A (2:18)

This is going to be a conversation about designing a life of meaning. But why does this matter? How is availing myself of your counsel going to make my life better?

C (2:29)

Okay, well, we do human centered design. We teach in the design program at Stanford. Started in 1963. Used to be called Product design. Now it's called the design program. The original methodology for how to innovate a solution to a problem is called Human Centered Design. Hcd. Now called Design Thinking, which is just a rebranding of the same basic idea. So it's about the human thing. So we're kind of in the how do humans innovate together well to make something humans could use. Well, so Billing often said, if you get the human part right, you can't go wrong. So we're in the meaning business because the humans we've been talking to have said they're in a lot of pain about that.

A (3:05)

Yeah. Every time I have academics on the show, they are just lamenting the mental health crisis being experienced by the student body.

C (3:16)

Yeah.

B (3:17)

I'm full time with all my undergrads, and I'm actually teaching the graduate class as well. I think what's going on is they're lonely and social media has kind of interrupted the normal process of communicating with each other. If you look at all the surveys, college students are having less sex, partying less, and having less fun. So that doesn't seem right. You went to Stanford? I went to Stanford as an undergrad. You're supposed to party when you're an undergrad. I think the loneliness thing and then a sense of right now, particularly a sense that, oh, man, if I finish my degree, I'll graduate. Will everything I know be obsolete because of AI? So there's a lot of pressures on them, but I would also say it's still a very optimistic generation, and they want to have impact in the world. They don't want to just go get some corporate job. A lot of them are walking away from the business consulting thing or the private equity thing and looking for something that's got more substance, more humanity. Computer science enrollment dropped 16% this year because everybody's realizing maybe that's not the path to a job. And I think as people realize, oh, taking these degrees I didn't really want just to get a job, is that pressure goes away. I think you're gonna see more and more students taking a humanities major, a poetry major, a creative writing major. So I think there's optimism in. In the students, but it's a lot of. It's a lot of loneliness and a lot of pressure.

A (4:44)

It's a really interesting dynamic and I suppose, on some level, unprecedented. We were chatting before the podcast, you know, about, like, when I was at Stanford, it was just about, you know, getting to the career center and what's the path to the safe and secure, like, high salaried career, the McKinsey's, the investment banks or medical school or what have you. And it was a pretty limited kind of set of choices, but there was a kind of sense of security, like. Or certainty, like, if I go in this direction, like, I will. I can foresee a career path. And there are kind of steps that I can take. And this is how it's going to play out. And the world is very different now you mentioned it, like AI. I mean, it's more than social media. There's this existential threat, like, what is the world going to look like? How can we even prepare for something that, you know, we've never been presented with? We can't conceptualize what the world is going to look like. And I think it's hard for any of us to imagine the level of. Of sort of fear and dread that that must instill in a young generation that's trying to forecast a future life for themselves.

B (5:51)

Yeah.

C (5:52)

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

B (6:36)

How did I get to be a lawyer? How did I get.

C (6:38)

It's just moving up.

A (6:39)

Yeah.

C (6:39)

You know, and so society and circumstance and politics and technology has brought the existential question up sooner, but it's the same question. So in a sense, the good news is if we can help these young adults get their hands on better answers to bigger questions sooner, they got a longer Runway. Yeah, but it's a tough time.

A (6:59)

That is a very curious thing that teenagers and people in their early 20s are grappling with the big questions and not waiting until, you know, the midlife, you know, situation where you're starting to wonder, you made all these choices that led you to this place of, you know, where you're lacking fulfillment and meaning and purpose, like perhaps, or, you know, to put an optimistic lens on it. They're going to answer those questions for themselves so early in life such that they're paving the way for, you know, decades of meaning and Fulfillment and satisfaction and purpose that, you know, our generation, the older generations, just didn't really even ponder. Like when I was in college, nobody was walking around thinking about like how I'm going to have an in. Well, not any. I mean there were some people, but for the most part, like people were just, you know, kind of in their own self obsession about getting ahead in the world or putting their stamp on things. Not like what is going to be most meaningful or even, you know, from like even beyond, just impact, like what is going to create, you know, true contentment for me.

B (8:04)

Well, I think, I think it's one of the reasons that our class is so popular and that the idea, I think the students are realizing, I'm not going to be able to plan this because it is unprecedented. No one's going to know what the jobs will look like in five years or 10 years. And we reframe that through the design lens, saying, don't you think it's so cool that five years from now you're going to be doing something that hasn't even been invented yet? So the goal is prepare yourself for that future. And so the planning strategies won't work because there's not enough data. But a design strategy, a design strategy for your future, it has the most flexibility because we are always looking for lots of answers and we're prototyping lots of solutions. And so I think we hear this pretty strongly from students who've taken the class. I feel more hopeful. This is a really good lens to think about my future. I was trying to plan it and optimize it and that wasn't really working. And I could see that would fail. But this idea of designing my way forward, prototyping things, taking small risks and learning as I go, that feels doable. And so that's why the class is successful. I think that's why the first book, people found something in it that was useful. And we're hoping now with the book on meaning, you know, we're sort of taking it up to the next level. It's like, well, what were you looking for in a well designed life? Meaning. Okay, well, we're not philosophers. So the big meaning of life question, you know, go, go back to Philosophy 101 for that. But if you want to get more meaning in your life, or you want to get more meaning out of your life, you want to live more meaningfully, we can help you with that because that's a design problem.

A (9:31)

Walk me through the epiphany that you guys had around how product design could Inform personal development. Because that's like the big idea here. Like you're sort of approaching it as an engineering problem in a reductive design problem.

C (9:50)

Well, it really starts back in 1999. So you know, I'm a high tech guy and. But I'm always cared about people and I always did youth work. You know, I taught Sunday school and I coached a Little League and I've always been doing stuff with young people and I got too busy and I was just doing my business work and doing my own family and then, and got away from doing youth work. And then I thought maybe I've got time to get back to it. And that was in the 90s and I hadn't been around college students for a while and hung out with college students a lot, said I better go back and check in with what's going on with college students. And I'm talking to a bunch of people about that who run programs or education or ministries or what have you. And this guy at Berkeley says you should come here and teach a class. Which says, well that's crazy and that's not going to work. He goes, no, it is. And he explained how it could work. And so I taught a class at Berkeley called Finding youg Vocation, subtitled Is yous Calling Calling? Which is actually the origin class that turned into Designing youg Life. I thought we'd do it once at the end of the semester, one of the kids says, my roommate couldn't take it in the fall. Dave, are you coming back in the spring? I said, if he gets nine more people with him, I'll come back. So 14 semesters later, we're onto something. So I had this idea about trying to help people find their way. And then Bill took the job full time at Stanford, you know, made the bright decision to take a 50% cut in pay, stop running a company and start teaching full time. And we had lunch and he said, what are you doing? I'm doing this crazy thing at Berkeley, we should totally do this at Stanford, you know. And so.

B (11:10)

And through the design lens and through

C (11:11)

the design lens and then, and then, and that became more inclusive and it got better. And then we wrote a book and it became this huge thing. So the invitation to get into the conversation really started very opportunistically. It wasn't a top down strategy. Somebody said, hey, come help us. We did. Everybody had that problem. And then now that we've had a couple of million readers and trained thousands of educators, we get a lot of feedback. So we keep getting Questions. And when the questions get asked strong enough, we get forced to write a book.

A (11:40)

Well, you're definitely meeting the moment. Right now we are in this crisis of meaning and this epidemic of loneliness. We touched on AI and social media, et cetera, as driving forces here. But are there any other elements that you think are contributing to this situation that we're in right now where, you know, a book about, like, how to, how to engender your life with more meaning seems like an urgent and valuable, you know, offering.

B (12:08)

Well, another, another trend that's obvious is that people are living kind of isolated in their echo chamber. They don't have strong communities. If you used to have a faith community or a neighborhood, that was your community. Those things have sort of mostly fallen by the wayside. So people are, in addition to, they're personally lonely or struggling or anxious, they're looking for other people to hang out with. I mean, we're communal animals. And so we really were looking. Dave is teaching a program he can tell you about called the Distinguished Career Institute at Stanford. And it's all about creating a kind of a community. And so we were thinking, when you forget students for a second, talk to people in their 30s and 40s, okay, they're in the middle of having kids, maybe they got older parents that they're dealing with, but they don't have a community to hang out with and they don't have anybody to talk to about what's going on. And so that was another one of the things we thought, that's a design. We can design a solution to that and help people figure out how to create these, what we call formative communities. You want to talk about the DCI program a little?

C (13:12)

The Distinguished Careers Institute at Stanford started in 2015 by the, that time, just recently retired dean of the medical school, Phil Pizzo, which is really a gap year for grownups. It's a gap year for grownups. But, you know, if you charge as much as Stanford does, it's a big number. You need a much fancier name than gap year for grownups. And so, you know, anybody from. Can be as young as 45, up to 90. It's mostly 55 to 75 people at what we used to call retirement age, taking a whole year off and going, now what? What do I do with the rest of my life? What do I do with my one wild and wonderful life now? So these are open minded, teachable, thoughtful people, but they are people who are asking that big question and don't have a framework to address it. I Mean, so we can go. We've learned a lot about them. And the whole idea of formative communities, which is a big one of our four top ideas, comes directly out of my experience with those people. But I think your question, why is this arising so much now, is that the institutions and the traditions that helped form people that said, gee, when that question comes up, here's how you might want to think about it, have fallen by the wayside. And now the common square is the Internet. And so the hue. And we heard literally a and cry that it's not working for me. I'm not having the. I wanted to have an impact and that's not working, or I wanted to be fulfilled. The two things we heard people saying over and over again that weren't working for them is the fulfillment thing is not working and the impact thing is not working. So we said, okay, then we need to reframe those problems and give you different ideas.

A (14:41)

Yeah, the word meaning is sort of a loaded word. Yeah. Like how, how are you defining this? I think words like purpose, meaning, passion, sometimes it feels like they do more harm than good because they're so large and ephemeral. Right. So when you're talking about meaning, what are you talking about specifically and where do you think people get off track and how they are commonly thinking about this word?

C (15:05)

We were talking about this just at breakfast this morning because it comes up all the time. I'll probably jump to the answer and say, you know, I, at least I think we, and we referenced in the book, would agree with the answer Joseph Campbell gave in a PBS interview many years ago in a video series when he says, I'm not sure it's really meaning we're after. I think what people are really talking about is the rapture of being alive. I'm here for the rapture of being alive. And again, we're human centered designers. So I think what meaning is, is when am I having an experience that makes me feel like I'm really having the fully human experience. So meaning is that which makes me have an experience of becoming more fully human. That can come in a variety of forms. I think modern people have gotten stuck on just too few forms, which is why there's a bit of a crisis around this thing. So my version of that would be it's that which moves me along toward having the experience of being more fully human. That's the shortest answer I can give. You want to add to that?

B (16:00)

No, I think again, we're all about how do you get more out of life Rather than cramming more in. I think you're right. What's your passion? I don't know. Am I supposed to have one?

A (16:11)

And then you feel bad about it?

B (16:12)

And then you feel bad about it or what? What's, what impact have you had today? Like, you know, give me the memo on your impact. This is too much. This is too much pressure. Yeah, exactly.

C (16:21)

If you died today, will it have been worth it?

