Outthinking The Future: Unleashing Strategic Innovation With Kaihan Krippendorff

Without pinpointing your life purpose and acting with intention every step of the way, one is bound to get lost along the way and ultimately fail. Tony Martignetti sits down with business strategist, keynote speaker, and author Kaihan Krippendorff to chat about the importance of understanding where to fully dedicate your life, energy, and skills. Kaihan looks back on his journey of how someone in investment banking and finance found himself growing a community of strategists and innovators as a thought leader. He also discusses how he became an accidental author, the importance of surrounding yourself with believers, and how to leverage digital transformation to develop proximate solutions for modern problems.

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Outthinking The Future: Unleashing Strategic Innovation With Kaihan Krippendorff

It is my honor to introduce my guest in this episode, Kaihan Krippendorff. He is a renowned business strategist, keynote speaker, and author. As a Founder of Outthinker Networks, he has helped organizations generate over 2.5 billion in new annual revenue. He was recognized by Thinkers 50 and Global Gurus as a Top Management Thinker. Kaihan is celebrated for his ability to simplify complex concepts and drive innovation. He has authored five bestselling books on strategy and innovation, including his most recent book, Proximity with Rob Wolcott, and is a sought-after advisor to leading companies worldwide. It is truly a pleasure and an honor to welcome you to the show.

Tony, thank you so much for having me.

Exposure

I'm thrilled. This is going to be a great conversation to really understand you at a very different level. Oftentimes, people focus on the now, but I'd like to go back and look at what got you here and then also, understand what's top of mind and the things that are making you tick these days. The journey back is going to be a fun one and understanding your journey to getting where you are through what's called flashpoints.

I'm looking forward to it. It's awesome.

Flashpoints, just for your own sake so you understand are these moments that have ignited your gifts into the world. When I turn it over to you in a moment, I'll have you share what you're called to share, and along the way, we'll pause and see what shows up. When you're ready, you can take it away and if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

I read your blog and I love this concept of flashpoints. There are many that pop up for me in not necessarily chronological order, but I think that one thing that I realized as I think about raising children and getting them off to college is what my high school experience was like. I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. I went to a school that was not known as a very good school, but we had great teachers and we had this amazing program.

At 12:30, I would get picked up by a bus. Instead of going to college, they would take me and maybe 15 or 20 other students to another school called The Educational Center for the Arts. For the rest of the day, we did art. If you remember that old TV show with Janet Jackson, Fame where they had these different departments. They had the dancing department. They had the music department. They had the writing department. I was in the visual arts department so I would paint. I would draw. I would sculpt and it was a perfect blending.

Fifty percent of my time on my right brain and 50% of my time on my left brain and having the space to just explore. I'm glad that my children have some of that. I think that we would all benefit from having more of that. We moved from Connecticut to Miami, the children changed schools and they had more of that. That's something that I feel now particularly blessed at having gotten to experience in part because it allows me to.

I'm not a very deep expert in many things and maybe strategy, but I mostly know a little bit about a lot of things. I think I'm good at making connections between things and domains that seem to be unrelated. What does music have to do with philosophy, medicine, and whatever? I'm very grateful for that upbringing.

I love that you started here. I love this idea that exposure is an important thing. We need to expose ourselves to more things and not necessarily say because it's just a nice thing to have. It's because it gives us the range to see that there are more possibilities. There are more connections to be made, but then also having this depth in maybe 1 or 2 areas where you can say, “My specialty or the things I excel most at is here, but I've been exposed to a lot of areas and I don't have to be an expert in everything.”

I agree and I know we're going to be talking about books towards the end, but David Epstein wrote a book called Range. He used the word range. It’s one of the most profound books for me, especially as a parent. I think opens this contrast to Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. Tiger Woods started at a very young age and it's decided for him probably at a very young age that he's going to be an excellent golf player. He golfs all day.

