Digital Disruption

00;00;00;10 - 00;00;27;03

GEOFF

Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be sitting down with Chip Conley. He's the former head of strategy for Airbnb. A seasoned CEO, veteran TEDx speaker, and New York Times bestselling author, and now head of the Modern Elder Academy. What I love about Chip is that he's the rare leader who is not just walk the walk when it comes to building a successful business three times over, but he's thoughtful enough to have collected wisdom along the way in a way that can be easily distilled and shared.

00;00;27;05 - 00;00;42;00

GEOFF

I want to ask him how we can find meaning in the age of AI, as more leaders turn to AI to guide them. Are humans becoming obsolete or more important than ever? Let's find out.

00;00;42;03 - 00;01;08;22

GEOFF

Really happy to have you on the show here today. I'm really excited. You know, it's funny when initially, when I was interested in having you on the show, the chip I knew was sort of the head of strategy for Airbnb. And I thought, oh, you know, that's interesting. But, you know, as I've learned more about you and followed you over the last few years, that's sort of, you know, one stop on the broader, you know, journey that is Chip and, you know, one, one component of, you know, the Chip Conley Doctrine.

00;01;08;28 - 00;01;27;17

GEOFF

Maybe before we dive into things too much, you know, can you tell me a little bit about, you know, and I'm trying not to be too facetious with Chip Conley Doctrine, but you know what your overall message is these days? You know what? What's the problem you're seeing out there? You know, in this age and what you're, you know, trying to get across to people.

00;01;27;20 - 00;02;05;20

CHIP

Well, I would say that, and we'll get into my history and how I got there, but I think in the era we live in, human wisdom has more value than ever before. But I, a lot of people see wisdom as, something abstract that only Yoda or Dumbledore has access to, and they don't realize the practical application of wisdom and how in the era of AI and rampant, you know, commoditization of knowledge, wisdom becomes more and more scarce and valuable resource in a complicated world.

00;02;05;23 - 00;02;30;26

GEOFF

Let's, let's unpack that a little bit because there's some very deliberate word choices in there. You know, wisdom and, you know, knowledge, which you said is being commoditized. And one of the things that we hear about AI is that, you know, it's intelligent. Obviously, the AI stands for intelligence, but it's unmetered intelligence. And now everybody has access to, you know, unlimited intelligence.

00;02;30;29 - 00;02;54;15

GEOFF

And, you know, there's this idea and this trend now where, you know, why would I bother asking another human when I could just ask AI and it'll give me an answer at my fingertips? And so you very deliberately distinguished knowledge from wisdom, you know, what do you make of that? And what is the right case for using AI to learn more about your context?

00;02;54;15 - 00;02;59;01

GEOFF

Or you know, your job or your life? Versus what value do people still bring?

00;02;59;03 - 00;03;16;19

CHIP

I is able to, summarize all of the knowledge of the world and all of the points of view of the world in such a expeditious and expert way that there's a there's a perspective that, you know, why would I need anything more than the wisdom of a crowd?

00;03;16;19 - 00;03;25;00

CHIP

And in some ways, I is taking the wisdom of crowds and making it more practical. I think the challenge with that is,

00;03;25;04 - 00;03;41;16

CHIP

are some times when you want the crowd sourced knowledge that I can bring you, but sometimes there's the uniqueness of a particular point of view. That is exactly what you need to hear at this particular moment.

00;03;41;18 - 00;04;00;09

CHIP

And and as Pablo Picasso said long ago, computers are useless. They only give you answers. And I think that my experience with AI has been, AI is remarkable at giving me answers not nearly as good at asking the right questions that I need to hear at this particular moment.

00;04;00;12 - 00;04;05;22

CHIP

I think it's getting better at that. And the more it gets to know me, the better it gets at asking the right questions.

00;04;06;00 - 00;04;35;23

CHIP

But at the end of the day, you know, knowledge, you know, as they say, knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit and wisdom is knowing that to put it in a fruit salad. And I and so for me, there's times when the context of what I am looking for requires human intuition. Someone being able to see my facial expressions and how I'm reacting to something.

00;04;35;26 - 00;05;02;04

CHIP

Someone who could actually give me some imagination and and something maybe outlandish in terms of a point of view that I might not get from AI. The other thing is that, you know, I, I has not suffered as far as I know. And so it's the storytelling sometimes of that wise person, and the wise person doesn't necessarily have to be older than you.

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CHIP

Wise person could be younger than you.

00;05;04;03 - 00;05;25;18

CHIP

But it's that storytelling, and it's the experience of hearing of someone else's experience that allows you to realize that wisdom is not taught. It's shared. And, so I don't think I could teach with wisdom. I think another human being can share it and actually allow someone else to get wiser.

00;05;25;21 - 00;05;48;07

GEOFF

There's there's a lot of really interesting stuff wrapped up in there. And I'll come back to the Picasso quote, which I love, by the way, about just giving you answers. Because that feels like almost like a leadership trap of just just give me the answer. I'm just looking for the answer. Right? Versus no to your point, understanding the context or understanding the right question.

00;05;48;10 - 00;06;19;20

GEOFF

And I don't mean to get too philosophical here, but there's, you know, I think a really interesting and important distinction around, you know, what is the role of the leader and what role can I play in that? And so, you know, maybe I'll ask this somewhat abstract question, but is AI a useful leadership tool at all? And what role does it play, you know, in the broader toolkit of, of a modern business leader?

00;06;19;22 - 00;06;40;27

CHIP

Well, first of all, I think, learning how to ask great questions is, is the a really important role for a leader? I, I'm a big fan of appreciative inquiry, which is a form of generative questions. You can ask someone else. But also being able to ask the right questions of AI, I, you know, is a skill.

00;06;40;29 - 00;07;06;22

CHIP

Just because two people have AI or, you know, it's, let's say chat doesn't mean that one. They're both going to get the same knowledge, because so much of it comes down to the precision of the kind of questions you ask. So I do think that leadership, in the era of AI, is a combination of helping people understand understand how to access the greatest treasure within AI.

00;07;06;25 - 00;07;43;16

CHIP

So it's we we're doing that at, at the modern older academy right now with our, our team, is is really teaching everybody how do you use the AI in a way that's going to maximize its effectiveness for you? But then how do you actually realize when AI is not going to solve something? And for example, marketing copy, you know, I can do a really passable marketing copy to market something, but it misses the sort of soulful fingerprint that has just the ingenuity baked into it.

