The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – #Masterpiece: What you would do with all the time and money in the world by Alexander Inchbald

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

#Masterpiece: What you would do with all the time and money in the world by Alexander Inchbald Amzn.to/4bj7cA6 Alexander-inchbald.com Themasterpiece.agency In Pirate Cove, Richard D. Bailey provides an insider's chronicle of a white-collar crime whose headline-grabbing elements first appeared on the front pages of The Wall Street Journal. It's the true, unvarnished, complete, previously untold, and fascinating story of how one honest man helped unravel the massive Southport Lane fraud perpetrated by the author's former employer, 26-year-old, self-proclaimed financial prodigy Alexander Chatfield Burns. A really smart friend of the author once asked Burns how he got control of four state-regulated insurance companies. With a Cheshire cat grin, Burns cryptically responded, “Jesus with a telescope on Mars couldn't figure out how I did this.” But the author eventually did. If (and when) Pirate Cove is made into a movie, it'll stand right alongside such successful dramedies as American Hustle, Can You Ever Forgive Me, Bad Education, White Collar Crime, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Michael Clayton. Bio: Alexander Inchbald is a global authority on creativity and how we can use it to reinvent business in harmony with Mother Nature. He leads The #Masterpiece Agency, designing personal journeys for purposeful pioneers (and their teams) to elevate themselves to the next level by creating and communicating their Masterpiece. He has helped over 2,000 changemakers to discover their Purpose in life and hundreds to get clarity on the next chapter of their life. Everything he does is based on his mystical experiences painting around the world in blizzards, gale force winds and tropical storms. These experiences and his research into psychology, physiology, metaphysics and epigenentics have helped him to realise we are not passive participants in a universe beyond our control, but active creators of our own playground. Alexander is a bestselling author a few times over, has worked on all of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals for some of the largest and most recognized companies including the UN, World Health Organization, The Red Cross, UNICEF, HP, Samsung, P&G, Unilever, Mercedes-Benz, Chloé, Roche. His paintings have been exhibited at Google and Tesla and he lives with my family above Lake Geneva.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com. There she is, ladies and gentlemen. The Iron Lady sings with that makes it official. Welcome to the big show.

We certainly appreciate you guys coming by. As always, refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. LinkedIn.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter. I think it grows like a weed. Like, every day it goes out on the weekdays. People love the damn thing.

And I didn't even know there was that many active people on LinkedIn. But I guess there is. Join the 130 000 group on linkedin as well go to good what is it chris foss facebook.com and chris foss one tickety-tockety we have an amazing author and mind on the show he's going to help you become more radical but he's going to redefine the term in a sense that probably makes more sense and can help change your life so he's not asking you like to storm any castles or anything but or or to come up with any new taylor swift conspiracy theories that's going on right now in 2024 if you're watching this show five to ten years from now on youtube he's he's just going to teach you what radical really means at least in in what he defines it and how it can help you he is the author of the latest book to come out on the show.

And we'll be talking about his book and everything that went into it and all that good stuff. In the meantime, let's go ahead and introduce him. The book is entitled Masterpiece. What would you do with all the time and money in the world? Came out February 2nd, 2021. Alexander Inshbald is on the show with us today. He is a global authority on creativity and how we use it to reinvent business in harmony with mother nature. He leads the Masterpiece Agency, designing personal journeys for purposeful pioneers

and their teams to elevate themselves to the next level by creating and communicating their masterpiece. He has helped over 2,000 changemakers to discover their purpose in life and hundreds to get clarity on their next chapter of their life. Everything he does is based on his mystical experiences, painting around the world in blizzards, gale force winds and tropical storms these experiences in his research into psychology physiology metaphysics epigenetics have helped

him realize we are not passive participants in the universe beyond our control but active creator of our own playground he is a best-selling author a few times over has worked on all of the united nations sustainable development goals for some of the largest and most recognized companies, including the UN, the World Health Organization, the Red Cross, UNICEF, HP, Samsung, P&G, Unilever, Mercedes-Benz, Chloe, and Roche. His paintings have been exhibited at Google and Tesla, and he lives with his family above Lake Geneva. Welcome to the show, Alexander. How are you?

