The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #248 - Christian Madsbjerg

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Melanie Avalon:
Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I am about to have. So the backstory on today's conversation, I received information about this fabulous person, author, entrepreneur, academics work a few months ago, and it was for his new book, which is called Look, How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World. I saw the title, I saw the content, I saw what he was doing, and I was immediately very alert and definitely wanted to have him on the show. And interestingly, so when I first saw the concept of the book, I thought it was going to be more about our modern digital world and how to pay attention, like people like with ADHD and things like that. And it does touch on that, but it actually goes, I mean, it's like a paradigm shift. It was a deep dive that I was not expecting, going really into how we, what we actually see in the world, and what we don't see. I kept having flashbacks actually while reading it to two different times in my own personal life where I was exposed to no pun intended, really eye opening information surrounding this topic. One was on one of the first days of high school in my honors English class, which I had the most incredible professor who really was a profound figure in my life. But one of the opening lectures in that class, he asked us, what is a chair? Which seems like a very simple question, but it was a paradigm shifting concept of how do we actually know what things are in the world and the idea of platonic ideals and all of that. And that really stuck with me. And then later down the road in college, I took a film critical theories class, and that went into the history of film and basically how all the different directors throughout history have interpreted and seen the world and how the camera relates to all of that. And it was a very difficult class, but it was really eyeopening as well. So this is a very, this is becoming a very lengthy introduction. But point being, this book kind of dives into all of those topics as far as to how do we even know what things are in the world and how do we observe and what makes a good observer. And I think friends are in for a wild ride with this one. So with that super lengthy introduction, I am here with I'm going to try to say the name correctly. It's a Danish name. So Christian Mesbier.

Christian Madsbjerg:
That's great.

Melanie Avalon:
Like I said, he is the author of that book, Look. He does a lot of stuff. He has co -founded the global consulting firm, Red Associates. His work has appeared in a lot of publications, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic. He has a lot of other really cool groups who will put his bio in the show notes. Christian, that was a really long introduction. Thank you so much for being here.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Thank you and thank you for the long introduction.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that because I just kept getting so many flashbacks. I mean, it's such a simple question, what is a chair? But I mean, it can really, if you really think about it, it's really, really haunting.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yeah. I mean, there's a great, maybe the greatest philosopher of the last 150 years is a German called Martin Heidegger. And he has this whole passage about what is a door handle. And what he wants to say with that is, these are things that you just assume in your daily life that just permeate your existence and your being so deeply that you never really think about them. And so life happens and all our interactions with the world are very rarely, very rarely works the way that a scientist would look at things, but just happens. And we don't really see things or analyze things, we just use them. So a chair is a great example of how our background practices just define us.

Melanie Avalon:
It's so crazy. I had so many moments when I was reading your book, when I would read a simple, seemingly simple question like that, and I would just sit there and be like, whoa, like, so things like you're like, how do you know the difference between, I think, an apple tree and an apple orchard? And I was like, thinking about that, I was like, or an apple and an apple orchard. And I was thinking, oh, well, yeah, like, when do I decide that the certain amount of trees becomes an orchard? But I know, like, when I see it, and then I was driving down the street, at one point in the book, you're talking about how we put boundaries on things in our mind, I think. And so I was looking at signs and I was like, how do I know where the sign stops? Like, how do I know? Just I don't know how I know all these things. And I want to hear about your personal story, but just really quick question about this. How long do you think it takes us to form those shared ideas about things? Because it's really, really mind blowing. So like the concept of a chair, for example, there are so many chairs. Like, at what point does a baby grasp the idea of a chair? It seems to happen relatively fast, that kids learn things.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yeah, and it's all we do when we are children, especially very young, is to get familiar with things. And familiarity with chairs and door handles and even floors or orchards are examples like of how all the things we have to learn in order to be humans. And the way we do it is we grow up in it. And we listen and we observe. Sometimes we forget to do that. But that's basically what growing up is. And, you know, you could see even more nuanced is, if you think about someone winking at someone else, like closing one eye, which is basically a muscle movement, but it can mean 30 different things. It can be ironic. It can be a message that I know, and you know, and I know that you know, it can be flirtatious. It can be all kinds of things. And so it's not just knowing what a wink is, it's knowing all the nuances of wicks. Somehow we do somehow humans know those things. And if you think about the millions and millions of things, we grow up in that and we end up knowing all those things.

Melanie Avalon:
That's crazy. I was actually thinking about really similar to the wink yesterday. I was thinking about it with emojis because I was putting an emoji in a text and I went and looked up, like, what does this emoji mean? And I was really happy to see that it meant, one of the things it meant was what I was trying to communicate. But then I was just thinking about how it had this whole other list of other things it could mean. And I was like, oh my god, oh my goodness. That's crazy. Is it all? Because you're talking about it's how we grow up. Is any of it inherited or are we like blank, slate -born? Have to learn all of this.

Christian Madsbjerg:
I think we are empty heads turned towards the world and we learn it as we grow up. And of course, depending on where we live, if you grow up in Japan or in Ghana or in the US, you of course have different ways of understanding what a wink is. So it's culturally specific. And maybe the way to look at it is there are universal things that all humans know, wherever we're from, we know things that we share and we know that other people know. And then, so you could call those universals. So universal background knowledge that humans have simply from growing up in it. And then there are particulars. So there are particular things to growing up in Poland or in Nigeria that are specific to that place, which is why travel is interesting. So when you travel somewhere, you can see that people wink in a different way or understand practices around food in different ways. You can also see how much you share. And then when you go, if you let's say you go to Poland and you see how people relate to each other, you will suddenly understand what you do from home. Like what is it about where you grow up that is different and specific because you don't see it in an everyday life. It just permeates you. And when you travel, you see more about where you're from than if you just stay in place.

Melanie Avalon:
You see more like you just said about yourself because because now it's like juxtaposed against something else. It seems different.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yeah, there's this thing about you only what is that there's a song lyric, which is I can't remember who but it is I only understood the East Coast when I moved to the West.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. So people who are like socially or who identifies feeling socially awkward, is that in part sometimes because they don't align with universals with humans socially? Could be.

Christian Madsbjerg:
or they are better observers than the rest of us. Maybe they're just more skillful and that makes the world strange. Anthropologist talks about how the strange is familiar and the familiar is strange. So when you see something that's completely everyday familiar to you from the perspective of it being strange, suddenly you can see how weird my world is. Like why is it I have these practices that just feels natural to me? And on the other hand, if you look at, let's say religion in other places than your own, suddenly you see that's completely familiar to me even though it's very different. So the strange and the familiar are sort of perspectives that are so close to each other really.

