Simon Sinek - Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Full transcript: Simon Sinek on London Real

8:43 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Simon Sinek, the TED speaker, ethnographer and author best known for popularizing the concept “Start with Why,” which became the second most watched TED Talk of all time. You are the author of two books, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, and your newest book, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t.

9:09 You speak around the globe, teach leaders and organizations how to inspire people, and comment for the New York Times, Business Week, Inc. magazine. Simon, welcome to London Real. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to have you. Welcome home to the UK.

9:22 You spent time here, you went to South Africa, I think, you came back, and now you live in the States. What’s it like to be back, and what’s it like to live in so many different places? Well, it’s always nice to be back. I mean, I have family here and I don’t feel like a tourist when I come here, even though I made to do touristy things. There’s a, there is a sense of familiarity which I, which I always enjoy, like going to a childhood home, you know.

9:47 So that’s great. And growing up all over the world, you know, it’s very funny, people ask me the question, “Oh, that doesn’t bother you? Don’t you really have roots anywhere?” And the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t have anything to compare it to, and that was my upbringing, and it was pretty great.

10:02 I lived on four continents by the age of ten. It’s definitely added to who I am and how I see the world, for sure, but yeah, I’m, I had a great upbringing, no complaints. And when you were getting your education here, at one point you almost went to be a barrister and went into law. That’s true. Didn’t that’s true.

10:20 Do you ever think about that inflection point in your life? No, I, I graduated college in the States and then came back here with the idea that I would become a barrister and live the rest of my life in the UK. And half a law degree in, I realized I didn’t want to be a barrister, I didn’t want to be a lawyer, and decided to leave law school and coincidentally was dating a girl who happened to be studying advertising. She was an American exchange student and she’s like, “You should look at advertising.”

10:55 And I went, “Sounds good,” and then sort of set myself on this path of getting into advertising and decided to do it back in the States and went back into the States and went into advertising and, and the rest is history, you know. So it’s funny how the, the world works. I would have thought you had some urge or some fascination with advertising and marketing your whole life. No, no, no. I mean, I like the idea, I like the idea of the vote.

11:19 I used to describe it many years ago as “the big sell,” you know. I like the idea of putting together an argument that would, the words I used back then were, convince somebody that they should choose this over that. And for me, the big sell was as true in a courtroom, which is why I wanted to be a barrister, not a solicitor, as it was in advertising. I had to put together an argument to convince someone that someone was guilty or not guilty. I had to put together an argument to convince somebody that this is better than that, you know.

11:46 So to me it was exactly the same thing. And there’s a public speaking component in the barrister world as well, because you’re presenting, right? Arguments, right? Well, were you good at that when you were training? People, I didn’t know, okay, I didn’t know.

11:58 It wasn’t something that I grew up doing. I’ve always been a behind-the-scenes person. I like being behind the scenes. Like whenever I did, like, theatre stuff in school, I was never on the stage, I was always behind the scenes. In fact, I resisted the front, and even now I don’t consider myself a front-of-the-stage person and don’t really crave it, quite frankly.

12:22 It, it has become part of my life and it’s, it’s part of the way I spread my message, but I’m still, I’m still a behind-the-scenes person. In fact, in fact, the work that I do now, even now, that I’m proudest of is the stuff that people don’t know anything about, don’t know that I do, and there’s not on any website and I don’t talk about it and it just happens, you know. It’s, it’s all the behind-the-scenes work that I’m generally at my happiest. Because people know you for the big TED Talks and the books, but you do a lot of work with corporations, charities, there’s a lot of different government, politics, military, right?

12:54 And it’s all behind the scenes. Take me back to 2009. Mm-hmm. Puget Sound, bad microphones, flipchart, a three-letter organization that, at that point, probably not that many people had heard of. The people in the know had, but it wasn’t a global phenomenon.

13:11 You get up to talk, you know, for eighteen minutes. Did you know how big of a platform that could potentially be? Did you get what’s happened? So TED, TED was already starting to become a thing, and it was still a thing of prestige, and so when I got the invitation to do it, I was very honored. It was still, it still had prestige, and I’m under no illusions that I’m very lucky.

13:34 It’s the timing, because as you said, TEDx was a very new thing and there weren’t that many TEDx events and there weren’t that many TEDx talks. If I had done my talk today, you know, twenty- five thousand talks and fifteen hundred events a year or whatever, something ridiculous, there’s no way that my talk would have gained the popularity that it did. There’s just no way. It just would’ve been buried in the masses. You think so?

13:57 Oh, 100 percent. Really. So I got very lucky with that, and so it was an honor to show up, and I gave a talk to a room of 50 people, 60 people, something like that. Was pretty small. And, yeah, I mean, the microphone, I was the first speaker of the day and so my microphone, the microphone broke in the middle of the talk, so I’m changing mics.

14:21 But you were smooth on that change. I mean, what am I gonna do? Yeah. Go as long as somebody has your new mic, you take it, right? I’ve been speaking on that message already for a few years.

14:32 I’d have really been giving the Start with Why message for three years before there was any TED Talk, any book, but it was always long-form, was always an hour, an hour and a half, and so I’d already had practice being on a stage. Never done it in 18 minutes. That was the part that I was nervous about, not the actual talk, and I guess practice. I knew what to do in the microphone. Brooke, can you talk about the genesis of that idea?

14:58 Because you were, you went into the marketing space and in the advertising space, but then you got a bit disillusioned. Yeah. But you were cognizant enough to recognize in yourself that there was something missing in your why. I was wondering if you can talk about that part of your life. Yeah, my story is kind of not that different to a lot of people, to be honest.

15:15 I, I had a good career in advertising and was working on new business pitches and stuff for the company I worked for, and I lived through September 11th in New York, and, you know, September 11th affected many people in different ways, and one of the things that it did to me was it made me feel like my, my job was stupid, you know. Like, I remember trying to come, and my office was really close to Ground Zero, and I remember coming back to work when we were allowed to, because the area was closed for a few weeks. I remember going back to the office just thinking, “What value am I providing here?

15:51 Like, my this industry and my job are ridiculously stupid,” you know. And so I already had an eye on sort of doing something else, and I had an entrepreneurial spirit, and I considered myself more of a marketer than an advertiser anyway, and so I quit and started my own business with a partner, and went to do something that I thought was in my vision, you know, not theirs. And it went really well for three years. I mean, when I say well-meaning, we survived.

16:17 It wasn’t, it’s never like that, you know. It was more like that, but, but we did okay, you know. We, there’s over 90 percent of all small businesses fail in the first three years, and we made, who didn’t, we didn’t. So I mean, like, that’s, that’s like that, we joined a very elite club, you know. But year four was very different for me.

16:36 I had already bought out my partner and I completely lost my passion for what I was doing, and I didn’t know why. And people say stupid things to you, like, “Follow your passion.” You’re like, “I’m doing the same thing and I don’t love it anymore.” Like, “Do what you love.” Like, same thing, you know.

16:50 So I was confused as to what it was, plus I was embarrassed because superficially my life was pretty good. I’d made a decent living, we had amazing clients, like we had blue chip clients that we had no business having at our little company. We did great work, well respected by our clients, and yet I didn’t feel it. And so I didn’t, I was very embarrassed by the fact, there’s like, you know, “I’m unhappy,” you know, it’s like everything looks just fine, you know.

17:17 So I didn’t talk about it, and I would say that all of my energy, instead of going into building my business, all of my energy went into pretending that I was happier, more successful, and more in control than I actually felt, which is a pretty dark space. Yeah, but you’re the leader of that organization, so you have to put them, so you put on this air that, yeah, you got everything under control and your family asks you how you is how you are, and everything’s under control. And, you know, I would go to business conferences to learn how to, like, build my business, and that actually made me feel worse, because I’d have all these people standing on the stage telling us how we should build our businesses, and all I could hear was everything I was doing wrong as opposed to what I should be doing.

17:54 And so it actually made me feel even more depressed. And it wasn’t until a good friend came to me, concerned about me, she saw that, she saw that there was something different and she was worried for me, and I remember the conversation. She was very nervous, sort of a coming to me, but like, you know, trying to approach, basically challenging you, like, “Your life is not as you claim it is.” And it really allowed me to admit that I was unhappy, and that gave me the courage to find a solution.

18:25 The fact that I had a friend in my corner who was there, that I could cry to and say, “I don’t know if I can do this,” gave me courage to find a solution. And I was very lucky, there was a confluence of events that happened around the same time. Long story short, I was able to discover that this natural occurring pattern based on the biology of human decision-making, that every single organization on the planet exists on the same three levels: what we do, how we do it, and why we do it.

18:53 Everybody knows what they do. I knew what I did. Some people know how they do it. I could tell you what made me different or special or stand out from my competitors, but I couldn’t tell you why. And so I realized until I was able to articulate that piece that my life was out of balance, everything was out of balance.

19:08 So I was obsessed with this thing called the why, figured out how to find my why, restored my passion to levels I’d never experienced before. Unbelievable. Did what anybody would do, or does, when you find something beautiful, you share with the people you love, and that’s what I did. So I shared it with my friends, and I had my friends started making crazy life changes, and they would invite me to their homes to share with the people they loved, and I would literally, it all started, I would stand in someone’s living room in New York City and people sit on the floor and I would give this talk about the why.

19:38 That’s how it all began, and people just kept inviting me to do it. Now I would help people find their why or a hundred bucks on the side, you know. That’s how it started. So there was never a time where I said, “Ah, this will be my career.” Yeah, this, this, “I can make my millions with this thing, you know, this thing has commercial value.”

19:58 It was never, it was never that. It was always something to share for free, or at least it wasn’t a commercial or academic exercise. Always something just to be shared because it had value, and that was it. And so that’s how I, that’s how I went on. And it’s really funny, my why is to inspire people to do what inspires them.

20:21 And I remember, I remember exactly where I was sitting. I had one of the biggest decisions I had to make in my life, which was the first test of my why after I had discovered it, which is, I’ve got this magical thing that clearly has value, do I copyright it, writes protect it, keep it for myself, probably TM every time you see it anywhere in the world, and, and literally sell everything and own it all, or do I look for opportunities to just share it and give it away whenever possible? And if my why is to inspire people to do what inspires them, there was no choice.

20:52 I only had one option. And so you’ve never seen a TM when you see the Golden Circle or Why, and the reason is, is because I want others to take it, I want others to build on it, I want the idea to spread. It’s not mine, I simply put the concept into words. It belongs to whoever wants to use it, and the reason it has spread is because that was a strategic decision many years ago that it should spread. You had probably people saying, “You better copyright it.”

21:17 Yeah. “Hide all that.” And you were like, “You’re crazy.” Yeah. I don’t know, it’s probably been shared more by the fact that you weren’t trying to control it.

21:25 Yeah. And, and, and I’m proud of that, you know. I, I tend to think that my life is the tip of an iceberg, meaning no matter what I’ve been able to accomplish or do, there’s so much more to do still, you know. I’m an idealist. I have a vision of a profoundly different world than the world that exists now.

21:47 You know, I want to live in a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired to go to work, feel safe when they’re there, and come home fulfilled at the end of the day. That is not the world we live in now. It is the world I want to live in, and that is the world I want my friends and family to live in, and so all of my work is committed to building that. Well, well, I know I’m one piece of a jigsaw puzzle and it’s gonna take a lot of us who are all working on different things.

22:15 My job may be to preach, like, you know, when you do a jigsaw puzzle, you put the box against the wall and then you do the jigsaw puzzle. Well, my job is to point at the box and remind people what we’re, what we’re building. That’s my piece of the puzzle, you know. I’m a preacher, right? And others have play another role.

