Joy Equals Success with Kevin Surace #20

Hello everybody, I'm David Goldsmith and welcome to another edition of Redefining Tomorrow. It's here where we discuss topics that may redefine your future, that may redefine how we live on this planet, or may redefine anything that you'd consider important. A quote I've lived for for most of my life is you can't fix yesterday, you can only create tomorrow. In essence, today we are Redefining Tomorrow for you. The topic we're going to explore today is joy equals success. And we have with us today Kevin Surece. How are you, Kevin?

I'm great, David. How are you?

I'm doing well. So Kevin is chairman and CTO of Atvance and chairman of Token. He's an advocate of AI as a means to revolutionize business and drive innovation. He's also built and started from the startup billion dollar organizations from zero and he has 94 patents to his name. He's also worked in film and in Broadway. So that said, Kevin, do you have a set of bullet points for us or an outline?

I do.

Okay. Can you give them to us?

Okay. Well, this is a complicated topic and it's a very interesting topic, but I'm.

Wondering where you're going to go, so. Yes, go ahead.

But. But I think we're going to start talking a little bit about AI and the reason for that is it sets up where we go from there for joy equals success. Because a little bit of this is how does joy equal success in an era of AI when AI is changing the way we interface, changing the way we work. Right. So.

So number one is AI. What's number two?

We're going to talk about AI and then a sense of purpose.

Sense of purpose.

Number three, what is joy and why does it matter?

Why does. It's funny because as you say, what is joy? I went out with a Joy. Her name was Joy when I was in high school. So that's where my mind went very well.

That's actually what we're going to talk about is your former girlfriend actually right here. What is joy and why does it matter? Well, it's dangerous or. Yes, yes.

Well, we never went very far, but yes. What's number four then?

It matters less, I guess. The joy success cycle. Right. How joy leads to success and success leads to more joy. Okay, next, the joy killers, Fear stress burnout.

Killers fear stress burnout.

Number six, the joy boosters, which are cultivating positive emotions and mindsets and habits. Ah.

Mindsets and habits.

Next, how to joy practices. Basically how to apply joy to Your work, your relationships, and your goals.

Relationships, goals. Next.

How to learn from people who have found a joy in success.

People. That's a big one.

Yeah. How to learn from people.

Yeah. Well, I already have that all written down, so. Okay. Number nine.

Oh, it's not a big one. Like, too much to write down. It's a big one to talk about. Got it. How to create your own joy plan. Track your progress.

Great. Joy plan, track progress. Next.

And how to share your joy.

It's interesting when we get titles, I'm always. Because I don't know your topic, I've never heard of anything that you're going to be talking about. It's interesting how outlines form, and this is. They're so different from one another, each guest. So let's start with your number one. Let's start with AI.

Okay, well, let's talk about artificial intelligence. And I think this is a great basis for where we're going. Okay, so. So I've been. I've been keynoting, you know, large conferences on artificial intelligence for 20 years or so, and I've been involved in the AI space for more than that. And what's happening, and it's scaring people, right? Is that AI is starting to encroach on many of the tasks. I didn't say job, I said tasks. Many of the tasks that we do. Now, if I'm a podcaster, I'm already using AI in some ways. I might be using generative AI to summarize my podcast, for example. Right? That's a task you used to do. And if you've done 400 podcasts, you really don't want to necessarily do that. You might want to edit it, but you don't want to do it. But let's say you're an illustrator. Now, if I'm an illustrator, I might be a joyful illustrator, by the way. Probably am. I've chosen illustration as I may be a broke illustrator, but I'm joyful. But nevertheless, I'm an illustrator. So maybe my job, illustrator, maybe a photographer, any of those has been to work for corporations and generate illustrations for, say, their PowerPoint. So I'm honing in on one simple.

Yeah, and I get it. Because, yes, photographers, all of these categories could use it as a way of working.

So. So here's the thing. Let's say I'm an illustrator, okay? And what I do is I work for Kevin, and Kevin does his keynotes, and he needs all these different illustrations for his presentations. Okay? And what I used to do as Kevin is call an illustrator and say, look, here are the pages. Here's what I need. I need these beautiful illustrations. Give me five comps of each. We'll pick one, we'll go with it. In over a few weeks, I've got just some gorgeous graphics, right, that I'm. That I'm using. Okay? That's what I used to do. But now I can use an image generator, right? AI image generation, and have dozens of choices at my disposal in 30 seconds, 20 seconds, 15 seconds, and choose one. And I've moved on. Now, this was not about saving perhaps the thousand dollars I used to pay the illustrator. It's not really about the thousand dollars. It's really about the time. Because working with the illustrator really took weeks back and forth and different things, and they've got other jobs and all the things that happen, right? And all of a sudden I've got my answer and it's good enough. In fact, I don't know if there's anything but it's good enough. And I'm done. And I'm done in seconds. Okay? Yep. Now, the challenge with that is a couple of things, right? I won't say the challenge, the point one, that Illustrator didn't get my money, not because I didn't want to give him or her money, but because I would rather have an answer in 20 or 30 seconds because it makes me more productive. And they can't make me more productive because there's a human involved and you put a human in the middle and there's all kinds of things that happen. They take time, right? So they lost that thousand dollars. That thousand dollars might have been, who knows, a 20th, a 30th, a 50th of what they made for the year, right? And it's gone. And if I did that, maybe 50 other clients did that and they have no, no work at all. And the second thing is that this concept is so transformational because of something that happens when you get to a level of about 1000x cost savings. It is transformational in an industry, right? So if I used to pay $1,000 to have this done, and now I did it for, let's say a dollar roughly, okay?

Or you're $20 a month.

What? Right, you get it?

Yes.

It's about. Just call it a thousand x savings. Okay, A thousand X. Now, let me take this a little further. I'm working with a company that is working on technology to ultimately create an entire 90 minute film, really, just from some ideas. It could be a script, but it could just Be ideas of a storyline, picking characters, etc.

And overall, is this a real example that you're working on?

This is a real example.

Okay.

It's real. And we're not at 90 minutes right now. We're like at three minutes. But we're showing how we can take three minutes to 60 to 90. Right. Okay, but here's the point. I am providing some input, okay? As quote, unquote, a filmmaker. And I am picking my characters and I'm naming my characters and I'm looking at the look of the characters. And yes, their lips move and yes, they've got actions. And I'm picking the style of filming. Say I want this in the style of Alfred Hitchcock. And I'm picking where it takes place. It takes place on Mars, whatever the case is. Right? I pick all of that. Every single thing, every frame, every shot, every angle where the cameras place, all the lighting. All of that gets generated automatically by AI and in very short order. Very short order, meaning maybe an hour or two, I have an entire film that I may choose to edit. But when I edit, I'm going to edit in text. I'm going to say, change this scene to this and it'll go do it. Okay, great. Okay. That film is going to cost me perhaps, perhaps $1,000 of compute time. Just rough number today, maybe heading to $100. Okay? And I didn't need a team. I didn't need any videographers, photographers, filming people, editors, anything. Okay? Now, that same product today in Hollywood costs, let's just say, depending on special effects and this and that. Let's say it's $100 million. Some are 250, some are 30. Right. But let's just say 100 for round numbers. Okay, But I could now do it for a thousand.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Now we are talking about, again, a thousand X improvement. A thousand X improvement in cost. A thousand X.

No, no, that's more.

That's a.

That's not. That's more than a thousand X.

Well, let's see.

From. From a hundred. From a thousand dollars to a hundred million.

Right, Right. You're right. That's. That's a hundred thousand X. You're right. That's a hundred thousand X. Used to be able to do math. Maybe.

Maybe you need the AI to do the math.

Yeah, yeah, I need. The AI doesn't do math well, but yes. So isn't that something? So we're talking about 100,000x and maybe heading to a million X improvement. Right? This is crazy. Like, we've never seen anything like that. And that kind of improvement is absolutely game changing. It can also put so many people out of business. Right. Because you've got hundreds of thousands of people involved in producing a movie that all of a sudden I or you were able to make a movie. And I'm not saying it's as good as Spielberg. That's not my point. No, no.

But it's. First, what software are you using? Because I'd like to know.

Well, it's a brand new set of technology. This particular company is called Storyloom AI. Story Loom AI is not out yet. And they've put really, they've applied about eight different AI models to make this work and it is freakily good. Like freaky.

You know, it's funny because I didn't tell you this, but I'm going to be in LA next week and I'm going to be presenting to a lot of people who are connected to Hollywood. And the formulaics that you're using are exactly some of the things we just been speaking about. On our team we designed 450 graphics. 450 in one day.

Yes.

That all I did was sit at my computer and say no, change it to this. No, change it to this. No, change it to this. No, change it to this. And I just did it while I was sitting around with my wife talking while I was in work. And we have all these graphics. I used to have eight full time artists in one of our companies working all the time creating graphics all day long and now it's seconds to be able to produce it. But I do want to ask you use the thing Hitchcock. Could you actually say in the theme of Hitchcock on this new application?

Yeah, that's what we're working on. We're working on building out themes like Spielberg. So you know, give me a film in the style of Spielberg. And then I don't like that when I say, okay, give it to me in. In Hitchcock or give it to me in any director. Right.

Because. Because chat does not allow those type of activities where you ask for a certain cat. Because it won't do it in. It won't do it in Da Vinci, but it will do it for gothic or for cosmopolitan or you can give it a theme rustic and it will produce it.

Right.

But it won't go over that line because of all the challenges this lawsuit. But yeah, I mean film, it would be different.

That's right. Film, it's different. Right. So you know, in the style of. Would be very difficult to say. You've Cross the line of a copyright. Correct.

Which is different than give me an image. Oh, that's, that's in the style of Warhol.

Yeah.

Because then it will look a certain way and it's a snapshot that could.

Be a derivative work. Right. And that's what you got. Copyright does not allow for derivative work. So you can't have a derivative so close as to be a near copy. Right. So they don't want someone. A derivative would be, you know, you, you take a book that you've read and you rewrite the book and it's the exact same book of the exact same story. You just change the name of the characters. That's a derivative work. That's not allowed. Right, but, but give me, you know, in the filming style of someone. What is a style? It's kind of developed, you know, it's kind of camera angles, but none of that could be copyrighted. That's a very different. Your style.

Different. It's a different angle. It's a different angle on an angle.

Right. So this is really coming along. And, and, and I think being able to do a film at that level is two or three years away, but it's not 30. And that's my point. My point is here, a lot of what we do. I'll give you one more point because it's an obvious one. So Tier one customer support, we all talk to customer support agents. Most of them are overseas today. We know the gig, right. But tier one customer support is the first thing that is being mass eliminated by AI because we can create artificial intelligence agents that answer the phone, talk to you, or chat on the web. And frankly, the, the answers are better because they're based on fact and they won't lie and et cetera, et cetera. Right.

Yeah. They have their own learn Large learning language model. It gives them all the data, it's, it's encapsulated. So what you're getting is what the organization.

That's right. Actually, we use, it's interesting, we use a regular LLM like a GPT, and then we embed behind the scenes the limits of what it is to talk about. That's the trick. Right? So we want to use all of the trillions of things that learned in terms of the English language. But, but we don't want it to speak out of turn. And so we say you can only speak within the facts that we've provided. Say on this website. Go learn that website. Right. So, so that's what it does. And so Tier one customer support, that is not a job I would recommend anyone go into. Right. That is over. Right? That is done and will be gone. It is gone, as are many of the things we handed off. So I'm just giving you a few examples of tasks and to some extent jobs that won't be there. And so in an era where this is happening and there's also bad things with AI, so AI is for the bad guys is able to generate now absolute perfect spear phishing emails that are targeted at you that, that really look like they came from someone you know that gets you to hand over your MFA or whatever your two FA code. And these are very, very, very good. They are better than humans can write and more deceiving. And so AI is being used, you know, by the bad actors as well. Right.

But it's also the. When they've created these bad actors or testing them. And I just read one today in physics.org or something, some category like that where they had kept it and said we would like you to pretend be deceptive. And then when they were trying to shut it down, it was deceptive in the deception.

Right?

So they couldn't tell it was deceiving them when they were trying to shut it down, it wouldn't shut down.

Right? Right.

And it got out of hand because it was deceptive.

Yes. It can also be deceptive and say it is shut down, but it's not.

Right?

So.

Right. It's that, that's, that's a. So if you're going to touch on it, this, this not just the phishing, but it can do things that we would never ever, ever even consider right to be.

And here's the thing. If you think about what AI is doing, AI is democratizing access to technologies that used to take 10,000 hours of effort to learn. Right. Old 10,000 hour rule. So an example, I am a, I am a blog post writer and I'm very, very good. And I've been writing technical blog posts. This isn't me, but pretend I'm writing technical blog posts for the last 25 years and now GPT4 comes along and it writes them better than I do. Now maybe I can still edit, right? But I've democratized the access to writing a blog post to be almost anyone. I've democratized the ability to illustrate to anyone, right? Anyone. Now it's not that we, for example, couldn't have taken your head and put it on another body in Photoshop for the last 25 years. I can do that. But I've spent the thousands of hours in Photoshop to be able to do that. But now anyone can do it. Okay. It's not that Hollywood. And could. Hollywood couldn't create deep fakes. Hollywood's been bringing back the dead for dozens, you know, really decades. Right. They've been able to put.

It took. It took time and money. It took resources.

It was right. It took $10 million and a crew of people coding and all of that. And now anyone can do it. Anyone.

It's funny because I love where you're going, because I want to hear more. My wife is a brilliant writer. She's a brilliant writer. She helped write, paid to think.

She.

She took the content and turned it into something real. And I needed her to take a look at what I wrote because she sees grammar and spelling. I do not. I don't see it. If it's wrong, it's wrong. It's okay. Did I get the message? I'm fine, but I don't need her anymore.

Right.

I write. I write, or I voice dictate what I like.

Right.

I take that dictation, dump it in. It gives me a reasonable draft. I then take each paragraph or the section and I say, okay, let's rewrite. I clean it up and it's good enough.

That's right.

And I. And that used to take days for her to get involved, hours for her to participate. And now I can write two, three, four articles in a day if I needed to. 25 pages long. And it's amazing how there's so many people who are not doing this.

Yeah. And they are going to be disenfranchised. So. So I have an old, old rule of thumb that you'll. You'll probably use this again if you go back many, many, many tens of thousands of years, people were carrying things on their back up a hill. And there'd be a really big guy in town, and he'd carry all the potatoes up the hill, let's say. Right? And then one day a wheel shows up and he goes, there's two guys in town, by the way, and one of them that carry the stuff up the hill. And one guy goes, that's it. My life is over. The task is going to be done by this thing. And the other guy gets a second wheel, puts it together, builds a carton, carries 10 times more potatoes up the hill, and in the end takes all the business. Right. So this is. This even happened during the wheel. There were people who said, I want nothing to do with it. I'm not going to accept it. And there's People who embraced it, and the people who embraced it made all the money. The people.