00;07;43;16 - 00;08;16;00

CHIP

Based upon a conversation our marketing person had with two of our alumni this morning that just like captured that that conversation is not captured on AI, that that conversation was where two women were talking about why they loved them. Yeah, that was based upon a personal experience that someone on their marketing team had with those two women, and that that data point of what those women said does not exist in the world of AI, because it doesn't exist on a computer.

00;08;16;03 - 00;08;27;23

CHIP

There's no data point for it, because it happened in a in a verbal conversation that was not captured by AI or any technology. It was a, a conversation in the field.

00;08;28;01 - 00;08;35;26

CHIP

And that that conversation could lead to, you know, the synapses firing and then a new ingenuity, a new line. And so.

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CHIP

If you want efficiency, you know, AI is going to be amazing.

00;08;40;22 - 00;08;47;18

CHIP

And for you, if you want soulfulness, you need to mix as a leader the the voice

00;08;47;25 - 00;09;18;04

CHIP

Of the soul and fingerprints of people that are not captured in the context of the crowdsourcing opportunity that AI offers. So I think it's the individuality and maybe the quirkiness that can happen. No it doesn't. It doesn't mean that I can't write you a quirky blog post, and I do that. I have a daily blog, and I got to tell you, ever since I came along, my daily blog has become a lot easier to write.

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CHIP

Partly because, you know, it's like a daily blog of 500 words on average, five, 600 words like, okay, that's that's a, that's a, that's a, that's an accomplishment to do that every day. And so there's times when I'll just say like, here's the thing, here are my inputs. Here's two articles that I have read that I like.

00;09;35;12 - 00;09;54;12

CHIP

Here's my point of view on it. Give me 500 words. And then I see it. And I was like, you know, there might be 10% of it that I would change and the 10% I'd change. And that's doing it in my voice. Let's be clear. The 10% I'd change is often the kind of thing that I doesn't know.

00;09;54;12 - 00;10;20;19

CHIP

It's a new perspective I have that actually, you know, that I have based upon a dream I had last night, or literally talking about the dream I had last night and how that relates to this. So but that's a beautiful opportunity to say, like, this is where a marriage of human and I can be very powerful. The problem is, in the process of efficiency and bowing to the gods of efficiency.

00;10;20;21 - 00;10;44;18

CHIP

Many people would not do what I just said. They would just say like, here's, here's the inputs. Give me that. Give me the blog post, and then the blog post comes out. You know, a minute, you know, 20s later, it's like, okay, perfect, let's throw that up. And and that's when I think you get to this sort of the lowest common denominator, as opposed to the highest common denominator.

00;10;44;21 - 00;10;59;27

CHIP

And the highest common denominator is when you actually give those fingerprints of the soulfulness to, in addition to the, the sort of the, the, the core of that blog post, to use the blog post example.

00;11;00;02 - 00;11;27;14

GEOFF

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00;11;27;17 - 00;11;47;25

GEOFF

that word soulfulness has come up a handful of times. Chip. And you've probably used it more than every other guest I've had on this show combined. It's not it's not a word we talk about a lot here. But but I want to I want to talk about soulfulness for a minute because, you know, it's a very deliberate word choice, and is obviously very evocative.

00;11;48;01 - 00;12;04;05

GEOFF

Maybe to provide some context to it, though. Let's back up for a second and talk about, in your view, what is the role of a leader? What where can a leader add the most value? What should they be doing, and where does this notion of soulfulness come into the mix?

00;12;04;07 - 00;12;31;22

CHIP

So, you know, a leader's job. One of my favorite questions to ask my direct reports at the three companies that I have helped to run, which would have been You Out of Eve, which is a boutique hotel company that I started when I was 26 and ran for 24 years, became the second largest in the US with 52 boutique hotels around California, and then seven and a half years as the modern elder to Airbnb, to the Airbnb founders, as the head of global hospitality and strategy.

00;12;31;24 - 00;12;41;03

CHIP

But the mentor to the founders as well. And then as the founder and, executive chair of the not an older academy. The question I love to ask is the following.

00;12;41;07 - 00;13;06;08

CHIP

How can I support you to do the best work of your life here at, let's say, Airbnb? And the reason I love that question is because I think a leader's role is to both support in that servant leadership kind of way. Servant leadership means basically, the more senior you are in an organization, the more you're there to serve the people who are less senior, you know, lower on the org chart.

00;13;06;10 - 00;13;25;24

CHIP

So service is is part of what a leader does. And and how do I how can I support you is a great way to start the question, because it's coming from the premise that, as a leader, my job is to help you be successful. But the second part of that question is to do the best work of your life.

00;13;25;26 - 00;13;46;12

CHIP

How can I support you to do the best work of your life? I want you to stretch. I want to create the conditions for you to look back at this stage of your life and say, I learned more, I did more, I accomplished more, and I feel incredibly complete about that era of my life. And it wasn't just me.

00;13;46;12 - 00;14;10;23

CHIP

I was doing it with a group of people and we did that. We did that together so that, how can I support you to do the best work of your life? At Airbnb, the the broader premise behind this question, though, is the really important thing, which is it is suggesting that it is not my job as the leader to prop you up.

00;14;10;23 - 00;14;32;07

CHIP

So you're successful. Your job is to have agency and to tell me with accountability what it is you need to do the best work of your life. You don't spring this question on someone and then expect them to answer immediately. You say, let's get together a week from now, and I'd love to have you come to the meeting with some thoughts about what do you need?

00;14;32;10 - 00;15;10;16

CHIP

And so I use this question to make the abstract of leadership practical, because, practically speaking, a leader's job is to help the people who work with them to do the best work of their life and to support them to do that, and to help them feel supported. But it all is also, the leader's job to to get people to stretch a little, not just to do the best work of their life, but stretch from the point of view of getting clear on what we sources they need to be successful.

00;15;10;18 - 00;15;30;02

CHIP

And while the conversation that can happen out of this question can be awkward at times because a week later your direct report comes in and says, here's the 22 things I need. And you as the the boss, know that you know 18 of those 20 things you cannot offer them, at least not yet. And there's only four that you can do.

00;15;30;02 - 00;16;00;18

CHIP

But that conversation is a valuable one, because what it does is it first of all, gets the gets your direct report to think like a leader. Because a great leader is a resource allocator. A great leader is, you know, makes, you know, dozens of decisions every day about resource allocation. And and so the resource allocation, putting that in the lap of your direct report, puts them in a position where they have agency and they have the ability to say, like, actually, these are the things I need.

00;16;00;21 - 00;16;25;24

CHIP

I think, you know, and now I need to hear talk to my boss who asked me this question to see what they think. But it's been a provocative question that I have found to lead to really interesting, conversations, because I think at the end of the day, a great leader is, somebody who is both a librarian and a confidant.