I'm very well, thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. Boy, that's quite a resume you got there. You've worked for a lot of great companies and helped envision them. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. So if you want to go and see my paintings, go to my personal website, Alexander hyphen inch bold. so that's inch as in a measurement and bald as in if you're watching this on video you'll see that there's not much hair on my head so inchbald.com and for the masterpiece agency it's the masterpiece dot

agency the masterpiece or one word dot agency there you. I've been looking over your photos and videos. People got to see this at alexander-inchball.com where you're literally on mountainsides and up on rocks painting beautiful mountain vistas and lakes and stuff. But you literally have this giant easel.

It looks like a giant TV strapped to the ground. And clearly you've got it strapped down so it doesn't blow off and away from some of the casual. This is wild. I mean, you're just out there in the element painting these beautiful vistas and stuff. Yeah, look, I'll tell you one very quick story. Actually, two very quick stories. So the first one, painting up at 3,800 meters, which is over 10,000 feet,

painting non-blanc. It took me 45 minutes literally to tie this canvas to the railings because the wind, literally it was a 50-mile-an-hour wind, horizontal, snow blowing into my eyes. And another one, you can see the video, and there's an interesting story around that because I couldn't actually see the mountain and come back to that one. But the second story, right, like this really big easel one of the biggest easels I've ever painted outside and you can see this video on my website it's it's a painting of the alleged

glacier the longest glacier in Europe which is about 16 17 miles long from top to bottom predicted to disappear by the end of the decade, thanks to global warming. It goes from the Jungfraujoch, right at the top, and the Eiger, the north face of the Eiger, all the way down to the bottom. And this big canvas that I painted. And if you go and watch the video, you'll see something extraordinary happen right at the end. He said, I tie it down so it doesn't blow away. Go and watch the video, and you'll see exactly what happened.

It's quite extraordinary. I've never seen anybody do that who's the who's that famous guy who with the hair bob what was his name who he'd do those pbs shows where he'd talk really softly to him kind of kind of meditatively bob i want to say proctor i don't know who the guy was on i think people know what i'm talking about. He had the big afro hair in the 70s. Oh, okay. No, not Bob Proctor. Do you know what? Living in Europe, we don't get PBS.

Oh, that's true. That's true. It's got the BBC and you can't swear. There you go. I guess that's quite the interesting television you have over there. But you do have Monty Python, so we forgive you for that. Yeah, there you go. And a lot of other great shows.

I grew up watching. Who's the guy with all the chicks running around all the time, super fast, sped up? The Saint? No. There was the circus music they went with. Everything he did was sped up. It was voice-oriented.

It'll come to me. But it wasn't the most cleanest show. So your book, Masterpiece, what would you do with all the time and money in the world? Give us the 30,000 overview. What went into this book? Everything. My entire life.

It tells my life story. Okay. How I suppressed my creativity. My dad basically came to me when all I dreamed of doing was becoming an artist. And he said, you know, I know you've just painted your best painting ever but I've just spoken to your your art teacher and your mother and we've come to the conclusion that you are not good enough to become a professional artist wow and my dreams were devastated Chris like that was my dream of doing that and I went rock bottom and when I say rock bottom I don't think you can go much lower I stopped eating properly I ended up drinking a lot at university.

I ended up in hospital twice thanks to drinking too much. And, you know, that whole journey was a journey down. And what I discovered in the process was how you can suppress creativity. You can't kill it. You know, Ken Robinson robinson bless him no longer here uh in his famous ted talk he says do schools kill creativity you can't you're dead if you if you kill kill creativity so you can't do it but it then compares vincent van gogh and michelangelo and compares the two of them and both of them had exactly the same thing happen.

Wow. The difference between them, without giving the game away, is that Vincent listened to his father and stopped painting for 12 years. Wow. And I stopped painting for 14 years. And Michelangelo did it anyway. Came home, was Vincent Guy's dad, did it anyway. Continued, created his first masterpiece at age 25,

and painted until the age of, or created masterpieces until the age of 37. Whereas our friend Vincent, over here, the mask, if you're watching this on video, died at the age of 37. So it then goes on to deconstruct what happened with both of those and then applies the principles behind that to how you can unlock creativity in yourself create your masterpiece and how you can do it in business as well with your team there you go there you go you know you're only you said i think you said you were 16 at the time

