Ask Jim Anything! #5 | The Jim Kleiber Show

Hello everyone, welcome to another Ask Jim Anything. This is episode number five and today I am going to answer 10 questions submitted by you or by me. I haven't done one in a while, so many of the questions are going to be coming from me this time, but I think that's okay. I think it's maybe can encourage you and inspire you to ask questions and also encourage and inspire me to collect questions from you. So we're going to get started in a second here. I know I put two and a half minutes for the timer, but that's probably a little too much. So I hope the audio sounds and the audio levels are good and the video is good enough. So let's go ahead and get started because I know I always run out of time at the end. So reset, move to the next question. Question number one. How do colors in our clothing or living spaces influence our emotions and the way we interact with others? Can choosing certain colors help us communicate or feel better? Question by Milen Kim.

I think so many things in our living spaces influence ourselves. And I think color is one of the most powerful ways. I think a lot of times we don't... Okay, so let me just say, cultures interpret color differently. Individuals interpret color differently. When I did Iphilio back in the day, I let people choose different colors which they associated with different emotions because people have different preferences. Some people think joy is more of a green or a yellow. Some people might find it as like a light blue. Some people may find it differently. Some people may associate black with darkness and sadness and some people may associate it with calmness. I think it really depends on the person. So I think one thing to and notice is to pay attention how the colors impact you and then choose the colors in the way that you want to be impacted. But secondly, to be aware that other people are impacted by colors differently. But sometimes maybe it's the same. So for example, maybe certain cultures have a similar reaction to black or to white, especially as it comes to clothing. So I noticed, for example, For example, in the US, often on a day activity, going to something like a horse racing, which I went to recently here in Kenya on a Sunday afternoon, people in the US would typically wear more white. Here a lot of people wear black, I'm like, you want black in the middle of the afternoon?

And I noticed that a lot of people tend to wear black in certain parts of Nairobi as well.

I don't, so how do colors, colors, spaces, influence emotions?

I think they influence us. What we wear influences us and influences others. But what others wear influences us and others as well. So it's like, I don't, when I notice people who are in a much kind of lighter, happier mood, sometimes they wear more colors. Sometimes when people are more dark, we tend to wear more neutral colors. But that might also just be because people don't want to spend a lot of clothes on money in clothes and they want clothes that match and so there's there's various reasons for why we do these things i don't know if that answer was very helpful but question two of ten how can someone effectively express difficult emotions like frustration or disappointment in a professional setting without damaging relationships number one is impossible to know whether we're going to damage relationships or not, I think often we damage them completely without intention. So relationships are going to get damaged and repaired all the time. So to try to not damage a relationship, yes, I think it's good intentions, but I think it's helpful, at least for me to realize that damages are going to happen. It's about how do we repair the relationship and grow the relationship deeper. So I can't give you any advice on how to guarantee you're not going to damage a relationship by expressing frustration or disappointment or even joy, especially in the workplace. But so that's one is just to recognize that relationships will get damaged small, like slowly, slowly over time. And how do we repair them so the damage doesn't grow too big? It's like a road. You know, a road will get potholes. It will get bumps and things like this. And how do we fix those before it gets really bad? So one aspect is maintenance of that. The second thing is how to express it effectively. So one way that's not effective is to express it very physically. In the workplace, if you start shouting, your voice gets very loud. So that means you turn up the volume on the voice or you start using certain words that are like insulting, name calling, like you're such an idiot or punching things. Physically using our hands or using our body, like pushing, punching, grabbing, throwing, these things don't work well in the workplace, but what can work better, again, depends on the workplace, depends on the culture, is saying, I feel frustrated.

But also saying that you feel frustrated about what's happening at work, but reminding them you also feel frustrated about other things in your life. So you're not saying you're the reason I'm 100, you're 100% the reason I'm frustrated. You're, you know, what you did frustrated me, but I'm also frustrated by the other thing, these other things. And then I would say also doing step two. So not just step one about how you're feeling frustrated, but even saying, I imagine you might be frustrated too by what's going on here at work, or maybe something else is going on that I don't know about. So reaching out and letting them know that you think they might be frustrated too can help alleviate the situation a bit. And I'll give you the space to express it.