00;16;25;27 - 00;16;30;11

CHIP

So the librarian means that you have the know how I know who to

00;16;30;11 - 00;16;30;19

CHIP

help

00;16;30;19 - 00;16;47;16

CHIP

a direct report in ways that allow them to ask you questions, and you answer the questions. But the that's the librarian role. The confidant role is a confidant doesn't just have your secrets. A confidant is the one that gives you confidence.

00;16;47;18 - 00;17;17;09

CHIP

And in a confidant role, your your role is as the leader is to ask great questions. And by asking great questions, helping guide somebody to find their roadmap to success. And it is those two roles as a leader. Occasionally the librarian with the answers and occasionally the confidant with the questions, that actually allows a direct report to feel like, wow, this person has my back.

00;17;17;11 - 00;17;35;27

CHIP

This person in the in the habitat that this, that this leader has created, I'm supported, but I'm also stretching and I am have I'm starting to think like a leader myself. So a great leader incubates great leaders.

00;17;35;29 - 00;17;46;26

GEOFF

I want to, I want to press on that a little bit more chip in the context of, again, of soulfulness, because there's everything you said makes complete sense.

00;17;46;29 - 00;18;04;05

GEOFF

But to me, there's there's a soulless potential reading of that definition where you can be a leader, you can be a resource allocator, you can try and do your best work, but where you view your own role as almost like a human automaton, where you're like you're a stand in for just.

00;18;04;05 - 00;18;24;29

GEOFF

I'm an operational execution based leader, and I just, you know, plug things in from A to B, and it's it's soulless, it's almost robotic. But that's not really what you're saying. I don't think you're saying that there is that there's a soulfulness that a leader can bring to what they do. That's if I'm understanding you correctly, that's irreplaceable by AI.

00;18;25;01 - 00;18;29;08

GEOFF

What does that look like and what does that add to the mix into the organization?

00;18;29;10 - 00;18;45;06

CHIP

Well, there's an empathy, you know. So so let's like go to that question of like what is the soul? So is a soul is, you know, in my point of view and I get I have, I have a unique point of view here. I believe the soul incarnates in us as we get as we're born and we our job is to be the steward of the soul.

00;18;45;06 - 00;19;19;15

CHIP

Over the course of a lifetime, we die. The physical body dies. That soul lives on, and it's going to be incarnated in somebody else. And part of our role in this lifetime is to evolve the soul and the consciousness of that soul, and and become, you know, wiser as a result. So that's the background. Having said that, when you meet somebody who is soul full, what you notice about them is often human qualities that are some are what?

00;19;19;18 - 00;19;45;16

CHIP

Dacher Keltner, the UC Berkeley professor who started the Greater Good Science Center, calls moral beauty, moral beauty is the number one pathway for a person to feel, in life. It's not nature. It's actually being exposed to someone with moral beauty is someone who is got grit and tenacity. That courage got compassion, got equanimity. Kindness.

00;19;45;18 - 00;20;19;09

CHIP

So someone is soulful, feels very human in the best sense of the word. But somebody who's soulful is also connected to something beyond themselves. A soul, a soul feels connected to other souls and to every everything in life. So when you meet a leader that soulful you, what you can feel is the heartbeat of that leader. But you can also feel the heart that this this leader is connected to something much greater than themselves.

00;20;19;11 - 00;21;03;13

CHIP

And whether that is God, whether that's, you know, source or some belief around something spiritual or whether it's just the ability for a soulful leader to be able to be intuitive and, you know, intuition is not something, you know, someone whose soul is doesn't feel very intuitive, someone who's soulful feels like they're connected to something almost indescribable, that allows them to make better decisions and be able to be more intuitive about me, because my soulful leader sort of understands me and how I tick.

00;21;03;15 - 00;21;34;12

CHIP

So, you know, to me, someone who's soulful is, you know, the best expression of human qualities, that moral beauty while being connected to something bigger than themselves. And, you know, you meet somebody like that and you sort of want to lean in and spend more time with them. So they're not they're not robotic. They're not, you know, they're not they're not purely focused on efficiency.

00;21;34;15 - 00;21;36;04

CHIP

Yeah.

00;21;36;07 - 00;22;09;20

GEOFF

There's there's a prevailing sentiment right now, I would say a somewhat cynical one, but I find myself thinking about it, too. That soulfulness is in decline these days, that with, you know, with AI, with, you know, technology in general, social media, the just kind of rampant consumerism and, you know, people's attention spans and just how we're choosing to live our lives these days that we're risking eroding soulfulness at a societal level.

00;22;09;22 - 00;22;11;28

GEOFF

Do you believe that? Go ahead.

00;22;12;00 - 00;22;14;23

CHIP

would, I would say I'm sorry to interrupt. Jeff,

00;22;14;25 - 00;22;25;26

CHIP

When something is scarce, it becomes more valuable. So if what you're saying is true and I'm going to answer whether I think it's true in a moment. But if what you're saying is true

00;22;25;29 - 00;22;46;15

CHIP

for those of us who want to try to be more soulful, it may actually have more value. Just like in a world in which it feels like knowledge is rampant, and wisdom is scarce, it's possible that wisdom becomes more valuable based upon the law of economics, potentially.

00;22;46;15 - 00;23;09;04

CHIP

Now, again, if something is scarce, it's scarce because it's not valuable. That's a whole different thing. But whether it's soulfulness or wisdom, I do believe that there's deep value, and I think people see it. And, you know, just as just as Potter in on the Supreme Court in the United States long ago, talking about pornography, like, how do you define pornography?

00;23;09;04 - 00;23;30;27

CHIP

And he said, well, you know it when you see it. And I think that's true about soulfulness and wisdom, too. You know, when you feel it, when you see it, when you're exposed to it. And so I, I in my opinion, I think what is, there's a lot of things happening right now. And, you know, as a Canadian, you know better than I do.

00;23;30;29 - 00;23;57;25

CHIP

You know what impact that's having in the world in terms of a political world that is, you know, full of expediency, a political world, a political world that is, in many ways is survival of the fittest. And there's a bit of a rugged individualism. And, you know, I America first confers whatever first. Like, everybody's got to be first, but not everybody can be can be first.

00;23;57;25 - 00;24;27;12

CHIP

And in that. So I think that what that's created and especially because of our president, United States, without going down the rabbit hole of politics, there's a coarseness, there's a coarseness. And I think that coarseness, that, you know, when one truism about leadership is the more senior you are in an organization, the more emotionally contagious you are and the more character contagious you are.