right yeah yeah i mean you're you're still a developing artist at that point. You know, I mean, people, you know, if you're like in a band, you know, you don't musically kind of hit your stride until maybe a few years later or whatever, but you're still developing, you know, right? What did your dad want you to do? Did he want you to go get a real job sort of thing, work in the mines, or what was his intent there? You know, you have to understand where he was coming from at

the time where did he want me to go he wanted me to go into business because he thought that was how i'd make money what i didn't know at the time was that he was going through some pretty big challenges himself and he was just projecting those onto me so two years earlier he was the youngest partner in in the company the real estate company he was a partner in and their company had almost gone bust and a year afterwards thanks to the stress he had three foot cut out of his stomach so he was a guy who was who was stressed right he was doing this not because he he didn't like my art not because he didn't love me in fact on the contrary he thought he was doing the best thing for me. You know what? If I'd never gone that low, I would never have worked

out how to liberate creativity and I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. And the hundreds of people that I've worked with around the world, I wouldn't have helped them. There you go. Liberate creativity. I like that. That could be a title of a book or a t-shirt or a coffee mug. So there you go. So story of. I like that. That could be a title of a book or a t-shirt or a coffee mug. So there you go. So story of how you went through that adventure and refound yourself, I guess, after 14 years of giving up on it. And how did you come out of it? How did you reawaken after 14 years and go, what my dad said i'm gonna i'm gonna do this

first of all i left the country so i was living in the uk and i moved to the alps and i was living on top of a mountain and on my 30th birthday i remember sitting there with a friend and saying to him i'm going to start painting again and it still took me six months to pick up a paintbrush. And I started painting and I was inspired by a quote by the author Paulo Coelho. And I painted this piece and I shed floods of tears the first time, Chris. Oh, wow. And then all the times that I hadn't painted, all the times that I'd suppressed this artist beside me. And then I just started painting again. I mean, the first paintings, let's be honest, they were rubbish. Well, yeah, you gotta, you know, no one,

I don't think any artist has ever painted a masterpiece in their first try, right? No. Maybe there have been at this point some talent people that are good at it. Pablo Picasso, I mean, he was painting pretty amazing pieces at the age of nine. Oh, geez. Mozart mean he was painting pretty amazing pieces at the age of nine you know Mozart he was composing symphonies about the same age you know there are people who come out and they're just genius genius but if you look at a Michelangelo yeah you know he's 25 he he created he sculpted David uh which was his first masterpiece if you look at Vincent he wasn't really creating a masterpiece the Dutch will hate me for this but until until the age of 35, I would say, and it was only in the last two years,

he was really creating anything of any merit. And then we look back and we go, oh, look, there's the journey. And these are masterpieces between you and me. I'm not buying it. Yeah. Most people don't know. I just made this up. Most people don't know the reason he he picked david and not chad because chad actually was better long he just didn't have enough clay and so or stone wait hold on this joke just started feeling because i don't know if it's clay or stone because i've never seen it in person but yeah that's the whole reason he's got that guy who looks like he just came out of the cold ocean hanging there anyway that's that's, that's, I don't know. We write the jokes sometimes in my head on the fly.

And sometimes they're working until. Nobody would ever tell, Chris. Not that way. But I think he's carved out of stone, right? Or is he clay? Marble. Marble. See, I knew that.

That was the joke. Somebody fix that and edit. No one would tell. I've just given the game away chris you just ran out of clay was oh yeah it doesn't even work now so but i sometimes when they sometimes you you kill when you die so there you go so now you've found your your your your artistry your creativity your your painting how did you turn this into something where now you're helping people and organizations be empowered using your creativity? It was a journey. At the time, I was working in communications. agencies in the UK and then left and ended up working on all the sustainable development goals for organizations like the UN, UNICEF, World Health Organization, Red Cross, people like that

and you know there was a pivotal moment where I started to go out into the mountains and I started to have these experiences that you can't really explain with modern science. Like things would happen, the weather would change, I'd end up in a blizzard or gale force winds. And I started to get some insights. And there were insights about how creativity works and how change works. And I was like, oh, my God, wouldn't it be amazing if we unlocked all the creativity in every single person in these big organizations?

