The Power of Knowledge

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Today we are going to look at the price of knowledge. Hello and welcome to humanizing the podcast that allows you to understand how you've been programmed by both evolution and culture so you can liberate any behaviour you choose and be who you would like to be. Today I'm Ginny. [00:00:30] Speaker B: I'm the map holder. [00:00:32] Speaker A: I'd like to introduce Marheen. Hello. Marhin is the explorer and together we will journey through this programming so you can understand through the questions you ask and definitely the questions Marheen asks, how to liberate yourself and be the most amazing person that you choose to be. And I'm going to let Marheed start off with this because she got loads of questions all about knowledge and how she sees it being used. [00:01:06] Speaker B: So many off go, darling, or not being used. Being hoarded knowledge as a hoarded thing that this is really interesting to me. I was born and raised in a family and a culture. I think that is the place's education, very high on its list of things because no one can take your knowledge away from you is what I was taught growing up. And you can protect yourself with knowledge because you can't be taken advantage of when you know things. You can't be ignorant. To be ignorant is to be vulnerable. But it certainly wasn't something that should be hoarded, it was something that should be shared. So the more you have, the more you share it. As we've talked about before on this podcast, I am a Muslim and one of the phrases of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, is to seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave. That is a directive, directive to Muslims all over the world, because knowledge is power. But it doesn't have to be a negative power because you share it. [00:02:24] Speaker A: Yeah, nice. [00:02:24] Speaker B: And from childhood we're given knowledge, right? [00:02:27] Speaker A: And yet what I think we are quite insidious about what we do to children is, and therefore it becomes one of those unconscious programs in your head, is we take them to school and we dump them almost immediately, especially in the UK, I know, not in other countries, in Europe, it can be slightly later than this, but we start testing them on what they know. And the odd thing about a test is that it only tests you. It doesn't test us. So right from the very beginning we are telling children that knowledge is only power to me and me alone because it's how I get positive feedback. I get nine or ten or out of ten or whatever and therefore I'm great. But I can't sit in the exam. I remember trying to do this once because I thought it was really mean, because I knew my friend Susan. This was when were at primary school. I knew my friend Susan didn't know this stuff. And we used to have this deal, actually, where I used to tell her what was on the board and she used to tell me. No, the other way around. She used to tell me what was on the board and I used to tell her what the answers were. We were a team, right? Because I was so short sighted and no one had worked out, I couldn't see the flipping board. So anyway, and that's what we did. And this included came into doing a test and we were sat there. She'd whisper to me, I don't know why I'm whispering, but it just sounded right. And she'd whisper to me and I'd tell her and she'd write the answers down. Teamwork, right? This is ideal teamwork. We're about six, maybe even five and a half. [00:04:10] Speaker B: Six. [00:04:10] Speaker A: Anyway, we were doing. [00:04:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:04:12] Speaker A: And we got hauled up, literally, as you used to in those days. I am talking like front of the. [00:04:18] Speaker B: Cast and shouted at. [00:04:19] Speaker A: And poor Susan bursts into tears and says, I tell Ginny what's on the board and she tells me the answer. We're a team. And we were separated from then on. And someone made me go and get a pair of glasses. Well, it was good. I got a pair of glasses. [00:04:38] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:04:38] Speaker A: I didn't realize. No, even. [00:04:40] Speaker B: Well, yeah, you got a pair of glasses. [00:04:41] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:04:43] Speaker B: But being separated is unnecessary, completely. [00:04:46] Speaker A: Why were we being separated? All I did was share and help and support. And yet, right there, right back at being five, and we still do it today, we say, you are only as good as what you know yourself. And yet, as you were talking, there are a lot of religious and also other institutions which is based on sharing knowledge. [00:05:13] Speaker B: Because we do share knowledge. We have to share knowledge, otherwise we don't learn anything. [00:05:18] Speaker A: Yeah, let's go deep past. Let's go what you and I wouldn't. [00:05:21] Speaker B: Have anything that we get. [00:05:22] Speaker A: So if we go deep into human beings past and let's make it out, we have to go pre writing systems, 5000 years. Okay. We have to go, in some respects, back pre language, which is anything between 50 and 200,000 years, depending who you