Podcast with Eyal Shay Transcript

Eyal Shay 0:00

Welcome, everyone to the Deep dive, the podcast that skips small talk and goes straight for the concepts that shape our thinking and behavior. In this podcast, culled expertise is defenestrated as warm philosophies enthroned, in an attempt to explore the field in which we're all scientists looking for answers, living well.

Hello world, welcome to another episode of 'The deep dive' with Eyal shay. Today I'm joined by Malcolm ocean. Hi, Malcolm.

Malcolm Ocean 0:43

Hi. It's great to be here.

Eyal Shay 0:45

Thank you for coming on the podcast. And straight away, how would you describe the topic for today-what we're going to explore that has helped you live a better life?

Malcolm Ocean 0:55

So, I would say, at the biggest level, it's something like, how to have really high quality conversations that push the edges of the kinds of thoughts that you're able to think. And I wanted to talk with you about that, because I know you're interested in dialectic, which is another lens. My lens is going to be less on that level of abstraction, and I think more on the level of something like, what it means to have a shared train of thought.

Eyal Shay 1:31

Yeah, that's such an admirable cause, and it will certainly benefit me if we can reach some conclusions and understandings. And I would be really interested in hearing, first of all, what made you interested in conversations at large. So of course, we're all humans who are going around speaking with people, and yet really thinking about the mechanics and the principles behind verbal communication, or we could include nonverbal, I guess as well. But what kind of piqued your curiosity about the whole endeavor of conversing?

I guess I would say it's something that I've been interested in, sort of in the background, all of my life. But it really came into focus about a decade ago, when I got connected with a group of people who were working on what you could call something like conversation as art form. So if you think of a conversation as a kind of sacred art even, if you think of theater improv, right? You know, people get up on a stage and they improvise, and act in some sort of comedy scene. And there's a way in which like, all good conversations are fundamentally also improvisational, you know? If I try to come in with all of my talking points, and just lay them all out, it's not going to be very interesting conversation. If you try to come in with a series of 10 questions, you're going to ask me, and you're just going to ask me the same 10 questions, regardless of what it is I say, it's not going to be that interesting, right? Any good conversation is going to be at least a little improvisational, and in some sense, extremely improvisational. I don't even know what the last word of the sentence that I'm saying right now is going to end up being.

So, when I got involved with this group, they were looking at conversation, partially as an art form, partially as a sacred practice, almost like a meditation. And, also as a means to getting into a space of thinking together. And they're not the only people to point this out. I was at a dinner party just recently with some friends, and we asked, you know, I sort of put out the question, “What do we even think conversation is?“ and one of my friends just spontaneously said, “A conversation is thinking together”. And that's very much how I view it. And in some sense, that's verbal conversation, but as you kind of hinted at, it also includes nonverbal conversation, you know. If I'm living with my roommates, and I leave a bunch of dishes in the sink, that's kind of a conversational move, it says something to them. What exactly it says is much less clear, and depends on them and me, and the situation, and the typical practices around dishes and sink in the place that we're living, and whatever they might know and so forth. But so do all conversational utterances. Ultimately, their meaning depends on context. So it's not fundamentally different.

Eyal Shay 4:47

Yeah, so would you say that your interest and the way you approach this is basically on some level, trying to think better or come up with meaningful ideas, just more expediently, more efficiently, right? Because we could spend our time having, you know, the typical kind of small talk, which is not allowed on this show. And spend time... or we could get the point and really be almost dancing back and forth that allows us to, reach a truth.

Malcolm Ocean 5:26

Exactly.

Eyal Shay 5:28

Which is exactly what dialectic is. So dialectic is literally thinking together. It's a shared endeavor to arrive at truth. Intrinsically, it can be the case that your interlocutor is not cooperating, and then it's not thinking together, then it's arguing. Right?

Malcolm Ocean 5:47

Right. I mean, there is a like, "I'm thinking you're thinking, we're kind of thinking at each other, there's some chance we're gonna learn something". But it's… it becomes an antagonistic process at that point.

Eyal Shay 6:04

Yeah, and that's really interesting. But, for me, I think I realized a while back that if you're having any trouble coming up with creative thoughts, what you need is to talk with somebody. There's going to be somebody who, if they're an ally, an ally of yours, is[sic] going to come up with ideas that you would never have thought yourself. And there you go, that's creativity.

Right. And when that really gets going, you end up with this funny thing where one person thinks that the other person came up with the idea, and the other person thinks that the first person came up with the idea because you came up with it together. And so you both associate it with each other. It's like, [one person is like] "Oh, that was that thing you came up with in that conversation." [And the other person is] like, "No, no, you're the one who said that". And it's like, there's often not even really quite an answer to that. It's like one person put out an initial little seed of it but it definitely wasn't the full idea, and another person said, "Oh, well, it could be like this". And it kind of builds on itself until it's not actually clear where it came from, you know? Sort of an evolutionary process of sensemaking.

Eyal Shay 7:11

Right, exactly. It's definitely something much like building a building, and each person contributes a brick, and you end up with a finished product that's elegant and robust and is going to stand there for a while. In terms of actually tweaking the modes of conversations you're using, or techniques, or anything like that, what are some of the things that informed you going into this? And what are some of the things that you've experimented with? If you have.

Malcolm Ocean 7:43

Yeah. So, there's kind of a lot of pieces, and depending on who I'm talking to, I might highlight different dimensions of that. Let me just try to name a few, to kind of give you a sense of the space that I've explored, and then you can ask about what you're most interested in and we can kind of weave, dance and improvise around all these. Piece number one is something about becoming comfortable sitting with uncertainty, sitting with not knowing, sitting with a question revealed, without trying to immediately answer it. Piece number two is something like, seeing that there's something to what everybody's seeing. And just because what I'm saying and what you're saying seem to contradict, doesn't actually mean that one of us is wrong. It does mean there's something we don't understand. It does mean that one of us has probably over generalized, if not both of us, in fact. But it could be that, we're looking at two different ends of a cylinder, and I think it's a square from the side and you're looking at the face, and you think it's a circle, and it's actually a 3d object. So there's this piece about being able to sort of assume there's something bigger that you're looking at together. And this is the classic parable of ‘the blind men and the elephant’.

