Good Life Project - Seth Godin: Learn to See, Leave Them Changed.

Episode Date: November 13, 2018

Seth Godin is the author of 18 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He’s also the founder of the altMBA and The Marketing Seminar, online workshops that have transformed the work of thousands of people.He writes about (https://www.sethgodin.com/) the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. You might be familiar with his books Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip and Purple Cow. His latest book is This Is Marketing (https://amzn.to/2JzNkMD).In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. His blog is one of the most popular in the world and in 2018, he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame.Beyond all of this, Seth is just a straight up good human with wise things to share about everything from education, work, meaning and craft to chocolate, creativity, curiosity and so much more. In this wide-ranging conversation, we touch on all of this and more.In addition to this week's podcast, we filmed an episode of Good Life Project TV with Seth as a few years back, which you can check out here (http://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/the-best-of-seth-godin/)QUICK CORRECTION: Early in the conversation, Seth mentioned that John Scharffenberger had passed away. It was actually his former business partner, Dr. Robert Steinberg, who is no longer with us. In the speed and joy of the conversation, Seth conjoined them and neither of us picked it up until after the final edit. Apologies for any confusion. We appreciate your kind understanding.--------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sparketypes/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So I was thinking about all the different ways that I could potentially introduce my guest today, Seth Godin. And Seth and I have known each other for a solid chunk of years now. I could tell you about how he's this brilliant thinker, a marketer, an entrepreneur, a founder, an educator. I could tell you all the accomplishments that he has out in the world. I could tell you all the accomplishments that he has out in the world. I could tell you what he's built. I could tell you about the gazillion New York Times bestselling books that he has on the market. And in fact, he does have a really fascinating new book out called This Is Marketing. I could tell you about how he helped sort of create an industry of books as idea viruses. But when I really think about Seth,

the thing I have come to know about him and admire him more than anything else is he's what my great grandmother would have called a mensch. He is just a kind, genuine, thoughtful human being who wants to see others experience their lives better. So when I have an opportunity to sit down and have a conversation with Seth, it's pretty much always a yes. And the last time he and I actually captured one of these conversations on a microphone was actually in something much bigger than a microphone is very early days of Good Life Project when we were filming. And that was about six years ago as I sit here and record this. And we sat down today for a really powerful and very wide ranging, and I think important conversation that touched on ideas of the day, reflected on some places that we've come

from. And also at the end, I think he poses a really important question for all of us to consider as we look at how we want to live our lives on a day-to-day basis, how we want to contribute to the world and what we would love that world to look like. Really happy to share this conversation with my friend Seth Godin. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. It's really good to be hanging out with you again. We don't do it often enough. I know, I know. So we live basically in the same city.

We see each other in passing and every once in a, every couple of years, we're like, hey. But I'm thinking of you because your name comes up all the time. As does yours. Can we just talk about chocolate before we talk about anything else? I can talk about chocolate the whole time. Because I learned this about you. It's been a chunk of years now. And you're not just a consumer of chocolate. You're an aficionado. You were at one point an aspiring chocolate maker. But I don't think you ever told me what started that whole thing.

Well, I don't have any popular vices. So I never drank once in my life, never done drugs. I don't have cigars or wine or any of those things you can be an aficionado of. Any magazine that says blank aficionado, I don't do that thing. And I'm the kind of person who's a little affected. I like to know trivia about origin and terroir and stuff. All of a sudden, I realized that dark chocolate isn't Hershey's. It's a whole other thing. And the deeper I dug about the fact that some of the lowest paid people in the world

grow chocolate beans and that the trees that the beans come from, all the good trees were about to become extinct because Hershey's and Nestle's only wanted the bad trees. That there's Forsterro and Carrillo and Trinitario. And the bad tree is high yielding and bug resistant, but doesn't taste good. And so the farmers, what are they going to do? They're going to switch to the one that makes them more money. And so just in time, the people at Scharfenberger and at Rogue and at Askinosie

showed up and said, we'll pay triple or 10 times for these. So it was like, it was a social thing and it was a cultural thing. And I can also taste it. Most people I don't think can taste the colors in chocolate that I've come to taste. But the downside is I have to eat it every day because I'm addicted now. You know, but if you're going to have a vice. There you go. And that's a good addiction to have. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I never really knew the sort of geopolitics of chocolate, but I love chocolate. I'm nowhere near the level of depth of wisdom about the beans and the process and the making. My sort of cursory knowledge of just what's actually fueled the economy underneath it

for a long time, I was like, wow, there's actually, I mean, there's bad stuff happening here. Yeah. And the fact is that usually when the privileged Western world shows up, it makes things worse. In this case, if chocolate disappeared, those people would be in worse shape, right? So when Sean Askinosie, and he's the reason I didn't start a chocolate company, is because he is not only making amazing chocolate, but he does it in such an extraordinarily ethical way. He not only pays more than he has to, he puts the kids of the growers through private

school. He supports their communities, and he goes there in person every year. And so to watch one human being, who used to be a defensive child, show up and do that. So what I've also found is I like the people who make chocolate. I like Sean. I like the guys who make Rogue, the guys who make Ritual. He was friends with John Schraffenberger before he died. And so I just keep bumping into these people, sometimes connecting them to other people. We need more of those sort of micro communities of artisans who are able to produce products. I found that in the book industry for sure, people like you.

And then in the chocolate. So you go down the list. There are these pockets where you can make a difference and be proud of what you make. Yeah, no, I love that. I feel like there's this return to makers, and all the sub-pockets of that. I actually built that guitar in the studio earlier this year

because there was something in me that was like a primal urge. I was really missing just working with my hands and forming something. We're going to have to start calling you Lex because you're a luthier. I don't know about that. That was a Superman joke. I wonder if part of the idea of getting back to being a maker is really just the culture in the community. It's like we're missing the gathering around and creating something.

