“ The Human Advantage “ | Expert Seth Godin On Teaching Excellence [4K]

We become what we do, so what holds us back from doing it? Confronting incompetence, which means being willing to acknowledge that yesterday, I'm not as good as I am today. People don't want to let go of that feeling, so they hold on to "I'm good; I don't have to get better." But if we can give people the foundation for them to feel like they can lean forward a little bit, their posture changes, and then they experience something differently. And then they will... This is the question I get so much: How do you find your

passion? How do I choose it? All this kind of stuff. But you're talking about something completely different. I don't think you're born with one thing and only one thing that you can be passionate about; I think we can choose it. Welcome back to Inspire Change with Jordan Mulligan, and today's guest is Seth Godin, an unbelievably talented author who speaks about many different things, from leadership to business, to entrepreneurs, to self-confidence. We had an amazing conversation today, and I'm super excited to share this episode with you. He’s authored over 21 bestselling books in over 39 different

languages, and his whole trick and skill is to give the viewer and the reader of his books an "aha" moment—something that changes inside your brain that will change your life and perception of becoming successful: achieving a goal, trying to start a mission, whatever it is. These books are designed to give you exactly that. I finished two of his books, and I can 100% stand behind that. In this conversation that we have today, there are a few "aha" moments that I know will connect with you guys. Today's episode was sponsored by HU, a quick, affordable, nutritionally

complete source of food with everything that your body needs. If you go to the link in the description today, you can get a free t-shirt and shaker with some of your orders, and also find different offers and products down below. I really recommend their Daily Greens; it's absolutely changed my morning routine. Find out more down below, but before that, here is the episode with Seth Godin—an absolutely insightful look into this author's mind and some of his teachings. Let's dive into it! So, the first thing that I usually ask Seth is just to introduce yourself for

people who might not know. Um, I'm Seth Godin. I have written 21 bestsellers, started a few internet companies. Mostly, I'm a teacher. What I try to do is help people see things they already are aware of, but don't necessarily pay attention to or understand. And then I try to encourage people to make things better. Just for context, I want to get into how you took the leap from business to wanting to be a teacher and sort of helping people. Well, I was a teacher first. I started in 1977 teaching canoeing up in Canada. I've taught

thousands of people how to paddle a canoe by themselves. What I discovered is that I got more satisfaction out of being good at helping someone else be good than I did out of actually doing it myself. I didn't necessarily have a plan about how you could weave together the kind of lucky life I have now; I just knew I liked making things and puzzles, and games, and solving interesting problems—all in a swirl. I knew that there’s no way I could do an ordinary job where someone told me what to do all day; that I would

last about a week doing that. I got super fortunate. The first real job I had after business school, I launched a line of games with science fiction authors like Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury—the first illustrated computer adventure games. I just got to do things and do things and do things. I ended up with 40 people on my team, and my job became helping them see what we were trying to build. I was basically teaching them what was possible, even though I didn't know how to code, I didn't know how to illustrate, I didn't know

how to write the music, but I could share a vision for that. Ever since then, I've sort of been trying to weave together projects, teaching, and possibility. How did you... Was there a vision going forward, like, I want to do this? How much of it was decision, and how much of it was just kind of happening and luck-based? There was definitely not a decision to do what I do now. I ran into people who gave TED-type talks long before TED, and I thought, "I'd love to be able to do that one day." I was lucky

enough to meet Tom Peters when I was in business school, Jay Levinson shortly after that, and I saw what it was like to be a business officer and I said, "I’d love to be able to do that one day, but I'm not qualified to do any of those things. What's an interesting problem right here, right now that I can do? And then another one?" I was... You know, the internet showed up right when I needed it. If it hadn't, I'd probably be working in a Burger King or something, you know? The idea of choosing a

passion—this is the question I get so much: how do you find your passion? How do I choose it? All this kind of stuff—and people become frozen by that sort of decision. But you're talking about something completely different. Right? I take real exception to a few things that are going around these days; one of them is... "Follow your passion." I think that's crazy talk because the chances that your passion is going to take you where you want to go, with the world helping you, is very low. If your passion is building little tiny ships in bottles,

there isn't a market for that. You're not going to be able to do that. It makes a lot more sense to become passionate about what you do as opposed to insisting that you do what you're passionate about. There are people who are passionate about customer service who work in a coffee shop. There are people who are passionate about helping kids who are school teachers, but they became passionate after the gig showed up. We are way more flexible than we imagine, and I don't think you're born with one thing, and only one thing, that you can

be passionate about. I think we can choose it. I completely agree with that because when I was growing up, I was hell-bent on becoming a professional basketball player. Like, that was it! And you know, I was so ambitious about it. I was so invested and so passionate about it, and this is not where I was supposed to be at all—far from it. But I prefer to be here, fortunately. I prefer to be here. But I didn’t see those steps moving forward. But I feel that living passionately is what got me here. For some people, it

is the combination of living passionately with, I don't know, having their eyes open to different situations and opportunities to arise. Is there an element of needing to? Because I have this kid down the street who also wants to be a professional basketball player. So I've had this conversation: What is it about being a professional basketball player that he is passionate about? Is it dunking a basketball? Because you can do that for free! Is it making a lot of money? Because there are lots of ways to make it. Is it being somewhat famous to a group

of fans? You have to figure out which pieces of that life you can actually make a living from without needing all of the scarce, super lucky lottery breaks that would get you actually drafted into a pro basketball league. So when we separate these things, what lights you up? What lights me up is being on Tippy Lake, looking a 12-year-old in the eye, and helping them confront their fear while paddling a boat. But it feels exactly like talking to you right now. So I don’t have to be on Tippy Lake to be passionate; I can just

figure out what are the triggers that make me feel awake and contributing, and go do those somewhere else. Wow! So the canoeing versus business and entrepreneurship—why the business and entrepreneurship? Because I couldn’t build the life and the family I wanted living in Northern Canada and working for two and a half months a year when it’s warm enough to be on the lake. It was actually a good thing that I couldn’t do that because if I had done that, it would have been limiting. Instead, I said, "What does it feel like on a really good day

up there when I’m surrounded by people who are enrolled in the journey, when there’s a feeling of mutual respect?" Well, I took that exact feeling and helped organize the Carbon Almanac, which is a groundbreaking book that 300 people and I wrote together. It felt exactly like it felt to be up in Anin Park, except I wasn't outside; I was sitting there touching the keyboard instead. You know, the reward that you were getting from those maybe 30 people on the lake, does it feel multiplied that you’re reaching millions of people with the book? It does! I

don't notice—you do a TED Talk, and it ends up reaching 10 million people. I don't know; I gave the TED Talk a long time ago; it's out there, and it's on its own now. For me, it’s what does it look like to have a puzzle, a problem, a page that’s not finished, a project that doesn’t quite work, a person in front of me who can go to the next level. Can I nudge this in a way that solves that problem? That’s what I do every single day. It’s what I do if I’m training my puppy,

and it’s what I do if I’m standing at the checkout trying to figure out why there’s such a long line and how they could fix it. It’s all the same. Well, what’s the most important thing for somebody to learn? What’s the thing they need to have when they come to—whether it’s canoeing or business? Okay, so all knowledge is self-knowledge in that if it’s in a book, you don’t know it yet. You know it once you do it. We become what we do. So what holds us back from doing it? If I’m going to talk about

basketball for a second, I’m terrible at basketball. I could probably get better at basketball. I will not get better at basketball by reading about it or watching YouTube videos. I will only get better at basketball by shooting in a way that makes me realize I can shoot better than I used to, which means confronting incompetence, which means being willing to acknowledge that yesterday I’m not as good as I am today. People don’t want to let go of that feeling, so they hold on to "I’m good; I don’t have to get better." But if we... Can

give people the foundation for them to feel like they can lean forward a little bit. Then they lean forward, and when they lean forward, their posture changes, and then they experience something differently. Then they learn because they did something. Yeah, I see that with my son, you know, a lot—especially with realizing he's done something. He's gotten better. Maybe he got the—I’m training my son to play basketball. How old is he? He's seven, but he's very tall. So, do you remember when he was a toddler? I do, yeah. So, why do we call them toddlers? Because

they're not walking; because they toddle. And every single person who has been fortunate enough to be able to learn to walk has learned to walk by walking poorly. They take a step, they fall down; they take a step, they fall down; they take two steps, they fall down. They don't give up on walking at that point. They toddle their way through it, and your son is doing the same thing now with basketball and with reading and with everything else. That learning is about creating the conditions for people to teach themselves, not lecturing people on something

that's in a book. Wow! So what is required to have people teach themselves? Like, what’s the most important thing? Because in the book "Tribes," you talk about self-confidence a lot, and I think an absence of self-confidence is a huge issue when wanting to take on new skills and learn. So, all change involves tension. It's the tension of, "This might not work," the tension of, "What will other people say?" the tension of, "This might work," and then, "What will happen?" So if I want to shoot a rubber band across the room—what do you guys call that?

An elastic? An elastic across the room. I pull it backwards before I let it go. If there is no tension, it doesn't go anywhere. We create tension when we establish the conditions for learning. We can't shy away from it; we have to see it. It's right there on the table. Tension is going to be created. How will people deal with that tension? Well, the class clown deals with it by not listening to you, disrupting the thing, and hiding their fear. Right? Other people put that fear to work and say, "I need to learn this more

because that’s the way to make my fear go away." But we see the fear; we dance with the fear. We create conditions of safety and tension at the same time—apparent risk. We want to create the conditions for someone to feel like the thing they're about to do is risky, but it isn’t really, because if we can train folks to look forward to that thing that feels risky, they will want to do it again, and then the cycle continues. That's part of it. And the other part of it is: what about our peers' affiliation? Who's to

our left and who's to our right? What are we all doing? People like us do things like this. You are defined by how your friends see the world because you have chosen them to be your friends; you're in that circle. So, if you’re in a group of seven people and they’re all angling to get into medical school, you are more likely to push yourself because you see the people you want to be in sync with pushing themselves. So when we create these conditions, it’s not about obedience or compliance; it’s about, "What’s it like around here?"