22:31 Your job is to help disseminate the messages. Somebody else’s job is to build the company based on those messages. You know, somebody else’s job is to demand that their leaders provide that thing. So we all have a role to play, and we all put our pieces down until we have the picture formed. So no matter what I’ve accomplished, we’re nowhere near that picture.

22:51 So I always think of myself, you know, as like I said, that month, my, my work is the tip of the iceberg. I still have much to do, but the one thing I’m really proud of is that the concept of why is now in the vernacular. When I started this, no one ever referred to their why, and nobody ever said that company needs to know their why or doesn’t know their why, and people who have no idea who I am and journalists who are writing, who’ve never read my work or seen me speak, are now using that vernacular.

23:21 That to me is, I’m proud of that because what it proves is that the message resonates, is that people have taken it and made it their own and, and use it as the currency, as the vocabulary of what they’re trying to communicate, which previously was unclear. And so most of us are out there doing things that we probably shouldn’t be doing and that we don’t really enjoy doing, so there’s massive inefficiencies of journal, and that if we can get these people aligned to find out what they want to do and then believing it with all their passion, then everything just can go up 10x, 100x, thousand x. Mm-hmm.

23:57 And here’s the folly, it’s good for business. That’s the joke. That’s the joke, which is people who know their why, people who are working for companies that align with their why, people who feel like they belong, people who feel trusted and trusting, people who feel that their work is valued and valuable work harder or more productive and more innovative. They are much better employees, and the joke is when we offer how people, that those companies invariably outperform their competition over the long term, almost always.

24:31 Costco significantly outperforms GE over the long term. The hailed General Electric has half the stock value of Costco over the long term. GE stock value looks like this if you go from when Jack Welch came into power, right back in the, in the, in the early 80s, literally it’s a roller coaster. Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down. An absolute roller coaster when you look at it, but they were hailed because of the steep spikes.

24:58 And you look at Costco, that for years the analyst community criticized because their stock price was flat and that they spend too much time and too much money investing, these are the analysts’ words, investing in their employees and the customers and ignoring their shareholders. And if you look at it on an annualized, a quarterly basis, the stock price certainly looks flat, but if you pull back over 30 years, this is what GE looks like and this is what Costco looks like. GE needed a 300 billion dollar bailout in 2008.

25:29 That’s not a stable company, that’s not a good company, that’s not a company that’s built to last. That’s a company built for short-term gain at the expense of human beings, right? Costco, where they prioritize people, was the steady, beautiful upslope and unbelievably stable, and when bad things happen in the economy, little bumps. Okay, so if you invest a dollar in GE the year that Costco went public, which is about December 1984, which, so Jack Welch had been in office about three or four years, you would have made six hundred percent on your money in GE today.

26:01 If you invested a dollar in the S&P, you would have made six hundred percent of your money, and if you invested $1 in Costco, you would have made twelve hundred percent on your money, 2x GE, 2x, in a much more stable fashion. That’s called investing. That’s called stability. That’s called a well-led company. That’s called a company built to last, right?

26:26 And invariably those companies always prioritize their people. And what do you see from the outside when you see Costco? Can you see it in a minute when you look at the language they use or the culture, employees. Is it, is it very stark difference? Visit 30.

26:40 If you work there, you feel trusted and you trust the people you work with. You don’t walk around with the sensor. You come from banking, you know, nobody trusts each other. You walk around waiting for somebody to stab you in the back. Yeah.

26:51 Even Jack Welch complained about the finance arm, you know, when you bought, of course he said they were even worse. Yeah. Then everyone else, they just wanted to get paid. But, but the joke was he was the one who pioneered shareholder supremacy. He was one of the ones who pioneered rank and yank.

27:04 He was the one of the ones who pioneered using layoffs to balance the books. So he built the culture he got, so he can not complain, that’s exactly what he built. Right, a company built to the short term. It’s kind of congratulate, love the management techniques before him, right? I come in, I do this, we charge this, right?

27:23 Yeah. And the problem is, is, you know, CEOs used to be compensated based on how well the company performed. Now they’re compensated based on how well the equity performs. That’s screwed up, right? So of course you had to invest in your employees and your customers because that’s how the company performs.

27:39 Now if you announced layoffs, the stock price goes up. Hmm. Figure that one, it figured out one that. So the fact of the matter is the theories that were proposed and pioneered and popularized in the 80s and 90s were done for a different time. They were done for short-term gains in years of prosperity with relative peace and a kinder, gentler Cold War, you know.

28:05 It’s a good time, it was an easy time, let’s be honest. And so we probably could afford to be selfish. I mean, that’s how we acted. Yeah, we dismantled Glass-Steagall and things like that, you know. Well, those times are gone.

28:18 These are not relatively stable times. The competitive landscape is very different, the economy is very different, and all of those techniques used to build a company in the 80s and 90s, they’re not working anymore, and companies are struggling more than they, they, they used to, but they’re still applying the same old techniques and so it gets harder and harder and the stresses go up and up in the, and working these companies is more and more difficult just from a stress standpoint or stability standpoint. So what happens?

28:45 Innovation suffers, engagement suffers, productivity suffers, trust suffers, and, you know, cooperation suffers. A few years ago, The Economist ran one of their multi-page, you know, specials in the middle of the magazine, and it was all about the decline of innovation in the world, and they spent a whole bunch of pages making the case that innovation is owned decline. Things like fewer patents have been filed and the ones that are being filed are of smaller value, you know.

29:17 And you know, they, they made their case that the innovation is in decline globally, and then they attempted to explain why, and they made all kinds of guesses, things like the internet, things like globalization, things like the speed of business, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Not one single word, not one talked about people. Not one. So my question is, who’s coming up with all of these ideas? If you want to know why this decline and decline in global innovation is, because why should I take a risk?

29:46 Because innovation requires experimentation and experimentation requires failure, it’s in the definition. So if there’s a decline in innovation, why a should I give you my great ideas if there’s a risk associated with them, in an environment where fear is, is the norm or at least lack of trust? And if, and if I don’t have ideas, I don’t have anything to inspire me to come up with ideas, because I’m spending so much time focusing on the short term that I actually don’t have time to figure out how to advance a cause or big ideas.

30:17 It’s just not, it doesn’t even factor into my daily thinking, you know. I’m too busy trying to, you know, build my book of business or what I’m trying to do. So we’re not fostering that innovation, we don’t foster an environment, right? Already the startups are different because they can do it themselves and themselves, but otherwise what not or they see, but they start out with an idea. They started out with an idea, right?

30:37 Right behind for their existence is the idea. I was at a company recently and I heard of things, the CFO, and he stood up and said our priority, his number-one priorities are innovation and efficiency. And I was like, good luck with that, because ain’t nothing efficient about innovation. It is wasteful. You know, you have to throw so much money into R&D, you have to try things, you have to fail, you have to try again, you know.

31:06 That’s just how it works. Nothing. You think the Wright brothers built one plane and it flew? You have any idea how many crashes they had before that plane finally took off? It’s not in the design, it’s in the trials.

31:20 That’s not efficient at all. It’s often slow and it’s sometimes costly, but if you don’t need to pay for it, then you can’t be innovative. The trials and error and sometimes product failures that you have to go through so you could pick one sometimes, their line, sometimes it can be efficient, but you can’t demand that both those fact both those metrics grow simultaneously. And so I get a kick out of this. I get a kick out of the fact that very, very smart people who are leading or running, I’m not sure they’re leading, you can’t lead a company, you can only lead people, but you can run a company.

31:54 So very, very smart people who run very, very big companies and they’ve got all sorts of degrees and, you know, credibility, that they don’t see that efficiencies and the innovations are not, they’re not compatible. It’s oil and water, you know. Sometimes they can be mixed if you shake them up, I guess. I want to get into here, I get a kick out of it. Yeah, I know, I can tell you’re very passionate about it, which is fantastic.

32:18 I want to get into your second book in just a second, Leaders Eat Last, and you made a few allusions to that at the, your first TED Talk, you know, the very end, you were talking about Martin Luther King and how people arrived not for him but for themselves. Yes. And there was some, some seeds in there of that next book. Yeah. And I want to ask you about that, but what happened to you after that TED Talk?

32:38 Was it a big pop or was it just kind of a awareness of your idea that had been happening, or did that change things for you and your future? So I was very lucky to get a book deal about the same time, slightly before the TED Talk, so that they actually came out at exactly the same time. They both came out at, at the end of the year of 2009. Right. And the TED Talk started to getting in popularity on YouTube, which is made the TED people take notice, and at one point I think was the highest ranked TEDx talk on YouTube.

33:11 That’s, I think I reached that point, and so they put it on ted.com in May of 2010. I didn’t know that they were going to do that. That I found out when it happened, you know. Right, cuz at that time TEDx talks didn’t go to ted.com. Probably TEDx was very, it was very new and it was very rare and the quality, as you pointed out, the microphone program is not the best.

33:33 It’s funny though, I remembered your TED Talk from years ago is a TED Talk, and it’s funny as I looked into it more, I was like, “Oh, it’s a bad mic and bad this,” but instead of funny enough to when I first saw it, it was the message that hit me, you know. Yeah. So they saw it, they decided they were gonna put it on ted.com, which gave it much broader exposure, obviously, and then the number starts to grow. Ironically, as the views went up, book sales didn’t.

34:00 It was really sort of very funny. The book did its own thing and TED did something and they weren’t related, but I think what started tapping was, like, the demand started to grow for me to come and share my ideas, to come and speak, and that allowed me to have a, to make a living spreading the idea that I wanted to spread. So I didn’t have to do consulting or anything in them anymore on the side. And did you welcome that transition? Oh yeah.

34:26 Okay, sure. And you, you closed down your advertising agency in the meantime. Yeah, I mean, I just sort of drifted away. Okay. And so this was a welcome change.

34:34 I, what an amazing opportunity to be able to share an idea that I’m passionate about, that others are passionate about, that inspires other people and hopefully inspires change. I mean, what a, what a great honor to be given that bully pulpit. And so, yeah, the TED Talk definitely created a demand for me to come and share those messages, and I’m immensely grateful for the, you know, to the TED folks for that opportunity. When you look back on that talk now, is anything changed about your concept of the Golden Circle and Why, How, What?

35:06 Or do you ever go back and think, “Okay, I would change this,” or has anything evolved? There’s not many people that disagree with what you say, but I’ve heard people say that they would throw in a Who the center of your Golden Circle, and I’m just curious if your views have changed and what you feel about that Who piece. Sure. So I’ve heard that before. It, people’s, I mean, you forgot a piece, you forgot Who.

35:27 I didn’t. Who is the sum total of all three of those pieces. Only when all three of those pieces are aligned will we know, quote-unquote, who you are. Right, because if you are doing things that are misaligned with your, your, your cause, your purpose, your why, then we’ll say to you, it’s like, “I don’t know who you are anymore.” Right?

35:45 If you are a person who is driven by X and you start doing Y, you know, people will not know who you are, and you cease to be trustworthy, reliable, or predictable. Right? Remember, this is the biology of the brain. It’s those three levels correspond with the evolution of the human brain, so I can’t just arbitrarily add or take away pieces. It is what it is.

36:10 But who you are or who a company is is the sum total of all three of those pieces. So when all three of those pieces are in play and aligned, the Who is clear. When they are not, the Who is unclear. So it’s, it’s, it’s built in, it’s, it’s there, it’s built in. But to answer your question, you know, there are definitely nuances that I would like to have said differently, that I would have added or taken away, but, and I think every author feels the same way.

36:40 Your, your book is never, the minute it comes out, you’re like, “All right,” you know, that you just accept that, that just goes with the territory. But, but no, I’m still a devotee to, to the purity of the original idea, and it serves me and how I live my life and sort of managed the business as well. And what’s also really inside is we don’t actually talk about the business. I talk about running the business, but we don’t actually run a business. We’ve never had a discussion inside our company as to what’s good for the business or what’s bad for the business, should we do this for the business.

