speaker-0: If you look at the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, for example, and others, Kepler, these really, really big minds on this planet, why they had been so extremely successful, each of them in their field, and you extend that research over the last two, 300 years and say, well, is it genetics? They have a special gene, they didn't find the gene, or did they have a specific degree in the university? Forget it. Some of them never went to university. They don't give a shit about university, right? It's something else. And you know what it is? They were able or unable to stick to a very complex topic for days and weeks and years and sometimes even decades and didn't give up. Thought about it over and over and over again.
speaker-1: you Stefan, I'm very excited to have you here on the Core Impact Podcast. I'm excited because you have different roles. So you are an author, psychiatrist, economist, sociologist, among other things. And also you focus on transformation, sustainable finance and AI. So my first question to you, what is your inner motivation to combine and connect all of these topics together?
speaker-0: Omar, first of all, thanks very much for having me in your show. And I'm looking forward to have an interesting discussion over the next hour on all these different topics you mentioned in the first place. My inner motivation to be involved in all these different disciplines ⁓ is ⁓ first, I think we need an interdisciplinary approach. in better understanding transformation, right? It's not only one discipline, it's several disciplines. ⁓ And I try to be involved in some of the disciplines, not in all of them, but in some of them. And social science is one and psychology on the other side and ⁓ clinical psychology is the other. And finance is one of the key issues in this domain, I think. And the second reason I think why I'm in
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: involved and interested in this topic is that you have to combine the inner experience and the outer world.
speaker-1: Okay?
speaker-0: And if you're able to do both being more transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary on one side, and at the same time being involved to understand the entire transformational process and as an inner process, which translates into an outer process, this is then where you sooner or later meet me.
speaker-1: Is there anything that you've learned recently in the last six months that changed your perspective on what transformation is or anything that is like core of what the things you're concentrating on talking about AI in general, the future of work or future of finance?
speaker-0: ⁓ because we're, are focusing very much in this podcast on finance. ⁓ I think I, the most important things the last six months I've been learning is that we've been systemically under utilizing and underscoring the relevance of the financial system, the relevance of the monetary system and. the relevance compared to other variables like technology or governance or lifestyle changes or a changing in your mindset, for example. Right. So I'm learning more and more that how important it is to look on finance as one of the most underutilized, as the Americans say, single most important factor, so to say, to change the world.
speaker-1: Right.
speaker-0: And whenever I give a talk or I'm involved in public debates and basically reconfirmed, and this is also happening the last couple of days, look at the war in Iraq, right? With the Strait of Hormuz, right? We are with this topic right in the middle of the monetary system. You know why? Because what's happening there. is regardless which part, uh, the party you take on, right? What do you see is the petrodollar system is challenged. You know, Iran is starting to nominate their oil in the renminbi. The Saudis have checked out of the petrodollar system, which was inaugurated in 1974 by Henry Kissinger.
speaker-1: of
speaker-0: to provide a new kind of security belt between the US dollar on one side as a dominant currency and securing the OPEC countries militarily by the United States. So this was a circle, right? This enabled the United States to print money and to provide energy for their citizens, their economy. On the other side, it provided also security in the region and peace in the region. Right. And now we are witnessing that all this is breaking down. Okay. The petrodollar system is marginally shifting away. The dollar is still relevant. 80 % of the oil is nominated in dollars, but it's shifting away to other currencies, you know, like ruble and more even than Bimbi. And this shift has a foundational impact. on any power game on the planet, not now, not tomorrow, but in general. And this is what the Americans are realizing. This is what you're all realizing is when the Americans are losing their U S dollar dominance. Right. They're losing their power on the planet. I would predict, I would predict Omar, if the U S dollar dominance is over, let's say in 15, 20 years. Something like that, maybe longer, maybe shorter, who knows. United States will be a country like South Africa or Brazil. Okay. And this has to do with the currency system involved. And this is the topic of our podcast, right? And this is what's happening couple last couple of days. And this is the untold story behind the whole, the whole war. This was also the beginning of the Iraqi war against Hussein, you know, decades ago.
speaker-1: Mmm.
speaker-0: They started to nominate not in US dollar and then Bush went in with their troops. Nobody talked about that. I'm talking about missiles. Nobody's interested in missiles. It's all about the money. It's about the power of the currency system in place in order to enable economic transactions or to prevent them from happening. Right.
speaker-1: Right. Stefan, since you started talking about mindset and also this is part of your search, how much our inner work or our inner transformation can influence the whole world around us. Maybe can you tell me about how do you see the connection between this topic about inner work and changing the system?
speaker-0: Well, I mean, it's always two parts of the coin, but we have to be very, very careful. On one side, I think it's relevant that we understand that the narratives, the stories we're telling each other, right? I'm telling you to you telling me, you're telling her to professor, your family, to politicians, the stories we're telling each other, they determine our common future. If it's a good story, it will be a good future. If it's a bad story. It's a bad future and the two dominant topics on telling each other stories, determining the future. The two topics is first God. People kill each other in the name of God. The most insane thing on this planet. It doesn't matter which religion you belong to, right? This is very, very unhealthy. And the second is money. These are the two stories that determine our inner world in one way or another. Determine transformation, determine security and peace and determine sustainability in one way or another. So if we have the wrong story in our minds, we're going to deliver the wrong future ahead of us. This is one part. The other part, which I think is just as important is that we have to understand that individual change, Omar. can easily lead to what psychologists call an individuality trap.
speaker-1: You
speaker-0: Let's buy veggie burger, let's ride a bike, doing yoga, do meditate, et cetera. And then the transformation is happening. That's wrong. Because this is the narrative that basically puts the entire pressure of change on the individual. Everybody has to ride a bike. Everybody has to eat a veggie burger. Everybody has to meditate. It doesn't work. And this is why we have to shift from the individual change to the systemic change. from the silo to the system. And the systems change. You're looking at the world from a different perspective. And here again, in my perspective, and for this podcast in particular, I think the most important variable on the systems level is the financial system. Right? If we look at the financial system, the way it's built, the way it's architectured, it's not a natural law. It's not...
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: following laws of physics. It's like a club rule or a marriage contract, right? You agree on, and when you think it doesn't work anymore, you re-adopt the legal coding. Right? And this is we're in right now, particularly over the last six, eight months. Money is not a thing. Money is a convention. We agree on, we build upon. And we have to change accordingly for the good of mankind. Okay. And this is why money in specific and the financial system in, in general, and the architecture of the system is so dominant for our brain, for our mind, because you always take it for, for granted. We always do as if this is a given. It's not a gift. In fact, actually, when you look at this topic from a from a historical perspective, would say it is a taboo. You know, a taboo is something you don't talk about, right? In the 20th century, there were three or four taboos. One is sex. Now I can talk about it. The second one is death, right? Your end of life. The third one is power. And the fourth one is money.
speaker-1: No.
speaker-0: And you we know from social psychology, whenever there is a taboo in a society, a collective taboo, not only an individual taboo for you and for me, but a collective taboo, which basically address whole societies, whole communities, the entire world, right? They don't go away. They still stay very, very powerful as what psychologists calls a shadow. Because they're not integrated in the only way to overcome the shadow. The only way to overcome the taboo is to face the way it is in order to integrate and transcend it and then reach another level of gravity of consciousness in order to better understand the world how it is.
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ That's already very deep. really, really happy. Exactly. Exactly. And I want to tell you something, Stefan, that I started thinking about recently after hearing, especially from lots of futurists that started asking this question. Why do we need money and why do we value money that much? And I'm thinking also about the future. Maybe you can tell me also more like.
speaker-0: Well, this is what you wanted to hear.
speaker-1: Money was a mean of exchange. is the main reason for it. It's not the purpose of life, right? ⁓
speaker-0: The means of exchange is one of them. Another one is the store of value and a price signal is another one, right? A signal for pricing. know, if you want to buy something, you want to make sure how much is it worth it? And the allocation of goods and service on the market can provide you a price nickel, which is normally nominated in a specific currency. Tells you this costs $100. If you don't know how much it costs, like in planned economy, the whole economy collapses. You need a signal. an economic signal for the value of a good or a service. You need a storage of value and you need a medium of exchange. All the three.
speaker-1: Hmm. and looking at the future, do you think there will be an alternative to money as we use it now?