Even if we're not creating the same thing together, we're parallel playing just the conversation that goes on and the community around it. Yeah. And the nature of industrial capitalism is it moves toward few players who have high leverage. And one of the things that the internet did with Shopify and Kickstarter, et cetera, is open it up for a while so that small players with low leverage could make enough. They couldn't maximize, but they could make enough.

And what it did was it turned all of us into marketers. Even if you don't make a thing, you're busy on social media, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And thinking hard about how much you want to be involved in that and what it gives you in terms of fuel or sustenance is really important. And I don't think very many people do that. And I think a key part of your work has been narrating that internal conversation. What's it for? Why am I going through this cycle?

Why am I beating myself up about this? Is this leading me to more of what I want? Yeah, I think that's a really missed part of the conversation. But I think it's not, I mean, it's a missed part of the conversation with other people, but I don't even think we reflect just the internal conversation that even includes that.

Exactly, you know, I was on stage in Mexico City about six months ago. And as you know, the worst place to speak is other than like a crowded bar is a convention center because the acoustics are terrible. And a convention center with simultaneous translation is worse still because everyone's got the headphones on and it's like an echo. But this one topped it because in the third row, there was a woman on her cell phone, but she wasn't on her cell phone checking her email. She wasn't on her cell phone listening.

She was on her cell phone having a conversation. And so I've made the flight. I've made it to customs. I made it to traffic. I'm standing up there and all I can do is keep looking at this woman. And I'm changing the arc of my talk to talk about how we are captives of our phones, hoping she will hear me and hang up.

And after about 15 minutes, I realized that I had decided to let this woman change the way I was going to serve 2,000 other people. And I took a deep breath and she was absent for me for the rest of the day because she wasn't there for me. I didn't need to be there for her. There were other people who wanted me to be present

and to choose to turn on lights for them because they were enrolled in where I wanted to go. And it's something I have to remind myself of every day. I have insulated myself from things like Twitter, Amazon reviews, because those are things that would derail the mission that I'm on. And it's so tempting because it's a click away. And, you know, if I'm having a moment where I need a weird endorphin rush, I'm so tempted to click this. I wonder what they're saying about this.

And I don't do it because if I do, I will have given up an hour that I could be spending producing for other people instead. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting because you're also, back in the early days of blogging, you were the first person that I ever remember actually just completely turning off comments. Yeah. I got a lot of crap for that. Yeah. But I mean, you also spoke to it and you were very, I mean, I remember you're pretty vulnerable and just very honest. You're like, look, this is spoke to it and you were very, I mean, I remember you're pretty vulnerable and just very honest. You're like, look, this is going to completely destroy me.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. If I had a blog with comments, it would be a blog without posts. Right. So it's, but I love the frame of doing that in the name of creating the space to actually go into the cave, to do the work that you showed up to do rather than spend 90% of your time engaging around it and then not having the time to actually create offerings on a level that make you feel like, yeah, this is what I'm here to do. Yeah. And I think a big part of it goes back to this sort of acceptance avoidance thing. So I'll hear from people who say, I can never please my boss, right? That I'm doing this and this,

so I'm gonna just check out. Well, what I learned from that note is you may think you've never pleased your boss, but you're not fired yet. So you please the boss enough to be able to come in. So given that you're able to come in, why don't you just ignore the boss? Why don't you just do the work you wanna do?

Because doing the work to please the boss isn't working. So what would it mean to use this position and this leverage in this moment to say, I made this and I don't need my boss to like it. I need to like it and I needed to serve the people I made it for. The question though is, I love that. And when you take that sort of ideal and you bring it into a scenario where you've got a kid who just graduated school, $250,000 in debt, and then they're in an organization where they step into another culture, they haven't asked for the boss, the project, the thing, and they're hired with a very specific intention and job to do. How do you navigate that tension? Oh yeah. I love this. So first of all, I'm sorry that four years ago they didn't ask me because in Stop Stealing Dreams, I would have made it really clear that probably not the quarter million dollars you wanted to spend. But leaving that aside, the essence of doing work that matters is a two-part question. Who's it for and what's it for? Because you can't do it for everyone and you can't do it for everything. Anything we do has a who's it for and a what's it for. So if you take a job, well, what's it for? If the what's it for is I need to pay off my debt, then don't keep renegotiating why you took the job.

You took the job to pay off your debt. On the other hand, if the who's it for is, if I please my boss enough, I'll get a promotion so I'll have more leverage so I can have more joy, blah, blah, blah. We know who the who's it for is. The who's it for is to please your boss. The what's it for?

Well, the empathy that I'm writing about these days is the empathy of saying, I don't know what you know. I don't want what you want. I don't believe what you believe, and that's okay because you're not wrong and I'm not wrong. There is a situation here where you believe these things and you want these things. So if what I am building is for you,

I cannot build it for you and insist you see the world the way I do. All I can do is go to where you are and say, based on what you know and what you want and what you believe, here, I made this. Now, if you can't do that and be proud of who you are, then you need to leave. But let's be really clear about the who's it for and the what's it for. Because I actually have a whole bunch of 22-year-olds in my life because they're peers of my kids. And they use the rationale of I'm in debt to take a job that must simultaneously pay off their debt and sustain them at a soulful level. And what I'm trying to say to them is, where is it written that you can get both at the same time? And be really clear about why you're

doing this, the who's it for and the what's it for, because otherwise every single day, you're going to be stressed because you're serving two antithetical goals. I mean, that frame, the sort of the context I think is super helpful. I mean, and your question is, where is it written that you can have both? It's like all over pop culture and all over everything that's common and sort of like popular in the self-help world is yes, yes, yes. It's funny. I remember like a chunk of years ago, back when we were filming this, sat down with Joanne

