The Viking Code, With Anders Indset

The Viking Code offers a blueprint for blending tradition with modern success. Anders Indset, author of The Viking Code, joins J.R. Lowry to share his unique journey from athlete and entrepreneur to philosopher. Exploring the core themes of the book, Anders reveals the power of collective values, drawing powerful lessons from Nordic culture and the world of high-performance sports. He delves into the importance of continuous learning, embracing progress, and fostering trust in a rapidly changing world, offering a refreshing perspective on how to live a fulfilling and impactful life.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/anders-indset

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The Viking Code, With Anders Indset

Best-Selling Author And Leading Thinker On The Quantum Economy

I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions, Career Lessons, which is brought to you by PathWise.io. PathWise is dedicated to helping you be the best professional you can be, providing a mix of career and leadership coaching, courses, content, and community. Basic membership is free, so visit PathWise and join today.

My guest is Anders Inset. Anders is the author of four Spiegel bestsellers, with his books translated into over ten languages. His latest book, The Viking Code: The Art and Science of Norwegian Success, was just published. His earlier book, The Quantum Economy: Saving the Mensch with Humanistic Capitalism, gained international acclaim, and his forthcoming book, The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI, is announced for early 2025. Thinkers50 considers Anders one of the most influential future thinkers in the fields of leadership and economy.

Our discussion will briefly cover Anders’ background, his books, The Viking Code: The Art and Science of Norwegian Success, and The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI, and a few of the other things that are keeping him busy professionally. Let’s get to it. Anders, welcome, and thank you so much for joining me on the show.

Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be with you.

A Journey From Norway To The World Of Business, Philosophy, And Sports

Let’s start with your background. Give our audience the Anders Inset origin story.

It’s a very diverse story. I was very interested in sports, have a background as an athlete, but also as an entrepreneur. I used to be a hardcore capitalist. I have always been very curious and interested in learning, and it took me down that path of trying to navigate into every section that caught my interest. It eventually led to me selling off my company and starting to write and think about the meta-topics of our time, the foundation of reality, but also very much in relation to business and technology and the practicality of how you can use philosophy as a thinking practice.

Pretty much for the last fifteen years, I’ve been doing a lot of writing, speaking at various conferences, and spending a lot of time thinking about the challenges of our time, being a thinker in my time, and then relating it back to some of these giants of the past, building upon their very foundational ways of thinking and looking at the world. That’s a short, fast-forward path to my origins. I’m a born Norwegian, grew up in Norway, Trondheim and Røros, later moved to Germany. I’ve spent the past 25 years in Germany and had a year and a half in Nebraska, with the Cornhuskers.

How did you pick Nebraska of all places?

It was part of an exchange student program during my senior high school year. I graduated from a small public high school in Benedict, Nebraska. It was one of those things that just felt natural to me, to try something different. That really felt different. I’m glad it was a very exciting year to do.

I grew up in Ohio, which would typically be viewed as part of the Midwest in the United States, but I feel like Ohio is like the light version of the Midwest. Nebraska is the full-on Midwest version.

100%. I can relate to that.

You mentioned being an athlete. You played handball competitively.

That’s funny. It’s always difficult when we talk about handball in the U.S. You envision something different. I thought it was referred to as team handball. I’ve been corrected by some journalists who say that it’s called Olympic handball, which probably sounds more sophisticated and relatable. I played team handball, Olympic handball, which is structured with two teams, like soccer. You run back and forth. You have a defense, similar to basketball, but you have a goal like in soccer.

Instead of kicking the ball, you throw it with your hand. You dribble like in basketball, play seven against seven with a goalie, and have a place that you run, similar to football. It’s a very fast-paced game, like ice hockey. It’s a mixture of many sports. It’s a very fun sport. It’s also a very authentic and honest sport because you have full-body contact, strategic, and a lot of dimensions to it. I’ve played it for many years.

It’s a sport that most Americans, at least those listening to this, will only know from the Olympics, if at all.

When I used to live in the States, handball was referred to as hitting a ball against a wall with your hand, something you typically do in prison. When I first said handball, people would ask, “Have you been in prison, Anders?” I’d say, “No, it’s something else.” Olympic handball is the best reference point you can make.

The Viking Code: The Art And Science Of Norwegian Success

You have a book that came out in October called The Viking Code: The Art and Science of Norwegian Success. Give us a brief overview.