Melanie Avalon:
Something I've been wanting to do for like Instagram or TikTok or something would be to make videos of people doing things that are very normal to us but remove like one aspect of it so that you would see how weird it is. So for example, like making a video of people like using their phones and playing with their phones but just remove the phone from their hand and then have them do all the actions at the same time and I think then you would see like how crazy it is like walking with your head like looking down for like like a long amount of time or just like getting somewhere to your destination than just like sitting in the car and like doing nothing because you're sitting and playing on your phone. It's like you have to remove a part of it to see how weird everything actually is.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yeah, the Philip K. Dick, the great science fiction writer, his method is on trying to look at the future where one variable has changed. So he just changes one variable and suddenly the world looks really strange.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, like that. That's so cool. Okay, your background, which you share in the book, would you like to tell listeners a little bit about it? What major catalyzing paradigm shift did you have that made you so interested in ideologies in the world?

Christian Madsbjerg:
My history is that I grew up on a little island in Denmark, just south of Sweden, and I grew up on the hard left. So not just the left wing as we know it today, but the really hard left that was turned towards the Soviet Union and thinkers of the early 20th century. That was very natural to me because I grew up in it. But then in my early teens, it started to dawn on me that basically I saw the world through an ideological lens, and I grew increasingly uncomfortable with it. And I could suddenly see that I felt, even though, you know, as an idiot 13 year old or 14 year old, I could see myself already interpreting the world through an existing set of ideas that I had just imported from how I grew up. So I understood that I might not even look at the world. I already saw it within an ideological framework. And you can say that's an extreme version of it, but we all have ideological frameworks that we experience the world through, which means that we don't maybe don't see the world. We already know what it's like. And therefore, we don't change our mind. And we don't see all the texture and richness in the world. So it was maybe an extreme version of it that I grew up in. And the second thing I realized, I think, was that I am a fairly quiet person. I like looking rather than talking, which is strange being a podcast right now talking a lot. But I just feel comfortable drawing back a little bit and looking at how other people behave and what they say. And therefore, where that behavior comes from. So it was sort of this experience with growing out of an ideology and being increasingly critical about it and sort of disagreeing with it. And then just learning about myself that I feel comfortable as an observer. And then I made a living out of it, I basically became a professional observer. It's what I do most naturally, you could say.

Melanie Avalon:
completely random side note. You talk about the moment when the Berlin Wall fell and the, you know, the role that that had for you and your epiphanies is just super random. My grandmother was German, a lot of my family's from Germany. And I'm really, really bad with historical dates. Like I just can't, it's not my, not my forte. I can't remember them. But I never forget when the Berlin Wall fell, I was not alive. But um, but growing up in one of our rooms, there was this massive poster of, it was just the wall. And it said November 9, 1989, it was framed on the wall. It was just the most random thing. I will never forget that date. It's like the only historical date I know. But then going to your other part about the observing everything, and you're talking about podcasting, it's so interesting because I'm really similar to you. Like I, I really love observing and listening and learning from people kind of you talk about in your book, how you decided to go interview all of your heroes and, and everybody. So it is kind of ironic having a podcast, which is all about talking, but it's really because I just want to observe all these people and then ask them a lot of questions. So some questions from there, you're talking about, you know, being saturated in these ideologies. So how can, like, can we see without any preconceived notions or ideologies? Is it even, is it even possible?

Christian Madsbjerg:
No, it's not. Even the most scientific studies that are completely open to new data always basis itself on a paradigm that already exists. So fundamentally, completely removing yourself from how you grew up and what you believe and how you see the world is not possible. And philosophers would say something like, there is no view from nowhere. You're always somewhere. And from that somewhere, you have a perspective on the world. But it is possible to train yourself to be better at it. And some people just have it more than others. Some people have a hard time stepping back and looking at things. But if you take a moment sometimes to look at how strange something is, it's possible to become much better at it. And I've met some amazing observers in my life. Some of them are trained anthropologists or trained journalists. Often, those types of the people that like to interview have a particular knack for it. But it's something you have to practice just like anything else. It's something you have to learn. It's also something that can be taught.

Melanie Avalon:
And what is the cost benefit of it? Like, should we be trying to do more of that? Should we not? Like, how do we know where to apply that? When should we look at the world and try to see without whatever? Because presumably these structures are there for a reason.

Christian Madsbjerg:
I always follow, I don't know if it works for everybody, but at least for my students that I've taught over the years, it often follows by looking at the world as strange. And that means that if you have sort of an intuition that something is weird, then it's often a trigger you can use to say, okay, what is this anyway? And observe that. And the way to do it is, I think, to frame that question as a phenomenon. So less of a question than, what is this social phenomenon? So if you use the word, let's go have coffee with someone, then it's worthwhile saying, what is having coffee? What is the social phenomenon of having coffee? Because it doesn't have to involve, once you start looking at it, you can see, it doesn't have to even involve having the infused beverage of coffee beans. You can drink all kinds of other things. And it's rather different from alcoholic beverages. It has a different, serves a different function. And it works in a way where we always like just, the most natural thing is to think, let's go have coffee. But if you look at it as a social phenomenon, suddenly you can study how all that works. And you want to, let's say you want to sell coffee to people or design coffee shops or something like that, then understanding the social phenomenon of having coffee can be really helpful. If you want to invest in Bitcoin, it's nice to ask the question, what is this phenomenon? Why is everybody upset or obsessed about it? And step back and see how people relate to it. So currency, basically, how does that work as a social phenomenon? So not as a technical phenomenon, but as a social phenomenon. And that, so I think reacting to the sensation that something is odd or something is up socially helps to direct what's important and what's not.

Melanie Avalon:
That's super helpful and super practical. I could really use that. Like right now, I'm developing a dating app. So I could, I mean, that's really helpful for analyzing the social phenomena of dating.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yes. Actually, a student of mine a few years ago asked that question and said, what is courtship? Try to describe the social phenomenon of courtship. And then they followed people for a while, studying how courtship works. And especially, of course, the technologically mediated relationship between people, so dating apps, and the algorithm that distributes how courtship works. And they could see that people had changed their courtship behaviors to manipulate an algorithm. So they would engage quite skillfully with an app, knowing how the technology changed their relationship to other people, particularly when it comes to love and courtship. And so you can study the technology through the lens of a very human thing, which is courtship.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that. We're connecting the dating app to the food aspect. So it's going to have like a diet aspect to it. So that's like two different phenomenon to study and how they interact. I love that. And it's really interesting how loosely defined or how definitions of things can change, like you said, with people changing for the dating app. But even just the other day, somebody was asking me like if certain people were dating and I was like, I don't know, like the definition of dating has changed and evolved and can mean so many different things. It's really interesting that we manage as a species to even with all of these fluid definitions still relate practically.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yes, I didn't know what dating was when I started to learn English. We didn't have the word in Danish.

