The Rich Roll Podcast - Stanford Professors Bill Burnett & Dave Evans On How To Design A Meaningful Life

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans created perhaps the most popular course at Stanford, "Designing Your Life," and co-authored the book "How to Live a Meaningful Life." This conversation explores the intersection of product design and personal development. We discuss the loneliness epidemic, why there is no best self, curiosity as the gateway drug to wonder, the transactional world versus the flow world, and why the wisest people across every tradition all arrive at the same conclusion. This one broke me open in the best way possible. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today's Sponsors: Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://www.rivian.com  Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order👉🏼https://www.seed.com/RichRoll  BetterHelp: Get 10% OFF the first month👉🏼https://www.betterhelp.com/richroll  Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉🏼https://www.gobrewing.com  WHOOP: The all-new WHOOP 5.0 is here! Get your first month FREE👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll  Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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This is the greatest crisis of meaning in the history of the species. You want to live more meaningfully? We can help you with that. Meaning is that which... Dave Evans and Bill Burnett are the founders of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University. They've both worked at companies from Apple to Electronic Arts. They use design thinking to influence every part of their life. All we're trying to do is offer tools that work for human beings.

the happier, more meaningful version of you. Prototype your way to it. Making a little progress on a huge question is fabulous. This is as good as it gets. Welcome, guys. Thank you for doing this. Well, thanks for having to talk to you. Thanks for having us.

We're really thrilled to be here. This is going to be a conversation about designing a life of meaning. But why does this matter? How is availing myself of your counsel going to make my life better? Okay. Well, we do human-centered design. We teach in the design program at Stanford, started in 1963, used to be called product design. Now it's called the design program.

The original methodology for how to innovate a solution to a problem is called human-centered design, H-CD, now called design thinking, which is just a rebranding of the same basic idea. So it's about the human thing. So we're kind of in the how do humans innovate together well to make something humans could use well. So building often says, if you get the human part right, you can't go wrong. So we're in the meeting business because the humans we've been talking to have said they're in a lot of pain about that. Yeah. Every time I have academics on the show, they are just lamenting the mental health crisis being experienced by the student body. Yeah, I'm full time with all my undergrads.

I'm actually teaching the graduate class as well. I think, you know, what's going on is they're lonely, right? and social media has kind of interrupted the normal process of communicating with each other. You know, if you look at all the surveys, college students are having less sex, partying less, and having less fun. So that doesn't seem right. You went to Stanford. I wouldn't Stanford an undergrad.

You're supposed to party when you're an undergrad. I think the loneliness thing and then a sense of, right now, particularly a sense that, oh, man, if I finish my degree and I'll graduate, will everything I know be obsolete? because of AI. So there's a lot of pressures on them. But I would also say, you know, it's still a very optimistic generation and they want to have impact in the world. They don't want to just go get some corporate job. A lot of them are walking away from the business consulting thing or the private equity thing and looking for something that's got more substance, more humanity. You know, computer science enrollment dropped 16% this this year because everybody's realizing

maybe that's not the path to a job. And I think as people realize, oh, taking these degrees I didn't really want just to get a job, is that pressure goes away? I think you're going to see more and more students taking, you know, a humanities major, a poetry major, and a creative writing major. So I think there's optimism in the students. But it's a lot of loneliness and a lot of pressure. It's a really interesting dynamic.

And I suppose on some level, unprecedented. We were chatting before the podcast. you know, about like when I was at Stanford, it was just about, you know, getting to the career center and what's the path to the safe and secure, like high-salaried career, the McKinsey's, the investment banks or medical school or what have you. And it was a pretty limited kind of set of choices. But there was a kind of sense of security, like, or certainty. Like, if I go in this direction, like, I will, I can foresee a career path and there are kind of steps that I can take. this is how it's going to play out.

And the world is very different now. You mentioned it, like AI. I mean, it's more than social media. There's this existential threat. Like, what is the world going to look like? How can we even prepare for something that, you know, we've never been presented with? We can't conceptualize what the world is going to look like. And I think it's hard for any of us to imagine the level of sort of fear and dread that that must instill in a young generation that's trying to forecast, you know, a future life for themselves.

Yeah. You know, it's unprecedented and as old as the hills. I mean, so, you know, human beings are meaning makers. We're meaning story seekers. You know, Victor Frankel's Man Search for Meaning, invented a whole new school of psychology called Logotherapy, defining that the fundamental definition of the human person is a meaning maker. And we've been at this question for a long, long time. Now, there are periods in history and there are periods when you were in college and when I was in college when there is a pro forma answer to what should I do. There is a track that's ready and, for you to run down and it'll work for a while. And then you wake up at what we used to call the midlife crisis, you know, and then you're 40 and look, why am I doing this? You know, you stare at the person in the mirror at three in the morning in the bathroom going, what were you thinking? You know, why are we doing this? How did I get to be a lawyer?

How did I get? It's just moving up. Yeah. You know, and so society and circumstance and politics and technology has brought the existential question up sooner, but it's the same question. So in a sense, the good news is if we can help these young adults get their hands on better answers to bigger questions sooner, they've got a longer runway. Yeah, that's a tough time. That is a very curious thing that teenagers and people in their early 20s are grappling with the big questions and not waiting until, you know, the midlife, you know, situation where you're starting to wonder why you made all these choices that led you to this place of, you know, where you're lacking fulfillment and meaning and purpose.

It's like perhaps, or to put an optimistic lens on it, they're going to answer those questions for themselves so early in life such that they're paving the way for, you know, decades of meaning and fulfillment and satisfaction and purpose that, you know, our generation, the older generations just didn't really even ponder. Like when I was in college, nobody was walking around thinking about like how I'm going to have an, well, not any, I mean, there were some people, but for the most part, like people were just, you know, kind of in their own self-obsession about getting ahead in the world or putting their stamp on things, not like what is going to be most meaningful or even, you know, from, like even beyond just impact. Like what is going to create, you know, true contentment for me? Well, I think it's one of the reasons that our class is so popular and that the idea, I think the students are realizing, I'm not going to be able to plan this because it is unprecedented. No one's going to know what the jobs will look like in five years or 10 years. And we reframe that through the

design lens saying, don't you think it's so cool that five years from now, you're going to be doing something that hasn't even been invented yet. So the goal is prepare yourself for that future. And so the planning strategies won't work because there's not enough data, but a design strategy, a design strategy for your future, it has the most flexibility because we're always looking for lots of answers. We're prototyping lots of solutions. And so I think we hear this pretty strongly from students who've taken the class. I feel more hopeful. This is a really good lens to think about my future. I was trying to plan it and optimize it and that wasn't really working and I could see that would fail. But this idea of designing my way forward, prototyping things, taking

small risks and learning as I go, that feels doable. And so that's why the class is successful. I think that's by the first book. People found something in it that was useful. And we're hoping now with the book on meaning, you know, we're taking it up to the next level. It's like, well, what were you looking for in a well-designed life? Meaning. Okay, well, we're not philosophy. So the big meaning of life question, you know, go back to philosophy 101 for that. But if you want to get more meaning in your life or you want to get more meaning out of your life, you want to live more meaningfully, we can help you with that because that's a design problem. Walk me through the epiphany that you guys had around how product design could inform personal development.

Because that's like the big idea here. Like you're sort of approaching it as an engineering problem in a reductive design problem. Well, it really starts back in 1999. So, you know, I'm a high-tech guy, but I'm always cared about people and I always did youth work. You know, I taught Sunday school and I coached a little league and I've always been doing stuff with young people. And I got too busy. And I was just doing my business work and doing my own family and then got away from doing youth work. And then I thought, maybe I've got time to get back to us.

And that was in the 90s. And I hadn't been around college students for a while. I've hung on with college students a lot. I said, I better go back and check in with what's going on with college students. And I'm talking to a bunch of people about that who run programs or education or ministries or what have you. And this guy at Berkeley says, you should come here and teach a class. Which says, well, that's crazy.

And that's not going to work. He goes, no, it is. And he explained how it could work. And so I taught a class at Berkeley called Finding Your Vocation, Subtitles is Your Calling, Calling, which is actually the origin class that turned into designing all life. I thought we do it once. At the end of the semester, one of the kids says, my roommate couldn't take it in the fall day or you're coming back in the spring. I said, if he gets nine more people

with him, I'll come back. So 14 semesters later, we're on to something. So I had this idea about trying to help people find their way. And then Bill took the job full time at Stanford, you know, made the bright decision to take a 50% cut in pay, stop running a company and start teaching full time. And we had lunch and he said, what are you doing? I'm doing this crazy thing at Berkeley. We should totally do this at Stanford, you know. And through the design lines. And And then that became more inclusive and it got better. And then we wrote a book and it became this huge thing. So the invitation to get into the conversation really started very opportunistically.

It wasn't a top down strategy. So we said, hey, come help us. We did. Everybody had that problem. And then now that we've had, you know, a couple of million readers and trained thousands of educators, we get a lot of feedback. So we keep getting questions. And when the questions get asked strong enough, we get forced to write a book.

Well, you're definitely meeting the moment. right now. We are in this crisis of meaning and this epidemic of loneliness. We touched on, you know, AI and social media, et cetera, as driving forces here. But are there any other elements that you think are contributing to this situation that we're in right now where, you know, a book about like how to how to engender your life with more meaning seems like an urgent and valuable, you know, offering? Well, another, another trend that's obvious is that people are living kind of isolated in their echo chamber, they don't have strong communities. If you used to have a faith community or a neighborhood that was your community, those things have sort of

mostly fallen by the wayside. So people are, in addition to they're personally lonely or struggling or anxious, they're looking for other people to hang out with. I mean, we're communal animals. And so we really were looking, Dave's teaching a program he can tell you about called the Distinguished Career Institute at Stanford. And it's all about creating a kind of a community. And so we were thinking, I mean, forget students for a second, talk to people in their 30s and 40s.

Okay, they're in the middle of having kids, maybe. They got older parents that they're dealing with. But they don't have a community to hang out with. And they don't have anybody to talk to about what's going on. And so that was another one of the things we thought, that's a design. We can design a solution to that and help people figure out how to,

how to create these what we call formative communities. You want to talk about the DCI program a little? The Distinguished Careers Institute at Stanford started in 2015 by the, at that time just recently retired dean of the medical school, Phil Piso, which is really a gap year for grown-ups. It's a gap year for grown-ups. But if you charge as much as Stanford does, it's a big number. You need a much fancier name than gap year for grown-ups. And so, you know, anybody from Kenby as young as 45 up to 90, it's mostly 55 to 75 people

at what we used to call retirement age, taking a whole year off and going, now what do I do in the rest of my life? What do I do with my one wild and wonderful life now? So these are open-minded, teachable, thoughtful people. But they are people who are asking that big question and don't have a framework to address it. I mean, so we've learned a lot about them and the whole idea of formative communities, which is a big, one of our four top ideas, comes directly out of my experience with those people. But I think your question, why is this arising so much now? is that the institutions and the traditions that helped form people that said, gee, when that question comes up, here's how you might want to think about it, have fallen by the wayside.

And now the common square is the internet. And so we heard literally a hue and cry that it's not working for me. I wanted to have an impact and that's not working or I wanted to be fulfilled. The two things we heard people saying over and over again that weren't working for them is the fulfillment thing is not working and the impact thing is not working. So we said, okay, then we need to reframe those problems and give you different ideas. The word meaning is sort of a loaded word. How are you defining this? I think words like purpose, meaning, passion, sometimes it feels like they do more harm than good

because they're so large and ephemeral, right? So when you're talking about meaning, what are you talking about specifically? And where do you think people get off track and how they are commonly thinking about this word? We were talking about this just at breakfast this morning because it comes up all the time. I'll probably jump to the answer and say, you know, I at least think we, and we referenced in the book,

would agree with the answer Joseph Campbell gave in a PBS interview many years ago in a video series. When he says, I'm not sure it's really meaning we're after. I think what people are really talking about is the rapture of being alive. I'm here for the rapture of being alive. And again, we're human-standard designers.