speaker-0: If you have time to read my last three books, Financing Our Anthropocene or in specific Financing Our Future, or my last book just came out, The Economics of Transformation, I'm explaining with a robust, I think, empirical evidence that there's a merge for a new monetary aggregate. happening right now. It's happening already, regardless of what I'm saying and whether we have a podcast or not is irrelevant. It's happening. And it's happening actually in three fields over the last years and decades, more or less. Sometimes suppressed, sometimes ⁓ supported. One comes out of the NGO field over the last decades already, starting already after second world war, which we call complementary or regional currencies. Let system, local exchange trading system, barter system, local regional currency systems. They operate on a local sub-local level. They are macroeconomically completely irrelevant, completely irrelevant, but they show something very, very important. They show Omar that a parallel system is working in a sandbox. It works. The second monitor aggregate we've been experiencing now since about 15 to 20 years is crypto currencies. They work in parallel to the given fiat currency. They are operating on a different digital design, so to say, right? Stable coins, Bitcoin. There is about 7,000. They have a market capitalization of about 5,000 billion. It's a lot of money there, but they don't have a specific purpose. As the regional currencies have a purpose to solve a specific problem, let it have a social target or an ecological target, or a local economic target. The cryptocurrencies basically are an investment tool or a speculation tool. You invest in order to get richer, but their collateral is irrelevant because there's nothing to be backed up with what do want to do with this money? You have to buy something in the real economy at some point. So it's a speculative tool. I'm not saying it's a bad thing having a speculative tool. I'm just saying it is a speculative tool. It's an investment tool, mainly, right? And it's by and large more than 30, 40 % used for money laundry. Okay. To, to, to clean up the shadow banking system and the informal sector. Right. So it's happening. And there is a third thing happening, right? Which I found super interesting. This is when central banks started to introduce what they call technically a central bank digital currency nominated in Euro or in Red Bimby. They are in the process this year, actually, and next year to create central bank money, digital money. public money, monetary systems, monetary channels, where each of us can have the option for potential ⁓ e-bullet directly with the bank. There's no commercial bank in between anymore. You don't need them anymore. The middleman is irrelevant. The central bank prints money or provides money, or you save money and have a central bank. account. And the reason why the Europeans are doing this, and Christine Lagarde said it several times, and it's very, very wise and very smart. First of all, getting independent and autonomous from the American system, right? From the dollar system, because most transactions in Europe in your credit card is run through an American server, the American service industry, and we want to be autonomous in Europe. At least I support that. Put it that way, whether you like it or not, I support that. And second, which is very important too, is if you take it to the extreme, it can prevent and avoid bank runs. Because if you look at the banking currency, crisis over the last hundred years. Most of them, if not all, ended in a bank run. People were standing in front of the bank account and wanted their money back. And this was then the final crash of the currency system, of the money system, of the banking system in one way or another. Right? But if you have a bank that can potentially print as much as it wants, There's no reason to stay in front of the bank accounts. want my money back because they have enough money. So this is stabilizing the system. Do you see the point? It's stabilizing the system in case of increasing volatility happening somewhere in the world. Avoiding bank runs and a new digital financial infrastructure to become more sovereign, autonomous, and independent are two major factors. And now my argument is. And I'm happy you raised the question. There's a third aspect, which might be relevant. Look, let's say we in Europe have central bank digital currencies in place. Let's say we have them in place and we're going to have them in place at the end of this year, next year, but they're operating and you have your wallet. Can you imagine this could also work the other way around? What's about just think, just think for a minute. What's about if the central bank is tackling the next pandemics, right? And the WHO needs 25 billion to prevent that pandemic. What is the fastest way to do that? You use exactly that channel and provide that liquidity on the bank account of the WHO.
speaker-1: Meh.
speaker-0: to upfront load and provide them the liquidity to face the next pandemics. Much faster than taxing Omar and Stefan and waiting and two years later, the money's on a bank account or going on the capital market saying we need money and the private investors will say, well, I will give you the money, but I want 50 % interest rate and then you have to pay the interest rate over the next two or three generations. This is much faster. This technicality, this monetary You know, this monetary mechanism is much faster, much more accurate, much more tailored and much more cheaper in order to face external shocks to an economy. This is why the Europeans are doing something very, very wise. Okay. So because do you know how high the probability for the next pandemic is?
speaker-1: Mm. ability are unknown.
speaker-0: I was just at a Chatham room based hearing in Berlin on that topic. And I cannot tell you who talked, but everybody in the room from different organizations said the probability for the next pandemics, the way we experienced through COVID, right, is almost 100%. We don't know whether in three months or in three years, but it's almost 100%.
speaker-1: it's not more than three years from now. ⁓
speaker-0: ⁓ it could be, maybe it could be fine. Nobody can exactly say when it's going to happen, but it is a risk which is materialized already. It's not a matter of we want to avoid it completely. It's only a matter of how do we adapt to a future shock, to a future risk in a way that is relatively speaking cheaper than the way we're doing it right now. At the moment, we're just running into the next crisis. And everything breaks down and then we start collecting money and providing vaccinations and masks and say, oh, we could have done better. We could have done more preventively. And this mechanism, this monetary mechanism, so to say, it's kind of a heuristic, right? It's a monetary heuristic. It's actually not a mechanism. Provides us the tools, the political tools. to exactly face all these shocks. And it's not only pandemics, it's also biodiversity loss. It's forced migration. It's climate related. doesn't matter. This is why the money system in its enlarged form with the so-called enlarge or enhanced conditioned qualified monetary supply aggregate can tackle future shocks better.
speaker-1: Stop.
speaker-0: than any other mechanism. That's my argument.
speaker-1: ⁓ While you are listening to the Core Impact podcast, please take a moment to pause and share with me. How do you feel? Are you enjoying the conversation, feeling inspired or something else? I would love to know your feelings in the comments. I remember this, I heard from you that currently finance is still driving sustainability, but it should be the other way around.
speaker-0: Exactly. This is in one sentence, the entire argument at the moment what's happening. If you go to the capital market, you go to an institutional investor, you go to a home office, a family office, whatever. And you say, you know, we should invest in this dam or we should invest in this drone or we should invest in this truck. And the investor says, well, I think I could do this, but The systemic risk is too high. So I don't do it. I just don't do it. I can take over the project risk, like how to build a dam, right? Or how to build a hospital. I know how to do this, but the associated systemic risk going beyond the project risk is far too high for a private investor to be involved. So what he's doing, he remains risk averse. He's not investing at all, meaning finance is driving whether we have sustainability or not. And my ⁓ argument, no, no, no, that's wrong. say that's wrong incentive, wrong system, wrong institutional system. Let's do it the other way around. Let's determine what we want to face. The pandemics I just mentioned, biodiversity, blah, blah. Let's face the challenges we have manifested. We have materialized already. They're not there yet, but they're there. are 100 % happening. the climate related costs are 100 % gonna happen. We don't know whether all of them are gonna happen next year, but the next 10, 15 years, know, economists call this negative collective externalities. This is a negative spillover. And this is going to happen for sure. It's not a ⁓ pipe dream in the mind of a psychiatrist. It is already unleashed, right? And now if you're running into this scenario where systemic risks are rising exponentially right in front of you in one way or another, what is the cheapest way to get out of this? Waiting until everything is broken? No, to get in what public health people call a so-called secondary preventive approach. There's three forms of prevention, right? Primary prevention means we do something that This stuff doesn't even happen. Right. For example, if you want to avoid obesity or diabetes, do sports, then it's never going to happen. Okay. Secondary prevention is you have diabetes already. So keep the cost of diabetes as low as possible. Different strategy. And third prevention is you have diabetes, have long-term costs already. You're already in a chronic state and try to minimize the chronic. costs in the future and we are in a secondary preventive state. Okay. And this is why this monetary aggregate I'm talking to you is so it's out of the box. It's unusual. It's unconventional, but if you simply ask one question, right, just one, the question is what is the cheapest way to finance our future? The cheapest way as the next best step out of the box. It is not taxing the rich. It's not wait and see. It's not eating veggie burgers. I'm not saying that they're wrong. And I'm not, you know, I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm just saying they're fine, but they're not changing the game. The game changers are happening on a monetary system and the change in numbers are happening on a monetary system affecting.
speaker-1: Okay. Hmm.
speaker-0: The architecture of the system and our approach by introducing this secondary monetary aggregate is the cheapest way to do it. And we're on the way to do it. You know, exciting, isn't it?
speaker-1: you It's exciting at the same time I see, I always look at this, as you say, this coin that has two faces. it's coming back to me this question when I know about all of this and the more I know about the future, the more I see how much of this exponential damage that we are making to the earth and nature in general. And ask myself again, how can I come back to myself?
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: and change my mindset to be someone who is contributing to a better future without feeling that there's lots of pessimism that taking me down and that making me be able to do something about it.
speaker-0: Yeah. You know, my argument is not against individual lifestyle changes. I'm not arguing against it. I'm not arguing against taxation system fees, regulation, ESG standards, ⁓ more technology, different. I'm not arguing against it. I'm just saying they have to be complemented by a monetary aggregate that enables them to happen. Because the last 50 years demonstrated all tools we've been using.
speaker-1: Hmm. ⁓
speaker-0: are in the box. Don't use a tool that caused the mess to solve the mess. This was Einstein saying a hundred years ago, look out for tools that are out of the box or able to solve the problems that caused the mess in the box.
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: That's my argument. So I'm not arguing against yoga and bad cheating.
speaker-1: Yeah. And there is something I love about you and how you describe things and go deep in like main keywords. One of them is transformation because in order to do all of this, we need transformation inside and outside. So let's take it a bit like one step by step because you describe transformation as a process. And you said no transformation without adaptation. There's no adaptation without learning. and no learning without awareness. So can you please walk us through this step by step, maybe also with real examples.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, of course I will. But you're now not in the financial monitoring system anymore. This is a very general statement, right? So, ⁓ let's get back to the initial idea of the story or the narrative we're talking to each other. You can ask yourself, what is the story? What is the narrative we need to transform our society? Right. And the story and the picture, the narrative I have in my head.
speaker-1: Right
speaker-0: is the picture of a staircase, right? A staircase has an inner boundary and an outer boundary. We can step up the staircase and it can step down the progression and the regression. can fall off the boundaries in one way or another. If we do it successfully, we can see more if you step up, wider and deeper, right? And this picture of the staircase helps me Onto genetically, meaning on the individual level. And it also helps me on a phylogenetic collective level, meaning it works for the individual staircase. And it also works for societies in one way up or the other way down. Okay. So I'm using this picture to better understand what transformation has to look like. And on a staircase, it's not a continuous. process, it's a step. Okay. It's a step. Okay. A is not B. We're going to shift from A to B from adverse to beneficiary next step. There's still more ahead and there's much more further down, but we're here when a step up and this step up is not a linear process. It's exponential process. It is a nonlinear process in fact, right? It's an hour. I'm, think it has to do that. We change the aggregate, the state of aggregate we're living. It's like, you know, water is available, ⁓ in a solid form, in a vaporous form and in, in, in a liquid form. Right. And each time the molecules are more, more or less the same, more or less, but each time the state of aggregate is completely different. And this step, to use that picture, this is where we're in. We're going to change the collective institutional societal state of aggregate, how are we going to live together? You know, with regard to educating our children, doing business, doing politics, doing economics, doing research, eating, drinking, living, everything. It's everything. This is, this is where we're in. The next step and the challenge is not only using that picture, but the challenge is that a vast majority of people are afraid of change, which is normal, which is normal. And the vast majority of people. Rather, because there is so much insecurity, uncertainty built in into the step for everybody, for you and for me, for everybody, they rather want to step down instead of up. Rather regress. So if the point of interest is a nation state to change, right? They are political parties who rather prefer to living in small homogeneous communities. Right? But the future is rather the next form, not homogeneous communities, but transnational forms of governance that enable national and ⁓ subnational aggregates. But the step is in this direction if we progress. But the point is two thirds of the world population, they have a level of consciousness which is more nationalistic. So if you favor the next step, but 70 % are not following, break the system. You have to be very careful what you're asking for. And if the change is happening too fast,
speaker-1: You ⁓
speaker-0: You also break the system and you create polarizations on the left and on the right, or people are just avoiding any form of change, right? They're regressing and saying, well, I am only interested in my in-group, like my local group. I don't care about the rest, but you have to care about because systemic risks are happening also on your local group in one way or another. And, and this is the challenge you're in.
