Joanne Lockwood: Welcome to Inclusion Bites, your sanctuary
Joanne Lockwood: for bold conversations that spark change. I'm Joanne Lockwood,
Joanne Lockwood: your guide on this journey of exploration into the heart of
Joanne Lockwood: inclusion, belonging and societal transformation.
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Joanne Lockwood: So adjust your earbuds and settle in. It's time to
Joanne Lockwood: ignite the spark of inclusion with Inclusion Bites.
Joanne Lockwood: And today is episode 206 with the title
Joanne Lockwood: Creativity Loves Difference. And I have the absolute honour and
Joanne Lockwood: privilege to welcome Fredrick Harron. Fredrick is a global
Joanne Lockwood: creativity explorer and author who has spent two decades
Joanne Lockwood: uncovering how diverse cultures unlock human potential and
Joanne Lockwood: fuel innovation. When I asked Frederick to describe his superpower, he
Joanne Lockwood: said that it is seeing creativity as a global language that
Joanne Lockwood: thrives, where every perspective is genuinely
Joanne Lockwood: included. Hello, Frederic. Welcome to the show. Well,
Fredrik Haren: hello. I'm super excited for this conversation. Yes,
Joanne Lockwood: we met six, seven years ago at a Professional Speaking association conference
Joanne Lockwood: in the uk in Coventry or somewhere. Somewhere obscure like that?
Fredrik Haren: No, in Nottingham Forest. Nottingham. Nottingham Forest, that was it,
Joanne Lockwood: yes. I remember your keynote. It was absolutely inspiring. And you did a
Joanne Lockwood: deconstruction of a keynote you'd given to
Joanne Lockwood: a, I think a 2,000 seater audience. It was a awe inspiring. No, no,
Fredrik Haren: no, it was 400,000 people watching because it
Fredrik Haren: was cast, video cast around the world for 400,000 people. It was
Fredrik Haren: 10,000 people in the audience, but it was 400,000 people watching.
Joanne Lockwood: Wow, that's almost like broadcast TV, isn't it? That's
Joanne Lockwood: more than most news channels get. That's incredible. So when we first met, you
Joanne Lockwood: were based out in the Far east, in Singapore, and you
Joanne Lockwood: repatriated back to your home country of Sweden, is that right? Yeah, I spent.
Fredrik Haren: I moved to Asia in 2005 and I moved back
Fredrik Haren: during the pandemic. So I had about 20 years in Asia and
Fredrik Haren: now we're based in the archipelago of Sweden.
Joanne Lockwood: Beautiful. It's beautiful. I mean, the skies, the sun, the atmosphere.
Joanne Lockwood: It's a better experience, isn't it? It's a special. Archipelagos
Fredrik Haren: are not that common in the world, actually. So yes, it's a very special place.
Fredrik Haren: I love it. Yeah. And you actually own an island and that
Joanne Lockwood: must be even more special. I actually own two islands to be business.
Joanne Lockwood: Two islands, okay. Yes. I used to own three islands, but now I only own
Fredrik Haren: two. But it sounds very excessive for anyone except if you live in Sweden.
Fredrik Haren: It's a fun fact. Sweden has 25% of all the islands in the world.
Fredrik Haren: We have 265,000 islands in Sweden. So if you ever dream
Fredrik Haren: of owning an island, it's actually quite easy to get. While in Sweden it's not
Fredrik Haren: easy to get the ones I have because it's extremely close to this capital.
Fredrik Haren: It's actually part of the capital. If you dream of an island, you buy one
Fredrik Haren: in a far in lake somewhere in Sweden. Only 8% of the
Fredrik Haren: islands in Sweden are inhibited. So 92% have no one living on them.
Fredrik Haren: So please come and, you know, join me as an island owner.
Joanne Lockwood: So I'm guessing that creates its own problem around utilities, waste, water,
Joanne Lockwood: electric, Internet, those kind of things. We are off grid. I've been off grid
Fredrik Haren: since 1999. All our panels. I have my own
Fredrik Haren: fully, how do you say, confined.
Fredrik Haren: I like. Basically I turn my waste into compost. I make my own
Fredrik Haren: water. It's. It's super cool. Wow. So
Joanne Lockwood: you are planning for a future, a dystopian future where you need
Joanne Lockwood: to cut yourself off. I am very. If.
Fredrik Haren: If the shit hits the fan. We are more prepared than most. Definitely.
Fredrik Haren: Unfortunately, island is very small, so we can't grow all our food.
Fredrik Haren: Otherwise we're quite self resilient. Water and energy
Fredrik Haren: self producing. That makes you very like
Fredrik Haren: independent. I like to compare it to.
Joanne Lockwood: What. Do you call that? Organic, like organic milk. To make your own
Fredrik Haren: energy and make your own water, it's like drinking organic milk. It's like,
Fredrik Haren: it's organic energy. It's very fulfilling to make your own
Fredrik Haren: water and energy. It just makes me feel good and happy.
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, I mean, I would imagine. And this is just me thinking off the top
Joanne Lockwood: of my head here in this dystopian future where being off grid and being in
Joanne Lockwood: island living is important,
Joanne Lockwood: food is probably the easiest thing to come by. Whereas power, water,
Joanne Lockwood: lighting, safety is probably the hardest thing to
Joanne Lockwood: guarantee. And you're on an island, you could defend it.
Fredrik Haren: Definitely. We actually moved back during the pandemic. So
Fredrik Haren: if you live on an island, per definition you're in quarantine from the rest of
Fredrik Haren: the world. So Frederic, as you said, you're a
Joanne Lockwood: worked across. I don't know, you Said this bit says in the notes you worked
Joanne Lockwood: across 75 countries. I know you are a global professional speaker and you've worked in
Joanne Lockwood: the HR space for most of your career. So
Joanne Lockwood: when did you put that two and two together where you realised that
Joanne Lockwood: diversity is important, creativity, in fact, it's the
Joanne Lockwood: essential building block of it. Yeah, I was reflecting about that a bit when I
Fredrik Haren: know he's going to have this. I haven't really thought so much about the connection
Fredrik Haren: with diversity and creativity before. So I hope this will be a good conversation.
Fredrik Haren: Like you're going to get me to think out loud about things I normally haven't
Fredrik Haren: reflected on. So I kind of like that. I
Fredrik Haren: mean, from a broad philosophical point of view, creativity in
Fredrik Haren: itself is diversity. Right. If you think about it,
Fredrik Haren: because it's about doing things differently and differently in the meaning. Differently,
Fredrik Haren: meaning better. Right. There is this saying, when all think alike, no one
Fredrik Haren: thinks very much. Which I had as a quote in my first book and I
Fredrik Haren: just love that quote. It was one of my favourite quotes. So this idea that
Fredrik Haren: there are many, many different ways of doing things is. And then that is.
Fredrik Haren: And that is an advantage is to me what diversity is all about.
Fredrik Haren: That there's different ways of doing things. But you
Fredrik Haren: asked me what was the point? I have this one moment. Maybe one of the
Fredrik Haren: most decisive moments in my Life is In 2005,
Fredrik Haren: I left Sweden. I have a very successful career in Sweden. I was
Fredrik Haren: speaker of the Year in Sweden. Everything was going fine, but I guess it was
Fredrik Haren: a midlife crisis. I said, you know, there must be more to world
Fredrik Haren: to life than this. So I dropped everything I had in Sweden and I moved
Fredrik Haren: to China without knowing Chinese, without knowing the Chinese culture. And I became a speaker
Fredrik Haren: in China. But the moment happened a couple of weeks in because
Fredrik Haren: I didn't know a single person in Beijing. I was totally alone
Fredrik Haren: and I would go to. And I couldn't speak the language. I would go into
Fredrik Haren: a restaurant and I would order food and because I couldn't read the menu, I
Fredrik Haren: would just point at three things, hoping knowing that one of them I couldn't
Fredrik Haren: eat, but the other two I could eat and then I'll eat that. But when
Fredrik Haren: they served me the food they gave me because also they couldn't talk to me.
Fredrik Haren: They served me. They served the food and gave me a fork, a knife, a
Fredrik Haren: spoon, chopsticks and a Chinese spoon. And they gave me all of that
Fredrik Haren: because they didn't know how I wanted to eat it. And because I didn't know
Fredrik Haren: the dishes, I didn't know how to eat it. So for the first time in
Fredrik Haren: my life, I had no culture around me
Fredrik Haren: telling me how I was supposed to do something. So I
Fredrik Haren: decided how I wanted to eat this dish, no one else.