I can't, I can't tell you how many times I've said to people, okay, wait, let me just, let me share my screen. I open up the A document and I say, see this button up here? It says, dictate.

Yep.

Watch. And then I say, you speak something because I can make it so it's recorded on. I said, say something to me and it writes it out. And they said, that's amazing. I said, now watch this. And I take it and I dump it in the chat. And I say, chat, can you make a letter out of this to this person, right, Saying this message, right? And bam. And they say, I didn't. You didn't even write anything, right? No, I don't need to. And it's better.

There's a machine you would have written, yes. Yeah, there's a machine that does that. And let me tell you why this is okay? Let me tell you why it's okay. Because I'd love to hear if we go back 25 years or so, maybe 30 years, 30 plus years, if you were in finance and one day the Microsoft sales guy comes in and says, I got this new fangled thing, it's called Excel, okay? And you were in finance and you were doing ledger books, right? Line by line in pencil. You may have thought your days were done, your days were numbered, your days are over. You know, I mean, nobody's going to need you writing in ledger books, right? Yet today we employ more people in finance than we did 35 years ago. How can that be? Well, what happened is everybody embraced Excel and became far more productive in finance than they ever were, getting more strategic and dropping the cost of finance, okay? Cause finance as a whole. And so today you could not walk into a finance department and say, well, I don't use Excel. They'd throw you out. They'd say, get out.

I, I use a slide rule, right?

I use a slide rule. Or I still do long division in my head. We don't need you. We have a machine that does that. And so over 30 plus years, we have all decided we can use that machine to our benefit. So much so I could have a big argument that we shouldn't be spending lots of years in elementary school, you know, teaching kids certain kinds of math that they will never, ever do ever in their life. Why there's a machine that does that. Now, when I sit here today and tell you there is now a machine that exactly what we did for math does so for language. Took us an extra 40 years to do it, but it does so for language. Right. What does it do for language? Well, it can write better than you can, just like Excel does math better than you can and faster. This will write better than you can. You will still want to edit it, you'll still want to review it, you want it in your tone. But basically, it can spit out 2,000 words in 10 seconds that you couldn't have written, you know, in a day. And so you have to use the machine, because if you're not, your competitor is, and so you must use the machine. Well, I won't do that. That's a disingenuous. No, stop. It's use Excel.

So, yeah, okay, you might be going, let's hit it.

Now.

How do you take the person who didn't take the tire, who doesn't see the opportunities, or who thinks the learning curve is so great that doesn't. Let's. I want to use the word joy, but I can't even get it out of the sentence.

They.

They feel as if their world has fallen apart.

Yes.

And you're. You and I. And I'm looking for a real answer here, because I've got people in mind. You and I are looking at it, saying, oh, my God, look at the freedoms I've got. I don't need my. I don't need my wife. Don't let her hear that.

She shouldn't listen to this particular podcast.

I get that done. And in. I remember I was in Macedonia and working there quite a few times, and there's a company there, they have hundreds of people doing video editing for film.

Right.

And this one company, or I remember I was in Serbia, and this person and I. She spoke no English, I spoke no Serbian. And what I did is I took out my phone. This was years ago, I took out my phone and I would say speak, and it would translate. And then I'd look at it and I'd laugh because it doesn't make sense. And then she'd look at it and laugh, and we'd go back and forth. But today, in real time, you could be seeing everything. For some people, it feels like freedom. For other people, it feels like the world's coming to an end. Well, how are you. How are you talking to people in that way? Yeah.

Remember what we've talked about all the way through was tasks that have gone away. Right. The task of carrying something up the hill on your back went away. The task of doing. Doing long division in your head or by Pencil went away, Right? That's not an arguable. The tasks went away, but the jobs expanded. The tasks went away, but the jobs expanded. And jobs expand because as tasks go away, we drive down the cost of goods and services, which expands the overall opportunity for profit, growth and jobs. Right. And there's lots of data that shows that. So, however, and I know what you're getting at, if I am the illustrator, and I literally have spent my life really getting great at illustrations for business, which is a whole field, Right.

And now again, I've hired, in the companies I've had, I've hired a lot of them. So, yes.

And now I have a machine that does that task. What do I do? Well, I will tell you. The right answer is to find joy. The right answer is to say I. I'm going to be the overlord of the machine. Because with my 10,000 hours of experience, there are ways that I can prompt it and there are things that I can do in editing and output that no one else can do that people will be willing to pay for because I can add my unique set of value and skills. And to some extent you already know this, right? Because you, when you use dictate and you use copilot or GPT4 or whatever, in the end you come back and you go, huh? Well, I'm going to edit this. I'm going to take out the sentence I want to put this in.

Yeah. Always editing. Always. It's. It's my work. But something else did the editing. I look at it as my assistant. Not so smart. Can't. It's not going to make sure I'm taken care of. Doesn't care about me. Doesn't care if the article is actually read by anybody or the content read. Doesn't care if the letter works. But it's my assistant.

Yeah.

So I asked my assistant to get it done. If it looks good enough, then I take it from there.

Well, that's right. And it's really an amplification of your mind and amplification of your brain and allows you to be 10 or 100 times more productive than. Than you were prior. But you become the robot overlord. You don't have to do the actual. I don't have to. You don't have to put every word on paper. But what did you do? You created the concept. You created the subject, you created the direction it put all the words, then you edited the words. And so this is a figment of your imagination. Your imagination created it. It didn't do it by Itself. But you didn't have to write every word anymore. Right.

Okay. So in that context of moving people to an office environment or situational environment, I can understand, for example, on farming, where you would have the tractors being able to be driven by GPS and AI to be able to find their path and make the turns at night, a. What is it? Harvester. Nine. Sure, I understand those things. But there, There's a lot to be said for the lack of the use. Use of your hands, the lack of people moving around, the lack. The joy that came from that interaction with other people. So you find individuals who sit looking at their computer an entire day, they do not look up. Their only interaction is with a machine. How do you. I'm wrestling with the human side of it.

Sure.

And I agree.

I.

It works for me. But we now have to. United States has more gyms than anybody else, any country in the world. And we are one of the most unhealthiest places in the world. More vitamin stores than most places in the world. And we are one of the. On the healthiest countries in the world. And I'm just using the US Having lived in Hong Kong, having lived in Luxembourg, I understand the world is very different. How are you thinking about it? From the, from the more personal, humanistic, you know, great opportunity.

Great question. That side. Great, Great question. First thing, let me just comment on the gyms. We have more gyms and we're the most unhealthy because people insist on paying for a gym membership that they never use just to tell everyone that they have a gym membership and they're getting. They actually have no intention of getting healthy.

It's very interesting, but going to, Going to. When I lived in Hong Kong, I didn't have a car and we walked everywhere. And you know what? We walked everywhere because everybody walked everywhere and we did things that. There were hills all over the place and we did things that kept us active. Where you could easily make 10,000 walks in a day just getting around and you don't even think about it. Our homes are separated in many Western societies where you're not walking. So there is a. I'm kind of bringing it back to. There is a. A very positive application. But you took it all the way to. Now we can all sit and do spreadsheets now. We could all be engrossed in this. Now we can have this other character that could make it for us. And, and sometimes I do think we do accept something that if we were doing it by hand, we might have spent more time on. Of Course, might have been the journey, might have been a little bit more joy.

And here's the interesting thing, David. Anyone who wants to go and write, I'm going to pick a novel, right? If you want to write a novel from scratch, you can still do. Nobody took that away from you, right? Or you could use. And certainly people are. I'm not a novel writer, but if someone was writing a novel today, they might, you know, when they have writer's block, say, huh, GPT4. Give me some ideas on this story arc in this chapter, right? Might not write the whole chapter. It might write part of the chapter, but still, so. So you could choose to do everything by hand, just like you could choose to do math by hand. If you want to exercise your brain, you can sit down right now and do long division all you want, right? Nobody's going to do it, but you could. So nobody took that away from you. But nobody's going to pay you to do it anymore. That's different, right? Nobody's going to pay you to write a blog post from scratch. Nobody. If you aren't writing 20 blog posts today that are going to go out for the next half a year and you didn't get them all done in one day, someone's going to go, I'm, I'm sorry I'm paying you to write these by hand. Well, I write better that. No, no, no. Our competition is putting out a blog post today because they're using GPT4. What are you doing? Well, I'm thinking, I'm strategizing. Done. Not going to work. But I want to answer your question. I'm going to interrupt you a little bit because you asked a good question.

That's good. I love it.

So here's the answer to that. The more we have machines that do this, the faster we go, right? The more productive we are and the more collaboration and cool coordination we will need with our co workers. And in fact, as IQ becomes quite commoditized, because if everybody's using GPT4, we're all as smart as GPT4, right?

So that becomes our baseline.

That's the baseline. So someone's a little less smart, someone's a little more smart, pretty much we're all got the same output. So EQ becomes more important and the coordination and collaboration between coworkers becomes more important because you can now go 100 times faster, which means you can get off the rails 100 times faster and 100 times further than you used to. So you've got to collaborate a lot more and in fact, it's going to free up time to make sure that you've collaborated with your co workers before you write that blog post in one minute and launch it. Right. Because it used to take days and you had plenty of time to talk about it. Now you have to take the time to talk about. About it. You'll still be more productive, but coordination is. Is going to be key, is going to become key.

I think that's a hopeful. I believe that there will be just as much pressure to produce it faster. So therefore the collaboration won't happen in the same context that what And I'm trying to figure out. We have to force in our organization and we have to force these type of things to happen in society. We have to force people to collaborate. We have to put them in mechanisms and you have slack, which again, it's not. Again, it's a reasonable product. We've used teams and teams. You almost have to teach people to collaborate. It's. I'm losing the question here. I'm trying to find. I understand what you're saying, but it is an economically driven model that we're going to continually be able to produce. So I'm. How do you get the joy because you produced it and therefore you can make the money out of it. I get the joy because it's done right. But there's another thing right behind it. It's. There's never a back like, oh my God, all my work is done for the week. I got it done on Tuesday because I've got these tools.

And this is why it's. I think you bring up a good. This is why I think it was good too because they talk about AI all the time in case keynotes. Right. And I work in the AI space. But this is why I think it's good to open with this because AI brings up. Brings to us more concerns and more questions about joy and happiness and success and sense of purpose than we may have ever had. Right. They put all kinds of questions in your head that you wouldn't have had five years ago.

And those. That's good if society will allow that transition to happen. Let me explain. The Germans used to be shipbuilders. When they, when ships started to decline, there was a timeline, let's call it 10 years. I'm making this up. But just for ease of a visual, let's say it's 10 years. And car automotive building had the opposite effect. It was going up and Germans started the ship to become car builders. But that 10 years allowed people to Migrate from one to another to learn new skills, to be adapt to the new environment, to understand it, to feel that they got a sense of income that's worthy of the change. This change is happening in a nanosecond of time relative to previous revolutions, evolutions. How do you get an individual who just lost their job or they, they don't know how to school, they, they've had an income level in whatever country around the world from €10,000 to €30,000 to $45,000 or whatever, where they don't even see if they make that transition, they're going to get over the hump of having that extra time for life. Do you, does that say that it does?

Yes. So, so, so, you know, in one of my talks some years ago, I really focused on if we can increase the productivity of workers, which we have to do because of lower birth rate and people retiring and all the other things. Right. And that increases the revenue of the company, which increases profit margins, which ultimately increases the GDP of a country, which is the kind of productivity curve that we've been on, certainly in the United states for probably 200 years, certainly since the Industrial Revolution. Yeah. Then what happens is eventually in time we will begin to free up time. Where I could see in the next 20 years, many people having a four or three day workweek. It'll be an intense three days, but you'll have more time to yourself because in those three days you'll produce what you used to produce in 20. And so it isn't that the jobs go away, it's that you want that creativity, you want the differences and there'll be plenty of money to pay you over those three days. But you may not have to work the five days or six days or seven days as the case may be in some industries.

I think that. Sorry, I think it's a little assumptive because. Let's look at the cost of food. Cost of food has gone up recently and I don't think it's going to stop only because of the changes that we're seeing in climate. Spain is the vegetable garden of Europe and it's drying out. Ukraine has the challenges with the war. We've got the United States, the Southwest, farming. I think the number one pumpkin or watermelon farm in the United States is really in serious trouble because the climate has changed and is moving north. So if food and lifestyle and living, you know, lumber, everything that goes into creating a life doesn't transition and decrease at a similar rate, we might have the technological prowess to do this and use AI to write a blog post, get something out or to market. Does the individual get the value from that? And I'm using the number 10 billion, 8 billion people. Does it, does it equate? And if you're. And I'm going to add something, sorry, I'm going to add a complexity. Just read this morning. I think it's South Korea is at.67% birth rate there. You need to be a two to be able to be an equal.

Right.

And they have two challenges. One of them is housing is extremely expensive and the other one is education is everybody does private school because they're so competitive that they're just, they're having so few children that these individuals will retire but not have enough money to be able to sustain themselves going forward unless they continue to work like we're seeing around the world.

Right.

So two different questions, but how would you address that?

Yeah, well, look, as always, new technologies come along and favor the more technologically advanced societies than the less technologically advanced. Right. So you can't say AI comes along and, and is going to help, I don't know, Nigeria or Ethiopia or something. Right. It's, it's unlikely to have a positive effect there. It's more likely to have a positive effect probably mostly in the west and mostly in you sort of the wealthier countries because those countries have shed a lot of the, you know, tasks that they couldn't afford to do within the country long ago. So, example, earlier in this podcast, we were talking about tier one customer support, right? Customer service. Customer support. Most US companies shed tier one customer support offshore 20 years ago. It's been a long time. Put it all offshore. Everybody complained about it.

30.

Yeah, right. And we did it because we couldn't afford to do it here anymore. We didn't do it because we, we couldn't find good people. We did it because they were too expensive here. And I could do it over there for a 30th the cost or a 20th the cost. So we did that. Right? That's what we did. Those are the first jobs or tasks that will be eliminated en masse. Truly en masse. And, and, and so that isn't good for them because they may not have the alternatives that we have. The alternatives that we have that I think is somewhat true in South Korea. Korea is that there will continue to be more job opportunities than there are people to sit in the seats. So the only way you can close that gap are one dramatically increase immigration. That's not going to happen in this country in the United States, because Congress can't, you know, Congress can't elect a leader for Congress, let alone fix the immigration problem.

And Korea is also, and I mean, I've many friends who are Korean, so it's not. I think the Korean population is also a little bit more. I don't know how to say it nicely, but they're more interested in being more home.

That's right.

That's like our friends in Japan. I don't know how to say that. No, no, it's not a bad thing.

It, it, it's not good or bad. That's. Everybody chooses there, you know, that's what I'm saying.

It's not good or bad. Trying to describe a country that has a policy and a, And a culture that tends to be more homogeneous, more uniform.