Right. So piece number two is something about, just because two people contradict, doesn't mean that one of them is wrong, but it does mean there's something probably that each of them is not seeing. Piece three is... there's something important about closing the feedback loop on knowing if you've been understood. And there's two main failure modes to this, one is people who don't speak enough. So they're not able to confirm if their understandings are shared by others, or [are] a landing for others because they don't speak enough in order to, have them land. Another is speaking too much, and this is where I've historically come from, where I'll go on and on about something for a minute or two and then I'll see somebody's face looking a little bit confused, and I'll think, "Oh, they don't quite get it, I need to say even more things". As opposed to sort of backing up and going, "Where are you stuck? How did that land so far?" And being able to actually take in? "If I was misunderstood, how was I misunderstood?" As opposed to [being] like, "Oh, I don't want to be misunderstood.

So I better like really explain how I actually see it". Because, if somebody misunderstands you there is structure and there's signal to how they misunderstood you. It's not simply random. It reveals a lot about how you spoke and it reveals a lot about what sorts of assumptions they're sitting with. So it's all information. In some sense, nothing to be discarded, is I guess, another principle.

Eyal Shay 10:48

Yeah. So first of all, the first point you raised ‘the unknown’ seems to be a consistent theme during this podcast, and I'm really tempted to go down that route. Having said that, the two latter points I find fascinating, and I think they can also be synthesized in a way. It's very much the case that there needs to almost always be a meta discussion between people about the concepts that are going to be used in conversations. Like, what do we actually mean when we say x? And what happens is, to refer to the last thing you said about talking too much, I think that with any conversation, the real interesting thing is that we see a lot of people introducing a lot of new concepts, per sentence or whatever in conversations. And this dramatically decreases the chances of any convergence in the future, because there's just more and more threads going to[sic] random places, and these are not going to be tied together into some sort of meaningful fabric.

So I see that a lot with doing dialectic and speaking with people, and I try to be very, very careful about new concepts that I’m introducing, because even a small conversation about one concept can encompass so much information. So I think that's interesting to remember. And it's also the cause almost, maybe not the only cause, but one of the causes for people to actually look at the same object from different perspectives. So from different perspectives, you see different aspects of one thing. And of course, this is what you mentioned, there might not be any agreement over what that thing is. And I completely agree with that, and I think the direction I want to take this is really those heated arguments that we all come across and see in today's society, that are[sic] way too divided, basically, in everybody's opinion. I'm really interested in hearing, how do you approach volatile discussions, potentially volatile discussions, and dealing with that?

Malcolm Ocean 13:30

So I guess, one piece, that's kind of a corollary to the "cylinder" thing about seeing, just because two people see something differently, doesn't mean that one of them's wrong. I'll give a brief caveat that, obviously, there are domains in which you can be certain enough that you've understood the nature of the problem, like Mathematics, or if you're taking a measurement, [you can say] "Oh, this is five centimeters long. No, it's 10 centimeters long". It's like, if you're certain enough about things that you... anyway, a sort of corollary to that is that it's in my experience, a lot easier to name a problem than to name a solution. And I generally assume, that this is partially an assumption, but this is also partially literally what I found. I have found that when I look at political discourse, I agree with something like 90% of the problems that people point out, and I think about 1% of the proposed solutions are good. And part of why a very tiny percent of the proposed solutions are good, is because the people who are articulating one problem don't really take into account that if they propose their solution, or if their solution to that problem were actually implemented, it would make a bunch of people very upset, who would go and undo that solution and cause them a bunch more problems in the process.

And, you know, this plays out everywhere from trying to resolve border disputes, to trying to resolve fights in a marriage, and also political things like, “Oh, well, we should do this with the taxes, or we should do that with the, whatever rights of whatever”. So, if you can find a way to sort of... get more problems in the room, and really see the way that they are all actually problems. And the fact that like, one person is saying, "Well, we can't keep doing coal, because the environment," and another person saying, "Well, we've got to keep doing coal, because our entire nation or whatever is based on coal mining. Like, that's one of our main exports. We would be economically non viable, both globally and locally, you know, if we didn't mine coal or whatever." Yep, those are both problems. What do we do? Right? And if you can actually properly sit with the fact that those are both problems, then you can start designing solutions that would actually solve all of your problems, as opposed to going, "Well, who's right here?" Or "What's the right trade off? What's the right compromise between these two things?" A compromise, sort of famously, although not officially, is a state of affairs where everybody's a little bit dissatisfied.

Eyal Shay 17:05

Yeah.

But the reality is, if everybody's a little bit dissatisfied, they are all going to be trying to tug, the state of affairs towards something that would satisfy them. They're not going to rest easy in a state of being compromised. And you know, you wouldn't want your security system to be compromised, why would you want your negotiation to be compromised? It's not a good state of affairs to be in. So there's something about being able to hold, "Okay, we have all these problems, we actually don't know how to solve all of them. Come to think of it, we honestly don't really know how to solve any of them adequately." And there's almost not even a difference because if you try to implement a solution that causes other people, more problems, they're going to fight back. And so the only way to get a stable outcome is actually a ‘win-win’. Or extreme force, right? Extreme, overpowering force, and then only still temporarily. Like it's a lot... it requires a lot of upkeep to maintain a kind of domination based stability.