Wilson, who I know, you know, who has spent many years, I mean, she's incredibly accomplished herself, many years working with a lot of founders. And I pose this question, I'm like, how do you feel about the, you can have this incredible, full, rich life and also have this incredibly explosive business, iconic business. And she's like, you can have it all one at a time. That works. And some people are lucky enough to get both, but what they tend to do is get both by earning the privilege before they take the benefits. Explain that. Well, so I would add that there's a third thing

that's in pop culture, which is not only can you get rewarded for doing what you love, you can also be authentic at all times, right? Well, what we more likely see are people who pay their dues in one of dozens of ways, either by doing work they love for no compensation over and over and over again in a generous way, feeding the community until one day the community says, we can't live without you here. Come over here, we'll pay you. Or they do work that they're not ashamed of, but they do work that's important enough to be valued by the measure of the person who hired them until they

have the status and the leverage to shift the work into a slightly different direction. But the other part that's so important is if Van Gogh had lived 100 years earlier or 100 years later, he wouldn't have painted the way he painted. That's not in your genes. That's in the moment. It's a choice. And so you can work on Wall Street or you can work at a coffee shop and your craft can be ideal

with humans in ways that I am proud of that transform those humans. It doesn't matter that you're making coffee or that you're making money. It matters that your day is probably spent interacting with humans. And if you want to own that as your art, I think that there's plenty of demand for that. Yeah, completely agree. I was recently asked, hey, I've been out of the yoga world for a long time. I haven't taught asana for many years now. Somebody recently asked me, they're like, do you miss it? And I thought for a moment, I was like, you know, in a lot of ways, I actually don't think I ever stopped teaching yoga. I'm just not teaching the physical practice anymore.

But the essence of it, what I was always curious about is the process of growth, the process of liberation, the process of realization. And I think it fits with what you're saying because there could be a thousand distinct expressions of that or a million. But what's underneath that is this intense interest in a process or an outcome. And that's maybe where the craft and expression. I mean, let's put a pin in this. This is so urgent and it's almost never discussed. So, you know, I grew up in Northern Canada and became a canoeing instructor when I was 16, changed my life. And kids would come up to me. This is, you know, I did this for years and years. This was my 42nd summer of teaching. And they'll say, you must really love canoeing.

Like, actually, I don't like canoeing at all. It hurts my knees. It hurts my shoulders. I do it so I can teach. It's just the most direct way I have to be in this spot with you teaching you. And what the boat does is a side effect. And too often, our culture has said, what are you? I'm a milkman. Well, no, you're not a milkman. You're just someone who happens to use the delivery of milk as a way to achieve various objectives in your life. But don't define yourself by the color of the bottle you're carrying around or the shape of the paddle or the guitar. It's a means to a basic human emotion. And there's only 20 of them. So we don't have to get super specific. Oh no, I could never do that because you ride Western and I only ride. No, that's not how it works. It's what is it that we wanted when we

went on this path? That's where a lot of my focus has been. And it feels like increasingly a lot of, you come at that question in a lot of different ways, especially in the last, I feel like two to four years. Yeah, I mean, I think that I've always wanted to do the teaching I'm doing, but it needed a different wrapper around it

to be in the space that I was in. So if you're gonna write a column in Fast Company or you're gonna give a speech to 5,000 business people, it's hard to show up and use the yoga wrapper, right? Because then you're already not going to where they are. But if you can start by saying, I'm here to talk about how to meet your goals and your boss's goals, how to sell more stuff or how to make more profit or how to, excuse me,

how to make a difference, people will perk up and listen. And then you can say, it turns out the way you do that is not by spamming and scamming and shortcutting. It turns out you do that in ways that you are actually proud of. And the combination of the two, I think think helps get us where we need to go. Yeah. It's like using business as the context for individual growth. Right. Which wasn't true in 1935. In 1935, place widget A into widget B, do it again. And there was zero expectation. And in 1965, if you wanted to talk to the person in the office next to you,

you called in your secretary, you dictated a memo. She walked over and gave the memo to his secretary and then she gave it to the guy sitting right across. So the human interaction wasn't nearly as human as it is now. And that shift happened in our lifetime and no one saw it coming. And a shift like that will never happen again. Yeah. But I mean, is there an argument that with the introduction of screens in between faces, it's almost like the pendulum in a tech, like technology is moving the pendulum back where we are, yes, in theory, we're more connected than we've ever been, but we're also more emotionally disconnected than we've ever been. Yeah. It's interesting. If you look at Slack, there's an enormous amount of software in Slack built around soft tissue. And the number of substantive things that go on in Slack isn't that much bigger than it is in real life. So

I think that as we move closer to high-yielding knowledge work, meaning if someone writes down what you do for a living, they're going to find someone cheaper than you to do it. That if it can be done in steps, you're doomed because the steps will either get done by a computer or someone who's disrespected. So people are racing to a job where they can't be easily replaced. And in those jobs, I think what we're discovering is fear and the cultural cohort of people like us drives so much of what's possible or not possible that we have to pay attention to the soft stuff because the soft stuff is 96%

of what's holding everybody back. Yeah, I mean, primary constraint and also gateway to potential possibility. Yeah, and I mean, if you want to be a Harvard Business School case about it, Ford, GM, Mercedes,

all knew how to make a Tesla. There was nothing that Tesla brought to the table that was unknown. But those companies were filled with people who said, I didn't sign up to work at a hundred year old car company so that I could risk everything to do some crazy-ass scheme. That's why it had to get done by an outsider. That's a soft tissue issue, a soft skill issue. It's not, we don't know how to get enough nickel, hadria, whatever into a battery. Yeah. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. I know you pull back on your speaking a lot over the last chunk of years, but you also, you're front and center with a lot of companies, a lot of people who are at a level in the companies where they're really affecting culture. I mean, how much, I know there's a lot of lip service given to these skills, but they're also called soft skills and people are kind of like,

this is like the stuff that we have to do because somebody told us we have to do it and it's gotta be in our brochure, but okay. Like it doesn't really matter that much. You know, I mean, do you still see that? Or do you feel like when the shops and the places you're going, do you feel like there's, there is any evolution in that? There is any realization that this stuff actually matters on the level of, quote, hard skills? Well, so in defense of the people who are running this,

if you emphasize soft skills a lot in a hurry, a whole bunch of woo-woo starts showing up. Yeah, I agree. A whole bunch of people hiding under that guise. But just as we can see that as soon as we measure something online, people become obsessed with that measurement. I don't care if you're good at tweeting. I just see you have 600,000 followers. Therefore, you must be good at it. The P&L has given CEOs this marvelous place to hide. And what it is, is the simplest measurement in the world.

