#49: Geoffrey Moore: Pattern Recognition

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:15):
Welcome to the Fools and Sages podcast.
We're honored today to welcome Jeffrey Moore to the show.
He's one of the world's most influential business
strategists, working at such companies as Microsoft, Intel
and Salesforce, and he's perhapsbest known for his work on
Crossing the Chasm, which is required reading for tech

(00:36):
entrepreneurs and has sold over 1,000,000 copies.
Jeff also recently published A philosophy book, which is really
interesting for us. It's called The Infinite
Staircase, and we're very excited that he's come on the
show to talk with us today. Welcome, Jeff.
It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.
Yeah. Thanks for coming.

(00:57):
We're super excited. Yeah.
So we thought that that maybe tokick things off, we touch on a
comment you made in our pre meeting that I found really
intriguing, which was that in effect, you're a literary
critic. And the way that you show up as

(01:18):
a literary critic has informed all of your work, the business
work, the philosophy work. And I'm curious to hear more
about that. Sure.
Well, if you so, you know, my first career was as a teacher of
English. I was a professor of English and
then I transitioned into technology.
It was sales and marketing and technology and then this latest

(01:39):
thing. And then I became a consultant
and was doing consulting. And the latest was the was the
book on philosophy, The InfiniteStaircase.
All four of those are characterized by a common
interest in narratives. So narrative and narrative is,
to my view, the most important stair in the Infinite Staircase
'cause it's the vehicle by whichwe explain things to each other
and to ourselves. And, and it needs, it needs

(02:02):
discipline, it needs critique. We know that there are, that
there are conspiracy theories and urban folk tales.
So there are narratives that getout of control.
But without narrative, we're nowhere.
And, and so if you think about what literary criticism does,
the first thing it tries to do is appreciate the narrative
without as, as innocently as possible.
We're not that innocent, but we we do our best.

(02:24):
And then the second piece of that is to say, OK, now let's
critique the narrative in terms of its value, its credibility,
its applicability, whatever it is.
You can do that. Obviously, when I was first
teaching, we did that in seminars, right?
We'd say, well, let's read Moby Dick.
What does Moby Dick have to do with being, you know, a teenager
in, in Olivet, Michigan? So we would talk about that in

(02:44):
in the marketing world, it's more about first of all,
obviously marketing messaging isclearly based on narratives.
You know, think about Steve Jobsand Apple and the 1984 narrative
that kicked off the Macintosh, that kind of stuff.
So there's always narratives there.
But also investment is about narratives.
So why would you put money into this startup?
It's all about narrative becauseat the early stage investing,

(03:08):
there's no history. You're just, it's just a story
and a bunch of storytellers. And so you, you, you interrogate
the credibility of their backgrounds and their story and
you pressure test it. So that's what's going on there.
And then when it came to writingthe Infinite staircase, it was
about how would you create a, there's been so much learned
about the way in which the universe emerged in a secular,

(03:30):
in the secular version of how the universe emerged, but it was
all in bits and pieces. How would you pull together the
narrative? And so that I really wanted to
do that. And that was, that was the first
2/3 of the book was just how could you build the story from
The Big Bang to Boaz and Brian and Jeffrey talking on this
podcast? How would you get from A to B?
And so, and then, and if, if that narrative held up the, the

(03:52):
other question you ask about narratives, because they all
imply strategies for living, they all, they all embody
strategies is what strategies for living would make most sense
given the narrative that we justwent through.
So that that was kind of where it all came from.
I think I watched a lecture thatyou gave or a little talk that
you gave to some Colombian students that were maybe

(04:14):
humanity students. And you know, as Boaz said, your
last book is about philosophy. But I would argue that all your
books are about philosophy. And interestingly, you started
with language and then at the end of your latest book, we end

(04:36):
up again with a kind of an appreciation of the leverage of
language, as you were saying with narrative.
And when I started looking at your work, because I'm not an
entrepreneur per SE, I've run little businesses.
And so I understand some of that.
But but what I saw and what I see through is metaphor.

(05:00):
And it seems to me that it if iflanguage was a tool set,
metaphor would be like one of the biggest wrenches that we
would have on the tool bench. And I remember you talking a
little bit about metaphor is like a a tool for understanding
what we're seeing. Yeah, if you think about
metaphor, it's it's the way it'sthe most creative, it's the most

(05:23):
innovative thing we can do with language.
Because basically with a metaphor, one way to think about
a metaphor is to say, look, there's a complicated situation
over here. We're trying to figure it out.
There's a known situation over there that we understand the
principles of how it operates. If I tell you that this
situation is like that situation, I'm inviting you to
take the strategies that work inthe known situation and test

(05:45):
them out in the unknown situation to see if they, if
they, if they account accuratelyfor what's going on.
And, and, and of course, great metaphors do that.
We talked about the metaphor, like the metaphor of DNA coding
for making proteins. Well, DNA has no brain and it
cannot code, right. But the fact of the matter is it
does create these three, these three amino acids together that

(06:09):
create something called a codon,which works a lot like a byte in
a computer language. And you can, you can build a
code around it. And so you couldn't understand
what DNA was doing. And in fact, nobody understood
what DNA was doing until in the last 50 years.
But once they put the coding metaphor, then and then they
understand, oh, there's a ribosome that builds proteins
based on the codes for coming from the DN.

(06:31):
And there's just an incredible amount of work that goes into
this because it's not the DNA, it's transfer RNA.
And I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on and on as to
how, you know, these incredible things people have come up with.
But you couldn't have even started that journey without the
idea of coding. And so that's an example of meta
we call it sometimes we call it a root metaphor.
And a root metaphor is one that is so strong, it kind of

(06:52):
organizes everything. Like the staircase, the infinite
staircase for me is the root metaphor of that book.
You know, just like the technology adoption, life
cycles, the root metaphor for crossing the chasm.
I mean, there, there's, there's that sense that metaphor can
create coherence and and and andorder in a very large scale.
And it's sort of built on maybe an instinct that as we're going

(07:16):
through experience, we say, wait, I think I've seen this
before somehow. And, and I'm relating back to
that prior experience, bringing it forward, which is of course,
that hermeneutical idea. So again, you know, language and
it, it isn't just the language, it's the linguisticality of

(07:36):
reality. Somehow.
It's this idea that we're discovering how things work, not
just this thing which is like the philosophical undertaking
would, would you say? Yeah, I mean, so I one of the
stairs in the in the staircase before we, well, it actually got
to metaphor at the end of it, but was language itself.

(07:57):
And I wanted to make the claim that although there are 6000
languages on the planet and they're all grammatically very
different than whatever that there are, there are only really
five functions that language, they're all 6000 language
perform and they're related to strategy.
And therefore they're related tofiguring out how the world
works. So there's the naming function.
It's mostly nouns and noun like things.
And but we're naming bodies of forces.

(08:19):
So whatever, whatever we have a noun for the reason we have a
noun for that thing is because there's some force associated
with that thing that relates to somehow how you live in the
world, whether it's a tree or aniPhone or a glass of water or,
you know, a car or whatever it is or your spouse, all, all good
things. The forces in the world.
And then the verbs are are how the forces interact with each

(08:40):
other, how they, how they behave.
They either did. They either describe the state
you're in, or they describe someforce that's going to change the
state to some other state. But verbs and nouns work
together to talk about how forces play out in the world.
That's the second category in all.
In all, 6000 language have verbs.
In all 6000 languages have nouns.
Modifiers just help you get a better view of both of them.

(09:03):
So you know, more specific verbs, more specific nouns.
And then conjunctions are the 4th category and that's what
sticks them together. So whether it's and this or but
that or when this or because of that or in the event that I
mean, it's all that stuff is sticking stuff together so you
can build larger and larger scenarios for what's going going
on. And then the final thing I said,

(09:24):
it's just the claim that when you pull these things together
in a sentence, what you're doingis you're making a claim about
the world. And, and part of the purpose of
any criticism, whether it's literary criticism or just
practical criticism, you know, natural language criticism is
just to say how verifiable is that claim and, and, and how
real, you know, how, how valuable is that claim.

(09:45):
Right now for me, that's a very American way to go about it
because the continental philosophers, they kind of would
drift off. And it was really the Americans
that said, let's look at outcomes.
And you know, that's why becauseas you mentioned, language, it's
really like mind reaching out into the world to try to work

(10:10):
with it. And what I see you've done in
your work is you've sort of aided people in that process by
sort of troubleshooting like we all like, like one that I love.
I did run a business and so I had customers and in anyone in
any business makes distinctions about customers.

(10:32):
And some of those distinctions are powerful and some of them
aren't. And they show up sometimes as,
oh, that guy, he's a pain in theass.
Or those people, they want a lotout, but they always want to
take more than they get, right? So not all distinctions are
useful. And it seems that in your work,

(10:54):
you have managed to not only identify the distinctions that
that bring home the bacon in terms of outcomes, but you've
also set them in a framework. Because, for example, everybody
knows people are different. Everybody knows that enterprises
go through lifestyle cycles, butyou've put those in a way, in a

(11:18):
framework that lets people work with them because they knew
that, but they weren't getting the results, the outcomes that
your structure of thought has provided for them.
So to me, that's just complete philosophy.
That's a philosophical machine. And that, by the way, that is my
life's work. So if I had to say, if I took

(11:38):
the word framework, I, that would be like, yeah, on, on, on
on this tombstone frameworks forJeffrey.
I mean, that's, and, and, and the purpose of a framework is
to, is to do 2 things. First of all, it's a, it too is
a claim. So, so there's not like the
framework is like, there's no God's truth.
We don't have any stone tablets.It's a claim, a set of claims.

(11:59):
But the idea is to empower another person to say, if you
try this, try it on this, try onthis pair of glasses, you know,
is it clearer, darker or sharperwhen you take them on or put
them off? And, and, and the frameworks
intended to say, OK, try it out.And if you like it, then let's,
let's continue to work with the framework.
So I've been working, there's a handful of frameworks that I've

(12:20):
been working with for 40-50 years.
And, and I'm pretty good at them, but, and some, and they
resonate with a bunch of people,but not everybody.
And and so the people that it resonates with you go forward
with and the people that don't, you say, you know, good luck
finding whatever framework worksfor you.
Right. And and and those frameworks are

(12:41):
kind of work like metaphors. And I suspected in your
consultation business, you use those that metaphorical process
for problem solving. You sort of say, oh, I feel in
this individual unique one off situation, I feel this pattern

(13:02):
that I recognize. And so here's the framework
they're missing, or here's the here's the special sauce that's
actually going to make these pieces relate correctly.
It, it, it's, it's pattern recognition.
It's, it's probably, I don't, I'm not a chess player, but I
imagine the good chess players, you know, these people that can
play like 64 games of chess all at the same time.
So they walk up to board and they go, Oh yeah, you know, Oh

(13:23):
yeah, Oh yeah. And, and I think when you work
with frameworks, a lot of times it's like, so I have this zone
framework, I've been working with a lot now with big
companies where they have a performance zone and a
productivity zone and an incubation zone and a
transformation zone. And again, it, it, it, Brian,
just what you said, there's nothing we say during those
conversations that they didn't actually know, but they, but

(13:45):
they couldn't, they weren't making it actionable.
They were getting trapped. And, and what the framework
tries to do is to show you, look, there's some principles
you cannot, you cannot violate the core principles that the
framework's trying to illustrate.
If or if you do, you're going toget yourself into trouble.
And that was true of the technology adoption life cycle
and it's true of the zone, the zone to win metaphors.
And I think it's arguably true with the infinite staircase

(14:06):
metaphors. So, so I'm curious to just to
Orient our listeners, Jeff, would, would you be kind enough
to share a little more about theInfinite Staircase's premise?
Like what the especially I'm especially interested in the
bridge that you create through being to the human experience.

