Good Life Project - Salacious Soundbites, Online Con-artists and Legacy Work

Episode Date: May 4, 2016

Today's Good Life Project Roundtable™ features guests-in-residence Daniel Lerner and Gabra Zackman. This is session 2 in their three-week residency.Dan Lerner is a leading expert on elite performance, excellence and the realization of unique potential, working with musicians, athletes, and numerous Fortune 500 companies and executives. He's on the faculty at both New York University (where he teaches the always waitlisted “The Science of Happiness”) and the University of Pennsylvania, where he works with the graduate program in Applied Positive Psychology. He is currently writing a book about the process and mindset that leads to healthy, uniquely individual excellence.Gabra Zackman is an actress, writer and voice over artist, frequent traveler and lover of adventure. She works regularly in theater, has a parallel and sustaining career in audiobook narration, having recorded over 300 audiobooks to date, and has had great success with her first writing contract, the humorous, romantic, spy-centered BOD SQUAD series. Her life philosophy is 'Say yes...and rock what you got'.Our three topics in this episode:The soundbite culture, how we take things as gospel, without validation.Online, how do you tell the difference between con-artists and real deals?If you knew you were soon to die, what would your legacy work be?It's fast-paced, fun, utterly unscripted and at times a bit raw, but always good-natured and very real. Enjoy! And let us know if you like this format, over on social media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey there, Jonathan Fields back with this week's Good Life Project Roundtable. This is week number two with my guest in residence, Gabra Zachman, who is a fabulous human being, romance novelist, voice artist, famous audio book reader, a stage, I think screen two actor, actress, and I think screen to actor, actress. And I think I already mentioned awesome human being. You can find out more about her at gabberzachman.com and Dan, AKA Daniel Lerner. Either way. And, uh, call me Daniel, but you, you can call me Daniel.

You're so go on, please. Another awesome human being expert in positive psychology, expertise, expert performance, wearing sweater vests. Every week. And working on a book, which is going to be phenomenal, which I don't think we can really talk about yet. But when the time is right, we are going to go deep into this because it's going to be pretty awesome. And you can find him at daniellearner.com. So cool to be hanging out with you guys for week two in your residency here. Dan, why don't we start with you this week since we teed up last week with Gabra.

What's on your mind? Let's do that. So last week, we talked about social cues. And we talked about how things are changing. And one of the things that it brought to mind for me was a recent article, a really spate of articles that talked about how one of the most foundational theories in social science was, quote, unquote, debunked, which was Roy Baumeister's theory on self-regulation, willpower, so on and so forth. It was debunked enough that our friend Jonathan Fields reached out to me in a text. I got a text from Jonathan Fields. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. With emoticons. Wow. Actually, I got the debunked emoticon. It was amazing. I made it up. I had to design it myself. Really impressive.

Yeah. It's beautiful. It's a double poop with eyes. I got emails from my students at NYU about questioning this. It's been debunked. It got me to thinking about sound bites. Say what the theory is, by the way. What was the theory that was what we call the chocolate chip cookie and radish study where a number of subjects were brought into a room where chocolate chip cookies had recently been baked. So it smelled like chocolate chip cookies.

Who doesn't love that smell? We all do. And part of the group was told – and there were chocolate chip cookies on the table and there were radishes on the table. And part of the group was told, you can have as many chocolate chip cookies as you'd like, or you can have radishes, do whatever you'd like, eat whatever you'd like. And the other group was told, no cookies for you, right? Only the radishes. At the end of a set period of time, we said, thank you so much for participating. Now we have a whole different scenario. And that is, we would like you to solve these brain teasers, puzzles.

And what they were looking at was how long the people would try when it came to these puzzles or brain teasers after their willpower had been depleted. And what they found was that those people who were allowed to eat cookies ended up trying at what turned out to be unsolvable brain teasers for 18 or almost 19 minutes, while the ones who had not been allowed to eat cookies, they stopped trying after about eight minutes, which means that your willpower can be depleted. So this was one of the foundational studies that launched, it was the study that launched a thousand studies. And it's been replicated in various different ways over and over and over and over and over and over from drinking lemonade and the glucose that goes to