Okay. Question number three. It feels like there's a lot of war and conflict happening in the world right now, and it's complicated and challenging to process all of it. What do you think is a helpful way to approach this emotionally, Caleb.

One way that has helped me approach it emotionally is to just admit that there will always be a lot of conflict, maybe not always a lot of active war where people are killing each other, but there's always going to be conflict. And I think when I get into the mindset of thinking that conflict will end, whether that's on a national, international national level, or even on a very personal or intrapersonal inside of me, internal conflict, if I think, okay, once I get through this conflict will be over, then I tend to go crazy because I rush to try to get it, to get rid of it. And then once it goes away, I really, you know, I breathe, I relax. And then of course it comes back a few minutes later in some other format. And so I think one way to really, that has really helped me is just admitting that conflict will always be here.

And so I think war often is just people avoiding conflict at the lower levels until it gets really, really big, and then projecting 95% of the other unresolved conflicts onto one sphere. So, when you take Israel, for example, Netanyahu has corruption charges against him, and then what was going on in Gaza, and then what's going on in Iran, and then what's going on internally, and I have no idea what's going on in his life. And so much conflict that people don't resolve can just get a fire hose projected onto one specific target, And that's not necessarily the cause of 100% of our pain and our fear and everything, or anger. So I think one of the most helpful ways is just to recognize that conflict exists, and it will always exist. And it's always going to be a battle. It's always going to be a fight. I call it emotional combat. When I see it that way, I go, ah, it's not a temporary fight. It's a long, ongoing fight.

And we're all going through it. but we're all strewn amongst conflict all the time. And to see that the ones who are killing each other probably just aren't good at resolving the other conflicts in their lives and just hoping that we can all get better at resolving the conflicts. I don't know if that helps, but we're gonna go to the next question.

Question four of 10. As an American, what do you think about the U.S. And Israel bombing Iran?

Like I just said about conflict, it says to me that the leaders of the United States and Israel, and frankly, the cultures of the U.S. And Israel, believe that violence works, believe that violence is a solution to conflict. And I just don't think it is. I think violence begets more violence. I think going in and shooting and killing people doesn't make them like you and you say oh I don't care if people like me well if you're trying to build a world and you want people to do what you want them to do yes you could force them to do it through violence but then you may get stuck in fear thinking that they're going to retaliate even if they never retaliate they may you may think they're going to retaliate and so I am just I think much more effective solution to resolving conflict is to resolve conflict. Is to talk with people, is to figure out what the real conflicts that are happening, what's underlying it, how do we express what's going on with us, but also connect with them and realize that, and have the hope that we can resolve the conflict without forcing it. Because when you force it with violence, it doesn't work long-term. It may get people to stop the behavior that you want them to stop, but if they're stopping it because of fear, they may grow fear and anger towards you you may grow more fear and it can create more and more distrust and so if the goal is actually to resolve conflict for me the resolution of conflict is love then talk with people figure out what's going on connect on a much deeper level. And you don't do that by bombing you don't do that by killing people you don't do that by dropping bombs from drones or from huge stealth airplanes in the sky. This is not strength. This is someone who is afraid to run away. And so they stay and punch, but is also afraid to stay because punching is still pushing people away. So it's not, it's someone who's afraid to actually have a deeper relationship.

So do I blame necessarily the presidents for this? Not really, because our cultures believe in this, and I think that needs to change if we actually want to get better and resolve conflict.

