Ep. 1384: Daniel Coyle Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

My guest today is Daniel Coyle. He is an author whose work explores how people and groups grow, perform, and thrive. He combines immersive field reporting with behavioral science to create practical frameworks for building skill, culture, and meaningful connection. The topic is his book Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning Joy and Fulfillment. In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: Purpose vs success and hollow achievement Flourishing as joyful meaningful growth Complexity vs complicated systems thinking Shared improvement and community over self improvement AI impact and human connection revival Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel https://twitter.com/covel Facebook: @trendfollowing https://www.facebook.com/trendfollowing/ LinkedIn: @covel https://linkedin.com/in/covel/ Instagram: @mikecovel https://www.instagram.com/mikecovel/ Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  My guest today is Daniel Coyle. He is a New York Times bestselling author. Too many books to count. I mean, we could count them, but there's a lot. Most famous, I think, for The Talent Code, a book that I definitely read back in the day. His new book, Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment. And I tell you what, in this crazy day and age of information overload, of chaos, of negative stuff, it's often nice to hear the ways to find yourself outside of all of that and to flourish. Without any further delay from me, let's jump right into my guest today, Daniel Coyle.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Where you have gone right now, perfect moment, perhaps, in modern history to open this topic up. My observation, you use the word flourish and maybe I'm using a synonym of purpose. Maybe they're somewhat similar. You can tell me your perspective. But it's amazing to me to make the observation of people that don't seem to have this. Smart people, people with good families, but there's something that's not there or not working correctly. I wrote the quote down here, and I've actually interviewed him as well, too, Barry Schwartz, a long time ago. People mistakenly think it's a treasure hunt, and it's not a treasure hunt. It's more like a treasure creation. For a guy that's traveled a lot,

• 1:44Speaker 00

  that's a real thought bender right there, considering I happen to be in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  No kidding. That's so cool.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  For over a decade, and this is where I really like to start with you. Why you? Why now? Because I mean, look, you're a bestselling author. You've got books out there. People know your stuff, but you didn't have your purpose?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  It's interesting, Michael. I think we've all been in the same spot where we've seen, I've spent my life studying high performers and hung around with the high performers like you have. And I've seen people, as you have, get, on paper, it's all there, right? They have achieved it all. They've played the game right. They've been extremely smart. They've been very intentional. They've been very systematic. They've had great habits. And at the end of the day, they're hollowed out by that. They don't have some sense of aliveness, some sense of growth. And we feel that sense of aliveness in certain places in our life, right? We can remember times where we felt really alive, where we felt really filled with meaning and joyful connection.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  And flourish is about the process underneath joyful, meaningful connection, joyful, meaningful growth. That'd be the scientific definition of a joyful, meaningful growth. That's what flourishing is. And we've all experienced it. And yet, modern life seems to be a little scarce with it. And it seems to be pushing us down these road. And I guess I found myself on that road too, right? Where I was extremely successful, maybe not extremely. For a writer, I would say, successful. Writing is hard. And at some point, I was in my mid 50s, kids are getting older. Both my parents happened to pass away within about three years. And it knocks you to the ground. It absolutely wakes you up. And those kind of moments where you say, wait a sec. This is not my beautiful life.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  This is not my beautiful car. How did I get here? And those moments, I think, if we pay attention to them, are gateways to figuring out something deeper. And so, my whole journey as a writer has been I started looking at individual talent, and then I started looking at group performance. And this was a logical progression to say, okay, we've gotten at the top of the mountain. What is there? And what's... It actually got me curious. Spending so much time on the mountain tops with the world's best performers got me curious about the valleys. Like, places where there is this generativity, places like this little town in Vermont, where they produce all these Olympians. And then they go back there to live afterwards. And they're chiropractors and coaches and teachers. What's going on there?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  I think we've seen that success isn't, isn't the answer. Pure success isn't the answer in the deepest way. So what is there? And that's what I went to visit. I went to visit these places that were like, these little valleys that were producing impossible numbers of really happy, fulfilled, growing people.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  A lot of questions, a lot of thoughts here. Let's try and lay out the landscape that we both see in society, civilization, right now. As someone who's written a lot of books, AI is radically changing life permanently. I think for guys like me and you, where we didn't necessarily have the easy way to research. It was more shoe leather. It was more knocking on doors. It was more turning over a rock. Whereas today, a young person can go on with a couple of different AIs and pretty much figure out everything that you and I might have figured out in our careers that took us a very long time to figure out. And they don't have to figure out anything. It's just there.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  This gets at some of where I think you go, which is for you, probably for me for sure. There became a calling, a purpose to figure something out, to meet with this person, to learn something, to uncover something. If you don't have to do any of that, and all you have to do is press a button, then you don't care, is my theory.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  I know. It absolutely puts a spotlight on the fact that answers aren't the answer, if I could put it that way. Getting the answer and having the answer and possessing the answer is never the answer because it doesn't energize you. It doesn't create a relationship. Everything we know about life is that life is about not being some solitary island, but being in an ecosystem, being related. When you look at these long-term studies of life, what do they find? Relationships are more important than diet or genes or anything. We're human beings are built to be in relationships, which means we're built to be in mysteries, in mysteries. Like, when you say you were called, you weren't called by, oh, the perfect answer is out there. That's not what energized you. And what energized me was, what's going on there?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Like, the question is so much more interesting. And so we find ourselves, as AI comes in, answers, as you say, are cheap as tap water, right? I've got all the answers I need right here. Maybe we can look at it two ways. We can look at it through the dark lens and say, oh, this is going to ruin everything. And you can look at it through the different lens that I would make the argument for. This is going to put a spotlight on what it actually means to be human. What we're doing right now is something that AI doesn't do very well. They don't ask good Questions and they don't understand context, they don't understand moment and they can't. Their training models are frozen, so they can't add to it in real time. So you and I are adding to our models in real time and we're responding to each other.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  And that's what gives these conversations, what you do, the sense of aliveness that people crave, that people need to live, right? We need these questions, we need this specific context, we need these little mysteries to explore. And so I think what we're finding, I've heard it called the humanist revival. I don't know if you've seen evidence of that in your world, but there's this sense of like, wait a minute. There's some deep truths are becoming apparent here, which is it's about, not about the answers. It's about exploring questions, not alone, with others, in relationship. The big surprise of my journey, and I took five years visiting these different places. Little deli in Michigan that's grown into a $90 million community of businesses that is incredibly generative. People are moving from the Ritz Carlton in Paris to go work in this place in Ann Arbor, Michigan,

• 7:40Speaker 01

  because it's such a fantastic place to work. Incredible places and looking at them. And what I found over and over again is that we have a pronoun problem in, with the way we look at the world. We're focused on self-improvement. And what these places are showing is that the real key to flourishing, the real key to having that sense of growth and joy and meaning is shared improvement, not self-improvement. They're finding we are built, we are pre-wired through evolution, deeply pre-wired, to become our best selves through our relationships with other people, which means through exploring the mystery of other people and exploring mysteries with other people, exploring deep questions. And I guess I'd ask your listeners to reflect on times where they've felt most alive and grown the most.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Let me throw it back to you, two guys that are authors. The words on the paper don't come from the team. The words on the paper come from Dan sitting there for years, doing the work. So I almost wonder, is there a delineation here between the internal drive and going down a path to either figure something out or make it happen? And the group drive, the shared experience?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  I would say, scratch that half an inch deeper. I'm alone, you're alone, and we're sitting at our desk. We look alone. Actually, you've got a community of voices in your head, a community of people, ideas, that you did not invent. You did not invent. You have models as a writer. I have models as a writer. I have to create a space where all that can work. But, oh my God, every hero story in our culture, every hero, every story of an individual genius, look at it closer. It's community all the way down. So, finding places.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  There is that moment, though, that as an explorer, an author, a programmer, or whatever, there's that moment where you kind of have to start. And once you start, and you start knocking on doors, you're right, the community opens up. If I didn't knock on doors, there'd be no community. I see some distinction there in terms of the individual taking a step forward.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. That's beautiful, and that every time. It's really individual courage. If there are two traits that these places that I've visited really embodied, it was two things. It was curiosity, especially about other people. But it was especially courage, the willingness to have agency, to step forward. And oftentimes, that is empowered by the community to say, oh, I've seen other people do this. Other people will be listening to this, and they'll say, oh, I'm gonna call somebody up because I heard Michael do it. It sounds like it worked out pretty well. And so, we get the opportunity to, you know, courage comes from the French word for heart, right? To give heart to other people. But ultimately, yeah, you're right. You have to step forward absolutely alone, and that can be terrifying. And what makes it less terrifying, I think, is to zoom out for a second.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  There's this thing that happens with our, and we can get into kind of how the attention systems work. But the places that I've visited that were flourishing had an extraordinary ability to zoom in and zoom out, to zoom in on the task, to focus, to have agency, to get something done. But then to zoom out and see all the connections and see what it meant. That sense of meaning. And that's really what ends up being behind these steps forward. When you look at those moments of courage, I think it's because we're finding, as you say, purpose, which is really... A cognitive link that connects this moment to something distant and it purposes really this imaginative thing that we have to picture the benefit and then we have to step toward it. So even in those moments of courage, it helps to be in relationship and in community with that stuff.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  One of my books from 2007, second edition was 2009, was about a famous trader in Chicago, and he taught a group of students to trade. And it became a great story, great experiment. This was someone like me using the nurture trumping nature. So I just wanted to add that because that's obviously something deep in your bones going back in time. And for me, I think one of my most favorite episodes on this podcast was with Anders Ericsson. I mean, just that whole deliberate practice. And he was such a sweet guy. I wish he didn't pass. These kinds of experiences, as you say, they shape you. Look, I was doing interviews

• 11:53Speaker 00

  of traders and I wanted to expand it. And I had an in because I had interviewed a guy named Vernon Smith, who won the Nobel Prize, and he shared it with Kahneman. I didn't know Kahneman. And so I just sent an email to his Princeton address. No response. Then I interviewed Vernon for the podcast, sent that to him. He replies, Oh, I liked your interview. And after that, you approach people. And guess what? Nobody really wants to say no once Kahneman said yes. So you're right, this becomes something that starts to expand and flourish. And it's beyond me. I happen to be a point person in the process of helping to move it along. But that's a weird stars aligning and you just sometimes go like this, you just had that happen.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  There's a beautiful sort of something that's really helped me understand those moments. And it's funny, you're catching me at spring training. I just got to Arizona last night. I've been working with the Cleveland Guardians for 13 years. I gotta say, I relate to your story because oh, this thing led to this thing led to this thing. And then all of a sudden, it's this big thing. And I'm here with the sports equivalent of traders, right? These guys have got to make quick decisions as the ball's coming toward the plate. It's brutal. You get measured to the south thousandth of a decimal point and you get cut or kept based on those responses. It's a decision making. It's very crisp and clear. And they're trying to navigate that. The distinction that I never understood until I did this book that might be useful to your listeners is between complicated and complex systems. You may already be on this, Michael, for all I know. But is that an interesting

• 13:22Speaker 01

  distinction to you?

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Keep going.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Complicated things, we always think of those things as being the same, right? It's complicated, it's complex, it's the same. In fact, it's deeply different. There's two kinds of problems in the world. Some are complicated. That means they come together the same way every time. The problem of how to build this microphone, it's complicated. If I give you the instructions and all the equipment, you could build it. If you'd follow the instructions, A goes to B goes to C goes to D. The world is very consistent, it's causal. We can trace it, we can write it on a piece of paper and follow it. Complex problems are different. Complex problems change when you interact with them. They're alive. So the difference, is it more like building this microphone? Or is it more like raising a teenager? Raising a teenager, you can't write instructions. This is what you're supposed to do with complex problems. You have to probe.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  You have to probe and have an experience and learn from that experience and reflect on that learning and then probe again. This strikes me, it may relate to the world of traders. It definitely relates to the world of sports. How we navigate complex spaces, how you created your podcast. You didn't have a machine where you said, I have the instructions. This is how to build a great podcast. I just simply will call a condiment and he will say yes. It's not, it's complex, it's complex. So staying curious and having courage to take that step ends up being the cheat code. It ends up being absolutely the best way to align your system, your own decision making, your own perceptions, your own actions, with the way the world actually is. Because there ain't no instruction path for this.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  There is no set, life is not complicated. Life, your career, your decision making, your very day is complex. And there's something I see a lot in the world right now where everybody's trying to automate everything. This speaks to the AI thing. Everybody's trying to have, how do you succeed? You have all these specific habits and protocols and do this. And that ends up being useful. Like it's good to automate some stuff. Like you might want to automate your fitness. You might want to automate your nutrition. But man, if you automate everything, you turn into, like spoiler alert, you lose the life, you turn into a bit of a robot. So you lose that sense of fun and aliveness. And the world isn't going to reward that. The world isn't going to reward somebody who can predictably write down the instructions to how they should spend each day, minute, hour,

• 15:39Speaker 01

  and who can't respond to change. Change, like the world, your career, your life, your day is going to change. So if you're gonna navigate that, it's really good to be what I would call a complexity athlete. Anybody can work with complicated problems. Go find an expert, follow the best protocol. But complex problems require an attentional athleticism where you're always pausing. And that's what I see, whether it's in the baseball players here at Major League Camp, or I see it with great decision makers, I see it with great leaders. In complex world, in the real world, it is very useful to have the ability to stop and to zoom out and to say, ask yourself, what is this? What is actually happening here?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  And to get free of biases and really look, and then take action. And then try something and see what happens, and then zoom out again. It's like the DNA of that process, that ability to say, wait a minute, I'm gonna let go of everything, I'm gonna pay attention in a deep way, and now I'm gonna try something new. And that lets you navigate this, I call it the squiggly path. Like, there's very few straight lines in life. So when you reach one of those curves, it feels like failure. It feels like you're going the wrong way, it feels like a dead end. But to navigate that squiggly path, you've gotta stop, zoom out, try to see it clearly, look at the people around you, try to get resources, and then take another step and see what happens, and then stop again. And so, these places that I visited had this rhythm to them that was so fascinating,

• 17:05Speaker 01

  because they were really good at like bold action and agency and self-organizing around problems. And they're also really good at like, okay, hang on a sec, let's stop, let's talk about this. What just happened? What did we just learn? What matters here? Are we still seeing the world the same way? And that skill set is just like fundamental navigational stuff. It's like your machete and your compass, right? You need a machete, life's like this jungle, you need to be able to take action and explore a path, but then you need a compass and say like, what's up? And that pausing, that open pause, I started to think of them as like just these big ass pauses. They were just really good at creating this spacious attentional space where they could see what was happening. And then where it gets interesting is that's aligned with how our attention systems in our brain actually are built.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  They are actually built to do those two things. And so, this isn't learning some crazy skill, it's more like just doing what you're made to do.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  Let me share a little background with you. The only reason in my 50s right now that I can do the full splits is because I do a lot of yoga, but because I was a baseball catcher into college. And so the Asian squat from age 10, that's the only reason. And the only reason that I'm talking to you right now is because I had a deep curiosity in the mid 1990s about who was on the opposite side of the bearings bank implosion in Singapore. Okay, this guy named Nick Leeson, and he blew up the bearings bank in Singapore. And so I was fascinated because he was trading in the futures markets. And so essentially there was somebody on the other side.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  And the guy on the other side was the owner of the Red Sox.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  No way, John Henry, that guy?

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Yes, so he made his fortune in this trading style that I write about, and then got the three World Series, maybe it's four now. So yeah, the only reason I'm talking to you is because I was fascinated by, and I was the first one to figure it out. Just to have some background, the thing that I really wanted to bring up where you were going was my favorite conversations was with a psychologist out of Berkeley named Alison Gopnik. And she talks about Bayesian babies, the whole idea, take a step, follow, take a step, follow. And that I think gets back to our overall conversation too, which is when you take a step, then you see you adjust, but you've got to take the step. If you don't take the step, if the group doesn't take the step, then there's nothing to adjust to, you can't learn anything. So you take the step.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  And this is where I think so many adults, they fall off and back to the whole idea of purpose. They sit back in the easy chair and they say, oh, let me dream out what my purpose is. No, you've got to start something, then you can maybe find your way to one of the groups, organizations that you've written about in your new book.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Action is actually a form of planning. I think in our modern world, we are entrained on the idea that we can analyze our way forward. We're absolutely entrained, this idea that we're computational beings, we should make good decisions. That's when our kids leave the house, what do we say? Make good decisions. That actually is only partly true, right? Think about times in your life where you've learned the most. Was it when you were just analyzing like crazy? No, it was when you did stuff.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  Was it when you were in school?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not. It's funny, but we absolutely do get in trained on this idea that we can analyze our way forward. When in fact, we sort of experiment and relationship our way forward. That's on that squiggly line. That's experiments and relationships. To me, it's far more fascinating to think about. You know, our schools are built around this idea of everything being complicated. So when you need to fix something, boom, here's a solution. In the book that I talk about, his name is Jeffrey Borman, and he did an experiment with middle schoolers that kind of speaks to this. Middle school sucks, right? Everybody knows it's terrible times. So they try to improve it and they give kids social emotional modules to here's how to be empathetic. And they teach them how to do that as if you can just boom, teach it. He tried something different. He had each kid, it took 30 minutes. It cost nothing. It was free, basically.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Each kid read a letter coming in first day of sixth grade. They read a letter from the graduating class ahead of them that says a couple of messages in it. It says, hey, guess what, Bobby? Sixth grade is hard, but you'll get through it and the teachers are there to help you. That's all it said. And then a week later, they got a chance to write a letter with some advice for incoming sixth graders. Now you guys write. That simple act, that act of reading and writing these letters had way more impact than all the social emotional modules did. It dropped failing grades by 20%. It improved attendance by 19%. You don't see effects like that very often, massive effects, because they got to experience it. And I think we downgrade, we just underrate the power of experimenting together. And that's what I saw.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  That's what community actually is. It's when you get people together. And I think in our individualized world, we don't do it often enough, whether it's traders or anything else. But over and over, I saw the power of small groups gathered around questions like, what does great look like for us? What does a great day look like for us? Let's say I see it with the coaches here at spring training. The major league coaches gather up and they talk about, who's the best coach you ever had? What did they do? Right? And exploring together into those questions. And then they go off. And do a bunch of little experiments. What works? What's the best way to design batting practice? There's probably another way to do it. Let's try it. At batting practice, we've had old men throw slow fastballs to players for years, and they all hit home runs. We've done it for years. It makes sense, makes the players feel comfortable.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  But somebody asked the question a few years ago, does it make them better? And let's do an experiment. Let's have machines throw pitches and let's not tell the players what's coming. It turns out that approach where you're going to replicate the game, make it much harder, players didn't like it. It went against their instincts. Some coaches weren't so sure. But that experiment took us into a better place. We now train hitters better than we used to. So it's about action.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  The only sport I really played is baseball. But to talk about something like flourishing with baseball, and for people that know something about the sport, and to look around at the various teams, the teams that flourish and the teams that don't. Now, of course, a lot of this, if you know something about baseball, audience, a lot of this is about money. So if you're the Dodgers, you spend a boatload of money, you're going to flourish.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  That's exactly the problem we're facing with the Guardians. We're one of the poorest teams in baseball. Our salary is about one-third, one-fourth of what the Dodgers are spending, one-fourth. And with some of these approaches in terms of activating our coaches and doing a lot of experiments and building these little communities of experimentation, we've won as many games as the Yankees over the last four years, and we've spent $1.3 billion less. And we made the playoffs seven times.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  If you can, a few examples as to why, and I won't say the Indians because it's stuck in my head for so many years. I have to say Guardians. But give some reasons why, because you've said you've worked with them for a long time, that they've been able to flourish with far less money than the Yankees, without an Aaron Judge. But ultimately, they've got the win totals that justify. What are some of the flourishing secrets behind the Guardian's success?

• 24:03Speaker 01

  It's an ecosystem, right? And with any ecosystem, you can't, it's not a machine. You can't say, here are the three levers to push. But I can tell you some of the elements that are present. One of the elements that's present is extraordinary stability. Our top leaders have been there for 29 and 20 years. The owner gives them a lot of, ton of latitude to do whatever they want within those budgetary constraints. The other ability is really agility, being able to evolve in real time. It's the point now where the only way we win is to do things differently. If we do things like other teams, we will lose because we have less money, less resources. And the key thing really was shifting the organizational generative question. There's a question at the heart of every organization, right?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Sometimes the question is, how do we maximize shareholder profits? For the guardians, the question always was, prior to 2013, the question was, how do we identify the best player? How do we Moneyball this thing? Is there's hidden value? How do we identify the best player? Like with any solution like that's focused on answers. That's focused on locating a sure answer. And those answers end up becoming very transferable. Other teams figured that out. Other teams figured out how to do that.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  The arbitrage is on.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  It's on, right. And so it's a copycat world. Your advantage there is good for a little while, but as with Moneyball, boom, it gets copied. And so they flipped the organizational question. Some leaders back in 2013 said, we can't ask that question anymore. Now we have to build every system around a simpler question, which is, how do we help every player improve? We actually have no idea how good any player can be. We have all-stars that were signed for peanuts, and we have players that we signed for millions, and everybody does, that don't end up being all-stars. So how do we build around the player to help them develop themselves? And so we change the structure of the organization where everything is built around the player. We have meetings now that we didn't used to have, where the players at the center and around you have strength and conditioning, and you have nutrition, and you have mental performance,

• 26:04Speaker 01

  you have domain coach, you have physical, and you have tactical. And those kinds of meetings where everything flips. There's a million little movements, but all of it was really started by that one move where it was this move toward humility and saying, we actually don't know how good any of these players can be. We need to build systems that allow players to grow themselves. And that ended up unlocking a whole bunch of little experiments and systems that gradually those have added up to developing more and more top players.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  I don't know if it's necessarily controversial, but if we're talking about a professional baseball team, there's ultimately cream rising to the top. People are paid very good money. Generally speaking, the best players are going to be on the field overall. There's a real driven nexus to get this team. But in the real world, finding a team, finding a group that you can be a part of. And this gets at also like what type of individual you might be, what type of group might you join? I happen to be in an Asian country. I've learned later in life, that particular culture is better for me. It's just better for me. It's more of my personality.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  That opens up the conversation to be, hold on, somebody's better than somebody else. The whole competition thing, the whole merit thing gets on the table. So how do we come into this idea of this group flourishing and even finding this in such a fractured world? A fractured world that is pretty easy to see is political, cultural, racial. We have an extremely fractured world. Now, again, it's really cool in professional baseball. Look, if that guy at first base is white, or that guy's black, or he's Dominican or whatever. If he's the best one, it doesn't matter, right? But in the real world, we don't have those incentives necessarily to keep it all together. How do you speak to this idea of where we are today?

• 28:00Speaker 00

  I must share also too, on this podcast, I found the conversations pre-COVID with Gen X, baby boomers. I forget the one in the middle of World War II. That I found those conversations were really nice. And you didn't have to worry about somebody was, oh, am I going to say the wrong word? And now I find post-COVID, I have found that a lot of the business authors are not doing anything interesting. So when I saw your work, I was like, oh my God, thank you. But really, things have changed and I see this fractured world. I see this world where people are on pins and needles. And even right now in our conversation, we're only both going to say so much. We might say more if we were sitting around having a beer or something.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  But how do you see this fractured world that we're in? Because I know you're very optimistic about it and you've got some great examples where people do things together and where they do flourish. And I don't question any of that, but I do see this overall societal break that is frustrating.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  It is frustrating. It's depressing. You see it. I would say it's partly real. There's no question that people are feeling this way. Couple of things come to mind. In the end, what we have is a space problem, these common spaces where we used to come together and set that stuff aside. So those spaces have been replaced in many ways by this online attention industry, trillions of dollars get made by keeping us isolated and ticked off. And they do that largely by putting words and images on glass screens and creating algorithms that keep us looking at them, which is not an easy thing to do. The encouraging thing that I see is that we're starting to understand that's just sort of part of our humanity and part of our attentional systems.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  When we look at the way our attention systems actually work, we don't have one of them. We have two attention systems. One of them is narrow. It's designed to judge and be swift and merciless and categorize everything. And that's the advantage. That's what they are exactly. That's what all of those companies are making money off of by activating that system. But there's another system. It's called relational attention and it is something that's activated by a different sort of a space. And we're starting to understand that to be attentionally healthy, you need to have both. There was a neighborhood in Paris. It was a typical disconnected, middle-class neighborhood. Everybody's got their nose buried in their phone. And there was a newspaper man named Patrick Bernard, who retired and he got frustrated at that. I don't want to live in a neighborhood like this. So he did an experiment.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  He rented off a street, closed off a street, put a giant table down the middle of the street, 800 feet long, put up flyers and sent emails saying, you're invited to the longest lunch table in Paris. Come join us at noon on Saturday. And people called him naive. There's an expression in French, if you think someone is naive and Pollyannaish, you call them a teddy bear kisser. Oh, you're a teddy bear kisser. So they called him that. And This is never gonna work. These are Parisians, man. Everybody's snobby because they're Parisians. This is crazy. But he did it. The whole neighborhood turned out and it was this incredible festival. People of all political stripes coming together and having just eating and drinking and playing music. And then, this was his smart move. He divided them, he allowed them to divide themselves into interest groups.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Like, okay, if you're interested in bicycles, here's a sign. Go gather up over here. If you're interested in like French history, if you're interested in dogs, if you're interested in museums, whatever it is, self-organize. But in those groups, there were a couple of rules. And the first rule was no negativity or politics. Can't do it. We're not doing that. Second rule was you gotta gather around a joy device. Food, wine, coffee. And those groups are free to gather. So he set the conditions, almost like riverbanks, to allow people to have agency to self-organize. And you go in that neighborhood now and it feels like you're in a village. There was older woman who broke her wrist and she got 15 offers to help her carry her groceries that week. There's a whole system where people get to visit people in hospitals.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  The neighborhood now feels absolutely close-knit. And it's not perfect. It's not some magical Truman show where now everybody's happy. But they found a way to balance their attentional health, where they're not focused on this narrow task attention, where they're creating spaces where they can wake up to community. So in places like this, what they're finding is that we're pre-wired for this. This is what we like. This is what we are drawn to. This is what we're built to do, to be around people in that way. And so they're giving us kind of a blueprint for doing that. And this long table idea, maybe it showed up in Ho Chi Minh City, I don't know. But it's being done all over the world now. This idea of, no, let's just put a table out and let people come together and see what happens.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  Let me share an example with you. So for over a decade, as I mentioned, I've done yoga in Ho Chi Minh. And before, before COVID, it was usually very big groups. 20 to 50 people in a room. And that became very collegial. And for me, it's a good thing. I'm single and there's a lot of ladies. Okay, it's a good thing. Not complaining, but it was still very collegial. And then sometimes there was this acro yoga where it was balancing people. And then you get into something like COVID where it changed people, it changed that situation. And now, all these years later, the group yoga kind of disappeared and it got replaced by Pilates. And Pilates is a very one-on-one, non-group thing, generally speaking.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  And usually tied to these days, the whole social media complex, taking pictures and all that kind of stuff. So it is interesting. I think that when you find a group that's flourishing, sometimes we can take it for granted and then the next thing you know, it goes away.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  I know. There's a lot of incentives to take it away, right? It doesn't make sense. It makes more economic sense to isolate people and to provide them with very specific services. Whereas making the argument to have, oh, no, wait a minute, let's all do it together. Doesn't make economic sense. So we go back to courage, I guess now. But what you find is that you end up in those situations of shared improvement in relationships. What you end up creating is way more than the sum of its parts. What you end up creating is this ecosystem that is flexible, fluid. There's a reason, I don't want to get too abstract here, but there's a reason that ecosystems evolved, right? There's a reason that our world is made of them. They're the most resilient, powerful thing in the world.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  If you treat your life like a machine, you are leaving a lot on the table. If you treat your relationships like they're machines, you're not taking advantage of these fundamental elemental powers of growth. And think about that group yoga class. Think about all the little conversations that happen as people come and go. Little collisions, little molecular collisions that might grow into something, right? All of a sudden, you've got new relationships. All of a sudden, you've got community. The word community comes from sharing gifts.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  We talked about it earlier, is this desire for automation drives so many men, especially, I'm Gen X, but it's less Gen X, but it's definitely millennial, definitely Gen Z, where the whole mindset of so many guys is, let me just automate this. I think to myself, okay, I get it. But then once you do that, what do you got? You got a tower in the sky? You got a penthouse condo and then you sit there and do what?

• 35:26Speaker 01

  And do what? Exactly. And it's not about automation, what these places are doing and what, they're kind of showing us the way. You should automate some stuff, but you have to animate too. Habits lead to automation, having a machine figured out where you're going to get a measurable response. You're going to put in one input, you get the predictable output. That's what automation is, right? Input, output. Animation is a moment where, right before you sit down to write your blog, you light a candle and you take a second and think about all the great writers who have sat in a place like this and figured it out. You pause and you don't do something useful. You pause and you open up your mind a little bit and you connect. There's an exercise a psychologist at Columbia taught me. It's called the counsel exercise.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  And basically, it's really simple, but you close your eyes and you think about, oh, you picture a wooden table. And at that table, you picture people in your life, living or deceased, who truly have your best interest in mind, who are truly deeply on your side. Picture them sitting there. And then you picture yourself walking up to that table. And then you picture yourself asking those people if they love you and you listen to their response. And then you ask those people, what do I need to know right now? What is it important, what's important that I need to know right now about my path? Tell me. And you listen. And it's, I'm not a woo woo guy. I've made my life in scientific journalism, looking at how the machinery works.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  This is pretty cool machinery, let me tell you. Like, it is a moment where you are doing something that makes no sense, that is completely useless. And if you do it once a day, which is called your counsel exercise, what you'll find is that you'll be more grounded. What you'll find is that you'll be deeply connected to things that were already there waiting for you. All those people that you think of sitting at the table, maybe it's your parents, maybe it's your siblings, maybe it's a great teacher, maybe it's a great colleague, who genuinely have your best interest in mind. They'll be with you in a way that they weren't. And so what we see with automation is we're leaving all of that out of our lives. We're bleeding that out of our lives.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  And if we look at all of your ancestors, at all the people who lived and died so that you could be here right now, very few of them automated their lives. They lived much deeper spiritual lives than we do now. They spent a lot of time thinking about their ancestors, thinking about purpose, thinking about meaning, living in community. And so activating this in our own life, creating these pauses, creating these moments where we can think deeply about what matters and what doesn't matter, where we can connect to the people, to the ideas, to the feelings that make us human. They're not extra. They're not like some extra benefit. Oh, that's just some woo good feel stuff. It's not the icing on the cake. Like, it's the whole cake, right? It's the whole thing.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  And so finding moments to do that, finding community to do it with, ends up being essential, I would say. It's like essential, not just wellness stuff, but just human stuff.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  My own life is usually the best ones because I know something about them. I never expected to be in a place like Vietnam. And when I came here, I was on a speaking tour in Asia. This was not on the schedule. And I came here and I had a little bit of a sense of, oh, I'm an American. What am I doing here? This is like 10 years ago. And then after being here for many years, living here, I decided I've got to do something because this place is so misunderstood and not known, no understanding of it at all. And so I started first with a script idea, going down that path. But just saying, I'm going to make a movie, a positive movie about Vietnam. And it's now morphed into a novel.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  It was amazing how many people you start to meet, the community that starts to develop out of nowhere. And so you say you're not a woo guy. I don't know that if I am, but I do think there is something going on that's beyond coincidence. I haven't asked you for the baseball. I'm sure there's some amazingly interesting story. I got shacked up with the Guardians, right? Maybe you'll tell me. A little bit of time left, but I love the idea of people just imagining that whatever it might be and wherever it might happen. And again, for your new book, people can go check out and read all the examples and they get into the nitty gritty of where you really go.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Today, I just wanted to have the big, open conversation, but the idea of flourishing and having that purpose, I think it keeps you from aging.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  It keeps you awake. It keeps you right. I agree. I could use the word surreal. All of life is slightly surreal that you would end up there, that I was a kid growing up in Alaska. I wanted to be two things. I wanted to be a baseball player and I wanted to be a writer.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  I never wanted to be a writer. I've never got above C in English.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  That's great. That's great. And if you could really zoom out, we sort of go through life, looking through a toilet paper tube in our situation or through that narrow attention. But when we really stop, and I guess a lot of the interest in psychedelics is also weirdly connected to this conversation too. When you really stop and take a deep look at the nature of reality and look at the nature of what it means to go through your life and have these encounters and the possibilities that are in each moment, that are in each conversation, that are in each relationship, that are in each step forward, how those change. It gets pretty interesting. It gets endlessly fascinating and having those navigational tools that I think you're talking about and that we've been talking about end up being not like destinational, they end up being directional.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  It's not like this idea of purpose or this idea, they're more like horizons that we move toward and in a directional way, without ever feeling like we can capture it and finish it because that horizon, you'll approach it and then you'll see it differently. And then you'll see it differently and then you'll see it differently. When the book's cover, we use this wave motif. It allows you to ride the waves and navigate these waves in a way that makes you fitted to the problems that life will create. Everything is not going to go great for you. Period. It will not. Every relationship will not work out. You will get older. You will lose things. You will suffer. That is absolutely part of the deal.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  But if you're going to navigate those waves, it's good to have some tools. It's good to have a paddle to move you. In a certain direction, it's good to have a compass to say, there's that horizon. And it's good to be ready for those waves. Because when they knock you sideways, it can feel very disorienting. But when you realize, when you tune into what's actually happening, when you pay attention in the right way, and able to zoom out and see the whole river. That's where you go from being a cork tossed around to actually being able to surf a little bit.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  I've got a side question for you. I can think about this myself for those very interesting people that I've had a chance to meet and learn from. Absolutely shaped my thinking, everything almost. Do you have a few names and why for people that you came in contact with? Because you're going to be one of those guys that's got a very interesting rolodex. It doesn't make a difference, the billionaire's still got to wear pants. They'll still got to put their pants on. They're still people, but sometimes they do have a perspective that is why they were successful. Because they have that perspective. Do you have a couple of names of people that you can recall over your career? That have really shaped you, shaped a thought process or a thinking?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  So at my council table, you're asking me about in a way, right? Who's at that wooden table that I would say? When I was a young editor, I thought I knew everything and I was real focused on having the answers and being the smartest one in the room. And there was a guy at the magazine where I worked who was just, I don't know why he was so nice to me. But he showed me how to be a better editor and a better person. And I'm still deeply in touch with him. At each stage, what is that saying, like when the student is ready, the teacher will appear? I think that's what I experienced. There's somebody else when I got into this area of leadership and culture. Who's just been former SEALs commander. And you think of a Navy SEAL and you think of somebody who's very stern and businesslike.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  And this guy couldn't be more energetic and curious. Really showed me a lot about leadership that I didn't understand deeply. And all these things have happened, not because I sat at their knee and they taught me things. It was more that we had experiences where we drove from. Chicago to Boston together when he moved house, or went on a big mountain bike trip and somebody falls over into a cactus, or whatever those experiences might be. And then you encounter them and you see them navigate those things. And it teaches you how to stand. Those relationships are never about the information. They're about the stance. They're about like, how do they think about things? How do they see things and respond to them? What energy are they bringing to that?

• 44:21Speaker 01

  And it's just been endlessly powerful to have this community of people that live in my head and my heart. Like, they absolutely are with me all the time when I think about, how can I be a better parent? How can I be a better spouse? How can I be a better friend? Now, there's a group of them right now, like six guys that we started indoor climbing out of the blue. I didn't, don't really like indoor climbing, but now we play music together. We go on ski trips together and they're just absolutely changed who I am. So it's cool doing, you think about it in that way. They're not big names, but man, to me, they're no bigger names. I really hope, and I don't know how it's going to shake out, because the generations are definitely coming along with different experiences. As we talked about at the very top of this conversation,

• 45:05Speaker 01

  I have concern for the younger generations that are living on the screen. I've got some hope. I have four daughters. They're aged now thirty to twenty-four. We had them for Thanksgiving and they had some friends with them. So we had this big old crowd for Thanksgiving. And I saw them like interact in ways. And also, I can do the old guy thing and be like, kids these days, you know? There was a time we were getting ready for Thanksgiving and everything was chaotic. And the kid turkey was coming out of the oven and I was starting to do my old, come on, kids, we should set the table, you know, da, da, da, da, da. But I didn't say anything and they just swung into action. And it was like one of those Disney films where all the creatures like, choo, set the table or something. Ooh. And then I said to one of my kids' friends, I was like, that was cool. That was amazing.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  And my kid's friend said, community is crazy. Where she just like, the power, she really understood the power of community, like the power of not having somebody saying, you do this, you do this, you do this, that they self organize. They saw what needed to be done. They came together and it was just like this little Petri dish of the power of that. And I think that this generation is getting aware of that power and realizing what kind of life you have when you live on the screen and in the algorithm, or what kind of life you can have when you live in community.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great place to for us to wind down. That's getting into the nitty gritty. So people have got to check out the book Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment. Isn't joy such a great word, right? Everyone knows if they know English, they know what joy means. And it's like one of the happiest words that exists, I think.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Isn't it great? Yeah, it comes out of things such a burst and the depth of it, not just mere happiness, but joy, to enjoy, to live in joy. And it's got that sense of surprise. And that's something that we always see in these places where it's man. If you're not occasionally surprised by what's going on or delighted by what's going on, like, it's a good feeling.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  Daniel, where can we send people? The book, Amazon, all that kind of fun stuff? You got a personal website you want to send people to as well?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Danielcoil.com is a good place to start and just click the link if they want to send me a note. I get them.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Thank you. This is really fun. Thanks for having me, Michael.

• 47:31Speaker 02

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