your brain to a whole different array of is willpower depletable. And then out comes one article which says that it's not replicatable, therefore it is debunked. And 30 years of research gets thrown out the window. So there was a huge uproar in not only in my community, in social me, I thought, wait, everyone's super upset about this. And they don't really know anything about the person who debunked it, what they tried to do to debunk it, what studies they were looking at when it came to debunking it. And what started to hit me was it sort of – it relates to so many sound bites that we hear today. Whether it's in science or in politics, people can say anything, especially in this election campaign, whether it's right or wrong. And then you go on CNN and they will tell you whether or not it was true or false because they can make things up anytime they want. But people don't necessarily question them, which has become a huge issue. We go on soundbites

rather than actually digging any deeper to get an understanding of, is it really debunked? No. This is science. It's a dialogue. We test things. Some work. Some don't work. And then we decide how we're going to proceed. It's a conversation.

But the conversation seems to be slowing down. And it's becoming a monologue. And the monologue lasts a certain amount of characters or a certain amount of emoticons. And we believe it. And that's what we start to trumpet. So I'm curious. This goes to both of you as a writer and also as someone who has such a vibrant presence

on social media. What do we do about the soundbite? Oh, we just don't do it anymore. Okay, cool. Thanks. I appreciate that. Next topic. Yeah, that was easy. That was really easy. I appreciate that. Next topic. Yeah, that was easy.

That was really easy. I appreciate it. Yeah, you're the best. You know what? We should sign a spotlight into a floodlight. So, I mean, I'm curious what you think. I have a specific thought, but I'm curious what you think. Well, I mean, that was fascinating.

Thank you so much for going through all of that because I didn't know anything about it. You know, I was recently told by someone that's funny as I just said that I I'm looking at my phone and I just got a text from him as I said I was recently told by someone that was totally weird and awesome but actually so this is a major in political science right this is um a new friend of mine and he was telling me about the system. He's particularly fascinated by the system of by our media. He was he was raised in Afghanistan. So has a lot has a lot to say about that culture versus this culture versus particularly media coverage here. And one of the things that he spoke about is I'm forgetting a site that he was telling me about that there's

this there's this site where you can go on and sort of report something that a lot of reporters refer to this site to get right there's this whole kind of infrastructure where people can look at this site which could be anyone posting about anything and be like oh yeah this is true without having like gone gone around to fact check what that thing is i bring all of this up just to say that it strikes me that this is a larger issue of actually how the kind of the public itself, the research institutions, whatever, or if it comes from the fact that, I don't know if it's the same in every culture, but certainly we in America, the way that we were all raised is, in a way, you hear something, and then you believe it's true, right? You hear a soundbite, and then you believe, you know, we almost hear something, and we take it at face value before we investigate what the truth of it is, or what the background of it is, or further into it. That's a lot of, I think, how we get our information. And maybe this is all part of being part of, I tend to think that our whole setup is from being part of a capitalist society,

which means that we have to work and work and work and work to make the money, to accumulate the stuff, and everything winds up moving faster and faster and faster. We want to produce everything more quickly so that we can make more money, so that we can have more, because our value is all based on that. And it's sort of the same thing with information. How we collect information goes along the same way. I don't know, is this addressing anything that you've brought up? I mean, to me, there's a systemic problem with our systems of how we acquire information, which is that we often will hear something and we take

it at face value before we investigate the deeper parts of it. So I have two thoughts on this. One would be a contrarian position, which is what I'm seeing in now media, which is no longer constrained by network standard time spots, is I'm seeing actually a move back to long form. So what we're doing at Good Life Project is we produce a 60-minute, a 30- to 40-minute, and then a 10-minute. So the shortest thing we do is 10 or 15 minutes on a single topic.

There are podcasts, there are radio shows that are going really long form now. So I think there's a bit of a backlash that's happening in response to what you said, and I agree with both of you, which is an information delivery paradigm, which is increasingly soundbite, soundbite, soundbite, soundbite, short segment, short segment, short segment. I've been a guest on radio and TV shows where there's a three-minute segment. And it's, I mean, literally, I feel like I'm being rushed to deliver my soundbite because I can see the interviewer's eyes looking at a teleprompter just waiting for me to stop

