TrueLife - Jason Voiovich - Booze, Babe, & the Little Black dress

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/In a career that spans more than 25 years, I have launched hundreds of new products – everything from medical devices, to virtual healthcare systems, to non-dairy consumer cheese, to next-generation alternatives to the dreaded “cone of shame” for pets, to sex aides for cows (really!) I am a graduate of both the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota, and I have completed post-graduate studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management.My formal training has been invaluable, but I credit my true success to growing up in a family of artists, immigrants, and entrepreneurs. They taught me how to carefully observe the world, see patterns before others notice them, and use those insights to create new innovations. History is my favorite way to observe the world. I believe the people from the past have plenty to teach us about the challenges and opportunities we face today.https://jasontvoiovich.com/ One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearist through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you're having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds are singing. I hope you got to wake up in the arms of the person you love the most. love the most. And if you didn't, well, hey, listen to the True Life podcast, because we can bring

a little bit of warmth over here. We got a great show for you today. In a career that spans more than 25 years, Jason has launched hundreds of new products, everything from medical devices to virtual health care systems to non-dairy consumer cheese to next generation alternatives for the dreaded cone of shame for pets to sex eights for cows. What? Jason is a graduate of both the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota and has completed postgraduate studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His formal training has been invaluable, but he credits his true success to growing up in a family of artists, immigrants, and entrepreneurs. They taught him how to carefully observe the world, see patterns before others notice them, and use those insights

to create new innovations. History is his favorite way to observe the world, and he believes that people from the past have plenty to teach us about the challenges and opportunities we face today. He's the author of several books. One is Booze, Babe, and the Little Black Dress, how innovators of the Roaring 20s created the Consumer Revolution, and marketer-in-chief, how each president sold the American idea. He's also the co-founder of Agent Zero. And Jason, I'm so stoked you're here today. We're going to figure out why you write about history.

What's going on, my friend? How are you? I'm doing well. It is a chilly, just about winter day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and where you are seems so, so, so much better. And I think that's something unique about Hawaii, generally, is everyone in the rest of the United States wants to be where you are right now. If we can just get a little, that's one of the, I love to talk with you, but just the, just to be in Hawaii for an hour, or just imagine that I'm in Hawaii for an hour is life affirming for me. So thank you. Well, you're here now. You know, we are, we are exchanging the vibes through the, through the interwires over here. And it is. It's a beautiful place. I think anytime you're really surrounded by nature. in a in a setting like this and we're free from billboards over here and the the pornographic nature of stuff screaming for your attention which i think plays a giant role in in focus and clarity and understanding so yeah hawai is such a beautiful place and often i think that some of the best teachers are a waterfall or a battered coastline and there's plenty of them over here to learn from so yeah yeah we're surrounded by nature here too it's just Most of it's brown and dead.

And it won't wake up again until spring. It makes people in Minnesota really appreciate spring. That's why we're so happy about it and why we're so joyful at that time. But we've got to make it through that and we find things to enjoy during the winter. Do you think that there's some, it seems to me that maybe there's a life lesson there. Like here in Hawaii, everyone's really laid back because the climate is the way it is and food literally falls from the trees. However, it does seem, much like in life when you're close to death,

you come to some real realizations and you are very thankful. So when the seasons change and the winter comes and you're freezing, like maybe on some level it makes you more thankful or more grateful. Like people in Minneapolis are like some of the nicest people on the planet. I think so too. I think there have been lots of folks from Hawaii though who I find also quite happy and thankful and grateful as well. Yeah, you can, you know, somewhere around February or March,

ask us again how grateful and thankful we are. And we'll let you know. This is, we're recording this right, a couple of days before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, so that's on the mind. But somewhere around middle of February, right at the time where Valentine's Day is there and we're wondering, why would you put Valentine's Day at the, Every time you talk to someone from Minnesota, Wisconsin, this upper Midwest area, they ask them, why on earth is Valentine's Day in the middle of February?

Maybe it's about that, like, hey, we've got a, you know, let's, this is the time to kind of snuggle with the person you love. Maybe that's part of it. I don't know. I see Brad there, welcome from greetings from Minneapolis. I love that. We're all here. we'll make it through. We do this every time.

We make it through every time. That's interesting. I think it's a great segue. A lot of people say that the best predictor of future behavior is past relevant behavior. And you have an incredible way of writing about history. Maybe you can talk to us about how that affinity came to be. You spoke a little bit right in the introduction. You referenced your family of artists and entrepreneurs and giving you this lens to see patterns

differently. That sounds fascinating. Maybe we could start right there. I think that, you know, like most people who ended up writing history, we started by being consumers of it and readers of history, you know, and, you know, just what fascinates me about good history is that it's so human and it's so relevant. And the more you read, not the surface stuff, you know, the too much history today, George, is, especially if you've taken it in college or high school, it's names, dates, places, a lot of wars, like, here's the battle of this, the battle of that. And, you know, for some people, that's really relevant, but for most people, that just doesn't, like, that doesn't really connect with their day-to-day life. And, but the more you read about it,

the more you kind of dig in and you read really good history, you start to, you start to see people, you start to see people in it. And you start to see, you know, historian David McCullough, who just passed away, had a wonderful way of putting this. He said, you know, people in the past didn't walk around saying, well, look at how great it was to live in the past. You know, you know, they, in our past, they're living in their present. And, you know, they are real human beings with real hopes and dreams and fears and to really understand what it was like. He wrote about the revolutionary area in the United States quite a bit, you know, kind of late 18th, you know, late 18th century.

And what's really interesting about that time is you start to get a sense for, you know, he would have the primary sources, people's diaries. People wrote a lot more back then because we didn't have TV. You didn't have radio. Printing was hard. you had to go to a printing press and that it took a lot of skill. You know, so people wrote a lot of letters. And you realized when you read, you actually read the letters.

How much people are afraid of like what their life was like, you know, that they lived in mortal dread of catching a cold or getting a fever. You know, and that all of them had, you know, they might have had eight, nine kids and maybe only two or three of them had survived from that time. And they're not all depressing stories like that. But, you know, it really changes your perspective on this is, these are real people. You can start to kind of put yourself there. You can start to think, well, gosh, how would I react to that? And that's that little spark of curiosity and that spark of connection with people who are gone a long time. And it makes you think, I want to learn about why they thought that way.

I want to learn about what was their life like where they reacted to this situation in that way. And that's kind of where it started for me. I, you know, for, you know, since my, you know, early 20s as a kid, I grew up, you know, with, you know, my parents and grandparents, you know, they would read history. They didn't read business books. There were no business books for, you know, Cuban immigrants coming over. They read history. And those are a lot of the books I grew up with. then in my 20s and 30s, I was a huge consumer of history.

And I think the real, one of the real catalysts to help me start to actually write and give back was, and some of your listeners may have, if they're into history, they know who this is. Dan Carlin, Dan Carlin's a pretty famous podcaster. He is the host of the program, hardcore history and its various spinoffs. And I think like a lot of people, he inspired. me, you said he's not a historian. I'm not a historian. But we have a perspective. We have a point of view and we can share that with people. And that was really started me on the path to say, you know what,

I can give back maybe some small bit I can contribute back to the world, all of that, all that I've been able to be gifted and take in. So that's a long way of saying, I felt like I wanted to give it back, at least some of it. I love it. I think that all, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful that people get to a point where they can give back. Because I think everybody can contribute. And maybe when you look back at history, you're beginning to see the echoes of people

in your own life. It seems to me when you look back at good history and you really get into a story, even like sometimes fiction too for me does this, But if you can really put yourself in the position of the person that was facing this thing, you can really begin to see a lot of yourself in that character. In some ways, it helps us shift our perspective and understand, wow, this person, I can identify with this person because they're going through something very similar to me, even though it's in a time I'm not aware of.

