#92: Bridging Technology And The Arts with Max Stossel

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's a pleasure. I want to dive right into this, what almost could be described as a sort of a tale of two things, two cities, a contrast between technology and the arts. So on the one hand, I want our folks to learn about what your art form is and where it came from. How you've been inspired to pursue it. On the other hand, there's this whole world of technology that I started out by describing as something that's really sped up the pace of so many things, communication. I don't mean to say that any of that's negative. I actually feel like it's made it possible for so many things to happen, like for people to be able to work virtually and for people to be able to pursue a lot of their passions because they can be more efficient with their time and more connected to people, et cetera. Yet, It's also created some challenge in terms of how we spend our time and how present we are in the moment, et cetera. So Max, first of all, give us a sense of where you are with your art form and how that all started and sort of the experiences you like.

I'll tell the story in a way that I think merges a bit of those together in that when I was in college, one of my first jobs was doing social media for a startup. They were like, hey, you're young, go figure out social media. And so I was working for a healthcare startup that was having a lot of trouble making sales. And all of a sudden, I, this intern, was generating a lot of leads on this social And that made them very interested. And I thought to myself, oh, hey, look, I can be good at something without having to go to school for it. How great. I can pursue this. I ended up doing social strategy for Budweiser, Dove, and some big brands. I fell in love with the startup world after I met some friends on a trip in Panama. And that was really a life-changing experience for me. They were all so passionate and curious and humble. And I just was like, wow, this social entrepreneurship community is cool. I like it. I want to be a part of it. And so I jumped into a friend's startup where we were trying to build a social media network. And it was in doing that that I really started to realize some of those challenges of technology and how it removes us from being present, because we were told by investors that if we could hold your attention for 2 minutes or longer, we had a valuable company. And so most of what we were trying to do is figure out, hey, which notifications should we send you? What language should we use that'll get you back into our experience? How many should we send you a day? What should the language of those notifications be? Once we have your attention, what design tactics can we use to hold your attention in our experience longer? And I realized that like our goals were just not really the same as the goals of the people we were designing for. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, wow, how much time can I spend on this app today? That's not a very human experience.

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And so it was starting to recognize that in conversations with someone named Tristan Harris, who's really the leader of this humane technology movement, that made me realize that, huh, okay, it really seems like there's a difference here between what we want and what we just will do as human beings. You put a certain set of stimuli in front of us, and there's been a big wave of that humane technology movement recently, and I'm grateful to be at the center of that and speaking at schools and to middle schools, high schools, education conferences, parents, teachers about technology and education in the age of distraction and how we can manage the challenges that we're facing with— as these phones have been a great social experiment of humanity. What was interesting about the merge between this side of my work and art was that I was always in storytelling, and I was noticing as our attention spans go down and down and down, and I recognized when I heard a spoken word poet perform In my friend's living room, and I'd never heard that before. I just remembered so much of what he said, and I really followed the whole thing right through and had this realization of, wow, rhyme and rhythm are a really powerful tool to help us listen through a message and to really get an idea from one head into another. And that was sort of what I fell in love with. And the reality of it too is that as I got chills up my spine, I started trying to figure out why I liked it so much. Like, wow, why did this stick with me so much? And I tried to, on the way home, just try to write, like, journal to figure that out. And the first 2 lines of what I wrote rhymed. And I was like, oh, okay, I can do this. And I finished that poem. And then, you know, that was where it started. So really, I didn't know I was an artist until this thing kind of happened to me and I started pursuing it. And I really do believe that that is in all of us. And it's just a matter of starting or trying or finding the thing that makes your body tingle and then trying to pursue that type of art form. And being patient with it.

So you didn't have any inkling when you were a kid that you were a poet, that you had a poet's soul or one of those ways of describing what an artist is at his or her core?

When I was really young, I definitely liked Shel Silverstein and poetry that way. I definitely lost that throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. And it wasn't until this happened that I rediscovered it. But this was certainly a surprise to me when I was 23 or 22, whatever it was that I had first heard this poetry and how much, wow, maybe I'm a poet. That was a very new, surprising realization.