Yeah, that's really interesting. It brings to mind, I think it's a quote that I already at one point, perhaps I've quoted it on the podcast, but Henry Miller, I think, wrote, “Everything that must be maintained with force is doomed.” And that is so true about society and how we're running society, which is basically a system where, like you say, they're not so many agreements. And we've made certainly some progress about keeping in check some of the people who would resort to violence and destroy the whole thing, but we're still not there in terms of actually producing consistently good results that people are satisfied with. And, I really like the framing and the fact that, you point out that not many people consider the fact that, the disgruntled losers of a proposition are going to actually develop animosity, and have some sort of backlash. That's a very true thing. And it also makes me think of the fact that, I recently found out that, the most heated discussions seem to be about things that for some reason, are perceived by us to be huge, huge life changing, life and death decisions. And in some sense, the fact that they are so hotly debated, should ring an alarm that tells us that they're not what we think they are.

Yeah

And it's really interesting, like for example, with COVID, right? So COVID is this epic pandemic at this point. It's a pandemic that goes all throughout the world, and people are willing to... you know the kind of rhetoric it gets out of people basically. It's like everybody who’s not vaccinated, you can die because, you know... or vice versa. Of course, both camps have their crazy extremists. And at the end of the day, if you zoom out, and you consider the fact that there would have been a pandemic, which really wipes out decimates 10% of the population, 20% of the population, you have to think that we would be busy actually, taking bodies off the street, all of us and not having all the time in the world to discuss and get into heated discussions, because we would be a lot busier, right? Saving our lives and so on. And I think for a large degree, the same is with politics, the huge differences you usually have -now, I have to design a caveat, and to say that Donald Trump was a weird, was an outlier, a weird thing that happened- but up until then, and since then, probably, the differences between Prime Ministers, and I'm going to talk about Israel, because this is where I live.

Yeah.

It's really not that huge, at the end of the day. And it's so rare that somebody is actually doing something bold, or anything like that. And all the heated discussions around it, to some degree, are heated because it's not the hugest issue it could be, right?

Totally, yeah, there's a whole bunch of stuff I could jump off with that. And, you know, while I also know various things about American politics, I'm also not an American so we can talk entirely in terms of Prime Ministers if we wanted. One thing that stands out to me as relevant to something I was saying earlier, and to what you just said, is, "What do you do? If all the politicians are missing the point?" Like, how do you place a vote for, "Guys can we get down to business here?" Where's that? Where's that button? And there's a fellow by the name of John Bunzl, who has this really interesting proposal that he calls the 'SIMPOL solution'. And there's a book by that title, which I haven't read, but I've listened to some podcasts of his and I looked briefly at the book. And SIMPOL stands for 'Simultaneous Policy'.

And the basic idea is we're having a lot of trouble with trying to sort out global problems, like climate change. And like, among the contributors to climate change are things like, in order to be globally competitive, you need to really not have too many regulations on business. And there's no way to enforce having regulations on business, because there's no global government that can say, "No, no, we're all going to have regulations on this." How do you get countries to come together, and decide together at the same time that they're going to do [certain] things in parallel. So, his proposal is essentially twofold. In order to understand part one, you kind of need to understand part two, but suffice to say, part two is a way of solving problems collectively. Part one, is a way to get countries to decide that they are going to use that way to solve problems. And so, part one is complex but it looks something like, having a small number of voters in a given region become - not exactly single issue voters or using this system, but top issue voters.

But the way that the system works is, it's not a commitment to doing anything in particular. You're not saying like... you're not calling up your local representative, your local candidates and saying, “Hi, I'm only going to vote for you if you support this particular tax or this particular policy”. What you're saying is “I'm only going to vote for you if you support using simultaneous policy to resolve political disagreements”. And that only takes place in the context of other entities, other agents, like other governments, or whatever, also wanting to use simultaneous policy to resolve disagreement. So they're committing to something that's sort of like, "Well, yeah, I'm sure hypothetically, if this other person and me had a better way of resolving disagreements, of course, I would want to use it." It's kind of a no brainer and it's pretty easy to commit to. And then once you have a few percent of a given region that's[sic] saying, "I'm not going to vote for anyone who doesn't support this, then kind of everybody's got to support it. Because they're not going to be able to win, if you have a solid voting block, that's only going to vote for people who support it.

And it's easy to say, "Well, I support it. Yeah, I would also want to resolve disagreements in that way. There's more to the sort of the game theory of that. But then the method of actually resolving these disagreements is quite precisely the thing that I was saying a few minutes ago, you try to get all of the problems in the room without trying to solve them one by one. And then you say, "Okay, well, yeah, these sure are all problems... can we find any win wins here? Are there any problems that are actually each other solutions that we can just sort of plug them in together?" And I don't, offhand have super easy examples for this. But I mean, when a when a co-founding team of a company, finds one person who wants to play one role, and one person who wants to play the other role, this is just a huge win win, right? They're not compromising on anything. They're like, "Great, I didn't want to do any of that stuff." "Great, I didn't want to do any of the stuff you're gonna do." "Okay, great. Well, let's work together." And so, sometimes you find problems that are directly solutions of each other. Other times, you might just find something like, "Okay, well, look, we all agree that we have this problem, which is the amount of co2 going into the atmosphere. We all don't want to go first on trying to like cut down reduction* or cut down emissions, because, there's a economic cost to doing that. But we've got different countries at different stages, who are able to make certain kinds of moves, and can we find like the best move for each country to make, which might be different."

In some cases, it might be like, "Oh, I'm going to taper off coal". In other cases, it might be like, "I'm going to invest in, this particular thing". And in some cases, you might say, "Hey, country over here, you're actually just already doing great. So, in honor of that, we're just going to, do this other nice thing for you, as part of you kind of getting on with this agreement, or whatever." And then there might also be… I forget all the examples he uses, but the point is you can solve problems better when you solve them in parallel, is basically the idea. And solving them in parallel also gets outside of the idea that we need to somehow figure out a compromise, because we're only looking at one dimension on which there can be no win-win. In order to find a win-win, you need to go up, at least, and you maybe also need to go out.