I was writing a book about capitalism because I think capitalism and the economy are the foundation of a lot of the meta topics, be it climate, the geopolitical tension that we have, or even fighting poverty. I think capitalism is a mechanism for progress with technology. I’ve discovered, in a time where I noticed that a lot of people have become reactive and, instead of taking action and doing things, seem to be tired, depressed, sick, and trying to work less. It felt like it was a time where everything that people acted upon was driven from the outside.

All of a sudden, I discovered that my countrymen, the Norwegians, rose to the pinnacle of some of these larger sport disciplines around the world, be it tennis, golf, soccer, running, and all of these huge sports. A country with only 5.5 million people, the diversity of things, but also the number of athletes, was just insane. I wanted to understand, was there a magic recipe that they had unraveled or discovered? I called a good colleague of mine who’s been a trainer, a coach of many of these athletes. I said, “What are you guys doing?” We started to dig into that, best practices of high performance. I noticed a lot of the things that I was familiar with from sports. When I dug into that, I discovered what became the narrative of the book.

I discovered that a lot of young men were not only the best at their game, in individual sports, but they were also the most liked. They were popular, practiced teamwork and fair play. I said, “That’s amazing because it sounds like a contradiction, that you serve the common good and have individual success.” That became the storyline of the book, how can you build a high-performance culture rooted in values? That, to me, was a special narrative to play with, particularly in this time. The book was also a very easy read, given my heritage and those phenomena that I look into in the book.

The second part of it is how to define success. Most would say the gold medals, the shebam, the glory, the fame, the fortune would be success. But again, here I’m speaking from my own personal path, where many might have seen me as successful, as an athlete or as a businessman, but I didn’t feel success. Now, I would say I feel very successful because, to me, I get to wake up every morning and learn. The very definition of success is a big part of the book, where I define success as experienced progress, which brings back liveliness, vitality, or, in German, you would say lebendigkeit, this wonderful German word describing how to live an active life. That becomes the part of success that accumulates over time into finite results. Those were the two big topics that I play with in the book.

The Balance Between Community And Individual

There’s an underlying Norwegian cultural premise that is foundational to the book. I’ll let you pronounce the word for me, but describe it for us and how it relates to the idea of community and individual in some form of balance.

Probably many of your listeners would also know something about hygge, which became a global phenomenon as a book in Denmark, that liveliness of the Nordics. In Norway we have the word you’re referring to is dugnad. Dugnad, it’s like voluntary work without the work part. The path is here that we understand that we have to show up for everyone else and just support the community to stay together. Historically it was like that. Me growing up, I did all kinds of sport, biathlon, cross-country skiing, soccer, because if I didn’t show up for the other guys, they wouldn’t come to my practice. It was a very foundational thing that we have to do this together. We have an unwritten declaration of interdependence. I am because you are.

The magical part here is that, and we relate to that in sport, but it’s not so trivial to understand in business, but it serves the same way, is that if everyone around me are performing at a higher level, I get to play and practice at a higher level. If I serve the community, if I serve the collective, if I serve the team and uplift others, and I have an aspiration to grow as an individual, obviously I’m better off training at a higher level. It becomes a reinforcement learning model, if you like, where you serve the collective in order to grow as an individual. I play with that in Dugnad, a word in that sense.

There is a second part of a phenomenon in Norway that I play with the law of Jante, where we were kept grounded and we shouldn’t believe in ourselves in Norway. I grew up with that as an old exaggeration or a sarcastic exaggeration of Moses’ laws. You have that Ten Commandments of you should not believe in yourself, just saying that you should not think that you’re better than anyone else. We were conditioned to be a part of the collective. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that some of these individuals started to say, I’m good. I want to become the best in the world, which is obviously a narrative in the US, you have a driving force. That was something that also became a part of the book to tell that story on how the first wave of young people with self-trust, they edged a little bit on the ethics part.

Now we have had a generation of high performing athletes that have kept the cultural ethos or the foundation of the values. I think this is a fascinating thing to observe in a global scheme that you can have collectivism and individualism lived out to the max at the same time. I think it’s a very good model to look at in times where we should cherish progress and we should encourage people to be active, but we should also serve the common good. Those two cultural phenomenon plays a part with each chapter in the book.

Norway has some amazing success stories in terms of athletic success. As you say, for a relatively small country, you’re punching way above your weight class, was the expression we got. How do you feel these more recent Norwegian athletic success stories are striking that balance between thinking of the collective but also wanting individual recognition for themselves? I think that’s particularly true in sports that are more individually driven, like golf, tennis, or track and field, where it is very much about you individually. It’s not a team sport, so to speak.