Yeah. I think this is really an important part of our conversation today that I just realized in this moment, Max, and spirit, universe, whatever you believe animates, or if you believe that there are things that animate everything as opposed to it just being one big random Random thing. I'm just remarking for myself right now how cool it is that we get to explore this conversation around purpose and identity, because I think a lot of folks believe or have been led to believe that we are born with a certain identity or a certain purpose, and then we spend our lives trying to seek that out and find that. Right. And if you don't know what it is, then somehow you're lost or you're less valuable than other people who have figured it out. And know it earlier on in life. And what's really cool is that, first of all, I didn't feel that way, and it took me into my sort of 40s to realize that something like identity isn't what we're born with, it's what we evolve into, and it changes. So our identity at 17 is very different than the identity we have when we're 33 or when we're 50, and that's okay. And the things that we're called to do— so our calling is also not necessarily something that we're born with and that we discover when we're, you know, We start to become aware of it when we're 5 and 6, and then we live our whole lives in that place of calling. But the calling is something that can evolve and materialize over time. So even if you don't think, let's say, that you have an artistic talent for art, but you're interested in it, it might be that that becomes something of a calling later on in life because that's what happened for you, right?

Absolutely. Yes, it really came as a surprise to me. I would not have expected this to be a path. And it's always— it's much easier to draw the lines looking back than it is going forward. Like, when I woke up that morning, if you had asked me if, like, in 3 years that I would be a poet, I would have laughed.

Yeah, exactly. There wasn't the classic signs of, oh yeah, I was a great writer when I was a kid. I used to— and like you mentioned Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree is a book we used to read to the kids. But yeah, it's not like you could even point back, oh, there were all these signs. I mean, In looking back, there probably were some signs, but clearly there was no light bulb moment saying, yeah, I'm going to be a poet someday. But at some point, it became something that you didn't just have an interest in or an appetite for, but you had an aptitude for poetry clearly. Yeah. Share a little bit about how that evolved and what it's done, where you've been, what you've shared, and what it's done for you on a personal level. And then I want to I want to see where we can build a bridge between, which is funny because that was the subtext or the theme of our TEDx, so that's kind of funny. So we'll build a bridge between these 2 seemingly antithetical things, that of technology and art.

Yeah. I'm excited to talk about this with you too. It's something I've been mulling over in my own brain, so I'll have a nice public therapy session here. But so for me, I can sit down at the page and write for 6 hours some days and have nothing good come out and just feel like, oh, what am I doing? Why am I doing any of this? Am I terrible? Was this all a fluke? Am I ever going to write something good again? And that's a pretty frequent occurrence in my writing life. But the reason that it feels that way is because when it comes, when creativity strikes, when inspiration strikes for me, it really feels bigger than me. It feels like it's coming through me, but not me doing it. And I'm trying to catch this message and I'm trying to put it on the page and I'm trying to get it out so that I can share this moment. of brilliance with people. And that has been the closest to something just truly higher power than myself that I've ever felt, and that's been invaluable for me. It's been almost spiritual for me. I feel a deep sense of purpose with it in that way, in that it just feels like, what could be more important than these perfect moments and trying to share these perfect moments with people? But it's interesting because the humane technology work, I give a talk, I hear messages like, the kids have ended their Snapchat streaks and they're trying taking a break from social media for a week to see how that feels, so they might know what that feels like. And like, I can point to that, or I can point to these new digital wellness programs that are coming out on phones that help people reflect and think about how much they're using technology. And I can point to events like that and say, aha, my work with the Center for Humane Technology has done that. That's the amount of like, I'm pointing the world in this direction, and that seems like a good thing. With the poetry, it's much harder. It's easy for me to feel like, oh, this purpose helps me plant good seeds of good messages into the world, and that matters. But It's much harder to say, hey, look, let me point to the thing that this poetry did, which in a way makes it feel less purposeful and in some ways more selfish, which is very confusing because it does not feel selfish in the moment at all. It feels like, wow, this is so important and I have to share this, and not for me, but because this message needs to be shared. It's like in the society that we live in, it's much easier for me to point to the purpose in the non-artistic work than it is in the artistic work, if that makes sense.

Yes. So give us a sense of what has been the purpose for the art for you and for others, do you think? I know that's not an easy question to necessarily answer, but what comes up for you?