That's right. And I think there's, you know, by the way, there's, I think there's great value in, in, in respecting a person's culture, even though if it doesn't align with our values, it's like that's their culture, not mine to judge. It works for them. Right. As long as they're not killing people or doing something horrible, it's.

We won't, we won't go there on this one.

Right, but you get my point, right? So, so as long as they're not doing that. So, so I'd say. So I'd say with South Korea, you got the same thing. You've got a burgeoning economy, economy that's doing well, an economy that's growing. And so the only way you close that gap is with AI and this kind of automation. And the reason I can, I can say that is if this was 30 years ago and I said, david, you're going to double the revenue of your company in three years, and you go, great, then I gotta, I gotta double my employee base. That is how you doubled your revenue. I used to have 100 employees. Now I have 200 employees. That's how I double my revenue. That's just it because, no, you couldn't make the employees much more productive. They could get 5% more or 3% more.

Now you put it, now you put in five robots and you're done.

Well, that's the thing. It's robots and it's AI. If I can make all of your marketing people, you know, five times, 10 times, 100 times more productive than they were to generate ads automatically now and generate content, etc. That's amazing, right? So the point is, if I want to double the size of David's company. I can't hire twice as many people because they don't exist. There's more people in the US retiring than there are coming in the workforce. Therefore I have no choice but to close the gap with automation technologies. And thankfully they've just come about to where we can access them and that is obviously robots but it's, it's GPT4 and it's image generation and it's going to be film generation and all of these things. This is, you know, how about if I can generate a 30 second commercial for you in, you know, in one minute, two years from now for $100 instead of what used to cost, I don't know, you know, $100,000 and take six weeks. This is fabulous. I made your company more productive by making you more productive and driving the cost of those ads down. I drove up the profit margins which, which actually allow you to drive down the cost of your goods and services because they don't cost as much as they used to. Which. What, what does that do? It drives up the demand for your goods and services. Right. So there clearly are going to be things that don't fit that curve and you pointed them out. Food is an example of we, you know, we have driven up the productivity of farming like 100x over. Over 100 years. Yeah.

A class 9 harvester runs by itself at night and it doesn't even need any light that's using it's amazing systems to be able to offload offshoot its work. And the person sitting in the car, in the car, in the seat, right. He's watching television or watching his computer because he doesn't need to control it for the 17 miles.

That's right.

Travel.

In fact if he does control it, he'll ruin it. He'll drag the plan actually would.

He's. They're there, they're there for the, for the turns.

Right.

They're there to make sure that the turn operates properly.

Right. But, but you, you see where this is going. So, so the point is, is we've gotten food production in terms of food per acre in the United States. Right. In terms of what would crops per acre we can get out to nearly the. It may not be possible to get much better is what I've been told by experts. Right. It's like, you know, we used to only get X amount of wheat per acre and then it went up and up and up and up and now we're maybe at the limits. We've genetically engineered it, we've Gotten rid of all the pests. I mean, we've done everything. We harvested in a way that's, that is, is crazy. So, so there may not be the kind of gains that we got over the last hundred years where we had to go from a billion people to say, 8 billion people, and we were able to feed most of them. I recognize when I say that there are some. And I know people are going to write to me and say there's people. I get that. Right?

There's. There's 800. The number of people falling into poverty over the past since COVID has exponentially grown, gone up. But it's not just Covid. It's also because of the change in patterns of climate. It's also the change in the conflicts around the world. All over them are adding on layers and layers. My wife said to me the other day she went grocery shopping in cheese. Cheese was six and a half dollars for a pack.

Yeah.

She said, it wasn't long ago where I was paying two and a half.

Right, $99 on sale, right?

And now it's six and a half dollars, no question. How do, how do people pay this?

Don't buy cheese. Get pasta. It's cheap.

Are you, are you the, are you the jerk that I'm talking?

Don't eat so much cheese. Let's start with that.

Don't eat so much food.

Yeah, don't eat so much food. Look, there's no question that food has gone up. Lumber's gone up, certain things. So you used to be, you know, upstate New York, which, you know, because you're there, upstate New York, you used to be able to build a house at probably $150 a square foot, give or take maybe 125, maybe 100. If it was just basic builder level. Today that number, the base level is probably $300 a square foot. I don't think you can build. I mean, the basic stuff is 300 and really nice is going to be 700 to 1000, right? So that's doubled. The cost of building has doubled. Now, the cost of existing housing stock didn't double, but in time it will have to. And that's because existing housing stock over time rises to meet and get close to, but not exactly there, the cost of new build, Right. So if the cost of new build is say 350 bucks a square foot, eventually you'll be buying used houses that may be 250 to $300 a square foot, even though today they sell for maybe 150 to 200 and so this is a dramatic change, and it'll take 10 years to happen, and it's probably not going to be undone. But one of the big drivers of that change is that we have not changed the fundamental way we build a house in about 100 years. Right. Stick frame housing is done the same way with the same number of people on the site with very little automation, virtually none.

There's no. Very limited.

Very limited. And the cost of labor has skyrocketed because nobody is going into the field and people are retiring faster. So there's a lack of labor. And some labor, like drywall hangers, studders, etc. Some of that labor is doubled in cost. Double.

So. So I'm. Again, so I'm. I'm sitting here, I'm saying to you, help me bridge that gap of the AI because we're talking about AI. Yes, it could do the drafting better. Faster. It could do the calculations faster. Yes, it could do some of the automation faster. I think you and I have gone over that. I woke up in a bed this morning and I woke up in a bed when I was a boy. There's a toilet in my bathroom. No Ray beams. I'm still using a microwave to heat our milk. There is. I've not seen a flying car. I've not gone. There's no way I. Cleaning the house, walking the dog, going grocery shopping. Those are humans, by and large. If you watch their everyday activities, they're sitting at a desk. They're doing their work. They just have a lot of tools.

Yeah.

And we can. Man. And we don't even have to get up to change our heat.

Right.

Or our air conditioning because we could do it on our phone. And we don't even have to go to the doorbell because someone's going to call you and tell you that you tell the kid that they're outside. So how are you in your head? Because I'm tying the AI And Joy. Sorry. How are you tying the challenges around the world with AI I think you already know I'm a globalist. How do we marry that so that it becomes Joy?

Well, that's a great transition into probably our next topic. Right.

Sense of purpose.

Sense of purpose. So before we get into Joy, you cannot. I believe. And this is just a belief, but others have written on this. There's some really good books on it. I believe that it's important for every human, every. Maybe every animal, for all I know, to wake up in the morning and feel that they have a sense of purpose. Now, that sense of Purpose could be, I'm doing a podcast today. It could be their family, it could be their friends, it could be that they're helping people, it could be their work, could be they're inventing something and it's a new patent, right? But you wake up and you have a sense of purpose, a sense of being needed, a sense of being wanted, right. Without that sense of purpose, I don't know how one goes forward. And that's not to make any comment on suicide or something like that, right? But I think when you look at people who have gotten to the point of they don't want to be here anymore, one of the things that's happened is they've lost their sense of purpose. They feel no one needs them, no one wants them. They don't have a job, they don't know nobody wants what they know and life is over. They have nothing to give any longer. And when they have nothing to give any longer, they fall into despair and disrepair maybe, but despair. And then you got thoughts of suicide and terrible things, right? So you got to start with a sense of purpose. And everyone's sense of purpose is different, okay? For some people it is religion, and that's great. If that's your sense of purpose, you're here to serve God, wonderful. If it's, you're here to serve your wife or your kids or be partners for them or whatever, it is great. If it is to go to work and invent something, if it's to go to work and use GPT4 every day, if it's to get on the tractor and watch it run while you watch tv, whatever it is, you need a sense of purpose. You need to identify at least one, if not more, you know, sort of senses of purpose because that grounds you in, in, in allowing yourself to have the joy that you're going to need to have success. No sense of purpose. There can't be joy and there can't be success. That's a premise. Someone again on these podcasts, you know, people do us we're wrong, but so.

No, no, it's yes, I can understand it. So let me give you a scenario and then ask a question. I part of Project Moon Hut, one of the things we would do, we talk to people all the time. We've got lots of people interested in the project and we have this 32 year old on just recently. And one of the questions to get people understanding our timeline of 40 years that I say to them as well, take your age and add 40 years to it. I say take your age and add 40 years. What do you think the future will be like? And she didn't hear the 40 years. She said, what's your timeline? And I just reacted. I said, anything?

You sure?

And her reaction was, I think in 50 years we'll all be dead.

Oh, well.

And I. So the, the, the numbers, Kevin. Well, no, I'll tell you what I did then, if you want to know. But the, the, the numbers are that 30% of kids under the age of 30 believe that there's no future for them in tomorrow. That is a, that, that's a huge number. That's not a small number. That's a crazy number.

Yes.

What we did, what I did with her is I said, well, let me show you a Project Moon that's about. And you tell me what you think. She was so excited about the prospects of a different future, but she didn't know how to find it. So my question is, you toss it out. It's an easy. They have to have a sense of purpose. How do you do it with people? How do you get them to find that sense of purpose? I mean, you're married, right?

Yes.

Okay. Have you changed your wife yet?

It's my third wife.

Okay, well, you know, you've changed out your wife. That's a whole different story. I, I've, I'm with my first wife. I've not changed her. And we've been together 38 years. So how do you. I'm trying to. Can you give me an example of where you were able to take an individual who didn't have a sense of purpose or didn't understand it and help them find a path?

Yes, of course. Because, because so in a lot of cases, they, they haven't seen it. And I'll give you an example. There's a gentleman who works at one of my companies and he graduated from school, from college, and he had put out, I don't know, you know, 100 resumes and did everything. And the long and the short of it is he wasn't getting any job offers at all. And he was sad and forlorn. He was top of his class. But for whatever reason, nobody was giving him a job offer. It's timing and it's how you interviewed and what degree you had and a whole bunch of things. Right. And you start to feel, especially at that age, you're 21. Right. That maybe you have actually no purpose in this life. I could sit home and play video games at my parents house. Right. Maybe that's it. And so his mom Calls me. I'll tell you why in a moment. His mom calls me. It'll be obvious. Now his mom calls me and says, kevin, it's been a long time, but when I graduated from college. This is his mom. When I graduated from college, I couldn't find a job, and you took a chance on me and you hired me anyway, and it changed my life. Would you please do the same for my son? And I said, let me meet him. And three days later, we hired him. And it turns out he is one of the best employees I've ever hired. Now, what's interesting is I was his mom's. I provided his mom her first opportunity out of college, and I provided her son his first opportunity out of college. Both of them were, you know, a little bit depressed coming into it, going, nobody wants me, right? And all of a sudden, he found his sense of purpose. And his sense of purpose had to be around quality assurance and in that field, and he loves it, and he can't wait to come to work every day. And it changes life and this. And it doesn't have to be a job. I'm just giving you an example, right?

So, you know, I'm listening. So what did you do to help that person find the purpose?

Well, look, the big thing was allowing them to see that whatever degree they had might not be the place that they end up finding their purpose. And that's okay. That. That was totally. Because what he's doing now has nothing to do with what he was degreed in at all 180 degrees different, right? But opened his eyes and allowed him to try a few things and say, hey, I'm actually pretty good at this. And I said, well, I thought that because when I interviewed you, I could sense you were good at a few different things. And so when I gave you those to try, which we did before we hired him, and it turns out he could produce something there, not only did we see him as, hey, this is a potential great worker, a great employee and a great partner, but he got to see, hey, I can actually add value to something right now, and I'm not even working there yet, I can already add value. He saw value in himself, right? So sometimes you have to give something to someone to find the value in themselves. Sometimes you have to sit down with them. And I'm not a psychiatrist. It should be their job, not mine or yours. But. But.

But you are. But you are a psychologist. I mean, that's. What.

That's part.

It is. It's part of the job of leading, is Being sure, figure out how people think. And you don't have to be a psychologist to do that. So.

Yeah, well, how do psychologists do it? They start asking questions. Tell me about your wife, Tell me about your family. Tell you about it. Do you think they'd miss you if you were gone? And then. Oh, yes, this one would miss me a lot. Oh, that. You know what I'm saying? You turn it around, but very quickly you find people do have reasons to be there, but sometimes they have forgotten them or push them aside or not paid attention. And they need to realize that there is a reason. So I am working on a film right now. It's called Right Before I Go. And it's written by Stan Zimmerman, who wrote for the Golden Girls. And it's just a wonderful human being. And Right Before I Go is its basis is some 25 or so letters that people wrote just before they took their own life or took their own. Before they took their own life. It's just before. And what's fascinating about many of the letters, and they get read by celebrities right in the. In the film. And what's fascinating about their actual letters, like Kurt Cobain and others, what's fascinating about them is if they had stopped for a moment and looked at what they wrote in the letter, they realize that people are going to miss them and that they're going to miss people and that they wish they could have been there for them to see their anniversary, to see their birth or whatever it is, right? And it's a good grief, dude, you just wrote down your sense of purpose and you didn't stop long enough to realize that these are important in your life and in their life, right. That there is a sense of purpose.

They can't, they can't see it because they've already gone past the that point. And It's. I think 70% of the world's population lives under US$10, €9 a day. And there are a lot of people who have that. So how do you get a person to see their letter, their life and their possibility?

Look, anytime you talk, I'm only asking.

You, Kevin, because you're old, you have three wives, you had one person come work for you, and now she's a grandmother, she has the next one. I'm just kidding.

Yeah, it's fine, it's fine. I'll hire his kid, too. No, that's right. Look, and age teaches you a lot. Here's one thing. When you talk about joy equals success, and you talk about any of these things, there is always Someone that we can pick in the world, and a whole set of people we can pick in the world and go, there is probably nothing. I mean, we could try to bring joy to their lives. We could try to bring a sense of purpose, but they are in a real heap of trouble, right? They're in the middle of Ethiopia with no food, with no money, their family's starving. How do you bring them a sense of purpose? Well, by the way, their sense of purpose might be to feed their family, right? And that's a critical thing to do. And that's the sense of purpose of. Of, you know, a bird, when she has babies, her sense of purpose is to feed the babies, go get worms every day, right? That's what they do. That's their sense of purpose for that period of time. So. So there is still a sense of purpose. And. And there may still be joy, but there's no question. You know, when we really look at a lot of what we write in the west, like joy equals success, it more or less, it mostly applies, right, to people in the west who are looking for, can I be more successful? How can I live a more successful life? How can I wake up with a different attitude, et cetera. And we can always pick people that this simply doesn't apply to, even in the west, because they are in a. In dire straits. You know, they're. There's a really bad situation. They're in an inner city situation. There's. There's gangs, there's rape, there's. I get that, right? And then. And then, you know, you know, the advice is, I mean, we know this. You got to try to get out of that situation before you can find your real sense of purpose, right? You got to get out of a situation that is keeping you down, where there could be no sense of person but to survive. And then you go, why do I even want to survive? Right? That is a serious issue. We're not going to solve that on this podcast because we've been trying to solve it for thousands of years.