Yeah, I agree, completely - cooperation beats competition every day, basically. And you're so right saying the thing about problems and how they need to be floated to the surface, so we can all see them and also adopt the perspective of our discussion partner, because we may be talking about something like being the blind men and the elephant, and we could with two different individuals. But, it could be that we're seeing the the elephants very differently, or not seeing [inaudible], because we have very different problems in our life. So I'm going to give a concrete example, listeners of this podcast, and [inaudible], do know that I have a moniker saying, “There's more to life than living”. And the reason I say it, the context, is that I'm on Twitter, I assume that everyone around me is, to some degree financially secure, is living probably in a western society. Or something close to that, and would be in the worst case scenario, getting food stamps or something like that.

In other words, I'm mostly talking to people who are not really worried day to day about what they're going to eat the next day, and are not so busy with survival, they don't have time to think right? And in that context, I say there's more to life than living, because just living is apparently not that great. Too many people commit suicide even though they're perfectly physically healthy. But if I speak with a friend who is, or with someone who is actually so worried about money, so worried about their survival, -even if it's not justified, even if he lives here, and actually he would be supported by the government, though he wouldn't be able to fly abroad or whatever- If I come with my solutions, if I come with my pet solution,

Right? Your concept of [inaudible] is fine, look you don't understand, you don't actually have the problems that you're having.

Exactly, exactly. And that's arrogant, it's not creative, because I'm not going into his shoes and seeing things from his perspective. So this is not going to lead to fruitful conversation. And it brings me to the point that I think that when we speak with other people, if we find ourselves ever in a situation where I'm saying, "I've heard enough from you, and let's agree to disagree," or whatever, [or] "You're very stupid for not receiving well my perfect idea," it really says something about us - we don't want to learn, and we have a problem we don't recognize at that point, and are not going for solution. Because our problem right there is that we're going to lose this person as an ally, because we're not willing to jump in the foxhole with them and fight their war. Of course, it's not our war, but I need to go the extra mind to understand where they're coming from, to start fixing things for both of us.

Yeah, somebody might have the way that they understand what it means to be a good person, or a man, or an upstanding citizen, or whatever else. [They] might say, "It's so shameful to accept handouts, from the government or something, I'd rather die". And they might just have that as a little 'emotional belief' floating around unconsciously, that they're not thinking about. They're not aware of it day to day, but when you try to tell them, "No, you've got a social safety net, like, you'd be fine, if you didn't have a job, and you just had to get, food stamps," or whatever, that would be very disturbing of a proposal to them. That would not, in fact, be fine for them, because of the meaning that they're making of everything. Sure they would, technically, theoretically be able to eat, but they would feel that they wouldn't deserve to eat, for instance, right? And if you're just trying to argue with them, rather than sort of seeing [that they're saying] "No, no, no, that would actually create this other problem for me." [You can go] "Oh, okay. Well, tell me more about that other problem, what's going on there?"

And there are whole methodologies of therapy based on having those kinds of conversations with people. And what I sense from what I've read about the work you do with dialectic, is that it actually is in some sense, a form of... like, it's very structurally similar to coherence therapy, which I've done a bunch of as a client over the last year. And I've also more recently been learning coherence coaching, which is basically the same sort of technique as coherence therapy, but applied to coaching instead. And it's the same sort of idea of like, invite out somebody's understandings, ask them questions, and notice where, "Hey, how does this thing sit with that thing? How, are both of those the case? It seems like this is true, and it also seems like this is true, what's going on there?" And if you can really hold that these are both somehow true, and yet they seem to contradict - if you can hold both of those together, something starts to open up.

Yeah. Absolutely, and it is adjacent to coherence therapy, from the little that I know of it. I haven't gone down that rabbit hole exactly.

Sounds like coherent therapy for your concepts.

Yeah. Dialectic is... the only reason I'm not calling it a coaching practice or a therapy practice is because, it's something that we should all do. And it's for well people. It's actually on your way to being a mentally healthy person with a good conception of the world, which allows us to live in it, kind of in a good flow. It's really not about having that specialized role of a therapist or coach, but just kind of this person who is in some way kind of an authority in that space or anything like that, because a person who's just asking questions, is more a friend to you than a therapist or a coach, you know? It's really not there to do that. So it's more about the betterment of well people, but-

Without disagreeing with the thrust of what you're saying here, I will tag that it is possible to ask people questions In a way that will tie them in knots instead, first of all. And that it's also possible to do something like coaching or even to some extent therapy, from a place of profound surrendering humility, where you're not actually representing yourself as understanding anything in particular, about what's going on for the person or what to do about it. You're just, kind of, helping them traverse the landscape of their own mind, basically, which it sounds like this is kind of what you're talking about. So I don't think that those have to be exclusive. Although I think, yeah, in many cases they are. But I would also agree with you that these kinds of basic skills that we're pointing at, you know? The skill of helping people clarify what it is that they are seeing, or knowing, or noticing contradictions or tangles in their own thinking. I think that is something that I would see as a sort of necessary skill to be, a good friend, or a good parent, or a good teacher, or a good co-worker, and in particular, a good boss.

But even just any kind of relationship that you're in, a romantic partnership, benefits from being able to see that everything that everybody's doing makes some kind of sense. I mean, if it didn't, they'd be doing some other apparently senseless thing. So just because you don't see the sense that it makes doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. And then the puzzle is, "How does this make sense? How does this all fit together?" And yeah, that's where if you can really sink into conversation with people in a way that's able to hold those unknowns - and that's, I think, probably why I started with that one, it's because it's so foundational to everything else. It's like, you're not going to get very far if you can't hold multiple unknowns, you know? If you can only surface one unknown, and then you got to try to solve it, or forget about it, you're not gonna be able to fit your unknowns together. And that's in my experience where the forefront is of both of an individual's thought and of sort of collective sense making.

Yeah. Absolutely. And it also makes me think of the fact that, you know, for me as I get older, and hopefully wiser, I realized that also coming into conversations, and specifically the conversations where there's the danger of me and the other person, not seeing eye to eye on almost anything, it's a lame resignation to kind of to revert to a space or a type of discussion where it's an argument or even worse than that, you know? A tug of war. And in some sense, my most recent thought about this is that some truths are not worth stating, at the expense of burning a bridge with somebody, which is surprising to me, because I've always been a rational person who cares about nothing but the truth, you know, supposedly.