want to talk to and what you consider languages. But if we were a group of people trying to survive and we didn't share what we knew, we'd all be dead. Because I need you as much as you need me. And yet we've trolleyed up in the late in the past 5000 years. And we treat knowledge as something we. [00:05:57] Speaker B: Sell well, because we've got institutions now that can sell them. And then we have an idea that some sell them better than others. So you have your private schools and you have your this and your that totally. [00:06:08] Speaker A: And it's like the demise of the public libraries in the UK. What we seem to have forgotten is the whole history of. And I know we keep talking about England, but it's where Marheen and I rock up most of the time. But we have public libraries. And if you look at the history of a lot of our large public libraries or institutions, they had most of their initial catalogue of books donated to them because people, it was considered one of those things you had to have in the victorian age, you had to have a library. So you spent money, if you had a load of expendable income, on creating your own library. And then I do remember the major library in Manchester had most of its original collection from. I think it's an. I'll have to look this up properly. We'll put it in the notes. But it's an industrialist who died and his wife was then there. And she decided when she died, she donated everything to the public library so everyone could access that knowledge. But in there, I think something interesting about print and how we then, because if you imagine we can't print something down or write it down, you can't sell it because words are ephemeral. So how do we share, how do you share knowledge when you can't write it down? [00:07:29] Speaker B: Well, because we communicate, don't we? We've always communicated, yes. [00:07:33] Speaker A: So for me, there's a thing in. [00:07:36] Speaker B: Story, if we think about storytelling as. [00:07:38] Speaker A: A way of, and I think this is really powerful, is the fact that, and there's a lot of work to show that the storytelling is one of those amazing technologies we developed as humans to be able to transfer, to hold data and information and knowledge outside the brain. Okay, if we haven't got a writing system, but we've got language, we can tell a story. And a lot of original oral stories, something like the Iliad and the Odyssey. So Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, because this is one of the first written down oral story traditions we can get hold of. They are structured in a very, very particular way with a very particular rhythm. I believe it's iambic pentameter, but it enters the brain in a very specific way. Also, we have, every single culture on earth has stories. And they even today, like, let's say fairy tales, tell us how to behave or what to be afraid from. And I said, I only know everything from Grimm's fairy tales. I've got some knowledge of indigenous american stories and some aboriginal stories. But what were the stories you were told? [00:09:07] Speaker B: I think probably very similar ones. I got the Anansi stories, which are the old african stories, which was something I didn't know a lot of. I thought everybody had the Anansi stories, but they didn't. [00:09:21] Speaker A: No, I don't tell me what they are. [00:09:23] Speaker B: So Anansi is one of the. Is the name for one of the gods. And they're the same kind of morality stories about trying to steal the honey and getting your hand stuck to each side of the honey pot and you can't get them off and you shouldn't have tried to steal the honey if it wasn't meant for you. It's the same sort of fabric of stuff. What I noticed as an adult looking back, the difference was that the morality stories, or morality plays or whatever they are, are about a personal growth or a personal journey and giving you morals, obviously. And then some of the fairy tales gave us. They felt a little bit more on looking backwards at them, like they were giving us people that we should be scared of or things cultural things that we should be worried about that maybe weren't completely rooted in truth. They sort of perpetuated this idea of the bogeyman or the crazy old witch in the woods. It was things to be frightened of versus ways to be a better person. Yeah, or ways to keep yourself honest. [00:10:40] Speaker A: I think that's really interesting because a lot of the received fairy tales we have, although supposedly because Grimm is the Grimm brothers, are probably our most considered one of the oldest structures of fairy tale. And they're all were written down in a particular place in time, but they're not that old, right? Very similar to. [00:11:04] Speaker B: No, they're very new. [00:11:05] Speaker A: And therefore, really, I think they probably reflect the moralistic structures that were available at that time. Because you tell stories to hand on data, information, knowledge about survival. So if you want to create out groups of very particular people. So let's say know. Yeah, I am going to go, you know, witch finds general UK and then perpetuated across Europe, which took away from women the economic ability to be an ale