Is that a reflection that kind of drew you to the history as well? I think it is. I think the, what's that old saying about, you'll quit watching a movie if you don't care about the characters, right? Or you'll quit reading a book if you don't care. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's something that, you know, historians generally, you know, can learn from fiction and fiction writers is that fiction really focuses on you, you know, those experiences and those kind of really human experiences and how to kind of bring that to life. the thing is that, you know, there are so many of those experiences that are real from real people and kind of real human experience that, you know, I believe that there would be very little need for fiction if we just told better history of better people. There are so many things. There's so, there's such fascinating stories that we just don't tell them enough. We don't, we don't tell them that way because, you know,

historians are working to get it right. They both have their place, right? That there's a, you know, there's kind of a historical accuracy and then there's a narrative. I just don't believe those are two separate things. That I think you can strive for both of those things. I think there are great examples of striving for both of those things. And I think the more we do, I just feel like the more people can see themselves

in people in the past, the good, the bad, the ugly, the better people we are. I feel like I'm a better person for reading history and kind of understanding. I'm certainly smarter, certainly more gracious, but I think better understanding of others, you know, situations that you see and kind of, you know, it's not that you tolerate bad things that are happening or injustice in the world, but you can better understand. And it gives you hope that, you know what, yeah, this bad thing happens. But you know what? We got through it. And here are the people that got us through it. And, you know, if they did it, we can do it. It's okay. You know, we made it through. I think history is a deeply hopeful sort of exercise. When you think about what our ancestors needed to get through in an average day just to survive, you know, you, you know, I'm sitting inside a room. It's about seven.

72 degrees. It's about 30 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but I'm perfectly comfortable. You know, I'm well fed, dressed. You know, I don't have to kind of, you know, I'm not sitting outside. Even just a couple of hundred years ago, you know, I would have been cold and outside probably two to three hundred years ago. even go back 500 years ago or a thousand years ago, you know, think about what human life was like then compared to what it is now. We've got it pretty good. We can make it. We can make it through this. When I say to you, history is the nightmare from which I'm trying to awaken.

What does that make you think of? You know, it's a lot of ways to interpret that. The interpretation I like best is related, the related saying that, you know, people who don't understand their history are doomed to repeat it, that history repeats itself. And that all of the bad things that have happened are destined and doomed to kind of happen again because we're not learning or not paying attention. Maybe there's some truth to that. I think that what is, the more you read about history, though, the more you realize that it is, it doesn't repeat, it rhymes. And it rhymes because the circumstances are different, but we are the same. People are the same.

We have the same kind of emotional makeup. We are still, you know, hurtful and jealous and angry and bitter. We're also hopeful and we're also kind and we're all of those things and we're complicated, complicated creatures. And those sort of things are universal. And as, you know, history continues to march on and we have new things, we have artificial intelligence, we have electric cars, we have social media. You know, those things aren't new. You know, if you thought like, oh, people are, people are so mean on social. media today.

You know, you can go back to the, you know, we talked about those revolutionary days where, you know, you look at the kind of things that Ben Franklin would say about, you know, his political opponents in the, you know, in the colonies. It's just as bitter and nasty as anything you'd read on social media today. So that's not new. Now, we have a lot more people. You can see a lot more of it because so many more people have access. to it, but it's not new.

We were, we are all those good things and all those bad things. We just have different ways to look at it now. I'm not sure if I answered your question. You just, I like good questions. Those are my favorite things because you don't know what the answer is, do you? I love good questions. I agree. And there's such a great jump-off point for an interesting conversation.

And I'm often reminded of when I think, think about history. Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History a while back, and it was to deal, it was talking about how maybe this is the way moving forward. But I like that title, The End of History. And what it means to me is like the end of whose history. When I think about the end of history, for me, maybe it's because I'm older in my life, but for me, it's the end of history as I know it. You know, when you talk about history as being complicated and diving into history and seeing some people try to get it right and other people have a narrative, Well, there is no right.

And my history, moving to Hawaii from Caucasian acres and coming over here to Hawaii, where I'm just immersed in all this Eastern culture, I realize that the history that I was taught is far different from the history that other people were taught. And my history is not normally right. It's just different. But someone else has an erratically different interpretation of the history that happened. And so when we can have all these different histories together, you could see why people get upset.

You could see why people fight about that's not what happened. this is what happened. But in reality, they all happen. So history seems to be this echo of reflections that all people contribute to. And that's what I think of when I, when I think of Francis Fukuyama's book, The End of History, for me it means the end of the history that I know. But history is everybody's history, right? Do you think that that's kind of the flashpoint for a lot of the confrontations we see today as people are fighting over history with maybe God being a real estate agent sometimes or you know what I mean? It's, you know, before we, Before we started the recording, you had a wonderful quote from George Orwell that I think sums that up perfectly.

You know, the, you know, those who, you know, those who, you know, those who, you know, what is it, those who control the future, you know, control the past. you know it's it's really you know if you want to control kind of what goes forward you have to kind of control that that narrative the story that people tell each other or the you know history is written by the winners you know and that that is often true you know how I think about that is you know, there is a narrative in history that I think sometimes is explicit like that, where it is trying to create a narrative moving forward. And that's not new. Every culture has a narrative creation element to it.

That's part of the definition of cultures. You have to create a shared story. Yes. By definition, that shared story will be different than someone else's shared story because they have a different culture. That doesn't mean that different is bad. It just means that every culture is going to try to define an in-group and an out-group. And, you know, that shared history will define that.

Well, by its very nature, it will be different. And just by its very nature, if you think about the totality of all experiences everywhere, and this is kind of a metaphysical and a physics sort of question, the totality of everything is just unknowable at a fundamental kind of particle physics sort of level. it's unpredictable and unknowable. There's just so much going on. Yeah. That as humans, we have a limited ability to, you know, to kind of take all that in.

The best metaphor I have for that is kind of the pyramid metaphor in any sort of organizational structure. A lot of your corporate listeners will understand this. They think, well, the CEO, the person at the top is going to have the most knowledge of anyone in the company. And actually, the opposite is true. that by nature you have to kind of filter information. Every successive layer in an organization filters. So by the time you get to the top, the CEO is probably the dumbest person in the entire organization

who knows the least about what's going on. It's only natural that out of the totality of human experience, we tend to remember those things that are interesting, that are compelling, that are novel. That's not unusual. we are, our brains are primed to work that way. That we will, you know, in journalism they call it if it bleeds, it leads. You know, that there are thousands upon thousands of stories.

I'm looking outside my window right now and there happens to be a Starbucks out there. Thousands upon thousands of people go through that drive-thru every day. I can promise you that because I see them. That line never ends. You know, but is that remarkable? Does that make the front page of the news? is that on even on social media that sometimes like, hey, I got a cup of coffee. Great.

But it's only really notable if it's novel in some way or different in some way. So I'm not sure that there are a lot of explanations to kind of that, you know, defining history and defining different histories is somehow, somehow, you know, meant to kind of of, you know, explicitly, you know, kind of take away someone else's history. And I'm not sure that sometimes that's true. Sometimes that is absolutely true. We are trying to erase things. But it's not always true. And I think there's both of those things working together that sometimes there are people who want to erase a history to be able to erase a culture. And some folks just like, hey, I'm only really concerned about me. We are all our own favorite subject.

So things about other people don't tend to be as interesting to us. That is just human nature. So when you put those two things together, I think the job of the historian is to break that pattern to explicitly go after the things that are being either explicitly or implicitly forgotten about. It's your job as a historian or someone who's telling historical stories to go find those that aren't getting told. or that might be forgotten if they aren't told. I think that's part of how I see my role is, you know, in Booze Babe and the Little Black Dress, there are stories about people like Al Capone that people remember

or Coco Chanel that people remember. But there are also stories in there about people like Clarence Birdseye, who people might recognize that name for the frozen vegetables. But they don't know a whole lot about birdsye. They don't know a whole lot about, you know, a lot of the other characters in that book who may just get forgotten about if their stories aren't told. And I think it's important for people who tell history to dig a little deeper than kind of the standard narrative. And it's not about trying to break the narrative or trying

to say that your history as a this type of person is invalid. That's not it. It's just, as you said, there are lots of other histories. And what could we learn? How much richer could our experience be if we understood more about them? And I think it is. I think the more you understand about it, the more you learn, the more interesting and rich, the more different you see people are and the same you see people are. And it's just more complicated and it's more interesting that way. I think standard narratives and story arcs are a little boring. Honestly, I'm not interested in in a lot of that anymore. I want to see things that are different and not the usual thing. I think that's that novelty is new. It's is important.

