Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: Kicking off the new deep-dive into the overarching theme of Action, Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Jürgen, Matthias and Kjell explore what happens at the interface between action and inaction — a Hudson River pilot forced to decide in seconds, an air traffic controller for whom decisive action means control, and why, once time pressure strips away room to reflect, what remains is our moral conditioning. Along the way: reason as the missing third pillar alongside consequence and responsibility, and why the same product can taste completely different from one country to the next.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Yasemin opened the room by acknowledging how tricky it was to say “the 1,001st episode” out loud for the first time, and introduced today’s topic: Action versus Inaction. What facets does acting, or not acting, actually have — and how does that connect to morality and ethics? She noted they could also revisit some threads from earlier rooms specifically on morality and ethics.
She then shared an impulse she’d found interesting: a piece by Freiburg historian Theo Jung on action and inaction, on practices of omission in European modernity, based on a 2017 conference. She read a passage aloud — not because they had to build on it, but as food for thought. The volume, she explained, looks at European modernity from a new angle: not action but omission at its center. As Jung explains in his introduction, and as Jochen Gimmel deepens in a closing philosophical outlook, this isn’t simply the opposite of action — inaction — but the interface between activity and inactivity, where passivity itself can take on the character of a mode of action. Jung coins a term for this mode of social and political practice: “non-action.” Drawing on the figure from Herman Melville’s famous short story and his “I prefer not to,” as well as the legal concept of omission, Jung describes non-action as failing to perform actions that are expected in certain situations — something that only takes shape within the given social context of interaction. She invited everyone just to let that sink in, whether or not they wanted to engage with it directly, simply as a way of sounding out which direction the conversation might take.
She then welcomed Jürgen and asked for his take. Jürgen admitted he’d rushed to get on stage, since hearing yesterday’s teaser for today’s topic had left him wondering how they’d possibly tackle action versus inaction, and its connection to morality and ethics, in just one hour. He raised a first point: building on their earlier conclusion in the “Thinking” theme that we cannot not think, he proposed, similarly, that we cannot not act — while acknowledging fierce philosophical debate on this, and that the answer depends heavily on how one defines “action” in the first place. He noted that the negative form — inaction, or omission — already carries a definitional difference built into the term itself. He grounded this in a further concept standing above both: control. We act, he argued, essentially to exert a degree of control over a situation or over our own behavior — and that’s where the connection to morality and ethics comes in. With omission, he said, that’s precisely the sticking point: by not acting, we essentially relinquish our will to control, or exclude it altogether. If I do nothing, I’m not exercising control — and I’m also not controlling myself, letting myself instead be driven by whoever else is exerting control. He acknowledged this was a heavy topic for the morning, but Yasemin had opened with real substance herself. He specifically endorsed Jung’s framing: often what we don’t do is more significant and more formative for our development than what we do.
Yasemin thanked him for the opening, then briefly addressed his earlier question about covering all this in just 60 minutes: today, she explained, they’d take a first deep dive into definitions; tomorrow they’d look at the consequences of action and inaction; and further down the line, after covering various specific aspects of action, they’d open a dedicated room on “action within inaction” — revisiting exactly the point Jürgen had just made, that what we don’t do is often more directionally significant than what we do, something that can be applied and controlled quite deliberately in certain professional contexts, which she wanted to look at more closely later. She felt this would let them build a nice bridge specifically toward morality and ethics and their societal dimension.
Jürgen picked up the thread, first checking he’d correctly understood the day’s scope — that responsibility and competence were deliberately being set aside for later rooms. Yasemin confirmed that was correct, though today could still hint at some of the connecting threads that would be picked up later. Jürgen then proposed a second thesis: any and all human action is also, inherently, a moral action — we cannot act without morality. He put this out as a claim, hoping someone might offer a counterpoint from the audience.
