Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today.
Speaker 1: It's great to have Chip Conley on the podcast. Chip
Speaker 1: is a New York Times bestselling author who helped Airbnb's
Speaker 1: founders turn their fast growing tech startup into a global
Speaker 1: hospitality brand. In his book Wisdom at Work The Making
Speaker 1: of a Modern Elder, he shares his unexpected journey at
Speaker 1: midlife from CEO to intern, learning about technology as Arabnb's
Speaker 1: head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, well also mentoring CEO
Speaker 1: Brian Chesky. This experience inspired the creation of the Modern
Speaker 1: Elder Academy, where a new roadmap for midlife is offered
Speaker 1: to help students unlock their wisdom and expand their potential
Speaker 1: at a beautiful ocean front campus in Baja California. Sir Mexico,
Speaker 1: his other books include Emotional Equations, Peak, Marketing That Matters,
Speaker 1: and The Rebel Rules Daring to be Yourself in Business. Chip,
Speaker 1: it's awesome chatting with you today. Yes, Scott, thank you.
Speaker 1: It's an honor to be with you. I love your
Speaker 1: new book. And I feel like it's shocking that we
Speaker 1: haven't met until now. Yeah, it is shocking. And a
Speaker 1: lot of people have recommended that I talked to you,
Speaker 1: so I'm so glad to finally get a chance to
Speaker 1: talk to you. And I'm glad I got Selfishly, I'm
Speaker 1: glad I got the opportunity to read so much of
Speaker 1: your work because it's so interesting. You're such a fascinating guy.
Speaker 1: You're just it's not just like the work you do.
Speaker 1: I mean, you are a fascinating human. Do you know that?
Speaker 1: I don't know. You know, I'm fascinating. Could be another
Speaker 1: way for saying bizarre or no, it's my style. My style.
Speaker 1: Helen Keller, you know, who basically was blind and deaf,
Speaker 1: and she said life is an adventure or nothing at all.
Speaker 1: And I do believe that. I believe that we're not
Speaker 1: here on earth to just get comfortable and apathetic. You know,
Speaker 1: I completely agree, and I know different people have different
Speaker 1: visions of the good life and what that means to them.
Speaker 1: But I've tried to embrace that the good life is
Speaker 1: the full life and being fully human. And my gosh,
Speaker 1: you're you're still working towards being fully human and you're
Speaker 1: not even halfway done, so work in progress. You know.
Speaker 1: One of the things that is interesting about the word integrity,
Speaker 1: or just even the whole, anything that's whole, and our
Speaker 1: integrity sort of speaks. It's always interesting to me because
Speaker 1: it's learning how to integrate the holes. You know, you
Speaker 1: have all of these holes in your life, all these
Speaker 1: different elements of your life, and when you are able
Speaker 1: to integrate them, you are in the form of integrity.
Speaker 1: You're actually sort of integrating all of the components of
Speaker 1: you into the you that shows up wherever you are.
Speaker 1: It's interesting that the subtitle in my first book, more
Speaker 1: than twenty years ago is called Daring to be Yourself
Speaker 1: in Business because in many ways, twenty years ago, people
Speaker 1: felt like they had to leave their personality, their soul,
Speaker 1: their politics at the door when they walked in to
Speaker 1: the office. And I'm a big believer in the idea
Speaker 1: that you know, just showing up with who you are,
Speaker 1: you know pretty consistently and whatever habitat you're in, it
Speaker 1: serves you well and frankly builds a reputation of consistency.
Speaker 1: I love that. And you know, some people might have
Speaker 1: different thoughts about authenticity and the importance of showing up.
Speaker 1: Some of people argue that, you know, there's some people
Speaker 1: that are so strategic about their authenticity all the time.
Speaker 1: I think it called high self monitor. I've never been
Speaker 1: a real high self monitor, and I don't know. I've
Speaker 1: always wonder sometimes, you know, is that good or bad? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: that's a very good question. It depends on whether you're
Speaker 1: a politician. If you're running for office, you probably should
Speaker 1: have a high self minitor. Yeah. Probably. I'm watching The
Speaker 1: House of Cards right now because that's what we do
Speaker 1: in a pandemic as we watch a lot of TV,
Speaker 1: and it's been like, there's not a lot of high
Speaker 1: self monitors among some of those people. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: think the challenge with you know, being selective about how
Speaker 1: you communicate and what level of candor you have is it.
Speaker 1: You know, especially as you get older, you sort of
Speaker 1: forget how much have I told these people about all
Speaker 1: of the components of my life, and it's a lot
Speaker 1: simpler to just be pretty, pretty candid throughout. Yeah, it's simpler.
Speaker 1: It's the path of least resistance for sure, of the self.
Speaker 1: But I want to jump into let's start with twenty
Speaker 1: thirteen and your work with Airbnb in mid age. What
Speaker 1: was that experience? Like, My background was, I started a
Speaker 1: boutikotel company called Juada Viv at age twenty six and
Speaker 1: ran it for twenty four years, created fifty two Boutiko hotels,
Speaker 1: became the second roundest Boutiko Tell You're in the US,
Speaker 1: and then in the Great Recession, we just crashed. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was just a very big downturn and I didn't
Speaker 1: want to do it anymore, and so after two dozen
Speaker 1: years I sold it. That company, Juadaviv is now part
Speaker 1: of Hyatt. But I wasn't really sure what was next
Speaker 1: to me. To be honest with you. There's a great movie,
Speaker 1: The Intern. It's you know, not going to win an
Speaker 1: Academy Award, but people do actually get a Chucklin love
Speaker 1: it and about Robert de Niro being the intern to
Speaker 1: Anne Hathaway, the CEO, and as he was joining her,
Speaker 1: he said, musicians don't retire. They quit where there's no
Speaker 1: more music left inside of them. So I actually knew
Speaker 1: that I didn't want to quit. I was a musician
Speaker 1: in my own way, and I had music left inside
Speaker 1: of me, but I didn't know who to share it with.
Speaker 1: And I was approached by Brian Chesky, the co founder
Speaker 1: and CEO. He asked if I wanted to help him
Speaker 1: democratize hospitality and be his in house mentor. And I
Speaker 1: didn't know much about Airbnb. I was. I'd gone from
Speaker 1: being the rebel Boutiko Tellier to being the establishment, and
Speaker 1: at age fifty two, I joined, but quickly learned that
Speaker 1: I was twice the age of the average employee, and
Speaker 1: I didn't know a darn thing about technology, And so
Speaker 1: I realized I was not just the mentor, but I
Speaker 1: was also the intern. I love that they could probably
Speaker 1: make a movie over your experience right there, you know.
Speaker 1: I think it was what was really interesting about it,
Speaker 1: Scott was I. There weren't a lot of models for me.
Speaker 1: The movie The Intern came out about three years after
Speaker 1: after I started there, and it wasn't even exactly the
Speaker 1: right model, but it was I had to learn along
Speaker 1: the way. I had to learn like, how can I
Speaker 1: be as curious as I am? Wise? Because when it
Speaker 1: came to leadership skills and hospitality and emotional intelligence, I
Speaker 1: definitely had some wisdom to offer. But when it came
Speaker 1: to understanding millennial travel habits or Silicon Valley or just
Speaker 1: tech design and engineering and that lingo, man, I was
Speaker 1: out of my element. So I had to be comfortable
Speaker 1: that in some meetings I would be the dumbest person
Speaker 1: in the meeting, and other meetings I'd be the wisest
Speaker 1: and I ultimately that's what led the founders to calling
Speaker 1: me the modern elder at Airbnb who was as curious
Speaker 1: as these wives. I love that curious as wise. That's
Speaker 1: similar to this mindset that you've proposed, think younger and
Speaker 1: older at the same time. It makes me think of Maslow.
Speaker 1: I know he's a mutual mutual friend of ours, so
Speaker 1: to speak, a friend we've never met, but you know,
Speaker 1: he used to write about this kind of mind where
Speaker 1: you're a child, but you're also have that wisdom, but
Speaker 1: you don't get rid of the child part of it.
Speaker 1: And so I love that you wrote about that mindset.
Speaker 1: I think more people should have that mindset as they
Speaker 1: grow older. Well, I think there's a lot of great
Speaker 1: examples of that. Walt Disney was a really great example
Speaker 1: of that of somebody who got wiser with time, but
Speaker 1: he never lost that sort of childlike innocence and sense
Speaker 1: of wonder. Peter Drucker, the management theorist, sort of had
Speaker 1: that as well. He had a practice in his last
Speaker 1: twenty five years on the planet of every two years
Speaker 1: coming up with a new subject that had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with being a business professor that was intriguing to him,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to become the world's leading expert on that.
Speaker 1: So what it did is it was like that curiosity
Speaker 1: almost lubricates the mind, the heart, the spirit, and it
Speaker 1: turns out with Peter Drucker, he wrote USh two thirds
Speaker 1: of his forty books after the age of sixty five.