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: When you talk about transformation, that if you're too fast, then you break it. If you're too slow, it's going to be broken. Right? So you have to come up with a good story and a good narrative to get people on board. Yeah.
speaker-1: Stefan, you are reminding me of another question that I don't ask anyone or I usually don't ask people a lot, but I reflect on, but I'm just going to say to you, which is about the future also, will there be any time in the future where we don't have borders, meaning we'd either have one country or we have less countries as we have like more like the European Union.
speaker-0: Yes, but this is, this is frankly within, with regard to your and my lifespan, it's irrelevant. You know, I just see that the EU is the first transnational political body in human mankind. A lot of challenges, but this is in part the future. have to learn a rule-based form of multilateralism. Right. And everybody who avoids that.
speaker-1: Okay. Hmm.
speaker-0: And there's big countries in the East and big countries in the West for different reasons. They can learn how it works in Europe because we are leading Europe is leading. I just finished this morning, an article for a federal weekly in Austria, trying to explain that the 21st century is a European century, not an Asian and not an American or. It is a lost century for humanity. Okay? Because of exactly that.
speaker-1: Let's talk also a bit about... what concerns you most and what excites you most about AI and in general the future of finance.
speaker-0: These are two mainly separate questions. There is an interlink. If it comes to fintech and predictive coding of AIs and the application in the financial sector. ⁓ If you, okay. what I find fascinating with the AI is it is the first channel purpose technology, which is completely different than any general purpose technology in human mankind. And I tell you the difference. It's not like the book press. It's not like steam engine. It's not like the DNA coding. It's not like a computer. It is not like electricity. It's not even like inventing a wheel. It goes far, far beyond that. And one of the major aspects which differentiates AI from all the other general purpose technologies, right, is that it has a self-learning component built in. And if people don't understand this part,
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: They don't understand the dynamic that comes out of AI. If you have a book press produced and built 500 years ago, it's still the same now. Okay. It's even old fashioned, but AI has a self-learning, self-improving property built into this technology. This is, we are now witnessing, which is transcending our way of our our way of being aware of ourselves, our way of educating, our way of being. And it's challenged human, homo sapiens sapiens in a very, very foundational way. Because the corpus reasoning, the corpus of cognition, what we're doing right now, we're talking, we're exchanging.
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: We're having ideas, we think, we write something down, we write an MBA, we write an article, we think about the world, we think about having some food, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. This is done by a machine faster and partly different, right? Transcending the way we are thinking, transcending our cognition in a very general sense. This is the challenging part. And now comes the concern. If we don't do it right, we risk not to progress into the next level. We risk to regress because AI is taking over, right? And we lose the capacities to handle this technology and to use it for the good of mankind.
speaker-1: Hmm. I think one of the main mistakes, let's say to deal with AI that lead us to digression instead of progress progression is, is giving away our critical thinking. of all, as I just said from you and the other one is, ⁓ having this physical activities, right? So, ⁓ but let's start with the first one is the critical thinking.
speaker-0: You know, 200 years ago, 95 % of the population in Europe were illiterate. They could not really read and write. 200 years later, running through the whole educational wave, 95 % are able to read and write. They have some sort of degree, right? Whatever. Whatever degree, doesn't matter. So they have a corpus cognition, ⁓ a cognitive corpus. to think about the world, whatever degree, there's a vocational training or reading, writing, and other things, And what's happening is that this corpus now is sooner or later replaced by a machine because it's done better by a machine, faster and better. And the question is now, what is the next best step beyond cognition that enables human to use the algorithm that they're done by a machine in order to progress and not regress. Right. And the term I think I'm using in order to better explain that is we're shifting from cognition to meta cognition. Meaning we start thinking about the thinking. Right. And this is the next step happening in education and pedagogic and training.
speaker-1: See
speaker-0: People can basically deploy a machine doing the stuff, but they have to be aware about the results. What does that mean? Meaning semantics, thinking, calculating, interpreting, I call it ecological rationality becomes even more important, not less. If you want to be part of the next best step, if you give that all up, Well, the machine is going to tell you what to do, right? Which is not a helpful thing. It can help you to trigger your thought process. It can help you to better understand parts of it, but you remain the agent. We humans should remain the agent of change. It's like a pocket calculator, right? When 30, 40 years ago pocket calculators were part of the mathematics classes. Everybody use the pocket calculator and we are risking to lose the capacity to calculate because the pocket calculator took over and there's a law in there in neuroscience called use it or lose it. If you don't use it, you lose the brain capacity to do it. And this shift is what's happening. in right now from cognition to metacognition. Right. If you do it right, if you don't do it right and say, I don't care. Let's the machine even think about what's the results is and that then decide that we don't progress. We regress. Okay. And this is the one aspect. this, the other second aspect, which I find as important is that your personal health, not only physical health, also mental health and emotional health is something you should remain responsible for. If you delegate this to a machine, we're going to extinct in a couple of generations because we are irrelevant. We die. just die. We just vanish on where another. So symbolically speaking, the pushups you have to do yourself. If you avoid eating, doing the pushups, having proper sleep, having good food and having a friend. Right. And read a book. It's not good, not good, not good. Regardless to what you study, doesn't matter what you study, right? You can become a plumber or become a PhD student. It doesn't matter, but these four or five things, don't delegate them to a machine. You better not because otherwise not good.
speaker-1: I remember from you, especially when you talk about reading a book, to keep having this habit of taking something from the beginning until the end. This is at least how I understood it. Because when we are used to ask directly, I give us all the answers directly, we don't have this capacity to take things like in a long process from the beginning until the end.
speaker-0: I don't know, I don't know where you heard that, but this is for me, the most fascinating thing over the last months and years I'm learning. I'm re I mean, this is kind of personally one of the most fascinating things. If you look at the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, for example, and others Kepler, right? These big, really, really big minds on this planet.
speaker-1: Mm.
speaker-0: And if you try to understand why they had been so extremely successful, each of them in their field, right? And you extend that research over the last two, 300 years and say, what is it genetics? They have a special gene. They didn't find the gene. Or is this the mother relation or the race to the father? Or did they have a specific degree in the university? Forget it. Some of them never went to university. I don't give a shit about university. Right. It's something else. And you know what it is? They were able or enabled to stick to a very complex topic for a very, very long time, for days and weeks and years and sometimes even decades and didn't give up. basically.
speaker-1: Mm.
speaker-0: thought about it over and over and over again, giving a talk and then going back and then thinking about it and meditating and writing a little paper. They were not pushed to write a book. They're pushed to solve a problem. Nowadays our scientific community is built on publishing papers. Okay. This is not creative. Right? This is not creative. What we need people
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: which are freed and enabled to think and stick to the problem, not to have a tension span of 12 seconds and then be with some other topics. And this is probably one of the hidden secrets of the European Renaissance, one of the hidden secrets, I think. And if we are able to foster and enable that in the 21st century as a so-called second Renaissance. You know, enabling, supporting people to sit and think on things, which are being harassed, which are being constantly ⁓ criticized, but in a negative way, enabled having an ecosystem where they can meet and think. This is the beginning of a new age. Right. This is metacognition. Think about your thought process. The machine is making the paper. Of course they make the paper. They make the book. Of course. But let's think, what did they write here? What does it mean? What does it mean here now? And this is, need time. You need space. You need an ecosystem. You need an environment that enables you to really dig deep into it. And this is not done with the attention span of a goldfish of seven or 10 seconds. It's not going to work. You need years, maybe even decades, but I'm very, very positive, very, very positive. If we enable the society to create, to have people doing this in the most positive and best intended way, we can solve the
speaker-1: ⁓ We are ahead. ⁓
speaker-0: But we need a systems change to enable people doing this. If I have to publish three, yesterday night I had a dinner with a famous philosopher, a philosopher of science. And he was saying, you know, I'm doing 80 % admin shot, admin stuff, admin, administration, not thinking. The guy is a thinker. We need people to think. think through, not to do admin stuff. He's not an administrator. He is a philosopher. He is a philosopher of science. He can think about the philosophy of science. This is where his expertise is. So he should spend 80 % in thinking and not in filling Excel sheets. All that stuff, you know? And this is true for all disciplines. This is true for major, for all of that stuff. Right? So.
speaker-1: And Stefan, now you're reminding me how important it is to stick with the problem and keep looking at it and taking time, giving yourself space.