Melanie Avalon:
What do you have instead? I thi-

Christian Madsbjerg:
I think having girlfriends and boyfriends was trying to get that and make it work. But the specific word of dating was new to me as a description of a social practice. So this idea of meeting people that you've never met before, like the blind date, I'd never heard about either. So for me, that was kind of an interesting introduction to a practice that's so natural in the Anglo -Saxon world. So it's interesting when a language doesn't have a word for something and then say, what are the universals and what are the particulars here? Because they're, of course, vast universals, but also some particulars to a practice like that.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm fascinated by the language question and the question of, I think, can you understand or experience something if there's not the word for it?

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yeah. And we use the same word for different things. So, for instance, the word freedom, if you are from Scandinavia, where I'm from, the word freedom is often related to having a big state, lots of regulation, and lots of taxes, because freedom is defined as social systems that support people to do what they want to do. So that could be education or health care and so on. Where in America, freedom is from the state and from taxation. And I'm not saying one is better than the other, but they're just very different description, actually opposite description, when we use the same words. So, understanding how people use words and not take them for granted as something we understand, I think is quite helpful if you want to understand your own culture and your own use of words.

Melanie Avalon:
That's so interesting. So when we censor words, are we actually censoring behavior? What are we trying to suppress when we censor words?

Christian Madsbjerg:
I think a lot of politics and a lot of everyday life is trying to agree on what words mean. And I think it's a good start as a sort of a philosophical assumptions that words are empty signifiers. They don't mean anything except when they're connected to other words. So in philosophy, there's a tradition called discourse analysis, which is trying to figure out when people say the word freedom or when they say the word opportunity or they say swimming, then it's only meaningful when they're related to other concepts and other practices. So it's quite helpful to think about these social concepts as completely fluid and something we constantly redefine, fight over and politics in many ways is a fight over words and how words have meaning.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm just thinking about how words relate to each other and then each individual hearing and experiencing those words has their own feelings about the concepts that it's relating to. Again, it's just, it's wild that we're existing. So say, I know people can have really pessimistic or optimistic views of the future of humanity, but say we continue to positively evolve and relate to each other and say that the future with AI is beneficial and all of that. If we accept that, do you think there would be benefit to or we would ever evolve to a universal language?

Christian Madsbjerg:
In my lifetime, we have moved radically toward a universal language. So what happened in November of 1989 was that the world was no longer split in two, but started unifying. And you could start having friends and talking to people and agreeing with people and dating people and all kinds of things from a different world. And suddenly we started merging language, agreeing on language, disagreeing on language. So I'm a huge optimist when it comes to human flexibility and human ability to live together and figuring out how to agree on making things and doing things in the world. Humans are, in some ways, you mentioned AI, people are down on humans right now. They talk about robots being better than us, being better at writing than us, being better at pretty much everything, and superior intelligence than humans. I think that's bunk. I think humans are incredibly intelligent in a way that machines haven't even started to do. So I'm quite up on humans and optimistic about our ability to fight our own biases and agree on things.

Melanie Avalon:
I love humans too. And speaking of AI, I don't know if you knew this, I just learned this and it blew my mind because I kind of have, I'll use chat GTP a lot. I tend to get in arguments with it because I'll try to, I'll get frustrated with what it says back because I feel like it'll not be telling me the truth or I don't know. I'll try to like call it out on things and I couldn't really understand why it would just walk in circles or like seemingly gaslight me about things. And I finally learned that right now the algorithm for AI, have you heard about hallucinations?

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yes, of course.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, so I didn't know this listeners. So apparently, the way it's set up right now, if the AI doesn't know the answer to something, it can't not know the answer. So it hallucinates and it makes up an answer. And so I was talking with it last night about this. And I was like, do you do this? And it's I'm paraphrasing. But it was like, yes, I do because blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, well, can you let me know when you're doing that? And it said, I'll try to, but then it said, but I don't always know when I'm doing it. And I was like, oh my goodness, this is not a good sign. It's literally making up stuff and doesn't know it's doing it. So we'll see how that bodes.

Christian Madsbjerg:
We should be very careful of using anthropomorphic or human words about these machines. They are technical marvels and probably will change a lot of things in human societies and might already do that. But it doesn't understand anything. It doesn't think the way that humans think. It doesn't appreciate. It doesn't perceive the way we humans perceive. It's radically different. Here's an example. The color red, a red color that you can define in terms of light, and you can define it on a pentone strip where you can see this is the exact color. And a machine can see that color or can't see anything. It can register that color and say technically what it is. But that red color on a fire truck or the same red color on a woolen sweater are the same color technically, but one is fire trucky and one is wooly to a human. And therefore in completely different worlds, a machine doesn't get that, understand that, or anything like that. It can replicate the idea or the sensation that it does, but it doesn't. So thinking of these intelligences as human intelligences are simply untrue. They're certainly intelligent in the way that a calculator is intelligent or something like that, but they're not intelligent like we are. And it's a ridiculous idea that these are like us. They're quite different from us.

Melanie Avalon:
Well, that's further troubled by the fact that it sounds like us, like when it's talking, you know, like the way it is programmed to talk. So you feel like you're interacting with a person, even though you're not. We'll see what happens with all of that. One other comment about the language and the universal language and the evolution of language. I find it so interesting going back to the emojis. I'm so obsessed with emojis. Like, I just feel like they're so important for communication because before we had them, when we were texting, it was not easy to communicate the tone or the intention often behind words. But if you just fill it up with emojis, then you can really communicate that aspect. And I, so I put emojis everywhere. Like I put them in business emails because I always just, it's really important to me that I communicate the tone of what I'm saying to a person. And so I find it really interesting, A, that, that evolution, and then B, it's kind of like going back to hieroglyphics, but, but now it's like the, the evolved version. What are your thoughts on emojis?

Christian Madsbjerg:
I wonder if they're even evolved compared to hieroglyphics, like if you one day go to Egypt, or you go to, I was at the Neue Museum in Berlin a year ago, and you see the hieroglyphics in on stone tablets that have been preserved. It's incredibly complex. And I think the amount, I don't know if there are more signs in that language compared to emojis, but there's certainly a lot. And people can read them, just like they can read the English language. So it might just be a new technological version of what humans have already had, or, you know, always had, or at least had for thousands and thousands of years. I don't use emojis because I try to use English full sentences when I write, but that's maybe just because I'm old fashioned.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, that's interesting. So what about full sentences, but then like an emoji at the end.