Yasemin thanked him and welcomed Matthias next. Matthias said he’d found this especially compelling given his background in aviation, where yesterday’s topic had already resonated — action is central there, particularly action under time pressure, in his specific case as an air traffic controller. He noted it’s interesting because, since leaving that field, he’s realized what a luxury it is to compare notes with people from completely different backgrounds — something Yasemin, through her coaching work, could probably confirm: talking with people from entirely different fields reveals learnings about how they handle certain things differently, which becomes useful for one’s own field too. Returning to the topic, he hadn’t fully thought through Jung’s quote, but it struck him that action and inaction together probably deserve to be treated as one overarching category of action. On the point about acting under time pressure, he noted that in such situations, you’re always required to act — otherwise, you get acted upon, as he put it, playing on the words. That mustn’t happen, since — back to Jung — the result is loss of control. Action, he said, is crucial for being an active shaper of events, and that’s where control comes from, a very central point in his field. On values: he found it interesting that, in his training, both in the West and in the East, an air traffic controller’s job could technically be learned very quickly — American trainees, for instance, essentially learn their specific sector by rote — whereas in the West, training was far more extensive, including, oddly, administrative qualifications not strictly necessary for the job, and in parts of the East it even required a full university degree. What’s interesting, he noted, is that in extreme situations — genuine danger — moral values really do assert themselves, and you find yourself guided by your own value system. That, he suggested, may be exactly why more extensive training, including academic study, was historically given more weight there.
Yasemin thanked him, noting Jürgen was giving a thumbs up, and invited him to build on it. Jürgen picked up Matthias’s contribution, thanking him for reinforcing yesterday’s example, which he felt beautifully supported his thesis that we cannot act without our moral context. Specifically regarding emergencies or situations under time pressure — even without lives directly at stake — he asked: what actually remains to move us to act, when we don’t have time to think or reflect, given that reflection and thinking, as they’d learned, specifically require a certain environment and, above all, time? His answer: in such situations, where our “System 2” thinking is effectively switched off by the situation itself because it would simply take too long, what remains is our moral conditioning driving our action. He returned to the pilot in the cockpit, forced to decide between letting the plane crash into a densely populated area or attempting to save everyone by choosing a river for an emergency water landing — the famous case, he recalled, from years ago in New York. For him, this was the clearest possible proof that in such situations, we cannot act without our moral background.
Yasemin thanked him and connected this back to earlier rooms, where they’d already touched on the idea that we cannot not act, and had made early attempts to describe how that manifests — even not acting is, in its own way, a form of acting. She noted that with the Hudson River example, Jürgen had just said moral conditioning is what remains — but they’d also previously discussed something like experiential knowledge. As Matthias had mentioned, training itself implies a certain foundation of learned automatisms or routines that kick in from other contexts, since even in an emergency, a pilot in the cockpit isn’t working from nothing — there are still plenty of reference points to draw on beyond pure moral conditioning alone. She wanted to look at this more closely, and invited Jürgen and Matthias to continue.
Matthias responded that he could confirm, 100%, from practical experience, that this moral category absolutely plays a role — a central one — in work under time pressure, and he suspected this holds true across many professions requiring quick decisions under pressure: you draw on experience and, he’d go so far as to say, gut feeling, reacting very quickly even under a lack of information. What’s distinctive in aviation, he explained, is that in such moments you briefly have to weigh “am I still within the rules,” and there’s a well-known saying in aviation: “emergency breaks all rules” — meaning you deviate from the rulebook, and afterward, investigation reports can spend hours determining that, technically, this or that should have been done differently. But that’s the job, and there’s no point lamenting it; that’s exactly the conflict inherent in it.
This, he continued, leads him to a fascinating question about AI, something often discussed in these rooms: he believes — and he’s speaking from expertise here — that in air traffic control specifically, AI has no realistic chance for the foreseeable future, because a controller has to decide precisely under scarcity of information, drawing on gut feeling and experience, something AI would likely struggle with. He’d almost claim that controllers’ jobs are secure for the foreseeable future and not threatened by AI.
Yasemin thanked him, noting Jürgen wanted to add something before she brought in Sabine and Kjell. Jürgen picked up Yasemin’s earlier link between experience and experiential knowledge, which he assumed she’d deliberately positioned as a counterpoint to purely moral action. He offered another thesis: this experience and experiential knowledge is itself grounded in our moral context, because he personally only ever stores as “experience” — positive or negative — whatever is useful to him, and what’s useful is always ranked against what he defines as good or bad, both for himself and, hopefully, for the environment he’s in. In short: experience and reliance on experiential knowledge is, for him, morally — not ethically, but morally — determined.
Yasemin thanked him and connected this back to what Matthias had said earlier about learning from people across different fields, suggesting they could widen that even further — not just different professional backgrounds shaped by different socialization, but different cultural contexts too, where the underlying moral framework becomes even more visible: when discussing the same topic across cultures, very different views and stances emerge, not just in theory (“how would I act”) but in the pros and cons people weigh entirely differently. That, she said, is an enormous enrichment — seeing what a given topic means across different professional fields and cultural backgrounds, including for action itself, what it would mean “in doing.”