When we're in a learning culture, what is the most important thing when you’re choosing, or maybe even realizing, the people around you that you hang around with and spend your time with? How important is it? And then also, I guess there are certain situations where we have to spend time with people that maybe do not fit that criteria—family. I guess there are old friends as well that maybe we grew up with. Do we cut them off? I’d love to know your thoughts on it. Yeah, I have two friends who have shared this with me. My

friend Anthony Ayano, who’s a great sales trainer, was in a heavy hair metal band—hair down to his waist and living a very fast life. He had a brush with danger and woke up the next morning and said, "If I keep doing this, I will not last." And he just deleted every single one of the people he had been spending his life with and said, "It's important to me to go to a different place and live a different life." That’s dramatic. That’s traumatic. That’s not what most people ought to do, but it demonstrates just how important

that circle is. If you’re surrounded by people who are saying, "That’ll never work," then you’re much less likely to do something important. So don’t show your work to people whose habit is to say, "That’ll never work." Figure out who that circle of people is that you bring your new ideas to. Who is that circle of people you go to when you’re seeking confidence or reassurance? Who’s that circle of people that you need when you do need direct criticism? In the same way, it doesn’t make sense to go to a hamburger place and ask for pizza.

It doesn’t make sense to go to a circle of friends that specialize in one thing and hope that they’re going to encourage you to do something else. Have you got any studies or facts that back this up? Like, do you know of any studies showing that if you surround yourself with successful people or wealthy people, you’re going to end up like them? Well, so it—I mean... The aphorism rings true, but there are specific studies about this in terms of, um, you know, how we create culture. What exactly makes an Ivy League school like Harvard work?

Do they have better teachers? Do they have better books? It's mostly that you're associated with people who are on the same path, so there's this amplification of what's going on. But my work isn't to do peer-reviewed research; my work is to say to the people who just heard me say this, "Oh yeah, that makes sense," because they know it makes sense, but they're not doing it. It's easier to be frustrated than it is to shift the circle of people that you're counting on. And if you don't want to be frustrated, start by shifting the circle

of people. Tell me what happens after that. Tell me what happens when you start a mastermind group or a circle of people that you have to check in with just for five minutes every day online. Five minutes where you have to go, "This is what I did yesterday." So, I run this thing called Purple Dospace; it's an online community for 1,200 people, and people post every single day what they're going to do tomorrow, and they encourage each other. There's no troll, there's no pitching, there's nobody hustling you. And the end result of this is that

people who thought they could never write a book are writing a book. People who thought they could never become a coach are becoming a coach because that's all it takes—five or ten minutes a day with people you want to impress, please, and connect with, all having a standard. So now, it's not just you living up to your standard; it's the group, right? One of the things I talk about in Tribes is that for 10,000 years, human beings only lived in groups of 150. That Dunbar's number is a real thing. We are uncomfortable if there are

more than 150 people in our Rolodex. There are only 150 people that match our brain's ability to really connect with. Well, that tribe has a lot of influence on us. You don't want to get kicked out of it because in the old days, if you got kicked out of the village, the tiger would eat you. There's a lot of pressure to fit into that circle. But now we have the freedom to either join a different circle or, even better, start one. The idea of small world leadership is so powerful. Every big idea in our culture,

every single one, started as a small group of people—20, 30, 50 people—who connected with each other, amplified it, and took it to the next level. That's what led to Wikipedia; that's what led to, um, any of the subreddits that you see that are super active. You know, there's 300,000 people in a community now that staples bread to trees. I don't know why you would staple bread to trees, but it didn't start with 300,000 people; it started with three. If that's giving them solace, satisfaction, and connection, it's worth the bread. I feel like any more context

on the bread... The bread—if you go on subreddits, they're very interesting little communities around the world, and the subreddit for stapling bread to trees is exactly what it sounds like. It has become, like, now it's been featured on billboards in Chicago and everything else. You can be very clever. What is a tree? Right? They just made a rule: no bonsai trees, because people were using bonsai trees and it was hurting them because the trees are so small. Right? What is a piece of bread? Is a bagel a piece of bread? Can I put... And so

it's just clever; that's all. It's just clever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. I can definitely relate. My own experience with this is when I started doing M. Brother, I have friends from, you know, from childhood who were telling me, "It's never going to work like this; it's never going to work. Don't think about it like that. Would be such a silly thing to sell your business and do this." And, you know, those people I don't hang around with anymore. Actually, it wasn't a choice; it just kind of happened naturally. And then the people I do hang

around with... I've got this crazy task I'm trying to do at the moment—this fundraising thing where I'm trying to carry a huge stone for hundreds of miles. An actual stone, not a metaphysical stone. My back... And I'm training for the moment; it's going really well. But, um, before I started, I passed the idea around a few of my friends, and all of them, you know—my close friends—are like, "Yeah, you've got this! If anyone can do it, you can do it." And just that belief from them got me into the training, and they were right! I'm

managing to do it. But I'm curious because my friendship group is very, very small, and I'm wondering, when you talk about 150 people, I know that's probably like the max capacity, but to me, that bamboozles me. I can't think beyond 10 to 15, maybe. Well, so, friends is an interesting concept. We have an enormous number of acquaintances in the village—the people you would confidently turn your back to and not worry about somebody jumping you, right? The people who you know their cousin, the people who you could borrow a fiver from, and they would know you

would pay them back. In my reading of darts, people who, if they had a funeral, you would go. Right? And that is an interesting thing to think about because even if... You're on Twitter, and you have 10,000 followers. You're not going to go to the funeral of 10,000 people; there is a smaller circle of people, and it shifts over time. Right? The number of people I have who I would consider my very close friends? Yeah, it's a handful. That's not what we're talking about when we're discussing our creative life, our creative work. There are people

who are a handshake away from you, two handshakes away from you, who know your work, and you could go to them and say, “I'm thinking of doing this fundraising thing. Do you have any insight for me about how I could maximize?” You could do that with me, and I would answer you, right? So I'm not going to go to the pub with you and spend all night drinking, but I’m here to encourage you on that part of your journey. Right? And so we get to pick that group, and if you’re just sitting there passively accepting

who they are, you have made a choice in doing that, and it is getting in the way of you making the change you seek to make in the world. Is that something that people—if you're working with people in business and entrepreneurship—is that something that people struggle with, like they have a poor group of friends around them? You see, quite clearly, I see it with every single person I know. It’s because it's culturally awkward, just the word "friend." Right? I'm not choosing my friends based on how they can help me professionally. When we think about the

TED Conference, it was only 225 people for the first 10 or 15 years, and I wasn't permitted to come. I really wanted to come; most people hadn't heard of it. But for whatever reason, Ricky didn’t invite me. And then the year that it shifted, I was able to go to that first TED that Chris ran. What happens when TED is working properly is there are people in the room who are not your friends; they’re your colleagues. And you need, in that year in between TED conferences, to do work so that when you see your colleagues

again in person, you're not embarrassed. You have to do work so that you can, when someone says, “What are you up to?” you have a good answer. My friend Jonathan is a breakthrough research physician; his circle of colleagues are people he can talk with about Parkinson's disease or heart disease. That challenges each one of them to make sure they’re up on the state of the art. Right? Whereas if you’re a small-town doctor, there’s no pressure on you whatsoever to be up on the state of the art. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad doctor; it just

means you’re a bad researcher because there isn’t this peer pressure from colleagues. Part of my philosophy over the last few years is to say some people have a job. You take something from your inbox and move it to your outbox. You try to do it pretty well for a pretty decent pay, and you're off the hook; you're not responsible. You just do what your boss says. But the number of people who have a job like that keeps going down, and AI is replacing a lot of those jobs. So what's left? What’s left is you’re actually

responsible. You have agency; you make choices. You can decide who you’re freelancing for, what kind of project you're working on, what’s the change you’re making. Well, if that's you, now you have professional responsibility, and you have colleagues. It’s not just, “I’m phoning in my job,” because those jobs are going to get worse and worse. It’s, “I am leading something here,” even if it’s a team of one. So it’s on me to decide who my colleagues are. It’s on me to decide who I am leading and who I am following. We may not want that responsibility;

it’s not how we were raised, but it’s a choice, and it's available. When we talk about the circle, is there a level that you could step too high? Like maybe you're in business, you know, a small business owner, and maybe you're looking—you start hanging around with a billionaire CEO or whatever. Is there an issue with that? Well, I’m not sure that’s the right proxy for who doesn’t belong in your circle. The billionaire CEOs I know—some of them are nut cases, and some of them are some of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet. It's

not what your external trappings are; it's what are the challenges you are choosing to face and who do you need as colleagues to encourage you, but also to challenge you to face those things. So if you hang out with Goldman Sachs investment bankers, their currency is currency. They’re just—not particularly deep sometimes; they just want to know how much money you made. Well, that could drive somebody to become, who knows, a hustling drug dealer because they just need to make more money. That's not going to help them get to where they want to go. On the

other hand, if there's somebody who's in the nonprofit space, but they’re the kind of person who sees interesting challenges, you could be someone who wants to make money and get a lot of insight and advice from someone who doesn’t have the same easily measured output as you. It’s not about easy measurement; it’s about how do we feel when we face the challenges we're choosing to face. Those are the colleagues that I think we should look for. I love this idea of like a self-sustaining sort of group of people. It's, and again, it’s really interesting. Because