talking so they can ask the next question. Not because, and they're not bad human beings, but they know that they live and die by the clock in mass media where it's controlled by specifically timed segments and ad insertions and stuff like this. Whereas when you look at what's happening in the world of podcasting, for example, where we own the format. We choose exactly what we want and we can go as long or short as we want. We can insert or not insert ads whenever we want. So it gives us so much more freedom to actually just let it happen, let the conversation unfold and to push back against the soundbite

and the move towards soundbite. And my sense is that one of the reasons that so many people are flooding to podcast or non-mainstream media is it's because of that, because they want to go deeper. Really interesting. Not long ago, we aired an episode with Krista Tippett, who's the creator and founder and the host of a long running public radio show that's syndicated on, I think, 400 stations called On Being. And she takes one guest and she spends about 45 minutes just going deep with that guest. What's fascinating is a couple years back, they actually record 90 minutes and they edit down to 45 minutes. And they started releasing simultaneously with the edited show, something they call Rough Cuts, which is the full 90 minute

from the moment they turn on the mic to the sound check to the banter in the beginning to the very end when somebody walks out the room. And those are extremely popular on her show too. And I, in fact, listen to the rough cuts. So I'm very time constrained in my life, but I really enjoy not just the 45 minute long form, but the full 90 minute rough cut where I can hear all the background and the conversation and the relationship building

in part because I think she's a brilliant, wise and know compassionate human being but she's also a phenomenal interviewer and i'm always trying to learn you know everything all both on the mic and off the mic so maybe i'm a little bit of an outlier there the second thing is one of the things that's driving the soundbite culture is that generation ago you measured measured media essentially by, you know, having boxes in people's homes and getting some sense of who is watching. You couldn't actually track who was listening, like the exact number of people who were listening to or watching or reading a very specific thing and how many milliseconds into that or words into it or shots into it, they were actually consuming the content. Now you can. And what that's led to is compensation for the creators of that media based on very

precise consumption patterns. So now it used to be, you know, you work for a major newspaper, you need two sources, preferably three before anything anything hits the air. Now, the news cycle is so dramatically faster. Everybody has a microphone, a pen, like a screen, or the ability to hit publish, and you don't want to be scooped. And you have the ability to measure audience consumption on a very granular level so that now the people who are producing the media and the stories are being paid based on consumption. So they have a huge incentive to be A, first to market, which means you're more likely to make a mistake and not get all the sourcing that you need and not double and triple check and make sure it's truly accurate. And B, as provocative as humanly possible, which means you're going to take the headline and the lead in your piece and make it as

click worthy, as click baity, as humanly possible, because paying your rent depends on it rather than being on staff and earning your salary. So there's actually really strong financial incentive, both for the institutions and the individual media creators, to be as provocative and be as somebody and be as fast as humanly possible. And that leads to a lot more either errors or just deliberate, we'll fix it when we come back to it. But we need to be first to market with this. And I think it's not a good thing because the fix never gets as much. I mean, it's always been this way. You know, like the little corrections, you know, and the newspaper's got a tiny little box somewhere. So it's always been that way.

The corrections never get the ink that the big breaking stories get. But I think that it's just been exacerbated these days. And it kind of is what it is. But I do believe that there are a lot of people that are just getting tired of it. And that's why there are a lot more people who want the longer, the deeper reporting and the long foreign conversations. And the major media outlets, the ones who do deep journalism and investigative reporting,

much to the contrary of a lot of people who said they would have been gone five years ago. They're still here. They're definitely hurting and they're having to change their paradigms, but some of them are starting to flourish again in different levels. They're still here for a reason.

So I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful, but I do think there's major systemic problems that have been caused. I think it started out where soundbiting has always been an issue, like you said, Gabbra. I think it's been really exacerbated by the way that media is compensated now and the crazy reduction in the cycle to market of news but i also think the human condition just wants deeper and longer and more accurate and we're getting

really tired of being whipsawed um constantly by information and we just want like you know what i'll wait an hour if i can read it once go deep and know it's right that's what i got cool yeah very if i could if you could drop that mic and wasn't attached to uh you could you could drop yeah you should drop it yeah you know i just i just think that there is about 10 different topics we could discuss with that story that you just brought up yeah i'm really fascinated thank you for telling me about that so we're kind of segwaying into you, Gabba, too. You can either piggyback or just offer something totally different. Great. Now, this doesn't happen

often, but just for a moment there, I was actually speechless. Wow. I want us all to just that deserves it. Let's take an extra moment to just... I've known you, what, like a dozen years now? This is the first time ever, maybe in your life, actually, since the age of three.