00;24;27;14 - 00;24;49;27

CHIP

So you are a role model. And as a role model, what comes from that is you have a huge influence on how people are showing up in the world or in an organization. So I think the it's not surprising given the, you know, the the nature of some of the leaders we have in the world. And I'm, by the way, a huge fan of of Mark Carney.

00;24;49;27 - 00;25;35;03

CHIP

So I would just say like, I really appreciate his leadership right now. I think that coarseness would be perceived as the opposite of soulfulness and expediency and selfish, individualism is the opposite of communitarian ism. And the idea of how are we in this together? So I would agree with you on some level that I think there's a, there's a, a pervasive top down leadership character, an emotional, perspective that is, is infecting the world.

00;25;35;05 - 00;25;36;17

CHIP

Having said that,

00;25;36;19 - 00;26;05;12

CHIP

I think what it does is it makes it the people who are showing up and saying things or exhibiting behavior that is soulful or human have humanistic that much more loved and cherished. So the pendulum is always swinging. We are at one era of the pendulum swing, and I think we were going to see a pendulum swing back in the next few years.

00;26;05;19 - 00;26;31;10

CHIP

In my opinion, that will lead to, more of a uprising of people who have a humanistic, soulful perspective, a long term perspective. But I think, you know, it's easy to say right now that we are in an era in which that has is not in power.

00;26;31;12 - 00;27;04;17

GEOFF

Let's let's talk about that piece for a minute, because you touched on something there, you know, in our little political detour, about values and leadership right now. And it does feel politically and frankly, I think, you know, in the corporate world as well, that there's this sense of this you know, sort of win at all costs leadership that, you know, let's just do everything in our power to, you know, get ahead to make as much money as possible to, you know, the word, arms race or, you know, the,

00;27;04;19 - 00;27;04;29

CHIP

I

00;27;05;01 - 00;27;06;11

GEOFF

the yeah, yeah.

00;27;06;11 - 00;27;15;23

GEOFF

The, the metaphor of war and winners and losers seems to be extremely popular right now. And the corollary to that is there's, you know, almost a view,

00;27;15;23 - 00;27;16;21

CHIP

again.

00;27;16;23 - 00;27;18;01

GEOFF

corollary.

00;27;18;03 - 00;27;21;28

CHIP

Wait, is that how is that how Canadians pronounce corollary?

00;27;21;28 - 00;27;24;23

GEOFF

Corollary, I don't know,

00;27;24;26 - 00;27;28;29

CHIP

I just love it, I love it. Okay, go back to you.

00;27;29;01 - 00;27;38;15

GEOFF

We'll have to we'll have to check that in post. What I was going to say, though, is that, there's an implication, let's say, to keep things simpler, that

00;27;38;18 - 00;27;49;18

GEOFF

soulfulness or this, you know, more human quality is in some ways weakness that that in this world where, you know, might makes right. And we have to get ahead at all costs.

00;27;49;24 - 00;28;16;02

GEOFF

To be soulful is to be weak, and it is to yield, conditions of victory, let's say, to people who are going to be more brash and more abrasive. Now, I, I don't want to ask you a loaded question, but, you know, but it's difficult for me to believe that that you agree with that. And so so I'm curious what your response is to that line of of reasoning and values.

00;28;16;04 - 00;29;03;26

CHIP

Well, you know, I'll use a war analogy, which is you can win the battle but lose the war. And I actually think that's what's going to happen. That's what's happening. And I think, otherwise, we are in for a lot of trouble because, you know, a dog eat dog world, at some point means we're eating, we're eating dogs, and we're eating each other, and we're creating, you know, with the weapons of mass destruction that we have at our, at our fingertips and with, you know, I, you know, really with, with drones and, and some of the kinds of warfare and biological warfare and things that could happen without ethics.

00;29;03;29 - 00;29;53;07

CHIP

I mean, this is what's interesting to me right now is, yes, the battle right now seems to be lost to those in the short term who are, you know, sort of trying to use rugged individualism as a means of getting what they want. Having said that, one of the things that's really interesting in talking to humanities professors and university people is, in the last two years, a real growth in curiosity in philosophy majors and ethics majors, and in some ways, some of these, these kinds of forms of education that have really been, you know, neglected.

00;29;53;09 - 00;30;15;15

CHIP

And what we are seeing is that there's a discernment that people are looking for, and they're looking to ask bigger and deeper questions. And, you know, talking to some people I know in the AI world, like they love philosophers. There's a recent interesting article about the physicist who is at anthropic. I think it was, and she's it was I think it was New York Times, maybe.

00;30;15;15 - 00;30;45;20

CHIP

And when she jumped, she's 37 years old. But the idea that you need an ethicist, for some of the questions that we are exposing ourselves to these days, you know, is, is, to me, the bamboo shoots that I'm curious about, the bamboo shoots are saying, like, yeah, if we are starting to maybe till the ground to make fertile soil for bigger ethical, philosophical, humanistic questions.

00;30;45;23 - 00;30;55;09

CHIP

I think I think that's, that's encouraging. But I think we're like to use baseball as an analogy. And I know you have your Toronto Blue Jays, you're in Toronto,

00;30;55;11 - 00;30;57;03

GEOFF

I'm in Toronto. That's right.

00;30;57;06 - 00;31;09;09

CHIP

your blue Jason, you know, we're in the first inning of the baseball game of a nine inning game. And when it comes to some of these questions, the thing that's interesting is I think back to my original premise.

00;31;09;11 - 00;31;54;25

CHIP

This is part of the reason I think wisdom's making a comeback. Wisdom was very popular 2000 years ago, and the last 500 years in particular, the era of enlightenment and then the knowledge, the idea of knowledge creation and the idea of, ivory towers of knowledge, and accumulating knowledge. You know, I think we are I think the interest in the kinds of questions that help us to discern how to live a good life, and how to create a society that can have a good life, are these are the kinds of questions that I think are going to become more available to us or fail to us in not the right way, said

00;31;54;25 - 00;32;22;08

CHIP

I think more there'll be more curiosity around it, and you can say in some ways that there's a lot of literature and a lot of essays written 5100 years ago about the leisure class and what we have coming forward. The idea that in an era in which machines and, you know, are going to give us more time and space in our life, there will be more space for leisure and asking bigger questions.

00;32;22;08 - 00;32;55;08

CHIP

Well, that has not really happened. Let's be clear. Like the number of hours we're working compared to 50 years ago is more working, more hours. We have more of a disparity between rich and poor. We have a lot of things that were suggesting, like there was this leisure class thing didn't happen. But I think it was I, I really think we may finally be there where the efficiency of AI will allow us to then have the opposite kind of questions, which are, you know, curiosity is not efficient.