B (16:23)

Yeah, so. So for us it's like, wait a minute. We're not trying to cram more in. We're not trying to set a bar. You can't clear. We're really about low bar. You know, set the, set the bar low and clear it, you know, and a lot of our stuff is psychology based, is positive psychology based. You know, the things like, you know, James Clear's, you know, atomic habits, like small changes are how you make big changes. So we rel on a lot of that stuff. But in the case of the meaning question, to sort of take out the pressure. It's like, I think what you're looking for is to be fully alive. We call it fully alive aliveness by design. You want aliveness, you want to feel a connection to other people. That's the community thing. You want to feel like you did something today that wasn't just about you. It was about something bigger than yourself. Right. We talk about the Maslow's pyramid and it used to be that the peak of the pyramid was self actualization. Maslow said that when you get everything else figured out, you become the fully realized version of yourself. What people don't know is that in his diaries in the last couple years of his life, he said, no, actually that's not it. That's all about the ego. The peak of human development, whatever is self transcendence. It's being, doing something for someone other than yourself. It's transcending yourself. And it's, it's. Which is in the wisdom traditions is compassion, is, you know, altruism is empathy. That's where we're asking people to look to see where, where is it that you have the opportunity to be fully alive and transcending your own ego. And by the way, he also got it wrong because you can be self transcendent at any level of the pyramid. It's, it's, you know, you can, you don't have to be rich or fully realized or anything else to be transcendent or to care about others. And we have so much in the wisdom traditions and theological traditions in science now we know that Altruism, empathy, the sense of awe in the world are all ways of achieving a transcendent kind of point of view. And when you do that, all the research says, and our experience says, you will experience your life as being meaningful.

C (18:34)

The meaning question, by the way, really goes to so I want to have a meaningful life. Oh, what's a life? What's a person? So your definition of the human person absolutely informs your definition of what makes a person meaningful. And our shortest definition of the person is you're a becoming. So a person is a become. You're an ever growing person. And we say in the Life Design lab, all of us contain more aliveness than when lifetime permits you to live out. There's more than one of you in there. So if, According to the 1943 paper by Maslow, fulfillment, which is the result of self actualization, occurs when you become all that one can be, that's what he says in print. And if there's more of you than a life permits you to be, oh, you can't have it. So the traditional understanding of fulfillment is a thing that's literally unattainable. So if I buy into that, which the NIH says is the stickiest idea in the social sciences, one of the stickiest ideas of all time in 1943, we're still looking at that pyramid. And so a lot of people are going down a pathway that there isn't an end to, there's a dead end to. So we need, that's why we talk more about fully alive than fulfillment. And the outcome, according to Maslow, of self transcendence is meaning making. So I can either be ego driven and I get to be all of me, I get to be fully manifested. Well, actually that's okay. It's not a bad thing. But becoming actually, oh, I can have experiences of participating in bigger than myself as part of us. And we now know consciousness is collective. You know, there's a lot of neuroscience on this now that we don't just hang out with each other. We're not autonomous beings bumping into each other like molecules. We are in fact part of a social network. So we're really trying to understand how people actually live in ways that actually helps them experience that aliveness as humans.

A (20:20)

There's a semester's worth of information that you just dumped in both of those two shares, like so many threads that I want to pull there. But sticking with Maslow for the moment, taking into consideration his, his like amendment from self actualization to self transcendence, irrespective of that update.

C (20:39)

Yep.

A (20:39)

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

C (21:38)

Is no best you. But there are lots of good use. Let's go try some.

A (21:42)

Yeah. And this bias to action. Yep. You know, which gets into kind of your prototyping idea of getting out of our indecision and our kind of navel gazing or paralysis around like. Well, I don't know if this is the right decision because there is this fully actualized version of me out there. And if I, if I make this decision, is that moving me away from that or this? Right.

B (22:02)

Oh, no. Yeah. Well, one is, we do believe that there's more aliveness in you than one life can contain. And that's actually the good news. And then two, you know, one, a couple of mindsets in the, in the book are, you know, let's, let's practice radical acceptance. Radical acceptance is, well, where am I? Right. Design starts in reality. You know, I was at Apple. We were designing the modern notebook. I know the guys on the iPhone team. When you're doing something that's never been done before, you got to start with, what do we got right now? What are the parts we can put together? So radical acceptance and then availability. The other mindset is like, okay, if I'm here in the present moment, what's actually available? I mean, this, this hypothetical best self way out there? It's like, it's like, oh, I'm going to run a marathon, except you looked at my phone. I only did 6,000 steps today. Right. So this is not going to happen. So you gotta get in the moment. Where are you right now and what's available to you to go forward. And if you could just put aside the I'm optimizing my best self or I'm hacking my whatever to get to someplace, what could I actually do in the next moment, in the next few days, in the next few weeks that would be coherent with who I think I am, where I think I'm going? Because you're still gotta have a direction, right? We talk about building a compassion and having coherence in your life so that you may not know exactly what the next step is, but you know you're going in the right direction. So the chance of suddenly going this way when you wanted to go that way is lower if you actually, you know, if you know yourself a little bit. Radical acceptance, availability puts you. It's kind of the mind for the two for mindsets. That's the power set. It's like, I know where I'm at. I'm being honest with myself about what's possible. And then I'm trying to figure out what's available, what can I make available? And when you start with that, you realize, well, there's so many more opportunities than I thought. Right. Designers never do their first idea, right. You always have a lot. You have lots of. Lots of research, lots of ideas leads to better choices. So you want to be able to have lots of ideas, and then why don't people actually make the change? Well, because it's scary. I just read a neuroscience paper where they've actually proven that your brain is much more comfortable to work on a problem that you've got that maybe is quite painful than to actually make a change to solve the problem that the stimulation of the amygdala is much higher to do something new than it is to just deal with the pain you've got. So our thing is like, all right, well, then you're going to take really small steps called prototypes. Try something, have a conversation with somebody, see what it's like, do a little experiment, have an experience, so you have a felt sense of what it might be to move in this direction. But if you practice radical acceptance and availability, all these opportunities start showing up. And so you do make some motions in the right direction, and then you get the felt sense of this is a good direction, or maybe that wasn't quite right. But no matter what you prototype, you're always learning something. So it really is the designer's mindset rather than the planner's mindset or the engineer. The engineer would need to know what's the formula that predicts the outcome. I don't have a formula. A planner would need to know, well, what are the causes and effects for the next five steps? I don't know what the cause and effects are, but I know how to way find into this uncertain future and know that I'm in the right direction. And radical acceptance, availability and prototyping is the sort of simple. I mean the other thing, the message in this book, it's simpler than you think. You don't need to spend 10 years developing a meditation practice. You don't need to go out and do, you know, 40 day fast in the wilderness.

A (25:39)

Yeah, maybe I'll just fly a kite today.

B (25:42)

Yeah, you know, you can do the ayahuasca thing in Mexico, whatever you want to do. But you could just start today by looking at what's available and seeing how you can see it a different way. And then slowly build up the confidence that you have a compass you are going in the right direction.

A (26:03)

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B (30:12)

Well, to go back to your Steve Jobs story, and I wasn't in the room with Steve when they were doing the iPhone, but I know some people were. But in the Isaacson's biography, they said they brought prototypes to Steve three times. He said, no, that's not it. Do it again. Do it again. So he did come in the room and say, I want a smartphone. I don't even know what it is. Figure it out. And I know they built over 300 prototypes, both industrial design prototypes and works like prototypes, because nobody, like if you put a, if you put messaging with a browser and you add a phone to it, like, what's that? I don't know. Let's try it. So even they creating the, you know, the revolution of the smartphone was. Had no idea what it was when they started, but they knew the process of finding it as they went. And so the future of you, the thing you're trying to design in the future, the happier, more meaningful version of you, prototype your way to it. Just, it's the way we invent the

A (31:03)

future, which is also all about essentialism, right? Like, it's, it's like what is really serving this. And most of it is stripping away, you know, I know, you know, like in the context of like the ipod, there were a lot of people who thought it should have all kinds of whiz bang stuff. And it's like, no, we're just doing this one thing. Like, what is the, you know, the essence of this thing that we're trying to create? And then thinking about that in the context of our lives. I think we think of this as an additive problem and not, not enough as a reduction, you know, like a removing, like what is, what's not serving me that I can strip away. It's not about going out and getting this other thing and bringing it in as much as it is like dispensing with the things that are leading us

C (31:43)

astray that surfaces two really critical things. So we talk a lot. So what do we do? We're the design guys. Well, you know, we help people get unstuck. We mostly deal with stuck people. People are stuck on meaning right now. And we'll probably give you some reframes to think about your problem differently. And the go the reframe is to be closer to radical acceptance and freer so you've got more choices. And then we'll give you ideas and tools for how to actually act once you've gotten more free. And so the reframe thing is a big deal because you got to be working on the right problem. Problem finding precedes problem solving. You're working on the wrong version of the problem. Really, really, really well, you're still going to get nowhere. So the two things that surface in the conversation you and Bill are just having for me are back to that personhood thing. So people kind of go, is this it? Am I getting it right? Is this really my best self? And you mentioning how sticky that is if it's actually true, there is no one best you. There are lots of wonderful yous and they could be pretty radically different, you know? You know, what if you just. What if you went back and stuck with a lawyer thing and did that really well? That's really different than what you're doing now, you know, but that could be a wonderful version of you. So once you accept there isn't a right then that thing because people have the experience, well, this is pretty good, but I'm not sure it's really it. And I don't know enough, I don't know what feeling like I found it feels like, but this isn't it yet. So there's this elusive never ending thing I should be doing, but I'm not. And you kind of go, no, you're fine. You are a becoming. You're going to become more. If I'm better tomorrow, I was worse yesterday and I'm never going to be done. So it's all partial credit essay questions. There's no right, wrong, multiple choice thing. So thing one, you're becoming, so relax, tomorrow's another day. And then the whole issue of well, is the iPad this or that? You know, and am I going to be the lawyer, the athlete or the podcaster, you know, which I can't do them all really well at the same time. Brings us to you talked about essentialism. We talk about the importance of understanding the scandal of particularity, you know, which is a philosophical concept that we think is terribly important. We knew we had the right editor when she underlined that introductory paragraph on that topic and said, if we get this right, we've done our job. Great. She gets it. It's terribly important. The scandal, particularity simply is. No ultimate is ever experienced in this life. Truth, beauty, justice, compassion, richness. Is this really the ultimate authentic rich. Have I got Bill right yet? No. You're a becoming that will never be realized. So even your own life is a particularity, a particular expression in a particular space and time with constraints and compromises. And you get to choose one of two reactions to that particularity, that constraint. Either. Shoot. Still not enough. Not quite. I'm a little disappointed. Or awesome. That's an honest reflection of something I care deeply about. And my longing says, it's kind of like that. I see the amazing sunset and my soul goes, yeah, that's what Beauty's like, go there. And then when it goes down, you don't go, oh, that's over, thank God. You go more. Do it again. You're never satisfied. That never satisfiedness about life, that never satisfiedness about meaning, that never satisfiedness about yourself isn't the bad news. It's the reminder that you're a human being. And deeply implanted in you is this thing called longing. So befriend that. Don't have your longing to go, oh, haven't got it yet. Oh, I'm still a human being. I still have the drive to move into my ongoing becoming project. It's going to stay interesting all the way to the end.

A (35:27)

So rather than flogging ourselves for having that longing or that sense of missing something, understand it to be this generative force in our perpetual becoming.

C (35:41)

Yeah. So the radical acceptance of particularity then joins availability. And now we celebrate it. So you celebrate. Oh, I actually get a chance to taste some coffee. How's this coffee? Today I'm going to celebrate the fact that I have access to something that reflects taste. How cool is that? So it's really a position that matters.

B (36:04)

Yeah. And that sunset in and of itself was enough. I mean, there'll be another beautiful sunset, and maybe I could even put myself someplace like Big Sur, where the sunsets will be amazing. Or at the front side is enough. I've got a couple of young grandkids, and watching them play reminds me what curiosity looks like and how intrinsically wonderful human curiosity is, because everything to them is new and everything is something to play and. Oh, Grandpa, look at this, look at this. What is it? It's an ant. Okay. But it's an aunt, Grandpa. You know, it's like. And so I'm reminded that. That we have the capacity for wonder. We have the capacity for. For awe and joy and all these things. But they show up in moments, right? Moments of joy, Moments of curiosity. And. And most often, people find it in nature because that's a huge, you know, trigger for what we call flow or a bigger. A bigger definition of flow. And it often shows up in interactions with people because that's where we find connection and community and joy. So go for those things. They're available.