Fredrik Haren: And it's hard to describe. It was such a liberating
Fredrik Haren: feeling to not have this. This is how you do it,
Fredrik Haren: thing around it. And I felt so pure. I felt so
Fredrik Haren: myself. And I said, okay, so, Frederik, how do you think you want to eat
Fredrik Haren: this dish? And that's when I felt, I'm gonna be me.
Fredrik Haren: And I felt, if ever I hope everyone could have a
Fredrik Haren: moment like that and say, I just want to be me, and then you can
Fredrik Haren: go back into the culture again with that feeling. I had a very similar
Joanne Lockwood: experience. I worked in Zurich for a while, and my
Joanne Lockwood: German is minimalistic. And like you, I was eating out. Okay. I was with a
Joanne Lockwood: group of friends. I wasn't on my own. And we were probably quite lucky
Joanne Lockwood: that in Switzerland, most people speak a bit of English anyway.
Joanne Lockwood: But I was ordering off the menu and I had this,
Joanne Lockwood: you know, you could think about pork, chicken, beef, you know,
Joanne Lockwood: the main food animals, if you like. I remember ordering pork
Joanne Lockwood: and what I thought was pork, and in came this pig
Joanne Lockwood: trotter, complete with the trotter and the whole
Joanne Lockwood: bottom of the leg. I looked at it and thought, yeah, it's pork pick,
Joanne Lockwood: not as we know it. So I know exactly what I mean. You're ordering stuff
Joanne Lockwood: by what you think and guessing and pointing and think, now what do I do
Joanne Lockwood: with this? So I learned pretty quickly that chicken was probably safest.
Joanne Lockwood: Or veal. Yeah, yeah. I ate a lot of veal
Joanne Lockwood: and Zurich. But, yeah, no, that's fascinating. It's almost like we
Joanne Lockwood: hear this Storey about, how do you explain something to a Martian who has no
Joanne Lockwood: concept of anything to do with the Earth? How do you
Joanne Lockwood: explain something to somebody? And that must be a real novelty, not having
Joanne Lockwood: any connection to what you're ordering or what you're doing. Yeah. But the other part
Fredrik Haren: is also that the fact that maybe the way you think things should be done
Fredrik Haren: is wrong. So the other aspect of this was because I married a
Fredrik Haren: Filipina, so I'm from Sweden and she's from the Philippines, and we lived in
Fredrik Haren: Singapore and then we had kids. And then the question became,
Fredrik Haren: so how are we going to raise the kids? Because if I married a Swedish
Fredrik Haren: person and lived in Sweden, we would raise them Swedish. I mean, no discussion.
Fredrik Haren: But now we had to talk about it. Are we doing Swedish way or Filipino
Fredrik Haren: way? Because they are very different ways of raising children. For
Fredrik Haren: example, in Sweden, we do not hit our kids. I was never hit, not once
Fredrik Haren: by my parents. And we were the first country in the world to make it
Fredrik Haren: illegal to hit children. And in the Philippines it's technically illegal to hit
Fredrik Haren: kids, but almost everyone does it and my wife was beaten as a kid.
Fredrik Haren: So now we have children. Are we going to hit them or are we not
Fredrik Haren: going to hit them? Right. And now we have. We can't just say, let's do
Fredrik Haren: like we normally do. We have to argue for our point of view and we
Fredrik Haren: have to decide one of them. And in this case, we decided not to hit
Fredrik Haren: them. She was the first person in her family ever to not hit her children.
Fredrik Haren: On the other hand, in the Philippines they have respect for old people. In Sweden,
Fredrik Haren: we don't really have that. We've lost that. So we took the best from the
Fredrik Haren: Philippines. Now, the. The point here is that every little aspect of
Fredrik Haren: parenting, we had to question it and say, is this really the best way to
Fredrik Haren: do it or is there, apparently there's another way of doing it, or there's a
Fredrik Haren: third way of doing it, which is a Singaporean way. And when you start to
Fredrik Haren: think like that, you realise, wait a minute, there are hundreds and hundreds of different
Fredrik Haren: ways to raise a child and I should take the best of them. So it's
Fredrik Haren: another way of getting you to realise that what you think is the way to
Fredrik Haren: do it is not the one. It's such a liberating feeling when you get
Fredrik Haren: rid of that weight on your shoulder, saying, this is how things are supposed to
Fredrik Haren: be. Yeah, you see it in our modern connected
Joanne Lockwood: Facebook, social media world. Everyone has an opinion. So it's
Joanne Lockwood: very easy to crowdsource different views, isn't it? It's trying to
Joanne Lockwood: make sense of some of those views and also
Joanne Lockwood: being open to listening to those perspectives is the hard bit. Because we
Joanne Lockwood: all want to be right. We all want to have our own opinions, don't we?
Fredrik Haren: Yeah, exactly. No, it's very hard. To be able to change your
Fredrik Haren: opinion, I think is a sign of intelligence, actually. Or not
Joanne Lockwood: be wedded to it in the first place is the hard thing, isn't it? It's
Joanne Lockwood: being able to change it must mean you're open to it not being right in
Joanne Lockwood: the first place. But we get invested in being right a lot of the time.
Fredrik Haren: Yes. And that is, to me, that's curiosity.
Fredrik Haren: To be curious about other people, other ways
Fredrik Haren: there might be a curiosity is the one thing that gives you the
Fredrik Haren: open mindedness and then open mindedness give you the ability to change. So the key
Fredrik Haren: is actually curiosity. Yeah. We got a new
Joanne Lockwood: dog, a puppy, about three, four months ago. And it's taught me a
Joanne Lockwood: whole new perspective on parenting, leadership,
Joanne Lockwood: everything. Because you have to start with a rule. The puppy doesn't know any different.
Joanne Lockwood: The puppy is just a puppy. Yeah. So if it's doing something you don't want
Joanne Lockwood: it to do, it's because you haven't set the environment to
Joanne Lockwood: prevent the puppy doing something you didn't want it to do. It's an
Joanne Lockwood: excellent lesson in personal accountability and patience
Joanne Lockwood: and understanding that you go, yep, my fault.
Joanne Lockwood: Yep, my fault. You bit me. That was my fault.
Joanne Lockwood: And the puppy is never vindictive. So it's really
Joanne Lockwood: taught me a new dynamic on humans and how we interact with each other.
Joanne Lockwood: That, okay, I've now got to take personal accountability. What could I do differently
Joanne Lockwood: to influence this in a different way? Yeah. And I love that because
Fredrik Haren: you're not blaming the dog for biting. I mean, you're not blaming, but
Fredrik Haren: it's not. Blaming is not the right word. But you're taking accountability for.
Fredrik Haren: Yeah, what did I do? Because so that the dog bit me. I
Fredrik Haren: think that's a, a lot of times people should, should use that
Fredrik Haren: approach when they get annoyed at stuff. Yeah. And I, I can, I
Joanne Lockwood: know now that our puppy will become very wired, that you can tell their
Joanne Lockwood: brain is in that sort of reactive hyper mode. So I
Joanne Lockwood: know at that point there, she's going to bite, going to be jumpy, she's going
Joanne Lockwood: to be all over the place. So how do I de escalate her? And again,
Joanne Lockwood: it's about moving from the prefrontal cortex back here to the logical thinking.
Joanne Lockwood: So you calm her down. Don't try and interact with emotion until she's in the
Joanne Lockwood: right place. And it's typical human lessons. We talk about all the
Joanne Lockwood: time about our brains and how we have to connect with people.
Joanne Lockwood: She is definitely teaching me in a different plane. And I recommend anybody who's
Joanne Lockwood: listened to get a puppy if you want to understand human interactions
Joanne Lockwood: better. And also because they do not speak and we also have a
Fredrik Haren: dog. The whole idea of being able to read is a body language.
Fredrik Haren: It's all, it all. It's so much body language and energy.
Fredrik Haren: You have to learn how to sense energy. Yeah. And just be
Joanne Lockwood: aware. Please don't talk about, talk about my puppy for the
Joanne Lockwood: whole episode. But when she needs to do things, she wants
Joanne Lockwood: feeding, she wants water, she wants to go outside. She has a
Joanne Lockwood: way now of just sitting there looking at you and you go, and you've got
Joanne Lockwood: to pick up on that body language because if you wait for it to say,
Joanne Lockwood: tap you on the shoulder and say, oh, yeah, I need to go outside. She's
Joanne Lockwood: never, it's never going to happen. But she will, she now, she's now learned. So
Joanne Lockwood: it's, it's a fascinating lesson in just
Joanne Lockwood: connecting with a culture that you've got no common language on.