Speaker 1: Is that right? I didn't even know that. Wow, go Drugger.
Speaker 1: How many more books do you think you have in you?
Speaker 1: Good question? I don't know. I have no idea, Scott.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a funny thing. I think being a
Speaker 1: writer and writing books is about being pregnant. It's impregnated
Speaker 1: with some idea and it's just growing inside of you
Speaker 1: and you sort of can't ignore it. It's actually keeping
Speaker 1: you up at night, it's kicking you. And of course
Speaker 1: you and I will never have that experience with a
Speaker 1: real child. But then there's the sense that you really
Speaker 1: need to nurture it and then birth it. And for me,
Speaker 1: other than the last book, Wisdom at Work, my prior
Speaker 1: for books all took approximately nine months from the time
Speaker 1: I really started to build the concept of the book
Speaker 1: to when I finished the first draft, so it's the Actually,
Speaker 1: even the time of the pregnancy was comparable. The last
Speaker 1: one was a fast one. I just I was so
Speaker 1: accelerated in my thinking that that happened pretty quickly. So
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm right now. What I'm doing is
Speaker 1: that writing energy I have is satisfied by writing a
Speaker 1: daily blog called Wisdom. Well, uh, that's out there in
Speaker 1: the world, and it's you know, that's a blog about
Speaker 1: how do you actually cultivate and harvest your wisdom? And
Speaker 1: I love that. I love the idea of writing a
Speaker 1: short blog post each morning, although I actually usually do
Speaker 1: a lot of them, you know, in advance. Uh as
Speaker 1: just a way for people to have to have a
Speaker 1: little microdose or snack of wisdom to start their day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love your blog and I know so every now
Speaker 1: and then you have some guest posts as well. Love
Speaker 1: to have one from you. Uh, that wasn't That wasn't
Speaker 1: like my way of of I'd be honored, but that
Speaker 1: wasn't my I was just yea, I hope you know
Speaker 1: that wasn't my way of Listen. I love, as I
Speaker 1: told you, your Scientific American article, just like blew me Away.
Speaker 1: It's like Arthur article from the Atlantic from last June,
Speaker 1: blew me Away, And so Arthur and I just did
Speaker 1: a Q and A on ours. So I'd love to
Speaker 1: have you write something, or we can do a Q
Speaker 1: and A or whatever. What I know is that the
Speaker 1: thing that's interesting, Scott is we don't really have a
Speaker 1: culture in the work world or otherwise that is invested
Speaker 1: in the idea of cultivating and harvesting wisdom. And what
Speaker 1: I mean by it's not that we don't have a
Speaker 1: culture of knowledge. In fact, Peer Drucker is the one
Speaker 1: who came up with the phrase knowledge worker. In nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine, he said the future of business will actually
Speaker 1: be ruled by knowledge workers. And here we are sixty
Speaker 1: one years later, and seven of the ten most valuable
Speaker 1: companies in the world today are in fact tech companies.
Speaker 1: But what I really believe is that we've moved from
Speaker 1: a time where we need to retire the concept of
Speaker 1: the knowledge worker, because everybody has an iPhone in their
Speaker 1: pocket and an increasing percentage of the population is what
Speaker 1: we might call knowledge workers. But I think what when
Speaker 1: we're a wash in knowledge, what we really have scarcity
Speaker 1: for is wisdom. And I think it's time for us
Speaker 1: to actually think about what would a wisdom worker be.
Speaker 1: And I know that sounds bizarre, but it's an interesting
Speaker 1: idea because wisdom literally speaks to a lot of what
Speaker 1: you've written about in your new book. A lot of
Speaker 1: it really speaks to this idea of wisdom is about
Speaker 1: pattern recognition. It's being able to assimilate and cultivate some
Speaker 1: of the patterns you've seen in your life and then
Speaker 1: almost develop the intuition such that you can see the
Speaker 1: future even before it happens. And I don't think that
Speaker 1: there's necessarily a direct correlation between wisdom and age. I
Speaker 1: think someone can cultivate their wisdom at a very young age,
Speaker 1: or be seventy five years old and have cultivated no wisdom,
Speaker 1: but what's interesting to me is how do we create
Speaker 1: a world where the future is partially defined by wisdom
Speaker 1: workers who are able to also understand emotional intelligence and
Speaker 1: understand people. Because one of the things that computers artificial
Speaker 1: intelligent will get better and better and better at data
Speaker 1: and knowledge and maybe even providing some insight, but understanding humans.
Speaker 1: Our official intelligence will get there, but you know, trying
Speaker 1: to understand creativity or intuition, or you know, Google's great
Speaker 1: at serving up all the answers in the world, but
Speaker 1: not so great at serving up questions. And a wise
Speaker 1: person like Socrates. We should have a Socratic CEO out
Speaker 1: there in the world who is the embodiment of catalytic questions.
Speaker 1: And I think that that will more and more be
Speaker 1: how we see business in the future. Hi everyone, I'm
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Speaker 1: It's going to be really exciting, and I'm really looking
Speaker 1: forward to getting to know folks and helping them realize
Speaker 1: their full potential. Okay, now back to the show. Wow,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of rich stuff in what you just said.
Speaker 1: Especially I've been interested in inmplicit learning, and it's amazing.
Speaker 1: We have these build in systems to learn lots of
Speaker 1: patterns underneath the level of awareness. And I found in
Speaker 1: my doctor dissertation that in plicit learning, that conscious kind
Speaker 1: of knowledge or ability is uncorrelated with IQ. So you
Speaker 1: can be like the smartest person in the world based
Speaker 1: on an IQ test and not have that pattern detection
Speaker 1: ability just as high. So I found that really interesting.
Speaker 1: Is that another way of saying intuition or is that
Speaker 1: different implicit? I think it's a part of the intuitive system.
Speaker 1: It's like we call it like one part of the system.
Speaker 1: It's really good at learning probabilities of things in our environment.
Speaker 1: Like you know, in our social environment, we're constantly we
Speaker 1: have this feeling like I don't think I like this person,
Speaker 1: or I really like this person. It's you know, interesting
Speaker 1: to see what goes into that feeling. You know, what
Speaker 1: is that based on? And our unconscious system takes this
Speaker 1: whole holistic view based on lots and lots of different probabilities.
Speaker 1: What do you think is the correlation between, say, wisdom
Speaker 1: and intuition. This is one of the things I want
Speaker 1: to write a blog post on and it's been really
Speaker 1: hard to actually look at academic white papers on the subject.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen a lot. You know, it's a really
Speaker 1: good question, and you know, people in the psychological literature
Speaker 1: may disagree on that. Some people may think wisdom is
Speaker 1: actually transcending your intuition in a sense that you can
Speaker 1: rationally and consciously move beyond how you feel about something
Speaker 1: to really see it as objectively as possible. You know,
Speaker 1: there's some people who might see the emotion or the
Speaker 1: intuitive part of it as clouding your perception of reality.
Speaker 1: And then there's others who you know, surprisingly enough, they're
Speaker 1: intuition researchers like Gary Klein others who probably would would say,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of wisdom to our intuition, you know,
Speaker 1: there's in some ways it's better to listen to your
Speaker 1: intuition under a certain context. So Gigorrenzer probably would would
Speaker 1: argue that as well. Maybe it depends on the context,
Speaker 1: depends on how much expertise you have for something. So
Speaker 1: if I want to be wise about something that I
Speaker 1: know nothing about, maybe I don't want to rely on
Speaker 1: my intuition. But if I want to be wise about
Speaker 1: something that I've thought an awful lot about and I've
Speaker 1: experienced a lot, maybe it's actually would be wiser to
Speaker 1: listen to my intuition. Interesting, Wow, okay, let's talk about
Speaker 1: let's go let you you're in charge of this, but
Speaker 1: let's talk about Maslow at some point. Oh well, are
Speaker 1: you kidding? Like that's definitely got to talk about that
Speaker 1: as let's before we jump into Maza. That's a big topic.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about phil Piso's research and how
Speaker 1: it's influenced you. Because when you were talking about wisdom,
Speaker 1: you know, while we're still on the topic of wisdom,
Speaker 1: I wondered how his three pillars of purpose, community, and wellness,
Speaker 1: and the intersection of them relate to wisdom in midlife. Yes, so,
Speaker 1: I huge fan of doctor Phil Pizzo, former formerly ran
Speaker 1: the Stanford Medical Center and then as sort of an
Speaker 1: encore career for himself late in his career, had chose
Speaker 1: to create the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute, and in his
Speaker 1: research there over the last almost a decade, has come
Speaker 1: to realize that the three pillars that define later life,
Speaker 1: that a healthy later life, are purpose, community, and wellness.