I’ve not done this consciously, but my good friend at the moment, one of my best friends, Luke Stalman, is in a very similar business to me. So when I go up to Scotland to be in his studios and look around at the work he’s doing, it really is like I have to make sure that I’m going—like you say—not be embarrassed and make sure that, you know, I’m almost motivating him and inspiring him in the same way he does for me. Um, yeah, I’m curious as if somebody stopped right now and was like, "Right, I’m looking

around me. The people that I have around me are not who I want to be associated with," or it might not be, you know, making me feel this way like I want to. It’s not self-fulfilling or self-sustaining. What do they do? Do they just go? I don’t think that makes sense. I think sudden motion is way overrated. It can lead to all sorts of trauma; it’s not helpful. This is the weird one, how it sounds so strange as an adult asking this: How do we find new friends? How do we go out and look consciously

for new friends who fit that kind of bill? Like, is it—you know, it feels like a very difficult thing to do. It’s not a difficult thing to do; it’s just hard emotionally to do. So first, again, we’re talking about colleagues here, and we’re not talking about mentors. The problem with seeking a mentor is it doesn’t scale. You’re looking for some sort of magical person who's got all this time to spend to help you. They can’t, and they can’t do it for everyone. So you just can’t call up Oprah and say, "I’m starting on this video

journey; will you be my mentor?" That’s not what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is being able to see other people who are on a journey and contribute to them. It turns out that if we contribute to other people whose work rhymes with ours, reciprocity will often occur. We’re not hustling them; we’re not doing it because we want them to do something for us. We’re doing it because we can. So the interesting thing about books is that authors don’t compete with each other. Bookstores are filled with books just like the ones I write, right?

But we’re not competitors because we know that if our book was all by itself in the supermarket, no one would buy it. It only sells when it’s next to all the other books. So I count other authors as some of my most valuable colleagues, and I can reach out to them and begin by saying, "I read your book. I love what you did here. I really like that. Did you think about this?" I’ve had some of my best professional relationships with authors I met by reaching out to them, cheering them on, and asking them questions

about their work. Inevitably, when you get together, they will challenge you on your work, and now you have that circle. But it doesn’t have to be authors. My friend Brian, who makes the TV show "Billions," is one of my best, most effective colleagues because he hasn’t written a book, but he knows what he would be confronting if he did. So he can ask me questions I’m trying to hide from, and he can push me in ways that I’m not willing to push myself. The same thing can be true if he’s thinking about something for a

new TV show, because he can say something to me. I’ve never made a TV show, but I can say, "What about this?" It’s this posture of not expertise but emotional connection to the way the work makes us feel that enables us to create these conditions. Sticking on this sort of theme, the book "Tribes" speaks more from a perspective of being a leader of a tribe. Can we just dive into what’s that difference? Because when you talk about today’s modern... how long ago was the book written, by the way? Almost 15 years ago. Were you ahead

of the curve with social media and stuff? Because it really rings true now with social media, but we could have these tribes around us, especially with social media and the internet. But yeah, what’s the difference between being a leader of a tribe versus the others? Okay, so the thesis of the book, first of all, the word "tribe" has various sorts of baggage associated with it. It’s thousands of years old—the tribes of Israel. But in my country, colonialism ended up dominating and bringing genocide to huge numbers of first peoples, indigenous people. Sometimes the word "tribe" was

used in a negative sense. That’s not what I'm talking about. When I’m talking about a tribe, I’m talking about a group of people who share culture, who share a goal, who share a way of being. What are things like around here? "People like us do things like this." Most people who have a project, or a brand, or an idea don’t have a tribe. They can talk to a tribe that already exists. There is a tribe of people who use YouTube not just for entertainment, but for inspiration— for connection, to help them get to the next

level. You are narrating for some of those people. Over time, how many things have you put on the channel so far? A lot. A lot, yeah—thousands, right? So now, there is a tribe of people who see themselves through your lens, who see... Themselves through your narrative, that group of people wants to be connected. They want to have something to follow; they want to have something to talk about. They're not doing it for you; you're doing it for them. And so, if we can help this group of people feel less lonely, feel more empowered, we are

offering this generative, resilient thing to them. What I'm arguing in the book, and I use the example of Nathan Winograd. Nathan worked at a small animal shelter; then he ended up at the San Francisco SPCA, and when he was there, he realized that in the U.S., they kill 4 million dogs and cats every year, usually within one day—that's their job at the SPCA. He said, "I didn't get into this business to kill dogs and cats." So he started a movement, just with three people, then with 30 people, then with 300 people. And then San Francisco

became the first no-kill shelter in the U.S. in a major city—not one healthy dog or cat has been killed since that day. Then he brought it, city to city, group by group, creating the conditions for people to do what they wanted to do all along. He has saved the lives of millions of dogs and cats, but he's also connected people who previously were disconnected. That's a tribe, and they're everywhere. We look now; this small-world network idea says that there are only 50 or 100 people in your circle, but some of those people know 50 or

100 other people. It doesn't take much for it to leap and to leap and to leap—that's what we get. I love the story, by the way, the—yeah, Nathan—the idea that at the start it might have been possibly just this thing he could do in one place, but then when he went to all the different cities, everything—I thought it was fantastic. There was a question I actually had personally on this. You spoke about the difference between a tribe and a company, like CNN or, you know, these big media companies. When we started Mulligan Brothers, we had

this strap: "No host, just the guest," and that was the whole point. There was not supposed to be some person on the other side of the camera—just the guest. We realized that the audience just didn't invest in it as much. So I feel like we're leaping out of being almost like a media company. I had a question for you: How would you turn something like a media company, one of the big corporations, into a tribe? Okay, so I can't help but be a little pedantic. The company can't be a tribe; the company has employees. Now,

if there's a useful culture at the company, the way there was at Apple during its heyday, you know, under Steve and stuff—people were getting the logo tattooed. Once someone gets the logo tattooed, they're part of a tribe. Right? I think what you mean is, how could a big media company narrate for many external tribes? Well, what the big media companies are discovering, and they're really suffering, is they used to make a show, and 60 million people saw it for sure. It was guaranteed because it was mass media. Now, a show on Netflix might be seen

by a million people. There's a huge difference between 60 million and a million, and they can't do mass anyway. So what they can do is find tribes that want to feel this narration. If you, you know, it's March—they just launched "The Three-Body Problem" on Netflix. That is a TV show based on a book that narrated a science fiction story for just a million people. A million is enough because those people, if the TV show is any good, will each tell five people, and now you're fine. So what we're seeing is, call it narrowcasting if you

want; I don't like that term. What we're seeing is, instead of saying, "You have to watch something tonight," they're saying, "This one is for you. This is worth it for you." Then the question is: Are they going to program to divide us, or are they going to program to connect us? The shortcut, particularly on things like Twitter, is divisiveness. "Let's just punch someone in the face," because people who want an argument will come watch. But the resilient, long-term option is connection—to put something into the world that people want to share because it makes them better.

Right? So if Susan Cain's TED Talk was about shyness, it's a little ironic because a talk about being shy has been seen by 50 million people. How did that happen? Did she do it by yelling about it? Not at all. She gave a tool to people who think of themselves as shy that they could easily email to their friends: "See, this is who I am." And so it spread because it was useful for the people who watched it to share it with someone else. It's really interesting in this space, you know, there are all these

tiny networks or, you know, people with these huge tribes. It's funny; now I'm starting to see with these big corporations that it's almost like talent acquisition—like trying to sign these guys and take, you know, a set of, you know, like you say, like a million followers, a million people in the tribes, and then put them on their roster or whatever it is. It seems to be happening a lot at the moment. Well, if you think about it, that's really the business that they've always been in, in the sense... That they don't know how to start

from scratch; they know how to use money to get attention. Yeah, yeah, makes perfect sense. I want to go back to self-belief for a second because, again, it's something that's mentioned in "Tribes," and it's a requirement almost to, I think you put it, as most endeavors or trying to achieve anything. Self-belief is super important, and I think I've always found it hard to articulate self-belief because it almost feels like sometimes you just have to stop doing it. It seems like such a weird, like, chicken or the egg kind of situation. Yeah, it's so easy to

get hung up on self-belief because it seems unattainable and essential, and it's neither one. If you're a lifeguard and there's a dock with six lifeguards on it and someone, God forbid, starts struggling in the water—drowning—right in front of you, it would be accurate to say that you are not the best lifeguard in the world. Maybe not even the best lifeguard on the dock. You didn't do the best at your bronze medallion, and someone could do a better job than you. But you are the one who's standing right in front of that person, and if you

jump in the water, you will save that person's life. That is a generous thing for you to do. I would like to think that most people in that situation would jump in the water. Well, this instinct to be a lifeguard is exactly what I'm talking about when it comes to leadership. There are lonely people, there are uninformed people, there are people who need to be activated, and there are people who want to be taught. You are standing right here on the dock; you are the single best person to do this generous act. I don't care

whether you believe in yourself or not. What I care about is that you can do something generous right here and right now. Go do that, and once you do it, now you will know that you can do it, so you can do it again. So, impostor syndrome is real—the sense that you feel like you're an impostor when you're doing something new because you are an impostor. The only way to do important work is to do work you haven't done before, so you have no proof that you can do it. The proof will come from doing

it. So I'm not talking about arrogance, and I'm not talking about showing up insisting that you are always right. I'm saying if you see someone drowning, you've got to jump in the water and try to save them. The idea of taking the leap of faith—is that something that people are born with? You know, with higher risk tolerance? Is that a connection that leaders have? Even though in the book you say no, there are no connections between leaders; you know, there's no one commonality between leaders apart from they want to be heard. But is that idea

of taking the leap of faith something that, you know, it's not a leap; it's a step. No one's asking you to go give a talk on the main stage at Davos. That's not what's on offer. What's on offer is: Can you send a constructive email to one person? Can you make a three-minute tutorial on video with your camera and share it with four of your customers who are stuck? There are so many places where we can step, step by step by step, and begin to lead. So, one of the places where this happened for me,