I think that would be the old narrative. I think everyone would agree that the whole training path is a part of data, it’s perfection in all levels of the game. What you see in the book is that all of these young men have a mentor, a father, to have a healthy relationship. If you look at society, one of the big challenges is that young boys, young men, don’t have any friends. They don’t have deep conversations. They don’t trust themselves. They become insecure. They have to play around. They have a toxic masculinity to tap into.

There are many things that show that even an individual athlete is part of a collective, the runners around you, the whole setting, the fans, the communication, the partners, the sponsors, the trainers. There is a huge machinery, and you could argue that the team part is even more important, more crucial, for an individual because there is nowhere to hide. Everything around you, from nutrition to data management to all the things that you have to do, has to be maxed out. It’s a huge team effort.

We would always see the one individual getting the gold medal, but you could also argue that team play is even more important in individual sports because there’s nowhere to hide. In a good team, you could always duck or be part of a winning team without necessarily having everything maxed out. If you’re a runner, it’s just you, the shoes, and the track. If you don’t max out, you’re not going to win.

I think that is something. But also, what is interesting to look at here is how this type of culture or phenomenon relates to education, politics, and business. In more recent years, we have seen the same play out, the different leadership styles of Nordic companies, how politicians on the global stage take an example.

One example would be Jens Stoltenberg, the former chief of NATO, who is now the chief of the Munich Security Conference. He navigated that delicate balance of having Turkey, Sweden, and all these countries come together to sign agreements to take on new NATO states. He used that in his communication, where he talked about Turkey and only used the pronunciation of the country in their language, and the respect for the culture led him to gain entrance with a head of state, Erdogan. He had to navigate those personal interests.

You see that these types of leadership styles are also different from some of the leaders we see back on the plate in the U.S. You see that this is also a model that can serve progress and also lead to success, be it in business, education, or politics. I think there is more to it than just sports. I think there are many lessons to learn in individual sports, particularly about that team factor.

Applying Viking Resilience Principles To Modern Times

Some of the lessons that you mentioned, think about how Viking principles would apply to resilience. Obviously, the Vikings of old were living in very challenging times. They were navigating around the world. They had to survive for themselves as they were out at sea. How do those concepts of resilience apply in this world?

I don’t play a lot of that old barbarian Viking narrative in the book. It’s the modern Vikings. Still, there was the explorative part of it, the risk-taking. I take that back to the will to truth or the essence of learning in itself, or progress as a foundation of what it means to be a human being. You could imagine Thor standing at the shores of the coast of Norway, having built those innovative light boats that you could carry over the countryside, that were faster and could navigate the North Sea, and you stand there with an open boat in front of your team and saying, “Thor, where are we heading?” He’s like, “No idea. We thought the world was flat. I had no idea. When are we coming back?” It was like, “I don’t know.” They were like, “Are we coming back?” “I don’t know.” He’s like, “Great idea. Let’s go.” I think that leadership style and that curiosity ties back to also, obviously, a lot about resilience.

I think resilience, staying at it, is something that you can practice and train. You could have very authoritarian training styles and regimes where you could take young people, kids, and then maximize their practice just through discipline, and you would have them cry for 10 or 15 years, and all of a sudden, you would have them at the top of the Olympics saying, “I’ve been doing what I love my whole life.” There is that one leadership style in terms of getting that resilience. What I think is that if you can get a human being to be active in the sense of not reactive, but an intrinsically motivated action where you can experience that you have learned something, the willingness to progress or to tap into the unknown becomes a higher motivation than the pain of losing.

You will always get back up. You will always strive for the next step. I think that is a valuable lesson today in a society where we are fed all these tasks and things and comparison, and everything is driven by outside extrinsic validation and goals taken out of that agency. I think that also has a lot to do with the foundation of resilience.

Lessons From “The Viking Code” For Business And Personal Life

What are some of the other lessons that you would draw out from the book for our audience that are more applicable outside of the world of athletics, in business, or personal life, or whatever?

It’s important to anticipate future scenarios. We have no idea what kind of jobs there will be in ten years. Instead of specializing, becoming an expert, a resource of knowledge, we seek understanding. We seek the complexities and to understand problems at the deep level and try to improve them. That requires that we have a broad toolbox. When I say so, I would say we live in an era of generalists as a comparison to the expert era that we just came out of, because now we all have infinite free access to knowledge. Now, it’s about seeing different patterns and having a deeper understanding.