Speaker 1: And if you see, frankly, the research that's been done
Speaker 1: on retirement, what you often see is that when someone retires,
Speaker 1: one of the challenges they have in retirement is they
Speaker 1: lose a sense of purpose, They lose a sense of
Speaker 1: community because work was their community, and often they lose
Speaker 1: a sense of wellness, not sort of. That was the
Speaker 1: one that was confusing to me. The reason there's the
Speaker 1: wellness is partly because they lose the structure and the
Speaker 1: discipline of work, and therefore everything in their life gets
Speaker 1: a little bit less disciplined than including their health. So
Speaker 1: those are the three pillars that define the Stanford DCI program.
Speaker 1: Well as we created as I wrote my book and
Speaker 1: then decided to create this Modern Elder Academy as the
Speaker 1: first real life wisdom school. We looked at almost like
Speaker 1: a then diagram of Phill's work and thought about what
Speaker 1: happens in the spaces between, for example, between community and
Speaker 1: community and purpose, or actually may think about it between
Speaker 1: community and wellness. So community and wellness. If you take
Speaker 1: those two and sort of creative ven diagram, it's social wellness.
Speaker 1: And so social wellness is a pretty important subject. It's
Speaker 1: gotten a lot of attention in the last five or
Speaker 1: ten years. The subject of loneliness, the subject of people
Speaker 1: feeling dislocated, you know, bowling alone, et cetera, et ceterric,
Speaker 1: et cetera. There's been a lot written on this. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that's interesting, especially for late people
Speaker 1: later in life, is how do we move the idea
Speaker 1: of wellness to something that you do personally to something
Speaker 1: you do collectively. You know, it's interesting the word wellness,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, the world illness starts with an eye. The
Speaker 1: word wellness starts with a we. And so social yeah,
Speaker 1: social wellness is a very important part of later life.
Speaker 1: If you look at the blue zones, look at the
Speaker 1: kinds of studies that have shown why do people live longer?
Speaker 1: You know, the George Dalliance study from Harvard really does
Speaker 1: speak to this idea of community, but it's the wellness
Speaker 1: component to that community, and you mix it with purpose
Speaker 1: and you get generativity. The Eric Erickson premise, who said
Speaker 1: as a developmental psychologist that I am what survives me,
Speaker 1: and the later stages of life is a question between
Speaker 1: generativity and stagnation. So generativity is about giving back, and
Speaker 1: it's about actually connecting your purpose something for the community
Speaker 1: and often giving to younger people. And then the interstitial
Speaker 1: space between purpose and wellness is flourishing. To highlight Marty
Speaker 1: Seligman's work, is your purpose and wellness that interstitial intersecting space.
Speaker 1: There isn't just about flourishing as a physical being. It's
Speaker 1: flourishing in your sense of being on this planet and
Speaker 1: why you're here and your sense of purpose. You know,
Speaker 1: to use a Maslow perspective, it's about being self actualized.
Speaker 1: And so what we tend to look at Loving Fills
Speaker 1: work and DC work is those three interstitial spaces again,
Speaker 1: social wellness, generativity and flourishing. Oh boy, I love that,
Speaker 1: and you really you bake that into your mission of
Speaker 1: the Modern Elder Academy. I'm going to read this. It's
Speaker 1: the world's first midlife wisdom school dedicated to helping people
Speaker 1: navigate midlife transitions, practice mindfulness, reframe their mindset on aging,
Speaker 1: and re enter the workforce. Dedicated to enhancing intergenerational collaboration
Speaker 1: in an erarow. And for the first time, we have
Speaker 1: five generations in the workplace. So the lot going on
Speaker 1: over there in the Modern Elder Academy. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: the origin of it was, I had my four years
Speaker 1: of full time work at Airbnb and then for three
Speaker 1: and a half years now have been a strategic advisor.
Speaker 1: Back in twenty seventeen when I started to write the book,
Speaker 1: I had a home here on the beach in Baja,
Speaker 1: about an hour north of Cabos on Lucas on the
Speaker 1: Pacific Ocean, and I came back from a run on
Speaker 1: the beach one day and I just asked myself, why
Speaker 1: is it. I've been talking to so many interviewing so
Speaker 1: many people in midlife, and I hear people feeling irrelevant
Speaker 1: and bewildered. And we know that the suicide rate for
Speaker 1: people forty five to sixty five has actually increased by
Speaker 1: fifty percent in the last twenty years. So what is it?
Speaker 1: What is it? What's missing here? And a friend of
Speaker 1: mine who's a gerontologist said, you know what's missing is
Speaker 1: we haven't as a society excepted that there's a there's
Speaker 1: an era of life, and it's not just midlife, but
Speaker 1: it's middle essence. So middle lessence is sort of like
Speaker 1: the adult corollary to adolescence and adolescence when you're in
Speaker 1: your teen years, you are in a transition, liminal space
Speaker 1: between childhood and adulthood, and you're going through emotional and
Speaker 1: hormonal and physical changes. Similarly, if you're in your late
Speaker 1: forties or in your fifties, you're going through emotional, hormonal
Speaker 1: and physical changes. And Frankie, I think that, as Carl
Speaker 1: Jung would say, you're going through a primary operating system
Speaker 1: change from your ego to your soul. And in that process,
Speaker 1: we have absolutely nothing in the way of public policy,
Speaker 1: government spending, or even sort of social understanding or schools
Speaker 1: or tools for that matter that help people in that
Speaker 1: era of the core of midlife. And so knowing that
Speaker 1: we don't have rights of passage, rituals or anything like
Speaker 1: that for people in this era and people going through
Speaker 1: all kinds of transitions during this era. We decided to
Speaker 1: create a beta version of modern Elger Academy down here,
Speaker 1: and that was early twenty eighteen, and then we opened
Speaker 1: to the public and followed twenty eighteen, and we've now
Speaker 1: had almost eight hundred people from twenty four countries come
Speaker 1: through the program. It's a social enterprise, so over sixty
Speaker 1: percent of the people have been on some form of
Speaker 1: scholarship we've given them because we believe that wisdom isn't taught,
Speaker 1: it's shared. And it's been a fascinating experience. I mean,
Speaker 1: I really appreciate that, after being a for profit entrepreneur
Speaker 1: as a Routiko tel ear with Drata Vive and then
Speaker 1: in home sharing with Airbnb, that I'm a social entrepreneur.
Speaker 1: I don't make any money from this. I built the campus,
Speaker 1: but I just love the fact that we're helping people
Speaker 1: find their sense of self actualization and transformation at an
Speaker 1: era in people's lives where a lot of people feel stuck.
Speaker 1: And the U Curve of happiness data does show that
Speaker 1: people tend to bottom out with their happiness life satisfaction
Speaker 1: around forty five to fifty or fifty two but actually
Speaker 1: it shows that people get happier with each passing decade
Speaker 1: after that. And yet and Becca Leivi's work from Yale
Speaker 1: has shown that you help people to re shift their
Speaker 1: mind or create a mind shift on aging, and you
Speaker 1: add seven and a half years to their life. But
Speaker 1: we have very little in the way of mainstream programs,
Speaker 1: schools and tools to help people with this. And that's
Speaker 1: really my mission in life today. It's a beautiful mission,
Speaker 1: I guess more selfishly, I have a question about how
Speaker 1: long do I have to wait to come to this
Speaker 1: beautiful beachfront property in Mexico. I love to have you
Speaker 1: come teach with me down here. But let's say, of course,
Speaker 1: with the pandemic, we're closed intil October, but we have
Speaker 1: our October through July calendar academic calendar in place. We
Speaker 1: have all kinds of really interesting people and very interesting subjects.
Speaker 1: So our average workshop has about eighteen people in it.
Speaker 1: It's a week usually a week long, although we have
Speaker 1: some five day programs as well, and it's really easy
Speaker 1: to get through. Los Cabos Airport is just an hour
Speaker 1: from us. There's something called NPS net Promoter Score. It's
Speaker 1: a way of evaluating customer satisfaction, and about ninety seven
Speaker 1: or ninety eight percent of our seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: people who fifty to eight hundred people have gone to
Speaker 1: the program have given us the highest scores of nine
Speaker 1: or ten on a one to ten scale. So it's
Speaker 1: really clear we've tapped into something we like to call
Speaker 1: it long life learning. We've heard of life long learning,
Speaker 1: but long life learning is a slight shift on that.