Roger Federer decides he's going to be a great soccer player and it's not until he's a teenager that he picks up tennis. What h contrasts is it better to have range and/or better be specialized? Where it lands is in changing environments when the rules change, having range allows you to adapt to the new rules more quickly. When the rules aren't changing, then probably the repetition and expertise pay off. By the way, we are entering a world with lots of change. It's important that we arm our children with range.

Self-Development Program

We're off to a good start here. There are some great insights to take away and I love the way that you're approaching this. Tell me what happens next. What's the next flashpoint? We started in your high school years, but tell me some of the things that happened along the way that made you who you are.

I think there is a combination of two things. One was I took this program that was like a self-development, a self-help program that was profound for me that my father suggested I take because he was a professor for 58 years at the University of Pennsylvania until he passed away. He was the longest-serving professor in the history of the University of Pennsylvania. He's had one job for 58.

One of his areas is social constructionism, and that's a class he taught. The idea of social construction is that as much of the world as we experience it, we don't directly experience it. Buddhists encourage you to meditate on a flower and to try to experience it because we don't directly experience the flower. The words that we use to describe what we're experiencing change things.

In a business context, if you say we are going to expand versus we're going to grow versus we are going to accelerate. It changes the narrative that people think they're in and therefore what options they see and choose. It's about using language and appreciating the power of language to create realities. I never took his class because I didn't have the opportunity to take his class.

However, after I graduated, I got to take his class by auditing his class with him. Once a week we would have a three-hour phone call. I had the syllabus and as his students were going through the readings and having discussions, I would go through the readings. I would then dialogue just like they do in class, but it's just me and him. Hours and hours and this syllabus is thick. It's half an inch thick.

That combined with this class I took, which was around social constructionism, in that process, you dismantle all the things that you think you should be doing or what people have told you what you should care about. In that empty space, you get to create what your purpose in life is. The whole premise is that life has no purpose other than the one that you create for yourself.

I created my life that, “Are people loving what they do?” That may mean going and finding what you want to do or it may be finding the love in what you're doing. I think if we all live in a world where everyone loves what they do is going to make for a beautiful world. Albert Einstein figured out what he loved to do, but he was working in a post office or a patent office before that. Had he not discovered physics, the world would be a different place. I would say that a personal lecture with my dad was an important flashpoint for me.

If we all live in a world where everyone loves what we do, we will make a beautiful world.

It's wonderful what you shared. There are so many things that you shared that resonate with me. First of all, how special to be able to have that time with your dad to do this course with him. One of the things that comes to mind is that words create worlds. People say that all the time and you just basically just demonstrated that through what your dad's course is all about.

Words create worlds is right. I think we underappreciate how powerful the words are. The term outthinking, is the name of one of my books, Outthink The Competition, and the brand that my business operates in. The whole concept of outthinking is that when you can't solve a problem, it's that you lack the words to solve the problem. Words are tools that help us think and think together, especially.

If you can't solve a problem, whether that's global warming, if that's equality, water safety, or if that's how to get to my office on time each morning, whatever that is, it may be that you're lacking the vocabulary. What we do is you take vocabulary from outside your current vocabulary and you add it in. That's what outthinking is. It’s taking language from outside the current domain and then putting it in. That changes again, the thinking and options you choose.

Just tying this together based on what you've already shared so far with the early experiences you had as a child as being able to be exposed to many different things allowed you to be able to say, “This is what we need to be able to have different options available to us to solve problems.” Outthinkers sounds like it's a combination of many things that you've been exposed to through your journey and I think that often happens.

It's sometimes the realization afterward. You tell the story of, “I had the insight and it gave me this idea that led me to that path later,” but often, you're just wandering around in the woods and then you look back and you're like, “Now, I see why I’m moving here to moving here. ” It is the randomness of that journey in retrospect that makes it look brilliantly planned. You're like, “Had I not been standing on that corner and bumped into that person, or if I had not been serving pizza at that restaurant that Pilar walked in and I happened to serve her, now, she became my wife and we have three kids.” In retrospect, it sounds like destiny, but the beauty of the story is realized later.

Education

It only could be understood by looking backwards and not by mapping it out, if you will. Tell me another moment because obviously, there are so many things that you've accomplished, but I want to hear what led to a lot of these things. What did you study in college?