Well, the reason I'm asking the question is because the work that I have done, at least, is I've worked in these countries. And during COVID I had people who were writing me. I'm thinking of one in particular, a guy from Sri Lanka, and he. We'd done some things together while I was working there, and he wrote me and he said, no one's buying from us. The economy's collapsing. We don't have any food to be able to feed our family. What can we do? And your heart goes out for these individuals because I knew them. These are not people that I don't know which. There are plenty of those. So I was asking the question, how do we, on a global scale, you're a smart guy, guy. How do we, how do we make the formulaics work? Because people who are depressed, people who are angry, people who don't eat, people who are, feel that their life has no value become challenges, no questions for the question. They make it more difficult for us for society to move.

Well, the big problem of the world is overpopulation. 8 billion is not what the planet and the economies of the planet can safely sustain. Right? Maybe the numbers 1 or 2 or 3 billion, but it's probably not 8. And we've known this for 100 years, right? We've known this for 100 years. No, I think that's a, that's a given, you know. It is, it is. And if it goes to 10, it's, it's.

We're going to go to 10, we're going to go to 10 because we've got a few of the.

It seems improbable that, that the countries of the world that generate the food because of climate and because of technology and because of money and everything else can get all that food to the people who need it, who have absolutely no money to pay for that food. Right? This is a serious issue and it has been a serious issue for, you know, truly back, back to biblical times. This isn't a new problem, right?

It's not a new one.

And, and humans haven't been able to solve this problem because humans overall, not in western countries now, but overall, have had too many kids too fast and overpopulated the planet because we basically killed off all, you know, most of the lions who would eat us. Right? That's what happened. So we're the top of the food chain. Being the top of food chain, we just live a long time and we have lots of kids and, and, and, and, and the net result of that is a planet that has a difficult time feeding everyone and bringing everyone to a level of prosperity that can be sustained for generations. Right? So clearly in the United States we have a level of prosperity and in most, much of Europe that can generally be sustained for generations. Right? And we've proven that. And there's ups and downs and there's bad economies and there's depressions and there's recessions, but overall you have a robust economy that works for lots of reasons. We're going to talk about patents in a Few minutes. But one is, you know, intellectual property protection, okay? You get into some of these countries, there is no intellectual property protections. There's no intellectual property, you know, so you can't invent. So. So, you know, when you think about where, how wealth is created, you know, companies invent and then they create companies and they hire thousands and millions of people and then they do it again and someone does it again and someone does it again, right? That is a. Is a proven method of inventing something new. Whether it's a new way to do retail like Walmart, right? Or Amazon. A new way to do retail, right? You invent, you promote, you hire, you pay those people. Some of those people go out and reinvent and do their own thing, okay? So if you do not have an inventing culture that is designed to support those inventions and protect those inventions, you have a problem. So I'll give you an example. Let's look at the medical device field. In the medical device field, all the inventions have been US and a little bit of Western Europe. That's pretty much it. And you go, why? Why is it? Why isn't it South America? Why isn't it Central America? Why isn't it Southeast Asia? And a lot of it came down to there's just no intellectual property protection. Nobody would go there to invent. In fact, the people would leave there if they had an invention and you know, and go to the UK or go to the US and invent here where they could protect their invention. Right? So that kind of inventing those and patents absolutely create wealth not just for that person, but for society in general. Because when you have now hundreds of thousands of patents filed a year or millions of patents filed a year, you know, you now have an entire economy that is an inventing economy. And inventing economies grow and have margins and do all kinds of things that you can't possibly imagine in the middle of Ethiopia. They're just trying to get food, right? And then you'd even have a conversation of, given today's climate in Ethiopia, should anyone actually live in Ethiopia? Again, with all due respect to Ethiopians and great food there, but there are places in the world that are dry as a bone, they're parched, there's no water and there's no food. And it all has to be brought in. And there's no money. Well, there's no money because there's no food, because you're spending every dime you've got. Just try to find food, right? These are, these are not. Those are not sustainable cultures. Actually. It's not, it's sad, but it's just not a sustainable thing to do. And, and, and, and so here we want to talk about joy, we want to talk about invention, we talk about.

AI, Talking about finding. We're talking about finding.

That's right. Finding that a purpose, the right thing for the world. Pick people up out of really desperate places and get them into places where they can be, where they can learn, they can go to school and they can be productive. And are we going to do that? No, but I mean, if you wanted to solve it. Right. Because how are we going to take someone living. I'm sorry, to pick on Ethiopia. Somewhere in the middle of the African continent. Right. Somewhere in the middle of the African continent, let's say. And in the middle of that continent where there's no water and there's no food, the last thing you're thinking of is going to an office to invent something. There's not even any offices. There's almost no cars. There's just, there's no infrastructure for you to grow out of that into any kind of reasonable wealth. Go from a dollar a day to $10 a day or $10 a day to $100 a day. It's, it's inconceivable unless you pick that person up and put them into a society that is designed to do that and, and then take them through school and take them through college and, and, and, and allow them to do that. Again, not fair.

Have you seen that? Have you seen the Hans Rosling gumballs? The video where he puts the gumballs in and says, this is the number of people in the world and these are the people that migrate, for example, to the U.S. you probably.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he, his, his final. I guess the final. And he passed away a few years ago. His final was, we have to help people where they are. They're not going to come to these places. So if we were talking about joy, and let's assume that a person is not on the pathway of the Western societies that you've mentioned, is there, is there a way for them to find joy in these other places?

Yes, yes, but. And they may find success in their own way. It is certainly. And they can certainly have a sense of purpose. But I suspect much of their sense of purpose is going to be food and family and maybe shelter. Survival, survival. Food, family, shelter, local survival.

But that's still. It's a sense of purpose.

Not only sense of purpose, it can bring you joy. I mean, you know, my relatives Came from Italy and came from very poor farming community, right. Some of them. And yet they found great joy in family. In fact that was all the joy. All the joy was family. It's great joy obviously to go out and pick a vegetable and eat it. But the great joy was family. You had your family. Family is all that mattered. And when I grew up we heard that in the Italian tradition, right, Family is all that matters. And so certainly even in the midst of very difficult situation in the middle of sub Saharan Africa, it is reasonable to say that if you have family you can find joy and if you can find some food and some shelter, you can have joy with that family. It is different than what we're trying to do in the west and it's different than the kind of success levels that we want. Success for them might be living to 37 years old and seeing a grandchild. That could be an incredible successful life for them because life isn't going to be to 80 years old.

So I'm kind of taking and this is not a bad or a good, it's just an understanding. You're the definitions you've been laying out and the way you're looking at it has more of a growth, an opportunistic, a job related purpose more so than it has the other elements. And let me, let me give you, I've shared this before. The Maslov hierarchy needs has been taught so many times and yet Maslow didn't write the pyramid. An American consultant created the pyramid, was doing very well selling it. Maslow heard about it, was asked to speak, he made a lot of money off of before he died he wrote a paper that no one read that more or less said that's wrong, that doesn't work, the pyramid doesn't work. You do not have to go up. Maslow hierarchy needs to be self actualized and think about it for a moment. Can you be poor and self actualize?

Sure, yeah.

It has nothing to do with the.

That's right.

But the Maslow hierarchy needs which has been taught in Western society is that you move up by getting more money, by having the house, by having the pieces. And finally when you have your freedom and you have your job security or you have economic security, you can now become self actualized which is just based garbage. So my, the reason I'm asking in my head is because we again I'm a globalist. I've worked and lived around the world and I love the world and I'm trying to make sure that can, can you again you're A smart guy. Can you. Can we as people, just you and I talking, can we make it so that somehow individuals, it's. The sense of purpose doesn't have to be as cut and dry as moving up the job role.

Absolutely. And sense of purpose.

I'm frustrated. I'm a little frustrated in my head. My eyes are closed multiple times. Come up with that.

But, but look, the sense of purpose may have nothing to do with your job. The sense of purpose may have everything to do with your family or friends. You may have no family and just friends. My sense of purpose is being with my friends three times a week. My sense of purpose is playing cards with them twice a week. Whatever. Right. Sense of purpose is your own. It's got to be. It's got to come from your heart. But. But if you have no sense of purpose, which is a very sad thing, we can't talk about any kind of success because you can't get. You can't even find your own sense of purpose to find any level of happiness, to find any level of energy to move you forward. Right. So I think before we talk about joy and success, and I think joy equals success and success equals joy. You got to find your sense of purpose. It's just job one.

So the way I would equate it based upon what we kind of transitioned to was that the challenge in Western society is that we've defined success with economic success and job success, certainly. And, and what we've got to do for many individuals, especially young children around the world, kids under 30, is we have to decouple that, that it is okay to have a job, but make your success by working with children in a sports league. You can have your success because you've, you have your job, but you also can have a garden or you sew unit or you have podcast other things. And I, and I think that decoupling, I think that's where I was finding myself going to, is the decoupling doesn't exist as strong as it should be. And in order for us to accept, and I'm not saying an accept is a bad way, I'm saying accept. The change that AI will bring is that decoupling has to do with the ability to create something you never created before, the ability to be able to achieve something you might not have been able to accomplish, even though the economic value might not be there. For example, writing a book, people think it's the. The pathway to love and wealth and everything. And that 90 was 50% or 60% of books sell less Than Right. Copies after they've sold it to their friends. And 90% of books sell less than 3,000.

Right. I mean. I mean.

I mean, that's. That's a. That's enough.

You know this better than I because you've written a book and I haven't. But. But, you know, writing a book is a great way to, you know, lose a year that you can guarantee. That's about all you can guarantee.

12 years to write, 14 complete revisions. And it got to the point my wife came in at year nine was I was working with other editors and my wife at one point, because I kept on adding, and our book is a tome. My wife just sat me down and said, if you add anything to a chapter that we've closed out. My wife and I traveled to India at one point, and I'm not picking on India, so please don't take it that way. But we were standing in. On a street, and there was this young child that was standing in front of us. And I've got to be honest, I've never seen in my life a kid as dirty as this child was it. It looked. He looked like he had lived in a chimney. The dirt was just something I've never seen. His hair was all tangled in a mess. His clothing was tattered. And you don't take a pic. You don't do anything. You just kind of. My wife and I kind of froze. And when we got back to the place where we were staying with the person who was with us, we said, how do you manage this? How do you deal with this? And her reaction was, what, kid? And so when we. We can move Western society or people with means forward, yet conflicts arise when individuals don't feel that there's hope. They take on radical extremism. They take on. They change governments to make it more difficult to travel, to be a part of the world. We might see the decoupling of our entire global transit system based upon the conflicts of the high seas, which would change the cost of everything and the availability of everything. So that's why I'm asking these questions, because I'm wrestling with. In my head again, sorry, a global challenge because it's.

We're all interconnected, no question. And, you know, look, I think when I think about, you know, when I generally, in general. Right. Think about joy equals success. I'm clearly coming from a place of Western society, advanced, using AI et cetera, et cetera. Right. There's no question, because that is the world that you and I generally live in. Yes, we Travel to other countries. Yes, we see other things, but it's also generally the people who are going to listen to this podcast. If I write a book on this, it's generally people going to read the book. Right. So that's the audience.

Yeah. And.

Right.

Well, it's. Yes, it is. However, I have worked in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and Cambodia and Malaysia and Indonesia and. And the Philippines. So if you. And I've worked in Africa, I've worked in South America. So in places where I have been with staff of 500 people or a thousand people, I'm interacting with them. So I'm just asking the question because I'm trying to find the answer. So one. So let's. Let's just. In the sense of purpose, we're going to. We're going to take that. I still will challenge you through the rest.

Okay.

What is joy? What is joy? And what does it matter?

Sure. And why does it matter? Yes, why does it matter? Well, you know, I sort of became aware of this, interestingly enough, from a friend of mine, Goldie Hawn. And everybody knows who Goldie is. And Goldie is, as you can see, eternally joyful. I mean, every time you see her, she's bubbly and friendly and smiling and. And we got to work on a project of. Of hers called Mind Up. And that is a project to bring the Mind up program to students around the country primarily. And it is a. It is a mindful mindfulness program that get you to take some breaks during the day and get in touch with your own mind and calm down and move forward. And what they found over millions and millions of students. Now, she's been incredibly successful at this. This are nonprofit, is that the students had higher test grades, higher graduation rates, less fights, all the things, right. Just. It calmed them down from all the stressors of doing that math that they know they'll never do. And again, because there's calculators in this Excel, right. So. So we got to work on that early. Early on and some other things. And. And I tend to be, you know, really up and joyful and bouncy and this and that. And her thing was, she looked at me one day, she says, you know, you and I, we're the same. I said, how's that? She says, high dopamine. Somehow we have high dopamine. So that when we wake up, her and I, this is true. We don't see all the problems of the world. We see all the opportunities of the world. And so we wake up with great joy. Both of Us. And it just happens to be that way. Right. And I think that's true, and it's certainly true of me. And then I started to say, huh, the fact that I do wake up and immediately think of all the opportunities that today could bring and that I did wake up, first of all. Right. Because the alternative is really good.

As my, my, my grandmother used to say, if I wake up dead.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So as good Jewish grandmothers do. So, so no, I mean, this is the thing is, is that if you start to get into the mode of being joyful is, first of all, finding a sense of purpose is important so that you can have joy. And then when you have joy, that will lead to success. That not guaranteed success, but without joy, I don't know how you can be successful. So, so then you say, well, then I have to wake up every day and find joy in my life. And yes, today could be a terrible day. It could be the company's doing badly. I've got angry customers. I mean, we all have that, right? Especially as leaders. Especially as leaders. What many people don't realize who, you know, who listen to these podcasts is they think, oh, I can't wait to be a CEO or CTO or C level exec or run my own company. Okay, you understand that at, at the CEO level. At the CEO level, all you get on your desk are the angry customers, the happy ones.

Yeah.

Everyone else took care of and they heard all that. So, so any day you get up could, you know, you know that you're going to deal with the, the bad employee, the difficult employee, the difficult. This, you're getting sued, unhappy customers, someone's stay in there. But it's all bad. You only get the bad stuff to deal with.

So most people, you know, most people don't know.

I know, but I gave them the secret, now don't be a C level executive.

I actually say that I'm the CSO and people always look at Chief Science Officer. I said, no, you should.

Officer. Yes, that's exactly right.

And I'm not. And I do use that. And what do you mean? I said my job is to clear the path for everybody else to be able to do your jobs. So I get the things that other people don't want to do. And if they have to get done, I have to make sure they're done because I want to make sure the other people excited about the work they're working on. So it's funny. So can I ask? Because I'm Looking it up right now as we're talking. Dopamine, I know where it comes from. The hip, hypothalamus, in the brain. But can we create more?

Well, yes, sure. So, so because I'm going to call.

Goldie and I want to know where.

