imagination and how it affects our world. From cool fiction stories to why property rights matter, we'll untangle the link between creativity and success. Join Amul and me for a real and interesting talk where personal stories mix with big ideas. It's a conversation where what's personal becomes something we all can relate to.
Ever think about how creativity, mental health, and our human spirit are connected? Let's explore that together! We'll talk about personal stories, like the joy of being a parent and how tough times can actually make us stronger.
We'll also dive into how our minds work and how the way we think can shape our view of the world. I'll share a story from my job, dealing with tricky situations where money and personal values clashed. And we'll talk about the human side of big business, like layoffs and how people bounce back from tough times.
Lastly, we'll celebrate imagination and how it affects our world. From cool fiction stories to why property rights matter, we'll untangle the link between creativity and success. Join Amul and me for a real and interesting talk where personal stories mix with big ideas. It's a conversation where what's personal becomes something we all can relate to.
Hey, I'm Matt. Welcome to my podcast, the Imaginin a time to explore the imagination, creativity and mental health. All of the conversations I'm having form part of the research for my new book. I hope that you have the opportunity during this time to discover something new about yourself, Mate. Welcome to the Imaginin. Bam bam, bam bam. Sam, thanks for having me. It's really going to be an interesting conversation on the basis that I produce your podcast, which gets released on Monday, the 15th, and by the time this is live, you could be, you know, one or two episodes deep into podcast and territory.
Speaker 1:I could probably as unfamous as I am now. Yeah, exactly yeah. My influence will know no bounds after just one or two weeks and we met in the place that we're recording this and we've been friends, working partners, getting on par for a year now I would have thought, yeah, Wow.
Speaker 2:And you've become a dad. I've become a dad. I think I became a dad for the second time and you know process, yeah, so time has flown, I've all began in Gaza the world has changed.
Speaker 1:We've seen Christmas come and go. We've yeah, lots of things have happened in that time.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I think a lot of people are. I mean, what is it? We're January the 11th, haven't we? So a lot of people are kind of well, I know it's been for myself still trying to cling on to that first week of January, kind of intention to reset and reorientate goals, yeah, and just get on it again. But it's starting to fade a bit. I'd say that impetus is kind of fading into kind of usual blur, just blur.
Speaker 1:Do you feel like you have gained anything from the first week of January? Do you feel like there's anything that's sticking?
Speaker 2:Yes, I feel, and I know, I know that this is the January, first half of January me talking. So you know, when the April me watches back, of course he's going to say that because it's the first half of January. So he's, yeah, but and you know, he said the same thing the last 17 January. So, yeah, but I'm a big believer in compounding and I do feel that kind of persistence and small, small kind of steady, repeated attempts do add up, yeah, and you get this kind of J curve or snowballing kind of and eventually you're going to see the big impact of that.
Speaker 1:Have you seen a big impact already of the compounding effect, or you still waiting for that to return?
Speaker 2:I think it's a good question because you know you will, I certainly still feel like I'm at the bottom of the J curve Right, or I'm still nowhere near that. That Okay, yeah, and we're at this kind of flat line and it's kind of forever be flat line. The challenge is kind of, if there is ever this sort of you know, bed of laurels, let's say, that presents themselves, how do you maintain that mindset?
Speaker 1:Yeah, renewal, and especially if you know there's no guarantee that the J curve will begin to exponentially kind of go up. There's a possibility, and I don't hope this for anyone's future or yours as a friend, but you have to find them, value systems and the practices that stick with you, regardless of whether the J curves begins to move or not. What are they? Yeah, for you.
Speaker 2:No, well it's. Yeah, the journey is. The reward is, as many you know, from Steve Jobs to kind of. You know you find it in most major religions. Yeah, you know, particularly, I know, in the Hindu religion. You know it's in the. It's written, you know you don't, you don't deserve the fruits of your labor. You deserve the labor Right and and the moment you and this is now being born out scientifically, apparently. You know, if you follow people like Andrew Hoobamon, who are, you know, neuroscientists at the front line, as you know things. You know things like dopamine reward systems, it's the best in class.
Speaker 2:Practitioners are the ones that go, you know, win the trophy. The next day they're back on the training court, you know. They're not the ones kind of partying for months and months. They're kind of. To them the training is the high, almost the high line is the yeah, that's where you get the reward.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the prizes are kind of you know, just totally coincidental, and if you can do that, I think you know success doesn't get to your head, and then you know, which is why. You know, you see this. On the flip side, lottery winners yeah, you know, will have serious mental health issues.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because they've reached the top of the J curve they can't live in the J curve out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they can't be exactly, they don't know, they've never had the yet to, they haven't had the journey exactly what you said. So what do you do with all this?
Speaker 1:And it's just pure reward, yeah it is one of the things I'm writing about and it's on the basis of one of the more interesting experiences of my life. So I once had a lecture in a morgue and we were studying a module on my degree in postural care and the general premise was you think that you are good at this whole youth work, counseling, know what to say, even like you're good on your theology and you think you're good at it, do you still think you're good at it when you're standing next to someone who's just lost a loved one? Do you still think you know what to say and we're being given this lecture in a morgue to you know dramatize the effect of being like.
Speaker 1:Well, you know this is.
Speaker 1:This is the most poignant event in a lot of people's lives is the loss of a loved one, and one of the theories that we explored is called the illness narratives, which is not a super exciting or compelling title, but it puts forward these three structures for living out.