A (37:10)

Talk more about curiosity, because it feels to me like curiosity is really something that we can control, that we have agency over. And it's this portal to all these other things like awe and wonder and connection, et cetera.

C (37:26)

Oh, it's absolutely the gateway drug to wonder. It totally is. It's an intrinsic human capacity oh, how interesting. I wonder what's here. And if you lean into it, it's going to draw you into all kinds of things. So we have a little equation, the wonder equation, that curiosity plus mystery, which is anything that's more than what you understand, even if it's understandable, I don't at the moment understand it equals wonder. I can be in wonder, and that's available all the time.

A (37:56)

So curiosity plus mystery equals wonderful wonder.

C (38:00)

Yeah, and I'm actually going to go to a quote. I kept my phone because there's a thing I can't ever remember how to say. Henry Miller, the playwright, said, quote, I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in and of itself. I have tried this experiment a thousand times, and I have never been disappointed. Now, that's a guy with a wonder mindset. So now there's more to curiosity than wonder.

A (38:32)

I mean, this is all rooted in being present in your life. There's kind of an Eastern aspect to this in the sense that the answers that you're looking for are in the right here and now. And if you're bored or you're just not paying attention enough, because if you actually focused on anything, a blade of grass, pick your whatever. These things are infinitely fascinating. But we're living our lives in this daydream where we're constantly captured by the past and the future. And even a discussion around designing a life of meaning is very forward casting. Right at costumes. Yeah. You know what I mean? And you're teaching Stanford students, and these people are all like, you know, like, here's what you know. They're all forecasting, right? Trying to put all the pieces together, and we're all missing our lives in the moment. But the only way that we can experience awe and wonder or true connection with another person or even, you know, find a locus for our curiosity is when we're anchored in the, you know, the moment that we're in, which is actually the only thing that's real anyway.

C (39:42)

Yeah, I'm let Bill come in on that, but quickly, just say you. By the way, you caught us with that comment, because after we figured out what we thought the book might be if we were going to write this book, we looked at each other and said, it's just about the present moment. Ram Dass was right, you know, be here now. Like, everybody knows that. Why waste their time? Why waste the paper? And so we came to the conclusion, we talked for Quite a long time. Almost two years. Do we deserve to write this book? Doesn't everybody know? In a sense, it's not the only thing we're talking about, but it's most of what we're talking about. And the conclusion was, well, either we're wasting the paper because it's obvious, or it's a fresh take with a really implementable, accessible, doable set of tools and approaches to get people back into this thing that we've lost track of. So you're. You figured it's really about the present moment, isn't it, guys? Yep.

A (40:30)

Pretty much what the whole book is about.

C (40:31)

Pretty much. Pretty much. And it's. Yeah.

B (40:33)

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

A (40:52)

Or my parents will tell me they love me.

B (40:54)

Yeah, my parents will tell me they love me mean at this time. And intrinsic motivations. Curiosity, autonomy, mastery, wanting to get good at things just because humans like to get good at things. So there's a bunch of intrinsic motivations. And we were talking to Bob Waldinger. I know you had Bob on for a while, and Bob told us that there's some neuroscience around. If you only stimulate external motivation and you don't live into or stimulate any internal motivations, you actually lose those circuits and you lose your ability to be creative. You lose your desire for mastery, to get better. And so one of the big messages in the book is, hey, we got to work with both sides of our brain here, and we got to work with our intrinsic motivations a lot to keep those alive. Curiosity being the gateway, and curiosity plus wonder, the things that you can't understand, but they're amazing. Curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. So we have an exercise, just sort of silly. Put on your wonder glasses and actually have a pair of goofy glasses. But, like, go out in the world, and instead of just seeing what's there or even just being curious about how I wonder how that grass grows. Take the Henry Miller approach of, like, if I really get into it, a world of wonder, mystery, excitement will unfold and my curiosity will be stimulated, and that will lead to more wonder, more curiosity. It's kind of a flywheel. But we talk about Your brain works in two worlds, the transaction world and the flow world. Dr. Lisa Miller at Columbia calls it the awakened brain and the achieving brain. But, you know, transactions, we do it every day. We get stuff done. And flow, which used to be just thought of as peak experience, is actually available all the time. I think of it like an aquifer under, you know, under the surface. And you can drill down and get into flow in almost any circumstance. And that's where meaning is. Meaning's not in transactions. Getting transactions done is nice. It feels good for a while. Even impact feels good for a little while. Yeah. But then, you know, what have you done for me lately? What's your impact lately? You know, hey, great numbers, you know, on the last five podcasts. What have you done for me lately? Right. And so impact is transactional and meaning is not transactional. It's down in the world of flow, in the world of intrinsic motivations. It's in the world of emotions, really. And we're under, we're under educated there.

C (43:26)

Sure.

A (43:26)

I mean, we live in a highly transactional world. All of the incentives of modern life are driving us towards a more and more transaction based experience. And when those transactional relationships or career paths, et cetera, don't deliver on fulfillment and satisfaction and all of that, then we're in this sort of arrival fallacy crisis. And then we descend into what Arthur Brooks calls like the strivers dilemma, convinced that it's always at the top of the next peak or around the bend. And we live our lives kind of on this hamster wheel of dissatisfaction, you know, and, and meaning is available to us all along, you know, if we would just, you know, avert our gaze and kind of look over here. But to your point about like, flow, it is this thing that we think about, like, oh, this is something that you can harness for these peak performances, whether you're an athlete or you're, you know, some kind of creative person. But you distinguish that from what you call like simple flow, which is what you were getting at. Right. So talk a little bit about that and like, how people can access that and why that, you know, what the connection between that is and, and the meaning that we're lacking.

C (44:41)

Well, the point you're making about, you know, the transactional world we, so we posited in the book we observed in People's Complaint, you know, I'm trying to make a difference. And so in the transactional world, the primary form of meaning making that's offered is. And did you make an impact? Did you change the World. Did you hit the mark? Did you hit the quarterly number? Did you do the thing? And most of the time, you can't control outcomes even if you do it right. So oftentimes, having an impact fails. Even when it does succeed, it's a thing. And it has a short half life. So people could be saying, how do I have my more meaningful life? And they're just looking through the one window into the transactional space. That's why they're stuck. So that's why we said, well, there's really only one actual cosmos and world. Your consciousness can only handle so much at a time. And we're leaning into this consciousness, this achieving brain that does transactions. So we talk about these other forms of meaning. Impact is fine, but it's just one form. Don't put all your eggs in that basket, you know, which go into these relationship things, these flow things, these wonder things. And so in flow, we said, well, flow is. The original book is Flow the Psychology of Optimal Experience. Great. So when I'm in an apex of experience, I'm deeply engaged in a task. What's it like? You know, I'm so in the thing. I'm totally in the zone, what we refer to as apex flow. But all it really means is I'm so engaged that I'm fully experiencing the moment that I'm in, fully alive. So the traditional definition of flow is I need a task, the requirements of which right on the edge of my capability. So what I've really done is I've outsourced to the complexity of my task, the ability for me to fully experience something, because I'm going to go do something that's so demanding, it will take all of my attention. And now suddenly I'm fully engaged. And so I'm so in the moment. I'm not worried about other things. I'm Alex Hondold making the climb. You know, I'm doing this thing and we're saying, wait, you can choose your way into flow. So simple. Flow is, you know, oh, I'm just going to chop onions. That's so boring. I better be, you know, doing my steps to get in my 10,000 while chopping. Can I chop while doing steps and having a podcast on at the same time? Great. As opposed to. No, just choose to totally be chopping onions. Enjoy the feel of it. Enjoy the texture of the knife going through the food. Notice the smells. Your body can smell things. Be fully present at the moment. That's a choice. And we said the flow world is the place where flow experiences come from. So we, we just came up with an idea. Hey, there's two worlds, not just one. There's the transactional world and the flow world. You're mostly missing the flow world. That's where flow is had. It's in the present moment. Let's go over there some more. So the biggest idea we have about flow is it's there all the time. You could have it in lots of

A (47:29)

forms in Lisa Miller's World of the Awakened Mind. Yeah, yeah.

C (47:33)

Yep.

A (47:34)

I'm concerned about these ideas coming across as. As very highbrow. And I want to drill down into some real world examples because I'm imagining the person who's listening to this, watching it and going, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. You know, the awakened brain and, like, chopping it. He's like, you don't understand my life. Like, I'm just trying to make it through the day. I'm deeply unhappy, but I'm stuck. There's no possible way that I can leave this job. I've got, you know, two kids at home and a mortgage and, you know, car payment, etc. I think this is the situation with, like, just so many people, if not most people, they are living a life that lacks meaning and fulfillment and a sense of satisfaction. But there doesn't really seem to be an off ramp or an accessible means to reframe how they're living, to engender these experiences that you guys.

B (48:27)

And they are legit. They're maxed out. They're maxed out all their time.

A (48:30)

Like, get out of here with all this. Like, I just, you know, like, they

C (48:34)

need something else I literally love.

A (48:35)

And then when I get home, home, I just want 30 minutes of Netflix to turn my brain off before I go to bed. And that's the only way. I can't handle anything more than that. But these are the people that need the most help, right?

C (48:51)

Look, there are 21, or, depending how you count, 23 exercises and possible worksheets in the book. We give you stuff to do. The whole idea is this should be implementable right away. One of the exercises is flip the switch. Flip the switch from the transactional world to the flow world. And all that means is drop into the present moment, even for two or three seconds. We give an example of sitting in a staff. I'm sitting here at the podcast table with Rich Roll. So what am I thinking? Am I thinking about how's this going? And am I talking as much as Bill and will they like this? And, you know, so all transactions opposed to like, okay, stop. What's going on? Here's this lovely guy, Rich Roll, and he's wanting to talk to us. And this is a new. This is. These are new studios. You've only been in here a year. Like I'm thinking, and what conversations are coming here? What is going to get said across this table? How is that going to impact some people's lives? Okay, I can think about that. In about us. It takes about 20 seconds to say that. Takes half a second to think that I can do that. I can just flip the switch. What's going on right now? Two, three, Notice. Flip back. What did we say? You know, flip back to the conversation. If you start doing that, you give the rest of your psyche, rest of your soul, if you will, a chance. So maybe you don't want to do Netflix, you know, instead. But if you're watching Netflix, are you zoning out or are you actually really enjoying, like, her voice is beautiful. That costume is terrific. You know, can you be present to the reality that you're in? There is more aliveness in every life waiting to be had.

B (50:28)

And that's why we really. It's not about cramming. It's not about learning five more ways to hack your meaning. It's about getting more out of what you've got right in front of you and maybe spending a little time on where's your attention right now? You know, And I fall into this. I'll sit there, you know, just before I go to sleep and scroll through a hundred reels or 100 short videos on YouTube. And then my wife.

A (50:54)

It's part of your becoming.