Question number five. As someone who's worked in the aid industry, how do you feel about USAID being closed? Question from me as well. I believe it closed today. I don't know the full details, but I believe it is fully closing across the world. And it infuriates me actually, because it's this idea that, it's the idea that, oh, other people aren't helping us, so why would we help them? Somebody has to lead. You think going across the world and saving people's lives is bad for American policy? What, is it better to go in and bomb people and kill people? Is that going to make us more friends? Why don't you care about having friends? Actually, having friends is really good if we want to resolve problems together. If we want to have more problems, if we want to live on our own and think that our money can survive and take us, it won't. Yes, there are problems in the aid industry. I left working in the aid industry because at times I felt it was patronizing and didn't let locals make the decisions that they needed. A lot of it was foreigners saying what locals needed. But I don't think the solution is to get rid of it. I think the solution is it to make it better, to give more trust, not less trust. Why would you just abandon people? Can you imagine if you were receiving ARVs, so like antiretrovirus, I think for like PEP or PrEP for HIV. Imagine you were receiving these so that you wouldn't give birth to a child who would get HIV. And then you're receiving them from free from the U.S. government. You are so grateful the U.S. Government cared that you wouldn't give, so you don't give HIV to your kid. And the US government just disappears. And now you give HIV to your kid or your kid dies of starvation or you die of starvation because people didn't want to give a dollar a day in peanut paste. I mean, I think it fundamentally comes from a misunderstanding of how conflict resolution works. And it infuriates me that again, our culture is going towards this direction of, well, either we hate people or we become indifferent to them and we stop caring about them. This is not, it's not a good strategy for survival, even for individual survival. When we stop caring about people, we stop caring about ourselves and we can become really suicidal, whether that's as an individual or as a nation. So I think this is a really.

I think it's more out of cowardice and fear and overwhelmed than it is a strategic direction for the country.

Oh, I got heated on that one.

Question six of 10. How do you feel about the current deportation efforts in the U.S.? Me. Well, first off, deporting people to a country that they're not even from, they're not even a citizen of, or maybe have never even lived in. I don't know how that's legal, but I don't even know how that's moral. What's the point?

Why would you do that? Could you imagine going to a foreign country and maybe you snuck in illegally or maybe you overstayed your student visa or maybe you did something else. Man, maybe you even committed a crime and they shipped you off to some country you've never been to? Maybe thrown you in a prison in some country where you never had trial? How? What? How is this a rule of law? Or again, is it I feel overwhelmed? I don't trust the law. Let me just kick people out and again, punish them. Because if we punish them, they will learn their lesson and then they will behave. This attitude that is so deep in so many cultures around the world, I believe, is so harming to human society.

That we should punish people, that we should hurt them, and therefore it will improve our relationship with them. No, maybe it'll improve their behavior. Maybe if they touch the stove and they feel hurt and we beat them after touching the stove, they'll feel hurt again. But maybe they already felt hurt by touching the stove. Maybe they already felt hurt by other things. And if we could actually try to figure out why they were hurting and resolve their underlying pain, then they wouldn't do it.

I think what we're doing in the U.S. with deportation is a fundamental, like, dehumanization of ourselves.

How can these ICE officers look themselves in the mirror and see their own humanity? You know, it's probably really hard to do that job. Why are we asking them to do that? You know how hard it is to be a police officer in general, but can you imagine deporting some of these people and ripping them from their families or deporting their whole families and knowing that these people are going to a prison in a foreign country they've never been to? Or going back to a place where there were drug cartels that were trying to kill them? Man.

So question seven of 10, how do you feel about paywalls? This is kind of a tangential question, but I saw an article on, I think it was wired.com say like, how do we fight? How to win a fight or something. I said, okay, let me check this out. Cause I think this is important conversation for us to be having. And it was hidden behind a paywall. And really maybe I can go and pay for it. Maybe I'm fortunate compared to enough people in the world that I could pay for something like this. But if it's such important information, why hide it behind a paywall? If you have something that you think can help people, why would you not let them have it, especially if it's information?

It's reproducible information. You publish it on the internet and anyone can read it. So it's just an artificial, arbitrary paywall. Like, I don't know. I think it comes again from this, not the lower ability to resolve conflict, lower ability to deal with fights, lower ability to collaborate. We think people won't help us, so we're only going to help them if they help us. We think they'll only help us if we give them something. Why would somebody help us if we didn't give them something? Why would they give us money? Why would they give us attention? Why would they give us information?