wife, because they made the fact that if you had a pointed hat and this was one of the signifiers of being an ale wife, you have a pointed hat and you have a cat because you tend to, when you get a lot of grain, you get a lot of vermin. Okay. And yet over the time, those two images of a cat and a pointed hat were taken and used to almost weaponize how you thought about those people. They created an out group. Now, some of the far more, absolutely. And I think a lot of that, my personal opinion is a lot of that comes from them. They're also about subjugation of women or anyone who doesn't conform to a particular norm. But you do see in a lot of older traditions, and when I'm saying older, I said indigenous populations, like we were talking about african stories, that they're more about moral reason to behave and be and look and act. There's also one thing here I'd also like to put in is the fact that we used to hand on trades by going to work with people. So knowledge, you had an apprenticeship, right? And I mean, I know latterly from the sort of elizabethan age onward, we had to pay. And again, I only know english history here, but we had to pay. You had what's called an indenture and you literally had to pay to go and learn. But before that, people just rocked up and said, right, I'd like to be a village blacksmith. And they got trained. They went to apprentice themselves with someone and learnt those. None of those things were ever written down in the books. They weren't held by academies, and you didn't get a big fat sticker at the end of doing it all. [00:13:41] Speaker B: So what is the price of knowledge? [00:13:45] Speaker A: So I think the price of knowledge is fascinating. I think on one respect what we've done is if we put, if we monetize knowledge, we forget what it's there to do, and knowledge is there, which is to educate but also survive better. Originally this was about survival. So if you monetize knowledge, you consistently only sell it. You consistently then think you have to buy it. So you get into an economic exchange that devalues the original purpose of knowledge, which was to help us survive better. [00:14:28] Speaker B: So knowledge becomes a tool. Yes. [00:14:31] Speaker A: And a weapon in some respects. You here, I know more than you. [00:14:38] Speaker B: Every tool can be a weapon. [00:14:41] Speaker A: Yes. [00:14:42] Speaker B: Before the advent of money as we know it, obviously we lived in a barter world where there was an exchange, something for something else. And I was reading a book about money by Noah Yuval Hariri, who talks about the confusion of the Mexicans when the conquistadoris came in, because they were like the things you're trying to exchange, they're not pelts, it's not food, it's not something that's got any sort of worth. It's soft gold, which can't be used in any sort of weaponry. This is not a useful thing for me to trade with you. Knowledge, now that we've monetized it, is an extremely useful thing to trade because you want to have it, to feel the most powerful that you can feel, because you feel like if you have knowledge, then you can do anything. We still recognize that. I think that knowledge is power. [00:15:49] Speaker A: I wouldn't argue that. [00:15:50] Speaker B: What you do with that knowledge is. [00:15:52] Speaker A: A different thing for me. What we've lost about being human is knowledge, is power to all of us, not just me. And if you teach someone that knowledge is power to me, they don't share. And if they don't share and they don't share openly and actively, then we have a huge problem. Because think about human beings as, like, a highly connected system for me at the moment. Now, in that highly connected system, I go learn something, right? Let's say I learned that eating that Barry over there is dangerous, and it made me very ill, but I only ate half of one. But I don't tell everyone else, and someone goes to eat four or five, or someone eats more than that, and half of us die, right? Because what we do when we don't see knowledge as power to everyone is us, as an entire system, become less competitively advantageous, we lose our edge, as it were. Because you then have to learn that for yourself instead of me helping you and then you building on that. And this, to me, is one of the most insidious things that happens. Because you see it in business, you see it in everything we do. Because not only do we not share openly everything we know, we also don't share when we get something wrong, because we're told back to one of our first episodes. We're told that if you get it wrong, it's your fault and you shouldn't. That's bad. So you fear getting it wrong. But more than anything else, you fear telling other people you got something wrong because that reduces your value to the system as we've now designed it, instead of looking at the people who. And your own not getting it right all the time. In fact, you learned. And wouldn't you learn so much better and quicker and faster if everyone who was doing what you've just done told you how they did it and what they learned? So we'd build on what we know instead of. And we'd learn very fast instead of. We're keeping it separate because I'm afraid of sharing that