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Silence – Justin Zorn & Leigh Marz

Justin & Leigh

So, in the book, we talk about how we can have our golden rules within an organization like for example, not multitasking while someone else is talking to us is something that that some people really cherish and honor. 

For others, it’s like looking out for the quiet for people who might have less power within an organization. If you’re a higher up in an organization, can you look out for the people who might be struggling with interruption and distraction and advocate for those people to have more space for pristine attention and deep focused work. 

Justin Zorn – Founder, Astrea Strategies

Silence isn’t just the absence of noise. It’s a presence that brings us energy, clarity, and deeper connection.

In this episode, we meet with Justin Zorn & Leigh Marz, to discuss just this. Their book, Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise, explores the meaning of silence and the art of finding it in any situation. The book reveals how to go beyond the ordinary rules and tools of mindfulness. It’s a field guide for navigating the noise of the modern world—not just the noise in our ears, but also on our screens and in our heads.

Drawing on lessons from neuroscience, business, spirituality, politics, and the arts, Marz and Zorn explore why auditory, informational, and internal silence is essential for physical health, mental clarity, ecological sustainability, and vibrant community.

In this episode we discuss:

  • what silence means to an individual
  • why it is so important
  • how to find silence in your life and work

Justin Talbot Zorn has served as both a policymaker and a meditation teacher in the U.S. Congress. A Harvard and Oxford trained specialist in the economics and psychology of well-being, Justin has written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Wired, CNN, and other publications. He is cofounder of Astrea Strategies, a consultancy that bridges contemplation and action, helping leaders and teams envision and communicate solutions to complex challenges. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife and three children.

Leigh Marz is a collaboration consultant and leadership coach for major universities, corporations, and federal agencies as well as a longtime student of pioneering researchers and practitioners of the ritualized use of psychedelic medicines in the West. In her professional work, she has led diverse initiatives, including a training program to promote an experimental mindset among teams at NASA and a decade-long cross-sector collaboration to reduce toxic chemicals in products in partnership with the Green Science Policy Institute, Harvard, IKEA, Google, and Kaiser Permanente. She is the co-founder of Astrea Strategies. Leigh lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and daughter.

You can find Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise at Amazon, Bookshop.org or anywhere you buy books.

For audiophiles, we highly recommend the Audible audio book —read by Prentice Onayemi.

For recent media and articles written by Justin and Leigh, go to Golden Media.

If you’d like to learn more about Justin and Leigh’s consulting work with Astrea Strategies—helping individuals and organizations address challenges and communicate solutions from a deeper place of attention and centeredness—you can find them at astreastrategies.com

If you’d like to learn more about Jarvis Jay Masters, a primary teacher in the book, and his appeal for his freedom—please visit freejarvis.org.

Freedom Matters Host and Producer: Georgie Powell 

Sentient Digital

Music and audio production: Phil Amalong | Toccare 

Philip Amalong

Transcript

Justin: It’s a demonstrable fact that there’s more auditory noise in the world. It’s a demonstrable fact that there’s more informational noise and there’s a whole lot of evidence that there’s more internal voice than ever before. So, are these driving each other? 

We come to the conclusion in our studies with academic neuroscientists and psychologists and people in all different disciplines and walks of life that a noisier world auditorily and informationally is driving a noisier world internally.

Georgie: Welcome to Freedom Matters, where we explore the intersection of technology, productivity, and digital well-being. I’m your host, Georgie Powell. And each episode, we’ll be talking to experts in productivity and digital wellness. We’ll be sharing their experiences on how to take back control of technology. We hope you leave feeling inspired, so let’s get to it.

This week, we’re in conversation with Leigh Marz and Justin Zorn. We’re discussing their book, Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise, which explores why auditory informational and internal silence is essential for physical health, mental clarity, ecological sustainability, and vibrant community. 

In this episode, we discussed the origins of external, internal, and informational noise, what silence means to an individual, why it is so important, and how to find silence in your own life and work. 

Justin, Leigh, welcome to the Freedom Masters podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. We really are so very grateful to talk with you. 

Leigh: Oh, thanks, Georgie. Thanks for having us. 

Justin: Really good to be here, Georgie. I’m a big fan of Freedom, used it a lot in writing this book. 

Leigh: Absolutely.

Georgie: Amazing. We love to hear that, and we do actually talk with lots of authors who say the same. So, we’re really grateful that our products help people to create great things. Thank you. 

