Soul Boom - The Secret to a Meaningful Life (w/ Bill Burnett & Dave Evans)

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, co-authors of Designing Your Life, join us to unpack why so many people are feeling stuck, why the search for one perfect passion can be misleading, and how radical acceptance, reframing, and small moments of meaning can transform the human experience. SPONSORS! 👇 Proton (protect your privacy for FREE!) 👉 https://proton.me/soulboom Sundays for Dogs (50% OFF!) 👉 https://sundaysfordogs.com/soulboom50 OneSkin 👉 Get 15% off OneSkin with the code SOULBOOM at https://www.oneskin.co/SOULBOOM  #oneskinpod Cozy Earth 👉 Go to cozyearth.com/SOULBOOM for up to 20% off! 📖 Bill & Dave's new book 👉 https://designingyour.life/how-to-live-a-meaningful-life/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⏯️ SUBSCRIBE!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠👕 MERCH OUT NOW! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠📩 SUBSTACK!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  FOLLOW US! IG: 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://instagram.com/soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tiktok.com/@soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  CONTACT US! Sponsor Soul Boom: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Work with Soul Boom: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Executive Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They've actually now proven that your brain would rather have a problem, even if it's a painful problem, then try something new. So it's easier to stay stuck in a rock, in rumination. Familiar pain is better than change. Design is a process of making the next thing better. But in life design, I got to decide I want to change something because you can't solve a problem if you don't want to work on it. You've got to be able to say, okay, I want to make this better, or I'm curious about what would happen if I tried something different. You have to start with accept, and then the process starts. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience.

I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. A quick shout out to our sponsor, Proton. Go to proton.m.m.m. to take control of your private and digital life. Enjoy the show. You guys, welcome to Soul Boom. I'm so excited to talk to you.

So you're an odd duo. How did you guys get together? I know that you're a devout Christian and theist and with some seminary experience, seminarian? Yes. Well, I have a degree in contemplative spirituality from a seminar. All right. I lean to the mystical side. I love that.

And you are a devout, a devout, atheist Nietzschean. Pretty much, yeah. Exist. Exist. Excessal. You see this. Yeah.

Have those two worldviews ever bumped up against each other? Or have they only helped you? And how did you meet? And how do you get along with such different ways of seeing the universe? Well, we were originally met, even before school, we met on some other business things, some consulting things and stuff. But when Dave came over in 2007. We encountered each other in business for years.

So when he said, hey, let's have lunch. I got to pitch you this thing. It wasn't, we already knew each other. It wasn't pitching. It was pretty pitchy, but, you know, he sold me in the first 15 minutes. And then before we started the class, we went out and we had a famous beer at Zotz, which is a beer hall near the university. And I was like, okay, two things.

The God stuff, that doesn't come into the classroom, no, none of that. And two, we actually have to do all this stuff we say the students should do, otherwise we're going to be hypocrites. So we've been managing, I'm not. not even attention, just managing those two worldviews. And in some ways, I think, modeling for the students that you don't have to agree on that stuff. You just have to agree on, hey, we're human beings. We're all trying to make something out of what this experience is about. Sometimes that's about meaning. Sometimes that's really just about getting through the day

and checking the boxes. But if you do that with a little bit more intentionality and recognize, there's a lot of stuff going on that you don't understand. And that's okay, you know, we can find common ground. The line I come back to all the time is our, you know, cosmologies are pretty different, but our anthropologies are virtually identical. So we think about the human person very identically. And my line is, if you get the human part right, you can't go wrong. So now, I may be a theist, but I'm a free will theist, and I think actually in the design that the divine allowed, there's a degree of agency. So if God, thinks Bill deserves to have the authority to decide what he thinks. Maybe I should accept that.

So I'm not in charge of that. And that's okay with me, which means there's got to be a way to hold a framework that allows persons to exercise their agency of their humanity into becoming their authentic selves in a way that transcends any particular answers to these questions. So when we got together, in fact, in that same first lunch, I said, no, no, no, not only do we have to find somewhere where the the the the the atheist comes up from the left and the atheist comes up from the right. And we've just barely touched fingers and we can bridge the gap. No, no, no. We have to have a complete handhold.

And every single thing we teach has to work for Bill totally. And every single thing we teach has to work for me totally and everybody in between. Or we don't teach anything at all. Wow. And that has been true since day one. And it has been incredibly easy. Yeah. Because you don't have to have the answer to the, we frame tools that help you find your answer.

Now, Bill is a mystery appreciating atheists. I often say, the only difference between us is when we hit mystery, I round up to God and he rounds down to physics, which makes a big difference as it turns out. But it's really, you know, look, thoughtful people are trying hard to answer hard questions to which there aren't good answers, respect that and hold a framework that allows all of them to find their way. And that's been working pretty well. But I have to start at the very beginning because I don't understand anything about design. Like I don't know what that means. You guys, throughout the book and throughout your interviews and stuff, you reference, well, in a design,

you do this. And in the world of design, you've got to do X, Y, Y, Z. So tell me a little bit about the world of design. What are the 10 most salient points? If you're designing a coffee mug, like, what does that mean? What is the world of design and the viewpoint of design? What does that mean? When people think of design, they think of like art design or interior design or designing wallpaper or something like that. Right. So we were always about, first of all, it was like engineering plus psychology plus art. So art to make things beautiful.

Engineering, because you've got to figure out how to make things. Okay. And psychology, so you understand people. So we came up with a sort of a little formula for this kind of innovation. And we say we start, don't start with a problem, start with people, start with empathy. Like, what are you, I'm designing a new microphone for people who do, you know, podcasts. What do they need? Like, go watch them and see what works and what doesn't work and how Finankees is.

So start with that. Then redefine the problem, right? So empathy, then define. What problem are you talking about? Well, I mean, whatever I'm working on, I want a better coffee cup. I want a better, you know, I want a better coffee cup. It's not really about coffee. It's about the coffee experience.

It's about the smell. You know, I'm trying to find something that's interesting about a redesign. And come up with lots of ideas, the ideation phase. And then just build and prototype and test over and over again until you figure out what you really want. it's not so much that we ask people what they want. There's an old Henry Ford quote, I don't know if you said it,

but it's really snarky like Henry. If I'd ask my users what they wanted, they would have said, faster horses because nobody knew what a car was. Yeah. So I can't just say, hey, you know, what would you like a better coffee cup? What kind of coffee cup would you like?

