The Exchanges

Q Do you think we're going to end up with like one model that just sort of like dominates, or do you think we're going to end up with niche models and they're effectively going to be commodities in some way?

A I think it's highly dependent on how things play out. There are certain examples in the verticals, especially in the coding one, which is probably the largest vertical right now where people have swapped out models. You know, cursor even lets the, The user picked the model that they're using, and as we move towards optimization and price optimization, which isn't really the objective function right now, but it will be in a few years, um, you may see more people try and do those swaps. I think the thing, you know, that could cut against that, if the regulation gets extremely difficult and mundane and expensive, that could actually lead to more oligopoly. And I think some of the players know that and are begging for regulation.

AI assessment note: “I think it's highly dependent on how things play out.”

Q Walk me through a little bit more about good conversations on our first date. I mean, I think a lot of people tend to just have this list of questions almost, that they're like, it doesn't quite feel like an interview, uh, but it kind of feels like an interview on the same token. How do you get out of that?

A Okay, let's think of examples. So I think a bad question would be, what did you study in college? I think then you're just finding out about a fact about somebody about their major. I think a good question would be something like, oh, you just told me that your job was a marketing manager for this tech company. Like, how is that different from what you thought it would be? Or can you see yourself doing that for a long time? Or like, what changes would you want to make to it? And that one might be a little interviewee, but I think the point is that if you go on a first date and you're information-seeking, Then what you will get is facts. If you go on a date and you're connection seeking, then what you will get are stories.

AI assessment note: “if you go on a date and you're connection seeking, then what you will get are stories”

Q And does that help your sleep? Like what happens if you eat later? I assume this was all like sort of measured and.

A The, the, the fasting, I eat my last meal of the day at 11 AM for the objectives of good sleep, because I mean, there's supposedly good benefits on fasting. I think the evidence is still maybe developing. So I mostly do it for sleep because when I eat my last meal of the day, I have all my digestion finished. So when I go to bed, my resting heart rate is around 46 beats per minute. And if it's a 46, I'm going to have a perfect night's sleep. If I eat at five PM or six PM, then my resting heart rate is going to be 56. And when I do that, I'm going to knock off about 50% of my REM and 50% of my deep and I'll increase my wake time by about 35 minutes. And so I've done these, I've done so many experiments now is algorithmic. And I know exactly what happens when I eat what, at what time and how it affects my sleep.

AI assessment note: “If I eat at five PM or six PM, then my resting heart rate is going to be 56”

Q And does that help your sleep? Like what happens if you eat later? I assume this was all like sort of measured and.

A The, the, the fasting, I eat my last meal of the day at 11 AM for the objectives of good sleep, because I mean, there's supposedly good benefits on fasting. I think the evidence is still maybe developing. So I mostly do it for sleep because when I eat my last meal of the day, I have all my digestion finished. So when I go to bed, my resting heart rate is around 46 beats per minute. And if it's a 46, I'm going to have a perfect night's sleep. If I eat at five PM or six PM, then my resting heart rate is going to be 56. And when I do that, I'm going to knock off about 50% of my REM and 50% of my deep and I'll increase my wake time by about 35 minutes. And so I've done these, I've done so many experiments now is algorithmic. And I know exactly what happens when I eat what, at what time and how it affects my sleep.

AI assessment note: “If I eat at five PM or six PM, then my resting heart rate is going to be 56.”

Q Is it true you used to bust in tapes from New Brunswick?

A Yeah. That's a, that's a, I wasn't going to mention that. It was so terrible. We built a tower down at Mount Shamcook on the U.S. border, and we received the Bangor channels there, taped them, put them on the bus, and of course Halifax got them first. By the time we got them in Amherst, they were two weeks old, but the sitcoms were okay, but the Boston Bruins two weeks later were not quite so good. There was not, not a lot of entertainment, so we were selling these, uh, U.S. channels, uh, two weeks old, and then eventually we got a microwave system that brought them in directly, and it's still off Mount Shamco, and now, of course, all this stuff comes by fiber, and so tremendous changes in that business.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. That's a, that's a, I wasn't going to mention that.”