And I would say that I would never hold back my... I would never hold my tongue when it comes to saying the truth. Like, you'd want to see the person who says the truth, and it doesn't matter how well it's received or something like that. Well, I recently have been on this journey, realizing that the first thing we need to make sure that is present, is actually, at least, a correct relationship, something that's where we can be at least correct with one another and not go into these wrestling matches, right? Like verbal wrestling matches or having animosity or anything like that. And it's only second to that, like, once we've diffused that, we can even start a discussion. But it's never worth going down the path where you end up fighting with someone.

Yeah. And when you first brought up the kind of, I forget what the word used was, maybe it was 'vitriol', some 'V' word [*] it's something about the kinds of awful conversations that people get in trying to sort political stuff. Well, it's not even quite clear if trying to sort out is quite the thing that's being tried there, but there's this... Anyway, I think a lot of what's going on there often, is a feeling of unsafety, that is trying to get itself resolved. It's like "If people can see it my way then I'll be safe," is sort of the background thought there. And if both people are thinking that, and neither of them has the space to listen to each other, until they feel safe, then you're just at an impasse at that point. There is nothing to be done, except to find a way to back up, get that safety and open up more space for listening, which again, benefits from having assumptions, like, just because we see things differently, doesn't mean one of us is wrong.

Huge, huge. That's huge. And that ties it back to nonverbal communication, I think. Because if you find yourself in a situation where tones are going up, and tensions are high, and you see somebody is starting to shout, right? And feeling like they're not heard? Really, you could continue focusing on the content and addressing the content, is that going to get you anywhere? Absolutely not, what you're seeing in front of you are two things, you see if you're very busy, about your own kind of self that you've constructed, and how you see yourself and your own feeling of unsafety, you're going to get hurt by these words, right, you're going to feel very threatened by the words thrown at you and what they do to you. Well, if I accept that what whatever this person has said, I feel completely unsafe, and they feel terrible, this is probably what got me so riled up. But if you're a person actually attuned to trying to have a decent dialogue, and get something good out of this situation, you have to look at the other person and realize that they are the person who is feeling unsafe. And they are basically crying out for help. They don't know how to cry out for help, they're not being vulnerable.

Right, [inaudible] that is in the background there.

Oh, yeah. And you have to lower the flames and address that, and address that as a person to person. Like, all the content stuff, all the thoughts stuff, we have all the time in the world to discuss it later, when we're both in a better position. But let's get to that better position where we both feel safe, and we're not threatening one another.

Yeah. And that can be very messy, because it may be that the thing you're trying to talk about, is the very thing that's creating the unsafety in the first place. You know? If you're trying to have a negotiation with somebody about whether, I don't know, they can continue sleeping on your couch, right? A friend of yours or something who you thought was going to sleep on your couch for one night, and they've been there for nine. And you're kind of like, "I want to talk about this". But what does it even mean to get to a place of safety there, if they're concerned about their material need of shelter, and you're concerned about your sense of your own boundaries and what it means to say yes or no to people. And in the meantime, where are they going to sleep? How do you actually do that backing up, when you have a live situation that is unfolding, as you're trying to talk, and the timescale of course, depends. Right? But that's part of, I think the situation that we're dealing with globally, is that there's no simple place to back up to from which to have the conversation.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, when the going gets tough, suddenly, there's not so much room for discussion, that is a problem. But the least we could do, is at least recognize their predicament and the fact that they're worrying about...

Yeah, being able to honor that the other person is in a tight spot. In the meantime, like literally like, "Hey, I see you're trying to show up for this conversation, even while you're dealing with this, immediate need that you're trying to resolve", working through all that.

Yeah, absolutely. I agree a 100% And those are some of the things that are just necessary, if we are going to have fruitful conversations with people. So, to be able to shelf for a while the very volatile topic, that you maybe reached. Maybe if it's not in the case of these really immediate dangers, but to be able to shelf and agree to disagree, not indefinitely, because I don't think that's good, I think we should always strive to agree with one another even with the people who seem to be disagreeing with us in the most obvious and irreconcilable way, but it is okay to shelf something for a while and come back to it when we have established prior understanding that is necessary for having the discussion in a constructive way. Right? So behind every problem that we can solve right now, there probably lies a problem which we haven't identified, going into that discussion, which we now need to identify because we see that the discussion is not going anywhere constructive.

Right. And that's what you were saying, well that's a different layer of what you were saying earlier about every conversation in order to be functional, needs also kind of a functional meta conversation. And meta communication has been identified as the way out of double binds, a double bind being something where you both must, and must not, and also must not point out that you're in this situation of having this contradiction forced on you. And so the only way out, is to be able to actually say, "Look, I don't have any moves here. I don't have any good moves. So you have kind of been, backed into a corner, and I'd like to find a move that works for us, but I haven't been handed one in the form of this question that you're asking, or this, decision you're trying to get me to make." And so it's like being able to have that meta conversation creates, or can when it works, when there's enough safety for it and so forth. That meta conversation is what unblocks the bind.

Yeah, that's so important, and so... basically, just so important to remember and go down that route. Because we want to have good outcomes to conversations, we don't want to spend our time, either conversing about completely useless things, which are not actually contributing to a well being. And we certainly don't want to ruin our day by becoming angry, exasperated, desperate, whatever, because we've just had an awful conversation with somebody and some bad words were thrown in the air. And, everybody feels terrible. So, I think everything we just said, is kind of essential to having those better conversations. And I want to maybe go back a little bit and ask you, if you have some examples or fields in your life where you've had the chance to implement some of the things or that it's taking you... yeah, either in a business context or relationship context. Anything, if you have some memorable examples of maybe things clicking with regards to how the conversation is going?

