Episode 51: Joshua Cooper Ramo & The Nature of Connection

I spoke with Joshua Cooper Ramo in this podcast interview, partly about his latest book, The Seventh Sense and partly about his overall life and pursuit of excellence. Mr. Ramo started off as a journalist, working at Newsweek then for Time Inc back when, as he says, "it mattered who The Man of the Year was." He worked as both senior and as foreign editor at Time, and he wrote for them long enough ago (1997) that he wrote The Man Of the Year cover story on Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel. From Time Inc he moved to China to pursue adventure in the world of business. He became fluent in Chinese and fell in love with the culture. In China he worked for the former president of Goldman Sachs and eventually began working at his current company, Kissinger Associates, where he's now co-CEO. He lived in Beijing full time for a little over a decade and now splits his time between Beijing and New York. Yes, he's a busy, pipe hittin' dude and I was super stoked to connect for this conversation. I found him through his first book, No Visible Horizon, a lovely story about his journey to aerobatic nationals as a pilot that reminded me of reading Ernest Gann's "Fate Is The Hunter", another excellent and relatively unsung pilot book. Curious about what else he'd written, I found his third book, The Seventh Sense, which I read through with great enjoyment and then went on to read his second book, The Age of the Unthinkable. Reading those two books gave me a look into the mind of a writer deeply immersed in international relations, intensely curious about connections in the modern age, and fascinated with networks in particular. Both books deal with the unpredictable nature of an increasingly connected world, and as a business owner running a small enterprise in that world I found them entertaining and educational. In fact, they forced me to re-evaluate our strategy at Paleo Treats and the way we're using our networks. In this interview we dive into the important points of a network, the difference between complex and complicated systems, what topology is and why it matters, and how emergent properties of networks are inevitable. I asked him how he curates and uses his curiosity, and he talked about his main theme in The Seventh Sense that "connection changes the nature of an object." We do dive briefly into some flying stuff and how flying may move from unnatural to natural as you become a better pilot, but the majority of this interview deals with networks and how to understand and explore them in this incredibly connected world. Joshua talks about the importance of figuring out what tools you need in order to understand and investigate a problem. He places the conversation in the context of historical cycles, the enduring nature of art, and the best kind of adventure you can have. Enjoy the show! Books Mentioned -No Visible Horizon -The Age of the Unthinkable -The Seventh Sense -Fate is the Hunter -China's Wings -The Rational Optimist For each podcast I do I end up writing a bunch of notes and questions. While I don't always ask the questions, it's helpful to have them written down and reviewed before the show. Here are my notes for this interview: -You're a searcher, a seeker, and a story teller. Tell me about that. -in Age if the Unthinkable you talk about the importance of relationships. You seem very well connected to a number of different cohorts. How did your learning of Chinese culture influence that? Is there anything more important than building relationships when it comes to getting things done? (Planning to be Dan Kaminsky) -connection changes the nature of an object. What does that mean? -how are the fourth revolution & the seventh sense tied together? -how do we cultivate the 7th sense? -Clausewitz noted, "Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain. . . . In short, most intelligence is false." How are you assessing a network accurately? -