Simon Sinek: You're Being Lied To About AI's Real Purpose! We're Teaching Our Kids To Not Be Human!

let's say you have a fight with your girlfriend you want to do the right thing so you go to chat gbt and you'll be like this is exactly what happened tell me what to do and you go babe i just want you to know i want to take full accountability and i care about this relationship and she says did you get this answer from chat gbt and you go i did how's that gonna go now you did everything right but what makes people beautiful is not that we get everything right it's that we get many things wrong and i think in the modern world we live in we forget that

simon sinek is back he's the visionary thinker inspiring millions to cultivate human connection find their purpose and overcome any modern day challenges so with ai do you think it really is

cause for concern and deeper thought so i'm not in the ai business but i am in the humanity business and here's the problem that we never talk about people keep telling us life is not about the destination life is about the journey but when we think about ai we only think about the destination and it's remarkable ability to write the book paint the painting solve the problem but we forget the importance of doing the work yourself and i think in our modern day and age we have underrepresented the value of struggle i am smarter better at problem solving more resourceful not because a book exists with my ideas in it but because i wrote it that excruciating journey is what made me grow

but it's the same for love friendships conflict and i think that we forget that we give up certain skills or abilities because of technology but it's like saying ai will provide boats for everyone except for the time there's a storm and you don't know how to swim and unless we take personal accountability to teach and learn human skills they will disappear sure you can have an ai friend trained like the best psychologist to affirm you the best listening skills that exist but my ability to know what to do when my friend is struggling my ability to function in the world or my ability to cope with stress these very very human skills are suffering so what are the other skills we need to

equip ourselves with based on the way that the world is heading two things one is this has always blown my mind a little bit 53 of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show so could i ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then i'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do

thank you so much

good to see you again it's just familiar familiar it's so interesting because when i sit down to talk to you you're one of the very few people that i don't come with a preconception as to what we're going to talk about but but i i come with a feeling and the feeling that i bring forth is the feeling of change and transition i have lived for 32 years but i don't think i can ever think of a time where the future has felt unclear uncertain scary exciting and i guess unknown and i don't just

mean with with technology but technology is one protagonist in the story and there's many other social stories playing out from politics to relationships to all of these things so my first question to you simon is what are those things what are the biggest forces of changes that you see happening at the moment in all of our lives that you think we should probably talk about today

that is a big question and i think one of the mistakes we make and this is in general is we like things to be very neatly organized we'd like them to be black and white yes or no right or wrong and as you know the world is messier than that it is more nuanced than that and nothing operates in a vacuum everything is connected to everything especially in a in a world that's filled with this rising technology called the internet and this burgeoning technology called the social media and

desires and feeling like belonging become more and more important we're struggling to find them loneliness epidemic stress epidemic suicide epidemics these are all feelings of disconnection lack of control and loneliness and so that only exaggerates our feeling of loneliness and despair and wanting more now etc etc etc and then you add in ai and now those feelings of insecurity are just exaggerated like crazy right so now i find ai there's an irony to ai right so if you go back to the 70s and 80s right you had the rise of robotics and so robots are now coming into our factories and we're able to cut

employees by dramatic amounts and we put people out on the street who they're they worked in a factory their their father worked in a factory their father's father worked in a factory like this is this is what they know and they say but these robots are changing they're taking our jobs and the ruling classes and the and the wall street classes and the ceo classes they go yeah i know technology you're gonna have to find a new skill reskill reskill that's what you have to do reskill okay flash forward to ai here's where the irony comes in because the world is always nature pours vacuum and life seeks balance at all times

right not always immediately but it seeks balance at all times it's always seeking room okay so flash forward to ai now you hear the knowledge workers it's the knowledge workers who are going my job it's the coders it's the finance people my job the plumber is not worried about ai at all the baggage handler at the airport here's zero about ai and so maybe the right response is it's the future man it's

technology reskill reskill you know maybe maybe become a plumber you know by the way money's really good you get to work for yourself if you want you know um so i just find the pendulum kind of funny

with ai do you think it's overblown or do you think it really is cause for concern and deeper

thought the honest answer is i don't know everybody falls on one side of you're over you're over you're you know the sky is not falling chicken little or the sky is falling and we're all going to die right the truth the truth like most things is probably somewhere in the middle but the the real answer is i don't know and neither does anybody else yeah and it seems that we should have some sort of controls because we didn't put any controls on the internet they did put controls

on the internet in china like children don't have the same access to social media like kids do here europe has controls on the internet and america doesn't and we're the ones that seem to be suffering more because of the lack of controls on the internet so i think some some and by the way when people you know talk about deregulation and no controls i mean they make us wear seatbelts in our cars yeah you know there's nothing that we have speed limits you know and and it's for the greater

good and yeah sure your seatbelt's uncomfortable but you'll get used to it like and it's fine you know so i i think the call for no reform is is wrong um there are correct limits to keep things safe i am fascinated by ai both the benefits and the weaknesses of it but it is revealing to me something

more important than what other people are talking about which is we're uh we're a result obsessed society right yeah we care about output we care about performance we care about numbers we care about final product more than anything right and when people talk about ai they talk about its remarkable ability to write the symphony paint the painting write the book write the article uh solve the problem like it it is and by the way the technology is incredible i asked only a few months ago

to please take this and put it in the style of me and it was it was fine i did it with a friend of mine who's also an author and we both did it for ourselves we did it on each other it was really fun and it was fine i don't think it was good it was it was it gave me a good start and i could edit it i did it recently we both did it it was damn near flawless it was it was scary good right

now ai doesn't know the thing i'm thinking about it doesn't know that the next book i'm going to write about is friendship it doesn't know the point of view i'm going to have on friendship if you ask it what would simon sinek say about friendship it's going to be why this and why that you know so it's derivative right we know that it's not original we know that but at the end of the day the work is good the symphony is good the art is good the article is good the book is decent like it's getting better and better and better but here's the problem that we keep not talking about

people keep telling us that life is not about the destination life is about the journey that's what we keep being told right but when we think about ai we only think about the destination

we only think about the output we never think about the input right i can tell you that and you and i can both say the same thing which is i am smarter better at problem solving more resourceful better pattern recognition not because a book exists with my ideas in it but because i wrote it

the excruciating pain of organizing ideas putting them in a linear fashion trying to put them in a way that other people can understand what i'm trying to get out of my brain that excruciating

journey is what made me grow and sure you can have an ai friend and that ai friend has been trained like the best best psychologist to affirm you the best listening skills that exist tell me about your day that sounds difficult boy it's hard being you oh my god it's so great being you have you you know like it's it's a it's an affirmation machine built by a for-profit

company that wants you to stay on can't neglect that but for the fact that nobody's learning how to be a friend it'll feel good you'll feel like you have a friend but you're not learning to be a friend right and it's the what made you a great entrepreneur is not that the company exists is that you built it with your hands and you've got the scars to show for it yeah it was when things went wrong and you were forced to fix them and think that now when problems show up you're quick you're

smarter you're a much smarter businessman now than you were five years ago six years ago yeah because you did it and i think what we're forgetting is that there's something to be said for and by the way i'm a fan of ai i want ai to make things but i would hate to lose out on becoming a better version of me and i think that um to really learn to grow and by the way i used to have a steel trap for phone numbers i knew everybody's phone number and then all of a sudden my phone my pda god i don't need to memorize

a phone number anymore i don't know most of the people that i love i don't know their phone numbers i type their name in right i just have to know their name and so my brain literally went on strike it said fine fine you no longer have the capacity to remember phone numbers and i can't remember phone numbers to save my life right so we give up certain skills or abilities because of technology regularly right that's fine i don't have a problem with any of those things because whether i can remember a phone number or not will not affect my relationships my ability to function in the world or my ability to cope with stress but my ability to know what to do when my friend is struggling

my ability to know what to do when i have a fight with my spouse my or my partner my ability to know what to do when my boss yells at me but i don't want to escalate it or my employee is acting out and i don't want to escalate it or fire them well how do i resolve this i've missed out on those skills and simply asking ai how should i resolve this thing it'll give you an answer and it may work and you've learned nothing right and so it's the difference between it's it's it's like saying

ai will provide boats for everyone except for the time there's a storm and you don't know how to swim

and i'm okay use the boat also learn to swim so i think there's something to be said for writing your own symphony painting your own painting building your own business you know writing your own book not for them not for the output not for the output for your personal growth before i got here today i

was writing a post for linkedin and i was trying to make the case that everybody using chat gpt to write their emails their social media posts their investment pictures that i received is now making the internet feel really inauthentic because people that i want i knew for many many years are now sending me these perfect cookie cutter emails with words that i've never heard them use before of course and so when i read it my brain mentally discounts it as not being their opinion not actually being them yeah and when you feel like you're speaking to someone's ai

the meaning is gone so i was writing this post about how actually now there's this premium on human written language like if you make a couple of mistakes yeah and you use the old words you don't use words like forged and robust i'd like to forge a partnership with you steven furthermore can we i'm like you you've never said that to me mate so the the end dashes oh my gosh it's funny right it's

crazy yeah but you but you're talking about what you're talking about have you ever heard of the japanese concept of um uh uh wabi-sabi no so wabi-sabi is a japanese design concept which is beauty in that which is temporary or imperfect okay so have you ever seen japanese ceramics yeah they're wonky or the the the glaze is not even yeah and they're beautiful you know why because they're handmade tree bark trees you know when you have a wooden bowl wood is beautiful why it's imperfect

perfect right think unique things made on a machine are the same and less beautiful and things made by hand are beautiful because they're imperfect what makes people beautiful is not that we get everything right it's that we get many things wrong and what makes us fall in love is not the person who's perfect it's the person who accepts our imperfections and we know we're in love when we learn to accept theirs not learn to want to right and you're 100 right i now know in the art world artists are being asked to

sign affidavits that say i painted this i made this not ai not because it's better or worse it's because i want to know it was touched by human hands and so i think you're right what will happen is everything will be so perfect that it'll be as if we're all driving or using things that everything came off a conveyor belt and what we will start to desire is things that are made by hand because by the way

we think rolls royce ferrari you take 39 months to get a ferrari you know why it was made by hand yeah right and one of the things that makes it expensive is the technology and the carbon fiber and all that but the other thing is it's slow and was made by people human error the value of human error the value of

human error scooter braun said to me the other day he said um we could watch a computer play chess with another computer he goes but the the chess games that have the highest demand are one human versus another because when a computer plays a computer the moves are predictable and they're the same and they're perfect but it's the human error of two human chess players who are worse objectively worse yeah at chess that makes it so fascinating yes it's it's that's any sporting event any sporting event

it's not the perfection of the game it's the error that loses the game that adds the drama and and and it's like trying not to make a mistake is as powerful as trying to get everything right and it's the humanity of the sport humanity of the competition it is the imperfection and i think that we forget as people what makes us beautiful like when you go on a first date or a first interview all you do is present perfection put on my my best clothes you know dressed up and i don't dress like this every day i dress up on my date right my interview i don't wear

