Cracking the Viking Code of Leadership w/ Anders Indset

In this episode of Relationships at Work, host Russel Lolacher sits down with renowned business philosopher and bestselling author Anders Indset to unpack the leadership philosophy behind his book The Viking Code: The Art and Science of Norwegian Success.

Anders explores how the values rooted in Norwegian culture have shaped a new model of leadership—where individual excellence and collective support are not at odds, but essential partners. He discusses how self-trust, intrinsic motivation, and brutal honesty can transform workplace relationships and performance. Plus, we dive into the role of ego, the danger of over-optimization, and how to navigate the uncertain future of AI and leadership.

🔹 In this conversation:

• Why leaders must uplift others to elevate themselves
• How Erling Haaland demonstrates Viking Code values on the field
• The power of subtracting what drains us to build self-trust
• What it means to lead in the “infinite game”
• How technology and humanity must evolve—together

💬 “If I uplift others and I wanna be better… I will be rewarded.”

This episode challenges what we think we know about leadership—and inspires us to lead with more purpose, clarity, and connection.

And connect with me for more great content!

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Transcript

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Russel Lolacher: On the show today, we have Anders Inset and here is why he is awesome. He's a business philosopher and tech evangelist and author of five bestsellers, one of which the Viking Code, the Art and Science of Norwegian Success. We're gonna dig into today. I'll be asking him all about it, and he's the founder of the Investment and Advisory Firm.

I'm gonna butcher the names of these things, Anders Njords and the Global Institute of Leadership and Technology.

Anders Indset: Got Njordis. You gotta put that Njordis...

Russel Lolacher: Okay.

Anders Indset: Nordic touch like the Nordic touch. Right. That's good. No, you did a great job, sir.

Russel Lolacher: Lessons in Norwegian for Russel Lolacher today. He's also been recognized by Thinkers 50 as one of the most influential thinkers in leadership and business in the years to come. Welcome to the show, Anders.

Anders Indset: Russel, happy to be with you.

Russel Lolacher: Sir, I am curious about being more Viking can help us be better in our relationships at work and our leadership at work. But before we get into any of that, sir, is, I have the question I ask all of my guests, which is, what, sir is your best or worst employee experience?

Anders Indset: I like the, the experiences that are close. So I had an experience last night that counts as a very nice experience. So I was, I was in an execution mode. I'm back to my investments, getting my team up on all the things that are going on. And there were small things that I was not happy with and one of my employees came back and said to me like I don't feel that I'm doing anything right, right now.

And was kind of, sucked into that energy of me just trying to get everything figured out in one day. And that was to me like a, a first touch of negativity. And then afterwards I like said, you asked for responsibility, you wanna act up, you wanna do, you wanna push, you wanna grow, you wanna learn.

That's why I invest time in you and the person reflected, came back and was very inspired to continue and, and from what could have been a very negative experience, it turned into a very positive experience because I am, I'm a, a person that, I, I put, having done a lot of sport, sport and doing a lot of things, I put people under pressure also, even though I like, that long talks and everything, but... so I did that and I was going beyond and I was probably not being the best leader at that moment, but I got back to that, reflecting back to that, essence of saying, I'm doing this because you asked for responsibility and I want you to perform at a high level, but I also want you to learn and grow and, and have that freedom.

And the person came back, reflected, first pressed down, and came back, and it turned into very inspiring, now we're going to go after it. Now we're going to push for this. And we sat down, cleaned it up and everything. What I want to say with that is just, I like those, those current experiences that are fresh in mind and to me that was one of the, the positive things that I experience with people that even though it feels like you're in stress, and, and I think we should be honest about in any relationship. You can turn what first seems as a conflict and a negative experience into a positive learning, which basically at the end of the day, strengthen the relationship.

And to me that was one of the positive things. Because, it could take out for a private life as well, if it's a conflict with your wife or whatever. It's the same thing. If it's a conflict, there's a chance for a, for a growth in a strengthened relationship. So therefore, I would say yeah, last night was one of the positive experiences of, of my employee engagement, relationship experiences of, of current times.

Russel Lolacher: And, and, and appreciate you sharing that. And I would almost wrap that in more of a positive lens too. And I understand what you mean by it's being negative. 'cause somebody's challenged and they're trying to be better and they're not happy with what they're producing and so forth. But for them to be comfortable enough with you to be able to come to you, to go, I'm not at my best. I'm not doing how I need. There are so many employees that do not have that relationship with their leadership, where they're just gonna bottle it up. They're gonna put it in and go, I'm fine, I'm fine. They'll use the F word, I'm fine. And just power through and cause damage in the organization, damage to the culture, damage to themselves, take it home with them.

So I think even in the negativity of it, it's in an environment of positivity that you are able to address it. So I think that's a phenomenal example.

