The Nature of Adversity

In this episode I explore the power of adversity, challenge and how embracing adversarial dynamics enables human beings and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to become relentlessly and exponentially smarter and stronger.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Nature of Adversity
• 20:18 Adversarial Approach for Achieving Growth
• 43:53 Embracing Adversity to Build Stronger Nation

Transcript

David Ding: 0:00

Okay. So this one's about the nature of adversity. Now, adversity is a hugely beneficial aspect of nature that gets overlooked. And I think in context of you know decentralized technologies and you know the nature of freedom, the true nature of freedom, it's important to accommodate the benefits of an adversarial experience. And I think, if you look at, you know I was having a conversation with a friend the other day and he was talking about socialism, and then you know we were talking about people who are socialists but who work in the commercial sector, and then we're looking at capitalists who have strong elements of socialism, and the reality is that the extremes of both are profoundly detrimental. However, as with everything, there is a temperate state which is harmonious. And so, if you look at so as an example, with artificial intelligence, the benefits of an adversarial model are that you can have a singularity and it can split its own intelligence, and it can polarize its own intelligence, it can attack itself or play itself at a game, and then it can defend itself against its own form of attack and it can perpetually, in a compounding way, get better and better and better at defending itself against a relentless attack. And so it's the extremes of both. In that scenario One is relentlessly and perpetually seeking to exploit its own vulnerabilities, and then the other aspect is seeking to perpetually defend itself against that attack and when it is exploited, its own intelligence is increasing, its experience is growing and it's learning how to become stronger and stronger and stronger. And really, this is the hidden superpower of AI, and part of the reason that it can has the capability to exponentially grow and learn and evolve, is because it's fearless. It's absolutely fearless. It's seeking to exploit its own vulnerabilities, and this is why human beings are so intimidated by AI is because we are terrified of our vulnerabilities being exploited. However, there's an aspect of our own nature that wants our vulnerabilities to be exploited relentlessly so that we can, in a compounding way, become stronger and stronger and stronger. This is the nature of adversity. It is the.

David Ding: 3:40

When we are in an adversarial environment, the only possible outcome is strength, and this is why, at some level, you actually want your vulnerabilities to be relentlessly exploited, because at some point, you begin to defy gravity, at some point you become so strong, because of how persistent you are at exploiting your own vulnerabilities and strengthening them, that the gravity of the environment around you has no impact, whether that be in terms of wealth generation, whether it be in terms of your own learning and your investment in your own learning. That's an adversarial approach. The absence of knowing is a weakness, and what you're doing is you're by learning. You are rendering what you currently believe obsolete in each moment, and that requires total surrender, because you are what you believe. And if you're prepared to surrender what you believe in each moment to give rise to an emerging truth, then you are growing relentlessly. And so how do we exploit the opportunity presented to us by an adversarial dynamic, and that is challenge.

David Ding: 5:29

Challenge is the fulcrum of growth. It's the fulcrum of growth. And so, if you're someone who is seeking to avoid challenges, you are not growing. You're either stagnating or you're going backwards, because in this reality, you're either appreciating or depreciating, you're expanding or you're contracting. There is no stagnant state. And so if you're avoiding challenge, you are becoming weaker and weaker in a compounding way your body, your mind, your emotions. The more you are avoiding challenge, the weaker you are becoming. In the same way, the more you are pursuing challenge, the stronger you are becoming, and it's just a simple fact, a law of nature, and this is why, when, if you look at AI and if you view it as a tool to create convenience, then what you're doing is you're removing challenge from your daily life.

David Ding: 6:58

Now, you may want to be challenged in your daily life in specific ways. You know, as an artist, as an example, there are multiple challenges you go through and mainly, with art, it's the challenges which ideas not to pursue. You know, the challenge is to be totally present in the moment and to allow inspiration to guide the brush or to guide the stroke, or, if it's music, to allow the sound in your mind to determine the course of the piece of music, without question, without logic. Now, this is a challenge, and so AI can remove that challenge because it's adversarial, it's playing a zero sum game with itself and it's conquering its own weakness relentlessly, fearlessly, and to create a deterministic outcome. It is profoundly decisive because there is a void of fear. It is not afraid of exploiting its vulnerabilities, because it is harnessing the benefit of challenge to become stronger and stronger and stronger, perpetually and exponentially and as close to zero time as possible. So challenge, really.