Yeah. Well, there's one interesting idea that comes to mind with respect to business context, which is that I've been running this software company for... wow! Coming up on nine years or eight and some years. And I'm just in the process of gradually onboarding a friend of mine, George, to work on a bunch of different projects, including some of the software. And he had a bunch of, kind of, well, let's just say the code base was sort of not optimized for anybody other than me. And so he's coming into this code base being like, "Oh, man, I don't really feel at home here". And he had kind of brought this up, a year or two ago, when he first started doing a little bit of work on it, in kind of a one-off sense. But at the time, I was sort of like, "Well, look, it's the way I like it and you're not a very major stakeholder here. So I'm going to keep it the way I like it." But as he's been joining the team more full time, we had another conversation about it, because he was like, “Hey, it would really make a difference to me. If we could somehow make the codebase feel more at home for me, is there a way we could do that?” And we talked about a bunch of different options and surfaced one of the proposals that he had originally made around using an automated tool to kind of format the code.

It's just one piece, right? There's obviously a lot of other layers to what makes a codebase good. And I had been resistant to this because there was a particular way that I was formatting the single quotes and double quotes in my particular code editor that was helpful for me to know what was going on. And I didn't want to ruin that with this, new system. But then, as we talked about it, I was like, "Well come to think of it, I can actually write a custom style for my code editor that would automatically highlight these things without having to tag them with single quotes or double quotes, and that would almost kind of be even better than the way I have been doing it." And it was that shift from, "Wait, like, there's actually a thing here that I like better. I can satisfy George and the particular thing he's asking for, not at costs to myself, but actually at benefit to myself," and I wouldn't have stopped to think about the opportunity to make that system work, and it might not have been worth it sort of just for me, but it did ultimately get me to a place that I liked better. And yeah, that's a really cool thing to notice, when it's like, you come up with a solution trying to solve, again, multiple problems at once, that ends up being a better solution to those problems, then you would have come up with if you'd only been trying to solve them one by one.

Yeah. And that, of course, happened also because he was good enough to approach you and actually start the conversation about the whole thing. And I really like the fact that you use the metaphor of joining into a home, an existing home. For you, a home is a place where you already feel at ease, and, you know, the place where you can actually chill and relax and not worry about something. And inviting somebody into your home is not, even if they're a good friend, it can be hard-

And then if you’re actually saying, "Okay, not just you're going to come hang out in my home, but we're actually going to live together."

Yeah.

Well, we might have to find some different ways of doing things. And I think that basic principle applies all the way up, like, are you and I living together? Well, not in the same house, not in the same country, not in the same continent, even. But we share a planet, we do have to somehow get along, we have to somehow take care of this planet together. And, somehow, humanity needs to make decisions on various scales, that somehow make this planet more or less home for all of us. And that's a really big puzzle. And if we can't even have those conversations on the scale of, little company disputes or relationship, romantic relationship disputes or whatever, good luck trying to solve that at political scale. People have, of course, the solutions that they have. It's not like... it would be naive to say, "Well, there's just nothing we can do in the meantime, then. We've got to first solve this perfectly on the scale of two people before we can scale it up." It's like "No", I mean, you've got simultaneous policy as a proposal from John Bunzl, for instance, which is, in some way, part of a solution that could be applied at a huge global scale. And so it's not like you can't be thinking about it all in parallel. But it's quite striking, I think.

And this is when I said at the start, I'm really interested in what good conversation looks like. I think, to some degree, I'm talking about a quality of conversation that most people don't have at any point in their year. It's not just like, what's good conversation? It's like, no, no, what is really good conversation? What is conversation that consistently produces insights and solutions to problems that nobody's solved before? And like that [produces that] quality of conversation. And that's largely what I'm trying to figure out how to do more generally, how to invite other people into that, and train them. And then there's a puzzle of like, what aspects of that needs something like training, just like practice, training wheels, or just going through the motions until you get it? Or, what aspects of that needs better understandings, does somebody really get the thing about, we can both disagree and neither be wrong. Do people really get that? Are they sort of stuck in a model where everything is logical, and thus, if two things seem to contradict one person must be wrong. Not everything is logical, like that. Which is not to say that logic doesn't work when it works, because it does. But if you haven't defined all of your terms, you can't just use logic on it. Logic only works in the domains where it works, and that's part of the magic of it.

So part of it is training, part of it is new frameworks, new viewpoints, new ways of seeing things, and those aren't totally separable. Part of it may also be, working on things like trauma, to create more safety for people in working with disagreement, and working with being comfortable in the meantime, when they don't know how to resolve some sort of tension that they have with somebody on whatever scale. I think there's more, but those certainly feel like three pretty core pieces. But I also think that, what the training actually is training in, is not totally obvious. And I only have a few rough sketches myself, at this point of what that training would actually look like. I'm thinking of designing a workshop on it, but I feel fairly far away from actually having a finished product.

Yeah, that would be a great contribution. The more we talk about it, and the more we explore the concept of conversation, and more specifically, an excellent conversation, the more it seems like you could have all the tapes, the list of tapes that we know from all sorts of places, on how to kind of troubleshoot a conversation, or how to go through it and have some sort of algorithm for having a good conversation. But as with so many other things in life, I think what you want is not to have people with the kind of technical know how, what to do in a conversation, because it's such a free flowing, fast flowing thing that's going back and forth. Rather, it's about creating us, each and every one of us, as a person who understands what conversation is on a higher level. Another big thing that comes to my mind is curiosity, right? Because I find that for me, speaking to many different other people, its really sparked my curiosity, and the human psyche, is just infinitely interesting for me, especially[sic] if somebody is really saying and meaning something that is very much foreign to me.