37:16 The only discussions we ever have is, is this right for the movement, should we do this for the movement, will this help the movement? That’s how we make decisions. So the Why goes front and center of how we make decisions for the company, because we think of ourselves as being responsible for the growth of a movement, not necessarily the growth of a company. One of the big things in that talk was the law of diffusion of innovation. I hadn’t really heard it articulated like that, and again, this is seven years ago now.

37:42 How has that morphed over time? Is that something you still talk a lot about, and what was the reaction to that part of that talk? So that, so it’s not my idea, it’s a guy by the name of Everett Rogers who wrote that down in the 1960s, and what I did with it was reapplied it. It was used, you know, Geoffrey Moore talked about it as it relates to the growth of technology, but I looked at it in terms of just the growth of, we’re spread of any idea. I just took it as a social phenomenon, so I sort of reapplied it, but I’m a, to me the law of diffusion is a religion for me, you know.

38:17 The idea is not to worry about the majority if you want to have an impact. In majority, if you want to have mass-market success, mass-market stability, or long, or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you don’t actually aim at the majority, you aim at the early adopters, and when you reach 15 to 18 percent market penetration, it just tips. It is the tipping point social phenomenon. The reason being because the early majority will not try something until somebody else tries it first.

38:44 And so when I say it’s become religion for me, I mean it. So we’re very good at figuring out and discerning who’s an early adopter and who’s majority. So for example, when somebody says to me, “Convince me why I should, I should bring you in to talk to our company. Convince me why we should use any of your ideas inside our organization,” my answer is, “Don’t,” because you just identified yourself. And you say, “Convince me,” you just identified yourself as being a part of the majority, and it’s not that I think that you’re a bad person, I just think that you’re coming at a different time and your time is later, right?

39:19 You’ll come along later. So I’m looking for the people who go, “Uh-huh, this is good. I mean, it’s not perfect and it’s good, you know. I’m not 100% sure how it works, but probably worth it, there’s probably something there that we should pay attention to. Would you like to come and work with us?”

39:38 Those are the people I want to work with. And so we’re very, very good at saying, “No, thanks,” the people who demand to convince them, and we’re very gracious and grateful to those who invite us into, to come and help. And that doesn’t mean we only preach the converted. We work with some pretty dysfunctional companies, but, but what we know is the leadership cares about trying to do the right thing, and that’s very appealing. Is that good advice for any innovator, to just not to pitch those people that are on that, that front part of the curve that we want, that are ready to adopt, and save the rest of them for when they’re in the cycle later?

40:12 Yeah, I mean, it’s a much more stable way of getting an idea to spread. The problem is, it’s not, you can’t predict as to when it’ll tip over. That’s the problem. People want certainty, that my three-year plan is that by this date it will. I mean, if you have enough money, you can buy popularity, but the minute you stop spending it, it goes away, you know.

40:31 Like, we know if you invest a huge amount of money in advertising, you’ll see sales go up, and if you stop advertising, I’m talking any advertising, bad advertising, when you stop spending, the sales will go down. Well, you paid for that. Now how would you do it without spending the money, you know? How will you do it so that when you stop doing anything? Remember, I don’t have a publicist, a publicist.

40:50 I didn’t, never had one through that, any of the book and I never knew the books. I’ve ever been reviewed by any major press? I haven’t. Right, the reason the TED Talk spread, the reason the books spread, is because somebody else told somebody about it. That’s by design, right?

41:14 Because we’ve, for 10 years, we’ve been obsessed with the early adopters and so if the work has spread at all, it’s because we always put all of our energy, in all our efforts and took, I would much rather get paid nothing to work with an early adopter than get paid a ton of money to go work with somebody in the majority. Okay, because I’m not in it for the return, I’m in it for the impact, and so you’ve got to align your strategy accordingly. And so I love early adopters, I love or their documents, and but like I said, when somebody says, “How long is it going to take?” the answer is, “I don’t know.”

41:57 It’s just like exercise. Consistency is more important than intensity. You can’t go to the gym for nine hours and be in shape, it doesn’t work that way. But if you’re gonna jump the gym every single day for 20 minutes, you will get into shape. The problem is I don’t know when.

42:12 I know, I know it will take more than a week. I know that, I’ve also know that if you’re doing, if you’re going every day and you see no results in six months or a year, you’re probably doing something wrong. I know that. The problem is I don’t know when. I just know it works.

42:28 I just know it. It’s like a relationship. When someone falls in love with you, you know, it’s not the big events, remembering their birthday and buying the flowers and Valentine’s Day that they fall in love with you. It’s the consistency, it’s the little things. It’s saying good morning to them before you check your phone.

42:43 It’s getting them a drink from the fridge when you get yourself a drink from the fridge. It’s acknowledging them when they talk to you. It’s turning off the TV and turning your body towards them when they want to have a discussion. It’s little things that you do on a consistent basis that doing any of those things once or twice does nothing, that eventually, I don’t know when, they’ll fall in love with you and you will fall in love with them. That’s just how it works, but I don’t know the timing.

43:07 And so the law of diffusion works the same way. It absolutely works, it absolutely works. The exact timing of when it tips is unpredictable, and if you’re okay with that, it’s golden. And if you know your why, and if you know your why, it gives you the confidence to stick with it. So knowing your why is the equivalent, metaphorically, of knowing that exercise works.

43:27 You don’t have to be a scientist or a doctor to know that it works, right? We have a sense that’s the right thing to do, right? And I know that if I stick with it, it will work. I just have that internal confidence, right, even though I don’t see it and I don’t feel it, even though there’s, um, you know, I can’t see any difference from a day-to-day basis on my body, right? It’s the same thing when you have the Why.

43:51 It gives you this calm confidence that when people are yelling and screaming at you what you should do, you go, “I’m good, I’m on my path.” Um, it might not be working. I remember, I mean, in the early days of this, when I would started to understand the power of the Why and I was really starting to understand this thing called the law of diffusion and realized this had to become a religion for me, I had to be obsessed with this because this was the way ideas would spread.

44:18 I remember going for dinners with friends of mine who were much more successful entrepreneurs, who are making much more money than me, whose businesses were much better structured than mine, and they would tell me in sort of stern to borderline insulting ways that I was an idiot and look at them as the, as the case study and how much money they were making and how well they were doing and how badly I was running my business. And sometimes it was unnerving because sometimes, like, I was bootstrapping this thing, I mean, I didn’t have two pennies to rub together, but I still believe that what I, the path that I was on was the right way to do it for me. not saying for everybody, for me, and it worked.

45:02 Would you articulate that to them at the time? I couldn’t. You couldn’t, right? I wasn’t able to write, I wasn’t able to. It’s interesting because so many guests that I’ve had on here are doing what you’re doing, is in there working on that diffusion, but they don’t necessarily know the theory that you do, right?

45:19 So they’re doing a lot of the things you’re doing without knowing why they’re doing them. Right. Yeah, and this is a great thing, and it’s why these entrepreneurs have success, but the question is how does it last? And very often what happens with these companies is as soon as they die or quit or retire, the company putters along for a little bit and then invariably nosedives, it goes out of business or it gets bought or merged, whatever it is. So until you can articulate the theories, then how, how are others supposed to know what’s in your gut?

45:54 I think this is the value of putting these things into words. Do I have to put my wine to where it’s no, for what it allows is for those on my team to make my cause their own, because we all believe in the same thing simply because I put it into words. It allows those we work with to share in our cause, and it allows us to build the army, and I don’t have to be the person at all. In fact, I don’t need to be the person, you know, the, this thing will only work because my vision, the one that I articulated with the beginning of the show, probably won’t come to life in my lifetime.

46:30 Probably, probably will never see it happen. That long? Yeah, it’s possible it might take it, I might get there, but what I expect to see is momentum. I expect to see that the needle is moving. I expect to see progress towards that.

46:42 I expect to see more and more companies adopting these theories and experimenting with them and inventing things that I couldn’t even conceptualize myself. I don’t have all the answers, and I think it is moving. I think we can see that. Look, it’s embarrassing that I have a career, right? Like, I talk about things like trust and cooperation, there should be no demand for my, from my, from my message, but the fact that there is means it’s missing, and people want it.

47:05 So I’ll take that as an opportunity. Yeah. Five years later after that publication, you wrote Leaders Eat Last. Why that book? Why then?

47:16 And is that something that had been brewing inside of you? Obviously, I felt like there were seeds of that in that talk. I know, nine, but you know, I don’t know that, I don’t know the whole of it. Yeah, so I never set out to be an author. I’m not a journalist, right?

47:30 So I honestly believed that I was a one-trick pony. I used to joke that I was a one-trick pony. It was a good trick, but it was, it was one trick, and that was the why, and people call me the Why guy, and I sort of, I never wanted to do one thing in my life, but I figured if I was gonna do one thing, was it that, was that a good thing? Yeah, you know. And never thought I’d write another book ever, but the good news is, is that I’m on a journey.

47:58 All of my work is semi-autobiographical and it’s my journey, and so the first book was about my loss of my passion and how to regain my passion and have a sense of purpose in my life and in my work. That’s what I wrote about, and then as my journey progressed, the new problem emerged, which is I had trouble trusting people. I had a couple of instances as my work started to get better known. I basically wrote a manual of how to talk to me. That’s what Start with Why is, and, and so I’d meet people, I tell others, once specific person I’m thinking of, where I met him, an event, and he sounded just like my kind of guy.

48:40 He’s amazing guy, and he talked in idealistic terms and believed in my work, and, and we became friends, and it, from all superficial standards, it looked like a friendship. He’d called me on the weekends when we were in the same city on business, we got for dinner, and telling me about his failing marriage. I mean, that’s what friends do, right? We confide in each other, right? And he said, “I’d love to work with you.”

49:00 I said, “Sounds great, I like working with my friends.” And so we started working, in one of his clients, or he invited me to meet one of his clients, and he sent me a contract. Great. And I went through it and offered a couple changes, to have a couple terms, no big deal, and he got furious. How dare I?

49:14 And I never heard from him ever again. In other words, he was never my friend. I was being worked. And so it, it, it scared me. Now I freaked out as, like, so everybody who I think I’m making friends with, how do I know that they’re not working me?

49:29 Like, who do I knew to trust? Like, I can’t make something, make myself vulnerable to these people. And so my walls went sky-high. I retracted and sort of only started hanging out with people I’d known for a long time, but simultaneously I was hanging out with folks in the military a lot, and I was doing a lot of work with, with the military, and I kept meeting people who would lay their lives on the line for others, people they didn’t even like, and the trust and cooperation they had, like, in, in business we have colleagues and co-workers, in the military they have brothers and sisters.

50:03 That just tells you something about the nature of their relationships, right? Why, why were you going to the military? It seems like a not an obvious mix, you. They called. Okay, I mean, they, they are run of that curve, they are what the, it was the Air Force, and the Air Force tend to be the early adopters.

50:19 They tend to be the ones who embrace Twitter very, very inside a jet, I think it is something, it’s out there somewhere, right? So the Air Force tend to be pretty early adopter as a culture, and they were the ones who found me first. They found me way back at the beginning. Hmm. You know, within a few months of me even articulating the way before there any TED Talks, before there any books, the Air Force was the first one, and and so I built relationships with people who, who’s, who their lives, their jobs, and their organizations are built on values.

50:51 They are values-based organizations, that’s what they are, and people are have such unbelievable misconceptions. They don’t, it’s not like this discipline thing where you do as you’re told and yet, it’s just not how it is. There’s brilliant minds with brilliant ideas that speak their mind and question authority and it’s, there, you know, it’s remarkable. Now are there pockets of extreme discipline? Of course, and usually it’s necessary for the particular job that somebody’s doing, but definitely the more senior you get in the ranks, the more people speak out.