Fredrik Haren: Yeah, exactly. Which is the same kind of way when you travel to a country
Fredrik Haren: where you don't speak the language. You do the same thing, you need to observe
Fredrik Haren: the cues. But yeah, as I said earlier, the struggle here
Joanne Lockwood: is trying to get people to be open to that
Joanne Lockwood: opportunity to learn more and not want to bring their.
Joanne Lockwood: We see this, tourists go to a country and want to eat their local food
Joanne Lockwood: wherever they travel and it's. They're not willing to explore something, oh, I couldn't eat
Joanne Lockwood: octopus or I couldn't eat this or I couldn't eat that. Oh, and people
Joanne Lockwood: get really fixated on. They want to, they actually just want to, they want to
Joanne Lockwood: be somewhere else but with a micro part of home with them, don't they?
Fredrik Haren: Yeah, I mean, yeah, there are a lot of Chinese restaurants right next to the
Fredrik Haren: Eiffel Tower. Yes, yeah, yeah. And
Joanne Lockwood: I remember travelling with my parents in law and they're very much a traditional
Joanne Lockwood: English roast beef, Yorkshire pudding type family
Joanne Lockwood: and that's what they were looking for. So you miss out on all the culture
Joanne Lockwood: and the diverse foods and the opportunity to explore things. Yeah,
Fredrik Haren: some people are just like that. I have a friend who has a friend who,
Fredrik Haren: he hasn't tried any new food since he was 15. He said, When I was
Fredrik Haren: 15 I knew what food I liked and what I didn't like. And since then
Fredrik Haren: that's. He only eats the food that he had tried and liked before at the
Fredrik Haren: age of 15. So there you go missing out.
Joanne Lockwood: How does this really intersect then with the. We think about problem solving,
Joanne Lockwood: creativity. Where is this the foundation of those.
Fredrik Haren: That's why, I mean the curiosity is the antidote to, to
Fredrik Haren: this. Because then that's what you will say, oh, I wonder what this is. I
Fredrik Haren: wonder what it tastes like. Right. So if I. In Icelandic the
Fredrik Haren: word for curious is for witten, for means before.
Fredrik Haren: Witten means knowledge. So basically what they're saying is that the word
Fredrik Haren: curious means that which comes before knowledge. Right.
Fredrik Haren: So you need to be curious. If you want to expand your knowledge about the
Fredrik Haren: world, you first need to be curious. I think it's a very beautiful way of
Fredrik Haren: looking at curiosity. Yeah. But also they have. In Iceland, they
Fredrik Haren: have this beautiful word which I love. It's called heimskir. And
Fredrik Haren: heimskjr literally means moron or stupid person.
Fredrik Haren: And it's an old, old Viking word from like a thousand
Fredrik Haren: years ago. And if you were a Viking, you're supposed to sail south and steal
Fredrik Haren: as much as you could, you know, gold and silver and
Fredrik Haren: whatever. But more importantly, you're supposed to steal ideas. And
Fredrik Haren: you see, how do they farm in Denmark, how do they make weapons in
Fredrik Haren: Turkey and so on. And you take those ide and you bring it back to
Fredrik Haren: Iceland to your own farm. If you didn't do that,
Fredrik Haren: you were a heimscher. You were a moron. You're a stupid person. So this
Fredrik Haren: idea of leaving your home, and haim means home, it's the word for home.
Fredrik Haren: So basically the word etymology of the word is that
Fredrik Haren: the person who always stays at home becomes stupid. You need to leave. I
Fredrik Haren: think it's beautiful. I think it's great. I visited Iceland for
Joanne Lockwood: about a week back in the 90s, and I don't know if you've
Joanne Lockwood: obviously been there. We had this delicacy, this putrefied shark.
Fredrik Haren: Yes, I have that too. Isn't that the one that's ranked one of the most
Fredrik Haren: disgusting foods in the world? It is, yeah. You have to drink. You have to
Joanne Lockwood: drink, Brennan. When you're. When you're eating the shark, obviously the antidote, it's Brennovan. But
Joanne Lockwood: I remember them telling the storey. Cause we were. We were there with some. Look,
Joanne Lockwood: with some friends and they were telling the storey about this shark. Apparently
Joanne Lockwood: they catch these sharks by mistake, I thought. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah.
Joanne Lockwood: And then you have to. You strip the fat off and you bury the shark
Joanne Lockwood: for like six months or something. And then you hang it up for six months
Joanne Lockwood: before it's. Before it's edible. If you. If you don't bury it and you don't
Joanne Lockwood: hang it up, it's poisonous. There's too much urea or something in the fat.
Joanne Lockwood: I thought, how do you discover that? How do you know that six months is
Joanne Lockwood: the right amount of time to hang it and to bury it without killing you?
Fredrik Haren: Yeah. So you talk about the curiosity from an Icelandic point of view. And they
Joanne Lockwood: must. They must have done a lot of curious foresight thinking.
Fredrik Haren: Yeah. Or. Or just a chance someone, you know, someone buried it because.
Fredrik Haren: And then suddenly forgot about it. Say, hey, wait, we found this and you had
Fredrik Haren: nothing else to eat. And Then you had to eat that and you didn't. There
Fredrik Haren: is a. There's a beautiful. Because a lot of. I've also tried it. It's disgusting,
Fredrik Haren: I think. But there is a museum in
Fredrik Haren: Malm in the south of Sweden. It's called the Museum of
Fredrik Haren: Disgusting Foods, something like that. And you go in there
Fredrik Haren: and they have an exhibition of disgusting foods from all around the world. In
Fredrik Haren: Sweden, we have a fermented herring, which actually tastes even worse
Fredrik Haren: than the Iceland one. But I went there
Fredrik Haren: and the funny thing with this museum is they showed you can actually taste it.
Fredrik Haren: So they have a tasting menu so you can taste disgusting foods from around the
Fredrik Haren: world. Like tiny bits of it. You have like
Fredrik Haren: 20 different things. You get to try just a tiny bit of each.
Fredrik Haren: But when before, and I tried all of it before you start
Fredrik Haren: tasting, they tell you that we have chosen food that
Fredrik Haren: in some in the culture it comes from, it is considered a delicacy.
Fredrik Haren: They haven't chosen food that someone has created just to be
Fredrik Haren: disgusting. Somewhere in the world someone finds this yummy.
Fredrik Haren: And it was such a big change for me to try it because when
Fredrik Haren: I tried all of this different things, suddenly I could
Fredrik Haren: enjoy it because I said someone finds this
Fredrik Haren: yummy. So let's assume it is. And then it became much easier
Fredrik Haren: to eat versus, oh, you have to try this disgusting thing from the Philippines.
Fredrik Haren: No, it's not. It's. This is a delicacy in the Philippines. But we find it
Fredrik Haren: weird. I once saw a map of eating horse and in
Fredrik Haren: which countries eating horse is a delicacy, in which countries eating horse
Fredrik Haren: is considered, you know, weird. And it's just. It's
Fredrik Haren: just some humans have decided it's delicacy. Some people have decided it's
Fredrik Haren: weird. It's. It's strange how we decide these things. I guess it depends on how
Joanne Lockwood: hungry you are and how you feel natural. If someone says
Fredrik Haren: horse is a delicacy and you grow up with that, you're going to think it's
Fredrik Haren: a delicacy. Yeah, I've seen that. I've seen a chart where you
Joanne Lockwood: have all these animals in a row. And where do you draw the line?
Joanne Lockwood: Where what is food? What is. Peter? Yeah. Different
Joanne Lockwood: cultures will draw that line in different places. You know, a rabbit. Yeah. A
Joanne Lockwood: mouse, A rat. A horse, a cow.
Joanne Lockwood: So what's the difference between a horse and a cow? They're both large
Joanne Lockwood: animals and they're both edible. We decided the horse isn't. Cow is.
Fredrik Haren: But then you have all the other. You have vegetarian, pescatarian and all these other
Fredrik Haren: versions also within the country of or you have religious reasons for why you can't
Fredrik Haren: eat something or not eat something. And it's all good. Like I have, I have.
