I Am the Lizard King. I Can Do Anything

"I am the lizard king. I can do anything” – Jim Morrison

There is a reason that this part of our brain has stuck with us since the paleolithic era; it is incredibly effective at achieving its ends. Think about the athlete who practices very intentionally and thoughtfully and then executes in the game entirely on instinct and emotion. Or the artist who learns and drills tactics and techniques and then executes a masterful performance. Militaries, speakers, designers all also have some concept of “trust your training”. That’s the lizard brain as well, providing an incredibly powerful execution mechanism… but only towards optimizing whatever instinct is powering it.

As our machinery and technology allow business processes to close the gap with brain synapses, similar ideas emerge with our corporations and institutions. These machines have incredible execution power, but they execute blindly toward the “instincts” that are governing them.

There are lessons to be learned and tactics to be deployed at all layers of this “lizard stack”.

1. Can we use technology, philosophy and human ingenuity to evolve a suite of calculable tools capable of creating “non-monetary calculable goals” that either are “good” themselves, or better proxies of “good” than money are?

2. Can we continue to use money as a functional lynchpin of society and a medium of exchange that powers relative value and trade, but have it be a byproduct of a bigger picture “non-monetary calculable goal”?

3. Can we use the machines and technological tools employed by our corporate lizards today to improve our own individual execution frameworks and “manipulate” ourselves into higher good outcomes?

4. Can we use mindfulness, philosophy, meditation and other individual based social sciences to re-orient corporation’s instincts toward the most impactful “non-monetary calculable goals”? Can we get corporations to a state of “flow”?

5. Can we ensure that the individuals who actually form the decision making bodies of corporations are also motivated by the same “non-monetary calculable goals”?

6. Can we use the very artificial intelligence technologies that have proven so adept at analyzing us to help us dispassionately set and analyze these “non-monetary calculable goals”?

7. Can we align the instincts of our governing lizards with the most impactful “non-monetary calculable goals” and create the execution machinery that allows them the flexibility to “fill in gaps” in real-time?

YES! We can do all of these things. Some we can do today. Some we can do in a year, some in five, some in ten, but all of these are things we can collectively turn our rational, logical, collaborative human minds to and make happen. There are gating items and roadblocks of course, some are capital, some are technological, some are regulatory, some are consumer behaviour, but they can all be overcome.

In this book, with the collaboration of many incredible friends and colleagues we’ll endeavour to use this lizard and machine framework to lay out what we can do today and tomorrow to re-wire our society around humanity and integrity. Starting from the lowest common denominator of deep rooted individual biology and moving through the instincts and “biology” of our institutions we have the opportunity to get past band-aid solutions and into the true roots of the biggest problems plaguing us today.

We must remember one thing: it’s just humans all the way down.

We can choose to override our own worst lizard instincts at any time. We’ve created shareholder value maximization, we can uncreate it. We have the ability to decide what governments work towards and the power to give them the execution vehicles to do it. There are no real all-powerful lizard killing machines that we need to create superweapons to stop. There are no evil machines bent on world domination, they model their intelligence and their goals on what we tell them to do.

It’s. Just. Us.

So let’s make it better.