I’m going to start with a big question. It’s basically part of the question of your book. Perhaps you could start by just giving me a sense of how you both think about what silence is. 

Leigh: Maybe I’ll start us off and have Justin weave in, because it really was a journey for us. We started out by writing this article for Harvard Business Review where we were really looking at auditory noise. So, we were looking first at silence and sound and noise like many of us do on the decibel level, that which happens in our ears. 

But that article actually went viral and it was a wonderful thing for us to take pause. So, then we decided to actually take a deeper dive into this as a book. And as we sat with that question, okay, what’s the book? 

We moved beyond that auditory ear silence and noise into informational noise, which is that which is usually coming at us through our screens, taking up and grabbing for our attention more and more aggressively all the time, which I know you all think a lot about. 

And then as we have these conversations with this extraordinary cast of characters, all kinds of people, politicians, artists, a man incarcerated on death row. 

Georgie: Yeah. 

Leigh: Just so many incredible people. They also pointed us towards a silence that is internal that really can be actually separated from whatever is happening externally. It could be loud outside but very quiet inside. 

Because when we ask them what’s the deepest silence they’ve ever known, they pointed us to extraordinary experiences like births and deaths and moments of awe, and moments where it might actually be ruckus like on the dance floor at 04:00 AM mark or something like that. Or running the perfect line through roaring rapids deep in the wilderness. 

So, for us looking at silence and the deeper exploration that we took on with this book, we wanted to look at the silence and the ways it occurs in our ears and on our screen in our minds. 

Georgie: And I think, in conclusion, your basically saying that it’s more about that feeling in your mind rather than the noise that we come to believe. 

Leigh: Yeah. We’re interested in the — and how they interplay for each of us. And for each of us, that answer, I think, is different. And that’s really what the book is about is finding your own answers. 

Georgie: Interesting. Justin, do you have anything to add to that? 

Justin: Yeah. I think Leigh said it well. And we were at first surprised to hear all of these answers that didn’t sound auditorily quiet when we interviewed people about the deepest silence they’ve ever known. 

And what we realized after some time was that they were describing moments of pristine attention. They were describing moments when nothing was making claims on the consciousness. No person or thing was seeking to dominate the consciousness. And this is something precious and rare in our world today. 

If you think about a waterfall or some birds in nature, they could be extraordinarily high decibels. But they’re not making claims on you. They’re not saying, oh, respond. Keep track of this. Do this. Do that. So, there’s some types of silence that might not necessarily be low decibel, might not necessarily seem auditorily quiet. 

So, it was something mysterious, something that we came to explore in the journey of writing this book. 

Georgie: So, interesting because when you start by asking everyone what their most memorable memory of deepest silence is, I actually misread it when I first read the book and I just thought it was what was your deepest memory. I had a memory in my mind. 

And then it’s like, oh, I think I’ve misread that. Like, I have to go back and check it and realize that it was your deepest memory of silence. And I realized, like, I was going through the portfolio of memories in my mind. And most of them don’t have any sound. Memory is quiet. 

Like, I was trying to — I was thinking of these really pivotal moments in my life, all these really lovely lasting memories, lots of different ones, as you say, birth, death, but also the one that popped to mind initially to me was me and my sister playing in a bowl of cold water as children are making footprints on the patio where we lived. 

And I can remember the feeling of the cold stones and the sun. It was spring, it was ever really warm enough to have your feet out, but you did anyway, and I remember how I felt. Probably I could even conjure up some smells, but I can’t remember the sound. 

And I don’t know if that’s something that also has come up for you as well. And remembering sound in very memorable moments I’m finding is hard. 

Leigh: Right. 

Justin: That is super interesting, Georgie. Because, and one thing we’ve explored in this topic of the deepest silence people have ever known is that this deepest silence is like a profundity of memory. 

Like in this space of silence, we can go deeper into feeling. Away from the verbal chatter, away from thinking about what it is that we want to present to the world and that was like a common denominator to what people described in the deepest silence. So, it makes sense that as we’re going to these memories that evoke strong feelings, they happen in silence, we perceive them in silence. 

Leigh: I love that I love also how vivid your memory is and in the sensory way, there’s so many other senses that you’re experiencing. And we did definitely hear that from most anyone we spoke to us with deep sensory experience and it’s stepping out of time at an experience of timelessness, time standing still. 

Georgie: Fascinating. Okay. I want to get to how we get into a place of silence and also importantly for our listeners like how that relates to how we work and how will we also think about our relationship with technology. 