I was 23 years old, and I was one of the youngest people at the company where I was working. We were making educational computer games for kids. It's Christmas, and the office is closed. There's no email; it hadn't been popularized yet. There's no voicemail. I go to work because I had nothing else to do, and I answered customer service calls for eight hours. I learned so much doing that. I had no authorization, I had no training, I had no ability to do it perfectly, but it was better than not having the phone ring. And for

the next six months, in every meeting I went to, I had something to contribute because I could say, “Well, you know, when our customers get stuck, they ask about this.” No one else in the room knew, but I knew because I had shown up and done that thing. You know, my mom was the first woman on the board of the art museum in Buffalo, where I grew up, and she invented this idea—this was before the Antiques Roadshow. She called up Sotheby's and she said, “Can you send a couple of appraisers to our museum? We'll say

to the public, if you've got candlesticks or old whiskey bottles that you want appraised, these people will be here.” It was a good way to get traffic and be part of the community. They got a little tiny article in the paper, but the night before, my mom was a little nervous—like, what if no one came? And then she said, “Well, guess what? If no one comes, no one will know that no one came.” The next day, there were a thousand people waiting in line. The fact is, you couldn’t get a permit to do that; you

couldn’t prove that it was going to work. You couldn’t practice it before you did it. If no one came, no one would know that no one came. But once she did it, something happened after that, and something happened after that, and something happened after that because we’re not leaping; we’re just taking steps. This is a great segue to the Ikaria story because whenever I’ve heard of the... Icarus' story, and like I said, I've read Steven Fry's book Mythos that went into this, but I read the Icarus story, and the only thing that resonated with me

and something that I remembered is "don't fly too high." That was it—don't fly too high. But that's not how the story goes. Yeah, I'd love to hear your opinion on that. I mean, just as a premise, I do believe that flying too low or taking no risk at all could be the biggest stay or the biggest risk of all. Anyway, yeah, so obviously it's a myth; it's been around for thousands and thousands of years. We can see how it evolved because it's been in writing, and they changed it about 1800 couple hundred years ago. The

myth, now which every school kid knows, is that Icarus and his dad, Daedalus, are on the island, they're stranded there, they make wings, and they put them on their backs, holding them along with wax, and they fly away. But before they fly away, Daedalus says to Icarus, "Don't fly too high, don't get arrogant. If you fly too high, the wax will melt and you'll perish." And Icarus flies too high, and he dies. So the lesson is obvious: listen to your dad, listen to the boss, do what you're told, fit in, don't get arrogant. But before

the Industrial Age, the story also said, "My son, do not fly too low, because if you fly too low, the mist will get in the feathers, and they will weigh you down, and you will perish." They took that part out because they wanted people to fly too low; they wanted people to settle. The argument I'm making is we have these magnificent tools that we've built at great cost to the environment and to other people, and we are wasting them—wasting them doing stupid stuff like tweeting when we could be building something important. But we are flying

too low. The idea of taking a risk or doing nothing meaningful is—I think that so many people are paralyzed by the fear of not flying too high, or maybe not even flying at all, but failing—that they don't take the risk. You know, they're not willing to. To me, that is the flying low, and I think that's the thing that kills dreams. They just never get started at all; they never begin because people are so fearful. You speak about dealing with fear in the book. I'm guessing it's something you speak about in all of your books;

it's such a crucial factor to becoming successful or wanting to achieve anything. Again, is it something that we are naturally born with? So many people seem to have this bravery sort of placed in them, and they can take risks and do all this kind of thing. But is it something we're born with? We are born with fear, and we're born with fear for a really good reason. You don't evolve as a successful species if you're not filled with fear. Evolution doesn't like change, external change, because it's risky. The frog, the wolf—they want everything tomorrow to

be just like yesterday: no threats. We have that too, for good reason. That's one reason, for example, why many people don't like cilantro. Because if you don't eat cilantro until you're a teenager, it tastes like soap, and it's horrible. We evolved to not like strong flavors we're not used to because they might be poison. Fear is real. The difference is fear of saber-tooth tigers, fear of lightning, fear of drowning—those are real for a good reason. Fear of someone not liking the talk you're giving, fear of someone not wanting to watch your video, is not useful

because no one is going to ever make something that everyone is going to like. What we have to do is have the empathy to be able to say to the non-believers, "It's not for you," and to be able to say to the people who say, "It's not very good," "I didn't make it for you." If there aren't any people who love it, we didn't make a good thing, but if there are people who love it, that's who it's for. So we have to reserve the fear for where it belongs. So that guy Alex, who was

in the movie, free whatever it was, who climbed Yosemite without any ropes—there's something broken about him; he is missing some fear. That's not what I'm talking about. He should not be doing what he's doing; if he does it long enough, he will die doing it. That's fine; he's a free human; he can do whatever he wants. But that's not what I'm talking about; I'm talking about the right fear for the right reason. When it shows up for the wrong reason, it's pretending that it's warning us, but it's not. We're just hiding; it's just our sort

of primitive brains sending those signals on. I think that trying to change it is a mistake. What we can do, as Steven Pressfield calls it, is resistance. When we're going to do something creative, something generous, something powerful, that voice shows up and says, "Better not." You can't make it go away; you can't make impostor syndrome go away. What you can do is dance with it. You can say, "Thank you." You know, if you want to run the marathon, you can go get a coach, but you can't say to the coach, "I would like..." To be

able to run a marathon without getting tired, because what comes with carrying a 220 lb stone is that you get tired—that is the point. So, the difference between someone who finishes the marathon and someone who stops at Mile 20 is simple: the person who stops at Mile 20 didn't know what to do with the tired, and the person who finishes did. You can't make the tired go away, but you can figure out what to do with it. The same thing is true with our fear when it comes to leadership and contribution. The fear is not

going to go away, but you can say thank you and put it in a useful place. Being charismatic doesn't make you a leader; being a leader makes you charismatic. When we say that person is really charismatic, what we are really saying is that person is leading, because the people we associate with charisma don't have anything else in common. Some of them have a stutter, some of them are tall, some of them are eloquent. So, what exactly made them charismatic? What made them charismatic is they are inhabiting the vital space between here and there, that we

are going somewhere with them, and that aura around them, with that charisma, sucks us along. But if they weren't going somewhere, then they wouldn't be charismatic. Today, the companies that are being the most successful in the market right now have these cult-like followings. The idea of tribes has developed massively, and like you say, through Twitter and social media, it's absolutely crazy. It was really interesting reading that because I needed to figure out when it was written. I can tell that it was written a while ago, but you were so ahead of the curve with it.

Did you foresee sort of social media being this big and having this much impact? So, the thing that I missed for sure is I didn't realize how negative it would be when we gave everyone a microphone. Like many early web techno-optimists, I started my first email in '76, and I started my first web company in '90, before the World Wide Web; it was an internet company. So, I've been seeing this thing evolve, and I just kept saying to myself, "Giving everyone a microphone is always going to be a good thing," not taking into account that

some people would run and lead tribes to make things worse, that some people would make a hobby out of being a troll. That's on me; I missed that, but even if I had written about it, it wouldn't have gotten any better. Yes, people have always connected. If we look at the growth of the telephone, if we look at the growth of the telegraph, if we look at the growth of the walkie-talkie or the CB radio, every time we give people a chance to connect, they connect. It's called the internet—“inter” means connect, “net” means connect. It's

a connection of connections, and that's what people do with it. With that, I wanted to ask you, we mentioned it briefly about AI. How do you see that sort of development over the next 20 to 30 years? Well, I think it's the biggest change in our world since electricity, and I don't think people really understand why. It looks a little bit like a gimmick now that it mostly understands what you say and mostly says things that make sense. That's just the gimmicky part. What it's going to do, first of all, is that it's always on;

that can't be minimized. What it means to be always on, for example, is if you're in therapy, you go for an hour a week, but if you have an always-on therapist that's there for one minute every couple of hours, it's going to transform the way you interact with everything. When we have something that is persistent and always around us, it shifts how we deal with it. The second thing is it works pretty close to for free, and that means lots and lots and lots of little tasks that we might not ordinarily assign because it's too

hard to find someone to do them and too much to pay them are just going to get done. The third thing is it finds any job where we've written down the steps of how to do the job and does a mediocre job of it, which means if you're mediocre at what you do—now, mediocre means average—we're going to get a computer to do it for free. So you better be prepared for that, and there's going to be plenty of room, more room than ever, for non-mediocre work, for extraordinary work, for things that change the rules. But

if all you do is write pretty good copy, or pretty good scripts, or you're a pretty good editor, or you're a pretty good sound engineer, I got a computer that'll do that for free. I hope you're enjoying this episode so far. Today's video was sponsored by Hu—quick, affordable, and nutritionally complete with everything your body needs. As you guys know, I've been using these guys for the past two years, and Hu has just made an absolute game changer. Their black edition is now available in their ready-to-drink bottles; you can grab one on the go, and it