Fredrik Haren: My version of this is there's only two people in the world who do. Who
Fredrik Haren: is what I am. I'm an eatarian only
Fredrik Haren: me and my daughter. So what does an eatarian mean? It means I
Fredrik Haren: only eat meat. I eat meat, but I only eat meat
Fredrik Haren: from animals who kill. I don't eat vegetarian,
Fredrik Haren: non violent animals. So, for example, I can eat the lion because
Fredrik Haren: the lion eats the zebra, but I cannot eat the zebra because the zebra doesn't
Fredrik Haren: kill anyone, it just eats grass. So why.
Fredrik Haren: The moral logic here is why should I kill something that doesn't
Fredrik Haren: kill anything? But if something kills, I can also kill it. So
Fredrik Haren: I can eat most fishes and most seafood and I can
Fredrik Haren: basically cannot eat horse, cow, lamb, goat,
Fredrik Haren: a few of those. So dog, cat, absolutely fine.
Joanne Lockwood: Because they kill and eat. I can eat dog and cat. I don't. I tried
Fredrik Haren: dog once in North Korea, but I don't eat cat. I mean, it means I
Fredrik Haren: can't. I could eat someone. Some people usually say, oh, so you can eat human?
Fredrik Haren: I say I could eat human. I don't want. For other reasons. I don't eat
Fredrik Haren: humans, but I can't technically eat a vegetarian or
Fredrik Haren: vegan. Yeah, that's right. So I've got to become vegetarian. So
Joanne Lockwood: I'm safe in Frederick's company. It's not about I have to eat animals who kill.
Fredrik Haren: I'm saying I'm not going to eat animals who doesn't kill. That's the rule. Yeah,
Joanne Lockwood: yeah, I've had, I've had crocodile in. I think it's in Australia. I had crocodile
Joanne Lockwood: over there. Yeah, I've, I've had that too. It's. And the
Fredrik Haren: crocodile definitely kills. Yeah, that's. That's
Joanne Lockwood: really interesting. Yeah, I suppose I like the fact. That I'm the only one, but
Fredrik Haren: then my daughter copied me, so now we're two. I like because it means I
Fredrik Haren: made up the rule for what I can and cannot eat. No, I didn't follow
Fredrik Haren: a book or a scripture or, or a cultural rule or something.
Fredrik Haren: I made up my very, very own. So most of the time you're,
Joanne Lockwood: you would call yourself vegetarian. That, that has meat from a
Joanne Lockwood: ethically sourced source in your book. Sorry, sorry, I
Fredrik Haren: didn't hear you. Generally, you're generally a vegetarian, but you also
Joanne Lockwood: eat fish? No, I eat chicken and I eat pork and I eat
Fredrik Haren: fish and I, I Meet most animals, actually. I mean, the whole idea is that
Fredrik Haren: most animals kill. If you look at nature. Chickens are
Joanne Lockwood: carnivorous, Are they? Or they. They kill other things, don't they? They eat worms.
Joanne Lockwood: Okay, all right, so worm. Okay, that's good point. Yeah. Okay. Yeah,
Joanne Lockwood: yeah. Okay. Pickling worms. Yeah. Any kind of as. As long as
Fredrik Haren: the animal eats another animal, it kills. And if that animal kills
Fredrik Haren: it should be fine with me killing it. That's the logic. Okay, yeah.
Joanne Lockwood: Pigs will eat anything as well, won't they? They'll. They will. They will. They will.
Fredrik Haren: Yeah. They will definitely kill to eat, but they often. They also eat.
Fredrik Haren: They eat all kind. They basically eat everything. Yeah, yeah,
Joanne Lockwood: yeah. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. There's a logic. Whereas a horse and a cow.
Joanne Lockwood: Horse and a cow are generally only killed by mistake. Eating a worm while they're
Joanne Lockwood: eating the grass. Yeah. I can also eat. I could eat a non. I can
Fredrik Haren: eat a vegetarian animal by mistake, which happens sometimes. Someone gives me a
Fredrik Haren: soup and I say, is this. This cow or pork? And they say, it's pork.
Fredrik Haren: And then later I find out it's beef. I don't feel bad about it. I
Fredrik Haren: ate it by mistake. I can eat anything by mistake. Anyone can eat something by
Fredrik Haren: mistake. That's the difference. But to properly say I'm going to kill to eat you,
Fredrik Haren: that's a very different mentality. And I like to have the
Fredrik Haren: peaceful mentality of not eating those peaceful animals.
Fredrik Haren: It gives me a lot of karma. Yeah. I think it's a great.
Joanne Lockwood: It's a great rule set. I think it's brilliant. But I like it mostly
Fredrik Haren: because it's a rule set I made up. No one told me that this is
Fredrik Haren: how you're supposed to eat. I made up my rules and then I follow that.
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah. You see, my natural thinking would be that vegetarian side of animals,
Joanne Lockwood: the meat is healthier. But that's
Joanne Lockwood: my belief. I have no fact to prove that, right or wrong. But I guess
Joanne Lockwood: with so much factory farming these days, what is. What is a health. What is
Joanne Lockwood: a healthy animal these days? It's so many chemicals. Yeah. But I
Joanne Lockwood: come back to this topic here. How do we persuade people, though, to
Joanne Lockwood: open their minds up? Because, you know, we've had this conversation, this has been some
Joanne Lockwood: fascinating sort of insights as to thinking differently and
Joanne Lockwood: coming in their own rule sets. How do we get people to step back
Joanne Lockwood: out of their beliefs into this world where they can start to be
Joanne Lockwood: creative or in the Icelandic way, thinking about things in
Joanne Lockwood: advance? Because we think about cultural intelligence. One of the first
Joanne Lockwood: steps of cultural Intelligence is having the drive to want to find out more. If
Joanne Lockwood: you don't care, you don't want to find out more, then you're never going to
Joanne Lockwood: step forward and move into that learning space. I think it's a good
Fredrik Haren: question, but I think the answer is to better understand yourself. Because
Fredrik Haren: the more you understand yourself, the more you then make up your own
Fredrik Haren: ways of looking at the world. And if you do that, per definition, you will
Fredrik Haren: be different. Right? You will be unique and you will do things your own way.
Fredrik Haren: I once, I was in Bhutan recently and I interviewed a
Fredrik Haren: guy in Bhutan, actually a former Minister of tourism,
Fredrik Haren: and he has. Because I wanted to understand how does. Let me move back because
Fredrik Haren: the sun is coming out. So half of my face is in. The sun is
Fredrik Haren: better, right? Yeah. So I was interviewing this minister of tourism in Bhutan because he's
Fredrik Haren: Buddhist. I wanted to understand how does he look at creativity. And
Fredrik Haren: he said, you people in the west, you think creativity is about expressing
Fredrik Haren: yourself. Like you want to understand, how can I express myself? That's the. How do
Fredrik Haren: you get people to express who they really are? And he said, it's the wrong.
Fredrik Haren: I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, but creativity is not about that. Creativity
Fredrik Haren: is primarily about understanding
Fredrik Haren: who you are. And I think this is really.
Joanne Lockwood: A. Very profound way of looking at creativity. Because if
Fredrik Haren: creativity is, I want to understand who I really am, and
Fredrik Haren: if people really did that and went deeper to understand who they really are
Fredrik Haren: at the core, then what they do express, what they do create,
Fredrik Haren: will be uniquely them. Right? And I
Fredrik Haren: actually help people find what I call their inner theme. I've helped over
Fredrik Haren: 400 people do this. Like the inner theme is like
Fredrik Haren: your core message that is in, within you.
Fredrik Haren: And I like to explain to people that an inner theme is a
Fredrik Haren: universal message that everyone needs to hear. So everyone in the world
Fredrik Haren: needs to hear this message, but only you can deliver it, which
Fredrik Haren: means it's a unique message only you can deliver.
Fredrik Haren: And if everyone found their inner theme, the message that
Fredrik Haren: only they can deliver, but it's important that everyone needs to hear,
Fredrik Haren: then, then that's what we should aim for. That's true of a lot
Joanne Lockwood: of things where it starts with yourself. You can't truly understand others until you
Joanne Lockwood: truly understand who you are, what your own person, what your values are, what
Joanne Lockwood: matters to you. And that allows us to step out of
Joanne Lockwood: judgement sometimes. Because if I understand who I am, I'd be less willing to judge
Joanne Lockwood: you for who you are, because I want people to respect me for
Joanne Lockwood: who I am. We Too often don't actually analyse what our
Joanne Lockwood: core values are, do we? Most people have no clue who they really are.