speaker-0: You also, yeah, it's very important, but this cognitive skill, right? Which is called a metacognitive skill of ⁓ ambivalence tolerance. You keep the opposites in your brain of attention span. You sit on the problem for years and you don't know what's coming out of it. There is an emotional component built in. We haven't talked about it. And the emotional component built in is. mainly Humility.
speaker-1: Mmm.
speaker-0: If you don't have humility, you're not getting anywhere. You only create an ego show and the ego shows it's for nothing. It's just, it's not worth it. It's not even worth it to follow. It's just, it's wasted time. Basically it's if you sit on your own ego for the next 10 years to solve a problem because you are the guy. Then it's, then it's 10 years wasted time. So you need a practice that enables humility, gratefulness, compassion.
speaker-1: you are the eagle then it's
speaker-0: Love, support, meaning you have to erase your ego in order to provide a vessel that is able to be ego free to keep all the opposites, the coincidencia oppositorum as the people in the middle ages call it, to keep the opposites in your brain. Your ego is irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Forget about it. You need your ego. I don't know, but you don't need an ego for that process. You need it afterwards in order, for example, to write a paper or to speak. At the moment I need my ego, my ego function in order to speak to you. You know, if I don't have ego functions, I would not be able to speak to you. Right. But for this process you're referring to, you need a trans personal, a trans ego state. And one way to classify it is metacognitive, but it's not only metacognitive. You can also frame it in different ways.
speaker-1: Actually, I'm gonna take this because she was also my podcast guest and you reminded me of her when you were talking about...
speaker-0: I can't, I cannot see the picture. What is United?
speaker-1: state of you. I'm going to tell you about why you reminded me of it. We were talking about compassion, love, et cetera. You reminded me to keep, stay aware of my heart and the process. It's not about my mind solving the issues. And here what she talks about, she says, we have 40 members. So our mind, our heart, our body and consciousness, and the one who can lead really from within can know how to integrate all these four team members and the mind should not be the one who's leading. ⁓
speaker-0: ⁓ Yeah, they're different. You know, there's different ways to say the same thing. You know, I'm not a literate. I'm not a humanity guy. I'm not, I'm not a poet, poet, right? So I'm not so good in telling these stories. But the message is very similar.
speaker-1: Mm. Stefan, there's one thing I like to do by like towards the end of the podcast. I asked the guest what question he's reflecting on and would like me to ask the next guest this question. And I start by asking you a question that my previous guest asked me. So the question is, he's talking about leadership. He's an author of the power of mattering, Zach Murkirio. When people feel that they matter to you, what are you doing?
speaker-0: I express my gratitude. in one sentence, you know? I express my gratitude and I try to get in a mode of serving.
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: This is in one sentence, I would say.
speaker-1: Okay, and what is the question that you would like me to ask a future guest? Something you've been reflecting on, you would like to have a new perspective on.
speaker-0: Yeah, you know, I'm asking a very, very academic question, right? Not a psychological question of wisdom and life, et cetera, et cetera. I'm going to ask a very, very, I'm not prepared, you know, but I'm asking a very, very technical question. And if my next, your next guest is not able to answer that question, he can look, call me up or look up my stuff because I found an answer to that question, right? Okay. The 10th question is the following because it refers to money. What is the common ground? Very technical question. Okay. Very technical. What is the common ground? I like that. What is the common ground between the U S petrodollar system and the Chinese Silk Road initiative from a monetary perspective?
speaker-1: ⁓
speaker-0: I just asked that question in Azerbaijan, in Baku, the Chinese delegation of the Chinese Academy of Science. And they were very silent about it. And this is the question you're going to ask your next interviewer. And I would be very, very interested in hearing what the answer is. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
speaker-1: that okay? Yes, you know what? I'm gonna ask them this question before publishing this episode so you can tell me the answer already.
speaker-0: Okay. The answer is the following. Both are relying on an enhanced monetary aggregate to fuel and fund debt. The Chinese are printing money or using their currency reserves along the Silicon Park road. And the Americans are printing money, US dollars. They're not taxing Mr. Smith in order to fund the US petrodollar barrel. in order to fund the petrodollar system. They're using something, technically speaking, what's called a quantitative easing. Right? And now comes the point, Omar, now it's getting really, really exciting. What do you think would happen? You're an economist. What do you think would happen if Europe would do the same thing for security and sustainability? We would live in the best possible world. using a green quantitative easing through central bank digital currencies and a smart contract to fund external shocks. hedge private capital to be invested and to manage negative externalities.
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: Sorry. Yeah, want to have, you know, if you invite people who are in the box, there's so many, you don't have to invite me. It doesn't make sense. know, there's so many in box people who are very smart, have very good expertise and very good knowledge, very knowledgeable, very purposeful, very smart, very wise. And you can interview them and they give you other answers.
speaker-1: Yes. I love this. Why do you think it's not happening?
speaker-0: ⁓ in part, this is a multifaceted question, multifaceted answer to that question. One aspect is because it's still considered to be a collective taboo. And the second thing has to do with our educational system. consider money to be a thing, natural law, but it's not. And we don't fully embrace the power of money for the transformational process. We're not fully utilizing. the relevance of currency systems and the money system for the transformation process. If we would sooner than later, we would live in a completely different world, which is more insured, more sustainable, which is fairer, which is better in so many respects. Right. That's, this is why the money system is so relevant.
speaker-1: Hmm. I'm really enjoying the conversation. last two questions will be a bit personal, but before we jump into the end, the very end, I have a ⁓ general question. Do you think there's anything important we haven't talked about yet in this podcast?
speaker-0: ⁓ thousand things. ⁓ my God. We should be charged five minutes on AI and the veggie burger and a little bit of money system. I mean, there's so much out there we have not even mentioned.
speaker-1: I'm gonna kill myself. Can you choose one? Can you choose one?
speaker-0: ⁓ the relevance of integral medicine, holistic approach in medicine. The systems change between open societies and closed societies. Right. ⁓ the creativity response, meaning how should we organize education for the future?
speaker-1: Bye.
speaker-0: ⁓ what's about the spiritual request? We have not talked ⁓ a sentence on that topic. I mean, it's just an hour. We need 10 hours. I'm sorry. You invited me to your podcast to speak on money only. So I am referring to money. It's fine.
speaker-1: No, I mean, that was one of the key themes to talk about. But yeah, then in this case, maybe we see if we can have another conversation in the future. The question I would like to ask you, I'm very curious also to hear how you experienced this, because I heard that you do not use a smartphone, right? I don't know if this is still the case until now. Did I get it right by the way?
speaker-0: Yeah, I don't have a smartphone. I'm feeling very good about it. I'm minority. The vast majority of people I'm meeting, they all use iPhones. And I still think for my brain and for my mind and for my life, I'm very, very grateful that I don't have to buy that machine.
speaker-1: How do you feel about it?
speaker-0: There's people who like to do it. My secretary, my backup office, they love making phone calls to an iPhone and say, let's just do it. They get paid for it. Right. My family likes doing this and I'm just coming up with the idea. It has an addictive potential. hacks your brain and it's potentially reducing your mental capacity in order to understand complexity. Be aware of that. And you're spending a lot of time on that machine instead of time to think.
speaker-1: Hmm. Yes.
speaker-0: And the point is, if everybody's doing this, you're surrounded by people that everybody, you take it for granted. This is normal. And my point is it's not normal. It is actually insane. It's unhealthy. The way we're doing this, the Americans have a term for this and they call it rot brain. Our brain is rotting and we're not aware of it because everybody around us is rotting too. We are regressing down the stair case.
speaker-1: So
speaker-0: without realizing that we actually regressing, but should do the other.
speaker-1: Hmm. It's very exciting. also this awareness of it. I remember also another podcast guest, she told me, at least when you go on the train, don't use your phone. Just look at the surroundings and everything. And I started doing this and I see people around me, over 90 % they're looking at their phones. So it's already inspiring. And I'm thinking about how to implement this as one of the takeaways from this podcast. The other one is how do you celebrate success and life in general?
speaker-0: Success is a random thing that happens to you. You know, it's not so relevant for me. You know, it's okay, but it's, you know, what is success? What is it? I don't, at the end, I don't even know what that means. So success. I'm celebrating life if I have a good conversation, a deep, honest.
speaker-1: Hmm. Mm.
speaker-0: coherent conversation on a topic, meeting interesting people. If I have time for myself, eating good food, doing good sports and having a exchange with my family and, or, being involved in treating a patient here at the hospital. We talked about that topic at all because you mentioned
speaker-1: Hmm. ⁓
speaker-0: What have you've not talked about? would say 99.99 % has not been addressed. were just, we just got a little glimpse of the crack of the stuff, which is interesting.
speaker-1: Okay. I'm really grateful for the conversation with you, Stefan. And as always, like when I hear about you and I read from you, what you said, what you wrote, it's totally different from the energy we have when we have this conversation. So there were lots of impulses for me from the beginning until the end, how to look at the inner work and system change as the same coin, but you have to always look at both sides and yeah, how we talk about. transformation AI and in the end, how do you also live like in a way that you don't have any kind of attachment to these tools, always give yourself space to live this. So thank you very much. If you have anything to say in the end, like last thoughts, this is the end of the podcast now.
speaker-0: Okay. Well, very many thanks for this ⁓ hour of conversation on very important topics. I wish you all the best for your future career, for your future life. And ⁓ let's disseminate and reach out with all these ideas through your podcast to other people to inspire other people doing similar things.
speaker-1: Yes, we'll do this. Thank you, Stefan.
speaker-0: Yeah, thank you.