has higher protein than their regular ready-to-drink options, but everything amazing about the normal fuel bottles as well. So, find out more with the link in the description. How do you feel about sort of authoring books and making films and all these kinds of things? What happens to... Those creative artistic jobs—well, there are different parts of the creative artistic jobs. You may recall that, in the movie business, there used to be someone whose only job was to have a light meter, and someone whose only job was to pull focus, and someone whose only job was to

hold a boom. There are some people who do that now, but not as many, right? Technology replaces things but creates new opportunities, and I think what we're going to see is—we're already seeing tens of thousands of books being written by AI a day. You give it the right prompt, and it'll write a book, right? Write a biography of the Mulligan Brothers—it knows how to do that now. No one wants to read that book, but that doesn't keep it out of the bookstore. So, if you're going to go ahead and write a book, you better have

something to say that isn't mediocre, that isn't something an AI could do. If it doesn't surprise people or resonate with some people or feel like it causes a challenge for some people, then you shouldn't write it, 'cause AI can do that without you. Do you think the sheer numbers, the sheer volume—let's say, you know, books, especially YouTube videos, are a huge one—and then coupled with marketing from these big companies, do you think they pose a threat, though, to talented artists? Well, there's always a threat to the talented artist. When the camera came along, painters were

freaking out. When Pop came along, and Andy Warhol had a team of people silk screening stuff, the real painters freaked out. When video—I mean, artists are always under threat. If you go to a wedding, every single person has a camera in their pocket. Now what do you need a wedding photographer for, right? So, there's all of this shift that's constantly happening. YouTube, as an open long-tail channel, is going to be way less appealing to a typical producer of videos. Like a guy who makes a woodworking video to teach you how to dovetail—who might have been

making $10,000 a month doing that—he's not going to be able to do that anymore. Because I can just have it make 300 videos, each more specific than the next. And if I'm way out on the long tail, you know, the last thing I read was half the songs on the iTunes Store had fewer than five listens last year because there's just too many people making music and not enough people listening to it. The same thing's going to happen with videos; the same thing's going to happen with movie-length animated stuff. But still, we want to watch

something great. We want to talk about what other people are talking about. We want to be part of something. None of that's going to change. What's going to change is the team you're working with; some of those people are going to be computers. I've thought about this tremendously, obviously, the course we're in. And for me, I think my favorite medium of all is documentary film. I think it's one of the most powerful mediums for change and impact, but I also think that in going against AI and, you know, having to have a physical camera at

an event—a moment in time of history—for me, I think that's the sort of way I'm leaning a little bit more. Conversations like this—I guess at some point something will probably replace it or try to replace or attempt it, but hopefully like these real connections, that's what's important to me—trying to get that on camera and translate that on camera as much as possible. But yeah, it's definitely something I've been thinking of. Yeah, well, so let's talk about documentaries for a second. So if Kevin Kelly has the best list of the best documentary films, if people haven't

seen it, they should. If you look at the 20 best documentaries, it's because of the editor, it's not because the camera was in the right place at the right time. My friend Michael is an Academy Award-nominated documentary film editor. The difference between what he can do with 400 hours of footage and what I can do with 400 hours of footage is enormous. So getting the footage is easier than ever before, but editing is a point of view; it's somebody who's going to take our breath away in the way they took the thing and juxtaposed it.

In conversations like this, you're asking questions in a way that is more insightful and more personal than most people would ask questions. That isn't something an AI is going to be able to easily do. But to get to the next level, you're going to have to figure out how we can start creating the conditions for interviews to happen that are even more exceptional than that. My friend Krista Tippett, who has done so many interviews on NPR, was an early pioneer in figuring out how to have a radio conversation with somebody that wasn't like a conversation

they'd ever had with anybody else. That's really hard; that's exhausting, because you have to keep redoing it. Because once there's a manual, they can do it too, so you train into the competition all the time. And that's true with lots of fields too, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, especially if you're the first. Yeah, there'll be a next for sure, and probably they'll try and be better as well. Yeah, yeah, I love that. Right, okay, there was something I wanted to ask you about—the Jamaica email. I’ve written it down as the Jamaica emails, but...

You were on holiday in Jamaica, and a couple of people walked past you, and they were like, "Oh, how sad! He's answering his emails while on holiday." You thought internally, "Well, no, this is exactly what I want to be doing. Is that a point to doing things that you love to do and enjoy doing? How much does that impact your life in terms of, you know, the job that you do that you are passionate about? Do you feel like you're doing something that's purposeful for yourself and for other people around you?" All right, well, first

I want to talk about being a workaholic, 'cause I'm not a workaholic. Okay, that's super interesting! Yeah, because as you said it, I thought, "Oh, he's a workaholic. That must be because he loves what he does." Yeah, but I define a workaholic as somebody who is working out of fear. Because if they're not—if their hands aren't on it—they're going to get caught, and something's going to get wrecked; things are going to fall apart. That drive to go back to the work thing to control it? That's negative. I don't see how you can see that as

a positive. But earlier, we talked about finding your passion and defining it by what you do. So, I cook dinner every night for my family. It would be pretty easy to just have a bunch of stuff in my fridge that was pre-made or order in or whatever, but in that hour I am cooking dinner. I am doing exactly what I want to do in that moment. I am passionate about it. And if I could never cook again, I'd become passionate about something else to do with my time. So if I'm in Jamaica and it's 5:30

in the morning and I can't sleep, well, yeah, I could just whine about it. I could just do nothing, which in itself is something to be passionate about, but in that moment, the joy I got from leaning into this practice I had built of interacting—I’ve answered 175,000 emails—gave me pleasure. I wasn't doing it to make pain go away; I was doing it because I have a craft. And so the reason that’s the first story in "Linchpin" is that what I’m encouraging people to do is stop doing your job and start doing your craft. So passion

comes first. No, deciding to be passionate about what you do comes first. So, and that’s it. I hate to use this term, "fake it till you make it" kind of thing. Do you have to feign the passion, and then as you start to do things that a passionate person would do, you actually start to become passionate about that thing? Well, "faking" seems like it's deceptive, or a bad word for you. I would say adopt the posture of someone who is passionate. Explore what it would mean to be passionate about this. If no one’s ever been

passionate about it in the history of the world, then don’t do that. But there are people who are passionate about emptying septic tanks. Right? How efficient can they be? How clean can they be? How much can they explore on other topics in their head while their body is doing something else? But what would it feel like to be the best in the world at this, at least for a little bit? The Reverend Martin Luther King said so many brilliant things, but one of the things he said is, "Not everyone’s going to be able to, you

know, go do that dunk of basketball at the NBA Finals. Maybe you're a street sweeper, but if you're a street sweeper, be the best street sweeper." I met a street sweeper in Hyderabad at 4:00 in the morning because I'm terrible at jet lag. This person got as much satisfaction from what they were doing in that spot that day as I got from going to the meetings I was attending that I had flown across the world for, 'cause they decided to inhabit what it would be like to be passionate about that job. I had this experience

when I was—before I started M Brothers. I was running a business at the time, but I also worked as a laborer, and we would clean roofs. At the end of the day, we'd shovel all the moss into these bags and, you know, bag them up. I would call it passion; I was so particular about how I wanted to do it, how many bags I could do, how quickly I could do it, how efficiently I could do it, and I genuinely was passionate about that work. And I would say the only thing I’ve not really been

passionate about, apart from starting the business, was the gym that I owned, because it was purely profit-based. There was no passion there whatsoever. It’s one of the things that I probably failed at in life; you know, I could look at it objectively and say I failed at that because, you know, the great opportunity—there was no passion there, though. But is it something that, again, I keep coming back to this because I feel like when people come to me asking for advice, sometimes I struggle to say you have— you need this about you to be able

to become successful, to achieve the thing you said you want to achieve. One of those things is to be passionate about all aspects of life or to be able to be passionate about aspects of life. Is, again, is that something that... As I'm saying this, I'm thinking everybody's passionate about something, whether it's playing a game. I don't know if I'd say everybody, but a few weeks ago, I was charging my car at a convenience store, and for people in the U.S., they know what I'm talking about: they sell snacks, beef jerky, drinks, and everything else.

The woman behind the counter greeted every single person who came in by name. These were regulars who came in—"You want your coffee, Mike?" blah blah blah. Then, I stood there for 10 minutes watching this woman light up the lives of 15 other people. I got to talking to her, and she'd been working there for a few years. She was the cornerstone of this transient community: these people were the only ones they would recognize all day as they went about their other businesses. She was passionate about it because she wanted to be passionate about it. It

turns out, if I came to you and said, "You've got to shoot 500 free throws for an hour, and I'm going to pay you $20 to do it," you might be into it for five minutes, but after a while, it would be a grind. Yet, there are people who are passionate about playing basketball because they choose to play basketball. It's not their job; it's their craft. So I believe we have the ability to choose. There's too much injustice. There are too many people getting the short end of the stick, but whatever stick we have, we

get to make a choice. And it turns out, if we can bring this passion to it, our days get better, and we're more likely to have a good outcome. So we can choose to do something else. There are a lot of people who are in this sort of mindset able to, you know, probably hear this and have that awareness. But then, I feel like there are some people who, you know, maybe are in a sort of survival mode, living paycheck to paycheck, living in fear, and it's a struggle to get that awareness. Usually, what happens

is there needs to be some kind of inflection point—death, illness, a relationship ending. Is that the case for a lot of people that that has to happen, or is there a way to find it without needing that, even when you're living in sort of a third-world setup? Yeah, I don't think it has to be something that rips your life apart. I know people, and I've had moments like that in my life, where you can say, "I have all these tools in front of me." Yeah, it's not, you know, there's too much social injustice, and I