Speaker 1:The first of them structures is called restitution the restitution narrative, and that narrative is all about if something goes wrong in your life, you want to instigate a process which just returns you back to when everything was fine. For instance, if you wake up one morning and you've got a terrible headache, you just you don't want to kind of progress through the headache, you just want to take a tablet and just return to when the headache wasn't there anymore. Or you break up from a relationship and you're like I just want to go back to when everything was fine. Yeah, that's the first narrative that we can embody. The second narrative is this idea of chaos, where you lose narrative structure of your life. You just fall into this pit of chaos and that's obviously a deeply painful place to be and probably something that everyone can like resonate with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we always kind of three steps away.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, people want the third of which is this what was identified as the journey narrative, and the idea being that every part of the journey the horrible headaches, the painful divorces are building in your life. So it helps you basically not to. It's designed to help you reflect on. Everything has a value, even if it's painful. What do you make of that?
Speaker 2:I find that very compelling and I mean I don't know if we all sequentially go through those, those steps. But you know, the headache example is a good one because you very many people who wake up in the morning with a headache will say the common phrase I'm never drinking again, for example. Yeah, and that's the restitution kind of narrative playing out, because had I not been drinking I wouldn't have this headache. Yeah, and very often people will take the medicine at the peak of pain yeah, so they would have got better anyway. Yeah, it's just they've kind of capitulated and saw that. You know, this is this tablet is the thing that's made me feel better, not the body healing, yeah, and so that's quite common kind of medicinally.
Speaker 2:On the, on the third one, I mean post traumatic growth is a is a big. I'm a big believer in that and the world's. I think we can. We hope the universe conspires to, yeah, not have stumbling blocks and and it's sort of we use it, it's unfair or things like that. You know when things happen to us and if we can kind of accept that, you know bad things are going to happen, like this thing and this is going to be a springboard for me to you know, either come back stronger with scar tissues, james, then you will be a stronger person for it. And this is again. I don't know if you've read a book by we may have talked about this before Victor Frankel.
Speaker 1:I thought you brought up his name.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's a psychologist who's in the in in Aus. I think he was in Aus. He was in the concentration camp during World War II and he wrote a kind of just phenomenal. It was a short book called Man's Search for Meaning and you know, one of his things is in the depths of. You know the way he described that place. You know it's the depths of hell. Yeah, you know, imagine it All you can. You won't know until you're in it. And one of the observations he made was when the inmate, the prisoner, called in sick, it didn't matter how old they were, how young they were when they kind of mentally gave up, then the body gave up, right so, and it would be yeah, young people will go. Yeah, I can't do this.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I can't do this. And and they would be physically far ahead. So you know he said the people who survived, for the ones that went.
Speaker 1:This is my this is what the universe has given me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that'd be damn good at it. Right, I'm going to scrub the floor and I'm going to you know. You know, be hungry better than anyone else could be hungry, yeah, and be cold.
Speaker 1:And actually it's really interesting that you've said this, because once had the privilege of being part of interviewing Eva Schollos Schollos, get, how you pronounce it step-sister of Anne Frank, right, he had lived through a concentration camp also and she said very similar thing in the sense that to survive such brutality, you have to move into this place of it's not quote unquote hope of one day we're going to get out of this and that's going to carry me through this. It's this thing of this is my life. Now, regardless of what comes to tomorrow, I have to live the life I've got in this moment and be the best of it and put myself into it, which is just such a at such extremes. It baffles me, yeah, and it's easy to say oh massive to say but we all, you know, there's a, there's this constant.
Speaker 2:I got the term post-traumatic, post-traumatic growth from a book called anti-fragile. Where you know is it written by a guy called Nassim Taleb and he kind of destroyed the. Basically, the opposite of fragile isn't robust, it's anti-fragile. So you kind of, when shocks happen, you get stronger, right, robust is just less fragile than fragile. Okay, if that makes sense. So you know, a stone vase is going to be less fragile than a glass, but it can be broken by a hammer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What you want is a vase to get stronger when it's whacked. That's the opposite of fragile.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now, you know, small doses of stress are basically examples of human beings being anti-fragile. So examples of small doses of stress Strettle doses that are non-lethal vaccines. You know, you give yourself the disease, yeah, yeah, and you become. Your immune system comes back stronger. You notice, you know ladies in the subcontinent who walk around with things on their head from a young age. That stress, yeah, gives them supernormal neck strength.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah when you break a bone, bone goes back stronger and post-traumatic growth is an example of that kind of anti-fragility. Where you are, life knocks you and if you can let it not break you, you'll kind of come back stronger. So, yeah, I think that the kind of illness narratives feed into that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What's the examples in your life? Because I'm aware that we haven't even really figured out who you are or what you do. It's a good introduction, straight into the conversation. What's the examples in your life, in your work, in your family, yeah, where not only you're seeing this compound in a J curve, but also this anti-fragility Cool Okay. Do you feel like you willingly submit yourself in your work, because obviously your working life is interesting? It's nothing like my working life. We have overlaps via podcasts, but do you regularly submit yourself to anti-fragility pressure?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that book has really provided me with a powerful mental model that has stuck with me and I don't know if it's. The danger with these things is they become kind of over. Yeah, human beings try and make sense of complex worlds by applying simple rules that can scale across multiple behavioral scenarios. And that's the behavioral psychology term for those heuristics, and it's easy to kind of simplify your world into things like that. It's all about the dopamine, it's all about fragility, it's all about but I mean just to answer your question properly one example when I was 25, my first job, proper job, I was a research analyst, a stock-breaking firm, and I was there for 11 months and I really enjoyed the kind of life of being a stock-broker or working a stock-breaking firm.
Speaker 2:I was in the city of London right, yeah, it's all office by the Bank of England. There were boozy luncheers and there were these kind of financiers and fund managers and I'd be there kind of all by died and I hated the work. Actually, looking at the conduct, I'd get a knot in my stomach when I got asked to do.
Speaker 2:There's an acronym called DCF, and all you're going to bullet, wasting your listeners' time by joining us. Many of them all know what it is, but they had to do these things called DCFs, which required you to make all sorts of very simple assumptions about the world To get to an answer that could be marketed as a product, and I would get a knot in my stomach every time I had to do this, and that was meant to be my main job.