I got it wrong. Because you'll think I'm bad. And also, you've taught me that knowledge is any power to me. And apparently I get one up on you because I know more than you do. [00:18:11] Speaker B: When does it start? When do we start doing? [00:18:14] Speaker A: That said, for me, it's how we teach normative, be unconsciously, how we repeat and teach normative to behavior, to children. Because you were saying right at the very beginning that there's a load of knowledge we hand on quite effectively, as in, please don't touch the hot thing. It might hurt. Okay, there are some people who will then touch the hot thing and go, oh, yeah, it did hurt, but they might not grab onto it. They might just touch it gently. Okay, did you do that? So there are a lot of things we teach because they're about how you actually act in the world and don't bloody hurt yourself all the time. But we then take those poor, nascent human beings who, when there is a group together, all share, all do stuff. This is how kids play, how they problem solve, and we dump them in an education system that then starts to tell them the complete opposite. And us parents can sometimes support that by. Because we know that if our children don't get past certain gateways and get certain badges, they don't have access to the things in society which allow them to be successful. So you don't pass exams, you don't get an education, therefore you can't get a job. And if you can't get a job, you can't be an economic unit in your own right. So technically, you're a failure. But all of these things go back to the fact that we teach. Knowledge is only power to me. And for me, it starts there. It starts at school. And as an individual, I always thought that was the stupidest thing on earth. [00:20:11] Speaker B: I think we have education from a very young age as mandatory for everybody, obviously, in this country. And then those who want to continue on, continue on. Obviously, money plays a big part in that, because it's where and how you can afford to continue into further education. But we do still have sharing spaces because education continues and continues and continues and continues. So we are still sharing our knowledge. [00:20:44] Speaker A: I don't think we do. [00:20:45] Speaker B: Is it that we've monetized? [00:20:47] Speaker A: It's more than that. It's not just monetization. I mean, even if you think about. There is no open sharing without exchange. No. And when I say exchange. So you go to university, you pay to go to university, your lecturers are paid at university, believe it or not, they're also achieved their own sort of rungs on the academic ladder. Very OD phrase only goes up. You can climb down, obviously, by publishing unique material. That's one brain. It might be a group of people, but that's not sharing. They are only valued by what they've done, which is supposedly unique. And it really bugs me when I've worked with a lot of large pharmaceutical organizations or anyone who depends on ultimate research, right? So if you depend ultimately on research to make money, because you've made a compound or something that does something to someone, and in those companies, they literally pitch one lab against another. And in those labs, one person against another. So why would I share something I learned? Because that's not how you pay me. And when we talked about group value right at the beginning, and saying, I have to have a value to a group for you to look after me, we've gone and told all of them that their only value is what they do as an individual. How weird. I mean, we even saw it over know one lab over in Oxford developed one way of doing things. There's no open sharing. In fact, I think the only person for me who literally took what he invented and gave it away from the world, actually there are two things I can think of. One's Volvo with the three point seatbelt. They gave that away to everyone because they thought it was safest, and they did. No, ip didn't take any money at all for doing that. They just literally gave it away. And the other is Berners Lee, who probably was the main proponent from the World Wide Web. And I think you see that fundamentally differently from that academic side in the UK to the Americans who I've developed this, this is mine, I'm going to use the Internet and I'm going to make huge amounts of money out of you just because I had an idea. Where would we be as a human race if we'd shared absolutely everything in the past 200 years and learned together? [00:23:25] Speaker B: If there was no patenting, no ips, no nothing like that. It's just all open source, available to everybody all the time. [00:23:31] Speaker A: Where would we be? I mean, one of the reasons I think the Internet and coding, it depends how much you know about how coding works on the Internet. But there is a whole slew of things called open source. Literally anyone, anywhere can use this type of code and it's called Linux. And Linux grew faster than any other operating system because of that. And there is a huge amount of open source code which drives the Internet today because it was based on that premise. We're all better together. But I think this is how we've limited our own ability to evolve, is