Q So, why did we start where we started? Why did we go on that journey? And obviously, like, you did this in real time, so you would refine this, but like, walk me through your decisions when you made that story.

A The most important decision to make in that story is the structure, meaning what's the chronological, um, structure of that story. I used a BABC model, which is a model that I started in the middle, actually, of the story. I started with my son is going to Camp, and I know he has to take a swim test, and I know it might not be easy for him. The real beginning of the story happens in 1983. I'm going down to the waterfront to take a swim test with nine pancakes in my belly. I jump in the pond and think it's stupid and get out, and I end up a beginner swimmer. 30 years later, I'm with my son. That's a terrible way to tell that story. You can feel that already, but that's how most people tell it, right? Most people tell it chronologically, meaning A, B, C. I started in the middle because, for a bunch of reasons. One is, if I tell you that beginning of the story, it already gives away the end. You know what's gonna happen.

AI assessment note: “I used a BABC model, which is a model that I started in the middle”

Q What are the most interesting mistakes you've seen people make when it comes to positioning?

A So many things. The first mistake is not thinking about it at all, and just assuming that there's only one position we could possibly take. Most products, we could position them in a dozen different markets, and if we really step back and forgot about the history and where we came from and looked at it with our fresh eyes, We might see something really different. So we need to think about this in the way customer thinks about it. So not thinking about positioning at all is the first mistake. The second mistake is, as we talked about before, treating it as a little marketing exercise. We're just going to put some new words on the homepage and that's it. We're done. But sales has no idea how to pitch it. Product doesn't really understand it. It doesn't actually represent the truth of Of our product at all. It's just nice, pretty words. This is not repositioning. This isn't going to move the dial on anything. Um, and then lately what I've seen is, um, companies that love the idea of category creation are, are attempting to create a category when they obviously fit In an existing market category, and it's kind of wishful thinking that this is a new category. So they'll say, no, no, no, we don't have any competition. This is a brand new thing. Nobody works like this. And the result is the customer's like, but wait, aren't you just a CRM? Why are you using all these other words? I'm …

AI assessment note: “The first mistake is not thinking about it at all”

Q What does wartime mean for you? Is that like we're fighting for our very survival? Does it mean We can just move faster and sort of ignore some of the bureaucracy. What, what does it mean?

A I think peacetime is bottoms up and more consensus, a wartime more top down. It's like, Hey, it's wartime. I don't have time to build consensus on this. This is what I think we should do. We're going left. Um, uh, and I like that about wartime and wartime is like, okay. I remember 2010, the economy was shaky back then, and we were a very young company, maybe it's 2009, and our retention statistics were horrible. Everyone was canceling our product wasn't good back then. And we lost, I remember, of the thousand customers we had in the beginning of the year, we lost like 700 of them, like just terrible churn rate in 2009. And that was existential. And it was like, let's just stop the music. And start over. Everything we're doing going forward has nothing to do with time to have new customers. It's like, how do we delight every new customer we have? Let's stop obsessing about how do we turn a prospect into a customer? Let's obsess about how do we turn a customer into a delighted customer? And so that was a crisis that really worked. We changed the culture of the company. We changed the center of gravity from prospects to customers. Never waste a good crisis. That was a really good crisis.

AI assessment note: “peacetime is bottoms up and more consensus, a wartime more top down.”

Q I was listening in previous interviews and you said, I think it was age 24 you got depressed. What happened?