Speaker 2:I was meant to be crunching numbers, but I love the kind of lunching side of it and I kind of I was good at, I was good at suppressing that knot in my stomach in a way that I'm less good now and I think that's a form of kind of compounding where I've got better at going. That's just work I don't want to do. I'm not going to beat myself up that I don't want to do it or that I'm not good at it. Anyway, I was there for 11 months and got a call in from the head of operations. He said look, there was that research that he was my direct boss. Nice guy, head of ops. He said look, animal, bad news. Markets are quite tough for the moment. We're going to have to make some economies. So we've put your position on the review and what that means is that we're going to look at the whole department. We're going to see whether there's alternate roles that you can do.
Speaker 2:I was literally taking what you're saying and face family. But this was just legal chat for fuck off, mate, right. And I even said oh great, well, I can just come back in. I don't mind, I'll come back into the office, I'll carry. If you figure it out, I'll carry on. Do what you want me to do. No, no, no, no. Sorry, it'd be better if you don't come into the office and then I hit me as a whole.
Speaker 2:Actually I'll rewind because it was I'll rewind. Just before that happened, we were kind of in. We were in the office on the trading floor and there's this old veteran analyst called Jeff. It went around and laughed a bit around from time to time and Jeff will come up again in a bit but the head of research came to this front trading floor and said Jeff, it was his birthday. Jeff, can we have a quick word please? I was just. I was sure it could come and so we took that. Basically I cracked the joke stupid joke in hindsight, it looks like because it was his birthday. We were all signing, leaving cards.
Speaker 2:Birthday card without him noticing what you do and I said, oh, it looks like this birthday card is turning into a leaving card. And, as Lady Crockett did, she gets a. Don't say that it's not funny. She'd seen what was about to unfold before. And about seven minutes later head of research comes back in and Nick, can I have a quick word please? And then the trading floor went quiet. Everyone realised what was happening. So Nick said, and then Jeff came back in and was like everyone.
Speaker 2:He did a kind of noose sign around there, I'm out, and he was furious and he grabbed the stuff and then, okay, sadly, I started winning off and I was like, oh God, the card was sitting looking at my screen and getting some stuff done. And then you have the sales guys in the trading floor all of a sudden making phone calls and looking super productive. This guy, like you know, Dave have you got that thing? I asked for.
Speaker 2:As if, like my math, as if the head of research was going to come back in and go. God, I was going to fire him, but look how productive he's being, I'm going to change my. It's amazing how everyone's like the intensity of the room.
Speaker 2:they're going to be in because people were being laid off one by one, and then it was my turn. I had, to clear, to have a word. So I kind of came back in after that conversation, grabbed my stuff and everyone you know you could everyone's eyes on you and I kind of got back out of the trading floor with all the meetings from them and then, like two ladies I'll never say I'm going to and, emma, I'm going to name-chat them because they could see where I was going and they kind of I just they came out and said I don't know, I was burst into tears and they took me to the meeting room and said look, you'll be fine this time. Three, fast forward, seven minutes.
Speaker 2:I'm out the lift and I see Jeff again rolling a cigarette outside his back and he's rolling up a cigarette and he's like, yeah, do you want one? I'm like, yes, I definitely want one. And he rolls me a cigarette and we saw the standing there and he goes look, emma, I've been doing this for nearly 30, 40 years now and don't be in my position. We have 55, I think that's how old he was and he got some on 15 years younger than you, telling you you're surplus, you're redundant, you're obsolete. Almost that's how you feel and that has always stuck with me and it has shaped the way I look at business, look at life. I think is the easiest example I can think of with post-traumatic growth, because I was kind of devastated and at the time you feel like what the hell am I going to do? Now you do grow from things like that.
Speaker 1:I think it's firstly, thank you for sharing that story, because it's a real part of your life and these moments, of the moments that shape us, the entirety of us, not just our work or our job choices.
Speaker 1:They shape everything about our futures, in a way. And my story starts with a similar moment in the sense that I've shared on a previous episode, about someone tearing you down, ripping you piece by piece apart to your nothingness, and it's in them, moments where, like you said, the post-traumatic growth comes alive, because it creates in you, it bursts something in you. It's almost like the creation of a star or something like that. You know what I mean. There's this intense moment of friction bursting you something new that without the friction, without the going right to the bottom, there is no newness, there is no new start. You could still be there now. You could still be there until you're 50 and then get laid off by someone and be like what a radist 30 years of my life just gone on the conveyor belt to be let go of. And I don't want to marginalise anyone that does live in that situation in a sense.
Speaker 2:But maybe you should.
Speaker 2:Sorry to just push back on that, because I feel it's almost creative types like you, matt, it's almost your duty to kind of point out to people, maybe with respect to humanity, maybe with mockery, maybe with comedy, maybe with you know, that the conveyor belt, you know, is a very dangerous place, increasingly so, and we've seen in history people's lives being turned upside down by the conveyor belt stopping or being replaced by a robot that doesn't need a commitment belt to carry goods. It can do more efficiently without taking breaks. You know, for people who've been told they've got to get a university and they've got to get a good, stable job and they've got to stick with it and work their way up, you know technology will come for you and you'll know better than a lot of these kind of white collar middle class. You know life is, think that kind of. There's a sort of yeah, obviously it happened to the weavers and it happened to the millers and the miners, but it won't happen to me and it is happening.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, it's incumbent on people to it's, it's a common creative, creative people to kind of maybe even like de-simplify and demystify which isn't in their interests. Yeah, because it's the interest of a, of a magician. Yeah, is to hide the system, Is to pull up the, and actually people are capable of way more. So yeah, I just wanted to kind of what do you that?
Speaker 1:firstly, that I think that's one of the most beautiful articulations of the responsibility of the creative.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Whatever you define that person as being.