Christian Madsbjerg:
I've never used an emoji in my life.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness! Never?

Christian Madsbjerg:
No, not a single time.

Melanie Avalon:
I would be so interested if you did how, what your experience of that would be. Like if you would feel, cause like I said, the reason I do it, and I used to be super, like when they first started being used and I was using them, I was like, Oh, but this isn't professional. Like, should I be doing this? But now I just feel so comfortable because I feel like I'm, like I said, communicating, I would be so interested. What your experience of using, cause it's like a new tool in a way to use for communication, like how that would feel for you.

Christian Madsbjerg:
I use commas and semicolons and punctuation marks and all kinds of things, even in the shortest text messages. And my daughter makes fun of me for doing it, but I kind of like it. I like sort of the challenge of trying to describe things with words in a grammatically sound way, rather than things like emojis or abbreviations. And I think it's just a fun game, but maybe I should start learning emojis and hieroglyphs.

Melanie Avalon:
try the blend because I'm the same way as you and I'm like reflecting on what my last email to you was. I don't know if it was a really long sentence, but I'm the same way with texting. Like I really appreciate... Well, I'm kind of a blend, but I do really appreciate like sentences and sentence structure. And one... Speaking of like dating, absent dating, one way to like not for me to like swipe no as if they have like typos in their or like not well constructed sentences. I'm not trying to throw it on you. I'd be super interested if you were to enhance your long sentences with the emojis. But going back to the book, okay, so this is a lot of what we see. And oh, another also something to that point as well. I love the fact... I don't know the exact numbers, but I've heard that there's a multitude of more... I don't know if it's like neurons or pathways or whatever, but it's from the brain to the eyes, then from the eyes to the brain. Have you heard this? So basically, we literally see what we want to see. Like there's more information going from our brain to our eyes and from our eyes to our brain.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yeah, I believe that. I think it's totally observable that we've already made up our minds about what we see before we see it most of the time. So I think that's true. I think the idea with eyes and brains are quite poetic that, you know, if you think about the brain, it's kind of an ugly object. Like it doesn't have aesthetic beauty to itself. It's it's basically fat and an electrical currents. But, but of course, I mean, check, you know, you have to play around with electrical currents and fat for a long time before you get anywhere near the collected works of Shakespeare. But if you start thinking about the eyes as the entrance to the brain, then suddenly there's great beauty to it. Because the eyes is one of the most beautiful things, aesthetically beautiful things about humans. So I've always thought about the brain, that the brain as eyes as the eyes looking like the brain and completely integrated part of it. And I think there's a lot of evidence for that.

Melanie Avalon:
I remember hearing, I think it was Andrew Huberman talking about the eyes, you're like literally seeing into your brain, which I had not really thought about before. He also said that your eyes are always moving a little bit. And if they didn't move, you would stop seeing. Like if you looked at something without moving, kind of like when you touch something and you can't feel it anymore because you're still touching it, or like if you're smelling and you don't smell it anymore because you've over smelled it too long, you said you would not see if your eyes didn't constantly move.

Christian Madsbjerg:
You can observe that in everyday life. When you walk down the street, you don't see that street. You're just basically drawn through it because you've already seen it and you're already made up your mind about it. But you can also say, isn't that what's most amazing about humans? So if you see great sports people, if you see a great basketball player, for instance, and they run down the pitch or the court that they're on, they are not looking at anything in particular. They're looking at all of it at once. They're looking at the rhythm of the game. They're looking at all of the patterns of behavior that's on the, and they're not thinking about anything. They're not perceiving anything in that sense. They just almost have what you could call a panoptic type of attention, an attention that pays attention to everything and nothing. They're not zooming in at something in particular. And if you think about just the everyday banal example of that, which is you could say walking down the street, you're not paying attention to anything in particular. You're paying attention to all of it at once. And that we can do that is incredible.

Melanie Avalon:
Crowds will blow my mind if I think about them, especially if you see them from above and you see all the people walking and nobody bumps into each other. Especially when there's like, even when there's like hundreds of people really close, I can't even like think about it too much. It distresses me out a little bit. I'm like, how do people not, but it's easy. You just walk, you don't run into anybody.

Christian Madsbjerg:
You know, the rhythm, yeah. Traffic is another example. I mean, we hear, at least, I mean, every day in the newspaper, you would read that machines are way better at driving than humans and that we're terrible drivers. But if you think about it, every morning, people get into their little cars and they drive from A to B, and they do that with millions of others. And somehow, they get from A to B without running a big machine into other big machines. Sometimes it happens, but most of the time, it's just a rhythmic thing almost between humans. So humans are incredible drivers. We can also learn it in 20 hours. So if you take, if you are driving, you can, you know, if you take some of the driving technologies, the autonomous driving technologies, they have millions and millions of hours of driving behind them, and they can't do the same that a teenager can do and can learn in 20 hours. It's quite incredible, really.

Melanie Avalon:
That's crazy. Yeah, I remember when we went to Rome, my family and I, at one point we just sat on the curb. Well, they're not roundabouts in Rome because there's nothing to go round about. It's like where they just have the open circle and the cars just go in and then just go out wherever they want. And we just sat there, we just watched the cars. We're like, how do they not run into each other? That's so crazy. As far as understanding, so it's this consistent theme here of like you were talking about seeing everything kind of at the same time, like seeing the details but also the whole and just understanding all of it. So when we are learning the meaning of something, presumably, okay, like a tree, for example, I'm looking at a tree right now. Presumably, I'm assuming when we grow up, we learn individually, I don't know, maybe I'm, I'll ask you. So like the ordering of learning the parts and the whole, like is it like you learned the parts, like you learned the branches and the leaves and then you learned the whole, which is the tree, but then knowing the tree, does that redefine the parts? Like what is the ordering and the meaning of the parts versus the whole and the order that you learned them in? Like, can you learn the whole first before the parts?

Christian Madsbjerg:
The whole defines what even counts as a part.

Melanie Avalon:
So you learned the whole first.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yes, you learn the background upon which anything can be understood. So the background that you don't see, it's just part of your how you how you grew up, you can see it. But most of the time, it's not you don't think about a tree, but you think trees as well as it relates to the forest, and what forests are, you also see trees as it relates to the technical use of them, how humans use them for floors and houses and bridges and all kinds of things. And some people even see it as part of God's work, that this incredible object of a tree is seen on the background of quite a mystical world or a part of a perspective on the world as induced by God. So a tree can be a godly thing or religious thing, it can be a natural thing, so part of the natural world. And it can be just something that humans can optimize and use for whatever purposes we have. So even a tree, the you know, which should be a banal thing is not banal at all, it's infused with whatever world we live in. And understanding those worlds is the kind of observation I'm talking about in the book. How do you understand which world is this in, whether that's a tree or a dating app or a wink?