we don't share anymore. [00:24:08] Speaker B: That's a problem, isn't it? That's a real issue. If we're not. [00:24:17] Speaker A: Yeah, it's huge. I feel like Julia Roberts now, wandering in that scene in Prithview woman, and she walks in and she goes, oh, look, right? Look what you got wrong. Look what you could have had. And I think this is how we need to get people to think, look what we could have been. Look what we could have had if we'd shared everything openly. We might have to change some other structures along the way. But how much more impact could you have as a person if you shared everything you knew and didn't expect anything in return apart from what someone else learned or built? [00:25:01] Speaker B: So that's sort of the choice that we have, isn't it? We can decide what to do with our knowledge. [00:25:05] Speaker A: Yes. [00:25:09] Speaker B: We don't have to hold it in or reserve it for those who are paying or those who are in some way exchanging something with us. Just put it out into the world. [00:25:19] Speaker A: Technically, that's what we're doing on the podcast. Right. [00:25:24] Speaker B: Well, I think podcasting as a medium is very much like that. There's lots of free knowledge available for everybody through this one medium. [00:25:34] Speaker A: Oh, I do. I think it's huge. And, yes, there will be a book, and yes, there'll be other things. And if I lived in another world, I'd give it all away free. That's all I ever wanted. In the end, we'll make enough margin to cover our costs and pay everyone who gets involved. But that's all I care about. And interestingly enough, I did this to such an extent that when I was a senior vice president for sales in organizations, I used to fight tooth and nail to change the way we did commission, because if you only pay someone for what they do by themselves, they will never share what worked. So I fought tooth nail and managed to get it through quite a lot of times when I said, right, we'll have individual commission, but we also need group commission as a group of people, as in, we pay people because otherwise, no one will share, and they won't share what they've developed out there in the field in front of customer, where no one else can see them, because 99% of the time, they're by themselves. But if they sell and they come up with a different way of doing it, they need to have, in the system we have today, they need to have the ability to, or we need to not ability. We need to positively encourage them to share what they know. And in the end, at the moment, we only did that through money. It had a huge impact on how those sales numbers went. Right. We performed better than anyone else. However, time and time again, I was told, well, we can't do that across whole organization. It wouldn't work. And for me, all they were showcasing is the fact that they've been shown that knowledge is power to them and not knowledge is power to us. And that if they accepted a different way of doing it, it took away the fact that as that individual people are what makes the world a bit like the american dream, you're by yourself. You'll get to the top because of your efforts. I don't believe that. I think we're enough. Yeah. [00:27:57] Speaker B: I think every time we look at anything in society, that's great, there's a team of people who have worked on it. That in itself shows that we are collaborative, where when we share knowledge, yeah, we do. And we don't have to have the same knowledge. All our little bits of knowledge come together. [00:28:14] Speaker A: But if you're taught that you shouldn't share it unless you get paid for it, or you shouldn't share it unless you get valued for that information you've got, because that's about you, you don't do it. So Microsoft and a lot of other major IT companies have all what they call collaboration software, right? M three, six, five. Being able to put data in one place so we can all work on it together, or Google Docs. And there are other collaboration suites out there. I'd like to point out having a tool will not change the norm in your head, which says, knowledge is power to me and not knowledge is power to us. So what you find, and this was hilarious when we used to do this work, that even if they had all of these tools, they didn't use them. And everyone kept their own knowledge on their own onedrive or their own secret drive or their own place on their laptop, and it. People would get really, really annoyed that they weren't using it properly. It's got nothing to do with the tool. It's got everything to do with how you've been taught to think about yourself. [00:29:23] Speaker B: Well, it sounds to me like we're in this world where we are. So there's nuance here. This isn't about knowledge. It's about copying. It's about someone taking what might be yours. So we all sit in a room in an exam, and we all have to answer the same question. And what is pulled out in that moment. This is a very basic summation of this process because obviously there's a lot of nuance around this, too. But a very basic summation is that you'll sit in a room with a load of people, your peers and classmates. You're asked the same set of questions, and what is tested is your knowledge