Fredrik Haren: Most people have not done the work. That's my experience. And the funny
Fredrik Haren: thing is, even speakers and authors who do this for a
Fredrik Haren: living, most of them don't really fully understand who they are. And I think a
Fredrik Haren: lot of this is actually because we never been taught. Like when we are
Fredrik Haren: children and we are going to learn, that's when we are
Fredrik Haren: developing our sense of who we really are. At that age we are put into
Fredrik Haren: school and everyone is more or less being taught the same thing. So we
Fredrik Haren: become more similar and we become less ourselves.
Fredrik Haren: I love to tell the storey of my mother because my mother used to be
Fredrik Haren: a normal regular teacher for, I don't know, 20 years, but then
Fredrik Haren: she reschooled herself and became a Montessori teacher and it
Fredrik Haren: totally changed the way she teaches. And I love
Fredrik Haren: a Montessori as a concept because it gets
Fredrik Haren: people, the children, to develop who they really are. So
Fredrik Haren: do you know how Montessori works? No, I've not heard that before. No, it's like
Fredrik Haren: this. Like a normal teacher says, today I want the children to learn to
Fredrik Haren: read. So now we're going to read. So it says to the class, okay, children,
Fredrik Haren: we are now going to read. And then everyone reads, right? Regardless if
Fredrik Haren: you want to read or not. That's fun. Today we are going to read
Fredrik Haren: Montessori teacher is like this, goes up to the child in the morning and says,
Fredrik Haren: what would you like to learn today and what would you like to do today?
Fredrik Haren: And the child says, I want to learn about dinosaur. I want to learn about
Fredrik Haren: dinosaurs. The teacher says, great, here's a book about dinosaurs. So
Fredrik Haren: now the kid is still learning to read, but now doing that from his internal
Fredrik Haren: drive. I want to learn about dinosaurs. If the
Fredrik Haren: teacher wants to learn, teach drawing, ask the kid, what do you want to do
Fredrik Haren: today? The teacher says, kid says, I want to learn about dinosaurs. The
Fredrik Haren: teacher says, well, here's a piece of paper, why don't you draw a dinosaur? So
Fredrik Haren: you're still teaching what you want to teach, but now you're doing it from the
Fredrik Haren: driver and then you go to the next and you do that with every child
Fredrik Haren: in the class. And one child is drawing dinosaur, one child is reading a book
Fredrik Haren: about dinosaurs. One person is making a, you know, origami version of
Fredrik Haren: a dinosaur. All are reading about dinosaurs, but they're doing it from their perspective of
Fredrik Haren: what they want to learn at the moment. And you see, you do that for
Fredrik Haren: nine years for the child. And out comes a thinking person who
Fredrik Haren: has learned a lot of things and more importantly, has learned a drive
Fredrik Haren: about who they really are and what they want to do. And now. So the
Fredrik Haren: class is full of people doing different things. That's diversity. If you ever, you
Fredrik Haren: know, that's the real meaning of diversity. But all learning about
Joanne Lockwood: dinosaurs? Well, no. All.
Fredrik Haren: If the teachers, let's say, want to have an art class, then
Fredrik Haren: everyone will be drawing, maybe, but they will be drawing whatever they're interested in if
Fredrik Haren: that's what the teacher wants to do. But many times they will have one person
Fredrik Haren: drawing, one person reading. They will do different things in class. And the teacher
Fredrik Haren: just goes, now the children are super happy. You don't need to force them to
Fredrik Haren: read a book. They wanted to read a book. So the teacher is much less
Fredrik Haren: relaxed and doesn't have to focus on making sure everyone reads. Everyone is doing
Fredrik Haren: exactly what they want, but the teacher is just making sure that whatever they want
Fredrik Haren: is also aligned with what they need to learn. That also plays into the
Joanne Lockwood: old adage that you haven't got
Joanne Lockwood: time to do things. You always find time to do things you want to do
Joanne Lockwood: or a priority in your life. Yes. If you're. If you're trying to eat that
Joanne Lockwood: frog, you're trying to do things you don't want to do, you've got to reframe
Joanne Lockwood: it and do it in a way that you. You enjoy doing it. So if
Joanne Lockwood: you don't want to clean the toilet, put some music on and dance while you're
Joanne Lockwood: cleaning the toilet. That will make it. Yeah, if you want to dance, you can
Joanne Lockwood: do that same time. So. Yeah, I get that completely. That's. Yeah, that
Joanne Lockwood: feeds into that. Yeah, I have a version of that. I hate to do invoicing.
Fredrik Haren: That's the one thing that I really hate. And nothing can make me make invoicing
Fredrik Haren: fun. Not even music or something. So the only thing I hate more than that
Fredrik Haren: is laundry. So I would go into the laundry, laundry room, and I sit in
Fredrik Haren: the laundry room and do laundry. Because now my body says, it could be worse.
Fredrik Haren: You could be doing laundry. But now you're just doing invoicing. So it's all about
Fredrik Haren: tricking your mind. I have a different way of looking at invoicing. I don't call
Joanne Lockwood: it invoicing. I call it printing money. That's a great approach for you. It wouldn't
Fredrik Haren: work for me because I don't care about money. Money doesn't drive me. Okay.
Fredrik Haren: Not that I don't need it. I mean, I like to make money, but it's
Fredrik Haren: not the driver for me. So I could postpone it forever, but
Fredrik Haren: I can see how that definitely is a better way of calling it than calling
Fredrik Haren: it invoicing. I don't think it was admin for me. It's
Joanne Lockwood: what's the objective. What you're trying to achieve with it is trying to. I like
Fredrik Haren: it. Paying for my shopping
Joanne Lockwood: or buying clothes. I have to do invoicing. It's a necessary
Joanne Lockwood: frustration. But you're right, I'm not a big invoicer either. That kind
Joanne Lockwood: of admin is tiresome. All kind of admin is tiresome. There should be as
Fredrik Haren: little admin as possible in the world. If you ask me what kills creativity most,
Fredrik Haren: I say administration. All kind of admin rules that kills
Fredrik Haren: creativity more than anything else because the creative soul doesn't like to do
Fredrik Haren: admin. But that's why I love AI, because I could be creative. And
Joanne Lockwood: the AI does a lot of the admin. It's wonderful.
Fredrik Haren: That's what we should use AI to. Not to make music and paintings. No,
Joanne Lockwood: I've started. In fact, what I do as a result of this podcast is
Joanne Lockwood: I feed the transcript into AI and get it to write a song
Joanne Lockwood: lyrics from the, from the, from the podcast. And then I take the
Joanne Lockwood: song lyrics and I put them into a platform called SUNO and I generate, I
Joanne Lockwood: generate a song from the podcast, which I've now got. I've started building up
Joanne Lockwood: a library now of podcast songs generated for the lyrics. And some
Joanne Lockwood: of them I listened to and they go, that's really good. And the lyrics are
Joanne Lockwood: really powerful. Yeah. And it was my father, father in law's funeral
Joanne Lockwood: last week and I, I took his eulogy, which
Joanne Lockwood: I wrote. Well, I say I wrote ChatGPT and I co created the
Joanne Lockwood: eulogy and I fed that into AI and said, like, write me a song.
Joanne Lockwood: And it wrote a song and I put that into SUNO and generated a legacy
Joanne Lockwood: sort of piece from the eulogy which I shared
Joanne Lockwood: with the family. And everyone's, oh, that's beautiful. And it's kind of another way of
Joanne Lockwood: taking one thing and using your
Joanne Lockwood: creativity or my ideation and a tool to generate something
Joanne Lockwood: else. But it's, it was my, I owned the thought process, the
Joanne Lockwood: creativity to do that, but not the admin of actually doing the work.
Fredrik Haren: Exactly. I. That's it. But that's. You could call it different from the admin. I
Fredrik Haren: think this is. A lot of people say, why no. Oh, it's so sad when
Fredrik Haren: People are not writing their own speeches at funerals, or
Fredrik Haren: why didn't you write your own song? But I am with you because the
Fredrik Haren: alternative would have been maybe a less powerful, strong
Fredrik Haren: or speech, or a much more stress writing the speech. At that
Fredrik Haren: time. No one says, no one says, when you take a camera, oh, all you
Fredrik Haren: did. People say, all you did was enter a prompt. No one says, all you
Fredrik Haren: did was press a button. When you took a picture on a photograph, that's all
Fredrik Haren: you do. Like, before a camera, you had to paint that picture by hand if
Fredrik Haren: you wanted to keep the memory. Now you just press a button. But that doesn't
Fredrik Haren: mean photography is not a creative art form. Of course it is.