A Yeah, I think it was, the onset was circumstantial. I had my first baby and he was colicky, so he just cried nonstop. And I don't think his mother and I got a night of sleep of good rest for, for six months. Meanwhile, I was building a startup and I was grinding at that with all the stresses of not having income and trying to make something work that was new. And then I was in a new marriage. And then I was also dealing with some internal term turmoil related to My religious situation where I wanted to leave my religion, but I was pretty stuck in the system, my community and the family and all the societal, like all of all my community structure. And it was just a chaotic time in life. And yeah, one day it, it, I remember it as the day my brain snapped. I just felt like something broke and I couldn't put my finger on it, but it just felt something felt different. Yeah. Yeah. And I was in that hole for 10 years.

AI assessment note: “the onset was circumstantial. I had my first baby and he was colicky”

Q It sounds like blueprint is optimized for the sole variable of sleep. Is that correct?

A I mean, so sleep is an important one. It's the number one priority because everything else rests, you know, hinges upon that. But it also, we are the first endeavor in history to focus on trying to rejuvenate every organ of the body. So we have 70 plus organs and we've tried to quantify and rejuvenate every organ of my body. So we just tried to rejuvenate my thymus, which is a gland right behind your, your, uh, chest here responsible for your immune system. And so, you know, if I can say I'm chronologically 46 years old, but the more important number is what is the biological age of my heart and of my lungs and of my liver. And that's really the, the more powerful predictor than a chronological number.

AI assessment note: “sleep is an important one. It's the number one priority... But it also”

Q You used to read a few important books. You called them, I think, quake books. And now you read many more books, almost disposable. Like, why the change?

A When you're young, it's quite easy to read books that will shake everything you know, and those are the quake books. So for me, you know, a quake book was reading Friedrich A. Hayek. A quake book was reading the early science fiction I read in my life. A quake book was reading John Stuart Mill's autobiography. And because you don't, your worldview is, is not as formed, books have an incredible influence over you. Uh, then as you get older, say, you know, by the time you hit 40, I don't mean that you never change your mind about things. You're changing your mind all the time. But it's very hard for something to have the impact, say, like the first time you heard Beethoven, or the first time you, you know, picked up Shakespeare. It's just not possible anymore. So you read more history books, you read more biographies, you read more for particular facts, you read for a kind of entry into cultural anthropology of different places or different industrial sectors. And what reading is, uh, changes. And books do, in a way, become more disposable. Like the books I still own, Or, you know, Homer, Shakespeare, some basic works of economics, and I'm not ever going to give up those books, but they're not necessarily the books I'm reading now. I do reread them sometimes.

AI assessment note: “as you get older... it's very hard for something to have the impact”

Q So for the people that can't work with you, what can they do at home to, to train their heart better that'll make the sort of biggest bang for the buck, if you will?

A The, the first piece is identifying resonant frequency. It's the rate of breathing that maximizes the heart rate oscillations, and you can use tools from elite HRVs, sensors, core sense is very good, uh, Oura Ring can be used, and what you're looking for is the highest amplitude of changes when you breathe at these different rates. So you'll do five breaths per minute, 5.5 breaths per minute, six breaths per minute. I generally start at, at 6.5 and work. My way down. Um, and then once you identify the rate of breathing that, that has the highest amplitude of heart rate oscillations, you go on. Here's the trick. If you can't get a hold of feedback, physiological feedback, 90% of the time, the rate that is someone's resonant frequency is the rate that just feels good. So out of, out of, if you do six breaths per minute, 5.5 and five breaths per minute, I'd have you try those three, and for two minutes using a pacer, You could use Breathe Plus, awesome breathing, easy air. There's an assortment of breath pacers that you can set the timing for, and, and then identify which one just feels most effortless, ok? And then from there, you go through a process. You commit to breathing 15 minutes twice a day. I generally have my clients breathe in the morning upon waking, and 15 minutes before breathing. This is awesome for increasing deep sleep and, and helping, Um, with any type of sleep…

AI assessment note: “The, the first piece is identifying resonant frequency. It's the rate of breathing”

Q Is there a spectrum of sort of concierge services or access?