speaker-1: Congratulations for listening until the end, you are in the top 25 % of listeners Studies show that we forget up to 70 % of what we hear within 24 hours But when we repeat an insight by sharing it with someone, commenting or journaling it, it moves into long-term memory So now tell me, what are your 1-2-3 takeaways you're keeping from this conversation? Enjoy every moment, until next time
speaker-1: you Stefan, I'm very excited to have you here on the Core Impact Podcast. I'm excited because you have different roles. So you are an author, psychiatrist, economist, sociologist, among other things. And also you focus on transformation, sustainable finance and AI. So my first question to you, what is your inner motivation to combine and connect all of these topics together?
speaker-0: Omar, first of all, thanks very much for having me in your show. And I'm looking forward to have an interesting discussion over the next hour on all these different topics you mentioned in the first place. My inner motivation to be involved in all these different disciplines ⁓ is ⁓ first, I think we need an interdisciplinary approach. in better understanding transformation, right? It's not only one discipline, it's several disciplines. ⁓ And I try to be involved in some of the disciplines, not in all of them, but in some of them. And social science is one and psychology on the other side and ⁓ clinical psychology is the other. And finance is one of the key issues in this domain, I think. And the second reason I think why I'm in
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: involved and interested in this topic is that you have to combine the inner experience and the outer world.
speaker-1: Okay?
speaker-0: And if you're able to do both being more transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary on one side, and at the same time being involved to understand the entire transformational process and as an inner process, which translates into an outer process, this is then where you sooner or later meet me.
speaker-1: Is there anything that you've learned recently in the last six months that changed your perspective on what transformation is or anything that is like core of what the things you're concentrating on talking about AI in general, the future of work or future of finance?
speaker-0: ⁓ because we're, are focusing very much in this podcast on finance. ⁓ I think I, the most important things the last six months I've been learning is that we've been systemically under utilizing and underscoring the relevance of the financial system, the relevance of the monetary system and. the relevance compared to other variables like technology or governance or lifestyle changes or a changing in your mindset, for example. Right. So I'm learning more and more that how important it is to look on finance as one of the most underutilized, as the Americans say, single most important factor, so to say, to change the world.
speaker-1: Right.
speaker-0: And whenever I give a talk or I'm involved in public debates and basically reconfirmed, and this is also happening the last couple of days, look at the war in Iraq, right? With the Strait of Hormuz, right? We are with this topic right in the middle of the monetary system. You know why? Because what's happening there. is regardless which part, uh, the party you take on, right? What do you see is the petrodollar system is challenged. You know, Iran is starting to nominate their oil in the renminbi. The Saudis have checked out of the petrodollar system, which was inaugurated in 1974 by Henry Kissinger.
speaker-1: of
speaker-0: to provide a new kind of security belt between the US dollar on one side as a dominant currency and securing the OPEC countries militarily by the United States. So this was a circle, right? This enabled the United States to print money and to provide energy for their citizens, their economy. On the other side, it provided also security in the region and peace in the region. Right. And now we are witnessing that all this is breaking down. Okay. The petrodollar system is marginally shifting away. The dollar is still relevant. 80 % of the oil is nominated in dollars, but it's shifting away to other currencies, you know, like ruble and more even than Bimbi. And this shift has a foundational impact. on any power game on the planet, not now, not tomorrow, but in general. And this is what the Americans are realizing. This is what you're all realizing is when the Americans are losing their U S dollar dominance. Right. They're losing their power on the planet. I would predict, I would predict Omar, if the U S dollar dominance is over, let's say in 15, 20 years. Something like that, maybe longer, maybe shorter, who knows. United States will be a country like South Africa or Brazil. Okay. And this has to do with the currency system involved. And this is the topic of our podcast, right? And this is what's happening couple last couple of days. And this is the untold story behind the whole, the whole war. This was also the beginning of the Iraqi war against Hussein, you know, decades ago.
speaker-1: Mmm.
speaker-0: They started to nominate not in US dollar and then Bush went in with their troops. Nobody talked about that. I'm talking about missiles. Nobody's interested in missiles. It's all about the money. It's about the power of the currency system in place in order to enable economic transactions or to prevent them from happening. Right.
speaker-1: Right. Stefan, since you started talking about mindset and also this is part of your search, how much our inner work or our inner transformation can influence the whole world around us. Maybe can you tell me about how do you see the connection between this topic about inner work and changing the system?
speaker-0: Well, I mean, it's always two parts of the coin, but we have to be very, very careful. On one side, I think it's relevant that we understand that the narratives, the stories we're telling each other, right? I'm telling you to you telling me, you're telling her to professor, your family, to politicians, the stories we're telling each other, they determine our common future. If it's a good story, it will be a good future. If it's a bad story. It's a bad future and the two dominant topics on telling each other stories, determining the future. The two topics is first God. People kill each other in the name of God. The most insane thing on this planet. It doesn't matter which religion you belong to, right? This is very, very unhealthy. And the second is money. These are the two stories that determine our inner world in one way or another. Determine transformation, determine security and peace and determine sustainability in one way or another. So if we have the wrong story in our minds, we're going to deliver the wrong future ahead of us. This is one part. The other part, which I think is just as important is that we have to understand that individual change, Omar. can easily lead to what psychologists call an individuality trap.
speaker-1: You
speaker-0: Let's buy veggie burger, let's ride a bike, doing yoga, do meditate, et cetera. And then the transformation is happening. That's wrong. Because this is the narrative that basically puts the entire pressure of change on the individual. Everybody has to ride a bike. Everybody has to eat a veggie burger. Everybody has to meditate. It doesn't work. And this is why we have to shift from the individual change to the systemic change. from the silo to the system. And the systems change. You're looking at the world from a different perspective. And here again, in my perspective, and for this podcast in particular, I think the most important variable on the systems level is the financial system. Right? If we look at the financial system, the way it's built, the way it's architectured, it's not a natural law. It's not...
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: following laws of physics. It's like a club rule or a marriage contract, right? You agree on, and when you think it doesn't work anymore, you re-adopt the legal coding. Right? And this is we're in right now, particularly over the last six, eight months. Money is not a thing. Money is a convention. We agree on, we build upon. And we have to change accordingly for the good of mankind. Okay. And this is why money in specific and the financial system in, in general, and the architecture of the system is so dominant for our brain, for our mind, because you always take it for, for granted. We always do as if this is a given. It's not a gift. In fact, actually, when you look at this topic from a from a historical perspective, would say it is a taboo. You know, a taboo is something you don't talk about, right? In the 20th century, there were three or four taboos. One is sex. Now I can talk about it. The second one is death, right? Your end of life. The third one is power. And the fourth one is money.
speaker-1: No.
speaker-0: And you we know from social psychology, whenever there is a taboo in a society, a collective taboo, not only an individual taboo for you and for me, but a collective taboo, which basically address whole societies, whole communities, the entire world, right? They don't go away. They still stay very, very powerful as what psychologists calls a shadow. Because they're not integrated in the only way to overcome the shadow. The only way to overcome the taboo is to face the way it is in order to integrate and transcend it and then reach another level of gravity of consciousness in order to better understand the world how it is.
speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ That's already very deep. really, really happy. Exactly. Exactly. And I want to tell you something, Stefan, that I started thinking about recently after hearing, especially from lots of futurists that started asking this question. Why do we need money and why do we value money that much? And I'm thinking also about the future. Maybe you can tell me also more like.
speaker-0: Well, this is what you wanted to hear.
speaker-1: Money was a mean of exchange. is the main reason for it. It's not the purpose of life, right? ⁓
speaker-0: The means of exchange is one of them. Another one is the store of value and a price signal is another one, right? A signal for pricing. know, if you want to buy something, you want to make sure how much is it worth it? And the allocation of goods and service on the market can provide you a price nickel, which is normally nominated in a specific currency. Tells you this costs $100. If you don't know how much it costs, like in planned economy, the whole economy collapses. You need a signal. an economic signal for the value of a good or a service. You need a storage of value and you need a medium of exchange. All the three.
speaker-1: Hmm. and looking at the future, do you think there will be an alternative to money as we use it now?
