Disruption in the New Human Renaissance | Dr. Scott W Mills | Ep. 24

Humans are in a moment of existential crisis and loneliness. 

According to Dr. Mills, we are currently experiencing a New Human Renaissance. Old systems and industries are dying. We can see that the emperor has no clothes, and it’s time to choose new sets of values and agreements globally to create a better future. We likely won’t be able to do that without healing our broken culture and leveraging AI to help us. 

In this episode:

• The disruptive power of truth-saying and asking better questions
• How choosing BETTER over “more” can help create a more meaningful existence 
• Humanity’s current healing moment and the opportunity to choose what truly matters
• The importance of processing our collective trauma from COVID-19
• Seeing through cultural delusions and letting go of outdated agreements
• How AI can help us become better leaders who solve complex, global problems
• Moving from existential crisis into a New Human Renaissance

In this eye-opening episode, we're joined by the multifaceted and brilliant Dr. Scott W Mills. With a background spanning from HIV prevention in the 90s to consulting with Oscar nominees and global thought leaders, Scott shares insights into the nature of complex systems and the pressing need to rethink leadership and problem-solving.

About Dr. Scott W Mills

Dr. Scott Mills is a master strategist known for weaving the disciplines of business, cognition, psychology, and artificial intelligence. His work revolves around three main areas: resilience, prosperity, and leadership. 

Scott challenges the prevailing narrative of our times and believes in the power of resilience to keep us moving forward, even in the face of challenges. His endeavors, be it through leadership mentoring, insightful course delivery, or transformative public speaking, converge on a single, essential mission – nurturing our collective growth and evolution on this planet.

Links:

www.scottwmills.com 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottmillsphd/ 

The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe

Transcript

1:01

Welcome back leaders to another episode of the living leaders podcast, Scott, I am so thrilled to have you here today. Every time I talk to you, I learn something new. And I just know that our listeners are going to take a lot away from this conversation. Oh, that's so sweet. Thank you. I feel the same about you. We started this conversation before we even begin recording and already my mind is just a blaze with all of your wisdom. And so I feel like we're kindred spirits. So just a blast to talk to you anytime I get to. Likewise. And I know that each of us are really seeing nuances and different things on the global landscape when it comes to leadership. I know today one of our intentions is to really look at what is happening with leadership and in this transition that we find ourselves in business at this very specific time where we are facing Climate disaster. We have political unrest. A. I. Is exponentially on the rise among other emerging technologies. I know that listeners will also really be interested in your background. Before we get into some of the sense making of what it is that's really happening on the leadership landscape today, would you mind sharing a little bit more about your background and the unique combination of skills that you're working with. Cause it's, this is fascinating to me too, all the things that you're bringing together to synthesize. Sure. Sure. It's always funny. I was at a party recently with my mom. So I'm staying down close to them to be. With my family and someone said to my mom, what does Scott do? And my mom came up and told me afterwards, and she said, I never know what to tell people. And it's a little difficult because for about 30 years now, I have been playing in this field of some version of human development and systems work. So that started really with this initial work was working in HIV prevention. Back in the early nineties, mid nineties, working with kids at the height of the epidemic, trying to find ways to keep kids from becoming HIV positive, because there was not a lot of information. People weren't hearing what they needed to. And, the kids who we worked with were homeless, who were poor, they didn't have a sense of, appropriate risk and reward. They were putting their lives in danger. Because they were, scared or ignorant or whatever. So I started there but I've always been fascinated and I think this is where this interest in policy and complex systems came from, because I was working on like a federal demonstration project to create. Life skills for kids and resilience. This resilience piece came up very early, looking at kids in really hard spaces and about 17 years ago, I had done my dissertation. I'd gotten really interested in graduate school in the world of work, my doctorate is a combined degree between religion, psychology and transformational education models. So I worked in this intersection and my dissertation actually was so weird. For my committee, it was written in five disciplines which they were not used to. So we had to have an economist on my committee and we had to have a theologian and a psychologist because my interest was in, at that point, how do we create a secular ethic of work? It really came down to this place. The Dalai Lama had written a book called ethics for a new millennium, which is a gorgeous book if you haven't had a chance to read it. And I looked at that and I was looking around at all of these workplaces and people being unhappy people wanting to leave their jobs. I really think what we're seeing now with things like silent quitting and the great resignation, they were all rooted much earlier. I was looking at how do we even talk about work in a way that it can be meaningful? So I wrote this dissertation, started to play very early in working with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, to figure out what made sense for them and continue to work in resilience. So now I've worked with all these global thought leaders. I've gotten to play with people who are Oscar nominated, Tony winners consult with governments. And we're always looking at the same things we're looking at. What are the systems that these problems exist in? And so the fun thing to me is. I was talking to a friend the other day and I realized that people don't pay me or invite me to talk because of a particular solution to a problem, but rather a way of thinking about problems. So this is the place the academic comes in that says, we've got a set of Problems that we often try to solve in a very narrow frame. So even talking about these issues of leadership in the context of business is a narrow frame at first. But if we widen the frame and we start to look at things like how is business affected by education? Talk about some really interesting examples of that. And historically this has been the case, right? I was just telling someone the other day that he said, Oh, these kids are, what was it, something about kids were working later or longer, people were having to compete. And I said, Oh yeah, we didn't have that until World War II when the veterans came back and we needed to have jobs for people. We made high school longer. So that they wouldn't be competing with kids. We were building in our education system. We were building spaces for people to be office workers or factory workers. Now we're wondering why we can't get innovative thinkers. It's because the education model is still stuck in that same place. We start to look at complex systems where we might talk about education, we might talk about meaning everything I play in is how do we look at the complexity