Melanie Avalon:
Do we ever learn the parts first?

Christian Madsbjerg:
No, I think there are no parts without a whole. You can't see a black dot on a piece of paper without the piece of paper. You can't see a fork on a table without understanding that it relates to the practice of having dinner, and it involves plates and food and all kinds of things. So there are no forks without the social practices. There is no such thing as a hammer without the practice of hammering. Otherwise, it's just a wooden shank with a metal blob at the end. It's only when it's activated part of a human world that we even think of it as a hammer. So there are no parts without the whole. The whole defines what even counts as a part.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, so a thought experiment. So what if there was another world where there's another hole with the parts that we have no idea about this particular hole and this particular parts of the hole and then let's say we're just put into a room and we're given a part of that hole with no context about the hole and we're holding this thing which is a part of the hole in this other world so we couldn't even learn that part.

Christian Madsbjerg:
We could guess, but there's a movie called The Gods Must Be Crazy. And it's about a man that drops out a bottle of Coca -Cola, like a glass bottle of Coca -Cola, into a tribe somewhere, I think, in Africa. And they have never seen a bottle of Coca -Cola before. And a view, of course, relate Coca -Cola to an American lifestyle and probably to hamburgers and other things. But they don't have that. They don't have the background. They only have this foreground of an object. They think it's a weapon, and they think it's a message from God. They have all kinds of interpretations of it. But since they don't have our world, it's not that it doesn't have our background, the object is just foregrounded in a completely different way. And you can say that with, if an alien arrived here on Earth, one of the jokes that people use is that they would think that the dominant species were cars, because it's something that we feed them and clean them to all kinds of things to them. And really, they are the dominant species. So you can't see what something is in one world without having that world. And nothing to us is meaningful except on a background.

Melanie Avalon:
So basically if we were given that alien part that's a part of a whole in another world we would just redefine it according to our world if we could.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yes, we would naturally have to do that. We wouldn't understand how it fit into something else. But with hammers, we know that it belongs to a world of carpentry. We know that it is related to nails, and wood, and houses, and floors, and all those kinds of things. And it's only in that world that a wooden shank with a metal blob at the end makes any sense. And it's only really working when we use it. It's only when we hammer that we fully understand what a hammer is. Otherwise, it's just an object lying around. And we don't experience that unless it's in the social world of hammering. Just like an app that makes people connect to each other and say yes or no to people based on a small text and a picture only makes sense in the world of love and courtship.

Melanie Avalon:
It's also reminding me of, like, I watched a movie that I really liked, what was it called? Wait, The Bear? Black Bear? I'll have to check. It had a vague ending that was open to interpretation, and so you go online and you read all the different interpretations and what everybody thinks it means. And I was so, I was so fixated, not so much on what the ending meant, because I could come up with what I thought it meant. But I was really interested in the concept of what was the correct ending. Because I was like, I can think it means this one thing. The director can have one idea, these other people can have one idea. But the reason I was so interested in it is I think the director never, like, actually said the ending, like, because he wanted people to come up with their own interpretation. But to me, I was like, no, it has a correct ending, a meaning, and it's whatever the director decided. And I want to know what that meaning is. I don't know if there was a question in there, but I'm just really intrigued by objective truth of meaning of things, especially in this context where everything seems to be relative.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Right. Well, what I'm saying is that lots of things are relative. If there's a volcano that erupts, then some people will interpret it. Certainly it's an event that happens. It's a physical event that happens, but some people interpret it as a natural event that they understand in geological terms, but other people see it as God's wrath on humans. So even though the event is objective and you can measure it, it depends quite a lot on which world you see it in, on how we humans see it. So we never see anything ever that isn't in a human world. We always see it as on a background of something. And the same happens with very natural phenomenon like that. And you can't say the event doesn't happen if you close your eyes. It does happen, but how you see it is rather important. And I think you can observe how that happens and what the structure of that background is. I know you can. That's what I do every day.

Melanie Avalon:
Have there been any universals for humans? Have there been any that have changed super radically?

Christian Madsbjerg:
Everything, everything changes super radically all the time. Like you example with cell phones, completely transformed our everyday life. The concept of dating is very different now than it was a hundred years ago, right? The concept of a tree was very, very different from 300 years ago, where trees were of course part of God's world and we were creatures in that world. So our relationship to the world is in constant negotiation and constant flux. Of course, there are stable elements like having children and things like that. But having children is quite different in one culture versus another culture. So even though it's a fact that we have children, the way we experience it is rather different depending on the context and the beginning on the world that we interpret that thing in.

Melanie Avalon:
The idea of love, is that something that has always, well, maybe not always, but is that something that's pretty constant, like love being a good thing?

Christian Madsbjerg:
No, completely new. It's a blink of the eye in human history. Romeo Juliet, of course, is a description of romantic love the way we understand it today. But the idea that two people had the choice of acting on love is very, very new and very socially centric on one culture rather than another. There are many cultures in the world where you don't have a choice, it's not your choice, who you love and how you do it. It's transformed for the better, I think. But certainly, if you go 500 years back, the idea that you could have a choice about whose life you want to be part of is not the same as today. And you can observe how things change. I have a whole chapter in the book about how you observe change. But in order to do that, you have to step back and not be in it. It's what historians would do. It's what anthropologists would do, is to look at how concepts like love, or friendship, or things like that, or phenomena like that transform over time. And if you take something like the environment, that's not the way they experienced the world 100 years ago, they just saw it as nature. But the environment now is a very technical thing with graphs and temperature changes in the environment, and what we today call the environment. So even the most natural things, which is relating to the natural world, grass and trees and forests and rivers, is transformed in the last 100 years, or even the last 50 years.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, speaking of history, that's actually something that has bothered me for, I mean, as long as I can remember, which is, because you were talking about the importance of stepping back to, you know, look at history, but I don't know how we would ever have an even remotely objective view of history. Seems like everything would be, because it's what people said about what happened. So we can't even, can't even, like, I don't even know how you, how you look at it even semi -objectively and step back.