00;32;55;10 - 00;32;58;29

CHIP

Curiosity, opens up a can of worms. And,

00;32;59;04 - 00;33;13;22

CHIP

I think the kinds of questions will ask, you know, with more leisure and space in our life will be the kinds of questions that a philosopher or an ethicist, or a humanities major

00;33;13;29 - 00;33;18;27

CHIP

would ask. And therefore they're going to be in more demand. So we'll see.

00;33;18;27 - 00;33;36;02

CHIP

I mean, I I'm this is my conjecture about this because I think the opposite of that, which is we just get more and more efficient and more and more selfish is, to me, you know, on the road to, you know, destruction.

00;33;36;04 - 00;33;52;07

GEOFF

No, I, I'm inclined to agree with that. And, you know, certainly when we think about, you know, the future of work, it's not hard to imagine a path. And, and some studies have actually come out recently that support it, that as you gain the ability to be more efficient rather than doing less work, you just end up doing more work, right?

00;33;52;07 - 00;34;14;16

GEOFF

Like your individual output just gets higher and higher and it's almost, you know, a race to the bottom. And so I'm curious as we look out at these potentially diverging paths and this, you know, foundation of new technology here in your view. I'll, I'll ask sort of the big the big question chip, which is, you know what what is the future of work to you and maybe, you know, on the opposite.

00;34;14;16 - 00;34;23;11

GEOFF

And what is it not where can we go from here? And, you know, where would you like to see us not go?

00;34;23;13 - 00;34;29;03

CHIP

Well, I think the future of work, it's also.

00;34;29;06 - 00;34;53;28

CHIP

Khalil Gibran in the, in the book the prophet he wrote said work is love made visible. But tell that to a factory worker on an assembly line. And I think that the way we have looked at work in the 20th century was sort of it was toil, you know, in the 19th century it was farming.

00;34;53;28 - 00;35;21;00

CHIP

And in some ways you you controlled your destiny to some degree. A farmer's an entrepreneur and you choose what you're going to plant. But we moved into the 20th century with the assembly line culture. And within the, you know, manufacturing. And I will say that I think the, the, the reason that retirement as, as a concept became more and more appealing was because work became less and less appealing.

00;35;21;02 - 00;35;44;11

CHIP

And, as we moved into the latter part of the 20th century and knowledge were, you know, a term that Peter Drucker coined in 1959 became more predominant. I think we went back to the Kahlil Kahlil Gibran love. Our work is love made visible point of view, which is people and really enjoying the work more

00;35;44;15 - 00;35;48;26

CHIP

realizing that you could be doing this kind of work later in life.

00;35;48;26 - 00;36;12;10

CHIP

I mean, the problem, the problem with being a factory worker or, you know, carrying boxes for a living is your body is worn out by the time you get to your 50s. And yet when we know that, you know, when it comes to intelligence, you have fluid intelligence, which is fast and focused, and you have crystallized intelligence, which gets better as you get older, which is thinking of synthetically, holistically, and connecting the dots.

00;36;12;12 - 00;36;42;15

CHIP

So they're knowledge workers who in their 50s, 60s and 70s may be actually coming into their own in certain kinds of thinking. This crystallized kind of thinking. And so therefore, I think that the future of work, you know, is not as bad as it's been in, in 1950, meaning it's like people doing work that they love and and doing work that they can do later in their life.

00;36;42;17 - 00;37;01;23

CHIP

If you read Arthur Brooks, who's our faculty at MIT. He's also faculty of at Harvard. Here we his book, From Strength to Strength. He talks in the book. He talks about the modern older Academy in the book, but he talks, in the book about the idea of what kind of professions are most suitable for people as they get older.

00;37;01;25 - 00;37;31;07

CHIP

And often they're teaching and philosophizing and they're crystallized intelligence, the idea of being able to use both sides of your brain, which is actually what you get better at as you get older, is you're not so fixated to left versus right. You're the you're the integration of the two. So I think the future of work will be synthesizing these bigger, deeper questions, using AI as an amazing partner.

00;37;31;09 - 00;37;53;22

CHIP

You know, with the efficiency the, the again, in some ways, the assembly line created an efficiency. Unfortunately, the worker on someone was a cog in the wheel. Will knowledge workers and those of us who want to use our brains be a cog in the wheel of what I can do? I guess right now I don't think so.

00;37;53;24 - 00;38;20;02

CHIP

In the future, I don't know. But right now I think we are partners with AI and I can do things just like an assembly line can do. That is, you know, could do it better than we can do it ourselves and certainly faster. But I think the future work, you know, is going to potentially there's all kinds of professions, you know, leadership coaches, management coaches, life coaches.

00;38;20;05 - 00;38;37;15

CHIP

In 50 years ago, they, you know, you went to a therapist for that kind of stuff. But you didn't go to a therapist because it was too expensive. And it was like, you know, it didn't look good to, you know, your friends or your spouse. So, you know, there's like professions that are going to, you know, they're going to be lifestyle curators.

00;38;37;15 - 00;39;03;26

CHIP

They're going to be people who are going to help you to curate a life. They're going to be the modern Elder Academy May, a place that is dedicated to helping people to distill the wisdom they've learned along the way and figure out what's next in their life as a result of that. I just think there's going to be a whole collection of new kinds of businesses and professions in the future of work that double down on that.

00;39;04;00 - 00;39;42;00

CHIP

So for humanity, peace. And, and really help people to make sense of their life experience such that it becomes wisdom. I find wisdom is metabolized, experience mindfully shared for the common good. And there's, you know, so I think helping people to realize, how do you metabolize experience, how do you tap into the collective consciousness, you know, because there are ten year olds were wise, not because they have a lot of life experience or are good at distilling their life experience, but because they can tap into something intuitively deeper than just their own experience.

00;39;42;03 - 00;40;01;26

CHIP

But mindfully shared is also a really important piece of that. How do you help people use their wisdom? Part of the reason I did well at Airbnb was because I had over 100 mentees over seven and a half years, and my my job was not to I sit them down at my feet and say, well, I'm a boomer and you're a millennial.

00;40;01;26 - 00;40;22;11

CHIP

Let me tell you how the world works, because I would have gotten an okay boomer in my face if I'd done that. So this idea of mindfully sharing it and how do we help people to get better at collaborating, which is a skill that I think is going to grow, in, in an era of AI, yeah.