shouldn't have to work two shifts, and I'm treated with disrespect, but I still have an hour a day with my smartphone. Am I spending that hour a day with my smartphone watching other people have an argument, or am I spending that hour moderating a community on Reddit? Am I spending that hour sharing my poetry? Am I spending that hour building something? Because if you can find something to be passionate about with a community of people, doors will begin to open. That doesn't mean you're going to get some fancy executive high-paid job, but doors in your

soul will begin to open because you've discovered it's not up to the outside world for you to light up. You can light up, even for five minutes a day, by connecting with someone who feels alone, by saying something that needs to be said. And then, when we get into it, we're more likely to encounter a flow state, and it's a flow state that gets us to the next level, right? When we feel like we are playing, we feel more alive. So what would you need to do to find a moment in your day where you

could play? Maybe it's not at your day job; maybe it is. But where is the chance to play at some level? Because you don't get today over again. I'm guilty of this; I will do the play inside of things. I'll have the fun, the passion, and the enjoyability, but I do it—or have done it in the past—a lot by myself. I do recognize, thinking about it, that community element is extremely important. But how much emphasis would you put on the community side of that? Well, so that's where we started. You know, my last book is

called "The Song of Significance," and what I talk about in it is I asked 10,000 people around the world in 90 countries, "Tell me about the best job you ever had." I gave them 14 choices about what made it the best job they ever had, and I included among the 14 choices things that bosses would pick, like "I got paid a lot," or "I got to tell other people what to do," etc. But then, I listed things that almost every single person picked. Almost every single person for the best job they ever had in their

whole life said, "I accomplished more than I thought I could; I was surrounded by people who encouraged me to do even more; and I did something that was difficult." When we have those three things in a job, we look forward to doing it again tomorrow. Different people need different things. Some people want to be completely alone on a desert island, but other people really benefit from having two or three people standing to their left and to their right—the Hong Kong Cavaliers, the group. Of people, the 14 of us who are on this journey together, this

cadre, this tribe that gets me through the hard days—because some days I'm going to help push them forward, some days they're going to help push me forward—and when we think about how lonely 7 billion people on Earth are, there's almost no one who says, "I'm fully connected. I don't need any more encouragement. I don't need any more people who are rooting for me. I'm good." Very few people could say that. So be one of those people, and they will then engage you in your circle and their circle, and it keeps becoming iterative. This is possible;

significance is real. To be in a place where we are respected, treated with dignity, where we make a change happen that we're proud of. You might even get paid for that work, but that, I think, is the purpose of our days. As an artist, when you hand over that work, that viability of work, especially as an author, how do you feel or deal with the idea of having that shared with community? Because I think that's, for me, where that wanting to be alone comes in. Yeah, well, the smallest viable audience, which is a concept I

talk about in "This is Marketing," is real. If someone doesn't get it, it's not for them. I have not read a review on Amazon in 10 years. It wasn't making me sad, and it wasn't making my writing better. I've never met someone who said, "I read all my one-star reviews, and now I'm a better writer." Right? Do you read the comments? I try not to. Don't read the comments! Never let them read the comments. There's no point in the comments. If someone writes a negative comment, all they're saying is, "This one wasn't for me." Right?

If everyone has a negative comment, you could learn from that, but if there's a division, all you're learning is, "Who are these people?" not "What was the video?" So when we expose ourselves and imagine that we're vulnerable, that's not an asset, right? The vulnerable is, I think, like authenticity—way overrated. I think what we want to be able to say is, "Here, I made this," and "My work is not me; it's something I made." I made this, and if someone says it's not for me, we can say, "Thank you. Thanks for even considering it. I made

this." And if no one wants it, we should make something better. But that cycle is the opposite of resistance. Resistance is, "I'm never going to work again. Everyone hates everything I do. I'm a fraud. I'm an impostor. I better shut up." That, for me, that's the—when you said about cooking the meal at night—that's what I like to do. Like, I like to sit. Like, last night we had dinner, and I like to cook it all, and I like to spend my time. You know, that's my thing. I'm passionate about it, and then I like to

serve it and give it up to people. And it's like, I don't need the comments, but I like to see, you know, if they smile, if they ask for more. Like, I have that. There's like a little bit of satisfaction with that for me as well. So when, with the avoiding, the reviews, are you avoiding the positive reviews as well? Yeah. If someone—you can't have it both ways. Yeah, about to say—if someone I trust, if someone I admire gives me useful feedback, it's a gift, right? It's magic, and that's it. That's it. I will do

anything to get that. But "I hated the book, and you're ugly too"—I don't know what to do with that. Yeah, makes sense. So then, without the external feedback from anybody (let's even say people you really respect), how are you going back to your books and, you know, reviewing whether you had a success in your own head? If you achieve what you want to achieve, is it at the point of release, or do you take a process afterwards? What would you—? I—two things: one is small, one is big. The small one is every five or ten

years I will relisten to a book on audio, and if I learn something from myself based on who I was then, I'm glad I made it. But the bigger thing is I would like to be measured by what the people I taught taught other people. So if I meet someone who hasn't read the book who says, "Somebody taught me about what you said in 'Purple Cow,' and it really made a difference," that means I did something right. That's cool. Just on the point of teaching people that—so you call yourself a teacher. There's a—I’m not going

to try and repeat the quote because I’ll butcher it, but there's an idea that once you get to the point of teaching somebody something, then you're really embedding that knowledge or those learnings in yourself more. Is that something that you subscribe to or believe in? Well, most people don't want to be a hypocrite. We're all hypocrites when it comes to climate, but in general, most people don't like being hypocrites. So if I've written something, my behavior gets better because I tend to write about right action, right thought. So I don't want to do the opposite

of what I said I should think people ought to do. I am not a master of marketing. If you hired me at Nike or Hyatt Hotels, I couldn't fix everything. I know how to highlight. Parts of it, I know how to do diagnosis. I can brainstorm ideas, but there are definitely people who are better at mastering the craft of doing it than me. What I find useful is that you can crack something wide open with a couple of stories by noticing a couple of factors. Well, I'll give you an example. One of the things that

human beings care about is status—who's up, who's down, who's more powerful, who's not. You get a huge unfair advantage compared to Neve because you're taller and because you're a guy, and that gives you more status in certain circles than somebody else. If you watch how politicians shake hands, you will see this demonstration of status. Some politicians need to have their palm on top and crush the other person in a handshake. Once you start to notice it, you'll just see it in every video when politicians meet. When I say that to somebody, a light goes on.

It just did for you, right? That is part of teaching: being able to find a little trivial thing that the other person says, "Oh yeah," and now they can't unsee it. That's different than being good at handshaking. Yeah, I am just seeing that as well in my head right now. So, okay, I can see that for sure. Okay, wow. Um, there are a few talking points I wanted to go over, but we've mentioned a few times Ted, and we've spoken about fear. When people talk about fear, I think the image that comes up for a

lot of people is standing on stage in front of a bunch of people. Yeah, so I'm curious: did you step into that with fear? Was it nervous for you? What was the first experience like, and how did you deal with it? So, yeah, when they rank fears, people rank public speaking and snakes ahead of death in terms of things that they're afraid of. I had—I’ve given more than a thousand paid speeches and way more than that unpaid before I was a paid speaker. The fear is different over time with practice. Because once it's a 3,000

people or 5,000 people—I once did a place with 22,000 people—it feels exactly the same as when it was six in the sense that it doesn't get more fearful. Now, the fear is not that a rock is going to fall on my head while I'm speaking, but just that I won't do the job the way I want to do it. If the fear doesn't show up, it means I'm not trying hard enough. It means I haven't set my standards high enough. One of the challenges of certain kinds of public speaking is that the people who are

organizing it believe erroneously that making you afraid will help you do a better job. Right? So the green room isn't actually calm. "You're on in two minutes, you're on in one minute, you're on in thirty seconds"—all that stuff that they add to it doesn't help. Trying to just not lean into that is important. The biggest thing was understanding that even in public speaking, you can't please everyone. I gave a talk in Mexico City to 2,000 people, and there were two or three strikes before I started. One, I don't speak Spanish, so it's simultaneous translation, which

makes it harder because you say something, and everyone hears it in their language six seconds later. So, it's much harder to be funny and things like that. Second, it was in a convention center, which is the worst place to speak. And third, there was jet lag. But I show up, I'm doing the thing, and there are 2,000 people. In the third row, there's a woman on her cell phone, but she's not listening—she's talking. She's actively having a conversation while I'm giving my speech, and I'm only ten feet away from her. So, I decide I'm going

to show her; I'm going to win her over. I'm angling all my energy at her and even talking about talking on the phone—changing the arc of what I'm doing for her. After about three minutes, I said, "What am I doing? There are 1,999 people who are here for me, and there's her. Why am I sacrificing their experience when it's not making any difference for her?" So she became invisible to me, and the rest of the talk was for everyone except her. Once we can make that shift and say, "I have to give this talk, but

there are three people I want to give it to," go give the talk to them, and everyone else who wants to watch, they can watch. Public speaking is something I've wanted to do for a long time, but it absolutely strikes a lot of fear into me. The skills required—what would be the steps you’d advise somebody to acquire the skills? Is it something you'd study before stepping on stage for the first time? Most people have exactly the wrong plan. They think the plan is to memorize your talk, rewrite it, practice it, practice it, practice it, and