Anders Indset: No, a hundred percent. And I think, if you look at that, what very often happens is that people justify, they come up with some kind of explanation, which in their view is not an excuse. It's just an explanation. And if you can take the objectivity of, it's very much about the essence of not making it personal.

That's very difficult because it's taken personal. Right? So if you can get that relationship to say that that strip it, is it about A or B? You said B. It was A. So it, it's not, I'm not going to, talk about this next week. It's just about in the moment it's wrong. So we should say that it's wrong.

We screwed up, we did a error, whatever. And this type of communication, a brutal honesty. You could always, pack it into an inspiring way. A good example of this being obviously Ed Catmull of Pixar with plussing and positivity on, unleashing creativity. But life as we know is not perfect.

So there are conflicts and stress moments and taking out the personal aspect of it. That I think is very important because then you can reflect and say, okay, I messed up here, but that doesn't, it doesn't matter because my aspiration to go beyond, my aspiration to learn, to continue, is higher than the pain of screwing up.

And, and this is very much true in sport because we talk about, failure culture and we should, we embrace failures. No, we shouldn't. We should have embrace success and, and, and performance and the aspiration to grow should be higher than the pain of losing. Everyone that loses a game in sport. It's, it, it can hurt. Life is not perfect. And I think in today's romanticizing the kind of fluffy state of everything being okay or fine, as you said, right. Getting down to that brutal honesty without making it personal. I think that's a very important part in communication.

Russel Lolacher: And so I'm a communication... first off. I love that you brought up Creativity Inc. I think that's a phenomenal book that people should check out from the former founder of Pixar. The side of it though, that I find interesting is you talk about not making personal, but you are kind of having to put it in a, in a package of personal and, and bear with me here.

It's about being blunt and it's about getting to the point of what's the problem we're trying to fix together? What can we do to do that? But depending on the person who's coming to you and how personal the problem might be, we still have to wrap it in compassion and empathy, which is the personal, human side of things, even if what we're and how we're fixing it is more brutal and to the point. 'Cause not everybody takes that help the same way. There are people that need that sort of empathy and compassion as opposed to, and I know some neurodivergent people that were like, I don't want the fluffy stuff. Just get me right to the point. I need to move on to the next thing. I need it to be black and white. But from a diversity lens, there's also people that are like, no, I need you to hold my hand a little bit. I need you to walk me through this a little bit. So as much as I agree with you on the brutalness of it, there's still this surrounding of humanity and the relationship that matters.

Anders Indset: I agree with that and I think it's very important. It's just that on the stress and on situations there, there is not always time for that and I think it, you obviously you nurture and you grow and you, you set, you, you, you, you put in all that effort and you are there. If you ask someone, how are you doing today?

You're prepared to sit down and cry for three hours. If you, if you are honest about it, right. So I totally resonate with that. But, but it's, I think it's also important in a, in a relationship to have that, it's let, let's get to a common ground to stand on. If we are at crisis, if we're, it's not about how you're feeling, it's just get to a common ground that we can work on.

It's okay, it was a mistake. Right. This is, a, a base fact this get, because in today's world, and I'm, I'm see, I'm seeing, I'm talking to you in a very direct way here, because I'm, I'm also more in that, interpersonal, navigating. But in today's world where difficulties of finding a common ground to stand on seems to be an issue where we are very divided and trying to find a basic truth, I said, okay, it was red, wasn't it? Yes. Okay. Okay. Now finished. We're not, we finished with that. Let's work out from, where do we get from red to green? Right? But to have that basis to get that, that. Cut to the chase right away and then start to navigate the communication skill of compassion and empathy and, getting into the feelings.

So I think that is something that, going on a detour for hours to try to figure out the common ground is to get to the base truth and say, okay, this is where we start at. And now we could start to I listen to you, I listen to your feelings, whatever. But like that I think is cut to the cheese as fast as we can.

And then from there on work on that, strengthening relationship and looking into better future that it's, it's not that I hold that as an absolutism, it's just that I see it in today's world because of the complexity, because of the speed, because of the, the, the various things that are catching our attention and our reactive behavior. I think it's even more important to just scrap it and get to that, brutal, honest truth as soon as we can. And from there on we build.

Russel Lolacher: I am so interested in the, in the point of truth being a piece of this. To your point, we are much more divisive nowadays. We are much more black is white, up is down, so truth comes up a lot and maybe it doesn't affect the workplace as much. But I'm certainly curious about your thoughts on this is coming to a common truth, we can't seem to get to a common truth on anything nowadays. Your truth is suddenly different than my truth. So what are you recommending that leaders and relationships in the org in the workplace, how do you get to a common truth when the default seems to be my experience is my experience. I don't care what your experience is and that default to combativeness.