of the situation and find where the real levers are, what's, first of all, what's really going on, because a lot of times we're looking in the wrong place I think the easiest way to think about this is if you go into Your doctor or your chiropractor, or massage therapist, whoever, and you say, my shoulder's hurting. And they go, okay, let me work on your shoulder. This is kinda the way we solve problems. But the reality is our body is a complex system and so often the muscles and the skeletal system, It's actually pulling maybe from a hip or maybe it's from a foot that's affecting the whole system. So I love looking at the whole system and first finding like, where is the real problem? What's really going on here? This is a very Buddhist concept, which is called being with what is. Letting ourselves follow the truth, wherever it leads you. And then once we have a sense of what the system is, we've mapped it. For those of your people who are about systems thinking, I know they'll have studied Peter Senge and so much of the work around learning systems. We're looking to define a learning system and all of the complex inputs that are coming into it. And then we can start to say, how do we shift it? So that's probably more in depth than you wanted, but It's I feel like that's useful to understand for your audience in particular, the way we approach these things, because it's much more interesting for me to get a group of people around the table and see all of their perspectives. That's part of why I love working with you in conversation. We play, we can see different angles. And the truth is never in 1 angle. The truth is, have 10 people around the table, maybe an economist, a physicist, educator. Psychologists working on resilience. All of this is going to hold a piece of the truth. And so the trick is to notice that all of those truths together actually paint a much better picture of the system than only one person's. Yeah, beautifully said there's something so powerful about doing that multi perspective illumination and really looking at a question or a problem and putting that in the center. And I love what you said about using something like that for investigating what is it that's really going on. Often when I think of sense making, I think of something similar where it's going to take all of us. It's going to take the computing power of all of us and maybe AI as well as a partner to really sense make what is happening because we do seem to be operating at such a high level of complexity. These days, the pace has gone. And Up to some extent, unless you're someone like me who's maybe taken a step back from the rat race to slow down to get into the right nervous system state to even be able to be sentient enough to be out of the noise enough that I can start to do some of that pattern recognition and the way that you're describing. Systems work and how interconnected it is. I think you're so right. We can't actually look at these things in isolation. that's part of the problem in some way of the mechanistic view that we are still very much operating in when we look at our systems today. I'm curious, you talked about finding the levers. When you imagine this interconnected system that is created by and run by humans, I often say these issues are not purely leadership issues, these are deeply human issues as well, because we show up to all of these systems, so how are you sense making The complexity that we're in and what are some of the biggest levers that you're seeing right now that we might be able to collectively pull or play with together. What do you think some of those most important levers even are? These are amazing questions. I want to say something about something you said first this conversation could be so rich, we could go 100 different directions, but I want to just acknowledge you said that. There's people like you who have stepped out of the rat race and slowed down. And when we talk about levers, I want to identify this as actually one of the biggest levers of possibility. We have been in a culture that has thrived on consumerism and really throw away consumerism. There's a radical difference from my grandmother who came over from Germany right after World War II who, when she bought something, she paid cash, she never bought in credit, and she bought the best thing that she could get. And then she used it for years and years, right? Very different than where we are now. Where we have to keep up with the Joneses and everybody else, now the Instagram culture, everybody's living their best life. And so one of the things that I find. really hopeful right away is that there actually are people all over the U. S. and around the world that I talk to all the time who are saying the same thing and actually don't see themselves mirrored because this is not the conversation our dominant, popular culture is having about really a shift from more to better. And I don't have any problem with people buying things. Like I'm not a minimalist. I'm not. Saying you shouldn't buy anything ever, but I think what's been interesting is we've been sold a perspective that we were going to buy something that will make us feel better, be better have a better life and the shift, and this has actually been really obvious, even in the research lately to experience right? People don't want more things. People want experiences. They want to have depth. So not surprising. We have a loneliness epidemic going on in the Western world. All of these, to me, are speaking to a larger existential crisis that workers in America are having, in workers in other countries. So we, when we look at dynamics, and this was part of my research and it's been fascinating for years and years, when we look at dynamics, like why are people actively disengaged or even just disengaged? the peer research around this is fascinating and the cost to companies. And part of it is because they think nobody cares about them. And the work they're doing is for the benefit of someone else, and there is no loyalty to them. So they, whether that's true or not that's the perception, depending on the company. So we've got all of these dissatisfied people. In a system that is fundamentally broken. It's made for a world that we no longer live in. It's accelerating this kind of consumer throwaway culture if we want to call it that is accelerating things like global warming as accelerating so much of this culture. So I actually see folks who are choosing to not opt out of the system but ask for better instead of more to be one of the biggest levers. The people like you and I are having this conversation. I used to live in a. Giant penthouse on the top floor of this gorgeous. Obviously, that's where the penthouses are right. The big view of the park and, this huge balcony that I had, garden on and there was something in me at some point that said, I'm using about 20% of this apartment three bedrooms. I used one. I didn't even use my office. I like to be in the living room where the light was or sit at the kitchen counter. And I started to think about that. And I thought, why is it that I'm in this space? There's no real reason for me to be here. It doesn't bring me joy. It costs a lot. And so now I have this beautiful apartment that I love. It's a one bedroom, really comfortable and it's funny because I know people sometimes are like, Oh, but you're supposed to be, living this big luxurious life. But I was reading Liz Gilbert's Instagram a while ago and she said, here I am in a 600 square foot apartment to write my next book. And this is comfortable for me. And more and more, I think people are realizing that excess isn't comfortable. It's actually exhausting. Yes, so as we realize the way that we are living