I studied Mechanical Engineering and Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. I went into investment banking. I thought of myself as a very quant person because I had lived a year when I was younger in Holland and I didn't take English for a whole year. I was just speaking Dutch. When I came back, I was in fourth grade speaking at a second-grade English level or with a second-grade vocabulary. I thought of myself as a very quant person.

I am working outside of Philadelphia doing investment banking. I decided I wanted to understand the full organization, not think of a company as a black box that spits out cashflows that you can discount. I want to understand all the people and all the human side that goes into that so I go to business school. I didn't get into a business school that I wanted to go to. I go to the Dominican Republic to join a friend of mine who's taking over his dad's companies and work for him for a year and get some experience.

On the way down, I stopped in Miami and went to a bookstore. I found a book that is a translation of the first 18 of 36 patterns in ancient Chinese texts called The Thirty-Six Stratagems. Now, I studied martial arts throughout my life growing up. My dad would go to Japan. When I was eleven years old, I was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Zen in the Art of Archery, Daoism, and all that stuff. I'm into this stuff and into the Tao Te Ching, and all that stuff. I found this book and I didn't know it and I was surprised I didn't know it. I thought I knew a lot about it.

I bought it. I go to the Dominican Republic. I don't have many friends there, so I have a lot of time on my hands. I think great things happen when our hands are idle. I think our idle hands lead to great things because as Albert Einstein said, “Play is the ultimate form of research.” I'm just playing around with these things and I go to the office. This is before you have Wi-Fi at home. I go to the office to have an internet connection. Also, I research stories and cases from business week and things like that. I categorize them according to these 36 different patterns then I go to business school. I'm collecting all these stories.

I found some Chinese friends of mine who sat down with me and they explained to me what the differences are between these 36. What does it mean to await the exhausted enemy at your ease? What does it mean to deck the dead tree with bogus blossoms? What does it mean to seize the firewood from under the pot? What do those things mean? I'm collecting all these things. Flashpoint leads to Flashpoint. Flashpoint one is to discover the book.

Flashpoint two is I go to London Business School. I come back. I've got one more semester at Columbia Business School and I don't want to take as many classes. I'm like, “I'm going to do an independent study.” I go to this strategy professor that I studied under. I said, “I want to do this research instead of this because I'm doing it anyway.” She looks at my document and it’s a 70-page Word document I printed out and gave it to her. She goes, “You're writing a book,” and that opens up this possibility. “I didn't know I could write a book. How do you write a book?”

That puts me on the journey of how to write a book. I get The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Published and I follow the steps. That sets me on the journey. Seven years after finding that text, I wrote my first book in 2004. That is the Art of the Advantage that becomes the basis basically for all of the rest of my, for my doctorate research for it's incorporated in almost all of my other books as well. So finding that translation and having the time to do something with it without having an intention, I think that was an important flashpoint.

It's a thing that you share about this. Giving yourself the space to play and to see what happens is really what opened up that possibility but also this accidental author that you became. All of a sudden, through all of those steps, you then realize, “I've got something here,” and you didn't even realize that. You were thrust upon that. It's a wonderful thing and I think a lot of people who go on this journey of saying, “I could never be an author. I could never do that. I could never do this,” that if they just take small steps in that direction or follow the thread, it eventually leads them to do amazing things.

I think so much of it also is being around and telling people what you want to be. I can relate to you as an author and if you're around people, Tony, he's an author. Kaihan is an author. One guy interviewed for one of my podcasts. He's an entrepreneur and he wants to get a sunglasses company in China to give him the exclusive rights to sell those sunglasses in Australia. He went there and he said, “We're the largest distributor of sunglasses in the country,” but they didn't sell any sunglasses.

It was a timing issue is what he put it. They were. It's like The Beatles always said, “We are the best band in the world. It's just the world hasn't caught up to that yet.” Being with people who see who you are even though you haven't caught up to that reality yet, and I think that's what her saying, you're an author. It created that possibility for me and then the space to live in it. I think the lesson is to surround yourself with people who see you as who you want to be, and also, be thoughtful about who you're listening other people to be.