So I think what meaning is, is when am I having an experience that makes me feel like I'm really having the fully human experience. So meaning is that which makes me have an experience of becoming more fully human. That can come in a variety of forms. I think modern people have gotten stuck on just too few forms, which is why there's a bit of a crisis around this thing. So my version of that would be it's that which moves me along toward having the experience

of being more fully human. That's the shortest answer I can give. Do you want to add to that? No, I think, again, we're all about how do you get more out of life rather than cramming more in? I think you're right. What's your passion? You know, I don't know.

Am I supposed to have one? Yeah, and then you feel bad about it. And then you feel bad about it, you know, or what impact have you had today? Like, you know, give me the memo on your impact. It's like, this is too much. This is too much pressure. Yeah, exactly. If you died today, will it have been worth it?

Yeah. So for us, it's like, oh, wait a minute, we're not trying to cram more in. We're not trying to set a bar you can't clear. We're really about low bar, you know, set the bar low and clear it. You know, and a lot of our stuff is psychology-based, it's positive psychology-based. You know, things like James Clear's, you know, atomic habits like small changes are how you make big changes. So we rely on a lot of that stuff. But in the case of the meaning question to sort of take out the pressure, it's like what you, I think what you're looking for is to be fully alive.

We have to call it fully alive by design. You want a liveness. You want to feel a connection to other people. That's the community thing. You want to feel like you did something today that wasn't just about you. It was about something bigger than yourself, right? We talk about the Maslow's pyramid,

and it used to be that the peak of the pyramid was self-actualization. Maslow said that when you get everything else figured out, you become the fully realized version of yourself. What people don't know is that in his diaries in the last couple years of his life, he said, no, actually, that's not it. That's all about the ego.

the peak of human development, whatever, is self-transcendence. It's doing something for someone other than yourself. It's transcending yourself, which is in wisdom traditions, is compassion, is altruism, is empathy. That's where we're asking people to look to see where is it that you have the opportunity to be fully alive in transcending your own ego. And by the way, he also got it wrong because you can be self-transcended at any level. of the pyramid. You don't have to be rich or fully realized or anything else to be transcendent or to care about others. And we have so much in the wisdom traditions and theological traditions

in science now, we know that altruism, empathy, the sense of awe in the world are all ways of achieving a transcendent kind of point of view. And when you do that, all the research says in our experience says you will experience your life as being meaningful. The meaning question, by the way, really goes to, so I want to have a meaningful life. Oh, what's a life? What's a person? So your definition of the human person absolutely informs your definition of what makes

a person meaningful. And our shortest definition of the person is you're a becoming. So a person is a become. You're an ever-growing person. And we say in the Life Design Lab, All of us contain more aliveness than when lifetime permits you to live out, there's more than one of you in there. So if according to the 1943 paper by Maslow, fulfillment, which is the result of self-actualization, occurs when you become all that one can be, that's what he says in print. And if there's more of you than a life permits you to be, oh, you can't have it.

So the traditional understanding of fulfillment is a thing that's literally unattainable. So if I buy into that, which the NIH says is the stickiest idea in the social sciences. One of the stickiest ideas of all time, in 1943, we're still looking at that pyramid. And so a lot of people are going down a pathway that there isn't an end to. There's a dead end to. So we talk more about fully alive than fulfillment. And the outcome, according to Maslow, of self-transcendence, is meaning-making. So I can either be ego-driven and I get to be all of me.

I get to be fully manifested. it, well, actually, that's okay. It's not a bad thing. But becoming actually, oh, I can have experiences of participating in bigger than myself as part of us. And we now know consciousness is collective. You know, there's a lot of neuroscience on this now that we don't just hang out with each other. We're not autonomous beings bumping into each other like molecules. We are, in fact, part of a social network.

So we're really trying to understand how people actually live in ways that actually helps them experience that aliveness as humans. there's a semester's worth of information that you just dumped in both of those two shares, like so many threads that I want to pull there. Okay. But sticking with Maslow for the moment, taking into consideration his amendment from self-actualization to self-transcendence, irrespective of that update, the stickiness of the self-actualization idea, it's like this vestigial limb, you know, that is kind of refuses to go away, right? And implicit in that is this notion, there's a singular self-actualized self.

And the aim is to, you know, embody that fully. And, you know, everybody dies before they're able to do that. And I've heard you talk about, you know, kind of the quantum physics of all of this. Like, we live in a multiverse and we contain multitudes. And there is an infinite number of selves and possibilities with every decision and thought that we have, right? So disabusing people of this notion that there is one thing, but that is the stickiest idea of all. Like whether it's, you know, be your best self. Self is like a single, it's, you know, the idea is that there is one thing and we're always falling short of it, which is contributing to us feeling bad about herself.

There is no best you, but there are lots of good use. Let's go try some. Yeah. And this bias to action, you know, which gets into kind of your prototype. idea of getting out of our indecision and our kind of navel gazing or paralysis around like, well, I don't know if this is the right decision because there is this fully actualized version of me out there. And if I make this decision, is that moving me away from that? Yes, and I'm towards it. Did I miss it? Oh, no. Yeah. Well, one is we do believe that there's

more aliveness in you than one life can contain. And that's actually the good news. And then two, you know, a couple of the mindsets in the book are, you know, let's, let's practice. this radical acceptance. Radical acceptance is, well, where am I right? Design starts in reality. I was at Apple, we were designing the modern notebook. I know the guys on the iPhone team. When you're doing something that's never been done before,

you've got to start with what do we got right now? What are the parts we can put together? So radical acceptance and then availability, the other mind says like, okay, if I'm here in the present moment, what's actually available? I mean, this hypothetical best self way out there. It's like, oh, I'm going to run a marathon, except you looked at my phone, I only did 6,000 steps today, right?

So this is not going to happen. So you got to get in the moment, where are you right now, and what's available to you to go forward? And if you could just put aside the, I'm optimizing my best self or I'm hacking, you know, my, whatever to get to someplace, what could I actually do in the next moment, in the next few days, in the next few weeks that would be coherent with who I think I am, where I think I'm going? Because you're still got to have a direction, right? We talk about building a compass and having coherence in your life so that you may not know exactly what the next step is, but you know you're going in the right direction.

So the chance of suddenly going this way when you wanted to go that way is lower if you actually, you know, if you know yourself a little bit. Radical acceptance, availability puts you, it's kind of the for the two-for mindsets that's the power set. It's like, I know where I'm at. I'm being honest with myself about what's possible. And then I'm trying to figure out what's available. What can I make available? And when you start with that, you realize, well, there's so many more opportunities than I thought, right?

Designers never do their first idea, right? You know, you have lots of, we have lots of research, lots of ideas leads to better choices. So you want to be able to have lots of ideas. And then why don't people actually make the change? Well, because it's scary. I just read a neuroscience paper where they've actually proven that your brain is much more comfortable to work on a problem that you've got that maybe is quite painful than to actually make a change to solve the problem.

That the stimulation of the amygdala is much higher to do something new than it is to just deal with the pain you've got. So our thing is like, all right, well then you're going to take really small steps called prototypes. Try something. Have a conversation with somebody. See what it's like. Do a little experiment, have an experience

so you have a felt sense of what it might be to move in this direction. But if you practice radical acceptance and availability, all these opportunities start showing up. And so, you know, you do make some motions in the right direction. And then you get the felt sense of this is a good direction or maybe that wasn't quite right. But no matter what you prototype, you're always learning something. So it really is the designer's mindset rather than the planner's mindset or the engineer. The engineer would need to know what's the formula that predicts the outcome.

I don't have a formula. You know, a planner would need to know, well, what are the cause and effects for the next five steps? I don't know what the cause and effects are. But I know how to weigh find into this uncertain future and know that I'm in the right direction. And radical acceptance, availability and prototyping is the sort of simple. I mean, it's the other thing, the message in this book, it's simpler than you think. You don't need to spend 10 years developing a meditation practice. You don't need to go out and do, you know, 40-day fast in the wilderness.

Yeah. maybe I'll just fly a kite today. Yeah, you can do the ayahuasca thing in Mexico, whatever you want to do. But you could just start today by looking at what's available and seeing how you can see it a different way. And then slowly build up the confidence that you have a compass. You are going in the right direction. We're brought to you today by Seed. If you've enjoyed my conversations with microbiome master Dr. B, then you know that happy gut means a happy body.

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having served more than 6 million people with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client reviews. Your emotional well-being matters. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash rich roll. That's BetterH-E-L-P-com slash rich roll. Product design is such a tactile way to deconstruct this problem because I'm just, as you're sharing, I'm thinking about a group of people sitting around, you know, Steve Jobs comes in,

and he's like, I want to make a portable MP3 player. And then he leaves the room, you know, and then you guys got to like figure it out. You have all this gear in front of you. Well, if we do this, it's going to be this big. Is it really portable? Like you've got this giant problem you have to solve. There is an infinite number of choices and tradeoffs that you have to make.

But that's the job. It is by definition grappling with uncertainty. But the human animal has a severe distaste for uncertainty, particularly when it comes to life choices. Right. So finding a way to engage at a very kind of like low bar where the risk, you know, is so minimal as a way of like that prototyping idea as a way of dipping. your toe into it, I guess is what I'm hearing. To go back to your Steve Jobs story, and I wasn't in the room with Steve when they were doing the iPhone, but I know some people were.

But in the Isaacson's biography, they said they brought prototypes to Steve three times. He said, no, that's not a do it again, do it again. So he did come in the room and say, I want a smartphone, I don't even know what it is, figure it out. And I know they built over 300 prototypes, both industrial design prototypes and works like prototypes because nobody like if you put a if you put messaging with a browser and you add a phone to it like what's that i don't know let's try it so even they creating the you know the revolution as the smartphone was had no idea what it was when they started but they knew the process of finding

it as they went and so the future of you the thing you're trying to design in the future the happier more meaningful version of you prototype your way to it just the way it's the way we invent the future Which is also all about essentialism, right? It's like what is really serving this? And most of it is stripping away. You know, I know, like in the context of like the iPod, there were a lot of people who thought it should have all kinds of whizbang stuff. And it's like, no, we're just doing this one thing. Like what is the, you know, the essence of this thing that we're trying to create?

And then thinking about that in the context of our lives, I think we think of this as an additive problem and not enough as a reduction as, you know, like a removal. moving, like what's not serving me that I can strip away? It's not about going out and getting this other thing and bringing it in as much as it is like dispensing with the things that are leading us astray. That surfaces two really critical things. So we talk a lot. So what do we do? We're the design guys. Well, you know, we help people get unstuck. We mostly deal with stuck people. People are stuck on meaning right now. And we'll probably give you some reframes to think about your problem differently. And the goal of the reframe is to be closer to radical acceptance and freer so you've got more choices. And then we'll give you ideas and tools for how to actually

once you've gotten more free. And so the reframe thing is a big deal because you've got to be working on the right problem. Problem finding precedes problem solving. You're working on the wrong version of the problem really, really, really well. You're still going to get nowhere. So the two things that surface

in the conversation you and Bill are just having, for me, are back to that personhood thing. So people kind of go, is this it? Am I getting it right? Is this really my best self? And you mentioning how sticky that is. If it's actually true, there is no one best you. There are lots of wonderful use

and it could be pretty radically different, you know, what if you went back and stuck with the lawyer thing and did that really well? That's really different than what you're doing now, but that could be a wonderful version of you. So once you accept, there isn't a right than that thing, because people have the experience, well, this is pretty good, but I'm not sure it's really it. And I don't know what-

I don't know what feeling like I found it feels like, but this isn't it yet. So there's this elusive never-ending thing I should be doing, but I'm not. And you're going to go, no, you're fine. You are a becoming. You're going to become more. If I'm better tomorrow, I was worse yesterday. And I'm never going to be done.