in this field, not how you learn what you learn. None of that stuff is tested, whether you're oral, Aral, any of that stuff, but just whether you can write the answer that can be measured in a standardized way to see if you've taken in the knowledge to give you permission to go into the next phase. Super basic example of testing. We tend to be encouraged to sit far away from each other. Well, we are sit far away from each other and cover our work so that nobody can copy what we're doing, so that they can't take credit for what we know. So at what point is because sharing means that you all have access to it, which one would argue in schools, you do. Everybody in that room has the access to that piece of knowledge. And then at some point you've got to show what you know, what you've taken away, what you've done with that way to measure that without. [00:31:08] Speaker A: I'm not sure what you do with that knowledge afterwards. No, I think it's still wrong. You should be tested as a group, not individuals. Right? Because it's the group that produces stuff, not an individual. Watch how kids play. They work together as a team. They are hardwired to work together as a team and they problem solve together. Right. So what have we destroyed when we then go and teach them that it's just you and the actual words of copy. Why is copy bad? Plagiarism copy. Why is it bad? Right. That's because we've been told time and time again, because that piece of knowledge belongs to me. It flipping well doesn't belong to me. It belongs to us. And you learn the knowledge, but you don't learn as a team. You don't learn as a group of people or as a group of kids. You learn as an individual. Again, for me, wrong, not human. We survive as a network of individuals moving data and information around ourselves. So we survive as a group better. And I can't unsee it. Right? All I can see is all the things we've been put in place to stop that happening. Because someone wants to control knowledge. [00:32:33] Speaker B: The things we're taught is absolutely controlled knowledge. That's such an important statement, I think, is that if you do not go out into the world and seek your own knowledge away from that which you've been taught. You're doing yourself a disservice. But that's why people are encouraged to go and travel, to go and learn other languages, to read different books like go and seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave, get out into the world and go and learn stuff away from what you've just been taught at home, or just been taught at school, or just been taught. [00:33:04] Speaker A: None of that counts when you go. [00:33:06] Speaker B: And get incredibly controlled knowledge, but none. [00:33:08] Speaker A: Of that gets counted when you go for a job. And I'll have to check with Miles what I'm just about to say, right? Because, no, I won't use miles. I'll use a specific thing. So I know people who are really senior in business, like board level, who are terrified if anyone looks at their qualifications, because they don't have any. And yet every single job interview, whatsid expects you to have a qualification, which is a set of knowledge tested by an outside body who for some reason can decide whether you know or not, or you're good enough or not, who will give you a sticker, which means you are now able to do something. [00:33:53] Speaker B: Or that you could prove. You could take the knowledge that you have in a test environment and turn it into an answer that got a good mark. That's the issue here, is that if somebody is not a writer, but they can tell you why they loved this story, what the mathematical equation means, because they can talk you through it, they can't write it down. It's the way in which our knowledge is tested. That is the first stumbling block, I think. [00:34:21] Speaker A: I think it goes back further because. [00:34:22] Speaker B: Not everybody can sit together. [00:34:23] Speaker A: And why test? Surely the only test is if we survive together. Well, and to be fair, as a human race, we're being really bad at that at the moment. Why test? What does it prove? [00:34:35] Speaker B: Well, I just think when the application of the knowledge isn't as obvious as can you gut a fish? Well, the only way to know if I can gut a fish is to give me a knife and a fish. [00:34:44] Speaker A: Which isn't a test. [00:34:45] Speaker B: Let's see if I can gut it. That is not. [00:34:48] Speaker A: But you would learn that with someone else and you wouldn't be told off. If you've got it wrong, you'd be allowed to improve, you'd be allowed to learn from someone else. Okay. And there is a really interesting thing in the difference between homo sapiens and neanderthals, which we've discovered, or someone's looked at the data differently and he's a french guy, which basically says one of the unique things about homo sapiens and why they. We are all homo sapien, right? Why they became the most dominant species on earth and then got rid of every other hominoid is down to one particular thing, which is, believe it or not, neanderthals were far more creative. Okay. Because if you look in the fossil record, all of the tools they created, the way did was always different, every