And so I started to take these insights back, and nobody was ready to hear them. Okay. And so what it boiled down to in the end was, it's a question of design, but also a question of mindset. So I realized that that wasn't gonna fly and i then went on a long journey to try and work out how to use these insights and apply them in a business context and i started off by running a couple of workshops called an issue creativity

with a friend of mine who was a master nlp coach and we ran two of those workshops and then we got invited to jordan by a guy who was building websites for me so he had a team of 15 20 people and he said will you come and run a workshop with us and we did and we ran it literally in jordan looking over israel and. And it was an incredible workshop. And this was the first time I'd run a team workshop. And then I realized, oh, I could do this. So then from there, I started to develop the tools and then find the right audience. And then the same guy, Heath, came back to me and he said, would you run a workshop for me as an individual to help me to work out what I'm, you know, my masterpiece? I said, yeah, sure.

And anyway, his first masterpiece, if you exclude the company he was running, was a program to help refugees who are not allowed to work by the UN to actually use their skills to actually create something. So kind of the original maker idea and eventually he he exited that and it's it's still an ongoing concern oh wow there you go so how did you get into this painting on the mountains all the time and and is this your main form of of artistry yeah unless you include writing or coaching or skiing or, but the main way I do it, yeah, is painting. So I was speaking to one of my mentors, a woman called Elizabeth DeVries, who's based in LA. And she said to me, you need to go out and paint outside. And I've been painting in the studio. Like when you're in an atelier in a studio there's no wind everything's

controlled you know the paints are nice and I went outside this first time and I cannot begin to tell you Chris the change like the winds running through my head these were the days when I had hair so wind running through the hair and like the wind is running through the through the the grass and it's making these really interesting patterns. I'm like, this is amazing. The painting was terrible because I wasn't used to everything moving. Like the canvas was moving, the grass was moving. How do you slow things down enough in order to be able to see what is actually there? And so I started to really struggle with this.

And then I just continued. And in the end, I ended up painting in more and more extreme locations around the world. Wow. And so you probably find it really inspiring. Like it fills your soul as a creative person. And, you know, here you are in this real environment. You're not just, you know, you're in a comfortable, you're not just in a comfortable studio where you're just like,

hey, the air conditioning and there's no wind and stuff. I'm looking at the easels and how you have tied stuff down. And I'm just imagining the gale force winds going off some of these mountains because that's how it rolls. And you're just trying to get this thing painted, probably with some cold hands and everything else. So it kind of takes maybe creativity and endurance and discipline to like a next level for you. Yeah, I'll take you down to Provence, if I may, for a second. And this is where I got inspired to actually tie the canvas down. So you can imagine I'm in front of a field of lavender. So there's rows of lavender, this beautiful purple lavender,

and there's a tree in the middle. And right behind me is Mont Ventoux, which is this kind of epic, legendary mountain that comes straight out of Provence in the south of France. And it's where they take the Tour de France up every so often. It just sticks out. Anyway, it's really windy down there. So they have the Mistral wind.

And this Mistral wind, it's not warm. It's a cold wind cold wind it comes straight down mont vontu and it was coming up to where i was standing on this kind of rocky outcrop in front of this field and i'm standing i've got my canvas in front of you if you can imagine this and literally the canvas is moving in the wind and i'm trying to take my brush right and I don't know if you've ever tried to do something where you're not in control it's very very frustrating so I'm trying to do this and the canvas is hitting the brush without me moving the brush I'm like literally fuck this so after three hours I'm I'm what I've done is I've put stones into the there's an easel with a with a drawer in it and I've put stones in it and it's an easel with a drawer in it,

and I've put stones in it, and it's still rocking around. The canvas is still moving. You know, Chris, I got to the point where I was shouting at the wind. I was literally, I was going, maybe a bit Vincent-like. I was going a little bit crazy. I was like, what the are you doing? Because I'm trying to paint here, and this is a great view. So in the end, after three hours, I gave up.