The broad interest, relating back to also how the youth and the athletes in young age in Norway are trained, they have a variety of sports. They don’t specialize until they’re like 15 or 16, maybe even, which gives them a very good foundation, the toolbox, so that you are more adaptable to new circumstances, regulated structures, changes in the game, and so on and so forth. That is very relatable to business and in the work environment. I think missions and goals are important, but I also write about being micro-ambitious. We have micro-ambitions where we set small steps that we could realize and experience as motivation. I would say everything in life is compound interest. It compounds into the outcome or the goal at the end, but it is that small incremental everyday quality input that will lead you there.

You could take building a Starbucks from scratch with the one cup at a time, where you can have an analogy to running the marathon, you have the long run, but it’s the quality of the next step that determines the outcome of the process. The quality of input as experience, “This was a good step, this was a good step.” Here, I learned a new step that is faster, and that, over time, accumulates into results. Micro-ambitions are something that I write about. Maybe to take a third one, I think in this world, the topic of trust is very important. We have lost trust in institutions, we have lost trust in the future, we have lost trust in each other.

In order to change that, I think it’s important that we teach young people to trust themselves, to have self-confidence and have a strong belief in oneself, not at the cost of others, like hierarchical dominance type of thing, because these overplay, to me, is very often overplayed insecurity. I want to have a secure young person that stands solid and can open up to vulnerabilities and feelings because they trust themselves.

If you trust yourself, then you put yourself in a position to trust others. Trust and vulnerability are the birthplace of progress and change because if you have that, you can have different opinions, you can discuss things. If we have trust and friction and come together, something new can emerge. I think that is very important that we equip young people with self-trust and self-love in order to trust and love others.

Surprising Reactions Following “The Viking Code” Release

I would imagine you write these books as a way of almost starting a discussion on a particular topic. This book’s been out for not even two months yet. Relatively new to the market. What’s surprised you in terms of some of the reactions and discussion threads that have started as a result of the book and your travels since it’s been out?

I could say that it surprised me, but I had an intuition that this is a deeper philosophy that everyone, regardless of culture and heritage, can relate to. You see it in Asia, you see it in the US. You could always say there is a Norwegian or a Nordic model to it, but that’s not my intention. I could very well have written this book without Vikings and the Norwegian flag because I think it’s a base philosophy of what it means to be a human being and how we can live together. I had a deep feeling of this, but it surprised me also that it’s so relatable in every cultural part of the world with challenges that we cope with, with the ideologies, with populism, with division.

I think it’s a universal philosophy on how to live an active life, taking back the agency and also serving the common good. I think that is something that most human beings would relate to. That’s one takeaway that I have. Also, as I said before, particularly the second part of the book that taps into the practicality and how it can be applied to business, politics, and education, that that also seems to be a model that a lot of organizations are now looking into, and how leaders can facilitate such environments for people to grow in a world where you could hop around and you’ve been set at home to work from home office and go from Zoom to zombie and getting back people to get into something where you can build something bigger than the sum of its part, a team.

That is something that I also think, not a big surprise, but still, that it holds true for so many, that this is something that seems to be very relatable for people, what they want to achieve. What we do is something else. We optimize, we maximize, but at least from the foundation, it seems to be something that most people would like to do.

We are tribal by nature. It was a survival instinct for our species, like it is for many. Yet, at the same time, we do celebrate individual success. I think the balance of those two differs across different countries. It feels like, in general, we’re feeling a bit of a retreat to not upsetting the collective. This element of populism that’s found its spread around the world is, in part driven by a sense of what is our society look like and who are you coming into it, particularly as it relates to refugees and migrants and the immigration challenges that many countries have talked about.

I would imagine that’s why it feels probably particularly topical. At the same time, you’ve got the social media phenomenon, which is about me. As you said earlier, very extrinsically oriented in terms of the reward system. It’s just interesting to watch how all of this plays out. That was one of the things certainly that crossed my mind as I was reading the book.

I’m happy to hear that, but I think coming back to your social media analogy, it seems that we have started to communicate like that. The reward system was not the social part of the social media. It was the media part of the social media. When I say that, I mean that we have created a mechanism for reaction and not for reflection. It’s a thumbs up, thumbs down society. It doesn’t matter if it’s thumbs up or thumbs down, as long as there’s a reaction. A quick reaction gives you likes, shares, economy, headlines, views, whatever. That is the economical incentive, is to generate quick reactions. The content, the substance of the communication gets lost due to the fact that we do not have reflection.