(14:33):
So you're kind of. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a big deal. Let me, let me do the staircase
first a little bit, just to be fair to people that have said,
well, what the Hell's staircase?I mean, the idea behind prior to
like 200 years ago, it was unimaginable to look at the
world and not assume that there was a divine creator.
I mean, how in the world could anything like this possibly
exist? Because no human being could

(14:54):
even come close to starting. What started happening was they
started building an an alternative narrative.
And the alternative narrative says reality emerges in layers.
And like, if you go all the way back to The Big Bang, the only
reality right after The Big Bangwas pure physics.
There wasn't even chemistry. There was no life.
There was no, there was just just pure physics.

(15:14):
And, and frankly, the mathematicand probably you could only
understand it with math, and I'mnot a math major.
When the universe cools down enough electrons can bond to
protons and you actually can getatoms and you can get molecules
and you can start to get chemistry.
Now the universe consists only of physics and chemistry.
That's it. Then you Fast forward a, a scant
3 billion, 13 billion years or whatever it is.

(15:36):
All of a sudden you have this thing called Earth forming out
of a cloud of dust about four and a half billion years ago.
And, and, and you get, and the earth consolidated and it gets
water into the sun. We don't quite, there's a whole
bunch of ways about how this could have happened, but the
point is biological life emergeson Earth about 4 billion years
ago. We think, you know, give or take
whatever, but the point is it's single cells.

(15:57):
So that's a third layer of reality.
It now it, it includes physics and it includes chemistry.
And this is important about the staircase.
You never leave a stair behind, but each stair brings a set of
phenomena to the table that werejust not present before.
They just weren't there. And so the first three, physics,
chemistry, biology, and that's, that's the realm of materialism.

(16:18):
And that's kind of that the natural science is that
everybody gets that. Then what happens is you start
getting complex organisms and there's a whole argument about
how this falls. I won't go into that right now,
but the point is that you get you get organisms that have that
have multiple tissues in different organs in there and
they sending hormones to each other and you get this thing
called, we called it. I just generalize it as desire,

(16:41):
where where chemical signals areare causing parts of your body
to want other things. And so, so you desire and that
desire creates seeking behavior,feeding behavior, mating
behavior, whatever, but no consciousness yet.
There's just, it's just, in fact, you think about it in a
plant. So a plant desires the sun or it
desires water or it desires. No, it doesn't.

(17:03):
It doesn't have a brain, but it but it, but it is acting out of
chemical signals that are shaping its behavior dynamically
within time. Consciousness emerges somewhere
along this line as it consciousness is an incredible
aid to desire and, and, and Hume, where there was what the
18th century British philosophers, you know, said,

(17:23):
you know, reason has no other business but to but to be a
slave to the passions. And what I translate that to be
is consciousness evolved in service to desire.
Help you get more food, help youget a better mate, help you
protect yourself from that predator, whatever it is.
And and by the way, let you move.
I mean, you couldn't be a mobileanimal without consciousness.

(17:43):
You could be a stationary plant,but you can't, you can't move in
the world without without a brain.
You have to have a brain if there's something like a brain.
So anyway, that's, that's 5th stair in the staircase.
So there's and then the next twovalues and cultures, which
historically I've always associated with very high on the
staircase. I realized in writing the book,
both of those come into existence before humans.

(18:04):
Mammals in particular have values.
It's clear that mammals nurture their young.
They protect the tribe. They act in all the ways that we
humans think are moral. Even though they don't have a
morality or a code, they act andthey demonstrate those values.
And culture, I decided, was justsimply the ability to transmit
strategy socially. And again, you see birds doing

(18:25):
it, you see chimpanzees doing, you see animals learning from
each other tricks, good tricks, if you will.
So the stairs in the middle, which I call the metaphysics of
Darwinism, were desire, consciousness, values, and
culture. And I said they all came into
existence before people. So and by the way, again with
the staircase, you never leave that behind, which means we're

(18:46):
animals before we're people, just like we're chemicals before
we're animals, right? OK, so we're, so we're now now
we're at the point where the thetop of the staircase starts with
language, which to me is the totally game changing
innovation. That's the one that completely
separates humanity from everybody else dramatically.
Doesn't mean we stopped being animals, but there's no animal

(19:07):
that comes close to behaving theway humans behave.
So we're doing that. And then that led to narrative
and then analytics, which is kind of the criticism that that
Brian and I were just talking about the, the hermeneutics you
would apply to a narrative that.And then the final one was
theory, which was OK, can you? And that was the thing we were
talking about metaphor. Could you find something that
sort of the the one ring that rules them all, you know, sort

(19:31):
of the explanation of all explanations.
And so the idea behind that was in doing that, I wasn't trying
to say, so you see, religion's wrong and this is right.
What I was trying to say is you could build a totally coherent,
incredibly fascinating, I found totally gobsmackingly miraculous
narrative around getting from The Big Bang to Jeff Boaz and

(19:54):
Brian talking today without having any intelligent agent
intervene. That doesn't say you couldn't
have had it, but, but you don't have to have it.
And I wanted to build that. And then that gets to, well,
that's probably a lot. But, but, but as you got to the
point of, well, then how do you get from there to ethics And,
and, and, and that is an interesting question, 'cause you
say, well, if there's no God, why do we have to be good,

(20:17):
right? I mean, if you think about
ethics as traditional, it's always been derived from from
some version of a divine responsibility, right?
And and you said, well, there's no divinity here.
Well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
What's going to keep, you know, people from murdering each other
in the streets or whatever it would be?
And so the, the notion of how tobuild that connection came out.
I said, I said in the book, you know, as an American, I'm, I'm a

(20:40):
heir to two traditions, a pragmatist tradition, which is
what Brian was just talking about before this outcomes
oriented American approach as opposed to a continental, more
cerebral, experiential, mysticalapproach.
This was saying, no, no, let's just deal with outcomes for a
while. But that, that pragmatist
approach was leaving me in the lurch when I was trying to
authorize ethics. Like, So what if killing people

(21:03):
were expected or not killing people?
Shouldn't we just kill people? Because that's what Darwin said.
And so I was trying to figure out how do we how do we get to
there? And so being is the the other
part of the American, the other contribution that America made
it, it was using Germanic romanticism, but it really put
its own flavor on it was transcendentalism.
And transcendentalism says that there is a field of in nature

(21:24):
called being with a capital B that that has the effect of a
divine force of energy. It's life supporting whatever.
But again, if I'm being a pregnant, it's like that's not
verifiable. I mean, you, you, you can't like
detect it. Like the Higgs boson, you can
detect, but you can't detect this.
But then I said, but on the other hand, the staircase, the
way the staircase, I make a claim about it.

(21:46):
We can't get to the absolute bottom of it and we can't get to
the absolute top. So to say that there couldn't be
something outside of the range of what we can investigate isn't
to say it couldn't exist. It it it could, but you can't.
You can't make claims about it. You just have to realize it's
possible. The other thing I claimed was
because as you guys know, I've been practicing Transcendental
Meditation for over 50 years. I just am totally internally

(22:08):
convinced that I experience thisthing all the time.
And so I thought, and by the way, people do mindfulness and
yoga and there's a lot of peoplethat have spiritual experiences
of various kinds, not so much the ones that are like the
unrepeatable, Oh my God experiences, the conversion
experiences. I think much more about the
quieter, you know, everyday kindof serenity experiences that,

(22:29):
that, that come out of these various practices that became a,
a psychological grounding point for going to ethics.
And, and, and that, and that's kind of how, how, how we got the
bridge from, from this very secular, non religious narrative
to because basically the ethics that I am the Christian ethics,
I mean, what I didn't invent anynew ethics.

(22:51):
When we get to the ethics part, I, I, I, I anchored them in a
different place because I tried to tie them back to the
staircase rather than tie them to a religious narrative.
But they're they're, they're thesame ethics.
Can I put that in a in the bigger philosophical picture?
Because this is an old problem, this idea that they usually call
it the grounding problem in ethics.

(23:13):
And, and I think it started backwith David Hume with this idea
that we can't get from is in that to to ought because we
because stuff we know about. But where does that ought come
from? And so this is you're, you're
taking on something that a lot of great minds have banged up

(23:33):
against through history. Just this is a footnote.
But the other thing is this, this idea of the great chain of
being, it's not a new idea, but but it's, but you've sort of
taken it it to a different place.
So or, or maybe it's not a different place.
Maybe it's an expanded place because they're, it's like, it's

(23:56):
like we witnessed certain thingsand then we made some
assumptions based on that. Let's here's God for example,
But at the same time, and this is sort of a route relevant to
that. Well, hold on, just let me just
stop for a second because you'vebeen saying I want to insert
something for you in the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Please do. A great chain of being was
created from the top down. So the difference between it and

(24:17):
the infant staircase, the infantstaircase is created from the
bottom up. And the problem with creating
from the top down is you end up getting this.
You end up getting a dualistic mindset.
At some point you think, well, there's mind and there's matter
and you have, you know, the, allthat dualism that really plagued
Western philosophy for a very long time.
And it's very hard. You, you, you kind of see the
staircase building down and by the time you get to animals,

(24:39):
it's like, well, animals can't be very relevant.
And, and, and, and after that it's just matter and matter is
mindless. So, so there's a lot of, I just
found that to be very, very hardto work with.
If you take the same staircase but build it from the bottom up,
then then it it's grounded in a way that that that just, I think
works better. And particularly you don't leave

(25:01):
anything behind, which is what, which is why I think was
important. And I'm sorry, go ahead.
You're making you're making another point.
Well, what, what I was, what I wanted to point to is exactly in
that process. You know, Plato said that the
beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.
And one of the things that we noticed is that all
philosophers, they'll take some terms and they become what I

(25:24):
call the beasts of burden of their philosophy.
Those terms get a lot piled on to them.
And then they can write these great ponderous books like Being
and time and truth and Method and all these great, you know,
and great, great works. They are in their own for what?
For what they do. But, but it seems like in that

(25:45):
story of building it, we still have this idea of emergence,
which becomes, I think in your model A, A, a bigger term than
just what we normally use when we talk about the chicken
emerging from the the. Egg, I mean, though I would say
the emergence is the core principle behind the staircase
and the Prince. The emergence to define terms

(26:06):
back to Plato is is to say reality is not constructed as a
as a gradient. It's constructed in in separate
levels and at each level it emerges from the one below it.
Meaning it is totally dependent on the low and below it.
You cannot divorce it from the one below it, but it is not
determined by the one below it. It has properties that are
genuinely novel. And so we have these 11 stairs

(26:29):
and, and, but maybe there are more stairs or fewer stairs, I
don't know. But every stair in that model
has genuinely novel properties at each stage that that emerge.
And that idea that that that order could emerge is, is really
that's that that's the alternative to intelligent
design. Yeah.
Yeah, go ahead. Both I.