Anders Indset: No, that's a very good question. And I think that's one of the, the things that we are grappling with, the challenges of our time. And it's not so much about knowledge and truth because we have an almost infinite access to knowledge, but we are too lazy to validate. So it's more about the state of being in a world where the will to truth.

Basically saying, why am I in this game? Is it to prove you wrong and I'm right? Or is it to grow and learn? And I think this is a found, found, foundation that also has a lot to do with the way of life, how you live and if you're happy with things, and how you give purpose and fill your life with things that are intrinsically motivated.

So I think a AI potentially has to, it has a potential to teach us how to, to think or to, to, to, to teach us how to learn. And if you look at us, like from young kids as toddlers come through the world, they pretty much have an empty storage and they navigate and they're, they are constantly looking for foundations and progress.

And then we are trained to be something, to hold on to who am I and who are you? What's your stance? And then we get into that communication battle where we are rewarded for quick reactions. The whole social media is not social at all. It's built on thumbs up, thumbs up, thumbs down. It's a divisive society.

The only thing we care about is a reaction, and the reaction is an absolutism and I hold on to self evident truth and you to use. So I think it goes, how do we get out of it? What's your question? So that, I think it's a lot to do with education. Can we get into practical, philosophical thinking? Can we teach, interpersonal relationships, collaboration, co-creation? We used to have that prior to, to the pandemic where everyone showed up at the office and we had some base trust to an entity, namely the company that was working for, that is out the window. But we had that. And we had a place in the organization where we got to experience progress, sparking ideas, and working together.

It was a trillion dollar industry. It was called the coffee machine, right? So people coincidentally bumped into each other. So two things happened, we had trust because you were working for the same company and we had friction because you were coming at things from different opinions. So we started to talk and we had that dance, it sparked new project, it sort of, that conflict from last night or whatever.

And that was kind of sort of the, the training pitch if you like, where you could play out that dance of progress. And I think when the progress is gone, as a foundation of growth or learning, then we have a homeostasis, a static system, and that's a dead system. And we have navigated into that an optimization society where it's all about rights and wrong.

It doesn't mean a thing. What is the truth or what's the basis, as long as you have an opinion, everyone should have an opinion, but everything, and we don't have any understanding of what an opinion is. If you have an opinion of something that comes with a high responsibility. If you play with knowledge, you best know your assumptions because we are not, as we know at the foundation of reality, we are not standing on solid ground.

Russel Lolacher: I. I love the idea of bringing in the, the, the water cooler or the coffee machine as it were, because truthfully, leadership doesn't seem to be trained to be leaders anymore. It is. You fixed a problem or you know somebody, so we're gonna promote you. We're not gonna help you about, oh, employee retention and interpersonal skills? We don't teach that. We just, it's all focused on productivity, not the human part of getting to those goals. So having leaders be forced to have those interpersonal... because you run into everybody every day. You walk by them in their cubicle or their office and so forth. So you're almost being forced to learn in the field about how to interact with people and how not to interact with people.

And that seems to be been lost just even in the last five years. I'm not saying training has been good the last decade or two decades, but there was that forced. You like you were in school, like you were in college, like you were around other people. You had to learn a thing and that is not as pushed or obvious or defaulted to anymore.

And I think that's a big loss for the workplace, especially people going, but I wanna work from home. Yeah. I see the flexibility in that and I see the benefit of that, but also I see the, the, the failure we're providing the interpersonal skills.

Anders Indset: Yeah, but also the question then comes up, do you really want to work at home though? And and when I say that, I say that in a way of we need stability. It's like saying, you, you're doing sport and it say, I don't wanna go to practice today because it's raining or stuck in traffic. Have two hours to drive there.

But that structure takes out any decision making that could or, or any deviation to a continuum of progress. The structure in life, stability in life I think is important. And we say we want to stay at home, but if you look at a life where you, that you take the kids to kindergarten or to school they are crying in the morning, you are all stressed that you didn't want to agree what to put on.

You get back home and you said, whoa, I need a coffee. You open up your computer, there's YouTube, you get sucked into some kind of, video and it doesn't say, this could also interest you. It just said, next video. And all of a sudden, oh shoot, I have a Zoom session. You jump into that meeting, you are all worn out.

You're not connected, you didn't prepare. So you're listening and you sit to a zombie and listen to that. And you do that for three hours and then you go to school and pick up the kids. You come back, you, you have to do some emails because you have work at all and you are sucked out of energy. So we have a much more time.

And I think, you know what, when we're saying we wanna work from home, it's something that seems intuitive, but it's not necessarily what makes us happy or have an achievement part to it where we have a feeling of accomplishment. And also coming back to your point on the performance on the leadership part, and, and I could kind of, sort of here flow into the Viking Code, into the book where you know, one of the discoveries there was that we started out sports, and you see a lot of young men, particular have a very strong relationship to a mentor, a father, a leader, and they are doing individual sports.