This, again, divides us in a very binary way of seeing the world. We are held hostage to our own self-evident truths. We talk about balance. I always say that there is no balance. Nothing is in balance. There is no balance between individualism and collectivism. There is a continuous strive towards a dynamic equilibrium or towards balance. Regardless of where you are in life, there’s the path forward for progress, which means making things better, better problems, as I talked about before. There is no finitude of a balanced world or a set-in-stone answer. Even taking it back to the streets of Agora or Ancient Greece, the whole foundation of philosophy is built on progress, the strive towards wisdom.

It holds true now, even that when you play with knowledge, you have to know your assumptions because at the core of the universe and our perceived reality, no one has figured this thing out. It always builds on an assumption. We cannot know anything, but we can know something based on base assumptions. Therefore, we live in a very dynamical state of being. This is where Eastern philosophy, the path, the dynamism of life, is the essence. If you talk about the homeostasis, a static system, it’s basically a dead system. Since we are, it feels like at least, a lively system, a vital system, or lebendig, as I would say in German, it’s always about dynamism, and it’s never in balance.

It’s always a strive towards dynamic equilibrium. I think if you get that essence, you would see life as a journey and not as a finitude of who I am or what I am or arriving somewhere, but more so like a wonderful journey to nowhere, where we fill our life with substance in order to live a fulfilled life. That’s very much my philosophy of looking at how to live an active, dynamic, and fulfilling life.

It comes back a little bit to what you said earlier on in the conversation about being happy for yourself, as opposed to having a view of how others would view your level of success, as you described it.

The funny thing with happiness is that, see, I don’t think you can make yourself happy. Happiness strikes upon you. It’s not like suddenly you feel happy, it’s not like you could write down a plan for that, but what you can do is make yourself less unhappy. Instead of seeing life as a finitude of reaching final goals and thinking you have arrived somewhere, that this is you, you can get it. What is not you? I always use the example of Michelangelo’s statue of David. So, he was famously asked, “How did you create this masterpiece?” He didn’t give the recipe. He said that, “I just cut away or cut out everything that was not David.” This is the way of life, to say that. Is there a thing that you can write down that disturbs you or distracts you or you don’t like, or you want to get rid of, or sucks out your energy? Can you remove one thing in your life today?

If you think, slice that over time, you will free up that space to put yourself in a position to be struck by something called happiness. If you’re walking around like a philosophical zombie and you’re not tuned in, you will not see the wonders of life. You will not see the magic. You will not feel the happiness, and therefore I think a lot of these strives towards maximizing optimization and having absolute answers to some questions. Many people would live a much lighter life and also experience more happiness if they turned it around and thin-sliced it and said, “What can I leave out?” I think this is something also that is very important in this time, where there’s so many things going on.

Understanding The Quantum Economy: How It Differs From Traditional Economics

Let’s talk about the quantum economy. I know you write and speak about that topic as well. Can you give our audience a basic definition of what you mean by that quantum economy and how it differs from traditional economic principles?

Sure. When I wrote the The Quantum Economy: Saving the Mensch with Humanistic Capitalism back in 2018 or 2019, first, I had an intuition about playing with quantum mechanics. I was interested in the theory. I’m not a physicist. I’m not a mathematician to that extent, but I had some overall understanding of that you can understand quantum physics. What could we do with it? I see it as a philosophy, and when I say so, I see it as this dynamism that I just talked about. I looked at capitalism and the economy as the operating system of our society.

Whereas people start talking about NGOs, impact investments, sustainability, and all of these words that were outside some kind of ideological view of how we could do things better, or even to tear down capitalism altogether, I talked about how we could upgrade capitalism and make it a humane capitalism, not a humanistic one, because we don’t know what humanism is, but a more humane capitalism. I took back that dynamism of a coming capitalism that could have never been here.

We, as a collective, looked at various options, and I started to play with that and then add two views. One was the strict development of technology and exponential technologies into AGI and eventual quantum computers. There’s a component in it. That is very unleashing the potential of exponential technologies, and the other part is more the foundation of quantum theory, where I use analogies of different types of paths within quantum theory to relate that back to interactions and how we operate and potentialities, and collapse of the wave function, and entanglement, and these types of phenomena from quantum theory that you can apply to finance or even to transactions.