Surround yourself with people who see you as who you want to be.

That's a cool way of saying it. I've talked with other people about this idea of having believers. People who believe in your potential before you do, and then you rise to the occasion. I think that is something that's an interesting concept that I've seen play out with a lot of great leaders in the world who have said, “I never would've thought that I'd be doing this, but because of X, Y, Z or this person, they saw the potential in me and they gave me the chance to rise into that level.” I think that's a beautiful thing. We need more of that.

Potential finders. That becomes a potential creator. You probably know this study. There was a study a long time ago where they had a teacher and they randomly selected half of their students. You knew that one, right?

I do know exactly which one.

Just because the teacher thought that this random group of students was highly capable, they became highly capable.

I think that was referenced in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers if I remember correctly. We have to do some diligence on that.

However, words create worlds so we can speak them into the truth.

Thought Leader

Let's get back into your story. I want to hear a little bit more about it. Here you are thinking, “Now, you've got a book or potentially a book.” Tell me what happens now. What led to the impetus for creating the things you've created? I think it's remarkable even just to hear that you were in investment banking and finance. I was doing finance before I got into this world that I'm in. How did you make the pivot to get into being a thought leader, creating networks, and such?

After business school, I joined a consulting firm, McKinsey, and I'm working there. During that time, I've finished it. My agent is pitching it and getting declined. Finally, we get a deal and then the book is published about four years into my time at McKinsey. I'm like, “This is great. I want to promote the book.” I thought, “Maybe McKinsey would've given me a chance to incorporate that into my work. We could turn it into a practice or somehow get a chance to bring that into my work.” They said, “We love it. You can do it on the weekends, but not at work.” I quit my job to do this and honestly, I had no idea what I was doing.

I end up joining a nonprofit and taking a 50% pay cut. I have some stability. It's also a nonprofit I've been involved in before but it gives me the freedom. I start doing workshops. I'm getting paid $300 to fly up to Manchester in Massachusetts, speak to the local plumber, and the local business owners for a couple hours, and then fly home. I try to get stage time. I was like a comedian trying to get stage time.\

There are two asks. One is building the business model. How do you make money as a thought leader? Also, the other is the craft. I was a slow learner but then a guy that we both know, Vern Harnish read an article of mine that I had published in the Harvard Business Review. He says, “Come and talk to this group.” I go up to Boston and I speak at this program for EO, the Entrepreneurs Organization. It's a program that's now called the EMP, the Entrepreneurial Master's Program.

I've told him this since, but I didn't tell him at the time. This is my first time in front of an audience of more than twenty people. He had the guts to put me up there, but I was so nervous. A good friend of mine, Jill Hellman, is an amazing speaker. She trained me and had me practice my opening line over and over again. She had me practice moving, walking, energy, and stuff like that. I go out. I'm sure it still wasn't great, but I laid it all out and then they invited me back. I then start doing other EO talks.

That is my first stage of getting an audience. I'm talking about the 36 Stratagems. I'm talking later on about the competition. That builds up this career but honestly, I was still not sure what the business model was, to be honest with you. It was workshops mostly. I did workshops and trainings. A friend of mine who saw me give a talk invited me to give something at Microsoft and they became a client. I end up doing it for 5 or 6 years doing lots of stuff.

I was going to Asia, going to the West Coast, and going all over the world for Microsoft. I was training them on strategic thinking. I further developed the methodology and then took those 36 stratagems and I turn it into what's now the outthinker process. These five steps outthink the competition. I ended up developing this IP. My two-part business model is speaking revenue, workshops and training, and some consulting.

Honestly, I couldn't figure out how to sell consulting because some people were brilliant at it and I was not effective at it but one of our clients asked us to introduce her to some other people like her. She was the head of strategy for a large company. We connected her with some other people. We had a lunch that led to another lunch, which then developed into Outthinker Networks, which is a peer network of heads of strategy and heads of innovation. I'm doing less and less training now. Right now, what I do is I do research, write books, and speak. That's one hat. My wife calls me a for-profit academic and I do teach at some schools, but I'm not attached heavily to one school and the peer network and growing the community of strategists and innovators.

