Pojačalo Adriaticfest EP1: Super Adaptibility: How Do We Thrive When Everything Changes? I Dr Max McKeown

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Ivan Minić: Dobar dan svima. Danas imamo veliku čast da smo u Maestral Resortu u Pržnom u Crnoj Gori, na Adriatic Festu koji se po prvi put organizuje ove godine, a koji organizuju naši prijatelji i omogućili su nam da pored, da kažemo, redovnog sadržaja koje ovde možemo da iskusimo kao gosti, snimimo jedan serijal specijalnih epizoda koje će pokriti neke teme koje su pokrili neki od ključnih govornika ovde. I iako bismo voleli da sa većinom njih imamo pune epizode u punom formatu, to najverovatnije neće biti moguće, a bilo bi greota da propustimo neke ovakve priče i zbog toga danas je sa mnom Max McKeown, Opening Keynote na ovoj konferenciji. Ceo razgovor će biti na engleskom jeziku, verujem da to neće predstavljati nikakav problem. 

Ivan Minić: So, Max really nice to see you in the podcast. It was a real pleasure listening to your talk this morning and especially a pleasure knowing that we are the first audience that saw this talk, this concept, this thing you are talking about in your new book that just came out. So what was the talk about?
Max McKeown: So the book… the book and the talk was about, I guess two things, how humans adapt is the big one, how they shape their future, how they always have. So it’s about one cognitive loop that allows for all human progress and any person to transcend their limits and find something better. That’s what the book’s about.
Ivan Minić: So basically what differentiates us from dinosaurs?
Max McKeown: Among others. Although so far they’ve done better than we have, but we have better television apparently.
Ivan Minić: Higher resolution definitely. We’re gonna talk more about that in the later part of the conversation but for the beginning, anyone can Google your name and figure out a little bit more, but from your own words, why should we care about what you have to say?
Max McKeown: Because of my stunning good looks clearly, or exemplary beard. All those reasons, I mean why does anyone listen to anyone? But in this case I suppose there’s always an origin story and there’s a book before and a book before and a qualification before. So I as a kid, I was still always interested in this question, how did humans shape the future? I wanted to know why did that thing work and that thing didn’t work even as a kid. So I was the kid who would throw himself out of his cot and would run around the apartment and pull down a television onto my finger and it chopped it off and, you know, that kind of kid, and take apart the television set and the telephone and the computer, all of that. So I was a curious kid and that led me to, first computing, my first degree was in computing and then after that, I was still interested in this because that was about the future. And then I did the MBA and then I did the MSc in psychology and then I did the doctorate because I was still interested in this. So I guess through, why should someone listen to me? One, I’ve been curious all my life. Two, I took the time to study some things. Three, I’ve worked in organizations, government, corporations, entrepreneurs all my life. So I’ve got some behind the scenes, Wizard of Oz style stuff. I’ve opened the door, taken the pill, know what’s happening behind the matrix. Which probably will excite at least, you know, 30% of your audience who believe it’s real. So I’ve done all of those things. So I think I’ve paid a price in terms of personality, in learning, and then in practical experience. And along the way published books on strategy, innovation and adaptability.
Ivan Minić: And yeah, your core skills, your core experiences do come from business consulting, innovation consulting, organizational consulting as well. And that was your let’s say first career. And from that, these things developed because you basically, if I understand correctly, you started noticing things. And when you start noticing things it bugs you somehow.
Max McKeown: It does. For me certainly, it feels much more like your embryo turns into a bigger fetus, turns into a child and so on through your life. It’s the same person, but they don’t share very… they share the same genetics, but they don’t share very many skin cells anymore. It’s gone, or hair follicles, whatever it is. You know, these things alter. So for me it’s a very natural development. And it’s not really a discontinuity. I guess if somebody reads this that knows my work, they’ll say, “Oh yeah, you’ve expanded the run loop.” You always were interested in how people notice patterns. What you never did before was put all of yourself into a book. Whereas the strategy book, it says here is a subject, this is the way that corporations do it, I’m going to explain what’s behind that. And there are models in there, “Speed Strategy” for instance, to really get teams working together. And I continue to do that work. But there’s one diagram in that book that has diagrams from all my books, including this one. And so in a way it’s the same brain attempting to answer the same questions sometimes for different audiences at different levels of depth.