It’s borrowing from the thoughts and ideas in quantum physics and trying to apply some of these things to the real world. That was basically to have a new narrative for our operating system and upgraded capitalism, if you like, that I described under the borrowing of the word quantum to the economy.

How would you describe it as being different from the traditional ESG-related concepts, sustainability, and things like that, that people have been talking about over the past 5 or 10 years? Longer in your part of the world, the last 5 or 10 years, maybe more broadly?

I think taking back to understanding that finding an incentive for change and progress is much more valuable than restriction and limitation and regulation. It takes out the energy of a system. Nothing is sustainable. If you look at the universe as a whole, at large, it’s only about navigation and progress that could keep us going. If we take a static view of the system to say, “What could put us in a balanced state?” That would never work because nothing is in balance. Having these categories, they serve a purpose, but they’re not strong enough.

If you look at Greta Thunberg or Fridays for Future in Germany, I really admire their engagement, and it’s great to have the youth standing up, speaking up, but if you look at the impact of the movement as in comparison to a technology-driven capitalist that finds an incentive for a business model, if you could develop, and that is happening as we speak, business models that are built on top of free energy, where the marginal cost of the next kilowatt is literally zero, if you can tame the sun in storage and distribute, you would have free energy.

By doing so, you’ll be very competitive, a scalable model where you can make a lot of money. Everything becomes efficiency that is much better for the climate than trying to measure, regulate, and limit every company. Take a very practical example. If you look at the problem of the airline industry as a polluting industry, you’ll see that flying is bad for the climate. That would be a statement that you would relate to. What do you do? You punish, you have restrictions on ESG. You have carbon-capturing certificates. You have to buy that.

What happens with the airlines then and the manufacturers is that they have less money to invest in progress, but you punish an industry because you’re saying it’s bad to fly. I would argue, it’s great to travel in the air because, first of all, it’s much safer than on the street, where you have all the crazy people. It’s a lot easier to navigate in the air. Secondly, meeting in a physical space and having people travel around the world seems to be a success model for global peace. We have moved from huge wars. We have everything but a perfect world, but looking at 8 billion people, the world has never been much more peaceful than it is today.

Globalization and meeting in the physical space is a huge part of that. The problem is not flying, the problem is the technology with which we fly. That’s one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is, if you look at the market, people fly like crazy, even though the prices are rising. They just don’t post it on Instagram this often, maybe, but the airports are crowded. People seem to be driven, so we can’t get people out of traveling, and if you look at a continent such as Africa that is 1.5 billion people, it will grow towards 4 billion based on the simple truth that the kids today survive as in comparison to 50, 60, 70 years ago, where 4, 5, 6 out of 8 children died.

The population will grow, and the assumption is then that Europeans will not sit at the shores of France and drink Chardonnay and eat canapés and look at all them Africans drowning, swimming over to Europe. We will take care of and find a way that they will survive. Which follows is that you will have 400 or 500 million new people in the middle class, and they will start to fly. After this long logic of problem description, the only reasonable thing to do is not to punish or limit it, but to innovate and invest in future technologies. The only sustainable power for humanity then would be to rapidly replace the terrible technologies that we are using, which seems contradictory to all these bureaucratic systems of reporting, measuring, and compensating.

There are huge organizations that are out to do good and make a lot of money and occupy a lot of people, but it doesn’t go into technological innovation. This is how I think about the world. I would like a green world. I won’t take on climate, but I think that progress with technology and capitalism is one of the big drivers. That being said, we have a lot of things to do in the field of education about values and how to live a healthy life and so on and so forth. The whole sustainability debate then becomes a debate about efficiency, having resources used efficiently, and that is something that we human beings like. We don’t like to own things, we don’t like inefficiency. We want things to work.

It’s a completely different way of looking at how to make what sustainable world would be. That is how many of the thinking concepts that I have in that book differ from these models, but again, there are good things with them, so on and so forth. These are things to spark change, but the bigger driver of change is finding an incentive for change. This is how human beings change behavior, not limit it, regulate it, or depress it, that’s not something that history has shown us that works. It’s very slow, and I’m at the other part of the spectrum, trying to find incentives for behavioral change.

Preview Of Upcoming Book And New Projects

You have another book coming out next spring?

Yes, first of all, a very long answer to a short, good question, but I had to go, so I hope you stand with me there. I’ve been writing with a quantum physicist friend of mine, shout out to Florian Neukirch, and we call it sci-PHI, science philosophy. We dance at the outskirts of mind and matter, and we have written a couple of papers on various topics, such as, are we living in a simulation, and what becomes of us? Something called the nexus anthology theory, but we have a book coming out together. We have finished it. It’s titled The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI. It’s found on SingularityParadox.com.