So it's all partial credit essay questions. There's no right, wrong, multiple choice thing. So thing one, you're becoming, so relax tomorrow's another day. And then the whole issue of, well, is the app this or that, you know, and am I going to be the lawyer, the athlete, or the podcaster? You know, which I can't do them all really well at the same time. It brings us to, you talked about essentialism. We talk about the importance of understanding, the scandal of particularity, you know, which is a philosophical concept that we think is terribly important.

We knew we had the right editor when she underlined that introductory paragraph on that topic and said, if we get this right, we've done our job. We go, great, she gets it. It's terribly important. The scandal of particularity simply is. No ultimate is ever experienced in this life. truth, beauty, justice, compassion, richness. Is this really the ultimate, authentic rich?

Have I got Bill right yet? No, you're a becoming that will never be realized. So even your own life is a particularity, a particular expression, in a particular space and time, with constraints and compromises. And you get to choose one of two reactions to that particularity, that constraint. Either, shoot, still not enough. Not quite. I'm a little disappointed. Or, awesome.

That's an honest reflection of something I care deeply about. And my longing says, it's kind of like that. I see the amazing sunset. And my soul goes, yeah, that's what beauties like. Go there. And then when it goes down, you don't go, well, that's over. Thank God. You go, more, do it again.

You're never satisfied. That never satisfiedness about life, that never satisfiedness about meaning, that never satisfied ness about yourself isn't the bad news. It's the reminder that you're a human being and deeply implanted in you is the thing called longing. So befriend that. Don't have your longing to go, oh, haven't got it yet. Oh, I'm still a human being.

I still have the drive to move into my ongoing becoming project. It's going to stay interesting all the way to the end. So rather than flogging ourselves for having that longing or that sense of missing something, understand it to be this generative force in our perpetual becoming. Yeah. So the radical acceptance of particularity then joins availability. And now we celebrate it. So you celebrate, oh, I actually get a chance to taste some coffee.

How is this coffee today? I'm just going to celebrate the fact that. I have access to something that reflects taste. How cool is that? So it's really a position that matters. Yeah. And that sunset in and of itself was enough. I mean, there'll be another beautiful sunset.

Maybe I could even put myself someplace like Big Sur where the sunsets will be amazing. But that sunset is enough. I've got a couple of young grandkids, and watching them play reminds me what curiosity looks like and how intrinsically wonderful human curiosity is because everything to them is new and everything is something to play

and oh grandpa look at this, look at this, what is it? It's an aunt, okay? But it's an aunt, grandpa, you know, it's like, and so I'm reminded that we have the capacity for wonder, we have the capacity for awe and joy and all these things, but they show up in moments, right? Moments of joy, moments of curiosity, and most often people find it in nature

because that's a huge, you know, trigger for what we call flow or a bigger definition of flow. And it often shows up in interactions with people because that's where we find connection and community and joy. So go for those things. They're available. Talk more about curiosity because it feels to me like curiosity is really something that we can control, that we have agency over, and it's this portal to all these other things like awe and wonder and connection, et cetera. Oh, it's absolutely the gateway drug to wonder.

It totally is. It's an intrinsic human capacity. Oh, how interesting. I wonder what's here. And if you lean into it, it's going to draw into all kinds of things. So we have a little equation, the wonder equation, that curiosity plus mystery,

which is anything that's more than you understand, even if it's understandable, I don't at the moment understand it, equals wonder, I can be in wonder, and that's available all the time. Curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. And I'm actually going to go to a quote. I kept my phone because there's a thing I can't ever remember how to say. Henry Miller, the playwright, said, quote, I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything,

even a blade of grass. It becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in and of itself. I have tried this experiment a thousand times and I have never been disappointed. Now, that's a guy with a wonder mindset. So now, there's more to curiosity than wonder. Yeah, I mean, this is all, this is all rooted in, in being present in your life. Like, there's a, there's a, there's kind of an eastern aspect to this in the sense that the answers that you're looking for are in the right here and now. And if you're bored or, you're like, you're just not paying attention enough. Because if you actually focused on any,

a blade of grass, pick your whatever, these things are, you know, infinitely fascinating, you know, but we're just, we're living our lives in this daydream where we're constantly captured by the past and the future. And even a discussion around designing a life of meaning is very forward casting, right? If impact is the primary form. Yeah, you know what I mean? So, and you're teaching Stanford students and these people are all like, you know, like, here's what, you know, they're all forecasting, right? And they're trying to put all the pieces together. And we're all missing our lives in the moment.

But the only way that we can experience awe and wonder or true connection with another person or even, you know, find a locus for our curiosity is when we're anchored in the, you know, the moment that we're in, which is actually the only thing that's real anyway. I'm going to let Bill comment on that, but it quickly just say, you, by the way, you caught us with that comment. because after we figured out what we thought the book might be if we were going to write this book, we looked at each other and said, it's just about the present moment. Ram Dass was right, you know, be here now. Yeah.

Like, everybody knows that. Why waste their time? Why waste the paper? And so we came to the conclusion. We talked for quite a long time, almost two years. Do we deserve to write this book? Doesn't everybody know? In a sense, it's not the only thing we're talking about.

But it's most of what we're talking about. And the conclusion was, well, either we're wasting the paper because it's obvious. or it's a fresh take with a really implementable, accessible, doable set of tools and approaches to get people back into this thing that we've lost track of. So you figure it's really about the present moment. It's that, guys, yep. Pretty much what the whole book is about. Pretty much.

And it's not that hard. And it's not that hard. You don't need to fast for 40 days. But back to curiosity, you know, the psychologists talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Extrinsic motivations is, if I work hard, I get paid more money. The money is the extrinsic thing. And we were talking-

Or you save the world or I cure cancer. Right, right. And my parents will tell me they love me. Yeah, my parents will tell me they love me. And maybe mean it at this time. Intrinsic motivations, curiosity, autonomy, mastery, wanting to get good at things just because

humans like to get good at things. So there's a bunch of intrinsic motivations. And we were talking to Bob Waldinger. I know you had Bob on for a while. And Bob would tell us that there's some neuroscience around. If you only stimulate external, motivation and you don't live into or stimulate any internal motivations, you actually lose those circuits and you lose your ability to be creative, you lose your desire for mastery to get better.

And so one of the big messages in the book is, hey, we got to, you know, we got to work with both sides of our brain here. And we got to work with our intrinsic motivations a lot to keep those alive. Curiosity being the gateway and curiosity plus wonder, the things that, You can't understand, but they're amazing. Curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. So we have an exercise just sort of silly put on your wonder glasses and actually have a pair of goofy glasses. But like, go out in the world and instead of just seeing what's there

or even just being curious about how, I wonder how that grass grows. Take the Henry Miller approach of like, if I really get into it, a world of wonder, mystery, excitement will unfold. and my curiosity will be stimulated, and that will lead to more wonder, more curiosity. It's kind of a flywheel. But we talk about, you know, your brain is kind of two works in two worlds, the transaction world and the flow world.

Dr. Lisa Miller at Columbia calls it the awakened brain and the achieving brain. But, you know, transactions, we do it every day, we get stuff done. And flow, which used to be just thought of as peak experience, is actually available all the time. I think of it like an aquifer under the surface, and you can drill down and get into flow in almost any circumstance. And that's where meaning is.

Meaning's not in transactions. Getting transactions done is nice. It feels good for a while. Even impact feels good for a little while. But then, what have you done for me lately? What's your impact lately? Hey, great numbers on the last five podcasts. What have you done for me lately?

So impact is transactional. And meaning is not transactional. It's down in the world of flow, in the world of intrinsic motivations. It's in the world of emotions, really. And we're under- We're under-educated there. Sure. I mean, we live in a highly transactional world.

All of the incentives of modern life are driving us towards a more and more, you know, transaction-based experience. And when those transactional relationships or career paths, et cetera, don't deliver on fulfillment and satisfaction and all of that. You know, then we're in this sort of arrival fallacy crisis. And then we descend into what Arthur Brooks calls, like the Stryver's Dilemma, convinced that it's always, you know, at the top of the next peak or around the bend. And we live our lives, you know, kind of on this hamster wheel of dissatisfaction, you know. And meaning is available to us all along, you know, if we would just, you know,

avert our gaze and kind of look over here. But to your point about, like, flow, it is this thing that we think about, like, oh, this is something that you can harness for these peak performances, whether you're an athlete or you're, you know, some kind of creative person. But you distinguish that from what you call like simple flow, which is what you were getting at, right? So talk a little bit about that and like how people can access that and why that, you know, what the connection between that is and the meaning that we're lacking. Well, the point you're making about, you know, the transactional world, so we posited in the book, we observed in people's complaint, you know, I'm trying to make a difference. And so in the transactional world, the primary form of meaning making that's offered is, and did you make an impact? Did you change the world? Did you hit the mark? Did you hit the quarterly number? Did you, you know, did you do the thing? And most of the time, you can't control outcomes, even if you do it right. So oftentimes, having an impact fails, even when it does succeed, it's a thing. It's a thing. thing and it has a short half-life. So people can be saying, how do I have my more meaningful life? And they're just looking through the one window, one of the transactional space.

That's why they're stuck. So that's where we said, well, you know, while there's really only one actual cosmos and world, your consciousness can only handle so much at a time. And we're leaning into this consciousness, this achieving brand that does transactions. So we talk about these other forms of meaning. In fact, it's fine. There's just one form. Don't put all your eggs in that basket, you know, which goes.

into these relationship things, these flow things, these wonder things. And so in flow, we said, well, flow is the original book is flow, the psychology of optimal experience. Great. So when I'm in an apex of experience, I'm deeply engaged in a task, what's it like? You know, I'm so in the thing. I'm totally in the zone. What we refer to as apex flow. But all it really means is I'm so engaged that I'm fully experiencing the moment that I'm in. Fully life. So the traditional definition of flow is I need a task, the requirements of which right on the edge of my capability. So what I've really done is I've outsourced to the complexity of my task, the ability for me to fully experience something because I'm going to go do something that's so demanding,

it will take all of my attention, and now suddenly I'm fully engaged. And so I'm so in the moment, I'm not worried about other things. I'm Alex Handel making the climb, you know, I'm doing this thing. And we're saying, wait, you can choose your way into flow. So simple flow is, you know, oh, I'm just going to chop onions. That's so boring. I better be, you know, doing my steps to get in my 10,000 while chopping, kind of chop while doing steps and having a podcast on at the same time. Yeah.

Great. As opposed to, no, just choose to totally be chopping onions. Enjoy the feel of the, enjoy the texture of the knife going through the food. Notice the smells. Your body can smell things. Be fully present. at the moment, that's a choice. And we said the flow world is the place where flow experiences come from. So we just came up with an idea, hey, there's two worlds, not just one. There's

the transactional world and the flow world. You're mostly missing the flow world. That's where flow is had. It's in the present moment. Let's go over there some more. So the biggest idea we have about flow is it's there all the time. You could have it in lots of forms. In Lisa Miller's world of the awakened mind. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. I'm concerned about these ideas. is coming across as very highbrow. I want to drill down into some real world examples because I'm imagining the person who's listening to this or watching it and going, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. You know, the awakened brain and like chopping.