this this is what i wore for my interview because i want to put out a good impression and i practiced i and i and i make myself confident i've got a great job and i've got a great personality and i love my mother and my goodness everything's great and then you get in the relationship you get the job and you become a slob right this is what ai is it's it's it's to your point it's it's fake it's on the

interview example the minute you started describing that i immediately flashback to an interview i had last week at our company where a young kid walks in wearing a suit and i thought now and i have no idea who you are because i know that's not you i know that you don't wear a suit you're 22 years old you do not wear a suit so i have no indication i have no clues as to who you are and therefore it's harder for me to figure out if you fit here and i think of because what he tried to do there was show up perfect how he what he thought perfect was and in some ways to hide who he actually was

whereas this is why i like now on the internet sloppy text i like grammatical mistakes but you at

the same time you don't want him to show up and put his feet on kick his shoes up and put his feet on the table either in the same way that there's an element of respect you want and you want somebody in that first interview to put on some effort now too much effort yeah is pretty inauthentic

but too little effort what's that this is my diagram you've got perfect yeah on one end which is low and then you've got poor which is also low yeah the sweet spot yeah is right here in the middle

yeah well i think there's some truth to that and so there's a level of you know like it's the same thing is like we all want vulnerability in our relationships but not on the first day like i don't need to know that quite yet you know what are the other skills that you think

we need to equip ourselves with based on the way that the world is heading because we're you know like the calculator came along and we no longer needed to be able to do complicated maths yeah completely forgot my time stables i can't spell anymore i said to my friends the most i can do is nine times nine that's like the top end of my range but with spelling it's the same i get like half the word correct but again you know so what are those skills i think it's all human skills i

think there needs so i think where the world is going to go and at least this is where i'm taking a bet is that as the end product becomes easier to produce it's the humanity that's going to suffer

and unless we take personal accountability both as individuals and organizations to teach and learn human skills they will disappear for all the reasons we're talking about so how do i listen how do i hold space how do i resolve conflict peacefully how do i give and how do i receive feedback those are two different skills how do i have an effective confrontation you pissed me off do i know how to approach you as a friend as a colleague without creating a massive fight or losing

a friendship over it um how to take accountability how to express empathy these skills these very very human skills are the things that we're already starting to see just with the internet and social media um are suffering and so i think ai will only exaggerate the loss of those skills and those skills

are more important than learning how to spell one of the concerning things was i heard sam ottman who's the founder of open ai and chat gpt launched this thing called world coin a couple of years ago when chat gpt really started taking off and it has been closely tied to the concept of universal basic income income the idea the overarching idea is that in a world where ai and automation eliminate many jobs ubi may be necessary world coin is one way to help implement it that was stated by the founder

of chat gpt sam altman yeah i just again i'll go back to my ironic statement before isn't it ironic that they want to do a universal income standard universal income now that the knowledge workers are losing their jobs but when the factory workers were losing their jobs those same people were massively against uh uh these kinds of things so i mean yes what happens to

i mean it's ironic and meaning if we're being because for anybody that doesn't know what universal basic income is the idea is the government the state whatever would pay you a certain amount of money every minimum salary so yeah two thousand three thousand dollars whatever it might be yeah um because they don't think many of us are going to have there's not going to be enough jobs to go around and i wonder what happens to purpose and meaning and pursuit and challenge and all these things in a world where

we're just being handed money so we're not being given wealth there's a difference we're being given survival money right and so you know you know we have to be very careful that says you know everybody who's on welfare is lazy you know that's not true you know so we have to be very careful that just because we give somebody something doesn't mean that they cease to have ambition or purpose or drive it's like somebody who who makes a commission salary commission you know works on commission and they make just enough to pay their rent and buy food and that's it like that's a loss that's a

lack of ambition you know the cases at least the people i've heard talk about it they make a compelling case for it especially in a world where there is plenty of wealth um but you know i don't know enough about it to make an argument for or against it if i'm honest but i do find it ironic that the sam altman's of the world are calling for it given the fact that there's going to be so many job losses when it's jobs of their kind and like i also think that's funny like what's going to happen when

sam altman's product gets good enough that he can lay off most of his staff

just curious what happens he has made a point of having i think it's a hundred people or less in his company he doesn't have like a big team and i think part of that is because when i had his ted talk a couple of days ago he's saying yeah i think agi is sooner than we think actually and i think we're gonna have a fast takeoff which means it's gonna arrive very quickly and accelerate very quickly so i think he's actually preparing not to yeah but when happened what happens to the 90 people he lays off

when he doesn't need 100 he only needs 10. this is the question i'm just curious i don't know and this is why anybody who has an opinion about it the answer is we don't know but i think people react very differently when it's their job on the line when it's their income on the line when it's their pride when it's their ego you know i keep hearing from companies i mean you we were talking about this before we turn on the cameras you know you know you talk to if you want a new website i guarantee you i don't care which company you talk to they will all talk about how they're ai this ai

that and you ask the question are you using ai yes we're using ai we're doing it differently we're the future blah blah blah and then you ask them for a proposal it's going to look like all the other proposals from 2015 you know and this is how many hours it's going to take our people to program this and code this and i was like what happened to all the ai why is this slow and expensive when everything's supposed to be fast and inexpensive because they're taking the margin of course they're taking the margin and and they've got a lot of people doing things the old-fashioned way because the business model you know people work very hard to pick the status quo exists because there are

people who benefit from the status quo you know that's why there is a status quo and it's uh and you like i said everybody's into change the future you know until it's until it's them that's threatened

or their income the billionaires that i that i know the one consistent thing they've whispered to me about ai is that people are going to have a lot of free time that's one of the things that's been really consistent you're so right when you say that when i asked you about the future of ai you said i don't know the reason why i know that's probably the correct answer generally is because when i sat with the most advanced people in ai whether it's mustafa who's head of microsoft ai now ceo of microsoft ai or people from google or the ceo of google or reid hoffman who's the founder of linkedin they all

had different opinions which made me to think actually the right answer is nobody knows the

right answer is nobody that is correct and and you always be be aware of the messenger right like you won't have anybody who owns an ai company talking doomsday scenarios it's not in their economic interest even if they secretly harbor that it's like people who used to run cigarette companies didn't smoke and let them they didn't let their family smoke it's like i remember visiting facebook in the earlier days and then i went into the cafeteria and they had like like picnic benches and i was like and they were telling me with pride how they have these communal eating areas to help

people maintain relationship and i was like this is hilarious you literally have a product that breaks relationships and yet you understand enough to make people eat together at lunchtime so that they'll maintain relationship i mean the point being if your economic interest you know show me how someone's paid and i'll show you how they behave you know one of the scariest conversations i was privy to

was one a friend of mine who's a billionaire in london he knows the ceo of one of the biggest air companies in the world who i can't name and he said by the way what he tells me in private is not what he's saying publicly yeah i he he said to me yeah what this particular ceo thinks is going to happen with ai is pretty horrific and the ceo of this big ai company is totally cool with it it's it's and it's horrific what he thinks is about to happen and then when i watch this guy do his like online talks and give his opinion he's so nuanced and everything will be fine and he's an ai optimist

then i heard this scenario at this kitchen table in east london from his friend about what he really thinks and it was chilling yeah like actually the lack of empathy yeah that makes sense to me they're like the obsession with power was shocking to me yeah the obsession with power and money and

all the rest of it yeah but this is because the internet has done something really strange and and challenged one of my theories head on right so i talk about in an infinite game you know jim kars his theory you know in an infinite game there's no winners or losers right and so like nobody wins you know fast food nobody wins cars like general motors ford voxel they can all exist at the same time right and they'll have degrees of success or not success but they can

all exist simultaneously no one's going to win the exception is in the internet in in the like like amazon it won yeah like you know google for search yep they won right and if you start going down like the big big tech companies there is only one i mean sure there's competition but not really right who you know walmart is making a run of it to threaten amazon but amazon's still so damn big you know all of these companies that there's only one and that's not good that you can't have winners

in a category and so this is why i think the the race for ai is so aggressive for ai dominance is so aggressive and which is why people are not being careful and which is why they're not putting controls is because the way that tech seems to work is there probably will be one dominant standard and then that's it and the question is which one because i don't think it just seems to be the way it is which is a very scary prospect to me that the fact that we can have winners is is a bad thing especially if we if we pride ourselves on being capitalists then there cannot be there cannot be a

winner and there cannot be one that is so dominant that that nobody else can even compete except for

scraps what are your emotions when you think about ai and what's happening because i i feel like the moment we're living in is a profound one and that we don't actually realize it because when these tools come out openai released yesterday 3.0 it's the best model ever the day after my life was the same so we don't really notice it because we go back to work our clients ask for the same thing we have the same team members sat around us it almost seems like the sound timer is rotated and we're on a clock and it's a slow disruption of our everyday lives sam altman the other day on his ted talk three four

days ago said in the short term everything will appear the same but in the long term he goes life

is going to be completely different yeah i think that's right i mean and look at any any technology like the like ai it was kind of the same until it wasn't and these are evolutions not revolutions like there's a revolutionary bit you know like i remember when when the internet showed up and like brick and internet shopping showed up and all the technologists were like it's the end of stores it's the ends of bricks and mortar like done like we'll never go to a shop again well that didn't happen now shops struggle to compete against internet but that's a price thing right that's that's a business model thing but we like going shopping because again they've all of these companies always

forget especially technologists they all forget that the end user is a human being and most of us don't fully understand everything even even our iphones most people use a small percentage of all the capabilities of our iphones most of us don't even know how to change the damn settings to make it do something we want right even and neither do your kids it's not an adult thing right it's not an old person thing like and there's a few people who get more out of it and good for them some people use it just as a phone fine and it's a bell curve so i think there will be a few people a few

companies that will get more value out of these things than the rest of us but i think he's right i think there'll be a revolutionary bit and then it'll settle i i i'm i find this whole thing fascinating when you ask me how do i feel you know depending on what subject i'm talking about

absolute fear and absolute amazement i i i have i have both and everything in between when i think about how it affects democracy and the ability to make deep fakes and and how it can manipulate people and their opinions to vote one way or another i have real fear yeah right when it comes to like productivity and the reshaping of business you know technologists and people who who are part of the internet revolution they love to say you know 20 years ago 80 of the jobs we have now didn't exist they love to say that right but when you ask them now though they think they seem to think that i

think it's the same which is all those people are going to lose those jobs in white collar you know white collar jobs and knowledge workers i think they're not they're not going to not work there's going to be new jobs the irs digitized a whole bunch of years ago right they got rid of all the accountants and they put in all the computers right do you know how much money the irs saved when it when it change completely changed the the way it looked the answer is zero yes they got rid of all the accountants the need to hire all the it people so the the the the workforce looked different but it

didn't get smaller and so i think the same thing what it's good we also we already know the massive incredible amounts of energy that it takes for ai to work data centers that use up massive amounts of electricity like we've never seen in our lives like nuclear has to be a thing there isn't enough coal or oil or solar or wind to power these things it just doesn't exist so nuclear has to be a thing so go be a nuclear engineer go you want to get an advanced degree i don't need you to be a coder