It doesn't happen often. But it was a combination of just being fascinated by that. My mind is still on that story and actually thinking how I might like to connect it to some of the thoughts that I've brought with me today. Well, something that, you know, I'm talking to the two right people about this, that I am endlessly fascinated by what I call the explosion of the kind of consultant website business, which I like to call You do you university or like you rock

university so i feel like we're in a world now in which i deeply love i love twitter so i'm on twitter a lot and i i'm fascinated by you know people creating their own businesses and their websites and their blogs and there's like there's this explosion in the blogosphere right and pretty frequently i come across what i like to call is like that dude or that chick who's on the website that's like you rock university right it's spelled like r-a-w-k like you r-a-w-University.com, you know? And it's like... Someone just got a lot of traffic. That's right.

That's right. That's right. I better buy that name right now. I should probably tell you that's one of my closest friends. That's right. That's right. That's right. But it's either like, you know, it's a dude in a suit, or it's like, you know, a chick

with, like, colored hair and a nose ring i'm actually referring to someone specific and her site is very cool but um if anyone knows what that is you'll know you know but uh but there's all this like uh fascinating website entrepreneurs they've usually written a book or two with that same image it's the dude in the suit. It's the chick with colored hair or whatever. And it's all promoting you be the best of you, right? Either in the emotional sphere, or maybe it's in a business sphere, like how do you get your business off the ground? And I'm fascinated by people who have an extraordinary amount of Facebook traffic, you know, Facebook page traffic, website traffic, Twitter traffic. Some of them I think are extraordinary, and they're pioneers not really even sure what the question is, but I'm fascinated by this new world we're in creative professions, we're looking to promote our own businesses. How do you tell the difference between, you know, someone who's real and someone

who's sort of a great con artist, but or is there a difference? Like if someone has conned us all into believing that they're a great business, if you rock you university is getting, you know, 10 million hits a day and is whatever then is he a con artist or is he a great consultant or is there a difference i just want to say the views expressed by but it's pretty cool it's a pretty cool topic right because it's what we're it's it's a what we're all in and it's b what we all look to in our businesses. I'm online and looking at these people all the time, and sometimes I can't tell the difference. It's the Wild West. Is there a difference?

Thank you. It's snake oil. It is. Or is it not? Or is it not? Or is it not? Sorry. Well, so it's really interesting, right?

So I had the opportunity to sit down with Maria Konnikova, who wrote a book recently called The Confidence Game. Awesome. Where she did all this in-depth research on the long con, the greatest grifters in history. Amazing. They were posing as ship doctors in the Navy for four years and doing surgery, and they were working people. And she was able to really deconstruct what are the stages of the con, the elements, the primary talking points, and all this stuff.

And it becomes unsettling in the conversation because as I read her book and as I have a conversation with her, it becomes very clear to me that everything I've learned as an entrepreneur, as a copywriter, as a marketer, are the very exact same tools, techniques, languaging, messaging that the greatest con artists in history have used. The difference lies almost entirely in the intention. I love this. This is exactly what I wish to talk about. And I said that to Maria and she's like, yeah.

You know, the difference is that it is, you know, there's, we talk about, so you look at these people and you're like, they are, somebody is either, you know, there's, we talk about, so you look at these people and you're like, they are, somebody is either, you know, like really good at the underlying thing, or they're just phenomenal at the art of persuasion. And then you're like, the lingering question is, and does it actually matter? Does it actually matter? Because if they're that good, that's right. Is that alone? Is that skills set, is that mastery of persuasion slash marketing alone such a powerful skill set that you've got something to learn from this person if they're willing to turn around and share that knowledge, that knowledge set with you? That's right. Like if I learn something from them, who cares in a way what their intention is? If I learn something from them, if they share it with me, then who cares what the intention was of them building their business in the first place, whether it was to help people who need it or to make $8 million billion kabillion dollars.

If I learn something, it's the same difference. So, Dan, what do you think of it? I know, right? It's a great question. I'm reading the soft signals in your body. And I'm not getting a lot of buy-in. Are you just reading that? How close are you to Dan right now?