He's like, you don't understand my life. Like, I'm just trying to make it through the day. I'm deeply unhappy, but I'm stuck. There's no possible way that I can leave this job. I've got, you know, two kids at home and a mortgage and, you know, car payment, etc. I think this is this situation with like just so many people, if not most people. They are living a life that lacks meaning and fulfillment and a sense of satisfaction, but there doesn't really seem to be an off-ramp or an accessible means to reframe how they're living

to engender these experiences that you guys are talking about. They're maxed out. They're maxed out all their time. You're like, get out of here with all this. They need something else to do like a hole in the head. And then when I get home, I just want 30 minutes of Netflix to turn my brain off before I go to bed. And like, that's the only way that I can't handle anything more than that. But these are the people that need the most help.

Right. Look, there are 21 or depending how you count 23 exercises and possible worksheets in the books. We give you stuff to do. the whole idea is this should be implementable right away. One of the exercises is flip the switch. Flip the switch from the transactional world to the flow world. All that means is drop into the present moment even for two or three seconds. We give an example of sitting in a staff.

I'm sitting here at the podcast table with Rich Roll. So what am I thinking about? How's this going? Am I talking as much as Bill? And will they like this? So all transactions, as opposed to like, okay, stop, What's going on? Here's this lovely guy, Rich Rowland.

He's wanting to talk to us. And these are new studios. You've only been in here a year. Like I'm thinking, and what conversations are coming here? What is going to get set across this table? How is that going to impact some people's lives? Okay, I can think about that.

It takes about 20 seconds to say that. It takes half a second to think that. I can do that. I can just flip the switch. What's going on right now? Two, three, notice. Flip back, what did you say? Flip back to the conversation.

If you start doing that, you give the rest of your psyche, the rest of your soul, if you will, a chance. So maybe you don't want to do Netflix instead, but if you're watching Netflix, are you zoning out or are you actually really enjoying it? Her voice is beautiful. That costume is terrific. Can you be present to the reality that you're in?

There is more aliveness in every life waiting to be had. And that's why we realize. It's not about cramming. It's not about learning five more ways to hack your meaning. It's about getting more out of what you got right in front of you. And maybe spending a little time on where's your attention right now. You know, and I have fallen to this. I'll sit there just before I go to sleep and scroll through 100 reels or 100 short videos on YouTube.

This is part of your becoming. Yes, part of my becoming. Am I awful to say, what are you watching? And I go, I don't know. Like, what was the last video? I don't know. Right. So catch yourself sometimes being,

sometimes letting someone else steal your attention. Just catch yourself and see if you can come back to the moment. And yeah, and flip the switch. Or, you know, at the end, you know, the simplest exercise from positive psychology is the gratefulness exercise. At the end of the day, write down three things you're grateful for. Or write down one thing you're grateful for.

because what you're trying to do is develop some processes which rewire the brain towards paying attention to right brain stuff instead of just left brain stuff, transactional, you know, flow stuff instead of just transactional stuff. You know, the old right brain, left brain model, Lisa updated it with achieving and awakened. It's the same thing. You want to be in all of your brain most of the time, and we're so over-indexed in the transaction stuff. You know, I teach design at Stanford.

Young engineers, I have to teach them how to design. They're used to having an answer in the back of the book. There's no answer in the back of the book in design. And I joke with them. You got in because you got 800s on your math and English. You didn't get an 800s on your creativity exam, right? So you're under-practiced in creativity, in curiosity. But you can learn it.

We know the brain's plastic. You can learn this stuff quickly. And what you find when you flip the switch, or you do what we call the sudden savoring exercise, or you do any of, I mean, the exercise are like five minutes that you have an experience in your brain where you say, oh, that was kind of, that was pleasant. That wasn't hard to do.

And there's a time psyche thing you've got to watch out for. So if I change five minutes of your week, it could have a 25% impact on your psychic ROI. He mentioned savoring. So I'm going to double down on this. You do the gratefulness exercise. Maybe you do it once a week. Then we'll say, okay, we have a thing called the seventh day savoring.

Again, five minutes, once a week, you know, just before dinner on Sunday or whatever it might be. Your Sabbath practice. You take one of those things you were grateful for this week and you return to it and you just go, oh, that was really great. You know, when Rich came into the office, you know, we were talking to the crew and Rich came in and he was really welcoming. And we were standing in the hallway having this really lovely chat. You know, that was great. I was grateful for the way Rich received us. Then I kind of go, okay, that's just recognizing.

Then re-enter it and savor it. Like, you know, play the GoPro camera screen of that moment again. And then freeze frame it. And then here's Rich Roll, this really successful podcaster, this guy that's really developed a life seriously. And he wants to spend time with this. And can I, can I savor that and receive the fullness of it? Because life in real time, you can't begin to get the fullness of life out of life in real time. So go back and do it again.

Frankly, if you do the seventh day savoring once a week for a while, five minutes a week, three minutes a week, you know, you start liking that, you could learn how to do sudden savoring. Can I savor in real time? That's a pretty cool skill. These are all highly accessible ways to live differently. Never in a million years did I imagine that the world would start waking. up to what I realized back in 1998, which is that life is infinitely better without alcohol in it. Giving it up isn't reserved for problematic drinkers, people like me, but it's actually something that benefits everybody. And at the tip of this spear is Go Brewing, the NA beer I love so much

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how more and more people want to live. So visit gobrewing.com slash ritual 50 to get 50% off your first subscription order to go brewing's beer club. So a little over nine months ago, I underwent spinal fusion surgery. And since then, my focus has shifted away from chasing these really big audacious performance goals like I did in the past to now accepting my limitations in this current reality and learning how to build a daily rhythm that actually feel sustainable for where I'm at right now today. And whoop, this wearable health and fitness coach that you see right here on my wrist every time you see me, is this amazing tool that gives me insights into all the things that influence how I feel and how I perform. My sleep, my recovery, my

strain and my overall health so that I can better understand how my habits are influencing how I feel. And what's interesting is how these insights translate beyond training, better sleep changes, improve how I show up at work, recovery changes, how patient I am with my family. And when I'm planning for bigger goals, like lining up to participate in the New York City Marathon to celebrate my 60th birthday this fall, WOOP helps me stay grounded in what my body needs right now, not what my ego wants it to do or what I used to be able to do. And I think that's really what adding more life to your years means, making decisions today that allow you to show up more fully tomorrow.

Go to join.wup.com slash roll for one month free of Wook. I can't help but think about how everything you're sharing overlaps with 12-step recovery programs. Have you guys thought about that? Like, in addition to this being all about the present, so much of what you're talking about really overlaps, you know, in the Venn diagram of like the 12 steps. It's like, you know, you do your inventory, which is kind of a form of coherence, right? Like, are your actions lining up with your values?

Are you doing what you said you're going to do, that kind of thing? A formal gratitude practice. An essential aspect of being part of this community is, you know, being service-oriented, like making it about something more than yourself. How are you transcending your ego through your daily actions? Sure. And really being rigorous in your kind of self-honesty and inventory of your behavior and your decisions.

Yeah. So, I mean, oh, aren't you guys 12-step? Bob Baldwin was pretty sure, aren't you guys Zen Buddhists? You guys are Zimb Buddhists, right? Yeah. All of these traditions are intersecting. It's like, this is ancient wisdom. No, the wisdom traditions share a lot of common.

We spend too much time about what we disagree about. If you look at, by the way, so buddy of mine, Scotty McClendon, the former chaplain of Stanford, says, if you look at all the spiritual, you've got the Christian spiritual men, the Judaic and the Sikhs, you know, and the Buddhists and the freelance spiritualists, you know. And he said, the people at the bottom love to argue about everything. He says, all the guys at the top, the mystics who are sitting up there kind of who really get it, they all get along fine. All the mystics understand each other, you know.

And so does our stuff sound familiar to these other wisdom traditions? Uh-huh. Because the truth stuff's true. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I don't know that much about the 12-step process. But it's, again, what we're trying to come up with are really simple things you can design. How do you become a moment designer, right?

If we say, hey, most of the experience of... Eautomic habits of design. Yeah, most of the experience of, yeah, most of the experience of meaning. Meaning will be in a moment. How do I design moments that are meaningful? How do I recognize the ones that just showed up for me? And how do I actually design something so that they work out fine? So, you know, I, like, David's example I think in the book was you can't experience total beauty, but you can make a cake for your grandson's birthday and you can see his face light up when he blows out the candle. And then he puts his hand right in it and grabs a piece of, you know, of icing. And it's like, well, that was cool. I can set that up and just let. it happened. The one difference, though, is that if you're making, baking a cake or you're building an iPod or you're designing some product or widget, there's a limited number of variables. And, you know, the key variable that's lacking in that is the variable of, you know, human emotion, you know, like fear and insecurity and, you know, like a bespoke set of life

circumstances that have created neural pathways and reactive patterns. I mean, essentially, so much of this boils down to the human animal getting in its own way and, you know, just unable to act in its own best interest despite, you know, reading the books and knowing all the information, just not being able to, like, translate that into new behavioral patterns. But it's also optimistic that those behavioral patterns, curiosity, mastery, and things, are built in to that same human who's got a, like I say, a bespoke set of neural pathways, maybe took them down to something that doesn't make any sense anymore.

But I'm totally optimistic that if you just start trying a few things, you can start to unlock some of that stuff. Refram. It's not about impact. Impact is in the transaction world. I need to find meaning somewhere else. The impact's fine. I still want to do a good job at work.

But if I'm looking there, I'm looking in the wrong place. So some reframes to give you all slightly different. You know, like every said you want out of the box thinking? well move the box you know i'm looking over here this isn't working move the box over here there's more possibilities here and if we and so i'm optimistic that even in a pretty grooved set of dysfunctional beliefs dysfunctional patterns there's still a curious person in there there's still an optimistic person in there fear kills curiosity right i'm not going to be curious about new stuff because i'm terrified of changing anything but you know small stats

what Albert Bandura called guided mastery, what David Kelly called creative confidence in his book. It's like small steps of learning to be, take a few risks, be a little more creative, have your curiosity, ask some of your questions, try a few things. Those small steps will overcome a phobia, will overcome the fear, and it doesn't, and it's not a lifelong practice, it's six weeks.

You know, you mentioned we kind of sound like some other things. other things. Well, you know, in the 75 ring circus called the human experience, the meaning tent, it's pretty big tent. And there's a whole bunch of, there's a dog act, there's some clowns in there, there's some dancing animals. There's a whole lot of stuff going on in the meeting room. And we just walked in there. But again, we're design guys. I mean, Bill's a Nietzsche-loving atheist, you know, I'm a Jesus-loving theist. I mean, we've got pretty different worldviews here. I'll say again, if you get the human part right, you can't go wrong. That's our, that's our baseline. And all we're trying to do is offer tools that work for human beings. So we're not

trying to be a new religion. We're not trying to be a new psychology. We're guys with freeing, reframed ideas to make your situation more manageable and tools to get you unstuck and moving. So this is entirely compatible with any world. There is no worldview that this is incompatible with. And we say at the end of the book, you know, we call the set of mindsets, the designer's way. you know, which is a little presumptuous. But, and then we say, your homework now is to figure out your way. And of course, you're never going to, there's no getting it done and there's no getting it right. You know, I made a mistake again today.

I'm so hopeless. Of course you are. You know, I mean, but, you know, if you're becoming, you're going to get better and you look back and you're a worse. So if you really can accept your humanity, then it starts getting and you start living generatively into it, not to get it done because there's no getting it done, thank God there's no getting it done. Literally on her deathbed. So my dear wife Claudia died of cancer five years ago, and I like being in love so much I'm going to get married again. But nonetheless, she really liked her brain. And she watched her mother lose her brain before she does. She said, I'm not going there. So because California is an end of

life state, we had the drugs for her to end her life before she lost her brain if her brain started to really go. And on the Tuesday before the Friday she died, I said, are we going there? She said, know I've decided, I want to stick it out. There might be one more lesson, and I don't want to miss it. And the last thing she said, she sat up in bed and she opened her eyes and she stared at me. She goes, oh, it's so interesting. Closed her eyes and fell back, last thing she said. So if you play the game, well, it's interesting all the way to the end.