you know coding was a thing for a go be a nuke because by the way you got to be just as smart to be a nuke as you have to be a so you're going to start to see that you know you're going to see energy work um i just think the jobs will change i don't think they're going to like it's i'd completely one thing i do disagree with you know it's not like you're going to be a bunch of people walking around bored i just think the jobs will change if there was a 10 year old kid stood here now and

the 10 year old said to us said guys what do you think i should focus on i would say two things

um uh one is going back to human skills learn how to be a good friend to your friends okay how do i learn that you're going to really need that how does a 10 year learn that or how do you and i learn that both a 10 year old learns it that when they go and have a play date at a friend's house a smart parent takes away all the phones but i would hate that the 10 year old has a phone in the first place but if they do take away all the phones and make the kids go play that when they have a fight the parents make them say sorry you know go over to your friend's house and knock on

the door and you're going to say sorry for the thing that you did um we're going to teach kids how to resolve conflict we're going to teach kids how to pay compliments we're going to teach kids how to take accountability and these are all the skills of you know what did you do wrong versus what did you what you know like it's not like you know it's not always the school or the teacher maybe your kid did is disruptive you know and so accountability is a real thing and so i think if we teach those things to 10 year olds and to adults um i think it makes for a better society and

the other thing is go learn a real skill and i don't mean like that you know prompting isn't a real skill that's not what i mean it's what i said before which is it's the excruciating like what makes great relationships great is not that you get along all the time the best marriages the best relationships they're not absent of conflict it's they know how to resolve conflict peacefully by the way i believe in world peace i don't believe in a world without conflict i believe a world in which we can resolve our conflict peacefully without the need to go to war to resolve conflict this is why i like democracies because democracies can solve conflict without bullets so i the human

skills one but i say a real skill me like go do something difficult build something design something imagine something write something and and and by the way i'm totally fine even if you plug into chat gpt and say tell me what's wrong with this your grammar's all screwed up you know and like i said i i am smarter because i did it i'm the reason i'm more confident than when i was younger and i think that's one of the things people talk about you get wise with age you know and like and you know you

have more confident as you get older and yes that's all true and there's multiple reasons for it but i think one of the reasons is is the things that are happening to me now i've gone through those things before they were scary and kept me up at night the first time and now i know how to do it i'm not afraid of it anymore and so i think what happens as you gain experience is you lose fear and if chat gpt or whatever ai product we use does everything for us i think you just end up scared one of the things

that i'm contending with at the moment with this new technology that's arrived being an entrepreneur seeing this huge opportunity thinking about the dot-com boom and all the great opportunity that that created people talking about the age of abundance and all these things is i'm contending with the question on a personal level which is when is enough enough and maybe this question is more pertinent now than ever in a world where creating stuff building stuff starting a company launching a book the cost of creating these things whether they're good or not so good has gone to basically zero

yeah so we can all theoretically from our computers now become movie directors and authors and software developers and so with this possibility opportunity and the thing we need to deploy is intention like what do i do what is the thing that's going to lead me to happiness do i pursue all of these things and start building and creating and running off down that path to climb some ladder or do i take a second when is enough enough and as an entrepreneur who is in this moment has a lot of resources could

roll the dice could start all these new companies could do all of these things when is enough enough

now right like we there's something to be said for gratitude and if you want to make it money we know the data on this right i think once you reach i can't remember the number it's seventy thousand dollars a year of income like like when you're talking about money you can't buy happiness like it absolutely buys happiness up to a certain level which is survival and then a little bit more you know but once you reach a certain level like the there is no discernible increase in happiness that comes

with money now what money buys is options you know what money buys is time you know um those things are true and you you said it like some of the people that you and i know who have made generational wealth they're not discernibly happy the ones that are happier were happy before they made the money and the ones who thought the money would buy them happiness or worse the money took away their purpose because when they made the money they were driven by something that they accidentally

made the money they built businesses that were that those were their passions and their cause and the money came and they weren't building the thing anymore and you know this this is this is the difference it's like why this is it really interesting it also gets the question is why is it that small companies are more innovative than big companies right like you think about it when you say what's the secret for for innovation when you want to have resources you want to have great people and you want to have great market opportunities and then you can have great ideas okay so big companies have tons of money they hire have all the best people they have mature marketplaces that people generally know who

they are and they're the least innovative organizations on the planet right then you have little companies that have no money they're bootstrapping it they don't have enough people nobody knows who they are in the shit market conditions and yet they're more innovative and then big companies innovate by buying the little companies you know that's basically what happens my exit your exit big company kind of innovates they just bought you right why is that why is that the rule and so it goes directly to this i think i think the reason is is because when you're small your ambitions are bigger than the resources you have to achieve those ambitions every small business

has outsized ambitions like beyond objectively stupid like you look at what they have and what they've got and you they tell you where they're going to be and you're just like no and yet some of them do and i think the problem with big companies is their ambitions are well within their the capabilities of their resources in other words their vision isn't big enough and i think your vision has to be bigger than the amount of money resources and intelligence that you have to achieve that and what that produces is creativity and so it goes right back to this which is if if if we can do so much

with ai then we need bigger visions and so when you ask me how do you find happiness i think that we need to set our sights on things that are bigger than finite success um and i think we do need a gratitude practice regardless of how little or how much you have to be grateful for what you do have is a profound impact i went through this with the la fires right the i was very lucky that my house survived and i didn't have to get evacuated but the evacuation zones were getting closer and closer

and two things happened that were profound that live that i will that live with me now one which is resolvable and one which is unresolvable we were all obsessed with this app called watch duty which is how we track the fires it basically took all the publicly available information and put it in one place in a really amazing way right started by this amazing amazing amazing entrepreneur named john mills and we were all obsessed with watch duty we all were on this app the whole time and one of the things we were watching was the wind because if the wind shifted it could profoundly impact your life

and i remember having this experience like we were all watching the wind and the wind went away from me and i thought oh thank god and in that moment i knew that somebody was looking at that going oh god no and it's not like service where i'll eat a little less so that somebody can eat more i'll give up some of my incomes that somebody has it's not one of those i don't want my house to burn down so somebody else's house doesn't burn down and i has i had to live with this paradox of how unfair the world is that simultaneously my relief and good news with somebody else's stress

and bad news and there's nothing i could do to change that so that paradox i it is horrible and i it was it was right in front of me so that's one but it's the second part which is the evacuation zones were coming a little closer and they were one zone away from where where i live

and we didn't know if we were gonna be woken in the middle of the night with a with an alarm to evacuate we didn't know and so we had i had to go through the process of packing up my car and making my go bag and i put as much stuff in my car as i could and i had to you know we all play that games like if there's a fire and you have to run out and grab two things what would you grab i had to do that right a lot of people in la had to do that right you actually had to make the decisions what am i going to take and what am i going to leave behind and i found myself bringing things that i never thought were important to me and i found myself leaving things behind that i thought i would take

but the one thing that was amazing was stuff that i couldn't fit but i still had love for like my favorite painting in the world it's just i couldn't fit it in my car i stood there in front of it and i said thank you and i said goodbye and it was like saying goodbye to a loved one you know i hear this you know somebody loses a parent they go look it was awful and you know he suffered as on his death but but i'm glad i was with him to say goodbye and it was the most amazing thing to have gratitude for something that i don't want to lose but accepted that i i might and it's made me a lot

more disconnected from my materials things especially the things i said goodbye to because i've already said goodbye to them i had i just sold some of my art for for charity and people said how did you love your art i'm like i know it's like my art's like my babies like that how did you choose and i said i've already said goodbye to everything here i did it months ago you know and i think this idea of gratitude gratitude for what we have but also um like you're gonna lose your parents all of us will lose our parents hopefully hopefully hopefully uh they don't ever have to say goodbye to us but

if things go well we're gonna have to say goodbye to our parents and we can't be angry about it we want to say thank you for the times we had and i think to have that level of appreciation for everything in our lives how temporary all of this is i think that's it makes you happier i know it sounds like i don't it it makes you happier to just look at someone and be grateful you know failed relationships you could be angry at the other person or you can be grateful for the lessons

they taught you and or for the good times you had and i think to change our minds to gratitude and you can you know it's it sounds it's a little bit you know hippy-dippy to have a gratitude practice and that's fine you know if that's your thing lie in bed every night or keep a journal and just say the things you're grateful for but i don't know if it works without an evacuation zone approaching

i don't know but to go around your home and just say thank you to the things that you like is a weird thing how many of us how many of us when was the last time you called a friend out of the blue and just said thanks for being my friend like hey just wanted to call and just tell you i love you just tell you thank you and you know that's all no just a quick just two minutes just just want to

say thank you for being my friend i think if i said that's one of my best friends they think i was losing my mind or something or that something was wrong they'd be so concerned because it's such an

unusual thing for me to do okay so you can do it this way so i had a guest on the podcast and he came up with this thing that is so outside of my personality but i'm gonna try it yeah that would make sense then you could do that yeah you know i'm i'm new to this you know i i know for years people have been like you should have a gratitude practice keep a gratitude journal and i tried it i was like

okay i'm grateful for my sister grateful for what i've um for my family grateful for my friends grateful for the life that i live all right good night all right next day i'm grateful for my sister grateful for my family grateful for my friends you know and i found it so repetitive that i was like is this worth it like sure like every now and then something was different and new and i've come to come to the conclusion like if it's the same three things every single day good i was thinking about

this a lot the other day when someone asked me think about all the people in your life and imagine if they were sick and imagine if you had a billion dollars in your bank and the billion dollars could cure their sickness like who would you cure it for for would you would you spend a billion dollars to cure your your girlfriend's sickness your your mother's sickness your father's sickness your whatever even if it was the the risk to them was was low and you would i'd give every penny i had to cure an illness that my girlfriend had even if the risk was low and as i was thinking through

that i was like but then if you look at my calendar and how i'm allocating my time against these individuals and against my priorities there's a real imbalance here and over the last couple of weeks in particular i've been on a bit of a journey of realizing just how important four or five people

in my life are i i and how much i neglect them yeah i mean like of course i mean we are only when it's and it's you're right like which is if you say give a billion dollars and you can cure this disease that affects you know two million people 10 million people you'd be like i'll give some money right but if it was one family member you would exhaust every resource you would quit your job you would do everything you can to for a one percent one for for a one percent chance you know and people do they quit their jobs when and and like so many charities have been started because my father died my mother

died my sister died my brother died and i've devoted my life to duh right like like literally that's the reason and it's because it's personal of course that makes sense it's why why are some entrepreneurs good and some entrepreneurs bad well how personal is the thing that you're working on to you because then i only like to like the entrepreneurs that i love i want to know that they are solving a problem that they struggled with or that somebody they love struggled with or something if they read an article in a magazine and thought this is a great market opportunity there is no passion there that is driven by money and power only i want to know somebody that is it's so deeply personal to them that they