My hand's on his knee. I'm actually taking his pulse. That's not my knee. Oh, no. I had to go there. Oh, sorry. Yay. Oh, boy.

I was like, I just got the next scene for my book. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Three people in a podcast studio. But they're only wearing headphones. I'm sorry. This is a complex issue. It's a great question.

I really appreciate you bringing it up. And it's one of those things where I almost wish I had more time to prep beforehand because my brain is kind of spinning with all these thoughts right now. There are a couple of things. One of the first things I was thinking about when you were talking through this was how we all have preferences in terms of what we find to be viable backgrounds for in this field. One of the challenges in this field is that there's no license needed. There's no degree needed. So you walk into a hospital, unless someone's a con artist, they're a doctor because they have the appropriate education and degrees and licenses to become a doctor. Same thing with the lawyer, same thing with many, many other occupations, but not in this. And so the challenge then becomes who is qualified to be able to offer

this kind of information. And the one that comes to mind for me immediately is self-help. Not that this is what we're all in, but because there's so much out there. And if you look at coaching, but really just self-help in general, in some cases, you're going to look at self-help and you're going to look in the book jacket or look online and see the qualifications and think, okay, this person has a master's in this or a PhD in this and clearly they're qualified. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're good at what they do. All right? But they do have the qualifications depending on the position. In some cases, they're not going to have any at all. In some cases, you're going to look at these books or these sources, and they're going to

find that they're citing strong empirical research. And that, for me, gives it some weight because that's my business. And if I don't see any, then I pause. It doesn't mean that they're not bringing valuable information. So I think what is it that's important to us is going to skew us towards what we're going to listen to. And in some cases, we don't care about that at all. We're like, is this person speaking to me? Yes, they are. And that in itself is going to play a role

in whatever they're providing us, its ability to affect us. So I think it really runs the gamut. It's like what is it that's going to help you buy into this person's stuff, so to speak? The challenge, one of the challenges that I have with one of the things that Jonathan was saying is – and actually I'm sorry. Let me not say that. Let me be inclusive, I'm sorry. Let me not say that. Let me be inclusive, both of you.

You can just include God right now. Everyone in the entire room except for me. If it's something positive, please include me. But if it's not positive, just make it about Jonathan. What I want to say is like download my report of five ways you're a moron. Whether Dan Lerner will be included in week three is up for discussion right now. So one of my questions is if it works, no matter what their intent is, is that okay? Or is that sort of the question of is something not illegal but it's immoral? If someone's going out there

to gain millions and millions of dollars, and we know that all those other suckers out there are buying it, but we can see through them and we can get something out of it, is it okay? And that's something that's always, that's just come to mind for me quite a bit because there are people out there who absolutely are helping people, no question about it.

And what they're saying is my material can help everybody. And the second I see that, I tune out because it can't. And that's when I started thinking, why are you here? Are you, you know, are you that ill-informed or are you really striving for the dough or a combination of the two? Nothing can help everybody. But if you're the person, one of the people that it can help, okay. Right? So that's always been a challenge to me.

I tune out when it's, this can help everybody because I know it can't. And I wonder how much that has been thought through. Yeah, and when it comes to the intent thing, I mean, the conversation was more about is the intent to benefit only the person who's representing? Or is the intent to benefit the person who you're

representing to and potentially yourself simultaneously? Is it about basically leaving somebody better off or leaving somebody worse off? And even if you leave somebody better off, if you both benefit, you know, is that totally fine also? You know, I live and breathe in this world that Gabbro was talking about yeah and and i know many of the people i'm sure that you you have looked at in your websites and references and there's a lot of really good people out there and some of the what's being offered is great and i like i think it's awesome some of it makes me feel a little weird also and i'm constantly balancing this dance of you know, I know how to build businesses,