I love it. I like to there's so much complexity involved. And I like to think that maybe, maybe we're moving past the hero's journey into something that is more complicated, right? Like we've thought about the hero's journey and we've had the hero's journey. It's beautiful and I love it. Like it goes to my heart. Like who doesn't love the Homer's Iliad in the Odyssey?

Come on, who doesn't love Star Wars? You kid, we've got a person you'll love Star Wars. But maybe there's more to it. Maybe we're beginning to start a new journey. Maybe there's a new chapter. Maybe there's a new mythology evolving right now, and that was the end of history. I'm curious, what do you think about the myths in which we were brought up on and the possibility of a new mythology unfolding right now? And what does that look like?

No, it's a wonderful, you know, in, when you talk about the hero's journey generally, that particular story arc, that's a very, it's kind of a Greco-Rexam. Roman Western SIV sort of story arc for sure. And it's been kind of told and retold because it works. However, there's good evidence that people tire of it. You know, if you took a look just recently here at the, I know some of your folks will kind of geek out on this. I totally get it. That's okay.

And for somebody who are not onto this, I'm using this. part of how I write history is I want to connect it to things that you you've seen out there so it seems relevant. But I'm going to bring up the Marvel Cinematic Universe for exactly that purpose. And if you think about it, why was that so popular from 2008 to about 2020? And why is it not so much anymore? And there are a lot of reasons for both of those things. but the, you know, the big reason, and there's a lot of criticism about it, but the big reason is it told very good hero's journey sort of, you know, sort of stories. And it kind of wrapped up and the hero went home triumphant at the end.

And to kind of keep that story going, it's kind of like, you know, the Iliad and the Odyssey part two, who wants to, who wants to see that it's done. You know, that story's done. We want to move on to something else. but I think where where you start to look at a world that is becoming more multicultural. There are a lot of bad things that happen there, but there are a lot of good things, too, that, you know, Western audiences start to learn about Eastern story arcs and different ways to think about that, and vice versa. You're starting to see more of a melding of different types of stories that you might

that might have only been told in China or might have only been told in Japan, you know, especially about of the, you know, the popularity of Japanese comics and stories in the United States, I think as an indication, George, that there is a hunger for a different type of story that doesn't fit that kind of,

you know, hero kind of narrative and that simple kind of three, four, five part arc. that can be well done, but is a little trite and a little tired. You know, people want to see these stories that don't fit that, that are either, you know, different tragic ends, you know, people want to see something a little, see something different. So I see a lot of hope in some of that growing popularity of other cultures coming in. And that mix, I think, is what will help us, you know, kind of get past some of that boring.

I think we're at a really boring era in the early 2020s in art right now. You know, whether that's film, whether it's music, whether it's kind of high or low art. It's boring right now. And I challenge anyone to come back to me. I'm sure there will be examples of, you know, kind of art that people are really excited about. But at the pop culture level, it's boring, isn't it? And we want things that are different and unique, and we want to see new things. But I don't think we know what we want to see yet.

I think there's a lot of experimentation. You know, that happened, frankly, during it, you know, to kind of bring it back to a historical era, we saw the same thing happen in the 1920s. That's why I'm so fascinated by that era, that that was the era that basically brought jazz to, you know, that became kind of America's classical music, as Ken Burns would say it,

you know, the documentarian. Basically, there are a number of factors that pushed jazz out of kind of the clubs of New Orleans and into St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit. New York, Memphis, and kind of brought this kind of new style of music that was adapted into blues, was adapted into rock and roll, was adapted into hip-hop, was adapted into pop music, that for the past hundred years, we have been living with the legacy musically of a very small group of people that were this kind of mix of Appalachian, African and Caribbean sort of musicians

at that time, improvisational, high energy. But a lot of that has started to work. We're in this era where we're ready, we've had some of those same kind of cultural shakeups, right, with the pandemic. We had a pandemic in 1918, 1919, as well. You know, we've had huge cultural shakeups. And no one knew in the early 1920s how all that was going to kind of crystallize into something new. But I am really hopeful that this decade will bring us something new that we haven't seen before, that will really be able to kind of give us something, some new energy, new art. Because art drives a lot of that culture, doesn't it? It drives innovation.

It drives, you know, the same improvisational mindset drove business. innovation as well during the 1920s. And those connections are all over the place. And we just, I don't know what the future of the next five to seven years looks like, but I'm kind of excited for it. I'm excited for what we might see. Yeah. I love the idea of the 20s, like the 20s, the 1920s or the 2020s.

There's so much, you know, we spoke earlier and you said maybe history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. I like to think that it moves in a helical model. And if we can look back at the 20s and the things that were happening there and the things we see happening here, when I look at the youth movement today, and I talk to some business leaders

and some people that are looking for jobs, there's such a more meaningful search going on. Younger people have such a more meaningful search. They've seen their parents, whether they're boomers or exers, get up and go work for a multinational corporation. suck the life out of them and they don't want to do that like they're like I'd rather work for free and do something meaningful and like to me you know like that that's that's so inspiring to me when I

I had a conversation recently with a gentleman I was a UPS driver for 26 years and I was speaking with another guy and he's like these new kids they come in they don't have any loyalty and like they just I'm like yeah why why would they why would they have any loyalty they're going to do the I hope they do less I hope they do less work here like I got all mad at me he's like well well you know you have good work I think I'm like, why should they? Like, what are you giving to them? Like, what kind of, and beyond that, what kind of example are we setting? What are we doing getting up and going, doing something we hate every day?

We should stand up for ourselves and give these kids something to live up to. So, but that's what I see when I see these 20s right now. Like, I see a generation of younger people that are thirsting for meaning, that are going to write incredible novels that are going to live a life that's meaningful, and it's going to be inspiring. And that is where the catalyst for change is going to come from. And that does come from artwork. Like maybe you could speak to the idea of the catalyst of change, whether it was jazz or the 20s in this explosion that happened and maybe try to draw some parallels to today.

You know, what I see that's interesting about the 20s at that time, we had a pandemic, major war during that time. You know, the World War I wasn't as big of a deal to the United States as it was to the European continent. for sure. There's not even close. But there was a war. During that war, the Wilson administration created something called the Committee for Public Information. Basically, what it did is it trained the advertising and public relations industry because

he wanted to sell war bonds. That was the big idea is to fund this effort because we didn't have the same kind of taxation regime that we have today. So we needed the money to do this. So you needed to find some way to do it. So we trained all of these people on how to do this thing. We had people coming out of the war who needed to find work and needed to do things. We had this kind of booming economy.

We had all of this new kind of innovation happening, all of these kind of cultural changes happening at that time. This was the time of, you know, migration out of the south, you know, from, you know, the previously enslaved people in the south of moving north, moving west. We had this tremendous kind of cultural upheaval on so many different levels. When you, it's kind of like, you know, you kind of, you know, think about the snow globe, just shaking the whole thing up and it's going to resettle in a different way. You know, the snow globe, the problem with the analogy is the snow always settles in the same place

that it was before. This, you're, you shook everything up right at the end of the prior decade and you knew things were going to happen. You just didn't know exactly what. It was really unpredictable. People really didn't know what was going to happen. And I think we have a lot of parallels to today of, you know, back in the 1920s, it was people moving into the cities.