But I can notice how often you spill things or how, you know, the thing doesn't work if you have arthritis in your hands. So it's a human-centered way of designing new we started out just designing new things. Back in the 60s and 70s, it was all things. And then we got into designing interactions, like on your screen. It turns out the more important stuff is what happens on the screen and how do I figure

out? Like, it used to be, you know, C-colon, backslash something, something, something to throw something away. And then the Mac was like, no, why don't you pick up the thing and throw it in the garbage? Right. How obvious, right, when you see it. One of my favorite design things is like, who thought of the thing on the iPhone to go, I'm going to make it bigger?

Yeah. I'm going to make it smaller with my fingers. Yeah, so stuff that seems so intuitive, when you see it, you go, well, of course, that's good design. Now, it's hard to do simple. It's much harder to do simple than is to do complicated. So the design process is start with empathy, make sure you're working on the right problem, build lots of solutions, and then, you know, then change the problem if you're finding you're on the wrong thing. If you read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, I was at Apple for seven years before. before I came to Stanford.

But I was working. In the mouse division. He was doing mouses. And I was, I appreciated it. It might work back in the Steve era before he was there. I was doing laptops,

but in iPhones and I have some of the folks in the iPhone team. According to the biography, they showed Steve prototypes three times and three times he said, no, no, that's not good enough. Do it again, do it again. But they actually probably built like 300 prototypes

because nobody knew what a smartphone was. So like you go, well, what if we added, you know, text and a browser to a phone? What would we get? I don't know. Let's try it. Well, what if we also added in GPS location so we could have mapping? Oh, wait a minute, that changes everything. So it's a design is a process of making the next thing better. It's an inherently

neutral process, except we're always optimistic. We can make a better design. It's a design problem because I'm designing the future of you. It's just like I'm designing an iPhone. And I don't know what the future of you is going to be like. I can't get any data about that. So let's use design techniques to design our lives. And the rest was, it turned out the fit was easy. The fit was obvious. And that's called the Stanford Life Design Lab, what's it called again? Yeah, it's the Life Design Lab.

So the innovation we brought was this design methodology. And again, so what was originally called, starting back in 63, HCD, human-centered design. It's human-centered design methodology. We started at Stanford in 63. It got renamed about 15 years ago design thinking. Same thing, just to cool your name. It's now broadly evolved throughout the world and was initially all about products. So it's called the product design program.

Then we design experiences as well. And we can design, you know, curriculum and we can design societies and people were using it in politics. So then it's just the design program. And then Bill and I went, oh, we could design ourselves. And particularly helping college students with that, what am I going to do? now question, which turns out to be the question that almost all sentient adults are asking for the rest of the lives. Yeah, sure.

Because as the poet says, what are you going to do with the rest of your one wild and wonderful life? And that question never goes away. So that's one of the reasons that apparently we ended up selling a whole bunch of books talking about how they could use this innovation method to design your life. That was the runaway bestseller designing your life from 2017? 16, yeah. 16.

Incredible. Did you have to add any other elements to these design formulas that you were? we're talking about, Bill, when you're talking about something like designing a life, what do you add to the form? Yeah, there's one big thing you have to add because normally, you know, designers, I get a brief, marketing wants a new copy cup, off we go. But in life design, I got to decide I want to change something. Nothing's going to happen until I decide I want to change something.

I don't have to be a big thing. I don't have to put my job or anything. Just I want to move forward and do some of these ideas. So we add the first step we call accept because you can't solve a problem if you don't want to work on it. So you got to be able to say, okay, I want to make this better or I'm curious about what would happen if I tried something different. And I was just reading a piece of neuroscience where they've actually now proven that your brain would rather have a problem, even if it's a painful problem, then try something new. Because evidently the activation energy in your brain is much higher for trying something new because it's so scary. So it's easier to stay stuck in a rise, in rumination.

Familiar pain is better than change. Okay. So you have to start with accept and then the process starts. Is except the same as radical acceptance that you talk about in your book? Radical acceptance is just accept on steroids. We can come back to that. So we added the step zero, which was always true in design. It's just as importantly explicit in life design because most people start with,

well, I really should have majored in comps eye. I really should have moved to Northern California. or I really should have married Susie, you know, and all these shoulds, which don't have any correlation to reality whatsoever. So, like, no, no, no, we're starting here. That's why I accept is so important. The other thing that life design includes is there's a whole thing. We talk about coherency. A coherent life is one where who I am, what I believe, and what I'm doing are in alignment.

That they cohere. I kind of make sense. Now, in order to connect those, we call it connecting the dots. If I can connect those three dots, some compromise must be involved because we live in the real world. But if they're manageable compromises and go like, yeah, I think I'm kind of in the right place doing the right sort of thing, your chance of meaning making goes up. And your chance of authenticity goes up. And if you can't connect those dots, it goes down. Now, when I was working on mouse design or Bill was working on laptop design, we didn't ask the laptop if it felt coherent about the fact that it was typing well.

So there's a whole thing going on relationally and psychically and soulfully. You can connect those dots like who I am. I'm an Apple product. That means a certain thing. What I believe is that it should be consumer forward. And then, you know, what I do needs to be kind of simple and effective and repeatable. And I would argue when you see a product and it all comes together and everything is just right. It is coherent.

It is. There is a coherent. We would call it elegant. Now, let's break this down a little bit. Who I am. What does that mean, who I am? How is that different than what I believe? Well, so we have an exercise.

We call it the compass. Talk me through the compass. So the compass has the elements of, first of all, what's my current story? So who I am is just, what's the, you know, 100-word version of my name is Rain and I'm currently, you know, doing the following things. I'm a washed up pathetic former sitcom actor. of having a having a podcast because everyone else

in Hollywood as a fucking podcast so that's all I've got going for me as I'm rapidly aging. A work view. So we do that stuff in the world but so you write three things, three little essays.

My current story. Yeah. My work view, which is simply not my job description, but like work is the largest expression of energy for most people. So we think that's an important thing. So what do I think work is for?