B (50:55)

Yeah, it's part of my becoming. Am I able to say, what are you watching? And I go, I don't know. Like, what was the last video? I don't know. Right. So catch yourself sometimes. Being sometimes letting someone else steal your attention. Just catch yourself and see if you can come back to the moment and. Yeah, and have. And flip the switch. Or, you know, at the end, you know, the simplest. The simplest exercise from positive psychology is the gratefulness exercise. Exercise. At the end of the day, write down three things you're grateful for. Write down one thing you're grateful for. Because what you're trying to do is develop some processes which rewire the brain towards paying attention to right brain stuff instead of just left brain stuff. Transactional flow stuff instead of just transactional stuff. The old right brain, left brain model, Lisa, updated it with achieving and awakened. It's the same thing you want to be in all of your brain Most of the time. And we're so over indexed in the transaction stuff. I teach design at Stanford. Young engineers, I teach them how to design. They're used to having an answer in the back of the book. There's no answer in the back of the book in design. And they're high and I joke with them. You got in because you got 8 hundreds on your math and English. You didn't get 8 hundreds on your creativity exam. Right. So you're under practiced in creativity, in cur. Curiosity. But you can learn it. We know the brain's plastic. You can learn this stuff quickly. And what you find when you flip the switch, or you do what we call the sudden savoring exercise, or you do any. Any of the exercises are like five minutes that you have an experience in your brain where you say, oh, that was kind of. That was pleasant. That wasn't hard to do.

C (52:42)

And there's a, there's a time psyche thing you got to watch out for. So If I change five minutes of your week, it could have a 25% impact on the. Your psychic ROI. He mentioned savoring. So he said, so I'm going to double down on this. You do the gratefulness exercise. Maybe you do it once a week. That's fine. Then we'll say, okay, we have a thing called the seventh day savoring again, five minutes once a week, you know, just for just before dinner on Sunday or whatever it might be your Sabbath practice. You take one of those things you were grateful for this week and you return to it and you just go, oh, that was really great. You know, I really, you know, when Rich came into the office, you know, we were talking to the crew and Rich came in and he was really welcoming, and we were standing in the hallway having this really lovely chat. You know, that was great. I was grateful for the way Rich received us. Then I kind of go, okay, that's just recognizing. Then re enter it and savor it. Like, remember, you know, play the GoPro camera screen of that moment again and then freeze frame it. And then here's Rich roll this really successful podcaster, this guy that's really developed a life seriously, and he wants to spend time with us. And can I, can I savor that and receive the fullness of it? Because life in real time, you can't begin to get the fullness of life out of life in real time. So go back and do it again. Frankly, if you do the seventh day Savoring once a week for a while, five minutes a week, three minutes a week. You know, you start liking that you could learn how to do Sudden Savior savoring. Can I save her in real time? That's a pretty cool skill. These are all highly accessible ways to live differently.

A (54:22)

Never in a million years did I imagine that the world would start waking up to what I realized back in 1998, which is that life is infinitely better without alcohol in it. Giving it up isn't reserved for problematic drinkers, people like me, but it's actually something that benefits everybody. And at the tip of this spear is Go Brewing, the NA beer I love so much that I decided to become an investor. One of the reasons I'm so behind Go Brewing's mission is because Joe is playing my favorite game. He's playing the long game, and he's doing every single thing right. Instead of rushing to market, he and his team spent years in their brewery and laboratory refining their process, testing literally thousands of batches before launching in 2023. That patience has paid off. Go Brewing has already won gold and silver at the Best of Craft Beer Awards, which is pretty rare for such a young company. Whether it's Freedom West Coast Pale Ale, New School Sour, or the Story Double ipa, you can feel the intention in every can. For me, Go Brewing represents something larger than beer. It's all about creating options that align with how more and more people want to live. So visit gobrewing.com richroll50 to get 50% off your first subscription order to Go Brewing's Beer Club. So a little over nine months ago, I underwent spinal fusion surgery. And since then, my focus has has shifted away from chasing these really big, audacious performance goals like I did in the past to now accepting my limitations in this current reality and learning how to build a daily rhythm that actually feels sustainable for where I'm at right now, today.

C (56:10)

And Whoop.

A (56:11)

This wearable health and fitness coach that you see right here on my wrist every time you see me is this amazing tool that gives me insights into all the things that influence how I feel and how I perform my sleep, my recovery, my strain, and my overall health so that I can better understand how my habits are influencing how I feel. And what's interesting is how these insights translate beyond training. Better sleep changes improve how I show up at work. Recovery changes how patient I am with my family. And when I'm planning for bigger goals, like winding up up to participate in the New York City Marathon to celebrate my 60th birthday this fall, Whoop. Helps me stay grounded in what my body needs right now. Not what my ego wants it to do or what I used to be able to do. And I think that's really what adding more life to your years means, making decisions today that allow you to show up more fully tomorrow. Go to join.whoop.com roll for one month free of Woke. I can't help but think about how everything you're sharing overlaps with 12 step recovery programs. Have you guys thought about this? Like, in addition to this being all about the present, so much of what you're talking about really overlaps in the Venn diagram of the 12 steps. It's like you, you know, you do your inventory, which is kind of a form of coherence. Right. Like, are your actions lining up with your values? Are you doing what you said you're going to do? That kind of thing? A formal gratitude practice. An essential aspect of being part of this community is, you know, being service oriented, like making it about something more than yourself. How are you transcending your ego through your daily actions?

C (58:05)

Sure.

A (58:06)

And really being rigorous in your kind of self honesty and inventory of your behavior and your decisions.

C (58:13)

Yeah. So I mean, oh, aren't you guys 12 step? Bob Waldinger is pretty sure. Aren't you guys Zen Buddhists? You guys are Zen Buddhist, right?

A (58:21)

Yeah, all of these traditions are tradition. It's like this is ancient wisdom.

C (58:25)

No, the wisdom traditions share a lot of common. We spend too much time about what we disagree about. If you look at, by the way, so a buddy of mine, Scotty McLennan, the former chaplain of Stanford, says if you look at all the spiritual, you've got the Christian spiritual man, the Judaic and the Sikhs, you know, and the Buddhists and the freelance spiritualists, you know, and he said the people at the bottom love to argue about everything. He says all the guys at the top, the mystics who are sitting up there kind of who really get it, they all get along fine. All the mystics understand each other, you know, and so does our stuff sound familiar to these other wisdom traditions? Huh? Because the truth stuff's true.

B (59:02)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I don't know that much about the, about the 12 step process, but it's again, what we're trying to come up with are really simple things you can design. How do you become a moment designer? Right. If we say, hey, most of the

A (59:18)

experience, the atomic habits of.

B (59:19)

Most of the experience. Yeah, most of the experience of meaning will be in a moment. How do I design moments that are meaningful? How do I recognize the ones that I. That just showed up for me and how do I actually design something so that they work out fine. So, you know, David's example, I think, in the book was you can't experience total beauty, but you can make a cake for your grandson's birthday, and you can see his face light up when he blows out the candle, and then he puts his hand right in it and grabs a piece of icing and it's like, well, that was cool. I can set that up and just let it happen.

A (59:52)

The one difference, though, is that if you're making, baking a cake or you're building an ipod, or you're designing some product or widget, right? There's a limited number of variables. And, you know, the. The key variable that's lacking in that is the. Is the variable of, you know, human emotion. You know, like fear and insecurity and, you know, like a bespoke set of life circumstances that have created neural pathways and reactive patterns. I mean, essentially, so much of this boils down to the human animal getting in its own way and just unable to act in its own best interest, despite reading the books and knowing all the information, just not being able to translate that into new behavioral patterns.

B (60:40)

But it's also optimistic that those behavioral patterns, curiosity, mastery, and things are built in to that same human who's got like, say, a bespoke set of neural pathways, maybe took them down to something that doesn't make any sense anymore. But. But I'm totally optimistic that if you just start trying a few things, you can start to unlock some of that stuff. Get reframe. It's not about impact. Impact is in the transaction world. I need to find meaning somewhere else. The impact's fine. I still want to do a good job at work, but I got. But if I'm looking there, I'm looking in the wrong place. So some reframes to give you all slightly different. You know, like everybody says, you want out of the box, thinking, well, move the box. You know, I'm looking over here, this isn't working. Move the box over here. There's more possibilities here. And if we. And so I'm optimistic that even in a pretty grooved set of dysfunctional beliefs, dysfunctional patterns, there's still a curious person in there, still an optimistic person in there. Fear kills curiosity, right? I'm not going to be curious about new stuff because I'm terrified of changing anything. But, you know, small steps, what. What Albert Bandura called guided mastery, what David Kelly called creative confidence in his book, it's like small steps of learning to be, take a few risks, be a little more creative, have your curiosity, ask some new questions, try a few things. Those small steps will overcome a phobia, will overcome the fear. And, and it doesn't. And it's not a, you know, a lifelong practice. It's six weeks.

C (62:17)

You know, you mentioned we, we kind of sound like some other things. Well, you know, in the 75 ring circus called the Human Experience, the meeting tent's pretty big tent and there's a whole bunch of, there's a, there's a dog act, there's some clowns in there, there's some dancing animals. There's a whole lot of stuff going on in the meeting room. And we, we just walked in there. But again, we're design guys. I mean, Bill's a Nietzsche loving atheist. You know, I'm a Jesus loving theist. I mean, we got pretty different worldviews here. I'll say again, if you get the human part right, you can't go wrong. That's our baseline. And all we're trying to do is offer tools that work for human beings. So we're not trying to be a new religion, we're not trying to be a new psychology. We're guys with freeing, reframed ideas to make, make your situation more manageable and tools to get you unstuck and moving. So this is entirely compatible with any world. There is no worldview that this is incompatible with. We say at the end of the book, we call the set of mindsets the designer's way, which is a little presumptuous. And then we say, your homework now is to figure out your way. And of course you're never going to. There's no getting it done and there's no getting it right. You know, you know, I'll. I made a mistake again today. I'm so hopeless. Of course you are. You know, I mean, but, but if, you know, if you're, if you're becoming, you're going to get better when you look back and you're refreshing. So if you really can accept your humanity, then it starts getting, and you start living generatively into it not to get it done. Because there's no getting it done, thank God. There's no getting it done. Literally on her deathbed. So my, my dear wife Claudia died of cancer five years ago. And I like being in love so much. I'm doing, I'm going to get married again. But nonetheless, she really liked her brain. And she watched her mother lose her brain before she died. She said, I'm not Going there. So because California is an end of life state, we had the drugs for her to end her life before she lost her brain, if her brain started to really go. And on the Tuesday before the Friday, she died, I said, are we going there? She said, no, I've decided I want to stick it out. There might be one more lesson and I don't want to miss it. And the last thing she said, she sat up in bed and she opened her eyes and she stared at me. She goes, oh, oh, it's so interesting. Closed her eyes and fell back. Last thing she said, so if you play the game well, it's interesting all the way to the end. Don't try to solve it, just live it.

A (64:48)

Embracing the mystery as opposed to trying

C (64:50)

to solve it, celebrating it. This is as. This is as good as it gets. Making a little progress on a huge question is fabulous.

B (65:01)

I am, in fact, an existential atheist, and every morning I get up and I say, I live in the best of all possible worlds, because this is it. This is the best of all possible worlds.

C (65:11)

I get an afterlife. But he's stuck. This is all, I guess.

B (65:13)

And everything I do today, I choose to do, which is about, you know, choices, makes you human. But we were in a restaurant a long time ago, and Dave and I were talking about, you know, atheism and, and, and, and Jesus. And he said, okay, I got it. We both believe in mystery. We believe in the thing that cannot be demystified. There is a mystery in the world. You round down to cognitive science and physics, and I round up to God. But it's true. I mean, the reason we're entirely compatible is. I mean, I'm also an artist. And when I'm standing in front of a canvas and, or I'm painting, or I've got an idea and I'm designing, there's a moment where I'm not in this world. You know, Rick Rubin, the record producer, wrote the book on the creative act. He talks about, you know, we just channel this stuff from, you know, he would call flow creativity.

A (66:05)

Yeah.

B (66:05)

And we're just channeling this stuff. But I have these experiences. Absolutely. Like the painting is happening in front of me and I'm just moving my hand.

A (66:12)

Yeah.

B (66:13)

And so there. That there is mystery.

A (66:15)

But that's. That is self transcendence.

B (66:17)

It is self transcendence.

A (66:18)

You can become an antenna or a vehicle for, you know, something higher, just something.