And it was, especially a lot of women moving into the cities. cities, a lot of women moving into the cities alone for the first time. You know, most people don't realize that they have this kind of 1950s image of women in the home and that that's kind of how it was. In reality, you know, a lot of the single women moving off the farms into the city, they didn't find husbands the first week they were there. You know, they just, most of them were working. They were, you know, they were, you know, they were, you know, they were finding work outside the home because they had to. So you have this tremendous kind of, you know, liberation there, people with their own money. It just passed the suffrage, you know, the women's suffrage amendment,

so the political power. You had the, you know, the 19th amendment, you know, the 18, 19th, 20th amendments right around that time, Prohibition Amendment during that time. So you had this, all of these different kind of cultural upheaval during that time, whenever you do that, you're going to create the kind of, you know, environment right for kind of recombination and change. It's going to be sloppy, messy, good and bad. And I think we're seeing the same thing. So it's interesting. You mentioned something about young people kind of searching for meaning and not really wanting to kind of put up with the same, you know, kind of work environment. You know, what's interesting is that we see that of Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, too,

the biggest single change. I'm involved in a business that works on this. For the biggest single changes we see in the workforce today is GenXers and baby boomers leaving the corporate workforce and becoming independent, becoming fractional contractors, selling their service. services to multiple employers and kind of giving the big middle finger to corporate America and saying, you know what, we don't have to be 25 anymore to be fed up. We're not going to take it anymore. We're going to, you know, we're going to chart our own path. You know,

we don't want to end up how many people have I talked to, you know, professionally, where they're in their 50s and they got laid off and they can't find another job. And, And they're just emotionally wrecked. And they, they're so smart. They have so much to offer yet no way to deliver that to the marketplace. And you think about what, there are a lot of bad things that places like Uber and Airbnb and DoorDash and all of those kind of services did to the economy in a lot of ways. There's good and there's bad. There's always good.

But one of the good things it did was it told. people like, hey, wait a second, I don't need to go work. Like, the idea of a job is not the center guiding force of my life. I think that's one of the biggest things that we're seeing right now is a reset from our identities being tied to what we do, to our identities being self-determined. And think about that, too, with the transgender movement. People are very passionate about that on both sides of it. But if you take a step back from that, you start to realize what people are really doing is they're saying, I'm not going to be locked in anymore to this idea of work or gender.

I'm going to throw out all of that. I'm going to determine what I want for myself. Ultimately, as kind of an independent sort of person and someone who values choice as the foundation of ethics, I have to celebrate that sort of independence. that people will chart their own course on what they want to do with their lives. That part is not going to kind of come quietly into the daylight. And we, I think the biggest thing as we see in the 1920s had a lot of conflict, social conflict, a ton of social conflict, very parallel to what you see now. we will not this won't settle down for a while this will get the more we kind of shake up the

apple cart and people determine what they want to do and reset how they want to do we can expect more social turmoil over the next five to seven years not less people are going to do do they're a little tired of the past 50 years or so it's gotten It was the whole thing about, I think that Marvel cinematic universe is a really good parallel there. We're tired of it. We don't want it anymore. There's nothing wrong with the movies. We're just done.

And we want something new. And I think we're going to see that the only prediction I can make over the next, the balance of the 2020s is more good stuff will come. More bad stuff will come. That's just the nature of it. We are in a time of change. And change is going to bring with it a lot of great things and a lot of things that are maybe not so great. We're going to have to sort it out. That's okay.

It is totally okay for that to happen. We got through the 20s. We'll get through this. Totally get through this. Yeah, it's, I love language and linguistics. And sometimes, whether you, it doesn't matter what news channel you listen to or you get your information from. There's this prefix of trans that's everywhere and it permeates everything. But I think it permeates the idea of what's happening in the world. Like we're in the midst of a

grand transformation, whether we are the caterpillar being liquefied in the chrysalis or whatever it is. There's another great book called the fourth turning that speaks about generational change. And I think it comes every hundred years like you see this thing beginning to emerge. And when I think about that, and one thing that I think is hanging on is, is I speak to a lot of death doulas. And they tell me, you know, George, when I'm, when I'm holding the hands of someone who are in their last days, they always talk about they wish they would have been a better father, there should have been a better mother, a better, a better husband, a better lover,

a better person. They never talk about how much more money they wish they would have made. Essentially, they're talking about their unrealized dreams. And when I think about that on a generational level, I think of the Marvel movies. I think of the people who still hold the levers of power that are coming to this conclusion of like, oh my gosh, I'm 80.

My kids hate me. I have all this money. And what have I done? It doesn't have to be that extreme. I'm an exor, so I'm a little offended with the boomer class. I'm not all of them, just my personal bias. But I think what we're seeing on a generational level is a lot of unrealized dreams.

And you see people like, look, let's give them a Marvel movie. Those kids love that stuff. They ate it up. They love the Marvel. But we're moving past that. And it is going to be a time where this next generation slowly moves on and the next generation takes its place. But you can see this echoes of these old ideas giving way to new ideas.

And maybe you need to have this in, not in time, but you need to have this exit of a generation. And I get kind of scared sometimes because I see such a large population of boomers moving forward that are still hanging on to so much stuff. And I see this young hungry class like get out of the way now or we're going to eat you. You know, and on some level, maybe you have to eat your way through the cocoon. But I kind of fear like a wave of elder abuse. You know, you start seeing these scams taking place. Is that too crazy, man?

What do you think? you know, I think there's always, you know, there's always been, there's always generational conflict. You see that there, part of that is natural. Part of that is biological as well, you know, that, you know, that we, there are a lot of, if you look at kind of ethnography over, you know, over multiple cultures, there's always that many cultures put structure in place to protect elders for exactly that reason. You know, that the, you know, that there are different roles and different prescribed roles of different, you know, if you look at a lot of the classic, you know, kind of coming of age and there are different phases in your life.

A lot of those things are built to address exactly that, where what role did you have at what point in your life? Because there is, and it was meant to mitigate conflict because there's, there is stress on that. I think now when you're in a time of change, you know, there's normal generational conflict. Both of us are Xers. So we had generational conflict kind of coming into the world in kind of the 80s, you know, the 70s and 80s. You know, so we had a little bit of that. But now we're in a time of not just generational conflict, but other social conflict

that is kind of layering on top of that that is going to make it different. I think that, you know, younger people are going to figure out, you know, what, you know, how do they want to kind of show up in the world? What do they want to do? And I think the same is true of boomers, people like us and Xers, who need to figure out, well, how do I want to, how do I want to go out? Yeah. How do I want to, you know, you're kind of on the back, you know, for the golfing analogy, the back nine. How do I want to play the back nine? Because it's probably different than how I played, you know, the front nine. And I think it's going to be, I think that's an interesting perspective. I think when you layer on top of that demographic change. And what I mean by that is macro-level demographic change. We have been increasing in population as a globe for the past, you know,

you know, since recorded history with some blips, some pretty nasty. blips, by the way, but blips. However, however, all population estimates say that by somewhere around the middle of the century, towards the back half the century, global population will peak and we will begin to slide back downward. And there are a lot of reasons for that. you know, increased education, all those sorts of things. And we have been in a growth, kind of a growth state where the generation coming up is almost always bigger than the generation leaving. That was certainly true in the 1920s. The number of young people in the United States was hugely bigger. It was a hugely bigger number than the people over 60, over 65.

hugely bigger. So there's much more influence. It is a relatively recent phenomenon that the number of people who are older than we are are a majority. That's not, that has not happened really before, and that is unlikely to continue, you know, for that much longer. You know, the generations will be smaller coming up. There will be fewer people, you know, again, coming up. So we have this kind of generational change, too, where there will be fewer of us every consecutive year in the not too distant future. And that's weird.

We have not experienced that ever, really ever since maybe the 1300s when it got bad. You know, that's, you know, really the Black Death at that time was the last major time when we had. had population shrinkage in recorded history. That is a completely unknown, unpredictable sort of thing that is starting to happen in places like Italy and Japan and even China. That's going to get weird coming up. And I think, you know, to your point, the default over that time is when the when the pie is growing, there's always this kind of the default mode is to,

more, more, more, like, how can we do more? How can we be more? How can we achieve more? But as the population shrinks, wouldn't it be interesting to think about more of those meaning questions? How do we do with less? How much less do we need? You start to see that now. It's no surprise that Marie Kondo's Japanese. That's no surprise at all because they're thinking about less. because the population is shrinking there. It's just a totally different mindset. It's crazy even to think about, you know, as a business person, like, I work on, you know, new products and innovation. The default for me, my entire career, has been growth.