(26:51):
I was just going to say it's it's similar to Ken Wilber's
idea in Sex, Ecology and Spirituality, or the the shorter
version I think was A Brief History of Everything.
Are you familiar with that one? Jeff No, I don't.
I don't know Ken. I think of Bill Bryson doing the
Brief History of Everything, butI don't know, Ken.
Yeah, yeah, there's, I think it's a similar name, yeah.

(27:13):
OK, OK, OK. But, but Wilbur talks about
hollons and, and a hollon is something that exists in and of
itself, but is also part of of afield.
So, so an electron exists in andof itself, but is part of an
atom and an atom is in and of itself a thing, but is part of a
molecule, etcetera. And, and he describes similar

(27:35):
properties. I think he's got 22 or 23 tenets
that each level has that that dowhat you're describing that that
demonstrate this novel quality at the higher level of function
when it's part of the next levelcompared to when it's stand

(27:58):
alone. And the key thing there is that
there's a tendency in the top down model to think that it's
inferior as it gets lower. And that's just a mistake.
I mean, it's true that a higher level creates the, the, the
significance of lower level things.
So, so, you know, if you have a,if you have a contract and
there's a misspelled word, you know, that that can affect the

(28:19):
contract. Or if there's a mutation in your
DNA, you can have MLS, there's Ms. or whatever.
That's a, that's, there's a casewhere the higher thing does is,
is become disabled or in some way by a lower level.
So there's a, there's a real connection there.
But, but the notion that that these that these layers are
inferior or superior is, is the wrong notion.

(28:41):
The better notion is to say every layer has a set of rules.
That set of rules predicts or does its best to predict
behavior of that layer. And, and when you're at that
layer, you should use that set of rules, but you should not try
to export that set of rules either up or down.
And, and the problem with a lot of a lot of, I would call it
moralistic philosophy is they try to export rules down and,

(29:04):
and, and in ways that are just, I think, inappropriate.
And so I really my whole wish, and this is true of all
frameworks. The whole purpose of a framework
is put it in the right context and then come to terms with it.
But most failed actions, not most, but a whole body of failed
actions are due to the fact thatyou put it in the wrong place.

(29:26):
I I do think there's a hierarchyof complexity though that you're
describing. Yes, yeah, yeah.
Each one is more complex than the prior.
As you go up the thing you're in, you're increasing in
complexity at every level. Yeah.
And so and as you said, you're not really starting from the
bottom, you're just starting from the lower end and moving
toward and we don't really know where the bottom or the top.

(29:48):
Are it's absolutely correct. It's a very, I mean, we, we're
getting pretty damn small, I mean, but still, to be fair,
yeah, that there's no absolute bottom that we can observe and
no absolute top so. Now I've heard this might this
might just be a rumor. I've heard that it's actually
turtles all the way down. Well, yes, yeah.
In fact, that that's I think. That's agreed upon by

(30:10):
philosophers. Oh, the first time I heard that,
I just, it just broke me in the heart.
I just love that. Just yeah, turtles.
All the before you ask, it's turtles all the way down.
Which which sort of points out to that that philosophical
problem that we can get into of an infinite regress where we
start that we start chasing our own tail.

(30:31):
Sort of. That's why I get cranky about
skepticism. I mean, absolute skepticism.
Because yes, you can play that game, but it's like, you know,
you're wasting time. You know that you have a finite
amount of time on the planet. Are you sure this is the way you
want to play the game? And I, and I, I think there was
a time when it was important because I think there was, I
mean, if in a world which has become overly righteous and

(30:54):
therefore, frankly unfair and injust all kinds of different
ways, skepticism is, is, is a good, you know, is a good way of
pushing back against it. But as a platform, it just
doesn't work. It just is, right?
Well, and it seemed like it served a purpose in the in a
certain chapter. Yeah, yeah.
And that, you know, this was my point about that in our pre

(31:16):
meeting. The difference between
hermeneutics really and A and a natural science approach is that
at some point our experience as humans brings a richness to
things that if we're only thinking ontically as opposed as
opposed to ontologically, we're we're going to miss a lot.

(31:37):
And I think you mentioned that in in your book.
Well, and, and, and I think the place where we start missing it
is when we, when we disconnect from animals.
So for me, I would, the thing that was shocking to me, or it
was the discovery for me in the middle of the staircase was to
realize just how mammalian all of our higher values are.
I mean, they're just, they're just, they're just anchored in
mammalian life. And, and, and once you do that,

(31:59):
then I think that that takes a little bit that says, OK, so I
do not want to divorce. I mean, that's also prior to
language, right? So it's so it's not just that I
inherit physics and chemistry and biology.
I inherit values and culture even before I become a human.
And that was a surprise to me. And and but that to me, that's

(32:19):
what creates that connectedness.Brian, that you're referring to
that, that we don't, that we don't divorce ourselves from the
quote lower parts of the chain? Now, now it's, it seems to me
that there isn't, I don't, I don't feel a huge break between
staircase and the rest of your work.
In some sense, it feels like a like a logical progression

(32:44):
because I'm not a business person and because I'm using
metaphor to translate. When I looked at a number of the
things that you said I could, I could dress it in a slightly
different context and make it all about psychotherapy.
Yeah. I mean, I mean, literally,
you're blurring this distinction.

(33:04):
You're not listening to the needs of others.
You're what was one phrase I really loved.
You're captured in the gravitational field of your own
past. It's great.
And it's so, so that you know, my feeling and I said in our pre
meeting that I felt there was a lot of trapped value in your

(33:25):
work. Trapped because it's only in a
context of how do I do a business startup and not in the
context of how do I understand my own thinking and the tricks
to my own thinking in the ways that that illusions play or my,
my thrown Ness. And, and the thing that I liked

(33:47):
about your your later chapters in Staircase was that it's sort
of implies that we have a lot ofwork to do that's not out in the
ethical fields of action, but it's actually in the being who
we are as humans in all of thosecapacities.

(34:08):
Thank you. I would just say that to that,
you know, there's a tendency sometimes to think of ethics as
some kind of a rule book or somekind of a code that you have to
live up to. I think first of all, if it
comes from animals, then sure ashell it's not a rude, but
because animals can't read. So so all right, so so the
question that is, is where is itcoming from and does it think it

(34:28):
embodied language? Yes, does can you at the time
and is there narratives that create ethical aspirations?
Of course there are that that's that's how we that's how we
become ethically inspired. And then is there natural
language criticism? Can you analyze those narratives
for critically? Yes.
And in an analysis, can you build rules?
Yes, you can, but understand that's a very late developing

(34:51):
intellectual act and it's not atthe heart of being moral.
It's more about stepping back from morality and trying to
understand it in some larger systems framework.
It's not about being moral. Being moral is much more
spontaneous. It's much more visceral.
It's it's, it's, it's, I mean, now you know, another guy said,
oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, it'sno, no, Jeff, you're wrong.

(35:14):
There's, there's God. He had the rules.
We got the Bible. We read the rules.
You know, we play by the rules. That's how you lead an ethical
life. I just don't.
I don't buy it. So, so see, I'm very interested
in the idea. Do we have an A priori intuition
for morality or ethics? Yeah, and I would say that I
would say that. Yes.
Because we're as mammals. Yeah, Exactly, exactly.

(35:37):
A priori simply in my view meansjust like somebody else thought
of it before you did. I really.
I really don't think a priori inany other sense means a lot to
me. But.
But. But yeah, you inherited it.
You. You.
Yeah, always I. Because always wanted to say
something that would let him geta word.
You and I will never let him geta word in edgewise so.
No, no, it's OK. That's it.

(35:59):
I'm appreciating the the conversation where where I was
going was thinking about you usethe word miraculous earlier
relative to kind of the formation of the universe and
life and and use the word sacredin the book, if I remember
correctly. And I'm just really interested

(36:21):
in how we relate to ideas like that from a secular point of
view. Yeah, I would.
I don't think I use the word sacred.
Maybe I'm. Misremembering.
That's OK. Sacred, I think, is part of the
vocabulary of someone who takes a narrative and privileges it to
be absolutely true. So if you do that, then that

(36:41):
narrative has become sacred and and you must not violate it.
I mean, because it's absolute truth, but miraculously so.
But you have to absolutely rightwith the word miracle.
In fact, I'm just writing one just a blog will come out this
week about this because one of the one of the things I'm doing
on on my blog, it's really fun. Somebody wrote a thing called 10

(37:02):
questions atheists have trouble answering.
And so I've been just taking, taking one on, But one of them
is about, well, how do you explain miracles?
And, and the simple way to say that is, well, atheists really,
if it's not verifiable, they, they will question the
credibility of it. So they don't have to explain
miracles because they frankly deny miracles at some level.
But that made me cranky because I was thinking, yeah, but then

(37:24):
there's the then there's all thestuff that's miraculous.
They have. Well, so the molecular biology
of the cell, when you read aboutthat and believe me, it's mind
boggling, you discover it is themost improbable set of
concatenating reactions. I mean, it's like a Rube
Goldberg machine would be a simple tic Tac toe compared to

(37:46):
what happens inside the cell. And so you think, well, how in
the world did that happen and how in the world did any of this
stuff happen? And to me it's that's
miraculous. And if I get cranky about
religion is that I think they'resubstituting a magical view of
miraculous, which I think is fall short of the actual

(38:07):
miraculousness. And so.
And so I really, I, I'm just afraid that people are going to
miss, you know, they're going to, they're going to see
something. Oh, this is a miracle.
And I got it. Yeah.
Water from wine. Got it.
It's a miracle, but it's like, yeah.
But have you looked out your window?
I I mean, yeah. Well, I think that's where I was
I was going, Jeff, is that it? It I, I thought that a, a