single time, right? It was new, it was different. You couldn't ever go, where does this come from? You can't date it. It could have come at any time, any place, anywhere. Over in the Antifell history, if you look at homo sapiens, we did something really, really unique. We developed something, we played with it till it became the best it could be in that environment. And then we consistently repeated it. That, to me, says we shared knowledge, we created together, we took it to its epothiosis, the best it could be. And then we went on to the next thing. That takes a group working together, constructing together, understanding how that works in the environment together, and then going, yeah, that's great. What's the next thing we want to solve? And that's fundamentally different and we don't today celebrate that in society at all. The actual fact everyone sits in the exam, I think, is wrong, but we're going to piss off a lot of people by saying this. If you look at the history of. [00:36:47] Speaker B: The exam, I think it's just trying to work out how we. [00:36:52] Speaker A: How we. How we what? If you look at the history, we've only had exams for the last 70 years. Didn't exist. Victorians, Edwardian. Sorry, early Edwardians. We've only had exams. We've only tested what people can do. And again, I only have huge knowledge of the english education system. But it wasn't until post second world war and even into the 1960s, we even made children stay in education beyond 14. And we became obsessed with testing them. It's recent. [00:37:40] Speaker B: So before then, how did we measure knowledge? In order for people to be. We'd have to go back into history for this. But we've had medicine and we've had science, we've had education for as long as I think people have been around in various forms. So how did we. [00:37:57] Speaker A: We didn't. If you actually look at the history of. [00:37:59] Speaker B: Was it more discussion? We're talking about Plato, but again, that's. [00:38:03] Speaker A: Very male dialogue, that's very male dominated education. So seeking knowledge was just a pursuit to do and you shared what you learned. That was it. But education system. So one of the reasons, and again, my knowledge is only really deep in England, but in the elizabethan age, if you wanted to sell something new, you had to go and ask the crown. You weren't just allowed to sell it, and you had to go and ask the crown. And the crown said, yeah, I'll give you a license to do that, but I'm taking 50% of everything you sell. Right. And then you've got the rise of the guilds, really strongly the rise of the guilds, where again, you've got apprenticeship and knowledge. And knowledge was learned, but you were produced a master craftsman. Because of what you produced, you made or a mastercraft person, not how well you answered something on a piece of paper for me, that has absolutely no relation to how well you can do that in the real world. I'm just about to piss off a load of NBA people, particularly impractical. And also, and I've seen this really recently, the knowledge we teach and then give someone a mark for, or say you're good at this can sometimes be hugely out of date, and yet that's what they just teach. But it's wrong, because they only teach what they've been taught or what the course says they can taught. And therefore, I mean, I saw some psychology recently, and that's my original first degree, and they are still teaching as dogma, the behaviorists who this is people, Pavlov's dogs and all of that. And the foundation tenet of behaviorism is your mind is a blank sheet of paper when you're born. This is from the yet still being taught today. Because the structures we've created do not allow for the fact that all the latest research is for everyone all the time, completely. Sorry, I'm getting on because I've got an example about a doctor. You can prosecute medicine on the basis you have to, professional learning, but you can give someone a drug based on knowledge you learned at medical school, even if you're 65. And the people who suffered mostly from this recently are women in HRT, because you are taught at medical school that HRT is dangerous, based in very bad science that's now been proved, and that you don't give it out, you don't give it to women. And even the whole profile, which we now know, that you need oestrogen, testosterone and progesterone. Testosterone is not even licensed for use in the UK for women in menopause, and yet it is in other countries. [00:41:24] Speaker B: So what choices do we have? What do we do with this? Because I think this is a big old topic. Knowledge is everything that we do. Every single thing that we do is from something that we know or that we don't know and we might try and find out. [00:41:40] Speaker A: Right? [00:41:40] Speaker B: So at its very heart, for those of us who are interested in anything, knowledge is seeking knowledge for that thing. [00:41:50] Speaker A: Is at the heart of it. [00:41:52] Speaker B: Totally. [00:41:52] Speaker A: I think I find this one really, really difficult because a lot of the things we need to change are how we have created norms in our global society, in our global structure, because it doesn't