Always. There are always going to be more people next year than there will be this year. What happens when they're not? You know, what happens when the market is shrink? I love it. How much new do we need? Does it really change the idea of what innovation really is? You know, I'm not sure what that means. There's such great questions that I don't hear anybody really talking about them in terms of, you know, people talk about demographic change. You know, we hear that and we mostly we hear that in terms of like, well, if there are fewer humans on the planet, maybe there would be put less stress on our ecosystem and our resources. And that's great.

I mean, that would be, that'd be nice. You know, so that's kind of a good benefit. But we're not talking about the rest of it. You know, what happens to, you know, not just kind of social systems, governments, balance of power. There's kind of geopolitical stuff you have to think about. But what happens on a day-to-day kind of, you know, getting your day-to-day existence when instead of cities growing and kind of new, like, how do we, what do we do with all the extra homes we don't need, for instance? It's just, it's crazy to think about what population decline will really mean 50, 60 years from now,

because it's already happening in a lot of places. So those are the things I think about that I think history doesn't really give us a great way to think about that, other than you've got to look far back, you know, when you think about, well, what happened after the black death in Europe, for instance, or on the Asian step? What did it do? It broke the feudal system, for instance. And the reason it broke it is people's the, you know, when you had a lot of people and you always had more people, there was always pressure that the, you always had someone else who would do that job.

So you didn't really need to make that job nice. you could take advantage of and abuse that corporate worker as much as you wanted. Because there's always some other schmuck who would come up and just do the same job. Well, think about what's happening now, George. And your listeners will kind of see this. How hard is it to find people to do these bullshit jobs? People don't want to do them anymore. And the prices are going up.

That's the market working. But what about, you know, I go around to the fast food restaurants near here. People don't want to do them at all at no price. There's almost no price that makes sense where people will want to do those jobs. What happens then? When you just don't have the people to do them anymore, I think you'd really need to think, rethink what matters. Because, you know, maybe Arby's doesn't matter anymore, for instance. Yeah.

And that probably would be good. I'm not sure the world needs Arby's. sorry, Arby's. No, no disrespect. I don't think the world needs Burger King either. But I think we're going to learn a lot about what really matters when there's less of it. And I think that's maybe, to me, that's really hopeful because it's going to kind of refocus. You won't be able to be lazy about your thought process.

It's what really matters. where do you really want to be if you could be anywhere, you know, you could do anything. What would you do? What would that mean to you? That's kind of exciting, I think. Terrifying, but all change is scary. All change is scary. That's just something we're going to have to get right with.

I love that. You know, on some level, if people don't want to. to do a job, maybe that whole industry is pointless. You know what I mean? Like if, if a organization can't figure out, hey, these people don't want to do this. On some level, doesn't that mean the consumer doesn't want that product? Like, if people aren't willing to create it, doesn't that mean that the consumer doesn't want it on some level? You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm crazy to think about, right? Hey, guys, guess what? You know what anyone wants to work here? Because your product or service sucks. And there's nothing you can, like you could fix it, but you won't.

You will not invest the time and the meaning into your own thing to make people want it because you just want to extract profit from it. Like that on some level, like I think we're just pulling back the curtain and looking at this. Like this is silly. It's dumb. Why do we have so many homes and all these homeless people? Like how many corporate, like how many houses can Black Rock buy? We're just going to, people are going to build.

and black guys are going to buy all of them. Why? Why? That's so dumb. Like, what are we doing? And I think that this shrink to this, this, this limit to growth that we finally hit is the last straw that breaks the camel's back. Like, there's so much fraud. And it's in, and now I think real talent, people that actually want to make a change have never had a better opportunity in their life. And it's not going to be because of money. It's going to be because they're passionate about doing it. And that is where change comes from. That is where leaders come from. That is where real ideas begin to percolate is that, hey, this person that was fed up for 25 years, they broke away. Like you said, these boomers and exers and even kids looking for more meaning. They finally found

the courage to do it. And now they're going to create this thing that is going to be the next thing. I love these ideas you're talking about. Tell me more. You know what's, we're going to totally geek out now. Yeah. Because we're going to bring up Star Trek. Because I, I, people ask me like,

what is, Picard, of course. You can, Janeway also gets an honorable mention. Here's the thing, though. Here's, here's what's different about that.

When people ask me, people ask me all the time, like, well, how, how do you help predict the future? You're in the innovation business. You have to have some vision for projecting the future. What models do you use?

What frameworks? What books do you read? And I said, none of them. Because they're all BS. The best way to predict the future if you're, and the best way to predict the future is to create it. That's also BS. The best way to see that is to look at science fiction.

what are the different ways because these are the people who are kind of envisioning different worlds in different scenarios and there are lots of great work but i'm interested in the economics of star trek and here's what i mean by that if you think about the economics uh of that what you realize is that it is essentially all resources the whole basic idea of economics the basic when you boil it all down you can talk about sea shells or wampum beads or dollars or British pounds or yuan or whatever it all boils down to one thing that resources are limited and that it is the allocation of scarce resources which basically makes economics work it kind of the best ideas rise to the top because they outcompete the ideas that aren't as good because why you have consumers have and your population is scarce resources to allocate to those things, whether they're capitalists or whether it's a socialist system,

it doesn't really matter. All economics deals with that basic reality that resources are finite. What if that's not true? For one of two reasons, either one, there are fewer of us, so that there are a lot more, think of how much resources we've exploited and learned how to exploit over the past couple of hundred years. What if there are a tenth as many of us with that same capacity? resources essentially become unlimited. Or in the case of Star Trek, we start to learn how to mine asteroids. We start to learn how to colonize other planets, which we are in the process of doing and working on right now. So you don't have land isn't limited.

Resources aren't limited anymore. And you have to think about, well, what happens when you can have as much as you want of anything, anytime? You can replicate any meal you want, anytime. What happens then? What is meaning in life when resources are unlimited? And what's interesting is that the whole basis for the Star Trek economy, if you kind of watch those episodes where they kind of get into that, it's about, well, how do you fulfill yourself?

How do you add something to the world? How do you create something new? how do you learn something and write and art becomes important and engineering for its own sake, the pure creativity of engineering. Those are the things that become exciting and interesting for people. And I am fascinated by an economy 50 years from now where essentially resources are unlimited for any number of different reasons. And the whole need for growth and competition sort of becomes this kind of anachronistic, you know, pointless exercise where we can say, well, okay, well, what matters then?

That's where you start to really find a, these skills that we're starting to work on now. I think we're starting to see the very early signs of a kind of an economic system that is, see we're stuck right now we're stuck in this like these tired old arguments and they are very old arguments around you know different economic systems and they're silly and the reason they're silly is they are all based on scarcity yeah and if you think about an abundance economy all of those different models make no sense at all they they're just they're not they're incompatible with with the kind of foundational assumption I am excited about what we can learn from those sorts of systems.

Like, what happens when, okay, you can, any meal, anything, anywhere you want to be, you just hop in a transporter and you can be there instantly. Where would you go? What would you do? I mean, think of the kind of change that we're already seeing. And when people say, well, that's really fantastical, you know, that's, you know, we would never have anything like that. I can tell you, I see kind of on my side, robotic food assembly technology right now

that can essentially act sort of like a replicator. You say what you want, and it does all of the cooking, all the prep from kind of base ingredients. We're not that far away from some of the basic ideas of that sort of technology, that abundance technology. Holy crap.