Speaker 1: It says, yes, you're going to lifelong learn, but the
Speaker 1: kind of learning that you need to do in midlife
Speaker 1: and later is to understand how to live a life
Speaker 1: as deep as it is long and understand the stages
Speaker 1: of life you're going through. And so in many ways,
Speaker 1: that's what we help people to do, is to shift
Speaker 1: their mindset on aging and really, you know, tap into
Speaker 1: that Carol Dweck concept of a growth mindset. It sounds really,
Speaker 1: really awesome, And I'm so glad you're shining a spotlight
Speaker 1: on this because you don't see this. This spotlight shined
Speaker 1: much these days, especially in this time of COVID, and
Speaker 1: you're probably seeing a lot of older people or even
Speaker 1: more lonely than even they were before. Right, So, because
Speaker 1: we had to close mid March. We have yet to
Speaker 1: sort of we've not had a cohort here in two
Speaker 1: and a half months. But what we do have is
Speaker 1: we have you know, hundreds of a lot and so
Speaker 1: what we have heard from them is they absolutely want
Speaker 1: to stay connected and so when I when a cohort
Speaker 1: leaves on a Sunday, they stay connected by Zoom for
Speaker 1: you know, weeks, months and sometimes years to come. But
Speaker 1: what we've seen more so is a desire for a
Speaker 1: weekly speaker. So we have a mastery hour every week
Speaker 1: with speakers coming in to talk to our alums about
Speaker 1: various subjects that relate to midlife and aging. And frankly,
Speaker 1: it's not it's not only about midlife. It's it's aging.
Speaker 1: It's sometimes it relates to you know, your relationship with money.
Speaker 1: We had lind Twist last week talk about the soul
Speaker 1: of money and that's that's relevant to anybody at any age. Well,
Speaker 1: that's interesting, the soul of money. Wow, here's a good question. Yeah,
Speaker 1: here's a question for you, Scott. If you if you
Speaker 1: and money were to go to therapy together and you know,
Speaker 1: you could say something about money and money could say
Speaker 1: something about you because you have a long term relationship
Speaker 1: with money, what would you say about each other? And
Speaker 1: this really gets to the question of, you know, what
Speaker 1: is our relationship with money, what's the money script that
Speaker 1: we were born with or brought up with, and how
Speaker 1: does it influence how we operate in the world. Does
Speaker 1: money give you freedom or does it take it away?
Speaker 1: And this is one of the questions we asked later
Speaker 1: in the week during our core curriculum programs because in
Speaker 1: many ways money, you know, money is a subject that's
Speaker 1: relevant at any age, but it's particularly relevant in midlife
Speaker 1: and beyond because for some people, one of the things
Speaker 1: that really hit has them hit bottom in midlife is
Speaker 1: the sense that they've not been successful. And the question
Speaker 1: then becomes, so what are the metrics you're using for
Speaker 1: defining success? And for so many people it relates to money,
Speaker 1: and especially in times like these where you know, in
Speaker 1: a Maslovian way, we're all moving to the bottom of
Speaker 1: the pyramid in our survival, it needs when we're in fear,
Speaker 1: especially around financial fear. So part of what we help
Speaker 1: people to do and what what Lynn definitely helps people
Speaker 1: to do with a Soul of Money is to see
Speaker 1: money as a currency and a currency is like an
Speaker 1: electric current. It's something that is a something that's an energy,
Speaker 1: and something that actually can be a translator for what
Speaker 1: you're looking for in your life. So it you know,
Speaker 1: to use it purely as a notch on your belt
Speaker 1: or on the wall of meeting some goal is such
Speaker 1: a limiting way to think of money. But instead, you know,
Speaker 1: money can actually be something that actually buys you freedom.
Speaker 1: But for so many people, because of the hedonic treadmill
Speaker 1: and our natural tendency to once you've gotten one thing,
Speaker 1: you want something bigger or better, we actually end up
Speaker 1: using money as a gauge for self worth. And you know,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a big subject, and it's a big
Speaker 1: subject in midlife because frankly, in midlife it's a really
Speaker 1: important time for a lot of people. So let's say
Speaker 1: forty five, fifty to fifty five, or average age of
Speaker 1: people in the in the program's fifty four, but we've
Speaker 1: had people as young as thirty eight and as old
Speaker 1: as eighty eight in the program. But in your early fifties,
Speaker 1: you're at a stage where you're sort of like, Okay,
Speaker 1: what is it that I want in my life? And
Speaker 1: in many cases that you sort of warn through all
Speaker 1: of the expectations that you're trying to build for other people,
Speaker 1: and it's now time to sort of ask some bigger
Speaker 1: questions about what it is that you want in your life.
Speaker 1: And for a lot of people, they end up pivoting
Speaker 1: back to their historical money script and they find that
Speaker 1: that money script isn't serving them, or that a lot
Speaker 1: of other scripts are probably not serving them. Oh there's yeah,
Speaker 1: there's that. We have a mindset exercise. We call it
Speaker 1: the Great Midlife Edit, and in the first twenty four
Speaker 1: hours it's all about, Okay, if the first half of
Speaker 1: your life is about accumulating and the second half of
Speaker 1: your life is about editing, what are you going to
Speaker 1: edit this week? What is it that is no longer
Speaker 1: serving you? What is it that you need to evolve
Speaker 1: out of? I love that, and people can start doing
Speaker 1: that even before midlife. For sure. Can I get a
Speaker 1: head start? I think the idea of cultivating and harvesting
Speaker 1: wisdom is something you can do. I started at age
Speaker 1: twenty six when I started my hotel company. I created
Speaker 1: a wisdom book and every weekend, at the end of
Speaker 1: a week, having gotten beaten up as a young entrepreneur
Speaker 1: who didn't know what the heck he was doing. I
Speaker 1: would go to my wisdom book and it wasn't a
Speaker 1: personal journal like writing in pros. I would just write three,
Speaker 1: four or five six bullet points of what I learned
Speaker 1: that week. And I did that every weekend. And I
Speaker 1: now have like nine wisdom books over the course of
Speaker 1: thirty four years. And these are just personal for me,
Speaker 1: and I go back to look at them when I'm
Speaker 1: going through a comparable time. So when we went through
Speaker 1: the Great Recession, I went back and looked at my
Speaker 1: dot com Bus nine to eleven period wisdom book to say,
Speaker 1: but there's some things I learned back then that might
Speaker 1: be helpful to me now. So yes, you don't have
Speaker 1: to be someone later in life to start looking at,
Speaker 1: cultivating and harvesting your wisdom. You can do it throughout
Speaker 1: a lifetime. So let's pivot to your book Peak for second,
Speaker 1: or for more than one second for the rest of
Speaker 1: this podcast episode. You talk about how Peak is the
Speaker 1: most meaningful book to you personally, and you think it's
Speaker 1: very relevant at this particular time in our challenging economy.
Speaker 1: Can you maybe outline, first of all, what inspired you
Speaker 1: to write this book. Thank you, I mean, I love
Speaker 1: I can't wait to spend more time in person with
Speaker 1: you to talk about all this stuff. So, Mas that
Speaker 1: was always interesting to me. I only took one psychology
Speaker 1: class in college, and yet the one class I took
Speaker 1: with Phil Lombardo at Stanford was you know, psychology want,
Speaker 1: and I just remembered Maslow. Maslow is the good guy.
Speaker 1: All the other psychologists seemed to be focused on worst
Speaker 1: practices and human behavior, and made was focused on best practices.
Speaker 1: And that's what ultimately to his hierarchy of needs, with
Speaker 1: the basic premise being that you have these basic needs,
Speaker 1: and then as you move up from these survival needs
Speaker 1: to your success needs, which wore be your social belonging
Speaker 1: needs and your esteem needs, and then you get these
Speaker 1: transformational needs at the top, which is self actualization. Well,
Speaker 1: when my company hit the skids in the dot com
Speaker 1: Best nine to eleven, my Boutik Hotel company, I went
Speaker 1: to a local library looking for a business book that
Speaker 1: was going to help me get through a difficult time
Speaker 1: as the CEO, and quickly I ended up moving over
Speaker 1: to the self help section of the bookstore because I
Speaker 1: realized my problems were more than just business. And that's
Speaker 1: when I saw some of Maslow's books, and I decided
Speaker 1: that I wanted to read some of his books, and
Speaker 1: so I did. And then I asked the question of
Speaker 1: my senior leaders about a month into reading these books, well,
Speaker 1: if Maslow was really about how to create self actualization
Speaker 1: for individuals, how could we create a self actualized company?
Speaker 1: Because our company is just full of individuals. And what
Speaker 1: I started to learn about Maslow is later in his life,
Speaker 1: in his last eight to ten years, he was really
Speaker 1: studying how his hierarchy of needs could be applied to
Speaker 1: the collective or towards organizations. He was working in companies,
Speaker 1: and not many people knew that. What this led me
Speaker 1: to is like saying, Okay, well, what if we were
Speaker 1: to translate the five levels of Maslow's pyramid into a
Speaker 1: simple three level pyramid survival at the base, success in
Speaker 1: the middle, and transformation or transform at the top. And
Speaker 1: then we applied that three level transformation pyramid to employees, customers,
Speaker 1: and investors. And long story short is, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the beautiful things about being both a writer and
Speaker 1: an operator as a business person is I can actually
Speaker 1: have a living laboratory to see if it works. And
Speaker 1: so between two thousand and one and two thousand and
Speaker 1: five we studied whether this peak model, where we helped
Speaker 1: people address their survival needs, whether their employees, customers, are
Speaker 1: invest just moved them up to their success needs and
Speaker 1: then moved them up to transformation needs, did it work.