will stop at nothing they will run through a brick wall and find every creative solution and it goes right back to the small company versus big company it's it's passion and a vision that is bigger than the resources that i have which you know i had a conversation with somebody recently actually

where they wanted to uh we uh it was a business problem and they wanted to change the goals and i said we can't just change the goals because they're difficult you know so we might miss the goal it's true yes we have a very aggressive goal and the likelihood of us hitting it is incredibly low but why would we lower it and they said to me you know i don't like to fail they said i don't like to fail and i know you don't either and i said ah that's where you're wrong that's where you're wrong i have spent most of my life a failure and i'm very comfortable being a

failure and i think of myself not as a success i think of myself as a failure and that's because my ambitions are bigger than my skills or my ability to achieve those ambitions and so almost everything i've done with a couple of exceptions have fallen short of what i had hoped for i'm very comfortable with that because failing at 80 is really much better than succeeding at 30 and i think this idea of fear of failure and embracing failure i don't want to fail but i just i i have

i think it's important to have dreams that are beyond your skills or your resources because that's where creativity comes from that's where resourcefulness comes from you know when you go how am i going to figure this one out and you told me the stories of your own team you know it's the resourceful ones and now we go back to ai ai is not going to figure that out

right there's there's data on this i have actually never thought about this this is good there was a book called oh it's the wisdom of crowds i think it was that one i think it was the wisdom of crowds by james serecki where people with experience knew what to do versus people who were just trained so i'll give you the example this is and again i might have the book wrong but this was i remember the case so there was a bunch of firemen fighting a fire in like the in wildfires right and the wind picked up and the fire was coming really fast towards these firemen true story

and they all started running for their lives as this fire was approaching them unbelievably quickly but the problem was if they looked ahead there was a small hill which means you're going to slow down because you can't run fast up a hill and this fire is coming fast right the senior guy on the on the team started screaming get down get down get down and they all ignored him they were all running for their lives and he just stopped running and got down and put his hands over his head and just lay in a ball and the fire was going so fast that it blew right over him and it caught up with the other guys

and burned them all to death now they didn't teach them that in fire school it it was accumulated knowledge of wisdom of that came from experience that he knew the right thing to do in the moment he was able to read the tea leaves in a way and his his gut whatever that means his gut said the right thing to do is to drop down you'll be okay and this is why i'm going to sound like a broken record the importance of doing the work yourself of writing the book painting the painting choreographing the

dance you know composing the symphony building the business having the difficult conversation stumbling and bumbling right the reason for it like let's say you have a fight with your your girlfriend you don't want to be in a fight you don't like being in a fight you want to do the right thing so you go to chat gbt and you'd be like my girlfriend and i had a fight this is what the fight was about okay i think i did some stuff wrong i think she did some stuff wrong this is exactly what happened tell me what to do and you go babe i just want you to know i want to take full accountability i'm really i'm really sad that this happened and i want you to know that i care about

this relationship and she says to you did you get this answer from chat gbt and you go i did how's that gonna go right now you did everything right you did everything right you did everything right but for the fact and it goes right back to what you said which is it removed the humanity it removed the personality it's artificial it's fake it's everything you said about the job interview it's everything you said about all those other things about all the resumes all of the pitch decks

it's not you telling me sorry it's chat gbt telling me sorry and even though you went with good intention to get it right i would rather you get it wrong and bumble and fumble it with me and be like babe i don't know how to do this i'm an asshole you know and then she fights with you because you get it wrong and you rumble through it together and what happens when you come you've had this happen

i know because i haven't i know anybody everybody has when you come out of the fight you're closer not because you got it right because you got it wrong and if you learn the skill and you get better and better and better and better and you do learn the skill of saying the right thing and you do learn the skill she knew wasn't because you asked ai in the moment because you just wanted to resolve

the problem and remove the tension it's because you learn the skill for the time that you don't know when it's going to happen because you're equipped for this relationship and it's that investment in the relationship rather than trying to transactionally solve the problem before me and that's the difference it's infinite versus finite it's transaction versus it's destination versus journey i'm in the journey of this relationship versus i have a destination i got to solve this problem now otherwise this is going to destroy my relationship and all of this is coming full circle and it comes right back to everything we started this i think it's hilarious that you and

that you're having a conversation with me about ai because i'm not an ai expert and i'm not in the ai business but i i am in the humanity business and i think everything we're talking about from every angle we're battle testing this idea and what we can't get away from is human beings really want human beings and human beings really want human experiences and human beings really want things made by human beings and we are not only okay with we want imperfection because imperfection is the sign

of human i was just thinking about how how when i'm in an argument with my partner if she was perfect if she was completely composed if she was looking at me without emotion without expression and if she was spewing chat gpt like responses back at me it would it would be a little bit infuriating but also it would be completely dehumanizing as you say and it's funny how actually even in conflict i want emotion i want imperfection yeah i want res human resonance so it's interesting because i've been like

thinking about what my struggle is a good thing yeah and i think in our modern day and age we have under appreciated and underrepresented the value of struggle and if you ask anybody in their life you know tell me about a time in your career where like you felt like boy this is the most amazing thing i've ever done i'm so glad i'm a part of this it's not the big win it's not the big success it's not we finished everything on time and under budget it's oh my god this one thing went horribly wrong

oh my god it went so badly and yet the way we came together like the most important thing in my career was when i lost my passion and went into deep depression never want to go through that again really glad it happened and all of our relationships professional personal romantic whatever they are right all of our relationships get better when we go through struggle together and we know we know the way the human animal works we know that oxytocin is released when you have shared struggle that's why when you put people in boot camp and they go through shit together or there's a natural a national

a natural disaster like all of a sudden i don't care who you voted for i saw your house blow down on the tornado i got you don't worry we're neighbors right like we can put aside all the rational nonsense the the intellectual nonsense and at the end of the day human beings are are are good at

helping human beings struggle also in many contexts is the value so when i think about a simon sinek book the reason why i value it is because i know that simon sinek spent years writing that thing and pulling it together the reason why certain handmade things that we talked about earlier are valuable is because of the pain and the toil that went into them and when you think about the art world and other creations through history the value comes from the fact that human beings came together for a prolonged period of time and did something and actually the investment is the value like the yeah the amount that went in

the top creates we're not buying the product we're buying the story yeah like the mona lisa is you're not buying the mona lisa you're not buying a piece of art you're buying the story that goes with the art the story that it took to create the art what the artist was going through what they were thinking you're not buying my book you're buying the story of the making of my book and the mona lisa was stolen from what i understand i mean we don't even know if the one in the louvre is the real one

because i heard much of the reason why the mona lisa is so valuable is because at one point it was stolen and then they like managed to find it again and actually it's just a painting but the story of the story is amazing it's worth 100 million 200 million whatever whatever i mean and so this is

what we forget the reason famous artists are famous is because you buy the story of that artist not not their talent there's a lot of famous singers and actors and painters dancers who are a lot less talented than the unknown ones but you buy into the story and this is why some celebrities

as much as they talk about the paparazzi and the tabloids they want to be in the paparazzi and the tabloid they want the paparazzi to follow them because it keeps their story relevant it keeps them you know they're worth more because they're in the zeitgeist apple know this better than anybody

because you go to an apple store and they've laid out their products as if it was an art gallery

the three feet either side of the iphone create the impression in my mind that this is a piece of art and there's only one of them and the fact that they've wasted all this space which i know real estate costs money and that must have been expensive pulls into the device itself if i'd gone into an apple store and there was a thousand iphones like the old electronic stops all stacked on top of each other i would assume the iphone was worth less but the story just by the frame in which i see it means oh my god this thing is it's theater it looks like one of one yeah it's theater and and some

would call it manipulative but we want things to feel valuable not just be valuable right i could tell you i've got a i i found a guy who makes cashmere jerseys and he uses the exact same cashmere as you know lure piano whatever some fancy fancy ass brand you know but the problem is it says like dave's cashmere shop you know i could tell you everything about where he sources the cashmere how he makes it that's the same everything and you'd be like yeah dave's cashmere shop because you're not

buying the cashmere you're buying the brand you're buying the story you're buying the association that's what's that's why brands have value because it's irrational yeah and humans are irrational and that's why companies invest in building brands for the story and so yeah i i think i'm you know as much as chat uh ai scares me i still believe the thing that the technologist the technologists don't

appreciate and won't appreciate and there there will be a rebellion and handmade will become more valuable and handmade will become more expensive and people will want to say that you know it's like you had that person write your speech for you you wait who did the painting they they did it themselves you know and i think that's good you know it's a pendulum right we're going to get enamored with the technology until we're until it's boring this also just expands generally i know

this sounds quite big and we're talking about these big things but just everything that you create it's very very tempting at the moment to just create something with ai and throw it up on your website on your social media pages or present it to the world a presentation deck at work but actually i'm already noticing i'm attributing huge value and interest in things that i can identify as human made i had a flashback a second ago so talking about this idea of scarcity

to one of my favorite brands in the world it's a clothing brand and i was obsessed with this clothing brand i'd spend a huge amount i don't spend money on clothes i would spend a huge amount of money every time they came out with a new item one day the founder of the brand and everybody knows this brand he posted a photo from his factory it was like a series of video and what i saw in the video was the shirt i was currently wearing as i watched the video in a massive bucket with 4 000 others of the exact same shirt and in that moment fell out of love i fell out of love exactly because

in my head i painted this like artisan picture of them sewing it these two guys sewing it in their

bedroom and then like that's probably what it's probably what it was on the ad too i think that's

what it kind of like used to be so i still had that image but it got too big yeah one thing that i've

always understood this is true for businesses this is true for absolutely everything scale breaks things you know scale breaks in the in the military they have special forces special operating forces navy seals sas you know all those folks right and there's a there's a saying in the special forces that's basically um special you can't scale special right so you can take whatever training skills whatever you have for the special forces and you give it to everybody it's not going to work special can only be small you know and and so scale breaks things scale always

so i mean like microsoft versus apple right so apple wanted the highest quality operating system in the world right so what did they do they they refused to clone right they wouldn't they wouldn't they wouldn't clone their their operating system and they as a result of of refusing to to do that they they never for years apple had like in the height of the the pc wars maybe four percent of the world's operating systems microsoft said we're happy to clone our operating system so it was a little bit

different on dell is a little bit different on ibm wherever you use it was slightly different and they had 90 something percent of the world's operating systems it's because you have to trade quality for scale every time there's a reason why buying fancy goods for a lot of money like because as you said the way you make things has to change and you have to start making them in factories and you have to scale scale scale scale break companies think about how beautiful companies are the number of companies that talk about oh our companies like a family get to about 150 people 200 people get to

dunbar's number not so much of a family anymore i think b2b marketers keep making this mistake they're chasing volume instead of quality and when you try to be seen by more people instead of the right people all you're doing is making noise but that noise rarely shifts the needle and it's often quite expensive and i know as there was a time in my career where i kept making this mistake that many of you will be making it too eventually i started posting ads on our show sponsors platform linkedin and that's when things started to change i put that change down to a few critical things one of them