speaker-0: If you have time to read my last three books, Financing Our Anthropocene or in specific Financing Our Future, or my last book just came out, The Economics of Transformation, I'm explaining with a robust, I think, empirical evidence that there's a merge for a new monetary aggregate. happening right now. It's happening already, regardless of what I'm saying and whether we have a podcast or not is irrelevant. It's happening. And it's happening actually in three fields over the last years and decades, more or less. Sometimes suppressed, sometimes ⁓ supported. One comes out of the NGO field over the last decades already, starting already after second world war, which we call complementary or regional currencies. Let system, local exchange trading system, barter system, local regional currency systems. They operate on a local sub-local level. They are macroeconomically completely irrelevant, completely irrelevant, but they show something very, very important. They show Omar that a parallel system is working in a sandbox. It works. The second monitor aggregate we've been experiencing now since about 15 to 20 years is crypto currencies. They work in parallel to the given fiat currency. They are operating on a different digital design, so to say, right? Stable coins, Bitcoin. There is about 7,000. They have a market capitalization of about 5,000 billion. It's a lot of money there, but they don't have a specific purpose. As the regional currencies have a purpose to solve a specific problem, let it have a social target or an ecological target, or a local economic target. The cryptocurrencies basically are an investment tool or a speculation tool. You invest in order to get richer, but their collateral is irrelevant because there's nothing to be backed up with what do want to do with this money? You have to buy something in the real economy at some point. So it's a speculative tool. I'm not saying it's a bad thing having a speculative tool. I'm just saying it is a speculative tool. It's an investment tool, mainly, right? And it's by and large more than 30, 40 % used for money laundry. Okay. To, to, to clean up the shadow banking system and the informal sector. Right. So it's happening. And there is a third thing happening, right? Which I found super interesting. This is when central banks started to introduce what they call technically a central bank digital currency nominated in Euro or in Red Bimby. They are in the process this year, actually, and next year to create central bank money, digital money. public money, monetary systems, monetary channels, where each of us can have the option for potential ⁓ e-bullet directly with the bank. There's no commercial bank in between anymore. You don't need them anymore. The middleman is irrelevant. The central bank prints money or provides money, or you save money and have a central bank. account. And the reason why the Europeans are doing this, and Christine Lagarde said it several times, and it's very, very wise and very smart. First of all, getting independent and autonomous from the American system, right? From the dollar system, because most transactions in Europe in your credit card is run through an American server, the American service industry, and we want to be autonomous in Europe. At least I support that. Put it that way, whether you like it or not, I support that. And second, which is very important too, is if you take it to the extreme, it can prevent and avoid bank runs. Because if you look at the banking currency, crisis over the last hundred years. Most of them, if not all, ended in a bank run. People were standing in front of the bank account and wanted their money back. And this was then the final crash of the currency system, of the money system, of the banking system in one way or another. Right? But if you have a bank that can potentially print as much as it wants, There's no reason to stay in front of the bank accounts. want my money back because they have enough money. So this is stabilizing the system. Do you see the point? It's stabilizing the system in case of increasing volatility happening somewhere in the world. Avoiding bank runs and a new digital financial infrastructure to become more sovereign, autonomous, and independent are two major factors. And now my argument is. And I'm happy you raised the question. There's a third aspect, which might be relevant. Look, let's say we in Europe have central bank digital currencies in place. Let's say we have them in place and we're going to have them in place at the end of this year, next year, but they're operating and you have your wallet. Can you imagine this could also work the other way around? What's about just think, just think for a minute. What's about if the central bank is tackling the next pandemics, right? And the WHO needs 25 billion to prevent that pandemic. What is the fastest way to do that? You use exactly that channel and provide that liquidity on the bank account of the WHO.
speaker-1: Meh.
speaker-0: to upfront load and provide them the liquidity to face the next pandemics. Much faster than taxing Omar and Stefan and waiting and two years later, the money's on a bank account or going on the capital market saying we need money and the private investors will say, well, I will give you the money, but I want 50 % interest rate and then you have to pay the interest rate over the next two or three generations. This is much faster. This technicality, this monetary You know, this monetary mechanism is much faster, much more accurate, much more tailored and much more cheaper in order to face external shocks to an economy. This is why the Europeans are doing something very, very wise. Okay. So because do you know how high the probability for the next pandemic is?
speaker-1: Mm. ability are unknown.
speaker-0: I was just at a Chatham room based hearing in Berlin on that topic. And I cannot tell you who talked, but everybody in the room from different organizations said the probability for the next pandemics, the way we experienced through COVID, right, is almost 100%. We don't know whether in three months or in three years, but it's almost 100%.
speaker-1: it's not more than three years from now. ⁓
speaker-0: ⁓ it could be, maybe it could be fine. Nobody can exactly say when it's going to happen, but it is a risk which is materialized already. It's not a matter of we want to avoid it completely. It's only a matter of how do we adapt to a future shock, to a future risk in a way that is relatively speaking cheaper than the way we're doing it right now. At the moment, we're just running into the next crisis. And everything breaks down and then we start collecting money and providing vaccinations and masks and say, oh, we could have done better. We could have done more preventively. And this mechanism, this monetary mechanism, so to say, it's kind of a heuristic, right? It's a monetary heuristic. It's actually not a mechanism. Provides us the tools, the political tools. to exactly face all these shocks. And it's not only pandemics, it's also biodiversity loss. It's forced migration. It's climate related. doesn't matter. This is why the money system in its enlarged form with the so-called enlarge or enhanced conditioned qualified monetary supply aggregate can tackle future shocks better.
speaker-1: Stop.
speaker-0: than any other mechanism. That's my argument.
speaker-1: ⁓ While you are listening to the Core Impact podcast, please take a moment to pause and share with me. How do you feel? Are you enjoying the conversation, feeling inspired or something else? I would love to know your feelings in the comments. I remember this, I heard from you that currently finance is still driving sustainability, but it should be the other way around.
speaker-0: Exactly. This is in one sentence, the entire argument at the moment what's happening. If you go to the capital market, you go to an institutional investor, you go to a home office, a family office, whatever. And you say, you know, we should invest in this dam or we should invest in this drone or we should invest in this truck. And the investor says, well, I think I could do this, but The systemic risk is too high. So I don't do it. I just don't do it. I can take over the project risk, like how to build a dam, right? Or how to build a hospital. I know how to do this, but the associated systemic risk going beyond the project risk is far too high for a private investor to be involved. So what he's doing, he remains risk averse. He's not investing at all, meaning finance is driving whether we have sustainability or not. And my ⁓ argument, no, no, no, that's wrong. say that's wrong incentive, wrong system, wrong institutional system. Let's do it the other way around. Let's determine what we want to face. The pandemics I just mentioned, biodiversity, blah, blah. Let's face the challenges we have manifested. We have materialized already. They're not there yet, but they're there. are 100 % happening. the climate related costs are 100 % gonna happen. We don't know whether all of them are gonna happen next year, but the next 10, 15 years, know, economists call this negative collective externalities. This is a negative spillover. And this is going to happen for sure. It's not a ⁓ pipe dream in the mind of a psychiatrist. It is already unleashed, right? And now if you're running into this scenario where systemic risks are rising exponentially right in front of you in one way or another, what is the cheapest way to get out of this? Waiting until everything is broken? No, to get in what public health people call a so-called secondary preventive approach. There's three forms of prevention, right? Primary prevention means we do something that This stuff doesn't even happen. Right. For example, if you want to avoid obesity or diabetes, do sports, then it's never going to happen. Okay. Secondary prevention is you have diabetes already. So keep the cost of diabetes as low as possible. Different strategy. And third prevention is you have diabetes, have long-term costs already. You're already in a chronic state and try to minimize the chronic. costs in the future and we are in a secondary preventive state. Okay. And this is why this monetary aggregate I'm talking to you is so it's out of the box. It's unusual. It's unconventional, but if you simply ask one question, right, just one, the question is what is the cheapest way to finance our future? The cheapest way as the next best step out of the box. It is not taxing the rich. It's not wait and see. It's not eating veggie burgers. I'm not saying that they're wrong. And I'm not, you know, I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm just saying they're fine, but they're not changing the game. The game changers are happening on a monetary system and the change in numbers are happening on a monetary system affecting.
speaker-1: Okay. Hmm.
speaker-0: The architecture of the system and our approach by introducing this secondary monetary aggregate is the cheapest way to do it. And we're on the way to do it. You know, exciting, isn't it?
speaker-1: you It's exciting at the same time I see, I always look at this, as you say, this coin that has two faces. it's coming back to me this question when I know about all of this and the more I know about the future, the more I see how much of this exponential damage that we are making to the earth and nature in general. And ask myself again, how can I come back to myself?
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: and change my mindset to be someone who is contributing to a better future without feeling that there's lots of pessimism that taking me down and that making me be able to do something about it.
speaker-0: Yeah. You know, my argument is not against individual lifestyle changes. I'm not arguing against it. I'm not arguing against taxation system fees, regulation, ESG standards, ⁓ more technology, different. I'm not arguing against it. I'm just saying they have to be complemented by a monetary aggregate that enables them to happen. Because the last 50 years demonstrated all tools we've been using.
speaker-1: Hmm. ⁓
speaker-0: are in the box. Don't use a tool that caused the mess to solve the mess. This was Einstein saying a hundred years ago, look out for tools that are out of the box or able to solve the problems that caused the mess in the box.
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: That's my argument. So I'm not arguing against yoga and bad cheating.
speaker-1: Yeah. And there is something I love about you and how you describe things and go deep in like main keywords. One of them is transformation because in order to do all of this, we need transformation inside and outside. So let's take it a bit like one step by step because you describe transformation as a process. And you said no transformation without adaptation. There's no adaptation without learning. and no learning without awareness. So can you please walk us through this step by step, maybe also with real examples.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, of course I will. But you're now not in the financial monitoring system anymore. This is a very general statement, right? So, ⁓ let's get back to the initial idea of the story or the narrative we're talking to each other. You can ask yourself, what is the story? What is the narrative we need to transform our society? Right. And the story and the picture, the narrative I have in my head.
speaker-1: Right
speaker-0: is the picture of a staircase, right? A staircase has an inner boundary and an outer boundary. We can step up the staircase and it can step down the progression and the regression. can fall off the boundaries in one way or another. If we do it successfully, we can see more if you step up, wider and deeper, right? And this picture of the staircase helps me Onto genetically, meaning on the individual level. And it also helps me on a phylogenetic collective level, meaning it works for the individual staircase. And it also works for societies in one way up or the other way down. Okay. So I'm using this picture to better understand what transformation has to look like. And on a staircase, it's not a continuous. process, it's a step. Okay. It's a step. Okay. A is not B. We're going to shift from A to B from adverse to beneficiary next step. There's still more ahead and there's much more further down, but we're here when a step up and this step up is not a linear process. It's exponential process. It is a nonlinear process in fact, right? It's an hour. I'm, think it has to do that. We change the aggregate, the state of aggregate we're living. It's like, you know, water is available, ⁓ in a solid form, in a vaporous form and in, in, in a liquid form. Right. And each time the molecules are more, more or less the same, more or less, but each time the state of aggregate is completely different. And this step, to use that picture, this is where we're in. We're going to change the collective institutional societal state of aggregate, how are we going to live together? You know, with regard to educating our children, doing business, doing politics, doing economics, doing research, eating, drinking, living, everything. It's everything. This is, this is where we're in. The next step and the challenge is not only using that picture, but the challenge is that a vast majority of people are afraid of change, which is normal, which is normal. And the vast majority of people. Rather, because there is so much insecurity, uncertainty built in into the step for everybody, for you and for me, for everybody, they rather want to step down instead of up. Rather regress. So if the point of interest is a nation state to change, right? They are political parties who rather prefer to living in small homogeneous communities. Right? But the future is rather the next form, not homogeneous communities, but transnational forms of governance that enable national and ⁓ subnational aggregates. But the step is in this direction if we progress. But the point is two thirds of the world population, they have a level of consciousness which is more nationalistic. So if you favor the next step, but 70 % are not following, break the system. You have to be very careful what you're asking for. And if the change is happening too fast,
speaker-1: You ⁓
speaker-0: You also break the system and you create polarizations on the left and on the right, or people are just avoiding any form of change, right? They're regressing and saying, well, I am only interested in my in-group, like my local group. I don't care about the rest, but you have to care about because systemic risks are happening also on your local group in one way or another. And, and this is the challenge you're in.