So all of a sudden, my home country, Norway, 5.5 million people only are at the pinnacle of tennis, golf, soccer or running track and field and, and, and, and all of these huge, major sports. And I was like, yeah, well, how is this? What kind of magic sauce, what kind of magic training path? What, what is the optimization game here?

And then you realize when you start to write about and think about that, that they are not only the best at what they do, but they're also the most liked. So you have a hyper individualistic sport where they are winning gold medal but they are liked by competitors, by the team, by everyone around them.

And you understand that the part of the magic of rising to that finite result of winning comes out of their engagement into the collective. So the unification or maximization or the dance of individualism and collectivism. That was what I wrote about in the book, and that is basically saying how to build a high performance culture that is deeply rooted in value, where the quality of your input over time accumulates into a high quality output.

And the understanding that if everyone around you are better at their game, you practice at a higher level. And if you then have an aspiration to grow, you will grow higher because everyone around you are doing better. And this to understand and to accept in team sports today where everything is data driven and optimized to the outmost, that becomes the only factor where you can distinguish yourself from other teams. And I hold that to be true also for future organizations. That if you don't have a culture, if you cannot build something beyond the sum of its part, some magic to it, to dance into the unknown, you are always attacked by someone that is more efficient, have lower energy costs, have the same world class product, better processes, whatever. So I think there is a very, very valuable lesson to be learned here, moving from that domination game of power, of individualism into a dynamic dance of individualism and collectivism.

Russel Lolacher: Dugnad? I believe you. It's... yes. See, my Norwegian's gonna be so good by the end of this. Can I take a step back though? I wanna understand the Viking Code in, in the sense of just sort of, I wanna get into it a bit, but I'd like, I'm a big fan of definitions, so I'd like to sort of, sort of set the table here and get an understanding of how you would define the Viking Code. Is it a philosophy, is it a model? Is it a framework? Like how would you define it?

Anders Indset: No, no, that's good. Because I'm the complete opposite. I don't like solid, finite things. I like to dynamism. So I would, I would definitely say that's a philosophy. It's much broader than the book for leadership and business. In the first part it's about sports. And the second part we get into how it's applicable for education, politics, and obviously business.

And so it's it's a philosophy and, and, and in a sense of it tackles the what even German say Lebendigkeit, the vitality of life itself. So we are becoming more philosophical zombies reacting to impulses. Therefore, performers are acting or doing things becomes exhausting. That's why we need all kinds of sabbaticals and retreats, and four day weeks and whatever, because everything we do as a vitality in life are done at the premises of others, comparing to others likes, shares, tasks that has to be solved and so on and so forth. There is very little agency of acting and performing from an intrinsic motivation. So this is basically coming also from a personal career, having been a professional athlete, having lived a life as a hardcore capitalist building companies, I never felt success.

It was always about that next goal and just pushing, pushing, pushing. And for, from an outside perspective, many of us said, well, he's successful. This is success. It wasn't to the extent of, huge global corporations, but in a local sense it was probably successful, but I didn't feel it. And it wasn't until like I, I started to let go of that and, and understand the beauty of success in my definition, therefore, a philosophy, is that today I would consider myself highly successful to me. Because I get up every morning and I get to learn. I'm privileged that I can get to experience my own experience of progress. And therefore, if you understand that as a life philosophy, that everything in life is compound interest. And you have a high quality of input. It compounds into the output, and this is like running the marathon, you're not talking about the start and the goal. You are trying to put in the very best next step. And you do that a zillion times after each other, in a perfection or even optimization and you do that and you experience... that was a good step, that was a good step, that was a good step. You have those micro ambitions of coming to the progress that accumulates into a fast time or a result, and, and that is to me a very fun, fundamental. Way of thinking about life in today's world where we are constantly trying to chase some kind of finitude of things to achieve as in comparison to putting in the best effort into the input or experience.

So I think Viking Code's a philosophy. But, and, but, and it also unifies things that we would see as, contradictions, like individualism and collectivism. It redefines success in a way that makes personal and, and, and, and, and life lively. And it tackles, the, the journey of life, Lebendigkeit.

It's a business book for leaders. With influence from sport on how to perform, but it's also very much a, a philosophical book about how to live a life where you feel your life from intrinsic, motivated tasks in order to have a fulfilled life.

Russel Lolacher: It's I, I hear the push and the pull a bit in there too though, because on one side you're like, you're about the infinite game. But also we're talking about definitions of success, which, so we are talking about things that are a little more defined versus this continually putting into something where there's never an end to it.

The piece that I really liked... You were talking about the individualism versus the community. Now I'm guessing, I'm not gonna put words in your mouth. This is the problem we're trying to fix is the individualism, the capitalism or old world capitalism of I'm, I'm doing this, I'm gonna make as much money as possible, I need to do the next thing.