00;40;22;11 - 00;40;48;03

CHIP

So I mean, there's, there's I'm sorry, I'm getting pretty abstract here, but I, I, I deeply believe that the future of work is going to be a future based upon, the humanities and psychology and philosophy and a bunch of, disciplines within the academy that have generally been not as well regarded until just recently.

00;40;48;06 - 00;41;13;09

GEOFF

And I think it's a great, you know, I love sort of the, the abstract of it. I think it's a great kind of philosophical framing. Let's, you know, maybe shift gears a little bit and try and bring it to, like, the hyper practical by talking about, you know, individual what can happen for the individual. And, you know, one of one of the themes that's in the background there that I want to, you know, bring into the foreground is this sort of crisis of meaning that's happening.

00;41;13;09 - 00;41;40;11

GEOFF

And, you know, you think about it a little bit more through the lens of, you know, middle age and that transition for, you know, folks as they move into their 40s and 50s. And so chip, for folks who are, you know, they're at that career stage now at that life stage, they're being subject to some of these technological changes that maybe, impact their sense of meaning.

00;41;40;14 - 00;42;05;10

GEOFF

What what advice would you give them? If they're in a job where they're saying, okay, you know, I'm concerned that, you know, I'm not maybe having the impact that I thought I would have or I have been doing more toil than labors of love in my career. When you're in that zone, how much you know, in your perspective, how much latitude do you have to change that at that point?

00;42;05;10 - 00;42;18;10

GEOFF

Because I know that's also a concern for people. If you know, oh, you know, I've got less road ahead of me than behind me at this age. What what can I do and how can I regain that feeling of meaning?

00;42;18;12 - 00;42;37;09

CHIP

So Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for meaning is one of my favorite books, and I call it a leadership book, which, you know, most people wouldn't say that. It's the story of a Jewish, an Austrian Jewish psychologist who ends up in a concentration camp in World War two. And if I could distill that

00;42;37;14 - 00;42;44;15

CHIP

the the wisdom of maybe the most famous book ever written on meaning down to an equation.

00;42;44;17 - 00;42;50;21

CHIP

And I ultimately wrote a book called Emotional Equations. That was a New York Times bestseller, that came out in 2012.

00;42;50;24 - 00;43;14;06

CHIP

The equation for man's search for meaning is despair equals suffering minus meaning. And what does that mean? So, so despair and meaning are inversely proportional. Suffering is sort of a constant in life. It's not. It's a Buddhism point of view, which is, you know, the Buddhists say the first noble truth of Buddhism is that, suffering is ever present.

00;43;14;08 - 00;43;41;10

CHIP

And so there's a sense that, you know, you always attached to something and that attachment in our life can, can create suffering. And so what does that mean, then? Despair equals suffering minus meaning. It means that if you can increase your meaning, you'll reduce your despair. And what Frankl saw in a concentration camp was he saw that the people who actually lived were not necessarily the ones who were the most physically in good shape.

00;43;41;10 - 00;44;02;13

CHIP

They were, frankly, the ones who actually had hope and meaning, who could see on the other side of this awful experience of being in the concentration camp, that they were going to be a better grandmother, where they were going to actually write a screenplay, or they were going to find the love of their life or they're going to be a better parent.

00;44;02;16 - 00;44;24;17

CHIP

So in Frankl's case, it was he knew he wanted to write a book, man. Search for meaning. So, so woven into the idea of meaning is this sense of agency a a word I use earlier and the sense that there's something you're supposed to do with it. I one of my favorite phrases is the purpose of your life is to discover your gift.

00;44;24;19 - 00;44;45;07

CHIP

I change that and say the purpose of life is to discover your wisdom, and the work of life is to develop it. And the meaning of life is to give your gift or your wisdom away. So meaning often purpose can have very singular. It can be personal, but meaning to me has a communal, a social element to it.

00;44;45;10 - 00;45;10;24

CHIP

And so one of the things a person could do, and one of the things I've done since I was age 28, is to try to make sense of the wisdom I've learned along the way. So a practice I've done to make this practical is since age 28, every weekend. So for the last 37 years, I have sat down and for 20 to 30 minutes on a weekend, I've said, what were my biggest lessons of the week?

00;45;10;26 - 00;45;31;17

CHIP

What did I learn? And often it was a painful lesson. And how will it serve me in the future? How will that lesson serve me so that I'm a better person or a wiser person? As a result of that? So this is the metabolizing experience piece. Well, what I do with my leadership teams and again, that that's something someone could do.

00;45;31;17 - 00;45;54;01

CHIP

But like now let's make it even more practical. Let's talk about how a leadership team could do this. I don't require my leadership teams to do their, you know, weekly wisdom journal. But what I do require is once a quarter, our leadership team at all three companies I've led, we sit down and we say, have each person say what was their biggest lesson of the quarter?

00;45;54;03 - 00;46;20;05

CHIP

So what did you learn? Like what happened? Like what was the thing that happened? What did you learn from it? How will serve you in the future? Now, the reason I love this is because it is a growth mindset. So you can have a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. So fixed mindset means that you're sort of trying to prove yourself, and your job is to optimize what you do, what you have, and a growth mindset you're trying to improve yourself and you're not trying to succeed necessarily trying to learn.

00;46;20;08 - 00;46;47;18

CHIP

And such in addition to his credit. And I'm he's a, I think, a great CEO at Microsoft, he realized that when he joined Microsoft as the CEO, he realized in 2014 that this was a know it all culture, and he wanted it to be a learn it all culture. And so he instituted millions of dollars of growth mindset training that helped people to say, how are we learning?

00;46;47;20 - 00;47;19;27

CHIP

How are we in constant motion for learning here? And, you know, to his credit, I mean, Microsoft has been one of the biggest winners on the stock market in the last dozen years and especially in AI. So what I would just say is this exercise where a leadership team comes together and once a quarter is vulnerable and candid enough, but also curious and learning enough to actually say each person on a six person team, let's say, says, here's what I learned, here's how it's going to serve me.

00;47;20;00 - 00;47;41;29

CHIP

And then the team at the end says, okay, what was our biggest team lesson of the quarter? And we arm wrestle over that. But the beauty of this is that I might learn some wisdom from the CFO, who was talking about something he learned or she learned. And so to me, that's a that that is a and meaningful exercise.

00;47;42;01 - 00;48;03;27

CHIP

It creates a wiser organization and allows you to share your wisdom, what you've learned along the way, the hard way. These are painful. Life lessons are often the raw material for our future wisdom. And most importantly, it's creating an environment where people are constantly realizing that the the work that they're doing is a noble experiment. It's not about failures.