B (66:25)

And it seems to be something that humans evolved to have the capability to do. You know, I mean, from prophets to seers to Shamans to whatever. There's always been people in a culture who saw something that everybody else didn't see.

A (66:42)

And those experiences are available to all of us at any time. If we can be present and get out out of our own way.

C (66:51)

Those experiences. I want to make sure the listener doesn't think by those that that pronoun is referring to these apex, either psychedelic or mystical mountaintop experiences. Or when Bill totally drops into flow in front of a canvas. And I call Bill the Flowmaster because he's really worked on being good at dropping into flow for years now. While those experiences are great, those experiences are great. What I hope we mean by and those experiences are available to all of us. That experience of having a deeper engagement and participation in the present moment and feeling my aliveness and my humanity more than when I'm just worried about the outcome that is available to everybody else.

B (67:30)

It's a process.

A (67:31)

There's tension in every moment between that type of experience and pivoting back to our default of thinking about how everything's going and our neuroses and insecurities.

C (67:44)

Take the trash out. I had to take this trash out.

A (67:47)

Just in the example of the podcast that you were talking about earlier. It's like, I know that the best version of this conversation depends upon the extent to which I can be present for it. Because if I'm totally dialed into you guys, I don't need this stuff here. I'll always. I'll let my curiosity find the next line of inquiry and it will be great. But I'm too insecure for that. So I have to surround myself with all of this stuff, you know, And I'm thinking, what's the next question? Or I'm going to have a brain fart, you know? Yeah. And successful. Convincing myself that I that that is what the this experience demands when it actually isn't. I wanted to go back to the this idea of reframes. You mentioned Joseph Campbell earlier. One of the things that serves us and also trips us up and gets in our way is our story. I spend a lot of time thinking about story. Like we all walk around with this story, you know, who we are, what we're capable of, what's going to work, you know, and you know, like everything, it works for us and it doesn't work for us. But we're very locked in on this. And the idea of challenging that story, let alone deconstructing it, like these stories are all fantasies. Like even the best story. I mean, it's all nonsense, right? None of these Stories are true, yet we're so indelibly attached to them. And it seems to me, and I'm curious what you guys think, that so much of what you're talking about is available when we can kind of release our clutch a little bit and start thinking about not even necessarily forming a new story, but just holding our story more loosely and being more curious about it and developing like the, the, the willingness to challenge it.

B (69:35)

Yeah, I mean, you know, you know, we are the story we tell ourselves. One of the first exercises in the design life classes, I say, hey, tell me the story you grew up with. You know, tell me what your parents, you know, what's, what you, what'd you

C (69:46)

learn from your parents?

B (69:47)

And you know, you get the common story of, you know, work hard, get good grades, go to a good school, get a good job. And I go, how's that working for you? And then it'll be well, you know, not really. So we are the story we tell ourselves. But we can, like you say, hold that more lightly and maybe lean into the opportunity to change that story. Because if we are the story we tell ourselves, let's change the story to be the one I want to live. Maybe I don't want to accept my parents notion of success anymore. That's not going to work for me. Or maybe I'm in the mid career and it didn't turn out to be what I thought and I can beat myself up for that, or I can say, and now I'm perfectly positioned to figure out what I want to do next. So we're narrative animals. Storytelling is part of the DNA of humans. I think all I would say is like, keep asking yourself what part of this story is working for me and what part of the story do I want to revise or get rid of or edit out because it just doesn't work anymore. And the striving mindset, the sort of I gotta be the best at everything. I remember one of the very first workshops we did a long time ago, a big workshop with a bunch of Stanford alumni. A woman who raised her hand, she was having problems. She said, what's the deal? She says, well, I'm really senior lawyer in a big law firm in New York, but I hate it. Well, what happened? She goes, well, I went to Stanford because it was the hardest school. And then my parents were both lawyers, so they said, be a lawyer. So I said, okay. I got into Yale because that was the school my parents went to. And then I went to New York. I got in the biggest law firm I could. I was the youngest woman partner. First, you know, first senior partner. I run the management thing and I hate my life. Yeah, I got a house in Manhattan. I got a place out on the island. You know, I got two Teslas, kids in private school.

A (71:26)

Because it's a terrible life.

C (71:27)

It really is because she, she didn't

B (71:31)

choose any of it. She. Little reward systems of reward and punishment.

A (71:34)

At no point did she feel like she had permission to actually ask herself, like, what do I want and what's meaningful to me? We're on these, these escalators. Yeah. You know, that is, it's hard.

B (71:46)

This is. Yeah. Deeply embedded and, you know, and I said, look, this is just a quick workshop. I'm not meaning to, you know, you, you don't need to have an existential crisis here and you know, in the 90 minute rubber chicken talk. But look at it this way. You're, you know, it's, it's a sunk cost. Right. And you got lots of resources. You know, you're making 6 million, $6 million, you know, base $20 million bonuses. Great. Bank that for two years and start moving towards the thing that's more authentic for you. But give yourself permission to one, not beat yourself up for choices you made that felt okay at the time. And two, look at what you've got available to you to go forward. And you're going to say, all we really do in office hours is give permission.

A (72:32)

Yeah.

C (72:32)

Together we've probably had a couple thousand office hour conversations. And mostly it's giving permission not to, hey, go off and join the circus. But we're reminding people they do have the right to exercise the agency over their own lives that they want. And I'm a big fan of story. The fifth mindset is create your world, which is acknowledging that life is a story we tell ourselves. Yeah, it is. So pick that story really carefully. What's the one you're in now? And that's not in dried in ink. It's evolving over time. Hold it lightly. For heaven's. If I'm a becoming, of course I'm holding it lightly. You know, we say, I don't know your one true purpose, but we could give you some tips on how to live purposefully on the way toward the thing that's ever changing. And so like in my own story, you know, my father died when I was nine. We learned later of suicide. That's a gift that keeps on giving. I've worked that through with lots of counselors. You know, I figured out my. I've retroactively figured out my coping systems and what my reactions are and what the good things and the bad things that came out of that were, you know, and how that affects my marriage life, you know, And I really know my story well. I mean, I've worked this thing really, really, really hard. I'm turning 73 in a couple of weeks. That happened 64 years ago. I've got this thing covered. So now my wife dies and now I'm in a relationship. My wife Claudia dies and now I'm in relationship with Fresh, who is a different animal entirely, but who I love dearly and is evoking completely different things out of me. And I am learning so much about that coping system that I thought I fully understood that goes back to my origin story. By virtue of simply being in the presence of a different soul with a different kind of reflectivity. I'm over and over again I say, oh, that's what Claudia was talking about, the woman who died. She kept telling me this stuff like, no, no, no, that's not it. You know, I'm like, oh, that's what she meant. So I'm rewriting my story. You never know your story, you're just working on it. But it does help. Having a story gives you some guidance, gives you a, where do I go from here? You know, you're not done. Like, oh, I got it, I got it. Yeah, but like, I'm getting it.

A (74:41)

So there's your story. There's the story of the senior partner at the White Shoe law firm in Manhattan. There's the story of the, you know, struggling to make it through the day person.

C (74:52)

Sure.

A (74:53)

What about the senior in high school who's looking at the prospect of applying to college and thinking, well, what's the point in that? Like there is a veneer of nihilism, I think, in Gen Z. Oh yeah. They look out onto the world and they're like, what's the point of any of this? As a parent of an 18 year old, like, I see this and I'm around young people a lot of, what do you make of that and how do you communicate your message to that person or that generation that's struggling in that particular way?

C (75:31)

Well, I would say first of all, their skepticism, which translates into disengagement, is well founded because what they're really seeing is, oh, all those games you guys told me the world was built around are falling apart. In fact, they're not even accessible to me in the same way. So the heck with you guys, right?

A (75:52)

Like they're thinking, oh, like Like a, like one of those jobs that you're. You older people are complaining about. That looks pretty good. Like I'd like to have a house, but I don't see any path to that. And you know the world's going to fall apart by the time and I

B (76:05)

don't want one of these crappy jobs that you keep complaining about. So this 70 of Americans are disengaged at work.

C (76:10)

Yeah.

B (76:10)

So that's what I'm looking forward to. I'm going to, to work hard, go to college, get a job, and then be disengaged for the rest of my life.

A (76:16)

You guys are all idiots.

B (76:17)

Thanks. Thanks for two reasons.

C (76:20)

When you guys won the games you told me to play, you didn't look all that happy. And by the way, we can't play them anymore. So other than that, it's a great idea. Good job. You're doing empathy step one of design really well. But now let's redefine the problem. Don't just say, oh, I'm screwed, I don't want to play, I can't play. You're accepting that the way we all describe the world to you is accurate. It. So if we do radical acceptance. Okay. AI is coming. Yep. We're going to have to adapt to that. You have to live in a post AI world for sure. There may be a different economic reality. Even, you know, kids, my kids at age who are, and my kids are all late 30s, 40s, you know, are not buying houses because it doesn't make sense. And so we're going to live a different kind of a way. So then inside the con, this, the particularity called the moment in history in which I found myself, if I radically accept those things. But I believe I'm a human becoming and I can live more fully into my aliveness within this framework. Where can I do that? How do I do that? What would be interesting to me, let's find ways to thrive in this context and get over the fact that the way they all said it was isn't the way it is anymore. It's just not true. So what is true? And let's go be human beings in the world in which you're going to live.

A (77:36)

Yeah. In some sort of upside down way. It's almost an accelerated way of giving that person even greater permission. Well, if it's all like this, you might as well go directly into the thing that you're, you know, where your curiosity is.

C (77:53)

We're living alternative. Bill's been saying we've seen this, this down to this Shift in the student profile in the last 10 years. But you've been saying just in the last one or two, it's turning around.

B (78:04)

Yeah, yeah, very much so. I will radically predict that in five years, the number one major at Stanford is poetry. Because why take an econ class? Why take an econ class or a CS class if you can't get a job? The number one major, poetry and creative writing.

C (78:19)

For the few people still getting the liberal education.

B (78:22)

But I would, you know, the sort of disaffected 18 year old, particularly the male 18 disaffected 18 year old, it'd be like, okay, yeah, radically accepted. Things are changing. I think this is why the creator economy is booming and it's so interesting to them. It's like, well, if the goal was to like, you know, make a bunch of money or at least get enough money, so I'm secure, but these other paths don't look so good. Maybe I'll just do my own thing. And that's going to be an explosion of creativity and engagement and other things. Not everybody will be successful. But that impetus to say, hey, wait a minute, you're right, I got to redefine the world maybe on my own terms or maybe with a community of people who I really want to hang out with. One of my students, one of my top students, left school, went to work for some big design firms for a while and then went, no, I don't think so. Bought some land and up in the San Juan Islands and is running an organic farm. And he's happy. And all the product designers want internships there because who wouldn't want to work the summer on a farm? And he's using design techniques to create a completely different sort of farm economy. But now there's so many. There's. So one of the classes I want to do is designing your creative life at Stanford because there's so many more options for how do you find your way in this new world where things are changing? Wherever there's going to be chaos, there's going to be dislocation and there's going to be opportunity. And I think I'm seeing sort of, of the students who are still engaged or trying, ready to engage. I'm seeing a renaissance in sort of, of creativity, entrepreneurship, engagement, and particularly in the arts. You know, by the way, by the way, in the, in the research that we always quote from Bill Damon on passion, only 80%, only 20% of people have an identifiable passion. 80% don't. In that 20%, it's all highly skewed towards creatives. I've always wanted to be a writer, a poet, a singer, a dancer or something. And what do we tell those kids? Oh, you can't get a job doing that. So what I'm going to tell those kids is that's probably the only job you can get because the McKenzie thing will disappear, the banker thing will disappear, all these other things will disappear. And so there is a. There's an another element to this. The kid who won't get out of the room just plays video games all day. I do a bunch of work in China, and they have what they call the lying flat movement. The kids. Yeah, it's interesting. The kids graduate from college, and instead of the picture where they're all throwing up their hats, they're literally lying on the ground, lying on the stairs. And, you know, in the most, you know, nihilistic way, just saying there's nothing in this society for us, not China is probably true. There's a lot of stuff in society for these kids. And whether they go to college or not isn't. It's kind of an open question whether colleges will even survive. You know, most of them, The AI wave, I don't know. But no, I would say now more than ever. I mean, the friction between my idea and the market is almost zero. You know, a long time ago when I graduated, you had to learn drafting. And there's a lot of hard. Hard to make something. I can. I can. I can talk to my phone and 3D print something. Sure. In 20 minutes. If you've got an idea. It's never been easier to put that idea inside your story and become the person who does that thing and whether that thing is college or college and something else. I just found out. I was talking to one of the Episcopal professors who's running a class for creatives. We have the number one Vietnamese influencer at Stanford. I haven't met him. He's like a sophomore. And I don't know what a Vietnamese influencer is, but he's really big in Vietnam. He's from Vietnam and he's, you know, and he's pulling in a million dollars a month, whatever he's doing.