It's one of those things that it's much easier for other people to talk about my art than my own. It seems like the trends are that there are these complex things happening in our world or in our lives or in our emotions, and I'm able to put words to those. In a way that sometimes people have trouble doing themselves. And so people will have been feeling something incredibly complicated or frustrating or challenging about the world, and then they'll feel alone. And I create a feeling of not aloneness, that, hey, look, he gets this hard thing that I've been feeling or dealing with or noticing in the world too. And that's it, he said it. So that's one of the purposes. And then each poem in a way has its own message. And the purpose of those individual poems are different, whether that's about Bringing our country together, whether that's about having healthy relationships with technology, whether that's about cherishing the moment and waking up to the world that's in front of our face. I would say that a lot of the times each poem has its own purpose, and I'm doing my best to try and guide that message to the people who need to hear it and trying to guide that message in a way that it'll really land. That's something that comes up for me a lot, is that a message is only as good as its ability to be received. And I'm working really hard to try and not just share the thing, but share the thing in a way that So that people can really feel it and hear it and get it, because so much of the brilliance in the world is lost in translation.

Yeah. It's interesting. I'm a public speaker and have been so for a long time. Part of my own pivot story was out of 18 years of law practice into this new arena of standing on stages and speaking to people and leading conversations and facilitating different explorations. In many ways, if I'm going to take the question on for myself, because I know it's a difficult question, the overriding experience for me is one of things flowing through me. Maybe it's overused or it's— I don't want to say appreciated, but maybe understood. I don't quite understand what it means to be a channel, or there's some mystery around that, but it very much feels like that, that things just sort of come through. always know exactly what's going to come out of my mouth, but in having spoken and not being a spoken word poet, but a spoken word presenter or a spoken word facilitator all over the globe, it is one of the most remarkable things to be witness to that process of just creating a clear opening, an opportunity for things to flow through and come out the mouth. that has the potential that it has, which is to impact people in a variety of different ways, sometimes really, really amazing and beautiful and positive ways, and other times not so. Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes Less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. I remember reading in an Emmett Fox book years ago— I refer to this book every single day because it's a book of daily readings. a place where he was describing how the spoken word is like an arrow and it goes where we aim it. So for me, my intention when I'm speaking now or in public, in larger or small groups, my intention is that my words are aimed at the heart. That's ultimately my driver, is that those words open hearts. So I think the words that we speak are a great deal more powerful than we're led to believe, even when we're kids, when we heard that old expression, you know, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me. Max, how do you feel about the power and impact of your words? Is that also the same thing for you, that you allow yourself to sort of be an open channel for expression? Is that how it sort of flows through you, or is it something different?

The best work has definitely come in, I think, the best way I could describe Being something like a channel, yeah, where something comes in higher than me and I am blessed enough or lucky enough to be able to catch that and share that. And then I grateful that that happens sometimes every day. My relationship with whether words matter is complicated. I'll share a little something with you about that, in that I am constantly wondering if I'm good enough to follow my heart, constantly wondering if I'm worthy of pursuing my art, wondering if my wording is worthy, worried I'm not worthy of working on creating beauty. I am constantly Constantly wondering if I am creating any beauty, if there's any substance to these fleeting words, anything it's really worth, anything that changes after people hear my work. And there's been no change as far as the eye is concerned, so I'm concerned that at the end my life's work won't have been worth anything. I'm afraid the world would be a better place if I replaced the time I spend on stage with walking out into the streets and doing literally anything. Do words matter if they don't make matter? Do ideas need to take matter to matter? Because to make matters worse, I don't want to be out there. I want to be here sharing words that seem to so very quickly fade. My work doesn't exist in physical, tangible space. It comes and then it goes away until we're left with this nothingness. Emptiness. Consciousness that I so desperately want to shift. But when I look around at this, it won't look any different than when I started, unless we're different than when I started. And we won't look any different as far as the eye is concerned. So I'm concerned that none of this matters. Then again, do we matter? Nothing but this miraculous organization of matter, miraculous accumulation of matter, seeing matter, being matter, breathing matter. We can't actually make matter, but we can make matter matter. We can turn matter into things that matter. We can give matter value. Are these words valuable? Is that measured in dollars and cents? Logically, that makes sense. But if we were observed by aliens, they'd wonder why we spend so much time and money on things that don't matter. They'd be like, why don't you value value for its value? Why not create a world where value actually exists based on your values? Planet Earth could be the thing you call heaven with an adjustment to your attitudes. Isn't that a beautiful idea? And isn't it something that an idea can be beautiful and maybe that's enough? I want so badly for it to be enough, for what I create in people's minds to be enough. I feel like I'm hurling stones into this giant pool of consciousness and I finish each poem with a splash. And for a few minutes, there's a ripple over this vast pool of thoughts that we've collectively amassed. And then it fades, as ripples do. Without a care for me or you, the eerie stillness is resumed. And as I gaze at this beautiful natural view, I can't help but feel it looks the same as before I threw. At least as far as the eye is concerned. So I'm concerned that this is still just the same lake That nothing's changed, that there's nothing in these words that doesn't fade. And I know the lake has my stones in it now, but if I'm being brutally honest with myself, is that change? Does that matter? And no matter how much time I spend crafting the perfect lines, it won't stop my time on this earth from its inevitable decline. Since birth, I have been slowly dying, losing this arm-wrestling match with Father Time. And it might look like I have my shit together as far as the eye is concerned, but I'm concerned that I'm wasting the only thing that matters. That I'll look back from my deathbed knowing that deep down I didn't matter, that it didn't matter, that I'll return to the earth nothing but mere matter without having made any more than a ripple, at least as far as the eye is concerned. And so that's where I'm at in terms of whether my words matter or not. It's a kind of constant battle for me. Mm-hmm.