Speaker 2:There's a great. Just to add to that, just to hammer the point home, like there's a great book called by a guy called Steven Pressfield, who's an author, but he's also written some sort of like motivational self-help. It's very short books and one of them was called the art of you know, the war of art, and in it you kind of there's a there's a great English writer, a fiction writer, called Summer Settmore. Very, very, those are short stories. Those are long, but long books, early 20th century, and someone, someone asked him something along the lines of you know, do you know when? Do you know, when the muses are kind of kind of give you the inspiration and his aunts, it will help. He goes. Yes, they do it. When I turn up every day at 9 30 in the morning and get my desk and start writing, like you got to turn up, yeah, whereas most people can't live a last for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I mean try it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's. It's one of the moments almost where, because it's a podcast, I feel like there's a duty to carry on articulating what I'm thinking.
Speaker 2:Well, in some, but in some ways no no, not at all.
Speaker 1:In some ways, what you've said deeply impacts, because I've always assumed that, like the magician, you hide the secret. As a divergent thinker, my value that I identify myself is is like a magician's ability to do magic and make it look like magic. And actually, if you flip it on it's head and say actually, to use a word like profit or something like that, the prophetic act of creatives is to say it's not magic trick, it's not, it's not real magic, it is a trick. And here's how you step out of the conveyor belt. Here's how you live out of the box, out of the some holders, the system and for all these people that talk about social constructs and living under hierarchies of power and the patriarchy and tyrannical processes, whatever you want to call it, the oppression of this is how we do things around here. Don't do it. A different is something to be set free from.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean to give some examples to that. You know, I think the numbers there will be. You know the manner paintings and pictures that Picasso produced on a daily basis. Bar used to write music every day. Yeah, anthony Trollup is one of my famous, one of my most favorite authors. He worked in the post office, he kind of he famous for inventing the red post box, amongst other things, but he was prolific writer, right, yeah, paul Bach was part of his parents, but his mother was a successful writer as well.
Speaker 2:You know, he used to get up, he used to write from 530 to 930 and then go to work every day and he used to churn out. You know, volume upon volume was of word count, right, but we only saw the best of it. But we couldn't have had the best of it had he not done the rest of it. And I think I've noticed creative types who are actually just kind of lazy. You know hands, and I think what people also, particularly people on the conveyor belt, do is they confuse creativity with skill. Yeah, and they're two different things. So, you know, you could be a very skillful pianist but you could have no creativity whatsoever. Right, it's hard but it unlikely, because the moment you kind of really, you know, thanks to Bach or Chopin or whoever it is playing the piece.
Speaker 2:They will bring something out of you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the skill is the vehicle. Yeah, but you've got to put the hours into the skills again.
Speaker 1:To yeah, to set the creativity free. Exactly In a way? Yeah, exactly. And how do you see the imagination as a liberator of society in that case? Or do you, or do you in fact recognize it more as an oppressor? Because that's the other side of that question?
Speaker 2:No, it's well, it's, look it's. It's certainly a very, very, very, very important question, so I'm going to answer that. I'm going to start with trying to answer why I think it's, or ask a different answer, a different question, which is why is that an important question?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And it's such an important question. One way to kind of articulate that why is it an important question? Let's say you asked me just now, hypothetically, to take a recent example what is a? What is a midspire?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean I could, I could go on a bit and try and fluff it up and talk about the artistry behind it and the, but within three or four minutes I can. I'll be done Right. You'll have a working understanding of what it's about. You know you've devoted you know word count podcast hours to answering this question. And it's a question that many people have devoted, so it's very difficult to reduce it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To a definable kind of dictionary. So, which, which which means that the answer will only come, may never come apparent, but will come apparent over a period.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, it's a brush on a painting, exactly.
Speaker 2:And if I can contribute to that in some way, I will. But yes, so you know, imagination, imagination is a very dangerous thing to many people, particularly people who who have an motivational incentive to control and suppress, and and it is a tool for for both oppression and liberation. I'll give you a very mundane example. I was at university I got a kind of temp job or a or a, you know, as a, as a waiter server in a in a fest, cold, cold festival called the Goodwood Festival, speed, this back in 2000 and 2006. And it was a recruitment company that had done this big, you know, got all these kinds of students, young people, to kind of, you know, go and work in the tents in the background where the nice cars in the front, and you kind of go in the background and you kind of surf, prep the food and scrub the scrub the polish, the culinary and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:And I sat outside, I got on really well with the staff and people and it was the Alpha Romeo tent and the people got and so they said, right, it's lunchtime, let's go out and you know, you can bring a sandwich with you. So I sat outside and the guy the kind of running the recruitment process on the on the same site. The kind of ex-tea came out and said excuse me, why are you sitting outside? I you know I'll have to have your lunch outside. I was up really, is that? No, it's a rule, company rule. We say if you're on the, you have your lunch inside.
Speaker 2:it was a beautiful day and we were in the field like you know, the guys in the Alpha Romeo tent, you know, like told them to get lost. You know, look, we're fine with that. Why did that guy?
Speaker 1:yeah, want me.
Speaker 2:Why was he enforcing that company policy? Yeah, and why is the company policy there? And it was to stop people there just getting ideas about their station. You know, maybe I'll just be out here two minutes longer. That's bad for production or brand value or whatever it might be. And it was them imagining negative consequences of having someone to do something. And also them imagining me imagining things, yeah.