But before we get there, I’d like to understand a bit more about noise, and you talked about decibels and you talked about external noise and internal noise. Talking about external noises, why is there a difference between artificial noise and natural noise? 

So, these last few days, we were away by the sea, the ocean was roaring. And I said, why is this sound regenerative? Whereas road noise, which is probably a similar consistency and decibel if you’re living near a big motorway, is so draining. 

Justin: That’s a really important question. We think about noise in two words as unwanted distraction, as that which takes us away from what we want. And there’s of course beautiful sound. We’re big fans of beautiful sounds. We’re not writing about a kind of silence that’s pulling us away from that. 

But there’s an acoustic ecologist named Arjun Shankar, a consultant who says, basically, sound is when you’re mowing your lawn. Noise is when your neighbor is mowing their lawn, and music is when your neighbor is mowing your lawn. 

So, it’s a matter of perception. It’s a matter of our own preferences and discernment what counts as a pleasant noise and what counts as a distracting noise. When your neighbor is mowing their lawn and not yours, there’s a distraction that’s happening there. 

There’s unwanted interference in your ability to sense and perceive. Because we get a lot in the book into the biophysical elements of how noise can drive the fight or flight response and how that could inhibit our concentration and inhibit our learning. 

So, there is something real to artificial human made noise like the sound of that lawn mower when it’s not presenting a gift to you. There’s a real physical response that happens in terms of cortisol levels in the body.

If we’re able to reframe a certain noise as something that’s a gift or something that’s representative of something beautiful or something that’s a manifestation of something beautiful in nature like the ocean, then we can perceive this as something that’s not an unwanted distraction, but something that we want; something that brings us joy, something that brings us lightness. 

Leigh: And I think what we really emphasize in the book is for us to notice what we experience as noise, to notice noise. And maybe to where Justin was pointing us, is there a way to reframe it so that we experience it a little differently? Sometimes we’ll get some context and everything will change. 

But people have asked us over the years or the months since the book has been out, you know, what about white noise? I really like white noise. I said keep your white noise if that’s serving you. 

So, I think it’s like noticing noise, noticing what you truly experience as noise, and then noticing what really is quieting for you, what brings you silence. So, tuning in and appreciating silence is the most simple instruction we can give. And it may be surprising. 

We spoke with a professor of Biobehavioral Health and Medicine, Joshua Smyth, asking him about — asking him for a definition for internal silence, mysterious place inside, which we’ll talk more about. And in exasperation, he said, quiet is what people think, quiet is. Quiet is what we experience quiet to be. And that could be rather surprising. 

He had a gentleman in his studies who he does large scale mindfulness studies and one of the men in his studies found his quiet, his flow state through carving, with a chainsaw, carving large chunks of wood that was where he found his most quiet, his deepest silence, if you will. So, it might be surprising. 

Georgie: Moving on, I was interested in how the rise of attention grabbing information or informational noise was impacting our internal noise and our ability to find silence. I asked Leigh to explain more. 

Leigh: Maybe I’ll take us from informational to internal and this may be a familiar statistic or a quote, the CEO, then CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, said in 2010, he estimated that every two days we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. Much of it good and much of it we celebrate. 

But what’s going on is, of course, evolutionarily, we are — we do need to pay attention to things that grab for our attention. We need to make sure that that saber tooth tiger is not hunting us. So, we need that. 

We need to not just focus on what we want to focus on, we need to focus that, which is demanding our attention. But we’ve never really been in the experience of having our attention grabbed day in, day out; having more, what they call bottom up attention demands so that our top down, that we want to focus on, attention gets overwhelmed. 

So, researchers have found that most people switch between different online content every 19 seconds and the average person spends about an hour a day getting back to what they’ve been working on. And another study suggested that people in the United States, anyway, take in about five times as much information as they did just a generation ago. 

So, the information scape is saturated beyond anything we’ve ever experienced and that other critical point, it’s grabbing for attention, not just sitting out there leaving us alone. 

So, we wanted to look at what does that do to our internal, our minds, and so we turned to Ethan Cross, a University professor at Michigan, who he suggests that we listen to something like 320 State of the Union addresses of compressed internal speech every day. This is inner monologue, 4,000 words per minute is what they estimate that happens internally. 

So, we are also flooding ourselves with this internal chatter, which is often like worrying about the future or ruminating about the past. Or maybe just dialoguing, internally dialoguing about everything. So, that’s a lot of noise. And we were really interested in that interplay, between information and internal noise in particular. What would you add, Justin? 