is out of touch with the natural rhythms of our bodies of the planet of each other. To me, that's actually one of those moments of leverage. So you are living. You're embodying it for us. So that's the first piece before we go anywhere else. But I want to pause because I know I just threw a lot out there. Yeah to mirror some of that back and share how much that resonates. I do think the level of consumerism that we've been in has been quite a burden and it does feel exhausting to have more your responsibilities grow. It takes up space. It takes our attention outside of ourselves and outside of our relationships. So I do think that part of what you're describing in that there's so many ingredients that I see as this has contributed to the sickness of our culture. And as we step into this massive healing moment and heal from the inside out to decide and determine. What it is that we really care about the pandemic was a huge moment of reflection around this where we all had to pause and reflect and ask ourselves what really matters. To your point where we're coming out realizing, oh wow, when I'm on my deathbed. What is it that is really important it's the people it's not the things that I had or accumulated in my life, and it's, did I live a life of integrity. So I think. There's this upgrade or enhancement that I'm often seeing among leaders, especially and I when I use that word, sometimes I hesitate to even use the word leader because not everyone self identifies as a leader. And yet I think a leader can sit. Anywhere in an organization or a community or society, and I'm seeing this upgrade of values essentially into a new set of rules or a new paradigm, whether that's the paradigm of business, the paradigm of community or family or whatever it might be, again, to your earlier point, these systems are intrinsically connected. So I just wanted to pull on that thread a little bit of I really hearing what you're saying that The values seem to be changing and what we see as significant or meaningful in our lives is evolving as well. I do wanna hear about the other levers that you're seeing particularly as they relate to the evolution of leadership, that we seem to be in. Let's hang out here for a bit more. You just said so much that I love. Part of what being an academic is about is actually realizing the difference between what I just want to call humble mind and arrogant mind. So I think this is a really good place as people are listening to conversations if they're thinking thoughts about hopefully you're thinking thoughts, bigger questions in your life about what it means to be alive. I love that you said, that we're thinking about what our lives mean and will there be any value? I love Dr. Donna McCullough's poem. I shall not die in unlived life. That just pops into my mind, but I'm listening to all this in. There's a couple of things I want to point out. First is, I love your definition of leaders coming from anywhere. I think if somebody needs to understand this, we think of leadership as top down, which is actually not how the world works anymore. It's actually never how the world worked, but it used to go slow enough that we could pretend. Together. Yeah we agreed to a collective delusion, which is how we live, right? All of our cultural agreements are really cultural delusion, right? What's a democracy? What's socialism? What's whatever kind of government system? We're going to agree this is something that's real. It's just an idea we agreed to. So if you think about things from a top down, it's very different than when you think about an organic system. So if you think about just for a minute, think about a pond, what is the leader in the pond? Now, most people who think top down will say it's the biggest fish in the pond. It's the apex predator, the one that eats the little fish, but that predator can only be in one place in a pond, right? If it's on the north side of the pond and something else is going on the south side, probably won't even hear about it. There's no internet in the pond yet. No, so wait, but the reality of a pond is if you throw a rock in any part of the pond, the ripples affect the rest of the pond. So when we think about leadership, to me, if we're thinking about an organic system, any rock, any person, any idea can become a disruption in the pond. It can create ripples. So even if you are the janitor, then all you're doing is you're saying hello to people. Thank you. And you're just seeing them there. There's great research. If you have a chance to look at Dasher Keltner's work on wonder and awe and gratitude. He's at UC Berkeley. The research is really clear. A simple moment of being seen will ripple throughout the rest of the day. So anybody in an organization can have an impact. It's harder now. I think that we've gone, online, working from home. We don't have as deep of connections, but we have all these places that we can be leaders. And if we got really, if we dug really deep, we'd start to play with something in the psychological world. We call parallel process. So that layers or levels of a company or an organization, whatever's happening at the top layer usually is mirrored in a pattern of the secondary level and the tertiary level. So when I was working years ago with an art therapy community in DC that was working with kids whose parents were HIV positive, the board ran through a period when they were really disheveled, right? There was going through a big transition. Very quickly, the staff started to mirror that very quickly. The client started to mirror that where we saw three layers. So we'll see these processes, even when something is segmented out and we think nothing can touch. It's not true. It's not how life works. So I want to point that out. And the other piece I want to point out that I just find so fascinating. You talked about a healing moment and I look a lot at the possibility of a new human renaissance, because I've been sitting in this space of, yes, the world is in chaos. Yes, things are difficult. And There seems to be this huge possibility because we've done things like connect globally. It's so much harder to be xenophobic when I can jump on a zoom call and be in a class with people from India, from South Africa, from Europe, which happens every week in my life. People who never could have met each other, who had stories about each other because they were across the country or across the planet now actually sit down and say, Oh, look, we're really similar. We have the same needs, the same desires. So one of those levers is actually global connection. And this is a long conversation about globalism and the way that we're connecting, but I want to point out an interesting piece about this healing moment. For me in the work that I do, the very first. Place we always start is seeing what is, it's a moment of truth COVID has a similar aftermath to 9 11 and people may get mad because I'm going to say this, but I'm going to say it anyway. 