Speaker 2:So, it is. It is definitely both. But I think a lot ultimately the kind of imagination will set you free and a lot of tools of oppression are there to kind of stifle it through disinformation, through through lying. And you see this in George Orwell's writing. You know the guy used fiction, you know it wrote. Probably you know the fact that most English, most school kids in their English classes will read 1984 and has done more for society than many things because it's helped us imagine in very nice ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what could happen? So when I was studying theology obviously the prime source of theology is the Bible, and there's lots of schools of thought about how one should engage with such a thing, you know, engage with it as the Word of God, engage with it as a book, engage with it as history, lots of things. However, the way that I took to engaging with it best and most was this idea that the Bible was like paints, but it didn't necessarily paint the picture. It was kind of the job of the human, of the reader, to use the paint to paint the picture. So they're almost like the raw materials, if you like, of a painting were present, and also some guidelines, and some guidelines maybe, but there wasn't. Actually it didn't fully articulate and illustrate the future, because if it did, you know, it would be an instruction manual, like an Ikea chair, where you could, by default, just follow the instructions and you have a chair On the basis that the Bible and Christianity is going about trying to bring heaven to earth.
Speaker 1:I would say that it's not a simple instruction manual, because if it was really simple instruction manual, we would have heaven, in much the same way as you would have a chair if you just follow the instructions. So for me it made more sense, as the raw materials and the job was almost the imagination of the reader was to take the materials and imagine bringing together disparate pieces and paint a picture of heaven, if you like, however you would want to interpret that, and I use heaven in this context, talking about a culture that is you know, where poverty is eliminated and people are healthy and mental health is down and all of them like I think it's a process more than a destination, as we've already discussed it.
Speaker 1:But in essence, what I'm trying to articulate, I think, is that we almost our imagination has become so important in painting the picture of the future that we should try and aim towards rather than aimlessly hoping of doing better. Because you've got to take these things where you say yes, it's all about the compounding effects of everyday changes within culture. For example, being kind, yes, if you're always kind, being kind is going to make a zippo difference to the global economy, to poverty at a massive just won't do anything. The compounding interest of that is obviously going to one day, if everyone is kind everyday to everyone, you arrive in heaven, in quotation. But the imagination is almost needs to lay before us the picture of what it would be to be better.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And without that we just accidently wobble into the next phase of human existence. It's just like an accidental process or a tyrannical process of a you know one single person's imagination painting an egotistical picture. So I perceive interest in one of the dangers of the lack of imagination and indeed the conveyer about that we were talking about earlier is a lack of understanding of the picture of the world that we're trying to create.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think there's so much in that. That is the you know, a profound but prescient, because we, you know, we have a genetic inheritance or an evolutionary inheritance, let's say, from what came before us, and that inheritance is in our brain, it's in our skull, it's at the deep root of our brain, you know, the amygdala, where we have flight or fight and we are reactive to dangers around us and we have impulses and the inability to orientate yourself to a higher purpose or future goal. Well, the ability to do that is what makes you human Right, what gives you and what makes you human is to provide yourself with a broader range of outcomes or possibilities, potentially very destructive, but also potentially very beautiful. And we, if we succumb to our genetic inheritance, which we all do on a daily basis and you know, religions can paint it as temptation or what you?
Speaker 2:there are different ways- of yeah, I think the religious kind of inheritance is to try and map that out and to try and take you away from that kind of that Hobbesian state of nature of us, that kind of you know basically, kind of you know the animal which does react to threat, but ultimately the kind of dispersion of outcomes of a deer or a gazelle is going to be. You know, wake up, yeah, eat some grass, drink some water, go for a shit and maybe run, run away very quickly.
Speaker 1:You're not creating your futures deliberately, but nor are you, nor are you doing genocide. Yeah right.
Speaker 2:Or committing acts of meanness.
Speaker 1:And actually one of the opening lines of the book is you know the imagination as responsible for teapots is, it is for terrorism. Yes, so you're right. So, whereas you have a deer who is neither responsible for teapots or terrorism, so they can abdicate responsibility of the terrorism, but they can't claim, claim the future of the joy of sharing a teapot with friends.
Speaker 2:Well, an example of the kind of imagination you know being throttled is in the Soviet Union, you know. So you know, profit wasn't allowed, you know, in many ways, and therefore an engine of creativity was stifled. And simple examples, like you know, glass, you know, I've got a glass on the floor here. It's got a sort of rim halfway up and it goes wider at the top and it's easy to hold below. There's glasses out there that kind of. You know, everything started looking the same, all glasses started looking the same because you couldn't make it, you were not incentivised to make a glass, yeah, it was any different, any different to it. So things just became grey, uniform, because that human spirit was just was throttled. Yeah, for again, the perverse side of orientating yourself to a future goal of utopia, yeah, that is actually very destructive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think it was George Orwell, you know, he was having a discussion with the communist historian about the Soviet Union, about communism, and the guy kind of fell into his trap Because he has, you know what about? You know, pushed the historian, you know what about all the millions of dead, you know, and they kind of poverty, and this was the time of the Soviet Union. So it's still going strong. And the answer is if you've got to make an omelette, you've got to break some eggs. So it's the answer and two ish. George Orwell's response is where's the omelette? You know, yeah, and you saw that. You know in multiple examples. You know coffee, for example. Like if you spilled your coffee, it was a kind of real luxury product. So the union, if you spilled it, you forgot it, you picked it up and you left it behind. You know you need to be a perennialian arguments galore. I'm actually do that, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There was a moment I remember in the you remember I was happening when I was working in the city. I think it was about 2000 and 11 there was this kind of occupied movement or what was kind of basically kind of middle, middle class, well off, sort of so champagne, socialist, kind of bitching tents in the city, outside the stock exchange and stuff. It was happening with Wall Street in New York as well and it became a kind of point of controversy that they were drinking. They were going to Starbucks to drink coffee. It was like, look at these they've got. I don't know if the iPhone was out then. Yeah, it must have been that they've got iPhones and they ain't a Starbucks, but they won't.
Speaker 2:You know the end of property rights and there's a lot of people defending them, going what was just a coffee, it's just a coffee.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the reason, the person, the people defending them.