51:21 It’s kind of amazing, way more than in corporate world, by the way. So that’s pretty, that’s, there, they’re amazing, and I, and I went to Afghanistan. I was invited to go with the Air Force to Afghanistan, and everything on my trip went wrong and profoundly changed my view on trust and cooperation, how the world works. What year was it? It was the impetus for Leaders Eat Last.

51:43 Okay. 2011. Okay, is what I went to up, come, you were having, you were finding some issues where your celebrity brought some wrong people into your life, and then you spent time with the military where you saw people with real core values, or her motherhood. Uh-huh. And what happened in Afghanistan?

51:58 So I didn’t tell my family that I was going because I didn’t want them to worry. I told them I’d be out of touch. I told them would be on a bunch of planes, all true, totally be in Germany, true, I just didn’t tell them was going to, um, to Afghanistan. We, we landed in Afghanistan in the middle of the night. We’d been on the ground, it was me and two escorts, had two officers who flew with me.

52:16 We landed the middle of a night and big side door and our KC-135 was open, but we hadn’t got off the plane yet, or like I said, we’re gonna be on the ground for ten minutes, and the base came into a rocket attack. We had three rockets hit a hundred yards off our nose, and for anyone who’s ever been in a war zone will know you have all the feelings you’re supposed to have, but you probably don’t have them at the same time. So I was strangely relaxed when it happened, and the panic came later, right?

52:42 We eventually given the all-clear and we got off the plane, and the goal was to try and get on an airdrop mission while we were out there, which are not regularly scheduled, so we found the one that was leaving first thing in the morning, and so we got about three, three-and-a-half hours of sleep and woke up the crack of dawn and went for this, this airdrop mission, which was amazing. Got on this big C-17, flew out about an hour and a half, two hours, dropped down to 2,000 feet, the back door opens, and we sat there when a live cargo slide out the back, parachute down to supply of an Army Forward Operating Base. Amazing experience, amazing experience.

53:15 Flew back to base, and now the goal was to get out of Dodge, to go back home, right? So we look for a flight that we can jump on, and it’s up the discretion of pilots, and things aren’t regularly scheduled, and we found an, an outbound air medical evacuation, so taking wounded soldiers, Marines, out of theater. Yeah. And they told us we could join them, and they told us to wait. We waited and waited and waited and waited and waited and waited, and finally all clear, and we’re sitting on the plane, we’re all strapped in, and literally five minutes before we’re about to leave, they tell us we have to be bumped because they need more room for stretchers.

53:49 And if there’s ever a good reason to get bumped, that’s, that’s the one. Yeah. So then we went to look for another flight, and that’s when we found out that there won’t be any other flights going in our direction until Tuesday, and it’s only Saturday, and there’s no guarantee that we’re gonna get on that flight. So I’m now stuck in Afghanistan for at least four days and no way to reach my family and say that I’m gonna, I’m gonna be out of, I’m gonna ride for home four days after I told them I was gonna get home.

54:14 They just won’t hear from me. It’s not like I can call them, be like, “Hey, I’m gonna be late, I’m in Afghanistan,” you know. And I remember every fiber of my being sinking. I just remember just all the energies leaving my body. I remember the feeling distinctly.

54:26 I remember we’re standing, the whole picture is clear, and I remember I became preoccupied with one thing and one thing only: my happiness, my success, not my success, my safety and my comfort, right? That’s all I cared about. And I remember there was a public affairs officer who said, “You know, I can get you on a plane to Kyrgyzstan, but you don’t have the right visa,” to which I said, “You get me on that plane.” Like, I don’t talk to people that way, and I could see myself becoming this, this person that I don’t know, self-preservation, right?

54:55 And I, I realized even back then, even at the time, that I was becoming that boss that we’ve all had that only cares about their success, their promotions, their advancement, and doesn’t care who has to twist themselves and knots to get them what they want. That was me. I didn’t care who had to go out of their way or twist themselves, I’m not to get what I wanted: my safety, my comfort, my happiness. So we went back to our housing. I was exhausted, obviously, we, we hadn’t slept much in a few days, and I lay down in my bed and closed my eyes.

55:26 I couldn’t sleep because my mind was racing. One of the guys said, “I’m gonna see if I can find us another flight,” and he left. The other guy said, “I’m gonna go to the gym,” and he left, and he thought I was asleep, so he turned out the lights, and I lay there in the dark and I remember the stress, I remember the panic, I remember the paranoia, I remember regretting saying yes. I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to go home, I wish I’d never said yes.

55:49 And, and I realized that I was living the equivalent of an unfulfilled life compressed and exaggerated, all of the feelings exaggerated to this 24-hour period, where, and we do this in our work lives where we mistake moments of happiness for fulfillment. So I had an amazing day, I saw things that most people will never get to see, and it was incredible. I didn’t want to wake up and do it again. And if you think about at work, you know, we have the thrills of hitting the goals, making the bonus, getting the promotion, the winning the client, it’s all fantastic, getting rich, I mean, whatever it is, it’s fantastic, but do you want to wake up and do it again and again?

56:25 Do you truly feel fulfilled? Those feelings are fleeting, they, they happen, they are, they’re amazing, and then they go away, and so we think falsely that happiness comes from trying to repeat those short-term thrills over and over again, but it never really fills, feels fulfilling. And so this is what I had done, I had confused happiness with fulfillment. I didn’t, I confuse the fleeting thrills with deep joy. And here I am, stuck in this, in this 24 hour compressed period, and, and, and I remember the paranoia.

56:58 I was convinced, I mean convinced, that there was gonna be another, another rocket attack, and I was convinced it was gonna land on me. I was convinced that my parents would find out that I was in a war zone when an, an, an Air Force officer went, knocked on my parents’ door. I was convinced of it. And so I’m trying to solve my problem. I’m lying in bed, trying to figure it out, make this horrible feeling go away.

57:24 I’m in the purpose business, so I know that when you have a sense of purpose it, it gives you this common. So I’m like, and I didn’t have a purpose, I was just there as an observer, so I tried to invent one. I’m like, “You’re here to tell their story and come back and share what you learn.” And it made me feel good for, like, a minute, five minutes. And this happens in companies as well.

57:44 They try and articulate some nonsense vision or mission or purpose or why, whatever they want to call it, and it doesn’t work. It lasts for a couple weeks, doesn’t really inspire, it’s inspiring in the meeting and that’s it. That’s what I was going through. And so I lay there, tried every trick I had, and I gave up. I just, I gave up.

58:09 I ran out of options and I ran out of choices and resigned myself to the fact that I was stuck. And so I figured that if I was gonna get stuck, I might as well make myself useful, cuz I got four days of nothing to do. So I, I decided I would volunteer. I decided that I would offer to speak wherever and whenever they wanted me to, them. I decided that I’d met some amazing people, that I would volunteer to help them.

58:36 I would sweep floors, floors, I would carry boxes. I didn’t care how menial the labor was as long as I could be of use, as long as I could serve those who are serving others. A pun making that decision, this overwhelming calm came over me. I was, the fear went away, the paranoia was gone instantly. I even had a sense of excitement.

59:04 I was actually excited to serve those who served others. I felt amazing, and this is what I learned. I learned that a true sense of purpose doesn’t come from what we can do to get, it comes from what we can do for others, that our true sense of purpose is the opportunity to serve those who serve others, and the calm and confidence and courage that it takes to live a life or build a business comes when we devote ourselves not to our own success but to the success of others.

59:33 The timing was eerie. As soon as I had come to this amazing conclusion, the door flew open and it was Major Throckmorton. He says, “I’ve got us on a flight. There’s been a flight that’s been redirected, it will leave without us, we have to go, we have to go now, we have to go now.” We ran to the gym, we got the other guy off the treadmill, we run back, we grab our stuff, and we just run out to the flight line, right?

59:55 We’re standing there, we can see the C-17 that we’re gonna get on, we will be the only three passengers aboard this redirected flight, and as soon as we get to the flight line, a security cordon comes down and they won’t let us out to the plane because somewhere else on base there’s a fallen soldier ceremony, and out of respect, when there’s a fallen soldier ceremony, everything on base stops. And so we sat on the curb and waited, and I told the guys when I’d gone through in the bed, and I cried like a baby, and one of the things most people don’t realize about the military is crying is just fine. I was vulnerable and I felt safe with them, and they, it was fine.

1:00:33 Finally the cordon went up and we walked out to the plane that would carry us home. What I haven’t told you is the reason this flight was redirected is we would be carrying the soldier for whom they just had the fallen soldier ceremony. And so we stood on board this empty C-17, huge big cargo plane, and the Army marched this flag-draped casket onto the plane, laid it down in the middle of the plane, did a slow eight count salute, marched off the plane, and we could watch them hugging and crying as they walked out of sight.

1:01:05 The Air Force crew got to work and strapped our precious cargo down. It would be a nine and a half hour overnight flight back to Ramstein. Once we got in the air, we all staked out a piece of real estate, put some sleeping bags down so we could get some sleep. I slept right, right next to the casket. Wow.

1:01:21 That was the piece of real estate that was left for me. And every other flight that had been on, we talked, we joked. Barely a word was spoken for nine and a half hours. On every other flight I visited the cockpit, hung out with the crew. On this flight I never visited the cockpit once, and I will tell you, it was the greatest honor of my life, having just gone through this compressed extreme experience in 24 hours, learning what, what fulfillment really is, learning the joy comes from the opportunity to serve those who serve others, not the thrills, right, that I had the great honor of bringing home someone who understood service much more than I ever will understand.

1:02:05 And the final mission was another air medical, medical evacuation from Ramstein back to Andrews in the United States. Thirtysomething wounded warriors aboard this aircraft, and there was one Marine in the back, and what they call sea cat, which is a critical care unit. He’s attempted an artificial coma from hit because of his wounds. His buddy stepped on the night edie and he took the shrapnel. He had two broken legs, broken arm, shrapnel in the chest, punctured eye socket, punch or punch at eyeball and broken eye socket.

1:02:38 I’ve never seen a body that’s broken, and I sort of stayed away from the back of the plane just out of sort of discomfort. I finally went to the back of the plane and talked to the docs who were assigned to look after him. They, his entire team of doctors just devoted to him, and one of the, the guy in charge was a reservist who works out of an emergency room in Houston, in Austin, and I asked him a question that I would never have asked him had I not had the experience that I had just hours before I asked him.

1:03:07 You’re a good guy, you work in an ER, you save lives for a living. Do you have a different sense of fulfillment when you do your reserve time on these missions than you do back home? And he said to me, “There’s no comparison.” He said, “90 to 95 percent of the people who show up in the ER, in the ER, either drunks or idiots. That’s what lands them in the ER in the first place.”

1:03:29 He says, “There’s not a single drunk or idiot here.” He says, “The fulfillment that I get working on these missions is, I, there’s no, there’s no comparison. It’s the greatest feeling I have in my career.” And when I got home, I, my, I went through a weird period where I was really on a short fuse. I got really angry really quickly, a little PTS, I don’t know what it was.

1:03:56 I remember, like, if anything went wrong, I mean stupid stuff, like I didn’t get an upgrade, you know, like my flight was delayed, I would go off the handle, and I remember I would call my assistant and it would be 10 o’clock at night, I’d call her up and just yell at her, and I’d be so embarrassed the next day, I’d call her and apologize. I would blame fatigue, “I’m so sorry, I’m just tired.” And I would realize, like, I would go to events that I used to speak at on a regular basis without thinking of it, and I realized something was different.