David Ding: 8:43

If you're afraid of challenge or if you're trying to avoid challenge, then your life is going backwards, you're not growing, and so the solution is to obviously focus on challenge, to introduce challenge and to put it at the forefront of your life. And so you might say to yourself, okay, well, okay, I get this. But so you know how do I set a challenge? And that's really simple as you look at the problems and in business that you would call this a problem statement. You know, if you're about to embark on a project, you begin with a problem statement. Or you know, in the startup ecosystem, it's quite a common template for a pitch deck as an example. To begin with, the problem statement, problem solution, and.

David Ding: 9:53

But what I would say is that you know you need to spend the majority of your time defining the problem, and I mean the vast majority, 80%, if not more. And I think this is a challenge in the job that I currently do, it's very focused on productization and delivery of products. However, you know, in from my perspective, the delivery of the product is such a minute part of providing the solution because I'm prepared to bear as patient and to listen for as long as it takes until I understand the actual problem. You know I won't attempt to solve it. I'm not just going to deliver a product until I understand the true nature of the problem, or the, the or all of the problems that exist.

David Ding: 10:55

Once you know the problem, you can then set the challenge, because the problem is where the ad, where the potential to leverage the adversarial dynamic exists, and ad ad where the adversarial dynamic exists, that's where the growth potential is. So all you ever have to do is to identify the problems, understand the problem, spend as long as it takes to understand the problem and then solve it in a fraction of a second. And it's the same with AI. You can test this with AI. You know, if you're using chat GPT and you just type something in like it's Google, you know, like template for an employment agreement, you'll get something that's just not fit for purpose at all. You'll get something that hasn't solved a problem. You'll get something that hasn't elevated you from where you are right now because you haven't defined the problem. So you haven't set a challenge for chat GPT to accomplish. And this is if you can adopt this in your life as an individual, you will propel yourself or you'll be catapulted forward in so many aspects of your life.

David Ding: 12:33

What is the problem? And you may experiment, you may be wrong. So, as an example, sometimes there are problems and we actually don't know what the cause is. And if you don't know the cause of a problem, then you have to create a hypothesis, and then that's the challenge. So this is the symptom of the problem is X? What is the cause? My challenge is to solve the problem, but I don't know the cause. So the fact that I don't know the cause really is the challenge.

David Ding: 13:18

And so what's my best guess? It's a hypothesis based on what is known to me now, and so the challenge is to render my hypothesis valid or invalid, and that's the mission Very, very simple. And so you're seeking to render your best guess, your hypothesis. You're looking for evidence that it's valid and or invalid, and success is the emerging truth. My hypothesis was invalid, so now I'm going to create a new hypothesis based on what I learned from this failure. And this is what, how it works. It's our life works. When you're charting your territory, when you're in growth mode and you're venturing into the unknown, you have to make a guess and be prepared to be wrong, but you celebrate what becomes known throughout the course of the experiment, because that's what enables you to create a hypothesis that you couldn't create before and at some moment, if you're committed and devoted to re-hypothesizing, at some point it'll become valid and eventually you will have defined the cause of the problem. Maybe you may run five experiments and eventually you've identified the cause of the problem, and so then your problem statement becomes a solution, and this really is. And so I want to demonstrate this pattern, because a lot of so.

David Ding: 15:20

I work with Callahan Innovation, I work with early stage startups, and a lot of people are confused about the transition from R&D, research and development on to commercialization. You know, delivering an MVP, so I want to bring this the benefit of the adversarial approach. I want to bring it into context of a product which is a solution to a problem. So, if you're still, if you're experimenting, what you have to? Stay devoted to understanding the problem first. Now, if you are not speaking directly to customers or to stakeholders, you're guessing, you're guessing, and so you can stand up an MVP based on your assumptions and your hypothesis. But the ideal scenario is to speak to customers sooner before you actually stand up the MVP.

David Ding: 16:28

You know, have a fluid version of the MVP, have a visual representation of it, but you can test your hypothesis with a concept you know. You can say if this product were to exist, would you use it? Oh, you wouldn't. Okay, what would have to be true for you to see value in this in order to solve your problem? And they may say well, I don't actually understand the cause of this problem, I don't know why this problem happens. And this is what R&D is, is you stay the course with that person. You don't think about products or commercialization, you just stay with them and solve the problem.

David Ding: 17:15

And once the problem is solved, you can't solve the problem. You then walk backwards through what you went through to solve it and you create a product and a business model and an operating model in place that can administer it exactly as it happened. So everything is a hypothesis until it's everything is. You're continuously rendering your hypothesis invalid until you come up with a hypothesis that is valid and that's validation. Once you have validation, you then have it, have the challenge. Sorry, you've validated, you've overcome the challenge. Now you can create the solution.