So as a tour guide, I had to take people on a tour in Israel, and many of them were fundamentalist Christians or Jews, people whose world to us are very different from mine. And that could have been creating tension for the five days that we were together, it could have been not fun. But instead, I chose consciously to really see the world as they do, with knowing that, even if I listen to them, and they run their thoughts in my head - and that's a big thing, you are not your thoughts, right? A lot of people are not willing to even take on the perspective of another person, because that means that they need to think their thoughts. And a lot of people identify with their thoughts, and they think that they immediately have been converted in some way. So that's a big thing. So curiosity and the openness, not having a strong ego. These are all meta skills, as you say, that really make up a good conversationalist. And it's less about, giving the five tips on how to ask a question in real time, actually, people are so diverse that any sort of baggage that you're bringing into a conversation - this goes back to the beginning of our conversation- any sort of... you could have at best an outline of what you want to achieve with a conversation. But you can't actually force how it's actually moving through the terrain. Right? And that's a good thing.

Right, because you have to interface with what's actually there. The "you are not your thoughts" thing is a very good point. I've jotted that down as like another sort of piece of view that people need to have, in addition to the thing about disagreement not implying somebody is wrong. There's something really powerful adjacent to that, that in order to be comfortable trying on other people's thoughts, it's like, part of what you need is like, the "you are not your thoughts" thing. But there's also something you need, this kind of self trust. It's a kind of like, trust that "I will actually naturally tend to see the world in the way that makes the most sense to me." And so if I try on another viewpoint, that makes less sense. I don't have to be worried about, accidentally getting stuck in it, because I'll be able to zoom back out and go, "Well, yeah, I can kind of see it that way, but that's definitely not my best model of what's going on with the world. I can sort of see how it would look from that angle, but that's a very incomplete view and I have another view that feels more central to how I'm seeing things." Trusting that you're not going to lose touch with that, I think it's something that a lot of people don't have.

And that is really important for people to develop as a capacity. And it's a kind of weirdly self reinforcing thing because the more you trust that about yourself, the more you can relax and the more you can expand back out. The less you trust, that you're going to be able to like comfortably... that you're going to be able to fall back in with your own best models of things, when you're not trying on other people's, the less you trust that the more you kind of need to guard your models, which actually makes them more brittle. They can't take in more information. And so then, somebody comes at you from left field and says, well, but what about this, and you go, "Well, I never considered that". And then now you've lost touch with your model, because you were busy guarding it from the world and didn't know how to talk to other models. Something like that.

Yeah. It's such a classic example to... when you're in a tough spot, where a lot depends on you adopting a certain viewpoint, right? Following a dogma? So many of us are conditioned, to live in a place where we know that our acceptance in society, in the society we live in, is conditioned. It depends on us saying some sort of thing and repeating some dogma that everybody agrees on, even though it doesn't make much sense, and it's these places that will make you really intolerant, when it comes to hearing a different opinion. Because you don't have the confidence in your own view, you don't have the confidence that your understanding is wholesome, and well founded. And if it's not, if it's just a dogma, you adopted from somebody, who told you, think this or else, of course, you're going to be very, very threatened by hearing something that could very well prove more logical to you, whether you like it or not, right?

Yeah. And that is part of the thing. And I think people, some people, think that only happens with external dogma, but as far as I can tell, it happens with internal, like over generalizations as well, you know? People have really rigid beliefs about how people are like, based on their childhood experiences, or their first... they date one person, and then they say, "Oh, men are so whatever," or "Women are so whatever". And then they come up with some generalization about how people are and it's like, "Well, this guy is, yeah, at least in this circumstance with you. Or he was last year anyway, when you dated him." But being able to actually say, "Well, what do I actually know about all such 'whatever's? Or, maybe I don't actually know that much". But if kind of have your thing of, "Oh, I need to believe that all, of whatever gender has whatever problem, in order to not feel bad about my relationship ending," then if somebody tries to point out that people aren't... they're not all like that, you kind of go "Whoa, whoa, hold up, hold up sir, you are not about to make me feel bad about my relationship ending. It's not my responsibility, I have a belief, protecting me from that. Don't you dare threaten my belief." And it's like... and again, all of those beliefs, they contain a bit of truth, you don't end up with a belief from nothing. They're all based on something. Even the most egregious dogma, largely has some basis in something, right? Even if it's totally overwrought, or even if it's [a] "Here's as a problem."

And so you got to get behind their solution, and even if the solution has almost nothing to do with the problem, you've just impressed people enough with your, "Here's what the problem is" that when you name the solution, they feel like, "Well, we better go for it, then I wouldn't want to contribute more to the problem" and they're not really... by that point, they're not really thinking that much about how it's related.

Yeah, absolutely. And this -again, I think it's an opinion I expressed on this podcast before- but this is, for me a really good framing of the thing; connecting it with problems and solutions, because many of the solutions that I don't find appealing at all today, for example, I talk a lot about how following a code of any kind is is bound to make you do unjust things because if you live by an algorithm, basically that tells you what and what not to do. There has got to be that one time where in context, the thing that the code told you to do, is not the just thing. And you can tell. And you can tell, oh, yeah, you can tell, but you're going to ignore it. Because you have external validation that you did right. You followed the code. So this is for me, a big thing that I'd like to push, that the whole problem with, for example, the 'meaning crisis', is looking at the wrong problem. Because there are many beautiful well spoken solutions to the supposed problem, which is the 'meaning of life' crisis'. And people are trying to redefine life in a way as to give it a different meaning. Well I say, "Well, that's not the problem. The problem is that we know what life is, not that we don't know. Life is what we share with bacteria and fungi." And this is exactly why people are not happy just living because they have something extra in their consciousness that they can [inaudible].

Ah. So the issue is not so much the meaning of life, but the meaning of meaning.

The meaning of living well, we have a concept of what it means to live well and live badly. And what we want to do is live well, it's exactly the problem that we are alive, and we know that we will continue to be alive tomorrow, we're not worried about survival. That is the problem. And instead of forcing a new meaning on the concept of life, we need to qualify life in terms of good or bad.

Yeah. Interesting.

So this is a place where I say, "Look at the problem." The solutions... you're trying to force solutions on something that is not... first of all, [inaudible] illogical to redefine life in terms of whatever hero's journey, whatever, No. That's not life. Life is information processing within an organism that's capable of-

Dissipative systems.