1:04:26 I would, I remember there was one event in Vegas where I was walking from my room to the venue and I was literally saying in my head as I was walking to the stage, “Think of the money, think of the money, think of the money,” like my body was rejecting it. But then there would be other days where I’d go work at a military base and they’d start me working at seven o’clock in the morning and I literally would not have a break until 10 o’clock at night, and I wouldn’t skip a beat and nothing would bother me. If things went wrong, I would just take it in stride.

1:04:49 And I realize what was happening is when I was putting myself in a situation where I was serving people who weren’t serving others, my body was rejecting a thing. My body didn’t want to let me be there, and so I had to convince myself that I would rationalize, you know, it was a financial gain, whatever it was. And I realized it made me a bad person, it made me ugly, it made me an, right? But as soon as I put myself in situations where I had the opportunity to serve those who are serving others, I was great.

1:05:18 I was charming, I was nice, I was relaxed, I was easygoing, no problem was a big deal, everything will solve, don’t worry about it. I had endless energy. You know, never missed a beat, slept better, was great. And that’s when I realized that I had a choice to make. I could now make prescriptive decisions, that I could now choose to work with those who care about people first or I could choose to work with those who care about numbers first, and it will directly affect how I live my life and how I feel about myself and how I treat others.

1:05:52 And so we completely changed all the systems in the organization as to how he selected opportunities, and, and again, we worked with plenty of dysfunctional organizations, but we worked with people now who prioritize the care of a human being over the care of themselves. They prioritize the advancement of others over the advancement of themselves, and we’ve never looked back, we’ve never looked back. All of those negative feelings, all of that, ish nough Stu 2012, right?

1:06:24 And the book was born out of these experiments. So the book, so I started asking myself the question, where does trust and cooperation come from? I kept meeting people who would sacrifice their lives to save the lives of people they don’t even like. Where does that come from? In business we don’t even like to give up credit for things, right?

1:06:43 I joke all the time that in the military they give medals to people who are willing to sacrifice themselves that others may gain. In business we give bonuses to people who are willing to sacrifice others so that we may gain. It’s backwards, it’s backwards, right? And so I, it was this very simple question. I just wanted to know where people like that came from because I wanted to be around people like that, and I’m not in the military.

1:07:06 And I thought it was the people. I thought they’re just better people. That was my original conclusion. And so the more I started to learn and investigate them, the more I realize it’s not the people, it’s the environment. If you get the environment right, trust and cooperation is what happens.

1:07:20 If you get the environment wrong, cynicism, paranoia, mistrust, and self-interest, interest prevail. But who sets the environment? Leaders. And so when you look at some investment banks and the lack of trust and lack of cooperation, the backstabbing, it’s not the people. They’re not bad people, they’re incredibly badly led and the environments are terribly poorly built, the compensation structures, all of it.

1:07:46 Yeah, all of it, right? The environment that the leaders in pitting guys against each other cuz they think it’s good for, no, it’s not, right? It’s unbelievably destructive to the human beings. Those people now treat each other badly, they treat their spouses badly, they treat their kids badly, they treat their friends badly, they treat themselves badly. You know, there’s nothing, there’s no good, there’s no good that comes out of that model.

1:08:08 Short-term gains is all you get out of it, but at what expense? I’m still living the hangover. Yeah, yeah. So that’s where Leaders Eat Last came from. Leaders Eat Last came from my, the next stage of my journey.

1:08:20 I understood the concept of purpose, what I didn’t understand was once you had the purpose, how can you make sure that you trust in court with others who share your purpose? And that’s what that, that’s, that’s how that came about. There’s a quote of things from the book, and you and I believe you said, quote, “The whole purpose of maintaining the circle of safety is so that we can invest all of our time and energy to guard against the dangers outside. It’s the same reason we lock our doors at night.”

1:08:45 Is that this idea that we don’t have to fight against each other, right? Okay. So, so when there is a sense of psychological safety inside the organization, we then will cooperate, align our talents to face the dangers outside the organization and seize the opportunities, right, because there are plenty of outside dangers, unpredictable economy, the ups and downs in the stock market, your competition that sometimes trying to put you out of business, trying to literally kill you, you know.

1:09:11 And if you’re too worried about fighting against each other, protect yourself from each other, you’re exposing yourself to external danger. But when there’s a sense of psychological safety inside the organization, we don’t actually fear our colleagues, we don’t fear our bosses, we are, bosses trust us to get our jobs done, they train us and then let us go, give us opportunities, then the natural human response, the biological and anthropological reaction to those conditions, is trust and cooperation. Remember, trust is a feeling.

1:09:39 You can’t demand that someone trust you. You just kinda did it. It’s a feeling, it’s what it is. So is cooperation. It’s a feeling.

1:09:47 And so when there’s a lack of psychological safety inside the organization, what happens is cynicism, paranoia, mistrust, and self-interest prevail, and ultimately it weakens the, it weakens the company. The cracks will show. The cracks will show. 300 billion dollar bailout. The cracks will show.

1:10:03 So that’s what that means. And some of the other things you talk about in the book, our autonomy, very important. Yeah. Giving that environment which you guys talked about. Yeah.

1:10:11 And you really go into kind of that empowerment. Yeah, which, and a lot of that you first saw in the military, and then you saw it in, in well-led organizations. I saw that the military was not unique. If you looked at the best-led organizations in private sector, they looked exactly the same. Okay.

1:10:25 The conditions were the same, the leadership was the same, and the people were the same. Do you know a gentleman by the name of Jocko Willink? He has a book called Extreme Ownership. He’s a former US Navy SEAL and he was here a few weeks ago in that chair and he’s, he talked about a lot of same things you do, you know. He’s, was in the Battle of Ramadi in 2006 and he’s like, “Brian, people think that my soldiers do what I say.”

1:10:47 He’s like, “They don’t, no, they respond to leadership.” And it’s, it’s we have, we really have this misperception, yes, civilian world, that these guys are robots. Correct. And the more elite the troops, the more autonomy they have. So SEALs are a great example.

1:11:00 Highly, highly, highly elite troops. SEALs plan their own missions. They’re told the objective and that’s it. That’s all they’re told, and they plan their own missions themselves. That’s unbelievable autonomy.

1:11:13 They don’t have a group of, there’s no bureaucracy that plans their missions and they’re just, oh, these drones that go next. It’s not what happens. They’re unbelievably sparked. Some of the smartest guys I ever met were in the SEALs. In fact, one of the guys on SEAL Team Six, he’s a very senior guy in the SEAL NCTM six, showed me this, which is when there’s about 2,500 regular SEALs, about 300 guys on SEAL Team 6, right?

1:11:34 So they really are the best of the best of the best, right? When they are looking at who they want to be on SEAL Team Six, one of the things they do is they look on two axes. They look at performance and they look at trust. Of course nobody wants this person, the low performer of low trust. Of course, of course.

1:11:53 Everybody wants this person, the high performer of high trust. Of course. What they learned is that this person, high performer, low trust, is a toxic leader, and they would rather have on their team a medium performer of high trust, sometimes even a low performer of high trust. It’s a relative scale over the high performer of a low trust. Right now, if you think about business, we have a million metrics to figure out someone’s performance and we have negligible or no metrics to discern someone’s trustworthiness, and so all we end up doing is looking at someone’s performance and promoting them based on performance alone, ignorant of the fact that they’re toxic to the other people in the organization.

1:12:34 What’s worse is that every decision an organization makes is a piece of communication, and so when the company promotes a toxic leader, it basically says to everybody else, “We don’t care if you, like, cheat and steal, as long as you make your numbers you’ll do just fine here.” So there shouldn’t be surprised when people break the law and do underhanded things, which is what happened in investment banking, right? Which is why there’s such a good example for us.

1:13:04 Yeah. Conversely, if you had a metric for trust and somebody who was a top performer but untrustworthy was first coached, and if they couldn’t be coached they were asked to leave, it also sends a piece of communication to the company that says, “We don’t care how good your performances is, if you don’t take care of each other, there, you’re not safe here.” And guess what happens? People take care of each other. And here’s the joke, do you know how easy it is to find the other untrustworthy guys?

1:13:31 Just ask the people they work with who’s the, the whole point, the same person every time. And until it, the military does that, peer, peer review all the time. Rangers do it, the SEALs do. They do peer review because they know that it matters, because they know that they, they absolutely evaluate performance, absolutely, right? They also absolutely consider leadership, considers the quality of their own people, of course, but especially in places like the Rangers, they know, they call them spotlight Rangers, that when the spotlight’s turned on, you do well, you make your numbers, in fact you’re the highest performing on the team, the, the instructors love you, but as soon as the lights, er, the spotlight’s off and the instructor’s not there, nobody likes you.

1:14:10 They know that, and so by doing peer reviews, that can be illuminated, right? And you have to pass all three skills, spots, and peer in order to make it to the next level. That’s how serious it is, right? So being just a good performer’s not, not, not enough. So the same as it is to find the, it’s also unbelievably easy to find the great leader.

1:14:36 Who do you trust more on this team than anybody else? The whole point, the same person. And that person may not be the highest performer, but that person gets more out of everyone else. That person is someone you want to keep around. But we in business, we don’t even think about, we’re not even trying to develop any metrics for trust, and yet the most elite forces in the world, the ones that all of the business leaders are reading their books, “See leadership this” and “See leadership that,” are not actually following what they do.

1:15:05 They just like the idea that these guys are elite. I guess there’s a very human organizations, they’re very, very humanoid. Yeah. There’s a phrase, “Hold the line,” is one that chakra says over and over again. “Hold the line.”

1:15:16 And that is the embodiment of that graph, trust, trust, trust, trust. Trust is always the most important thing because it keeps that organization whole, and that’s something. Yeah, it’s really, and over and over again. And, and Navy SEALs are a special breed. I mean, all the special operation forces are special breeds, but one of the things that you find that’s remarkable about them, it’s not just about the guys.

1:15:38 In fact, I’ll put it, I’ll tell you a story. A SEAL was asked who makes it through BUD/S. So BUD/S is the selection process to become a SEAL, and it’s grueling, you know, and you have to live telephone poles in northern, all the rest of it. It’s grueling. And he responded, “I can’t tell you who makes it through, but I can tell you who doesn’t.”

1:15:58 He says, “The guy covered in muscles and tattoos who wants to prove to everybody how strong he is,” he says, “none of those guys make it through.” He says, “The preening leaders who like to delegate everything,” he says, “none of those goes, those guys make it through.” He says, “The star college athletes who’ve never really been tested to the core of their being, none of them make it through.” He says, “Some of the guys who make it through are skinny, some of the guys who make it through seem scrawny and weak.”

1:16:27 He says, “Some of the guys who make it through, you’ll see them shivering out of fear.” He says, “But every guy who makes it through, when they reach the point where they’re emotionally and physically exhausted, they have nothing left to give whatsoever, somehow, someway, they’re able to dig down deep inside of themselves to help, to find the energy to help the guy next to them. Those are the guys that become SEALs.” So yes, there is a physical component, they absolutely make it through the hell that is BUD/S, right?

1:17:00 But it is one of the most deeply caring organizations. The way they care and love for each other is unfathomable. It’s the highest level of caring that you’ve ever seen. That’s what makes a SEAL. It’s both, it’s skills and trust, it’s not one or the other, it’s both.

1:17:16 And in business we value one over the other. We talk about the other one, we just don’t do anything about it. What was the reception to the book? It’s very nuanced, your points. They take a while to actually understand.

1:17:27 I’m behind and I have to digest them a bit, because it’s not like bullet point this, bullet point that, it’s a real deep culture, it’s almost like a real selfless kind of a Buddhist way to approach things and look at things. How’s the response been? Positive. People asked me to speak about it, which is nice, and people are buying it, which is nice, but it’s Start with Why, I really went like this, and this one’s sort of, it’s much sort of steadier, you know.