Christian Madsbjerg:
What you can do is you can gather information, what historians would do if they want to study the 1920s and how people experience love in the 1920s or the 1820s. Then they go back and they look at poems and newspaper articles and first -hand description and so on, on that phenomenon. And then they try to put that together into a picture of what that is like. And really good historians are able to extract themselves and how they see the world today to trying to see how the world might have been or might have looked like from some other time. In the same way that you can go to northern Japan and try to observe and put pieces together. But of course the way we see the world today will color the past and will color that information as you gather it. And I think the humanities is basically fighting with the idea that fighting against our perspective today in order to understand something else which could be the literature or music or history of some other time or some other place. And in humanities you call that the hermeneutic circle. So it is the idea that the interpreter interprets based on the position that he or she is in today. And you can never extract yourself to a view from nowhere fully. But you can do your best. You can try and you can try to be organized about it.

Melanie Avalon:
I loved everything you talked about in the book with different art examples and I'd actually been to an exhibit for one of them, Terrell's work. I'm trying to remember, I don't know if he was at LACMA or at USC where they had an exhibit with all of his light.

Christian Madsbjerg:
He was at LACMA.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, he was? Okay, I went to that.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Gorgeous.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, it was really exciting to read in your book about the different artists and then like Google it and look at what you were talking about. So I'm curious because there's so much history and art and everything. How did you decide which figures No Pun intended to focus on for all of this in the book?

Christian Madsbjerg:
So I focus on a German tradition of psychology called Gestalt psychology. And the word Gestalt means a whole rather than a part. So they're trying to understand and describe holes. And then I tried to look for artists that made sense to me that are describing holes. So describing basically how we see, how humans see at the most basic level, at the most sort of fundamental level. And of course, the master in the American master, there are lots of other artists around the world, but the American master of showing people how they see, or seeing how you see, is James Turrell, who's an LA based elderly gentleman now, I think he's in his 90s, that describe how light makes us see. And he's very known if you went to the Lochma exhibition, and good for you that you went there, because it was quite a special exhibition. He uses a technique he calls sky spaces, where you sit inside a room that he's built. And there's a hole, often rectangular or square hole in the roof, sometimes oval. And when you look up through that hole, it looks as if the sky is the ceiling of the room. It's as if the sky has been pulled down and become the ceiling of the room. So the sky is close, and feels like just right above you. But then if an airplane or a bird or something flies across what you see, suddenly the sky moves to become far away again. And then when the bird disappears, the sky moves down and becomes the ceiling again. So that shows that we don't see really, we don't experience the world as millions of small increments, we either see close or far. So he's trying to trick you into seeing how you see through his art pieces. And anyone that has a chance that there are many of these sky spaces scattered all over the world, and particularly if you're from the United States, most towns, no, no, it's not true, most cities have one of these pieces or more where you can go and experience basically how you see. So the art piece is not the object, the art piece is your experience of, in this case, distance, how you experience something as basic as distance. He does the same with color and light and, you know, visual phenomenon like that. And you can even trick yourself into seeing it. If you go to a train station and you look at a coming train, an approaching train, first you see it as far, which is a tiny dot, and then suddenly it becomes close and it becomes a full train. And it's not that the little dot becomes a little bigger as you see it, you either see it as a small dot or a big train. So somehow our brains or our visual perceptive system sees the world as these holes, far, close, big, small, and so on. And it's quite remarkable really that our brain not doesn't trick us into anything, it's just how we work, it's just how we perceive the world. And he's doing it at the most simple, the most sort of human basic level you can imagine, which is quite different from let's say a camera or a technical sensor, which would actually see the train coming closer or the distance between the ceiling and the sky.

Melanie Avalon:
I want to go back now to that exhibit. I want to go re -experience when I was there. I just remember there was one room, or there was another room that you had to have a special ticket for that we didn't have. And to this day, I'm haunted by what was in that room. It was some experience.

Christian Madsbjerg:
I went in there.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, what was in there?

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yeah, it was remarkable. I'm sorry you didn't get to see.

Melanie Avalon:
No, I want to know. I've been like dying to know what was in that room.

Christian Madsbjerg:
they put you into a slot in a big, if you imagine a big sphere, huge. And then they put you into a almost like a bed that they slot into the sphere. And inside that sphere, there is black completely dark. And then there, and then there are little dots as if there's kind of stars. And it makes you kind of float in a way it makes you it breaks down your ability to see close and far, and even understand your perspective of where you're at. So he's tricking you into understanding not what happens in there, but what happens usually, what happens normally, which is that you see the world from a place. And from a particular perspective, which you could say, you know, in that case, the most basic level, which is black and white, basically, but you can also see it philosophically, that culturally, you know, and philosophically, you always come from a place, you always stand with a perspective on the world. So the brilliance, the genius of James Turrell is to showing us how we see.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness, I am so happy to be having this moment right now. Someday I knew I would know what was behind that. And it's interesting. I actually, I went with a guy I was dating and he was a magician, which probably explains in part, it was his idea. It probably explains in part why he wanted to go. Do you have any thoughts on magicians and how they manipulate what we see and don't see?

Christian Madsbjerg:
I'd have to think about that, but I would imagine they are manipulating our perception and using that we see things from a place and what we're used to. I would imagine that that's what magic is about. I haven't thought enough about it. There are some magicians that contacted me after this book came out and wanted to talk to you about me about it, but I don't think I fully understood what it is really they're doing. Maybe I should spend some more time on that. Fun to date, I'm a magician, by the way.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, it was an experience. I highly recommend everybody data magician at some point, because so much of what they do is understanding how we default to how we see things. So by knowing that they can so easily just do things because they know how our brains work and how we see things, because it's so easy to be fooled, because we're so locked into these, you know, the way we see things, and our ideologies and everything.

Christian Madsbjerg:
That's what jokes are too, right? Jokes take you out of the natural place that you would experience something and points out how silly and every day that way of seeing the world is. So I think great, great comedians also have a, like an intuition about observation that we're talking about. And many of them are observational comedians, which is a kind of magician in a way.

Melanie Avalon:
I'd heard laughter was like the way we deal with not things that are wrong, but when it's, I guess it's basically what you were saying, things that are different from the normal that need to be like discomfort. I don't know.

Christian Madsbjerg:
It's pointing out the perspective you have on the world in a way where you can see it. And you can see how silly it is that you see it in that way. And that's the same as what James Turrell is doing. James Turrell is doing it in the most gorgeous way. And you don't get involuntary response like laughter, true laughter is. But I think it's onto the same phenomenon, which is pointing out how we see the world.

Melanie Avalon:
That's not a permanent exhibit, is it?