Fredrik Haren: And you give a camera to a professional photographer, it gets a much more
Fredrik Haren: beautiful photo than if you give it to an amateur. But more importantly, both
Fredrik Haren: of us are not taking much more pictures, which is great. So, yeah,
Fredrik Haren: use AI for AI is an amazing creativity tool.
Fredrik Haren: If used right, it will kill your creativity. If used wrong.
Joanne Lockwood: Oh, yeah. A professional photographer will be looking at light. They'll be
Joanne Lockwood: studying the landscape, thinking, where do I stand? Where's the light
Joanne Lockwood: falling? What time of day do I need to take this? How do I crop
Joanne Lockwood: that? How do I frame it? What action, what expression do I want? When.
Joanne Lockwood: So you're thinking about the entire shot and then, as you say, click. And then
Joanne Lockwood: AI in the camera these days is doing a lot of the work for you
Joanne Lockwood: to tidy it up. But, yeah, I mean, photography more than anything
Fredrik Haren: is observing. Right. It's observing the world and seeing the picture that needs
Fredrik Haren: to be taken. Yeah. Like the infamous
Joanne Lockwood: Tiananmen Square picture from all those times ago for the tanks. It was
Joanne Lockwood: just that one person captured the entire mood of that
Joanne Lockwood: event with that one picture. Just become iconic. Yeah, yeah.
Fredrik Haren: I like to tell the storey I was interviewed, and he's not a photographer, he's
Fredrik Haren: an illustrator. But he says, I don't see myself as a painter, I see
Fredrik Haren: myself as an observer. I observe the world and then I
Fredrik Haren: paint what I see. The key here is observer. This key is not painting. The
Fredrik Haren: key is observing. And he asked me, he said, frederick, do you ever walk in
Fredrik Haren: the forest? I said, yes, of course I do. And then he said, okay. How
Fredrik Haren: often do you turn around? Do you walk in the forest? In nature?
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah. I take my dog, we walk through. It's not going to a forest, it's
Joanne Lockwood: a wood, a thick wood. How often do you turn around? Often, because my
Joanne Lockwood: puppy is sometimes behind me. But not generally. No. Yeah,
Fredrik Haren: good. So he's. I Said, what do you mean, how often do you turn around?
Fredrik Haren: And I said, I think I turn around if I hear a sound or something,
Fredrik Haren: like there's a reason. I said, how often do you turn around? He said, every
Fredrik Haren: 50 metres. Because when you walk through a forest or a wood
Fredrik Haren: and you turn around every 50 metres, you will see twice as much forest because
Fredrik Haren: every tree, every stone will look. You will see it from both sides, so you'll
Fredrik Haren: see twice as much. But more importantly, the animals can sense you
Fredrik Haren: way before you can sense them. Like a deer will sense you
Fredrik Haren: when you're like, I don't know, a bear can sense you two kilometres away. Right.
Fredrik Haren: But so they will hide when before you come, but after you pass, they
Fredrik Haren: know you have now passed, so they will come out. So you'll see much more
Fredrik Haren: animals if you turn around, which I think is a beautiful observation. So, but that,
Fredrik Haren: that is the work of an observer, that's you than a person who has
Fredrik Haren: made it a mission to observe the world.
Fredrik Haren: And after him, after he taught me that I'm trying to be a better observer.
Joanne Lockwood: I like that. I see far more of nature with a dog because
Joanne Lockwood: the dog flushes a lot of the wildlife out. You see more
Joanne Lockwood: squirrels and more things leaping around and darting for cover and the
Joanne Lockwood: dog reacts in advance. Okay, what's up there? What can you smell? What can you
Joanne Lockwood: see? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with you. I mean, walk in the
Fredrik Haren: forest without a dog and you see zero squirrels. Walk in a dog with a.
Fredrik Haren: Walk in the forest with a dog and you see 50 squirrels. Yeah,
Joanne Lockwood: exactly. And the dog wants all of them. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, our
Joanne Lockwood: puppy's only six months old and it remembers on our walk
Joanne Lockwood: exactly where the squirrels are like to appear. It's almost like with excitement going, right,
Joanne Lockwood: there's a squirrel going to be anywhere right now. Yeah. The next bit, not interested.
Joanne Lockwood: But this one little stretch, it knows exactly that squirrels are going to be there.
Fredrik Haren: We can learn from the animals to observe. Observe. Because the whole funny
Fredrik Haren: thing also when you observe, the ego goes away. Yeah.
Joanne Lockwood: So our world we live in today is, I believe it's
Joanne Lockwood: becoming a bit more divided. You know, we're fracture,
Joanne Lockwood: fracturing on and polarising on issues and we're
Joanne Lockwood: in a world where you have to be right, so you have to be wrong,
Joanne Lockwood: you have to be left, you have to be right, you have to be this,
Joanne Lockwood: you have to be that. It's. We're getting more and more polarised, rather more educated
Joanne Lockwood: about the, this diversity of thought. What's Been going wrong. I don't
Fredrik Haren: necessarily think that is wrong, actually. I
Fredrik Haren: think if. Yes, if you get polarised, it's wrong.
Fredrik Haren: But to have a diverse. Have a diverse.
Fredrik Haren: Have more diverse opinions being heard is not necessarily
Fredrik Haren: a bad thing. The problem is that people are. It's probably. It's not that people
Fredrik Haren: have different opinions or that more opinions are being heard or even that the
Fredrik Haren: opinions being heard are more extreme. The problem is that people are
Fredrik Haren: so stuck on not changing them that they are digging
Fredrik Haren: trenches and say, I don't want to hear what you're saying. I have made up
Fredrik Haren: my mind already. That's a bigger problem. Are we only hearing
Joanne Lockwood: from the loudest voices or the voices with money? Is
Joanne Lockwood: that also what's going on? That's a different problem. That is definitely
Fredrik Haren: a problem. I think that's a bigger problem that we. Then that's not getting
Fredrik Haren: enough attention. Definitely. That is a big. That is a big, big problem. And
Fredrik Haren: I don't know how that's going to be solved. And it's polarising us
Joanne Lockwood: into tribes, I think as well. Also, selling clicks, advertising revenue,
Joanne Lockwood: selling pain is easier to sell than
Joanne Lockwood: happiness, isn't it? Yeah. But I also think we are like.
Fredrik Haren: I was recently in Mongolia. Not recently. That was right before
Fredrik Haren: the pandemic. I was in Mongolia and I went and lived with the
Fredrik Haren: nomadic tribes of. Very exotic. But on the way back,
Fredrik Haren: I went to a tech startup and I met with like some
Fredrik Haren: web designers in Mongolia, I swear to God. And I also did that in Bhutan
Fredrik Haren: out of coincidence. And both in Bhutan and in
Fredrik Haren: Mongolia, I went in, you know, it's very exotic. And I open the door, I
Fredrik Haren: go inside and boom, I'm. I'm not in Bhutan anymore. I'm not in Mongolia.
Fredrik Haren: I'm in a web design bureau. And they look. They look just like they do
Fredrik Haren: in Stockholm or Berlin or New San Francisco.
Fredrik Haren: There's a little Star wars figure on top of the computer. It's a pool
Fredrik Haren: table, there's a Nike cap turned upside down. They're wearing. All wearing
Fredrik Haren: black. It's just the same. And then I go out and boom,
Fredrik Haren: I'm in Shangri La again. And I realised that
Fredrik Haren: These guys are 100% Bhutanese, but they're also 100%
Fredrik Haren: web designers. And they are surf. They are. When they have
Fredrik Haren: some free time, they join a Facebook group, which is web
Fredrik Haren: design. Facebook group. And now they sit and they talk with web designers, which makes
Fredrik Haren: them more similar to their profession than they are to their nation.
Fredrik Haren: Right. So. And I love that. I don't think this is a problem. I think
Fredrik Haren: it's amazing that we, as a humanity, I, like
Fredrik Haren: you and I, we are connecting because we are both doing similar things. We're
Fredrik Haren: trainers or coaches or speakers. So I have a lot of
Fredrik Haren: my speaker friends, I have hundreds of speaker friends all over the world. My
Fredrik Haren: Facebook feed, I think I have like 15, 20 different languages in my Facebook
Fredrik Haren: feed. Thank God they introduced translation. Yes.