Don't try to solve it. Just live it. embracing the mystery as opposed to trying to solve it. Celebrating it. This is as good as it gets. Making a little progress on a huge question is fabulous. I am, in fact, an existential atheist. And every morning I get up and I say,

I live in the best of all possible worlds because this is it. This is the best of all possible worlds. I get an afterlife, but he's stuck. This is all I guess. And everything I do today I choose to do, which is about choices makes you human. But we were in a restaurant a long time ago, and Dave and I were talking about atheism and Jesus.

And he said, okay, I got it. We both believe in mystery. We believe in the thing that cannot be demystified. There is a mystery in the world. You round down to cognitive science and physics, and I round up to God. But it's true. I mean, the reason we're entirely compatible is,

I mean, I'm also an artist. and when I'm standing in front of a canvas, or I'm painting, or I've got an idea and I'm designing, there's a moment where I'm not in this world. You know, Rick Rubin, the record producer, wrote the book on The Creative Act, and he talks about, you know, we just channel this stuff from, you know, he would call flow creativity.

Yeah. And we're just channeling this stuff. But I have these experiences absolutely, like the painting is happening in front of me and I'm just moving my hand. Yeah. And so there, that, there is mystery. But that's, that is self-transcendence.

It is self-transcendence. Yeah, become an antenna or a vehicle for, you know, something higher. Just something to go on yourself, yeah. And it seems to be something that humans evolved to have the capability to do. You know, from prophets to seers to shamans to whatever, there's always been people in a culture who saw something that everybody else didn't see. And those experiences are available. to all of us at any time if we can be present and get out of our own way. Those experiences, I want to make sure the listener doesn't think by those, that pronoun is referring to these apex,

either psychedelic or mystical mountaintop experiences or when Bill totally drops into flow in front of a canvas, and I call Bill the Flowmaster because he's really worked on being good at dropping into flow for years now. While those experiences are great, those experiences are great, what I hope we mean by, and those experiences are available to all of us, that experience of having a deeper engagement and participation in the present moment and feeling my aliveness and my humanity more than when I'm just worried about the outcome, that is available to everybody all that. It's a process. There's, you know, tension in every moment between that type of experience and, you know,

pivoting back to our default of like, you know, thinking about, like, how everything's going and our neuroses and insecurity. Somebody's got to trash out. I had to take this trash out. Just in the example of the podcast that you were talking about earlier, it's like, I know that the best version of this conversation depends upon the, like, the extent to which I can be present for it. Because if I'm totally dialed into you guys, I don't need this stuff here. Like, I'll always, you know, I'll let my curiosity find the next line of inquiry, and it will be great. But I'm too insecure for that. So I have to surround myself with all of this stuff, you know,

and I'm thinking, what's the next question? I'm going to have a brain fart, you know. And convincing myself that that is what this experience demands, when it actually isn't. I wanted to go back to this idea of reframes. You mentioned Joseph Campbell earlier. One of the things that serves us and also trips us up and gets in our way is our story.

I spent a lot of time thinking about story. Like, we all walk around with this story, you know, who we are, what we're capable of, what's going to work, you know. And, you know, like everything, it works for us and it doesn't work for us. But we're very locked in on this. And the idea of challenging that story, let alone deconstructing it, like, these stories are all fantasies. Like, even the best story. I mean, it's all nonsense.

Right. none of these stories are true, yet we're so indelibly attached to them. And it seems to me, and I'm curious what you guys think, that so much of what you're talking about is available when we can kind of release our clutch a little bit and start thinking about not even necessarily forming a new story, but just holding our story more loosely and being more curious about it and developing like the willingness to challenge it. Yeah, I mean, you know, we are the story we tell ourselves. One of the first exercises in the design life classes, I say, hey, tell me the story you

grew up with, you know, tell me what your parents, you know, what's what you learn from your parents. And, you know, you get the common story of, you know, work hard, get good grades, go to good school, get a good job. And I go, how's that working for you? And it'll be like, well, not really. So we are the story we tell ourselves. but we can, like you say, hold that more lightly

and maybe lean into the opportunity to change that story because if we are the story, we tell ourselves, let's change the story to be the one I want to live. Maybe I don't want to accept my parents' notion of success anymore. That's not going to work for me. Or maybe I'm in the mid-career and it didn't turn out to be what I thought and I can beat myself up for that or I can say, and now I'm perfectly positioned to figure out what I want to do next.

So we're narrative animals. Storytelling is part of the DNA of humans, I think. All I would say is like keep, you know, keep asking yourself, what part of this story is working for me? And what part of the story do I want to revise or get rid of or edit out because it just doesn't work anymore? And the striving mindset, that sort of, I've got to be the best at everything.

I remember one of the very first workshops who did a long time ago, was a big workshop with a bunch of Stanford alumni. I was a woman who raised her hand who's having problems. She said, what's the deal? She said, well, I'm a really senior lawyer and a big law firm in New York, but I hate it. And what happened? She goes, well, you know, I went to Stanford because it was the hardest school. And then my parents were both lawyers.

So they said, be a lawyer. So I said, okay. I got into Yale because that was the school my parents went to. And then I went to New York. I got in the biggest law firm I could. I was a youngest partner. First, you know, first senior partner. I run the management thing.

And I hate my life. Yeah. I got a house in Manhattan, I got a place out on the island. You know, I got two Tesla's kids in private schools. Because it's a terrible life. It really is. Because she didn't choose any of it. She had little reward, systems reward and punishment.

At no point did she feel like she had permission to actually ask herself like, what do I want and what's meaningful to me? We're on these escalators. Yeah. That is like, it's hard. She was deeply embedded in. And Jen, you know, and I said, this is. just a quick workshop. I'm not meaning to, you know, you don't need to have an existential

crisis here and, you know, in the 90-minute rubber chicken talk. But look at it this way, you're, you know, it's a sunk cost, right? And you've got lots of resources. You know, you're making six million dollars, you know, based $20 million bonus. Is it? Great. Bank that for two years and, you know, and start moving towards the thing that's more authentic for you. But give yourself permission to one, not beat yourself up for choices you made that felt okay at the time. And two, look at what you've got available to you to go forward. And you're going to say, all we really do in office hours is give permission. Yeah. Together we've probably had a couple thousand office hour conversations and mostly it's giving permission. You know, not to, hey, go off and join the circus, but we're reminding

people they do have the right to exercise the agency over their own lives that they want. And, you know, I'm a big fan of story. I mean, the fifth mindset is create your world, which is acknowledging that life is a story we tell ourselves. Yeah, it is. So pick that story really carefully. What's the one you're in now? And that's not in, you know, dried in ink. It's evolving over time.

Hold it lightly for heaven's. If I'm a big coming, of course I'm holding it lightly. You know, we say, I don't know your one true purpose, but we could give you some tips on how to live purposefully on the way toward the thing that's ever changing. And so, I'll like in my own story. You know, my father died when I was nine. We learned later of suicide. That's a gift that keeps on giving. I've worked that through with lots of counselors.

You know, I figured out my, I've retroactively figured out my coping systems and what my reactions are and what the good things and the bad things that came out of that were, you know, and how that affects my marriage life, you know. And I really know my story well. I mean, I've worked this thing really, really, really hard. I'm turning 73 in a couple of weeks. That happened 64 years ago. I've got this thing covered. So now my wife dies and now I'm in a relationship, my wife Claudia dies, and now I'm in relationship with Frisch, who is a different animal entirely, but who I love dearly and is evoking completely different things out of me. And I am learning so much about that coping system that I thought I fully understood that goes back to my origin story by virtue of simply being in the presence of a different soul with a different kind of reflectivity.

I'm over and over again I say, oh, that's what Claudia was talking about. The woman who died, like, she kept telling me the stuff like, no, no, no, that's not it. You know, and like, oh, that's what she meant. So I'm rewriting my story. You never know your story. You're just working on it.

But it does help. Having a story gives you some guidance, gives you a where do I go from here? You know, you're not done like, oh, I got it. I got it. Yeah. But like, I'm getting it. So there's your story.

There's the story of the senior partner at the Wichu law firm in Manhattan. There's the story of the, you know, struggling to make it through the day person. Sure. What about the senior in high school who's looking at the prospect of applying to college and thinking, well, what's the point in that? Like, there is a veneer of nihilism, I think, in Gen Z. Oh, yeah. They look out onto the world. and they're like, what's the point of any of this?

As a parent of an 18-year-old, I see this and I'm around young people a lot. What do you make of that and how do you communicate your message to that person or that generation that's struggling in that particular way? Well, I would say, first of all, their skepticism, which translates into disengagement, is well-founded because what they're really seeing is, Oh, all those games you guys told me the world was built around are falling apart. In fact, they're not even accessible to me in the same way. So back with you guys.

Right. Like they're thinking, oh, like one of those jobs that you older people are complaining about, that looks pretty good. Like, I'd like to have a house, but I don't see any path to that. And, you know, the world's going to fall apart by the time. And I don't want one of these crappy jobs that you keep complaining about. So this goes 70% of Americans are disengaged at work. Yeah. So that's what I'm looking for.

or two. I'm going to work hard, go to college, get a job, and then be disengaged for the rest of my life. You guys are all idiots. Thanks, thank, thanks. For two reasons. When you guys won the games you told me to play, you didn't look all that happy. And by the way, we can't play them anymore. So other than that, it's a great idea. Good job. You're doing, you're doing empathy. Step one of design really well. But now let's redefine the problem. Don't just say, oh, I'm screwed. I don't want to play. I can't play. You're accepting that the way we all describe the world to you was accurate. So if we do radical acceptance, okay, AI is coming. Yep, we're going to have to adapt to that. You have to live in a post-AI world for sure. There may be a different economic reality.

Even, you know, kids, my kids at age, and my kids are all late 30s, 40s, you know, are not buying houses because it doesn't make sense. And so we're going to live a different kind of a way. So then inside the particularity called the moment in history in which I found myself, if I radically accept those things, but I believe I'm a human becoming and I can live more fully into my aliveness within this framework, where can I do that? How do I do that? What would be interesting to me? Let's find ways to thrive in this context and get over the fact that the way they all said it was isn't the way it is anymore. It's just not true. So what is true? And let's go be human beings in the world in which you're going to live. Yeah. And some sort of ups and

side down way, it's almost an accelerated way of giving that person even greater permission. Well, if it's all like this, you might as well go directly into the thing that you're, you know, where your curiosity. Bill's been saying we've seen this down to this shift in the student profile in the last 10 years, but you've been saying just in the last one or two, it's turning around. Yeah, very much so. I will radically predict that in five years, the number one major at Stanford is poetry.

Because why take an econ class? Why take an econ class or a CS class if you can't get a job? The number one major? Major will be poetry and creative writing. For the few people still getting the liberal education. But I would, you know, the sort of disaffected 18,

particularly the male disaffected 18 year old, it'd be like, okay, yeah, radically accepted, things are changing. I think this is why the creator economy is booming and it's so interesting to them. It's like, well, if the goal was to like, you know, make a bunch of money or at least get enough money so I'm secure, but these other paths don't look so good, maybe I'll just do my own thing.

And that's going to be an explosion of creativity and engagement and other things. Not everybody will be successful, but that impetus to say, hey, wait a minute, you're right, I've got to redefine the world maybe on my own terms or maybe with a community of people who I really want to hang out with. One of my students, one of my top students, you know, left school, went to work for some big design firms for a while, and then went, no, I don't think so.