1:17:55 And I agree with you, it is a more mature book. There’s more, a lot more depth to it even. I think I was more mature when I wrote it, and the experiences that push me to write it were super intense, as I, as I shared with you. But you know, I guess it’s a hard question for me to answer. I mean, I mean, people are using the vocabulary, which is good, and the fact that people are behind the book, I guess, is, is a metric.

1:18:27 We have to choose wisely. If a corporation comes to you and says, “I want you to come talk to us more about this book or to look at our organization,” do you have, you have, you made mistakes before where you’re like, “Yes,” and you go in and you’re like, “Maybe they’re not on the front part of that curve, maybe they’re not gonna be able to receive this message”? I mean, look, I’m there’s, there’s, I have a limited amount of time, ana limit amount of days left on the planet Earth, and so I would love to say yes to everybody, you know.

1:18:50 I sometimes get accusers, like, accused of, like, why aren’t I helping the ones on the right side of the curve? They’re the ones who need the help most. I’m like, “You’re right, you’re right, you’re absolutely right,” but if the goal is to define the tipping point to change the way the world works, I’ve got to make some strategic bets, and sometimes I bet wrong. Sometimes I do show up into the whoops, and sometimes I bet wrong where I say no to somebody that probably is amazing.

1:19:14 You know, I absolutely get it wrong, but the number of times we get it wrong is pretty small, so so on average we say yes to the bulk of the right kinds of, the right kinds of people or right kinds of companies on average. What’s the next part of your journey? I’m guessing that might involve a book. I’m guessing you probably don’t always know where. Yeah, I know the, I do have a couple books in the works, actually.

1:19:38 I’m writing a version of Start with Why for twelve to sixteen year olds, which I’m actually really excited about. I’ll Kato take the message down to kids. I have a book coming out, I, which is a quote book just, I start Leaders Eat Last was a very hard book to write. It took two years of my life, it just lost two relationships because of it, and it beat me up, and sorry, lonely process. It’s a horrible guy, he says writing books is the worst.

1:20:00 Is it? Oh, everybody who says it’s easy and great now either didn’t write a good book or didn’t write it themselves. It’s hopeful, there’s no, I’d never met an author who finds joy yet in writing a book. You have to go inside it’s yourself and it’s family. Yeah.

1:20:16 And, and so I decided to do something a little fun for the next one. So this fun, beautiful quote book, a little bit of delight and inspiration to share on a daily basis with people, um, you know, sort of little gifts that we can give each other, sort of thing. But there is a new sort of think, think eBook, the next step in my journey, which is, okay, you have your why and you know your purpose and you have Leaders Eat Last, okay, you’ve got the team and you know how to build a strong team of trust and cooperation, but the challenge is, is that team, that company now exists in reality, and there’s plenty of companies and people out there who are selfish, who are self-motivated, and who aren’t idealist and don’t want to change the way things work.

1:20:55 How do you factor that into all of this idealism? Does butt up against reality. And so the next stage of my, a journey, it’s part of my own, my own life story is I, up, my lawyer likes to tell me that he’s like, “Simon, you live in the world, you know.” And so there’s some theories that I’m tinkering with that are really helping me understand how to align myself and my cause in a world that may not see the world the way I see it. And so because it’s helping me and because I’m sharing those ideas, it’s the same organic nature, might, might, might, may eat my agent likes to joke that the only reason I’m writing this book is because I ran out of excuses why not to write it, and he’s right, because I’ve been talking about this new idea for a few years and I’ve been sharing with people because I think it has real value, and it has found real value, and so I’m now at the point where I guess had to share with more people, which is sort of the organic nature of all my work, you know.

1:21:55 So that one, that one I’m really, really excited about, and it’s all about game theory, and it’s a lot of fun. It sounds fascinating. Yeah, it’s good stuff. Technology, I mean, the last seven years since your talk, technology has changed in a huge way, not to mention just the core technology itself, but also how we interact with it on a daily, my second by minute basis. Just curious on your thoughts about technology, Millennials, how we’re interacting more but really connecting less.

1:22:22 Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, the technology is great, you know, it’s lots of fun, very helpful, makes a lot of things easy, but like anything in the world, there’s, there is too much of a good thing, you know. And I think one of the things we don’t talk about is what is the balance of technology in our lives, and I would argue that for many of us it’s out of balance. We know that the chemical dopamine is released whenever we get a big buzz, flash of beef from our phone or email, right?

1:22:53 So dopamine is the exact same chemical that’s released in alcohol, nicotine, and gambling, right? In other words, it can be addictive. It’s left unbalanced. A little alcohol is great, too much alcohol, that’s a great gambling is fun, too much gambling, really bad, right? Technology is wonderful, too much technology can be very destructive and destroy our relationships, or, like all addictions, destroy our relationships, right?

1:23:24 And so what the one thing we’re not considering is what is the right balance. If you wake up in the morning and you check your phone before you say good morning to your spouse, that’s a problem, right? If you have phantom beeps, that’s a problem. That comes from something, right? If you find yourself incapable of getting through a day without needing to check, that’s a problem, right?

1:23:49 Now where it gets really dangerous is with kids, millenials, some of the more kids anymore, so almost all alcoholics on the, I discovered alcohol when they were children. When we’re very, very young, the only thing we need is the approval of our parents, right? When we go through adolescence, we now need approval from our peers, frustrating for our parents, very important for us because it allows us to acculturate outside of our immediate families into the larger group, right?

1:24:20 Very stressful time, and we’re supposed to learn in this time of anxiety to rely on our friends, to reach out to our friends for help. That’s what we’re supposed to learn. Some people, quite by accident, discover alcohol, and that they learned the numbing effects of dopamine actually help them get through the stress of adolescence. This connection unfortunately becomes hardwired, and so for the rest of their lives, when they face any kind of financial, career, or social stress, they don’t turn to a person, they turn to the bottle, right?

1:24:51 Now we have age restrictions on alcohol, cigarettes, and gambling because we know that an immature mind is not yet strong enough, or mature enough, to deal with the powers of these addicting chemicals, is addictive chemicals, right? So we put an age limit. We have no such age limit for age restriction on social media or cell phones, right? So ostensibly what we’ve done is we’ve thrown open the liquor cabinet and we’ve said to our adolescents, “Hey, I know this whole adolescent thing is really stressful, so here’s the vodka, take as much as you need.”

1:25:27 That’s basically what we’ve done. And so what we have is an entire generation that’s growing up addicted, and like all addicts, they haven’t learned the skill set of, when they suffer stress, to turn to a person. What they do is they turn to the device, and what that only does is increase senses of isolation, of loneliness, and can actually destroy relationships. We’ve all had the experience where you’re with somebody, walking down the street, in a meeting, out for dinner or whatever, and they pull out their phone and you feel like an idiot.

1:25:57 I won’t tolerate it, and when I’m with something, right, but it actually makes us feel stupid, so what do we do? We pull out our phones because it’s better than feeling stupid, right? Or when you’re talking to them and they’re going, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” you sort of like, “What am I the point of this?” Now take an entire generation that has no memory of a time before the device. We at least can reference times before cell phones and internet and social media, we at least have a point of reference.

1:26:23 They don’t. So this is their normal, but that’s how they feel. So you have an entire generation growing up with addiction and an increased sense of loneliness and isolation. We’re already seeing the results. We’re seeing increased rates of suicide amongst this generation, we’re seeing increased rates of accidental deaths due to overdoses amongst this generation, we’re seeing increased numbers of mass homicides largely performed by this generation, school shootings.

1:26:51 Yeah, over 70% perpetrated by kids born out to the year 1984. We, schools, universities are now dealing with numbers they’ve never dealt with before of kids requesting leaves of absence due to depression. We’re already seeing it, right? We’re seeing the effects of loneliness and isolation, we’re seeing it, and yet we’re not reacting to it, we’re not doing anything about it, right? And parents are a lot to blame for this because parents, there are some schools who want to restrict phones in the schools and it’s the parents who demand that they keep their phones in case of emergencies.

1:27:26 Seriously. Seriously, when was the last time the cellphone was used for an emergency? “What time are you coming on?” “What time should we pick you up?” And if there’s an emergency, you call the office and they know what classroom the kid’s in and in five minutes they’ll bring the kid to talk to you on the phone.

1:27:39 Like, the old way worked just fine. And remember we talked before about innovation, it has to solve a real human problem. What human problem exactly did we solve by compressing the five minute time frame? We added to the problem, we didn’t solve it. So that’s one huge problem, you’re dealing with an addicted generation.

1:27:57 This is a big time bomb ticking. You it will get really worse. Okay, so combine that with the fact, so you have an addicted generation that doesn’t have the skill set to ask for help, combined with the fact that they’re so good at Facebook and Instagram, they’re good at putting filters on everything, so they’re good at showing you how smart and strong they are. These kids who commit suicide, you go look at their Instagrams, you would have no clue that they were depressed.

1:28:20 So they’re happy, and they’re star athletes, right? You have no clue because they’re really good. So when we say silly things like “my door is always open,” yours, they have the courage to come in, combined with the fact that they’re subject, largely, not all, but too many, to a failed parenting strategy because their parents told them they were special, they could have anything they wanted, they can be anything they want, they got medals for coming in last, which by the way we know doesn’t work, it devalues the medal for the one who comes in first, and the one who came in last, it makes them feel stupid because they know they didn’t deserve it, right?

1:28:54 The kids got into honors classes not because they deserved it but because the parents complained, and some of them got good grades not because they earned them but because the teachers didn’t want to deal with the parents. And then the kids graduate college and they get a job and in an instant they find out they’re not special. They don’t get anything for coming in last, the parents can’t get them a promotion, and and you can’t have whatever you want just because you want it.

1:29:19 And in an instant their entire self-image is shattered, and so you have an entire generation growing up with lower self-confidence than previous generations. So you have a lower self-confidence than previous generations, combined with an inability to ask for help with things that you’re struggling with, and you turn to social media or device, you keep checking, you keep checking account your likes, you count your likes, you count your followed, you count your father’s. If somebody on friends you, oh my god, it’s trauma, right?

1:29:43 The way they break up with each other is they just ghost each other, just cut each other out and stop returning to text, returning texting, returning phone calls because they don’t have the skill set to say, “Hey, it’s not working out, it’s not me, it’s you,” right? There’s no closure on things, right? Combined with the fact there’s an institutionalized impatience, so they’ve grown up in a world of instant gratification. You want to buy something, you go on Amazon, it shows up the next day.

1:30:09 You want to get in touch with someone, you don’t leave a message on their machine and wait for hours for them to get them, and did you just text them and they get back to you immediately. You want to watch a movie, you just log on and watch it, you don’t have to check movie times, right? Everything happens instant. You want to get a date, swipe right, you don’t even have to muster up the courage to go Blake, yeah, you know, you don’t have to there you go, got a date, right?

1:30:29 And so the problem is they’re accused of being entitled. I don’t think they’re entitled at all. Not at all. I think they’re impatient. I keep meeting these fantastic, smart, driven, ambitious, idealistic, fantastic kids who graduated school, they got a job, they want to make an impact in the world, and I go up to them and say, “How is it going?”

1:30:50 And they say, “I think I’m gonna quit.” I’m like, “Why?” They’re like, “I’m not making an impact.” I’m like, “You’ve been here eight months.” And it’s as if, it’s as if they see the summit of a mountain, does that is, if they’re standing at the foot of a mountain, they can see the summit, they can see the thing they want.

1:31:08 I want to make it in back. What they don’t see is the mountain, this large, immovable object. You can go up fast, you can go up slow, I don’t care, but there’s still a mountain. What they don’t understand is that life, that relationships and career fulfillment are a journey. There’s no app for that.