David Ding: 18:14

Problem solution, solution is this product, with this service, with this business model, with this operating model, and you come up with a valid concept to create a solution to the problem. And then you do the same thing. You've got the concept. You then go and find evidence or proof of that concept and there'll be a whole bunch of assumptions and a whole bunch of other hypothesis you have to make because you know the customer or the tester you were working with had to make a whole bunch of assumptions because and those assumptions will be wrong. And so then you get them to use the proof of concept. You know, business model, operating model, product, whatever it may be. You stay with them until the problem is solved using the product rather than just conceptually. Then you've got proof of concept. We made a product, we provided a service, provided an operating model, we solved the problem and at the end of it they valued the solving of that problem at $500 or whatever it might be. In order to not lose the privilege of continuing to receive that product or that solution or whatever it may be, they're prepared to pay X, proof of concept. And so you know, the process goes on.

David Ding: 20:18

So this is the nature of an adversarial approach. This is the benefit of adversarial approach is the perpetual seeking of failure, of rendering something invalid until the evidence arises to tell you that it actually is valid. Then you create the solution. So in the startup ecosystem, if you align yourself with these events, this is how you de-risk a venture and lots of people. Now I need to temper this with the fact that just because there are lots of funds open and available venture capital funds and just because they have a portfolio or they have capital to deploy of $100 million, let's say, and you may tick all the boxes, you may de-risk the opportunity, that doesn't mean you're guaranteed to raise capital. In fact, such a tiny percent of ventures will be able to raise capital. So much of them, many of them, raise their capital through private capital channels. So I do want to temper this. It's not like a black and white thing where, if you check all these boxes, you're definitely going to raise capital and, by the same token, sometimes you can raise capital without doing any of this stuff. So you know, but there are best practices that will stand you in good stead.

David Ding: 22:04

But really, the topic that I'm wanting to hone in on is the adversarial approach, the benefit of an adversarial approach. So, with your body as an example, you've got the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. One of those systems is seeking to avert risk because it's trying to avoid death, and the other one is trying to move towards life. So one is trying to expand, the other is trying to contract. And I've done some pretty full-on experimentation in this side of my life and what I've come to realise is that If you allow, if you become too sympathetic to yourself, if you're too sympathetic to the challenge meaning self-pitying you know you become pitiable, you become a victim. Then your life contracts, your body contracts and the part of your nature that is trying to be sympathetic to yourself you begin to curl over and contract in your body. You know that part of your nature takes over.

David Ding: 23:38

Now, if you become focused on overcoming challenge so if you're setting challenge for yourself and you're accomplishing the mission as a result then then you the opposite happens. You stand more upright, you become more stronger and you're embracing challenge. And you know I talk about being mission-led to founders all the time is well, what's the mission? I know your vision is, I can see the business model, but what's the mission? And you need to know what the problem is in order to unearth the challenge, in order to formulate the mission. And so, in life, your challenge may be if you're all hunched over and curled over because you've, you've, you're relentlessly avoiding the challenge, then your challenge is it's huge. It's huge.

David Ding: 24:49

And the result of my experiment was pretty, was pretty full on, because I allowed the extremes of all the aspects of my nature to totally dominate and control the other aspects so I could come to understand them. And so when you so, when I allowed the sympathetic aspect of my nature to dominate and control the parasympathetic, the experience was catatonia, almost like becoming catatonic, so non-responsive to stimulus. And by the same token, when the parasympathetic one dominates and controls the sympathetic aspect of your nature, same thing again paralysis through physical catatonia. It's the same for emotional, same for mental. So the extremes of all of these aspects of your nature end in the same place Total paralysis, total stagnation and everything shuts down. So what's the solution? Of course it's temperance, and I speak about temperance quite a bit.

David Ding: 26:17

So how can I harness the benefit of challenge and the adversarial dynamic so that I can evolve and expand and grow in a compounding way, and that is through? In business you would call this consistent, rapid improvement, but in your life it's the same thing. So the challenge is to get better in some way. That you're focused on is that every day, in some small way, you're getting better and better in a compounding way, and that's by setting daily challenges that you can emissions, that you can accomplish on a day-to-day basis and then to have space in between. So when you set the challenge, it's a moment in time. You accomplish the mission and once you've accomplished the mission, you rest, you're sympathetic in the trough and you're parasympathetic in the peak. You are overcoming adversity in the peaks and you are sympathetic and passive in the troughs and you focus on devoting yourself to those moments in time, creating them for yourselves, for yourself, to such a degree that there is a, there is a surplus compounding effect. That means that you can measure your growth on a day-to-day basis. You can see the improvements happening on a day-to-day basis, whether it be with your money, whether it be with your strength, your speed, your agility, your vision, your ideas, your emotions. That compounding impact every single day is how you use temperance to embrace both.