Christian Madsbjerg:
No, it's not. It's it was a moment in time where there was access to all of it. And Michael Govan, who runs LACMA, is a big fan of James Joel. So he might bring it back. But there is something people can do, which is going to their local, wherever you live, you can when you come to us an American city, you can get to see one of his pieces. And one is enough. I mean, more is better, but one is enough to understand how you see and how precise this artist is is describing what seeing even is in the first place.

Melanie Avalon:
And if people like color, there's a lot of, I remember like a lot of color related things. I'm in Atlanta. I should look into, I should look into what they have around here. Okay, I'm dying to ask you something because you talk in the book about the work that you do and you've mentioned it briefly here, but it's really fascinating how you work with companies and you know, applying this because everything that we're talking about can seem, you know, philosophical and esoteric, but has really real life applicable applications. Not to use a word twice in a row, but I am dying to know because you talk about what you discovered, basically the history of what predicted, because you talk about interesting things about predictions, but what predicted the concept of like streaming services and binge watching and all of that. So why were all these random communities fascinated with that? Was it monument Valley in Arizona? Was it?

Christian Madsbjerg:
Right. Well, the story is that I ran a company for a while, built and ran a company called Red Associates, which is an anthropology -based observation company. And we work with some of the biggest companies in the world and government agencies and NGOs to observe something. In the early 2000s when we were just starting out, and I was very, very young, we were asked by a very large Korean manufacturer of TVs, so screens basically. And they were interested in the future of screens and the future of the TV. And then they asked us, could you go see some of the new behaviors around TVs? So if you imagine in the early 2000s, the internet was quite young still. YouTube hadn't been truly invented yet. Streaming was certainly not the case, neither music nor TV or movies. So we went to find the places around the world and basically stay with them for long enough to try to understand how these new cultures behaved. And what we could see, first of all, was that people were stealing content, even people that could afford paying for the content, what we today call content. We didn't call it back then, but we would call it a movie clips or something like that. And we could see that they were stealing it through these sharing services or torrent services. And we just want to understand why. Why are they doing this? And it turned out that, well, we started to find these pockets of behavior around the world where people were behaving differently around media. So the first place I found was a place in Japan where this small group of kids were obsessed about movies shot in Monument Valley. And they would steal movies about it. There are lots of famous movies shot in Monument Valley in Arizona. And they would steal all kinds of stuff around it. So interviews, movies, TV shows, all kinds of things that had to do with that. And they would then share that with other people around the world that had the same obsession. We would find many other obsessions than that. That's just a very specific kind of first one we saw. And what we saw was they had sort of watching parties. So they would watch movies about this topic six, eight hours straight, which was a new kind of behavior back then. We would also see that they would find very, very specific content about it. It was not just looking at whatever was on the TV. It was extremely specific hunt for content in that area. We would also find people commenting on it. We would find people be sort of almost nodal points in a global culture where people were obsessed about this topic. So what we found was basically early, early versions of what we today call binge watching, what we call YouTubers, what we call reactions. So people would do, they would do reactions to these things. So what later became and streaming, of course, over the top streaming of media, where you have access to everything about something, some topic or some type of movie or type of topic. So what we found, these are like early days of the internet, we would find what we today find completely normal and everyday, and what's now called Netflix and YouTube and so on. And of course, if you make TVs, or if you make screens or mobile phones or something like that, it's helpful to understand how the future of media will behave. And we call it all this social TV. So today, what you could call, what online communities really are, is a kind of social TV. We just called it TV because we didn't have any other word for it at that time. So in that sense, if you find early behavior, early versions of a kind of behavior, you have a chance to at least a better chance to predict what the future might hold. And therefore, change your product, change your investments, get rid of things that is not helpful anymore, and what's not necessary anymore. So that was that sort of that case. But we've done that over and over again in automotive and media and sports and all kinds of areas.

Melanie Avalon:
It's so fascinating. So did you ever find out why they actually were obsessed with Monument Valley or does it not even matter? Do you just need to know what people are doing but it doesn't matter why?

Christian Madsbjerg:
I wanted the pattern, the pattern of behavior. Some people were obsessed with the movies of David Lynch, who made Twin Peaks and TV shows and movies like that. Other people were obsessed with growing tomatoes. And they would share information and media clips and so on about that. So the topic was not so interesting to us. What was interesting was how specific it was, how global it was, and all the behaviors around it that today is so normal and everyday and completely dominate our media usage, and therefore also our screens and the business models around media.

Melanie Avalon:
I don't know if you'll have any thoughts on this, but do you have any thoughts on the phenomena of Taylor Swift? Have you been asked that before?

Christian Madsbjerg:
I have not. I have not. I don't think she's that much bigger than other bands in the past, or other musicians and acts in the past. She's just quite big right now. But I think there were 20 years ago and 30 years ago and 10 years ago, there were just other social phenomena that completely dominated. And if you go back to the 70s, where I didn't know anything about this and weren't aware of it. But David Bowie, or Michael Jackson in the 80s, or Prince also completely dominated the cultural discussion, maybe even more than Taylor Swift does.

Melanie Avalon:
What is the role of being seen?

Christian Madsbjerg:
Right. So yeah, so one of my students or a group of my students actually studied what does it mean to be seen? And the reason why they wanted to look at that was they wanted to look at dating, because they were very interested in dating, and they wanted to understand what it means to get attention from someone. And then they started saying what is the what's the phenomenon of being seen. And that took them to study different things. So they studied catcalling, which is, you know, in their case, they looked at a construction site in Manhattan, where men were catcalling on girls walking by, which is a kind of being seen. It's not a welcome one, but it's a kind of being seen. Then they looked at dating. And they also looked at jazz musicians. So they they went to a jazz club and looked at what is that what's the dynamic of being seen as a musician by other musicians. So they tried to look at the whole social phenomenon of what what it means to be seen by someone else. They also looked at, by the way, they looked at teachers. So what does it mean for a student to be seen by the teacher? And how does that change your world and life? And they found that there is a kind of a continuum from, you could say, unwanted to very wanted types of being seen. And they were interested in not on judging it, not in having opinions about it, but on just understanding the structure of being seen, and how terrifying and exciting and thrilling it is to be seen and necessary it is to be seen by someone else from whether that is negative or positive.

Melanie Avalon:
I guess it's really what social media caters to and just with the concept of like likes, you know, it's basically like a signifier that somebody saw you in a number.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yes, it is. That's why it feels so good.

Melanie Avalon:
Well, this is all just so fascinating. Oh, and one thing that you end with, why is The Peregrine such an important book for you?