Ivan Minić: Yeah, one of the things when I teached students about project management, one of the things I always try to explain to them is there are certain levels of your work and one of the things is the first level, maybe not the first, maybe the second, but the low level thing is how you do a certain thing. Because when you learn how to do a certain thing you only do that because you know how. The crucial moment that happens to only a fraction of people, not too many of them, is why I do this. Why I do this instead of the other options? What are the other options? Oh, there are many other options. Why did I choose this solution for this particular problem? These people usually tend to have bigger success in life, wider understanding of things. These people can in the end maybe, you know, modify things in life. The other guys are just, you know, when you hold a hammer in your head everything looks like a nail. It’s all fine but have modest expectations. What’s very interesting about you is the way your personal education was structured because it’s fairly unusual mix of things. It’s extremely potent mix of things when you see it now, but it’s very unusual. Not many people would go that way. Why did you do that like that?
Max McKeown: Well, and if I go back for instance to being a kid, my father used to work for a newspaper and he would bring home sometimes rolls of paper, big rolls of paper, just the end. But I could pull them out across the room and I could draw on them big cartoons and everything was connected to me. And you saw today me do something similar really, all this time later. So for me everything is connected factually and it seems connected in the way that I see it, the pattern is connected. And if you dig down, computing is humans trying to advance technology but also to see what’s possible and also to fix things. So is strategy, it’s the same thing. It’s humans trying to shape their futures. Innovation is the same thing, they’re trying to be creative. So for me they’re the same thing viewed from a different lens rather than being a different thing. But perhaps other people see them as silos. But that’s why they end up with silos. And a lot of my clients really in the end pay for me because I don’t see them as distinct. And that means I can rise above and actually see what’s really happening. I love that levels thing. They say that in boxing too. They say there are levels in boxing. Because you can be strong but nowhere near the level of a top boxer who sees what you don’t see. And I think it’s similar in this case. Once you see the world as connected, what subject could I study that wasn’t relevant to what I do?
Ivan Minić: So in this part of the world, one of renowned religions is basketball. And when you learn to play basketball, the first thing you learn are the fundamentals, of course. You have to learn the fundamentals and then you can figure out everything else. But the crucial moment is when you don’t have to think about the fundamentals. When it’s automatic. When you use your brain to solve complex problems, not the basic problems. Because if you stay with the basic problems, you can never grow in this world.
Max McKeown: That kind of functional fluency. Yes. So if I’m doing, because I’m relatively tall and was a relatively tall kid, I was put onto the basketball team and I enjoyed it, but it never really became fluent to me even a layup. I didn’t really want to throw myself in the air. And I can’t do a backflip because I don’t trust gravity to sort things out. So even though I rock climb and I do jiu-jitsu and I take certain risks, climb buildings, if it’s out of my direct control I find that harder. But another person becomes so beautifully fluent, it’s remarkable how quickly they pick it up. You seen that French kid? The 21 year old? I mean it’s astonishing. 7’4″ and he just moves with this unnatural grace. Remarkable.
Ivan Minić: We thought that it was impossible for a tall person to play like that. It’s been impossible in the past 20 years for many other things as well. So the, you know, the border moved across the time and then this kid came and took everything else down because there are no rules.
Max McKeown: Well it’s back to levels, isn’t it? Basketball has levels. The kid’s on the court… it’s Spurs isn’t it he’s playing for? He’s on the court, 7’4″, kind of skinny but muscular. He can, I saw a clip coming in here, and he can block, he can shoot, he can three point, he can lay it up, he can one hand dunk. I mean, levels.
Ivan Minić: And when you speak, and I had a chance to speak with a couple of people who played against him. Everything you learned before about basketball doesn’t apply here because his reach is so big, his speed is so high, the way he moves… You have to adapt yourself to that or you will be losing.
Max McKeown: And he sees the game back to the patterns you mentioned before. So when somebody is that much better, especially in basketball or a one person sport like tennis, if the person is the best, they’re the best. Federer just was the best all those years and he knew when he rolled up on the court he was going to win because he saw things you couldn’t see and could do them.