You just gave a masterclass right there on how things work to get to this place of making success happen. First of all, it's a long road. Some people get success. They just get lucky, to be honest. People get lucky. They figure out the formula and then they hit it hard and it happens but most of us are going through the journey you just went through, which is what you just described. It is this idea that it's a long process of keep showing up, collecting the small checks, and then hoping that eventually at some point because of that consistent process, people will recognize that you've got something going on and you're learning the process. You're getting better.

That then leads to a bigger impact and then you start to figure out how to get the flywheel going. That's where things start to take shape and form and luckily, you did. I think what you've created at Outthinkers is something remarkable that you wouldn't have been able to create out of the gates, that's for sure. No offense. You wouldn't have had the thought or the ability to think that big in those early days.

I think you're absolutely right. How do you keep showing up? I think part of it is intrinsic motivation, not doing it for the art, but not for the outcome and/or its resilience. It's being okay being told no, getting low ratings, and keep showing up. I saw this documentary about Joan Rivers. There were so many periods of her career where she gets hot and even at her age, I don't know what her age is or was when I saw this podcast, but one woman described her as she just keeps going out there waiting for lightning to strike and eventually lightning strikes. She keeps going out and going out. I know we’re going to books later but The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Do you know that?

Open-Mindedness

Yeah. It’s such a brilliant book. I want to take a slight detour to get into your latest book. Speaking of books, before we do that, let's talk about what Outthinkers is, and give a little more context for those who don't know what it is. Give us a one-sentence or a quick blurb on what is it and why should people care.

There are two different outthinkers so I'll give you two sentences. One is it is a strategic philosophy and methodology to have people and teams more consistently come up with fourth options, which is to say options that they currently can't see. Outthinker Networks is a community of smart enough to be humble future thinkers who are shaping the strategies and innovations of large companies to have a space to explore future possibilities. Maybe we could call it that.

I think connecting back to what you said and connecting to what you just said is a sense that we think better together. One person thinking alone, sure, you'll have some good thoughts, but eventually, you start to run out of juice. You run out of, “How do I solve that problem?” but when you think with others, your thinking gets better. However, you have to also be open-minded, humble, and without that strong ego that says, “I have to have the answer.” I think one of the things that you're modeling with this is this sense of, “Sure, we've got some frameworks and things that we can share,” but it's also about bringing the right people into the room with the right mindset and allowing them to think.

I never saw that connection between those two sides. That's brilliant. Yes, because the outthinker process says that there are five types of conversations that you want to have with others. There's one that is what do we want? Another one is, where should we focus. Another one is, what are our options? Another one is, which options should we choose? Another one is, how do we enroll other people in those options?

Being aware of which conversation you're having makes it easier for you to engage other people in those conversations and not try to rush to step three when you're still at step one. At Outthinker Networks, we don't bring any of that IP there or that point of view. We ask people, “What are the topics that you care about,” and then we go find thought leaders who have the content, and thinking and bring it in and then engage people in peer-to-peer conversations with them. Sometimes that might be my content, but a lot of our members have no idea that I've written books.

It is funny because they're enrolling in this process not just because of you and your star power but because of what the whole network bodies and that’s cool.

I think what's so beautiful about that network is like any one of them, it is star power. They're all stars. They all could be people. When we get together and we have a meeting, it's like a panel discussion with no audience. Everyone there is on the panel.

Proximity

We're going to shift gears a little bit because we're going to run out of time quickly. There are so many things I want to cover. Tell us what's going on with Proximity. What is this book about? Maybe a little bit of preamble to why this book? How did it come about?

There are so many trends that people are confused with, especially right now from AI, digital transformation to digitization of products, to deglobalization, to the metaverse, and all of this confluence of all these things is very confusing. My co-author Rob Wolcott proposed this idea, and when I listened to it, we shared it with our members, and it clicked.