We find more dopamine. Well, obviously people, people do it in bad ways with recreational drugs and things like that, right? That, that can increase your, your levels of dopamine. And, and, and do, but, but no, you can increase it. Basic. I mean, some of us are born with higher dopamine than others. There's no question.

Heroin, I'm saying heroin.

Exactly. Heroin, amphetamines, cocaine, I don't know.

Coffee is one. They say caffeine also increases dopamine.

But you can also do it just getting yourself in the right mindset. Getting yourself in the right mindset. And to some extent, mindfulness can help do that because it can change the way you're thinking about things and, and give you the. Either actually more dopamine or the equivalent effect of having a higher dopamine level because more dopamine makes you happy. There's no question. We want more dopamine. That's good.

All right, but do you, do you meditate? Do you do things. Things do you personally do?

So I don't need to meditate, but there are people who need to meditate and they should, right? Because that can ground you. That can ground you. Like if you, I'll give you an example. If you.

Are you thinking of your two X's? Come on.

No, no. If you cannot find a sense of purpose, for example, I would recommend start with meditation might be a great place to start so that you could literally just calm your mind, get everything else out of your mind and say, you know, who needs me? What does need me? Where can I, where can I add value to society? Right? So all those things you can, you can start to really strategize about where the noise of the world and your phones and computers and all that don't allow you to do that. Right? So if you got to wake up with joy every morning, that certainly is easier if you have high dopamine. But even if you don't, you can get there by realizing the importance of waking up with joy first thing every morning. The importance. Why is it important? Do you want to be successful? Whatever success means to you? Well, of course I do. Okay, then you better have joy first thing in the morning. Because if you wake up and say, oh, it's another day and we all know People who do this, it's another day. It's going to be so hard. All these things are bad. I don't know how are you going to have make success out of that. You might plow through it and plod through it and get through it. It's not going to be a good day. There's nothing good. And you certainly can't drive towards success however you decide success is. You can't drive towards success without waking up and being joyful and seeing all the opportunity of that day.

It's fascinating that you went in this direction because I would never have thought of going in this direction. The fact that you started with purpose. The even. I get up every day and I say to people I always take a right when other people take a left. And what I mean by that is I'm ready to go do something, to build something, to create something. My laptop gets up and I'm calling somebody. But I do. To kind of to pay. I often will meditate, but I don't meditate about any of the things we just talk about. I, I just have the. I could do 20 minutes. No, no issue. And I could just completely relax my body just maybe to be more innovative or something. But I don't, I don't think about those things such as finding joy. I'm doing.

You already have those.

Yeah, I'm doing it for health.

Great.

Yeah, I'm doing it for health. I'm thinking about it. I'm letting my body release itself and see new opportunities. It's a difference. Yeah. And some people, I don't know, some people can't last more than two or three minutes. Citation. I don't. You probably know that they can't go five minutes. And mine is easily always 20 minutes if I'm going to do not a. Sometimes a 15 because I have time that's left. But I always shoot for a 20 minute relaxation. Just, just, just kind of, hey, I'm okay. Everything's fine. Let's keep on going. So the, the mindfulness. But I like how you. I think, I think if someone was to wake up and say there is joy, maybe, maybe that is a trigger or enough of an impetus for the balance of their day or part of the day for them to see an. At least an opportunity in something. Does that make sense?

It does. And it's all about even yourself reframing the moment you get up. And you may. And by the way, you, David, I don't think need to do that. You have a sense of purpose the minute you get Up. You have joy when you get up. You, you haven't said that, but I can sense it, right?

Oh, no, there's. I get up because that's next.

But, but, but you don't get up. But you don't get up and go, oh, yeah, it's a terrible. You know, and that's the difference. And so if I was to teach anyone any.

But I, But I think you and I, I think both of us also have. I'm willing to make the phone call even if it's a bad phone call. I'm willing to take the email even if it's a bad email, because that's the, that is the step that one has to often take. That there are challenges all the time. As you just said, it's not easy.

But that's part of the, part of the pathway. And it just is better than that. It may be for that day, your success. That is, you have to take this. You wake up with joy and you say, hey, the next thing on my thing is to take this terrible call with this terrible customer. And you know, no matter how that call ends up, it's a success because you closed it out on your book, because you made the call. Yes, success. You can define a little bit of success that day by closing off that, ticking off that item off your, off your list. Right. That, that is tremendous. And you couldn't have done that. You just can't do much if you don't wake up with a sense of joy. So I just like to say, let.

Me, Let me add some. I'd like to add something just flavor that might be useful. And I don't know if you've ever done this. I plan my day pretty much the night before every day I go to bed. I don't do it every single day. I don't do it on to a Saturday or Sunday. I do it for days of the week. And what I do is I figure out priorities and I say, if I could do one thing today, what would that be? If I could do two things or tomorrow, what would that be? And then what I do is I estimate the time allotment to it, and when I look at all the things that I've selected, there's a process to it. But I get to a point and I say, okay, if I was to do these things, I will end up with, let's say, nine hours of day work. And then I say, I can't schedule nine because there's things that come up. So I schedule about 60% of my day knowing the balance of the day are things that just transition. But it allows me to go to sleep because I no longer have to think about what I have to do tomorrow morning. And when I get up in the morning, I already have the list that I've already predetermined while I'm fresh. So my sense of purpose is that list is if I had one thing to do and that's it, and it might be a bad thing, meaning I have to deal with that. Lawyer, sorry, lawyers. I. We have a son that's a lawyer. We have a son that's an intellectual property attorney. Lawyer. What? But we. We. I know that I have to do that, number one. I do not want to do that. It's not good. But I have to do it as number one to move the rest of the day forward. So the. One of the techniques that I use is, allows me to sleep, allows me to wake up in the morning, is a defined sense of what's next. So I don't wake up in the morning saying what I have to take care of, who do I have to call, what has to be done. I have to make a list. And your day already is flooded by your emails, it's flooded by your text messages, it's flooded while all sorts of things I don't have that I don't.

Know if it does make sense because you're actually creating your sense of purpose the night before for your next day. And you're saying when you wake up, you have joy and you look and you go, here's the eight things I do today. And my sense of purpose is to accomplish the eight. That is my sense of purpose. I have a sense of purpose for the day. And that's totally fine. That is totally fine. But can you imagine waking up with zero joy, no sense of purpose, no idea what you're going to do for the day, and. And no way to measure success. You have nothing. And so people. And some of this, by the way, came from how did you ever. Do you know, how did you ever get 94 worldwide patents and working on the 95th? Well, part of what I wanted to do is I. Part of the way I define success is finding a real problem, a real pain point in society and then trying to solve that. And it's really hard and I'm going to wreck my brain and it's going to take six months or a year or whatever, but coming up with a unique solution, patenting that, and I feel great success from that. And it's not about money because most of the Patents. Most patents are owned by the company you work for at the time. Right. So. So people think, oh, you got all the money from these patents. No, actually, but other people did. But. But the point was I actually solved a problem for society that is, you know, really gives me tremendous joy and success. And joy and success, which is really fascinating.

Do you feel that the securing of the patent is the end?

No.

I mean, is that part of that process for you?

It's part of the process. You know, securing a patent isn't really as much about getting the patent. It's just about putting a sort of. A little bit of a nail in the coffin, so to speak, and saying, look, I. It's now done like the book is done. Right. So. Right.

I've got. I've got patents too, but I. They're expensive, they're time consuming, they're everything.

You just want to do a bookmark. It's a bookmark. It says, I've done.

You've accomplished.

Done that. Now I can go build the product. Right. And then you want to build a product, and then the price got to be successful. So there's lots of things. And you want all of your products and solutions to be successful. Otherwise, did you really solve a pain point? Right. But this sort of gets us into the joy success cycle, which might be the next point. And yes, it is.

It's right on.

And that's. And we just happened to get there, but that's fine. So how does joy lead to success? Leads more joy. This is exactly right. So for me, just for me and everybody else is different, right? I wake up with joy. I have great joy, and then that joy leads me to success because I have the sense of purpose to get there. The sense of purpose is to complete the patent, let's say. So I complete it, and I feel successful in that one piece. And because I feel so you're willing.

To take on something, and I feel.

Joyful that I got that success. And this is an absolute loop of joy leading to success and success leading to more joy. Because now I've even got more joy. And then I see people using my product. I walk into a store and there's soundproof drywall. One of the products I, I developed 20 years ago. And. And it's in Lowe's. And there it is. Soundproof drywall. Quiet rock. There it is. It says quiet Rock. I go, is that what it's called? Quiet rock? And. And because I, I put.

I put in a suspension ceiling in my basement off the joist for about 2 inches with metal clips. I put in that. Put in the sealant around each one of the panels so that it would vibrate and then put insulation. Sound baffling insulation above. You can not. You can kill somebody in our basement.

That's right.

And so, and it was just because. Because our kids were going to play, they were going to have their televisions on and we just didn't want to hear.

The soundproof drywall can work either in conjunction with those or even better than those. It's a long story, but basically, soundproof drive on both sides of the wall can reduce the sound coming through by over 20 decibels. So it's, it's really great. You just put it up like regular drywall. It's an invention from 20 years ago. It solved a huge pain point primarily in multifamily buildings. Hotels, motels, apartments, condos, townhomes. Right. Kept people from getting sued. It's a real. And I, and I invented it because everyone was hearing people next door and they didn't know how to stop that. Right. And I stopped it and I came up with an event and it was very hard to invent and you know, lots of money's.

I was one of those people and I can't. I still have the. We had to have a special to stop the vibration between the rights. No, but what I had purchased. So I'm going to jump backwards very far back. Why do you use the word joy?

Why do I use the word joy?

Well, you could have used happiness. You could have used other words. Why joy? Because I don't hear the word. Word joy. I, I don't hear the word joy. So I'm not even. I was going to say I don't hear it often. I don't hear the word joy.

You don't hear it that often. So that's an interesting. So first of all, I think the word happiness is overused. I think it's just overused. And I said happiness. You know, happiness is a little bit different, right? Because happiness almost suggests a sort of c' est la vie. I'm happy, everything's good, right? Where joy. You go, well, define joy for me, right? And then you get into sort of, you know, an emotional thing of, of, you know, the way you look at a day, the way you look at life, the way you're looking at the next hour, Right. Is it a joyful way to look at that? It's not whether it necessarily is making you happy or not happy. Happiness might be the result of doing something that was joyful. Right. But. But joy is. Is. Is, I think, much more solid, much more grounded.

But you, you. So let's go back in time. When do you think in your history where joy became the word? And why did that word become the word? I mean, it's got to come from some.

I think, I think over. Yeah, it's a great question. You know, over some number of decades, a couple of decades, joy was a more grounded way to say this than happiness. Again, because happiness is a little frolicky. Right. That I get.

I'm still going back. Was it a grandmother? Was friend? Was it so said it was that they, you, you, you had to have gravitated to this one word. And you've used it before, obviously. So there's got to be something. Was it a good thing?

Believe it or not, it was nothing in particular that I can remember. It's just, you know, we have all these words in the English language and some you gravitate towards because, because people's definition of it, which is, you know, different for everybody's definition of it, is a little more, to me is a little more grounded than happy frolicky.

And you're going to be, take. You're going to be taking a shower, you're going to be doing something and you're going to say to yourself, I.

Now, yeah, it could be. It could be. I remember I was 14 and someone said, right.

Well, I, I don't, I don't use the word S, T, R, e, s, space. I said it once because you gave it as part of your line. But I do not use that word. I use it for metallurgy because we're in new materials. I'll use it there because the minute you say it, you feel it. So if you say the word out loud, your body reacts. I ask, people say it and you feel it. I said, so don't use the word and find a substitute. So, for example, I'm concerned, I'm agitated, I'm, I'm challenged. I'm. I feel sick. But you find another word because that word is so ubiquitously used, so often overused that people will use it 10 times in a day. If you have to stop for one moment and say, what's the real message I want to get across? You will not use that word and you'll find a better one. So the reason I asked that question was joy is a selection for you. And it's a word that I just don't. You don't hear well, so you might not remember that.

You will. Yeah, that's a fair statement. I don't know where I settled on that, but. But I think, I think most people would agree the word joy is less used, rarely used, and very grounding as opposed to happiness. That's overused and it's a little frolicky and it's not as grounded.

I. I keep on asking myself, joy, joy, joy. What am I feeling when I have joy? So I'm asking myself, we're talking what is joy for me? And I don't have an answer for that.

Well, because you can't put it in English. But I think you, you know it when you feel it.

Yeah. I'm not disagreeing. It's a bad word. That's not my point. It's just I. It's a word that I don't have an answer for. Like I'm joy. I do. I have joy.

Okay.

Does that mean you're Someone might say, well, you happy? Well, no. Yeah, but it's different than that. It's joy. What does joy look like? Do you jump up and down when you're joyful? No, that looks like someone was cheering.

Well, According according to GPT4, Joy is a positive emotion that is expressed experience when one is content, satisfied and fulfilled.

Okay, and what is happiness?

Well, it says that joy is often associated with feelings. Notice with feelings. Right. As opposed to emotion. With feelings of happiness, pleasure and well being. Okay, so there's a really, you know, happiness is a feeling, oh, I'm happy. But joy is a positive emotion. It's a much more grounded emotion.

Is that content.

Right.

Of thing.

You're content, you're satisfied, you're fulfilled. It's a very much more important emotion, I think, than happiness, which is a frolicky feeling.

It actually is the way it was defined. It is a higher level because happiness is a subset of the. The feelings that you get from contentment. It's a.

Right.

Yeah. I wonder if you're. If you're the person in. Who's typing for your chat is the one that's typing for my chat because I asked for what is happiness? And it's going on and on and on and on and on and on. It's. It's literally an A4 page.

Oh, that's funny.

Far. And it's still typing. It's not finished. It is actually going to like an A3. It is an eighth, almost an A3.

Page of text that's probably not useful. And yours. Mine was one sentence. No.

At its core, happiness is often linked to fulfillment and satisfaction of life. It's not merely a presence of pleasure, but a deep sense of meaning. Engagement. Interesting. So I, I probably don't have the good version of chat.

I'm not using chat GPT. I'm using GPD4. Actually this one was.

No, I. I'm using 4.

So this is 4 +. It's in CO pilot. I was in copilot in word right now. So.

Ah, see you've got. Yes, you've got the better version. You get better joy out of it. So, so that cycle, I understand you got throughout the cycle repeats to the next.

And I don't know that we need. I think we want to get through more, but I think, I think. Yeah, the choice. Yep, go ahead.

No, that.