What's my manifesto about good work is. You know, it's just about the money or it's about creativity or it's about communion or it's about solving a problem. What do you think that is true about good work? And then my life view or worldview, what do you think the really big questions are? And what are your answers to them? The ultimates about truth, beauty, justice, God, whatever. You tell us what you believe. That tells you which important questions you should have a preliminary answer to. So I've got three little, you know, two-thirds of a page essays. My current story, my work view, my life, you, those three, those are the three dots, and now I can start connecting you. Okay. And the, the who I am,

really, I mean, it starts what I do with my students? Like, well, what does your parents tell you? Well, you know, work hard, get good grades, go to good school, get a good job. That's the story a lot of people grow up with. Yeah. And a lot of people never change that story. And then, and then I got a good job, and then I wanted a better job, and then I got a better job, and then I wanted a better job. And then I wanted a bigger house. And like, all the external things are driving their story. And particularly if I can intercept them somewhere before they graduate and go, is that story working for you? Because it's not really very extendable, right? I mean, where's the you in this story? I mean, I get your parents told you to work hard and everything else, and that's probably okay. But is this chasing success

really the right thing, whatever? And we don't, our first rule is we don't should on the students. We don't tell them what they should think. But we want to get them to think about what part of your story are you happy with? What part of your story might you want to, you know, maybe do some editing? I would love to hear, because we talk a lot about the mental health epidemic on this show. As do we? And in 2007 and 2010 was just the first inklings of something going on with the mental of young folks and millennials at that point. And what have you seen transpire between, you know, essentially over the last 20 years since you started ideating on this. Now, what's changed since 2007, 2010, is the loneliness epidemic and anxiety has gone way up.

And anxiety around things now like AI, I'm going to have the whole education. By the time I graduate, there'll be no jobs. So anxiety, but loneliness is a big deal. And I think one of the reasons the class is so attractive is, you know, you can sit next to somebody in a lecture hall for four years and never meet anybody, right? If you're not an outgoing person. In our class, you're going to meet everybody in the class, and you're going to have a really interesting conversation. What's the story you grew up with? Technology rules the world.

That's the biggest government in the world is the people designing the app you spend all day looking at. So those people should talk to each other about how we're controlling the world. Kind of a scary thing. Okay. But these are the top of their game people in the most profitable industry on the planet. They're about a year in, and the coordinator calls me and says, can you help us? I'm going to help you what? You guys are all killing it.

Well, they're struggling. Okay, what's the struggle? Well, they're just not feeling fulfilled. It's not meaningful enough. I'm kind of going, oh, we got that problem. They go, yeah, we got that problem. So I'm thinking, man, this is all over the place. So those are multi-millionaires at the top of the tech game.

And they're designing products and apps and games. They're not feeling it. They're not feeling it. So you're saying this is kind of across-the-board meaning crisis. Yeah. It is a fundamental human question. It's been around since we got out of the slime, but boy, is it having a day right now?

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That's 50% off your first order at Sundaysfordogs.com slash Soul Boom 50. Sundays for Dogs.com slash Soul Boom 50 or use code Soul Boom 50 at checkout. What's amazing about your work is how you say, oh, we're not philosophers. But you're clearly philosophers. You're stoic philosophers because what you teach is what you do. It doesn't really matter what you think and feel and believe, although you're, you know, behaviorist, yeah. Yeah, taking stock, but it's like, what do you actually do?

Yeah. What are you doing the world? And the beginning of that is not like what is the meaning of life, but how do you find more meaning in life? On the way, yeah. And I love that just switching a couple of prepositions really shifts your perspective. So how do you find? more meaning in life through actions.

Let me T Bill up on that. So the shift in that, the book is about how to design more meaning in life now. In the life you're already in. Yeah. Not fix your life and get meaning. Like the life you've got, there's more meaning there. It's not go somewhere else. No, I promise you there's more meaning in the life you're in right now.

That you could find. That you can find. And start designing more of. So I promise you that. That's a big claim. because, and we're not good at ultimately answering the ultimate question of what is the meaning of my life. Because back on our agreement about what's a human person, our shortest definition of the human person is a becoming. You are a becoming.

There's more aliveness in you than when lifetime permits you to express. So you'll never get done. There's more than one of you in there. We'll only meet a few of them. That's fine. That's the way it's meant to be. That's the way God intended it. according to day, but nonetheless, that's what we observe.

So if you're a becoming, then there isn't, there can't be a the meaning of life that I know early on because the person that's going to answer the question, what's meaningful to me a year from now, 10 years or now 15 years from now, is a person I haven't met yet. So there is no ultimate right anything. There's no right you. There's just a bunch of different good evolving becoming use. Yeah. So with that in mind, now let's go get better at design.

meaning in life, and how do we do that, Bill? What does that mean to you, Bill, to be a human becoming? That tomorrow is going to be different than today, that I'm a designer. So every design, I always say design is a neutral, you know, neutral playing field. We don't have any bias one way or another, except every design has got to be better than the last one. So every day, I'm going to figure out another way to have, you know, design in a little bit more meaning, design another moment, design something.

So for me, the becoming, and particularly, you know, I just, you know, I just, became a grandfather. So that's cool. That's a whole new. Congratulations. That's a whole new thing. He's got like 11 of them. I just got a couple. But wow, you want to, you know, I talk a lot about that's a difference between the secular and the spiritual. You guys have oodles of kids. You got like one. Yeah, we talk about curiosity in the book, curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. But you want curiosity, hang out with a four-year-old. You know, man, that's where we all used to be. We all used to think everything in the world. This is amazing. This is so cool. Grandpa, look at this. It's an ant. We can study the ant for 10 minutes. So I'm always dazzled by what's available if I'm paying

attention. So for me, becoming as easy. And I spend a lot of time, we talk about transactions and flow. We'll get to that. But I spend a lot of time in flow because I'm just, I'm quite amazed by the world. There's a misunderstanding that being an existentialist or an atheist, means, you know, you wear, you know, black shirts and, you know, and you're jaded and cynical. Like, I'm a, I'm a very happy existential atheist. It's, it's life is, life is, life is so interesting, isn't it? The most popular question people ask, frankly, people of all ages, including the 70-year-olds I'm working with, with her gap year, is so, Rain, have you found your passion? Have you found your passion, have you found your passion, Ray? Mm-hmm. Preferably said, breath, have you found her passion?

Mm-hmm. You found your bliss to follow your bliss. You followed your bliss, you know. Is that really the authentic you? Is that the best you? You're becoming the best you. Fully realized. That stuff is going to kill you.

Because we now know from science that, you know, only 20% of persons have a single life-motivating passion that could be the point of directing them. You talk about seven different paths that people want to follow. We want to follow. We do a little experiment. We do what's called a Godalkin experiment. It can only do in your head because it can't be done in a reaction. that's imaginally done, to get to the point of, look, there really are more than one of you,

or more than one worth of you, in you, we say, let's assume for the moment that it actually is a multiverse. Let's assume actually that string theory is correct, and now I have access to that, and I can actually communicate with all my parallel selves and all the parallel universes if I want to, so I can enjoy as many lives as might be available in multiverse, except let's not waste them, you know, nature abhors abuse.