Justin: For me, this — One of the most interesting questions for me that we got to explore in this journey in writing the book was these feedback loops. It’s a demonstrable fact that there’s more auditory noise in the world. 

It’s a demonstrable fact, as Leigh’s just alluded to, that there’s more informational noise and there’s a whole lot of evidence including that 320 State of the Union addresses a day that we listen to in our heads that there’s more internal noise than ever before. 

So, are these driving each other? And we look at these feedback loops and we come to the conclusion in our studies with academic neuroscientists and psychologists and people in all different disciplines and walks of life that a noisier world auditorily and informationally is driving a noisier world internally. 

And I think this is very appropriate that we’re on the Freedom podcast right now to take some time for respite for a sanctuary from the auditory and especially the informational noise can create the conditions through which we can have more silence and focus more of this pristine attention internally. 

I really just want to focus on one in particular right now, which is that as a society, as a culture, really globally right now, we tend to think of the maximum possible production of mental stuff as a good thing. And that often includes the maximum possible production of thought of this internal sound and stimulus as a good thing. 

Because as a culture right now, we often mistake the feeling of stress for aliveness. We’re not thinking about the value of pristine attention, the value of silence. And what this can do for our well-being, for our creativity, for our real productivity in the sense of being able to solve difficult problems with generative solutions. 

And we tend to think of big data, the maximum possible production of data sound information as the goal, as productivity. And what we’re proposing in this book based on all these explorations with these extraordinary people we met is that maybe the answers to the biggest problems that we really need to solve will come through the silence. 

Georgie: It feels so intuitive that silence is necessary to really see how to solve hardest questions. And yet, the information economy is snowballing, and sometimes it feels impossible to slow it down. 

In the book, I was particularly interested in one study that proved that whilst we are hardwired to gather more and more information, having that information does not make it easier to quieten our minds. 

Instead, our brains are capped with respect to how much information they can process, and information overwhelm just means that the important bits can be overlooked. I asked Leigh to explain some more. 

Leigh: Cognitive scientists have been onto this for some time now. They’ve known that there’s very much an upper limit of what can hold our attention and we’re filtering out 11 million bits of information every second according to cognitive scientists like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, brought us flow or popularized the concept of flow for us. 

And then at that same time, our ability to process to filter through it, our attentional networks hasn’t increased. We still are somewhere around a 120 bits per second. So, 11 million bits, a 126 bits. There’s no big increase there. So, our attention is really that scarce commodity. Where we put our attention is what we are attending to in our lives. 

And I think you’re right, a lot of us will just know, whether we know those numbers or not or even know those parts of the brain or not, it doesn’t matter. We just know we’re not holding with our attention that pristine attention the details of our lives we’re not, the presence of in conversation, we’re not feeling that on the other side. And that’s a huge cost. It’s too big of a cost, if you ask us. It’s too great a cost. 

Georgie: I completely agree. So, let’s talk a little bit about how we can move towards finding silence. It’s individual to everyone, where should we start? 

Justin: Leigh, you want to say a little bit first about the healthy successor to this smoke break? 

Leigh: Sure. In the book I make a confession that I was a smoker and the confession is actually not so much that I was a smoker, it’s that I loved it; love the quiet it would bring in my day. At that time, I was working in some high-intense crisis work in runway shelters and battered women shelters. 

So, those moments of pause were so precious. So, we ask our readers in the book and take on a chapter of how do we bring in a healthy successor to this smoke break, these little pockets of silence that bring us calm? And actually, Georgie, you just gave us one of those pockets just moments ago with just a pause, just a moment. I felt things rearrange in me and just expand a bit in me. 

And what we’re really looking to do at our first step is in addition to noticing all the noise and appreciating silence, is really thinking about weaving it throughout our days, especially for listeners like the ones that’ll be hearing this. How do we bring that into our day? It makes a world of difference to the attention, the quality of attention and the depth of work we can bring to bear. 

So, in the book, we look at all these — all kinds of ways really to spark ideas, not to be so much prescriptive, to bring a little pause, a little moment of breath. So, can we take a little bit of time, give it excluded attention to say three breaths and see what we noticed there. 

We talk about the Japanese concept of ma and one of our preferred definitions for that other than silence and or emptiness, nothingness, things like that, is pure potentiality. So, to bring more ma into those spaces in between. In Japanese culture, you’ll see that in architecture, you’ll see that in Ikebana flower arrangements. 