(38:29):
secular experience of the miraculous is essentially
wonder. And I, and I wonder if that's
related to this a priori intuition that you and Brian are
talking about relative to morality.
Like, you know, if, if, if we can experience this wonder as,
as something that kind of just arises within us when we witness

(38:53):
what we're experiencing, is thatpart of what guides us about
morality and ethics? I, I think what you, I think one
of the ways to think of wonder, not the only way is that it is
that pre linguistic reality thatwe participate in finding its
way into our consciousness. And, and it's typically through

(39:16):
because we live in language. It's, it's tricky because it's
hard to have wordless experiences, but that's part of
the point of meditation and mindfulness and some of these
other things such to see if we can reconnect without the, the
filter of words. But when you have that
experience, it, it is, I mean, it, it's, it's wonderful.
And, and, and, and wonder is, I think a form of consciousness

(39:39):
that's, it's very, very close. It's, I think it's close to the
spiritual experience. It's close to the, to the serene
experience. It's, it's, it's hard.
It's, it's an incredibly precious gift.
And, and I associated it in the book with joy.
And I said that that what makes joy different from happiness and
pleasure is that the stimulus, the, the, the, the experience is

(40:01):
so out of proportion to the stimulus.
So the stimulus is something really rather slight or modest
in the vast evanescence and yourentire being is just like, whoa,
I mean, it just completely takesyou over.
And and so you're thinking, well, how in the world?
And I think it's part of this wonder thing.
It's it's part of that same field of experience that that I

(40:26):
think does underlie. It's not that you don't apply
conscious and language to moral decisions, because we do.
But I don't think you start there.
I just don't think it's that. Yeah.
So, so that brings up for me a couple related ideas.
You know, Aristotle's idea of ofmorality.

(40:47):
It isn't just do this and don't do this.
It was one that we actually kindof strive through our lives to
attain. And and you know, Confucius had
the same idea. We want to be Chunsu.
We want to be the gets translated as the superior.
Man, Yeah, yeah. But it's like over our lifetime
we accumulate and we build this and and because because you and

(41:11):
I are both longer in the tooth than our younger companion here.
A child that we're talking with you, you're prior to yes, yes,
yes, you know. We have some some breadth of a
dimension from the view that that that sort of contextualizes
things. And so my questions are there's
two sides to it. 1 is what do you think about that and our our

(41:34):
moral career, as it were, but also because we have that same
bigger sample size. What do you think about the
world since since you and I werewatching Lucas McCain and
Sergeant Saunders? See, See youngster Boaz here, he
doesn't know anything. But you and I both know that if

(41:58):
we were going through some, we would want Lucas McCain at our
side, right? Absolutely.
Oh gosh. Well, there's so much that but
but a bunch of that stuff. So back to Aristotle first,
since, so, you know, Aristotle had this vision of anything
wanted to fulfill its function. I mean, a tree wanted to become
an oak, acorn wanted to become an oak.

(42:19):
And they had the same sense of ahuman being.
A human being wants to become virtue was becoming your your
fulfilled self. We would probably call it self
realization in in contemporary psychology.
But the other piece of that is socialization.
So, so it's not just, and the thing I get a little cranky
about the existentialist was because they had such a horrible

(42:41):
social experience with the war, they tended to discount social
as as a force of goodness. And they, they went back inside
themselves and said, you're thrown into the world.
The world's a heartless place. You got to make it on your own
buddy. And, and, and in their world
that probably was pretty damn close.
But that's not my experience of the world.
And so I think there's a piece of it when you think about the

(43:02):
Aristotelian view, there's a there's a part that says, I want
to be like Lucas McCain. I want to be like Luke
Skywalker. I want to be like Harry Potter
or Holden Caulfield or ElizabethBennett or, you know, whoever
I'm going to be like. And that's a narrative, by the
way, that we're playing a character in a narrative.
That's the self as a character in a narrative.
But those narratives came from the culture, right?
We didn't invent those narratives.

(43:23):
They we were gifted with those narratives and we, we select
them on them. And we we like some and we don't
like others. So, and I think the other piece
of that is we critique the narratives and we say, well, is
that just escape fantasy or is that something, is that a real
strategy for a living? Or is that just a fantasy that,
you know, in real life could never really work?
And and so I think that's part of what we were doing because.

(43:46):
But to your point about the Longview, I think as you, you
know, we carry those, those rolemodels that forward with us and
we find new role models. But I would say that my life was
determined by role models that Iknew, all the role models I knew
before I was 20. I mean, I am now I'm, I'm living
out that heritage, but I'm totally loyal to those earlier

(44:07):
that 7th and 8th grade teachers.I had my parents, I had my had a
handful of literary experiences,you know, and periodically when
I read a new one, Yeah. But after a certain point, it's
like, yeah, but that's not me. I mean, I, I might wish it could
be me, but it's not me. And and so that's where part of
the continuity continues. Yeah.
Although in fairness, that's notin.

(44:28):
It's not entirely random, right?Those narratives, like there's,
there's definitely something, another emergence, if you will,
through culture as a filter. Maybe, Yeah, yeah, No, exactly.
I mean, but the point is, look, as parents, you select the
narratives you expose your children to, right?
And and and and and. Society does the same thing now,

(44:51):
by the way, you can get caught up in a undercurrent which
actually puts you into a countersociety.
But that's a society too, right?It's just, it's just a different
society. And there's some dark societies
that are pretty damn dark and they're pretty bleak place to
get, but a lot of people, they aggregate people to get there.
So that's a that's part of the part of the world.
I think if you feel really privileged and blessed, and I

(45:13):
think the three of us have been,we were raised in situations
which got us involved with essentially healthy narratives.
And, and, and not to say that wearen't crazy, but, but, but the
point is that the, you know, we're, we're, we were gifted
with enough good stuff to work with that we can build a life
that, that has a good shot of being fulfilling and, and, and,
and useful to others as well as to ourselves that.

(45:35):
And they've stood the test of time through the lives and our
moral dilemmas that we might have had to face.
Yes, and by the way, the narratives have stood the test
of time. So Shakespeare's narratives are
still playing, you know, and, and, and and there's a bunch of
other narratives that are not so.
So I think there is a form of cultural criticism that just the
culture carries forward some number of its strategies for
living and, and and, and sort ofoffers them as where's in a

(46:00):
marketplace to the next generation and the next
generation picks and chooses andrepudiates some.
And, you know, it's just a new, new world.
That makes me curious. This is a different direction,
Jeff, but I have 3 kids in their20s and, and I'm starting to
see, you know, employees and some of the companies that I

(46:21):
work with even a little younger than that.
And it seems to me that how a lot of people, younger people
are exposed to narratives is very different from how we were.
Brian and I did an episode aboutreading and, and the importance
of, of books in our, in our lives a few weeks ago.

(46:42):
And, and, and, and it came up that kids these days, many of
them really aren't reading and, and they're bombarded with memes
and sound bites. So they are getting a, a very
complex cultural download. But what do you, what do you see
about how the role of narrative is changing in the world or the

(47:08):
the nature of the narratives that are present?
How are those changing? Well.
I, I think, I think you've made a point about reading and I
think, I think media, the mediumby which you experience the
narrative is actually more profoundly influential than I,
I, I, I would originally have imagined.
So it when I was growing up, it was, well, the book is the movie

(47:29):
is never as good as the book. That was a frequent, you kind of
heard people say things like that because there were such
different mediums. With a book, you can put it
down, you can pick it back up. You can fall asleep reading it,
you can come back. I mean, there's a, there's a
sense of lots of space in, in, in, in a, in a video or a film
or a play or anything like that.You, you can't stop time it just

(47:50):
you go from, I mean, you can pause the video, I guess, but
that, but that's about, about it.
So that was, and then when I went to a live play, that was a
third experience because I thought the audience reaction
and that was like, Oh my goodness.
Now we go to, we Fast forward past COVID and we've taken, we
took a whole lot of the social experience away from media
became very much more, you know,screens, individuals screens.

(48:15):
And then the other thing we did with social media is because
there was no accountability. There's there and there was no
editing to speak of, despite what the president says of the,
of that, you know, that you get exposed to all, all these
different narratives. And, and I make the point in the
book that, you know, a narrativehas two properties.
It can it can speak some kind oftruth that would be useful to

(48:36):
absorb. And it can also be a really cool
narrative that's fun to tell. And the problem is you can,
those are viral narratives. And the problem is some of the
viral narratives are not life supporting.
They're actually life negating or life destroying.
And, and, and I think the hardest part with, and the thing
I think most parents are worriedabout now, particularly with
kids maybe like 10 years or 15 years younger than yours, Boaz,

(48:58):
is when you're early on, you're,you're just, you're innocent
about narratives. You, you just, you just suck the
narrative in. And, and, and, and it could be
easily, you can easily get dissuaded by a narrative and you
have these people that, you know, shoot people because they
became radicalized on, you know,through social media.
So these these are, they're verycompelling narratives.

(49:20):
And, and so, and I don't think our society right now, right now
has a handle on how to do that. I mean, I think the correct
handle is to vaccinate through critical thinking, but that that
takes a while and it takes a commitment.
And by the way, some of the teachers are caught up in the
narratives that frankly, I wouldwant to vaccinate against.
So it's it's not an easy problem.