9 11 happened and we had an opportunity to actually gather together as a people. Humans are amazing in crises. We come together, we get over our differences, we see connections, we help each other. There's just some part of us that recognizes that's another being that's in need. So we have this beautiful possibility, and people were thinking deep in some of the same ways that COVID, has done to us. It gave us this moment of reflection, and then we got the clarion call to go back to the store. Keep America shopping. That's what's going to keep us moving. We moved the conversation out of the place of depth because the depth conversation is always disruptive. It can't help but be disruptive because the more we think about what we really want, the more we realize that We may not have been choosing, we've been sleepwalking. The reason I'm sharing this is because when we look at COVID, what I found fascinating is we had this two year period, which was massively disruptive. I spent most of COVID talking about trauma, the trauma bath that we were in. People were like what's a trauma bath, right? So we actually got some conversation about trauma. And most of us now have suffered something. we think about PTSD, but there's something called complex PTSD, which mostly happens for kids who are bullied a ton, often LGBTQ kids people who are in economically disadvantaged areas, racial minorities, folks who essentially we're killed by a hundred little cuts. It's not somebody comes up and hits you over the head with a club, it's every day somebody puts you down, somebody makes you smaller, somebody puts you into a place where you are in survival mode. So we went through this complex PTSD experience for most of us. And it's interesting because complex PTSD has just recently been identified makes the world make so much more sense. And what we've. Mostly done is ignored it. If we look, there's six, six, almost seven, I looked the other day, it's almost people have died globally around COVID or from COVID. People are still dying. These conversations have disappeared. There has been no collective mourning. Or grief or movement through trauma, and so we wanted to get back to life as normal. That's a really interesting place to be because I just want you to think about for a minute what happens if you have a fight with your partner, because they did something that you were really upset about. Maybe they don't even know they did it, right? but you want the relationship to just keep on moving. So you just swallow it down and then you see them do something else that kind of reminds you of that. You swallow it down and you swallow it down. Before you know it, you're literally tense, anxious, right? There's got to be somewhere for that stuff to go. And we have not allowed. Anywhere for this stuff to go in two respects, primarily, we haven't allowed for any of the motion to move. So some of what we're seeing right now, and I'm literally talking to people around the world constantly about existential crisis. They don't know that word. They feel listless. They feel depressed. They feel anxious. They know something is wrong. They can't figure out what it is. Because nobody's talking about it. It's like it would be as if we went through a massive trauma and everyone went, don't say anything because it might go away. That's not how it works. I think 70 people died. So that's the first piece of this that I find fascinating. We have been ignoring this possibility for massive transformation. This, the second piece that we have seemed to quickly forgotten is the incredible movement. that happened because of COVID. One of my favorite things that happened from COVID, obviously there are horrible things that happened from COVID, but there were some shining moments. And one of them is the way that the scientific community came together around the world to share real time research all over the planet. Nobody was saying, Oh, no, this is about getting a patent. We have to guard our research. We have to keep this information secret, but instead there were massive databases that were being shared so that everybody could get information. So to me, this is like one of those moments where if we can see what we learned, we can see the possibility. We could start to say, wow. We came up with a, not me, but the collective will of the planet. Together we had a common enemy, which is when humans are at their best. When we have a common enemy. Beginning of COVID really hard because we didn't really understand it. We didn't know what it was, we didn't know if looking at someone across a bus or on TV was going to cause us to get COVID, you would see people driving around in their cars by themselves with a mask on, it was like, what are you worried you're going to give it to yourself? It's strange, but we look at these places where there was such possibility. And now for me to say okay if we could do that with COVID. What if cancer, was something that we collectively across the planet decided to work on where we weren't worried about patents. So I just want to name that because I think there were so many ways that we came together to face a common threat. As a planet. And I think there's such a powerful possibility to learn from this, because we have other things like global warming, right? That's a complex system. It doesn't matter if a small country, maybe a little bit, a small country has a tiny environmental impact, right? They change something great, yay. But then big countries who are not doing anything or not doing enough. We have a disproportionate impact. So there's this place that says we actually have to come together as a global complex system because we all live in the pond we were talking about. And we have been suffering from a collective delusion that says, if I'm on the north side of the pond and Fukushima happens, that it will not affect me, the people over on the south side of the pond. And we know from research that this is affecting the planet, so many of these collective ills are affecting the planet. And this is a piece of why when you asked me about the context of leadership, I look at what are the real questions. And, one of the things I love about the project you're involved in this leaders on purpose, and you're involved in so many amazing things. But one of the core questions is, how does business work for the common good? If the question the business is asking is just how do we make money? How do we get more clients? How do we get more reach? And I have this conversation with entrepreneurs and business leaders all the time. Those aren't bad questions, right? They should be in the question pool because a company won't survive. If it's not making profit, if it's not. Expanding its reach, but if it's missing the larger question of how do we function for the common good, then we're in trouble. And I think COVID gave us an opportunity to imagine a different world, a different way of connecting globally. It's interesting. There's a book called the fourth turning. And I didn't know this book until recently my friend John Sinai, who's a futurist and, you can see his five best selling books. He's amazing. So he introduced me to this book. Fourth Turning is written by, oh, Howe and Strauss. They're the guys who defined generational diversity. And they started to talk about boomers and, Gen X, Y and Z weren't here yet. But, they talked about silent generation. They're historians. They wrote a book in 1997 called the 4th turning and the 4th turning looked at the seasons of American history. And I've been trying to find if anybody's done research in other countries. I haven't been able to find any. They wrote this book. It was essentially. A total sleeper. Nobody paid attention. The book made an argument that America goes through these seasons and that the season that we were heading into was winter. So winter is a time when there's lots of political change. And one of the things that's Kind of a hallmark of winter in the system is because something new is coming, it's an incredibly disruptive period, lots of social unrest, and they've literally traced this back to the beginning of the country, you can see the pattern going every 20 years about, roundabout, it's not exact, but a pretty, pretty reasonable cycle. And so one of the hallmarks though in this period is that old power structures are dissolving. But because people want to hold on to the old way of doing things, they cling with a death grip. We're, I feel like we're watching that. So in my