1:31:26 I got nothing. You’ve got to go through the slow, plodding, annoying, meandering process called career and life. But if they don’t get it in eight months, they go look for it somewhere else. They don’t get it, they go to look for it. So it’s impatience, and because they don’t have the skill set to ask for help and because they feel lonely, it compounds and compounds.

1:31:48 Solutions for this? So then, so then we dump them in office environments that are built on theories from the 80s and 90s that prioritizes a number before a person, and no one really cares about their confidence and their personal growth, they’re just numbers on a spreadsheet. And so they enter work cultures that don’t help them, and the problem is they’re entering the workforce at a deficit. I hear from kids, they tell me that they struggle to form deep, meaningful relationships, and the companies don’t care, and so it’s destructive to them as individuals, but ultimately it’ll hurt the companies because more and more millennials are entering the workforce.

1:32:27 I believe to your point about solution, that now the responsibility on companies is even greater than it’s ever been before to take care of its people, because if the environments in we’re asking our youngest workers to work in isn’t built to help them, I can’t even imagine what the suicide and, and homicide and just the rates of depression, you know, an accidental death due to overdose are gonna look like in the future. It’s gonna reach pandemic proportions. It’s already the, the statistics are already alarming, and yet nobody’s sounding any alarm bells.

1:33:03 Parents have to intervene. We have to stop giving our kids free access to social media and phones at young ages. They are not ready for it, their minds cannot cope with the dopamine. Balance is fine. You can give a kid a phone, but they can’t use it in their bedroom, they can’t have it at the dinner table, they can’t take it to school, they can only have it up to a certain hour, and you take it away, their children, you can take the phone away.

1:33:26 We’ve got to intervene as parents, but as companies we now have to deal with the influx of kids that are coming into our companies with addiction. Watch, I see it all the time. Walk through any office, you’ll see the older employees have their phones on the sides of their computers as they’re working. You’ll see the youngest employees have their phones face up in front of their keyboards, between their arms as they’re working, and this is how they work.

1:33:49 And the science is alarming. They did experiments on mice where they did the multitasking, they changed the, they changed, they put flashing lights to mimic going from the computer to the cell phone, the computer to the cell phone to the TV. The mice that were exposed to the changing lights, it took them three times longer to solve a maze than the mice that weren’t, and the damage was permanent. It didn’t improve when they stopped the lights. This is intense, um, and the leadership now is even more important than the leadership now, it’s even more important.

1:34:25 Yeah. And the leaders now I’m even more is irresponsible. You are responsible for the lives of human beings, and some of these human beings are your children. So okay, you busted CEO who thinks all the stuff that I talked about is craziness and you don’t have time to make these changes, this is, I here, we don’t have time, it’s a war out there. I’ve actually heard executives tell me that it’s a war out there.

1:34:47 “I don’t have time for this leadership stuff.” I know guys who go to war, and I’ll tell you, it’s not a, what you’re going through, you know, you tinker with money, it’s not a war. You do have time for this, and if it’s really that way, then what were you doing when it wasn’t a war? It’s even more, it’s what, an indictment that in peaceful times, when times are good, that you weren’t focusing on the stuff, right? But my point is, is a lot of these executives have children of this age working in other companies, and my question is, would you like those other companies, would you like those other executives to care about the growth of your child, the confidence of your child, the career success of your child?

1:35:28 Would you like those other companies to help your kids learn the skills of social interaction, the ability to ask for and receive help? Would you like their jobs to give that to them? Set the example, do it for other people’s children. Every single employee, 100%, is someone, someone, someone’s daughter. A hundred percent.

1:35:48 And if you want someone to take responsibility for the life of your children in their company, then why don’t we start taking responsibility for the lives of the children in our companies? It has to happen. This is an epidemic happening right in front of us. I have an 11 year old, and so she wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone when she first went to her school, and she has to take a bus across town, and I was just like, “No.” Mom was like, “What if an emergency, merge this?”

1:36:11 Like, “It’s an emergency, she can walk home, it’ll take an hour. Emergency, we’ll call the school, everything will be fine.” He’s no independence, I did it, you did it, everything’s gonna be okay. It was okay for a couple months, then she went missing for a few hours. Now she’s got the mobile phone, and I’m just constantly worried about, again, this, like, addictive pattern that we don’t even understand, and it goes to, and, and, and, and I am cognizant of it.

1:36:35 What if you’re not, you know? So, so what some families are doing, here’s some strategies that are out there. Some families are changing the password on the Wi-Fi every single day, and so until the kid finishes their homework or completes their chores or whatever it is, they don’t get the password. Some of the families change the password so that the kids can only use the Wi-Fi for a couple of hours, so they just turn it off, right? That’s changing, to change the password, that’s one strategy I’ve seen.

1:37:01 Another strategy is with their 11, 12, 13 year olds, they’re having them sign contracts. In return for getting the smartphone, you have to agree to a contract. You can either not have the phone or we can have a contract. Yeah. And the contract says things like, you may not use a cell phone in your bedroom, you may not use the cell phone after 8:30 at night, you may not have it at the dinner table, you may not X, Y, and Z, right?

1:37:23 And prescriptions are in the contract, which is if you violate any of these terms, you will lose the phone for a week. It’s, and the kid signs the contract, you know. So it is my only bargaining power now, that the threatening of taking away the device, and it is shocking, not powerful. But we as parents, we as parents are also to blame. Yes.

1:37:43 We sit there on our phones, not talking to each other, sitting in the living room or at the dinner table. You know, I’m tired of, of dads telling me that my kids these days, while they are the most egregious offenders at the dinner table. Yeah, I’m good at the dinner table, but afterwards I go upstairs to the iMac and so, and sometimes she’ll even joke with me, she’s like, “Okay, yeah, your screen’s bigger than mine, but it’s not much,” so she’s right, by the way.

1:38:06 And so if we’re supposed to be, if we’re supposed to be setting an example, and they will throw it in our face, they’re not stupid, right, then we have to get over our own addictions too. So for example, for us, one of the things I started doing, I started charging, charging my phone in the living room. I no longer charge my phone by my bed, and people send me, well, I use my phone as my alarm clock. So buy an alarm clock, right? They cost 10 pounds, right?

1:38:29 Yeah. Arianna Huffington gives them away now, the wind-up ones. So, so charging your phone in another room means when you wake up in the morning you say good morning to your spouse because your phone’s not there. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you fall back to sleep, and so they’re checking the phone. It’s like it has miracle applications.

1:38:44 When I and my girlfriend go out for dinner, we bring one phone because we only need one phone in case we want to call an Uber, we want to find out a restaurant or whatever it is, we get lost, or we bring one because we, we don’t need, and if we want to take pictures of our food or each other, okay, one of us will take pictures and send them to the other person. And if we go out with our friends and we have sort of all leave from one apartment, we leave our phones at the apartment, we actually don’t even bring them because who we calling? We’re with our friends.

1:39:11 Yeah. So like an alcoholic, you remove the alcohol from the house because you can’t trust your willpower, it’s just not strong enough. It’s a, and so by removing the alcohol, you remove the temptation by not bringing our phones out for dinner. What ends up happening is real relaxed, and you look great, we’re social, but the anxiety. If you say, “Don’t check your phone,” you literally go like this with your phone in your pocket, right?

1:39:34 But by not bringing it in, you don’t actually, goes away, you actually relax. You just don’t. And yes, for the three times, like, “Oh, I wish I could look that up right now, that movie, remember that movie that we saw, remember what it was?” I don’t have the instant gratification. I can just look it up really quickly.

1:39:51 Yes, it will happen, it’ll be annoying, you’ll ask somebody, “What are you doing next Thursday?” and they won’t know. I, I know it sucks those five times, but the benefits are so much more worth it. Thank you for bringing that point to life, appreciate that. I have to ask you quickly, I, I do, I’ve got you quickly, when it comes to public speaking skills, most people say you have a black belt. People comment on how you present, and I was just wondering what do you tell people when they ask you, you know, how can I present like you, how can I get better?

1:40:19 It’s funny how you told me that in the school plays you were the guy behind the scenes always, and there’s a nuance part of you when you’re up that makes me think that he doesn’t want to be up there, but that makes you more fascinating to listen to, because it feels like you’re not there to perform and be you, you’re there to give this message, and in a weird way you’d rather not be there, but it makes me want to watch you more. I don’t know if it’s that deep, to be honest, though, because when I’m there, I’m proud to be there. I mean, what an honor to get asked to share what you think.

1:40:52 I mean, you know, that’s pretty cool. Yeah, I’m not gonna lie, it’s, it’s a great honor. I think the, the thing that really, really helps is I’ve learned about the perspective, to change my perspective. So for example, I show up to give, and I always remind people that the most important thing about being an effective presenter and effective speaker is you have to show up with a giving attitude. You have to show up to give, you, you know, something you’ve seen, something you’ve done, something you’ve tried, something that someone else thinks others need to hear.

1:41:23 That’s why they invited you to speak, right? Because we don’t anoint ourselves, right? We get invited, right, or somebody gives us permission, even if we do offer, right, somebody goes, “Okay,” right, so someone has deemed whatever we have a value to someone else, so we have to show up with the giver’s heart. I’m here to tell you what I know. The problem is the number of people who show up to take, to get, and you can see it, it’s very plain to see.

1:41:47 People ask a question and they say, “You’ll have to buy my book,” or you could just tell me the answer because you know the answer, cuz you wrote the damn book, right? But clearly they’re trying to drive book sales. It’s a taking mentality, it’s taking, it’s a getting mentality. The, every single slide of their PowerPoint has their Instagram, their email, their website, their Facebook. Well, clearly they want you to follow them, they want you to reach out, the last slide is their website and their email, right?

1:42:16 They have a taking mentality. They come up and the first thing they do is tell you their credentials: “Hi, my name is, you know, Dr. Blah-dee-blah, I have six PhDs, I’ve worked for 55 companies, I advise CEOs and generals, and let me tell you a little something.” It’s about them. It’s very easy and very quick to discern who’s the giver and who’s the taker.

1:42:36 The best speakers, a hundred percent of them, you look at all the top ten folks, you know, Sir Ken Robinson, Amy Cuddy, Brené Brown, right, Dan Pink, all of them, all of them are there to give. None of them want anything from anybody, not even your approval. Nobody. I don’t know any great speaker that stands in the backstage that goes, “I’m gonna get a standing ovation.” You may get one if you earn it, if they decide that what you have given them has value, but that’s not the reason you show up.

1:43:05 You’re there to give, not get. That, like, learn that, and it takes practice. I do it out loud before I go up on a stage. More often than not, I will say to myself out loud, “You’re here to give,” just a reminder, and it profoundly changes the words you choose, the sentences you structure, the way you answer questions, the way you present information. It profoundly changes those.

1:43:29 It’s like a salesman who’s paid on commission, you can tell, because it changes the way they sell versus a guy who’s not on commission, you can tell. Same thing, same thing, right? So learn that and it profoundly makes you a better speaker, and then there’s some other tricks as well. Do you have all your, your, your board forward, or do you kind of go with how it feels? I know these ideas are deeply ingrained into you.

1:43:52 I think out loud, so very often people watch me think. You know, when you do a talk enough times, it gets its own rhythm, but even then I’ll have new ideas while I’m up there and they’ll come out. I actually can’t do the Start with Why talk anymore. It’s not that I won’t do it, that I can’t do it. I’ve done it so many times that it just comes out so automatically that I can’t be present.

1:44:16 It’s like I’m disconnected from my own body and I’m watching myself give a talk, and I’m like, my mind is wandering, and it’s such an uncomfortable feeling, not being present, that I literally, and I’ve tried different strategy, I’ve tried mixing it up, and only does this screw it, screw it up. Okay, and so I literally can’t do it anyway, so I think these things have a shelf life. Yeah, at least for me. That’s fast. Mine aren’t memorized, perfect.