(49:43):
And, and we might be compoundingthe problem with the advent of
AI and, you know, technology in,in general kind of continuing at
its pace even as more narrativesbecome less available or less
accessible. And, and, and also what we
figured out early on that you could that you by, by following

(50:05):
your signals, I can find out which narratives you prefer.
And I'll start feeding you more and more narratives to amplify
whatever narrative you're on, which is not healthy.
That that's like going to a single, a single food diet,
right? And, and, and we're, we're not
out of that loop yet. That is a very dangerous.
And then if you put AI in chargeof it, you just threw gasoline
on that fire. In one of our previous episodes,

(50:30):
you know, I made the observationthat it seems like rhetoric has
made great advances and dialectic, which according to
Plato, you know, he hated rhetoricians, right?
Those sophists, those sophists, right?
It's like, well darn the luck the sophists are still with us,
aren't? They, if you did a score between

(50:55):
Plato and the Sophos right now, the Sophos are winning pretty
handily. And, and I mean, particularly if
you look at our political sphere, it's just, it's well,
our political sphere sphere right now is kind of
embarrassing at the level of thelevel of, of sophistry, I guess
would be the nicest term you could use to, to getting there.
But that's the point. You know, these, the, the

(51:15):
narratives have these two, thesetwo attributes.
They have this natural selectionin Darwinism, it would be
natural selection and sexual selection.
So there's the am IA good? Am I, am I good at being
whatever I am? So I survive and I reproduce and
I survive. That's natural selection.
Sexual selection is can I get a mate?
And can I, you know, turn around, can we, can we get to

(51:35):
the next thing? And so you, you can imagine if I
related that to venture capital,a entrepreneur who can run a
good business would be natural selection, but an entrepreneur
who can get funded, it's actually sexual selection.
And we had many entrepreneurs who are incredibly good at
getting funded, but could not build a business.
So in other words, they, they, and I've also had entrepreneurs

(51:58):
who are incredibly good at building a business, but
couldn't raise money. And so it's it's an interesting
you need the intersection of thetwo.
You know, and that that was one of the things that I thought was
really worth expanding about your work because when I, when I
start, was exposed to crossing the chasm, I recognized it as an

(52:22):
artist as as having an image. And now I have the challenge to
make this image live in the world with me.
And, you know, and if I'm makinga piece of furniture, I don't
just want to need to make the chair.
Now I actually have to make the wood shop that I need to make

(52:44):
the chair. And if I really want to do the
wood shop, I need to have the business that supports the wood
shop that supports the chair. And so all of this is like
creation and then meta creation and then meta, meta creation.
And. And that's what your formula
really is about is crossing the chasm.
Yeah. And in the biggest sense, isn't

(53:07):
that what we're always, all of us trying to do in life?
We're trying to take this mind thing and we're trying to make
it live in the world, Yeah. And and, and, and, and to live
in the world, it has to recruit allies in the world.
And so it has to be, it's an ecology.
Nothing, nothing exists in the world without some kind of
ecosystem building around it. And, and, and, and it co-ops the

(53:28):
ecosystem, the ecosystem co-ops it.
So, so your, your chair and thenyour workshop and then your,
your business support the workshop.
So, so, yeah, I, I, I think we're always doing that.
And, and the crossing the chasm piece was.
So what happens after a while iswe get into a set of routines
and a set of established relationships that have inertial
momentum. And, and, and so you can go on

(53:49):
quite a while actually without, without innovating.
You just sort of say, well, I'm,I showed up my job again.
I didn't get fired, you know, but I got promoted in fact, that
last year and I hope to get promoted 2 years from now.
OK, so it's going along with thetechnology adoption life cycle.
And the chasm was about is what happens if you disrupt that?
Like what happens, for example, if the entire industry you're in
goes out of business or AI takesaway the job that you do or

(54:11):
whatever. Now you've got to kind of
restart the engine with a, with a new premise, But, and, and,
and, and when you do that, what the model says is you'll always
be able to find some people who believe in you and believe what
you're doing. And so that you can start it
with people that are supportive.But to get it to scale, you've
got to essentially enlist peoplethat you know, are skeptical.

(54:31):
And, and so crossing the chasm was about how could you get a
larger group of people interested in the same idea?
And you can't do it by telling you how wonderful it is and how
much you believe in it. How much, because that's not who
they are, but what you can do. And what Crossing the Chasm was
all about was saying, well, if they have a problem that they
can't solve today, that's deteriorating.
And whatever it is that you're advocating for would actually be

(54:52):
the solution or could be the solution to that problem.
Now you can get an anchor with people who are essentially
willing to entertain your idea, but only if it's useful to them.
And so it's a weird thing because you start in the early
market, it's really all about you.
It's all about the technology. It's all about we, it's kumbaya.
But when you cross the chasm, it's now about you.
It's about them. And then could you be of service

(55:13):
to them in their terms, not yourterms?
And that would, for a lot of entrepreneurs, that's really a
hard, a hard, hard journey to take.
Did you move from the first person to the second person?
Exactly. It's I from I to thou.
This is Uber. Exactly.
Exactly. Which is actually again,
translating this as a in the general philosophical sphere or

(55:36):
even in the psychological psychotherapeutic realm, this is
not insignificant. This is really, you know, I
think this was one of the thingswe talked with another professor
from from St. John's who is into the work of
Emmanuel Levinas. I don't know, Levinas.
Levinas was a student of Heidegger who was also in a

(56:00):
German prison camp. So he's coming out of all of
that and, and his deal really isethics and it's about
encountering the other, you know, of course he wrote in
French. Of course nobody wants.
To no. One wants to make it easy.
Remember, we used to have a phrase called lingua franca

(56:22):
because in fact, my mother's generation, French was the
international language, not English.
Yeah, I took French from the third grade to the 11th grade.
Yeah. But anyway, keep you're back to
Lavitas and the Heidegger. His point was it really was
about encountering the other andsort of putting yourself aside

(56:44):
that bracketing idea from phenomenology.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, putting yourself aside so you can actually reach out and
create what he calls a, a fusionof or not Lavina's this is God
of War now, a fusion of horizons.
And we build that through language, through that
narrative, through sharing a narrative.
And it seems like that's very relevant to exactly what what

(57:07):
you're doing there, which is just, it's totally philosophy.
Yeah, the thing thing the distance I have for some of that
is that it feels like it's happening in the head before
it's happening in the heart and absolutely right.
And I feel like that's you. I think you want to start with
the heart 1st. And so that's why I get back to
the animal mammal stuff that that, you know, like we said, it

(57:29):
kind of the other, but, but if you think about a baby growing
up, the first being of the baby encounters is, is their mother
or their mother maternal caregiver.
And that relationship is totallysupportive.
I mean, babies get unconditionallove or they die.
So, yeah. So there's zero.
So the core experience either, if you start with the very

(57:50):
beginning of your psychological experience, it starts with
unconditional love. So to then to describe a a, an
adult version of reality that has no place for unconditional
love, that just that's just a mistake.
I might even argue that there isno you there until it's
encountered by the mother's consciousness, you know, and

(58:14):
this is a great, this is a greattime for me to say kind of
dovetails into the, the conversation, the technology.
You know, I read the your book, but I also went and I saw a lot
of the lectures that you'd givenand the interviews that you'd
given and what I got, because, you know, at first I thought,
OK, here's this guy, He's a business consultant.

(58:35):
He's read some books, you know, got to be a lot of these guys
out there, right. And then, but then I, I listened
to some lectures with you and I said, wait a minute, you know
what? And I'm curiously, it wasn't
necessarily the most professional, but what I got was
that you had a certain patience.And then when I saw that

(58:57):
patience, I said, you know, I think that might be compassion
there that's resting behind thatpatients.
That's actually what's the dancebehind the interaction with this
interviewer. And because, you know, again,
back to Aristotle, he said we can't just educate our mind.
We have to educate our hearts and pretty smart guy for the BC,

(59:19):
right? And, and, and I thought, you
know, I know that we're going tofind a place to talk about this
because this seems like someone who's been educated in the heart
as well as the mind. And so that because obviously
your mind is very sharp, but, but there's a lot of smart
people are a dime a dozen, right?
We both know that. So there I, I did, I got that

(59:43):
there was something there and I didn't, I wouldn't necessarily
have gotten it the same way fromyour book because the book is
kind of rhetoric, you know. So anyway, I just wanted to
remark that. It's, you know what I was saying
that you know, I'm accumulation of narratives.
So between my parents and then these two teachers I had in the
7th and 8th grade, one of whom is actually my first cousin, but

(01:00:06):
I somewhere along the line I just absorbed a, a, an ethic of
being in service to others. And if I had to just serve,
that's sort of like the motto. That's like, I know if I'm being
in service to others in authentic ways, that's what I'm
supposed to do, which is why I can't retire.
You know, I just, I just, it's just, it's not going to stop.
But the point about that is it, it, it that patience or

(01:00:29):
whatever. And you, by the way, you have to
be intellectually curious because sometimes others are
boring people. But, but, but you know what, so
are you, you have to be willing to do that.
But if you are, it was a, it's just, it's, it's delightful.
It's also, you always learn something.
And so that's right. That's kind of cool.

(01:00:51):
But, but I think it's just, it'sthe keel that says, and there's
meaning and purpose. One of the questions that the
atheists think was how do you find meaning and purpose in a
world that has no God? And my answer would be by being,
by acting out your animal nature, by being in service to
others with both conditional love and unconditional love.
I mean, unconditional love without conditional love is a
mess. I mean it, you know, but but

(01:01:15):
either one without the others, that doesn't work.
You need both. But anyway, being in service to
others that sort of that's why Ithink maybe we're hearing in
some of those interviews of justlike, OK, what are you trying?
What is this boss? Well, you have a generosity of
spirit to Jeff that that I thinkis exemplified by you, you

(01:01:35):
joining us today. We know I want you to.
Send you a big bill. Oh, don't worry, you have to pay
it. But.
But, but I wanted to ask Jeff, Brian's pointed out a couple of
times a connection, you know, a thread through your work
relating to business consulting,philosophy, ethics.

(01:01:59):
How do you see philosophy and ethics playing in organizations?
What do organizations need today?
And, and part of where I'm coming from is, you know, I see
them needing to deal with more complexity in, on, in every way,
right? The, the kind of complexity in,

(01:02:20):
in, in the fragmentation of narrative that we were talking
about earlier, complexity in theeconomic environment, you name
it. How How do businesses need
philosophy and how do we get it to them?
Yeah. I, I, I, I think if we call it
philosophy, they'll they'll, they'll think, well, that's too
abstract. But the truth of the matter is
it's not for me. The you know, I was talking

(01:02:41):
about that four zone model from zone to win.
The way in which I introduced that in most conversations is
I'll start with what I call their performance zone, which I
will say that's where you deliver your value to the world.
And that's where you act out your mission.
And what I'm trying to get to early on is if you, you have to
be in service to a mission and acertain mission has to be in
service to the world or the world's not going to buy your

(01:03:03):
stuff, you know, So, you know, so that, So what is your what,
what is that role? If you look at, at the current
generation of younger people coming into the business,
they're looking for, meaning they're looking for mission,
they're looking for values. And when and if, if a company
says, well, that's not my job, our job is to, you know, make
computers and sell them and givemoney to our shareholders that

(01:03:25):
that doesn't work, It's not enough.
And and, and so, and so I think,I think so the words that I
think do come in, I think you could get, you can use the word
mission to introduce into the business conversation.
I think you can use the word values to bring it in to, to the
business conversation. And then I think customer
success is another one because customer success implies you're

(01:03:45):
being in service to your customer.
But we got to, we got to connectwith, with that.
That's the life, that's the lifeenergy that was given to us.
And we're supposed to give, give, give, pass along.
And if you don't connect to thatwell, particularly in this
digitally remote world, you'll have disengaged employees and

(01:04:05):
you'll have disengaged customersand you'll kind of, you'll kind
of drift along and it's, it's not serving anybody.
What's really cool about being in Silicon Valley is there's
always, there's always been thispassion about, we want to create
technology that changes the world.
And sometimes that passion has gotten out of control and it's
gotten, it's not, it's not all been good, but the fact is

(01:04:26):
that's engaged. There's an enormous amount of
engagement and, and I think thatthat engagement is critical.
And I would just say most businesses aren't going to be
that technologically innovative.So it's not like you can't copy
the Silicon Valley model. It's, it's really kind of a
corner case almost. But but you can be in service to
your customers. And, and, and one of the things
I try to warn companies to get into trouble is most companies

(01:04:49):
get into trouble because they'veover rotated to being in service
to their investors and they've under rotated to the other
constituencies, their customers,their employees, their
communities, their, their partners, their ecosystems.
And so it's like, you know, and I, I make this point over and
over again, investors don't careabout your company to investor,
your company's a financial instrument.
And by the way, that that's exactly correct.