You know, what happens when all that's free? You know, do we, how do we act differently? And I think the search for meaning and the search for creativity will, I mean, think about even artificial intelligence. If the, if the futurists are right, we will get to a point where artificial general intelligence would be able to take basically all of the basics and drudgery out of everyday life. You know, you won't have to do any of those things. Well, what do humans do then? You know, what will you do when artificial intelligence could you do your job, whatever that job is,

better than you could? What do you do then? You know, what does it mean to be a human? What does it mean to kind of get up in the morning and what do you, what do you want to experience? I think that's, people are really scared about that and there are some scary things about it. But the hopeful part is, well, you know what, maybe I'm not going to have to reply to 50 BS emails today. You know, maybe I can just kind of focus on, you know, what does the beach look like today? And, you know, I, you know, I want to sit there and I want to watch the sun come up and really watch, not think about anything else. That's, I know that sounds kind of, it might sound kind of zen, maybe a little kind of,

you know, the criticism when we were kids, Georgia was it was kind of new age and a little fruffy and, you know, fuzzy. I'm not sure that it is. I think it's a real challenge to think about what, you know, what we will be at that time that we're not now. That's really cool. That's a, that's kind of deeply hopeful for me to think about what the, what the future looks like.

I have no idea what it'll look like or when it'll show up. I think it's happening right now. Like, I'll take myself, for example, and I know other people. I think that, I think we already have AGI. And I think what's happening around the world is that it's slowly being let out. And you had mentioned earlier, like there's boomers and X. that are leaving the workforce. Like this is the first grunion on the beach.

Like how are these people going to react after 40 years of conditioning? Like, and I'll tell you, it's, it's hard. It's hard because I've been conditioned to see value in money. And I've been conditioned to see an end of the rainbow after 50 years, but I know it'll never show up. But, and so, yes, reimagining something means. meaningful is difficult, but people will do it. You can begin to see real beauty in yourself, but you have to be free from the shackles. You have to, the control has to be given up.

And there's an interesting article that came out about this whole open AI thing that's happening right now. And they talk about, look, there's AGI right here. Maybe it's already here. But the fear is, if you just let it run, there'll be chaos. And there could very well be. It's meaning is a very, very powerful thing. And what does it mean if you realize at the age of 50 your life was a lie? What does that mean? What does it mean? What does it mean? Like, there's some real issues that could come up for people in positions of authority.

If you just let this cat out of the bag right now. I think there's a, you know, when I think about what people are deciding to do right now, over the past few years since the pandemic. The pandemic was a sort of catalyst, but it's not like that was the thing. There are a lot of catalysts. Right. But people starting to kind of rethink what meaning means,

what does growth mean, what does productivity mean, what does enough mean, what does my value mean, that sort of rethinking and reorientation of, you know, your value in a sense. society, your value in an economy, you're a value in a family. You know, those, those are good conversations to have. I agree. You know, that kind of change, you know, there's that, you know, just historically,

when you think about the broad arc of history, and you think about when do societies, you know, kind of rise and decline. And there are a lot of reasons for all of that. the historians talk about. But one of the most compelling ones for me has always been that all societies kind of skate on a razor's edge. And the razor's edge is the amount of stability and the amount of change that they have. The better they manage kind of that razor's edge of just enough change to be dynamic,

just enough stability to avoid kind of falling into chaos. that's sometimes that's easy to do you know i think for since the 1920s uh because frankly the great depression as difficult as it was created a certain stability yeah it was bad universally uh pretty bad during that time not you know it's not that people stop living their lives but there was kind of a you know foundational narrative since then oh the past hundred years or so yeah, it's been pretty easy with a few hiccups to say, hey, there's an amount of change and there's an amount of stability. There were different times during the 60s, of course, where you kind of went more towards one side, kind of maybe in the 80s kind of a little bit too much stability for that. But we are at a time now of, hey, we took the box of kittens and we shook it up.

And it's going to be really hard to know where that balance point is. It's very difficult right now for people in a corporate workforce. I mean, think about the whole debate, the really prosaic sort of debate about work from home. What it really means is what does productivity mean? That's really what we're talking about. you know, beautiful. That's what it really means. It has nothing to do.

Like, people talk about, well, you know, we, we want people to be in the office. Why do you want people in the office? Well, we feel like they are more productive and we get more out of them when they're there. Okay, well, then the base argument is productivity. So what is the best way to achieve that? So that's really all we're talking about. And people, workers saying, whoa, wait a second. You know what, George, the most interesting.

interesting, the most interesting people I find, a lot of bosses will talk about, you know, managers to talk about like, well, you know, people are lazy. They're only going to work, put in five hours during a 40-hour work week when they work at home. My answer to that would be maybe five hours a week is all the job really needed, that the other 35 were just wasted. That's what I would argue. But you know, the most interesting people, especially, the younger folks. This isn't only younger folks, but mostly people who are doing two, three, or four full-time jobs. Work from home, they work three to four full-time jobs. Think about that for a second. If you just think like, oh, well, they're violating a contract or some such

thing. That's all fine. I think what's silly about that, though, is wait, how could one person do four jobs, those jobs must not be worth full-time. They can't be. That's what it really says. If that person can be successful doing four full-time things, why would you make them do just one thing? I find that not just silly, but counterproductive. I think to your point, the biggest thing we need to free ourselves from is kind of the constraints we put on ourselves. The thought process we are conditioning, what we think is normal. You know, what is it? You know, you grow up thinking whatever your parents did was normal. My parents were not normal, by the way, as you could probably guess. So I kind of think everyone's not normal. But I realize that most people I meet are

really stuck in kind of a mindset of, well, this is just kind of how you go through a life. And this is kind of the stage as you go through. And I see in the 2020s here people saying, I'm not sure I buy that. I'm not sure that that has to be the way it is. Maybe things can be different. And that's really cool. That will lead to innovation we can. even really conceive of right now. I think we're locked into like, oh, it's kind of flying cars and

artificial intelligence and all. I think those are just limited thinking. I think what it really means is what is it, what can we do as humans when we are decoupled from this kind of productivity treadmill that we're on? What would we do differently? You know, when I think about, I was in the Key West a few months ago. And I got to have rum with Ernest Hemingway's grandkids. No way. Yeah. It was his birthday.

You know, Ernest Hemingway is like, you know, some birthday anniversary, some such thing. And his grandkids are doing book signings. And it was really cool. I took a tour. Of course. I took a tour. Of course. It was a rum distillery. Why are you not going to take a tour?

But we're in. And they had little stories about Ernest Hemingway and kind of what he did during life and kind of his creativity. And you know what I didn't notice about Ernest Hemingway? A nine to five, 40 hour a week kind of job. You know, he, he kind of effed around on his fishing boat. He drank a lot. He enjoyed himself. And, you know, he did dangerous stuff.

and he created, you know, a half dozen of the world's best novels during that time and lots of other writing and inspire generations of people to write and to create, you know, American novels kind of in his wake. That's interesting. That's that kind of like, how do you, what will all our lives kind of look like Hemingway's life? 20 years from now. I don't know if that's good or bad. I think he died at like 55 or something. I can't remember he'd, uh,

uh, I'm interested in learning what that might be. To live a life worth living. To have the courage to do what you want to do instead of what you have to do. I wish that was taught more in schools. I wish that instead of a Pavlovian system, and I understand the need, taking it all the way back to the beginning of the conference, I understand the need for a shared story and shared goals, shared sacrifice.

But at what cost, at what cost are we robbing the imagination and the lives of those who have a right to live a life worth living? You know, like I want that. And maybe that comes from us as individuals getting to a point in our life. And we say to ourselves, I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop living this life of productivity

and begin living a life of, of, I can't think of a word that rhymes of productivity, But there's probably a good one in there somewhere. But to find a way to live a life like that, and it's difficult and it's challenging, but it's also very rewarding. And I think if we want our kids to live this life we're talking of, then we have to have the courage to do it.

Because you can say to your kids, listen, you got to fight for what you believe in. Now I'm going to get up and go do this job. I hate, like they're not going to do it. You have to do it. But it's hard because you may have to give up everything that you currently have. That's a real possibility.