I gave up, right? I went back to the b b this is before airbnb i went back to the b b following day got up when it hid somewhere painted a painting wasn't great got in my car went and had lunch got out from lunch put into the gps the address where i was living back in switzerland started to drive and then saw there was a four-hour delay on the autoroute to Slade, the main highway back to Geneva. I was like, I'm not doing that. So I turned around, and the detour takes

me right back where I was painting the previous day. Oh, wow. This is the sign. It's the sign that you're, it's like, you need to go back and do that. Yeah. So I started to count within the car, right? So I drive it, and I it's a sign that you're it's like you need to go back and do that yeah so i started the canvas in the car right so i drive it and and i i i i said to myself maybe i'll set up again so i set up the canvas again and just like you i was like maybe there's a sign maybe i'm supposed to learn

something here i sit down and i still my mind right and I have this crazy thought I have one of these sponges you know there's ocean sponges you get really beautiful sponges and and I pick up this sponge and I go to the canvas and I load the palette up with paint and I fill the the literally I dab this sponge into different paint and then I grab the size of the canvas and I suddenly have this revelation which I don't think I was conscious of at the time but the only thing in this whole landscape you know the trees blowing in the wind the lavender's blowing in the wind the canvas is blowing in the wind everything's blowing in the wind except this dumb Brit standing in the wind trying to resist the wind.

Can you see this, right? And at that moment, I was like, what if I just allow the wind to move through me? And I followed the line of the wind. And the whole canvas transformed in literally 10 minutes. I was like, wow, what just happened here? Oh, wow. And this was the beginning of a revelation and the revelation you can summarize simply as what you resist most persists and grows she's right there you go what you resist give that to me one more time so

what you resist persists and grows and it's carl jung the psychologist father of monday's psychology what i understood afterwards was actually if you embrace it you embrace the resistance it kind of partners with you oh there you go and and and you were kind of resisting your creativity for 14 years. So that was festering, and now you finally embraced it, right? Yeah. And, you know, who else is doing that in the world? How many of us have resisted our own creativity? How many of us have said, you know, I'm not artistic.

I can't draw. I can't paint. I'm not creative. Well, where does that come from? People told us that don't be creative or you suck at this. Yeah. Just like my dad.

I mean, school kills a lot of creativity. That's why I had trouble in school. It's because I have a pretty creative mind and a lot of pattern recognition. so i figured stuff out pretty quick i seem to have some sort of i don't know i've always had it since i was young i figured out a lot of things were bullshit when i was young and maybe it might have been a response to growing up in a cult and seeing what that was about i think that's i think that's it was incredibly traumatizing it it helped me recognize patterns very quickly so it may have been a survival tool that i was going through

that in a chaotic childhood but doing those things really helped me develop and but in school creativity just kills or schools kill creativity i mean they don't they want you to i always have this image in my head that i always go back to you probably you've probably seen this but pink floyd's video of the wall where the kids are marching lockstep through the machinery of of of a production line at a factory just always comes to mind that's always what i think of and i think there's you know it used to be i don't know how things things are going in your end of the world over in Europe, but here in America, they've killed off a lot of art classes. You know, a lot of liberal art stuff has gone out the window with budgets and stuff.

And when I grew up, there was still art. They would teach you art stuff and you'd have an art teacher encourage you to do some creativity. But for the most part, that was like all the creativity. You know, if you wanted to, I don't know, if you wanted to get it weird on math or creativity and anything else, you know, that wasn't encouraged. It's like you stick to your art class. So, yeah, it's interesting how that's working out right now. Now, how does that lead, you know, repressing who you are

or what your talents are or what you want to do? How does that lead into what we teased out earlier in the show about radical? You talk about having a radical agency is what we talked about in the green room of your show as on your website. What does radical mean to you and does that play into what we were talking about just now? Yeah, it does. So radical comes from the Greek word word radix which means root so to be radical is actually to go back to the root to go back to the origin and agency believe it or not comes from the latin agentum which means effective or powerful so agency as we understand it is only a kind of 18th 19th century concept

post-industrial revolution where we will do it on behalf of someone but the origins of agency are actually you have agency so a radical agency is going back to the root so that you have agency to create your masterpiece to bring into the world whatever it is you are here to bring into the world there you go so you lead a radical agency as you put on your website under masterpiece agency and you lead personal journeys for purposeful pioneers to elevate themselves to the next level. Tell us about the work that you do there. You've done the work with the, and you've learned from some of your work with SDGs, the UN, UNICEF, Red Cross, etc. Tell us some of the work you've done with them and work that you do with organizations.