00;48;03;27 - 00;48;29;14

CHIP

It's about learning from the experiments that you're doing. And, and that creates meaning. So meaning can come from a combination of realizing that you're getting better at something or that something is improving or there is hope and belief on the other side of this, that you will be wiser as a result of it. You know, I there was a woman who came to an, a modern, older academy workshop recently, and she was distraught.

00;48;29;14 - 00;48;44;26

CHIP

She both got fired from her job. She's a knowledge worker. Gotten fired from her job. Partly because of AI. In her belief, at least. And and her husband had filed for divorce, like, within the same month.

00;48;44;29 - 00;49;05;03

CHIP

And so when it came to the divorce piece, I, I asked her, I said, like, okay, I know how hard it feels. And they had two kids. The kids are not living at home anymore. So for the first time in 30 years, she's living alone and she's struggling. But I said to her, you know, I at some point are you going to maybe start dating again?

00;49;05;05 - 00;49;32;11

CHIP

And she said, yeah, I think I will. And then I ask you the question that really helped. I asked her, do you think you're going to wear a better pair of glasses to understand your next mate? Do you have life experience that has made you wiser based upon this marriage you were in? And she said, absolutely. I know I especially the filters of what I, I mean, look for her not to marry a narcissist again, I'm not going to do this.

00;49;32;11 - 00;49;51;23

CHIP

And I give that like and she just sort of and she realized as she was spouting all of this, she had learned something. There was some wisdom in that painful experience, and there's some meaning that can come from that. It means that she's going to be a lot more thoughtful and discerning about who her next mate may be.

00;49;51;25 - 00;50;29;08

CHIP

So meaning comes from the sense that we're learning something along the way and that we can share it with others. And I mean, this is again, part of the reason why may I think, is a, you know, the start of a movement of midlife wisdom schools where people in the middle of their life, at the the low point of a you curve of happiness, which is often around 45 to 50 people are asking bigger, deeper questions that allow them to curate the second half of their life, differently than the first half.

00;50;29;11 - 00;50;34;14

GEOFF

I want to, I want to try to synthesize some of that. And, you know, keep me honest here if

00;50;34;14 - 00;50;52;06

GEOFF

I'm hitting it or missing it. But there seems to be a theme there around how can we make sure that we're actually looking forward to the future? And how can we sort of package our experience in a way that allows us to do that and also feel a sense of, you know, again, in your worship agency over our future?

00;50;52;08 - 00;50;56;09

GEOFF

Does that does that resonate with you in terms of some of the themes they're around, meaning?

00;50;56;12 - 00;51;27;00

CHIP

Yeah. No. So, again, despair equals suffering. Most meaning despair often comes from not having agency, despair comes from not having hope. Despair comes from, you know, feeling like the suffering will never end. So yeah, there are agencies critical. The sense of learning is critical and and wisdom, the sense that there's some hope is, is is critical as well.

00;51;27;00 - 00;51;55;09

CHIP

So yes, I think all of those can help someone find that sense meaning. But I think the other piece that may be missing in what you said is the ability to share, the ability to actually offer something, and, and to feel that sense of making a difference out there. I do think that that is woven into the best that humans have to offer.

00;51;55;11 - 00;52;25;14

CHIP

So it's not just the selfishness of, like, I got what I needed and, you know, now I'm going to take care of my family, which is fine. I mean, you can be very selfish and, and do all kinds of good things for your family, and that's that's good too. But when, when there's an element of, you know, there's a, a sort of generosity, around meaning to me, there's a generous generosity of spirit that, to my mind, is woven into what meaning is about.

00;52;25;16 - 00;52;57;07

CHIP

And that's when you feel this deep sense of a new kind of ROI, not the return on investment, but the ripple of impact. And it is in that feeling, the ripple of impact. You feel what George Bailey felt in It's a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart playing George Bailey, you know, he could based on what Clarence the Angel did in coming down in that famous movie, coming down and showing George what his little town, Bedford Falls, would have look like if George had never lived.

00;52;57;07 - 00;53;20;29

CHIP

And he was able to see that the ripple of impact here was profound. And people want that and need that. And it's part of the reason why children in our lives, our kids, both create short term and happiness and long term meaning, because there's a deep sense that you have maybe hopefully had some impact.

00;53;21;01 - 00;53;53;05

GEOFF

It feels to me like one of the biggest barriers to getting there right now is, you know, this pervasiveness in many of our lives of, you know, what I'll call a diet of despair, where we're just being fed all this, you know, rage based content or, you know, the news and the political cycle and social media is just feeding us all this information designed to, you know, coax us into a state of outrage or feeling despair or feeling that the world is worse than ever.

00;53;53;09 - 00;53;56;02

GEOFF

what gives you hope for the future? Like what?

00;53;56;02 - 00;54;04;18

GEOFF

do you see as some of the opportunities or, you know, you know, the hopeful signs that things are actually getting better rather than worse?

00;54;04;20 - 00;54;08;18

CHIP

Well.

00;54;08;20 - 00;54;34;17

CHIP

And, you know, my experience is very much a function of the 3000 people who go through our program every year. And seeing the transformation of someone who came, you know, I always tell the story of the litigator. She came at age 60, and she'd been a litigator for 35 years, and she hated it. But she did it because her father wanted her to become an attorney.

00;54;34;19 - 00;54;56;17

CHIP

And at 60, she came to me thinking, I want to work ten more years, but I don't want to be a litigator anymore. Maybe I'll just be a litigation consultant. And she hurt her. She had not opened the aperture of her life, and she was very narrow in her thinking. And in so doing she had some despair about like, okay being a litigation consultant has some upside.

00;54;56;17 - 00;55;22;19

CHIP

I don't have to be in court. I'm the consultant behind the scenes, and maybe that's less stressful. But the reality is, over the course of a week, what I saw from her was she was having dreams and memories of her grandmother. Like, where was that coming from? And cooking pies with her grandmother and realizing that when she travels overseas, the first thing she does this look for a local bakery because she loved to see what kind of baked goods they have in different parts in the world.

00;55;22;19 - 00;55;46;10

CHIP

In Croatia, it's very different than in Peru. By the end of the week, she realized that she had the hope of I want to, like, have a hobby of becoming a pastry chef. If I really like it, I think I might become a pastry chef, entrepreneur or a baker and create a bakery. And that's what she's done. So that's an end of one, you know, just one person.