Speaker 1: And what we found is that in the downturn when
Speaker 1: we were using this peak model, that eighty percent of
Speaker 1: our hotels gained the market share in the dot com
Speaker 1: Best nine to eleven downturn, which is really unusual because
Speaker 1: usually it's just the chain hotels that succeed in a downturn.
Speaker 1: So we ultimately taught everybody in our company, thirty five
Speaker 1: hundred employees, the model, and then I was starting to
Speaker 1: give speeches about it, and that's what led me to
Speaker 1: write the book Peak, How Great Companies Get their Mojo
Speaker 1: from Maslow? And I love that. Yeah, well Mojo and Maslow,
Speaker 1: I mean there really is. What I started to find
Speaker 1: was that there are a lot of companies that had
Speaker 1: used Maslow's hierarchy of needs in their employer customer thinking,
Speaker 1: whether it was Southwest Airlines or Whole Foods Markets or
Speaker 1: Harley Davidson or later after my book came out Zappo's Tony,
Speaker 1: So it was really fascinating to see that Maslow had
Speaker 1: a bigger impact in the business world than most people knew.
Speaker 1: But no one had actually written a book on Maslow
Speaker 1: Applied to Business before Pete came out. Yeah, besides Maslow himself,
Speaker 1: that was a long time ago. Psyche and Management, which
Speaker 1: you know, sold three thousand copies, and then Debra Stevens
Speaker 1: really popularized it with the Maslow Business Reader and Maslow Management.
Speaker 1: But to be honest with you, they were quite academic
Speaker 1: in terms of their focus. They were not They were
Speaker 1: not really written for the business audience so much. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: you didn incredible service to the world. So I want
Speaker 1: to zoom in because you have pyramids upon pyramids here.
Speaker 1: So you have an employee pyramid, you have a customer pyramid,
Speaker 1: and then you have an investor pyramid. And would you
Speaker 1: mind if we walked our listeners through each one of
Speaker 1: those three pyramids so they can see, like, what is
Speaker 1: the highest aspiration the free to these concepts. So again
Speaker 1: with the transformation pyramid as the model, survival at the base,
Speaker 1: success in the middle, and transform at the top. The
Speaker 1: employee pyramid is money or the compensation package at the base,
Speaker 1: the middle is recognition and the top is meaning, so
Speaker 1: money recognition meaning, and interestingly enough, it lines up with
Speaker 1: job career calling. So when someone has a calling, they
Speaker 1: often feel like they have a straight meaning in their work.
Speaker 1: When someone has a job, that tend to be focused
Speaker 1: on their compensation package, and when they're focused on their career,
Speaker 1: they're focused on being recognized in what they're doing and
Speaker 1: having a career path. So what this helped us to
Speaker 1: see is that in fact, stats on this are very,
Speaker 1: very very conclusive. The fourth most likely reason a person
Speaker 1: leaves their job in the United States is because of money.
Speaker 1: It's not the predominant reason, and so it's a base
Speaker 1: money and compensation package is a really important thing you
Speaker 1: need to stabilize, especially in a downturn, and job security
Speaker 1: and perks and things like that, but it's not the
Speaker 1: reason most people leave their job. The reason most people
Speaker 1: leave their job goes to the second level of recognition.
Speaker 1: The number one reason people ere their job is because
Speaker 1: they're boss, and so recognition starts with your boss, but
Speaker 1: it goes beyond that. It goes to how do people
Speaker 1: in the organization recognize you and appreciate you. Is there
Speaker 1: a career path that gives you the sense that you're
Speaker 1: recognized for your growing value to the business. Is there
Speaker 1: a learning and development program around that? And so that also,
Speaker 1: But those first two things are sort of like bartering
Speaker 1: things there. You know, if the company gives you money
Speaker 1: and recognition, you will give you know, a lot in return.
Speaker 1: What happens at the third level, of which is meaning,
Speaker 1: is you move from strinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation. And
Speaker 1: when a company can do that and help create an
Speaker 1: environment where people feel a deep sense of meaning in
Speaker 1: what the company does, you know, at the organization, and
Speaker 1: in what they do to support that noble purpose, it's huge.
Speaker 1: And that is what great companies do, is they help
Speaker 1: people move up that pyramid to that state of being
Speaker 1: inspired by the meaning and also feeling a sense of calling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you also talk about loyalty. Feeling a sense of
Speaker 1: loyalty to the company. I sure love that also. I
Speaker 1: just love inspiration as a goal among your employees. You
Speaker 1: don't often see that in every company where that's like
Speaker 1: their bottom line is not always inspiration you right. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: in a serious downturn, most companies get fixated at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the pyramid and don't look at the ways
Speaker 1: they can create recognition or meaning for the companies. Do
Speaker 1: you think within the context of COVID this is even
Speaker 1: more relevant. I mean it seems so. You know, when
Speaker 1: we hit bad times, people moved to anxiety and then
Speaker 1: to survival. And so even if you're a company that
Speaker 1: has developed a peak model, a lot of people get nervous.
Speaker 1: And when people get nervous, they move down to the
Speaker 1: survival needs. What that tends to do in their brain
Speaker 1: in terms of their operating philosophy is it means that
Speaker 1: they're less creative. It means that they're less focused on
Speaker 1: being curious. They tend to get more focused on how
Speaker 1: do we survive this. That's fine in the short run.
Speaker 1: I think it's an absolutely smart thing to do. The
Speaker 1: problem is they get stuck there. And the reality is
Speaker 1: that if you get stuck at the bottom of any
Speaker 1: of these to be pyramids money, the employee, the customer,
Speaker 1: of the investor one, you over time just become a commodity.
Speaker 1: You have not differentiated yourself, your created loyalty and great
Speaker 1: business and great organizations that are models do not do
Speaker 1: that because they're at the commodity survival level of the pyramid.
Speaker 1: So the key is for us USA. Back in the
Speaker 1: day in the dot com best, we had to secure
Speaker 1: what we wanted to say to our employees and this
Speaker 1: We were the only hotel company in the Bay Area
Speaker 1: that did this. We are not going to lay you
Speaker 1: off due to economic reasons. If you're not doing your
Speaker 1: job while we promise you we'll give you warning and
Speaker 1: you'll get performance reviews along the way. And progressive discipline
Speaker 1: of needs. I hate to hate that that term for
Speaker 1: just a discipline sounds like you're talking to children. But
Speaker 1: the idea is you will not lose your job in
Speaker 1: this economic downturn now. In order for us to do that,
Speaker 1: we had to number one, be open, having a slightly
Speaker 1: lower profit margin than our competitors. And number two is
Speaker 1: all of our senior leaders took ten and twenty percent
Speaker 1: pay cuts. I did a pay a salary sabbatical for
Speaker 1: three and a half years. We moved all of our
Speaker 1: employees over the Kaiser, which was a much more affordable
Speaker 1: health insurance plan. If people wanted to do a PPO
Speaker 1: incident of at HMO, they could pay extra for that,
Speaker 1: But we wanted to actually make a major cut in
Speaker 1: our expenses. So we did a bunch of things in
Speaker 1: order to create people's sense of safety. And if you
Speaker 1: have a sense of safety in your work and you're
Speaker 1: not going to walk into work one day and realize
Speaker 1: you've lost your job, people then can move up to
Speaker 1: the next level of the pyramid. But when people are
Speaker 1: in turmoil and anxiety, they tend to get stuck at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the pyramid. So true and Maso definitely
Speaker 1: pointed that out a lot. The deficiency motivation the d
Speaker 1: realm of existence. Okay, so let's talk about the customer pyramid. Now,
Speaker 1: what are the needs that you differentiate within the customer pyramid?
Speaker 1: So the customer pyramid is it's relevant across whether you're
Speaker 1: a defense contractor or a dry cleaner. There are three levels.
Speaker 1: The survival level is meet my expectations, that's what customers want.
Speaker 1: The success level is meet my desires to one high
Speaker 1: level higher. And the peak of this pyramid is to
Speaker 1: meet the unrecognized needs of the customer. So any company
Speaker 1: in a downturn is going to try to do its
Speaker 1: best to benchmark itselfs versus its competitors. What's your level
Speaker 1: of customer satisfaction. But often what's at the base of
Speaker 1: the pyramid is the commodity. It's what a person as
Speaker 1: a customer expects from you, and if you don't even
Speaker 1: deliver on that, you don't even count to this pyramid
Speaker 1: at all. There's very little loyalty there unless you're in
Speaker 1: like some kind of governmental regulated industry, or you know,
Speaker 1: you're in some kind of business where you can't have
Speaker 1: new competitors. But in the era of the Internet, which
Speaker 1: is we're about twenty five years into it now, the
Speaker 1: customers become more promiscuous, which means the customer has more choices.