She then welcomed Sabine. Sabine noted that air traffic control is a whole different league, and offered a more everyday example instead: how ChatGPT entered the market. Many companies, she said, had essentially been standing at the starting line with comparable products ready to go — but they didn’t act, and then OpenAI stepped in, acted, and took on a pioneering role. She suggested this happens often in life: many people are poised to act, but no one dares to go first, and once someone finally moves in a given direction, that sets the direction, and others often follow — even if it’s not necessarily the direction they themselves would have chosen. She agreed that inaction is itself a form of action.
Yasemin thanked her, noting that with technological developments specifically, it’s a real challenge since it’s often unclear what will even become possible — AI being a good concrete example. Research in this area, she noted, goes back a long way; it’s not something that appeared overnight. Despite years of research, many earlier promises or predicted directions simply didn’t materialize as expected — which may have led some to lean back and let others carry on, while others kept believing and pushing forward, until a breakthrough eventually happened once a certain volume of data reached a tipping point nobody had quite anticipated. That sudden breakthrough then led many companies who’d leaned back to jump back in, while others, in turn, leaned back themselves. She connected this to the broader role of timing in bringing new products to market from an entrepreneurial perspective — sometimes a certain market readiness is needed. Before Siri, for instance, and Siri did eventually get adopted, there had been earlier attempts, like talking smoke detectors, which never caught on because they arrived too early, before society was ready to embrace them. This shapes how companies handle innovation: either being savvy enough to watch the market and conduct research to find the right timing, or letting themselves be discouraged by a lack of societal readiness and moving on to something else entirely — both valid bridges back to action and inaction.
She then welcomed Kjell (apologizing if she’d mispronounced his name), who was on a walk in the woods and warned he might occasionally have to chase after his dog if it went after a squirrel. Kjell said he loved the air traffic controller metaphor in relation to action, being acted upon, and process. In his own field as a brand specialist, he observes that clients often expect the solution but don’t always see the process — and the time it takes. What he’d heard so far strongly mirrored his own professional world: things need to be actively worked through over time, with room for correction along the way. That’s exactly why the pilot metaphor resonated so much — it reflects his own work, constantly correcting course, guiding clients step by step through an ongoing process. Especially now, with AI entering the picture, that advisory and corrective role is essential. (He briefly paused to deal with an alarm going off near him.) He summarized: the process is often more important than the product or the final solution, at least in his field — making the “piloting” role, along with experience and values, absolutely central, especially when guiding projects through this new era.
Yasemin thanked him and opened the floor again, tying it back to the earlier emergency scenario requiring fast action: what’s left when there’s no time? Time and process both matter here too, tying back to Jürgen’s earlier point about reflection and thinking as prerequisites for acting. Jürgen responded, connecting to his second-to-last point about product timing — “the time wasn’t ripe yet” — and introduced a third concept alongside consequence and responsibility, which they’d discussed earlier: reason. Reason-based action, he argued, presupposes deep thinking before acting. For him, this trio — reason, together with consequence and the responsibility tied to it — forms the essential framework standing above action, as criteria for measuring and evaluating it.
Yasemin picked up on the word “reason” directly, admitting her first instinct was “be reasonable” — but what actually is reason? She noted this ties straight back into the moral context, since reason itself is shaped by morality. She invited Jürgen to elaborate. Jürgen said he wouldn’t go all the way to Kant’s categorical imperative, but it points in that direction — thanking Yasemin for making that connection, since the very concept behind Kant’s categorical imperative is essentially about the ethics of reason: the link between conscious thinking and thinking about thinking — reflection — leading toward the ethical/moral construct. That, he said, was actually his original motivation for introducing the concept of reason at all today. To answer her question directly: reason, for him, is precisely the capacity and ability to think, to reflect, and — crucially — to evaluate and judge accordingly.
Yasemin thanked him and invited Matthias to continue with any further thoughts sparked by the recent contributions. Matthias picked up on what Kjell had said about seeing the process rather than just the end result: he’d immediately thought of how often we make a decision — act — while knowing that action, especially in time-pressured processes, can still be overruled later, meaning you re-decide as you go — but you have to make an initial decision first, just to keep the process moving. He offered this as a possible spark for further thought.