You know, it's funny that when, I think the best thing that boomers and exors can do for their kids is, you know, kids are funny. I've got two boys and they're, you know, thank you. They're out of the house now. They're, you know, they're young men of their own. And, you know, I think the biggest gift you can ever give your kids is an example. you know

I think you want to cry yes yeah that okay you you started your own business or you live the life on your terms or you know what you're not going to do that anymore

because what they see is okay you did that and you're okay you made it through it it was hard but you made it through it or you had you kind of took control of your life and you did that

you know I think boomers and extras have a responsibility There's always that kind of what, you know, that role in society of people. We talked about that earlier. You know, what is the role in society of the young people versus the middle-aged people versus the, you know, your elders? And your elders, the responsibility was always kind of a wisdom work. You know, your job was to provide wisdom and guidance for the leaders who are the middle-aged people and to provide that kind of example to children and to younger people.

And the best thing that boomers and Xers can do is set that example and show kids, you know what? Yeah. We can, that's what wisdom really is, is being able to, you know, kind of have the courage to do that. And if we do it, people think, ah, you know, Gen Z, you know, their, you know, younger people, they're not listening to you. No, they're not listening to you. They are absolutely not listening to you. You know what they're doing? They're watching.

Yeah. they're observing. They do not care about what you say. They care about what you do. And I feel like if more of us can show, you know what, you can work independently. That'll work. You can make this thing work. Yeah, it's hard.

But you can do it. You can decide what you want to do. You're not going to work 50 hours a week. You know what? You might only work 10 hours a week and you're going to have these art projects and you're going to have this kind of charitable stuff. going to contribute to your community. You're going to kind of have this, you know, kind of environmental, kind of this nature thing

you're working on. Like that's, you know, you get to design, design that life. Younger people will watch that and say, yeah, I bet I can do that. I can do something like that. There's a path they can follow. We need to kind of clear a path for that. Otherwise, it should come as no surprise that younger people like us will follow in the same footsteps.

And it's pretty clear right now they don't want to. I think we have a responsibility to get out there and act like it. You know, act like we can, there is something different. If we just go and retire from the same corporate grind, why would we expect our kids to do any different? It's the only thing they know. That's sad. That part is sad.

If people want to go and they say, I want to work for company X, until I retire and I want to do that and they're happy doing that, more power to you. But they got to see a different path. So, you know, if there's anything that we can encourage our, you know, listeners on this is, you know what?

There are people who are doing this. You can to. Yeah. You know, you make it work. It is, it's not so bad. You learn that you can live with less and that those things that were kind of, you know, those things that you had, you didn't really need.

I had a mentor of mine, someone at close friends said that really success is, you know, success for a kind of like productivity should not be defined by how much you do. True productivity is really defined by how little you can do to get the result. it's really about how little and how quickly you can get something done. Just a different way to look at it. So thinking about how to do not how to do more with less, how to do less with even less, you know, and really kind of boil it down. It's something we talk about in innovation all the time.

People think that innovation is about adding new things to things until it becomes kind of bigger and bigger and better and better and better. What people don't understand is that most, true innovation is cutting away all of that stuff. It's more like a sculpture and less like a painting. You know, innovation is not kind of adding layers to the painting for something to appear. It's more about kind of removing extra stone from a sculpture.

And you discover it when you're there and you know when you get to the point, what did Michelangelo say? You know, you know, there's, you know, David is in there. I just got to get rid of the stuff that's not David until I see it. I think it's just a different way to think about it. I wish that young people would ask, instead of like, well, how many more extracurriculars could I take in high school or college, I wish I'd say, how much less could I do that would be more meaningful?

You know, wouldn't that be a different question rather than trying to just add more things on? Because that's that cult of productivity, right? That cult of more where, you know, what is the thing I'm really kind of passionate about? And how about I just do that thing? And kind of let all the other stuff go. You know, that would be if artificial intelligence could take care of all the BS stuff and you could just focus on what things meant, that would be a good use for it. You know, I could do without a lot of the tasks that need to get done in an average day.

And if I could just focus on being bored and walking around and kind of letting my mind go, that would be, I would appreciate that. Yeah. Having the freedom to think about what's important in your life and how to live a better life. I love the idea of the sculpture versus the painting, taking things away. It's interesting. In my house, we have a new theme, and it's called Letting Go. I have this giant library, and I'm looking at these books, and I'm like, why? Why do I have this book?

I've read this book. Why do I hold on to this? And there's something beautiful about the art of letting go. By taking that book and putting in the pile to go away, I get to reflect on why I'm holding it. Do I love this character story? I did. I like the writing in that. like about the writing. But by letting it go, I get to hold it dear one more time and understand

and then make it mine in a way. It's like, I was holding onto this thing. But now, why don't I just take it? Why don't I just keep it inside and then give it to someone else to hold? It's getting kind of heavy. I couldn't agree more. I think the, I love the, you know, I've been going through that. I'm kind of in the middle of a move here. And all of us in some way. All of us in some way, It's me very, you know, my wife and I very physically and soon. And we've had to have those decisions on, okay, instead of just putting things in a box, you know, we set a rule that like, hey, everything needs to fit in this area and kind of the hatchback of the car in order to move. And I thought, all right, well, do you really, you know, books are a great example, but even clothes you might have or things.

you may have around you and you think okay that had a place and a time and the act of giving it away I love how you put that where the act of letting it go forces you to reflect on it in a way that you wouldn't have otherwise if you just keep it and it's on a shelf it's almost like you never have to do that and I meet a lot of people who are you know moving into assisted living or they're moving into memory care or some such thing and they have to let you know all of that stuff go in a hurry and think about how hard that is for people. Where it's almost overwhelming that it's better to give yourself a habit of letting things go routinely. Yeah.

That, hey, is this still something that, you know, that's kind of not like bringing you joy, but does it kind of serve a purpose right now? And I love the idea of, and I hadn't thought about it quite that way, that it makes you experience it again, reflect on why you wanted it, and say, oh, you know, that was really important to me at that time. It is not important to me at this time.

So I'm going to give it to someone else that maybe it could be important for them at their time, you know, that life is temporal, right? That, you know, things are right at the right times. And to keep something longer than it's time, is, I don't want to say selfish. I think that's too harsh of a word. But that's how I want to think about productivity.

You know, the, like, that I am using the things in my life that are absolutely essential right now. And I've let the other things go because, you know, I, you know, from a creative person's perspective, people think, oh, you just kind of want more and more and more. And really the opposite is true there, too. It's you need to kind of clear away things. Otherwise, your mind can't fit new things in. Yes, yes. You know, at least that's true for me that if my mind is cluttered with too many things,

I don't have room. You know, like during this move, it's there have been so many things going on that I haven't been able to pick up a new book in maybe six months. You know, I've been kind of rereading some things. I enjoy reading or I'll read things for research, you know, but that's more. you know, that's different. That's not kind of reading for pleasure, you know. I just haven't been able to really pick one up. And I feel a loss with that.

And the reason is I just don't have mental space for it right now. And I'm looking forward to kind of putting that behind me and being able to say, okay, well, I've got some space now. I'd love to pick up a few new novels or new things that just haven't had time for, not the time. And time is, everyone has the same 24 hours, but the mental time, which is a different thing, kind of the emotional time for it. And I'm interested in that. I'm interested in reading something that has no other purpose.

That's where all the good ideas come from. You know, when you're not looking for something is when the best ideas come. I love it. It's mesmerizing to think of. and I do. I've been giving away a lot of books lately and look at someone like, this is a first edition.

I'm like, who cares? What is, you know, and here's the cool thing about books that you can do. As I'm giving them away, and I like the idea of, of,

you know, holding something past its prime. It seems to me like holding a wonderful fruit that doesn't go, that goes bad. You know, like, what,

this fruit is right. Give it to your neighbor, man. Yeah, they'll probably love it. So I'm like, this is the first edition. You know who would love this book?