The emphasis is not just on the branches and the petals, but the empty space around that. So, can we bring more attention to the empty spaces, if you will, those pure potentiality spaces and really sink into that fully? So, it’s not so much about the quantity, but the quality of dropping into that silence. 

Justin: We go beyond just these individual personal moment to moment practices in the book to look also at ways that an individual could cultivate deeper silence, even come close to what we call rapturous silence. 

So, we look at an idea that we got from the acoustic ecologist, Gordon Hampton, that he calls take your to-do list for a hike. Which is where Gordon will look at his to-do list at home, at his office. And then he’ll drive some ways away and get to the quietest place in nature that he could get. 

He’ll often hike a whole day to get there as well. And once he gets to the quietest place, he could get, in his case, it’s in the whole rainforest in Olympic National Park. And when he gets there, he gets as quiet as he can. He tunes into the quie of the surroundings. 

And from that vantage point he told us, he’s sometimes able to cross months of professional commitments off of his list because the things that seemed important from the noise of his office just aren’t important once he gets to the place of external and internal silence that it’s possible to achieve in the rainforest there. 

So, but you don’t have to be too radical about it. You don’t have to go too far away, but can you get to a quiet place? Can you get to a place of quiet within yourself and then evaluate what your priorities are, what needs to be done. 

Similarly, we look at the model, the example that Gandhi gives us, who even in the midst of his tremendous leadership of India’s movement for independence over decades, would spend every single Monday in silence. 

Sometimes he’d be around other people, sometimes other people would be talking to him, but he wouldn’t speak a word. Because he said a seeker after truth needs silence, has to be in silence. 

So, we look at these deeper practices and then in the book we get into what it means to build a culture that honors quiet time. What it means to experiment within an office, within a school, even within family or friend life, to try out different experiments to see how we can create more sanctuaries for silent pristine attention. 

And then we work in the book all the way up to a society that honors silence. What would it look like to change laws and public policy to honor pristine attention in terms of how we deal with thinking about deliberation in the public sphere, in terms of the management of the attention economy, and so on. 

Georgie: So, then moving on into organizations and teams, are you getting a sense that companies are waking up to the importance of this and the power of having breathing spaces and silence within a working culture. 

Justin: I’ll just say one thing real quickly, which is that one of the main ways that companies are doing this is through, of course, an appreciation of mindfulness practice. One thing that we want to bring forward in the book is that while this sometimes feels a little bit constricted, particularly in a corporate kind of environment, where it becomes a kind of to do. 

We wrote this book in part wanting to give license to people to give up these feelings of self doubt and guilt. Oh, I’m not going to my company’s mindfulness sessions enough. I’m not meditating enough in the mornings as I’ve been recommended to do by HR or by my physician. 

And to give people license to find silence in whatever way is right for them. So, they give up on the rules and tools and bells and cushions of mindfulness. And as Leigh was describing before, recognized that silence is whatever, we perceive silence to be and to tune into our own knowledge, our innate knowledge of what silence is for us. 

Leigh: I’m here in the Bay Area where a lot of companies have been using mindfulness for actually decades. And it’s run its course at this point, maybe for some of them in the workplace. They’ve gotten what they can out of it. Those who’ve responded to it are doing it. Those who aren’t or maybe just feeling bad and wrong that they’re not responding to it. 

So, it’s just not for everyone that one size fits all. But we wanted to turn to silence because we felt like it really does belong to everyone. And it’s really about finding your own route there. And as a team, we can be experimental and playful with the routes of finding that. 

So, we mentioned Ma, that concept and so we have a little segment called Ma on the job where we bring Ma into our work day, into our meetings even. What I love to do with groups as we sit, is to first just come together and for a moment, just tune into what the purpose of the meeting is. 

Sometimes people won’t even really remember or know why they’re there. And we can waste a whole lot of time talking in circles rather than really focusing everyone’s attention on the reason for being there, why it’s important to use this time, and do we really even need an hour to do that? And then give ourselves a break and some time for transition, reflection, all those things. 

Or if it’s a difficult meeting, maybe there’s a great conflict taking place. We could turn to what the Quakers have done for hundreds of years when there’s deep conflict or heat in the room that we just pause for a second and really reorient to why it’s important to resolve this perhaps without blame or further polarizing. 