A (82:09)

That's wild.

B (82:10)

And he's a college student. Yeah, Right.

C (82:13)

So.

A (82:13)

And he's still choosing to go to college.

B (82:16)

I mean, you know, I think the other thing is we have an exercise where we talk about what's college for? And, you know, college is. In addition to career readiness, college is really for the life of the mind, like learning how learning works and reading Widely the great books from all traditions and understanding that, you know, we're not just here as a civilization that was born yesterday. I mean this goes back, you know, read Socrates, read Plato and read Chungzi and you know, lots of. But I think, I think the life of the mind, the kind of perfecting myself, Those years between 18, 20 something or 19 and 20 something, those are important years of becoming the person you will be, you know, dealing with for the rest of your life.

A (83:05)

And as we hurdle off this AI cliff, the only thing that we have is our consciousness and our unique expression of humanity. And I think that becomes a premium, I mean even in the best case situation where AI comes in and optimizes everything and takes away all these jobs. But don't worry about it because there's going to be universal basic income and there's just going to be massive prosperity. I mean this will augur in the greatest crisis of meaning in the history of the species. Like okay, well what are we supposed to do now?

C (83:46)

We've been thoroughly distracted and we won't be anymore.

A (83:49)

You know, this rose colored view on like how great it's going to be. Like I just don't see any set of circumstances in which that is going to be how this is going to unfold. But at the center of all of this is meaning. Like how are we going to find meaning amidst the birth of new form, of this new life form, you know, that we are apparently the sex organs of.

C (84:12)

Yeah, no, I think in terms of where do the, where's the post AI future land and how does it, you know, this would be like saying a gymnast going off the high bar making a move for the very first time and sticking the landing in an Olympic perfection on day one. You know, it's, this is my third or fourth massive technological revolution in the past 50 years. It is orders of magnitude bigger. I've finally been convinced that AI isn't just one more cool thing thing, it's a massive different thing. That being said, every transition is a mess. And while transitions and disruptions create new opportunities for new people, frankly usually the people hurt by the disruption are not the ones who get the benefits of the upside on the other side. So there will be losses, there will be sacrifices, there will be suffering. How long it will take, whether or not we'll get stuck in a bad corner and we'll end up with a massively AI enabled oligarchy might be, I don't know. But regardless of how well or how poorly we get through this, you're going to need to know who you are. You're going to need access to tools that will remind you you are worth it. And you're going to need some people around you that you can do that with.

B (85:22)

And don't count on Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to provide you with your basic income, because they're going to take all the money and build a bigger yacht.

A (85:30)

It's looking pretty clear.

B (85:31)

Yeah, they're not going to be.

A (85:33)

That's the route that we're on. But you guys are still optimistic. Guys, right there at Stanford, in the heart of Silicon Valley, around all of these, the next generation of the people who are going to kind of innovate on this, you remain optimistic about the human species surviving this? Sure. Okay.

B (85:53)

I've been teaching since the 80s, since you were in school. And there have been waves of times when the students were just interested in how do I get a job? And there have been ways of times when they were a little more socially interested. You know, we had the protests a couple. Last year, we had the protests around the Palestinian Gaza thing. And so I see a lot more student activism lately that just kind of had disappeared in the 90s and early 2000s. And I see a lot more, you know, students will say, I want to start a startup, but I want to do something meaningful that has impact, that I want to just start another food delivery company or a version of a social media thing. Thing. So they're pretty aware and they have all these new tools where they can build almost anything instantly. And they're pretty aware of the negative impact that technologies like smartphones and other things have had on their generation. So I think they're smart, they're aware, they've got great tools, and they really want to do something that has value into it, which ultimately will rest on their. Their values, their. Their meaning making ideas. And so, yeah, it'll be a bumpy. It'll be a bumpy ride, but I don't know. I don't know where it's going to go. I doubt that we're going to all be living in some blissful future where we don't have to work and we just, you know, hang around the park all day.

A (87:12)

I don't. I don't see that.

B (87:13)

I don't think that happens. The other thing is. But the other thing is it'll put more.

A (87:16)

Maybe that will force us to be more intentional about our formative community.

B (87:23)

It'll put my stress on building communities we care about. You know, I've been looking at different kinds of Communities. And one of the communities I don't understand, but I, but I see it all around my student is the gaming community. People get together, they put the headsets on and they've got their thing and they got their team and they got their game. That's a, that's a community where people love to play together and not even just to win, but just to play together. Sports isn't, I don't, I'm terrible at predicting anything. But if you wanted to predict what to invest in, in, invest in women's basketball teams, professional teams, invest in the second league for the, for the baseball teams, whatever, you know, the farm teams. Invest in things where people have to go to the stadium to be part of the community that watches the activity.

A (88:04)

Anything where people are gathering, restaurants or, you know, in this increasingly secularized world that we live in, where we've lost all these third spaces and, and after school programs, et cetera, and we're in this kind of desert of disconnection, there has to be a counter response to that at some point we're hardwired to be together. And it doesn't matter how amazing this technology is, that is always going to be the case. And so these are things that the AI can't engineer out, like people getting together to sit down and have a conversation over a meal.

C (88:42)

Again, you have to decide what you think it means to be a person. Viktor Frankl, after coming out of the Holocaust, develops a new school of meaning making in psychology and concludes, there are three ways you can experience a meaningful life. Through love, through achievement, or through suffering. Now before him Freud said, liebent und are love and work. Those are the two key things that make a human life worthwhile. And he added suffering because sometimes you're in a situation completely beyond your control where the only freedom you have is how do you bear suffering? Well, so if I accept that I'm up becoming, you know, I accept that, you know, there are forces over which I have no control and I recognize, oh, if I'm just thinking transactionally, oh, I can't change the politics, oh, I can't change AI. I guess it doesn't matter. I'm impotent, I'm powerless, I'm going to lay flat. I'm thinking transactionally. Now, I'm not saying I think radically. Accepting some of these difficulties is easy, but it may be necessary. So one of the organizations I work with, I live in Santa Cruz on the Monterey Bay. That's the north end of the Salinas Valley, which is agricultural. So I work with a group called Digital Nest. And Digital Nest does a really fabulous job of helping brown kids crack into high tech because there's a big color barrier in high tech. They do a really good job. Now that means overwhelmingly they work with brown people who ICE are very interested in right now. And they're getting raided right and left. So there's this whole community and this whole subterfuge. I can't even tell you the details because it's all secret about how these organizations and how the families that they serve are helping one another avoid getting picked off the street. It's a very generative, loving, human making experience in the face of a really horrible, constraining, lifestyle ruining reality. So if you accept this is what's going on, how can I participate? So if I'm, if I'm a person who recognizes I don't control everything, then I'm not first and foremost a producer. I am first and foremost a participant. So regardless of what world you find yourself in, you're participating. What's the most generative, life giving, human making way. You can participate in the situation in which you find yourself. That's the particularity you're in or frankly you're stuck with. So when the plotters of the escape that Frankl was going to participate in finally pull it off and they're ready to go, a colleague runs into the barrack that he's in where he's tending to a patient because he's an MD as well as a psychiatrist and says, we're going, you have to go now. And he's sitting by the bed of this inmate and he looks at the other guy and he says, no, I'll stay. And he just chooses, I'm sure all my patients and I will die here, but suffering well with them, that's life making for me. We have choices to make.

B (91:43)

Yeah. One really quick thing. The notion of radical acceptance has nothing to do with endorsement. Accepting that the situation, accepting the situation is out of control and people are raiding, you know, pulling, pulling folks from, you know, from Salinas off the street for no good reason. You can accept that's the reality. What can we do about it? How can we make this community safer? But there's nothing about that that's an endorsement. Right? So yeah, people, people often think, oh, well, if you accept something then you have to agree with it. No, it's okay. No, I don't. There's nothing about that. I have to agree with it. Nothing about it that I think is okay. There's a lot of things going on in the world I really don't think is okay. Okay. And then the question is, if that's the reality I'm in, what do I do? What's available? What can I do? What can I do that's useful? What can I do at Stanford? I can sign a petition. You can work with this group to help these kids get a good job. I can write a letter so one of my students who's going to be deported can get a visa. Whatever you can do. Do the thing you can do. Many people, the Buddha would say the distance between the way things are and how you want them to be, that's suffering.

A (92:48)

Yeah, of course. And you can't solve a problem that you're not accepting, you know, in its fullness. Right.

C (92:55)

So it's like can't solve a problem you're not willing to have.

A (92:57)

It's. You're not endorsing it. You're putting yourself in a position to deal with it equanimously and not reactively.

B (93:03)

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

C (93:30)

They got time.

B (93:30)

Yeah. So we're not saying, you know, that pick your battles carefully. Pick the things that are meaningful for you.

A (93:37)

Right.

B (93:38)

And pick the things where you think you can move the needle.

A (93:41)

I think there's an important piece packed into that, which is that the Western mind is going to default to this idea that the means, to the meaning that I lack is through a deeper investment in my own self obsession. Whereas the solution is actually disabusing yourself of that self obsession and getting into a contributory, service oriented kind of approach to life. Like, oh, I'm lacking meaning, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna optimize my life and I'm gonna like construct this thing and it's all about me, and I've got my blinders and here's my thing, and I'm doing this. Whereas if you just like let the blinders go and you walk into a room thinking, well, how can I make this room better for being in it? Rather than looking for, like, what am I going to get out of this situation? That seems to me to be the real means to, you know, kind of, of accessing this meaning.

C (94:40)

I mean, psychology has known for a while now if you're experiencing anxiety or depression, best thing you can do is go help somebody else. If you want to feel better, go help somebody else. So what's going on there? Well, you know, and again, wisdom traditions have cared deeply about service for a long time. You know, in the Cain and Abel story, you know, after, you know, the brother kills his brother, he says, you know, who am I? My brother's keeper. And one of the comments of that is that, you know, the answer was so obviously yes, that God didn't even answer the question. Like, everybody knows, yes, you're your brother's keeper. We're in this together. We now know psychologically that consciousness is in fact collective. We say all the time in these small groups that we help people talk to each other meaningfully in that it's almost impossible to hear yourself by yourself. So, you know, we're big fans of Dan Siegel's work in the mindsight Institute, where he's talking a lot about collective consciousness and that we're much more a we than an I. So no matter where you are in the midst of all this thing, if you start living your life in such a way that is participating with others, your chance of experiencing self transcendency and it gets more meaningful goes way up. So absolutely, it's not just about you. Now, we don't preach that real hard. We just talk about, hey, formative community really works. And living coherently works where who I am and what I'm doing are in alignment and what I believe are in alignment. But by the time we talk to anybody, they pick up a book, they walk into our class, they even sign up for office hours. I've already found myself in front of a teachable person. So anybody who's listening to this is open minded enough to probably have some pretty good values. Your values are probably going to take you to a good place. And that good place is probably going to involve somebody other than you too.