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: When you talk about transformation, that if you're too fast, then you break it. If you're too slow, it's going to be broken. Right? So you have to come up with a good story and a good narrative to get people on board. Yeah.
speaker-1: Stefan, you are reminding me of another question that I don't ask anyone or I usually don't ask people a lot, but I reflect on, but I'm just going to say to you, which is about the future also, will there be any time in the future where we don't have borders, meaning we'd either have one country or we have less countries as we have like more like the European Union.
speaker-0: Yes, but this is, this is frankly within, with regard to your and my lifespan, it's irrelevant. You know, I just see that the EU is the first transnational political body in human mankind. A lot of challenges, but this is in part the future. have to learn a rule-based form of multilateralism. Right. And everybody who avoids that.
speaker-1: Okay. Hmm.
speaker-0: And there's big countries in the East and big countries in the West for different reasons. They can learn how it works in Europe because we are leading Europe is leading. I just finished this morning, an article for a federal weekly in Austria, trying to explain that the 21st century is a European century, not an Asian and not an American or. It is a lost century for humanity. Okay? Because of exactly that.
speaker-1: Let's talk also a bit about... what concerns you most and what excites you most about AI and in general the future of finance.
speaker-0: These are two mainly separate questions. There is an interlink. If it comes to fintech and predictive coding of AIs and the application in the financial sector. ⁓ If you, okay. what I find fascinating with the AI is it is the first channel purpose technology, which is completely different than any general purpose technology in human mankind. And I tell you the difference. It's not like the book press. It's not like steam engine. It's not like the DNA coding. It's not like a computer. It is not like electricity. It's not even like inventing a wheel. It goes far, far beyond that. And one of the major aspects which differentiates AI from all the other general purpose technologies, right, is that it has a self-learning component built in. And if people don't understand this part,
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: They don't understand the dynamic that comes out of AI. If you have a book press produced and built 500 years ago, it's still the same now. Okay. It's even old fashioned, but AI has a self-learning, self-improving property built into this technology. This is, we are now witnessing, which is transcending our way of our our way of being aware of ourselves, our way of educating, our way of being. And it's challenged human, homo sapiens sapiens in a very, very foundational way. Because the corpus reasoning, the corpus of cognition, what we're doing right now, we're talking, we're exchanging.
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: We're having ideas, we think, we write something down, we write an MBA, we write an article, we think about the world, we think about having some food, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. This is done by a machine faster and partly different, right? Transcending the way we are thinking, transcending our cognition in a very general sense. This is the challenging part. And now comes the concern. If we don't do it right, we risk not to progress into the next level. We risk to regress because AI is taking over, right? And we lose the capacities to handle this technology and to use it for the good of mankind.
speaker-1: Hmm. I think one of the main mistakes, let's say to deal with AI that lead us to digression instead of progress progression is, is giving away our critical thinking. of all, as I just said from you and the other one is, ⁓ having this physical activities, right? So, ⁓ but let's start with the first one is the critical thinking.
speaker-0: You know, 200 years ago, 95 % of the population in Europe were illiterate. They could not really read and write. 200 years later, running through the whole educational wave, 95 % are able to read and write. They have some sort of degree, right? Whatever. Whatever degree, doesn't matter. So they have a corpus cognition, ⁓ a cognitive corpus. to think about the world, whatever degree, there's a vocational training or reading, writing, and other things, And what's happening is that this corpus now is sooner or later replaced by a machine because it's done better by a machine, faster and better. And the question is now, what is the next best step beyond cognition that enables human to use the algorithm that they're done by a machine in order to progress and not regress. Right. And the term I think I'm using in order to better explain that is we're shifting from cognition to meta cognition. Meaning we start thinking about the thinking. Right. And this is the next step happening in education and pedagogic and training.
speaker-1: See
speaker-0: People can basically deploy a machine doing the stuff, but they have to be aware about the results. What does that mean? Meaning semantics, thinking, calculating, interpreting, I call it ecological rationality becomes even more important, not less. If you want to be part of the next best step, if you give that all up, Well, the machine is going to tell you what to do, right? Which is not a helpful thing. It can help you to trigger your thought process. It can help you to better understand parts of it, but you remain the agent. We humans should remain the agent of change. It's like a pocket calculator, right? When 30, 40 years ago pocket calculators were part of the mathematics classes. Everybody use the pocket calculator and we are risking to lose the capacity to calculate because the pocket calculator took over and there's a law in there in neuroscience called use it or lose it. If you don't use it, you lose the brain capacity to do it. And this shift is what's happening. in right now from cognition to metacognition. Right. If you do it right, if you don't do it right and say, I don't care. Let's the machine even think about what's the results is and that then decide that we don't progress. We regress. Okay. And this is the one aspect. this, the other second aspect, which I find as important is that your personal health, not only physical health, also mental health and emotional health is something you should remain responsible for. If you delegate this to a machine, we're going to extinct in a couple of generations because we are irrelevant. We die. just die. We just vanish on where another. So symbolically speaking, the pushups you have to do yourself. If you avoid eating, doing the pushups, having proper sleep, having good food and having a friend. Right. And read a book. It's not good, not good, not good. Regardless to what you study, doesn't matter what you study, right? You can become a plumber or become a PhD student. It doesn't matter, but these four or five things, don't delegate them to a machine. You better not because otherwise not good.
speaker-1: I remember from you, especially when you talk about reading a book, to keep having this habit of taking something from the beginning until the end. This is at least how I understood it. Because when we are used to ask directly, I give us all the answers directly, we don't have this capacity to take things like in a long process from the beginning until the end.
speaker-0: I don't know, I don't know where you heard that, but this is for me, the most fascinating thing over the last months and years I'm learning. I'm re I mean, this is kind of personally one of the most fascinating things. If you look at the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, for example, and others Kepler, right? These big, really, really big minds on this planet.
speaker-1: Mm.
speaker-0: And if you try to understand why they had been so extremely successful, each of them in their field, right? And you extend that research over the last two, 300 years and say, what is it genetics? They have a special gene. They didn't find the gene. Or is this the mother relation or the race to the father? Or did they have a specific degree in the university? Forget it. Some of them never went to university. I don't give a shit about university. Right. It's something else. And you know what it is? They were able or enabled to stick to a very complex topic for a very, very long time, for days and weeks and years and sometimes even decades and didn't give up. basically.
speaker-1: Mm.
speaker-0: thought about it over and over and over again, giving a talk and then going back and then thinking about it and meditating and writing a little paper. They were not pushed to write a book. They're pushed to solve a problem. Nowadays our scientific community is built on publishing papers. Okay. This is not creative. Right? This is not creative. What we need people
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: which are freed and enabled to think and stick to the problem, not to have a tension span of 12 seconds and then be with some other topics. And this is probably one of the hidden secrets of the European Renaissance, one of the hidden secrets, I think. And if we are able to foster and enable that in the 21st century as a so-called second Renaissance. You know, enabling, supporting people to sit and think on things, which are being harassed, which are being constantly ⁓ criticized, but in a negative way, enabled having an ecosystem where they can meet and think. This is the beginning of a new age. Right. This is metacognition. Think about your thought process. The machine is making the paper. Of course they make the paper. They make the book. Of course. But let's think, what did they write here? What does it mean? What does it mean here now? And this is, need time. You need space. You need an ecosystem. You need an environment that enables you to really dig deep into it. And this is not done with the attention span of a goldfish of seven or 10 seconds. It's not going to work. You need years, maybe even decades, but I'm very, very positive, very, very positive. If we enable the society to create, to have people doing this in the most positive and best intended way, we can solve the
speaker-1: ⁓ We are ahead. ⁓
speaker-0: But we need a systems change to enable people doing this. If I have to publish three, yesterday night I had a dinner with a famous philosopher, a philosopher of science. And he was saying, you know, I'm doing 80 % admin shot, admin stuff, admin, administration, not thinking. The guy is a thinker. We need people to think. think through, not to do admin stuff. He's not an administrator. He is a philosopher. He is a philosopher of science. He can think about the philosophy of science. This is where his expertise is. So he should spend 80 % in thinking and not in filling Excel sheets. All that stuff, you know? And this is true for all disciplines. This is true for major, for all of that stuff. Right? So.
speaker-1: And Stefan, now you're reminding me how important it is to stick with the problem and keep looking at it and taking time, giving yourself space.
speaker-0: You also, yeah, it's very important, but this cognitive skill, right? Which is called a metacognitive skill of ⁓ ambivalence tolerance. You keep the opposites in your brain of attention span. You sit on the problem for years and you don't know what's coming out of it. There is an emotional component built in. We haven't talked about it. And the emotional component built in is. mainly Humility.