Speaker 1: And if the customer has more choices than all you're
Speaker 1: doing is meeting expectations, the customer will start looking for
Speaker 1: other options that actually take them to the next level
Speaker 1: of the pyramid their desires. And it's a very subtle
Speaker 1: change from expectations to desires, and it requires you to
Speaker 1: be really close to your customers. And this is where
Speaker 1: focus groups and things like that can be very helpful.
Speaker 1: But the third level of this pyramid is altogether different.
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs was quite famous at Apple for saying focus
Speaker 1: groups tell us nothing, because customers need to see what
Speaker 1: it is we're creating in order to understand it. And
Speaker 1: so at the top of the pyramid, it really means
Speaker 1: you're going to be creating something that your customers hadn't
Speaker 1: even thought of. This is why we call it meeting
Speaker 1: the unrecognized needs, and that's what creates the transformation. So
Speaker 1: Apple was spectacular at creating products that were not created
Speaker 1: by the customer. You know, if you think about the
Speaker 1: iPod long ago, it was a Sony Walkman but made digitally,
Speaker 1: and the idea of being able to have mobile music,
Speaker 1: but there was a whole different product. No customer was
Speaker 1: ever going to create that. But Apple could feel like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is what customers wanted. When I created one of
Speaker 1: my hotels in San Francisco called the Hotel Vatali, this
Speaker 1: is twenty years ago, I could see that yoga was
Speaker 1: a growing part of the business traveler's life. But you
Speaker 1: didn't have a yoga studio in your hotel. And if
Speaker 1: you're staying in a financial district, of course you didn't.
Speaker 1: Maybe if you're in a Spa hotel, you did, but
Speaker 1: not in a business class hotel. So we put a
Speaker 1: yoga studio on the penthouse level of a first class
Speaker 1: business hotel, and everybody looked at me, like, what the
Speaker 1: heck are you doing. That's like you put your best
Speaker 1: real estate for a yoga class with great views of
Speaker 1: the Bay and an outdoor area, And I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: because I want the theme of this hotel to be
Speaker 1: all about helping people to feel like they can be
Speaker 1: healthy while they're on the road. Now today that makes
Speaker 1: a ton of sense, But twenty years ago, that was
Speaker 1: an unfathomable idea and it was an unrecognized need of
Speaker 1: our customer. No customer ever had ever asked for it.
Speaker 1: But the moment we actually launched that hotel with that
Speaker 1: three yoga class every morning in the penthouse, it became
Speaker 1: a huge hit, and the Wall Street Journal and La
Speaker 1: Times and other newspapers wrote about it, and it became,
Speaker 1: in many ways the brand of the hotel. So long
Speaker 1: story short is I mean, trying to understand the unrecognized
Speaker 1: needs of your customers requires that you're a bit of
Speaker 1: a mind reader. You better understand both your customers really well,
Speaker 1: but also the aspirations of what they wish you you're
Speaker 1: delivering to them that they almost didn't feel like was
Speaker 1: a possibility. I mean, it's like Wi Fi in the
Speaker 1: air six or seven years ago, like you know, business travel,
Speaker 1: you wanted Wi Fi in the air, but just it
Speaker 1: wasn't even available. But here's the other thing about this
Speaker 1: pramid is once you give Wi Fi in the air,
Speaker 1: which is an unrecognized need, with the two years, it
Speaker 1: goes from unrecognized needs to desire to add it to expectation.
Speaker 1: And when you don't get your WiFi in the air,
Speaker 1: I hope you're listening to the United Airlines and you're
Speaker 1: constantly not getting your wife out in the air, all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, what was an unrecognized need has become
Speaker 1: an expectation, and then you get upset as a customer,
Speaker 1: that's for sure. Well, since jobs passing, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: think if there's if Apple has put on anything that
Speaker 1: we didn't realize we needed. I can't think of anything,
Speaker 1: and I wonder what the future of Apple will be
Speaker 1: in that regard. That's a good question. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: he had such an intuitive sense of humans. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think Johnny I've was a beautiful designer of that vision.
Speaker 1: But it's real question. It's a real being able to
Speaker 1: out of thin air or imagine what people want is
Speaker 1: an exceptional gift. Good news is there are companies companies
Speaker 1: like Ideo that are design thinkers who help companies like
Speaker 1: Apple and others to imagine products that don't exist today.
Speaker 1: So I don't think it requires the heroic CEO entrepreneur
Speaker 1: of like the See Jobs to do that. I think
Speaker 1: it can be a collective effort as well. Hey everyone,
Speaker 1: if you find the themes we cover on the Psychology
Speaker 1: Podcast interesting and enlightening, you might be interested in my
Speaker 1: new book, Transcend, The New Science of Self Actualization. The
Speaker 1: book is the culmination of my journey to scientifically discover
Speaker 1: the factors that can lead us to optimal health, growth, creativity,
Speaker 1: peak experiences, and deep fulfillment. I believe we could still
Speaker 1: manage to have peak experiences, the most wondrous moments that
Speaker 1: make life worth living, regardless of our current life circumstances.
Speaker 1: We can choose growth. For more. You can visit Transcend
Speaker 1: hyphenbook dot com. A's transcend hyphenbook dot com with a
Speaker 1: hyphen between the word transcend and the word book. If
Speaker 1: you get a chance to read the book, it'd be
Speaker 1: great if you could leave a review on Amazon, tweet
Speaker 1: about it, or share the book with friends, I truly
Speaker 1: hope this book can help people get through these tough
Speaker 1: times and realize that we all have greater resiliency, creativity,
Speaker 1: and potential within us than we ever realized. Okay, now
Speaker 1: back to the show. I agree and you see it
Speaker 1: all the time on Twitter. Just Steve Martin posted a
Speaker 1: video of him playing banjo in the woods, and the
Speaker 1: big headline for everyone who was sharing on Twitter was like,
Speaker 1: this is the video I didn't even know I needed
Speaker 1: just to watch. So I think just in the age
Speaker 1: of social media, just people just on TikTok or all
Speaker 1: these different ways that everyday people you don't have to
Speaker 1: be a Steve Jobs or Steve Martin. You can. You
Speaker 1: can produce content that is so strange and creative that
Speaker 1: people are like, wow, I didn't know I needed to
Speaker 1: see this today to uplift me, you know what I
Speaker 1: mean exactly. Let's move on to the investor pyramid. How
Speaker 1: about that You said that one was the most surprising
Speaker 1: to you, Is that right? It was very surprising primarily because,
Speaker 1: like you know, we know that employees are humans, we
Speaker 1: know that customers are humans, so that a hierarchy of
Speaker 1: needs of humans made sense. But our investor's human and
Speaker 1: when they have a hierarchy of needs. And I came
Speaker 1: to realize yes after interviewing a lot of them, and
Speaker 1: I had a lot of investors in my company. So
Speaker 1: the base of this pyramid, the survival need, is a
Speaker 1: transactional alignment, which just basically means that you have a
Speaker 1: common definition of what the business is and what it's
Speaker 1: trying to accomplish. And quite frankly, in a lot of cases,
Speaker 1: most companies, not most, but many companies, especially entrepreneurs and investors,
Speaker 1: don't even have the base of this pyramid, right. The
Speaker 1: next level of the pyramid, the success level, is like
Speaker 1: what Warren Buffett does. It's a relationship. It's relationship alignment.
Speaker 1: Buffett says to his owners or I'm sorry to his
Speaker 1: CEOs and the companies he invests in or buys, I
Speaker 1: want you to operate as if you're going to be
Speaker 1: here one hundred years from now. So instead of sort
Speaker 1: of seeing as everything's transactionally based and short term oriented
Speaker 1: in terms of returns, Buffett has a long term perspective
Speaker 1: based upon building a relationship. And then finally, the third level,
Speaker 1: the transformational level, is a legacy investor or a mission
Speaker 1: aligned investor, and these are people who put their money
Speaker 1: where their heart is, and they tend to invest in
Speaker 1: something because they either want to do something socially responsible
Speaker 1: for their community or for the world. They want to
Speaker 1: invest in someone they care about, like their daughter or
Speaker 1: son who's creating their clothing business, or even someone like
Speaker 1: Peter Teele, who you know doesn't necessarily give people to
Speaker 1: warm and fuzzy sometimes. Peter Tweet Peel is a legacy
Speaker 1: investor because in many ways his intent is to disrupt industries.
Speaker 1: And that's what you could say, Okay, well that's just
Speaker 1: a person at the base of the pyramid. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: A legacy investor has a very long term perspective. At
Speaker 1: the base of the pyramid is short term. At the
Speaker 1: top of the pyramid is long term. At the base
Speaker 1: of the pyramid is tangible. At the top of the
Speaker 1: pyramid is intangible. It's true of all three pyramids. And
Speaker 1: so Peter Keel is in fact interested in investing in
Speaker 1: a company like Airbnb that's going to disrupt hospitality, not
Speaker 1: because he necessarily is doing it for a social good
Speaker 1: in society, although he is a big believer in the
Speaker 1: idea that disruption creates. You know, the wildfire is necessary
Speaker 1: to burn down the things that need to be burned down.