(01:05:09):
That's exactly how they should think about your company.
But that means you cannot think of them as your number one
constituency because they can't be.
Now, back in the day when, when,when you needed a lot of money
to make a particularly manufacturing company, the
investor had a lot more to say. But today with digital
businesses and service businesses, you know, investors
are important, but they're not that important.

(01:05:30):
Customers and employees are muchmore important and increasingly
communities are more important. And so I think getting people to
reorient and, and business schools, you know, they, they
give lip service to that, but they really haven't, they really
haven't nailed it. Back to Brian's point, business
schools need to become more psychological, more ethical,
more whatever, not to preach ethics, but to, but to integrate

(01:05:55):
that energy into the business model and into the operating
model as opposed to saying, well, you know, we, we've, we've
done total shareholder returns and we've also done our, we, we
get rid of, we get rid of the bottom 10%.
And we, you know, it's there's abunch of stuff that they teach
in business schools that are tactics that are not stupid, but
left to their own devices, they're heartless and soulless

(01:06:17):
and it's not good. My experience of of investors
unfortunately is, is not that businesses have over rotated
towards the investors interests.Rather, investors have
tremendous power and and use it to maximize their return at the

(01:06:41):
to to the detriment of of the organization, the customer, the
other constituents that you named the I'm thinking of
private equity in particular. I think that's failed
management. In other words, yes, I, I think
when when management capitulatesto investors, investors do
exactly what you said, but but I'm not blaming the investor,

(01:07:02):
I'm blaming management. Say more.
Well, in other words, it's, it'smanagement's job to, to, to
capital, to fund the capital to run the business.
But you have to select it from people that, that are going to
play by your rules, not by. And, and I think what happens is
people are very naive about, about the various agendas of
investors. So you have to be thoughtful

(01:07:23):
about how you do that. And by the way, the sooner you
can create your own capital through, through your own
operating income so that you canbecome a self-sustaining, the
better. And, and you know, like when
Brian was I'd do my business, I,I, I've never had an investor in
my business. Brian, I don't know if you had
an investor in your business, but it's like, no, you, you kind
of, you start with a service business.
Can I wash your car? And you build from there and

(01:07:45):
eventually you can create product.
And so I think investing, I think no capital, if you're
manufacturing, you need capital investment.
If you're going to scale any business, you need capital
investment. And so there's but I think you
have to be careful about your narrative and you have to
understand the investors narrative.
And there, I mean, because you bring these people on your board
of directors and a single bad board of director can tank a

(01:08:08):
company and, and have, and many of them have and, and that is
bad. And, and you are vulnerable
because you don't know if you're, if you're ACEO and you
want money and they offer you money.
It's like, well, what's the bad part?
And you don't find out what the bad part is until maybe it's a
bit late. So as a related question, you
know, we have those relationshipbetween morality and ethics and

(01:08:31):
then that sort of comes to live within a company.
And we talked about a story in past episodes where a guy was
sent to interrogate a prisoner. And if he lied to the prisoner,
he was, he would maybe get the information that he wanted, but
the prisoner was going to get shot either way.

(01:08:52):
And he found that he was in the grip.
He couldn't, he couldn't lie to the guy and they didn't get the
information that they wanted. But one of the comments from
management was I guess he wasn'tthe right guy for the job.
So my question is, this was fromthe 40s and it seems like in
those days ethics only lived in the C-Suite and but now we're in

(01:09:17):
this time. I know you've talked about the
role of collaboration and I, I personally read history and say
that the, the role of the individual is sort of becoming
more and more enhanced and therefore the responsibility.
So the individual's morality needs to relate to the company's

(01:09:38):
ethics in a way that's more direct maybe than in past days.
Do you can you speak to that? Do you think?
Yeah, it did to. There's one of the books.
So I wrote a bunch of business books I built the two I'm really
committed to are the 1st and thelast ones.
But one in the middle I, I hitchhiked a, a, a culture model
from a guy named Bill. I'm going to say it's Schneider,

(01:09:58):
but it's not Schneider. Anyway, he, he, he had these 4
cultures and, and, and, and he called them the creativity
culture, the collaboration culture, the competition culture
and the control culture. And you could sort of see
businesses in different industries and in different
states of maturity would naturally gravitate to one of
the, one of the others of those things.
So that, that claim you man about the guy that said, you

(01:10:21):
know, you weren't the right guy for the job and whatever, that's
a competition culture. It's a competition goes, it
says, look, just win, baby. That's the only only ethics is
just win. The creativity culture is very
individualistic culture. It's it's it's sort of the start
up the, you know, self realization kind of thing and do
do you know, think different and, you know, be be your best

(01:10:41):
self and all that kind of stuff.It it's really great for
starting things. It probably doesn't scale at
some point. It it just doesn't scale very
well. The collaborate.
What, what's interesting about my world is my dad grew up in a
hierarchical control culture world where bureaucratic
controls with how you scale things around the world and
what's, and then, and then I would argue in the 90s, actually

(01:11:01):
in the 90s in tech competition cultures, Intel, Microsoft, Sun,
these are all the Silicon Valleyideas.
They, they kind of ran the table.
Oracle, I mean, they were reallyvery, very competitive and not
particularly nice. I think what's interesting about
the last 15 years is that collaboration cultures are now

(01:11:22):
winning. So the CEO of Microsoft now,
Satya Nadella, is a collaboration culture leader.
Bill Gates was not a collaboration culture leader.
Neither was Steve, neither was Steve Ballmer.
OK. So it's interesting to watch
that happen. Marc, Marc Benioff is a strong
collaboration culture leader. It's it's it, you know, it's not
everybody is but, but, but it's really interesting to to watch.

(01:11:44):
And so I think, and I think thatthat the young people right now
are expecting, in fact, young people are a little bit naive.
They believe that you should be able to entitle to control the
entire philosophy of the organization cycle.
You, you, you, you might want tojust hold on it for a second,
but that's but they feel they feel entitled.
Well, that's, that's possibly, Iwould say a, a weakness and a

(01:12:04):
collaboration culture still has to have accountability, still
has to have discipline. But, but I think that that, and
because, and the reason why is because collaboration culture is
so powerful, at least in the technical world, It's, it's
obvious to see that with all thewhat they call APIs, all the
ways that software connects to other software, connects to
other software, you create thesevery, very large webs of

(01:12:25):
capability, but they have to be managed mutually.
You can't, you can't dictate that.
There's no single sense of pointof control.
So there's a sense of continually ongoing ecological
adaptation. And that's a leadership style.
You have to be able to play thatgame.
But that is the winning game right now, at least as far as I
can tell. I think it's, and by the way,

(01:12:45):
it's also my, I think also what happens is I like collaboration
cultures and they, like me competition cultures are very
suspicious of me and, and rightfully so.
And so I I tend not to work as much in competition cultures.
I might even make the argument that collaboration culture needs
more accountability than normal operating procedures.

(01:13:08):
Yes. In fact, the sad thing, I mean,
you look at the progressive movements and say San Francisco,
Seattle and Portland, where the cities really have suffered
dramatically from governments that were that were very
empathetic with marginalized constituencies, but but lost any
sense of accountability to the majority and eventually lost
their mandate because of more, you know, eventually people
said, well, no. And so I do think that building

(01:13:31):
accountability and getting accountability and empathy
together because they're, they're they're a very powerful
combination, but either one by itself is not, you know, it's,
it's really important to get them together and, and that
that's not that common you. Know well that's almost a
philosophical anarchist opinion that to the degree that we have

(01:13:53):
an internalized master, Yep, we don't need an externalized one.
But if we can't internalize thataccountability, then there's
only going to be hell to pay literally in one form or the
other. So then we'd better get an
external master to just keep thesurvival of the species.
Which by the way, is what we elected in the United States.

(01:14:16):
A whole bunch of people took exactly that thought process and
said therefore we're going to vote for that guy and he is
external and he's anyway we'll. Have a related question to that
and that is we you you've related to the life cycle of a
business has definite stages, definite chapters.

(01:14:39):
And in those chapters, the thinking that works in one
chapter not only doesn't work sowell in the next.
It might be exactly wrong. Do you see a chapter E kind of
thing going on with the cultural, you know, again back
to our our aged condition of having seen a big part of the

(01:15:00):
pattern. Do you think we're because I
was, you know, if you want to really get friends at a cocktail
party, ask people. Do you really think if it
matters who runs, who wins the election?
And by the way, for some people maybe the answer is.
Well, my question was, are we ina chapter thing and are we

(01:15:20):
trying to vote our way out of a chapter?
Like I'd love to vote my way outof old age, but I know there's
an inevitability because of the the the life cycle.
If you just take our, our cohort.
So the 60s was a hugely influential time in my life, but
but let me go back to the 50's. The 50s was a hugely influential

(01:15:42):
thing because I was a nebuchy nerdy guy and there was no place
in the 50s for a role model. You either were a surfer boy or
you were, you were a gank, you were a cool guy or whatever.
I I was none of the above. The 60s came along and God
bless. I don't know why some Nebushi
people who became kind of popular for a while.
And so I had this opportunity tosort of thrive.

(01:16:03):
But it was also a time of idealism.
I mean, we were protesting the war in Vietnam.
There was a whole youth movementthat was, you know, it was, it
was very, very active. It wasn't, it wasn't as
self-righteous as some of the movements are today, but it was
definitely, definitely wanted to, to engage.
And so that was great. Then then then you have the 70s
eighties night. So I think there are these

(01:16:24):
cultural things that happen. I remember the, you know, the
late 70s or early 80s being veryself centric, very kind of
hedonistic kind of that. I remember that kind of period.
The, the thing that's interesting to me about, about
today is we, we made a very serious mistake in America's

(01:16:45):
politics and we're going to, we're not even close to having
understood how serious that mistake is.
But but that's what we're livingwith.
And so, and I think the game is that's, you know, and by the
way, that in part is due to the prior administration not
fulfilling enough of the of the majority's needs to be able to

(01:17:06):
stay in retain its position. So we're in the middle of
something that's I think very, very challenging.
And we'll, we'll see how it, howit plays out.
But yeah, it, this is and the, we don't have a playbook for the
current, but all our playbooks were based on things like rule
of law, like if a judge tells you to do something, you do it.