Sure. There's kind of really two parts to this. So we do personal journeys for individuals. So people who just want to go out and create their own masterpiece. And then we do work with organizations. And actually the organizations you mentioned there, I'm not working with those at the moment.

Why? Because honestly, they're not going to help us to realize the SDGs. The most we can honestly get from the UN was the SDGs themselves. Why? Because the design of those organizations is designed to create a framework, but not to actually implement it. Now, there may be people listening to this who are now going to disagree with me. You know, full on, fine.

I'm willing to discuss that one at length the organizations which are really going to make the difference in the world are look and don't get me wrong here they're doing great work okay so what we're saying is what i'm saying is that that framework is amazing and the work that they're doing is fantastic. But we can accelerate it. And the organizations which are really going to make the difference are those who are leading with purpose. So what is it we do? We start off by helping somebody to articulate the purpose.

I just literally had a conversation an hour ago, two hours ago, with a consultant who's done a lot of big transformational work. And in 26 minutes, helped him to work out his purpose. His purpose for me is who you are and why you're on the planet. And for a lot of people, it's what you do. For me, I call that your masterpiece. And so what we do with those organizations is we help them to unlock their purpose discover their purpose work out their mission what they're called to do next and then link them to creating their masterpiece and we work with hp you know i work with the chief

sustainability officer there and they they went off on a journey they implemented what we developed with pwc and when they implemented that three-year roadmap, at the end of it, they were voted by, oh, which magazine was it? Newslife as the most sustainable company in North America. And they've now been awarded that four years running, which is for a company that essentially produces printers and pulls chemicals out of the ground and puts them on paper. It's pretty impressive, right? That transformation. Yes. Similar journey that we went on with Chloe.

They became B Corp certified, first luxury goods, luxury fashion company. We become B Corp certified. So that's what we do with teams. And then we do the same thing with individuals, but we can be a little bit more adventurous with where we go so for instance last october we were last november we were in belize this year we're going to be going to kyoto in japan into cappadocia in turkey probably out into the desert in abu dhabi or possibly in Dubai. We'll be going to, where else are we going to? Oh, we'll probably be coming to North America at some point.

Oh, wow. Yeah, and possibly Kenya. We have some pretty things here you can paint. We have a few pretty things here. It's mostly concrete and buildings, but there's mountains running around here. We tried to pave over everything as Americans, but there's still time. You have Yosemite and

some of the most beautiful national parks in the world. We're going to pave them next week. That's how we roll in America. America! We pave everything over with concrete. You know, Californians are going to need a place to move after this recent. This is some crazy storm hitting us that's just burying us with rain.

It's certainly, it's like a 100, 150-year event or something. So, yeah, it's a little hard to die global warming these days when you see what's going on. I mean, I think this is the second massive event they've had. They've had like, I think they had to issue hurricane things for the first time in California or something like that. I was reading this morning. Those of you who are watching, it's 2024. People that comment on our videos from 10 years ago, 10, 12, 15. Somebody did over the weekend.

I'm just like, are you seriously commenting on that video that product so how do you how do what what do you see each of us that we can do to change the climate considering the craziness of what's going on or help create peace in the world you know we've got two wars going kind of two wars i mean technically you count the israeli hamas thing i know there's some stable rattling going on around the world in some different places as well. What do you see that each of us can do to change and have an impact in the world? Yeah, look, my wife is Ukrainian. So my children are half Ukrainian. And in 2014, when pro-Russian troops invaded Donetsk, my mother-in-law was living there.

And she doesn't live in Donetsk anymore because she was detained illegally for 10 days by pro-Russian forces. And when she escaped, literally with her life, we said, do you need to come and live with us? And that was 10 years ago. So she's been living with us almost for 10 years. So for me, the concept of war is not something that I see out there. It's something I see at home because when she moved in, she was traumatized. Imagine being held by, with 30 other people underground,

being fed once a day and seeing your co-captors being beaten. What's that going to do to your psyche? And what I realized is that to be a refugee, we see people lose their homes, lose their families, lose all their possessions. But what I don't think most of us really appreciate is that what we really lose is ourselves, because all of those things outside of ourselves actually define who we are. So we actually lose the essence of ourselves. Our identity. Our identity. are so we actually lose the essence of ourselves our identity our identity and the hearing kind of