Speaker 1: But he does it partly because he thinks that the
Speaker 1: world needs the constant new competition to help, you know, improve.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like somewhat of a Darwinnian philosophy, which
Speaker 1: is a survival of the fittest, and it's more of
Speaker 1: a survival of the most adaptable, which is really what
Speaker 1: Darwin talked about, and I think it's really what Peter
Speaker 1: Teel's all about. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: And then in your model of the investor payramid, a
Speaker 1: self actualized investor is one who focuses on legacy and
Speaker 1: is mission aligned. Right, there's definitely a sense that the
Speaker 1: entrepreneur and the company and their investors are all aligned.
Speaker 1: And if you're not aligned, you end situation where the
Speaker 1: company and the entrepreneurs have a very long term perspective
Speaker 1: on things and then all of a sudden they realize
Speaker 1: their investors are very short term oriants. And that can
Speaker 1: happen in a recession. I mean very much can in
Speaker 1: a recession if a company is bleeding money, has a
Speaker 1: big burn rate, and their investors say you have to
Speaker 1: cut your burn rate and become profitable in the next year.
Speaker 1: And the company is so far from profitability, they might
Speaker 1: as well be telling the entrepreneur close up shop. And
Speaker 1: that's where, frankly, making sure you're aligned with your investors
Speaker 1: is pretty important because if you don't have that, you
Speaker 1: may have a great idea, but it's three years out
Speaker 1: and your investors are going to not give you three years.
Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense. I love how you
Speaker 1: look at this from every possible angle. You also have
Speaker 1: looked into peak leaders and what are the practices of
Speaker 1: peak leaders that you have eate practices? What are some
Speaker 1: of your favorites That might be a hard question to ask, Well,
Speaker 1: I think I'll just give you two or three because
Speaker 1: there's it's interesting, there's eight and they have a certain
Speaker 1: they're chronological on some level. I mean, I think one
Speaker 1: example is you better have a positive perspective on human nature.
Speaker 1: So this is, you know, peak is very much a
Speaker 1: mas Loovian perspective of if you give people the incentive
Speaker 1: and the space to live their best work life, they
Speaker 1: will show up and be incredibly engaged. Now that's sort
Speaker 1: of theory why management theory X management has a different perspective,
Speaker 1: and in fact, it's the industrial model that goes back
Speaker 1: to Frederick Taylor, and it's all based upon the premise that,
Speaker 1: you know, what, employees are basically lazy, so you better
Speaker 1: have a time clock. Otherwise, you know, you got to
Speaker 1: you gotta watch when they arrive and when they depart.
Speaker 1: You better give incentives to them. And you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: the carrot's not the solution, it's the stick. And so
Speaker 1: the premise of peak is that if you create the
Speaker 1: conditions for people to live their callings and to actually
Speaker 1: be inspired by the purpose of the company, you will
Speaker 1: get more engagement out of them. Most of us now
Speaker 1: believe that, but honestly, when I first started to talk
Speaker 1: about this stuff fifteen or twenty years ago, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of people who didn't agree with me, especially
Speaker 1: in the hospitality business, which is generally a pretty hierarchical industry.
Speaker 1: What's another example, Another example I talked about in my
Speaker 1: TED talk in twenty ten when I went to Bhutan
Speaker 1: and study their Gross National Happiness IndX, and that is
Speaker 1: that generally what's at the base of the pyramid is
Speaker 1: tangible and easily benchmarkable. For example, companies have compensation surveys
Speaker 1: where they competitively benchmark themselves versus other companies, and therefore
Speaker 1: they can sort of see how they're doing. But no
Speaker 1: companies have a benchmark for a meaning and like what's
Speaker 1: at the peak of the employee pyramid. But there's lots
Speaker 1: of ways in a customer satisfaction survey with your employees
Speaker 1: where you could actually get clarity on what level of
Speaker 1: meaning your employees have in the organization. You may not
Speaker 1: be able to benchmarket versus other companies, although today you can.
Speaker 1: Five years ago it was harder to do that. So
Speaker 1: what a peak leader does is they realize that don't
Speaker 1: get you know, it's very important to manage what you
Speaker 1: can measure, But don't just assume that the only things
Speaker 1: you should measure are the simplest things to measure, like
Speaker 1: you know, profitability or compensation. But instead look at how
Speaker 1: do you measure evangelists, how many evangelists you have and
Speaker 1: how do they show up for you? How do you
Speaker 1: measure reputation, how do you measure loyalty? But employee loyalty
Speaker 1: and customer loyalty. So these are all I think very
Speaker 1: important things, and I could go on and on, but
Speaker 1: I'm going to leave it at back just to say
Speaker 1: those are two of the eight peak practices. Thank you
Speaker 1: you right. Peak leaders believe humans are basically good, and
Speaker 1: you mentioned that earlier. And that's also similar to this
Speaker 1: Selight triad scale that we're developing to counteract the dark
Speaker 1: triad in the scientific literature. And this, and one of
Speaker 1: the key components of we call them everyday saints, is
Speaker 1: that they believe that humans are fundamentally good. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: love that. That also is a good good for a leader.
Speaker 1: Did you have you come across in your readings Maslow's
Speaker 1: Theory Z. Yes? Yes, How does that go beyond theory Why?
Speaker 1: I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about that. Well,
Speaker 1: if I'm not mistaken, and you tell me, Scott, I
Speaker 1: love I love getting schooled. I was lucky enough I
Speaker 1: have Maslow's diaries for the last ten years of his life.
Speaker 1: There are one hundred volumes out there, and his family
Speaker 1: gave me the two volume set, which is where I
Speaker 1: saw him write a little bit more about Theory Z,
Speaker 1: although he did in New Psyche Imagine Management as well.
Speaker 1: My impression of Theory Z is when it actually is
Speaker 1: moving towards sort of the transcendence level, of something that's
Speaker 1: beyond just what's good for the company, what's good for
Speaker 1: the human it's it has a it has a bigger
Speaker 1: purpose attached to it. But am I am I correct
Speaker 1: in that? Is? Am I off? I think you're right.
Speaker 1: There's theories he called them the transcenders were motivated consistently
Speaker 1: motivated by the b values, the values of being itself,
Speaker 1: things like goodness. So you could just call them higher values,
Speaker 1: more quoqually, more spiritual values, things that transcend oneself, truth, beauty, meaningfulness, goodness, justice.
Speaker 1: And we're also motivated by peak experiences. It was an
Speaker 1: important part of their their day and at work they
Speaker 1: want to be in that kind of flow state or
Speaker 1: be deeply absorbed in what they're doing. But also I
Speaker 1: feel like a great connection to humanity more generally. So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think when a lot of people don't know about Maslow,
Speaker 1: you know, it's beaten up a lot, especially in academia.
Speaker 1: Not cool. Yeah, Nazlos perceived as like an old school thing,
Speaker 1: and you know, and it's it's perceived as sort of
Speaker 1: Western society, and you know, and they very self absorbed,
Speaker 1: very nineteen seventies, you know, the me generation. But you know,
Speaker 1: later in life, Maslow added a seventh, sixth, seventh, and
Speaker 1: I think at eighth level, and I know the two
Speaker 1: of those three levels are beauty or aesthetics and transcendence
Speaker 1: self transcendence at the top. And in many ways, you
Speaker 1: know Maslow, Maslow is some somehow got a little bit
Speaker 1: besmirched by the fact that in an era of the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties and seventies, when there was a sort of
Speaker 1: counter revolution against tradition in all forms, including in psychology,
Speaker 1: that people sort of thought of Maslow as just a hippie.
Speaker 1: And he was nothing like a hippie at the institute
Speaker 1: in Big sur And yes, he was fascinated by a
Speaker 1: lot of different ways and including Native American ways of
Speaker 1: building community and what were the hierarchy needs for Native Americans.
Speaker 1: But he really did believe that at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, these these transcenders were people who actually transcended
Speaker 1: their own self actualization. They were doing something that allowed
Speaker 1: them to almost create social actualization, something higher than a
Speaker 1: self actualization. And in his case he could just call
Speaker 1: it transcendence absolutely, and a lot of people don't know that.
Speaker 1: And also he even went beyond the peak experience to
Speaker 1: talk about the plateau experience. I was wondering how much
Speaker 1: you've did you come across the plateau experience in your life?