The book will be out in March, and it takes on the implications of artificial general intelligence and how we could build humanoid robots. Our argument is basically saying that once we hack biology and chemistry and all these things come together in the next 5 to 10 years, maybe it becomes crucial for saving humanity that we build artificial human intelligence or some controlled consciousness where we know that it’s different from what we human beings are, so that we still have something to hold on to and being a mentor, a human, but still create robots that behave in a humane way.

If we would say that the base condition of humanity is good, this is how we have got this far, it would be good to have robots behave in that way if that’s paired with ethical structures and comparison and have that base conscious experience or that base value system that we seem to have, that we are not born to kill each other, then maybe that’s a good idea. We play with those various paradoxes that will occur once we tap into those superintelligent entities.

The Future Of Humanity In The Age Of AI And Technology

This is a very timely topic. Jenna and I took the world by storm a couple of years ago when ChatGPT got unleashed on everybody, and it’s really new, and people have been writing about robots and things like that probably since the days of Isaac Asimov, but it does start to bring into question, where does the order exist between humanity and technology? What does being a human mean in the future when you’ve got all of these technologies around you? It’s a hard question for a lot of people to come to terms with.

A hundred percent. I’ve been writing about how to avoid the zombie apocalypse, and there are multiple dimensions to that. One is the reactive society that we live in, where we are not tuned in, we are not listening, we are not here. We are so busy with other things, all the way up to, we wire up our brain. We get to understand the structures of the brain, which is happening as we speak, and you take ten neurons and how they function, you take a hundred neurons, take a million neurons, take a billion neurons, you take 50 billion neurons, and the question is, if you remove or replace every cell and every atom, every neuron, in our body, is there a place where the lights go off? Is there a place where consciousness is a part of physicalism that is a part of computation that we could figure out how it functions?

Which means we are not distinguishable from robots, we are robots. If we’re something else, be it something spiritual, divine, or something outside of physicalism, if that is what we want to play with and there is something magical sauce or something magical about what it means to be a mensch, a human being. If that is true, then the question is, is there a place where the lights go off so we could have the same conversation, and the light seems to be on, but there is no observer, no experience, no qualia to experience this conversation?

I obviously cannot know if you are conscious, but no one can take away the feeling that I have about my own experience or how it feels like to talk to you. Again, a perfect humanoid would say the same thing, and you couldn’t distinguish. I think that very essence of the experience of your own experience, the subjective sensations, is something that’s very special to us, and is it special that it’s not replicable, or is it not possible to rebuild it in a machine? I don’t know, but I like to romanticize that, and I like to have that aspect of saying what it means to be a human being or a mensch is that we cannot answer what it means to be a human being because then progress is possible.

You refer to Asimov’s The Last Question. As long as there is one more question to be asked, meaning there is a questionnaire and there is a perception about the question, then the light seems to be on, and then it seems to be hope for humanity. That is something that, if you take the physicalistic journey and the computation all the way, it’s not given. It seems that we cannot replicate, and if you think everything is a part of physicalism, then eventually we’ll figure it out.

Again, we could build a Jameson and Anders, and they would be identical, so then we are robots, and then questions of simulation and computation obviously come up. All these arguments, if you think long and deeply about them, I always come to the conclusion that I like to romanticize and say that we are special and we are defined by the fact that we cannot really say what we are.

There’s certainly some truth in that at the same time, and there will come a point at which computers can calculate, consider, and do things faster, better than a human being can, and that threatens the very notion of humanity as being the pinnacle of what exists on the planet. I think that’s why all these dystopian movies, TV shows, and books have become so prominent in the last however many years, because these questions are being asked. Those are the questions that are still being asked, what’s the endgame here? What does it end up meaning for us?

Now, it’s not a philosophical pondering. It’s a practical, more in the realm of, do we want to build it? That’s the interesting part about this. If you look at good science fiction, it’s starting to get old. Being a science fiction writer now, it’s very difficult to come up with a future to envision, because in three years, when it’s out as a movie, it might be overdue. These fiction scenarios go back 10, 15, 20 years to AI movies.

What does it tell us? It tells us that the question in the future will not be about, “Is it possible?” but “What future is worth striving for?” If there are things that we do not want to automate, and I 100% agree with you, I would even argue one step further and say that AI now is better at most things already when it comes to the knowledgeable part of the world. If you can have the mechanisms and the biology behind building entities, there are not many things that AI will not be able to replace human beings at doing.