Ivan Minić: And it’s very interesting for… in that example in tennis, when you have three people in a generation that are amazing and completely different. And when they, you know, it’s not fighting back with the same weaponry. It’s completely different but it’s equally amazing.
Max McKeown: Well yes, the giant bicep versus the smooth player versus this massive serve. Yeah, which I think again equifinality or the idea that you can get to the same place via a different path I think is very… should be reassuring to all of us. That while there are levels, play a different game then. Or play the game in a different way. Rather than saying I’m not as good at playing basketball as he is. I mean I’m not 7’4″, there’s nothing I can do about it apart from going to those clinics that break your legs and add extra bone. I mean imagine.
Ivan Minić: But yeah, at the same time you have Steph Curry that has like 15 year career, one of the greatest of all time. He is too small, he is too skinny, he is too weak, yet he’s amazing. And he is one of the greatest of all time.
Max McKeown: But didn’t you find with him for instance that it was his… I don’t know if you know Sir Anthony Hopkins, the actor? So he’s, I don’t know, 90 or something at the moment. And a clip I liked about him was he said, “I wasn’t very clever at school. I didn’t come from money. But I discovered acting and Shakespeare and I just was really good at memorizing,” he says. “So I memorized the whole canon and when I met a famous actor, I performed to him straight away to show off.” But what I thought was interesting there was, it wasn’t that he was good at memorizing, it was that he was willing to spend hours memorizing. And that’s what he described. And so Curry is willing to spend hours doing those three point shots. I wouldn’t. That’s a talent in itself I think. The willingness to pay a price. I mean I can’t even imagine doing that over and over again. But I do my own things over and over again to improve.
Ivan Minić: And hopefully everybody finds something that’s that important to them because why do you do it? It’s not because you can shoot well. You do it because you want to achieve something. That what you want to achieve, you just have to figure out a way how you can do it because you can’t rely on the things that maybe some other people have.
Max McKeown: And depending on your personality, depending on your abilities and then and your outcomes. But I think it’s quite important to have something of your own. So to always have something that you’re doing for the external world and something that you’re doing for yourself that doesn’t need somebody else to compare with. You go for a run, you go for a run. Only you can run your way. You look after your garden, it’s only for you. I think it’s very important to have an intrinsic set of activities and an extrinsic. We all have to pay the bills, but we also all have to be fulfilled. Oh look, that rhymed. That’s excellent.
Ivan Minić: Exactly. Yeah. One thing I want to ask you before we move more into current moment is, so your education spent, you spent a lot of time educating yourself and it was some years ago. So many of the things you learned in the institutions that were for that were no longer relevant once you finished education. Some of the things were but for example computer science, you know, in five or six years it develops so fast that maybe some of the things you learned were irrelevant. In this region, and that’s one of the biggest weak points for us over here, people consider education mostly as a thing that you finish once you finish the university. And for most people that’s the peak point in their career in terms of knowledge, understanding and everything. And obviously life doesn’t work like that especially in this time. How was it for you to figure out your own way of absorbing new knowledge?
Max McKeown: I think in a sense it’s easier for me if we go with the abilities, I am curious and I see how things are connected. So when I was a kid I was using a computer but then when I was I think 12 years old I was doing adult courses in computing because I was interested. Which meant that when I was an adult, well a kid really, an early adult, I did official qualifications but I haven’t stopped. I find it interesting. I think when somebody does something for kudos or as a pass into a job, they think it’s a forever pass, a forever key. And what they don’t understand is it’s a time… there’s an expiry date on that knowledge and there’s an expiry date on your credibility. Which must be very hard. I haven’t experienced it really, but it must be very hard for people who don’t actually naturally want to do it and nobody told them it was time, it was an expiry date situation. Because I would have imagined the person then suddenly finds themselves less in demand than they used to be and they think the world is unfair. But they still don’t want to go back to school or do it on their own because unlike Anthony Hopkins, they’re not willing to put that effort in. And I’m not blaming you if that’s you listening, I’m just saying that that’s not what you were sold. You were sold something that was only good for maybe 10 years. You’re the one who’s expected to keep it up to date.