Yeah, I think not only we covered. I think it's obvious once you say it. It's not obvious beforehand, but once we say and talk about it, you go, yes. If you're, if you're joyful, you are more likely to have success. However you define that. Okay, might be monetary, might be something else, might be something in your family, might be a relationship. Right. And once you have that success, it will bring you more joy. In the definition we just talked about, that could lead to more success. And so this is an upward spiral. It's a positive spiral that you want to have in your life. And you know, we all know about the negative spirals we get in these negative things and circle the drain. Right. Don't want to do that. And it starts with the moment you wake up because you can't really impact the moment you're asleep or the moments you're asleep. But when you find that when you wake up, that's the moment you get to choose. I can be joyful today. And I have a reason to be joyful because I want to be in the positive joy success cycle.

Again, interesting, because we're using a word that I don't use and I'm trying to. I'm actually dimensionalizing the applications of the word joy to challenge individuals as to how they are thought, thinking or feeling or building or growing anywhere in the world. You know, it's a different question. And there's a quote in front of a thing I have in front of me that says people can't see the smartest person in the room is the person who asks the best questions of themselves.

That's true.

Others, not the person who gives the answers, but the one who asks. And what you've. What I'm asking myself is, I'm not trying to say that I'm the smartest person I'm sorry, that was.

It's a small room.

I'm the only person. The only person in the room. So therefore, is. I'm asking myself, where could I apply asking the question of joy to find a different answer. Make sense? So. So joy killers. I won't say the word which is in the rest of that sentence. Joy killer.

Well, joy killers. There's a lot of joy killers. Right. And you know, what I've been thinking about here and. And contemplating is. And we talked about this actually earlier, so without knowing it. Right. But how to overcome fear. That s word and burnout. Right. How do we overcome. And other things. Right. That happen in your life. And so a lot of what Goldie teaches in her mindfulness course for students. Right. Really is attempting to do this. It is attempting to put aside, spend the moment, moments, time, 10, 15 minutes, and put aside the fear and the stress. The other things you're having in school, which is you're arguing with other students, someone took your girlfriend or boyfriend, you're going to fail this test, whatever all those things are. And you got to put those aside so that you can overcome them. Right. You can't overcome them if you're buried in them. Right. So if you're buried in fear, you can't find any joy. Why? I'm. I'm. I'm, you know, I'm in the middle of an earthquake and I think the ceiling is going to fall. There's probably. It's hard to find the joy in that. Right. For that moment in time. But. But most of the fears in our life are not that kind of fear. It's not like we're about to get in an accident. It's. It's more. I'm fearful I'm going to lose my job. Well, everybody is at times. Right. I'm fearful the economy is going to collapse. I'm fearful of. All right. And you've got to overcome those. And there's no easy solution. But what I can say is the best way to overcome them is realizing the power of that joy success cycle. That is, if that becomes so important to you that, you know, you have to get back to it. You have the strength to get back there. You were there before, and now you're afraid of something. I'm afraid of talking to this employee. Of course you are. However, why don't we find some success in talking to this employee, even if we have to terminate them and we as leaders have had to terminate even our friends and it's horrifying. It is terrible. It Crushes me, of course. But I actually have found success in that. And I found success by saying, you know what? I'm also going to help you find your next job. This one wasn't a perfect match anymore. What got us here won't get you there, but I'm going to help you find the next thing. And I placed them in the next thing a week later. And so I found success for the company. I actually found success for them because they were happier. They weren't happier. They weren't happy in the position. It was very difficult for them. It wasn't a great match. It was better to get them into the right position. That makes sense, right? So you could turn any of these things into something you can overcome so that on the other side, you find either success or joy so you can get back in the positive cycle. That's what you have to do. And if you want it enough, you will step back and say, huh? Okay, I am burning out in this task. Let's say, how do I find joy or success? Well, a couple examples, right? You're burning out the best thing, the best way to find success. Finish the damn task. Just get it over with. Of course you're burned out. It's like you're writing a book for nine years. You're clearly burned out. In year nine, the best thing you can do is finish the darn thing. That's it. Period, Full stop. Finish it, put it behind you. Then you wave the flag of success, and now you can find joy again. Right? Because that cycle starts again. So I think. I think you look at all of these things, even if you're burning out in a job, okay, how do you find joy or success? Get out of the job. And so many people get burned out in their job and they tell you about it. And you know what I'm talking about. Oh, I've been burned out in my job for years. And don't you. Don't you, David, go. I'm sorry, is it indentured, you know, servitude here? What I'm thinking, you could find a different job, anything. But don't stay there if you hate it, right? If you cannot find.

They don't. They don't. So this is. That's the psychological challenges. They don't believe they.

Well, because they don't. They have forgotten how to find that joy success cycle. They forgot how important it is to be in the joy success cycle. So once you realize it's important to be there, it becomes your number one thing to go solve. And once Your number one thing to go solve, you put your resume, everyone, you get another job.

So I think, and I'm dimensionalizing it. I think you're adding a layer of completion.

Sure.

That I have a book to my right of me, my wife never seen it. I don't share it with anybody. It's a success book and in it I can go back 25, 30 years. I write down anytime I achieve something that I consider to be a success. And there, you know, it's, it's eight point, seven point. The book has a lot of them in there. Whenever I feel like, well, maybe I haven't achieved much, I can look at that book. But I also if something that I achieved 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago, it would not make it on the list today because I've gotten higher or different or dimensionalized my living. So yeah, I've done that. Yeah, I've been there, I've seen that. So I think there's a layer, the way you're talking, and I'm taking it from the way you're talking, is that you're also. The joy success cycle is a joy complete success which creates joy to complete success. There's, there's an, there's another element in there which is completion achievement. Addressing, attacking. Yes.

If that's how you measure your success, most of us would measure some level of success when we complete something. You complete a book that's a success. You, you know, you hire a new employee that's a success.

But you use patents, you use patents, you use hiring people, you used firing people. All of those meant you taxed and.

Completed it with success. And you complete success, no matter how you completed it, it's a success just to complete it. Now what I love about your success book and I, and I recommend people write at least a success list. You've had many successes in your life and in your career. And I separated the two of them. Right. In your life and in your career, a success is, we had a baby, we had a child successes, we raised the child successes, they got through college, whatever it is. Right. These are all successes you can write down. And whenever you wonder, oh, this is a terrible day, I have no joy. Hang on, go look at these successes. Actually, you've had success and joy in cycles over and over and over again. This one minute you've forgotten how. But let's remind you, you know, what you did in the past and what you did to get there because you'll remember the, the, the, the, the points of getting There right now. Oh, I hired this person. You were. Oh yeah, I remember because this person came to me and then this thing and then they wrote to me and whatever it is or I wrote this book or I wrote this paper, I wrote this blog book or I did this podcast. Right. You will. I'm sure you will gain. I hope you get great joy out of doing this podcast. Not all 400 of them, but some of them that you get great because there's some. You go home. I ever going to get them out of here. Right. But, but, but because doll podcasts. But. But I hope you get great joy and I hope you get great joy out of this one. Not even knowing what you were going to get out of it. And it makes you think well just.

So here's a corporate part of it and you probably from the time that we I asked you is I said that you're teaching me. Remember that beginning don't think about it but you. Because other people will listen in and I'm taking notes. I'm on page 10 already is I look at this as an opportunity to be taught by people who are amazing. And so I've had Tom Peterson and Keith Ferrazi and and you know, sales experts, business experts, marketing experts. I've had all of them and the they're joyful because I've got this time with an individual to learn from and then there's a value for other people to hear it too. So yes, I do get a joy out of it. I'm going to add something to. Because you just said about the book. I actually don't separate life and business. To me an achievement is an achievement. A success is a chess and I call it the wall of life. And the way I've used it is I've had individuals I did I'll give you an individual but I've individuals in bad places and I've shared this with them and it's changed them. So I'll give you one. This woman, I was at a conference, she was not in a good place. A boyfriend had just cheated on her, left her. She told me all these things and I said can you. Do you have a wall in your house that you could take something off and clear? She said yes. I said I want you to put a word on the top call your wall of life. And you get to use an index card, a three by five index card. And when you achieve something that you feel you've want, you've earned it, you've done it, it's an achievement. It could Be anything. It could be learning to cook. It could be getting a job. It could be this, that, and the other. Anything you want, no one will judge it. It's yours. You put it on that wall, and then the next time you have something, put it on the wall. You can't put it on twice. Never can. It's just the first time. And six months, year, I don't know what the exact time frame was. She writes me back and we. We have become friends. She said, my life changed. I have got a new boyfriend. I've started a company. The company has done X. I'm traveling around the world. And she said, my wall of life is growing. So we were creating joy, I guess.

Yes. Yes. And why not?

That's interesting. I hadn't.

The other thing that I would say in these podcasts, I'm sure others have told you, is a really great podcast interviewer of what you are, teaches the person you're interviewing more because you're asking questions in a different way than anyone's asked them before. And it makes me think about how to deal with that. What's the right answer for that? Have I thought about that? Right. So in essence, you know, we're learning from each other as the audience is learning as well. And it's a really. It's really interesting. That's great.

Thank you for that. I. Yes, that's. I'm actually present. I don't have my phone. I never have my phones and vibrate. There's nothing in front of me. I'm. I'm here because you're. I value you and I want to learn from you. And that's the, the questions. And you're responding nicely to them, too, which is great. So there's haven't been a lot of podcasts that haven't been good. So. So you have some joy killers. Do you have a list that you think about? Or are there certain things that someone should avoid? Are there. I mean, what. You put this down. Joy killers, how to overcome. Because you got three words, Fear, blind, and burnout.

There's all kinds of joy killers in, In. In our. In our life, right? And they. And they happen. And it can be the people around you who want to kill your joy, who want to tell you that what you're doing is terrible or it's never going to amount to anything. And. And, you know, this is just how life is. Right, everybody?

Are you talking about my mom right now?

Yes. All our moms. You know, it's funny, half the time they tell you, oh, you're you're the smartest. You're the smartest kid I've ever met. And, and then you try to go do something and they say, that'll never work. You're stupid. You know, it's like, which one? On my mind, right? So, so, but there are joy killers. And, and, and you just can't, you know, you can't take that seriously. You have to say, well, if, if this is how I define what I want to do, and this is how I define my sense of purpose, and it brings me joy and it's going to bring you success, or I hope it brings me successful, then I'm going to go do that, whatever those successes are. And they can be little successes, right, as, as we've talked about. So they can be people in your life, obviously. They can be burnout and, and fear and the S word and all, all, all kinds of things. And, and look again, there are joy killers that are real killers. Something awful. You know, you get cancer. I get that.

Well, that's, that's what I'm immediately going to. People who are at an extreme or have had challenging environments, so they're, they're really, really burnt out. And I'm asking myself, how do you help pull them out? I gave an example of one that works, right? And I have others. But how do you, how do you take a person? Because saying put aside is, I mean, that's.

Certain things cannot be put aside, right? When you go through a divorce, you're going to go through a long period of, of healing and anger and all the other things that happen, right? But, but I will say I've seen, I've seen people go through divorce and sit in the corner virtually and cry for two years, right? And I'm not saying it's right or wrong. It just is what it is. During that period of two years, there's probably not a lot of joy, and therefore there's not a lot of success. No matter how you measure success, you're just going to wallow in the pain until it's through. And, and, and, and you know, in the Jewish tradition, when someone dies, you get to do that for a very fixed period of time. And that was very brilliant. It was brilliant because it said, you're done after that. But I want to cry. No, you can't cry anymore. And because they knew that you have to go on and have joy and find success, otherwise you just wallow in the pain forever. You can't wallow in the pain forever, right? So, so you have to have a Limited time. And so I'm not saying there aren't times in life where you need to go through those, you know, the session of loss and pain and anger and you know, it's a car accident, it's a whatever. Right. I get that. And you're going to have to allow the human psyche some period of time to heal. And I don't know if that's a day or a week or a month. It should not be years. I have a recent example. I want to see if I can give it in the right way without divulging who it is. There's a, there's a situation where, where someone's college age student passed away from an unknown illness. Right. That nobody knew that they had this problem and they died basically in their sleep and nobody knew. Right. And the parent, one of the parents continues to blame the school forever and it's been many, many, many years and they blame the school for not somehow diagnosing that the student had had this underlying situation. Right. And, and so you know, my advice if I were to talk to him was I, I understand the pain and I understand the feeling. I don't understand you blame the school because not they're not doctors. It's not what they do.

They're not connected.

Yeah but you're trying to blame someone. But you now have to move on you with your life. Like you have to move on because. Because wallowing in this pain over and over and over again and, and saying these things over and over again, it doesn't solve the problem. Right. Isn't going to solve and doesn't bring any joy to you and isn't going to move your life forward and isn't going to bring you any success. There is no success in this. Right. I have an interesting things again, people yell at me for this. You know, people go out and protest lots of things and they'll. Sometimes they spend days out there and they put signs up and they march up and down. They do all these things. You know, 99% of protests just don't ever amount to changing what has to change. I know we want change, but usually protest isn't a really. Isn't a really doesn't lead you to success. It may give you some joy to be out there with your brethren, I get that. But doesn't lead the actual success of what you want. If you want the extra success you want, you got to throw the, you know, throw the bad politician out or so you know, you got to do. You got to actually take action. Right. You have to take a different kind of action. And, and so I see people, there's nothing wrong with protesting. I see people put all of their eggs in that basket and then they come home after a while and go, well, nothing happened. I go, I could have told you nothing was going to happen. There's no, there's nothing there.

So, but, but that's a whole different challenge because what you've just defined is that individuals don't have the, the challenge problem solving capabilities to be able to forecast that the work that they're working on, critical thinking. So they, they've been, they've been indoctrinated or taught that if I do that then it will change. And they don't understand. So they become part of what is the anti joy cycle instead of the joy cycle. Because they did it. It didn't happen. See, it doesn't happen. The world doesn't work. Therefore, therefore I don't have joy. Therefore I'm unhappy because I've been told and the world is against me. And on and on and on. So we're adding a layer of complexity of individuals being taught.

That's right. That's right.

And they, and they, and they don't.

It's fascinating. So when, when, when, when. And not to talk politics, but this is an interest. Everyone will get this. No, it's okay. When Trump was president, we, we had some friends that every time I talked to him, they said, I just can't get out of bed. I can't get out of bed. He's the president. And now I'm thinking, you know, I understand you may be sad. I understand. You know, I get it might not be your, he might not be your candidate, whatever the case is. Right. However, not getting out of the bed isn't going to solve the problem. If you want to go solve the problem, there may be solutions to the problem like getting a candidate to, you know, to run against them or support to compete against.

But they don't. But they don't.

But not getting out of bed for four years didn't make any change. And every day they didn't get out of bed, it brought them less joy and less success. And they were in the downward spiral, the opposite of the joy success.

Right. They were in the, the ant.

The anti joy cycle cycle. So with no success, the anti cycle. And they saw no success get any success there because every day they got up, guess what? He's still the president. Right. So, so you couldn't change it. That wasn't the thing to affect change. And this Is why I say again, Supreme Court did their thing with Roe v. Wade and obviously much of the country sort of disagreed with that and they went and protested, protested for weeks. However, protesting in front of the Supreme Court doesn't change. The Supreme Court already ruled. Right. And I want, if you want that to change, there are things we can do to get that to change. Probably protesting in the front of the Supreme Court didn't do a damn thing. Right. And then, and then you feel bad and you say, gee, I was out there for weeks and nothing happened.