The anxiety is real. It’s legitimate, and it’s fully understandable, but I would like to say that as long as we have agency and the lights are on, and we can see these challenges and problems in the making on the horizon, you can compare it to cloning human beings or the nuclear bomb. Once we see it to that extent that it doesn’t feel right for humanity, it seems like we have had the capability in the past to get together and figure out a way to navigate. These are, without doubt, very interesting and fast times.

As I take it in under an hour, we’ve talked about the community versus the individual living an active life, technology, sustainability, quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence. I have a feeling your dinner conversations at home don’t start with, “Honey, how was your day?”

A lot of times, my daughter, my kids, and my wife are just doing many other things than talking about all the things that I said at my desk and invited and thought about.

I’m sure you’ve heard, “Dad’s getting all philosophical again.”

We have that when I have had a glass of wine, a glass of rum in the evening with our neighbors, and conversation guests coming over. I tend to find that social. I should look an hour or two later. They have to listen to me go on about all my thoughts at the later stage.

It’s good to have a curious mind, and clearly, you’ve had that for some time. I would imagine that’s probably why you went over to Nebraska and did the exchange student thing back when you were a teenager. It’s clearly carried you through the things that you’ve done since then.

That was a spark of this journey. I’m happy to confirm that, James.

What’s Next: Future Plans Beyond Book Releases

What else is ahead for you, other than continuing to publicize the current book and get ready for the new one?

To me, writing is thinking, it’s where I sort out my thoughts. Once I’ve finished with one book, people go on tour and do readings and all that kind of stuff. I start to write again. I think even with AI and all these things, to me, it’s to sort out my thoughts, and it puts things into structure. I really enjoy that. We’re adding a lot of content and things on my website at AndersIndset.com.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve been again picking up on my investments. It’s something I see philosophy as a thinking practice. In 2025, I’ll also be joining some of the leading tech companies in a more active role as a tech evangelist or a philosopher in that sense, to take my reflections and thoughts and see them brought to life. Those are things that I really like today. It’s always under the aspect of, how can we improve the state of humanity? How can you build positive progress?

All my investments go toward that, and I learned a very interesting investment strategy from a colleague in Norway, a very successful entrepreneur and investor. He invests on ROL, Return on Learning, and that up, and I like that, and that’s what I try to do. I try to engage with companies where I could use my network and support them in scaling. I look at these cases, I look at the human part of it, and I look at the technology and ask, “Can I learn something? Can I build relations? Can I help? Can I help them scale?” I like that very much, and I’ll be doing more of that in months and years.

I envy the portfolio of things that you are doing. It sounds like a great mix of things.

Thank you so much, James.

Thanks for doing this. It was a fascinating conversation. I know we just scratched the surface of the things that you’re thinking and writing about on a more regular basis, but hopefully, our audience will find it thought-provoking. It will come out early in 2025, which seems fitting in terms of time for this discussion to be put out as a podcast. Again, thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.

It was a great conversation. Thank you so much.

I want to thank Anders for joining me to discuss his book The Viking Code: The Art and Science of Norwegian Success, his writing, and thinking on the quantum economy, his new book The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI, and some of the other things that are keeping him busy professionally. As a reminder, our discussion was brought to you by Pathways.io. You can take control of your career and join our community today. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website, the Pathways newsletter, and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks.

Important Links

• James (J.R.) Lowry on LinkedIn
• PathWise on LinkedIn
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• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• AndersIndset
• Singularity Paradox
• The Last Question
• The Viking Code: The Art and Science of Norwegian Success
• The Quantum Economy: Saving the Mensch with Humanistic Capitalism
• The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI

About Anders Indset

Anders Indset is the author of four Spiegel bestsellers, with his books translated into over ten languages. His latest book, “The Viking Code – The Art and Science of Norwegian Success,” was published in the US on October 8th.

Anders is the founder of the investment and advisory firm Njordis and the Global Institute of Leadership & Technology (GILT), as well as the initiator of numerous projects such as the Quantum Economy Alliance.

His book “The Quantum Economy – Saving the Mensch with Humane Capitalism” gained international recognition, and his forthcoming “Singularity Paradox – Bridging Humanity and AI” is announced for early 2025.

Thinkers50 considers Anders one of the most influential future thinkers in the fields of leadership and economy.