And oftentimes, what people will tell us time and again is that just something, some other kind of possibility will emerge from that just pause, that moment of silence. And it may come from the least likely person to speak up in the meeting as well. Because the other thing is when we’re defaulting to our meetings, the way we have been, the default is to the tyranny of the fastest and the loudest, and we’re not hearing the quieter voices, including the quieter voices inside ourselves about maybe what’s needed. 

So, one thing that Justin and I are really committed to is we’re working teams who are working on complex and important issues like climate change or removing toxic chemicals. And we’re not going to get to those solutions through conventional thinking and the same old kind of brainstorming sessions. We need deeper, more connected thinking going on in order to find those breakthrough solutions. 

Georgie: On an individual level within an organization, if you’re not a manager, how can you start to create change if you think there’s a problem? Like we’re all just going too fast. There’s too much noise. There’s not enough opportunities for us to create silence. How would you recommend someone starts talking about it in their organization? 

Justin: So, one thing to do is to propose an experiment. We talk in the book with an old colleague of Leigh’s named Michael Barton, who some years back in the early days of the open plan office he was working at, what’s now a division of Ticketmaster, the ticket seller. And he saw engineers and coders having a really difficult time coping with the sound of the open plan office. 

So, they proposed an intervention that anyone who needed to could put on a little red sash and then put their headphones on, and everyone would know that when a person was wearing that red sash, it was essentially a little do not disturb card that was like, don’t bother me, don’t come talk to me because I’m doing deep work. I need to not be interrupted. 

And that little red sash was an experiment just to see how it would work. How people would respond to it. And Michael told us it wasn’t a panacea in itself, but what it really did was it opened a kind of experimental mindset and which people would say, let’s iterate and experiment with what works for being able to create more pristine attention, to be able to honor people’s space and attention. 

So, that led to other experiments and interventions. So, in the book, we talk about how we can have our golden rules within an organization like for example, not multitasking while someone else is talking to us is something that that some people really cherish and honor. 

For others, it’s like looking out for the quiet for people who might have less power within an organization. If you’re a higher up in an organization, can you look out for the people who might be struggling with interruption and distraction and advocate for those people to have more space for pristine attention and deep focused work. 

Leigh: We’re not coming from a place of finger pointing and finger wagging. There are things I do without question that are allowed and disruptive to those around me. So, if we can just get really playful and kind and lighthearted about that, we can find our way. There’s no need to convince anyone that it’s noisy and hard to focus. Everyone’s got that. 

Now, what to do about it? That’s the question. Like, how we can address it. And if you are an independent worker, you can also, I notice people and I did this as we wrote the book. You can also create like a buddy system where maybe you’re working freelance and they’re working freelance, but you can say, okay, we’re going to do this focus work here, and then I’m going to work out in the garden. 

And what are you going to get done? And we set those goals, but also set the goals for some open spaciousness as well. Little things like that are gifts that we can give one another to just make it go better. 

Georgie: Amazing. Do you have any other final advice? 

Justin: I think really just tying all this together, Georgie and Leigh. I feel like the core message that is central to this book is simply appreciating the empty space. Simply appreciating that this is where the answers and the inspiration could come from. 

And Georgie, you said something really perceptive and profound earlier when you were talking about this idea that if we just had more information, more data then maybe we could relax into the silence because we would have what we need. And this fallacy of thinking, if only we had more data. 

And we spoke with a neuroscientist psychologist duo Larry Rosen and Adam Gizali who explained that really what’s driving us to seek more and more information and avoid the silence is that when we gather information, when we go check our email, check the news, it creates a dopamine hit like our ancient ancestors used to get from collecting juicy berries in the forest. 

So, we’re wired to seek that dopamine hit. And when we don’t get that information, like you were talking about, we get into a place where it sometimes feels scary because we feel like we can’t make sense of things, we can’t fulfill our commitments in the world. 

But our core proposition in this book is that if we can resist that temptation for more information, if we can sit with that slight discomfort of not always knowing, not always getting that extra bit of information, then we can come closer to real intuition. We could come closer to a real deeper sense of creativity and inspiration that can guide our lives and guide us to find the solutions we’re seeking. 

Georgie: Amazing. Justin, Leigh, you’ve been fantastic guests. It’s been an absolute pleasure to speak with you both today. Thank you so much for joining us on the Freedom Matters podcast. 

Leigh: Thank you, Georgie. 

Justin: Thank you so much, Georgie. 
Georgie: Thank you for joining us on Freedom Matters. If you like what you hear, then subscribe on your favorite platform. And until next time, we wish you happy, healthy, and productive days.