Is this guy that I, does me. I bet you what a wonderful gift. And I'll give it to him for Christmas. Hey, this other book, my cousin's going through this thing. Maybe they would love that book. Now I get to take this thing, reflect on it, get to hear the story again, tell it, and then give that story to someone else. And so it's like, wow. And on top of that, when you're clearing stuff out of your environment, you are, you're creating space so that you can grow again. Getting rid of the stuff in your environment, getting the rid of stuff in here, these old ideas that no longer serve you, while difficult because you must process them and understand why they no longer serve you. But once you figured that out,

you can't let them go. Like hold them, I love you, and then be on your way. Now you have room to grow. And if you think about that on a grand scale, it's beautiful because when you look at it, you go, holy cow, I'm growing right here. Holy cow, I'm creating this whole new space. Holy cow, what does that mean? I'm a whole new person. What does that mean? I'm a whole new person. What does that mean? can help other people. I can, I can help myself. I can help my family. I understand relationships different. Like it all comes together, this letting go, you know? I think we see that, you know, to bring it full circle, we see that at the societal level. We saw it in the 1920s. We're seeing it again here where people were letting go of, in the 1920s, people were letting go of the pre-World

World War I world. And there were a lot of things about it. And people were kind of figuring out what a new world sort of looked like. And they were letting go of a lot of things. And no one knew exactly what was coming in, but there was a lot of rapid growth and change. And it was scary and it was chaotic. But people had to let it go. Otherwise, it was very difficult to let anything new in.

And so I think at the micro level, a lot of us are letting a lot of things go, letting a lot of those assumptions go, doing different things. And that's happening at a societal level as well. You know, so when you think about, you know, what can history tell you about that is, you know what, that that's necessary, that it can be a little scary, but that we'll get through it and that will be better in some ways and worse in some other ways on the other side. of it, but it's okay if some bad things are in. You know what? We'll have to clean those up. And that if good things are in, we're going to have to recognize them so that we don't mess them up. But it's okay. You know, that's that kind of shaking things up a little bit is a natural process that happens cyclically. It happens after major events that we've lived

through, it's okay. And it's okay not to know exactly what's coming and to kind of let it, let some of it happen and try some things out and be okay if, like, hey, this, this thing that we were kind of experimenting with and kind of thinking about, well, that didn't work so well. You know, that, that, you know, that wasn't great. Let's not do that again. There are a lot of things in the 1920s that people let go and didn't do again. And we're seeing this, some of those same things here. I think people get so wrapped up that if they see something happen on, you know, TikTok, or they see something happen in their professional life, that it's going to be that way forever. We're in a period of really rapid change. Things will come and go. Just,

you know, we got a, that's, that's saying about weather in Minnesota. And lots of places have this. You know, if you're, if you're uncomfortable with the weather in Minnesota, just wait. You know, wait a day. It'll be different. tomorrow. It's okay. We'll be fine. We'll be fine. Yeah. It's a, if you stop and smell the roses for a minute, we live in truly transformative times. And with, with chaos comes opportunity. Was there an incredible amount of opportunity in the 20s as well? Oh, yeah. I mean, if you think about just the amount of, you know, new products, new services, kind of growth happening, that immigration, new things,

kind of happening, this kind of cauldron of new things happening at that time, I think like the number of new products that got invented during that time and new things and new places to go and new entertainment, you know, all of those things were so exciting during that time. It was always overwhelming for people. It was really scary for people who were born in 1870 or 1870. Or 1870. you're born at the tail end of the Civil War to experience something like the 1920s was so jarring to them because their life hadn't really changed that much until wow, I could go to the first supermarket. You know, I could, I'd have the first radio.

I mean, just think about how crazy the radio was that you could hear a baseball game as it was being played across the country and you didn't have to be there. I mean, crazy stuff that, that, you know, there are a lot of times that they kind of rich, privileged people have always had kind of more advantages than other people have had throughout history. That's been true. But during the 1920s, what was really crazy is the average person had access to a lot of that. Lots, not everybody, not everybody. People get you on that. That, like, well, you know, they were this group. I know they're always saying that, but most people, really most like low income people, you know, traditionally disadvantaged people, women, groups of people that never had that kind of freedom and a freedom of choice before finally had it.

That was scary at a culture level, especially for the people in power who said, wow, there are a lot of people I'm not used to. being around here exercising this kind of power, you know, voting with their wallets. That was a crazy time, you know, where people had those kind of consumer choices. And we're seeing that again, that people could choose to work the way they want to work. They could choose to have the identity they want to have. That's really scary to a lot of people. Really scary. And you get a lot of grinding and gnashing of teeth.

I can tell you that all of the same things, I had this fun experiment once where I took a kind of cultural critique from the 1920s, and I just changed a few of the names, you know, changed some of the references. And people thought, oh, is that MSNBC?

Is that, you know, is that Stephen Colbert? And then I had another one and people said, oh, is that Sean Hannity? You know, is that,

like, nope, these are all people from the 1920s and I didn't even change their words. Wow. it's the same stuff. That same kind of like the world is ending because people have freedom now to, you know, to make choices that I would prefer they not make. You know what?

That's okay. I love it. I love it. Jason, this is an amazing conversation, my friend. I feel like it's flown by too fast. And I feel like we could probably talk for another hour if I didn't have another podcast coming up here.

So if it's okay, I would love to have you come back and we could begin to solve some more of the world's problems. I think it'd be a lot of fun. Next time, we will be in similar climatic zones. I'll be in South Florida where I've got some family. That's where we're moving. Half my family's Cuban. So I will argue that although there are a lot of great things about Minneapolis, good Cuban food is not one of them. And I am looking forward to a little bit of food that better meets my heritage.

And I cannot wait. There is some lechonisado ready for me down there as soon as I get there. Not to mention the warm embrace of a family that you've probably been away from far too long, up in the cool weather up there. So I'm excited for you. I can't wait to speak again. Before I even let you go, maybe you can talk a little bit about where people can find you, some of the books coming out and what you got coming up?

Yeah, people can find me best on jason t.voyovich.com. Just put the tea in the middle. I'm pretty easy to find on Google. If you search for Voyevich, you know, it's kind of the benefit and the drawback of having a really unique name. I'm very easy to find. If I do anything bad, I'm also very easy to find. LinkedIn is an easy place to find me to or Amazon for the books. Marketer in Chief was my first book.

The second one is Booze Babe and the Little Black Dress. That's about the 1920s. My current project is working on the follow-up to that, which is consumer culture in the 1930s during the Great Depression. So learning a ton of really cool stuff. I think it's going to be a great follow-up. I think it'll be just as exciting and over-the-top as kind of the 1920s era. People think that the 1930s was the Great Depression. and it was just depressing.

But it was so crazy, so fun, so innovative, so interesting that I think people really be surprised by that. Check it out. Join my mailing list. You'll get kind of a heads up on one that's coming, but probably later next year at the earliest. But there's plenty to read there in the meantime. So I really appreciate the opportunity just to chat with you. It's been a lot of fun and just to kind of meet some new people. in the interwebs and all of that.

And I think your cat who was kind of walking around in the back there. I think I also saw your cat. I got to meet the cat. That was that was also good. You got a newsletter too, don't you? I do. It's published. I wish it were published regularly.

Kind of do as I say, not as I do when it comes to things like that. But it is published when I think I have something to say that's interesting, which is sometimes really often. and then sometimes you need to wait a little while. So I will never send anything that I don't think is interesting. That's my promise. So if it's like, boy, it was supposed to be Monday

and I don't have anything interesting to say on Monday, I will not send you anything. I love it. Because if I'm bored, I think so will you. Yeah, that's really well said. Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot recommend enough. You saw what happened here today. You got to listen to the,

hopefully amazing, incredible, and wonderful as I thought conversation. And I look forward to hang on briefly afterwards. Jason, I'll speak to briefly. But to the ladies and gentlemen out there, I hope you have a wonderful day. I hope you know that change is something that's necessary. And if you have the courage to do it, the life will unfold in front of you in ways you can't imagine. And if you're an X or a boomer, you have a responsibility to do it. Let's make the next generation better.

That's all we got for today, ladies and gentlemen. Aloha.