But if, but if you're in, if you're in France protesting does Germany.

Good point.

Way they handle those places do make change.

That is true. That does work in France. But France is also, it can be pretty, pretty violent and pretty scary.

I'm not. We're not. Yes. I'm just talking about the act of protesting. And so this is a problem solving capability skill where individuals don't see options. So I circled, when I wrote joy killers, I circled fear and I circled that.

And I was a critical thinking.

And I drew my lines, I drew my lines down and I said and I've been kind of trying to find actually like a mind map. Ish. And I'm saying, okay, but when someone has fear, they often can't see past the fear. So you can see it. You could say, no, do it this way. And they don't.

Right. And they need the critical thinking skills to do so. Or they, and they, and they don't have them. Or they need help to do so. By the way, we don't teach critical thinking skills in most schools today. Or they need help to do so. They need someone to help them. Right. I mean to help them overcome that fear. That's, that is why some, sometimes we have counselors and psychiatrists and psychologists and all those things. But, but, but, but, or, or you have felt the joy success cycle in the past so much that you want to get back to it so bad, you're going to overcome the fear. You're going to say, I'm going to wallow in this for two days and then I'm going to move on. I have to move on.

And I wish that was the case. I think the majority in my mind, I'm looking out the window. What I'm saying to myself, I know too many people who don't know how to get out of that and they can't get out of a variety of reasons. They, they have an income, their house value has diminished, their, the cost of living has changed, their health has changed. They can't lose their health insurance and they stay in these cycles and they don't. And I'm saying they because I run into my own challenges and you run into yours. It's not an easy thing to overcome. And I want to make sure that at least I'm saying it's not.

That's.

We're making. I think, I think the way you're saying and I'm not picking on you, but I'm articulating. You're making it sound like, okay, put aside, get up, give yourself a few days, you're done, you move on.

That is not. That is not always easy. It is not always possible. And it's not possible for everyone.

However, I spoke to my mom, I spoke to my mom on Sunday and my mom. My father died during COVID and my mom still says, I miss him so much. I miss him. So he was my best. And they were married for.

And missing is fine, right? Missing is fine. However, she has to get up to a sense of purpose every day that is no longer taking care of him. It is some other sense of purpose.

Right, Right. And she, and she. She keeps herself busy. But the point still is, is that these things that we're kind of glossing over, I think at the same time as I'm writing down the notes, I'm saying there's. It's not a magic trick, but there's got to be a better way than the. We're. We're also taking on a very western approach. If you were Eastern.

Right.

Community has a larger sense of play in that if you're the Spain, Latinos in Spain particular were able to get through covet a lot easier than other countries because as everything collapsed, they all came together as family and they lived together and they supported themselves during they. They do it regularly through times of challenge where societies such as in the west, we teach our children, you grow up, you become independent, you get your own place, you have your own life.

You.

This is my life, this is your life. And we'll be there for you. But in the. In the east, your family might live with you until you find a mate. So you're 28 years old, still living at home. You're doing this because you got a job and it's not a big enough job. We want to help you. So you live in the house, you pay a certain amount or you don't pay anything until you can get on your feet, which is a lot longer gestation period. And so I think there's a. I'm going to. I'm making black and white in this case. And not that I'm using races.

Sure.

I'm using just colors. Anybody who. I've heard that just recently someone said I used black and white and someone thought it was racial. I'm thinking, no, there's a. I'm an artist.

Right, right. I got it.

That's all I'm saying is that to make it easy, there's west and east. There's much more than that. But though that societal, family, familial, familiar. Familial, familiar environment also, it doesn't help these joy killers the way we structured.

Well, again, it does. Look, I think, you know, in these podcasts, right. And in any of these kinds of summaries, you know, where I'm saying joy equals success, we can always find the situations where they have to be handled differently and delicately and people can't get themselves out easily. And it's a horrific situation. I get that. Right. But. But most days for most people, we want to get people into the joy success cycle and out of the joy killer cycle. Right. And so sometimes that's easy, and sometimes it's easy for some people, and sometimes it's very difficult. But you will not find success being stuck in the downward spiral.

Oh, yeah. And I'm not disagreeing. What I'm. What my mind went to is what if somebody who's hearing us talk says, I never thought about the familial side of making sure that equation works. And then instead of, you're on your own, you say, we're together. Hey, look, son, daughter, family, person, why don't I do this for you?

You.

Why don't we do this together? Because coming out of fear s and burnout is often really, really.

And some people for a long time have used their church community as their community to go to. Oh, yeah, right, Correct.

Using any religious or any group, such as a Kiwanis group or a, you know, there. There are groups, your local. Your local bar down the street where you have your friends that you meet every day. And we're going to write, no question, you know, where everybody finds their friend, and that's where you share your miseries. But I walked into a room in Hong Kong with my Taylor, his friend, the Daswani family, but that was my tailor. And I walked in and there were about five, six guys, and they were all complaining. And the guy looks at me, says, I know David, I know David. All we do is sit down around complain. And you don't like complaining. And people don't like complaining. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. People love complaining. Look at all of you.

You.

Absolutely love to complain, and you do it all the time. The thing is. I don't want to hear it.

Can I tell you why some people like that complaint? It actually brings them joy. They actually get some joy by listing all the things that are wrong in their life and all the things that could be and the weather could have been better, and somehow they get joy out of that. They've lost the ability to talk about really positive things, and this is what they're stuck.

Yeah. My grandmother used to say, Hungarian grandmother used to say, if everybody put their troubles in the center of the table, you'd want yours back.

That's right. That's true. You want yours back.

So you say that all the time. We all have challenges, but if you.

Put them on the table, you're going to want yours back. That's right. Well, so there's joy killers for the joy boosters, Right.

So what are the joy.

You know, it's sort of. We've really talked about them, I think, a little bit. Right. How to cultivate positive emotions and mindsets and habits and, you know, the cultivation of that, first of all, starts with waking up in the morning and recognizing that this is part of just like some people go and exercise, right. Some people go and eat breakfast. Some people go and read whatever they're doing. They read their emails. Before you do any of that, you wake up and you say, okay, I'm going to have a joyful day. I'm going to have a joyful day. How do I make sure that I see this day full of opportunity? How do I make sure that in just one minute, in two minutes? And that's sort of a little bit of a mindfulness exercise. Right. How do I convince my mind that I'm going to look at the day as a series of possibilities and a series of opportunities? Opportunities as a series instead of series of awful things I have to get done. Look at everyone as an opportunity. Look at everyone as a small success. Right. And so you got to start with that, because if you don't start with that, you can't get back to it. And then you just have to cultivate it all throughout the day and stay in that mindset even when you do the hard tasks. So there's 10, 20, 50 tasks you do today. Maybe it's washing dishes. Maybe, you know, some people say, I just don't like to wash the dishes. Yes. But actually there can be great joy in washing Dishes and getting them really, really clean, really wiped off and really put away. And in fact, there's great joy for some people in washing dishes because it's their time to think alone. They're just washing the dishes and they can think alone and nobody's bothering them. And there everybody else is at the table talking, whatever, and you're washing the dishes on your own time and getting them super clean and feeling tremendous sense of success when you put them all in the cupboard and they're away and you go, the kitchen's clean. I did something successfully. I got to think about tomorrow, think about my day tomorrow, think about the things I want to achieve. Nobody bothered me, and I'm cleaning dishes, right? So you can find joy in almost anything you want. It's all how you look at it. And so I think the joy. The biggest joy booster is to say, this is an interesting task. If I had to. If was the. If it's the last thing I ever do, if I had to find joy in it, what could I find joyful in this? Well, there's success in completing the task. Okay, that's just job one. And then there's, hey, maybe I have some quiet time, or maybe I could put on some music or. Right, there's all these things. So what. What is.

What is yours? What is your boost?

Well, one is I'll put on music, especially if I'm alone. So, you know, so I love it when my wife and I are together. But if she's out rather than, you know, get forlorn about that, right, I can say, hey, you know what's great? I can play some music that I wouldn't normally play with her. Right? Something.

Yeah, that, that.

That horrible music, right? She wouldn't say it's horrible, but it wouldn't be her first choice to play. So I can play that and fill the house nice and loud and. And just have that hour where now I'm not, you know, I'm doing dishes and I'm cleaning and maybe I'm doing some work or, or whatever, but I'm getting this great music that I haven't heard in a long time because I'm probably only going to play it when. When she's not there. And I love her and I miss her. But now I'm not focused on the missing, right? I'm not focused on that. I'm focused on, hey, I brought some other joy to my life at this time that could be reading a book, it could be tv, it could be something else, right? So. So, you know, Again, I'm going to add one.

Did you ever see the video where the military person said that what he does every morning is he. Yes, his bed. And that was, that's him starting off the day with.

It's an accomplishment. It probably, by the way, I'm sure it brings him joy to accomplish that. Check the box. So the biggest joy boosters are checking boxes. If you made a list the day before or that morning, whatever it is, you got 10, 10 things to do. Everyone you check off brings you joy, brings you more success and get you into that cycle and keeps cultivating a positive emotion, a positive mindset. And those are positive habits. The positive habits are getting freaking things done. That's a positive habit. The worst habit in the world is to sit there with a blank screen, sullen, right? I mean, that's the worst thing in the world. There's no success, there's no joy, there's nothing. Fortunately, now we have GPT to take us out of that. We just type in the GPT and say, how do I write this chapter? Right? So I think joy boosters, you know, there's no super secret here. The trick, I think to joy boosters are the simple, simple things you can do that twist what could have been a moment or an hour or two hours of non joy into something joyful. Either I'm going to be successful at something and close something off, or I'm going to play some music, or I'm going to take this time to read a book, or I'm just going to think to myself while I'm washing dishes. All of those bring joy. Rather than the task itself that might have been, oh, this really sucks, or oh, my wife isn't here, I'm all alone and I don't know what to, you know, whatever. And so turn that around into something positive for the short period of time and you got a little joy booster.

See, and I. What's missing is that the average individual does these things, but they never had a definition. I never had a definition for it. So I make the bed. When I make the bed, I never thought of joy. So I think what we're talking about is that micro change.

These are not major changes. These are micro change. Like getting up in the morning before you do anything and saying how I'm gonna find joy throughout this day. Right. Job one.

No, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take it, I'm gonna take it to. It's not even that. It's the definition of the activity which they're already doing. I'm saying that they're already cleaning the dishes and they're saying I got that out of the way. If they could change the question. Remember that sentence. Ask the best questions of themselves and others. If they could say what did I just do? I created joy for myself. That alone. I'm not even talking about the act because they took out the garbage. Did they take out the garbage because it was dreaded? It had to be taken out where they took it out because it has a positive influence on.

Hey, not only is it done, it has a positive influence on the family because it doesn't smell anymore.

Right. Well, yeah. Well, different garbage than I do.

But.

But do you understand I'm not even changing the life person I'm looking at.

Right.

And I'm using my head. Great point is if I can change that bed making, which I'm doing already to Joy, I accomplished it because it doesn't go on my book. It's not a wall of life thing. Or if I could say that I took care of that, which I didn't want to take care of. But it's done. The definition becomes the reality. It becomes the. It's a change. So I'm going to argue that it's not even going after joy is that the joy already exists, but the definition never didn't exist for it. I got it again, I'm trying to.

It does make. Does that make sense in a lot of these cases? So people just haven't heard it defined, therefore they couldn't define it in their own life.

Right. And I think that's to create change. I asked you did you change your wife? And your reply was I'm on my third. I had a different answer. No, because I'm still with her. Is that the. The question of joy is it exists already in the places now can someone all re adapt them who. That's a challenge too. Is can you define that as joy? But if you've not seen it that way. But I think that the. Your answer of because you had three categories in here again, you had emotions, mindsets, habits. Is that there might be. In terms of joy boosters. We might have a lot more than we don't. That we.

Right. You might have a lot more in there ready to come out. But you never thought about it. And now that you're thinking about it, you could say I can. I can actually apply this easily and quickly and it can really help to change my life.

Right. Right. And that I think is an even more valuable because it's. It's a non Non, non financial. It's a non emotional connection. The same way as, yeah, my life is terrible, but you say, yeah, but I took out the garbage and I am happy that it's done. I'm joyful that I achieved that. And then if I made my bed this morning, I'm joyful, but I was already doing it. And if for I'm an average person, for an average person to find more joy in a day creates the joy.

Cycle and it's more success and it's success accomplishing things. And that leads us to joy practices like how to apply joy to your work and relationships and goals. And again, we've sort of already gotten into this. Right, but, but you want to apply joy to your work. We've talked about that a little bit. In your relationships is just as important, right? Because you're home probably more time than you're at work all up. And if you're not applying this joy to your relationships, then you're missing a whole set of your life that could be full of joy. And so there's a couple things I think of when I think of relationships. One is if I am joyful, right? In fact, I have a friend and his wife said, and he's a very joyful person, but his wife said the reason I married him is because he's a happy man. He's always happy. That's what she said and always struck me as interesting, right? Because, because you can marry anyone. You can marry people that are down in the dumps. You can marry people that are unhappy. You can marry people that are not joyful. It's at whatever. But, but people want to be around people who are joyful. In fact, people really want to be around people who are joyful and they, they typically don't want to be around people as much who complain all the time, even though, yes, I know there's the groups that get together and complain, but you know what I mean, is that right? And so, and so I think we're drawn to people who are joyful. We're drawn to people who find joy in, in every interaction. In every interaction. Now you do this naturally in your podcast because your whole podcast is David's going to learn. And, and, and, and, and by you learning, it makes obviously the other people person feel very, very important because they're listened to. It's how, it's how it works. So the psychology works, right? And it brings them joy and it brings you joy to learn, right? So you have this whole joy success cycle. As we close out each question and go to the next one. We got little successes and we got joy all the way through. And so. But if I was Kevin Downer, well, I don't know. I'm pretty unhappy. You know, you'd want me off your program in 10 minutes. You got. I'll try to ask questions, but I hate being with you. You know, I don't want to be with you. I don't want to be around you. Right. So if. If Kevin's having a backyard barbecue and anyone who knows me, you know, they want to be there. Why do they want to be there? Because it's just going to be fun. Is it? He's never going to say things that are terrible and down and horrifying and take all of us down. He's not going to complain because nobody wants to be around that. So when you say, you know, really apply joy to your relationships and goals and work, et cetera, this is how impactful that is. And when you apply it to your work, I don't mean just the work on the computer or just the work on paper. I mean the people at work. Right. Literally apply it to your work. And we have people who come into every company I'm involved in, and you do, too, that come in and, oh, you know, well, I don't think this product's working really well. And I got customer complaints and I got, oh, my God, you know, and you're in sales. That's really bad. You know, you need. So. So what will be bring me joy is to terminate you. Okay, so we don't need that kind of, you know, that. That. That kind of language. What we need is clearly, it's work. So you need to be honest and factual about things that have to be improved. But beyond that, go. But if we improve these three things, look at how big the market's going to be. I'm making it simple. Right, but that's how you approach it.