David Ding: 28:46

And yeah, this is. I call this a baseline. This is how you establish a baseline quality of life where you're able to do things, and you're able to do things in a baseline quality of life, where you are leveraging the benefits of challenge, but you're not in a constant state of adversity, because that's pure hell. And in the same way. If you're in a constant state of sympathy for yourself, where you're self-liclimiting, blaming everyone around you, avoiding challenge, that's pure hell as well. And if you don't challenge yourself, you'll be just living in pure hell, whether it's because you're trying to force yourself through constant adversity or whether you're too sympathetic to the point where it's become self-pitying and pitiable. Both of those are states of living hell.

David Ding: 29:48

Temperance is compounding growth. That comes out of consistent, repetitive challenge, where you can measure the growth on a day-to-day basis, and so I just want to bring this back into so when I finished the experimentation, I was in a real state with my health, and I knew I had to stop and then begin the process of implementing what I learned, and over the course of 12 months. So I could barely walk. I was in a almost fully catatonic. My body was all hunched over, I'd put on an incredible amount of weight and I had allowed my sympathetic nature to completely dominate and control the rest of my nature, and so it was now time to set the challenges using what I'd learned.

David Ding: 31:01

And I couldn't even walk in the beginning. I couldn't walk 20 steps, so the first time I went for the walk, I walked. So the challenge was 12 months. And I'm going to walk, I'm going to average 5,500 steps a day over the period of 12 months. So that's the challenge, that's the mission, sorry. And so the challenge is to create incremental progress every day. So I created a baseline of what I'm capable of doing now. I walked about 18 steps, something like that. It was a pretty sobering experience. And then went again the next day, went 20 steps, I think, it went 50 the next, and then the benefit of Fibonacci kicked in, and the next time I walked I walked probably a kilometre. And so I broke through that ceiling, just through a small, maybe four days in a row of consistent progress, just shattered the glass ceiling, and so it went exponentially from there and it got to the point even within, maybe within three months, I could walk as far as I wanted to walk, I could walk four hours a day, eight hours a day, and just through consistent commitment to progress. And, yeah, so over the period of that 12 months I walked over I think it was 1.3 million steps, something like that.

David Ding: 32:58

And but when you're in that state of being almost catatonic and you can barely move it, if you think about walking a million steps, if you think about averaging five and a half thousand steps a day. You'll never begin. You'll think that that's impossible. And this is the key is you. You establish what true north is. You establish what true north is.

David Ding: 33:29

My mission is to, over 12 months, to average five and a half thousand steps a day and my challenge is, on a daily basis, to make incremental improvements every single day, and that's all it is. The mission never changes. True north is true north. Your North Star changes on a day-to-day basis because whatever improvements you made upon the day before, you're just seeking to raise the bar, and you know I never, for me personally, I didn't determine what that bar was. It's like I didn't go into the next day saying, okay, I walked 4,000 steps yesterday, so I have to walk 4,500 today. I went in with the intention to improve on the day before and then just pushed it to my limit and stopped before the, before that limit, and it was always an improvement on the previous effort. If without fail and I talk about the I should not don't need to go into that yet.

David Ding: 34:53

So adversity, you know it can, you can make it. It could be pure hell where you're just forcing yourself to change relentlessly and impressively. Or you can set, create a mission and then set a challenge. Set the challenge, the challenge, my challenge today is to be incrementally better than yesterday. That's it. And once you, once you've after you've set that challenge and you've accomplished that mission for that day, then you rest. You can be as sympathetic as you want to, because the improvements just happening, the growth and the strength is just happening now. But some sympathy is what's gonna kill you. If you, if you're too sympathetic, if you are too challenge a verse, then you, you fall into a state of what I call overcoddling, you overcoddle yourself and you stagnate entirely and you don't grow strong. And just to tie a bow around this now, what it would say is that New Zealand currently is in a state of overcoddling and is far, far too sympathetic, far, far, far too sympathetic. And I think our legislation has become extreme to the point where New Zealand is no longer prepared to challenge itself. And I think we.

David Ding: 36:51

It's time for this nation to set itself a mission. What is our mission as a nation? What it, what? What are we trying to accomplish together? Do we have any clue? We're just trying to survive, we're just trying to be reactive. We just, we truly were waiting for the rest of the world to innovate so that we can be second movers. But what is our mission? How do we want to challenge ourselves on a day-to-day basis?