Fredrik Haren: Now I'm. So I have a level of identity that is on a global
Fredrik Haren: level and I follow, like, if there's. Now there's fighting in Bangladesh and I see
Fredrik Haren: all my Bangladesh friends posting what's happening in Bangladesh from a
Fredrik Haren: Bangladeshi perspective. I love that. Does that make me
Fredrik Haren: a little bit less Swedish? Yes, it does, but it also makes me a little
Fredrik Haren: bit more human. Yeah, you're right. We're becoming
Joanne Lockwood: almost like special interest communities, so it doesn't matter physically
Joanne Lockwood: where you are. We talk about affinity bias, affinity
Joanne Lockwood: groups. It's connecting people around the world who have a similar interest in a game,
Joanne Lockwood: in a technique, in a profession. Yeah. And I like, if you
Fredrik Haren: want to be really philosophical, this is very big
Fredrik Haren: thought. But you think about this because people say tribes, right? Oh, we need.
Fredrik Haren: It's a tribal community. You can't have a global mindset because the Tribe is
Fredrik Haren: just 150 people strong, or whatever they're saying. And we're now seeing the
Fredrik Haren: antidote, like the world is closing up, becoming more local, less global. And
Fredrik Haren: people think this is where we're going to end up. Think so.
Fredrik Haren: Because what defines our worldview? This is going to be a little
Fredrik Haren: bit of a philosophical outlying here, but I think this is interesting.
Fredrik Haren: What defines our world? Like, if you're living in a tribe in Amazonas, one of
Fredrik Haren: those hidden tribes that never met anyone from outside their whole
Fredrik Haren: worldview is five kilometres outside of that village. That's all
Fredrik Haren: they know. They don't know about the Internet, they don't know about the moon landing,
Fredrik Haren: they don't know anything of that. Their whole worldview is five kilometres around the
Fredrik Haren: village. And because they don't have technology, then we invented technology.
Fredrik Haren: Like we tamed the horse and suddenly we could go 50 kilometres. And then we
Fredrik Haren: built the train and the telegraph and our technology made it possible for us
Fredrik Haren: to have a wider understanding of the world. And this technology that we're
Fredrik Haren: using now makes it possible for you and I to talk anywhere in the world
Fredrik Haren: and we can read newspapers and we can communicate and say, so now our
Fredrik Haren: community, for the first time in human history, it's possible to have a
Fredrik Haren: technology that connects Anyone, anywhere. Of course
Fredrik Haren: that is going to change how we look at ourselves. So from
Fredrik Haren: village, from tribe to village to city, to kingdom
Fredrik Haren: to nation to post. Nations would be
Fredrik Haren: like United States or the eu. And the next step is the human
Fredrik Haren: mindset. Of course that's going to take maybe 50 years or 100 years,
Fredrik Haren: and right now we're a bit confused. But in a hundred years from. Most people
Fredrik Haren: are going to have. Their main identity is going to be human, not
Fredrik Haren: nation or religion. And when that happens, that's. That's going to
Fredrik Haren: change so many things. Yeah. As you're talking, I was thinking that if I
Joanne Lockwood: think about the community, the people I engage with, most of them are not
Joanne Lockwood: localised and I don't. I don't feel that I need to have a local community
Joanne Lockwood: because I've got a community of people around, as you say, around the world, different
Joanne Lockwood: first languages, different cultures, and I feel as
Joanne Lockwood: connected with them now as I would if they lived next door. I probably see
Joanne Lockwood: them more often. Yeah, I interact them on LinkedIn, on Facebook and other platforms.
Fredrik Haren: Yeah, exactly. But it doesn't mean you don't have to have a local community.
Fredrik Haren: I'm sure you have neighbours and stuff. Like, the village didn't
Fredrik Haren: disappear because we invented the
Fredrik Haren: kingdom and the kingdom or the nation, we just added a layer.
Fredrik Haren: I'm still Frederick, I still have my family, I still have my neighbours, I still
Fredrik Haren: live in Liding it, which I'm still part of Stockholm, I'm also Swede, I'm part
Fredrik Haren: of the eu. And then now add one layer on top of that, which is
Fredrik Haren: I'm also a human being and I communicate with friends all over the world.
Fredrik Haren: So all the other layers are still there, we just layer. But
Fredrik Haren: while the person in Amazonas only has 12 layers, which is family
Fredrik Haren: or me, family and tribe. And that's it. It stops there.
Joanne Lockwood: I've met people in real life, irl, as we. As we like to say these
Joanne Lockwood: days, irl. And the first part of the conversation is
Joanne Lockwood: we try and work out if we've ever met in person before. And we go,
Joanne Lockwood: I don't know. But we seem to know so much about each other, we know
Joanne Lockwood: everything. I know we both follow each other on Facebook, so we know
Joanne Lockwood: a lot about each other's lives and what we've been up to the last couple
Joanne Lockwood: of years, and we probably haven't met in person for at least two or three,
Joanne Lockwood: maybe even four years, but it doesn't matter because
Joanne Lockwood: we're building that human connection across the world. As you say, this
Joanne Lockwood: disparate connected technology. Yeah. Which I think is beautiful.
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, it is, it is. I agree with the premise of. I think
Joanne Lockwood: when we started this is those perspectives from different cultures.
Joanne Lockwood: Because, yes, we are globally connected, we still
Joanne Lockwood: are heavily influenced by our own local cultures. Yes. When we bring
Joanne Lockwood: that together, we bring different perspectives, don't we? But I think it's a bug
Fredrik Haren: in the human DNA that we are not better at picking
Fredrik Haren: up good ideas from other people. Somewhere,
Fredrik Haren: someone in the world has invented a better way of doing what you're doing.
Fredrik Haren: And. And why are we not better at picking that up? It
Fredrik Haren: blows my mind that we are not better. I mean, we have Internet for 25
Fredrik Haren: years, so it's not that we don't have the technology anymore. We have the technology
Fredrik Haren: to look what other people are doing and sometimes we even
Fredrik Haren: see, oh, my God, look, they're doing it better than us. And then
Fredrik Haren: we're still not doing it. My favourite pet peeve example right now, because I
Fredrik Haren: moved back to Sweden, in Singapore, they have
Fredrik Haren: these automatic passport reading machines at the airport, so when you arrive,
Fredrik Haren: you just put your passport in. Actually, in Singapore they have face recognition now, so
Fredrik Haren: you don't even have to do that, you just walk straight through. But in, they
Fredrik Haren: have all these machines, you just put your passport in, Boom, down through, no queues
Fredrik Haren: at all. You have it in the UK too, Right. But we
Fredrik Haren: don't have it in Sweden. Like, how can you be in charge of passport control
Fredrik Haren: in Sweden when Singapore's had that for 15 years? UK has it for 10 years
Fredrik Haren: or something, I don't know. And Sweden doesn't still have a single airport
Fredrik Haren: with a single even test machine. And I go and
Fredrik Haren: think, it's working. It's everywhere, it's working. It's not like a dangerous new
Fredrik Haren: technique. It's working everywhere. And once I, when I fly, I go, I like to
Fredrik Haren: ask the Swedish passport control people who are still sitting there manually looking at passports,
Fredrik Haren: and I say to them, you know, they have automated this in Singapore, right? Why
Fredrik Haren: don't we have that in Sweden? And their reply is, oh, that's cute. And then
Fredrik Haren: I went home and I googled it. I said, what kind of countries have automate
Fredrik Haren: automated patch machine reading machines? Is it just like Singapore?
Fredrik Haren: Highly developed countries? No. Mongolia.
Fredrik Haren: Mongolia has it. How can Mongolia have a, a technology
Fredrik Haren: that we still haven't implemented, even as a trial in Sweden? It blows
Fredrik Haren: my mind. Is it down to the fact that when
Joanne Lockwood: technology emerges, it's easy to adopt it
Joanne Lockwood: in a, in a culture that doesn't have a Legacy of that. Of that thing.