I know how to create language, I know how to market. But I always want to do so in a way where I know that I need to build a business and exchange value for what I'm offering. But I really want to make sure that just because I can doesn't mean I should. And that there is genuine benefit. But I agree that that in the online space, especially, it's become easier and easier to create the illusion of value. And it's potentially harder and harder to understand who truly has it and who doesn't. And to Dan's comment, hardened credentials don't always tell the story. We've all been in a place where, I'll use yoga teachers as an example, I own the yoga studio, and people would come and want jobs

teaching on a regular basis. And we learned really quickly that the resume rarely ever told the story of whether this person was actually a gifted teacher, that they could have studied with extraordinary teachers and been certified with luminaries in the field and interned with this person. And then they've been teaching for five years at this place and they show up and we ask them to teach a demo class as part of their audition to represent us on the floor. And the experience is really unsatisfying, whereas somebody else shows up with a very light resume, you know, on paper, this person, you know, shouldn't know what they're doing. But you know, it turns out that they're one of those rare people that is just tapped in, that has a stunning intuitive sense of the body, sense of the mind,

ability to read social dynamics in a room. Either maybe it's intuitive and intrinsic, or maybe they've just been developing it themselves deliberately over a period of years, but there's nothing on paper that shows. And they walk in, and in 30 seconds, you know that this is an extraordinary teacher. So there's nothing on the surface that would allow you to determine who you actually wanted to spend 90 minutes with. And at the same time, you know, so in the online world, so even if you, so the point there is, is that, you know, what you see as, you see as what we would consider classical in dishes of credibility and proof, to me, I rely less and less on. You know, if I need surgery, you better believe that I'm going to go and look for someone who's gone to a great med school and interned and is the chief resident here and stuff like that.

Because it feels like that, I think, you're much more likely to be able to validate that. But in the types of things that Gabby was talking about in personal development and self-help and coaching and sort of lesser where the path to excellence and expertise is not nearly as well prescribed, I think it's much harder to understand. So for me, very often, I just look for all sorts of tells. And because I'm also in this space and I understand how a lot of things are communicated, I may be able to see things that aren't all that apparent to some other people. You should write a book about that. Your self-help guide to finding the Right Personal Development Person for You Online.

Your Self-Help Guide to Finding the Right Self-Help Guide. I can't believe you just added my next book. Find whatever. Finding Yourself. On sale Friday. Amazing. Try to be on here until Thursday. Get on that.

Buy that. Buy that right now. Anyway, let's... It's a great question. Is that back to me or is it? It's back to you. Oh, yeah. All right.

So I read this book called When Breath Becomes Air recently. I don't know if you guys have read it. First book I've read in years that... So I started the book and then I was reading on a plane and I got to the epilogue in the book and I was like a couple pages into the epilogue and I started to tear. And a couple more pages and I started to kind of like shake a little bit. I'm like, I need to put this away because I'm going to like lose it emotionally on the plane. They're going to think that I'm some sort of freak and like, you know, land at the nearest airport and restrain me.

So I put it away. I got to my hotel room. I opened it back up. I finished the book and I was sobbing. Absolutely sobbing. This is the book, and I was sobbing, absolutely sobbing. This is an extraordinary, extraordinary book. And it's a book about a neurosurgeon who actually lost his life to cancer at the end of last year. And he had also gotten, I think it was a master's in literature and always wanted to, his next act was supposed to be writing. And when he found out the diagnosis he was like

this is the thing i i need to write now and the story is relatively unfinished and the epilogue finishes it and it's his wife writing the epilogue i can't even i mean come on and god and it and there's so many so many veins of conversation and and i'm going to write about a couple of things around this because it moved me in so many different ways on so many different levels. But as a writer, it did something to me, which, which took me by surprise too. And which is, it really made me question the choices of things that I'm writing about and, and how and when I want to allocate my abilities and refocus on, you know, and it kind of led me to ask the question, if this is the last thing that I was writing, what would I write? So I'm kind of curious, you know, to me, you know, we're deathly afraid of death in this country. We never talk

about it, but it is incredibly, it can be incredibly life affirming and focusing as a motivational power to actually go and do the work that that's deeply meaningful to you so so i'm this is not in a morbid way but but and i haven't primed you guys for this so you haven't thought about this it's probably a type of thing where you really would need to think about it but just on a gut reaction intuitive level if you're kind of like okay this may be like, I don't necessarily have a fixed window of time, but the thing that I'm going to spend the next X months or years on is the thing that I want to rep. This is the work that I need to get out of me now. Because I don't

know if I'll be able to get another body of work out of me. Do you have a sense for what it would be? Dan's nodding. yeah. I do, and yeah, I'd love to have more time to think about this, but I'm trying to think how to put it exactly. I have long kept a journal about parenting and the experience of being a father for my son with the express purpose of giving it to him when he is of that age. Regular journal, what it's like to be frustrated, what it's like to