Yasemin thanked him warmly, and connected this to the topic they’d touched on the day before, during the 1,000th episode: Clubhouse’s recent update, which had real consequences and now requires new decisions. She suggested they could keep revisiting and reflecting on this very process in the coming days — since it fits so well with the overarching theme of Action: they’re themselves in the middle of exactly this kind of process, shaping decisions and weighing options in real time. This example, she noted, nicely illustrates Matthias’s point: a decision has to be made first — something needs to happen — against a backdrop of prior reflection, observation, and background thinking. That leads to a first decision: something needs to change, let’s look again at platforms they’d already considered before, and so on — while still weighing the implications and leaving the door open, exactly as Matthias described, for certain tentatively-made decisions to still shift. She noted they often make decisions fairly quickly, sometimes from gut feeling — and gut feeling, in this context, is really the sum of one’s experience, itself tied back to socialization and morality. She recalled an important aspect that had come up the day before, when she’d mentioned X and X Spaces as a platform option: suddenly, moral considerations entered the discussion too, given the surrounding media debate around Elon Musk and the platform — up to and including concerns about brand impact. There were many angles to weigh here, shaped by external discourse and media debate, ultimately embedding one’s own decisions within certain moral frameworks — something she found genuinely fascinating.
She invited anyone to pick up the thread further, and Jürgen responded, linking back to the second-to-last topic. Yasemin’s phrase “the time wasn’t ripe yet” had stuck with him as a key hook, and he wanted to illustrate it with a recent real-world example: the tension — not quite a conflict, but two counterparts — between reason on one side and moral obligation on the other, drawing on the Covid era and the companies that developed vaccines. He felt Yasemin’s phrase applied perfectly here, but in reverse: external circumstances suddenly made the time ripe for an entirely new kind of vaccine — the mRNA vaccine, if he recalled correctly. And yet, one has to ask: why hadn’t that company brought this vaccine to market earlier? Here he ventured into speculation, suggesting this was precisely the tension between reason as an entrepreneurial thinker — homo economicus — and moral obligation. If one assumes a company anticipated such a wide global need for this new vaccine eventually arising, then, from a moral obligation standpoint, they arguably should have pushed this vaccine and the knowledge behind it out much earlier and more broadly. Standing against that, though, was entrepreneurial reason — exactly Yasemin’s point: the time isn’t ripe yet, let’s wait and see. He stressed this was pure personal speculation on his part, not an actual claim: if the time becomes ripe, then I’m ready. He felt this was a strong recent example of how, in nearly all action and inaction, we operate between these two poles — moral responsibility and the conditioning toward doing good or bad on one side, and reason-driven action as an entrepreneur (or in another form, as a private individual) on the other.
Yasemin thanked him, and wanted to add something specific: what preparatory steps, in thought and in action, can be taken not just to wait passively for external circumstances to make the time ripe, but to actively support that ripening process. Companies, she noted, do exactly this — developing something fully, but not presenting the final result all at once, instead releasing intermediate versions over staggered time intervals to gradually bring society along. That, she said, is another important aspect here, tying back strongly into thinking and acting against the backdrop of reflection, context, and the ability to assess moral considerations, socialization, and the current status quo. She connected this to something many might recognize: the same product being offered differently across countries, adapted to local culture, eating habits, and so on — where morality plays into these adaptations too, taking into account cultural background, price structures, and more. That’s why the same product can cost differently, or taste differently, in America versus Germany versus China — just picking a few countries as examples. When traveling, we often notice this with familiar chains like McDonald’s: ordering a familiar menu item abroad and finding it tastes completely different usually isn’t a failure to replicate the standard recipe, but a deliberate adaptation to how things are handled, and tasted, differently in that particular country’s cultural context.
She then invited Kjell to continue. Kjell said he’d found Matthias’s point about letting the time be ripe very interesting, and reflected that in his own field, he sees himself increasingly acting less as someone simply selling a product and more as a design advisor within companies — requiring patience, advisory skill, expertise, and flexibility on his part, matched by the same on the client’s side. He noted this ties into AI too, which Yasemin had touched on earlier — the whole structure of his field is shifting. What he also observes across some client industries, though, is that morally sound considerations aren’t always the only driving factor — even though they’re present in the vast majority of his clients — because time pressure, as discussed today, plays a huge role, along with market pressures forcing action: staffing shortages, supply bottlenecks, and uncertainty around digital transformation, with many competing offers arguing from different angles. In that environment, he believes patience, flexibility and curiosity matter enormously, along with staying genuinely close to the client. Going forward, he sees regular touchpoints and advisory relationships becoming necessary, coaching companies to eventually do things themselves, especially in areas like social media and employee branding.