Bought some land and, you know, up in San Juan Islands, and he's running an organic farm. And he's heavy on all the product designers want internships there because who wouldn't want to work to somewhere on a farm? And he's using, you know, design techniques to create a completely different sort of farm economy. But now there's so many, there's so, one of the classes I want to do is designing your creative life.

at Stanford, because there's so many more options for how do you find your way in this new world where things are changing. Wherever there's going to be chaos, there's going to be dislocation, and there's going to be opportunity. And I think I'm seeing sort of, of the students who are still engaged or are trying, ready to engage, I'm seeing a renaissance in sort of creativity, entrepreneurship, engagement, and particularly in the arts. You know, by the way, in the research that we always quote from Bill Damon on passion, only 80% of people have an identifiable passion, 80% don't.

In that 20%, it's all highly skewed towards creatives. I've always wanted to be a writer, a poet, a singer, a dancer, or something. And what do we tell those kids? Oh, you can't get a job doing that. So what I'm going to tell those kids is that's probably the only job you can get. because the McKenzie thing will disappear, the banker thing will disappear, all these other things will disappear.

And so there is another element to this. The kid who won't get out of the room just plays video games all day. I do a bunch of work in China and they have what they call the lying flat movement. The kids, the kids graduate from college and instead of the picture where they're all throwing up their hats,

they're literally lying on the ground, lying on the stairs, and, you know, in the most, you know, nealistic way just saying there's nothing in the society for us. Now, China is probably true. There's a lot of stuff in society for these kids. And whether you go to college or not,

it's kind of an open question, whether colleges will even survive, you know, most of them, the AI wave, I don't know. But, no, I would say now more than ever. I mean, the friction between my idea and the market is almost zero. You know, a long time ago when I graduated, you had to learn drafting, and there's a lot hard to make something.

I can talk to my phone and 3D print something. Sure. In 20 minutes. If you've got an idea, it's never been easier to put that idea inside your story and become the person who does that thing. And whether that thing is college or college and something else, I just found out, I was talking to one of the fiscal professors who's running a class for creators, we have the number one Vietnamese influencer at Stanford. I haven't met him. He's like a sophomore. And I don't know

what a Vietnamese influencer is, but he's really big in Vietnam. He's from Vietnam. And he's, you know, and he's pulling in a million dollars a month, whatever he's doing. That's wild. And he's a college student, right? So. And he's still choosing to go to college. I mean, you know, I think the other thing is we have an exercise where we talk about what's college for. And, you know, college is, in addition to career readiness, college is really for the life of the mind, like learning how learning works and reading widely the great books from all traditions

and understanding that we're not just here as a civilization that was born yesterday. I mean, this goes back, you know, read Socrates, read Plato, and read Chongza and, you know, lots of. But I think the life of the mind, the kind of perfecting myself, those years between 18, 20 something, or 19 and 20 something,

those are important years of becoming the person you will be, you know, dealing with for the rest of your life. And as we hurdle, you know, off this AI cliff, the only thing that we have is our consciousness and our unique expression of humanity. And I think that becomes a premium. I mean, even in the best case, situation where AI comes in and optimizes everything and takes away all these jobs, but don't worry

about it because there's going to be universal basic income and there's just going to be massive prosperity. I mean, this will auger in the greatest crisis of meaning in the history of the species. Like, okay, well, what are we supposed to do now? You know, we've been thoroughly distracted and we won't be anymore. You know, this rose-colored view on like how. great it's going to be. Like, I just don't see any set of circumstances in which that is going to be how this is going to unfold. But at the center of all of this is meaning. Like, how are we going to find meaning amidst the birth of this new form, this new life form, you know, that we are apparently the sex organs of. Yeah, no, I think in terms of where do the, where's the post-AI future

land and how does it like, you know, this would be like saying a gymnast going off the high bar making a move for the very first time and sticking the landing in an Olympic perfection on day one. You know, this is my third or fourth massive technological revolution in the past 50 years. It is orders of magnitude bigger. I've finally been convinced that AI isn't just one more cool thing. It's a massive different thing. That being said, every transition is a mess. You know, and while transitions and disruptions create new opportunities for new people,

frankly, usually the people hurt by the disruption are not the one. who get the benefits of the upside on the other side. So there will be losses, there will be sacrifices, they'll be suffering. How long it will take, whether or not we'll get stuck in a bad corner and will end up with a massively AI-enabled oligarchy? I don't know. But regardless of how well or how poorly we get through this,

you're going to need to know who you are. You're going to need access to tools that will remind you you are worth it. and you're going to need some people around you that you can do that with. And don't count on Jeff Bezos and Yon-Mouth to provide you with your basic income because they're going to take all the money and build a bigger yacht. It's looking pretty clear. Yeah, it's pretty clear. They're not going to be the guess.

That's the route that we're on. But you guys are still optimistic guys right there at Stanford in the heart of Silicon Valley around all of these, you know, the next generation of the people who are going to kind of innovate. on this. You remain like optimistic about the human species surviving this? Sure. Okay. I've been teaching since the 80s, since you were in school. And there had been waves of times when the students were just interested in like, how do I get a job? And there have been ways of times when they were a little more socially interested. You know, we had the protests last year, we had the protests around the Palestinian and the Gaza thing. And so I see a lot more

student activism lately that just kind of had disappeared in the 90s and early 2000s. And I see a lot more, you know, students will say, I want to start a startup, but I want to do something meaningful that has impact, that I want to just start another food delivery company or a version of a social media thing. So they're pretty aware, and they have all these new tools where they can build almost anything instantly. And they're pretty aware of the negative impact that technologies like smartphones and other things have had on their generation. So I think they're, I think they're They're smart, they're aware, they've got great tools, and they really want to do something that has value into it, which ultimately will rest on their values, their meaning-making

ideas. And so, yeah, it'll be a bumpy ride, but I don't know, I don't know where it's going to go. I doubt that we're going to all be living in some blissful future where we don't have to work and we just, you know, hang around the park all day. I don't see that. I don't think that happening. And the other thing is, but the other thing is, it'll put more. Maybe that will force us to be more intentional about our formative communities.

It'll put more – Absolutely. It'll put my stress on building communities we care about. You know, I've been looking at different kinds of communities. And one of the communities I don't understand, but I see it all around my student, is the gaming community. People get together, put the headsets on, and they've got their thing, and they've got their team, and they've got their game. That's a community where people love to play together, and not even just to win, but just to play together. sports isn't a I'm terrible at predicting anything but if you wanted to predict what to invest in

invest in women's basketball teams professional teams invest in the second league for the for the baseball teams whatever you know the farm teams invest in things where people have to go to the stadium to be part of the community that watches the activity anything where people are gathering restaurants or you know in this increasingly secularized world that we live in where we've lost all these third spaces and after school programs, et cetera, and we're in this kind of desert of disconnection. Like there has to be a counter response to that at some point. Like we're hardwired to be together.

And it doesn't matter how amazing this technology is. That is always going to be the case. And so these are things that are, you know, the AI can't engineer out, like people getting together to sit down and how. a conversation over a meal. Well, again, you know, you have to decide what you think it means to be a person. You know, Vector Frankel, after coming out of the Holocaust, you know, develops a new school of meaning-making and psychology and concludes there are three ways you can experience a meaningful

life, through love, through achievement, or through suffering. Now, before him, Freud said, Liebent, Untarbiden, love and work. Those are the two key things that make a human life worthwhile. And he added suffering because sometimes you're in a situation. completely beyond your control where the only freedom you have is how do you bear suffering well. So if I accept that I'm about becoming, I accept that, you know, there are forces over which I have no control.

And I recognize, oh, if I'm just thinking transactionally, oh, I can't change politics, oh, I can't change AI. I guess it doesn't matter. I'm impotent. I'm powerless. I'm going to lay flat. I'm thinking transactionally. Now, I'm not saying radically accepting some of these difficult.

is easy, but it may be necessary. So one of the organizations I work with, I live in Santa Cruz, you know, on the Monterey Bay, that's the north end of the Salinas Valley, which is agricultural. So I work with the group called Digital Nest. And Digital Nest is a really fabulous job of helping brown kids crack into high tech

because there's a big color barrier in high tech. They do a really good job. Now, that means overwhelmingly they work with brown people who ICE are very interested in right now. And they're getting rated right in right and left. So there's this whole community and this whole subterfew, I can't even tell the details, because it's all secret, about how these organizations and how the families that they serve are helping one another avoid getting picked off the street. It's a very generative, loving, human-making experience in the face of a really horrible, constraining, lifestyle-roining reality. So if you accept this is what's going on, how can I participate?

So if I'm a person who recognizes I don't control everything, then I'm not first and foremost a producer. I am first and foremost a participant. So regardless of what world you find yourself in, you're participating. What's the most generative, life-giving, human-making way you can participate in the situation in which you find yourself? That's the particularity you're in or, frankly, you're stuck with. So when the plotters of the escape that Frankl was, going to participate in, finally pull it off and they're ready to go. A colleague runs into the barrack that he's in where he's tending to a patient because he's an MD as well as a psychiatrist

and says, we're going. You have to go now. And he's sitting by the bed of this inmate and he looks at the other guy and he says, no, I'll stay. And he just chooses, I'm sure all my patients and I will die here, but suffering well with them, that's life-making from me. We have choices to make. Yeah, one really quick thing. The notion of radical acceptance has nothing to do with endorsement. Accepting that the situation is out of control and people are raiding, you know, pulling folks from, you know, from silliness off the street for no good reason.

You can accept that's the reality. What can we do about it? How can we make this community safer? But there's nothing about that that's an endorsement. Right. So yeah, people often think, oh, well, if you accept something, then you have to agree with it. No, no, I don't, there's nothing about that I have to agree with it,

nothing about it that I think is okay. There's a lot of things going on in the world. I really don't think is okay, okay. And then the question is, if that's the reality I'm in, what do what's available? What can I do? What can I do that? You know, at Stanford, I can sign a petition.

You can work with this group to help these kids, you know, get a good job. You know, I can write a letter, so, one of my students who's going to be deported, can get a visa, whatever you can do. Do the thing you can do. Many people, the Buddha would say the distance between the way things are and how you want them to be, that's suffering. Yeah, of course. And you can't solve a problem that you're not accepting, you know, in its fullness, right? So it's like, can't solve a problem you're not willing to have. You're not endorsing it. You're putting yourself in a position to deal with it equanimously and not reactively.

Again, this can sound like, oh, everybody's got to be some kind of an evangelist or, you know, a savior. It's like, look, people are busy and they have hard lives. The person you talked about was me in my 40s with three kids and the job and my wife working and blah, blah, blah, blah. And where the heck will I have time to, you know, get on the, get on the, you know, write a sign and go down to the Tesla dealership and protest, right? You'll notice all those people protesting. It looked like they're retired. Yeah. They got time.

Yeah. So we're not saying, you know, pick your battles carefully, pick the things that are meaningful for you, right? And pick the things where you think you can move the needle. I think there's an important piece packed into that, which is that the Western mind is going to default to this idea that the means to the meaning that I lack is through a deeper investment in my own self-obsession. Whereas the solution is actually disabusing yourself of that self-obsession and getting into a contributory, like, service-oriented kind of approach to life, right? Like, oh, I'm lacking meaning. So I'm going to optimize my life and I'm going to, like, construct this thing.

And it's all about me and I've got my blinders and here's my thing and I'm doing this. Whereas if you just like let the blinders go and you walk into a room thinking, well, how can I make this room better for, being in it rather than looking for like what am I going to get out of this situation. That seems to me to be the real means to, you know, kind of accessing this meaning. I mean, psychology is known for a while now. If you're experiencing anxiety or depression, best thing you can do is go help somebody else. If you want to feel better, go help somebody else. So what's going on there?