speaker-1: Mmm.
speaker-0: If you don't have humility, you're not getting anywhere. You only create an ego show and the ego shows it's for nothing. It's just, it's not worth it. It's not even worth it to follow. It's just, it's wasted time. Basically it's if you sit on your own ego for the next 10 years to solve a problem because you are the guy. Then it's, then it's 10 years wasted time. So you need a practice that enables humility, gratefulness, compassion.
speaker-1: you are the eagle then it's
speaker-0: Love, support, meaning you have to erase your ego in order to provide a vessel that is able to be ego free to keep all the opposites, the coincidencia oppositorum as the people in the middle ages call it, to keep the opposites in your brain. Your ego is irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Forget about it. You need your ego. I don't know, but you don't need an ego for that process. You need it afterwards in order, for example, to write a paper or to speak. At the moment I need my ego, my ego function in order to speak to you. You know, if I don't have ego functions, I would not be able to speak to you. Right. But for this process you're referring to, you need a trans personal, a trans ego state. And one way to classify it is metacognitive, but it's not only metacognitive. You can also frame it in different ways.
speaker-1: Actually, I'm gonna take this because she was also my podcast guest and you reminded me of her when you were talking about...
speaker-0: I can't, I cannot see the picture. What is United?
speaker-1: state of you. I'm going to tell you about why you reminded me of it. We were talking about compassion, love, et cetera. You reminded me to keep, stay aware of my heart and the process. It's not about my mind solving the issues. And here what she talks about, she says, we have 40 members. So our mind, our heart, our body and consciousness, and the one who can lead really from within can know how to integrate all these four team members and the mind should not be the one who's leading. ⁓
speaker-0: ⁓ Yeah, they're different. You know, there's different ways to say the same thing. You know, I'm not a literate. I'm not a humanity guy. I'm not, I'm not a poet, poet, right? So I'm not so good in telling these stories. But the message is very similar.
speaker-1: Mm. Stefan, there's one thing I like to do by like towards the end of the podcast. I asked the guest what question he's reflecting on and would like me to ask the next guest this question. And I start by asking you a question that my previous guest asked me. So the question is, he's talking about leadership. He's an author of the power of mattering, Zach Murkirio. When people feel that they matter to you, what are you doing?
speaker-0: I express my gratitude. in one sentence, you know? I express my gratitude and I try to get in a mode of serving.
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: This is in one sentence, I would say.
speaker-1: Okay, and what is the question that you would like me to ask a future guest? Something you've been reflecting on, you would like to have a new perspective on.
speaker-0: Yeah, you know, I'm asking a very, very academic question, right? Not a psychological question of wisdom and life, et cetera, et cetera. I'm going to ask a very, very, I'm not prepared, you know, but I'm asking a very, very technical question. And if my next, your next guest is not able to answer that question, he can look, call me up or look up my stuff because I found an answer to that question, right? Okay. The 10th question is the following because it refers to money. What is the common ground? Very technical question. Okay. Very technical. What is the common ground? I like that. What is the common ground between the U S petrodollar system and the Chinese Silk Road initiative from a monetary perspective?
speaker-1: ⁓
speaker-0: I just asked that question in Azerbaijan, in Baku, the Chinese delegation of the Chinese Academy of Science. And they were very silent about it. And this is the question you're going to ask your next interviewer. And I would be very, very interested in hearing what the answer is. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
speaker-1: that okay? Yes, you know what? I'm gonna ask them this question before publishing this episode so you can tell me the answer already.
speaker-0: Okay. The answer is the following. Both are relying on an enhanced monetary aggregate to fuel and fund debt. The Chinese are printing money or using their currency reserves along the Silicon Park road. And the Americans are printing money, US dollars. They're not taxing Mr. Smith in order to fund the US petrodollar barrel. in order to fund the petrodollar system. They're using something, technically speaking, what's called a quantitative easing. Right? And now comes the point, Omar, now it's getting really, really exciting. What do you think would happen? You're an economist. What do you think would happen if Europe would do the same thing for security and sustainability? We would live in the best possible world. using a green quantitative easing through central bank digital currencies and a smart contract to fund external shocks. hedge private capital to be invested and to manage negative externalities.
speaker-1: Hmm.
speaker-0: Sorry. Yeah, want to have, you know, if you invite people who are in the box, there's so many, you don't have to invite me. It doesn't make sense. know, there's so many in box people who are very smart, have very good expertise and very good knowledge, very knowledgeable, very purposeful, very smart, very wise. And you can interview them and they give you other answers.
speaker-1: Yes. I love this. Why do you think it's not happening?
speaker-0: ⁓ in part, this is a multifaceted question, multifaceted answer to that question. One aspect is because it's still considered to be a collective taboo. And the second thing has to do with our educational system. consider money to be a thing, natural law, but it's not. And we don't fully embrace the power of money for the transformational process. We're not fully utilizing. the relevance of currency systems and the money system for the transformation process. If we would sooner than later, we would live in a completely different world, which is more insured, more sustainable, which is fairer, which is better in so many respects. Right. That's, this is why the money system is so relevant.
speaker-1: Hmm. I'm really enjoying the conversation. last two questions will be a bit personal, but before we jump into the end, the very end, I have a ⁓ general question. Do you think there's anything important we haven't talked about yet in this podcast?
speaker-0: ⁓ thousand things. ⁓ my God. We should be charged five minutes on AI and the veggie burger and a little bit of money system. I mean, there's so much out there we have not even mentioned.
speaker-1: I'm gonna kill myself. Can you choose one? Can you choose one?
speaker-0: ⁓ the relevance of integral medicine, holistic approach in medicine. The systems change between open societies and closed societies. Right. ⁓ the creativity response, meaning how should we organize education for the future?
speaker-1: Bye.
speaker-0: ⁓ what's about the spiritual request? We have not talked ⁓ a sentence on that topic. I mean, it's just an hour. We need 10 hours. I'm sorry. You invited me to your podcast to speak on money only. So I am referring to money. It's fine.
speaker-1: No, I mean, that was one of the key themes to talk about. But yeah, then in this case, maybe we see if we can have another conversation in the future. The question I would like to ask you, I'm very curious also to hear how you experienced this, because I heard that you do not use a smartphone, right? I don't know if this is still the case until now. Did I get it right by the way?
speaker-0: Yeah, I don't have a smartphone. I'm feeling very good about it. I'm minority. The vast majority of people I'm meeting, they all use iPhones. And I still think for my brain and for my mind and for my life, I'm very, very grateful that I don't have to buy that machine.
speaker-1: How do you feel about it?
speaker-0: There's people who like to do it. My secretary, my backup office, they love making phone calls to an iPhone and say, let's just do it. They get paid for it. Right. My family likes doing this and I'm just coming up with the idea. It has an addictive potential. hacks your brain and it's potentially reducing your mental capacity in order to understand complexity. Be aware of that. And you're spending a lot of time on that machine instead of time to think.
speaker-1: Hmm. Yes.
speaker-0: And the point is, if everybody's doing this, you're surrounded by people that everybody, you take it for granted. This is normal. And my point is it's not normal. It is actually insane. It's unhealthy. The way we're doing this, the Americans have a term for this and they call it rot brain. Our brain is rotting and we're not aware of it because everybody around us is rotting too. We are regressing down the stair case.
speaker-1: So
speaker-0: without realizing that we actually regressing, but should do the other.
speaker-1: Hmm. It's very exciting. also this awareness of it. I remember also another podcast guest, she told me, at least when you go on the train, don't use your phone. Just look at the surroundings and everything. And I started doing this and I see people around me, over 90 % they're looking at their phones. So it's already inspiring. And I'm thinking about how to implement this as one of the takeaways from this podcast. The other one is how do you celebrate success and life in general?
speaker-0: Success is a random thing that happens to you. You know, it's not so relevant for me. You know, it's okay, but it's, you know, what is success? What is it? I don't, at the end, I don't even know what that means. So success. I'm celebrating life if I have a good conversation, a deep, honest.
speaker-1: Hmm. Mm.
speaker-0: coherent conversation on a topic, meeting interesting people. If I have time for myself, eating good food, doing good sports and having a exchange with my family and, or, being involved in treating a patient here at the hospital. We talked about that topic at all because you mentioned
speaker-1: Hmm. ⁓
speaker-0: What have you've not talked about? would say 99.99 % has not been addressed. were just, we just got a little glimpse of the crack of the stuff, which is interesting.
speaker-1: Okay. I'm really grateful for the conversation with you, Stefan. And as always, like when I hear about you and I read from you, what you said, what you wrote, it's totally different from the energy we have when we have this conversation. So there were lots of impulses for me from the beginning until the end, how to look at the inner work and system change as the same coin, but you have to always look at both sides and yeah, how we talk about. transformation AI and in the end, how do you also live like in a way that you don't have any kind of attachment to these tools, always give yourself space to live this. So thank you very much. If you have anything to say in the end, like last thoughts, this is the end of the podcast now.
speaker-0: Okay. Well, very many thanks for this ⁓ hour of conversation on very important topics. I wish you all the best for your future career, for your future life. And ⁓ let's disseminate and reach out with all these ideas through your podcast to other people to inspire other people doing similar things.
speaker-1: Yes, we'll do this. Thank you, Stefan.
speaker-0: Yeah, thank you.
speaker-1: Congratulations for listening until the end, you are in the top 25 % of listeners Studies show that we forget up to 70 % of what we hear within 24 hours But when we repeat an insight by sharing it with someone, commenting or journaling it, it moves into long-term memory So now tell me, what are your 1-2-3 takeaways you're keeping from this conversation? Enjoy every moment, until next time