I don't care how you run your shop, just keep making your budget numbers. And so no, I don't think we're one-tenth of the way toward a coherent method for improving soft skills among talented people. I think that there are some pockets in some organizations where really special things happen and you can see it in the outside world. But too often, if the company's doing well financially, then they say, oh yeah, sure. And if they're not, the first thing that goes out the window is the thing that they should be most reliant on, which is where are we going to find brave, generous people who care enough to do uncomfortable things? And almost everything we buy, we could buy from someone else, which means that if you want a shot at not being a low-priced commodity creator,

you're going to have to have a team of people who care about something more than widget A going into widget B, because that's not worth paying extra for. The importance of finding those people, but also on top of that is the importance of elevating training, education. I mean, this is the whole idea behind Tom Peter's last book, right? It's like at the hardest possible moment when you've got no money at all, spend it on training the most incredible, like invest in your people, show them you care, help them learn. And I think some of the cases I'm trying to, I think I reflect some of what he talked about is the companies that really actually survived in the last downturn, 2008, 2009, when everybody was cutting their budgets to take care of their people, were the few that actually said, no, we're doubling down there. Yeah. I mean, Tom, I've stolen 80% of my stuff from Tom and he continues to be right. I think

that it's important to outline that there's also an obligation on the part of the employee. And that obligation is this, almost all company training is terrible. And the reason it's terrible is it's based on command and control. It's based on the compulsory nature of education. So you show up, there's attendance taken, there's a lecture, maybe there's a compliance test at the end. We've been running the Alt-MBA now for four years. We've had 3,000 people go through it. HR departments do not like it. They do not work with us because it does not match their paradigm.

It's a complete bargain compared to what they're currently spending, but they can't control it the way that they want to because, and this is the key part, they're worried that if they treat employees like adults, employees will take advantage of them. And that is often true because if you come up believing that the only thing that's worth listening to in a lecture is stuff that's going to be on the test and there isn't going

to be a test, then why pay attention? And so as companies try to shift away from command and control and away from this dictating to people what to do next to create these cadres of brave, passionate people, a lot of people, but even people who listen to you all the time, want that at work, but aren't willing to experience the fear that goes with it. And if you are willing to experience the fear that goes with it, the place you work will either let you do it or someone will hire you away. Because that is in such short supply that the leaders who do get it are killing each other to try to find the few people

who are willing to go on that journey with them. And I think a lot of the, that also drives part of the fear of providing that container because you're like, well, I'm going to invest all of this. And then maybe the person's going to walk out the door rather than saying, maybe. Yeah.

And what Tom Peters says is, and which would be better, that or not investing and having them stay? Yeah, it's like when you create that frame, you're kind of like, huh, okay. It's funny, I listened to the audio book of that, that last book on a drive down from Vermont. And that halfway down, I'm like, I think he literally like recorded this himself

just so he could sort of like challenge himself to say bullshit as many times as he would be possible in a seven hour window. It's really, it's very funny. I've known him for a long time and I used to have a really good Tom Peters imitation and I can't do it anymore. You can't bring it up.

I just can't, you know, he used to say, and that's job one, period. And it's the period part. That's so great. And so when he sent me the book, I was so thrilled and I blurbed it. And I think my blurb was something like, this is vintage Tom Peters, period.

That's awesome. He's great. Yeah, agreed. You brought up something interesting also, kind of jumping back to Sean Eskenosi, which is that when, you know, so here's a guy, astonishingly successful lawyer, but he didn't like for him, it wasn't about chocolate. It was about, this was a mechanism for him to go and become the best person on earth and be of service. And what was interesting is when you were just sharing that part of what he does is he goes to these villages, these places and helps teach and educate and help the kids go and get their education. I jumped back to a

conversation I had with Bob Taylor years ago from Taylor Guitars. He's at a point in his life and his career right now where it's a sizable company. And a lot of his days are spent going to small villages in the Amazon or different places and trying to find beautiful wood for their company. But in a way where they're literally,

how can we actually create a're literally, how can we actually create a sustainable enterprise and how can we respect the environment? How can we create jobs and education and health for the people in these villages? I wonder, so you're talking about two guys who are essentially doing this towards the later part of their careers, where I think there's like a natural shift towards legacy, towards impact. And I've often wondered if there is a way to, in some way, trigger that yearning earlier in a person's life. Well, I think in my experience, that yearning is present. And we don't need to trigger it.

We just need to not extinguish it. And there's a ton of pressure. And this generation coming up is doing a better job than most at resisting the pressure and saying, maybe I'll be a nomad for a while. Maybe I'll work in a social enterprise. Maybe I will just figure out how to do this work that is for the smallest viable group of people. It's not happening enough, but it's clearly happening. But the pressure is, oh, you have student debt, blah, blah, blah. So Michelle, well, she used to work for me, now runs a school in Nepal and she's 30, right? And so she's not Sean Askinosie. She didn't make a giant pile of money. She went for two weeks to recover her breath in a monastery,

which is not uncommon for people of a certain age and part of the culture. And she said, this is resonating with me. She saw things in people that needed to be drawn out. She felt like she could help. And now it's been two years. And the magic of the internet means that she doesn't need to raise a lot of money,

but she can from a far away. She's gotten kids from Nepal, from little villages in Nepal, into Harvard with a full scholarship. And so the world keeps getting smaller if we let it. And when I watch someone like Michelle in her little corner of the world doing something, we say, well, what difference does that make when there's all this horribleness? It makes a lot of difference because if we multiply it by 100,000 people, suddenly it matters a lot.