mind, we have this possibility of a whole new system emerging, of new ways of connecting, and yet there are people working really hard not to see that. To say, Oh, but we've got to keep the old way. And I understand change is scary, right? Change is not what our nervous system is designed for. We're designed to be as stable as possible to not have. You know, Anything that's changed is something we haven't survived before, right? And our brains are trained to repeat what we survived over and over. And we've survived the system. So now we have this new system emerging. The fun thing about, and part of why I think this book is so interesting, is this book became a bestseller now twice after the 1997 kind of non release. Came out super quiet, but in 2008 the book became a bestseller because they literally predicted crash of the, Economic market. And then it became a bestseller again in 2020 when COVID happened because it was smack in when they expected something like this to happen. So when we talk about larger context, this is the other piece that I want to bring in, is we don't exist out of time, right? We have a history. We have larger cultural patterns that are not very hard to see if people are students of history. Obviously we're going into a new way of being, we've got new things happening, but we have lots and lots of data that shows us what happens when transitions happen. When we move from horses to cars, when we move from typewriters to computers, to when we add an internet into the mix, when we add cell phones, right? We've had all of these transitions. So I think the historical context is useful. I'm, I have gone on a tangent, but I think it's important to paint the picture. So in my mind, it would be beautiful if I had a giant whiteboard and I was drawing this out for you to be able to see all of these unique pieces that then feed into leadership, which is often happening in a vacuum as if we have no history. I love for people to think, did you wake up with amnesia? Have you forgotten the past, both your personal past and the past as your country, as other countries we're dealing with? We have a global history that we can draw on. All of what's happening now is in the context of that global history. Yeah this feels like really important wisdom to hold especially the younger leaders who are Emerging. And they're excited about the new paradigm that's coming. They're excited about the new wave of technology or of business. It's so easy because the future can be so sexy. It can be so alluring. And yet to your point, there's all of this wisdom that if we do look back and if we do look at how, say the nervous system works and how our body heals trauma, and look at that as. A microcosm of how we collectively might shift our culture, right? You talked about those who are at least the way I heard it, those who are fear based and in survival mode and wanting to stay comfortable. They're clinging with the death grip because it is a matter of life or death, or at least that's how it might feel in the body. There's a whole construct, there's a whole. reality that feels like it's breaking. And I love the term that you used cultural delusion as the cultural agreements that we're in. I think we can actually look to how the body heals and releases trauma. To look for strategies for how we as leaders might heal culturally and what I love about how you're expressing this is that you're touching at the patterns level. When you talked about parallel processing and that these this mirroring that can happen across layers. I also think about how these cultural patterns they happen across different fractaled Scales essentially right where it's like we have the cultural patterns within us in how we're treating ourselves. If we're indoctrinated into a consumer based culture of extraction and control. Guess what? We're probably doing that to ourselves internally in our inner culture and then doing it to one another and playing into that. Exploitative transactional relational pattern, but if we can actually heal the cultural or relational patterns across all of these scales and get that ripple effect and get that coherence, I think there's just such huge potential. For this healing moment that we've been talking about. And when you were talking about the this ripple I was also connecting the dots with what you were saying about disruption and healing. Sometimes there are those disruptive moments. Disruption isn't always technology. It might actually be asking someone the real question, asking someone, No, how are you really? Or how did that thing that you just went through impact you? And it's this pattern interrupt that takes us into a different space. And now we can process things differently. Now we can feel our feelings. We can Be in the grief processing together that we've been so avoidant of post pandemic. So whether we're pattern interrupting at the one on one level, or like you said, convening around a big, bold question. This is also so significant at this moment, because if we're not asking. Different questions. We're not going to get to different answers. If we keep asking, how do we make our business more profitable? It's okay, we've been playing that game for a while. There are unintended consequences and all sorts of things that come from that. But what are the questions? That we're not asking, how do we disrupt these patterns at the one on one relational level, but also at the systems level. And so I find myself curious in all of the circles that you're playing in and exploring all of the topics that I know you're so passionate about. What are some of these questions that you're sitting with and maybe even what are the questions that collectively you're noticing people are most activated by right now or most curious about right now? Beautiful. Yeah. I want to hang with that, but I'm going to do the same thing. There's so many interesting things that I can't just leave. And this will lead us into some of these questions. One of the things that I just love that you just talked about was the way in which we're like a body, right? So I think what's interesting is It's difficult for one part of the body to recognize what's going on with the whole, if we were to take, for example, a Polaroid photo, I know some people might still remember what those are or just some photo that stops time. That's frozen, right? So it doesn't tell us. Where the system has been, it doesn't tell us where the system is going. And so sometimes when we're in that moment, it's hard to see that there's a larger system that we're interacting in because everywhere we look, it's feels frozen. But if we take a series of photos over time, we can start to notice, Oh, look, there's a change here. There's a change here. There's a change here. Especially if we. Photograph a human through its evolutionary cycle, right from a baby, who thinks a baby looks the same as an 85 or 90 year old person, right? The body has changed. Everything has changed. And in fact, if we put a picture of the baby up and a picture of the 90 year old, and we just showed those two pictures, people would not understand there was a relationship be like, Oh, somebody has a baby, right? There's a baby there. There's an old guy there. So I think if we start to play with this in the sense of body just in a way that we're all interconnected. And we think about this in a sense that often we can't see in the moment what's actually going on. If we're lucky, and this is part of where my excitement gets, because what I like to study is the patterns. You talked about fractals. Some folks listening on the call may not know what a fractal is, but a fractal is a pattern found in nature that repeats perfectly. Like you'll find them all