then go give the perfect talk. It's boring, and it’s flat. Go tell me a story. Are you capable of telling me one story for two minutes that I will remember? Is there a story about something that happened to you? Right? You told me about your cage for women franchise, and I got a lot of insight into you; it’s interesting to hear about your gym. Women, that's a story most people can tell—a two-minute story that resonates with somebody else. Can you do it twice? Can you tell me six stories? If you could tell me six stories

that resonate with me, that's your whole talk. You don't need to memorize anything; you just need to write down what are the names of the six stories and look me in the eye and tell me a story. It's much easier to do that than you think. How did the first TED talk go? Did you shake the nerves off? Okay, so they weren't on video at the time. There was no TED.com, and nobody at TED knew that TED Talks would be seen by millions of people. You were only talking to 250 people. That was good; it

was bad because the Vice President of the United States was there, so were five billionaires, a Supreme Court Justice, and some of my dearest friends in the whole world. I really didn't want to mess up. What I remember about the first one was that the audience really wanted you to succeed. That was what the early TEDs were about: there were 250 people there who wanted you to give a great talk. So if you gave them even a hint that something good was coming, you got back all this energy. Once the first little bit of energy

got back to me, I was fine because I'd done enough talks. Every talk I've ever given is different, but I've given enough talks, and then I was fine. The second one was harder because Herbie Hancock, the pianist, was on stage before me, and they forgot to move his piano, so his piano was right there. Second, I knew about the videos. Third, I had brought a gimmick with me, which I didn't need, but I thought the gimmick would help me get started, and the gimmick didn't work. So there were all these thoughts in my head that

obviously were there because I was trying to be nervous. I told my first story, and then I was fine because I was there to tell stories. The thing about not being able to please everybody, I think this is something in all of us that we want to be able to please everybody. I would say, really, I'm a people pleaser for sure, and having a different opinion or an opinion that can match everybody's is just not possible. But it's also not the way I believe we should go. Especially with social media, we have direct feedback. If

somebody disagrees, you know straight away, and when there are thousands and thousands of people, you really quickly learn from quite a few how to get over that. How important is it? Because I think you spoke about this again, and you said it's also good to clearly identify the group of people who are not supposed to be part of the tribe. Yeah, I mean, let's be clear; you're being respectful when you give other people agency. So let's say you're a stand-up comic, and you're doing a thing, and there are people there who aren't laughing. Well, maybe

they only speak Italian. Is it their fault they don't speak English? Is it your fault they don't speak English? They speak Italian; they don't have to laugh. That's obvious, right? Well, if somebody's life experience is such that they are diametrically opposed to the thing you just said, the empathic thing to say is, based on who you are, what you know, and where you've been, you are right to not like what I just said because your experience is totally different than mine. Good luck to you—not "you must change your mind," because that's not what we're leaving

room here for. So if I'm talking about Darwinian evolution and someone says the earth's only 5,000 years old and there were no dinosaurs, or the dinosaur bones were planted—whatever, whatever, whatever—I could argue all day long about the scientific and theoretical obviousness of evolution. It's not going to make any difference. What's useful is to say, based on your experience and what you were taught, you are absolutely right, and I'm sorry this isn't helpful for you, but this is what I'm teaching right now. If what I'm teaching right now is going to help you get to where

you want to go, come along. And if you don't want to go there, I get it. Do you think it's important to say stuff like "you might not agree," you know, to acknowledge them, or is it better to just teach your teaching and that's it? Well, so again, teaching is storytelling, and creating the conditions for other people to— the phrase I use is, "don't steal the revelation." What we are trying to do is get people to have in their own head an "aha." So what do I have to say? What do I have to do

for you to have that "aha" in your head? Not lecture you that I am right, but simply say, "Have you noticed this and noticed this?" So I'll give you an example. One of the three great frauds of climate change is that plastic is recyclable—the plastic water bottles that you throw into the blue bin are somehow magically turned into new plastic water bottles. In the county where I live, they are collected and burned because the physics of it are such that when plastic gets comingled, there isn't one process that you could use to turn it into

much of anything. The world is a fraud. What should we do about it? Well, if I tell you the story through the eyes of the people in the plastics industry who invented the fraud, what they were trying to accomplish, how they tried to manipulate our need for affiliation and status, and the feeling of not being a hypocrite, do you want to be manipulated like that? If someone says, "Oh," and then they come to their own conclusion, bringing in their own stories about when they've been manipulated in the past, they can make a new decision about

whether they want to buy plastic bottles or not. I'm not here to say you're a bad person for buying a plastic bottle; I'm here to say, based on what you know now, what decision do you want to make? How do you implement a moment? Is there a trick to it? Well, I think it mostly comes from practice. I don't have a method that I could teach an AI how to do, but I'm always looking for it. If I, you know, I've written 8,700 blog posts—9,000! Half of them have a revelation buried in them somewhere; that's

a good blog post. Maybe a thousand of them really hit home. So, that's what I do: all day long, I look for where is that thing that, if you knew that little piece, you would, on your own, come to a conclusion that would change the way you see the world. I don't know if you've watched the documentary "Cpy." It's a documentary about agriculture and its effects on climate change. I watched it like eight or nine years ago now, and halfway through, I said, "If half of this is true, I would go vegan overnight." And I

did. I did the research. There were so many "a-ha" moments that just completely resonated with me because I said that I was an environmentalist. I wanted to make sure that I was doing these things, but I was also lying to myself in so many different aspects. I'm curious about the environmental aspect—just slightly off subject, I guess—but it is something that's really interesting to me. All of my family, all six siblings, are vegan now. So, one brother is not vegan, but all of us are vegan, mostly down to environmental reasons. Obviously, for us, ethics are involved

in that as well. I'm curious about your connection to that side of things, the environment, and how people can have an impact. Well, big impact—let’s talk about the impact first. I wrote my first blog post about climate change 18 years ago. It was a really good blog post, and it didn't solve the problem, amazingly. I realized I hadn't been blogging about it a lot, and I hadn't been blogging about a lot because I felt like a hypocrite and I felt uninformed. Because I'm in the book business, everything looks like a book to me. I organized

the Carbon Almanac, and it’s been translated around the world, been a bestseller, and won awards. I voluntarily took a year and a half of my life with 300 other people in 90 countries—40 countries, now 1,900 people in 90 countries—and we all built this thing to explain it to each other and to the world: what is actually happening? So, what to do about it? Well, the first thing is, as I said, we’re all hypocrites. Everybody, no matter what we say, is doing something that puts carbon into the air. The second thing is that one person becoming

a vegan is fine and admirable, but it’s not going to solve the problem. What’s going to solve the problem is organizing people, changing cultural expectations, and causing community action to happen so that it becomes widespread. For example, if your family got the local high school to stop serving meat on Mondays, that has a multiplier effect. If you organize five other people to make it so there’s no meat on Tuesdays, that also has a multiplier effect. When we figure out how to charge a fair price for carbon, the market will solve an enormous part of this

problem. You're right: beef, for example, is 25% of our problem with climate change. That means if we just killed all the cows in the world today, just killed them, we’d eliminate one quarter of the climate change problem in one day. That’s not going to happen, but we can start changing the cultural expectation. Can you have a wedding without serving meat? Can you be a wedding organizer who encourages people not to serve meat? How do we multiply and multiply? Can we stop spending the billions of dollars we currently spend subsidizing the beef industry? How many people

would have to call how many congresspeople before that law would change? For instance, my town has banned gas leaf blowers for six months a year; the town next to us bans them all year round. A leaf blower, in one hour, puts out as much carbon-causing gas as driving a pickup truck from New York to Los Angeles, and they're annoying. The poor folks who have to use them because they work for landscapers are vibrating all day, and it's bad for their health. So, there’s no one against it except for the people who don’t want anything to

change. How many people does it take to ban leaf blowers in a village? Twenty—that’s all. And yet we don’t want to do it; we want to just say... I don't have a leaf blower, and that is throughout all my writing, which I didn't realize until recently. That's what I'm trying to tell people to do. It's fine; thank you for being a vegan, but can you organize 10 more people, please? Yeah, I mean, we're lucky; we're a big family, so it was one brother, and now there's six, so it kind of... it was beneficial. But this

is something that, um, the idea of the grand gesture I think stops people so often because it's like, "I can't change; I can't kill all cows." Great example: I can't kill all cows; that's never going to happen, so what's the point? I can go vegan, but that's not going to have that much impact, you know, that kind of idea. Um, and you speak about this a lot—the idea that actually one person can change a whole industry. I love that—not just on the environmental side of which I want to pick up again in a second—but the

idea that you can go into a business and have changed the whole industry by yourself. Having that as a belief—like, how important is that? And again, the examples... I think you gave the example of "you"—was it Jim? Might not be the right name, but someone at McDonald's developed the Big Mac and, like, you know, changed the whole thing. Yeah, the idea that you could change a whole company, a whole industry—that's just, uh, really interesting to me. Yeah, so the Big Mac story—he didn't work at their headquarters in Illinois; he had a franchise in Pennsylvania. And

in those days, the rules were more flexible, and you could just... he invented a new sandwich, and then other franchises copied it and copied it and then went to headquarters, right? Um, I wrote a book called "Permission Marketing," and I built a 20—now it's a $50 billion a year business in email marketing, which I invented. But I never ran one of the like MailChimp or anything; I just... here’s the blueprint: here’s how you could spread this idea. But it doesn't have to be a business, and it doesn't have to be a book. What we're talking

about is creating circles of people who have an idea that’s contagious. So I decided, partly out of COVID, partly out of this book, not to fly anymore for work. Like, I used to go to Paris, give a speech, and fly home without sleeping over, and it was wearing me out. And also, it has a huge impact. But me not flying isn't going to change anything. But me giving really good talks via Zoom has changed the way conferences are booking other speakers, which is changing the way conferences are being run. They're saying, "Well, why do we

even need to rent the theater anymore? Let's just have all our attendees show up online." So now, me not flying—not by myself—but me not flying leads to 20 people, 50 people, a thousand people. We are living in contagious times, and COVID almost killed us, but ideas are also contagious. Which ideas are we spreading, and how much time are we spending spreading them? So again, just with that documentary, "Conspiracy," to me—like, how many people went veg just because of one documentary? That's why I think documentary film is so powerful. Yeah, um, just on that—so you built

a $50 billion industry. Okay, credit: you spoke about credit in the book. Do you want credit for that? Do you deserve credit? I have—I’m happily taking credit for it now and then in interviews, 'cause I don't want people to forget that it was really hard in those days to do what we did. But no, I'm delighted if things get better and I don't get credit, because that's not why I'm doing it. I'm doing it to make things better, and if me not being associated with it makes it more likely it's going to spread, that's fantastic.