I'm never fulfilled because I'm always hungry for the next thing. Do we have to define success ourselves, or are we defining success as a community?

Anders Indset: No, I like that. I think that we're, we, we need some kind of declaration of interdependence, I am because you are, we can only do this dance and talk to each other, and it only makes a difference if there are listeners or if we have this talk. Right. Otherwise I can be sitting and talking to the wall so we have some kind of, relationship to other human beings per se.

And, I think, the part that we should understand about success is the moment we start to materialize it. And, and I've seen a lot of successful business people that has very little relation to how much money and how much thing they own. To me, owning stuff takes me away of the magic and the beauty.

I'm not saying that having a good travel and having all these experiences is okay, but we go there with our phones to manifest and to share and and with every to me time is the highest luxury. And as soon as I have a high level of assessment where I buy things, there are always things happening.

If you have 10 cars, there are constantly things that you break. If you have 14 houses and you rent out and you have, the more you own, the more you are sucked into that game of materializing for the sake of materialism. And, and I believe that, I believe that the definition of, the life as success, I'm not saying that money and, and, and things cannot make life easier to that extent, right? But it shouldn't be the sole definition of who you are, what you want to achieve. And I think that is also lessons, lessons that can be taught and also experienced. And if you don't have that self-trust, that self-confident to trust yourself, then you seek validation from the outside.

Then you seek and measure your own identity as a comparison to what you own and what you have. And by all due respect, I think, the only one who doesn't have a lot of comparisons at the moment in terms of fortune is Elon Musk, but everyone else below, they're living a crappy life then, so if that is, if that is how you define a fulfilled and successful life, so you have, one, one lucky monkey at the top, and then you have 8 billion crappy ones below. Coming back to Musk is obviously a genius in the things that you've done, but, but anyhow, I mean, if that is your definition, and I would argue that. Like for people at this top or pinnacle of fortune, of course they have an ego, but I don't see it as the sole purpose for their, for their passion to drive.

And I think if that is, and that holds to be true for very many people then, then you will have a misery. Then you will experience one time, one point that your foundation is taken away from you and then you're terrible off because you don't have a foundation that is also related to your inner life or your self interest.

Russel Lolacher: One of the first steps you take in the journey or explaining the philosophy of the Viking Code is getting into self-trust. And you sort of mentioned it there really quickly, and it does talk about confidence and it does talk about beliefs in our own decisions how we handle challenges, how we act in alignment with values and goals and so forth. So I know so many people that don't have self-trust, they don't have confidence. They're going into work, and I mean this at every level in the organization. They don't cultivate it because they're too busy. They're going to the next meeting. They have five seconds till the next meeting. They don't even have a bio break. Like they're moving too quickly that they even get to invest in themselves. So you, you prioritize this self-trust, but how do you start down that path of self-trust if you don't even give your time the, the luxury of, as said, time.

Anders Indset: First of all, I think it has a lot to do with your, your parents and your childhood teaching kids that in the early stage, it's very important. I think it's should be a part of any, family that your parents, equip their kids with a healthy trust to oneself. I think it should be a part of the schools.

All of this is very slow in terms of a transition. When it comes to like people in that rat race or that busy mode that you describe, I think we have understood to some extent that taking care of our chemical scum, as Stephen Hawking called it our body, to do exercise or to eat better, that that has some implications on our performance. What we have not really grasped is the phenomena of our minds and that we should maybe have, just as many exercises for the mind as we do for our body. When I say just having a thinking hour that you put in your calendar. We do nothing. You could take a white piece of paper and stare at it until the blood comes dripping out of your eyes, literally, right.

Just do nothing. Try to shut it off. You cannot, but you can train your mind. And the magic of that people that go down that path and get outta that reaction mode they experience these type of progress and changes in their life. And that is something that I think you have to do with discipline because never in history have you had more time than we have today. We have productively never worked less because we created all these tools. And at the same time we have filled our life with so many things that we seem so busy, but we don't get that we actually have much more time to, to, to tackle this. And then ever in, in human history. We have resources, technology, we have, we are wealthier than ever.

And that is something that it's, it's not something that can hit you, of course with some kind of sudden experience, but I think also you could train it. And what we do is that we constantly try to optimize and find the right answer and we feel worse off. That is why we're trying to answer life.

We're trying to figure out who we are and all that, and I always use the me metaphor to Michaelangelo and the statue of David. So when Michelangelo did David, they asked him like, how could you produce this masterpiece? How did you do it? And I said, that was very simple. I just cut out everything that was not David.

So it means, metaphorically speaking to life, instead of racing after all the things that you think you should do, you should take a pause and think about the things that you should not do. So we try to make ourself happy. We try to make us as successful, but actually it's the other way around.