Speaker 2:What they didn't realize was it's only just a coffee, because you've got hedge fund traders trading coffee on the futures markets making the making the price of coffee predictable, so that a farmer can then grow a crop, set it forward and have the confidence that someone's going to buy it from it again price, and that he will then therefore have a predictable set of cost inputs that will then enable them to carry on predictably for the next three, five, ten years. So coffee, thanks to the miracle that is free enterprise and the ability to people, of people, to interact with each other when they want, is just a coffee. Yeah, I don't know how we got into that.
Speaker 1:But I think it was that you liberate imagination and in your sphere of work, the liberation of imagination links to the liberation of profit which also empowers the liberation of enterprise, which means that we can engage with a richness of culture in terms of you know, we can have thousands of different types of chairs to sit on, we can have, we can have coffee from all different types of places at predictable prices. So, in a sense, if you don't liberate imagination, you know and you, you can see the knock on effect of that when you look at you know, extreme communist, yes, culture or governance yeah fascism is when the imagination becomes the property of a few rather than the inheritance of the many.
Speaker 2:Yeah becomes a tool with a means to an end, rather than a vehicle for experimentation.
Speaker 1:let's say yeah, I mean within that experimentation, obviously, that it's the classic light bulb thing. Isn't this correct? You can do it a million times wrong, but eventually you get a light bulb. You have to have the freedom of imagination in order to arrive at the light bulb, in order to arrive at the society, the best society that we can live in.
Speaker 2:That's why it's an act of rebellion in many ways, and the rebellion is not always a good thing and for many people it's a terrible thing. But you are, you are on a conveyor belt, let's say, to carry all that that mess for, and you, you see a better way of doing something. You stepped outside of the yourself and your routines and your interactions with people and you've gone. Hang on, maybe I'll, maybe we'll do a little bit like this and that's that, folks, very challenging for many people, but we've all got it in us, but we're kind of. I do think that you know it's, it's take, it's definitely the world conspires to suppress that through many shawls.
Speaker 1:And in many ways, I think I've identified another theme that I'm I'm trying to engage with. Is this relationship between courage and creativity, or courage and imagination, and is that same as what you're talking about? If someone doesn't have their own courage to step out of the conveyor belt and go I think we could do this differently in whatever sphere that is in then it's the responsibility of the courageous to give courage Absolutely, and the responsibility of the creative or the imaginative to empower the creative and imaginative and reveal the magic trick.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you are. Your genetic inheritance is fighting teeth and nail to stop you. And if you, the example was given by Jeff Bezos recently on the podcast and that he gave the example of being disagreeable people, disagreeing with other people and or telling the truth. No, it wasn't even about being disagreeable, it was about telling the truth. We're not truth tenors, we're social animals. Oh I think I called. I've been there since, have you Okay?
Speaker 1:So, yeah, exactly, explain, explain.
Speaker 2:No, no, I mean, I'm nearly the example of you know you being in a village or a cave or whatever you know in pre-preservalized, you know, thousands, thousands of years ago, and if you stood up and went, you know we're very. You told the truth, you were very opinionated, you thought you were telling the truth, that could get you, that could get you killed.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:By your fellow village dwellers. Yeah, and the reason is that we are social animals that don't want to disagree with each other. They don't want to look stupid, they don't want to look silly. All be seen to be disagreeable, because survival is more important.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right Than than standing out, and in every generation there is some, there is. We are right now Standing on the shoulders of giants. It's really, you know, it does.
Speaker 2:One example that stuck with me when I read a book about trade of all things, many years ago, history of trade, and you know, most, most seafarers who used to, you know, go from Europe to to India, would either go across, you know, the Silk Road or they would hug the coastline around the, the, the Arabian peninsula and kind of the Gulf, and just one one, and then it, you know, took a long time and you get there and you can hug the coastline back, and one sailor I think he was apparently Greek origin, you know, had this theory that there's the winds change every kind of six months.
Speaker 2:It's really odd, but, like you know, notice the winds kind of, and so what I'm going to do is not hug the coastline, but I'm going to let's say we're starting that Alexandria in Egypt. I'm going to point my ship downwards, south, away from the coast, into the deep ocean, right, let the wind carry me, and in a few months time it's going to change and it's going to send me back up and the guy discovered the monsoon and he discovered a route to India to pick up spices and silks in a quarter of the time, away from pirates and you know, but the courage to do that yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, to think, think of, not even to think of it. I, I, I was sitting, I was when I was doing, I was doing an internship and and there's a person in the office, I've got all these ideas. Yeah, so many business ideas. So many business ideas are, you know it's execution? Yeah, and I have a. You know it's. One of the things I'm most self-critical of is is I getting committing to something?
Speaker 1:and executing life is very hard and I think that's the. I haven't quite nailed these down, because I'm really trying to look at where creativity and imagination overlap, where they're where one leaves and one picks up or whatever. For me, in a sense, the, the creative act, is taking the imagining and putting action into it, as opposed to the imagining act, is the is the ideas. That's a bit of a crude articulation, I feel. I don't. I don't really like what I've just said particularly, but it's kind of tending getting a little bit closer to what I think is happening and, in a sense, what it, what it allows room for, is creativity is a is a willful act rather than an act of talent. Yes, what resonates to me Once, creative people are those that put the time in to exporting this imagination into real world, in whatever sphere that may be.
Speaker 1:So you almost have to deal with two. You have two stages, if you like, of of the process of creating futures. The first is within the imagination, where you fairly boundlessly although boundaries are helpful imagine, and then that process turns into creativity, which is how do I bring and birth that into the real world? And in a sense, that's why it becomes so. Well, you need both, and I think some people would say I would identify, maybe, certain people as creative but not imaginative. And I would maybe identify people as imaginative but not creative, because everyone that I've met that said if I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this, and I think that's the way the light bulb is going bing, bing, bing, bing, bing inside, but the creative act does not occur.