You might like... Have you checked out John Vervaeke's work?

I know him, yeah. My wife is a student of Rafe Kelley, who has been speaking to him a lot. Rafe Kelley is a natural Parkour specialist in Birmingham these days, so not far from you.

Because, I think Vervaeke has a thing about meaning in life as opposed to meaning of life, which seems to kind resonant with what you're pointing at here.

Yeah, it could be I do take some of this stuff. I'm not a scholar of him by any means or anything like that.

He's put out a lot of videos at this point. I checked out the first piece of his paper on relevance realization, and it seems really neat, and related to the whole puzzle of how to have a good conversation, because part of the nature of a good conversation is, how you figure out what's relevant? How does what's relevant, have both consistency, but also the capacity to evolve as new elements flow in? And how do you curate that? And how do different people's curation functions actually enhance each other? Because we notice different things, different things are salient to us.

Yeah. That's so interesting. I mean, and again, it highlights the fact that, going into a conversation, it's probably good to have some sort of idea what it is about, right? So not every conversation.

What it's for

What it's for, exactly. What it's good for, what is going to be an outcome that we're happy with. And yet keeping in mind that it could be derailed because, like we said before we found, we stumbled onto a problem that we now realize has to be resolved first before we-

Right, in order to even get to all the other ones.

Yeah, I really love it, I think we've gotten over the one hour mark, and not that it's a bad thing. And it just seems to be a good place to kind of take it back to living well for conclusions and just saying a few last meta things about this conversation, that I just wish we were able in some way to explore the whole concept of conversation, and give people some nutritious food for thought about what it means to have a meaningful conversation, and a successful conversation. Any last thoughts?

I think that, one of the most powerful things you can do to enhance your conversation is if you can hold the question non-neurotically, which is a big ask for some people. So I want to be really clear. I'm not suggesting anxiously considering the following question. If you're prone to anxiety, focus on that. But if you can hold the question non-neurotically, "What makes conversation really good?" If you can have that in the back of your mind while you're having a conversation and just notice. "Where does the conversation break down? What happens when a conversation breaks down?" It's very different with two people versus five people versus more. But, you can start to notice little generalities and sort of see, "Oh, conversation is not very good when you one person kind of hogs the train of thought, and is sort of, kind of unsatisfying," or "Conversations, not very good when, nobody really knows why we're here," right? You can kind of notice the little edges of like, "Oh, what makes what makes conversation work, better?" And that can be both just a really cool thing for you to notice in your own life. But also, if you do come up with some generalizations, I am interested, and you can reach out to me on various platforms. I am the only Malcolm ocean out there. And so long as you can spell Malcolm, you can find me.

Yeah, that's such a great tip, you know? Have the conversation. And if it breaks down, don't fret about it, but actually do a post mortem and see where things went wrong and what could be done better. And to me, the solution to neuroticism is always, while we want to have the best conversation that we want to have, and excellent conversations. If you don't want to be neurotic about, I'd say, anything in life, just to remember that. A good enough thing is good. It is good. Just don't worry about optimization. Optimization is a big enemy. This is what brings on the anxiety and neuroticism for sure. Yeah, Malcolm, thank you so much. And I would love for you to more explicitly, kind of tell listeners where to find you, your website and thoughts and everything like that. And what you do.

Yeah, so my personal blog is Malcolmocean.com, and Malcolm has a silent L in it. Like the word calm. Well the one in calm is slightly less silent. MALCOLM

Salmon

Kind of like salmon. And so, yeah, malcolmocean.com or @Malcolm_ocean on Twitter. Those are sort of the two main places to find me. Yeah, I've got a lot of writing on my blog. And I guess also on Twitter, about the kinds of topics that we've been exploring on on today's episode. So if you're interested in more of this, if you're interested in more of me talking, I've been on a number of other podcasts by now. And you can find those listed somewhere on my site.

Wonderful. Well, thank you for a lovely conversation. Malcolm.

Yeah, thank you, Eyal Shay. So we just ended the recording. And Eyal was saying, this is really nice felt like just, a casual conversation between friends, or what did you say? A curiosity call, I think is what you called it. And I was saying, yeah, for me, it's like, I'm really comfortable and familiar with recording my conversations. It's actually something that I've done a lot of, both with Zoom calls, but also, various groups that I've been part of have done a lot of just making voice memos of the entire conversation, and you can go back and listen to it later and make a transcript or, revisit a part where you suddenly got triggered and be like, why did I get triggered right there? Or, revisit a part where, "He said, you said this. No, I said that. Well, let's go look." And I talked a bit more about that philosophy on my podcast with, Tasshin Fogleman, his Reach Truth podcast. So if you're interested in sort of understanding more about, the art of recording conversations, that is over there, but I wanted to mention it, just because it ties in so powerfully with this thing we've been talking about the whole time, it just felt like a really important thing to mention, in the context of talking about what makes for good conversation.

It's like, if you can see conversation as both an art form to be experienced live, as we are right now, you and I, but also as a conversation, as an art form to be experienced later, as you the listener are right now for you, but not now in my now. There's something kind of potent that can happen there. And again, only when you're able to let go of a kind of neurotic energy towards making sure it goes right. It has to be done with the kind of play, but when you can get that it's really cool and part of how I have become so interested in, and have so many thoughts about what makes conversation good, is by really iterating on it and having this feedback loop of not just, post mortems on a conversation, kind of "Oh, how did that go?" But like, really drilling into, "How did that go?"

Yeah, I love it and, coming to do podcasting, I thought that I would not enjoy the editing. And it turns out that, I have the best time listening to good conversations that I had. So here's another one that can go in this blooper reel. If you had a good conversation, it's probably better to re-listen to it, then have some sort of conversation, which you know, is not going to be as good as that. So there's no shame in re-listening to a conversation. It's actually pretty good. And as you say, you can also learn about the mechanics of it and how it went well. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that addition. That's awesome.

Cool.