It feels like also that there's a bit of a sort of a reclamation of the need for meaning and purpose at an earlier age in that generation. And the quote millennials, which I hate lumping all into one thing. But still, I feel like I'm Gen X. We're kind of like just forgot about everything and put our heads down and hope to be able to do it in a reasonable way the next night. And I'm sort of this weirdo in that generation that sort of say, well, maybe there's something else. But I do feel like the, like, generation or two, like, behind came up and there is an expectation, almost an entitlement to existential compensation really early in life. And I think this can be a double-edged sword too. For sure. For sure. I mean, you know,

capitalism has decided, and it's the dominant method, even in places like Russia or countries where you wouldn't expect it. You know, the number one country in the world for e-commerce is Kenya. And the origin is really fascinating. So I'll give the one minute version. If you lived in Nairobi and you wanted to get $100 to your mother who lived in a far village, what you would do is put Kenyan shillings in an envelope, wrap it up a few times, go to the bus station and say, who's heading out toward my village? And some stranger would say, I am.

And you'd hand him the envelope and he would carry it on the bus for the two days and then hand it to your mother when he found her. This is a pretty inefficient way to transfer funds. Well, around the same time, the local cell phone company, SafariCon, started setting up kiosks all around the country so you could pay as you go on your phone.

And because no one was gonna sign up for a monthly subscription, that doesn't make any sense. Well, you pay as you go, pay as you go. And then they realized they could make it so that the guy in Nairobi could pay for his mother's cell phone. And so from Nairobi, you could go to the kiosk and say, here's my mother's cell phone number, top up her account. Well, once they figured that out, they realized that not only could you transfer credits from one phone to another, but if you go to any of our kiosks, we'll take money off your phone and hand it back to you in shillings. So suddenly every single person who has a phone

has the ability to give and get money. And now no one's going to redeem the money because currency doesn't need to be in money. Currency is on the phone. Well, the end result is that in an economy that was not based on commerce, commerce is now in every single person's hands. And one of the things that means is you can be a dreamer and you can be a connector and you can live the life of an artist or a poet. But anywhere in the world, you're also expected to create enough value, to earn enough money to pay for your food. And the way we do that keeps shifting really dramatically. Because on one hand, we've got

people who are used to making $3 a day who can now go online and make $6 a day doing something digital. But we also have radiologists who are used to making $275,000 a year who can't make a living anymore because their computer can read an x-ray better than they can. So the whole thing is just, it's not a mess, but it's all been shuffled.

I mean, which opens a whole nother exploration of if we put the crystal ball on the table between us and we're like, given that, and given the state of AI, and given what's happening 20 years from now, you know, like, what is the, in 1914, I think it was, maybe 1913, when they started mechanizing. The steam shovel, when the steam shovel goes along, what happens to everyone who digs ditches? It's over for them. And there was a lot of hand-wringing about the fact that mechanization was going to destroy the economy because all manual labor would go away. And what we saw really clearly was being a machine operator has higher yield and higher paying than being a ditch digger. And that being a foreman of machine operators is even better than, and then, then, then, then, then. Well, in our lifetime, the shift has been following instructions is not nearly as good as

writing instructions. And writing instructions is not as good as inventing the next thing. So I think that it's really unlikely in the next 50 years that AI is going to do the emotional labor of a linchpin, a human who cares, somebody who can work without a manual. It will happen eventually.

It's hard for me to see it happening in a generation. So that's where we need to run. We need to run into the direction where you don't care that no one told you what to do. You're happy that no one told you what to do because it gives you a chance to do even more than is expected. No one teaches this in school. And as a result, we have generations of people coming out saying, where's the placement office? Where are the instructions? And they're going to be-

Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do. And they're going to be bitterly disappointed. And I guess, I mean, it seems like a lot of your work over the last really 10 years has been to try and present a contrary argument, but also a contrary path. Yeah, exactly.

And I found it thanks to my parents and some lucky breaks, but I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want to be on this path or at least try it. And it's really, you know, Zig Ziglar, my late teacher, used to tell the story of how you train fleas. And it turns out if you put fleas into a jar, they'll jump out. But if you put fleas into a jar

and put a lid on it loosely, they'll hit the top and hit the top and hit the top. And then they'll get tired of hitting the top. And you can take the top off and they won't jump out. And that's what we did was we took the top off the jar. And a whole bunch of people aren't jumping out. And I know why they're not jumping out, but someone needs to encourage them to jump out. Yeah.

What does Marty Seligman call that? Learned. I know learned optimism was the opposite phrase, but essentially it's. Yeah. Maybe learn compliance. Something like that. Yeah. Let's kind of zoom the lens out a little bit.

I was thinking this morning that last time we actually kind of formally sat down, we had cameras around us. Why don't we just pretend we have cameras? Because it would be so much more comfortable. We had cameras around us. Why don't we just pretend we have cameras? We're not showing anyone the footage. Because it would be so much more comfortable. We got all these lights here. You and I. How's my forehead?

There's like six PAs bringing us juices. Somebody's fanning us behind the chairs. That was six years ago. And big picture, it's been a hell of a six years for the planet, for the country, for us individually. Over that window of time, and maybe if you want to shorten it up, that's fine. When you think about what are the issues, the touch points, the crux moves that have really drawn your focus, your attention, your curiosity, what jumps out to you?

There are two things that are happening at the same time that are really a surprising juxtaposition. What Steve Pinker has pointed out, which really frustrates a lot of people in ways that surprise me, because it frustrated me when I first heard it, is that the world is safer and healthier than it has ever been and keeps getting safer and healthier

than it has ever been. And keeps getting safer and healthier than it has ever been. And we don't want to believe that. And the reason we don't want to believe it is that what the media does for a living is remind us all day, every day, that the world is getting less safe and less healthy. So on one hand, you've got this dramatic disconnect between the ratchet that technology and civil society are creating in the right direction. But on the other hand, you have the fact that we have clearly set the table for the world to melt. And this summer was one of the 10 hottest summers of all time.