It gives clarity to the chaos, which is you take all of that, all it is doing is driving our industries towards proximity. By proximity, what we mean is the value that you create. You usually create value by combining things. Peanut butter and chocolate become more valuable. Soda water and syrup combined become more valuable. You create that closer and closer to the moment of demand in both time and space. Don't mix the soda water with the syrup until someone goes to the freestyle machine and says, “I want soda water with diet caffeine-free vanilla Coke.

Also, don't mix it in a bottling plant far away. Mix it right there where they need it. The advantage of this is you no longer have to predict demand. The easiest demand to predict is demand that's already there ready to pay for demand. Also, it allows greater customization because you don't have to combine them for an audience of a minimum size. You can combine them for an audience of one so people can have the exact thing that they want.

We can say all these technologies like robotics, dark factories, and automation change the economy so that whereas before we had to produce thousands and thousands of bottles, we can now produce one bottle and that's due to one thing. The cost of customization comes up and the premium of personalization goes up. If I try to sell you a diet, caffeine-free cherry, vanilla Sprite, that may mean something you do not want to spend money on.

The premium is negative for you, but for the right person, that's exactly what I want. When you enable that, you get higher margins and premiums. You create more value for the customer and you can now produce it at a manageable cost as well. Apply that to energy. Where is that getting produced? We shouldn't be calling distributed energy. We should be calling it proximate energy. Creating energy on rooftops and offshore closer to where it's needed.

Also, food. Let's not make food and far away giant fa factories. Let's do vertical farms closer to the homes and the hospitals where it's needed. Healthcare or hospitals. Let's not do care in hospitals. Let's do care in homes and not after it's needed, but even before it's needed. Let's do preventative care. Across every sector, what we can say is all that messy stuff leads us toward a state of proximity.

What that allows us to do is say, “What does it look like in a world of P=0? In any industry you're in, what is P=0? You offer coaching. What does it look like when someone said needs coaching? As the thought emerges in their mind before it even becomes a conscious thought, you are already there providing the coaching.

First of all, this is such a brilliant concept and it has me thinking about a couple of things. One of them is the idea of removing waste too. When you have things that are custom made, first of all, no one's going to say, “This is not what I wanted,” then return it. They're going to most likely say, “This is exactly what I wanted. Thank you,” and move on. Also, the sense that they're not going to mass produce a lot of things that will then just be sitting on shelves and then go bad.

There's a sense of how we create that need for what is in the moment. One thing that was playing around in my mind, and this is a real throwback. You're going to probably know this, but do you remember back when record stores existed? Record stores used to have these machines where you could go in and you can choose your own playlist of songs to put on a cassette tape. It would record the cassette tape and give you it. That made me think about this whole process.

That’s a great example.

People don't have cassette tapes anymore. They don't even have any physical copy but having a playlist of your own making is what this embodies.

You take the album, then you break it down into songs, and then you combine those songs in a new unique way. Your playlist will be different than my playlist. Now, you can have the playlist you want. Now, we add some automation into it and you have Spotify that's playing what you want at that moment. That's a perfect example. Also, add to your waste point, that 38% of food that's produced in the world goes to waste.

Acting With Purpose

I'm not shocked by that in the least. It's crazy to think that way but it's such a brilliant concept. This book is definitely top of the list for people who are inside companies who are in charge of making the decisions around how we produce, what we produce, and the strategy. Your target audience is quite wide. I'm glad you wrote this book. On the topic of books, before we get in there, we do have a moment here. I'm just going to say, what is something that you haven't shared already that you want to share? I want to give you that invitation.

I think that there is this question of purpose and acting without purpose. I think that there's merit to both, which is, “I just do it because I love it and we'll see what happens.” Also, at the other extreme, there is, “I'm going to make a bunch of money and I don't care how I do it.” I have a lot of friends who did that who have a lot of money and now they're like, “What's my purpose? Have you heard of this person, Deepak Chopra? What's the meaning in life?”