being that linkedin was then and still is today the platform where decision makers go to not only to think and learn but also to buy and when you market your business there you're putting it right in front of people who actually have the power to say yes and you can target them by job title industry and company size it's simply a sharper way to spend your marketing budget and if you haven't tried it how about this give linkedin ads a try and i'm going to give you a hundred dollar ad credit to get you started if you visit linkedin.com slash diary you can claim that right now that's linkedin.com

slash diary is it harder now to find love because there's lots of stats that say we're having less sex we're lonelier than ever before um interestingly this is maybe an adjacent point but i was looking at bumble share price i love the founder of bumble the ceo is a really really good friend of mine i think she's amazing whitney whitney i think she is amazing has she come on she has and i know her and she's a wonderful human being but when i was looking at the bumble share price it painted a really interesting

picture because then you you overlay that with some of these other dating apps and you see i mean this is the well she's had to come back she's just come back in yet to turn the company around and actually interestingly i saw her do an interview which is one of these ones here and in the interview she says she's going to revamp bumble to make it not about finding love with others but falling in love with yourself yeah and there's also going to be this dating marketplace but her first objective is going to be get people to love themselves yeah through coaching and all these kinds of things on

the app and then find a partner sure yes i mean i i agree with that i mean it's like it's i mean we're all broken records right i don't mean that is it like a like we're all broken souls like you know your customers will never love you until your employees love you first you'll never find somebody to love you unless you love yourself first and look at failed relationships right where there's so much tension it's somebody's lack of self-love that contributes to the failing of that relationship i mean i have a dear friend who's going through it right now she just can't find love and she

it's it's just but it's because she doesn't love herself and and she knows that you know it's a hard thing to do so bumble can crack that code more power to them it's it's a but this is the problem with a lot of these things you know they're common knowledge we just don't do them everybody knows how to be healthy everybody knows how to exercise everybody knows what eating right means don't do it

because wrong is easier and right takes effort everybody knows what we're supposed to do in a relationship everybody knows that we're supposed to like hold space everybody everybody knows philosophically what we're supposed to do but we don't do it by the way it's the reason why most people i've written all these lovely books and it's the reason why most companies don't use them it's because my work is like exercise which is i can tell you every single if you want to get into shape hey simon how do i get into shape easy every single day work out for 20 minutes every single day okay can i take the occasional day off yes but not too many work out every single day and 100 of you

will get into shape i know it 100 when i don't know and neither does any doctor and that's my work yes i can profoundly help you find purpose with start with why i can help you build trust on a team with leaders at last i can help you embrace the infinite mindset and have this incredible calm in life and the reason most companies won't do it this innovate this is a book for innovation right here you want to innovate infinite game the reason most companies won't do it is because they need it to happen by the end of the quarter or the end of the financial year it may or may not i have no clue and i cannot

predict that it will or won't it'll work 100 i just don't know when and the problem is goes right back to the beginning of this conversation we're all so obsessed with the output we're all so obsessed with the result that we've completely ignored the value of the journey and people would rather hit the number at the end of the year than build a good strong company think about it right if i meet another entrepreneur when i say so tell me about your company like we're hyper growth we're a hyper growth company we're a gazelle right like show me then i always say the same thing because i'm an ass

can you please give me one article from a reputable publication just one and i don't care the publication that says that building a hyper growth company is good for business just one and the answer is you can't because it's not and so why are we so obsessed with high speed growth it's because our investors want us to be obsessed with high speed growth right or our egos want us to be obsessed with high speed growth right and if high speed growth happens by accident that happens for many of the unicorns right it was an accident i think building a good company is better than building a fast company i

think building a good relationship is better than building a fast relationship and we're all so obsessed with speed and immediate results a present company included i've had to learn this the hard way that i think there's something joyful and beautiful about slowing down saying thank you reprioritizing friends it's okay i mean by the way cell phones and so but before cell phones we went to work and then we went home and we didn't do work at home because we couldn't do work at home

because we didn't have computers at home and we didn't have cell phones or people to call us and so you you did work at work and then you left and i remember when cell phones started i remember the advertising at&t had this campaign that they showed people working on the beach you know with their computers i mean this is like the future right and they said now um well i remember what was the what was the tagline it was really funny it's like now you can leave work right and that's not

what happened work came with us we never left work work came with us wherever this is the problem with cell phones and computers and the internet which is we do not leave work work is with us in our pocket every day every vacation every evening every weekend as you said that i thought you know what

that's so interesting because that kind of means that friction creates freedom in that regard if you know what i'm saying so the friction of not being able to go home and tap away on my computer all night meant that i had a certain level of freedom because i had to kind of wait for things right so in the same context with ai coming along now i can build software throughout the weekend whether the agency's working or not now i can build anything i want at any time yeah using the phone in my pocket the friction has come down again and therefore the pressure to do it now because i can do it now goes up and this is kind of maybe what i was alluding to earlier on in the you know what

i was saying about how you're going to get more stressed and more overwhelmed and that's good

more isolated that's so good that's so right it's we're taking work with it i mean it's like you know then everybody has a story of like where the battery ran out on their phone and they ended up having the best night yeah or the internet went out at work and they actually got more done like you hear these stories all the time you know that that when when we're forced not to take work with us forced it takes a bit of time sometimes to relax but it's always better because you learn to stop worrying stop checking you know you know and you just i one of the things

i did i i can't delete instagram completely as much as i'd love to but i hit it so you know you can do that on iphone you can take it off the it's gone it's hidden it says hide app and then i and when you go into the search you know when you go search it suggests i took it off the suggestions which most people don't even know you can do that so i took it off the suggestions so when i go because i realized what i was doing is i'm like when i'm bored i just pick up my phone and i just like and then i see instagram like and i just click it like a like a zombie and then i'm done for an hour you know so i hit it so the only time i go to instagram is when i have to go to it and i have

to type in i n s t you know and then it pops up and my usage of instagram has plummeted

plummeted because it has to be intentional and the problem with most social media is it's

unintentional one of the big things talking about community instagram ai that i think a lot about is

is the is the value of in real life community going to rise and i think we might be on the precipice of the community revolution i say this because when i think about what's going to remain in a world where creating things goes to zero like when you know once upon a time if you made a social network or if you built an app or if you built a media a movie or a media company or a podcast that was half of the job and the other half of the job was like getting it out there in the world yeah and so now the people that have the other half of the job which hasn't gone to zero

now have this tremendous advantage because we can all create but we can't all distribute and so having community and building and fostering community i think now is one of the things that remains what are the values of a community like how do i build a community well i have a

definition of community and i think we said it before which is the community is a group of people who agree to grow together interesting community is a group of people who agree to grow together and i believe friends are at least two people who agree to grow together in marketing this is the

absolute obsession at the moment community run clubs and yeah brands becoming it's offline is the

new online right um offline is the new black um like there's a there's a company called clicks and it was started by she's a talented entrepreneur and she was in college and she suffered severe depression and loneliness and literally struggled didn't know how to make friends and uh she oh i just called by her name her name's alix um but her company clicks she started it to solve her own problem right my favorite kind of company and basically to help her friends at school quote

unquote friends people at school make friends and she did it by taking people offline and taking their phones away and she would come up with reasons to come together whether it's running or this or just like it didn't matter what the reason was coming just a reason to come that made you that when you saw the ad hung up on a piece of paper at college you know they'd be like i like horror movies whatever i like baking i'll go to that right just a trick and then basically just and so she's built this business predominantly for young people but it's available to anyone but she's built this

business to just bring people together to meet people without phones offline and she wants she has and there's a great irony in it she has an app that she wants people not to be on you know and what is it

that holds the community together is it so like we want to improve together so we have to have some kind of shared value that we want to improve on presumably it's like a community of runners they're trying to get fit together or they're trying to improve that i don't think it matters i mean it's

like it's it's shared shared interests is a is a way to start a relationship right comic con you know you know nerdvana you know burning man all of these larger than life events big and small going to the going to the going to the football you know it's like you're everybody's friend when you wear when you wear the right when you wear the right colors you know you know you see people on the on the tube who's going to go into the same game they're wearing the same jersey your friends your friends right so i think common interest is a is a is a trick it's a way of getting

people to come together and it's a nice place to start because at least conversation is easy right you know at least one thing about this person that you have in common with them do you need a

shared goal in a community do you think thinking because in the football analogy we have a shared goal oh yeah you want to win i think that's a very good question you have a shared goal even in a relationship yeah i think so that seems to make sense the reason why i'm asking these questions is i am building businesses and brands and i know that community is one of the most important things that everyone building a brand or business is thinking about at the moment so there's a big difference between having an audience which is what you might have on like a podcast or something and having a community and i'm as a brand leader and as an entrepreneur i'm trying to shift from having an

audience over to having a community and that's about like relationships and shared values shared values

i mean i like to think the people who really like my work not the ones who just like passively like but the ones who really like my work like if somebody says i love start with why or i live my life by the infinite game that it says something about who they are and how they see the world and that we share the same values and that if and because i am you know me you know i'm an idealist

and and my i i'm consistent in the way i talk about things from the day i started to now and won't ever change and and i think that's the value of values and the problem with the modern world we live in and the pressures that people face is money and fame and all the rest of it and you know influencer status i think it sometimes forces us to question our values or walk away from them i was invited to a group of they called it a mastermind group where's a bunch of folks like me author speakers who wanted this is what they told me come together to based on shared shared goals

shared values how we can work together to improve the world together i'm like oh sign me up i'm in right so i went and we sat around and you know who some of these people are you know and we sat around a room and they spent all of their time talking about how they can share their lists with each other and how they can cross promote with each other and what margins are you getting on this and i'm like you guys and i spoke up i was like you guys are just talking about making more money what i thought we came here to like do common good together they didn't invite me back but it was but

the point is is like the money and the fame is seductive you know this is this is this is joseph campbell's hero's journey which is you start off as the reluctant hero and you get called to your mission for some reason and at some point in your journey there will be something to seduce you away from your mission money or power you know luke skywalker was nearly seduced away from the vision you know from the journey like this is what this is what the hero has to go through and do you have

the friends who will slap you around and keep you in line and say no you signed up for this you have to stay true to what you're doing because i think none of us have the courage or the strength to stay true to our cause by ourselves very few of us we need to have at least one person who believes in us to give us the strength to stick to it because the temptation the temptation you and i have both at various times gone through it like when you start making money and you start making money for something you didn't expect like i never expected to have a career from any of this stuff right it happened by accident and you get to the point where you start thinking you're more

important than you are do they know do they do they know who i am no no get over yourself you know and you start becoming seduced and i think the seduction when we turn on social media and we watch kardashian the kardashian model and like you have people who pursue influence without knowledge or skill like those two buckets they have the other three buckets but they don't have the first two buckets and it is temporary for some or unfulfilling for others and you know the funny thing about that job

you know i was i was i went to a concert and there was this there's a woman who walked down the aisle and some guy was taking pictures of her she was posing and the person next to me goes she's a famous influencer and i said you mean she's a freelance employee of an algorithm and and there's somebody who chooses to be an influencer that's what you are you are a freelance employee of an algorithm and the minute they change the algorithm you might be out of business