Well, you know, and again, wisdom and traditions have cared deeply about service for a long time, you know, in the Canaan Abel story, you know, after, you know, the brother kills his brother, he says, you know, what am I, who am I my brother's keeper? And one of the comments of that is that, you know, the answer was so obviously yes that God didn't even answer the question. You know, like, everybody knows. Yes, you're your brother's keeper. We're in this together. We now know psychologically that consciousness is in fact collective. We say all the time in these small groups that we help people talk to each other meaningfully in that it's almost impossible to hear

yourself by yourself. So, you know, we're big fans of Dan Siegel's work in the Mindside Institute where he's talking a lot about collective consciousness and that we're much more a we than an eye. So no matter where you are in the midst of all this thing, if you start living your life in such a way that is

participating with others, your chance of experiencing self-transcendency and it gets more meaningful, it goes way up. So absolutely, it's not just about you. Now, we don't preach that real hard, We just talk about, hey, formative community really works and living coherently works. We're who I am and what I'm doing are in alignment and what I believe are in alignment. But by the time we talk to anybody, they pick up a book, they walk into our class, they even sign up for office hours.

I've already found myself in front of a teachable person. So anybody who's listening to this is open-minded enough to probably have some pretty good values. Your values are probably going to take you to a good place, and that good place is probably going to involve somebody other than you too. You can't transmit something you haven't got. Obviously, you have to walk this talk in your own lives, right? You can't have office hours and go on podcasts and write books about this unless you're actually doing this. So how does it work in your own lives? And what are the challenges that you guys face?

You're like, well, I wrote about this. I really have to do this. I really don't know how to do this. Resisting this. Well, a long time before, even when we started the class and Dave had come over and said, hey, let's do this thing. I said, okay, great. So we went over to Zotz. You remember Zots?

Sure. Went back when it was still kind of a favorite places in the world. Yeah. It's not, they really like dialed it up, didn't they? Yeah. But they didn't ruin it. Some mums bought it and they made it much fancier. But anyway, so we were sitting there with a pitcher of beer on a warm, dusty picnic table.

And I said, okay, the one thing about this is, well, one thing I said is you got to leave the Jesus stuff out of the classroom. He agreed to that. The second thing was, you know, we're asking people to do these exercises. So we have to do them. And we have to actually do them ourselves, just to understand what it feels like to wrestle with three odysseys or it feels like trying to figure out your balance dashboard better. And particularly with this book,

it was the possibility of the imposter syndrome loomed large. I spent with Sam Harris, the wake-up app, I spent a whole like nine months trying to develop a mindfulness practice, complete failure. So I'm terrible at mindfulness. If people out there are good at it, I'm sure it's of a great value.

I couldn't figure it out. And I listened to all the Sam Harris stuff. I listened to, you know, calm. I tried them all, headspace. Can't do it. I have other ways of finding myself in my own thoughts, you know, in something that isn't just, you know, repeating transactions. Most of the other stuff, you know, we do.

I just finished, I just finished rewriting all of my compass, my workview, worldview, and life view. And I found it had changed since, you know, since a year or two ago when I was. when I last did it. At the lab, I have a rotating set of fellows who come in and teach with us and then they leave. And every time they come in, we do a new set of a heavy, let's all write our values down

so we know what the culture is all about. So I actually have a chance to do most of these exercises every couple of years. And I think that keeps me honest, right? And the rest of the stuff I learned, I learned from my students confronting me with something that either didn't make sense or seemed hypocritical.

to them. And I've been married for 37 years to a lovely woman named Cynthia, and she keeps me very honest. She's just read the book, and she goes, I got some questions. You don't do this. When we talk, you don't seem present. You know, it's like, okay. I can keep you honest on that. I can work on that. Yeah. There's a great line in a John Fogarty song that I'm rather fond of in the refrain that says, I ain't no hypocrite except mostly every day. And boy, you do this kind of work. You hand out stuff recommending how people live their lives. I mean, you are asking for it. So I'm up against my own stuff all the time. And I would say one thing in particular right now. So where am I learning my way into my own book? And one of the simple little exercises is change your

vowel. Go from got to to get to. You want to flip the switch? Look at your to-do list. I've got to get this thing done. So what's the best thing an item on your to-do list can be over? with a line through it. Oh, that's great. It's gone now. Oh, that part of my life is over. It's gone for everything. Wait, you know, oh, I got to talk to ritual today.

Oh, I get to talk to ritual today. So can I flip from got to to get to, which is from over to participant? It's a complete shift in mindset. And truth be told, even though I'm pushing 73, and I've been teaching this kind of stuff for years. And over 20 years ago, I got an advanced seminary degree

in contemplative spiritual. I suck at this stuff. I mean, I am goal-oriented, deadline-driven, a transactionalist production-minded guy. So really trying to move what I call from Roel, getting impact made to Seoul, just being pressed to the moment, is a bigger shift than I want.

My number one goal this year is to live into get-to-not-got-to. Am I experiencing things as a get-to, not a got-to? And I catch myself missing it constantly. So the growth angle is still pretty steep. Yeah, it's a true. tricky thing. I mean, you talk about like the the Odyssey years, right?

Yeah, 15 to 35. If we're that first cohort, the younger people, their identity building. And the kind of council is, you know, like, hey, be wary of, you know, descending too far down the transactional lifestyle kind

of approach. And then there's mindlessly transacting. And just everything becomes about that. We get indoctrinated in that. Like, you know, just by being alive in this world, in this developed world. And then in these older years, it becomes about meaning making. You know, we've kind of ridden that wave. And it's that tension with our kind of strive for disposition.

Like who I am, my identity is this construct that's contingent upon these things that I'm doing in the world, like my position at my job or my salary or whatever it is. And I see the suffering that is created when the person can't let go of that. And they start to miss the gifts of that phase of life because they remain so fixated on, you know, continuing to tell that story. It's a real challenge. I call it the role to soul impact challenge. And this really comes up particularly in these DCI fellows, the Distinguished Career Institute people, the 35 to 4.4. 45 fellows a year that come to spend a year with us.

I happen to know one particular cohort really well because it's the one in which the woman I'm now going to marry is a member of. So I get to be... Now it's all making sense. Yeah, after 20 years of teaching at Stanford, I finally got something out of it, other than barely enough money to pay for the parking. And so I'm hanging out with this cohort. And a year and a half after they, quote, graduated from spending this year thinking deeply

about their futures, we all get together for pizza and beer, one of the, the, alumni members' houses. This is the people still in the Northern California area. And there's a conversation goes around the circle of 20-some people. And the question is simply, so how's it going? It was a year and a half after they'd finished thinking deeply about their lives. And 18 of the 20 people told some kind of a long, it was two and a half hours to get around that circle, eight minutes per person. Eighteen of the 20 stories were, essentially, I'm having a real hard time letting ago. I don't want to live the way I used to live. I'm done with that. I'm not going to go back and run the law from anymore. I'm not going to, whatever it is. But, boy, I'm, I got a lot of muscle

memory on living that way. I got a lot of muscle memory on I am the person who did that sort of thing. And I thought, boy, this is a struggle. Now, the good news is another year and a half later, so three years after they graduated, they got together again at somebody's beach house, went around the same circle, asked the same question, and almost everybody said, I think I'm getting the hang of this now. So it may take a little time. Yeah. But, you know, you're a person. You can grow. Have you guys connected with Chip Conley? Yes. Just talked to him. Modern program. Because that's did his podcast. He's a great guy. Yeah. I mean, he's amazing. And obviously, his work is just all about that. Yeah. Yeah. Modern over. The crystallis. It's not a crisis. But, you know, how do you use your,

what's it called synthesized? wisdom, like the brain changes. Arthur talks about this too. Like you have really good at like, strength to strength, yeah. Data processing to like more of a synthesized. The second curve. Where you can make all these connections

and you have this wisdom, you know, based on your experience. Fluid, yeah, fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence. And leaning into that. Which is really wisdom, yeah. And being this modern elder, this mentor, you know, for the next generation, which requires, you know,

a confrontation with your ego in order to get there. But this is really the past of meaning when you reach that stage of life. Yeah. The other shift I've seen in students, by the way, is that it used to be very much what my parents expected me to do was one of the stories I would hear.

And do I have permission to do something else? Yes, you do. But now what I hear is the parents aren't so, parents are like, hey, do whatever you want, it's fine. The students, the pressure's coming from their peers. The pressure's coming from their peers. I don't know if this is social media or something.

It's like, I got to look a certain way, I got to act a certain way, It's not coming so much from the grownups because I think they don't think the grownups, you know, have the right answer. And so it's really in that circle. And then I wonder, you know, because I'll do some work with some people, folks who are retiring, you know, I was a senior vice president of everything. I retired and on Monday morning. I'm just some guy in the line at Starbucks chatting up people because I have nothing to do. And nobody cares that I was once the senior vice president.

So that loss of identity around jobs. It doesn't just happen at that point, right? All along you've been pegging your value to the title, to the role, like you said, to the role that I had. And now I need to move to this other place of working from the soul or working from the heart. It's hard, but boy, isn't that an interesting challenge? Isn't that an interesting journey to be on? And if you're lucky enough to have the resources to do that, why would you miss it?

Why would you, you know, like the CEOs who go back, after two years and be a CEO again because they're screwing up my company, I got to go back and fix it. It's like, what are you doing, man? It's not just the egoistic person like, oh, I'm a big EVP and I aren't terribly important. And it's not that archetype only. Frankly, you've been doing this way of living for 40 years, 50 years. That's a lot of moments. And it was a bunch of momentum. It was overwhelmingly transactions. So Bill and I are both in formative communities, guys groups. Mine's 51 years old. Bill's is 35 or something like that. And so I'm the eldest, but it'll be a couple of months in my group.

And so we're all entering our 70s and two years ago. The year I was turning 70, I said, we need to talk about this. We need to talk about becoming elders. So we had a two-year-long conversation. It was carefully curated with some core questions. And the questions included, how much is enough? And enough, it wasn't so much money as it was, how much is enough contribution? I mean, can you slow down, saving the world and start trying to travel a little bit before your wife dies again?

you know, is that okay? And then probably the other most important. So how much is enough was a very important question. And the second most important question is, and what do you let him go? So, yeah, I think for those later in life, there's absolutely some letting go. And it's very freeing, or you hang out too long and then life rips it out of your hands and that's worse. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I really like this idea of the formative communities and then having this formal question, you know. and holding yourself accountable to answering it to other people, you know, that you're checking in with. I think that's like a huge piece in all of this. Myself, you know, I'm turning 60 this year. I don't want to, it's almost as if like, oh, well, you know, I'll figure that out when I, you know, when I walk out the door on my final day.

You know, it's like, no, I want to think about this now. What am I doing now? How am I making this like a multi-year transition? And so it isn't like an overnight like, wait, what happened? Like, I thought I was going to, you know, like, it's not like, oh, you buy the RV or you play golf or, you know, it's like I'm intent upon remaining engaged. Right. In things that interest me and that I'm curious about, some of which, you know, may or may not be professional. But it's not going to look like it looks like right now.

And how can I acclimate to that idea now? So it's not some kind of ego, you know, devastating blow later. Cliff transitions are hard. We were doing just the only live book talk we did at a local, you know, Kepler, so the book store in Mental Park. And then somebody said, what's your next book going to be? And Dave was like, we're not doing another book. So he hates writing.

And he's really working hard on moving from a task-driven human. You don't know anybody who's as good as Dave at getting things done. He's really good at it. From that to a soul-driven human who's just kind of in the moment. And so I'm pretty sure this is the last book because it took me two years to talk him into each of the books and that's going to happen this time because he's going to be on a different journey.