matter where you go. Knowledge is power to an individual, not to a group. And for me, this is each of us individually acting and behaving differently and permanently sharing. We have the technologies we're discussing on this podcast now. We have the technologies to positively share all of this, all of the time. Okay? We don't consistently have to go through the routes that were available for a lot of the time. And in fact, I remember my daughter saying when she did her gcses and considering she's now 24, that's a long time ago, she said, mum, why am I being tested on what I know, not where can I get information from? How do I know it's good information and what I can do with it? And she was asking that at, what, 1516? And I said to her, look, that's just the way the world works, right? These are badges. [00:42:56] Speaker B: These are gates. [00:42:57] Speaker A: They're gateways we have to walk through whether we like it or not. If you want to do X, Y and Z, and we can only change that if we, us as individuals, look at it differently, we behave differently, and we share in a different way and we collaborate in a different way. And that's one of the hearts of laugh think play. Because as listeners to this will also know, you and I, Marhin, are a part of laughing play. And we want to get people to look at all of these things we've discussed differently and give them tools to be able to do that. I don't think there's an easy answer, not to this one, apart from you can look at it differently yourself and you can prosecute how you use knowledge differently and how you share it so hard. [00:43:49] Speaker B: So I guess it's breaking out of the rules of knowledge, right? So you can ask people, I think when you ask them something, are quite willing to share their knowledge with you. [00:44:00] Speaker A: No, they're not. [00:44:03] Speaker B: I don't think we, as one on one, well, I don't think they kind of harbor it like that. I think if somebody says to you. [00:44:09] Speaker A: I really want to, oh, they might on a personal level. But when they're an economic unit in a business, they behave entirely different way. They use knowledge politically, they use it for power, they use it for influence. So maybe that's what we do. Maybe we ask people to, when they go to work, be different. And that's very hard because you are paid at work for what you know, not what you share. Ha. And unfortunately that's how we all earn a living. So I said, I don't think there's an easy answer. Yeah, we do. We can share like this. [00:45:01] Speaker B: So how do we break out of it? [00:45:04] Speaker A: I said, this one I have no answer to really. What we need are businesses to change in governments to change, in education systems to change. Right. And we need to have enough gumption, to use a northern phrase to be heard and to change things. You can change yourself how you think, and you can probably change a couple of other. It would be great if someone big in a large organization, I don't know, let's say a Smith Klein or a big unilever, a PNG global corpse rocked up and said, we want to do it differently because I honestly believe if they did, they'd fundamentally shift their own competitive advantage in the marketplace because they would be properly using what everyone knows. That's a challenge and a half. So this. [00:46:01] Speaker B: This is sort of, this has gone two ways, hasn't it? There is personal knowledge, there's business knowledge, there is critical thinking, there's the media and the knowledge that that gives you, quote unquote knowledge. I'm not sure it's always knowledge. There is certainly a huge amount of power there. You're being told by people who run large businesses how to think, what to think. The use of language is incredibly important to critically assess. A newspaper article or just a newspaper you read, who owns it? [00:46:43] Speaker A: Always. [00:46:43] Speaker B: Who are they? [00:46:44] Speaker A: Ask those questions, what do they want. [00:46:45] Speaker B: You to do as a result of it? Right. What emotions do they want you to feel as a result of this article? What do they want you to do next? Totally with those emotions. [00:46:54] Speaker A: And that beautiful segue takes us into probably one of our next podcasts, which is how people weaponize your emotion by what they tell you and how language works. Thank you for listening. [00:47:18] Speaker B: Thank you for coming on the journey with me, with us. [00:47:22] Speaker A: Well, you're the explorer, Marhin. [00:47:24] Speaker B: I'm off. I'm bashing into the undergrowth of our brains and into all that programme prodding. [00:47:31] Speaker A: Around, gallivanting within that programming what we want to do as we've always done with this, is help you understand why you feel the thoughts that you do and then the behavior behind that. So you have a choice of how you behave and who profits by it. And if it's not you and it's not humankind, then stop and think and go. Who's controlling who's behind my steering wheel? So I want to invite you back. Whether you're on a walk, going for the train, on that commute, taking a bath, even cooking, driving a car. Wherever you find yourself, come and find us. We will be waiting.