lies part of the solution so as gandhi said be the change you want to see in the world not act on the change not think about the change not talk about the change, not do anything. And so we see a lot of people doing great stuff like planting trees and recycling plastic, and all of that is great. And we can accelerate that. We can move that faster. How? By reconnecting to our true nature because if everything on the planet all of the tension that we see is created by us in disconnection

mother nature then the simple solution is to reconnect to mother nature how do we do that we reconnect to our true nature what's purpose about it's about connecting ourselves to our true nature what is my painting about it's about being in a state where i'm connected to nature and when we are connected to nature all sorts of extraordinary things happen so actually i think the solution to climate solution to peace is actually easier and far harder than we're told for me me, it's not about doing more. It's about being more. It's about being who we truly are. And if you just put this into context, there's not enough land on the planet to plant enough trees or to plant all the trees which have been promised to be planted. And I think it was the Today program program but no the evening show which pointed that out

it's like okay if that's true then what do we do we'll panic we'll give up or is there a simpler way of doing this and so to me it's about it's about reconnecting and what i see is that a lot of people are moving towards sustainability as a reaction to unsustainability. And if you're following the idea of resistance, just if you resist something, it persists and grows, then the solution cannot be more resistance. There you go. So on your website, you have several things that you offer here. Tell us about some of them.

You've got purpose sessions on discovering your purpose. You've got a pathway to elevate your perspective. Is that you on the cliff there? It's not actually. Not on that photo. There you go. It's a beautiful shot, though. It is beautiful.

How to elevate your communications. Tell us about some of these offerings you have and how people can onboard with you or reach out to you and handshake with you to get involved? So look, if you fancy working out your purpose, come and join us tomorrow at 12 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. That's 9 a.m. on the West Coast. And that's a complimentary session we run every couple of weeks. If you go to themasterpiece.agency and you'll see, as Chris is is seeing there's just a navigation item at the top there on the menu called purpose session just click on that and follow down and register and

we'll work out your purpose for you those sessions are unbelievably powerful and that's why I do them because it's so much fun to do then if you want to go a little bit further you mentioned masterpiece pathway so if you're looking at this on video, you'll see behind me an infinite loop. This is the Masterpiece Pathway. And I'm not going to go into all of it, but really quickly, it basically says, you know, there's an artist inside us. There's a creative director outside of us. We need both of these forces when we're creating. So when I paint, for instance, I'm resourcing myself. I'm going on this pathway here to place a brushstroke on the canvas,

and then I'm going back and resourcing myself. But you can also map this, the lifetime of a person, you know what, the history of humankind, the history of the planet. It's a fractal model, and that's the pathway. It's designed to help people unlock their creativity, discover their their destiny and get clarity over what they're really here to do and then we offer other retreats so offline retreats and the next one's called the samurai so we're going to japan samurai is really interesting because you know in the bushido code which is the code behind the samurai they say the artist without the warrior is not a true artist and the warrior

without the artist is not a true warrior in other words you need both of these aspects within ourselves in order to truly create which is the same conclusion i came to and that that starts off a sequence this year where we're helping individuals to literally create their their masterpiece but each person what we do is we work out a journey for them a specific journey for them and that may mean offline may mean online it may be in person it may also mean communications so for instance you know when somebody's worked out what their masterpiece is we're also there to support them to actually bring their communications bring that to life through communications because

i spent you know 15 years working out how to design and develop websites and so you're going to look at my websites you'll see the design is really simple, super Zen. We also help people to actually go through that journey. So it's all the way from working out your purpose, all the way through to actually bring it into the world and creating something powerful. But the key is just to start somewhere. And then we do the same thing for organizations as well. So you'll see a piece there for teams. And if you want to do something with the team, you can read up about that. There you go. Creativity is so important in business i've been an entrepreneur all my life since 18 being able to create being able to to have a mindset of of you know everything you build

as an entrepreneur you you take something that's nothing and and you sit down and you you build you know sometimes a you know billion dollar companies you know you see some of the ideas that Elon Musk has come up with. I'm not sure he's the most stable guy with some of the drugs he's taking these days, but you see, you know, a lot of the vision that he had for some of his companies and how he built them, Steve Jobs, and other people around the world that are, you know, kind of stick out in people's mind. But people do that every day with businesses. I mean, sometimes I've sat around in my companies that, you know, 13, 20 years later, I'm looking

back at this, you know, sprawling company and hundreds of employees and you're looking around going, Jesus, I built this from scratch. This is an idea in my head. This is a dream. And for big companies like HP or massive corporations like that, creativity is super important because if you're not coming up with the latest and newest idea, your competitors are and bringing them to market.