Speaker 1: Tell us about it. Towards the last couple of years
Speaker 1: of his life, when he was facing his own mortality,
Speaker 1: he realized his life was not so full of these
Speaker 1: peak experiences, these these one off momentous feelings of ecstasy,
Speaker 1: but something more measured and sustainable throughout the day, where
Speaker 1: he would see the miraculous in the every day. He said,
Speaker 1: it's like lounging in heaven, not getting so excited about it.
Speaker 1: I call this spying on the divine. That's beautiful. I
Speaker 1: go out and I actually now have three segments a week,
Speaker 1: about three hours each time, three to four five hours.
Speaker 1: You know, living in nature here where you know a
Speaker 1: lot of people don't know that the Baja Peninsula that
Speaker 1: starts at San Diego goes all the way down to
Speaker 1: Combost and Lucas. We have actually more coastline than California
Speaker 1: plus Florida combined, or actually we have, I'm sorry, we
Speaker 1: have just under what Florida in California have combined. We
Speaker 1: have almost no people on the beaches. So I love
Speaker 1: going to for a drive in the desert, or go
Speaker 1: to a beach, or go to a little tropical forest
Speaker 1: here and then just spend an hour or two or
Speaker 1: three just observing. Sometimes I'll take a picture, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and and post on Instagram, but rarely I'm just doing
Speaker 1: it for the sake of observing, because that's spying on
Speaker 1: the divine. That sense of being at one with you know,
Speaker 1: is is It's like being in cathedral. It's like being
Speaker 1: in you know, in church. Absolutely I'm getting I'm getting
Speaker 1: chills as as you talk about this. And I love
Speaker 1: that phrase. Spying on the Divine's beautiful and Matt Maslow
Speaker 1: would would would would love it, I think. So. Think
Speaker 1: about the pyramids interesting because I never actually found him
Speaker 1: and draw it. He never drew a pyramid. Yes, and
Speaker 1: uh and with you if you trace back it is
Speaker 1: as some researchers have in the business world to how
Speaker 1: did how did who created the pyramid? It looks like
Speaker 1: one of the earliest pictures was of a step ladder
Speaker 1: with like the man at the top with a flagpole.
Speaker 1: As self realized, yeah, you know, it's interesting. It's it's
Speaker 1: part of those for those of us who are like
Speaker 1: maslow Vians, and we should have like an annual conference. Well,
Speaker 1: we totally should, almost like UFO people, because people are
Speaker 1: like like Maslow is a complete religion to them. I've
Speaker 1: read a lot of different articles about this, and of
Speaker 1: course I never met him because he died when I
Speaker 1: was ten years old. But I what is clear to
Speaker 1: me is that he did see the way that the
Speaker 1: pyramid is drawn. Now was is written, it's it looks
Speaker 1: like it's quite literal that you have to actually finish
Speaker 1: a level before you go to the next level. And
Speaker 1: when he was very clear is that once a person
Speaker 1: hits fifty sixty seventy percent of that first level, this
Speaker 1: new need pops up at the next level, and then
Speaker 1: another one pops up. But what he hasn't written, he
Speaker 1: didn't write a lot about the following thing though, that
Speaker 1: I think is really interesting is you know, if you're
Speaker 1: a monk and you live in the Himalayas, and and
Speaker 1: you your life is basically getting your basic needs met,
Speaker 1: but you're you know, you're just going straight to the
Speaker 1: top of that pyramid. I think you can absolutely transcend
Speaker 1: some of the middle levels. And he didn't talk a
Speaker 1: ton about that in my from my experience, or didn't
Speaker 1: he didn't write a lot about that, but I do
Speaker 1: think the idea that there's some literal you know, you
Speaker 1: have to meet one hundred percent and then the next
Speaker 1: level is silly, and I don't he never said anything
Speaker 1: about that, and you're right that he never even had
Speaker 1: an actual pyramid. Yeah, I'm glad that we can. We
Speaker 1: can nerd out at this level of specificity. There's an
Speaker 1: unpublished a book of Maso's unpublished essays. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you came across that in your research, where he
Speaker 1: has an article in there, an essay that's never been
Speaker 1: punished called can Monks Ever Self Actualize? Where he writes
Speaker 1: his thoughts on that, And I think it comes to
Speaker 1: the conclusion if I remember correctly, and I can, I
Speaker 1: can try to find it and share it with you.
Speaker 1: But I think it comes to the conclusion that they
Speaker 1: can't be that if you're isolated, if you isolate yourself
Speaker 1: from the from the world, and you don't have that
Speaker 1: connection and it's all internal in your head, then you
Speaker 1: cannot become fully human. I remember reading that. I was like, Damn,
Speaker 1: you're kind of like hating on monks a bit there, Maslow,
Speaker 1: But I thought it was a very interesting essay. I
Speaker 1: really appreciate your time. I wanted to just end our
Speaker 1: chat today with a really funny video and an elucidating
Speaker 1: video at the same time, where you talk about some
Speaker 1: existential questions to ask yourself during a downturn. I thought
Speaker 1: this would be a great place to end because it
Speaker 1: can really help people during this time. And I also
Speaker 1: love this machine. I want to know where you can
Speaker 1: get this machine where you can balance yourself. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't remember the exact five questions I
Speaker 1: asked there, but I think I'll give you two or three.
Speaker 1: It's an inversion machine that allows you to turn upside
Speaker 1: down and I do it every morning, and it's not
Speaker 1: just good for your back, but it's actually everything in
Speaker 1: your body sort of gets used to the idea of
Speaker 1: like being on the other side. What I think we
Speaker 1: need to ask ourselves in a crazy time like this
Speaker 1: is some profound questions, like Wow, if I were to
Speaker 1: live just five more years, how do I want to
Speaker 1: spend those five years. I'm not a big fan of
Speaker 1: saying just a month, because they you know, most of
Speaker 1: us are not going to live just another month. The
Speaker 1: five years is a provocative number because it allows you
Speaker 1: to actually be productive and focus some of your time
Speaker 1: on work. A lot of people it's just a month,
Speaker 1: they just said I would never work again. But that's
Speaker 1: not necessarily a solution, but creating a little bit of
Speaker 1: this same urgency about what is important to you and
Speaker 1: getting clear, and that's really important. One of the other
Speaker 1: questions I like to ask myself, and that we've really
Speaker 1: taught here at MEA is ask yourself what you know
Speaker 1: now that you wish you'd known ten years ago. And
Speaker 1: there's a lot of things like I wish i'd learned
Speaker 1: Spanish ten years ago, I'm now learning it now. I
Speaker 1: wish i'd learned to serve ten years ago, I'm now
Speaker 1: learning it now. So then ask yourself the question, based
Speaker 1: upon that sort of foundation, what is it that ten
Speaker 1: years from now you wish you'd learn now it would
Speaker 1: serve you ten years from now. And that's a really
Speaker 1: great way of trying to help you understand what are
Speaker 1: the paths toward learning things that are going to serve
Speaker 1: you in the future that you might put off now,
Speaker 1: but that actually by learning them now, are going to
Speaker 1: actually accelerate your process. Like I don't want to learn
Speaker 1: how to serve at sixty nine years old. I'm fifty nine.
Speaker 1: I don't want to learn Spanish at sixty nine. I
Speaker 1: want fifty nine. What else could you how else could
Speaker 1: you apply that? So people are welcome to actually see
Speaker 1: my videos and my blog posts at wisdom will and yeah,
Speaker 1: because I think everybody nurturing yourself with a little piece
Speaker 1: of wisdom every morning is not a bad way to
Speaker 1: cultivating and harvesting your own wisdom. I agree. And then
Speaker 1: I love this one. Can can you write an obituary?
Speaker 1: You can live with? What's your legacy? Dude? In two
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty characters, So it's concise and even tweetable,
Speaker 1: and I believe that at that point in this video
Speaker 1: of bird tweets Yes, wow, I'm very impressed. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: very weird that it just happened, like you know, serendipity.
Speaker 1: But yeah, being you know, David Books has written a
Speaker 1: lot about eulogy and the values of eulogy, the values
Speaker 1: of resume and virtues, and you know, I think more
Speaker 1: and more of us need to be asking the question
Speaker 1: of what we want said at our eulogy. I love it, well, Chip,
Speaker 1: I really appreciate talk me today and think what you're
Speaker 1: putting out there in the world is so beautiful and important,
Speaker 1: and it's great to have a kindred spirit that we
Speaker 1: can we can bond over our nerdy love from Maslow Well, Scott,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna spend more time together. We're gonna
Speaker 1: figure that out. How we're gonna get you down here
Speaker 1: to the academy. Maybe have you write a blog post
Speaker 1: on Wisdom well or have me do a Q and
Speaker 1: A with me. And and I'm excited to read your book.
Speaker 1: I haven't gotten a chance to read it yet because
Speaker 1: it's actually sitting for me, sitting in San Francisco for me,
Speaker 1: so so to be continued. All right, thank you, thanks
Speaker 1: for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to react in some way to something you heard,
Speaker 1: I encourage you to join in on the discussion at
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