And nine of those hottest summers of all time have been in the last 10 years. There's no doubt in anybody who examines this honestly's mind that the world is melting. And we are, if you care about your grandchildren or your great grandchildren or even your children, this is malpractice of the highest order, what we're doing by being distracted by things that are minor compared to this opportunity. But then the other thing that's going on is the media is eating itself. And there's something in mythology called an Ouroboros, which is a snake that eats itself by the tail. And the media is in this constant race for our attention. And every single time they set aside a cultural taboo or boundary,

that media outlet gets more attention. And so there's a race to the bottom. And my instinct is everything goes in cycles. And I don't know how much longer the cycle of animosity and anger and pushing against things that we probably shouldn't push against will continue. But I'm optimistic that it will be replaced by kindness. And it will be a kindness that comes from people who are exhausted by the battle. That human beings care very much about one of two things in any given moment,

affiliation or dominance. And we're in a dominance moment right now, where what we see is it's all pro-wrestling, right? Who's up, who's down? Is my guy beating your guy? But the affiliation instinct is also great. Who's on my team? Where do I stand? Who's to my left, who's to my right? Are we together? And not one of those things has ever lasted forever.

We go through dominance phases in pop culture and then affiliation ones and vice versa. So for me, I think voices like yours matter a lot because they remind us that kindness has not left the building. And they remind us that every single thing that has ever mattered has been based on culture. Culture beats strategy. Culture beats despots. Culture beats technology. And culture comes from the grassroots. Culture is what we do. Culture is not done to us. We can participate in other people's culture, but if you're not proud of it, don't. And so the cycle's got to go the other way, being an optimist and crossing my fingers.

So what I see in the last six years is a media narrative that is chilling and I'm ashamed of, one that has shifted our world in ways that I'm not happy with. But I also see, when I see human beings, actual human beings, most of them are erring on the side of,

I see you. They're erring on the side of, how can I help? Erring on the side of kindness. And so my hope is that the culture, that the media realigns with the culture and we end up seeing what's actually around us. Yeah. I feel like I'm noticing that same, I don't want to use the word pushback because it's a wrong word. That same sense of it's, I don't know exactly what to do, but I do know I

can choose to be kind in a moment. And maybe if that's all I can do right now, let me try that. Just not even for someone else, just so maybe I can breathe. And maybe the compound effect of that across larger and larger numbers of people starts to have an effect. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

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The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Think about the 15 minutes after you cut someone off in traffic really elegantly and they had to slam on the brakes versus the 15 minutes after you held the door open for someone with a baby stroller,

which is better for you because the fact is the person you cut off didn't learn a lesson so why did you do it because in that moment maybe it felt juicy but you paid for it you paid for it by giving up a quarter an hour of your life yeah i wanted to ask you something else which really ties in with this which is i've always known you as being somebody where you have very strong beliefs about society, about politics, about humanity, yet in your public sharing and your writing, you've never been somebody who dives into the middle of politics,

takes sides and offers something specific on the issue of the day. And at the same time, when we were leading up to the election in November 2016, you wrote a few posts that weren't like pick sides, pick sides, pick sides, but it was speaking to the sense of responsibility to act, to vote, to do something. That was unusual. It felt to me like that was unusual for you. I care enough about the issue of the day is a trap because it protects us from having to take responsibility for a larger point of view, right? That if Kant or Descartes had spent most of their time chiming in on the intrigues of the court,

we never would have benefited from any of their work because we don't care about which duke was hurting which, you know, baron in those days. And so I think we do have an obligation within our circles and across circles to influence the conversation and the standards that we carry around because the culture is up to us. But I don't think Wolf Blitzer and the Situation Room is anything but not very good entertainment. And I don't want to be part of that cycle. And so I think you can read at least half my blog posts as political, but none of them are saying,

today, I think this person is wrong and this person is right. Because as soon as I do that, it's so easy to ignore what I said, because I'm not on the right team, whatever team you want to be on. And so I don't want to play that sort of short-term tribal thing. Instead, I want to say thank you to people from wherever you're coming from for giving me two minutes of your time. Think about this. And if you think about this and still want to support that,

well, that's your choice because you're a grownup. Because I don't believe what you believe. I don't know what you know. I don't want what you want. But here, here's a thought that feels to me coherent and hard to argue with. I notice things. Do you notice this? And I know that that kind of input has influenced my life coming up, particularly as a teenager and shortly thereafter, way more than when someone says, that person is right, that person is wrong.

Yeah, I don't think that person is right, that person is wrong. I mean, we develop defenses to that pretty early in life because that's the way we're always taught. And yet at the same time, I do feel that you are calling people to think and act. You're calling people to step into a place of responsibility in their lives and not a sense of either entitlement or complacency. Yeah, I view that as my responsibility

because I got this great gift. You know, a million people a day say, I'll listen to you. And I don't take that lightly. You know, I don't have any ads. I'm not doing this for sponsors. I'm doing this because I can't believe I get to do it because it feeds my need to explore the edges. And if people are enrolled in this journey with me, I feel like I have a really higher calling to inspire them and to

make them uncomfortable at times to say, I'm not here to tell you you're always right. I'm not always right. I'm usually a hypocrite, but I am here to tell you, I noticed this. What will you do when you notice it too? Yeah. And that's a serious prompt. It's a serious, it's a question to walk around with all day. It's also kind of touches on, so you have your latest book, This Is Marketing. It's interesting. The subtitle of it really grabbed me. You can't be seen until you learn to see. And well, first tell me what do you actually mean by that? Well, marketers who do it with a capital M are narcissists often, not always,

narcissistic, short-term, egomaniacal, selfish spammers who say, I have money. My job is to get more market share and sell more stuff here. And that worked beautifully for 80 years. For 80 years, media was a screaming bargain. If you spend money on media, you got back way more than that, which meant you could buy more media. And 10 or 15 years ago, that stopped because the internet's not a mass medium. The internet's a micro medium with a billion channels. It's the first medium ever invented

not to make marketers happy. And that's a really big deal. Like we have magazines because they needed a place to put magazine ads, not the other way around. So into that world, we have to bring an enormous amount of humility. And the humility is to say,

they don't have to listen to me if they don't want to, no matter how much money I have. The humility to say, I cannot make anything for everyone because everyone has the freedom to choose and everyone is not going to want anything I could make. So if those two things are true, I have to show up with the expectation that what I made is probably not for you. And I have to show up with the belief that no matter how hard I try,