And then, of course, being creative, I think, gives you a different outlook on life than just being lockstep and this is the way we've always done it, so this is the way we do it. You see companies like Kodak and other companies that that fought and resisted even when they had the ability to eat their own lunch with like

digital photography they're just like no we've got to keep doing it with film you know and bury just bury that idea that digital idea you know who's gonna want that you know it's like ibm was the old i think it was watson one of their original CEOs who said, there's no reason to have personal computer. No one would ever want personal computers. There's only, you know, there's maybe 10 or 12 that need to be done in the world. You know, you miss that ball. So creativity is so important.

And I think from a mindset of creativity, you just, your mind is so far expanded. You think about other things than just rudimentary sort of thought processes to get through the day. And it puts you more in touch with the world. And I think, you know, you would say probably the universe and other things. It can make a difference in your organization. And I think it makes a difference in the most successful organizations in the world. You know, who would have thunk that you could put all those items into an iPhone and build the iPhone? Who would have thunk that you could jack a tactile keyboard on

a cell phone like BlackBerry had and they thought they were the top of the world? They come out with a touchscreen that does it and all the different innovations. And you see what's come out of the innovations of Apple with steve jobs even the new ar glasses that have come out or xr whatever you want to call them this week you know i think that there's going to be a creativity splurge that's going to come out of there that's going to be amazing so creativity is just so important so alexander thank you for coming on the show we really appreciate it give us your on give us a way people can onboard your dot coms and we're happy to reach out to you and get on board with you. So go to the masterpiece dot agency, the masterpiece or word dot agency, and just follow that link purpose session and

you know, sign up and we'll help you work out your purpose or just get in touch. If you've been inspired with anything here, you'll see a let's talk in the bottom right-hand corner. And if you want to go and get inspired by some of the paintings I've created, go to alexander-inchgold.com. That's I-N-C-H-B-A-L-D.com. And you'll find there a series of videos, some of the pictures that Chris was talking about, me standing on top of mountains, canvases on top of mountains.

And you can also step into some virtual galleries there. So there's some 3D galleries, and you can see the series of paintings when I was black, when I was white. And then there's also some videos which explain the stories of each of those paintings, because each painting tells a story. And you're right, Chris, you know, we need creativity in the world. And a lot of people say AI is going to solve it for us.

AI is only as good as the input. And really, we're the creative ones because we're sitting there, you know, giving the prompts and creating the sort of elements. You know, I see what people are doing with chat GPT and then different AI image models. And, you know, they're playing with them all the time giving them like different prompts to see what comes out so really the kind of the creativity is what we're coming most of what's being painted and some of the videos I've seen are really you know they're designed by human beings and human beings being creative and basically the the AI is just being used to paint the pictures of what their creative inputs are doing. So it's almost more like, I don't know, it's interesting to see what AI will come up with,

but still we're at the creative core of it. So hopefully it always stays that way, but I don't know, there's still time to turn into Terminator, so that's it. Gotta love those AI germinator jokes. Dun, dun, dun. So thank you very much for coming to the show, Alexander.

It's been wonderful to have you on. Thank you very much. Sure. Thank you, Chris. Great to be here. There you go. And thanks for tuning in.

Order up his book wherever fine books are sold or you can go to his website and I think you said it's free on your website. Is that correct? You can download the PDF on my website.

So just next to Purpose Sessions you'll see a link to book. Click on the book and you will be able website. Is that correct? You can download the PDF on my website. So just next to purpose sessions, you'll see a link to book, click on the book and you will be able to download it or purchase it on amazon.com. It's also available on lots of other stores as well. If you go to your local bookstore, you should be able to get it too. There you go. Order up wherever fine books are sold folks at masterpiece. What would you do with all the time and money in the world? As always, go to goodreads.com for us as Chris Voss, linkedin.com

for us as Chris Voss, youtube.com for us as Chris Voss and Chris Voss1 on the tickety-tockety over there. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.