Speaker 1:And that's a very the courage. It becomes an integral part of that bit because it yes, it does take courage to imagine a better world. It takes even more courage to create a better world. So that's how I'm kind of seeing it. Yeah, Unpack itself within my own thinking.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess it's maybe to try and reframe it a different way, but along those lines is. It's a bit like the hero's journey. So I mean, the point of the hero's journey, I guess, is that you have again that kind of broad range of outcomes. You could either, when Hercules did his seven labours, he could have died on his first one, versus the stable boy, whoever who didn't do any of the labours, who didn't do any of that but will be alive. And that predictable future, yeah, will go round and round the cabaret. But it's a good batch of that to mix many methods. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:To bring it In essence, to use your example of finding a quicker route to India, it would be very easy to go, imagine away. It's almost like, oh, if we build boats better I'm not sure how or if we could fly, then that would be really fast to get to India.
Speaker 1:But the creative act never occurred, whether that be through lack of resources or lack of know how the imagination was beginning. Because there was people already going. We could fly there, like if I knew there was a way of flying there. They were thinking of the future that was hundreds of years away but still was going to arrive eventually. The creativity was getting on the boat and exercising and imagining.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think If that works I'm not 100% certain whether it does- Well, a lot of them, a lot of you know I have a lot of creativity. Imagination is almost there to undo our own failures. So a lot of entrepreneurship, for example, successful entrepreneurship is built upon this. You know, you hear the term disruption a lot. Let's say what are you disrupting? Something that's been create, man-made.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:You take. You know, ride sharing, for example. Now you had a system where the state apparatus effectively handed out licenses that were closely controlled by a small group of people who decided who couldn't, who couldn't ride a driver taxi, which kept prices very high. The downside of that was that if you you know a young lady on an evening out needs to get home safely, you probably took the financial decision not to get a taxi to the decision to walk, for example, and the kind of use of a technology platform to connect drivers and riders was an act of imagination and creativity to get around this human problem.
Speaker 2:And the same can be said of you know Amazon, you know bookstores would control. You'd have to buy a book of information and the management of that bookstore would decide what books are there.
Speaker 1:And now you know you can't find my book. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:You know when your thing comes up, you know you're not necessarily going to be reliant on waterstones or faunces or whatever it is, you're liking them. And I feel like there's a guy called Peter Till who's he's the old produr, one of the early PayPal founders, first outside of Western Facebook, and he can put it quite interesting what is it about our society that means that the best, the only people going into entrepreneurship or art, that's in to take his, to extend his point are those kind of almost the socially awkward, the Asperger's types. They're the ones that just are able to transcend the oh, I'll look silly or don't do it. What will my mates think if I go out and, you know, quit my job or decide not to do that? They just don't feel, they don't get. You know, like it's the. You see, why are they the ones that only feel comfortable or feel like they can do the entrepreneurship? What can we do? Right, to make this a bit more mainstream, because then the more things that are tried, the more things are. Experiments will mean that we can strive towards a kind of better world, and that's again going full circle to that kind of responsibility that we have, and that kind of is something that I grapple with or I try to keep front of mind.
Speaker 2:You and I walked into this room before we started recording. You asked me how was your day Last few? And I was. You know. I was about to give you nine different reasons why my day has been really crap. Yes, and we've got a little routine at the moment, in the evenings, when I give our younger daughter, who's 10 months old, her milk separately, just to get her away from her older sister and because it's just chaos, otherwise we'd throw it together and I go. She can now hold her own milk bottle. Right, it's a huge.
Speaker 2:I can sort of read what in that seven minutes that she's and I've been reading, rereading her. She's the third time I've read this. This is a very short story I recommend it to everyone but called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Soltz and Itzin, who was a Gulag survivor and, from a literature perspective, using the tool of literature was a huge tool of bringing down the Soviet Union or changing the mindset amongst the intelligentsia, the Western kind of elite, as to what this thing, this mistrusty, is and he was in. He's a short story, he's based on his times in the Gulag and it goes through one day, one day in the Gulag, and it's like you know again that's not a good day.
Speaker 2:So when I'm literally kind of you know, read a few pages, you know, whilst Arya, bless her, is having her milk, it just reminds you like you know he's talking about. You know for a while. And getting the inmates when the temperature gets to minus 40, there's a supposed rule that no one has to work. There's no work. So there's this like tense moment at the start of every day where someone is responsible for going cleaning up this kind of pole in the freezing cold to go and check the temperature gauge, and it's like everyone's like God. It's bulls**t, it's not worse than bulls**t.
Speaker 1:It's so buried right.
Speaker 2:So it is freezing, worse than freezing. So today's the day it's going to be minus 40, we don't have to work. And it climbs up and everyone stops. As the guy's climbing, it's like no, it's minus 27. And then carry it on. Everyone Get back to like, and it's like a gory laugh, but it's the only way. And there's mutterings of like God, of course they've never put a thermometer that works up there.
Speaker 1:Why would they? You know, like it's all rigged.
Speaker 2:And so like maybe it's like not that useful, because then you don't take genuine things seriously that are. You know, something happens. Well, we could be in a concentration camp. So stop moaning about this. And actually, no, it's probably to focus on tension. Think about how to creatively, yeah so, but I do think it's. You know, one way to give fuel to your imagination is to kind of learn about history, and I don't.
Speaker 2:It's amazing how few people read or get make the time for themselves to consume something that isn't necessary to, isn't either a short, quick dopamine here or is kind of necessary for their day to day working and like, yeah, the news is entertainment, it's designed to make your blood boil. It's not reading, it's kind of it's a soap opera on a page or on a website. And we'll be better built to cope with things if we can contextualize a bit better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the the people have come before us because we are phenomenally lucky. I kind of grapple with this because, yes, there's in many ways, from a statistical perspective, it's never been harder to be a young person. But if you compare us to teenagers from history, we are, we're not teenagers and you're not, but like let's say yeah you're not an 18 year old being sent to war, right?