What a seamless— someone who didn't know better like myself might think we planned that.

Not planned.

No. All the best things in life I think are unplanned.

I like that.

Yeah. Well, we have 4 kids that would attest to that. Max, that was lovely. I have a question for you based on what I just heard. Do you believe in eternity?

I love that that was the question that spurred for you, because so many of my musings, the answer comes back down to like, well, if something goes on forever, then this, then X, and if it doesn't go on forever, then Y. And so I'm, I'm not sure. I mean, do I believe in eternity? And yes, I believe in eternity. In what for eternity?

Well, it's interesting because I think the question of do we matter It has different meaning in a different context. So if this is all we've got, if this is, as you say, an arm wrestling match from birth to death, this arm wrestling with Father Time, and we believe in time, then yeah, there's a lot to exploring what are we doing that matters. And if this is a chapter in a bigger book, for example, then it has a different meaning. It doesn't mean to me the things we do don't matter. Maybe there's a little less pressure on us to matter so much.

And to matter towards this thing.

Yeah. The tech companies, I guess, might have not coined this, but they're certainly known well for creating cultures, especially among really young people, millennials and Gen Z, I guess, at this point too, of purpose, of being purpose-driven Enterprises that want to make the world a better place. I mean, there's almost nothing that matters more than that on some level. So mattering seems to matter quite a bit to the tech world. And on some level, that also seems a little disingenuous. So maybe that's the bridge. It might not be the seamless bridge that you created with that beautiful poem, but let's talk a little bit about technology and humane technology. I mean, I know you came— you're an ex- I don't want to say ex-VaynerMedia guy, but you used to work there, I suppose, and now you are the head of education at the Center for Humane Technology. So I'd love to— just let's have a little conversation here for a couple minutes about your views on tech these days. Obviously, from GaryVee, he's really out there in a big way speaking about how important it is that we embrace technology. Yeah. I'm a pivot guy, so there's a lot of pivots in the tech space, and I believe that pivot's just a synonym for change for me. So yeah, I think we should embrace change. We always have the choice to make change our friend or make it our best friend, or we can make it our enemy. So I'm on the side of embracing the technology. And at the same time, as you said, we're in an age of distraction. And I also think that technology is more than just a distraction. It's also a manipulation, and Facebook I'm not a big, huge fan of Facebook these days because of more recently just how that manipulation's become quite well known. So anyway, just ruminations on that. I'd love to just get your thoughts there since on the one hand, you've got this spirit and artist soul, and on the other hand, you're working as the head of education for an organization that wants to bring humanity into technology. So it's an interesting combination of things.