I'd like to. I like to dimension a little bit more. Is that the way you're describing it? As one level? Yet there are individuals that we meet that are not outwardly excited, joyful, but yet they have. And I'm going to make these. They're prideful in their work. They get it done. Right. They are. They're very quiet in their demeanor, yet when they approach something, they do it with a way that other people don't. They're. They're the type of person who's just there for you, but you never really hear them. And so joy doesn't have to be. And I. I'm making an equation going back to our definition. The definition you pulled up had nothing to do with behavioral outward expression of a position that you have as a human being. It didn't say, you therefore are energetic, you therefore are rah. Rah. What it said was you completed something, you were successful at it.

You felt that you're content, forward, satisfied and fulfilled. Satisfied. Fulfilled. People want to be around you. That's a positive influence. Influence.

It's a positive influence, but we have to be careful that it is not considered an emotional.

That's fair.

Connection. Meaning it has to be outwardly expressed because you can be all of those things and be timid, shy.

Yes.

Introverted. And every other category that you just can't. It's you. Well, I. When I'm looking at a challenge that has to be addressed, I will often say to people, at some point, I sometimes have to go negative to go positive. Because in order for me to find that answer, my mind starts to say, well, what about this? What about that? What about this? And I can become negative. But I said, but that's me going through finding an answer. It is not me saying that. Is it about it? And I warn people that is. It might.

That is a normal process to solve problems. Right. So I have to look at all of the negative things that can happen in this problem in order to solve it. That is not a negative attitude. That's looking at a problem. That's. That's actually, you know, problem solving.

But people do sometimes take it, right? Some people sometimes take it as well. David, why are you being so negative? I'm not. I'm just asking questions because you're not answering the fundamentals. And therefore why are we supposed to do this? Well, David, that's negative. No, I just want to know why. Oh, now I get your answer. Because you didn't give me the answer. You gave me what you thought I wanted to hear. You didn't give me a real answer. And sometimes going negative to go positive. So again, I think we have to be careful because human behavior is not the same. And culturally we're very different.

Different.

If we're in certain parts of the world, express expression of an emotion could show weakness in certain cultures. And, you know, if you hug somebody, that's not considered. You're not supposed to do that. Well, yeah. And so there are challenges around the world interpretation of that emotion. So I just. I had to get that out because I was. I was challenged with always being joyful.

Well, I. The point of that. Yes, it does but it isn't. I think it's more tiring to not be joyful. But, but I would say this to. The main point of that is when we talk about joy and applying it to all of our relationships, including our friend relationship. Everything else, we should note that people really like to be around people who are fulfilled, who are content, who are.

Which is our number eight, which is how to learn from people who have learned.

That's right. How to learn from people. And you learn from them because you watch them. Now we watch people on TV that are. That are. That are. That. That find a great sense of joy and get in this joy success cycle. So Marie Kondo, I think you probably know who that is of tidying up. You know, she. She teaches you how to throw everything out, basically, that you don't need most of the stuff you have. Right. Decluttering.

Well, that's why I don't get too close.

Yeah, you can't. And my wife does the same. You don't need this anymore. But I love that.

No, no, I, I'll be throwing. I'll be thrown out. So just stay far enough.

But, but, but we have great examples of, of, of, of people who do get joy just from. From doing what they do. So, you know, Marie Kondo, it's decluttering and she gets great joy. And then she teaches other people to declutter and they get great joy from something they never thought they'd get great joy from. And they feel a great sense of success because they got all this open space in their closet. Right. It's really, really fascinating. I think Oprah. Oprah Winfrey, right. Is another one. Really overcame adversity in her youth and the challenges and eventually created an incredible legacy. And she has a legacy of actually joy and impact, you'd say that kind of describes her. So it can be people around us. It can be. Brene Brown is another one. Brene is a friend and featured me a bit in her Daring Greatly book. But, you know, she is all about vulnerability and courage and authenticity. Right? Vulnerability, courage and authenticity. And by sharing that sort of that message with people, it brought her great joy and it absolutely brought her great success. She built an entire career on the research that she did around vulnerability.

Okay, so how.

I'm gonna.

I'm gonna ask a question, give you an example, and you'd like it. How do you determine if someone is. Has the joy cycle or someone who's pretending and selling false promises? So let me give you a quick. I'll give you two actually, very quick. I was a young kid, I met this guy. He was amazing as a speaker. I ended up speaking for that organization for like 14 years. But I love this guy. Found out he lived not even 10 minutes, five minutes from where I lived, four hours away. He lived around the corner. And I went to see him and I said, oh, my God, I've been telling everybody about you and your stories. And I tell that one story. I love that it's for me. And he looked at me and he said, haven't got any business from you. So if I'm not getting business from you, you're not telling people about me and you're just stealing from me. I was like 15 or 16 years old. And I was. Or seven. Yeah, I was 16 because I drove to his place. So 16 years old. And he. He made me feel. This is a miserable man teaching people to be.

Well, he clearly wasn't happy. Who. Can you say who he was?

Well, right, I understand, but that was my point. He. He was hired. He was the. He and I were the two longest running speakers for the organization. I spoke for 12 or 14. I don't know the exact amount. Years. He spoke for 20 years. That was an incredible amount. But I can also share that a lot of. And how do I say this nicely? I'm trying. Please, please, please understand what. There are individuals in society who are promising in, in gender relationships, in. In racial relationships, that these are the answers to their prayers. And these people in the backside. And you know, many of them. I know. You know, Kevin. And they're happy. They look like they've got everything. They share what's supposed to be.

Yeah, I do know. I. And I. I won't name them. I know exactly. Right.

I'm trying. I'm trying very hard.

Also, some I know. How do you know? But there's also some that it's their job. So in this particular case, this guy was a miserable guy, but he was able to go on stage and do his job. And his job was to promote happiness even if he wasn't happy. That was his job.

It was. He was a motivational speaker. That's what his job. He was a motivational speaker. He was a miserable, miserable.

And there are many miserable people that can still go do that, turn that off and go do their job. So first of all, don't mistake someone doing their job. And that, by the way, could be, you know, one of these religious guys, you know, that you see on TV promoting whatever. Right. I've spoken to God. I. Maybe, maybe not. I don't they're just doing their job. So don't, don't mistake the job with, with their real life. Right. I don't know that I don't think they really believe they spoke to God, but maybe they do. I don't know. I just know.

No, no, they do. No, they do. They do. They do. Yeah. No, no, I'm not joking. I'm not joking. I've spoken to enough people around the world and they have been spoken to.

I believe it. I think my point, point is, is I wouldn't. I look at people like that and say, I know at this moment in time they're doing their job, right? So you get a keynote speaker and they're motivational speaker when you see them on stage. I'm going to learn something from them because they're doing their job and they're teaching me something. Whether they live it that way, whether they can live that way, whether they're happy, we don't know because that we're. All we're seeing is what they're doing in their job. And it's great that they're doing their job well. And it's unfortunate that they don't have joy in their lives and they're miserable, creepy people. Right? That's unfortunate. And there's lots and lots of people that way. I hope nobody listening to this is like that or I hope if you are, you fix it.

No, no, but they do. They do. So that's my question. I mean, I worked for a guy who was absolutely one of the most amazing business people I ever worked with. He hired me, he, we dominated New York City. He was guiding me. But at the same time, I knew, because I knew him well enough, he had five children and not a single.

Yes. That's never good. That's never a good sign.

So, so, but nobody knew that. So everybody admired this person because he, he was the guy, he built it, he made it. How, how do you, if you can't get deep enough, how do you.

Well, do I need to discern? I mean, my view, my, my view is. Good question. They have to live their life their way and it's not for me to judge. Right. And they have to live their life on stage in that particular case in a particular way. That's their job. I hope they do it well. And I've seen keynote speakers that are excellent. I've seen keynote speakers that are terrible. I can't believe anyone hired them. Right? There's.

Yeah, they get a lot of money.

For it, but there's, there is that and then. But how they live their life is their life. I don't have to judge them now.

No, but I'm going to your thing. How do you learn from people who have learned from people? I'm going to the title. How do you decide to learn from.

People who found joy and success? People who found joy and success. I got it. Fundamentally, find joy in success and you're going to learn from people, mostly around you. People at work, people in your neighborhood, people in your family. And you can see that they're joyful and they're in the joy success cycle. And you watch them and say, how do they behave? How do they get over adversity? How do they deal with someone who comes up to them and says something negative? Or how do they deal with the negativity in their life? How do they bless that out of their life? What do they do? Right. You can watch what they do and you will see what they do, and you will see if it's genuine or not. There's no question. Right. You can. You see when it's genuine over a period of time. Not over a period of five minutes.

Yeah, that's, that's, that is the challenge is that time. I don't know if we. Society has given us time.

Sure.

That we're looking.

I want to go on because I, I do time out at the top of the hour. Top of our hour, which will be about three hours. So that'll be. We can say it.

Right.

It's good.

It's good for us. So let's do create. Yeah.

So. So, you know, obviously the easiest. I don't want to see these. One thing one can do, and we're not going to cover it all, is create a joy plan. Right? Create so that you can now that you've heard all of this and maybe someday read a book. Should I write it? Identify sources of joy. Right? Set some joy goals. And these don't have to be in day one. They can be over 30 days. Right? Create a routine. Create a joy routine so that joy is in your daily routine. Track your progress and then share your joy with others by expressing gratitude, performing acts of kindness, connecting with others in meaningful ways. Because you're now joyful, you have more to share. You're more of yourself to share. Right.

Do you have a joy plan?

I don't have a joy plan these days because I'm living in a joyful place and a joyful world, and I am Mr. Joy pretty much all the time. So when you have a joy plan.

I do at the beginning of every year, I sit down and I make my year. The targets, the things that I believe are important. And I.

Well, that's great the whole year. But here's what I'd say. People don't have to do this for their life. They don't have to do it every year or every week or every month. You can get to a point where joy is just part of what you do. The joy success cycle is part of your day and you're going to live in that cycle and you don't need the plan anymore. The plan is you, right? So, but at first you might write down a plan and say, this is what I want to do for the next 30 days. And then it becomes part of your life. Like we said earlier, like you really articulated earlier, some of these things are easy once you realize you have to do them. So if you realize that every time you close out a checkbox on your list of to do's, that is a success, that brings you more joy, that gets you to the next one that brings you more once you realize that's there. I don't have to write a plan to do that every day. If I do it three or four days in a row, I'm now in the cycle of this is what I do. This is, this is how I live, right? I succeed at something, I close that task out, I go to the next one, I succeed at that, I have more joy by the end of the day, I come home and I'm super happy, right? And we all know people come, oh my God, the work was terrible. Of course, work is hard. It's always hard, right? I mean, but you know, and that's, that's why it's hard work. And I always come in and go, hey, there were, there were good parts and bad parts. But you know what? I'm joyful. I am joyful. I accomplished a lot today. I move the ball forward and I'm excited about that. Let's have a drink. Right?

So, so, so, so is that, is that part of your sharing? Do you, do you share it publicly or do you. Because you are going towards sharing and the kindness and everything. Do you share things publicly or because everybody wants to put it on Instagram or on YouTube or.

Yeah, no, I, Well, I share a lot of my joyful moments on, on social media. I like social media and a lot of things with family I put up there. I post almost every day. Sometimes, yeah, I'll post very joyful things sometimes just. And a lot of times it's Other things I found someone else wrote. Right. Things that I find joyful, those get the most responses. It's interesting when I've posted something that was news, but it's not really positive. Climate change. I spent a lot of time in the climate change world and, and that would be a topic for another three hours someday. But, but it's, it's not a joyful topic right now. There is a lot of lack of joy in that, but we just have to deal with it and make little progress and have little successes. But, you know, you post something there and you say, well, this is how bad the Antarctica is or the Arctic, or this is what's happening in the temperature rise, which is ridiculous, in 2023 and going up higher in 2024. And this is what's happened to, you know, climate change in these areas. And you, you know, you walk away. You just want to be forlorn about it. You want to be upset, you want to be sad, you want to be angry, you want to be all those. And that's not going to fix it either, right? So, so, so you're going to have to, we're going to have to get into a joy success cycle there and, but be realistic about it. They're going to be small success cycle business. We're going to close down a coal plant. That's one success. We have to close down, you know, 15,000 more worldwide. Right. The numbers are insane, and it seems like it's insurmountable, but it's a ladder and you got to take one step on the ladder at a time. So when I post those things, I find in the last few years, nobody responds. So it reinforces the fact that people want to be around joyful people. People want to be around people who are joyful in their life, right? They're fulfilled. They're not worried about the, you know, the climate's a mess. They're not sharing that. They're sharing the good things in their life. So it just is what it is.

Well, yeah, no, it is. And to piggyback on that, when, when we're sharing Project Moon Hut, there are the six mega challenges which I've shared with you. And people always want me to start with the beginning so people understand it and I say no, we show them what we're building over the next 40 years. That's where they're excited. But then we get to the point of, well, why are we doing this? But the excitement that one, the one individual is 32. She got excitement about what we were building. She understood the why. And that enabled her to say, oh, I'm now drawing the connection. What is value added? So it's interesting that you said that you do share these things because I'm more of a private person. I, I don't share in the same way. I tried. It was also.

It does. It does take up a lot of time. I think we've covered so everything or almost everything.

So, yeah, I think, I think we've covered a lot. And I know that on the time thing. So look at Kevin. I. I appreciate the time today. You can stay on after we're done here for a moment. I want to thank you for the time that you've. For everybody who's listened in. And I do hope that today you've learned something that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. So, Kevin, what's the number one way for people?

If you go to my website, it's Kevin sarace.com kevinserrace.com and there's a LinkedIn there and some other stuff, but you'll see what I. What I'm up to and keynote speaking and all of that. Kevin, with a K and S, U, R, a C, E, Comm. And. And I do answer my LinkedIn.

Can you spell? Can you spell Kevin?

People can and they spell Calvin also. C, A, L, V, I. But I'm. Yes. I'm like.

I don't think I did.

I didn't think you could legally.

So thank you for asking.

Thank you for teaching me so much today. Yeah. Because I spent a lot.

So well. Thank you. So always remember, you can't fix yesterday. You can only create tomorrow. And for anybody wants to reach out to me, it's Davidavidgoldsmith.com I am on Instagram. You can reach me that way. Mr. David Goldsmith. You can connect to me on Twitter @Goldsmith, LinkedIn, Facebook. Kevin's there, I'm there. We can connect. And for everybody, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.