through nature in leaves, in cell structure. They're repeated patterns that just repeat themselves over and over. Now they can change a little bit, but we're looking for those patterns, those fractals that are built into our society. One of the things that's interesting when you start to talk about the body and the people who are starting to see something is off. There's two places I want us to notice here. One is At some level, those folks who, I don't want to say heal trauma, I think we release trauma. Heal is a weird word. If we watch animals in the wild we'll notice, and Peter Levine is really the kind of the, one of the preeminent folks on this, but there's many amazing trauma therapists, but he's the one that noticed that when an animal plays dead, because certain prey likes to eat things that are running and living. It's a strategy for survival. Fall over, play dead. When an animal has done that's a trauma. Now we can define human trauma a little differently'cause it actually has, is a little more complex, but it's a trauma. And you watch the animal get up, the animal shakes off. And it goes about its life. And an animal in the wild cannot stay traumatized very long without becoming somebody's lunch. If it stays frozen. It's in trouble. So I want us to realize that trauma isn't something that, we, yes, we heal from it but we move through it, we release it we reinterpret it. What's interesting is those of us who managed to release or shift our relationships to trauma, what essentially we're doing is we're re regulating our nervous system. So we're creating an opportunity for our nervous system not to get triggered over and over again by small things make it harder to get triggered. We make it easier when we fail or when things get tough to keep going for those of us like you who have said this isn't quite working in the system. I'm going to pull back. I'm going to change some things. You've begun to release some of the old Cultural delusions or hallucinations or whatever word we want to use. I'm not trying to be mean to these agreements we have. I'm just trying to point out that they're just agreements that are based in fantasy. Like we get together and we say, okay, we're all going to believe this. We could all believe all kinds of things together that aren't true. So we become like the white blood cells in the body. So those of us who have stepped back and said, it's not about more, it's about better, right? We start to be the original disruptors like that had nothing to do with technology. We have beautiful religious systems through our whole human history of people who were disruptors. The system is wrong, weird, corrupt, needs to change. My favorite story of a disruptor has nothing to do with computers. It was about a little child who watched the emperor, who'd been convinced that he was wearing a fabulous outfit by some tailors. And many of us know this story, we learned it as children, it's in different cultures. And so the emperor who's been sold a hallucination, he's been sold a lie. Look at this beautiful. garment that you're wearing. Let's take you around and parade you through the streets, right? And one little child says, the emperor's naked, right? Old guard disruptor, right? Doesn't require any technology at all. Yeah. Often disruption is simply someone stating the truth in a way that someone else can hear it. Now technology is disrupting us in some regard because it's Pushing the truth in our face very quickly. Some of it is disrupting us because it's upsetting our comfort the way we've done things in the past. But the real disruption is. When it's spoken, and all of a sudden that collective agreement gets broken, and to me that's actually where we are right now. We've had a lot of truth spoken. We don't have a collective agreement right now about how we live, who we are, what our purpose is. And this is something that, these are not things that I'm just Kind of hallucinating in my house. These are things that have been studied by sociologists for years and years. It's a massive shift in culture depending on where you look. Historically, it maybe starts as early as 1905 with the beginning of some of the quantum thinking that occurred. We look at other markers like the nuclear bomb dropping changed the way we understand the world. There's all these moments that something changes. So all of this, to me, are ways in which we're inviting a change, we're disrupting, and there's a possibility for something new to happen. So the disruption, funny, I was talking to a friend in Portugal a while ago, we were over having lunch, and she said, oh, I hate that word. I was like, yeah, disruption even as a word is disruptive, but it's become cliche. Everything's a disruption. It's a disruption to this. It's a disruption to that. True disruption is actually if we look at a stagnant pond and we throw a rock in it. Talking a lot about ponds today. But when you have a stagnant body of water where there's no movement, it breeds disease. Yeah. So when we get movement in, because that old thinking, that old story that actually doesn't exist anymore, all of a sudden we get movement happening. The disruption creates the possibility of new life to emerge for things to get the mud and the muck to get cleared out for all of the. Things like mosquitoes that are creating malaria, all of these things that breed in spaces where truth is hidden, and there is no disruption, all of a sudden get a possibility of some sort of movement, and this is super uncomfortable, because. The reality is we're all complicit, right? I'm amazed, and I'm going to get myself in trouble again, but this is just important for me to say. I'm amazed at gun violence in the U. S. and in the schools. I'm, because any other country in the world would not accept this collective hallucination that there's nothing we can do. That's the agreement we've bought into. We've said, our politicians are in the pockets of lobbyists, we can't move these laws. And the dumbest thing ever is that these schools, we could just, as parents, say, our children are not going to be allowed to go to schools as long as they're dangerous places. I would not let a child go into a crack house, for example. I wouldn't say, just play anywhere you want. Here, go play in a construction site. How many people say to their kid, go play in a construction site. How many people say to their kid, go play in a toxic waste dump. If we define schools as actually more dangerous for those children, which would be actually saying, look, we were naming the truth, shooting deaths are one of the top causes of deaths and children in the U S. And it's insane that would be a thing. It used to be car car accidents. Now shootings are number one. We have shootings all the time here. All we would have to do to disrupt the system is first believe that we'd have to break the lie. We'd have to disrupt the delusion that parents have no power. That people don't have kids, don't have any power. And we'd simply have to have parents say, I'm going to keep my kids home from school. It's a mass walkout, right? And those of us who don't have children, I don't have children, I would be happy to help homeschool. I would literally say I'm, I have a PhD. I know a lot of friends with PhDs. We could teach these classes. We could give money to support homeschooling because this is so important. Easy place to disrupt a system just by realizing that we've been sold a lie. Or told a lie. We've bought into a collective hallucination. I think that's a simple example of a problem that actually would take almost no effort to solve. Because as soon as nobody goes to the schools, something that's going to change. We use this strategy, I'm a little older than you, but we use