A The easiest way to think about what we do is this five-step Spectrum, where to the left, things are simple, and to the right, they're difficult to impossible. So, one, two, three, four, five. On the left, anything that you can purchase on a web browser. You want to rent a home to stay in when you go to LA. Well, there's Airbnb for that. You want to buy a ticket to Coachella, go to Coachella.com. You've got a VIP pass. Number two is hard. These are things where maybe they're available online, but they're still difficult for you to get your hands on. Uh, so these would be things like booking a private jet. Yeah, you can book a private jet online, but it's so confusing and so much brain damage from a booking. Most people use a broker or a travel person to do it. Number three, we call off market. And so these are things that sellers want to sell, but they never list or make available on a website. Artist credentials to go see your favorite band, and all sorts of other things that are never on public sale. Category four would be stuff that's hard, walking red carpet at the Met Gala, or being on stage with your favorite artist, et cetera, et cetera. And then, um, the fifth category are the impossible requests, like the ventilator chase, or all of these other sorts of wild and interesting things that we get called on to do.

AI assessment note: “The easiest way to think about what we do is this five-step Spectrum”

Q And then talk to me about the importance of sort of like routine and timing of sleep. Like how important is the two to three hours leading up to sleep? And then sort of like the consistency around times we go to bed and how that impacts us.

A There have been studies to show that the more volatile your sleep onset time The worse, the cognitive outcomes for older people. So it hasn't really been studied as much in younger people, but if you have a regular bedtime in older people, you're, uh, it's predictive of better cognitive outcomes. Two things control our sleep. Our homeostatic need, which is the longer you're awake, the more you need sleep. And the other is the circadian clock timing of it. So, um, one thing that helps you to have a good, solid, even circadian clock is in the morning when you wake up, expose yourself to bright light because bright light, um, especially in the blue frequency is the strongest resetter of our daily clock. And that starts the clock at the right time of day so that you're ready to go to sleep at night. The circadian clock is one of the things that its drive for wakefulness starts relaxing at night at the same time that the homeostatic need for sleep builds, and so that allows you to go to sleep at the right time. If you expose yourself to really bright light in the evening, for example, with the electronic device with lots of blue in the frequency of light, you are setting your clock to, to say, oh, it's time to wake up, and so then your homeostatic Need for sleep, and your circadian rhythm are fighting one another. Yeah, so there are lots of things that set your circadian clock besid…

AI assessment note: “the more volatile your sleep onset time The worse, the cognitive outcomes”

Q How would you define sleep? I want to go into sort of, uh, resolving our emotions and cleaning our brain, but before we do that, how would you define?

A Uh, so, uh, sleep is behaviorally defined as an inattentive state, uh, where we're less attentive to the world around us. It's reversible though, so we can definitely wake ourselves up unlike coma. And, um, we usually have a characteristic posture and, um, And it's homeostatically regulated. So if we don't get enough of it, our, our brains, our bodies will demand more of it to make up for the sleep that we've lost. We've recently discovered in the last five, six years that sleep isn't necessarily a whole brain at the same time phenomenon. That in fact, some of our brain can be asleep while other parts of our brain can be awake. And that's probably what sleepwalking is about. We are unconscious, but we are awake enough to be able to interact with the world around us.

AI assessment note: “sleep is behaviorally defined as an inattentive state, uh, where we're less attentive”

Q Is it important that those are family operated and owned, or why wouldn't Caterpillar just take control and like hire somebody to run those stores?

A In Caterpillar's case, what they want their family ownership to represent is a value in the relationship with the customer. Um, and they want the, the, the dealership is a family owner dealership to put the customer first and not have to worry about, uh, reported earnings. I mean, there's a, the, the largest non-family Caterpillar deal in the world, I think is Tormont here in Canada. That's a rarity. The rest are all family. So they, they want that steady hand. I wouldn't call it long-term perspective. It's called steady hand, not too, not too high return, not too low return. In the business. But to, to, to return to the problem, the problem is getting the offspring to do it. By the third or fourth generation, the offspring often loses interest in the business.