But as you said, it doesn't happen overnight. You prepare yourself for this, right? If you're looking ahead, you're like, and a really interesting question is, what am I willing to leave behind in terms of my identity, my position, you know, everybody knows me or whatever it is? What are I willing to leave behind in order to make space for what's coming.

And being in radical acceptance of what's coming. Yeah. I think we, you know, our culture is such that we just, well, you know, on some level, we all are convincing ourselves that we're not going to actually die. That's right. That's right. And this is not serving us. The number of billionaires who are trying to live forever is an example of the sort of narcissism.

Don't get me started. In our culture. But I have fully accepted there is a lot less runway in front of me. than there was behind. We do an exercising class at the last of the class. We call it the 25th reunion. We say, hey, imagine you. You're 23 years.

Imagine you're now 47. And you're back for your Stanford reunion, 25th year. And we're going to get up and talk about stuff. And we got them through three different conversations. And the last time we did this, I realized, wait a minute, for 25 years, I'll be 95. 94. Oh, shit. I'll probably be dead.

head. And then I actually, I told my co-instructor, I need to leave the room for a second. I walked out and I tried to deal with it. Now my reframe is, no, no, no, I bought this new exoskeleton. I'm great. I'm running around. It's fantastic. But yeah, when you... Built by one of your students. Yeah, we're built by one of your students. But when you actually start, you know, accepting that, yeah, you know, probably there's going to be an end. But can I live all the way up to that last moment and go, oh, how interesting? I didn't know. Yeah, I think the radical acceptance, it liberates you and gives you permission to engage with those years more intentionally.

I mean, I've heard you tell the story of like the woman who came to you, who, I don't know, she was like 52 or something like that. I was like, I'm thinking about going to medical school. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a perfect example of maybe just tell the story, like how you forecast out, like, all right, well, how long do you think you're going to live and let's reverse engineering. Yeah, this is just, you know, what's crazy or what's not? and how do you think about things? I give a talk.

And this 54-year-old woman comes up and says, you know, can I ask you a question? I said, sure. Well, I'm thinking about going to medical school. I've always wanted to do that. And I think I have the time. But all my friends are saying, I'm too old and I'm crazy and it's stupid, you know. And I said, well, look, let's just run. I mean, so very quickly, you know, how old people in your gene pool live?

Well, you know, if you look around my family, you know, I'll probably make it to a 90. you know, 90, maybe 95. I said, okay, now if you're active person, how long do you want to be working? Well, probably 80 at least. And I said, okay, so, okay, so we got 26 years. Okay. Now, so let's say it takes a year for you to get ready to apply to medical school because you're out of practice, fine.

It takes a year to get in. That's two. It takes four years to go through medical school to get your MD to become an intern. Okay, that's six. By the way, after internship, you go into residency. You're doing medicine. Most medicine is done by residence. You're now a full-fledged doctor.

nephew who's a resident, doing medicine all day long. So, you know, in six years you're doing medicine, you finish your specialty in another three, four, five, depending which one you want to get. So, you know, now I'm 11 years in, you're now 65. You've got 15 more years between then when you're going to retire from being a doctor to do the work you're doing. By the way, if we take a quick look back at the last 15 years of your life, would you say you were largely wasting your time? Oh, no, I think those years kind of matter to me. That's what we're talking about here. So are you crazy? I don't think so. No. Just decide how you want to choose to think about this. Yeah, that's an incredible reframe. You know, the idea that, you know, you would entertain going to

med school in your mid-50s. I mean, it seems insane. And then when you, you articulate it that way, you're like, oh, well, yeah, why not? Yeah, this could work. It says who. You know, I mean, my sister got her PhD in her early 60s. She'd been doing a PhD's job as running a graduate school for many, many years with a master's degree and finally decided to get the degree she should have had. The woman in front of her getting stalled with her PhD was 83. Wow. There are no rules. There are just perceptions.

It's up to you. So this answers the question. Like, is it ever too late? No. No. Like, okay, I just signed up to do a motorcycle tour with my brother-in-law in Morocco. I ride a BMW GS-1250, which weighs a little over 600 pounds. I can still barely pick it up if I drop it.

I kind of have a rule if you can't pick it up, you shouldn't ride it. I'm not sure I'm riding that bike when I'm 85, maybe a smaller bike. So there might be some things that go away, but, you know, the rules are a lot more fungible than they let you to believe.

I'm kind of hoping he's not riding a motorcycle when he's 85, because I love him dearly and I don't have to... I might be bad at it. You guys are very fun, interesting pairing. You know, like the devout man, and the atheist, the painter and the extrovert, Santa Cruz. It's an interesting.

It all works. But I think, you know, just as we kind of bring this to a conclusion, it's not too late. And it's also not indulgent to, you know, consider a life of meaning. I think for a lot of people, it's like, well, that's just, you know, how nice for you. Like, what an extravagance. Like, I'm just gonna keep doing my thing. Or, you know, I got enough meaning, you know, I'm chasing the whatever.

Yeah. And that's just fine. But this notion of not only giving, you know, everybody permission, like, no, you deserve to have a life of meaning. It's available to you. In the life you're already in. It's not too late. And you can find it within, you know, it's like,

this is not about like, chase your, quit your job and like, become worse. Yeah. Yeah. This is something that you can, you know, build into your life on a moment. to moment basis, free of charge. Right.

And you will feel, feel, you'll feel better. You'll, your, your curiosity will kind of peak and kind of start, start activating again. And you'll find, you'll find yourself in the world in a very different sort of mindset. You know, I went to school and back when dinosaurs from the campus long before you. But I found this thing called design, which was really, cool. And it was built around this idea, we'll study engineering, art, and psychology. We'll put it all together and we'll make things that people want. And that's been a lot of fun. And it's an inherently curious thing to do. Like, hey, can you come up with a better one of these? Hey, can you come up with a

better one of these? It's like, yeah, maybe, let's try it. So once you get in that mindset, the designer's mindset, and you realize, oh, there are no rules. Nobody made up any rules. There's no rules for what microphones need to look like. There's no rules for what my life needs to look like. There's some things that probably... There's some constraints. There's some constraints. And there's some things that, you know, probably shouldn't do that if, you know, it might not work, might be too risky. But I bet I could try stuff, right? And I bet there's more out there than I thought. And if I just start with these designers mindsets of wonder, curiosity, availability, let's see what happens.

Let's give it a try. Yeah. I mean, you start, look, you exist. You deserve to be here. you're a human being. You deserve the entire human experience. Good chance if you're like a lot of modern people, you're cutting some of that short lately, which probably mostly isn't your fault. It's a systemic habit that society and largely capitalism have invited you into.

So we're just saying, here's an invitation. You can encounter more of the fully human experience in the life you already have. You deserve it. Go get it. And if you do, you actually start becoming more yourself. You become more whole, and then it gets even better. More of yourselves.

Yes. Or of yourselves, yeah. Well put. And for the person who is being newly introduced to these ideas, who's stuck, who's trying to find their way forward, whose curiosity is piqued by, you know, just a discussion of the possibility of meaning, like what is a practice or, a first thing that that person can do to begin this journey. Well, I'll do wonderglasses. There's an exercise called put on your wonder glasses. Very simple.

You walk outside, nature is a great place to do this. Walk outside and you see a plant or a tree. And you go, okay, my transactional glasses are on. That's a tree. I have an app. I pull it out. I can tell you what kind of, that's a Monterey pine. Fine.

They need to trim it. Yeah, a bunch of stuff with the tree. And then it go, all right, now put on your curiosity glasses. Oh, Monterey Pine. I wonder what a Monterey Pine is doing. in Southern California. This is in Monterey. That's interesting.

And who put that there? And why did it grow there? So that's the kind of curiosity lens. It's very interesting. And now put on your wonderglasses. The final thing is the wonderglass is like, look at that tree. That tree started from, you know,

something that was nothing. I'll bet the biomass of that tree weighs 2,000 pounds. How the hell did that happen? And why is the Monterey Pine, you know, needle, so different from the tree next to it that's a different tree. And isn't it wonderful that I live in a place like this where nature is all around me?

We haven't torn it all down yet. And I think I'll go to the beach. So put on your wonder glasses, go from transaction to curious to wonder, and see what happens. Take five minutes. I'm going to, because you mentioned, this is maybe a person who doesn't know anything,

maybe they're feeling a little bit stuck. You know, they're in situations they can't do a lot about, so I can talk about coherency sightings. So you've got to do a little bit of homework, do the compass exercise, which means just simply writing down, what's my story,

what do I believe about the work world, what do I believe about the universe, you know, where am I really coming from? And then with that in mind, you now have an idea of who it is that you are. And whatever you're doing, particularly in the workplace, as constraining as that may be,

there are opportunities when you get to act yourself out authentically. So we call a coherency siting, catching yourself in the act of acting just like you. Maybe that particular action didn't create a result yet, but hey. The mask came off for a moment. I was acting just like Rich Roll for five whole minutes at that particular moment in the staff meeting or what have you. I'll give you an example.

So we gave this talk at this bookstore a couple of weeks ago. And one of the people who was there was Denise, Denise Bennett-Sar. So a woman who volunteered and worked with us for a couple of years, a couple of years ago. And she walked up and just said, I really love the book. And, you know, I just have to thank you guys again. Those years I got to work with you

were some of the best years on mine. And I really cared by giving people an opportunity to do what gives them aliveness. And we gave Denise a chance to experience some aliveness that she's carried on since that. That encounter was about 30 seconds. That's a moment of coherency for me. So I caught myself in the act.

of acting just like the Dave Evans I'm trying to be. And then patch yourself in the back a little bit. Well, actually, I have you know. And it's meaning-making to find yourself in the experience of being yourself. I teared up a bit, actually. Yeah. So give yourself a chance to catch yourself in the act

of doing it right and being you. It's called a coherency setting. And no matter how sucky that job may be, there are some moments when you're executing it in an authentic way, and you deserve to affirm yourself for doing that. I helped Gladys, you know, clear the thing on the copier. She was freaking out.

She had the thing she had to do for a boss. I helped to clear the copier, got it working, took five minutes of my time. Right. She's super happy. She's going to take the copies to where they need to go. I'm the kind of person who notices when somebody else needs some help. That's all. Simple. We're so reluctant to be earnest, but that kind of earnestness is the connective tissue.

Yeah. You know, and that simple gesture, you know, of her expressing the meaning that she experienced with you guys then became a meaningful moment for both of you. Like that's how it works in that way. That's a beautiful story. If you're available to it. We make the offer and everybody says,

that's outrageous, make the offer for all of your students, you get office hours for life. Come back anytime, I don't care, 10 years, 20 years later, come back, and they think it's a great offer. And most of them are doing it. I'm having dinner tonight with a kid. I taught 20 years ago. Yeah.

But we do it because they come back and they tell us a story. And that's the payoff. Like, what have you been doing for the last 10 years? Well, I did this and this and this and this. But I remember this one thing from class where you could reframe a problem. And I've been doing that. And it really works. Oh, thank you.

Thank you very much. Somebody was listening. The book is great. You guys are providing a much-needed public service right now. I said at the outset, you really are meeting the moment. You know, I think there is a craving and a need and a desire to understand how to engender our lives with meaning. And you're providing this roadmap and this, you know, this way forward, this solution. So thank you for coming and sharing with me today. Appreciate it. Well, thank you. And you didn't need any of these notes. You were totally,

you were totally in a little bit. You know, one day I'll like, I'll like leave them in the, you know, like, it's just the safety net. You know what I mean? I get it. You guys made it easy. And, and you forced me to be more president. Like I had to like, you know, talking about like walking the talk. I was like, okay, can I just be here? Cool. Cheers. Thanks a lot. Peace. Thank you guys.