be elated, what it's like to experience fatherhood. Because there are things where I think, oh my gosh, my dad told me about this. I didn't realize it was true, but I want it in real time. And, you know, one of the things that dominates, one of the themes that dominate, you know, both as a father's experience and also watching him and sort of charting his, is tied in with one of my things I'm most interested in, which is human potential. So I think if I could really spend time writing about human potential from the perspective of a father and son, that is what it would be. It would bring together two things that I am most passionate about in life, which is my boy,

and about the ability for people to realize their best possible life. And what started with my son eight years ago is that I got a whole new lens and perspective on what it means to help somebody realize that. And through those dual lenses of trying to see his perspective and my perspective as a father has been really wonderful. I have as much time

as I'd like to spend on it. I drop in every once in a while and drop in this happened today or musings on what happened the past week. But that would be it. Leaving something for my boy and leaving something for all the fathers and sons who are out there, who are striving to live their best possible lives. I'd read that.

So would I. That's awesome. You know, I have a not dissimilar answer, even though I'm in a very dissimilar place in life. You know, the first thing I wanted to say was that I always talk about my, Sam, who I've talked to you about before, one of my best friends from childhood who passed away a couple years ago, but had about when she was diagnosed with late stage cancer, she had about a year and a half from that point until the point where she passed away. And in that year and a half, we all say this was already one of those people, you know, shining light, beautiful, talented, just on every level through the roof. But in that last year and a half, what she did, who she became, it was remarkable

to watch. I mean, what she just became the deepest, truest, best version of herself. And that's really what you're talking about is what is your greatest capacity made manifest on this earth. And sometimes people get that if they know they're going to die. You know, sometimes you do manifest that. You know, in terms of writing, there's a project that I just pitched to my agent. And it would be this for me, her response to what I sent her, which was also me journaling about a particular journey I've had over the past, let's say the past six months, but really this journey towards, let me see my truest, deepest self in the midst of a life that sort of self-destructed, right? A phoenix rising from the ashes of my own life and how I've shifted my perspective on my life, my life's path. You know, I submitted it to my literary agent and she said, this is something but not yet, which is actually a pretty cool response. She said, this is in the incubation of this. But she said, I see where you're going, but not yet.

We need to talk about this. I also wanted to pitch it as a podcast to a friend of mine who wants to do work with me because I'm in the voice world as well. And she said to that, not yet. It's a pretty, pretty cool response. But whatever that thing is, and that's very much like Dan, I think that's the deepest, the deepest levels of me talking about my search for what I think is missing in my life, but ultimately what's not missing in my life. That's what I think I would leave for the world. I would leave the book about how I searched for what was in my own backyard. The alchemist. That's right. I would leave the alchemist. That's exactly right. It's funny. I don't have an answer yet on my side, but there definitely, you know, and I have a book that I wrote that's coming out later this year that I'm excited about that I think has value and it'll help people. And there's something more.

Oh, that's great. That still needs to get out. And interestingly, I mean, similar but different to you, Dan, there's, there's a book in mind sort of notes to my daughter that's been in my head for years now. And finishing that book that you know when breath becomes air it kind of it brought me back to that that was one of those things i was thinking i was like you know what god willing i have decades left but if i didn't that's probably what i'd write next yeah so anyway ending on a really high note here. But I think it's just really focusing.

And again, you know, you can have a conversation about death as a focusing and motivating agent. But that's, I just brought up a curiosity. Like, you know, because I think it's a question, you know, like if this was the last major thing that we were working on, what would it be? Yeah. Like, and what would happen if you lived life as, you know, if you had then, if you could work on it and then bring it to fruition, and then at that moment you had the gift of then being able to turn your energy to the next thing,

and you re-asked the question, and you lived your life that way, how might it unfold? It'd be pretty fucking dynamically, I think. I think that's well put, and a great place to end. So I be pretty fucking dynamically, I think. I think that's well put and a great place to end. So I've been hanging out and we've been hanging out this week's round table, second week guest in residence, Gabra Zachman. You can find her at gabrazachman.com and Daniel Lerner at daniellearner.com. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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