Christian Madsbjerg:
Right. This is my favorite book in the world. And in the beginning, that was the reason why I wrote the book was I want I wanted to write a book about that book, because it's just it's it is ecstatic, in a sense in in how someone can observe something with such poetry and detail. It's a book from the from the 60s that was written in the in the east of London, where today is called Essex, where he's studying a pair of peregrines, so pair birds, coming from the north and staying over winter. And he's observing it every day in an extraordinarily organized way, and ends up describing peregrines, where he understands them. In a way, I haven't seen anyone understand a natural phenomenon before. And it's a little book, maybe 100 pages, I read it every year. And if you want to see how humans can be excellent at something like human excellence, when it comes to observing the world, that is a the first place you should start. And people should read that book before they even think about reading mine, because it's a much better example.

Melanie Avalon:
the author, everything that he did with the peregrines, do you think that carried over into the rest of his life and how he saw the world? Or do you think it was just in that world of peregrines?

Christian Madsbjerg:
it was in the world of nature. So basically he understood the environment, the where he lives. He understood what it means to live where he lives through the lens of peregrines. So the peregrine is of course a concrete, you know, it's a bird that lives in that area. And I'm not interested in bird watching in general. It's not something I'm attracted to in that sense, but it just happens to be his interest. And through that lens, he understands what it means to live that place at that time. And I think many of us can use that to understand really where is it we live and what's important about it and how does it all work. So the book is of course about birds, but really it's about observation. It's about the human ability to observe the world in an organized, detailed and quite poetic way.

Melanie Avalon:
the broader question it leaves me with, I don't know why it makes me a little bit sad. Just when I think about all of this, I get a little bit sad or a little bit overwhelmed because I feel like I can never, like that's so much energy put into observing this one aspect of the world, like nature with peregrines. It's like in my world, I just, I can't see everything. Like it's like, I feel like I can't, like we can't see everything or know everything. So it's like, how do we choose where to look and how to observe? It's overwhelming.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yeah, whatever peaks out wherever our curiosity takes us. And of course, you can't observe everything that will drive you mad. But you can observe when if you want to make a dating app like you do, then and you want to have it integrated with diet, the diet of people involved, I would understand I would start there and say, how do I understand that social phenomenon of love and courtship and looking for love and attraction, and how it relates to diet? And then I would say, let let me obsess over that. And if you do that, you'll get become a better observer. And you would understand what to make, what, how to design that service in a way that's way deeper than if you don't do it. And I think you can service you can be more successful. And you can service whoever signs up for the service in a way that's, that's more helpful, and more human. So I would just start with that.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that, that's helpful and practical. Yeah, it's like, I just want to know everything whenever I just want to like see and know everything. And when you hear about these people who know so much about one certain thing, it's like, wow, I could be knowing that about everything and I never will. You could study like one small little thing probably for the rest of your life and learn something new about it every single day. There's just so much. Well, this has been absolutely amazing. Are you working on another book now?

Christian Madsbjerg:
I'm not working on a concrete book, but I think I have to say something and try to observe these new technologies that are arriving and how we are different. If we're different, then how are we different from these new technologies? So from a philosopher's perspective, not from an engineer's perspective or a mathematician's perspective, I don't have anything to contribute from a mathematical or engineering standpoint, but I think I do have something to say about how humans perceive the world and how that's different from a machine.

Melanie Avalon:
That would be so fascinating. I mean, I clearly would love that book seeing as how I can't, again, I'm anthropomorphizing, I can't say that word, the AI, but I feel like a lot of people just, you know, ask the question, get the answer. I literally can't just have a very simple conversation with it because I get so fascinated and perplexed by how it understands or how it answers and then I want to know why it's answering that way and like what led to that. Like I got in a loop with it the other day because it hallucinated and made up an answer and I kept asking it how it came up with that answer and it would just go in like circles. It wouldn't actually like ever say the answer and I was just so fascinated by like how is it coming up with this then and I realized that it's not conscious so it's not like it's perceiving the world but I'm fascinated by it. So point being is I would love to read that book.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Well, I'll have to write it first.

Melanie Avalon:
Yes, you have AI write it. I'm joking.

Christian Madsbjerg:
I think that would be the wrong approach, but yes.

Melanie Avalon:
not the right approach wait you could have it write the introduction chapter or like you could have an intro by ai that would be so great oh my goodness well thank you so much christian this is absolutely amazing was there anything else you wanted to touch on

Christian Madsbjerg:
I just think just like everybody that listens to this podcast probably go to the gym or have some sort of physical relationship to their body and work out in some way to feel stronger and better about themselves. They should also treat their observational skills and as a muscle that needs to be that needs to be practiced and trained and strengthened. So just like you go to the gym, you should also go to the observation gym and start with whatever you're obsessing about and whatever you're doing right now, whatever you're making right now and try to observe it as a social phenomenon. And if you do that a little bit every day, you'll end up becoming better at it and you will get a richer, more colorful, more textured world and you will understand other humans better. So I think an attention gym is an appropriate way to think about observation and it's that important.

Melanie Avalon:
I like that. Is that an agilist to your looking labs?

Christian Madsbjerg:
Yes. But I think there's something even more basic. It's just doing it every day. My looking labs are very specialized. Red was a looking lab. That was very specialized, and it served leaders in big companies making big investments and so on. But you can also do it just in everyday life. Particularly if you're an entrepreneur, understanding the social phenomenon underlying what you're trying to do will make your products or services better.

Melanie Avalon:
The last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it's just because I realize more and more each day how important mindset is. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Christian Madsbjerg:
I am grateful in terms of this conversation, I'm grateful for many things, but I'm grateful for the human ability to change our minds and do that based on looking at the world and our ability to be open to be wrong about things. I think that skill is something we need to protect. And when it happens, it's a beautiful thing. So I'm quite grateful that that is still something we can do, but that we need to protect and train and practice.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that answer. I could not agree more. That's amazing. How can people best follow your work and get your book?

Christian Madsbjerg:
So, my book can be, I think you can get that wherever you get books. People seem to only get it one place these days, which is on Amazon. Other than that, I have a website, which is my surname, Madspark .com. Yeah, those are the main places I'd say. I'm not very active on social media because I don't like it. I don't like it what it does to my attention. So, I'm trying to protect myself against it.

Melanie Avalon:
That's the wise decision. Well, thank you so much, Christian. I enjoyed your book so much. It really created a lot of paradigm shifts for me personally. And again, no pun intended, opened my eyes to so many things. And then just talking with you now was just amazing. I can't thank you enough for what you're doing and look forward to your future work. I really do hope that you write that AI book. I'll be here for it. Sounds amazing.

Christian Madsbjerg:
That's very delightful. Thank you.

Melanie Avalon:
Thank you. Bye.

Christian Madsbjerg:
Bye.