I probably cannot reach you. So if both those things are true, I start by saying, what do other people need and want and believe? What are they hoping for or dreaming of? Because if I am not aligned with those things, I'm invisible. For the people who I am aligned with, they will be eager to hear from me. I will be seen because I saw them. So if seeing others is the starting point, and the truth is, yes, the context of the book is marketing, but I think we both agree, marketing is just about the human condition.

Correct. It's psychology. It's how do I see and serve somebody else in a way that lifts us both fundamentally. So it's really, it's a much bigger thing. When I think about how artists are trained, like you don't learn to paint first, you learn to see first or learn to hear first.

Exactly. And which is fundamentally, it's underlying what you're saying here. And which always makes me wonder, why is the only form of formal education where that training exists? Why is that only about if I want to paint or if I want to draw?

Why is that not just the most fundamental thing that you're starting to learn in elementary school? Exactly. It's because of industrialism. Industrialism is the water that the fish never sees. It's everywhere. We underestimate how profound the world shifted in a hundred years. So profound that skyscrapers, cheap glass windows, elevators, cars, roads, vaccines, everything in our life is brand new. And if you go spend some time in the woods without all that stuff from REI,

you realize human beings didn't live like we live now. So industrialism is this magic trick and industrialism is based on compliance and conformance and production and mass. So we had to teach everyone all of that because otherwise we'd run out of factory workers and we'd run out of customers. So that's baked in to our culture.

It's Soviet level thinking worldwide baked into our culture. And only now are people starting to blink their eyes and realize we got industrialism nailed. You could live your entire life without working in a factory. You could live your entire life without working in a factory. You could live your entire life without doing what you are told. And that's new this century.

And so the question is, with that incredible power and freedom, what are you going to do with it? And it helps if you could begin by doing what musicians and artists do, which is learn to see. Yeah. So important. I think I first saw you write about this in a blog post years back, but it's in your recent book also. This word starts with an S. Sonder, S-O-N-D-E-R. That's it, yeah. Which is, it seems like it's sort of, is it the same thing as empathy or is it different? Is it bigger? Oh, it's very different than empathy.

Okay. So take me there. Okay, so I didn't make it up. It's in a blog that's becoming a book. And I can't remember the name of the person who wrote it because it's not credited to a human. It's credited to the blog. You have a noise in your head. Everyone does.

A rolling narrative that never ends. Your noise is not the same as my noise. The minute you realize that other people have a noise in their head, everything changes. Because now, instead of looking around and seeing just people, you can hear the noise in everyone's head. And the noise in their head is different than the noise in your head. That moment of realizing that there's 7 billion noises, none of which align with yours in any given moment. There's so much humility in that, right? There's so much.

Think about how that noise has brought you down some days. Well, that noise is bringing down the person right next to you right now. Now is when empathy kicks in. Because we say to ourselves, oh, you didn't reject what I did because I didn't do it well. You rejected what I did because you have a noise in your head just as bad as the noise I have in my head. What are we going to do about that? And it leaves us so much more room to be able to then say, you don't know what I know.

You don't want what I want. You don't believe what I believe. How will we work together? And that's one of the problems of the new top-down dynamic in politics is it doesn't leave room for that. So it's really the awareness of, I am not the only one with my own spin cycle

and everybody else around me has a radically different cycle than mine. It's that awareness, which is like the precursor to the possibility of empathy, really. Yeah, and then it leads to everyone else is right. Based on who they are and what they know, based on what they believe and what they want, everyone who is not mentally ill does what's right

based on all of those things. Now you could say, they need to know what I know. They need to want what I want. Because if they did, they'd want to do what I want to do. Fine. So that means you're now a teacher and your teacher has to earn enrollment, which says, are you willing to know what I know

so that you can see what I see so that we can get to a right that we can work with? Because for me to just start by saying, I am right and you are wrong, doesn't acknowledge. Sonder doesn't bring in empathy. It only makes us angry. Yeah, and then it becomes a transmission fest.

Correct. With really no possibility of understanding. That's right. It occurs to me also, sort of like in this conversation, I don't think we've ever talked about this actually. I'm kind of fascinated by Sam Harris's view on free will. Yeah. What's your take on this?

And for those who, maybe we can sort of deconstruct a little, and I'm going to butcher this, but fundamentally that the argument is, do we actually have free will, like true 100% pure free will or not? And his argument, and now I've heard a bunch of other similar arguments, is that, well, we kind of have some, but it's always constrained by a combination of genetics because there's a physiological container, you know, like which produces the signal for free will or lack thereof. So there's a genetic element to it. And there's environmental, like over a period if we're alive for 40 years, certain neural connections have formed and been broken, which create certain constraints, certain, there's a biological structure that houses free will. And our ability to exert it

is only like the ability to, like we hit those boundaries and we can't just, we're not completely unbound. Is that, is that your understanding or? So let me give you two ways to begin thinking about it, at least the way I see it. So James C. Kirk is going to beam down to the planet's surface and Scotty's got the transporter, but something trips in the dilithium crystals and something goes wrong. And instead of beaming down whole, he beams down twice into two rooms that are right next to each other. He can't see into either room.