this strategy to end apartheid in South Africa. We stopped buying from companies that were supporting apartheid because it was dangerous and violent and horrible. It's not just about collective buying power, but the idea is that we withdraw our support. We withdraw the energy. We stop their power. So that's a lot, I know, to talk about disruption, but I think disruption is one of those questions is what does it mean to truly disrupt? So when you ask what are the questions that, that I'm asking, that I'm talking to people about, one of them is constantly around disruption. Because disruption has become a marketing term. This is going to disrupt the industry. Okay, is it going to change anybody's life? Maybe. AI is clearly changing people's lives. I'm excited about the possibilities of AI. I'm also aware of its dangers and the dangers I'm mostly aware of are because humans created it. But if we start to actually ask questions about what is true disruption, what is cultural disruption, what periods in history have we seen real disruption where things change at a macro level, then we'll start to get into a really interesting conversation. I'm also seeing people ask questions about meaning. We're in this really interesting time in human history where, if we read Homo Deus is his book. My brain is leaving his name somewhere out. But one of the beautiful things about this book, Homo Deus, and the professor who wrote the book, and maybe you'll find it and put it underneath me or something, is he identified the fact that we have overcome most of the obstacles that humans have faced for most of human history. We have the capacity to produce enough food for everyone. Hunger does not need to be an issue, and we have some distribution issues and some justice issues, but production is not an issue. We have enough energy for everybody, right? We have ways to connect. We have some of the best health care we've ever had. Again, distribution of justice are issues, but we've moved into this place where, for most people, we live a relatively comfortable life. And that's been a domesticated life as Seth Godman calls it. I think it's very smart. He likes to talk about raising free range children, which I just think is so beautiful. We've become domesticated. We're comfortable in our cages. Our cages are not just the homes we live in, but also the thoughts we think and the ways we relate to the world. And so there's this beautiful place to play in. Where do we go from here? What is the meaning that we have when we're comfortable? Because comfort can only stay comfortable for so long, right? And so people are actually getting bored in this, in comfort, something wrong. You can feel it. You're disconnected from things. And so I'm watching lots of conversation about what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have meaning? How do we connect with each other? When we have to have loneliness, SARS, which they're now is in London or actually England as a whole. Loneliness are, the Surgeon General in the U. S. has started talking about loneliness as a health crisis. I read a recent study that said one in five Americans don't feel like they have one friend they can turn to in a crisis. These are heartbreaking things to hear. These are the questions I'm hearing. I know they're bigger. They're not necessarily the questions that leaders are asking in business. And I think if they're not asking these questions, it is a massive mistake. It's a mistake because they're not listening to their employees. They're not listening to themselves. I spend my days with high level leaders who are telling me about how bored they are with life, how overwhelmed, how frustrated, how life doesn't feel like it's meaningful, and they're just going through the motions. So they're doing a disservice to themselves. And they're doing a disservice to the larger culture that's wanting to ask bigger questions, and not simply be told to have another glass of wine, or some CBD, and that will make everything okay. Or whatever it happens to be to numb us just a little bit more. Exactly. Yeah. If we stay numb and if we don't ask the questions, then we don't call out that disruptive truth, like you're saying, or call out the lie or the delusion. And I'm reminded of what we were saying earlier as well, where these things seem to happen at fractal levels where, you can call out the delusion in the culture that you're in Potentially by asking a really bold question, but you can also honor that truth within yourself. Like you just said at the end there, and that disruption in self disruption in the prison of our own thoughts or the box that we're living in. Sometimes these questions can be such breakthrough. moments when we start to question our reality or the norm. I'm really appreciating that you've given us a couple steps in a way here where it's step one what is actually true? Notice the delusion, say what the truth is, whether that's within yourself or within what you're observing. And we can do this collective sense making together to, to find those patterns. And then maybe even opting out, right? Like taking a step back or doing something different to disrupt at the cultural level or the nervous system level, even because I know that you're so steeped in the world of neuroscience and body wisdom as well. So this analogy that you used has been so helpful of the body and in the podcast and within this audience, we talk a lot about. the collective nervous system as well. If we can honor that truth, step back, regulate ourselves, we get to regulate or co regulate the collective nervous system. And now we're in a much more receptive open state to even be able to ask the questions that fundamentally take us into bigger and bigger breakthroughs and take us towards pathways of answers that are more rooted in. Things like togetherness, right? As we heal the separation wound that we've been in, like some of the answers that we might find from the questions that you're hearing most often, as I imagine what those answers to be, I actually imagine that, oh, wow, that seems like a very different cultural fabric than what we're in right now. Those are very different conditions. That we might arrive to should we start to collectively ask these questions. So yes, I just am appreciating this conversation so much and what you've pointed us to and the big bold questions around disruption and how can we be facing this crisis of meaning, this existential crisis of meaning that so many leaders are facing right now where they are a bit bored with the comfort. So Scott, you've just you've taken us on such a amazing journey today, and I know that one other space that you're really steeped in and fascinated by right now is AI. And so I did actually want to take us in a slightly different direction as maybe our final question today. To just look at that specific type of disruption and acceleration and at least from what you've seen, how might leaders be, how should they be thinking about this? How can they be preparing to thought partner with a technology like this to maybe support their longer term strategy or their long term perspective that they might have? how does AI actually make us better leaders? in your opinion? Beautiful question. So one of the things that I always want to start with is ask more questions. So to the beginning of even our conversation on AI is first of all, to ask more questions, but also ask better questions. Sometimes we're in this tiny little space, which is what I'm watching with AI right now. In the corporate sector. It's some level, not entirely. I'm fascinated and excited about a lot of what I'm seeing. So at a small level, the question seems to be, how do we make more money? How do we let go of