1:44:38 More TED Talks in your future? I mean, that’s not up to me. That’s okay, it’s up to them. And do you watch yourself back in video? Do you always make notes on body posture and these kind of things?

1:44:48 I mean, I, I, the answer is yes or no. I mean, when I do a talk that’s different from others, I’ll go watch it mainly to see what I said. There’s a 99% talk I did a few years ago, and 99U talk that I did, longer, right, 40 minutes. Yeah, I did two of them, but it’s the first one, it’s, I think they titled it “A Hundred Percent of Customers Are Human” or people or something like that, “Business Is Human.” I camera with how they titled it.

1:45:18 I’m wearing a black sweatshirt, I remember that, and I’ve never given that talk prior and I’ve never given that talk since, and so I, I did go back and watch it because there’s some stories in there that I just was, I made a spawn, you know, extemporaneously. I didn’t make him up, but I shared them extemporaneously. So I do that, I take notes of myself, I take notes myself as soon as I get off the stage. I’m pretty self-critical and I’ll go through my talk as soon as I’m off, so I don’t necessarily go back and watch them, but I do go through it.

1:45:50 And the great thing for me is when I travel with a member of my team, I’ll always ask them to evaluate me because they’ll, they’ll be honest with me. Did I speak too fast? Did I skip over some things? So my team gives me instant feedback, which I, I asked for. Just a few last questions.

1:46:04 What’s your biggest challenge for you right now, you know, at this moment in your life, whether it’s creative or work-wise? What’s a good question, is the hard thing. Um, you know, I am, I’ve had to learn patience. I’m better now than I used to be, probably could still be a little bit better. I had to learn patience.

1:46:27 I had to learn that things that matter take time and that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. But I think my biggest challenge is that, um, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m an idea person and I, and I like to, I like to understand the world, but I also know that there is structure that underlies that is required to help build things, and I really struggle to build those structures, so I have no choice but to ask for help and rely on people, and I’m really good, I’ve learned to be really good at letting go and, and trusting people around me and, and doing that. But when you combine the inability to build structures, I can follow them, but, but the inability to build structures and impatience, it’s sometimes a juggle.

1:47:14 Yeah, yeah. I, I, I, I tend to, like I said, I, this is a journey for me, and so when I have a struggle, when I have a challenge, I, I really do obsess about it, and so a struggle that I had around the time of Start with Why is no longer a struggle, and the struggles that I had around the time of Leaders Eat Last, and they’re longer struggles, and the struggles I’m dealing with now, which are coming into this, you know, the game theory is all about, okay, this is fine and good, but this is reality, you know. People think I’m an idiot and people think I’m stupid and naive, and I have to, I can’t scream and yell, that’s not gonna help, I can’t trick them, that’s not gonna help.

1:47:51 So what do I do? Like, how do I help those, all those organizations that agree with me in theory but they’re not really gonna, impractical because the pressures are just too great? What are, what’s that challenge? I, so I think that’s probably my greatest challenge, I guess. I figure, yeah, because the other things they’ve, if I ask for help, find, I sort of kind of fix the other ones, I guess, mitigate the other ones.

1:48:12 Yeah, I think that’s what it is. I have to now deal with those who believe in all of the stuff that I write and talk about, and they want to do it, but really the pressures of reality are overwhelming. I don’t fault some of the CEOs who make really bad leadership decisions. I can only imagine some of the pressures they must feel, especially those who run public companies. I don’t help those guys, you know, I don’t help them get out, get over and through that, you know.

1:48:39 How do I help those guys? Will learn the courage, build the courage. Yeah, I think that’s the next one. Do you have any daily practices or any kind of success secrets that you found over the years, that if I kind of do this in the morning and do this, because I know you travel, you know, sometimes 200 plus days a year, that get you set up in this mindset where you can do Good, people that around. Yeah, I have to ask you about Donald Trump before we go, because you wrote an article about him here and you said some fascinating things about television.

1:49:36 One of them you said is that people watch TV, they don’t listen to, right, which really reminded him myself, and you said people don’t love who Donald Trump is, they love who he’s not, right? And Hillary Clinton should be worried. Uh, briefly, tell me your thoughts on the Trump phenomenon. Right, and I’ll break down both of those things. So the Republicans did a remarkable job for the past decade or so marketing anti-Obama.

1:50:00 I mean, Mitch McConnell himself stood in at a press conference and said the single purpose of the Republican Party is to deny President Obama any wins. So he say basically said, we hadn’t talked, we’ve had Lyon an entire political party against someone versus for the people. That’s really screwed up, right? They made this whole concept of being an insider a dirty word and an outsider the most brilliant thing in the world, that all outsiders are saviors, and they used fear as a tool for short-term gains.

1:50:29 Well, congratulations, all the marketing worked. You now have the consummate outsider who is, who is the consummate anti-Obama-ist, who is using fear to advance his personal selfish gains, and you let the genie out of the bag. Like, congratulations, all your 10 years of marketing worked. They laid the foundations for this. That’s number one.

1:50:49 Number two, we can’t neglect the power of the screen, you know. Political historians often talk about the Nixon-JFK debates, which is the first televised presidential debates, and what’s so interesting about them is anyone who listened to the debates on the radio thought that Nixon won, but everyone who watched them on television gave the win to Kennedy, and the famous bead of sweat that rolled down Nixon’s face versus Kennedy was dry and confident. You know, we don’t listen to presidential debates now, and politics has not played out on the radio.

1:51:25 Politics has played out on television and morning political shows and press conferences and sound bites and YouTube and, you know, in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We largely watch politics, we don’t really listen to it, and we, you know, we don’t read it as much as we watch it. Nobody, what, read the transcript of debates, right? You miss him, what you watched him, right? And the people who were advancing are the ones who the most tell, afriend, Lee, a good-looking, they’re tall.

1:51:54 Governor Kasich is a moderate, he’s a fantastic governor, has remarkable success as a governor, he’s got an incredible reputation as, as a, as a consensus builder across party lines, and yet he’s absolutely abysmal on television, and guess what’s happening? He’s way behind. I mean, you know, and at the end of the day, Americans are completely sick of all politicians. We’ve had ineptitude for more than a decade, the approval ratings are in the toilet, for 15 years we’ve seen nothing getting done, we see, we see selfishness / selflessness, we see their own political priorities over doing good things for the country and for us.

1:52:33 We’re just sick of all politicians, and so Donald Trump, as you said, he’s not popular for who he is, he’s popular for who he isn’t. He’s not a politician, and that’s it. It’s not a vote for Donald Trump, it’s a vote against everyone else, and they should all be ashamed of themselves, all of them, Republicans, Democrats. Now there’s the other side of it, which is the question that must be raised, which is, are our politicians a reflection of us? Our politicians, a mirror raised to us?

1:53:04 And should we be the first to throw stones, or should we be first, or should we accept that maybe we get the politicians we deserve, and if we want them to change, maybe we should change ourselves? Maybe we’re the ones for devicive, maybe we’re the ones who are narcissistic, maybe we’re the ones who are putting our interests ahead of the interests of everybody else, and if you look at the way that we’re raising our kids, our running our companies, I don’t know we can say that we’re better. And so maybe instead of demanding that they change, maybe we should demand that we change and take some accountability for our own actions, and maybe then we’ll get the politicians we deserve.

1:53:40 That is very well said, and this comes up a lot on this show. We talk about sometimes drug policy. I’ve had Dr. Carl Hart in here, and he has a great TED Talk, it’s called “Let’s Stop Abusing Drug Users,” and it always comes back, you, our policy, you can say it’s wrong, but it is a reflection on us, and I believe somehow our own self-hatred of our own desires and wants, and it’s, it’s very complicated how, you know, you know, a narcissistic population gets narcissistic politicians.

1:54:09 Yeah, I know, and why do we respond to that fear in Trump’s? It says so much about because we use it ourselves to get to get, you know, work out of people. It’s, I mean, it is the predominant, it is the predominant business philosophy of the day: hit the goal, get the bonus, with the goal, get the bonus, at the goal, get the bonus, underperform, out. That is a fear-based, dopamine-based system. That’s what you get, that’s what you get.

1:54:36 Simon, I always finish the show by asking a question, and that is this: if you could make a phone call to the 20 year old Simon and give that young man a bit of advice, of all things, what would you tell him if he would listen? You don’t have to know all the answers, and when you don’t have, when you don’t know the answers, you don’t have to pretend that you do. I think that lesson is probably the most powerful lesson I ever learned. The willingness to admit I don’t know what I don’t know, and the willingness to admit, oh, ask for help or accept it when it’s offered has been huge.

1:55:12 What I learned is that people have wanted to help me my whole life, but they never offered because they didn’t think I needed it, because I portrayed that I was good to go. And and it’s amazing how many people are willing to help if you just say, “I don’t know,” or, “Yeah, I’d love that help, thank you.” So that, that would be the advice. I wish I had learned that sooner, but I’m, at least I’m glad I learned it. At least you learned it now.

1:55:34 To, on that same, no, best advice you’ve ever received, could be anything really, business, personal. So I was a young Turk at a, agency and they invited me to a very senior meeting, and I was the man on the front line, so I had more information on the daily workings of the account because I was the one actually doing it, and they invited me just to work the PowerPoint in this meeting of all this partners and presidents and senior clients and all this stuff, and they would have discussions, and I actually knew some of the stuff that they were talking about, and so I would always add a little more, not out of, to prove anything, I was literally trying to help. I’m like, “Oh, I know the answer to this, I can tell you.”

1:56:15 Right, and at the end of the meeting, one of my work mom, one of the partners, we walked out the meeting, she put her arm around me and she said one sentence to me that has stuck with me my whole life. She said, “Three-quarters of an answer is better than an answer and a half.” And to this day I was sitting meetings, think, “Oh, I could add some more to that, that’s an incomplete answer,” and I think to myself, “It’s fine, it’s fine.” So three quarters of an ounce is better than an ounce of a half.

1:56:40 This is some of the best advice I got. Good advice. Yeah. Last part is to that twenty year old that’s watching us somewhere in the world, listening to us, and who might have even thought to themselves, “That’s me,” when you’re describing the Millennials, their relationship to technology, you know, how do you get out of that when you’re in it and you just barely recognizing that you might be in this weird place, self-esteem, demand on technology, things are rushed?

1:57:02 What advice do you give to them to kind of snap out of that? Help your friends. Don’t worry, don’t worry, and I understand that the, I understand that’s overwhelming and difficult, I’m lonely, I get it, I get it, I know, I know, I got it. Help one of your friends. You, one of your friends who uses their phone too much, come up with a way to keep the phones away from the time you spend with that friend.

1:57:25 Not for yourself, for them. Make yourself a better friend to your friends for them. Don’t expect your friends to be better friends for you, be a better friend for them. Find techniques, find ways that you will help your friends realize the value of each other. That’s the advice I would give.

1:57:46 Simon Sinek, I’ve enjoyed your talks, but you all have the TEDs, the, the pieces on YouTube, but never knew you this deeply, and so I really appreciate you telling us about how it’s really been your life’s journey that’s created your work, and being so open about that time in Afghanistan. That really connects a lot of the dots for me and makes me understand why you wrote these books and why that’s why it’s so important to you, then these changes make. So thank you, this is, this has been a treat for me and I believe everybody watching this knows you in a different way.

1:58:19 And okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for giving me a forum to, to share my ideas and help advance the movement, so I really appreciate it. Our pleasure. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey.

1:58:28 I wish you well in your continued one and come see us again. It’s like that, I like that. Thank you very, very much, I appreciate it. Thank you.