AI assessment note: “what they want their family ownership to represent is a value in the relationship”

Q What are some of those strategies? What are the ones that are most valuable?

A Well, the one that always works is know your cost better than your competitors know their cost. Because most people don't know their cost. They think they do. They know the cost that gets between the revenues and the profit line. And those are all averages, and they don't go behind the averages. And if you go behind the averages, what, what, what people will discover is that some things cost more than they thought they did, and some things cost less. And some customers are more profitable, and some are less profitable. Um, And if you know your costs better than your competitor, know their costs, you could do nasty things. Gain market share, uh, because, uh, you would understand how the costs work, your costs work, and not what the volumes mean. So what may appear to be a, a, a less profitable customer is actually the high volume customer produces a whole bunch of economies of scale and reduces costs. But that, that all gets lost in the averages. So that's, that's a big winner. One that works very well is be faster than your competitors at providing your customers what they want, when they want it, and where they want it. And if a company can do that two or three times faster than its competitors, it'll usually grow two to three times faster. It'll be twice as profitable. And that was the story of Walmart versus Kmart for many years. That's the story of Toyota versus most of the…

AI assessment note: “the one that always works is know your cost better than your competitors”

Q providing here. There's a couple areas that I wanted to sort of follow up with here. One was the nature of the airplane and constant adjustments. It's like there's an active stability to it. Right. You need to be conscious and active in order to stabilize. And then the other thing around the core wants that you said, so approval, control, security, oneness. Can you explore those a little bit?

A So I first heard about these from Hale Dwoskin, who is the teacher of the Sedona method. It's a really great method. And he, I believe got them from his mentor, Lester Levinson. They're not original, I'm sure, but that's where I heard him. I want to give credit. So the four core wants of all human beings, and these are natural, they're not wrong, they're natural, they're instinctual. The first core want is approval. It's the desire to be liked, loved, valued, respected, wanted. The second core want is for control. It's just simply the desire for the world to be the way we think the world should be. All of us have a belief about the way the world should be, and the world could be how fast my computer's running. The world could be my desk. The world could be my children. The world could be, ah, Economic variables going on right now. We all have a way we think the world should be and a way the world shouldn't be. Control is just our desire to make the world be the way we think it should be. So I say to people all the time, we're all control freaks. We don't, our very survivability is at threat when we lack approval and when we lack control. If we get cut out of the clan, ostracized from the tribe, Because we're not approved of, that's a death sentence. So it's natural and normal that we are looking for approval, love, connectivity. When we feel out of control, it's threatening tha…

AI assessment note: “The first core want is approval. It's the desire to be liked, loved”

Q us are addicted too, myself included. Together we explore dopamine, what it is and how it works, addiction and why behaviors can be as addictive as drugs, early warning signs to look for in yourself and others, treatment, and her struggles with insomnia. Let's take a simple idea and take it seriously. It's time to listen and learn. Let's just jump right in. What is dopamine? How does it work?

A So dopamine is a chemical that we make in our brain. Um, it's a neurotransmitter, and neurotransmitters are the molecules that bridge the gap between neurons, and that gap is called the synapse. So neurotransmitters allow for fine tuning of the electrical circuits that are conducted by the neurons themselves. Dopamine is the most important neurotransmitter for the experience of pleasure, reward, and motivation. It's not the only neurotransmitter involved in that process, but it is the common pathway for all reinforcing substances and behaviors. Anything that's reinforcing releases dopamine in a specific circuit of the brain called the reward circuit. The more dopamine it releases and the faster it releases dopamine, the more reinforcing and potentially addictive that substance or behavior is.

AI assessment note: “dopamine is a chemical that we make in our brain. Um, it's a neurotransmitter”

Q Can you go deeper on that, that the decrease from a baseline I'm assuming?

A Sure. So to, in order to understand that, it's, it's essential to appreciate that pleasure and pain are co-located in the brain. So the same parts of the brain that process pleasure also process pain, and they work like opposite sides of a balance. If you imagine like a central fulcrum and a beam on that fulcrum, something like a teeter-totter in a kid's playground, and that represents how we process pleasure and pain. And there are three rules governing that balance, and the first and most important rule is that the balance wants to remain level. It doesn't want to be tilted very long to the side of pleasure or pain, and our brains will work very hard to restore a level balance with any deviation from neutrality. So for example, let's say I read a romance novel, I get a release of dopamine in my pleasure pathway or my reward circuit, and my balance tilts to the side of pleasure. No sooner has that happened than my brain starts to adapt to that increased dopamine by downregulating my own dopamine receptors and my own dopamine production, not just to baseline levels, but actually below baseline levels, and this is really the key piece of neuroadaptation. I like to imagine this as these little neuroadaptation gremlins who hop on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again, but the gremlins really like it on the balance, so they don't get off as soon as the balance is lev…

AI assessment note: “downregulating my own dopamine receptors... not just to baseline levels, but actually below baseline levels”

Q There's a couple of interesting things you said there. One, motivation. So what's the correlation or tie between dopamine and motivation?

A Well, it was originally thought that dopamine was primarily related to the experience of pleasure, euphoria, getting high, but a series of important experiments suggest that dopamine may be even more important for motivation, that is our willingness to do the work to get high, uh, than for the experience of pleasure itself. And one very important seminal study, uh, Bioengineered rats to have no dopamine receptors in their reward circuit. And what the researchers discovered is if they put food in that rat's mouth, it would eat the food and seem to get pleasure from the food. But if they put the food even a body length away, the rat would starve to death. So the absence of dopamine in that reward circuit essentially took away uh,, ah, that uh,, ah, that rodent's desire to strive uh,, ah, to do the work to get the reward.

AI assessment note: “dopamine may be even more important for motivation, that is our willingness to do the work”

Q So, so that's just it, right? So the, the motivation part of this is. We have a goal, we want to do something, and we get a dopamine response from that, so we're motivated to do it.

A Well, it's first of all that we have to have been exposed to that stimulus and have experienced it as reinforcing in some way, and then that lays down really a very permanent lifetime memory of that experience and the desire to recreate it in order to, uh, again, experience the release of dopamine. Once we are reminded of our drug of choice, we actually get a little bit high, or we get a little release of dopamine in the reward circuit that then also creates the desire or craving to want to do the work. The other thing is that, uh, that's very important here is that once people start to become addicted, what's salient is not so much the release of dopamine when they're getting high or experiencing pleasure, but But it's actually the decrease in dopamine in between or the dopamine deficit state that leaves them in a constant state of craving that then motivates them to want to do the work.

AI assessment note: “Well, it's first of all that we have to have been exposed to that stimulus”

Q And so we can be addicted to substances and addicted to behaviors. It's almost as if there's a spectrum. Is there something that makes one particular thing more addictive than another?

A Yeah, so this is a great question. In general, the more dopamine a substance or behavior releases in the reward circuit, and the faster it releases dopamine, the more likely it is to be addictive. However, the huge caveat to that is that there's enormous inter-individual variability. So what might release a lot of dopamine in your reward circuit might not release a lot of dopamine in my reward circuit, and vice versa. In general, intoxicants tend to be intoxicating for the, the majority of people, but, you know, there are people for whom, uh, regular intoxicants are actively aversive, and they would not seek those intoxicants out again. Um, also importantly, you know, speaking to sort of the, the world we live in now, there are so many more drugs than there used to be, and even, you know, healthy activities have become drugified, And the result is that we're all more exposed to a potential drug of choice, and hence also all more vulnerable to the problem of addiction.

AI assessment note: “the more dopamine a substance or behavior releases in the reward circuit, and the faster”

Q So two, two follow-ups there. One is, is there a component of treatment that involves, uh, addressing the double life or the honesty with yourself?

A Well, what I've developed over the years is asking, explicitly talking about the double life, which is familiar to many people with addiction. But one thing that I do is I actually prescribe honesty, uh, or what I call radical honesty. So in addition to asking patients to abstain from their drug of choice for Um, in order to reset reward pathways, what I also say to them is, and you can't tell any lies this month. Um, and these aren't, I don't just mean you can't lie about your use. Um, I mean, you can't lie about anything, which turns out to be really hard to do, because the average adult tells one to two lies per day. Um, and usually it's little lies about sort of why we were late for a meeting. Um, but even those little lies can trip us up and get us telling the bigger lies related to our addiction.

AI assessment note: “one thing that I do is I actually prescribe honesty, uh, or what I call radical honesty”

Q And was it Frederick Taylor who came up with this sort of, like, method of organization?

A I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, I actually have his, uh, original book, uh, right here on my shelf, um, The Principles of Scientific Management. Yeah, he was one of that generation. There was a whole generation of folks, actually, That, uh, that saw the opportunity to help apply the principles of science and numbers and analysis and stopwatches to the way we work in order to make those factories and those businesses that were, you know, focused on scale really work. And so he was a guy who would literally spend his weekends figuring out what is the optimal number of pounds of coal in a shovel that would give you the maximum amount of shoveled coal in an hour. And then he would go back to the factory and actually say, Hey, I'll make you a deal. I'll give you a small raise if you agree to shovel exactly how I show you. And so this whole idea of the one best way was really born with him. Um, and, and the idea of like best practice and that, that infected the mindset of, of workers everywhere. He also really gave birth to the management class for the first time because they're, they were charged with ensuring that stuff.

AI assessment note: “this whole idea of the one best way was really born with him.”

Q There's so much I want to dive into there. Uh, I think let's start with, I mean, were there moments you wanted to quit? We all have moments when we want to quit where it seems like it's just impossible to keep going. And I'm sure you had many of those moments. How did you keep going?

A Oh, I did. Um, I remember I got malaria, which was reasonably common in those forests, and I was lying on the floor of my hut, which is, you know, it was about six feet by seven feet or something, tiny little hut in the forest with a tin roof, and quite wretched, and one of the monks nearby had gone to tell the, the teacher, and he came to visit me, and he, He, he, he spoke in, mostly in the Lao language, which is very, kind of, laconic and straightforward, and he looked at me, and he said, um, kai ba, which means you sick? I said, yes. He said, tu ba, is it hard? Are you suffering? I said, yes. And he smiled, and he said, yeah. He said, this is suffering, all right. Um, we've all had it. It looks like it's probably malaria. I said, yeah. Then he looked at me, he said, makes you want to go home and see your mother, doesn't it? I said, yes. And then he looked at me, he said, you know, you know how to do this. We all have gone through this. I'll send the medicine, Monk, but this is a part of your training, and you can do it. And he smiled, and I just felt this transmission of somebody who'd lived in the jungle for years with malaria and tigers and things like that, saying, hey, Go for it.

AI assessment note: “Oh, I did. Um, I remember I got malaria”

Q So is it fair to say that space and movement have changed how we describe things? Is that fair to say?

A Yes, and in fact, it's, I think it's fair to say that all our spatial representations depend on, on interactions. They're a coupling of what we do and how we perceive it, and those studies go way back, um, a 150 years when, when Stratton and later others put lenses on people's eyes that moved the visuals System or the visual perception, left words or right words, you can do it upside down. And people adapted by moving, by grasping things. And if they didn't grasp things and recalibrate how space was represented in the brain, then they didn't learn. To behave in a new situation. And it's undoubtedly something we're doing continuously all our lives is recalibrating, um, our many visual spatial systems to the way they allow us to behave in the world.

AI assessment note: “Yes, and in fact, it's, I think it's fair to say”

Q What are the common mistakes that people make in running a premortem?

A One of the mistakes is that they just frame it wrong from the beginning. They'll say, okay, we should do a pre-mortem. So what can go wrong? It's not an issue of what can go wrong. We're dealing with a crystal ball that has showed that the plan has failed. We know that it failed. And our job is, is to, uh, explain why. So say what can go wrong is too tentative. It's too vague. And so that's a, That's I think maybe the most common mistake that, that, that people make is they don't frame it that way. Another mistake is they let, uh, uh, individuals talk too long and, and everybody else is waiting. And this way we're, we're going around the room in a pretty rapid clip and everybody just stating one thing at a time. And a third mistake might be the leader gets cold feet. And says, ah, I just want to hear what everybody else has. And so instead of creating a culture of trust and candor, the leader is, is creating a dangerous environment where people can get in trouble, and the leader is, is being Shielded and protected.

AI assessment note: “One of the mistakes is that they just frame it wrong from the beginning.”

Q a commander, you, you have to make decisions with maps, not physical maps, but sort of abstractions of reality that have been filtered through a lot of people before it gets to you. And the decisions you can make are only as good as the information that you get. How do you make sure you're dealing with reality on the ground to make sure that you're really understanding what's happening?

A Yeah, this is really important because, as you know, by the time it gets up to you, it's been sort of homogenized to the point where it looks neat and clean, and military units are Depicted as symbols on a map, and you move military units around, and the little symbol doesn't get tired, doesn't get frightened, you know, doesn't suffer casualties, but on the ground, it's very human and very different than that. There are several things. First is experience on the part of the commander, having been there, having looking at a movement Of an organization across the map and you go, wait a minute, I've made movements like that. I know what it does, how tiring it is or, or difficult. The second is staying in communication with people as much as you can listening. You know, there's a lot of, uh, text communication now, but there was incredible value in voice communication. You could talk to a subordinate and you could tell by the tone of their voice, how their morale was, Whether they were upset, whether they were shaky, and you could hopefully be a reassuring voice to them that's hard to do in a, in a printed thing. Finally, it's gotten trickier in recent years because we have the ability to get two-dimensional depictions of the battlefield specifically from unmanned aerial vehicles. In Iraq and Afghanistan, over every fight we could have at about 10,000 to 20,000 feet, full motion vi…

AI assessment note: “First is experience on the part of the commander... The second is staying in communication”

Q to note is that Dr. Walker is not a medical doctor, and anything in here is just opinion. So before you do anything or make major changes to your sleep, Or your routines, it's wise to consult with your physician. It's time to listen and learn. Let's start with the basics. What is sleep? What are sleep stages? How do we sleep? How does it play out across the night?

A Yeah, sleep is a funny thing in that way. Um, sleep, at least in humans, and, um, in fact, in all mammalian species is broadly separated into two main types. Um, on the one hand, we have non-rapid eye movement sleep, or what we call non-REM sleep for short. Um, and non-REM sleep has been further subdivided into four separate stages, and they've been unimaginatively called stages one through four, um, increasing in their depth of sleep. So stages three and four, that's the really deep phase of non-repid eye movement sleep. And then stages one and two, that's what we consider to be light non-REM sleep. And then on the other side, we have rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep, um, which is named not after the popular Michael Stipe, uh, 19 nineties indie pop band, but because of these bizarre horizontal shuttling eye movements that occur during the stage of sleep, uh, these rapid eye movements. And we're, by the way, we're yet to really understand why the eyes dart back and forward, left and right, left and right, during rapid eye movement sleep. But rapid eye movement sleep is principally the stage within which we dream. Now, that depends a little bit on your definition of dreaming. If you have a very lax definition, then you probably dream in almost all stages of sleep But when most of us say, oh, I had this strange dream last night, you're really talking about a dream that came …

AI assessment note: “non-REM sleep has been further subdivided into four separate stages”