We should make ourself less miserable and less, and that is, if you can understand that concept, you will see how much magic it is to it. So you said one thing that you could stop doing today. Can you write down three things? And you can look at, these are things that suck out energy, hold me back, or you make me feel miserable. And then, okay, yeah, I can write down three things. Take on one of those. And you do that, you think, slice that over time you put yourself in a position to be struck by something called happiness. You're open to experience, you're open to new things, so you take off that weight and you put yourself in a position where you can learn and experience as you compare to just react and function.

And I think that's where we get it. I wouldn't say wrong, but I think that is where potential is to switch out of that, trying to figure out in every situation the optimize, maximize answer. So we are running around trying to find the quickest perfect answer to the wrong question. Right? So that's like kind of, sort of the state of, of how we, or how I perceive how many people live today. And I think that's fixable.

Russel Lolacher: And I and I, I love that you're not talking about it being in the workplace. I think there's so many leaders that talk about it. It's performance. It starts at 8:00 AM and ends at 5:00 PM when really the heavy lifting in the work is the things that happen outside of that to prepare you to be a better leader, better employee, better colleague happens outside of the performance of it so you can be a better performer. So I, I love that you're talking about this philosophical side of thing of going, no, no, you need to approach it better. It's not when you're in it, it's how you spend all that time before you get to that point.

Anders Indset: Yeah, and also I think the whole notion of eight to five and, and not having that work part. First of all, nothing is in balance. It's always a strive towards dynamic equilibrium. So there, there's no, a, a arriving at a perfect equilibrium that would be a static state, a dead system.

And secondly there aren't many work, jobs, whatever left where you have a clear set of this is your way, click in and stamp out. It's just fluidity and, and why, if it's the concept of having holidays and taking 14 days off, it could be more stressful than any job if you plan and family.

And do you wanna go here? Do you wanna go there and you want that and yada, yada yada. So why do we commit to that? Even the concept of a weekend, it's a mental model in our heads, right? If I get enough exercise and I have enough time with my family during the week, there is no final recipe that I need to spend 48 hours Saturday and Sunday discussing in misery with my family just to be in the family.

It could just be as well as having a fluid seven days a week where you have enough hours for your relationship and your family and we're happy. And then, okay, if you're gonna work for a couple of hours on Saturday evening because the missus don't wanna go out, or the kids are asleep and she's tired, whatever, that's, that's, that's the world we live in. And holding onto these concepts of the past, they give us structural guidance for some things, but we, we shouldn't take them as a, a fundamental truth to the universe because they're only models that we human beings have come up with. And by all due respect, there have been models and understandings of the world of the past that was not that foundational. So we might just think about work as something that we do, and everyone can decide how much they do it and how they feel about it. And so I think, hold that aspect. That's, that's why you are, you're, the whole definition of being a leader, it's constantly in the making.

It's a part of your life. It's more of a life, life strive towards balance than a work-life structured finite balance.

Russel Lolacher: I find it interesting as well in the book, you talk about the micro, you talk about micro ambitions, but you also talk about the macro, which is the infinite player in the infinite game. How did those work together? They both make tons of sense, but we're talking about something that never ends, and yet you gotta do a bunch of little things every day.

Anders Indset: Yeah. No, no, that's right. No, that's, that's fascinating. And I mean, Simon Sinek has written about this, he caught that from the same book that I wrote many, many years. I read, I didn't write it. I wrote, I read it from a theology.

Russel Lolacher: Like you are very young to have written that.

Anders Indset: Yeah, yeah. No, no. A theologist that wrote it back in the eighties coming from theology, he wrote the Finite and Infinite Games, James P Carse. Very thin book.

And Simon Sinek put that in a beautiful way into thinking about business. I wrote a book back in 2018 where I started to play with that concept called the Quantum Economy. And the same thing applies. There are finite games that you play where there is a result, but they're not consequential to the sense of, absolutism.

So take a sport game, people play and there's a winner, there's a clear loser, and there are, thousands of thousands of people screaming. There's a concept, there are some kind of clear rules to, to relate to. Life and business is not like that. Companies come in. Some are huge companies, small companies, some measuring months and days and years, what have you.

There's a dynamism and the finite game is there to stabilize and to make things, achievable and measurable and tie them down to you would consent of some a certitude where there can be a reward, where there can be a result, where there can be a paycheck, where there can be something that checks in.

So that's, the optimization of the finite game is something that is very relevant. In the business world, optimizing for the finite game, it's very much about management, it's very much about technology. The efficiency game. Can I do more with less? That's basically understanding of innovation.