So if we asked you to reserve ahead, how many life slots would you like in the multiverse, including you could repeat your, unless I really love the podcast version of rain. I'll do that one three times. Fine, take three of those. And we say, one, two, three, how many of you would you like? And people shout out a number and we get all kinds of numbers. But the median is seven or eight. So most people think they're, you know, if it's eight, 12% of you is really going to happen.

And the rest isn't. So forget the phone. They have the fear of missing out because this, oh, did I blow it? That was it. I missed it. Now my life is over. As though there's one it of my life. It's small. You get one shot at it. And for God's sake, don't screw it up. As opposed to like, whoa, the joy of missing out, the world is an interesting place. There are lots of things to do, lots of different ways I could go. I'm barely going to get to pick one. I probably will make some mistakes along the way because I'm imperfect at all times. And that's the joy of it.

that's very liberating. I think, I always think about myself and my life as like sliding doors. Like, I happened to move at 17 to a high school outside of Chicago that had this incredibly outrageously great theater program. It happened to work with some of the best high school drama teachers you could ever possibly imagine on the planet. And my life went this way. But if I had stayed in suburban Seattle, like my friend Mike Wenzell, I would probably have gone to University of Washington and be a high school English teacher. And there is nothing wrong with that. I think I'd make a great high school English teacher. And I have a parallel passion filled, bliss filled, fulfilling life as a suburban Seattle high school English teacher. And yeah, I wouldn't have made as much money,

but I would have changed lives, affected lives. And I think it could have been a pretty awesome life. So I love that idea. It's very liberating to think of like, there isn't your one path. that you need to find. Right. Our gig is pretty straightforward. We provide reframs. Yeah. Different ways to think about your problem, because if you're working on the wrong

problem or a badly considered version of your problem, it's going to propagate all the way down to the end. And then we're going to give you some ideas and tools for how to prototype your way forward and build a solution to this thing you've now reframed. And the point of the reframe in every case is twofold. Number one, it should be truer, it should be closer to a description of reality. and that closer, more accepting of reality, more radically accepting of reality, and that will give you more freedom because now I actually have, I've always have more freedom the closer

to reality I am. Wow. Say that again. I've always had more freedom the closer to reality I am. Look, design only works in reality. It's a bottom-up empirical approach to things. We build prototypes. We do real things with real people in real time.

We don't just conceive stuff on whiteboards. So I have to be in reality for it to work. By being closer to reality, I have more choices that actually are available to me when I'm dealing, oh, if only I had bought the Tesla instead, you know. And I'm stuck in this unreality, you know, I'm less free because I don't have good choices there because I don't have that Tesla. So now I'm struggling with a problem I don't even really have, which is what should the, you know, person who bought the Tesla instead of the Ford do? That person doesn't exist. Why are we talking about him? Right.

So most people are stuck in their head where there isn't a lot of room. In reality, even though that comes with constraints, those constraints actually have less impact negatively on those lives than what's going on in their head. What's an example of a couple of reframes that blows students' minds? Well, one is, well, I've got to pick the right major. If I pick the wrong major, I'm screwed. It's going to be terrible. And we said, well, here's the data. The 10 years out of school, less than 20% of you will be doing anything that has anything

to do with your undergraduate degree. You go, really? I go, yeah. Majors are organized around the way we like to teach. There's nothing true with you guys. So you can be an engineering major, you can be a science major. You can be a writing. The correlation between your major and your career is zero.

It's almost zero. It's almost zero. And then we show a bunch of pictures of people who are like, oh, you know, he's a, he had a philosophy degree and now he's a famous actor or he had a she had a you know a degree in american studies and now she's a famous biologist um sometimes you know like i think obama went to school and got a political science degree at american history degree and he ended up president but most of the times it's a winding road so one pick a major that's going to be exciting and fun and so you have four years of doing something that you want to do instead of something you think you're supposed to do and and and two take the

stress off, man, because five years from now, particularly now, five years from now, don't you think you're going to be doing something in a job that hasn't even been invented yet? You know, I got out of school way back when dinosaurs room, you know, the campus, you know, engineers, designers had to learn drafting and there's all this complicated stuff. Now I can talk to my phone, 3D print a, you know, a cup and I'm done. Right. And none of those, I couldn't even imagine those things would exist when I was 22 starting my design career.

So that's one. Any other reframes having to do with kind of like seeing the world? Yeah, right now, my current favorite reframe which I'm using a lot is fulfillment is unattainable. It's a complete dead end. You can't have it. But you can become fully alive. Mm.

The fulfillment, forget it. Fully alive. Let's go. So fulfillment, fool's errand. Yep. Fully alive, totally available. Fully alive. Totally available.

Because you can get more and more alive every single day. Yeah. By making proactive, alive-filled choices. Yeah, and being present in the moment in which you find yourself being alive. Ram Dass was not wrong. You know, be here now. Fulfilment as almost everybody defines it, according to Maslow, fulfillment being the result of attaining self-actualization,

which according to his 1944 paper is attained by becoming all that one can be. That's what it literally says in print. And we now know if more aliveness is in you than a lifetime permits you to, express, you can't be all you can be because there's nowhere near enough time. So if I've decided I have to be fully manifested, that's how we'd say it today, in order to believe my life really was okay, you're screwed. You've just decided you have to be despondent for the rest of your life. That's a bad choice.

So forget fulfillment. Isn't it lovely that you're bigger than you're ever going to get around to realizing? However, whichever version of you is currently up and running, how about being fully present and getting the most out of it you possibly could? which is again, being a human becoming. Being a human becoming. Yeah, it's a verb. It's not a place you arrive.

Yeah, and I'm coming back tomorrow and we'll do it again. But what do you say to these 20-somethings that are feeling all of this world pain? And it can be so overwhelming. It can be stifling and paralyzing. For most of my life, my skincare routine was, well, water. So I've started paying a little more attention to skin care lately. Enter one skin. One skin was actually founded by longevity researchers

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functional human. Discover how care in every detail transforms simple routines into moments of true comfort and ease. Head to cozyEarth.com and use my code soul boom for up to 20% off. That's code soul boom for up to 20% off. And if you get a post-purchase survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth. Right here, on Soul Boom, experience the craft behind the comfort and make every day feel intentional. One of the things that I think has changed since COVID is they recognize these are hard problems. You know, I joke with a, hey, my generation gave you climate change, a social system, political system that doesn't work, we're going to run out of energy. You've got lots of things to design. Yeah, I'm stepping off the stage.