He's locked in each room, okay? So there's Kirk one in this room and there's Kirk two in this room. Both healthy Kirks beam down. The question is, would you expect those two Kirks to act the same, read the same books that are on the shelves, drink the same stuff the whole time that they're on the planet's surface? Or would free will kick in and they would start diverging from one another?

And I hope that we can agree that if you look at the physics of it, they have to do exactly the same thing. That it is possible that some sort of quantum glitch would come in along the way. But basically, their inputs and their outputs, it's exactly the same Kirk starting in exactly the same state. Inputs are going to lead to outputs. That free will is something we invent, a narrative that comes along so that we can tell ourselves that we did something, but we start from a state. There's inputs and there's outputs. That's part A. Part B is all of us have a voice in our head, right? Now, if you watch a football game, what happens is play goes on in the field, and then the color person says three seconds

after the play, what happened? So Joe Namath back to pass, right? Blah, blah, blah. What would happen if we did a small switch to the TV so we heard the voice before the player did the action? That would be crazy. It would be so cool to watch, but it'd be crazy with a color person says something, and then three to five seconds later, the players on the field do it, right?

That's not how it works, but that's how we think we work. We think we have this voice in our head that says, oh, I'm thirsty, I think I'll drink some water. But in fact, the opposite happens. What actually happens, and this is, I'm not making this part up, this is completely true. What actually happens is a part of our brain that has no voice decides to do something. And then the voice comes up with a story to explain why we did

it. It happens after, not before. And that is the myth of free will, is that that voice in our head is actually making decisions? No. That voice in our head is doing a color commentary on what we already decided to do. And what that means is that this whole story we tell ourselves of free will with a little homunculus man with controls, that is clearly not true. We've proven that for hundreds of years, but people hate that because it doesn't- They want it to be true. That doesn't, we've proven that, philosophers have proven that for hundreds of years. But people hate that. Yeah. Because it doesn't. They want it to be true.

It makes you feel like you're insane if that's not true, right? So that's different than the discussion of should we punish people when they act poorly because they had no free will, right? No. All I'm saying is they don't have a narrator who's talking before they do things, right? What we know for sure is that cats don't jump on hot stoves twice, right? They have no narrator.

What language do they speak? Cats have no narrator, but they know that jumping on a hot stove is a bad thing. So there's clearly a cycle of this worked, I'll do it more. This didn't work, I'll do it less. And then when we start bringing in the distinction between culture and genes, it just quickly devolves into really bad discussions

about sexism and racism that I don't want to go into because I think those are widely misunderstood and not useful. Yeah. I mean, when you talk about it on sort of like the meta level, I think there's a really fascinating conversation to be had. And I have seen the same thing when you get into a granular, like, okay, how does this apply in this one very slim scenario in the real world, in real life? It's when you're most likely to come to fisticuffs.

And yet that's where we live. Well, yeah, we live because everyone thinks they're a philosophy professor and Sam Harris knows he can get more people to listen to his podcast if he finds the edge cases. But we don't actually live with edge cases. We actually live making thousands of small decisions every day, very few which will end up in a Spike Lee movie, right? And so the question is, how can we make those decisions with a habit toward kindness and with a habit toward mindfulness and with a habit toward living in whatever we chose to do, realizing that we started a cascade of things that could make things better or make things worse.

So I don't think we have free will in the sense that I get to have a spoken conversation with myself before I make most choices, but I do believe habits work and I do believe you can acquire them. And that's when spirituality is at its best, when it leads to a practice that makes it so we don't need to even have fake free

will to do good things. Agreed. So when you think about the work that you're doing now and you think forward, I don't know, I'm curious actually, how much, how much do you feel like your energy is focused on present versus sort of future casting? Or can you make that distinction? Yeah, I've been doing this for 30 plus years now. And I hope to do it for a while longer. But I will tell you that it's harder to recover from a plane flight. And then when I walk past the mirror, I look at someone who I don't recognize. And so I don't spend a lot of time saying when I'm 70, what will I have been building for the

last 12 years that I could point to? I am more in a chop wood, carry water mode of saying, this is a really cool plateau I am on in the sense that I worked pretty hard to get to this point of attention and trust. How will I use it on behalf of those who have given me their attention and trust? But I don't have a giant secret plan. It still revolves around education. It still revolves around doing it with leverage.

I'm not itching to have a hundred people working for me, but I feel like if I can give people tools, whether it's an online seminar or a book where they can do the teaching, that's a better use of my time than me indulging my ego and having to do first aid in the moment. Yeah, the ripple.

Yeah. Yeah. If you were to, if you were to think about, if you had the ability to call people to focus a lot of their generative energy around a single, a defining question over the next five years, something come to mind?

I think it's a two-part answer. One part is we should probably spend less time teaching people a lesson because it almost never works. And the second half of it is the theme of my book, Stop Stealing Dreams, which is what is school for? And I still don't hear people asking the question. And when I ask the question, I get 10 different answers. And for us to spend as much time and money as we spend on education in all its forms and not even agree about what it's for is frustrating for me. And I think if we can figure out how to train adults, kids, parents, friends, to learn things that will prepare us for where we want to go, we'll be glad we did. That part of the American miracle of the 1900s was we built school knowing

what it was for. And that created generations of people who are compliant factory workers, part of the American dream. I think school is for solving interesting problems and learning how to lead. And we don't teach either of those things almost anywhere. We do in the Alt-MBA, but not very many other places. It's not an interesting problem if you can look up the answer on the internet. And leading is different than managing. But if we created generations of people who had soft skills and put them to work solving interesting problems and leading, I can't imagine how juicy their future would be. I love that. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle also. So as we sit here in

this container of the Good Life Project, if I offer out the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? I feel like I can't possibly be as pithy as I'd like to be in this moment. I think that what it means is to interact with people in a way that you would be missed if you were gone. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do.

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Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot?