Stanford Professors Bill Burnett & Dave Evans On How To Design A Meaningful Life

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans created perhaps the most popular course at Stanford, "Designing Your Life," and co-authored the book "How to Live a Meaningful Life." This conversation explores the intersection of product design and personal development. We discuss the loneliness epidemic, why there is no best self, curiosity as the gateway drug to wonder, the transactional world versus the flow world, and why the wisest people across every tradition all arrive at the same conclusion. This one broke me open in the best way possible. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today's Sponsors: Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://www.rivian.com Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order👉🏼https://www.seed.com/RichRoll BetterHelp: Get 10% OFF the first month👉🏼https://www.betterhelp.com/richroll Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉🏼https://www.gobrewing.com WHOOP: The all-new WHOOP 5.0 is here! Get your first month FREE👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:08Speaker 01

  If you want to live more meaningfully, we can help you with that. Meaning is that which...

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Dave Evans and Bill Burnett are the founders of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University. They've both worked at companies from Apple to Electronic Arts.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  They use design thinking to influence every part of their life.

• 1:26Speaker 04

  All we're trying to do is offer tools that work for human beings. The happier, more meaningful version of you. Prototype your way to it. Making a little progress on a huge question is fabulous. This is as good as it gets.

• 1:44Rich Roll?

  Welcome, guys. Thank you for doing this.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Well, thanks for having us.

• 1:47Rich Roll?

  Thanks for having us. We're really thrilled to be here. This is gonna be a conversation about designing a life of meaning. But why does this matter? How is availing myself of your counsel going to make my life better?

• 2:00Speaker 04

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

• 2:35Rich Roll?

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

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm full time with all my undergrads and I'm actually teaching the graduate class as well. I think, you know, what's going on is they're lonely, right? And social media has kind of interrupted the normal process of communicating with each other. You know, if you look at all the surveys, college students are having less sex, partying less and having less fun. So that doesn't seem right. You went to Stanford, I went to Stanford undergrad. You're supposed to party when you're an undergrad. I think the loneliness thing and then a sense of right now, particularly a sense that, oh, man, if, if I finish my degree and I graduate, will, will my, will everything I know be obsolete because of AI? So there's a lot of pressures on them. But I would also say, you know, it's still a very optimistic generation.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  And they wanna, they wanna have impact in the world. They don't want to just go get some corporate job. A lot of them are walking away from the business consulting thing or the private equity thing and looking for something that's got more substance, more humanity. You know, computer science enrollment dropped 16% this, this year because everybody's realizing maybe that's not the path to a job. And I think as people realize, oh, taking these degrees I didn't really want just to get a job. Is that, is that pressure goes away? I think you're going to see more and more students taking, you know, humanities major, a poetry major and a creative writing major. So I think there's optimism in the students. But it's a lot, it's a lot of loneliness and a lot of pressure.

• 4:15Rich Roll?

  It's a really interesting dynamic and I suppose on some level unprecedented. We were chatting before the podcast, you know, about like when I was at Stanford, it was just about, you know, getting to the career center and what's the path to the safe and secure, like high salaried career, the McKinsey's, the investment banks or medical school or what have you. And it was a pretty limited kind of set of choices, but there was a kind of sense of security, like or certainty, like if I go in this direction, like I will, I can foresee a career path and there are kind of steps that I can take and this is how it's going to play out. And the world is very different now. You mentioned

• 4:57Rich Roll?

  it like AI, I mean, it's more than social media. There's this existential threat, like what is the world going to look like? How can we even prepare for something that, you know, we've never been presented with? We can't conceptualize what the world is going to look like. And I think it's hard for any of us to imagine the level of sort of fear and dread that that must instill in a young generation that's trying to forecast, you know, a future life for themselves.

• 5:22Speaker 04

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

• 6:07Speaker 04

  How did I get to be a lawyer? It's just moving up. Yeah. You know, and so society and circumstance and politics and technology has brought the existential question up sooner, but it's the same question. So in a sense,

• 6:21Speaker 01

  The good news is if we can help these young adults get their hands on better answers to bigger questions sooner, they've got a longer runway.

• 6:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  But it's a tough time.

• 6:29Rich Roll?

  That is, that is a very curious thing that teenagers and people in their early twenties are grappling with the big questions and not waiting until, you know, the midlife, you know, situation where you're starting to wonder why you made all these choices that led you to this place of, you know, where you're lacking fulfillment and meaning and purpose. Like perhaps, or, you know, to put an optimistic lens on it, they're going to answer those questions for themselves so early in life, such that they're paving the way for, you know, decades of meaning and fulfillment and satisfaction and purpose that, you know, our generation, the older generations, just didn't really even ponder. Like when I was in college, nobody was walking around thinking about like how I'm going

• 7:13Rich Roll?

  to have an, well, not any, I mean, there were some people, but for the most part, like people were just, you know, kind of in their own self obsession about getting ahead in the world or, or putting their stamp on things, not like what is going to be most meaningful or even, you know, from like even beyond just impact, like what is going to create, you know, true contentment for me?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think it's one of the reasons that our class is so popular and that the idea, um, I think the students are realizing, I'm not going to be able to plan this because it is unprecedented. No one's going to know what the jobs will look like in five years or 10 years. And we reframe that through the design lens saying, don't you think it's so cool that five years from now, you're going to be doing something that hasn't even been invented yet? So the goal is prepare yourself for that future. And so the planning strategies won't work because there's not enough data, but a design strategy, a design strategy for your future, it has the most flexibility because we're always looking for lots of answers. We're prototyping lots of solutions. And so I think what we hear this pretty strongly from students who've taken the class, I feel more hopeful.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  This is a really good lens to think about my future. I was trying to plan it and optimize it, and that wasn't really working. And I could see that would fail. But this idea of designing my way forward, prototyping things, taking small risks and, and learning as I go. That feels doable. And so that's why, that's why the class is successful. I think that's why the first book, you know, a lot of people found something in it that was useful. And we're hoping now with the book on meaning, you know, we're sort of taking it up to the next level. It's like, well, what were you looking for in a well-designed life? Meaning. Okay, well, we're not philosophers. So the big meaning of life question, you know, go, go back to philosophy one-on-one for that. But if you want to get more meaning in your life, or you want to get more meaning out of your life, you want to live more meaningfully, we can help you with that because that's a design problem.

• 9:02Rich Roll?

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

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Well, it really starts back in 1999. So, you know, I'm a high-tech guy, but I've always cared about people and I always did youth work. You know, I taught Sunday School and I coached a little league and I've always been doing stuff with young people. And I got too busy. And I was just doing my business work and doing my own family and then, and got away from doing youth work. And then I thought, maybe I've got time to get back to it. So that was in the 90s. And I hadn't been around college students for a while. I'd hung on with college students a lot. So I better go back and check in with what's going on with college students. And I'm talking to a bunch of people about that who run programs or education or ministries or what have you. And this guy at Berkeley says, you should come here and teach a class. Which is, well, that's crazy. And that's not going to work. He goes, no, it is. And he explained how it could work. And so I taught a class at Berkeley called Finding Your Vocation,

• 10:05Speaker 04

  subtitle is Your Calling Calling, which is actually the origin class that turned into Design Your Life. I thought we'd do it once. At the end of the semester, one of the kids says, my roommate couldn't take it in the fall, Dave. Are you coming back in the spring? I said, if he gets nine more people with him, I'll come back. So 14 semesters later, we're on to something. So I had this idea. About trying to help people find their way. And then Bill took the job full time at Stanford, you know, made the bright decision to take a 50% cut in pay, stop running a company and start teaching full time. And we had lunch and he said, what are you doing? I'm doing this crazy thing in Berkeley. We should totally do this at Stanford, you know.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  And through the design lens.

• 10:41Speaker 04

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

• 11:10Rich Roll?

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

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Well, another, another trend that's obvious is that people are living kind of isolated in their echo chamber. They don't have strong communities. If you used to have a faith community or a neighborhood that was your community, those things have sort of mostly fallen by the wayside. So people are, in addition to they're personally lonely or struggling or anxious, they're looking for other people to hang out with. I mean, we're communal animals. And so we really were looking, Dave's teaching a program he can tell you about called the Distinguished Career Institute at Stanford. And it's all about creating a kind of a community. And so we were thinking. I mean, you forget students for a second, you talk to people in their 30s and 40s. Okay, they're in the middle of having kids, maybe.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  They got older parents that they're dealing with. But they don't have a community to hang out with, and they don't have anybody to talk to about what's going on. And so that was another one of the things we thought, oh, that's a design. We can design a solution to that and help people figure out how to create these, what we call formative communities. You want to talk about the DCI program a little?

• 12:43Speaker 04

  The Distinguished Careers Institute at Stanford started in 2015 by the, at that time, just recently retired dean of the medical school, Phil Pizzo, which is really a gap year for grownups. It's a gap year for grownups. But if you charge as much as Stanford does, it's a big number. You need a much fancier name than Gap Year for Grownups. And so anybody from, it can be as young as 45 up to 90, it's mostly 55 to 75 people at what we used to call retirement age, taking a whole year off and going, now what? What do I do with the rest of my life? What do I do with my one wild and wonderful life now? So these are open-minded, teachable, thoughtful people. But they are people who are asking that big question and don't have a framework to address it.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  I mean, so we've learned a lot about them and the whole idea of formative communities, which is a big, one of our four top ideas, comes directly out of my experience with those people. But I think your question, why is this arising so much now? Is that the institutions and the traditions that helped form people that said, gee, when that question comes up, here's how you might want to think about it, have fallen by the wayside.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  And now the common square is the internet. And so we heard literally a hue and cry that it's not working for me. I'm not having the, I wanted to have an impact and that's not working, or I wanted to be fulfilled. The two things we heard people saying over and over again that weren't working for them is the fulfillment thing is not working and the impact thing is not working. So we said, okay, then we need to reframe those problems and give you different ideas.

• 14:12Rich Roll?

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

• 14:36Speaker 04

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

• 15:21Speaker 04

  crisis around this thing. So my version of that would be it's that which moves me along toward having the experience of being more fully human. That's the shortest answer I can give. Do you want to add to that?

• 15:31Speaker 01

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

• 15:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and then you feel bad about it.

• 15:43Speaker 01

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

• 15:51Speaker 04

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

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so for us, it's like, wait a minute, we're not trying to cram more in, we're not trying to set a bar you can't clear. We're really about low bar, you know, set the, set the bar low and clear it. You know, and a lot of our stuff is psychology based, is positive psychology based, you know, the things like James Clear's, you know, atomic habits, like small changes are how you make big changes. So we rely on a lot of that stuff. But in the case of the meaning question, to sort of take out the pressure, it's like, What you, I think what you're looking for is to be, be fully alive. We have, we can call it fully alive.

• 16:29Rich Roll?

  Aliveness.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  By design. You want aliveness. You want to feel a connection to other people. That's the community thing. You want to feel like you did something today. Uh, that wasn't just about you. It was about some, something bigger than yourself, right? We talk about the Maslow's Pyramid and it, it used to be that the peak of the pyramid was self-actualization. Maslow said that when you get everything else figured out, you become the fully realized version of yourself. What people don't know is that in, in his diaries in the last couple of years of his life, he said, no, actually that's not it. That's all about the ego. The peak of human development, whatever, is self-transcendence. It's being, doing something for someone other

• 17:12Speaker 01

  than yourself. It's transcending yourself and it's, it's, which is in the, in wisdom traditions is compassion, is, you know, altruism, is empathy. That's where we're asking people to look to see where, where is it that you have the opportunity to be fully alive and transcending your own ego? And by the way, he also got it wrong because you can be self-transcendent at any level of the pyramid. It's, it's, you know, you can, you, you don't have to be rich or fully realized or anything else to be transcendent or to, to care about others. And, and we have so much in the wisdom traditions and theological traditions, in science now, we know that altruism, empathy, the sense of awe in the world are all ways of achieving

• 17:55Speaker 01

  a transcendent kind of point of view. And when you do that, all the research says and our experience says, you will experience your life as being meaningful. Hmm.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  The meaning question, by the way, really goes to, so I want to have a meaningful life. Oh, what's a life? What's a person? So your definition of the human person absolutely informs your definition of what makes a person meaningful. Um, and our shortest definition of the person is you're a becoming. So a person is a become, you're an ever-growing person. And we say in the Life Design Lab, all of us contain more aliveness than when lifetime permits you to live out. There's more than one of you in there. So if according to the 1943 paper by Maslow, fulfillment, which is the result of self-actualization, occurs when you become all that one can be. That's what he says in print. And if there's more of you than a life permits you to be,

• 18:47Speaker 04

  oh, you can't have it. So the traditional understanding of fulfillment is a thing that's literally unattainable. So if I buy into that, which the NIH says is the stickiest idea in the social sciences, you know, one of the stickiest ideas of all time, 1943, we're still looking at that pyramid. And so a lot of people are going down a pathway that there isn't an end to, there's a dead end to. So we need, that's why we talk more about fully alive than fulfillment. And the outcome, according to Maslow, of self-transcendence is meaning-making. So I can either be ego-driven and I get to be all of me, I get to be fully manifested. Well, actually, that's okay. It's not a bad thing. But becoming actually, oh, I can have experiences of participating in bigger than myself as part of us. And we

• 19:31Speaker 04

  now know consciousness is collective. You know, there's a lot of neuroscience on this now that we don't just hang out with each other. We're not autonomous beings bumping into each other like, like molecules. We are in fact, part of a social network. So we're really trying to understand how people actually live in ways that actually helps them experience that aliveness as humans.

• 19:50Rich Roll?

  There's a semester's worth of information that you just dumped in both of those two shares, like so many threads that I want to pull there. But sticking with Maslow for the moment, taking into consideration his, his like amendment from self-actualization to self-transcendence, irrespective of that update, the stickiness of the self-actualization idea, it's like this vestigial limb, you know, that is, is kind of refuses to go away, right? And implicit in that is this notion, there's a, there's a singular self-actualized self. And the aim is to, is to, you know, embody that fully. And, you know, everybody dies before they're able to do that. And I've heard you

• 20:33Rich Roll?

  Talk about, you know, kind of the, the, the quantum physics of all of this. Like, we live in a multiverse and we are, we contain multitudes. And there is an infinite number of selves and possibilities with every decision and thought that we have. Right? So disabusing people of this notion that there is one thing. But that is the stickiest idea of all, like whether it's, you know, be your best self. Self is like a single, it's, it's, you know, the idea is that there is one thing and we're always falling short of it. Which is contributing to us feeling bad about ourselves.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Is no best you, but there are lots of good yous. Let's go try some.

• 21:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And this bias to action.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:15Rich Roll?

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

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Did I miss it? Did I miss it?

• 21:33Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Yeah. Well, one is we do believe that there's more aliveness in you than one life can contain. And that's actually the good news. And then two, um, you know, one, a couple of the mindsets in the, in the book are, you know, let's, let's practice radical acceptance. Radical acceptance is, well, where am I right? Um, design starts in reality, you know? I was at Apple, we were designing the, the modern notebook. I know the guys on the iPhone team. When you're doing something that's never been done before, you got to start with, what do we got right now? What, what are the parts we can put together? So radical acceptance and then availability. The other mindset is like, okay, if I'm here in the present moment, what's actually available? I mean, this, this hypothetical best self way out there, it's like, it's like, oh, I'm going to run a marathon.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Except you looked at my phone, I only did 6,000 steps today, right? So this is not going to happen. So we got, you got to get in the moment, where, where are you right now? And what's available to you to go forward? And if you could just put aside the, I'm optimizing my best self. Or I'm hacking, you know, my, my whatever to get to someplace. What's, what could I actually do in the next moment, in the next few days, in the next few weeks? That would be coherent with who I think I am, where, where I think I'm going. Cause you're still got to have a direction, right? We, we talk about building a compass and having coherency in your life so that you, you, you may not know exactly what the next step is, but you know, you're going in the right direction. So the, the chance of suddenly going this way when you wanted to go that way is lower.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  If you actually, you know, if you know yourself a little bit. Radical acceptance, availability puts you, it's kind of the mind for, the two for mindsets, that's the power set. It's like, I know where I'm at, I'm being, I'm being honest with myself about what's possible. And then I'm trying to figure out what's available, what can, what can I make available? And when you start with that, you realize, well, there's so many more opportunities than I thought. Right? Designers never do their first idea, right? You always have a lot, you have lots of, we have lots of research, lots of ideas, leads to better choices. So you want to be able to have lots of ideas. And then, why don't people actually make the change? Well, because it's scary. I just read a neuroscience paper where they've

• 23:40Speaker 01

  actually proven that your brain is much more comfortable to work on a problem that you've got, that maybe is quite painful than to actually make a change to solve the problem. That the, that the stimulation of, you know, the, of the amygdala is much higher to do something new than it is to just deal with the pain you've got. So our thing is like, all right, well, then you're going to take really small steps called prototypes. Try something, have a conversation with somebody, see what it's like. Do a little experiment, have it, have an experience so you have a felt sense of what, what it might be to move in this direction. But if you practice radical acceptance and availability, all these opportunities start showing up. And so, you know, you do make some motions in the right direction,

• 24:22Speaker 01

  and then you get the felt sense of this is a good direction, or maybe that wasn't quite right. But no matter what you prototype, you're always learning something. So it, it, it really is that the designer's mindset, rather than the planner's mindset, or the engineer, the engineer would need to know, what's the formula that predicts the outcome? I don't have a formula. You know, a planner would need to know, well, what are the cause and effects for the, the next five steps? I don't know what the cause and effects are. But I know how to wayfind into this uncertain future and know that I'm in the right direction. And

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Radical acceptance, availability and prototyping is the sort of simple, I mean, it's the other thing, the message in this book, it's simpler than you think. You don't need to spend 10 years developing a meditation practice. You don't need to go out and do, you know, 40 day fast in the wilderness.

• 25:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Maybe I'll just fly a kite today.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:13Rich Roll?

  Or watch a sunset or something.

• 25:14Speaker 01

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

• 25:36Rich Roll?

  Product design is such a tactile way to deconstruct this problem because I'm just, as you're sharing, I'm thinking about a group of people sitting around, you know, Steve Jobs comes in and he's like, I want to make a portable MP3 player. And then he leaves the room, you know, and then you guys got to like, figure it out. You have all this gear in front of you. Well, if we do this, it's going to be this big. Is it really portable? Like you've got this giant problem you have to solve. There is an infinite number of choices and trade offs that you have to make, but that's the job. It is by definition grappling with uncertainty. But the human animal has a severe distaste for uncertainty, particularly when it comes to life choices, right? So finding a way to engage at a very kind of

• 26:21Rich Roll?

  like low bar where the risk, you know, is so minimal as a way of like that prototyping idea as a way of dipping your toe into it, I guess is what I'm hearing.

• 26:32Speaker 01

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

• 27:16Speaker 01

  in the future, the happier, more meaningful version of you.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Prototype your way to it, just the way we invent the future.

• 27:24Rich Roll?

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

• 28:03Speaker 04

  It surfaces two really critical things. So we talk, so what do we do? Where the design goes? Well, you know, we help people get unstuck. We mostly deal with stuck people, where people are stuck on meaning right now. And we'll probably give you some reframes to think about your problem differently. And the goal of the reframe is to be closer to radical acceptance and freer. So you've got more choices. And then we'll give you ideas and tools for how to actually act once you've gotten more free. And so the reframe thing is a big deal because you've got to be working on the right problem. Problem finding precedes problem solving. You're working on the wrong, wrong version of the problem really, really, really well. You're still going to get nowhere. So the two things that surface in the conversation you and Bill are just having for me are back to that personhood thing. So people kind of go, is this it? Am I getting it right? Is this really my best self?

• 28:46Speaker 04

  And how you mentioning how sticky that is. If it's actually true, there is no one best you. There are lots of wonderful yous and it could be pretty radically different, you know? You know, what if you, what if you went back and stuck with the lawyer thing and did that really? Well, that's really different than what you're doing now, you know? But that could be a wonderful version of you. So once you accept there isn't a right, then that thing, because people have the experience, well, this is pretty good, but I'm not sure it's really it. And I don't know what, I don't know what feeling like I found it feels like, but this isn't it yet. So there's this elusive, never ending thing I should be doing, but I'm not. And you're going to go, no.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  You're fine. You are a becoming. You're going to become more. If I'm better tomorrow, I was worse yesterday, and I'm never going to be done. So it's all partial credit essay questions. There's no right, wrong, multiple choice thing. So thing one, you're becoming. So relax, tomorrow's another day. And then the whole issue of, well, is the app this or that, you know, and am I going to be the lawyer, the athlete, or the podcaster, you know, which I can't do them all really well at the same time, brings us to, you talked about essentialism. We talk about the importance of understanding the scandal of particularity, you know, which is a philosophical concept that we think is terribly important. We knew we had the right editor when she underlined that introductory paragraph on that topic

• 30:10Speaker 04

  and said, if we get this right, we've done our job. I go, great, she gets it. It's terribly important. The scandal of particularity simply is, no ultimate is ever experienced in this life. Truth, beauty, justice, compassion, richness. Is this really the ultimate authentic rich? Have I got Bill right yet? No, you're a becoming that will never be realized. So even your own life is a particularity, a particular expression, in a particular space and time, with constraints and compromises. And you get to choose one of two reactions to that particularity, that constraint. Either, shoot, still not enough, not quite, I'm a

• 30:51Speaker 04

  little disappointed, or awesome, that's an honest reflection of something I care deeply about, and my longing says, it's kind of like that. I see the amazing sunset and my soul goes, yeah, that's what beauty's like. Go there. And then when it goes down, you don't go, well, that's over, thank God. You go, more, do it again. You're never satisfied. That never satisfiedness about life, that never satisfiedness about meaning, that never satisfiedness about yourself.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Isn't the bad news, it's the reminder that you're a human being and deeply implanted in you is this thing called longing. So befriend that, don't have your longing go, oh, haven't got it yet. Oh, I'm still a human being. I still have the drive to move into my ongoing becoming project. It's going to stay interesting all the way to the end.

• 31:47Rich Roll?

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

• 32:00Speaker 04

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

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and that sunset in and of itself was enough. I mean, then there'll be another beautiful sunset. And maybe I could even put myself someplace like Big Sur where the sunsets will be amazing. But that sunset is enough. I've got a couple of young grandkids and watching them play reminds me what curiosity looks like and how intrinsically wonderful human curiosity is. Because everything to them is new and everything is, you know, something to play. And, oh, Grandpa, look at this, look at this. What is it? It's an ant. Okay. But it's an ant, Grandpa. You know, it's like, and so I'm reminded that that we have the capacity for wonder. We have the capacity for for awe and joy and all these things.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  But they show up in moments, right? Moments of joy, moments of curiosity. And and most often people find it in nature because that's a huge, you know.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  A trigger for what we call flow, or a bigger definition of flow. And it often shows up in interactions with people. Because that's where we find connection and community and joy. So go for those things. They're available.

• 33:30Rich Roll?

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

• 33:46Speaker 04

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

• 34:16Rich Roll?

  Curiosity plus mystery equals wonder.

• 34:20Speaker 04

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

• 34:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, this is all rooted in being present in your life. Like, there's a kind of an eastern aspect to this in the sense that the answers that you're looking for are in the right here and now. And if you're bored or like you're just not paying attention enough. Because if you actually focused on anything, a blade of grass, pick your whatever, these things are infinitely fascinating. But we're just, we're living our lives in this daydream where we're constantly captured by the past and the future. And even. A discussion around designing a life of meaning is very forward casting, right?

• 35:31Speaker 04

  If impact is the primary form.

• 35:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you know what I mean? So, and, and you're teaching Stanford students and these people are all like, you know, like here's what, you know, they're all forecasting, right?

• 35:41Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 35:41Rich Roll?

  And they're trying to put all the pieces together. And we're all missing our lives in the moment, but the only way that we can experience awe and wonder or true connection with another person, um, or even, uh, you know, find a locus for our curiosity is when we're anchored in the, you know, the, the, the moment that we're in, which is actually the only thing that's real anyway.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm not, Bill, coming on that, but quickly to say, you, by the way, you caught us with that comment because, um, after we figured out what we thought the book might be if we were going to write this book, we looked at each other and said, it's just about the present moment. Ram Dass was right, you know, be here now.

• 36:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  Like, everybody knows that. Why waste their time? Why waste the paper? And so we came to the conclusion, we talked for quite a long time, almost two years. Do we deserve to write this book? Doesn't everybody know? Um, in a sense, it's not the only thing we're talking about, but it's most of what we're talking about. And the conclusion was, well, either we're wasting the paper because it's obvious, or it's a fresh take with a really implementable, accessible, doable set of tools and approaches to get people back into this thing that we've lost track of. So you're, you, you figured it's really about the present moment, isn't it, guys?

• 36:49Rich Roll?

  Yep.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  Pretty much what the whole book is about. Pretty much, pretty much.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  And it's, yeah, and it's not the, and it's, and it's not that hard. You don't, you know, you don't fast for 40 days. But back to curiosity, um, you know, the psychologists talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Extrinsic motivations is if I work hard, I get paid more money. You know, the money's the extrinsic thing. And we were talking-

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Or save the world, or I cure cancer.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah. And, um-

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Or my parents will tell me they love me.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, my parents will tell me they love me. Yeah.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  And maybe mean it this time.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  And intrinsic motivations, curiosity, autonomy, mastery, wanting to get good at things just because humans like to get good at things. Um, so there's a bunch of intrinsic motivations. And we were talking to, um, Bob Waldinger, and I know you had Bob on, uh, for a while. And Bob was, would tell us that there's some neuroscience around if you only stimulate external motivation and you don't live into or stimulate any internal motivations, you actually lose those circuits and you, and you lose your ability to be creative. You lose your, you lose your desire for mastery to get better. And so, one of the, one of the big messages in the book is, hey, we gotta, you know, we gotta work with both sides of our brain here.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  And then, and we gotta work with our intrinsic motivations a lot to keep those alive. Curiosity being the gateway and curiosity plus wonder, the things that you can't understand, but they're amazing. Uh, curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. So, we have an exercise, just sort of silly, put on your wonder glasses. And I actually have a pair of goofy glasses. But like, go out in the world and instead of just seeing what's there, or, or even just being curious about, huh, I wonder how that grass grows. Take the, the Henry Miller approach of like, if I really get into it, um, a world of, of, of wonder, mystery, excitement will unfold and my curiosity will be stimulated and that will lead to more wonder, more curiosity.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  It's, it's kind of a, it's kind of a flywheel. But we talk about, you know, the brain is kind of two, works in two worlds, the transaction world and the flow world. Dr. Lisa Miller at Columbia calls it the awakened brain and the achieving brain. But, you know, transactions, we do it every day, we get stuff done. Uh, and flow, which used to be just thought of as peak experience, is actually available all the time. Um, we, I think of it like a aquifer under, you know, under the surface. And you can drill down and get into flow in almost any circumstance. And that's where meaning is. Meaning's not in transactions. Getting transactions done is nice. It feels good for a while. Even impact feels good for a little while. But then, you know, what have you done for me lately? What's your impact lately?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  You know, hey, great numbers, you know, on the last five podcasts, what have you done for me lately? Right? And so, impact is transactional. And meaning is not transactional. It's, it's, it's down in the world of flow, in the world of intrinsic motivations. It's in the world of emotions, really. And we're under, we're undereducated there.

• 39:45Rich Roll?

  Sure. I mean, we live in a highly transactional, uh, world. All of the incentives of modern life are driving us towards a more and more, you know, transaction-based experience. And when those transactional relationships or career paths, et cetera, don't deliver on fulfillment and satisfaction and all of that. You know, then we're in this sort of arrival fallacy crisis. And then we descend into what Arthur Brooks calls like the strivers dilemma, convinced that it's always, you know, at the top of the next peak or around the bend. And we live our lives, you know, kind of on this hamster wheel of dissatisfaction, you know, and, and meaning is available to us all along.

• 40:29Rich Roll?

  You know, if we would just, you know, avert our gaze and kind of look over here. But to your point about like flow, it is this thing that we think about like, oh, this is something that you can harness for these peak performances, whether you're an athlete or you're, you know, some kind of creative person. But you distinguish that from what you call like simple flow, which is what you were getting at, right? So talk a little bit about that and like how people can access that and why that, you know, what the connection between that is and, and the meaning that we're lacking.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  Well, the point you're making about, you know, the transactional world, we, so we posited in the book, we, we observed in people's complaint, you know, I'm trying to make a difference. And so in the transactional world, the primary form of meaning making that's offered is, and did you make an impact? Did you change the world? Did you hit the mark? Did you hit the quarterly number? Did you, you know, do, did you do the thing? And most of the time you can't control outcomes, even if you do it right. So oftentimes having an impact fails. Even when it does succeed, it's a thing and it has a short half-life. So people keep saying, how, how do I have my more, more meaningful life? And they're just looking through the one window, one of the transactional space. That's why they're stuck. So that's where we said, well, you know, while there's really only one actual cosmos and world,

• 41:45Speaker 04

  your consciousness can only handle so much at a time. And we're leaning into this consciousness, this achieving brand that does transactions. So we talk about these other forms of meaning. Impact is fine, but it's just one form. Don't put all your eggs in that basket, you know, which go into these relationship things, these flow things, these wonder things. And so in flow, we said, well, flow is that the original book is flow, the psychology of optimal experience. Great. So when I'm in an apex of experience, I'm deeply engaged in a task. What's it like? You know, I'm so in the thing, I'm totally in the zone. What we refer to as apex flow. But all it really means is I'm so engaged that I'm fully experiencing the moment that I'm in. Fully alive.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  So the traditional definition of flow is I need a task. The requirements of which were right on the edge of my capability. So what I've really done is I've outsourced to the complexity of my task, the ability for me to fully experience something because I'm going to go do something that's so demanding, it will take all of my attention and now suddenly I'm fully engaged. And so I'm so in the moment, I'm not worried about other things. I'm, I'm Alex Honnold making the climb, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm doing this thing. And we're saying, wait, you can choose your way into flow. So a simple flow is, you know, oh, I'm just going to chop onions. That's so boring. I better, I better be, you know, um, doing my steps to get in my 10,000 while chopping. Can I chop while doing steps and having a podcast on at the same time? Yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  Great. As opposed to no, just choose to totally be chopping onions. Enjoy the feel of it, enjoy the, the, the, the texture of the knife going through the food. Notice the smells, your body can smell things, be fully present at the moment. That's a choice. And we said, the flow world is the place where flow experiences come from. So we, we just came up with an idea. Hey, there's two worlds, not just one. There's the transactional world and the flow world. You're mostly missing the flow world. That's where flow is had, it's in the present moment. Let's go over there some more. So the biggest idea we have about flow is it's there all the time. You could have it in lots of forms.

• 43:49Rich Roll?

  In Lisa Miller's world of the awakened mind.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 43:54Rich Roll?

  I'm concerned about these ideas coming across as, as very highbrow. And I want to drill down into some real world examples because I'm imagining the person who's listening to this or watching it and going, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. You know, the awakened brain and like chopping onions. Like, you don't understand my life. Like, I'm just trying to make it through the day. I'm deeply unhappy, but I'm stuck. There's no possible way that I can leave this job. I've got, you know, two kids at home and a mortgage and, you know, car payment, et cetera. I think this is the situation with like just so many people, if not most people. They are living a life that lacks meaning and fulfillment and a sense of satisfaction.

• 44:36Rich Roll?

  But there doesn't really seem to be an off ramp or an accessible means to reframe how they're living to engender these experiences.

• 44:46Speaker 04

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

• 44:50Rich Roll?

  You're like, get out of here with all this. Like, I just, you know, like.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  They need something else to do like a hole in the head.

• 44:55Rich Roll?

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

• 45:10Speaker 04

  Right. Look, there are 21 or depending how you count, 23 exercises and possible worksheets in the books. We give you stuff to do.

• 45:21Speaker 04

  The whole idea is this should be implementable right away. One of the exercises is flip the switch. Flip the switch from the transactional world to the flow world. And all that means is drop into the present moment, even for two or three seconds. We give an example of sitting in a staff. I'm sitting here at the podcast table with Rich Roll. So what am I thinking about? Am I thinking about how's this going and is, am I talking as much as Bill? And, and will they like this? And, you know, so on all transactions, as opposed to like, okay, stop. What's going on? Well, here's this lovely guy, Rich Roll, and he's wanting to talk to us. And this is a new, this is, these are new studios. This, you've only been in here a year. Like, I'm thinking, and what conversations are coming here? What is going to get said across this table? How is that going to impact some people's lives?

• 46:05Speaker 04

  Okay, I can think about that and about us. It takes about 20 seconds to say that. It takes half a second to think that. I can do that. I can just flip the switch. What's going on right now? Two, three, notice, flip back, what did I say? You know, flip back to the conversation? If you start doing that, you give the rest of your psyche, rest of your soul, if you will, a chance. So maybe you don't want to do Netflix as, you know, instead, but if you're watching Netflix, are you zoning out? Are you actually really enjoying like, her voice is beautiful. That costume is terrific. You know, can you be present to the reality that you're in? There is a more aliveness in every life waiting to be had.

• 46:48Speaker 01

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

• 47:13Speaker 04

  This is part of your becoming.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's part of my becoming. Am I, am I awful say, what are you watching? And I go, I don't know. What was the last video? I don't know. Right? So catch yourself sometimes being, uh, sometimes letting someone else steal your attention. Just catch yourself and see if you can come back to the moment. And yeah, and have a, and flip the switch. Or, you know, at the end, you know, the simplest, the simplest exercise from positive psychology is the gratefulness exercise. At the end of the day, write down three things you're grateful for. Write down one thing you're grateful for.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Because, because what you're trying to do is develop some processes which rewire the brain towards paying attention to right brain stuff instead of just left brain stuff, transactional, uh, you know, flow stuff instead of just transactional stuff. You know, the old right brain, left brain model, Lisa updated it with achieving and awakened. It's, it's the same thing. You want to, you want to be in your, all of your brain most of the time. And we're so over indexed in the transaction stuff. You know, I, I teach design at Stanford, young engineers, I have to teach them how to design. They're used to having an answer in the back of the book. There's no answer in the back of the book in design. Uh, and they're high, and I joke with them, you got in, you got in because you got eight hundreds on your, you know, math and, and, and English.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  You didn't get an eight hundreds on your creativity exam, right? So you're underpracticed in creativity, in curiosity. But you can learn it. And we know the brain's plastic. You can learn this stuff quickly. And what you find when you flip the switch, or you do what we call the sudden savoring exercise, or you do any of them, the exercises are like five minutes, that you have an experience in your brain where you say, oh, that was kind of, that was pleasant. That wasn't hard to do. And there's a time psyche thing you've got to watch out for. So if I change five minutes of your week, it could have a 25% impact on your psychic ROI.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  He mentioned savoring, so he said, so I'm going to double down on this. You do the gratefulness exercise. Maybe you do it once a week. Then we'll say, okay, we have a thing called the seventh day savoring. Again, five minutes, once a week, you know, just for, just before dinner on Sunday, or whatever it might be, your Sabbath practice. You take one of those things you were grateful for this week, and you return to it. And you just go, oh, that was, that was really great. You know, I really, you know, when, when Rich came into the office, you know, we were talking to the crew and Rich came in and he was really welcoming. And we were standing in the hallway, having this really lovely chat. You know, that was great. I was grateful for the way Rich received us. Then I kind of go, okay, that's just recognizing. Then re-enter it and savor it. Like, remember, you know, play the, play the GoPro camera screen

• 49:59Speaker 04

  of that moment again, and then freeze frame it. And then here's Rich Roll, this, this really successful podcaster, this guy that's really developed a life seriously. And he wants to spend time with us. And can I, can I savor that and receive the fullness of it? Because life in real time, you can't begin to get the fullness of life out of life in real time. So go back and do it again. Frankly, if you do the seventh day savoring once a week for a while, five minutes a week, three minutes a week, you know, you start liking that, you could learn how to do sudden savoring. Can I savor in real time? That's a pretty cool skill. These are all highly accessible ways to live differently.

• 50:44Rich Roll?

  I can't help but think about how everything you're sharing overlaps with 12-step recovery programs. Have you guys thought about that? Like, in addition to this being all about the present, so much of what you're talking about really overlaps, you know, in the Venn diagram of like the 12 steps. It's like, you know, you do your inventory, which is kind of a form of coherence, right? Like, are your actions lining up with your values? Are you doing what you said you're gonna do? That kind of thing. A formal gratitude practice, an essential aspect of being part of this community is, you know, being service-oriented, like making it about

• 51:27Rich Roll?

  something more than yourself. How are you transcending your ego through your daily actions?

• 51:33Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 51:33Rich Roll?

  And really being rigorous in your, you know, kind of self-honesty and inventory of your behavior and your decisions.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I mean, oh, aren't you guys 12-step? Bob Baldinger is pretty sure, aren't you guys Zen Buddhists? Aren't you guys Zen Buddhists, right?

• 51:48Rich Roll?

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

• 51:53Speaker 04

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

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know, I don't know that much about the, about the 12-step process, but it's...

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Again, what we're trying to come up with are really simple things you can design. How do you become a moment designer? Right? If we say, hey, most of the

• 52:45Rich Roll?

  Atomic habits of

• 52:47Speaker 01

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

• 53:20Rich Roll?

  The one difference though, is that if you're making, baking a cake or you're building an iPod or you're designing some product or widget.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:29Rich Roll?

  There's a limited number of variables and you know, the, the key variable that's lacking in that is the, is the variable of, you know, human emotion, you know, like fear and insecurity. And you know, like a bespoke set of life circumstances that have created neural pathways and reactive patterns. I mean, essentially so much of this boils down to the human animal getting in its own way. And, you know, just unable to act in its own best interest, despite, you know, reading the books and knowing all the information, just not being able to like translate that into new behavioral patterns.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  But it's also optimistic that those, those behavioral patterns, curiosity and mastery and things are built in to that same human who's got a, like I say, a bespoke set of neural pathways. Maybe took them down to something that doesn't make any sense anymore. But, um, but I'm totally optimistic that if you just start trying a few things, you can start to unlock some of that stuff, get on, reframe. It's not about impact. Impact is in the transaction world, I need to find meaning somewhere else. The impact's fine. I still want to do a good job at work, but I got, but if I'm looking there, I'm looking in the wrong place. So some reframes to give you all slightly different, you know, like everybody says, you want out of the box thinking? Well, move the box, you know, I'm looking over here. This isn't working. Move the box over here.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  There's more possibilities here. And if we, and so I'm optimistic that even in a pretty grooved

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Set of dysfunctional beliefs, dysfunctional patterns. There's still a curious person in there, still an optimistic person in there. Fear kills curiosity, right? I'm not going to be curious about new stuff because I'm terrified of changing anything. But, you know, small steps, what Albert Bandura called guided mastery, what David Kelly called creative confidence in his books, like small steps of learning to be, take a few risks, be a little more creative, have your curiosity, ask some new questions, try a few things. Those small steps will overcome a phobia, will overcome the fear, and it doesn't, and it's not a, you know, a lifelong practice, it's six weeks.

• 55:44Speaker 04

  You know, you mentioned, we kind of sound like some other things. Well, you know, in the 75 Ring Circus called The Human Experience, the meeting tent's a pretty big tent, and there's a whole bunch of, there's a, there's a dog act, there's some clowns in there, there's some dancing animals, there's a whole lot of stuff going on in the meeting room, and we just walked in there. But again, we're design guys, I mean, Bill's a Nietzsche-loving atheist, you know, I'm a Jesus-loving atheist, I mean, we've got some pretty different worldviews here. I'll say again, if you get the human part right, you can't go wrong. That's our, that's our baseline. And all we're trying to do is offer tools that work for human beings. So, we're not trying to be a new religion, we're not trying to be a new psychology, we're

• 56:27Speaker 04

  guys with freeing reframed ideas to make your situation more manageable, and tools to get you unstuck and moving. So this is entirely compatible with any world, there is no worldview that this is incompatible with. And we say at the end of the book, you know, we call the, the set of mindsets the designer's way, you know, which is a little presumptuous, but, and then we say, your homework now is to figure out your way. And of course, you're never gonna, there's no getting it done, and there's no getting it right. You know, I'll, I made a mistake again today, I'm so hopeless. Of course you are. You know, I mean, but, but if, you know, if you're, if you're becoming, you're gonna get better, and you look back and you were worse. So if you really can accept your humanity...

• 57:11Speaker 04

  Then it starts getting, and you start living generatively into it, not to get it done, because there's no getting it done. Thank God, there's no getting it done. Literally on her deathbed. So my dear wife Claudia died of cancer five years ago, and I like being in love so much, I'm doing, I'm gonna get married again. But nonetheless, she really lacked her brain. And she watched her mother lose her brain before she does. She said, I'm not going there. So because California doesn't end of life state, we had the drugs for her to end her life before she lost her brain, if her brain started to really go. And on the Tuesday before the Friday she died, I said, are we going there? She said, no, I've decided, I want to stick it out. There might be one more lesson, and I don't want to miss it. And the last thing she said, she sat up in bed, and she opened her eyes, and she stared at

• 57:56Speaker 04

  me, she goes, oh, it's so interesting. Closed her eyes and fell back, last thing she said. So if you play the game well, it's interesting all the way to the end. Don't try to solve it, just live it.

• 58:15Rich Roll?

  Embracing the mystery as opposed to trying to solve it.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  Celebrating it. This is, this is as good as it gets. Making a little progress on a huge question is fabulous.

• 58:28Speaker 01

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

• 58:38Speaker 04

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

• 58:41Speaker 01

  And everything I do today, I choose to do, which is about, you know, choices makes you human. But we were in a restaurant a long time ago, and Dave and I were talking about atheism and Jesus. And he said, okay, I got it. We both believe in mystery. We believe in the thing that cannot be demystified. There is a mystery in the world. You round down to cognitive science and physics, and I round up to God.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  But it's true. I mean, the reason we're entirely compatible is, I mean, I'm also an artist. And when I'm standing in front of a canvas, or I'm painting, or I've got an idea and I'm designing, there's a moment where I'm not in this world. You know, Rick Rubin, the record producer, wrote the book, The Creative Act. He talks about, you know, we just channel this stuff from, you know, he would call flow creativity.

• 59:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 59:33Speaker 01

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

• 59:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  And so there that there is mystery.

• 59:42Rich Roll?

  But that's, that is self-transcendence.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  It is self-transcendence.

• 59:46Rich Roll?

  You've become an antenna or a vehicle for, you know, something higher.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  Just something bigger than yourself.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  And it seems to be something that humans evolved to have the capability to do.

• 59:58Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, from prophets to seers to shamans to whatever, there's always been people in a culture who saw something that everybody else didn't see.

• 1:00:09Rich Roll?

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

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

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

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  It's a process.

• 1:00:58Rich Roll?

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

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  Somebody's got to take the trash out. I had to take this trash out.

• 1:01:14Rich Roll?

  Just in the example of the podcast that you were talking about earlier, it's like, I know that the best version of this conversation depends upon the extent to which I can be present for it, because if I'm totally dialed into you guys, I don't need this stuff here. Like, I'll always, you know, I'll let my curiosity find the next line of inquiry, and it will be great. But I'm too insecure for that. So I have to surround myself with all of this stuff, you know, and I'm thinking, what's the next question? Or I'm gonna have a brain fart, you know, and convincing myself that that is what this experience demands, when it actually isn't. I wanted to go back to this idea of reframes.

• 1:01:58Rich Roll?

  You mentioned Joseph Campbell earlier. One of the things that serves us and also trips us up and gets in our way is our story. I spend a lot of time thinking about story. Like, we all walk around with this story, you know, who we are, what we're capable of, what's gonna work, you know, and, you know, like everything, it works for us and it doesn't work for us. But we're very locked in on this. And the idea of challenging that story, let alone deconstructing it, like, these stories are all fantasies. Like, even the best story, I mean, it's all nonsense. None of these stories are true, yet we're so indelibly attached to them. And it seems to me, and I'm curious what you guys think, that so

• 1:02:41Rich Roll?

  much of what you're talking about is available when we can kind of release our clutch a little bit and start thinking about, not even necessarily forming a new story, but just holding our story more loosely and being more curious about it and developing like the willingness to challenge it.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, we are the story we tell ourselves. One of the first exercises in the Design Life class is I say, hey, tell me the story you grew up with, you know, tell me what your parents, you know, what'd you learn from your parents? And, you know, you get the common story of, you know, work hard, get good grades, go to good school, get a good job. And I go, how's that working for you? And then it'll be, well, not really. So we are the story we tell ourselves, but we can, like you say, hold that more lightly and maybe lean into the opportunity to change that story. Because if we are the story we tell ourselves, let's change the story to be the one I want to live. Maybe I don't want to accept my parents' notion of success anymore. That's not going to work for me. Or maybe I'm in the mid-career and it didn't turn out to be what I thought and I can beat

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  myself up for that, or I can say, and now I'm perfectly positioned to figure out what I want to do next. So we're narrative animals. Storytelling is part of the DNA of humans, I think. All I would say is like, keep asking yourself, what part of this story is working for me? And what part of the story do I want to revise or get rid of or edit out because it just doesn't work anymore? And the striving mindset, the sort of, I gotta be the best at everything. I remember one of the very first workshops we did a long time ago, it was a big workshop with a bunch of Stanford alums. There was a woman who raised her hand, she was having problems, and she said, what's the deal? She says, well, I'm a really senior lawyer in a big law firm in New York, but I hate it. And I go, well, what happened?

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  She goes, well, you know, I went to Stanford because it was the hardest school and then my parents were both lawyers, so they said be a lawyer. So I said, okay. I got into Yale because that was the school my parents went to and then I went to New York. I got in the biggest law firm I could. I was the youngest woman partner, first, you know, first senior partner. I run the management thing and I hate my life.

• 1:04:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  I got a house in Manhattan, I got a place out on the island, you know, I got two Teslas, kids in private schools.

• 1:04:53Rich Roll?

  Because it's a terrible life. It really is.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  Because she didn't choose any of it. She, little reward, systems of reward and punishment.

• 1:05:02Rich Roll?

  At no point did she feel like she had permission to actually ask herself, like, what do I want and what's meaningful to me? We're on this, we're on these escalators and these, you know.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  It's hard. She was deeply embedded in, and Jen, you know, and I said, look, this is just a quick workshop. I'm not meaning to, you know, you don't need to have an existential crisis here and, you know, and the 90-minute rubber chicken talk. But look at it this way, you're, you know, it's a sunk cost, right? And you've got lots of resources.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  You know, you're making six million, six million dollars, you know, based twenty million dollar bonuses. Great. Bank that for two years and, you know, and then start moving towards the thing that's more authentic for you. But give yourself permission to, one, not beat yourself up for choices you made that felt okay at the time. And, two, look at, look at what you've got available to you to go, to go forward. And you're gonna say, all we really do in office hours is give permission.

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. Together, we've probably had a couple thousand office hour conversations, and mostly it's giving permission. You know, not to, hey, go off and, you know, join the circus, but we're reminding people they do have the right to exercise the agency over their own lives that they, that they want. And, you know, I'm a big fan of story. I mean, the, the fifth mindset is create your world, which is acknowledging that life is a story we tell ourselves. Yeah, it is. So, pick that story really carefully. What's the one you're in now? And that's not in, you know, dried in ink. It's evolving over time. Hold it lightly. For heavens, if I'm a becoming, of course, I'm holding it lightly. You know, we say, we, I don't know your one true purpose, but we could give you some tips on how to live purposefully on the way toward the thing that's ever changing. And

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  so, like in my own story, um, you know, my father died when I was nine. We learned later of suicide. That's a gift that keeps on giving. I've worked that through with lots of counselors, you know, I figured out my, I've retroactively figured out my coping systems and what my reactions are and what the good things and the bad things that came out of that were, you know, and how that affects my marriage life, you know. And I really know my story well. I mean, I've worked this thing really, really, really hard. I'm turning seventy-three in a couple of weeks. That happened sixty-four years ago. I've got this thing covered. So now, my wife dies, and now I'm in a relationship, my wife Claudia dies, and now I'm in a relationship with Fresh, who is a different animal entirely, but who I love dearly and is evoking completely different things out of me. And I am learning

• 1:07:27Speaker 04

  so much about that coping system that I thought I fully understood that goes back to my origin story, by virtue of simply being in the presence of a different soul with a different kind of reflectivity. I'm over and over again, I say, oh, that's what Claudia was talking about. The woman who died, like she kept telling me this stuff like, no, no, no, that's not it. You know, and like, oh, that's what she meant. So I'm rewriting my story. You never know your story. You're just working on it. But it does help. Having a story gives you some guidance, gives you a, where do I go from here? You know, you're not done like, oh, I got it. I got it.

• 1:08:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  But like, I'm getting it.

• 1:08:08Rich Roll?

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

• 1:08:19Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:08:20Rich Roll?

  Uh, what about the senior in high school, uh, who's looking at the prospect of applying to college and thinking, well, what's the point in that? Like, there is a veneer of nihilism, I think, in Gen Z.

• 1:08:37Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:37Rich Roll?

  They look out onto the world and they're like, what's the point of any of this?

• 1:08:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:42Rich Roll?

  Um, as a parent of, you know, an 18 year old, like I, I see this and I'm around young people a lot. What do you make of that? And how do you communicate your message to that person or that generation? That's struggling in that particular way.

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  Well, I would say, first of all, their skepticism,

• 1:09:03Speaker 04

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

• 1:09:19Rich Roll?

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

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  And I don't want one of those crappy jobs that you keep complaining about. So this goes 70% of Americans are disengaged at work.

• 1:09:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

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

• 1:09:44Rich Roll?

  You guys are all idiots.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Thanks, thanks.

• 1:09:46Speaker 04

  For two reasons. When you, when you guys won the games you told me to play, you didn't look all that happy. And by the way, we can't play them anymore. So other than that, it's a great idea. Good job. You're, you're doing, you're doing empathy. Step one of design really well, but now let's redefine the problem. Don't just say, oh, I'm screwed. I don't want to play. I can't play. You're accepting that the way we all described the world to you is accurate. So if I do radical acceptance, okay, AI is coming. Yep, we're gonna have to adapt to that. You have to live in a post-AI world for sure. There may be a different economic reality. I even, you know, kids, my kids at age who are, and my kids are all late 30s, 40s, you know, are not buying houses because it doesn't make sense. And so we're going to live a different kind of a way.

• 1:10:30Speaker 04

  So then inside the particularity called the moment in history in which I found myself, if I radically accept those things, but I believe I'm a human becoming and I can live more fully into my aliveness within this framework. Where can I do that? How do I do that? What would be interesting to me? Let's find ways to thrive in this context and get over the fact that the way they all said it was, isn't the way it is anymore. It's just not true. So what is true? And let's go be human beings in the world in which you're gonna live.

• 1:11:04Rich Roll?

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

• 1:11:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. Bill's been saying, we've seen this, this down to this shift in the student profile in the last 10 years, but you've been saying just in the last one or two, it's turning around.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

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

• 1:11:43Rich Roll?

  The number one major?

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Poetry and creative writing.

• 1:11:46Speaker 04

  For the few people still getting a liberal education.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  But, but I would, you know, they, the sort of disaffected 18 year old, particularly the male 18, disaffected 18 year old. It'd be like, okay, yeah, radically accepted, things are changing. I think this is why the creator economy is booming and it's so interesting to them. It's like, well, if the goal was to like, you know, make a bunch of money or at least get enough money so I'm secure, but these other paths don't look so good, maybe I'll just do my own thing. And that's going to be an explosion of creativity and engagement and other things. Not everybody will be successful, but that impetus to say, hey, wait a minute. You're right. I got to redefine the world, maybe on my own terms, or maybe with a community of people who I really want to hang out with.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  One of my students, one of my top students, you know, left school, went to work for some big design firms for a while and then went, no, I don't think so. Bought some land and, you know, up in the San Juan Islands and is running an organic farm. And he's having, and all the product designers want internships there because who wouldn't want to work the summer on a farm? And he's using, you know, design techniques to create a completely different sort of farm economy. But now there's so many, there's so, one of the classes I want to do is designing your creative life at Stanford, because there's so many more options for how do you find your way in this new world where things are changing? Wherever there's going to be chaos, there's going to be dislocation and there's going to be opportunity.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  And I think I'm seeing sort of, of the students who are still engaged or trying, ready to engage, I'm seeing a renaissance in sort of creativity, entrepreneurship, engagement, and particularly in the arts. You know, by the way, in the, in the research that we always quote from Bill Damon on passion, only eighty percent, only twenty percent of people have an identifiable passion, eighty percent don't. In that twenty percent, it's all highly skewed towards creatives. I've always wanted to be a writer, a poet, a singer, a dancer or something. And what do we tell those kids? Oh, you can't get a job doing that. So what I'm going to tell those kids is that's probably the only job you can get.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Because the Mackenzie thing will disappear, the banker thing will disappear, all these other things will disappear. And so there is a, there's another element to this. The kid who won't get out of the room just plays video games all day. I do a bunch of work in China and they have what they call the lying flat movement. The kids, yeah, it's interesting. The kids graduate from college and instead of the picture where they're all throwing up their hats, they're literally lying on the ground, lying on the stairs. And, you know, in the most, you know, nihilistic way to saying, there's nothing in this society for us. Now, China is probably true. There's a lot of stuff in society for these kids. And whether they go to college or not is kind of an open question.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Whether colleges will even survive, you know, most of them, the AI wave, I don't know. But um, no, I would say now more than ever. I mean, the friction between my idea and the market is almost zero. You know, a long time ago, when I graduated, you had to learn drafting and there's a lot of hard hard to make something. I can, I can, I can talk to my phone and 3D print something.

• 1:15:04Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  In 20 minutes. If you've got an idea, it's never been easier to to put that idea inside your story and become the person who does that thing. And whether that thing is college or college and something else. I just found out, I was talking to one of the Episcopal professors who's running a class for creatives. We have the number one Vietnamese influencer at Stanford. I haven't met him. He's like a sophomore. And I don't know what a Vietnamese influencer is, but he's really big in Vietnam. He's from Vietnam. And he's, you know, and he's pulling in a million dollars a month, whatever he's doing.

• 1:15:36Rich Roll?

  That's wild.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  And he's a college student, right? So.

• 1:15:41Rich Roll?

  And he's still choosing to go to college.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  He's still choosing to go to college. I mean, you know, I think the other thing is we have an exercise where we talk about what's college for? And, and, you know, college is, in addition to career readiness, college is really for the life of the mind, like learning how learning works and reading widely the great books from all traditions and understanding that, you know, we're, we're not just here as a civilization that was born yesterday. I mean, it goes back, you know, read Socrates, read Plato and read Chongza and, you know, and lots of. But I think, I think the life of the mind, the kind of perfecting myself, those years between 18, 20 something or 19 and 20 something, those are important years of becoming.

• 1:16:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  The person you will be, you know, dealing with for the rest of your life.

• 1:16:32Rich Roll?

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

• 1:17:12Speaker 04

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

• 1:17:16Rich Roll?

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

• 1:17:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I think in terms of where do the where's the post AI future land and how does it like, you know, this would be like saying a gymnast going off the high bar, making a move for the very first time and sticking the landing in an Olympic perfection on day one. You know, it's this is my third or fourth massive technological revolution in the past 50 years. It is orders of magnitude bigger. I've finally been convinced that AI isn't just one more cool thing. It's a massive different thing. That being said, every transition is is a mess. You know, and while transitions and disruptions create new opportunities for new people, frankly, usually the people hurt by the disruption are not the ones who get the benefits of the upside on the other side. So there will be losses, there will

• 1:18:22Speaker 04

  be sacrifices, there will be suffering. How long it will take, whether or not we'll get stuck in a bad corner and will end up with a massively AI enabled oligarchy. I don't know. But regardless of how well or how poorly we get through this, you're going to need to know who you are. You're going to need access to tools that will remind you you are worth it. And you're gonna need some people around you that you can do that with.

• 1:18:49Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:58Rich Roll?

  It's looking pretty clear.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty clear.

• 1:19:00Rich Roll?

  That's the route that we're on.

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:03Rich Roll?

  But you guys are still optimistic guys.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Rich Roll?

  Right there at Stanford in the, you know, heart of Silicon Valley, around all of these, you know, the next generation of the people who are going to kind of innovate on this. You remain like optimistic about the human, the human species surviving this?

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:19:20Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  I've been teaching since, since the eighties, since you were in school. And there have been waves of times when the students were just interested in like, how do I get a job? And there have been waves of times when they were a little more socially interested. You know, we had the protests a couple of last year, we had the protests around the Palestinian Gaza thing. And so I see a lot more student activism lately that just kind of had disappeared in the nineties and early 2000s. And I see a lot more, you know, students will say, I want to start a startup, but I want to do something meaningful that has impact. That I want to just start another food delivery company or a version of a social media thing. So they're, they're pretty aware and they have all these new tools where they can build almost anything instantly.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  And they're pretty aware of the, the negative impact that technologies like smartphones and other things have had on, on their, on their generation. So I think they're smart, they're aware, they've got great tools and they really want to do something that has value to it, which ultimately will rest on their, their values, their, their meaning-making ideas. And so, yeah, it'll be a bumpy, it'll be a bumpy ride, but I don't know, I don't know where it's going to go. I doubt that we're going to all be living in some blissful future where we don't have to work and we just, you know. Hang around the park all day.

• 1:20:39Rich Roll?

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

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  I don't think that happening.

• 1:20:41Rich Roll?

  I don't see that working out.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  And the other thing is, but, but the other thing is it'll put more-

• 1:20:43Rich Roll?

  But maybe that will, uh, force us to be more intentional about our formative communities.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  It'll put more-

• 1:20:49Rich Roll?

  Which is a big piece here.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:32Rich Roll?

  Anything where people are gathering.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:34Rich Roll?

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

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  But again, you know, you have to decide what you think it means to be a person.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  Um, you know, Viktor Frankl, after coming out of the Holocaust, you know, develops a new school of meaning-making and psychology and concludes there are three ways you can experience a meaningful life. Through love, through achievement, or through suffering. Now before him, Freud said, leben und arbeiten, love and work. Those are the two key things that make a human life worthwhile. And he added suffering because sometimes you're in a situation completely beyond your control where the only freedom you have is how do you bear suffering well? So if I accept that I'm a becoming, you know, I accept that, you know, there are forces over which I have no control.

• 1:22:53Speaker 04

  And I recognize, oh, if I'm just thinking transactionally, oh, I can't change the politics. Oh, I can't change AI. I'm, I guess it doesn't matter. I'm impotent. I'm powerless. I'm going to lay flat. I'm thinking transactionally. Now, I'm not saying radically accepting some of these difficulties is easy, but it may be necessary. So one of the organizations I work with, I live in Santa Cruz, you know, on the Monterey Bay. That's the north end of the Salinas Valley, which is agricultural. So I work with a group called Digital Nest, and Digital Nest does a really fabulous job of helping brown kids crack into high tech because there's a big color barrier in high tech. They do a really good job. Now, that means overwhelmingly, they work with brown people who ICE are very interested in right

• 1:23:36Speaker 04

  now, and they're getting raided right and left. So there's this whole community and this whole subterfuge, I can't even tell you the details because it's all secret, about how these organizations and how the families that they serve are helping one another avoid getting picked off the street. It's a very generative, loving, human-making experience in the face of a really horrible, constraining, lifestyle-ruining reality. So if you accept this is what's going on, how can I participate? So if I'm, if I'm a person who recognizes I don't control everything, then I'm not first and foremost a producer. I am first and foremost a participant. So regardless of what world you find yourself in, you're

• 1:24:18Speaker 04

  participating. What's the most generative, life-giving, human-making way you can participate in the situation in which you find yourself? That's the particularity you're in, or frankly, you're stuck with. So when the plotters of the escape that Frankel was going to participate in finally pull it off and they're ready to go, a colleague runs into the barrack that he's in where he's tending to a patient because he's an MD as well as a psychiatrist, and says, we're going. You have to go now. And he's sitting by the bed of this inmate and he and he looks at the other guy and he says,

• 1:24:56Speaker 04

  "No, I'll stay." And he just chooses, "I'm sure all my patients and I will die here, but suffering well with them, that's life making for me."

• 1:25:08Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:09Speaker 04

  We have choices to make.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, one really quick thing. The notion of radical acceptance has nothing to do with endorsement.

• 1:25:15Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  Accepting that the situation-

• 1:25:17Speaker 04

  It's really important.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  Accepting that the situation is out of control and people are raiding, you know-

• 1:25:20Speaker 04

  It's not okay, it's just true.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Pulling folks from, you know, from Salinas off the street for no good reason. You can accept that's the reality. What can we do about it? How can we make this community safer? But there's nothing about that that's an endorsement.

• 1:25:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  So, yeah, people, people often think, "Oh, well, if you accept something, then you have to agree with it."

• 1:25:38Speaker 04

  It's okay.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't, there's nothing about that I have to agree with it, nothing about it that I think is okay. There's a lot of things going on in the world I really don't think is okay, okay? And then the question is, if that's the reality I'm in-

• 1:25:49Speaker 04

  What do I do?

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  What's available? What can I do? What can I do that's useful? What can I do that I, you know? At Stanford, I can sign a petition. You can work with this group to help these kids, you know, get a good job. You know, I can write a letter so one of my students who's gonna be deported can get a visa. Whatever you can do, do the thing you can do. Many people, the Buddha would say, "The distance between the way things are and how you want them to be, that's suffering."

• 1:26:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course. And you can't solve a problem that you're not accepting, you know, in its fullness, right? So it's like-

• 1:26:23Speaker 04

  Can't solve a problem you're not willing to have.

• 1:26:24Rich Roll?

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

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

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

• 1:26:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, they got time.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, we're not saying, you know, that, pick your battles carefully. Pick the things that are meaningful for you, right? And pick the things where you think you can move the needle.

• 1:27:08Rich Roll?

  I think there's an important piece packed into that, which is- That the Western mind is going to default to this idea that the the means to the meaning that I lack is through a deeper investment in my own self obsession. Whereas the solution is actually disabusing yourself of that self obsession and getting into a contributory, like, service oriented kind of approach to life, right? Like, like, "Oh, I'm lacking meaning, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna optimize my life and I'm gonna, like, construct this thing and it's all about me and I've got my blinders and here's my thing and I'm doing this."

• 1:27:48Rich Roll?

  Whereas if you just, like, let the blinders go and you walk into a room thinking, "Well, how can I make this room better for being in it?" Rather than looking for, like, "What am I gonna get out of this situation?" That seems to me to be the real means to, you know, kind of accessing this meaning.

• 1:28:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, psychology is known for a while now. If you're experiencing anxiety or depression, best thing you can do is go help somebody else. If you want to feel better, go help somebody else. So what's going on there? Well, you know, and again, wisdom traditions have cared deeply about service for a long time, you know? And the Cain and Abel story, you know, after, you know, the brother kills his brother, he says, you know, "What am I, who am I? My brother's keeper?" And one of the comments of that is that, you know, the answer was so obviously yes, that God didn't even answer the question. You know, like, everybody knows, yes, you're your brother's keeper. We're in this together. We now know psychologically that consciousness is in fact collective.

• 1:28:49Speaker 04

  We say all the time in these small groups that we help people talk to each other meaningfully in, it's almost impossible to hear yourself by yourself. So, you know, we're big fans of Dan Siegel's work on, in the Mindsight Institute where he's talking a lot about collective consciousness and that we're much more a we than an I. So no matter where you are in the midst of all this thing, if you start living your life in such a way that is participating with others, your chance of experiencing self-transcendency and it gets more meaningful goes way up. So absolutely, it's not just about you. Now, we don't preach that real hard. We just talk about, "Hey, formative community really works and living coherently works where who I am and what I'm doing are in alignment, and what I believe are in alignment."

• 1:29:33Speaker 04

  By the time we talk to anybody, they pick up a book, they walk into our class, they even sign up for office hours, I've already found myself in front of a teachable person. So anybody who's listening to this is open minded enough to probably have some pretty good values. Your values are probably going to take you to a good place and that good place is probably going to involve somebody other than you too.

• 1:29:51Rich Roll?

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

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Well, a long time before, even when we started the class and David had come over and said, hey, let's do this thing. I said, okay, great. So we went over to Zot's. You remember Zot's?

• 1:30:24Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  Beer garden. Back when it was still kind of

• 1:30:26Rich Roll?

  One of my favorite places in the world.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  A dusty old place.

• 1:30:28Rich Roll?

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

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:31Speaker 04

  They didn't ruin it.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  Some alums bought it and they made it much fancier. But anyway, so we were sitting there with a pitcher of beer and on a warm dusty picnic table. And I said, okay, the one thing about this is, well, one thing I said is you got to leave the Jesus stuff out of the classroom. He agreed to that. The second thing was, you know, we're asking people to do these exercises. So we have to do them. And we have to actually do them ourselves, just to understand what it feels like to wrestle with three odysseys, or to feels like what it's trying to figure out your balance dashboard better. And particularly with this book, it was the possibility of the imposter syndrome loomed large. I spent with Sam Harris Wake Up app, I spent a whole like nine months trying to develop a mindfulness

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  practice, complete failure. So I'm terrible at mindfulness. If people out there are good at it, I'm sure it's of great value. I couldn't figure it out. And I listened to all the Sam Harris stuff. I listened to, you know, Calm, I tried them all, Headspace, can't do it. I have other ways of finding myself in my own thoughts, you know, in something that isn't just, you know, repeating transactions.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  Most of the other stuff, you know, we do. I just finished rewriting all of my compass, my worldview, worldview and life view. And I found it had changed since, you know, since a year or two ago when I last did it. At the lab, I have a rotating set of fellows who come in and teach with us and then they leave. And every time they come in, we do a new set of, let's all write our values down. So we know what the culture is all about. So I actually have a chance to do most of these exercises every couple of years. And I think that keeps me honest, right? And the rest of the stuff I learn, I learn from my students confronting me with something that either didn't make sense or seemed hypocritical to them.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  And I've been married for 37 years to a lovely woman named Cynthia, and she keeps me very honest. She's just read the book and she goes, I got some questions. You don't do this. When we talk, you don't seem present. And it's like, okay, I can work on that. I can work on that.

• 1:32:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a great line in a John Fogerty song that I'm rather fond of. And the refrain that says, I ain't no hypocrite, except mostly every day. And boy, you do this kind of work, you hand out stuff recommending how people live their lives. I mean, you are asking for it. So I'm up against my own stuff all the time. And I would say one thing in particular right now. So where am I learning my way into my own book? And one of the simple little exercises is change your vowel. Go from got to to get to. You want to flip the switch? Look at your to do list. I've got to get this thing done. So what's the best thing an item on your to do list can be? Over with a line through it. Oh, that's great. It's gone now. Oh, that part of my life is over.

• 1:33:25Speaker 04

  It's gone forever. Like, wait, you know, oh, I got to talk to Rich Wald today. Oh, I get to talk to Rich Wald today. So I kind of flip from got to to get to, which is from over to participant. It's a complete shift in mindset. And truth be told, even though I'm pushing seventy-three and I've been teaching this kind of stuff for years and over twenty years ago, I got an advanced seminary degree in contemplative spirituality. I suck at this stuff. I mean, I am, I am goal-oriented, deadline-driven, a transactionalist, production-minded guy. So really trying to move what I call from role, getting impact made, to soul, just being present in the moment, is a bigger shift than I want. My number one goal this year is to live into get to, not got to. Am I experiencing things as a get to,

• 1:34:10Speaker 04

  not a got to? And I catch myself missing it constantly. So the growth angle is still pretty steep.

• 1:34:18Rich Roll?

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

• 1:34:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, fifteen to thirty-five.

• 1:34:26Rich Roll?

  If we're that first cohort, the younger people, their identity building.

• 1:34:31Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:34:31Rich Roll?

  And the kind of council is, you know, like, hey, be wary of, you know, descending too far down the transactional lifestyle kind of approach. And then there's

• 1:34:43Speaker 04

  At least mindlessly.

• 1:34:45Rich Roll?

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

• 1:35:28Rich Roll?

  start to miss, you know, the, the, the gifts of that phase of life because they remain so fixated on, you know, continuing to tell that story.

• 1:35:38Speaker 04

  It's a real challenge. I call it the the role to soul impact challenge. And this really comes up particularly in these DCI fellows, the distinguished career institute people, the 35 to 45 fellows a year that come to spend a year with us. I happen to know one particular cohort really well, because it's the one in which the woman I'm now going to marry is a member of, so I get to be.

• 1:35:59Rich Roll?

  Now it's all making sense.

• 1:36:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I find after 20 years of teaching at Stanford, I finally got something out of it, other than barely enough money to pay for the parking. And so I'm hanging out with this cohort. And a year and a half after they quote graduated from spending this year thinking deeply about their futures, we all get together for pizza and beer, one of the alumni members' houses. This is the people still in the Northern California area. And there's a conversation goes around the circle of 20 some people. And the question is simply, so how's it going? It was a year and a half after they'd finished thinking deeply about their lives. And 18 of the 20 people told some kind of a long, it was two and a half hours to get around that circle. Eight minutes per person. 18 of the 20 stories

• 1:36:42Speaker 04

  were essentially, I'm having a real hard time letting it go. I don't want to live the way I used to live. I'm done with that. I'm not going to go back and run the law from anymore. I'm not going to whatever it is. But, boy, I'm, I got a lot of muscle memory on living that way. I got a lot of muscle memory on I am the person who did that sort of thing. And I thought, boy, this, this is a struggle. Now, the good news is another year and a half later, so three years after they're graduated, they got together again at somebody's beach house, went around the same circle, asked the same question. And almost everybody said, I think I'm getting the hang of this now. So it may take a little time. But, you know, you're a person, you can grow.

• 1:37:25Rich Roll?

  Have you guys connected with Chip Conley?

• 1:37:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:37:29Rich Roll?

  Just talk to him.

• 1:37:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know Chip. He did his podcast. He's a great guy.

• 1:37:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, he's amazing. And obviously, his work is just all about that.

• 1:37:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:37Rich Roll?

  You know, becoming the model.

• 1:37:39Speaker 04

  The crisis.

• 1:37:40Rich Roll?

  The chrysalis, it's not a crisis, but you know, how do you use your, what's it called synthesized? With like the brain changes, Arthur talks about this too, like you have

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:50Rich Roll?

  Really good at like

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  Strength, the strength, yeah.

• 1:37:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Data processing to like more of a synthesized.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  The second curve.

• 1:37:55Rich Roll?

  Where you can make all these connections and you have this wisdom, you know,

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  It's the fluid knowledge.

• 1:38:00Rich Roll?

  Fluid, yeah, fluid intelligence.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  Fluid intelligence.

• 1:38:02Rich Roll?

  Um, and leaning into that.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  Wisdom, yeah.

• 1:38:04Rich Roll?

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

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. The other shift I've seen in students, by the way, is that it used to be very much what my parents expected me to do was, was one of the stories I would hear. And do I have permission to do something else? Yes, you do. But now what I hear is, um, the parents aren't so, the parents are like, hey, do whatever you want. It's fine. The students, the, the pressure's coming from their peers. The pressure's coming from their peers. I don't know if this is so social media or something. It's like, I gotta look a certain way, I gotta act a certain way, and I gotta get the right job. And it's, it's not coming so much from the grownups. Cause I think they don't think the grownups, you know, have the right answer. And so it's, it's, it's really in that circle. And then I wonder, you know, when you, cause I've, I've seen some work with some people, folks who are retiring. You know, I was the senior vice president of everything.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  I retired and on Monday morning, I'm just some guy in the line at Starbucks chatting up people because I have nothing to do and nobody cares that I was once the senior vice president. So that loss of identity around jobs, uh, doesn't, doesn't just happen at that point, right? All along, you've been, been pegging your value to the title, to the role, to like you said, to the role that I had. And now I need to move to this other place of working from the soul or working from the heart. It's hard, but boy, isn't that an interesting challenge? Isn't that an interesting journey to be on? And, and, and if you're lucky enough to have the resources to do that. Why would you miss it?

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Why would you, you know, like, like the CEOs who go back after two years and be a CEO again? Cause they're screwing up my company. I gotta go back and fix it. It's like, what are you doing, man?

• 1:39:52Speaker 04

  And it's not, it's not just the egoistic person like, oh, I'm a big EVP and I are terribly important. And it's not that archetype only. Frankly, you've, you've been doing this way of living for 40 years, 50 years. That's a lot of

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  And it was all transactions.

• 1:40:05Speaker 04

  A bunch of momentum. It was overwhelmingly transactions. So Bill and I are both in formative communities, guys groups. Mine's 51 years old. Bill's is 35.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  35 years old.

• 1:40:16Speaker 04

  And so I'm the eldest, but I'll be a couple of months in my group. And so we're all entering our seventies and two years ago, the year I was turning 70, I said, we need to talk about this. We need to talk about becoming elders. So we had a two-year-long conversation. It was carefully curated with some core questions. And the questions included, how much is enough? And enough, it wasn't so much money as it was, how much is enough contribution? I mean, can, can you slow down saving the world and start trying to travel a little bit before your wife dies? Again, you know, is that okay? And, and then probably the other most important, so how much is enough was a very important question. And the second most important question is, and what are you letting go? So, yeah, I think for those later in life, there is absolutely some letting go.

• 1:41:01Speaker 04

  And it's very freeing, or you hang out too long and then the life rips it out of your hands and that's worse.

• 1:41:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah, I really like this idea of the formative communities and then having this formal question, you know, and, and holding yourself accountable to answering it to other people, you know, that you're checking in with. I think that's like a huge piece in all of this. Myself, you know, I'm turning 60 this year. I don't want to, it's, it's, it's almost as if like, oh, well, you know, I'll figure that out when I, you know, when I walk out the door on my final day. You know, it's like, no, I want to think about this now. What am I doing now? How am I making this like a multi-year transition? So it isn't like an overnight, like, wait, what happened? Like, I thought I was gonna, you know, like, it's not like, oh,

• 1:41:49Rich Roll?

  You buy the RV or you play golf or it's like I'm intent upon remaining engaged Yeah. in things that interest me and that I'm curious about, some of which, you know, may or may not be professional. But it's not going to look like it looks like right now. And how can I acclimate to that idea now? So it's not some kind of ego, you know, devastating blow later. Cliff transitions are hard.

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  We were doing a, just the only live book talk we did at a local, you know, Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park. And somebody, and at the end, somebody said, what's your next book going to be? And Dave was like, we're not doing another book. So he hates writing and he's really working hard on moving from a task driven human. You don't know anybody who's as good as Dave at getting things done. He gets really good at it. From that to a soul driven human who's just kind of in the moment. And I'm so I'm pretty sure this is the last book because I, it took me two years to talk him into each of the books. And that's going to happen this time because he's going to be on a different journey. But, um, you know, as you said, you, it doesn't happen overnight. You prepare yourself for this, right?

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  If you're thinking, if you're looking ahead, you're like, and, and a really interesting question is what am I willing to leave behind? Terms of my identity, my position, you know, everybody knows me or whatever, whatever it is. Um, what am I willing to leave behind in order to make space for what's coming?

• 1:43:13Rich Roll?

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

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:43:25Rich Roll?

  And this is not serving us.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  The number of billionaires who are trying to live forever is an example of the sort of narcissism.

• 1:43:34Rich Roll?

  Don't get me started.

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  In our culture, but I have fully accepted there is a lot less runway in front of me than there was behind.

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  We do an exercise in class at the last of class. We call it the 25th reunion. We say, hey, imagine you're 23 years old, imagine you're now 47 and you're back for your Stanford reunion, 25th year. And we're going to get up and talk about stuff. And we, we got him through three different conversations. And the last time we did this, I realized, wait a minute, 25.

• 1:44:02Speaker 04

  Twenty-five years, I'll be ninety-five, ninety-four. Oh shit, I'll probably be dead. And then I actually, I, I, I told my co-instructor, I need to leave the room for a second. I walked out and I tried to deal with it. Now my reframe is, no, no, I bought this new exoskeleton. I'm great, you know, I'm, I'm running around, it's fantastic. But yeah, when you-

• 1:44:25Rich Roll?

  Built by one of your students.

• 1:44:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, we are built by one of our students. But when you, when you actually start, you know, accepting that, yeah, you know, probably there's going to be an end, but can I live all the way up to that last moment and go, oh, how interesting. I didn't know.

• 1:44:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think the radical acceptance, it liberates you and gives you permission to engage with those years more intentionally. I mean, I've heard you tell the story of like the woman who came to you, who, I don't remember, she was like fifty-two or something like that. I was like, I'm thinking about going to medical school. Yeah. I mean, that's a, a perfect example of, well, maybe just tell the story, like how you forecast out, like, all right, well, how long do you think you're going to live? And let's reverse in an era-

• 1:45:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is just, you know, what's crazy, what's not, and how do you think about things? I give a talk and this fifty-four-year-old woman comes up and says, you know, can I ask you a question? I said, sure. Well, I'm thinking about going to medical school. I've always wanted to do that and I think I have the time. But all my friends are saying, I'm too old and I'm crazy and, and it's stupid, you know? And, and I said, well, look, let's just run, I mean, so very quickly, you know, how old do people in your gene pool live? Well, you know, if you look around my family, I'll, you know, I'll probably make it to ninety, you know, ninety, maybe ninety-five. I said, okay, now, if you're an active person, how long do you want to be working? Well, probably eighty at least. And I said, okay, so, okay, so we've got twenty-six years. Okay.

• 1:45:50Speaker 04

  Now, so let's say it takes a year for you to get ready to apply to medical school because you're out of practice, fine. Takes you a year to get in, that's two. Takes four years to go through medical school to get your MD, to become an intern, okay, that's six. By the way, after internship, you go into residency, you're doing medicine. Most medicine is done by residents. You're now a full-fledged doctor. I've got a nephew who's a resident, doing medicine all day long. So, you know, in six years, you're doing medicine, you finish your specialty in another three, four, or five, depending which one you want to get. So, you know, now I'm 11 years in, you're now 65, you've got 15 more years between then when you're going to retire from being a doctor to do the work you're doing. By the way, if we take a quick look back at the last 15 years of your life, would you say you were largely wasting your time?

• 1:46:32Speaker 04

  Oh, no, I think those years kind of matter to me. That's what we're talking about here. So are you crazy? I don't think so. No. Just decide how you want to choose to think about this.

• 1:46:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's an incredible reframe. You know, the idea that, you know, you would entertain going to med school in your mid 50s. I mean, it seems insane. And then when you articulate it that way, you're like, oh, well, yeah, why not?

• 1:46:55Speaker 04

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

• 1:47:13Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:47:14Speaker 04

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

• 1:47:19Rich Roll?

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

• 1:47:22Speaker 04

  No. Well, like, okay, I just signed up to do a motorcycle tour with my brother-in-law in Morocco. I ride a BMW GS 1250, which weighs a little over 600 pounds. I can still barely pick it up if I drop it. I kind of have a rule. If you can't pick it up, you shouldn't ride it. I'm not sure I'm riding that bike when I'm 85. Maybe a smaller bike. So it might be some things that go away, but you know, the rules are a lot more fungible than they let you to believe. I'm kind of hoping he's not riding a motorcycle when he's 85, but because I love him dearly and I don't want to, I don't have to. I might be bad at it.

• 1:47:59Rich Roll?

  You guys are very fun, interesting pairing, you know, like the devout man and the atheist, the painter and the extrovert Santa Cruz.

• 1:48:08Speaker 04

  It's, it's interesting.

• 1:48:10Rich Roll?

  It all, it all works. But I think, you know, just to, as we kind of bring this to a conclusion, it's not too late.

• 1:48:20Rich Roll?

  And it's also not indulgent to, you know, consider a life of meaning. I think for a lot of people, it's like, well, that's just, you know, how nice for you. Like, what an extravagance. Like, I'm just gonna keep doing my thing. Or, you know, I got enough meaning, you know, I'm chasing the whatever. And that's, that's just fine. But this notion of not only giving, you know, everybody permission, like, no, you, you deserve to have a life of meaning. It's available to you. It's not too late. And you can find it within, you know, it's like, this is not about like, chase your, quit your job and like, yeah, it's, this is, this is something that you can, you know, build into your life on a moment to moment basis, free of charge.

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  Right. And you will feel, feel, you'll feel better, you'll, your, your curiosity will kind of peak, kind of start, start, start activating again. And you'll find, you'll find yourself in the world in a very different sort of mindset. You know, I went to school and back when dinosaurs roamed the campus, long before you. And, but I found this thing called design, which was really cool. And it was built around this idea that we'll study engineering, art and psychology, and we'll put it all together, and we'll make things that people want. And that's been a lot of fun. And it, and it's inherently curious thing to do. Like, hey, can you come up with a better one of these? Hey, can you

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  come up with a better one of these? It's like, yeah, maybe, let's try it. So, once you get in that mindset, the designer's mindset, and you realize, oh, there are no rules. Nobody made up any rules. There's no rules for what microphones need to look like. There's no rules for what my life needs to look like. There's some things that probably There's some constraints. There's some constraints, and there's some things that, you know, probably shouldn't do that. If, you know, it might not work, might be too risky. But I bet I could try stuff. Right? And, and I bet, I bet there's more out there than I, than I thought. And if I just start with these designers' mindsets of wonder, curiosity, availability, let's see what happens. Just give it a try.

• 1:50:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, sure. Look, you exist, you deserve to be here. You're a human being. You deserve the entire human experience.

• 1:50:38Speaker 04

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

• 1:51:08Rich Roll?

  More of yourselves.

• 1:51:10Speaker 04

  Yes. Or of yourselves, yeah. Well put.

• 1:51:12Rich Roll?

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

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  Well, I'll do, I'll do wonder glasses.

• 1:51:35Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's an exercise called, put on your wonder glasses, very simple. You walk, you walk outside. Nature's a great place to do this. Walk outside and you see a plant or a tree and you go, okay, my transactional glasses are on. That's a tree. I have an app, I pull it out. I can tell you what kind of, that's a Monterey pine.

• 1:51:51Speaker 04

  They need to trim it.

• 1:51:52Speaker 01

  And then, yeah, and then a bunch of stuff with the tree. Then, and then they go, all right, now put on your curiosity glasses. Oh, Monterey pine. I wonder what a Monterey pine is doing in Southern California. This is a Monterey, that's interesting. And, and who put that there? And why did it grow there? That's, so that's the kind of curiosity lens. It's very interesting. And now put on your wonder glasses. The final thing is the wonder glasses. Like, look at that tree. That tree started from, you know, something that was nothing. I'll bet the biomass of that tree weighs 2,000 pounds. How the hell did that happen? And why is the Monterey pine, you know, needle so different from the tree next to it? That's a different tree. And isn't it wonderful that I live in a place where,

• 1:52:36Speaker 01

  like this, where nature is all around me? We haven't torn it all down yet. Uh, and I think I'll go to the beach. So put on your wonder glasses. Go from transaction to curious to wonder and see what happens. Take five minutes.

• 1:52:50Speaker 04

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

• 1:53:35Speaker 01

  The mask came off for a moment.

• 1:53:36Speaker 04

  I was, I was acting just like Rich Roll for five whole minutes at that particular moment in the staff meeting, or what have you. I'll give you an example. So we gave this talk at this bookstore a couple of weeks ago, you know, and one of the people who was there was Denise, Denise Benatar. So a woman who volunteered and worked with us for a couple of years, a couple of years ago. And she walked up and just said, I really love the book. And, you know, I just have to thank you guys again. Those years I got to work with you were some of the best years of mine. And I really care about giving people an opportunity to do what gives them aliveness. And we gave Denise a chance to experience some aliveness that she's carried

• 1:54:19Speaker 04

  on since that. That encounter was about 30 seconds. That's a moment of coherency for me. So I caught myself in the act of acting just like the David Evans I'm trying to be. And then pat yourself on the back a little bit. And it's meaning making to find yourself in the experience of being yourself.

• 1:54:37Speaker 01

  I teared up a bit, actually.

• 1:54:38Speaker 04

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

• 1:54:54Speaker 01

  I helped Gladys, you know, clear the thing on the copier. She was freaking out. She had things she had to do for her boss. I helped her clear the copier, got it working, took five minutes of my time.

• 1:55:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:55:04Speaker 01

  She's super happy. She's gonna take the copies to where they need to go. I'm, you know, I'm the kind of person who notices when somebody else is, needs some help. That's all. Simple.

• 1:55:16Rich Roll?

  We're so reluctant to be earnest, but that kind of earnestness is the connective tissue, you know, and that simple gesture, you know, of her expressing.

• 1:55:28Rich Roll?

  The meaning that she experienced with you guys then became a meaningful moment for both of you. Like, that's how it works in that way. That's a beautiful story.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  If you're available to it. We, we, we make the offer and everybody says, that's, that's outrageous. Make the offer for all of your students. You got office hours for life. Come back anytime. I don't care. 10 years, 20 years later, come back. And they think it's a great offer. And most of them I'm having dinner tonight with a kid I taught 20 years ago. Yeah. But we do it because they come back and they tell us a story. And, and that's the payoff. Like, what, what have you been doing for the last 10 years? Well, I did this and this and this and this. Yeah. But I remember this one thing from class where you could reframe a problem and I've been doing that. And it really works. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. Somebody was listening.

• 1:56:16Rich Roll?

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

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

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

• 1:56:44Rich Roll?

  One day I'll like, I'll like leave them in the, you know, like it's just the safety net. You know what I mean?

• 1:56:49Speaker 01

  I get it. I get it.

• 1:56:50Rich Roll?

  You guys made it easy. And, and you forced me to be more present. Like, I had to like, you know, talking about like walking the talk. I was like, okay, can I just be here? Cool. Cheers.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  Thanks a lot.

• 1:57:01Rich Roll?

  Peace. Thank you, guys.