But they actually, there is a little bit of the, this is too overwhelming. I'm just so depressed. I can't, I can't think about it. But mostly they're like, okay, yeah, your generation really screwed this. You guys really screwed this up. We're going to have to fix it. My youngest son works in Congress for Congressman Eric Swalwell, and he's, you know, he's 32 and he's going to like fix politics. And I'm like, go for it, Ben. I love you. I see the kids coming out of school are walking away from the high-paying jobs in, you know, McKenzie and VCG and private equity, and they're going to become teachers, a teacher for America. So I think it can be overwhelming, but a lot of the, a lot of the young people that I know are stepping up and, you know, stepping into the problem,

saying, somebody's got to fix this stuff, and you guys screwed it up. They don't have a lot of nice things to say about my generation. What would you say to a young person that is feeling paralyzed by that? It's very easy to be overwhelmed right now. And that overwhelmed, is not entirely appropriate or rationalized. I mean, so horrible news makes the cut. Good news doesn't. So what we're being presented is not an objective characterization of what's going on on the planet.

Sure. So there's the factfulness guys out of the Scandinavian research group that, you know, shocks everybody with actually extreme poverty is far better than it's been hundreds of years. You know, oh, it was so much better back then. No, it was much worse back then. On a percentage basis, far less war, far fewer people dying in conflict than there ever have been. So there are a lot of things that are far better than you think. None of it gets any press.

Right. So first of all, train your eye on the right thing. Be very careful where you send your mind. Now, that's not the whole solution, but it helps to start with because you're overwhelmed by more than you need to be. You're actually signing up for more pain than you deserve. There's a media ecosystem that thrives and makes a profit by outrage and overwhelm. Totally, yeah.

It's all about amygdala firings and let's go. So don't get your amygdala fire. Don't fall for it. That's thing one. And then thing two, eras in history are different. Levels of oppression rise and fall. Levels of freedom, rise and fall. The people going through the AI disruption.

This is my third or fourth technological disruption. It is orders of magnitude bigger than any that have preceded it. All that is not overstated. And most of the people who pay for the cost of transition are not the ones who receive the benefit of the new opportunities it creates. So some people are going to get hurt. and they're just going to get hurt. So these are simply true.

This goes back to radical acceptance. Because I accept it doesn't mean I think it's okay. Doesn't mean I think it's good. It just means I'm being objectively honest. So, okay, now, Velt-Schmurched, burdened young prison. What do you do? Number one, get a more accurate picture of the world.

And number two, where is something going on that you care about that's part of the solution, not part of the problem, and lean into it? Well, I'm not going to boil the ocean. No, you're not. but you're going to die with your boots on, so let's go. So you have to decide how you're going to play your cards. And look, most people have not been able to fundamentally change the world permanently during their lifetimes.

We're all participants. You still get to decide what you're going to participate in and which part of the equation you're on. Are you in the solution side or you're on the problem side? That's beautiful. Yeah. And you can do it. I mean, you can actually have an impact. A lot of my students want to do startups.

I'm going, well, you can do a startup, but you know, probably have more impact if you went to work for Greenpeace or something because they're already in them, got boots on the ground. About half of my design students now are getting a master's in sustainability because they do believe that climate change is the biggest problem. If we don't fix that, it doesn't matter everything else because you won't be a world to live in to have the arguments about politics and everything else. So a lot of them are jumping. You know, like I said, look, you guys are some of the best and the brightest. if you don't go jump on, you know, jump into the fray, who's going to do it? Who's going to solve these problems if you don't do it? So, you know, get activated, get going.

It reminds me the best cartoon I just saw today. It was a little bambi deer drinking some water from a pond. And then someone was shouting from off screen and said, hey, leave some of that for the AI. I will share a metaphor because you're asking a lot about the youth, about young people, and you're concerned about mental health. I haven't shared this metaphor for a little while, but I think it's really apropos. So there's an educator, an educator reformer named Parker Palmer, who I think highly of. He's a Quaker.

He's very deeply. Oh, yes, I've heard him speak. Yeah, brilliant. Lovely guy. Oh, my gosh, yes. And Parker talks a lot about vocation and life and that sort of finding your way. And he has a little talk about the tragic gap. He says, well, you have to decide how to manage the tragic gap.

What's the tragic gap, Parker? It's the gap between the way things are and the way they deserve to be. He said, we all stand in the tragic gap. Now, the decision where in the gap to stand is a very important decision. You can be way out on the edge in your hair shoot protesting against climate change or are going to go along to get along and just be a hedge fund manager because somebody's got to run the bank. Now, there are rationales, not necessarily making those good or bad, about how dramatically prophetic on the one side you want to be and how responsive and managerial you want to be in the other.

He said, I really care about what decision you make, but that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is what's going to happen. Because no matter where in that gap you stand, how far out on the change agency versus how close to the just administering the current world you are, we know what's going to happen. You're going to get your heartbroken. It's not going to work. You're going to run into stuff that's over your head. And so the critical thing to understand is no matter what, what you do, make a good decision, but once you're there, be ready to have your heart broken.

And then you have to decide what to do. And there are two choices. You can have your heartbroken hard and it shatters into a million pieces and you spend the rest of your life in your hands and knees picking up the pieces or the rest of your life bitter looking for who to blame. Or you can have your heartbroken soft and it hurts like howl, but it rips it open and it heals back bigger. So, yes, ladies and gentlemen, particularly those of you under 35, pick carefully where in the tragic gap you want to stand. But once you get there, be ready for it and have your heart broken open. That's beautiful.

Wow. What a great metaphor. No ultimate is ever experienced in its fullness. Beauty, truth, justice, divinity. You know, we never get there. Even the fullness of being rain is, have I rained completely? No, I have not. The ultimate rain has never been known and never will be. And you can go, oh, well, I guess it's not enough again. Or you go, oh, wait, wait, wait. That's the fundamental nature of reality. So all of my experiences of something that are ultimate or ultimate like come through the particularity of a particular thing in time and space and its imperfect impartiality. And what, it does do is it reflects back to me the nature of that ultimate that I care about that I long

for and draws me into it. And its insufficiency isn't a problem. It's just a part of its created nature. And so what I do is I stop complaining about not enough. And I start celebrating, oh, wow, you know, there was that one point during the podcast when the three of us were talking for about 12 seconds, we were really on the same page. I could actually, we understood each other. That's kind of like unity. It smells just like unity. God, I love it. And then it went away.