Joanne Lockwood: Mobile phone. Mobile phone growth grew more quickly
Joanne Lockwood: in countries that didn't have a decent phone network. I remember going to
Joanne Lockwood: Hungary and some. Of the eastern countries leapfrogging, and it's definitely a thing, but
Fredrik Haren: that doesn't mean, I mean, uk, you had. Every country has had manual
Fredrik Haren: ban, more passport controls. Every country has that. So in this case it's not the
Fredrik Haren: reason. The reason is that Sweden is, I don't know, so sure that what
Fredrik Haren: we're doing is the right way. We are not even curious to look what others
Fredrik Haren: are doing. I can list thing after thing after thing that someone
Fredrik Haren: is somewhere, usually China, but somewhere or Singapore, somewhere
Fredrik Haren: a country is doing something better than you are. Why don't we have also your.
Fredrik Haren: I mean, it's also true for your industry. Someone somewhere is doing something way more
Fredrik Haren: effectively than what you are doing. Why are you looking at. And just copy it,
Fredrik Haren: steal it. Does Sweden have a huge
Joanne Lockwood: influx of people away? I mean, is it just down to the fact that
Joanne Lockwood: Heathrow, Gatwick, for example, have tens and tens
Joanne Lockwood: of thousands of people arriving at each hour And Singapore may be the same. Yeah,
Fredrik Haren: but now you're doing the very human thing of trying to find a reason for
Fredrik Haren: why Sweden shouldn't have these. I'm curious. No, no, no. Do you think Sweden has
Fredrik Haren: less people arriving than Mongolia? I don't know. I don't know.
Joanne Lockwood: Sweden probably doesn't not compare with Bulgaria. That's one logical reason for why we
Fredrik Haren: haven't done it. Except this idea
Fredrik Haren: that, no, we know how to do things and we are not curious enough to
Fredrik Haren: look at. They are aware that this technology is out there, but
Fredrik Haren: they have said, nah, it's not for us. But is it a
Joanne Lockwood: pain curiosity ratio? There's not enough pain
Joanne Lockwood: to spark a need. No, no, no, there is pain. Don't get. No, here is
Fredrik Haren: pain. There is pain because when you arrive in Sweden, especially if It's a non
Fredrik Haren: EU country aeroplane, there is 40 minutes or
Fredrik Haren: 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes queue, because they only have four people sitting there
Fredrik Haren: and there's like 400 people landing. And if you're not from Sweden,
Fredrik Haren: you have to wait for like. There's a lot. Actually, there's a lot of complaining
Fredrik Haren: in that queue because people are annoyed that they have to wait for so long.
Fredrik Haren: And of course, the Swedish passport police could do much more meaningful work
Fredrik Haren: than manually looking at. Manually taking a passport and then putting
Fredrik Haren: that they're still putting into the machine. They're just manually doing what the
Fredrik Haren: machine does actually not even what the machine does. They're doing what people are doing.
Fredrik Haren: In England, they're doing the job of putting it into machine because you're looking. In
Joanne Lockwood: the camera anyway. They're doing like this. Yes, it's the same thing. They're not doing
Fredrik Haren: any meaningful work. There is no reason for why it is like
Fredrik Haren: this, except in people's inabilities to change. That's
Fredrik Haren: all it is. But imagine if they did. I'm a big fan of the author
Joanne Lockwood: Rutger Bregman and he would term that as a bullshit job. It's a job that
Joanne Lockwood: has no value. Yeah, exactly. And it's also. Yeah, exactly. But it's also
Fredrik Haren: a bullshit service, as in that job is actually. It's not
Fredrik Haren: only a bullshit job, the job itself is slowing people down. That
Fredrik Haren: doesn't need to be slowed down. In Singapore you wait for two minutes. In Sweden
Fredrik Haren: you wait for 30 or four minutes. So it's less than a bullshit job.
Fredrik Haren: It is meaningless and it ruins other people's lives. Probably.
Joanne Lockwood: The automation is probably less prone to error. You're going to be able to
Joanne Lockwood: spot patterns easier. You're going to. And also you can then resource
Joanne Lockwood: the problem solving to less
Joanne Lockwood: trained or different trained people. So you'd have an IT person or a
Joanne Lockwood: machine support person rather than a border guard. So it's a different skill set as
Joanne Lockwood: well, isn't it? Exactly. Or you can still have those four people, but now they
Fredrik Haren: can look at. At people arriving and look for suspicious people, which they can't do
Fredrik Haren: now because they're looking down on passports. And in Sweden it's even more annoying because
Fredrik Haren: they have four people working checking airport, but then they have three people managing
Fredrik Haren: the queue. So you're paying the salary of seven people. These three seven people
Fredrik Haren: managing the queue are only here because you're so inefficient. You could save
Fredrik Haren: seven jobs, not four jobs. People who could do other things. I
Joanne Lockwood: would have thought the EU would have insisted that these machines are coming in, aren't
Joanne Lockwood: they? As is that not the case? I don't think EU is known for speed.
Joanne Lockwood: No, no, it's not. But you'd like to think with all these new border restrictions
Joanne Lockwood: and this, these new processes coming in. But you'd like to
Joanne Lockwood: think that. But the lesson is not passport machines in Sweden, the lesson is
Fredrik Haren: what thing are you doing that you shouldn't be doing? Because someone else somewhere
Fredrik Haren: has invented a better way of doing it and all you have to do is
Fredrik Haren: go and look for it. And you would save time, energy, money, whatever you would
Fredrik Haren: save. It's really interesting. What you're talking about here is in the
Joanne Lockwood: UK we often cite Scandinavian countries as
Joanne Lockwood: having your shit together because you do things much better than we do
Joanne Lockwood: much this. And we should be taking more examples from Sweden. And now you're saying
Joanne Lockwood: actually Swedish systems are stuck in the
Joanne Lockwood: dark ages. They're not moving forward. And we're seeing those ideals. Some things we do
Fredrik Haren: is great and some things that the UK does is great. Something Mongolia
Fredrik Haren: does and great. Something that Singapore has done is great. So the whole idea, that's
Fredrik Haren: the Heimsker again. The idea of going out and looking what other people are doing
Fredrik Haren: and feeling that is a very, very, very valuable thing. And if you don't
Fredrik Haren: do that, you're stupid to say it properly.
Joanne Lockwood: That's a great way to end the, the conversation. If you, if you're not out
Joanne Lockwood: there expanding your mindset using the Icelandic definition, you're stupid. You're.
Joanne Lockwood: You're not taking advantage of, you're living in your, your one degree of separation.
Joanne Lockwood: You're not, you're not moving out. Or if you want to be nicer, a nice
Fredrik Haren: way of saying it is you're not as smart as you could be.
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, yeah. You're not, you're not crowdsourcing opportunities and ideas
Joanne Lockwood: and then bringing them back and going. This could work for us as well. Yeah,
Joanne Lockwood: I agree completely. Frederick. It's been fascinating. How can people get
Joanne Lockwood: hold of you? I usually say just Google the Creativity Explorer.
Fredrik Haren: Hopefully I come up or my name. That's the best
Fredrik Haren: way.
Joanne Lockwood: LinkedIn is a good place. Sorry? LinkedIn is a very good place.
Fredrik Haren: I'm quite active on LinkedIn. So just Google my name there. And then I share
Fredrik Haren: insights around the world about what I've learned about creativity which if it's
Fredrik Haren: okay, I'll also share that I just. Because we've been talking a lot about being
Fredrik Haren: open minded to new ideas. Right. So the book that just came
Fredrik Haren: out is called the World of Creativity. The subtitle is a journey across
Fredrik Haren: 37 countries to discover the secrets of creative minds. And the
Fredrik Haren: whole idea of this book is to show how people around the world
Fredrik Haren: approach creativity differently. So it's the same thing. Now imagine if you
Fredrik Haren: were open minded and curious about how other people approach creativity
Fredrik Haren: and now you have more tools to approach your own creativity.
Fredrik Haren: So that's the main lesson of that book. Excellent. So
Joanne Lockwood: Frederic is F R E D R I K and
Joanne Lockwood: Haren H A R E N. So if people are googling you looking that up
Joanne Lockwood: and it's the World of creativity with Frederick Haron. They can find
Joanne Lockwood: you on Facebook as well. Fantastic. Frederick, it's been
Joanne Lockwood: amazing. Thank you so much. Hey, wonderful. Thank you.
Joanne Lockwood: As we bring this conversation to a close, I want to express
Joanne Lockwood: my deepest gratitude to you, our listener, for lending
Joanne Lockwood: your ear and heart to the cause of inclusion.
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