David Ding: 37:33

You know we're in a, we're in a coming up to an election and lots of people saying that's. You know, we're in a recession, so we don't have the luxury of being able to invest in innovation. And, of course, a recession is adversity. It means adversity, and so adversity is the ideal opportunity to innovate, and and true innovation actually comes out of adversity, because it's the challenge. It's the challenge that that adversity presents to us to be able to come up with a hypothesis, challenge ourselves to validate or invalidate that hypothesis. And success is measured because we set the challenge to either to either validate or invalidate that hypothesis, understanding that at some point validation of a hypothesis will be valid and the mission will be accomplished. And the failure was part of the journey to get there. But we have to set the challenge. We have to set the challenge and you know, I see innovators in the innovation ecosystem in New Zealand who the adversity is.

David Ding: 39:08

It's phenomenal the challenge they set themselves, absolutely phenomenal the relentlessness of their pursuit, of standing up their innovation, of trying to get someone to understand of we're getting rejected relentlessly. You know, less than 3% of all pitch decks that cross a VC's desk will get back the relentlessness it's. It is incredible and the challenge is monumental and the opportunities that are missed because people aren't prepared to stand beside them and de-risk that venture with them and give them, create the space for them to fail. So until something valid presents itself, that buffers just isn't there, we're not prepared to stand beside our innovators and and go on that mission with them and lift them back up when they fall over and when they fail and it's catch 22. Right, there needs to be a surplus that people are prepared to lose due to failure.

David Ding: 40:45

If you, if you experiment, you've got a hypothesis, it's based on assumptions, the cost of that experiment. You have to be prepared and willing to lose everything that you put into it. So that has to come from a surplus and so it is that. Does that surplus have to come from philanthropy? Does that have to come from grants? Well, what we find through Callie and innovation is, you know, we diffuse grants because we know that there's a massive void, that the private sector will not fail to de-risk opportunities and but Callie and innovation receives lots of criticism.

David Ding: 41:39

I work for Callie and innovation. New Zealand's government agency tasks to diffuse, you know, a significant amount of the innovation budget for the government. And what would happen without that? The private sector is not going to de-risk an early stage venture. They're not going to invest the time and energy and effort, human resources, into enabling a founder to challenge a hypothesis that's probably going to fail.

David Ding: 42:18

So what's the solution? We're experiencing adversity as a nation and there's a narrative arising that we need to tighten the purse strings In a moment where the challenge presented is so great that the potential for innovation could be profound. What's the challenge? What's the challenge? Surely it's to generate an ongoing surplus. Now, let's say hypothetically, we decided as a nation yes, we're going to generate a surplus, a compounding surplus. That's true north for us as a nation. So what's what is the challenge that presents itself on a day to day basis? Well, what's? Creating a deficit? So we may not know the root cause of the problem, but we have to begin experimenting to unearth the root cause of that problem and then we need to begin investing in creating sustainable solutions to operating in a surplus. And that needs to be visible. It needs to be a collective, shared mission that we can all embark on together so that we can grow strong as a nation.

David Ding: 43:53

Strength comes from that challenge, but we are overcoddling ourselves as a nation. We do not challenge ourselves as a nation, we don't stand up to that adversity, we're trying to avoid it, and so we're contracting as a nation. You see, in order to grow strong, we have to challenge ourselves, and innovation in adversity is where that strength will come from. Challenging a hypothesis, refuting our own conjecture, being prepared and willing to fail to be wrong so that we can get stronger this is where strength happens. This is where it occurs. So how can we? How can we? So adversity and the benefit of the adversarial approach we see it in AI, adversarial models are profoundly potent. They get stronger and stronger and stronger, perpetually and relentlessly. So how can we embrace this? By challenging ourselves collectively as a nation.

David Ding: 45:24

Where is the surplus within the New Zealand innovation ecosystem? Well, within the economy even, there are the human beings that have surplus funds that they're prepared to lose in the spirit of embarking upon a mission, because there is an abundance of founders and innovators who are so undercapitalized that it's just untrue Barely putting food on the table, simply challenging themselves every day, getting stronger and stronger, failing fast, being rejected day by day, learning as much as they can. So how can we stand beside them and fail with them, and embrace those failures and recognize that that is the process of becoming strong? That's how we become stronger as a nation. How can we Okay? So if you are extremely wealthy and you're interested in assisting innovators, don't hesitate to get in touch, and there's a plethora of projects and people who are challenging their own hypothesis every single day in the hope of building a strong nation. So how can we Okay? That's it for now, for the nature of adversity. Talk to you later.