Why is that scandalous? Well, it seems philosophically, it's like, really? You can only get the ultimate. We all love the ultimate. We all love the ultimate. We all see it. We all know. We all long for it. And you're never going to get it.

What's up with that? Yeah. Yeah. That's the scandal. You're just going to get little tastes here and there. A little tastes here and there. Yeah, but they point to the ultimate, right? So, you know, in my world of art or design,

we're trying to create beautiful things. Well, you know, ultimate beauty, I don't, is a, it's a big, big concept. Yeah. But, but boy, you know, if you could just figure out a USB plug that went in the same every time, and you don't have to, why is it the USB plugs should go in either right or left 50, 50 times, but they really don't go in like 100% of the time. Yeah. Like if you come up with something that's beautiful, that's elegant, we talk about elegance in design or beauty design.

And it's in little tiny detail. So Dita Rahm's the famous industrial design. designer for Braun said, you know, 10 rules of design. You mentioned 10 rules of design, but one rule is the consequence of details. That good design is about the consequential details. You've got to get the whole thing right. But boy, if this handle just fits my hand, beautiful. So it is in those little tiny details in a design or in a moment that you can have a moment

and then notice it's beautiful. can design a moment, it's beautiful. You can see a sunset. And when you see a beautiful sunset and it's over, do you go, oh, God, damn, I wish that lasted longer. You know, just say that was as good as it gets. And, you know, and I might go down the coast and find another one, you know, later, but enjoy the things that are right there, the little moments that point to beauty, truth, justice, whatever. And that's where you'll find, that's where you'll find the thing that kind of feeds your soul. And the reason that rather lofty concept comes up in a hopefully practical, highly doable book, is all about, look, you know, if you're going to have this experience

of meaning that comes out of the present moment, what we call the flow world, this flowing around you all the time, not the transactional world where you're just worried about the outcomes in the future, but the flow world what's happening right in front of you, then it's going to be in the moment. So the fundamental task of a meaning designer is moment making. And moments are small and they're incomplete and they're fractured and they come and they go. And that's fine. So we're going to celebrate that finitude, that limitation and enjoy the heck out of it.

And we're going to come back tomorrow and get more as opposed to finding it. Like, am I ever really going to write the perfect song? No. But that was a pretty good one. How do you manufacture these moments of meaning? How do you get students to focus on that? The good news is it starts with you don't even have to make, you can get good at manufacturing,

but first of all, you mostly just realize them by virtue of bringing your attention and your intention to, you hit a stoplight, oh shoot, I missed the light. You know, the guy in front of me stopped early in the yellow. He didn't shove the stale yellow, so I didn't get to shove the red light.

Now I'm stuck at this red light. What do I do? I guess I'll listen to the radio. The song comes on. How about actually Oh, I love that song. Listen to it. Actually listen to it.

Don't just tap your fingers going, damn light. So simply be present to the moment and allow what's in front of you to be what it can be. These moments are lying around just begging to be enjoyed. And you can design them.

And the two easiest place to design a meaningful moment is out in nature. Take a walk. Take a walk. And then really look at that tree and go, holy cow, that tree must weigh 3,000 pounds. How the heck did that happen? From an acorn.

Yeah, look at all the biomass. Oh, my gosh. And my, my scientific brain goes, you know, it's biomass, blah, blah, blah. It must have, that must have meant that it rebuilt itself a couple billion times to be a 30-foot tree. So nature is a place. So it's easy to find moments. And then humans, conversations. It's easy to find moments in conversations.

show up, put your phone down. I just read a study and if a phone is even on the table, the connection between people won't work and I used to have my phone on the kitchen table now and I put it away when my wife and I were having dinner together. I used to use it to time a little moment of meditation, but now we're like, nope, no phones. So find another person, find a group of people and really show up this time and ask some interesting questions like, how's it going and what's up for you? and not just the report of the day, but how are you feeling?

The complaint we heard for most people was that the one form of meaning making, which is an important one, that they think is valid, is having an impact, changing the world, making a difference, which is great. So go work as hard as you can. Even if you do it all right, a lot of times the impact still doesn't work. You can do it all right and still fail because some of the other 8 billion people might go off script when you're not looking. And even if you have an impact, like, okay, three, two, one,

what have you done for me lately? Impact is a thing. You're not a thing. You're a person. So the effect, the meaning effect on your life of having had an impact is going to atrophy pretty quickly. So if all your eggs for meaning are in the basket called impact, you're probably in some trouble. We've got to look for some other forms. So the impact is occurring in what we call the transactional world where what Lisa Miller calls the achieving brain spends its time and we're way too much in that side of our brain. Over here, the floor, low world happening in the present moment where your awakened brain is paying attention, you have all these other experiences of the present moment that are alive making, human making, that therefore feel

meaningful. And that's an accessible thing to all persons. So what Bill is just describing, I love this quote from Henry Miller, the playwright, who says, I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, in describing. probably magnificent world in and of itself. I have tried this experiment a thousand times, and I have never been disappointed. And that's a guy who's really doubled down on wonder. We call it the wonder mindset. So we think that's pretty available.

Yeah, yeah. That's beautiful. For me, and from a soul boom perspective, what you're talking about is kind of witnessing the spiritual reality of something. I suppose one could say it's platonist and seeing like the underlying form of something as well. How would you describe this interaction of seeing something as it is, having a kind of a transcendent experience and experiencing that blade of grass or that human being or that empathy with spirit, with emotion. how would you describe that from your perspective as an atheist scientist? I'll give you the existentialist perspective.

Yep, he was going to ask you that question. But you used the word transcendent, and it is in fact a transcendent experience. And, you know, all through history, we've got recordings of, you know, prophets and sages and shamans and people who live in this transcendent world. So there must be something about our brain that allows us access to this stuff because there's thousands and thousands and thousands of years of reports of human transcendent. And actually, Maslow rewrote his pyramid after just a couple of years before he died in his diaries.

He said, it's not about the ego and self-actualization. It's about self-transcendence. That's actually the peak. At the top of the pyramid. He never published it. And in fact, you can be transcendent at any part of the pyramid. But is that transcending yourself and your ego? Yes.