uh you just lost like 170 followers i mean maybe you just lost like 170 blue ticks

like i don't have a problem with the concept of being an influencer if you bring something of value the only time i have a problem with it is is if you make it about you and i have to get more of everything in the early days of influencing there was a young couple that were trying to get followers and they would do crazier and crazier things and so she what they did is he took a dick a big book a dictionary i think it was and he put it over his chest and she took a gun and shot it at the book thinking that the book would stop the bullet and she killed him she killed him on camera right now

they admitted she admitted afterwards she he's dead but she admitted afterwards they were doing it to do bigger and crazier stunts to get more and more followers because the financial pressures of driving at those youtube views was overwhelming and so it's an extreme case obviously of the the the the how we will lose our minds trying to gain followers and i don't mind if people gain followers by giving but to gain followers by taking look at me look at me look at me versus i have something that i think this will help you and like there's not there's no i don't have problem

with what it's it's the it's the input right it's the intention um anyway anyway i sound like an old

man complaining about nobody you kids these days and you were influencers someone i printed off some graphs which i think are absolutely fascinating and dovetail into everything you've said today but also into your work generally so i'm just going to give you all of these to give you a second to look through them and i want to get your read interpretation on them okay adults lack of meaning and purpose overall lonely okay i mean that makes sense to me that didn't make sense i couldn't understand how if someone is low in purpose then they are lonelier i mean it just makes sense that when you have

lack of purpose the likelihood that loneliness comes nearby like i think family gives meaning friends give meaning like you feel like you're there for someone else um but if you don't know why you're showing up every day i think it it feels like a lonely existence like you feel like you're searching when you have a sense of purpose it gives you a mechanism to meet people it gives you a mechanism to make decisions it gives you a mechanism to talk about yourself in a way that's quite inspiring to others you know when you say your why and somebody says so what do you do you say i wake up every single day to inspire people to do what inspires them what do you do

you know like it's it's i yeah i do i do and i think it's it's not the thing that makes you

less lonely i think it's a mechanism to make you less lonely just as you said that that why you just gave it becomes a magnet for me yeah because then i know who your people are and i know what to talk to you about and it throws down this bridge for me to walk across yeah versus yeah i'm a dentist

or i don't know which is even worse which is even worse yeah yeah so so yeah that that doesn't

seem unusual distribution of people feeling lonely worldwide by gender so it's about 50 50.

are you surprised by that i thought for some reason i thought i think that not at all lonely looks like women do better i would think do you think you thought men were more lonely i thought men would be more than i saw i also don't know what the age groups are because like i want to know what how they like what age are they to start are they starting at is it 18 i guess if we just put that all aside i mean women being slightly less lonely than men i think makes sense because i think

women are probably better at making friends maybe i have that wrong what else we got here adults mental health health ratings 68 of people who have depression are lonely and 67 of people have anxiety are lonely do you think good mental health is a foundation for being

not lonely i guess no i think having somebody who cares about you is a foundation for not being lonely and when you're in a period of strained mental fitness it definitely can manifest as loneliness and anxiety and the best way to manage through that period of is to lean on the people who you know love you that will help so i don't think you can separate the two so does it affect it of course it affects it can it make you withdraw from your friends of course it can um so i don't think you

can separate the two i read um a couple of years ago that when people are lonely they fall into a state of self-preservation because of some evolutionary uh sort of mechanism which meant that if we were alone on the serengeti in africa we would sleep worse we'd become more selfish we'd become more angry our cortisol levels would be up which means more inflammation and this idea of self-preservation basically means that lonely people become more selfish more bitter more angry and that that's not conducive ironically with finding more friends but it is conducive with survival it is conducive with

being able to fend for yourself it makes it's more conducive survival as an individual yeah so like if you're in a deserted island and you're lonely and all those things and the cortisol rises and you become better at being on edge being on edge which is a survival mechanism right but if you live in a community with other people then it is counterproductive because we are social animals and i need you to help me and you need to help me so if we live in tribe together and i'm the selfish asshole i'm not you're not

gonna wake me and alert me to danger tonight you're just gonna leave me so so it's a it's a it's a though i think it's a hundred percent true in a social environment it becomes counterproductive and i think you're right when somebody feels lonely they do go into survival and they become paranoid and they think everybody's out to get them and it's but the problem is is you don't live on a desert island and that's one of the reasons i think it's it's dangerous we're increasingly being living on islands

the islands are different now they're four walls in a in a white city and um it's so funny that so many my friends are using this word loneliness when 10 20 years ago it wasn't it wasn't something that i heard frequently from from adults but now it seems to be also common in fact my masseuse yesterday was saying to me that she's lonely and this is a woman that lives in los angeles has people around her but she's lonely yeah and i remember when she went and she's because we had a conversation and i text her and said oh thank you for for being so open and stuff i was thinking about like what advice i could

give her she's got no friends she's in los angeles she's desperate for friends she doesn't have a partner anymore because she's had a divorce what advice do you give someone is it take more risks

so it's it's it's easy to give the obvious advice like you got to put yourself out there right but when you're in a period of loneliness and stress it's hard to find that that energy and that risk-taking right especially when you're down on yourself we've all been there i've definitely been there but the um i think for me what i've learned is um to put myself second meaning don't worry don't try and solve my problem but do i have somebody else who's lonely that i can help like how do i help somebody else who's dealing with their loneliness and it's the act of service that is so valuable if you know you guys are talking and she has many clients and somebody else

and her willing to admit that i'm lonely that one of her clients might say you know me too like her ability to admit her loneliness out loud creates a safe environment for somebody else to admit the same and then once she learns that they're lonely now she can say tell me about it and then she can talk them through it and hold space for them and her ability to help somebody else manage or understand their own loneliness will will help her so interesting because one of the hallmarks of her

personality if you met this person something she says to me every single time she comes over um for the treatment is that she doesn't like sharing herself with people because she thinks if people get to know her they'll change so literally she's been my misuse for many years now and if people get to know her they will change she's scared about people knowing her she's scared about people knowing the details of her life so she guards it all and it took me and i'm someone that just asks way too many questions of every stranger i meet it took me like 20 sessions just to figure out she had a family

i had no idea she had two kids took me she was and when i asked her her body language went like this yes i have kids and i said why why are you so guarded with your information well if people know who really i really am and they know more about me then they'll change or they may not like me anymore or they'll think differently about me so i just keep it to myself but i mean this is the age-old

problem i mean it's everything you said when you when people who are driven only by the thing that they want you know versus the givers and this i mean this is the age-old problem which is i'm never i'm gonna keep my walls up high i never want to love anybody because then i'll get hurt and then you just end up lonely and hurt and this is this is goes this goes back to struggle which is this goes look you and i both know that that if somebody who chooses to go in an entrepreneurial venture or adventure the statistics bear out that the over 90 of all new businesses will fail in the first three years right what idiot would ever start a business right you have to be compelled by

something else to make you do something with overwhelming statistical chance of failure right and and it's opening yourself up to failure that is the thing that makes it work you know at least for a small percentage but it's the same for love which is or relationship or friendship which is it absolutely comes with risk there's nothing risk-free like yeah they will some of them might change yes some of them might not like you for that yes yes and the odds are equal that

somebody will fall in love with you and love you and like you and think you're the best thing and think you're amazing and so if you can't take the risk you can't get the reward if you don't play the lottery you don't win the you know you don't win the jackpot if you aren't willing to take i'm not telling you to open up and tell everybody your deepest darkest secrets but if you're not willing to give somebody anything to latch on to to be like if you can't give them anything to say me too

then then it's going to be a hard road or it'll take somebody to chip away at you 20 times you know before you open up but but the fact that you did and she got it to open up a little bit

she could make a friend in you now she's fully open yeah and we've been through everything i know where she wants her house to be well there you go you see that thing so you have to point out

to her that this friendship and that you know so much and that she feels so safe with you only happened because um you chipped away at her and she finally you wore her down and she opened up and it can happen in two directions right which is sometimes we have to take the little risk to just tell somebody some a little something about ourselves to find something or sometimes it's somebody who's so curious about us that they chip away and chip away and chip away and chip away and chip away until we give up and open up and that person becomes a friend you know and so one of the

reasons she should be grateful for the friendship is you kept trying you could have just tried it three times and be like forget it i'll just lie here quietly and have a massage you know so yeah i mean all of

this stuff comes with risk i could see it in her face though i could see but you're also curious yeah

i can see this she lucked out because you're curious about people is this what connection is

you when you said me too finding something to say me too with someone is that the essence of what

like connection is i mean me that i can mean it could be values it could be interest it could be many things but i think to find i think yes like this is i mean if you want to go political you know one of the problems in our politics is both sides think they're right and both sides think the other side is wrong and neither side is willing to try to even understand what the other person's point of view is without thinking them an idiot or thinking them wrong or thinking them sheeple

and the ability to say can you tell me more about how you came to your beliefs i'm genuinely curious and to not agree or disagree but to be curious to be an investigator you know and i and i've done this with people who have polar opposite political views with me at some point we will get to a level of me just chipping away trying to understand that they will say something that i'm like a hundred percent i agree with that and then from that point on there's a there's a simple validation not

agreement but a validation that your opinions do matter and we do have common ground that we can build from there and on that on that validation they become vastly more open to my point of view also and curious to my point of view also and so yeah the person the person like the ability to listen and be curious even if you disagree is one of the most underappreciated skills on the planet and yeah i think when you find the ability to say i agree then you can find community you can and maybe that's what we need to heal this country or most of the countries in the world right now which is one

group or one person to just be curious rather than agree or disagree there's something about

relationships here as well because my girlfriend is you've met my partner and um she's very spiritual but also like all of us she's emotional so sometimes in those interactions when we sit down and there's a problem and we spend the first 60 minutes to 90 minutes trying to figure out what the problem is it doesn't sound very logical to me and one of the things that i think sort of is adjacent to what you're saying is my job in that moment actually isn't to like pass through truth and to figure and to correct truth it is to sit and let someone get it out get it out so you and i have the same problem

which is we live above our necks yeah and you and i both have the same struggle which is to learn to live below our necks right like you and i are head people and we have to learn to be more heart right and i want to understand everything explain anything you know evaluate everything analyze everything and when i come to my emotions i'll give you an analysis you know when it comes to your emotions i'll give you an analysis and so i have to learn to be like i feel this and that's it and i feel the same way it's funny because i'm good at it with art you know i always tell people you don't

have to understand art i'll take you to a museum i'll take you to a gallery and if you look at a piece and i know you're intimidated to come because you don't understand art or you don't understand music whatever it is and all you need to do this is the only rule is do you like it i do why i don't know i just like it that's it you're done you're done i don't like it why i don't know i just don't like it great excellent and now we're going to look at four five six ten pieces that you like and i'm going to see four five six ten pieces that you don't like and i'd be like you like all of the