00;55;46;12 - 00;56;25;18

CHIP

But with almost 10,000 people who've gone through our program now, I have seen the human spirit and the ability for people to evolve and transform in ways that, you know, our mainstream press and our social media feeds, is don't don't quite capture. Yes. You might not get an Instagram picture of somebody happy on a beach here at May with a bunch of new friends, but what that's totally missing is the sense that that woman asked herself ten years from now, what will I regret if I don't learn it or do it now?

00;56;25;21 - 00;56;47;07

CHIP

And it was that provocative question. Ten years from now, what will I regret if I don't learn it or do it now that had her dreaming and have it at her, you know, thinking of things that she that were not adjacent to being a litigator. So I guess where I come from is the small pebble in the pond.

00;56;47;09 - 00;57;08;23

CHIP

How am I? We have 56 regional chapters around the world with me. And how are those regional chapters making a difference in the communities in which they're located? How do we create a movement of people who feel like their best years are ahead of them? And they're saying that at age 50? And in so doing, I'm doing my part

00;57;08;26 - 00;57;10;21

CHIP

when it comes to the global perspective.

00;57;10;22 - 00;57;38;00

CHIP

You know, it's interesting that there's a, there's, you know, more and more trials going on around social media, like legal trials. And the the premise of this is very interesting is we, you know, sometimes you don't know the effect of something, you know, you don't know the effect of smoking until lung cancer becomes prevalent and and maybe, you know, we're starting to learn some of the effects of some of our technology.

00;57;38;02 - 00;58;11;04

CHIP

And maybe that will lead to some adjustments in laws as well as in behaviors. You know, in many ways, you know, the laws around smoking it, there are laws around, you know, you can't smoke in certain places, but generally, you know, people can go smoke in their car, they can do whatever they want. But, you know, but the the cigarets have a warning label and, and over time there's a little bit of a social stigma attached to like smoking.

00;58;11;06 - 00;58;42;23

CHIP

You realize that your smoking affects other people or secondhand smoke, and frankly, it makes other people smell bad. But so are we sort of in the early stages of maybe, a shift in terms of social media and technology that helps people to see that we don't have to, you know, be be the pawns of rage bait. I hope so, I hope so, but I don't know.

00;58;42;25 - 00;58;47;23

CHIP

All I know is what I, what I can do, and that's what I focus on.

00;58;47;26 - 00;58;49;01

GEOFF

So with that in mind,

00;58;49;06 - 00;59;08;11

GEOFF

what message would you give to people who are feeling despair right now and maybe I'll break out into two parts, you know, business leaders or more, people more in the midlife bucket that are feeling despair. And then maybe young people as well. And I know that's where you spend a little bit less of your time.

00;59;08;11 - 00;59;19;14

GEOFF

But young people who look at their future and say, oh, you know, I can never have the career or the wealth that, you know, the, the baby boomers did. What advice would you give to each of those groups?

00;59;19;17 - 00;59;42;09

CHIP

Well, for the young people, we amazingly, we have we added some two weeks ago, 24 years old who can make. And 25% of the people who come to me are millennials. So and obviously a 24 year old was a Gen Z, but, for the young people, I would just say like, the world is changing faster than ever before.

00;59;42;11 - 01;00;23;23

CHIP

So in some ways you are at the advantage of that because you can see the how to surf the cultural zeitgeist and the technological zeitgeist better than I can. So, you know, there's real opportunity in that. And, so I would just say, double, double down on whatever it is that you're passionate about, whether that's the humanities, because as I've said in this episode, you know, I think humanities really come back or whether that's understanding how to curate technology in such a way that we make it, you know, a great partner.

01;00;23;25 - 01;00;55;27

CHIP

I think there's a real there's a lot of opportunity there. I think some of the, the existential issues of climate change, the existential issues of, you know, I risks. Yes, those things exist. But guess what? Back in the 50s and 60s, we had we also had nuclear weapons that were really in a dangerous place. We had a Cold War that, you know, and we had, you know, Cuba right off the shore of Florida with Russia having, you know, having missiles there.

01;00;55;27 - 01;01;19;29

CHIP

I mean, like we've been through some shit before. And so, I, I don't want to be a Pollyanna here, but I do want to say this is for the young people. You know, you didn't come through Aids. You didn't come through the Vietnam War era, you know, where, Canada got a lot of Americans because they crossed the border because they didn't want to go into work.

01;01;19;29 - 01;01;47;07

CHIP

So there's, like, there's there's been turmoil before. So for others beyond that who are feeling that sense of despair, ask yourself, what's one thing you can do today to make a difference out there in somebody else? So the best thing we can do when it comes to, despair is to feel like we have some ability to influence something.

01;01;47;09 - 01;02;10;19

CHIP

How do we influence something? How do we how do we help someone else get out of the despair? You know, sometimes the thing, the medicine we need is the medicine we're giving going out and helping someone else and doing it. Doing something for someone else can be a great way to feel both a sense that you're giving, but also someone else receives it and you have value to them.

01;02;10;21 - 01;02;31;20

CHIP

You know, the issue as we get older is not about being useful, it's about being useful. And so it's not about trying to, you know, use the Botox or whatever it is to make you look ten years younger. Yes, you can do that. That's fine. But at the end of the day, as we get older, the sense of utility and usefulness becomes more and more important.

01;02;31;22 - 01;02;55;18

CHIP

And so when you're feeling despair, looking at how you can be useful is probably the most important thing you can do. You can do. Yes, you can do gratitude lists. And there's lots and lots of evidence that, you know, gratitude is a way to solve for despair. But, you know, thinking without acting is not enough. The acting piece is really important.

01;02;55;21 - 01;03;13;09

GEOFF

I love that message, and I think in some ways it's a perfect note to kind of end our conversation on. So with that chip, I wanted to say a big thank you for joining today. It's been a really interesting and really insightful conversation. I know it gave me a sense of inspiration as well. And hopefully, some people listening to it felt that.

01;03;13;09 - 01;03;15;03

GEOFF

So thanks again for joining.

01;03;15;05 - 01;03;33;00

CHIP

Well, definitely a different conversation than your normal conversation, I guess. And I hope it wasn't too abstract. But, you know, I do think the idea of asking bigger and deeper questions is, is something that is perfectly suited for the the time we live in.

01;03;33;02 - 01;03;50;05

GEOFF

I completely agree. And, you know, as someone who has, philosophy background himself in school and a bit of, you know, business ethics as well, I'm, I couldn't agree more. I love the comments about asking the right questions and not just, you know, these answer machines. So it certainly resonated with me.

01;03;50;07 - 01;03;52;15

CHIP

Thank you.

01;03;52;18 - 01;04;18;03

GEOFF

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