Transcending yourself and your ego. To something beyond yourself. Beyond yourself. Compassion is a version of life bigger than you. Yeah. Compassion is a version of that, transcendence. a transcendent experience where you realize, hey, wait a minute, everything is connected, or there's something in the beauty of this blade of grass that is beyond, you know,

just me staring at it. I wonder what that's all about. For me, those transcendent experiences show up in my creative life, standing in front of a canvas trying to figure out what I want to paint or, you know, sitting down with some composing software and trying to write some music. there's there's a transcendent state a flow state that happens and all artists will report this and actors and people who are in the arts will report I was in a place where the painting was painting itself and I was watching literally I'm standing there yeah I'm moving my hand but

the painting is happening the song came through amuse and came out through my guitar I'm channeling this Rick Rubin his book the creative act talks about he calls it the creative world and you're just, you're just harvesting things or channeling things from that world, I'd say it's the flow world. Because when you're connected to the arts and then people say, oh, I'm not artistic or I'm not talented, they opt out. Everybody can equally access the flow world with the transcendent world. So for me, it's in moments of creativity where I transcend what I thought was going to happen and something else happens. And it's like, that's amazing. One of the reasons we teach improv to designers is so that they have to be in the moment where they're

They create something without planning, without cashing, without thinking about it in advance, without having a joke ready to go, right? And we force them into these situations. And first, they hate it because it's hard. And then eventually they love it. And one of the most popular classes at the business school is the improv class at the GSB with all these high type A, you know, MBA students. And they love the improv class because it forces them into the experience of a moment where

they came up with something that turned out to be pretty good, and they don't know where it came from. So that's my version of transcendence. You? God loves me. No, it's, you know, I'm really a pan-antheist at the end of the day, meaning not that God is a being, but God is the ground of all being. So there is a divine substrate underneath everything,

out of which everything emerges. And so, well, if I want to go overtly religious, from it. There's a great line from the Apostle Paul that says, they, the people who don't believe, are without excuse for the divine power and eternal nature are evident in the things that have been made. So Paul is saying, look, sorry guys. If you're paying any attention at all, you're picking up this divinity eternity thing. Like there's something that goes on forever and it's bigger than all of us that's got this divine transcendent. That's available. So the creation reflects the creator is what the traditional language would be. And so what I'm thinking is the fundamental

nature of reality has this, there's this longing in me that's insatiable, you know, for love, for beauty, for realization, for truth. And it finds objects and even responsive subjects that resonate to that all the time over and over again. And this guy, Rain wants to talk to us. And he's asking us these questions. He's looking at me really sincerely. You're really caring about what I'm saying. It's all an act. You're doing it well. You're doing it well.

I appreciate. I'm lettuce, toilet paper, tomato soup. Monkeys behind you. I'm thinking the soul boom thing. It's a little deeper than that. I do think there is a renaissance in this kind of thinking. And these other persons, these other animals, these other objects, these other natural phenomena actually harmonize and resonate to those longings in me.

So this thing is not unrequited. I have a longing that is not starving to death. It's, in fact, finding calories, meaning-making calories everywhere if I'm available to it. So from my point of view, the idea that some kind of a form of an experience that makes me realize I'm in the midst of a world this bigger than I am, whether it's a social experience, whether it's a beauty experience, whether it's a technological experience, whether it's a natural experience, they all remind me. and have me actually physically experience, there's more than meets the eye and I'm part of it. And it turns out the deepest way to feel like yourself is to get beyond yourself.

Transcendence. Yes. Dave, you lost your wife during COVID. True. And I found that story to be incredibly moving. and it was like a splash of cold water. It kind of woke me up to looking at a death transition in a profoundly different way.

Can you share that story with us? Well, yeah. February 25th of 2020, our second book came out. A few days later on March 8th, my wife got a terminal cancer diagnosis and a week after that COVID started. So 2020, a week after that, the California fires started

and the evacuation line was less than a mile from my house. So it was kind of a year. But so we're going along, and my dear wife, Claudia, with whom I had a wonderful and beautifully in a marriage, we think bronchitis, oh, no, it's her second bout of cancer. She beat cancer 20 years before, got it again, much nastier version. And after her first diagnostic day, she was terminal. She had a very, very nasty kind of...

So it was like stage four cancer? She was stage four, four ways metastasized on day one. She was a dead woman walking on day one. They gave her six to 24 months, depending on how she handled her chemo. She got nine. I mean, that's a long story, but the brief version is back to radical acceptance. So we got this news and went, whoa, not what we had in mind. We sat on it for eight days.

We just held it the two of us because we had a whole lot of people who were going to be upset in addition to us. We didn't know. We said, we can't share with them until we have the story. And then Claudia came up with, well, to you're six, at the time. You know, this is not tragic. It's sad, but it's not tragic. So the line one is, it's sad, not tragic. I've had a great life, got to do a lot of things. There's really nothing on the bucket list that I really care about that I've missed, but I wouldn't mind some second helpings. So the introductory line of what's the story is, I'm going to die of cancer pretty soon.

It's sad, but it's not tragic. And I'd like some second helpings in the next year if we could get We didn't get many of them, frankly, because between COVID and the fires, she was pretty clamped down. But that was our positioning. And we accepted that everybody dies. And second helping is like another trip to somewhere or another experience. Another big birthday with all the grandkids in the same room. We got all the grandkids in the same room, you know, so we did that one more time. Do another Christmas.

Do another, you know, whatever. They were mostly small things, you know, we didn't do a lot of trips because she couldn't travel. But so we lived into that and we said, okay, we're dying. what can we learn from this? There's got to be a gift. You know, so the most important watchword about how we received that year and really helped me in the grief year after she died, the first year of grief after she died, was a line we got from a nurse when Claudia went in for yet one more imaging procedure. And the nurse says, now, when we inject the dye, you may feel a little warmth. And then Claudia's reaction about it was, oh, you mean like where you take a can

of kerosene and shoot it down my throat and light it on fire in my body. explode. And then the nurse goes, oh, I see you've had the procedure before. She says, yes, I've had the effing procedure before. And I'm sick of your medical euphemisms. Just give it to me straight. And the nurse goes, okay, so here's the deal. It's just pain. All right? Let it rinse through you and then it's over. Or you can resist it and it's worse and last longer. I don't care. I get bad to say me either way. Up to you. Whoa. That's a tough nurse. That's intense. But that was responding to Claudia. It was the most important thing we were ever told. How so?

Incredibly freeing. Two critical words. It's just pain. Let it rinse through you. Oh, wow. That is powerful. This is back to, you know, the Buddhist position, all pain is illusion because first of all, okay, it's hot.