impressionists and you hate all the old masters so why don't we just go see more impressionists you know and so when when your girlfriend opens up to you you know you don't have to agree you don't have to disagree you just have to and you and i both have to learn to stop thinking and to just like feel something when somebody says where do you feel it i'm like what that's the stupidest question i've ever heard where do i feel it and they've literally like i had somebody take me on this journey and she goes she told me an emotion you have simon you told me an emotion yes where do

you feel it in your body where do you feel it and i'm sitting there going you've got to be kidding me you know but all right we'll go through this all right and she says so you said you feel x i'm like yes all right where in your body did you have some sort of reaction i hear what happened it got a little tighter in my chest okay and i went on this journey with my friend that's my friend bea bea voce she's she's incredible and she took me on this journey and she does repair with couples and

she's just incredible and she helped me recognize that my body does react to my feelings tension in my shoulders heavier breathing in my chest clenching my fists you know like my body does react and so i'm learning to experience feelings beneath my neck when my inclination is to do everything above above the neck it's a hard skill oh my god it's hard and so i have a men and so when you're when you meet spiritual people they are all below the neck and we think it's stupid but they recognize that we have

an ability to feel because we want to think about everything and so we both have a lot to learn from each other which is they're thinking about things has value not all the time and so your girlfriend and i because i know her her ability to know her body when she has feelings i think is way more is has a lot of value to you and to me i think it's like the biggest opportunity yeah i have to for relationships yeah change the number of posts for automation prone jobs compared to manual intensive

jobs so this is a graph that shows the drop in job postings online for jobs around automation

it's yeah the knowledge work is going to get hammered by ai um i met a guy in japan

who he's one of the very few guys left like a hundred of them left 150 of them left who make samurai swords in the traditional samurai sword way you make them you hammer the metal and he folds his own metal and he makes samurai swords they made them the way they made them 200 years ago

and we went to his little workshop and he's this little old guy and he's telling us the story like how did you do this he's like well i had a desk job i worked in a company and i woke up one day i was like i can't this i can't do this like this is this can't be my life and i just i've always been enamored by sword making so i found an apprenticeship and tried to learn and you know i'm i i'm just starting to get the hang of it but i have a lot of room for improvement and we're like how long have you been doing this he said 30 years 30 years but that's so japanese you know the japanese like

they'll never be good at this i'll just keep working at it and and like it's such hard work

but he i think there's something to be said for i think a lot of us like think about how many white knowledge workers like ask them what their hobbies are you know and like maybe there is an opportunity to learn a skill i mean look at look at look at lockdown when we all went through lockdown i mean what skill did you practice during lockdown what did you learn deejaying running

cycling deejaying deejaying right i did kintsugi it's the japanese art of fixing broken things with gold so basically you take a broken plate or broken cup and you put it together and with gold paint or gold epoxy you put it together and you make it the whole concept is you can make something more beautiful like things can get more beautiful after they're broken right i love the philosophy of it i spent hours doing freaking kintsugi ask me how much kintsugi i've done since we came out of

lockdown how much djing have you done zero and so maybe all this free time that we're supposed to get

which i still don't think will happen maybe it's not such a bad thing think about the joy you had djing i had so much fun doing kintsugi i had so much fun it's been hours just my head down focused i was so relaxed not thinking about work so why why that's the other question people talking about how we're all gonna have all the spare time we've lost all of our spare time we have no spare time because all we do is work and think about work and talk about work like if we go back 40 years 50

years there was plenty of spare time and people went bowling and they went to the movies and they went over to each other's houses for dinner and they cooked isn't it a good thing that we're getting

time back you know a lot of us got a lot of good things out of lockdown and that's extreme so like maybe maybe it's okay that we get some time back because it sounds like we've lost all of our own

time it fixed the loneliness you'd have space for relationships you'd have space for relationships

you'd have space to try things and we couldn't bury ourselves and work and escape from our lives that we hate by just burying ourselves and work like maybe maybe ai doing some of the work for us is the thing we've been desperate for for the past 30 years just saying

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marissa and she said that creating this product has been no easy feat they tried launching in 2021 but as is often the case in business the development process turned out to be extremely complex so they've spent the last four years testing and refining every single detail to create this which is a perfect ted matcha vanilla latte and a perfect ted matcha strawberry latte so what we have here in these cans is barista quality matcha straight from the can and it tastes like it's just been made from your favorite cafe naturally sweet and naturally creamy in a can and the reason why

i've invested in this company and i drink matcha is because matcha as an energy source gives me lasting energy without the big crashes that i get from other products grab their ready to drink canned matcha lattes at waitrose tesco's and hollandandbarrett and perfected.com where you can use code steven40 for 40 off your first order what are you struggling with in this season of life i think i've asked you this in every conversation we've had and the answers

evolved conversation to conversation yeah we'll both go i'm doing so much right now by the way absolute joy and i wish i had more time in a day and not in the sense that i'm deprioritizing my friends you know you talked about how you you know you you would give them all your money to secure them but you don't give them any time i actually treat a lot of i've actually gotten very good at this it's probably when you write a book about friendship you sort of like take yourself on a little bit where i i will schedule friends like meetings in the middle of the day haven't seen a

friend for a while um four o'clock in the afternoon tea with and i go and i leave the office like i'm going to a meeting because nobody says hey simon where you going to go in a meeting where you having the meeting at that restaurant people like have fun nobody will give me any kind of grief if i'm leaving to go to a meeting now i go and see a friend and and when somebody says can i cancel this french tea with friend because that you that you have a phone call you have to have like no just

like you wouldn't cancel on my meeting don't cancel on so i treat ice i put it in and i give them equal weighting to things that have to do at work because i've become much more discerning like do i have to have this meeting or this phone call today or can i do it next week i could do it next week and you realize we fake we fake or we add fake urgency to things and i i have a friend who's kind of amazing he he's way busier than me and he he says i don't want to spend time with anybody like i saw i saw it

was really funny he came out of a meeting and it was he had a meeting with a very fancy person who's who's courting him for business right or he should be courting the other guy actually

very fancy person and he comes out of the meeting i'm like how was it's like total waste of time i'm like you don't want to do business you he doesn't want to work with you i was like no he wants to work with me he wants to work with me badly total waste of time i'm like what are you talking about i was like he's just some rich asshole like i learned nothing i didn't enjoy it and i don't want to work with him and i was like tell me more he's like i only want to work with people who when i spend time with them they teach me something i laugh or i feel inspired when i walk away and if somebody

sucks my energy i do not want to i do not want to work with them and i was like that's amazing to have that level of confidence that you would turn down money in your business and and now what if we applied that as much as possible in our lives like what if we stopped hanging out with friends who just sucked our energy are they really friends rather than spend more time with people who we enjoy what if we take meetings from people we're excited to take a meeting with not that we just

see dollar signs and opportunity and what if we only partner with companies where we really like the people who are who work at those companies doesn't you don't have to have a relationship with the ceo but i really they've got a good culture i really like working with them and we make a little less money with them versus that other company but i i really like them because when things go wrong i want to call that person and and people ask me this all the time they say how do i choose a publisher and i've seen this mistake a thousand times i've seen people like like former ceos who are like i now i'm going to write my book i'm like great you've got a lot to say and they've

got multiple offers and there's a bidding war and they always ask me which one should i go with which publish should i go with and i always say the same thing choose the one you're going to fight with best choose the publisher you're going to fight with best they're like what i'm like the goal is to make a good book there's going to be creative tension there's going to be fights choose the the publisher who believes in your idea believes in you wants to make a great book who you're going to fight with really well they every single one of them ignores me every single one of me takes the biggest bid and every single one of them has written a shitty book that didn't sell

isn't that just relationship advice as well then probably yeah choose the person you're going to fight with best and the the number of times that we forget about the quality of the product and we just want it's the same it's the same for job interviews you know don't this is especially true for for young people like when you're interviewing in a relatively junior job entry level or slightly above don't worry about how much they're going to pay you like just as long as they pay you a livable

wage you know choose the job choose the job based on who you're going to work for choose the person i used to in early on in my career people you know hr people say what are you looking for i always i'd always say the same thing i said the thing that i'm looking for is probably like looking for love but i'm looking for a mentor and every time i'd evaluate a job i didn't care how glamorous the brand was i didn't care how much money they're going to pay me and by the way it's not like i had money i knew they were going to pay me something i knew i could pay my bills it's not like i've got i'm not a i'm not a trust fund baby like i needed i needed an income but one company offered me you know five

thousand dollars more and one company offered me five thousand dollars less but i really like the person over here i took that job and it was the sim is if i got one thing right as a as a as a as a young person it's that i always chose jobs based on who i would work for not how much they were going to pay me or what account or what brand i was going to work on and that's the one thing i got right because yes i made less money than all my friends in the short term but i got a i got a i got an education and a care and a love from somebody who took me under their wing i am i am i am i learned

leadership from dennis glennon i learned leadership from peter and tamagio i learned leadership from pamela moffitt i learned leadership from these leaders who took a weird liking took me and took me under their wing and they were exceptionally good leaders themselves and i got that education and all of them in the early days paid me less than i could have got somewhere else and it's the same choose the people

in my um in my book that i wrote the first chapter and it talks about this idea of these five buckets

and i'm giving i'm trying to give young kids advice on how to prioritize their career and it sounds somewhat similar to you so i'm going to throw this concept at you and see see how it lands with you so the idea was that we all have these five buckets when we're starting our career and the first bucket is your knowledge the second bucket is your skills now these are the only buckets that no professional earthquake in your career can unfill right you can be fired you can be cancelled whatever you still have your knowledge and skills but the other three buckets i'm about to name they can fluctuate bucket number three is your network can fluctuate bucket number four

is your resources can fluctuate and bucket number five is your reputation can fluctuate and the idea is that focusing on those first two buckets when you're young opt choosing jobs based on how much they're going to fill those two buckets and also what they're going to fill them with and how relevant that information is and when knowledge is applied it becomes a skill so you focus on filling your knowledge you apply that knowledge into skills and that really is the essence of career longevity and as i noticed over time with people that i i hired and then watched them throughout their careers and what they did it seems to me that life over the long term typically brings you back down

or up to the level of your knowledge and skills i.e i had this one kid step down from my company because he got a job offer at 21 to go be a ceo in america and as he departs i'm thinking he has not got the knowledge and skills to be a ceo within 24 months the company had gone bust he was back down to doing the same job he did for me and i thought life just like resets you to the level of your knowledge and skills over time so what do you think of this all these i think we're saying the exact same

thing you did it more eloquently than me you know i think i think it's 100 right uh um and the people who will fill that bucket with knowledge and skills are the people who again for some reason they're good people they're good leaders they take a liking to you and they will give you they will put you in situations and they will let you screw up and fix your own problems fix your own mistakes then that's what my bosses did for me they rewarded my behavior when i got it right as opposed to my results never got rewarded for my results i always got rewarded for my behavior

so if i showed initiative i got a result i got a reward even if the results didn't follow right and i could i can tell you a great story on that and if i got things wrong they would say