Yeah. And this organization, I think, exists out of necessity and out of frustration with the way that things are and the way that they're headed. A good way of looking at this is when the commodity is time, like when that is— we get back to time here— when that is the thing that is so related to profits with advertising, it's really hard for these companies, even when they're talking of like, yeah, we want to make the world more open and connected, bring people closer together, even when that's like the vague mission, When the thing that's getting measured is how much of your time did we get, and I need to look at you as an X-year-old male who has 24 hours in his day, and I need more of that time this year than I got last year in order to keep my shareholders happy. It's just, it's very hard for that system to look at you as a human being with like thoughts and hopes and dreams and things you want to accomplish when time is such a deep commodity. And the downstream consequences of that have been really severe. It seems like when you point I mean, I could go on for a long time about this and we don't have that time, but when you point these machine learning algorithms at systems that distribute information to 2 billion people, it seems like those systems learn what works for you. What is the type of information that is most likely to kind of keep you engaged and watching or scrolling or liking? And it doesn't matter to the system what that information is. So it tends to push us to the extremes of whatever ideas we're most likely to believe. One good example of this is Zeynep Tufekci, who's a disinformation researcher. When she was researching the Donald Trump rallies, she went to watch a YouTube video of them, and she was very quickly pushed towards white supremacy in the recommendation algorithms. And those are not the same thing, like watching Trump videos and white supremacy, but you're very quickly pushed in that direction. And it's not just Trump. It's like same thing happens with like a Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton video and the conspiracy left. And it's not just even politics. It's like, if you, if you like watch a video about being a vegetarian, the algorithms start pushing you towards veganism. She says it very well in that it's like you're never hardcore enough for YouTube.

Hmm.

And that's one of the things I'm most nervous about, is like 2 billion people being pushed towards the extreme of their ideas and being so certain because we look through our little screens and our window to the world. And even when it's not that, we're talking to our friends who are looking through their screens and their windows to the world. It creates this certainty that we know what's going on, we know what's best for the world, and God, can you believe how stupid those other people are who just don't get it? And when you have 2 billion people thinking that way, I just, I get nervous about what direction that's pushing the world and the state of news and the state of information in. I very much want us to create technology that's actually thinking about human values, that's actually thinking about human goals and helping us achieve them and really getting on the same team. For the most brilliant algorithms that were ever created so that they're not working against us, so that they're not using us and farming us, but working for us and trying to help us live the lives we want to live.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Yeah, it's really interesting because as a lawyer years and years ago, I remember part of the criminal code is this thing called inciting a riot. And it almost sounds like the design of those systems or the algorithm that is distributing information is intended to sort of throw wood on a fire. What is the fire that it's stoking? Yeah. When that's done without a governor or some sort of a collar to say, well, is this ethical or is this moral to throw another log on a fire where people are in riotous emotion about something? Is that Does that make sense to a human being who'd be examining it through the lens of different set of parameters than a machine would? So do you know of any safeguards to that kind of a thing, or is it once the algorithm is running, it's sort of just running without any human intervention?

I have to duck off in a minute, and I definitely cannot answer that question in

a minute,

but maybe we table that one for another discussion. But it's a challenging question and the right question.

Yeah. All right. Well, listen, Max, I have so enjoyed this conversation and I really appreciate that you shared some of your art and your words with all of us. There'll be more information about Max Stossel in our show notes. So everybody, I hope you enjoyed this conversation, but whether you did or you didn't, we'd love to hear from you anyway. I mean, the feedback is oxygen for us. So please feel free to leave a review on iTunes. You can also go to adamarkel.com/podcast and leave a comment, and we'll reply to that comment right there. I'm gonna also remind everybody that today was a blessing. We all got to wake up. I know that for certain. There's not everything— not too many things I know for certain, but the fact that you are listening to this right now means you have woken up, and that was a blessing. And of course, there's no guarantee that we get to wake up again tomorrow, but that's my hope and even my prayer. So when you wake up tomorrow, as I know you will, please feel grateful for that. Feel that blessing alive and well in your body and in your mind and in your heart and in your soul tomorrow, because it is something truly special. And if you're inclined in that state of gratitude to say these words out loud, I welcome you to do it. Max, you'll remember these words, I think, because this was the subject of my TED Talk back in September in Lake Tahoe. The words are, I love my life. I love my life. I love my life. It has been a blessing. Thanks again, Max. It's been a pleasure to have you on the show today.

Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, truly great. Everybody have a wonderful rest of your day, your evening, wherever it is we're finding you. We'll see you soon. Ciao for now, everybody. Bye-bye.

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