Yasemin thanked him and connected this back to a broader pattern: many people working with clients face challenges precisely because clients expect the result but can’t see the process — simply because they can’t perceive it. There’s a well-known saying in marketing: give them what they want, and deliver what they need. Many highly qualified professionals genuinely struggle here, sometimes out of a moral instinct — can I really do this, shouldn’t I show them properly, shouldn’t they be made to understand — and in doing so, lose out on real market potential, because the customer, unable to see the underlying process, simply buys from whoever promises them the outcome directly. There are many psychological, neuroscientific and biological processes at play in the background driving customers to act the way they do — even when, arguably, they’re not buying the objectively better option. She found this balance fascinating: developing the awareness that the other side simply doesn’t see it yet, and figuring out how to work with that. Many moral questions come up immediately here too — can I do this, should I do this, quality should win out — while human behavior, in practice, doesn’t necessarily follow quality at all, but rather the underlying biological and chemical processes at play, which can lead someone to choose a competitor offering a worse result, simply because it’s marketed differently. This, she said, opens up space to correct course and think about how to navigate it.
Jürgen picked up the thread again, apologizing for jumping back a step rather than engaging further with the process perspective he genuinely loves, to instead highlight what he saw as the real point Yasemin had made: societal differences. For him, this finally closed the conceptual loop of today’s room. Throughout, he noted, they’d talked almost exclusively about morality — but not about ethics. And it’s precisely in recognizing this essential difference between ethics and morality that the position of society, and society’s own self-understanding, is what actually shapes ethics — setting, through cultural development and scientific work, the framework for what counts as good and bad, what counts as moral. This, he noted, varies fundamentally across societies and regional identities — and that variation is precisely the foundation ethics provides for morality. He repeated that Yasemin’s second-to-last point, about societal differences, had brought the whole conversation full circle for him today. Thanks for that.
Yasemin thanked him and moved into the closing round, inviting everyone to share their key takeaways or highlights, noting they’d return to related topics like responsibility and competence in future rooms, so there was still plenty of room ahead to deepen these threads and build further bridges. She invited Kjell, Matthias and Jürgen to close, in that order.
Kjell said he loved the air traffic controller metaphor, which had given him something new to think about in relation to his own job, and appreciated Yasemin’s comment on his earlier idea — that not every good product or good process finds an audience, even when it makes sense, and that it’s worth reconsidering whether one should let go of striving for pure excellence and instead simply give people what they want, even if it’s not always exactly what they need.
Matthias said this exchange, and Clubhouse as a medium, reinforced his thesis that you can learn an enormous amount from people with different backgrounds and experiences. He admitted he still had homework to do — digging further into morality and ethics himself — and thanked Jürgen for his input, and Yasemin for moderating it all so wonderfully.
Yasemin thanked him, and added a brief note that they’d already had various rooms touching on morality and ethics, where they’d tried together to build a shared understanding and definition — suggesting the podcast archive might be worth revisiting for anyone interested in those earlier episodes as additional support.
Jürgen closed by thanking Matthias and Kjell first, for backing him up on this topic. Allowing himself a personal assessment of the hour, he said he was very satisfied — the essential concepts, and broadly the content relevant to today’s overall theme, had all been touched on. He trusted, as always, in Yasemin’s skill at weaving these threads into a deeper, ongoing context, and said he was looking forward to future episodes. Thanks, and a wonderful day to everyone.
Yasemin thanked everyone, reflecting that they’d accomplished a lot in 60 minutes given all the different impulses and real-life examples shared — especially considering how abstract her opening impulse had been. Successfully building these bridges, she noted, matters a lot, since it’s what allows them to transfer and adapt these ideas into everyday contexts they can actually apply. She said she was looking forward to continuing tomorrow with Action and Inaction — and their Consequences: what consequences does acting, or not acting, have both personally and for society? That’s the question they’d explore together the next morning. She invited everyone warmly to join again at 8am, and closed by wishing everyone a wonderful day, looking forward to tomorrow. Until then, ciao.