A (96:25)

You can't transmit something you haven't got. Obviously you have to walk this talk in your own lives, right? You can't have office hours and go on podcasts and write books about this unless you're actually doing this. So how does it work in your own lives and what are the challenges that you guys face? You're like, well, I wrote about this. I really have to do this. I really don't want to. I don't know how to do this or resisting this.

B (96:49)

Well, a long time before even we started the class and Dave had come over and said, hey, let's do this thing. I said, okay, great. So we went over to Zotz. You remember Z, back when it was still kind of a dusty old place.

A (97:01)

It's not. They really, like, dialed it up up, didn't they?

C (97:03)

Yeah, they didn't ruin it.

B (97:04)

Some alums bought it and they made it much fancier. But anyway, so we were sitting there with a pitcher of beer and on a warm, dusty picnic table, and I said, okay, the one thing about this is. Well, one thing I said is you got to leave the Jesus stuff out of the classroom. He agreed to that. The second thing was, you know, we're asking people to do. To do these exercises. So we have to do them, and we have to actually do them ourselves just to understand what it feels like to wrestle with three Odysseys or it feels like what it's trying to figure out. Your balance. Balance Dashboard Better. And particularly with this book, it was a. The possibility of the imposter syndrome loomed large. I spent with Sam Harris Wake up app. I spent a whole, like nine months trying to develop a mindfulness practice. Complete failure. So I'm terrible at mindfulness. If people out there are good at it, I'm sure it's of great value. I couldn't figure it out. And I listened to all the Sam Harris stuff. I listened to comm. I tried them all. Headspace. Can't do it. I have other ways of finding myself in my own thoughts, in something that isn't just repeating transactions. Most of the other stuff we do. I just finished rewriting all of my compass, my work view, worldview and lifeview, and I found it had changed since a year or two ago when I last did it at the lab. I have a rotating set of fellows who come in and teach with us, and then they leave. And every time they come in, we do a new set of heavy. Let's all write our values down so we know what the culture is all about. So I actually have a chance to do most of these exercises every couple of years. And I think that keeps me honest. Right. And the rest of the stuff I learned, I learned from my students confronting me with something that either didn't make sense or seems. Seemed hypocritical to them. And I've been married for 37 years to a lovely woman named Cynthia. And she keeps me very honest.

C (99:00)

Yeah, she.

B (99:01)

She's just read the book. And she goes, I got some questions. You don't do this.

A (99:06)

Yeah.

B (99:07)

When we talk, you don't seem present.

A (99:09)

Right.

B (99:10)

You know, it's like, okay, gonna keep you honest. I can work on that. I can work on that. Yeah.

C (99:13)

There's a. There's a great line in a John Fogarty song that I'm rather fond of in the refrain of the same is I ain't no hypocrite, except mostly every day. And boy, you do this kind of work, you hand out stuff recommending how people live their lives. I mean, you are asking for it. So I'm up against my own stuff all the time. And I would say one thing in particular right now. So where am I learning my way into my own book? And one of the simple little exercises is change your vowel, go from got to to get to to. You want to flip the switch? Look at your to do list. I got to get this thing done. So what's the best thing an item on your to do list can be over with a line through it. Oh, that's great. It's gone now. Oh, that part of my life is over. It's gone forever. Like, wait, you know, oh, oh, I got to talk to Rich roll today. Oh, I get to talk to Rich roll today. So can I flip from got to to get to, which is from over to participant? It's a complete shift in mindset. And truth be told, even though I'm pushing 73 and I've been teaching this kind of stuff for years and over 20 years ago, I got an advanced seminary degree in contemplative spirituality. I suck at this stuff. I mean, I am goal oriented, deadline driven, a transactionalist, production minded guy. So really trying to move what I call from role getting impact made to soul. Just being present at the moment, moment is a bigger shift than I want. My number one goal this year is to live into get to, not got to. Am I experiencing things as a get to, not a got to. And I catch myself missing it constantly. So the growth angle is still pretty steep.

A (100:51)

Yeah, it's a tricky thing. I mean, you talk about like the, the. The Odyssey years, right?

C (100:58)

Like 18 to 35.

A (100:59)

If we're that first cohort, the younger people, their identity building and the kind of counsel is, you know, like, hey, be wary of, you know, descending too far down the transactional lifestyle kind of approach.

B (101:15)

And then there's mindlessly transacting and just

A (101:18)

everything becomes about that. We get indoctrinated in that, like, you know, just by being alive in this world, in this developed world. And then in these older years, it becomes about meaning making, you know, we've kind of ridden that, that wave and, and it's that tension with our, you know, kind of striver disposition, like, you know, who I am, my identity is, is this construct that's contingent upon these things that I'm doing in the world, like my position at my job or, you know, my salary or whatever it is. And, and I see the suffering that is created when, when the person can't let go of that and they start to miss, you know, the gifts of that phase of life because they remain so fixated on, you know, continuing to tell that story.

C (102:11)

It's a real challenge. I call it the Role to Soul Impact Challenge. And this really comes up particularly in these DCI fellows, the Distinguished Career Institute people, the 35 to 45 fellows a year that come spend a year with us. I happen to know one particular cohort really well because it's the one in which the woman I'm now going to marry is a member of. So I get to be.

A (102:32)

Now it's all making sense.

C (102:33)

Yeah. After 20 years of teaching at Stanford, I finally got something out of it other than barely enough money to pay for the parking. And so I'm hanging out with this cohort. And a year and a half after they, quote, graduated from spending this year thinking deeply about their futures, we all get together for pizza and beer. One of the, the alumni members houses, this is the people still in the Northern California area. And there's a conversation goes around the circle of 20 some people. And the question is simply, so how's it going? It was a year and a half after they'd finished thinking deeply about their lives. And 18 of the 20 people told some kind of a long. It was two and a half hours to get around that circle, eight minutes per person. 18 of the 20 stories were essentially, I'm having a real hard time letting it go. I don't want to live the way I used to live. I'm done with that. I'm not going to go back and run the law firm anymore. I'm not going to whatever it is. But boy, I got a lot of muscle memory on living that way. I got a lot of muscle memory on I am the person who did that sort of thing. And I thought, boy, this is a struggle. Now the good news is another year and a half later. So three years after they graduated, they got together again at somebody's beach house, went around the same circle, asked the same Question. And almost everybody said, I think I'm getting the hang of this now. So it may take a little time, but, you know, you're a person. You can grow.

A (103:58)

Have you guys connected with Chip Conley?

B (104:01)

Yes.

A (104:01)

Just talk Modern.

C (104:04)

He did his podcast. He's a great guy.

A (104:05)

Yeah. I mean, he's amazing. And obviously, his work is just all about that. You know, the modern elder becoming the modern price. Like, the chrysalis is not a crisis. But, you know, how do you use your. What's it called? Synthesized. Like, the brain changes. Arthur talks about this, too. Like, you have really good at, like, the strength of.

C (104:24)

Strength.

A (104:24)

Yeah. Data processing. To, like, more of a synthesized. The second curve where you can make all these connections and you have this wisdom. It's the fluid experience. Fluid. Yeah. Fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence and leaning into which is really wisdom.

C (104:37)

Yeah.

A (104:37)

And being this modern elder, this mentor, you know, for the next generation, which requires, you know, a confrontation with your ego in order to get there. But this is really the path to meaning when you reach that stage of life.

B (104:50)

Yeah. The other shift I've seen in students, by the way, is that it used to be very much what my parents expected me to do was one of the stories I would hear and, do I have permission to do something else? Yes, you do. But now what I hear is the parents aren't so. The parents are like, hey, do whatever you want. It's fine. The students, the pressure's coming from their peers. Their pressure's coming from their peers. I don't know if this is social media or something. It's like, I gotta look a certain way, I gotta act a certain way, and I gotta get the right job. And it's all. It's not coming so much from the grownups. Cause I think. They don't think the grownups, you know, have the right answer. And so it's really in that circle. And then I wonder, you know, when you. Because I'll do some work with some folks who are retiring. You know, I was the senior vice president of everything. I retired. And on Monday mornings, I'm just some guy in the line at Starbucks chatting up people, because I have nothing to do and nobody cares that I was once the senior vice president. So that loss of identity around jobs doesn't just happen at that point. Right. All along, you've been pegging your value to the title, to the role, like you said, to the role that I had. And now I need to move to this other place of working from the soul or working from the heart. It's Hard. But boy, isn't that an interesting challenge? Isn't that an interesting journey to be on? And if you're lucky enough to have the resources to do that, why would you miss it? Why would you like the CEOs who go back after two years and be a CEO again? Because they're screwing up my company. I got to go back and fix it. It's like, what are you doing, man?

C (106:25)

And it's not just the egoistic person, like, oh, I'm a big EVP and, and aren't terribly important. And it's not that archetype. Only frankly, you've been doing this way of living for 40 years, 50 years. That's a lot of momentum. And it was all transactions. Bunch of momentum. It was overwhelmingly transactions. So Bill and I are both in formative communities, guys, groups. Mine's 51 years old, Bill's is 35 years old. And so I'm the eldest, but only a couple of months in my group. And so we're all entering our 70s. And two years ago, the year I was turning 70, I said, we need to talk about, about this. We need to talk about becoming elders. So we had a two year long conversation that was carefully curated with some core questions. And the questions included, how much is enough? And enough. It wasn't so much money as it was how much is enough contribution? I mean, can you slow down saving the world and start trying to travel a little bit before your wife dies again? Is that okay? And then probably the other most important. So how much is enough? Was a very important question. And the second most important question is and what are you letting go? So, yeah, I think for those later in life there's absolutely some letting go and it's very freeing. Or you hang on to it too long and then the life rips it out of your hands and that's worse.

A (107:39)

Yeah, yeah. I really like this idea of the formative communities and then having this formal question, you know, and, and holding yourself accountable to answering it to other people, you know, that you're checking in with. I think that's like a huge piece in all of this myself, you know, I'm turning 60 this year. I don't want to, it's, it's almost as if, like, oh, well, you know, I'll figure that out when I, you know, when I walk out the door on my final day, you know, it's like, no, I want to think about this now. What am I doing now? How am I making this like a multi year transition so it isn't like an overnight. Like, wait, what happened? Like I thought was I, I was gonna, you know, like it's not like, oh, you buy the RV or you play golf or, you know, it's like I, I'm, I'm intent upon remaining engaged, right, in things that interest me and that I'm curious about, some of which, you know, may or may not be professional, but it's not going to look like it looks like right now. And how can I acclimate to that idea now so it's not some kind of ego, you know, devastating blow later?

C (108:45)

Cliff Transitions are hard.

B (108:47)

We were doing a, just the only live book talk we did at a local, you know, Kepler's, the bookstore in Menlo park. And somebody, and at the end somebody said, what's your next book going to be? And Dave was like, we're not doing another book. So he hates writing and he's really working hard on moving from a task driven human. You don't know anybody who's as good as Dave at getting things done. He gets really good at it from that to a soul driven human who's just kind of in the moment. And so I'm pretty sure this is the last book because it took me two years to talk him into each of the books and that going to happen this time because he's going to be on a different journey. But you know, as you said, it doesn't happen overnight. You prepare yourself for this, right? If you're thinking, if you're looking ahead, you're like. And a really interesting question is, what am I willing to leave behind in terms of my identity, my position, you know, everybody knows me or whatever it is. What am I willing to leave behind in order to make space for what's

A (109:45)

coming and being in radical acceptance of what's coming. Like, I think we, you know, our culture is such that we just, well, you know, on some level we all are convincing ourselves that we're not going to actually die and that we're not

B (109:58)

going to get forever.