And then there is this infinite potential to come up with a better explanation of something. So we relate to the optimization of the given, which is in the finite results. And then there is the potential with the human being in relation to technology to tap into the unknown, to do things in a destructive disruptive way to make leaps or to change things, and it seems that, that we have an infinite capability to come up with better explanations of various things. And this infinite game, it's about also very much about the Eastern philosophical way of thinking at life. It's the way of being. It's not static, it's not, it's not a point of arrival. It's that, constantly strive towards progress. And I think that progress is very fundamental to human being. If you don't have progress, we will eventually lead to a static system, a homeostasis which to me is a dead system.

So a computational system where we know everything that would lead to us being replaced by something that is more efficient and better, that is not a state that we most likely do not want to go into. And therefore the infinite game is life itself. It's about the potential tapping into some kind of a dance between ambiguities.

I call it ambiguity tolerance plus, where you tackle the ambiguities, but you also tackle the unknown. So you have that uncertainty of progress and, and that is to me, something that is also very important for being alive or being a human being. And even though it seems at least still that there's some kind of finitude to life itself, that dance within it when we are alive, that is, of, of some borders and regulations and rules and static, but it also has a huge potential in the unknown.

And, and in the infinite game.

Russel Lolacher: All I hear is from what you're saying it, I, I love the idea of this, but I so see ego getting in the way of all of this, and you used the Elon Musk reference earlier, how do we move from ego, this such capitalism sense to more the Dugnad, the, the decentralized models, the idea of moving towards community.

Anders Indset: Yeah, so I think, the decentralized principle. And there are many things that I think will run into that. Be it, health or even finance or education that has boundless potential in the decentralization with new technologies. But still, even within the Dugnad of the collectivism, there is room for the individual.

So what we have, what we, what I, what I, what I observe at least, is that a lot of the times where we see people that are powerful and strong, where we take like this is a strong manager, it's very often overplayed insecurity. So it's good to have a strong ego, but you should live it out on the cost of others.

So having an aspiration to grow is fine. So you could take I don't know if you're familiar with Erling Holland, the striker of Manchester City, the best soccer player in the world. So there's a soccer player from Norway, came out of nowhere basically. He is like now the, the, the, the best goal scorer in, in, in the history of soccer. And he is still only 24.

Russel Lolacher: Side point. Thank you for saying soccer. I'm perfectly fine with football, but thank you. I appreciate that you even said that out loud, so thank you.

Anders Indset: American audience you often have to go there. And also because I love football myself, a life fan, to give a football. But anyhow, he is the only thing he does is to score goals, right? Someone can say that would be egocentric to always try to shoot, to shoot to south.

So what does he do? Last year, the season was closed. Now, they were about to win the league. It was at close race. They play at home and. Colleague in his team had scored two goals. So in soccer there is some, magic to scoring a so-called hat trick where you have three goals in the same game.

The German player Gundogan had scored two goals and he is like the best goal scorer. He is breaking all the records and there is a penalty. He always shoots the penalty, but he goes over and gives the ball to Gundogan because he said okay, you should get your hat trick, right? So the only thing that he's rewarded for is scoring goals.

Remember that, that's the only thing he's good at, but he gives the ball to Gundogan because he has that intrinsically value driven system of Norway that if I can make Gundogan even better, I would get three passes from him in the future, so I would score three goals in the future, either without thinking about that optimization, the thinking like that, that's how we act. But he acts out of a natural understanding that if I can uplift others, that's a good thing. He doesn't think about like the, the, the, that, okay, I'll get three goals back. But that is his consequence. And it's kind of sort of like a reinforcement learning model. Coming back to what I said earlier, that if I uplift others and I have, I wanna be better.

If my, all my team, co colleagues are better, they're happy, they're motivated, they play better passes, I will be rewarded. And to trust in that process and to trust in that type of of life, I think that's very important. So I, I think having a good ego is okay. We all do, or most of us. We can let go of the ego to some extent.

You can take, psychedelic trips or you go into spirituality or do all kinds of stuff to free yourself from, from, from that part of, of living. But I, I think that's okay. I have an ego. I like to, to have positive feedback and to have like people listening and talk and, and, and, and, and from... so I think that's okay, but you shouldn't play it out at the cost of others. And, and that's where it becomes, delicate dance or difficult, that, that people seek a balance, but it's never, in balance. So how can you, can, can you optimize or maximize collectivism at the same time leave room for a very, very strong strive towards individualism?

And, and that's very much what this book is about because this is an outcome of a cultural way of living that even my countrymen in Norway are not fully aware of how the, the children and the youth had a broad toolbox of various things that they did and how this is interrelated because now they're trying to build elite camps and to perfection and specialize and do all of that individual tailor making of the being.

And, and maybe that will, backfire. But last decade at least, it was a model of success. And I think there is something magical to this for the Global Society, I think it applies in every single region of the world.