I haven't read the article because it wouldn't let me, but I'm guessing the advice in there is probably not that good if it's stuck behind a paywall. Because how do you win a fight? You win a fight by helping people out. Because if you're fighting against the person, you're not going to... Maybe you'll win temporarily, but they might come back. You win by making them a friend. You win by truly helping them out. I'll tell more about this in the next question. So I don't like this idea of paywalls because I think it...

It makes information and that type of help exchange-oriented.

It makes it transactional.

And I think information is one of the things that can... And then it competes with information that is trying to be open, but may not be as helpful.

So maybe somebody will stand on the street corner and say that everyone's going to hell for free. They're not, but then a very helpful article is locked behind a paywall because it's a more transactional mindset. I don't know. Next question.

What do you, question eight, what do you think popular culture gets wrong about fighting?

That we fight, one, that fighting is something that we shouldn't do. I think fighting happens all the time. I think we should fight. I think we should learn how to fight. It's not about not fighting. It's about how to fight in a way that respects each other and actually resolves the fight and resolves the other fights and the other conflicts going on. But what I think we often get wrong about it is that fighting is against somebody. Fighting doesn't have to be against somebody. And frankly, fighting against somebody doesn't really work long term. Again, you can punch the guy in the face, but then he might come back and punch you in the face or hit you in the head with a bottle, or might bring two or three of his friends. And even if it's not a physical fight, okay, you may cuss somebody out, you may attack somebody and make them look stupid. Do you think they're not going to attack you? Do you feel afraid that they might attack you? One of the ways to dissolve that fear that the person is going to come attack you is to help them. It's to not fight against them, but fight with them, fight for them. I was, uh. And out dancing the other day and there was this guy and uh he was very drunk uh he was vomiting and and i recognized the guy because i had seen him looking at my girlfriend before and i know he was trying to make a move on my girlfriend and before i really didn't like the guy at all but i looked at him and i was like man this guy's in a bad situation and he's by himself i don't see any of his friends that are normally around and so i went over and i helped him my girlfriend and i helped him and you know i we figured out one of his friends was there and, his friend and I walked him to the car. He got an Uber and he went home. And the next time I saw the guy, he's like, bro, I owe you, man. I owe you so much. Let's get a shot. You're a really good guy. I respect you so much. I respect you so much. What the guy doesn't know is that I knew he was trying to hit on my girlfriend. But again, what am I going to do? Let him just sit there and puke all over himself? Man was struggling. Maybe he was hitting on my girlfriend because he was struggling. So why don't I help him out? That's how you win fights, man. You win fights by making them friends, by caring about them, by really genuinely wishing them well and recognizing that it's not the fight. There are so many other fights in their life. It's not just about us. There's other stuff going on.

Question nine of 10. What do you think will be one of the biggest challenges in spreading your work? Me. I think often some of the biggest challenges in getting ourselves out there is ourselves. We stop ourselves. We hinder ourselves. Our fear, our insecurity, our doubt, our... Yeah. Yeah, I think...

Our internal conflicts. Oh, maybe I want to be on a big TV show, but do I really want to be on a big TV show? Because then maybe I'm wearing makeup all the time, I'm behind the TV, and I have to be stuck in the studio, and I can't travel as much. Do I want to be super, super famous? Ah, maybe I do, because then it feels like I have friends everywhere. But then these people want to talk to me all the time, and I'm okay with it, but sometimes I want to go out and not talk with other people.

There are other challenges. I could say it's other people. I can say it's culture. You know, they're not accepting of love.

Sometimes the people who want to punch people in the face really want to punch harder. And one of the challenges is if, as I become, as anyone becomes more loving towards somebody else, if they're really afraid of receiving love, then they can get even more intense, like the retaliation can be even stronger in some ways, but a lot of it is really just me. Do I give up? Do I push forward? Do I take the leap? Do I try things that scare me? Do I fight back, not against people, but keep fighting when people tell me to stop fighting? When people tell me to do something in one way, do I keep doing it? I don't know, I think one of the challenges over the last 10 years or so has been me. Getting energy, getting motivated, and then stopping when people say, ah, but I'm not sure, like, kind of stopping, slowing down, retreating. So I think one of the biggest challenges in spreading my work is to continue to spread it, for me to continue to consistently persist.