So let's say you have a goal, and you're in a business—or maybe you're working in a corporation—and you invent the next Big Mac. Getting hung up on credit, is that something that's, like, should be a non-issue? Should we be focused on the "tus?" So for people who work in an organization, the best advice I have is this: give away credit, take blame, take responsibility. If you are willing to do those two things, no one's going to get in your way, because when you keep giving away credit to your boss, your boss wants you to do

it again. And if, when something doesn't work, you take responsibility, they're off the hook, so they let you do it again. And if we do those two things over and over and over again, soon there will be a line out the door of people who want you to give them credit, who want you to have resources so that they can take credit for the fact that you were about to go do something. If you flip it and you’re constantly blaming other people for the things that don't work and taking credit for the things that do,

don't be surprised that no one wants to help you. And just on that point, then, when you're in a big corporation and you, you know, you're working your ass off, you're doing all this work—and you're doing, you know, I think that is the right thing to do, you know—give away credit, take blame. But when it beats you down and you feel like you're underappreciated, undervalued, how would you deal with that? Well, I think part of the challenge is when you're working in a... Big corporations—it's easy to just do your job and what the bosses want,

what the bosses' bosses want. Sooner or later, it's going to burn you out because what they want isn't what you want. My encouragement is to figure out how to do things beyond just doing your job. The simplest example is to start a book club. Once a week, six other people at work meet and you talk about a book. No one's going to fire you for doing that. If you did that, you now have a new network inside the organization. You're now in charge of this; no one can tell you how to run the book group.

You have now put in the first peg in the path of you having agency, and that cycle is the opposite of saying, "My boss won't let me." I want to do really cool, creative stuff, but they won't let me. Well, "let you" means you're asking them to take responsibility—not what we're looking for. We want you to take responsibility for the smallest unit of change that you can get excited about that is yours. I know you're working in a big company, but there's something like that. A friend of mine, when the low-carb thing started to happen,

the whole grain thing—he worked at one of the biggest breakfast cereal companies in America and he initiated a 90-day program to turn every one of their breakfast cereals into a whole grain product in 90 days in a company that took a hundred years to do this. And he pulled it off. After that, his career was on fire because, step by step, he didn't announce the 90-day thing on the first day; he just said, "How can I meet with three people? How can I get six more people? How can I get twelve more people?" They're not

doing it because I told them to; they're all volunteers. They don't report to me. How do I build these horizontal networks? That's a craft, and you could learn to love that. Would he have had the idea of achieving what he achieved on day one, though? Do you think? Well, the plan on day one was, "I think I'll sit with Bob and Tony and ask if this is even possible." And now that I've got this, this is going to be hard, but it's possible. Now I can go talk to Felicia and Susan, and then, right like

that. And so how? Yeah, the idea of pushing against the norms, especially in these big—I think of corporate America, this huge thing—like pushing against the norms when you're a small fry in that industry or in that. Well, here's an example: if you work at a decent-sized company, do you have Slack? If there's Slack where you work, I guarantee you Slack was not installed by the head of Information Technology. Slack showed up because someone really low down said to three other people on their team, "Let's talk about this on Slack," and then it spread. It was

one of the fastest-growing pieces of commercial software in history because they didn't have to meet with any CEOs; they didn't have to meet with any purchasing departments. They just had little tiny small networks of people, and then it scaled from there. I think that's the thing, this being a small fry, is the over-analyzation of change. Yeah, like, I'm going to—this is what's going to happen to me. Or how, again, how do you overcome that? Like, is it small, small steps? Yeah, I mean, here's the deal: you might get fired. Has anyone in your company ever

gotten fired for something like this? You might get fired. Is it worth it? I'm not here to reassure you; I'm not here to tell you it's guaranteed to work. The reason it's rare is because it's not guaranteed to work. But if it makes you passionate, just start the book club. If it makes you passionate to run an AI seminar to teach other people what you know about it, then do it and find out if you get fired. But I don't think you will. I agree; I don't think they would. But also, the reward—if there is

a smaller risk of that, I guess the reward is even outweighing the risk anyway. I think what is important about compromise is to understand that it is extremely unlikely that you are right. It is very likely that you are interesting. But how can you be right about the future that isn't here yet? What change is, is about inventing a new kind of future. If the Wright brothers were still around and they didn't compromise, no one would be flying anywhere because you can't fly in a Wright brothers' plane—it only goes a couple hundred yards. They compromised

with nature; they compromised with engineers; they compromised, etc. to get to a thing that worked. So there is a core change we seek to make, but we can't make that change without compromising with reality when it arises. That doesn't mean we're here to please everybody. If some people want to take us somewhere and others don't, we can just work with the people who want to go where we want to go. But reality demands that we recognize it. Reality says, "I don't care how much you want something if it violates the laws of thermodynamics; you can't

have it." So you have to be willing to change. I think that's part of the deal—bringing other people in. You know, when you talk about having the community around. You bringing other people in. How open are you having to be to other people's opinions and ideas? Well, why does someone else have an opinion? Part of it is because they want to have agency; they want to be passionate. They want to be there for their contribution. This is why CEOs should never have any say about the logo, because everyone’s good at logos. Let somebody else pick

the logo. Let somebody else pick the other parts of it that aren't at the core of the change you seek to make, because now they're getting ownership over that part. We can't do these things by ourselves, but we can invite people along, and as long as we're getting to where we seek to go, it doesn't matter that we didn't do all of it. It's better that we didn't do all of it. How do people drop the ego when it's especially small business, but even big business as well? How do you drop the ego of even

a small change, like a logo change? How—what are the work-throughs of that? Oh, it's hard. I mean, it's really hard. The same way a little kid doesn't want their mom to get them dressed in the morning because it's our face; it's what we look like. But right now, visualize a great logo. Can you visualize one? Yeah, no one ever picks a horrible organization’s logo, right? Somebody who lost the World War or whatever it is. No one ever picks that, even though that happens to be a great logo, because they associate it with a cause they

don't agree with. The logos we tend to pick are for brands we like: Nike, Starbucks, whatever it is. They’re not great logos; they’re just the flags that organizations we like fly. So it doesn't matter what your flag is. Let somebody else pick the logo. That doesn't mean it's easy; it hurts, because part of the beauty of being the boss is you get to pick trivial stuff like the logo. Let it go; embrace the things that aren't core to the mission so that other people are as invested in it as you are. In terms of having

agency as a CEO or director, you know, businessman, entrepreneur, whatever it is, what are the things that you should be focusing on? The people you seek to serve and the change you seek to make. If you have those two things nailed down, everything else is flexible. And the mission, is that flexible? You know, the idea of, "This is the impact I want to have; these are the people's lives I want to change, the change I seek to make, and the people I seek to serve." That's it, right? So if the change I seek to make

is to decrease the amount of beef that people are eating and the people I seek to serve are busy business folks who are going out for lunch, and it turns out that dosa is much easier to sell than chickpea dal, sell dosa because you told me what the change you seek to make is: get people to eat some. That's not me; you told me that people you serve can deserve this better. You just figured it out. It’s like a great filter; you put every decision through it. The idea of— I don't know if you heard

the Steve Jobs speech where he talks about connecting the dots going backwards. And I think when you talk about teaching people to canoe, and you're here today, did you see any of this going forward, or is it all looking backwards? You can see where it's connected. Well, I’m glad you brought up the dots thing. One of my riffs that I like a lot is most people collect dots; they don't connect dots. We spend a lot of time collecting all these dots, watching another video, reading another thing, but we're not connecting them and finding our aha

moment. So I just wanted to say that because you're reminding me of it. I decided it would be great to be a speaker of something when I was 20-something years old. I don't think I could have imagined being able to spend an hour with you. But, yeah, I don't think that that informed my journey. My journey has always been informed by who I am seeking right now to serve, what is the change I'm trying to make, and for yourself, the change is: I am looking forward to meeting that person who I am hoping to become,

who is maybe a little wiser, a lot more generous, calmer, insightful, and brave. And if I can avoid shortcuts and help me get there, that’s the day I want to spend. Seth, this has been an absolutely wonderful conversation. I think what I need to do is dive in, sh new Bor, and we can run this back at some point, because I could speak to you for an hour about this. Oh, thank you! Super fun. Thank you! The thing I hate the most is people going, "Oh, you've got to be gentle with yourself. Take a night

off, darling; you’ve done too much already. You've already earned your place." No, no! I don’t need time off; no, I haven’t earned my place. No, I haven’t done enough already. I sympathize, and I have compassion for a lot of people who are struggling. I really do. You know, that’s the reason why I do all of the stuff that I do.