(01:17:26):
I mean, so we, we, as I said, we're at the very beginning of
the, of the, of this, of this interaction and hopefully we'll
become a better nation because of it, but we'll see.
I wanted to go back to the staircase, Jeff, if, if you
would, your last chapter of the book is about mortality.

(01:17:47):
And I think we've touched on that a little bit here.
But I I'd love to hear more fromyou about why that's where you
ended up and what, what is the context that that provides for
you. Well, it's interesting because
when I was, when I think about 10 questions, the atheists have
double answering one point I wanted to make the point that

(01:18:09):
immortality forms, that this plays the same role in a
religious narrative that mortality plays in a secular
narrative, or the other way around.
Mortality is the grounding area,is the grounding for secular
narratives, similar to immortality being the grounding
for religious narratives, Which means that, look, you need to
start with the fact that we're playing a limited engagement

(01:18:29):
here. So what's the point?
And, and yet at the same point, we're, we're, we're filled with
the life force that we're just like, we're compelled to live.
I mean, obviously cells aren't compelled to live.
They, they, they, they do all that, but we're compelled to
live. Now, that doesn't mean we can't
commit suicide, but it's really hard because we're in this game.
So then the question becomes, how would you conduct your life?

(01:18:53):
And I made the claim in the Being Mortal book that there's
being mortal Part 1 and Being Mortal Part 2.
And, and initially I said, you know, early on in life, you're,
you're too young to be mortal. I mean, you, you just just just
do what you're doing. And, and, and, and I, I made the
claim that even you can even getup to I, I gave myself to 50
because I, I figured that was half time.

(01:19:14):
I said, even before you know, look, there's, there's enough on
your plate. You don't worry too much about
being mortal, but somewhere around you realize you pass the
50, you go, OK, I'm playing in the second-half.
So this is not the second-half of the game.
So is there any? And I'm and I think that got me
involved with legacy and impact.Those were two words that kept
them coming back to me. So that OK, so you want.

(01:19:35):
And by the way, because I feel like those role models that I
live with, they gave me a legacy.
I feel totally gifted by that. I think, damn it, Jeffrey, pass
it on. Don't.
Absolutely, Absolutely. And so, and so, so mortality and
what mortality does at some points it says, OK, clock's
ticking. This is, you're not playing a
more limited engagement. Are you doing the things that

(01:19:57):
are most important for you to doin the time that you have?
And, and I made the claim that this way I did Being Mortal Part
1 and Part 2, Part 2 came from abook called Being Mortal by a
guy named Atul Gawande, which was about how do you extend
Hospice to a longer, more constructive socially thing,
which is great that that was fun.
But I wanted to talk about no, no.

(01:20:18):
You know, Brian and you and I, well, Brian, you're 2.
But Brian and I, we still have, we're still as good as we're
going to be. So it's not like we can't be
powerful, but we need to be. We need to focus it enough that
we have the maximum impact. So in my business consulting,
I'm always talking about you want to have a, you want to
serve a market that's big enoughto matter, but small enough to

(01:20:40):
lead and a good fit with your crown jewels.
That's sort of like a mantra in our business consulting.
Well, same deal. You want to serve a constituency
that is big enough to matter, small enough that you can have
real impact and a good fit with your crown jewels.
And So what? And then the question is how
much of your time are you willing to give in service to
that as opposed to just kind of trundling along, you know,

(01:21:02):
keeping the lights on and keeping keeping things going.
And the answer is not you don't want to do 100%.
We don't need to be Sister Teresa, but but you but you
don't you don't want to get to the end and going.
Damn it, there's a lot of I could've done a lot more.
I could've done a lot more. And so that's that's that's the
challenge that so being mortal for for me, Part 1 was all about
how could you construct a a lifeplan which gave you the maximum

(01:21:27):
impact to have as much as you can afford, you know, so that's
why it was important to have fish to pond ratio.
We call it pick a pond that's small enough that you can be a
big fish, not, not a puddle, youknow, come on, but not, but not
an ocean, you know, So, so because if you think about the
people that want to like World Peace or, you know, eliminate

(01:21:47):
hunger, or it's like, come on, you're 1 of 9 billion people,
you're not that powerful. So focus it down to a place
where you can be powerful, but then be powerful.
And, and it's interesting when Isay that to young people, young
people are still a little bit afraid of the word powerful.
Like they think it might be a bad thing.
And my point is, damn it, if you're going to do good and

(01:22:08):
you've got you, damn it better be powerful.
What the What's the point of being good if you're not being
powerful? Yeah, it's not OK to be powerful
and not good. I, I, I get that part.
But it's not OK not to be powerful.
So anyway. I don't know if that's just
young people, Jeff. I think that's an archetypal
struggle that that humans go through.
And and I kind of, I think of mortality as, if not the force,

(01:22:29):
then one of the key forces that that causes us to either step
into our power or, or not, right.
But but it kind of puts us at that crossroads.
It also kind of relativizes things when we're talking about
ethics, doesn't it? Because we start when you think
about legacy, you're talking about a timeless kind of value

(01:22:52):
as opposed to a momentary kind of value, which usually the
lesser ethical choices represent.
Yeah, it's, I like this metaphor, the relay race and
passing the baton. I feel like I'd like I got
passed a bunch of batons by my grandparents and parents and
teachers and whatever and, you know, just just run, run your
part of the race. By the way, you know, Cher

(01:23:15):
batons on the way, but pass the batons, you know.
So anyway, that's, that's sort of that's sort of the arc of
meaning for me. I, I think of you gave a pretty
pragmatic explanation of, of mortality and the, and the role
that it plays in a secular ethics.
And I guess I see it as like an archetypal process that we have

(01:23:40):
to go through. We mature because of our
awareness of our mortality. We seek meaning because of our
awareness of our mortality. And it seems very much a
internal human experience to grapple with that.
And I wish our culture was more comfortable with our mortality.
Did I say I say in the book, look, natural selection also
taught us to fear death. OK, so and we let's build in we

(01:24:02):
should fear death. But, but as a result, the way
our culture is, and then in the old days with a religious model,
the way you, you could, you could accommodate, you could
accommodate fear of death and, and, and you could still embrace
mortality. And because you had the
immortality vision behind it. And so you could, you could look
death in the face if the problemwith current society is it's not

(01:24:25):
very good at looking death in the face.
And so as a result, we have AI mean our, our vision of death is
like people in hospital beds with tubes tied to themselves.
And it's like, come on, we can do better than that.
But but we're so that's a place where I really would like to
'cause that the archetypal struggle or not struggle, but

(01:24:46):
the archetypal tension you just described is made more
complicated because we don't have a socially sophisticated, a
secular socialization of death that would be as as useful as
the religious. The religious, the religious
handling of death is extremely useful, really, really good.

(01:25:07):
And we don't really have that with a secular thing.
And we we need something more there.
I wonder if that's where some Eastern philosophy, which is
arguably more secular than than than religion, provides some
answers. You know, like the the idea of

(01:25:28):
attachment in Buddhism, for example.
Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think, I think
you're right. I think that the Eastern, you
know, the, the, the taking the personality, the personality,
the personalized deity of makingit more afield or impersonal or,
you know, something more being, being the, the, the, the, the,
the, the, the word I was using does help.
And, and, and, and I think the other thing that helps is, I

(01:25:52):
mean, if you have, if you do have meditative like
experiences, they do center you and they do, they do erode your
fear of death at some level. I mean, it's like you're saying,
OK, you know, I'm not quite surewhat's going on, but I think
it's OK. And, and, and that's, that's
really helpful because in the absence of that, if it's just
anxiety, it's not OK and, and. Yeah.

(01:26:15):
And of course that's going to drive behavior and and that's
especially not OK. Yeah, yeah.
And it's going to drive ethics, particularly because you realize
that that little part of you maybe that thought it would get
benefit from the non ethical behavior.
It really doesn't matter. It's really OK to not have that

(01:26:36):
benefit. And you know, when we were
starting this podcast, that's why we use the image of the
skull. Oh, OK.
And and I was thinking a reference.
You might be the one of the few people that will get is I was
thinking of Yorick. Yes, absolutely.
And of the of the motivation. And you know that old idea,

(01:26:57):
Mementi Mori. Yes.
That that we want to, we want tomake our decisions based on
that. And I think that that's a big
part of that legacy idea. It, it is and and and yeah.
So yes. And it's like whatever the
narrative is, it has to be both about us and not about us.

(01:27:17):
It's got to be about us because we're the ones that need to be
served. But but we know we're temporary.
So it's got to be about something we have to participate
in something that creates A context that's bigger than that,
that we can say, yes, that is what I'm going to be in service
to. I can find my place in that
tradition or that or whatever itis.
If you can't, if you, and this is what was scary to me about

(01:27:40):
some of the existentialist stuffthat was coming out at one point
is that it's just like, man. So I mean, I did just get
scared. I just, it's just I'm I'm
impressed with their courage. I'm impressed with their
authenticity. But I'm thinking, but where's
the love? I mean it's.
Pretty bleak. Yeah.

(01:28:01):
Well, and for me, there's there's always been this idea.
You know the Hindus have this idea they call Satchit Ananda
being consciousness bliss. That.
If somehow, if we are in the right, if we're doing it all
right, if we've got everything working, we're going to
experience a a juicier reality like the outcome.

(01:28:25):
It's is very pragmatic. And so, you know, we've talked
before about some of these old ideas of whether and you know, I
held the card up the other day because or the other a few
moments ago because I'd written down being in service too from
other things that I had listenedto that you had had mentioned.

(01:28:46):
And which really is a big, big part of it, I think.
And I guess, you know, I want tobelieve, and this is maybe the
maybe this is a metaphysics creeping back in.
Are we going somewhere? Are we getting smarter?
Do you, do you believe in a teleology at all?

(01:29:08):
Are we just circling the drain until the next chapter happens?
Or are we going to get somewhere?
Will there be a childhood's end?Will there be the eschaton?
Will we attain oneness? Or is this a big metaphysical
promissory note that we never get to cash?
Well, you know, by the way that that part of narrative is the

(01:29:31):
ending, right? And the whole point of the
narrative, I mean, how did the plot ends?
And we talk about these narratives, the comic narrative
and the heroic narrative and thetragic narrative and the
absurdist narrative, which is a little bit like what you just
did. One of the ways I would
contextualize this, however, is to say as far as we can tell,
the beginning was 13.2 or 4 billion years ago, and the end

(01:29:53):
is is heat death. And that's probably 8 to 10
billion years this way. So maybe what happens in the
next 10 years isn't quite as important as we think it is.
It's the part of me that just says this is above my pay grade.
I'm going to play along and I just, I don't know, it's above

(01:30:14):
my pay grade. You don't.
You don't know. You don't have a sensibility for
making. I, I I.
Get you to climb out on that. Limb of the four genres of the
four genres I'm predisposed to comedy we and remember in the
comic genre you're succeeding even though you don't even
though you don't deserve to. It's like I use Ferris Bueller
as an example. It just kind of like you're just

(01:30:37):
you're just winning because because the world's being very
nice to you. I kind of have that sense of
benignness somewhere, But but I,but I, yeah, I can't.
Like, for example, Hegel had a really interesting, you know, he
had that whole technology of where where society advances
through dialectic to increasing advanced places.