wow what are you gonna do really screwed that one up didn't you okay what are you gonna do and they didn't they weren't happy with me but they let me fix my own messes and they stood by and i knew that they were there if i needed them you know peter and tamagio one of the best leaders i ever worked for annoyingly he never answered a single question i asked hey peter what should i do i don't know what do you think we should do well i think we should do this i'm like okay so go do that you know what do you think peter i'm asking you because i don't know that's why i'm asking you

he's like oh well you should probably go think about that he was it was the worst but what he taught me was self-reliance what he taught me was self-reliance what he taught me was if i don't know then i have to go keep searching and keep talking to people i have to have a point of view and may not be right and i'll find that out myself too and i also learned to have backup plans from him because something went haywire on me and it went so wrong it ended up being okay but they he made me sweat it and remember at the end of the day at the end of this whole thing that went wrong

that was totally my fault the phone rings i see his it was 6 p.m phone rings i see his name come up on the caller id and i pick up the phone i remember the whole call word for word right i pick up the phone i go hello he says close call today i said yep he said better to get shaved by the bullet than hit by the bullet i went yep he said have a good night i said you too that was the whole phone call and so since then since that experience i always have a backup plan now it doesn't mean it's

all ready to go but i've thought about if this thing that i'm trying to do doesn't work what will i do and i at least committed some thought to it so if if something does go wrong i'm like i'm a little bit ahead either have it planned or i'm like okay okay don't worry i kind of if this happened i thought about this already and it's only because of these great leaders and it goes this is this recurring theme of this whole conversation which is it's the struggle it's the journey not the destination it's the human beings that guide us it's the human beings that hold space for us that make us better at what we do better better than how we show up in the world and ai will

absolutely make our lives easier like most technology makes our lives easier that's kind of the role the rule of technology which is to make life a little easier a little more efficient a little quicker a little less you know strain on the muscles you know that's kind of what it does you know from the from the plow you know all the way up to the internet and ai it just makes life a little easier but we're still human beings who are forced to live with human beings you're writing a book about

friendship that we're all waiting for yeah i'm not going to ask you when it's due because i don't want to be your publisher but um i know that they they chase and chase and chase and chase but my my closing question is why of all the things you could have written about simon you're someone who's able to traverse several subject matters across business and life and everything in between but you've committed yourself to the struggle of writing a book about friendship there's an

entire industry to help us be better leaders right there's an entire industry to help you have a successful relationship or a successful marriage or even find a partner right industries books companies there's very little on how to be a friend and if you think about if you're going to have a successful career and can and can survive the stresses of career and if you're going to have a successful romantic relationship or marriage and survive that do you know what what you need in both of those circumstances friends because when your marriage is falling apart you go to a friend

when your job is falling apart you go to a friend when and there's a few things that i've discovered about friends that i find delightful and i have been reorganizing my life to as i and i mentioned it before like i've been reorganizing my life to ensure that my friends aren't taken for granted and that sometimes i do deprioritize work in order to see my friends and spend time with my friends because i know it feels good to them and i know it feels good to me and i know that the only reason i can get through

any work stress or personal stress i have is because of those magical human beings and i will not take them for granted and um doesn't mean it's always easy i'm conflicted often but i'm trying and i also know if you look at the work the world today like there's so much conversation about loneliness depression anxiety inability to cope with stress even the obsession with longevity like there's so much about these subjects and some people treat it with drugs and then meditation and vacations and burn like there's so many theories the one thing that fixes all of those things is friends friendship is the

ultimate biohack you know we've talked about this before i fundamentally believe that and if it's so valuable like if i know if you know vegetables are good for you you eat more vegetables if you know exercise is good for you you do more exercise so if i say friends are good for you shouldn't you do more friendships right like shouldn't you exercise is not fun or easy and you have to get over a hump sometimes eating vegetables can sometimes be boring and unsatisfying but you do it or you find new ways and so maybe friendship is not always easy or fun but it's still really really good for you

and the best thing about friends is it actually doesn't taste like spinach it's like you get the benefits of spinach but it tastes like chocolate cake if you get friendship right it's it's the healthiest thing in the world how do i know if someone's a friend i have that conversation with them because i know a lot of people yeah yeah i mean look and you have deal friends you know you have a lot of deal friends you know podcast friends podcast friends yeah uh work friends you know and you and we have and not look i'm not talking about there's all kinds of friends there's friends that you just like hanging out with they're just fun but you're not going to go to them

with your problems or to sort out you know issues you're not you just not work or personal they're just fun right there's nothing wrong with that um but i think you know i'm certainly guilty of spending time with people that you know they fill a space and they make me feel not lonely but at the end of the day i don't feel smarter inspired brighter lighter when they when i say goodbye i'm just like all right bye that was fun and i kind of want to spend more time with people who lift me teach me support me love me give me a give me a chance to serve they open up to me and

let me serve as well you know i struggle to make friends and i think do you know why i think i

i think i'm lazy with it lazy with friendships so i will meet someone i'll have a great connection with them and then my follow-up like i don't really know what to do next so i'll meet your follow-up is just crap oh fuck you know this is what i mean like my i'll meet someone i'll text you and maybe i'll get a response vice versa i think you left me on red but you're the same are you the same or is it just with me it's just with me it's just with you but but i think my follow-up game is like crap

i'll meet someone i'll go oh my god i'll see i'll see the potential for a friendship and then i won't know what i have or maybe i'm just being lazy i'm trying to i want to be honest maybe i just

don't prioritize it i think also when you start having fame and money and you're used to being the boss you get away with stuff so you show up late everybody's like pissed off and angry and then you show up and they're like and you're like sorry like no no no don't worry don't worry right like you get away with stuff in the world right and so i think what that does is i see this with celebrities all the time right because everybody yeses them to death and they get away with it and nobody ever holds them accountable at some point they just get lazier and lazier and lazier because they can yeah you know yeah and so you don't have to put in the effort because other people put in the effort

yeah and nobody bees like like somebody who's a nobody won't say to them yo asshole not respectful oh you think my schedule doesn't matter i've been waiting here for three hours oh just because you're a celebrity you think you can just keep me waiting not cool nobody says that to them and somebody should say that to them but uh they should say to themselves they should say to themselves that would be ideal and some of them have the self-awareness to know they're getting away with it that's even worse because then they're doing it on purpose at least blindness i think you

know they can at least hide behind ignorance but uh yeah i mean friendship takes effort yeah there'll

be a lot of people listening now i know that understand i think they'll resonate with what i'm saying which is i'll meet someone i'll be like we could be really good friends i see so much in us i love what you stand for we have so much in common and then it drifts because neither party have the tools

or the skill of like what to do then we also live in a strange world where i've met people where i have all of that and i follow up like immediately i'm like hey i had such a good time let's make a plan and they're like what huh what or i call as opposed to like texting and people like what why are you calling like well we had a nice time i thought we'd maybe talk you know and i think we live in this strange world where people put it out there but they don't really want it looping us right back

to the beginning of this conversation as you said that about the call that made me think again about how there's going to become a premium on human because calling is so archaic to me that when someone does it it's like a treat now and i was thinking what's what's taking that even further would be writing someone a letter if someone do you know who wrote me a letter evan from snapchat came on the podcast the founder and ceo of snapchat and then by the time i'd got back to london there was a letter on my desk from evan and it just said i had a great conversation with you um thank you for being so

thoughtful with the questions thank you for the research here's my number would love to stay in touch yeah and it blew me away ai wrote that

no it was with a pen he had an auto pen he just took it was with a pen i had a signature in his phone number and i thought that is so beautiful it's classic it's classic and classy there's a premium on being human simon thank you so much thank you for being so generous with your time always always i always have fun with you you always move me forward in my thinking in such a profound and unexpected always unexpected way that i'll tremendous i'll value tremendously for a very very long time in our friendship i i'm gonna text back even faster i'm you know we need to go on more dates um and i look forward to that and look forward to our next date in london which i know is coming up

sometime soon yeah we'll go out for sure it'll be fun we have a closing tradition which i nearly forgot

i do know the tradition which is the last guest leaves a question for the next guest yes what's my question what are you doing in your life to mentor someone coming up behind you and then who is a person that you'd like to mentor teach or coach that needs your voice the most

i it's it's my team is everything right now like i want to give everything i've learned to my team i want the folks on my team to benefit from all the mistakes i've made and one of the joys of being in founder mode when it's not the the actual beginning is i have way more in my skill and knowledge bucket that i want to pour out and so i one of the reasons i'm having so much fun in founder mode is because i want to give away everything that i've learned so that my team can be stronger and

stronger and better and better because i want to leave something that can survive me that you know if if i you know the whole school bus test you know if the founder gets hit by a bus will the company continue or will it will it not and i really want to build something where they want to build it without me feels like there's been a change here what was the catalyst for the past couple years i've been just trying out a lot of different things to find to to find a level of excitement and energy that i think i'd lost for a little bit and i found it like this has been like the founder mode my team are so great and they so want to they still want to push boundaries

and all i want to do is take take the reins off like take the leash off like i want them to experiment i want them to try things and i'm trying to create an environment where they're creative they do things half of them will fail i don't care let's try again and i i just love being around all the creative ideas that they're coming up with my team asked you to bring something that meant a lot

to you and you brought me this and i don't know what's in this box oh dallions medals those are

military challenge coins um i brought the one the round one just to show you what the traditional ones look like um uh this is the one i care about i mean i care about them both but this is the one i brought so these are uh only generals or commanders will give these out they're hard to get you get them when you do something of service it's it's less formal than a medal they can give it out to them however they want and it's their way of saying thank you and the challenge coins that i've been given i'm very very proud of because i feel like i earned them and the thing that i love is when they

give them to you they don't just hand it to you they put it in their hand like this and they shake your hand go on and that's how they give them to you and they say thank you simon so much for coming here and helping us out and that's how they give me the coin the reason this one means a lot to me is because i did some work with the with air force top gun it's called the weapon school but it's air force top gun and this is their coin and this is their patch that's and um i did some work with them to help them get to the core of their why what their true value was just to make sure that

their culture stays clear and good for a long time and we came up with three words three actions that everybody who goes through air force top gun is required to do which is build teach lead which is the idea that you build a skill set you teach that skill set to other people and then you build leaders and you lead right this whole idea that you have you have a responsibility to build to teach and to lead accumulate and give and serve and the thing that is so powerful is the commandant of the weapons school after we did the work he took those words and he put them on the coin oh really and they

exist on the coin and they have been on there for years since and i am so proud to have given something

that has longevity that is literally on the coin build teach lead yeah that is such a beautiful mantra

for life yeah and they're they're wonderful people who go there and uh what an honor that work that i did ended up on a coin and so they gave me the coin out of gratitude for the work that i did and it had my words on it so it's not my words it's their words i just helped distill them it's who they are when they're at their natural best i just helped them put it and codify it simon thank you thanks

always love our conversations and long may they continue likewise this has always blown my mind a little bit 53 percent of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show so could i ask you for a favor if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then i'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much