Russel Lolacher: The book is fantastic at highlighting the importance of humanity when it comes to process and productivity and culture, but I have to ask as we start wrapping up the conversation about technology, because that is going way faster than... we can talk humanity, but then the next and, and next thing is AI, AI, AI. Or we need to do more process driven. Here's the technology that's gonna make us faster and better and faster and better. Money, money, money, money. How do we resist that need to go in that direction while still protecting our we still need to go in that way. There's no way we're gonna not go in that direction with technology. But how do we balance humanity with...

Anders Indset: Yeah, no, I, I'm taking an assumption that we'll not get bored of progress, which also is an option. Right. But I, I don't, I don't see it coming. So I, I, I would play with the other thing that you said. So I think when it comes to AI, I think there is much many things that we need to do in terms of regulation or that that is a very important field. Regulation, security is a big, big topic. I've just finished another book titled A Singularity Paradox, Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI. Where I, together with my quantum physicist friend Florian Neukart, we argue in what we call Sci-Phi, PHI science philosophy, that we need to create artificial human intelligence.

Meaning that we as a species need to merge with the almighty knowledge, the AGI, in order to have access to that and still relieve our biological consciousness that is different than an artificial consciousness would be, we don't know how and why, but it should be because you wanna remain a human being, a human entity.

Coming back to your question and, and, and what I think about this is that we need a much deeper understanding of the implications. And therefore the question in future will, will not be, if it's doable, if it's achievable, we're already at a point where you know, everything you could, could, could state, can be literally rebuild.

So everything we understand, we can build it, replicate it. We will hack biology, hack chemistry over the next 10 years. And then the question then remains, what kind of future is worth striving for? Just because we can, shouldn't mean we must do it. And I think this will only function if we understand possible implications upfront, which requires a lot of philosophical thinking, a lot of the smartest brands within technology coming together.

I think we will go there. We'll try. Unless we know in advance what the consequences would be, all the way up to emerging with technology taking every single neuron based until maybe somewhere our conscious experience get overwritten by so kind of program. So we would have the same conversation and the light seems to be on, but they're no one home to perceive them.

Narcissist from the Greek mythology, he stares into the water and there's a beautiful mirror of his fantastic appearance and the mirroring is there, but there is no narcissist who perceive that very experience. And I think that's a legitimate risk that we have. So I always encourage the last one that is stepping into the simulation to try to leave the lights on.

Russel Lolacher: I appreciate that immensely. I, I love the fact that we started very much in the past, but trying to understand what our future's gonna look like with respect to that past. So thank you very much, Anders, for, for being here. I could wrap it up with the last question I ask all of my guests, which is what's one simple action people can do right now, Anders, to improve their relationships at work?

Anders Indset: Yeah. I think getting into that, anticipating future dance so that we can talk about the future I think the leadership skill that we are not good at is to think about plausible future. What do you really think, Russel? Do you think technology will advance? What do you think will happen? That we get into that beyond the surface of just you swapping out words and buzzwords and highlights. Say, what do you think, you know? What happens if, do you think our cell phone will, get worse? Do you think the batteries will get worse? Do we go backwards or do we go is there progress and we'll see progress? What does that mean? So we get into that very, very intellectual discourse on what do we think will happen because out of that, we can take a conscious decision on how to act and we can get that into workplace to getting back into healthy dialogues and discussions.

Founded on what we think, really think, I think that would be very helpful because we don't wanna be bad. I think there is a very much good in, in, in human beings, and I believe, and I romanticize about that and, and so I think getting into that anticipated future mode. Maybe at the last point here...there was a professor from Sweden, Hans Rosling. He passed away way too early. He founded a Gapminder foundation. It's o online. His family is continuing it, and it's he talks about possiblism. So between the negativity of pessimism and the utopian optimist, there is a possibilist. And the possibilist understands the implications of things in the world.

Growth of population, how do you see technology advancing and so on and so forth. A fact-based discussion criteria on how as an enlightened being can talk to other people about things that seems to develop in a certain direction. And I think this is the first action task that we can do, try to, to anticipate future scenarios together.

What do you really think? And spend that time to think about what does it mean when Africa grow from 1.5 to 4 billion people, you know? What will happen then? What does it mean when energy costs might plunged in the next 10 years because we have so much solar after taking on that dance about what will happen with batteries and so on and so forth? All these consequences that are, that most people would come to the conclusion if they thought long about them. That I think is very healthy for each organization, not only to build relationship, but also to anticipate and build future business models.

Russel Lolacher: That is Anders Indset. He's a business philosopher, tech evangelist, author of five bestsellers, his latest being the Viking Code, the Art and Science of Norwegian Success, and he's got another one coming about singularity and AI and technology that we should really be paying attention to. Thank you so much for

Anders Indset: Thank you so much for having me, Russel.