more people? Which is actually a legitimate question right now because there's a work shortage, so trying to figure out like if people don't want to do jobs, part of why they don't want to do jobs is because they're repetitive tasks that give them no meaning. I'm wanting people to you. Go beyond the question again of simply how do we use this tool to make more money and to begin to open the door to ask how do we use this so that we can solve global human problems and environmental problems. And within that, let's create Eco sustainable businesses that actually are aligned with the planet. So when I think about AI, the places I get the most excited aren't how we can make more money. Now I will say very clearly I use AI daily. I love the tools. I'm a huge fan and I use it to make my life easier. So I think for humans that want to like individual humans to say, how can I use these tools to have a more elegant life, to live more easily, to not be doing repetitive tasks, like emails is exhausting. Emailing is exhausting for me. It's just so much data. So I have an AI program that helps me filter it, that lets only certain emails in at certain times of day that groups it. So I can delete 40 emails together. So there's a simple place of like, how do we help? Enhance the lives of humans. But this bigger question then becomes, how do we use this to solve collective global problems? And for businesses, I think who are really on the front of the cutting edge, this is the place they'll be working because they're going to solve real problems that people want to solve. So I've been looking at, just to give you a simple example medicine. Medicine in AI is one of the most fabulous opportunities that could exist for so many reasons, everything from personalized medicine, so that instead of having a kind of one size fits all approach to things like what do we eat, how do we exercise, how much body fat should we have. We can actually start to understand our individual bodies, but we can also start to take an iPhone and this has been one of the promises of AI for a while into a village that doesn't have a doctor and to help diagnose illness using like a little piece. One of the fascinating things that came out this week is a study that showed that AI was able to diagnose. breast cancer 20% more accurately than simply a technician. And part of that is, technicians get tired. We're human, right? We miss things. So if we partner with it, we have the capacity to say, how do we help human lives? So in my mind, that's the beginning. How do we look at this as a tool for the common good so that we can build something worthy of ourselves? And honestly, to me the big problem with business, and I can't understand how anybody who's in business does not sit with this, is so many people are spending their lives on something that doesn't matter at all. So one of the things I have written on my little wall of reminders is live each moment as if it matters, right? If I spend my life doing something that's completely unimportant. Chasing paper, which is really what just chasing money is chasing paper. If that's my only objective, how much paper can I get? And now we don't even use paper, right? How many imaginary numbers can sit on an imaginary, screen on some computer, it's a very small. Metric for your life, right? So I would think as a leader, and this is one of the places that we can have a profound impact is to wake up and say, what would it look like for my life to mean something? What would it look like for me to go to a company that I believe in? What would it look like for, if I'm working for fossil fuels, for example, fossil fuel company, and I'm able to say, wow, this is contributing to the destruction of the planet. And I look and I say, I have kids or grandkids or people I care about. I don't want to leave them with a planet with air that's unbreathable, with ecosystems that are destroyed. What could I do that would leave a legacy that would actually be worthy of my life energy? Because if all you think you're here to do is be comfortable, that's a sad life. It's a really small life and what I know about the leaders that I'm most excited about is that they're big dreamers, they're visionaries, and if they breathe into their bodies for just a minute, and this is the trick like I got to get out of just my head for just a minute. If I breathe into my body, and I say what is really important to me. I almost never have a leader tell me it's just money. Money is usually a scorecard for them, right? It might help them figure out what the impact they're having is, it might help them feel secure, it might help them have a sense of freedom, right? Identify that, figure out how to get it, but get it doing something that gives your life meaning. That at the end of the day, you are able to say, that meant something. I believe it was Steve Jobs who had written on his Mirror, if this was my last day to live, would I be happy with how I spent my time? If we all lived in that space, if we all realized that there's no waiting period on life, that today is the day you get, and all of us have had friends who die, we've lost people. COVID was a great example of that. This is not just a metaphor. This may be the day you have. And to realize the fragility of life and also the immense value of it. That there's something beautiful you can do in this moment that's not just putting yourself in a comfortable cage. That's not just feathering your nest. That's doing something that leaves a legacy beyond yourself. That leaves something for the people who will be here. So to me, those are the questions that I hope leaders are asking, not just for AI, because AI is just one piece of a complex system of technology that's coming into place that includes nanotechnology, blockchain. We have all of these technologies that likely, if we're listening to someone like Peter Diamandis, who started the XPRIZE, we're going to have about 100 years of change in the next 10. It's not just going to be AI. AI is one of the core components, but it's only one. It's the one that people can understand the most easily. So it's the one we're grasping onto. As all of those changes happen, if we're able to ask ourselves, Did I matter? Am I doing something that's worthy of my life energy? I think... People have a very different experience of their lives and their leadership. Scott, I cannot think of a better message to leave our listeners with than that, of the power of questions, of legacy. Thank you so much for sharing all of these perspectives and the questions. I'm really taking that with me today, of the power of meaningful questions to create meaningful lives. Thank you so much for being here. If listeners want to. learn more about you or work with you. How can they find you and get in touch? Super simple. Just go to my website, www. scottwmills. com. You can find ways to connect with me. You can see what classes I'm offering or whatever I happen to be up to in a minute. It's always changing. You can imagine. Fascinating. I just want to appreciate you. The way that you engage these questions is so profound, and I think that you're doing a huge service to the leadership world by bringing people in and having deep conversations because we're past a soundbite culture, right? We need depth. We need connection. And we need to think new questions and imagine new worlds. And I think you're creating space for people to do that. So I so appreciate you and all the work you're doing. Thank you, Nicole. Thank you so much, Scott. That gives me chills. It just means the world. Thanks listeners for tuning in for another week of living leaders. And we'll be back with you next week for more in depth conversations like this. Thanks again, Scott.