And do it for myself, so that I maintain the energy for myself, but then also to maintain the energy to publicize and share with others. Okay, last question, 10 of 10. Why do you say people are not addicted, but conflicted?

I think we often look at addictions as the problem. And I remember listening to a podcast earlier this year where the guy said.

Drugs, alcohol are not problems. They're solutions. They're just ineffective solutions. I thought, yes, yes, that's the way to look at it. Because I think so many of us have conflicts in our lives that we just don't want to think about.

Should I stay in this relationship or leave this relationship? Should I stay in this job or leave this job? Should I go to bed or stay up and watch this TV? Should I send a gift? Should I not send a gift? Should I answer this phone call or should I not answer this phone call? Should I look at my bank account? Should I not look at my bank account? Should I go to the doctor? Should I not go to the doctor? Should I get that surgery? Should I not get that surgery? I think so many conflicts are happening in our lives and, especially now with the internet and this whole emotional comment just totally overwhelmed with all these different conflicts, that sometimes we just want to stop thinking about these things. And often a way to stop thinking about these things is to get a really intense experience that forces us to stop thinking about it, stop feeling things. So drinking alcohol can help us lose awareness of what's going on. We become more lucid. We become more relaxed. Ironically, you actually talk more about these things. But we, um, drugs can put us into a different world.

Work can make us forget about home. A lot of these addictions, sex, can make us temporarily forget where we are, like an otherworldly experience. Again, so much can be this escape mechanism to stop thinking about the conflicts.

Which works temporarily. Again, it's a solution. It's just not a very effective solution, especially long-term. It doesn't seem to work, and sometimes seems to cause more conflicts, often. You're worried about money, and then you have a shopping addiction, and you go spend money to stop thinking about money. Now you have less money. So, okay, that's the end. Let's reflect. Ah, what did you learn from today's session? 30 minutes is long. I don't know how much I enjoy I doing these? It's like long amount of reflection. I might enjoy doing these more live, but I've got to figure out the mechanism to do it live because I don't think I can get the two and a half, two and a half minutes so quickly. It may just have to be like 30 minutes or an hour of just open question answer. And then I clip up the answers afterwards. That might be more fun.

I talk about conflict and fighting a lot. And to me, because I say it all the time, it seems commonplace. It seems like I'm just saying the same thing over and over again, but maybe to you, if you've never heard it before, it's quite different. Maybe it's refreshing. Maybe each question and answer felt really different to you. I worry that they feel a little too similar, but maybe we need to hear the same message over and over again.

What else did I learn during today's session?

That I think it's easy for us to blame individuals like the president or the leader of our organization. Sometimes, more often than not, it's a cultural phenomenon that most of us behave in a specific way. So, for example, it's easy to look at politicians in any part of the world and say, oh, they're so corrupt, but often they just do the same stuff that we do. And often it's not corruption, often it's just fear or inability to resolve conflicts. Like, for example, black tax here in Africa is probably the cause of corruption in government, where people just are expected to give a percentage of their income to their family members, or extended family members. And saying no can be really hard. And so a lot of people don't say no, they just find ways to make it happen, and often find illegal ways. But that's not just politicians, it's a lot of people.

So, yeah, I think a lot of times it's just how do we work on our collective behaviors, our collective expectations, which is the cultural level, which operates even deeper than the political level. And if we can change that, then we can change our leaders. We can change our own lives. And it gives me hope in a way. It also doesn't demonize the leaders. It shows that they're just like us, stuck in the middle of the environment.

Creatures of our environment. On that note, I'm going to end and hope this was 30 minutes long. Thank you everyone for joining and I hope you learned something as well. Take care.