I feel like I've lived my life in reverse. I don't care about the money. I'm just going to do what feels right, but I think the sweet spot is the overlap between the two. The access to the overlap and the two is to have the mental flexibility to have lots and lots of thoughts about what you could be doing so that as you create those ideas and you put them in the Venn diagram, you find things in the middle. I think the access to achieving the nirvana of purpose and profit is having lots of options, which goes into the flexibility, the mental range as we talked about before, to be able to think of lots of things.

Achieve the nirvana of purpose and profit by having a lot of options which goes into the flexibility of the mental range.

It’s such a great insight and I think it's a great way to bring that to closure around this idea that we have to find a way to, instead of waiting until the end of the back half of the process of our journey to maybe think about it earlier on and saying, “How can I create that connection point earlier on?”

Also, going back to our story in retrospect. Maybe it's looking at all the ideas of things that feel good and then looking for the patterns and looking for the purpose in that. Also, marrying that with what's the purpose and therefore, what are the things we could do to achieve the purpose? However, I think that often the purpose comes out of the ideas because I think our intuition is intelligent and when you feel like what you're doing, it activates you, it puts you in the zone. You feel like, “This is what I was meant to do.” It is some wisdom that is telling you, “Tony, this is important,” and maybe you can't see why it's important yet or how it fits in what you think your purpose is, but follow it because it fits into another purpose or something like that.

Book Recommendations

Our last question is, what are 1, 2,3, or 4 books that have had an impact on you, and why? I can't wait to hear.

We covered two of them. Range. The War of Art is mind-blowing because it's not the art of war. It is that art that you create is a war. It's a battle between you and complacency. There are two of you and it is your creative side that needs to battle with the one that says, “Just sit on the couch. You got writer's block. You don't have time.” It's invigorating to think of it that way but there's so much more and his language is great.

The two other books have been profound for me, but I can't link to a greater purpose behind them, but I think are awesome. One is called Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by an entrepreneur named Bhu Srinivasan. He explains the history of the United States, not from the lens of politics or religion, but economically. It offers alternative explanations for why things happen that make sense and you're like, “It's awesome.”

The other one is Ian Morris, an anthropologist. He wrote a book called Why the West Rules—For Now. It is a 700-page book where he tracks the evolution of the social evolution of the West versus the East and when it increases or decreases. He measures this by things like energy capture per human, computational capability, and size of cities. He tracks this meticulously and he ends up with this crazy conclusion at the end of it, which I won't give you the conclusion of, but it is a singularity kind of conclusion. It is fascinating to read.

Episode Wrap-up

Both of those books sound fascinating, and it reveals more of your range. This interest in all these different areas is peeling back like an onion if you will. I think it's great because sometimes when we think about history, we think of those elements of history we learned in school, and that's not the only history. There's a lot more to it. There are also a lot of different stories of our history that we need to dig into. Economic history that we need to understand. In the interest of time, I want to start by saying thank you so much for a wonderful conversation. It is so insightful. It was deeply full of insights. Thank you so much.

This has been not an interview like I normally have. It's not information that I had in my head, but your questions created insight for me and for us, hopefully. Thank you for the opportunity. 

That's all I could ask for. Before I let you go, I want to make sure people know where they can find out more about you. What's the best place to reach out?

Probably LinkedIn is the best place you can directly connect with me. Just look for Kaihan Krippendorff on LinkedIn. I'm the only one. I also have a website Kaihan.net as well.

Thanks again and thanks to the readers for coming on the journey. I know you're leaving completely blown away and inspired. Go pick up Kaihan's new book, Proximity. In fact, go pick up all his books and check them out. I'll also mention that Kaihan's group has a podcast that you should check out. It's fantastic. There are so many amazing people.

Important Links:

• Outthinker Networks

• Proximity

• Range

• Outthink The Competition

• The Thirty-Six Stratagems

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

• Zen in the Art of Archery

• Tao Te Ching

• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Published

• Outliers

• The War of Art

• Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

• Why the West Rules—For Now

• Kaihan Krippendorff - LinkedIn

• Kaihan.net