(01:30:58):
And, and, and, you know, there's, there's parts of it.
You go. Well, certainly in the world of
science and mathematics, we've certainly seen a bunch of that
in the world of human behavior. We haven't.
And and so, you know, it's like,where does that fit?
But but what I don't want to do is, is hitch my hitch my wagon
to that kind of a horse. I I want to stay more in the

(01:31:19):
present saying, look, yeah, I'm not quite sure what's going on,
but I'm, I know, I think I know what I'm supposed to do right
now. So.
It's interesting because I thinkI, I interpreted, you know, some
of what you've shared today and,and the book as making a
statement about progress. Also, just by virtue of saying

(01:31:40):
that there's, I think earlier you said up until 200 years ago,
the only underpinning for ethicswas religion.
And it with the emergence of a rational secular world view, we
have a challenge of still integrating ethics.
But that's a new chapter of how people think and operate and

(01:32:04):
certainly a new cultural chapter.
And it makes me think, well, what's next?
Is there a, is there a post rational or a or a or a hyper
rational or you know how? I don't know how you would think
about that, but. Well, for me, it's like the
imply, if you say what's next? This is like futurism because,

(01:32:26):
you know, there was faith popcorn and there are all these
futurist people that do this stuff.
It's like I get, I love, I like the phrase that's above my pay
grade. And what I really mean by that
is, look, there's, there's a, there's a, there's a part of
stuff that we can control that we can be part of.
And, and a lot of I, I use the phrase a lot, play the hand
you're dealt because people, some people have been dealt some

(01:32:47):
really, really bleak hands. And, you know, you just have to
play the hand you've been dealt.And so there's this bigger,
bigger issue. Where are things going?
Don't know, don't know. And, and I, and it really, and I
think that I, I get why people like to speculate about it, but
it's like, I, I have nothing, nothing to add at that point.
Yeah. Fair enough.

(01:33:09):
And and maybe that's a a good segue to something I wanted to
ask, which is what are you excited about?
Oh man, everything so well. We've got grandchildren and
children, so there's a whole family bunch of stuff that
that's really important. I'm excited about technology.
I'm excited about what they are artificial intelligence with all

(01:33:29):
the issues that are around it. I'm excited to see what happens.
I'm excited to see what all the people I know are going to do
next and how they're going to doand you know what's going on.
I'm even a time to be excited about my golf game.
So, you know, we're working on that right now.
So that's kind of fun. I'm embarrassingly excited by
what we're going to eat tonight or any night.

(01:33:51):
Marie is a wonderful cook and then we go out to dinner a ton
of times. And I think obviously I'm a
mammal from that point of view because I definitely I, I, I, I
would say I completely live to eat, but it certainly, it's
certainly, it's certainly up there in my, in my things.
They get me excited, you know, I, I worry, I worry about some
things, but I'm not, you know, alot of things I worry about are

(01:34:14):
things I are beyond my control. And so at some point it's just
like, no, stay focused on what you can do and just do that.
That's kind of where we are right now.
A lot of that sounded really chapter appropriate, you know,
in terms of really appreciating family.
And that that's an experience that I've had is I've, I've

(01:34:35):
become more aware of my own mortality as family continues to
get more important and having dinner together regularly and
having holidays together and things like that and making sure
my wife and I travel to see our our various siblings around the
country and. Where are they, by the way?
Where, where? Where you guys?
Where are you by the way? Where you guys?
Looking right now, I'm in Philadelphia.

(01:34:57):
That's right. And Brian?
Where are you? I'm about 25 miles South of
Santa Fe, NM. Oh, that's.
Right, that's right. I remember you.
You tell that. And so boys, where's your
where's your family? And the bride desk is my.
Brother was was living here in Princeton with his wife and
they're both professors, one at Princeton, one at Temple, and
they both got job offers at UC Berkeley at the same time that I

(01:35:20):
was moving out to Philadelphia from New Mexico.
So we, we, we. Literally.
Yeah. And so we missed each other,
which is, I'm honestly bummed about it, but we're going to
California next week to visit them.
So I think you would by the way,we, well, let's see, Saturday
might be a little, the weather has been a little, a little iffy
this month, but but anyway, still, it's still good.

(01:35:41):
And did you guys meet when you were in Santa?
Is that how you and Brian met when you were both when you were
in New Mexico? Yeah, back I would say probably
around 1997 we met and I ended up buying a piece of land right
across the Arroyo from Brian andhe helped me build my off grid
house using a lot of the learnings from from his off grid

(01:36:01):
house. And I used to visit him a lot on
the weekends. I'm asking him for direction in
life and that's how these conversations.
Started and that was Brian, is this Whole Earth Catalog and
Stewart brand. I mean, is that what I was
thinking about what when living off the Grid started And I don't

(01:36:24):
know if the Whole Earth Catalog got it.
It was a big thing out in California for a while.
That's the real goods and and Jade Mountain.
OK. Thing yeah but but New Mexico
has a rich heritage of of off grid living actually.
Presumably starting with the Pueblos well.

(01:36:45):
Well, in fact, someone visited me once and saw my house.
He was a Navajo artist and he looked at my house in amazement
and he said that looks like my grandma's house higher.
Compliment he could not have given you.
Exactly. And I said, you know, I wish a

(01:37:05):
lot of people were more on your and my, your grandma on my's
page, you know, but but there was a cadre of young kids that
are now, you know, Boaz's age that, you know, I think they
were sort of that may be the beginning of that wave of
looking for meaning, you know, knowing that that there's what

(01:37:26):
we're given culturally, but there's a deeper dimension to it
somehow. And, you know, a lot of my
experiences were sort of lookingin that direction.
And so, so you know, very similar stuff to Transcendental
Meditation or you know. The other thing that's
interesting for me is is the, the Santa Fe Institute was where

(01:37:47):
I first got exposed to complexity and, and, and
complexity theory. And so the OR emergence or the,
the so that was AI don't know ifthat's if that I don't know how
public that is because I don't, I've never actually been to the
Santa Fe Institute, but but it'sbeen a huge impact on my
thinking. Yeah, I, I used to drive by it
every day on my way up to the the hiking trails, and they had

(01:38:10):
some really interesting people over the years.
I know Cormac McCarthy was involved with them of all
people. Yeah, it was pretty interesting.
Yeah, very good. Guys.
We may be at the end of our conversation that's it's OK if
we are. I mean, it's fine.
It does have that that trajectory.
I just was going to, I had two more questions for you.

(01:38:30):
One is, is there anything important that we didn't ask
that you know, like because you've encountered a lot of
minds and a lot of minds grappling through this birthing
of new thought into reality. Are there general advice that
you would have for somebody? That's my first question.
I'll save the second one. Well, I think, I think when you

(01:38:53):
said that to me, it made me think about the framework of the
of the technology adoption life cycle and the point you already
made, which is in the gestation of anything generally new, there
are these stages. And so there's this early
adopter and innovation stage where you really need to be true
to your vision. And even if your vision is being
contradicted by other people, you need to find supportive

(01:39:15):
community, You need to build it as best you can.
But then there's this crossing the chasm thing where you've got
to now encounter the people thatare not part of your vision and,
and how do you be in service to them?
And then, and a lot of times that's far enough and the vision
doesn't necessarily need to go to great scale, but, but
occasionally with technology, when it does, we have this third

(01:39:36):
stage we called the, the tornado, where basically it
just, it proliferates everywhere.
And, and, and the challenge thenis to be able to maintain the,
maintain the integrity of the, of the, of the paradigm as it
commoditizes, because it will commoditize like crazy.
And then the 4th 1 is after we've absorbed it, then, OK, now
can we take advantage of it in more incremental ways?

(01:40:00):
We call it Main Street, you know, incremental sustaining
innovations going forward. Yeah.
If you think about what you're trying to do, where are you in
that journey? And each of those, as you point
out, each of those plays actually creates success in that
state, but would actually prevent you from succeeding in
the next phase. And so if people have that

(01:40:20):
ambition to to take things to scale, then that that would be
important. That'd be the.
That would be the thing I would add there.
OK. And then my last question is
Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe or the Earl of Oxford,
if you want, I can say him againand you can just wink when one
goes by. You're trying to figure out who
Shakespeare is. Oh my goodness, You know, it's

(01:40:43):
so funny for me because, you know, my dissertation was
actually about a guy that EdmundSpencer who was.
And the reason I, I, I, I, it was interesting.
I, I read that was reading the Fairy Queen, which, by the way,
is a acquired taste, to say the least.
I mean, it's, I suspect there are not 1000 people on the
planet that have read a fairy queen.
But anyway, it was at the time, it was quite, it was quite the

(01:41:05):
quite the thing. But I was reading the, the, the
first book was was about Christianity.
It's called the Red Cross Knight.
And the second book was about temperance.
It was holiness and then temperance and then chastity and
friendship and a bunch of other ones.
But but Temperance was the second book and I thought
there's something wrong with this story.
This is this is, you know, there's something wrong with

(01:41:26):
this narrative. I'm I'm just going to figure
this thing out. Well, what I ended up figuring
out was that Spencer said there's limitations to
difference because I was thinking it was supposed to be,
you know, a heroic story. It's it's he's a hero.
It's obviously got turned out perfectly.
The last line of that particularbook is, you know, we, let's get
the hell out of here. I mean, said a little bit more

(01:41:47):
Elizabethan, but basically the heroes flee the, the scene in
the last line of the poem. So it's like, what the hell.
But anyway, what was fun about that was it was a, it's where I
got involved with strategies forliving literature and, and, and
realizing that literature is a, is a laboratory to explore
strategies for living and that, that as readers, we can identify

(01:42:09):
with heroes and we can participate in the experiences
fictionally. And that actually does shape, I
mean, that's where we get our, not all our role models from,
but we get a bunch of role models from them, like the
Westerns we were talking about with, you know, Lucas McCain and
people like that. Yeah.
Right. Wonderful.
Well, guys, thank you. It's been an honor, a pleasure.

(01:42:29):
Thank you so much and I I hope we can have you back sometime
and and keep in touch. OK, well, we'll see what your
audience thinks before you do that.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

The Joe Rogan Experience

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#49: Geoffrey Moore: Pattern Recognition

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

The Joe Rogan Experience

Dateline NBC

All Episodes

#49: Geoffrey Moore: Pattern Recognition

Stuff You Should Know