Speaker 1:You're not being sent to war, or you're not?
Speaker 2:you know you're not an 18 year old.
Speaker 1:in medieval Poland Like or or in the you know you haven't lost all of your brothers and sisters to the plague or the plague.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we are the. You know, we've got information available to us to be subject matter experts and whatever we want in whatever domain.
Speaker 1:And it's like like you said there is a, the internet. The internet has wherever you are in the world, unless there's great censorship on that internet, has there risen? Some countries has empowered imagination and creativity in a way that no one else has experienced in in time, because the access to tools and the access to information is just so like widely distributed. Yeah, so given to everyone. I wonder whether, as a final, question you could impart a final wisdom as final wisdom.
Speaker 2:You're making it as something that is what has gone before us at any wise.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can, I can just be final have to be wisdom as to what you see the responsibility of the creative is and what wisdom you'd give to someone who perhaps does feel like they are trapped on a conveyor belt.
Speaker 2:So to the responsibility of those inclined towards acts of creation or creativity. I think my advice would be to kind of to perform small, repeated acts of bravery where possible. Choose the slightly braver paths when faced with and but ground that in a sense of duty because you have a. You can take it two ways. You can see yourself as superior or kind of Luciferian, or as a member of some sort of elite club, and the rest just don't get it. And you know all the time amazing kind of thing. And you know that's where you know you're not superior. You just you know you've got to, you've got an endowment which just partly filled with fortune and say you're, it's incumbent on you to work very hard and talk to myself as much as anyone or question yourself as to how you can get the most out of that and act upon it because it's important for the rest of us. You know, if you can draw, do that. If you can sing, if you can't sing, you know, do it.
Speaker 2:And you know, something that we've both grappled with with our podcast is so easy to talk yourself out of stuff. What have I? You know, what have I got to add, really? And you don't know and you'll never know, but you might add something positive, and so that reason, just go for it, as long as you're not harming anyone. You don't have to listen.
Speaker 2:To you, yeah, and to people trapped, it is, it is. I would say to them look, it is very hard where you are, this place you're in right now is, is, is a kind of is a hell, living hell for you for many reasons. But just see it as a little kind of a little you know spot of light at the end of the tunnel that you know you're trapped. You're lucky because many people are trapped and they don't know it. So the the fact that you are sensing this, whatever this is, this emptiness, this knot in your stomach, this kind of feeling as on we for it's something that you are fortunate to have as well.
Speaker 2:You may not feel like it, yeah, it may feel awful, but see where it goes. Put on that thread, yeah, hold on and just keep walking in the darkness and you will set yourself free. It's no one else's debt for you, yeah, but it's not a debt for you. No one else's debt for you. But you will be surprised to find how many people are out there wanting you to help you and it may come from shedding some negative influence in your life, whether it's the people you associate yourself with or the influences that you have online. But use the people out there, find some mentors, online or in person, because there's no shortage of goodness out there wanting to kind of help you if you can just be brave enough to ask for it.
Speaker 1:Amal. This has been a truly awesome conversation. I really appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Well, I have seen pleasure in that. It's been so much fun spending time with you and watching this thing grow, so keep it up. I know you will. You don't need me to tell you that, but it's been brilliant, and I'm kind of really excited to see what the output is and then what the next part of the journey is once the output's there. So thanks for helping me be part of it, because I've learned a ton too.
Speaker 1:If you have enjoyed listening to my good friend Amal, here he's, a podcast is coming out, as I said at the beginning of the episode, you can find it anywhere you listen to podcasts and on YouTube. It's called Meeting People and give us the download. What's Meeting People about? All right, very quickly.
Speaker 2:Meeting People is basically an idea that I had in the summer from it following advice online from a kind of I guess you know someone that I've found quite helpful, a guy called Tim Ferriss who runs his own podcast. I've never met him, but shout out to him for kind of you know doing what he does and you know he was being interviewed and he kind of. I was driving on the M25 to meet my brother and you know he said I've learned a load by just doing my own podcast, and so you know the act of finding people to interview, preparing for them and carrying out, watching it back, seeing yourself watching all your fidgeting and your humming and aring, is something that, even if you just did three episodes, will be super powerful and I recommend everyone do that. And I was kind of driving, gripping the steering wheel, tightrope and tightrope, feeling kind of like my you know my nervous system kind of kick up against I just you know I've got to do this Like I work for myself.
Speaker 2:You know there's no but also compliance officer or anyone to tell me that. You know that this is, you know, risky to the brand or whatever it might be. So it was. I was feeling some emptiness and thanks to that podcast, you know, I was given that kind of jolt and since then I've in partnership with someone you'll find out this is Matt Coopercom. I've recorded about five episodes. The first was again going live on Monday and we've spoken to, you know, martial artists, entrepreneurs, investors, because I've got a ton of exciting people lined up just to kind of effectively talk to people who've jumped off that conveyor belt.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or, you know, are basically our free spirits in some way, whether it's, whether it doesn't have to be in a kind of, you know, in an autistic domain, but it often, often is. So that's the thesis long chats with people that I feel are braver, braver than me, and hopefully some of it rubs off.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, it's a really good one, and if you want to check out the trailer, you can see that on my Facebook page as well. For that stuff, follow me there.
Speaker 2:Thanks for the plug, no worries, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:It's been so good, bro. I hope you have a great weekend. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening to this episode of the Imagining. I hope that you've had the opportunity to discover something new about yourself. If you went mind and you enjoyed listening, then I'd be really appreciative if you subscribed on whatever channel you're listening on.