A (109:59)

And this is not serving us.

B (110:01)

No. The number of billionaires who are trying to live forever is an example of the sort of narcissism.

A (110:07)

Don't get me started, our culture.

B (110:08)

But I have fully accepted there is a lot less Runway in front of me than there was behind. We do an exercise in class at the last of the class. We call it the 25th reunion. We say, hey, imagine you're 23 years old. Imagine you're now 47 and you're back for your Stanford reunion, 25th year. And we're going to get up and talk about stuff. And we got them through three different conversations. And the last time we did this, I realized, wait a minute, 20, 25 years, I'll be 95, 94, oh shit, I'll probably be dead. And then I actually, I told my co instructor I need to leave the room for a second. I walked out and I tried to deal with it. Now my reframe is, no, no, no. I bought this new exoskeleton. I'm great, you know, I'm running around, it's fantastic. But yeah, when you built by one of your students, yeah, Billboard was too. But when you, when you actually start, you know, accepting that, yeah, you know, probably there's going to be an end, but can I live all the way up to that last moment and go, oh, how interesting. I didn't know.

A (111:12)

Yeah, I think the radical acceptance, it liberates you and gives you permission to engage with those years more intentionally. I mean, I've heard you tell the story of like the woman who came to you, who, I don't know, she was like 52 or something like that. I was like, I'm thinking about going to medical school.

C (111:30)

Yeah.

A (111:31)

Yeah. I mean that's a perfect example of maybe just tell the story, like how you forecast out, like, all right, well how long do you think you're going to live? And let's reverse anything.

C (111:40)

Yeah, this is just, you know, what's crazy, what's not, and how do you think about things? So I give a talk and this 54 year old woman comes up and says, you know, can I ask you a question? I said, sure. Well, I'm thinking about going to medical school. I've always wanted to do that and I think I have the time to and. But all my friends are saying I'm too old and I'm crazy and it's stupid, you know. And I said, well, look, let's just run. I mean, so very quickly, you know how old people in your gene pool live. Well, you know, if you look around my family, you know, I'll probably make it to 90, you know, maybe 95. I said, okay, now if you're active person, how long do you want to be working? Well, probably 80 at least. And I said, okay, so, okay, so we got 26 years. Okay. Okay. Now so let's say takes a year for you to get ready to apply to medical school because you're out of practice. Fine, takes a year to get in. That's two. Takes four years to go through medical school, to get your MD to become an intern. Okay. That's six, by the way, after internship, you go into residency, you're doing medicine. Most medicine is done by residents. You're now a full fledged doctor. I've got a nephew who's a resident doing medicine all day long. So, you know, in six years you're doing medicine, you finish your specialty. Another three, four, five, depending which one you want to get. So, you know, now I'm 11 years in. You're now 65. You got 15 more years between then when you're going to retire from being a doctor to do the work you're doing. By the way, if we take a quick look back at the last 15 years of your life, would you say you are largely wasting your time? No, I think those years kind of matter to me. That's what we're talking about here, so. Are you crazy? I don't think so.

B (113:13)

No.

C (113:13)

Just decide how you want to choose to think about this.

A (113:16)

Yeah, that's an incredible reframe. You know, the idea that, you know, you would entertain going to med school in your mid-50s.

C (113:22)

I mean, my sister got her.

A (113:24)

Seems insane. And then when you, you articulate it that way, you're like, oh, well, yeah, why not?

B (113:28)

Yeah, this could work.

C (113:29)

It says who? You know, I mean, my sister got her PhD in her early 60s. She'd been doing a PhD's job as running a graduate school for many, many years with a master's degree and finally decided to get the degree she should have had. The woman in front of her getting stoled with her PhD was 83.

A (113:47)

Wow.

C (113:48)

There are no rules, there are just perceptions. It's up to you.

A (113:51)

So this answers the question, like, is it ever too late?

C (113:56)

No. Okay. I just signed up to do a motorcycle tour with my brother in law in Morocco. I ride a BMW GS 1250, which weighs a little over 600 pounds. I can still barely pick it up if I drop it. I kind of have a rule, if you can't pick it up, you shouldn't ride it.

A (114:13)

It.

C (114:13)

I'm not sure I'm riding that bike when I'm 85. Maybe a smaller bike, so there might be some things that go away, but, you know, the rules are a lot more fungible than they let you to believe.

B (114:25)

I'm kind of hoping he's not riding a motorcycle when he's 85, but because I, I love him dearly and I don't want, I don't have to.

C (114:31)

I might be bad at it.

A (114:32)

You guys are very fun, interesting characters. Like the Devout man and the atheist, the painter and the extrovert Santa Cruz.

B (114:41)

It's, it's interesting.

A (114:43)

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

C (115:11)

Yeah.

A (115:11)

And that's, that's just fine. But this notion of not only giving, you know, everybody permission, like, no, you, you deserve to have a life of meaning. It's available to you in the life you're already, it's not too late. And drop it. Find it within. Yeah. It's like, this is not about like chase your, quit your job and like become a nurse. Yeah, yeah. It's, this is, this is something that you can, you know, build into your life on a moment to moment basis, free of charge.

B (115:38)

Right. And you will feel, feel, you'll feel better. You'll, your, your, your curiosity will kind of peak, kind of start, start, start activating again and you'll find, you'll, you'll find yourself in the world in a very different sort of mindset. You know, I, I went to school and back when dinosaurs roamed the campus long before you and. But I found this thing called design, which was really cool and it was built around this idea that we'll study engineering, art and psychology and we'll put it all together and we'll make things that people want. And that's been a lot of fun. And it's an inherently curious thing to do. Like, hey, can you come up with a better one of these? Hey, can you come up with a better one of these? It's like, yeah, maybe. Let's try it. So once you get in that mindset, the designer's mindset, and you realize, oh, there are no rules. Nobody made up any rules. There's no rules for what microphones need to look like. There's no rules for what my life needs to look like. There's some things that probably some constraints. There's some constraints and there's some things that, you know, probably shouldn't do that if, you know, it might not work, might be too risky. But I bet I could try stuff, right? And I bet there's more out there than I thought. And if I just start with these designers mindsets of wonder, curiosity, availability. Let's see what happens. Let's give it a try.

C (116:59)

Yeah, I mean, sure, look, you exist. You deserve to be here. You're a human being. You deserve the entire human experience. Good chance. If you're like a lot of modern people, you're cutting some of that short lately, which probably mostly isn't your fault. It's a systemic habit that society and largely capitalism have invited you into. So we're just saying here's an invitation. You can encounter more of the fully human experience in the life you already have. You deserve it. Go get it. And if you do, you actually start becoming more yourself. You become more whole, and then it gets even better.

A (117:41)

More of yourselves.

C (117:43)

Yes. Well put.

A (117:45)

And for the person who is being newly introduced to these ideas, who's stuck, who's trying to find their way forward, whose curiosity is piqued by just a discussion of the possibility of meaning, like what is is a practice or a first thing that that person can do to begin this journey.

B (118:06)

Well, I'll do wonder glasses.

C (118:08)

Okay. Yeah.

B (118:09)

There's an exercise called put on your wonder glasses. Very simple. You walk outside. Nature's a great place to do this. Walk outside, and you see a plant or a tree, and you go, okay, my transactional glasses are on. That's a tree. I have an app. I pull it out. I can tell you what kind of. That's a Monterey pine. Fine, I need to trim it. Yeah. And then a bunch of stuff with the tree. Then. And then they go, all right, now put on your curiosity glasses. Oh, Monterey pine. I wonder what a Monterey pine is doing in Southern California. This is a Monterey. That's interesting. And. And who put that there? And why did it grow there? That's. So that's the kind of curiosity lens. It's very interesting. And now put on your wonder glasses. The final thing is the one glasses. Like, look at that tree. That tree started from, you know, something. That was nothing. I'll bet the biomass of that tree weighs 2,000 pounds. How the hell did that happen? And. And why is the Monterey pine needle so different from the tree next to it? That's a different tree. And isn't it wonderful that I live in a place like this where nature

C (119:10)

is all around me?

B (119:11)

We haven't torn it all down yet, and I think I'll go to the beach. So put on your wonder glasses. Go from transaction to curious to wonder and see what happens. Take five minutes.

C (119:24)

Because you mentioned this is maybe a person who doesn't know anything, Maybe they're feeling a little bit stuck. You know, they're in situations they can't do a lot about. So I'm going to talk about coherency settings. So you got to do a little bit of homework, do the compass exercise, which means just simply writing down, what's my story? What do I believe about the work world? What do I believe about the universe? You know, where am I really coming from? And then with that in mind, you now have an idea of who it is that you are and whatever you're doing, particularly in the workplace, as constraining as that may be, there are opportunities when you get to act yourself out authentically. So we call it coherency sighting, catching yourself in the act of acting just like you. Maybe that particular action didn't create a result yet, but, hey, the mask came

A (120:08)

off for a moment.

C (120:10)

I was acting just like Rich Roll for five whole minutes at that particular moment in the staff meeting or what have you. I'll give you an example. So we gave this talk at this bookstore a couple of weeks ago, you know, and one of the people who was there was Denise, Denise Menizar. So a woman who used. Who volunteered and worked with us for a couple of years, a couple of years ago. And she walked up and just said, I'm just. I really love the book. And, you know, I just have to thank you guys again. Those years I got to work with you were some of the best years of mine. And I really care about giving people an opportunity to do what. What gives them aliveness. And we gave Denise a chance to experience some aliveness that she's carried on since that. That encounter was about 30 seconds. That's a moment of coherency for me. So I caught myself in the act of acting just like the Dave Evans I'm trying to be. And then pat yourself on the back a little bit. And it's meaning making to find yourself the experience of being yourself.

B (121:10)

I teared up a bit, actually.

C (121:12)

So give yourself a chance to catch yourself in the action act of doing it right and being you. It's called a coherency setting. And no matter how sucky that job may be, there are some moments when you're executing it in an authentic way, and you deserve to affirm yourself for doing that.

B (121:27)

I help Gladys, you know, clear the thing on the copier. She was freaking out. She had things she had to do for her boss. I helped her clear the copier, got it working, took five minutes of my time. She's super happy. She's gonna take the copies to where they need to go. I'm an, you know, I'm the kind of person who notices when somebody else is. Need some help. That's all simple.

A (121:48)

We're so reluctant to be earnest, but that kind of earnestness is the connective tissue, you know. And that simple gesture, you know, of her expressing the meaning that she experienced with you guys then became a meaningful moment for both of you. Like, that's how it works in that way.

B (122:09)

Way.

A (122:09)

That's a beautiful story.

B (122:10)

If you're available to it, we make the offer. And everybody says that's outrageous. Make the offer for all of your students. You get office hours for life. Come back anytime. I don't care. 10 years, 20 years later come back and they think it's a great offer. And most of them having dinner tonight

C (122:23)

with a kid I taught 20 years ago.

B (122:25)

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

A (122:48)

The book is great. You guys are providing a much needed public service right now. Like I said at the outset, you really are meeting the moment. I think there is a craving and a need and a desire to understand how to engender our lives with meaning. And you're providing this roadmap and this, you know, this way forward, this solution. So thank you for coming and sharing with me today. Appreciate it.

B (123:11)

Well, thank you. And you didn't need any of these notes. You were totally. You were totally in it.

A (123:16)

You know, one day I'll, like, I'll like, leave them in the, you know, like, it's just the safety net. You know what I mean? I get it. You guys made it easy and you forced me to be more present. Like, I had to, like, you know, talking about, like, walking the talk. I like. Okay, can I just be here?

B (123:32)

Cool.

A (123:33)

Cheers.

B (123:33)

Thanks a lot.

A (123:34)

Peace. Thank you, guys.