All my vessels feel like they're on fire. Ow, ow, ow, I'm in pain. Then, oh, no, I'm in pain again. That's all voluntary. That's all secondary. Right. And if you're in resistance, you're like, oh, no, pain is coming, pain is coming. Oh, the pain is bad.

Is it going? Yeah. And it's exactly. It's like it's just pain. It's not going to kill you. It's just going to feel horrible. Let it rinse through you. Completely accept it. Open it up, in and out. Out we go. And I applied that during my grief year. I'm not going to go on and on and make this a grief show. But no, I will say, and it sounds melodramatic. It's actually true. The best year of my marriage was the year after she died. Because I learned so much. I was in so much pain. But that pain is just to love and love. another form. So I had to say, look, this is, everybody dies. This death thing is going around. You may have heard about it.

So let's do it well for God's sake. There's got to be a gift here. And if you're willing, it pains the price. It's not the point. Grief isn't in order that you be in pain. Grief is in an order that you complete the process of what it means to have been profoundly changed by being deeply loved. And the end of that process is painful.

It just happens to be painful. But it's full of love from another side. I learned so much more than I knew I didn't know from that experience. Radical acceptance and availability really work. It hurt like hell, but it left me better. I wouldn't trade it for anything. And one of the reasons that I've been working with this guy for 17, 18, almost 20 years now, is that story, other stories.

he really works hard at figuring this shit out. He really does. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, and, and, and holds himself to, you know, to the stuff we talk about. It's not, it's not made up. His wife was wonderful.

I had a great. I mean, every time he tells the story, I get choked up because I remember how wonderful, you know, Claudia was. But, um, hey, you don't get to pick. Let's go out with some hope. Yeah. Okay.

How can we live? a meaningful life and where do you see hope for people living a richer, more meaningful life? You've talked a lot about perspective shifts. Yeah, perspective shifts. We're all stuck in this shift of like everything is, is shitty and going to hell in a hand basket right now and there's so much fear and anxiety or amygdalas are firing, as you say. how can we put on a different pair of glasses? How can we have a shift and see things through the lens of hope?

Yeah. And we've been talking about particular. Let me zoom back out. I've been in a men's group for 35 years. The guys in my group will go down to the Tesla dealer every Sunday, but holden signs saying, you know, ice out of the town. The people in Minnesota who stood in the streets with their cameras give me great hope. That there are people in the world who say, no, no, no, no.

truth and justice matters and you can't tell us what we saw. So I have great hope that people, I mean, even maybe it takes a catastrophe to create that kind of action. But I see those people and I just think that's, that's what, that's what, that's what, that is in fact what makes America great.

All the way down to my students who, you know, are facing, you know, giant tuition bills and the uncertainty of the future. And they're still willing to do a startup in sustainability because they think, hey, if we could figure out how to solve this food waste problem, you know, something good would happen. So you see the indomitable human spirit out there thriving.

All the time. All the time. And it's in the news if you want to look for it. Don't pay what they call it a surprise again text. Oh, did you see the state of union? You know what he did? Well, you knew he was going to do it. Why are you surprised again? Don't be surprised. I mean, just it's going to happen. Stop paying the bill. And that sense he is right. There is this Trump derangement syndrome where people are can you believe he, can you believe he said, and now he said, can you believe? Of course you do. He's the most coherent guy.

He is so much better being Trump than you are being rain. I mean, I like the way he does it, but that's not the point. You know, there's no surprise here. So I do, I see a lot of hope. And then I do fall into these moments, particularly, you know, writing, creating something, particularly like writing. And Dave's not that fond of it, but I really like writing, I discovered. And in my art and other practices, I find ways that nerve. nurture my sense of meaning. So I think from the whatever you do to practice designing little

moments for yourself all the way to look around the world, there's a lot of smart people working hard on hard problems. And, you know, don't pay attention so much to the people who make the news because they're only there because they provoke, you know, fear, chaos, and, you know, and clicks. And again, don't be duped by scale. You know, we're here. in the West Coast. We live in the land of venture capital. It's all about scalability. It's all with the next unicron. It's all about big. Well, I can't make a difference. You know, I can't solve the government problem. I can't solve the sustainability problem. Dude, okay, there are people working on that. You might want to work, if you're the scientist on the right lab to work on that,

great. I know people working on hydrogen fuels. Great. Keep going. That's going important. So if you're on one of those world-changing problem-solving teams, get going. That's great. Not everybody will be. Not all 8 billion people can work on hydrogen fuels. And meanwhile, don't forget the overwhelming majority of what happens in the world is happening in small little chunks of humanity called communities and places and workplaces and offices and schools. And that's where most of life really happens.

And you can pay attention to that. David Brooks in The Second Mountain talks about... Love that book. The problem with scalability is you have to simplify a problem down to where you can replicate the answer over and over again. And the really nasty problems aren't that simple. They're highly localized. They're relational. They have community fabric in them. So he calls the people who work on, who work long, slow and committedly with communities of persons, with highly localized solutions to gnarly problems like foster care or whatever it might be. Weavers,

these are people who are weaving the fabric of community back together because it's multi-layered and multicolored and it takes a long time. And you can't just come up with an app and crank out a billion copies and you're done. So there are very unscailable, important things that are small. And other people are going to do other small things all around the world. These little tiny fires are going to try to make the world a better place. And you can make your contribution where you find your opportunity, where in that tragic gap you're going to stand. So I'm walking out to my car at Costco. And I just finished loading up my stuff. And out comes this woman with a really, really big cart, you know, and she's starting to load her truck up

and she's got two big flats of water in the bottom, which I happen to know are really heavy. So I said, hey, can I give you a hand with that? She said, what? I said, well, those water flats are heavy. Let me grab that for you. And I picked up a flat of water and I put it in the back of her truck.

And she burst. She shot you in the face. She burst into tears. There has never been a time when small acts of kindness can be better received. If the world is going to hell in a handbasket, put something nice in the handbasket. That's beautiful. What I'm taking away is making moments of meaning in your formative communities.

Yep. That's where the answer lies. You guys have written a beautiful book. I love your ideas and just an honor and privilege having you here on Soul Boom. Thank you so much. Well, thanks, yeah, thanks for the invitation. Thanks for letting us join the Spiresville Revolution. Yeah. Let's get it on. I'm down for that. You say you want a revolution. Well, you know. Okay. The Soul Boom podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts,

and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.