Ivan Minić: Exactly. And you are part of the problem or you are part of the solution. So for example here it’s quite common, I don’t know, with accountants and people doing taxes, helping you with taxes. We’ve been doing this exactly like this for the past 30 years. I mean guys, have you seen what changed in the past 30 years? You can’t do it exactly the same. And in my opinion the biggest issue is when you approach this as something you do every once in a while you learn a new thing. No, you constantly learn a new thing. Because every once in a while, if you every 10 years go to a gym, nothing will happen. Or at least the beginning will be extremely hard and it will take a lot of time to get good at it.
Max McKeown: Well that analogy works quite well. Just because you were good at running when you were 16 doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at running later. The fitness doesn’t stay just because you got a medal. And certainly it’s true here that the person who wants to… when they do reskilling, it does puzzle me. I don’t like to blame people. I don’t like to make somebody feel bad. People are valuable. But when government and when business has to talk about “we’ve got this set of people and they were qualified but now we’ve got to reskill them,” something still has gone wrong there where the individuals involved don’t think that’s their job. It’s their lives. You know how if you’re running a business, you’re meant to keep 20% of your money for marketing, for instance. Just as a basic. And you’re meant to put your taxes to one side to make sure you can pay them unless obviously you’re American or a big brand, in which case no money is necessary. But in this case where if you’re younger listening to this or even if you’re older, just say what percentage of your life should be spent keeping yourself up to date? Well at least 20%, surely. If you’d spent 20% of the past 20 years keeping up to date, you wouldn’t be worried about this stuff at all.
Ivan Minić: You can see what’s going to come into the future if… because everything has been a cycle. So you can usually notice what happened in other industries and maybe yours is not quickly adapting to these things as some others, but it’s coming in 5, 10 years. And especially in regions like this, I mean this is basically south central Europe, it’s central Europe, we can always say that. And we’ve been 10 or 20 years behind the most developed societies. You just have to copy things. You don’t have to make anything up. It would be ideal, you know, Tesla is from these places over here. He made things up. He was a nut job. He changed the world for the better. But you don’t have to be a Tesla. You just have to figure out what people are doing in other places and have in mind what happened prior to the big change and you start noticing things changing in that direction.
Max McKeown: That’s it. I have a term, the “Long Emergency”. That you should, if you were paying attention, have known it was coming. So algorithms, we’ve had algorithms since Ada Lovelace a long, long time ago, the concept of them and then the concept of a machine that could calculate. But most people still listening to this, watching this won’t really know about any of that. And they won’t remember that this was in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s. This was always coming. Always coming. And so if you weren’t paying attention or you were only paying attention a little bit, you’re now shocked. It’s finally happened. But that’s like smoking and being surprised that you’ve got lung cancer. I mean these things do happen. And I think seeing that cause and effect can leave you in a better place. Again, no ill feeling to anybody. Bad shit happens.
Ivan Minić: Yeah and maybe you shouldn’t always think that, you know, correlation means causation because it doesn’t. But if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, there is a high probability it’s a duck.
Max McKeown: You choose your… you can get lung cancer without having ever smoked from some other source and not get lung cancer. But very similar to this. So you could really luck out and all of these things will have nothing to do with you. And there will be some people, they’re running some business, they’re a car mechanic and they think that’ll work, or they clean windows or they’re a builder. Builders are going to be safe for quite a while because they’ve actually got to do something physical and that robot’s not coming, but one day it will come.
Ivan Minić: Yeah and people are 3D printing houses now. Now you have, you know, the car mechanic 20 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago and now it’s a completely different job. Sure, if you are in Balkans you have 25 year old cars so you will still have some job but eventually if we manage to keep up, if we catch up, you will have five year old cars. There is no work for a mechanic.
Max McKeown: But my local garage that I really like, they can only fix the mechanical. They can fix an internal combustion engine plus its mechanics. They can’t fix any of the electronics and they don’t understand electric engines. And they’re just I guess waiting to die and hoping that cars don’t stop before they get there. But I’m not sure that’s possible. Again, none of this is welcome. It’s just the nature of humans to keep trying something new. And I think it’s more fun to and more enjoyable and more productive to keep up with it and even to go ahead of it and go “Ah this is cool”. I mean it seemed inevitable to me that as soon as you put an AirPod in your ear… what, 10 years ago? As soon as you put one in your ear you knew that AI was going to go mainstream because Siri could already talk to you. It wasn’t perfect but it was coming. And I remember my youngest son, I have four children but my youngest son, he used to talk to it back then. And he tuned it to learn his voice and he thought it was very natural. So it was yet another signal to me that said, and I tagged it, I said, you know, I’m scanning for signals, hunting for patterns. But then I tagged this one as maturing, I thought “But this is coming then, isn’t it?” If this kid can use Siri and talk to it and make it useful, eventually we’re all going to do it.
Ivan Minić: Yeah and you know we have a mascot here that’s a colorful bird. And two years ago there was a, this time of year, so the Black Friday is close. And I was looking at what German Amazon had because I ordered some things for me, some books and everything and I could put a few more things in the box. And my friend’s daughter was six or seven. Her English was amazing because she was watching English shows all the time. And they didn’t have this new thing, active speaker where you can interact with the speaker, ask for something. And there was a version of Amazon’s Alexa speaker that’s like a round ball and everything but there is a special version where that round ball is covered like a little owl. Like a little bird. And it’s the cutest thing ever. And of course I bought two. One for myself because I’m a big kid and the other one for the kid. I never connected it. The kid plays with it every day. And prepares for school and does some things. Of course the technology is still fairly low in comparison to what you now have with, you know, talking with ChatGPT. It’s not nearly good enough. But she is seven and for her it’s amazing.
Max McKeown: It’s another signal that says, well you remember the talking dolls like Woody that you could pull the cord? Same thing. And before that you would invent words and you would use your own doll and move it around. And I suppose when I go back, I say human nature is unlikely to change ever. If we like a thing at a small scale or with low technology, we will love a thing that is big scale or has the technology and is easier. So of course eventually people are going to have their little friend in the corner and they’re going to talk to them because they don’t want to be lonely. Of course. Not everybody. But I think, you know, 20, 30, 40 years unless there’s a revolution…
Ivan Minić: Look, there is a reason I studied robotics. I preferred talking to a machine than talking to a human. I learned to talk to humans, not a big recommendation from me but okay. But eventually machines started really well interacting with me and I made amazing things using that. To not miss talking about the thing why are we here now. So you had already a book about this topic. Why did you make a bigger one with “Super” in front?
Max McKeown: And pictures as well. And poems. And all sorts of things. Well, last year I published the fourth edition of the Strategy Book. So that was really successful. I know everybody has to say that, but it is amazing so if you haven’t read it. But very much for a corporate world getting teams together. And then the editor for Adaptability sent me a message and said, “Listen I’m with a new company, we need a flagship book. Could you do something for us?” And I thought it’s been 13 years, a new edition of Adaptability would be a good idea, maybe I could do that. And the original plan was just to, because I thought the world still needs adaptability. And I was going to update the examples 10% and you know kind of sneak it out the door just as a new edition to keep everybody happy. And I started to do it and I underlined all the examples and thought, “Oh well I’ll go back in there.” And I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I felt there was a much… I kept asking myself questions. But how does this work? And does it really work? And why does it work, this loop I’m talking about? And what does the world need in terms of a book? And I started this quite an odyssey. Really an emotionally surprising thing. I ran 200k a week, it says on my Pokemon Go… which is my running app. 200k a week and I was jogging mainly around the kitchen inside dictating and rewriting and thumb typing and going out to clubs and carrying on doing it, all that stuff. And it just got deeper and deeper but connected. So I ended up realizing that there were three steps to greater adaptability logically, and these were backed up by the science, and they could be broken down into three functions each. And those could be broken down into other habits. And that’s how you got Superadaptability. I mean it must be the world’s most interconnected recursive book. Absolutely everything ties into everything else front and back. You can even start reading it from the back and it makes sense. So why? Because the world needs Superadaptability. It needs a book skewed positive. Needs a book that isn’t obsessed just with AI or billionaires or with what’s happening in some countries I won’t mention. I think I wanted to find out about minds who in very tough situations had done amazing things or had started as ordinary people and had had a sudden click. I love that. That’s what I needed in my life.
Ivan Minić: And I think the world really needs that. And I’m so grateful that you put so many ideas, so many interesting cases, so many different things, but also a lot of emotions because you can see that you are quite passionate about everything when you talk about it. And that makes a lot of difference because what’s meaningful is something that maybe 20% of people are gonna react to. But if you put emotions inside you have a really big chance on getting into minds and hearts of more people. And I think that more people need to understand that they are far more capable than what they think now, that the motivation comes from inside, but that the discipline is the one thing that usually makes a difference because after a while things start to ramp up because you stood with them, you took your time. So this morning you explained the basic concepts with some examples. The concepts are in their basicness old but some of the ideas are quite new. Can you, I mean it’s hard but can you sum up and explain the basic things and how it, you know, builds a tree around it?
Max McKeown: Yes. It helps that I like things in threes like all humans do really. Even if you don’t get religious with it but triptychs and triples. So in this case I asked the big question how do humans shape the future? And I asked the question why does one human adapt better than another? And then a third question, what is the pattern that is learnable from that? And from that came I thought a surprising answer and it was emotional even as I’m thinking about it now really. But came the answer that there was one loop. And I remember asking this morning, I said, “What if?” For any nerds out there, they’ll recognize this as recursive.
Ivan Minić: Exactly.
Max McKeown: So what if, what if one, what if one loop, what if one powerful loop, what if one fractal-like powerful loop, what if one fractal-like powerful recursive loop could change your life? I won’t do it all for you. But what somebody might notice there is that every time I said a sentence I added something and the final sentence is infinitely more powerful than the starting point and it’s built. And that’s one of the things that I discovered in here was that humans have a very simple loop, indeed I would argue all life is a loop, and we could argue, well not argue but we could discuss that, you know, all the way back to atoms and the big bang and gravity. But all life is a loop, but particularly all conscious life is, and then particularly us. Because we are able to recognize what’s happening, we’re able to seek understanding, and then we’re able to take necessary action following the plan if you like or the desire that we have, goal directed. And this “run loop”, I think I demonstrate, so it’s a run loop, it goes forward and then it curls back on itself because you’re going into yourself and creating a recursive space, a space for thinking, a third space, and then you’re curling back out and then taking action. The pictures are in here. And that simple loop is fractal. And even understanding it, I swear to god if I was very religious, that once even understanding it for a moment makes a difference. You go, “Oh yeah.”
Ivan Minić: And there are still, you know, there are some amazing things if you were interested in your life in different things, when you put that into your mind and you start thinking, you eventually figure out how many amazing things happen because you had to take a so to say step back. And the first thing that comes to my mind because I’m special is the gravitational slingshot.
Max McKeown: Yes.
Ivan Minić: We have to go from this to this and but we can’t do that unless we do something that from the very basic standpoint is counter-intuitive. It’s counter-intuitive until you have all the information inside. And many of the things that we are talking now as original, amazing, innovative is extremely derivative. But it’s not derivative for everyone. You have to have all the shit inside.
Max McKeown: Well everything… a few things I thought of. Everything is made of something. And that means all new ideas are made of old ideas. And when you see them as interconnected and you see their history of course, you can see how they’re woven together. I would say that all the way down there are loops of matter and those loops of matter have varying levels of consciousness. Some of time can’t talk to us, well that’s debatable, but time, gravity, pressure, mass, they can’t talk to us in that normal sense and you could say that they’re not conscious but they do exist. And if something exists, I’ll pull this back actually to some of that reskilling. If a thing exists, it has met the conditions for existence. If a thing persists, continues to exist, it has continued to meet the conditions for existence. That realization that everything shares that common thread, me and a rock, we share that common thread, I think is really quite liberating because it allows me to look around and see one connections between myself and everything. So I don’t feel a separation between myself and my fellow man, but also almost, and this will seem weird, myself and my fellow chair or clearly bird or the cat that I petted outside on the beach. They’re all one. So I think it helps you to not be so anxious about the future. I will die but I will continue. That’s metaphysics. But also day to day everything that I do, even things we label as errors, are not really errors. They’re experiences, they’re thinking patterns, they are me. And I could no more separate myself from those than from my successes.
Ivan Minić: And especially many people when they talk, especially extremely successful people, people most of us look up to, they most of them always say that they learn far more from their mistakes than from their successes. Because when you succeed you celebrate, you don’t analyze. Some people analyze and usually later. But when you don’t succeed, you try to figure out why and you come better next time. And maybe it won’t be good enough even the second or the third time, but maybe eventually you will manage to do something that’s beyond amazing just because you were giving it.
Max McKeown: Well sometimes it’s just the price. Sometimes the price of success is failure. If you want success, get used to failure. Of course. That’s back to basketball too, isn’t it? You know, you never score any of the shots that you don’t take type of idea. Sure. I think there are other elements here too though that… it makes sense if there are multiple ways of winning. I say winning, I don’t mean beating somebody else, but of winning. So if I think that life as an experience is valuable in itself, it’s rather difficult to lose. So I might also want to get better at something, but what if the embarrassment wasn’t failure? It was an experience and it was worth having. It’s the philosophical idea of if you had to stop being you in order… if you wanted to get rid of a mistake you made in the past and to stop being you now, would you do that? Would you be willing to do it? I wouldn’t. I like being me now. And so I’m willing to accept everything that’s ever happened to me because it’s part of my experience. And again it’s very peaceful to think like that. It’s very zen.
Ivan Minić: Yeah and meaning that you can’t be what you are now, you can’t be that in the future. If it’s something that’s gonna be, you know, it’s gonna be a long journey, you are gonna transcend into something else, it’s far easier to accept than cutting this off and starting something completely different.
Max McKeown: Yes and to know that that might be the case in the future too. Because some people say all’s well that ends well. And what they’re saying is consequentialism. They’re saying that if it ended well it was worth my sacrifice. But you don’t know if it’s going to end well because it hasn’t ended yet. So maybe better to say that things will happen to you, you’ll try to make them good, but you also enjoy I guess the ride.
Ivan Minić: Yeah and if you only play it safe so that you make sure it ends well, you will never shoot for the moon.
Max McKeown: Well you asked about the book didn’t you? I mean some people… people keep asking, they go “So you have a perfectly successful career doing what you did with the previous book and with the previous book and with the previous book and with the previous book. So why do you keep kind of like putting it to one side when you could just rake in the money?” Well because I’ve only got so much life. I can’t extend it apart from being fit or whatever but what, extend it past 120? 130? Nobody ever has. And you can always get hit by a bus tomorrow.
Max McKeown: You could. Although I love Marvel superheroes so I love that scene where the Hulk or The Thing just gets hit by a bus and then just pushes it away. And I used to tell my children that’s all that would happen to dad. And that I was immortal. So my daughter’s very unhappy that now she’s learning that mortality… “Have you been lying to me all these years dad?”
Ivan Minić: And the Santa Claus doesn’t exist but for now…
Max McKeown: Dad is immortal but Santa doesn’t exist.
Ivan Minić: One thing. Superadaptability is something that, it’s a concept regarding us as a species because it helped us evolve and adapt to all the things that happen. In the past five years, and we all know why, one of the biggest concepts everyone was talking about and is talking about now is the resilience. Resilience in minds of many people means that you protect yourself, you hide yourself, you don’t adapt, you like bounce off what happened. It doesn’t really work like that. No matter how strong you are, there are things that can crush you unless you adapt. Do I see this correctly?
Max McKeown: Yes, it’s like grit. Another subject like that. This idea that, or even mindfulness to some extent on its own. There’s this idea that I will accept the pain, I will accept the suffering. I will try to avoid it when I can but I just will be strong.
Ivan Minić: I’ll push through the pain.
Max McKeown: You know, I’ll still punch you. You’ll just stand there and I’ll… you’ll just punch you. And the more that you can be resilient and accept my punches the better. What about ducking from the punches? What about fighting back? What about leaving the room? To be resilient I think has limitations because it leaves us exactly back where we were. You fall over, you get up. That’s good but what about… Once upon a time I was on a beach, well next to a beach walking along and I was walking backwards because I was filming my family and I suddenly looked round and I realized that I was about to hit a park bench, a metal one. And so I kind of flipped and rolled across it because of my jiu-jitsu training. That one’s good because I wasn’t resilient, I was adaptable. I moved to a better place and I was safe. I think the problem with grit is it says keep doing something you hate because the reward will be good eventually. Resilience says put up with anything that happens to you, be brave my son. These are not the highest level of adaptability which is to shape your world and to shape yourself so that you are somewhere better.
Ivan Minić: A friend of mine who is an Olympic gold medalist once told me, and for him it makes sense, he’s very special, “No one ever became Olympic champion by having a good measure of things.” But the more important question is does everyone really needs to be an Olympic champion?
Max McKeown: I think this is so important. You’re not one thing. I’m not one thing. You’re not one thing. I said this morning you are incomplete, I am incomplete. That’s a feature not a flaw.
Ivan Minić: I wouldn’t say incomplete, I would say work in progress.
Max McKeown: Same difference really, they’re synonymous because the idea is that…
Ivan Minić: Sounds nicer.
Max McKeown: Does it? Well maybe mine’s deeper, more godal. But the idea is I suppose work in progress suggests that there might be an ending. And there isn’t. You will never…
Ivan Minić: It’s an infinite game.
Max McKeown: You will never be complete. So your life is finite, you will die, but at the same time on that moment you will not be complete. There is no finish. There is no design we’re working to. And that’s what drives us to the next thing. And I find that thing exciting because I don’t know what I’m going to become. I don’t know who Max is going to be next and what he’s going to acquire and what experience he’s going to have. I didn’t know we were going to do this today. How cool. You know I got to know you and for me getting to know someone is my mind, 87 billion neurons, reaching towards your mind. And sometimes you really do connect. It’s like that scene in Iron Man or The Avengers, you know I think that’s AI but two minds connecting and suddenly you are actually an extended mind talking to another person. And I think it’s that side and still we won’t understand each other fully. How exciting. How cool.
Ivan Minić: Yeah and I think that the way we learn things is through stories. And stories actually never end. You just as a storyteller sometimes decide to put a full stop somewhere. But it doesn’t mean that the story ends there. It’s the work of storyteller maybe ends there, then it’s your story to work on. So for the last question and for the end, you decided to you know do a full backflip on your life. You ended up at the same place but with an experience that’s extremely special and I would think life changing. What’s next?
Max McKeown: Well I think the first thing to do with this, which isn’t even published yet, although you can buy it at all good bookstores, pre-order it, is to share it with the world. It’s been quite an emotional journey and I really am incredibly excited to share it. Both because as an object when people get hold of it, it’s full of my art, it’s full of ideas, it’s full of stories, it’s full of mind…
Ivan Minić: It’s not a boring big book.
Max McKeown: It’s like 10 amazing page-turning books. I mean there’s a poem… let me show somebody. They won’t believe us but you should. There we go, maybe.
Ivan Minić: It… you don’t… You really like your sharpies I can see.
Max McKeown: And so I suppose… I do like my sharpies. “Ever made a mistake? Ever made the same mistake twice? That’s not a mistake that’s a repeat. A repeat of what you’ve been… you’ve thought before.” I… one… Well the first reward of doing this was to write it myself. The second was to give it to my children so that they could know their father better. Like the Christmas Carol, the Muppets Christmas Carol scene, come and know me better. And the next thing really is to share it. There’s a lot to share and it’s not just my story. It’s the story of the hundreds of people who are in it and then the millions and millions of people who could have been in it. Some of whom we have never even written about because they existed before somebody, one of our ancestors, invented writing. And that’s exciting to be part of it and to share it. So in a series of talks including to people here, I’ll be sharing it I imagine for the rest of my life.
Ivan Minić: Thank you so much. And for the end I would like to use the opportunity to quote one of my favorite quotes from Mr. Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Max McKeown: That’s great. Right near the end there’s a section called “Crap’s Last Loop” and from Beckett of course. And there’s a form of poem about that very subject. So it’s in there just for you and I didn’t even know I’d get to know you.
Ivan Minić: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you all for watching us. Do Google it, do order it. It will change your life. See you in the next episode.
Max McKeown: Thank you.