 I have the wonderful honor today to have a discussion, a purposeful dialogue with a wonderful author and I hope most of you already know who he is, author John P. Strelicki. I've read a lot of his books and I just want to tell you a little bit about him before we jump into this purposeful discussion and exchange, this dialogue. Also, John, just so you know, if you have any questions during our discussion, please feel free to ask me if you need to have a drink. I want you to feel relaxed at home. I already feel like we're connected and good friends and have a lot in common and many similarities. So, you are on the bestsellers list. In Germany, things have really exploded. Millions of books and I've heard something like 23 seconds every 23 seconds in the German region. Speaking Dach regions, there's a book of yours sold. You were 700 weeks on the bestseller list, 200 weeks in the number one spot. You've sold, you know, 4 million copies of the Y cafe. It's been translated in something like 40 different languages. It's on every continent. So, I mean, the list, I could just go on and on of your success and I congratulate you for that success. I know why. I can definitely tell why that is. You have a management degree from Kellogg's Graduate School of Management and you are a management consultant for a few years and have many wonderful things. Here in Germany, you were on a stage right after Obama, the world, exactly what it is called the World Leadership Summit last year, 2019, 15,000 people on stage. I mean, unbelievable. You see this big auditorium and that. So, wow, that's an honor and the Germans absolutely love you. But you are a hard act to follow because you have a great message and you inspire people. So, I'm very honored to have you here and I'd like to welcome you to our little discussion and I'm so honored to be able to partake in this. Thank you. Thanks. I'm glad we have a chance to sit down and talk. I look forward to when we can do this actually sitting next to each other. But in the interim, this is a good substitute. So, thanks for taking the time. Thank you so much. Did I leave anything out in my introduction of you that you would like to add that you feel that's important for people to know about you? You know, you hit a ton of the highlights as it relates to the books and I certainly am grateful for that. I'm humbled always and honored at the way in which the books have been received. I would say the other thing just to sort of put things in perspective about who I am is I'm also a guy who is backpacked twice around the world. And when I'm doing the things that I love to do, there's a variety of them. But one of the most important things to me is throwing on a backpack and heading off to a place that I don't know in a region of the world that I'm just intrigued to learn more about. To meet people who exist in a culture that I'm fascinated by. And then I immerse myself in that experience trying to be as absolutely local as possible when I backpack around the world. My buddy and I always laugh if we're paying more than $30 a night for hotel room, it's too much. And so just as much as I love all these aspects that you've talked about, I think it's important for context to people understand that there's this whole other side of me as well. And really, it was my first experience of taking a year backpacking around the world that is what inspired me to write the first book. And so that always will hold a very deep place in my heart, this idea of just getting out there and seeing the world and all that that brings to our lives. That's wonderful. Thanks for sharing. I know you're an adventurous. You are very big in sports and like the outdoors and like traveling. You've been around the world numerous times and done fabulous things. There's something with Africa though, right? Is there a particular romance or something with Africa that you would like to maybe let us know what it is or what we're missing out on for those of us who haven't been there? So I had dreamed of seeing Africa and experiencing Africa since I was a very little boy. I had read every one of the Edgar Royce Burroughs Tarzan series books, which is a huge series of books. And I don't know what it was when I was a child that captured my interest. I love animals. And so I suppose there was an element of the opportunity to actually see an elephant in the wild or a lion in the wild was something that I just couldn't even quite wrap my head around as a child. But I thought that would be amazing. And so yeah, as part of the first adventure of backpacking around the world, my wife and I backpacked through South Africa and spent three months just really getting to know the country and the culture and the people and seeing the animals and the experiences. And it was absolutely life changing. I've since learned some really cool stuff, which is maybe why we have this pole to go to Africa. I know that so many of the discoveries in terms of ancient hominids were tied to Africa. And so I always had the perception like, oh, well maybe that was sort of the birthplace of the human experience, right? Six, seven million years ago. But there's something actually much more recent, which is about 70,000 years ago, there was a major volcanic explosion in the South Pacific. And they feel that the human race went down to somewhere around 5,000 people, somewhere between two and 5,000 people. And that the best of the best, the brightest of the brightest, the strongest, the strongest, the most empathic of the most empathic all migrated to try and find a safe zone. And they feel that the safe zone ended up being somewhere in Africa. And so really from that perspective, we all, if it's true, in DNA evidence suggests that it is true. If it's true, then we actually have ties to Africa that are much more recent than the 7 million years that the human race actually re expanded back out about 70,000 years ago from Africa. Because it's really strange when you go there, you have this, at least for me, and I know many other people talk about this too, there's this feeling that you're home, which feels odd when you're in a place that you've never been to before, but maybe it is because we do have this deep, deep connection that's not that ancient going back to Africa. So, and I have to say that if you are a lover of animals and a lover of cool cultures and nature and wildlife, Africa is just a place like no other out to Africa, Alaska are like so high on my list of just amazing nature experiences. That's fabulous. I'm so glad to hear that. That's beautiful. Thanks for sharing that. You probably know as well that I speak a lot about the hominids and the hominids of our close, not too distant past. And as a matter of fact, in November of 2018, they discovered a new hominid in the Philippines, in a cave in the Philippines, and so there were seven close relatives to us, you know, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalus, Homo africans, and now there's one that they discovered in 2018, November out of the Philippines. But where are they? They're our closest friends and relatives or, you know, cousins, I so to say. And we're on the same branch of the tree as them. And where are they? Where did they go? And so I like that connection, not only to understand that we're not the only Homo sapiens or the Homo tribe hominids that are on this planet or were on this planet, but that they just discovered more. And there's probably others that we don't know of. And that there's some deep ties to Africa that we just don't know about. I really love Africa as well. I do a lot of different projects there. I mean, you can see some. And so I felt that connection, a similarity with you that you're not only a world traveler and an adventurer and that life's a safari and an adventure that I really am so glad that we can talk about some of these moments, aha moments, but also moments in your life that kind of maybe influenced you or had given you the opportunity to see the world differently. How many? One of the things I love about that mark is that I'd be interesting to hear your perspective on this as well. I think one of the great things about traveling is it just opens your mind in so many different ways. And one of the very first things I remember happening. So when I was about 28 years old, I was graduating from grad school. And I had a new job lined up that was going to start about four months later. And so I took the summer off. And prior to that, I literally had been working every single second of my life. I was trying to make it as a professional athlete. I was doing my MBA at night. I was working full time. So my life was just everything was scheduled for years prior to that. And so I took two trips. One was to Italy and one was to Costa Rica where I spent a month. And I remember going to Italy. And it was the first time I'd ever traveled to Europe. And the two friends that I was traveling with had some friends in Milan who let us stay with them. And so I got into a shower in Italy. And in the States, you get into the shower and it's a massive experience. It's a giant tub. But I get to Italy and I get in the shower. I can't even turn around. This thing is so freaking tiny. And there's this device at the top of the shower head that I have to turn on to get hot water. And I know for people who are very, very worldly and traveled, etc., that this sounds probably foolish. But that was such an aha experience for me that, oh my gosh, not everybody walks into the shower and can extend their arms as far as they can extend them. And wow, you have to get into a shower in a very modern country, a very advanced society, and you have to turn on the little electric clicker and you have to wait until it warms up. So I think one of the great things about travel is learning that the way you do it is not necessarily the way that everybody else does it. And it applies to everything, the way you think about money, the way you think about generosity, the way you think about caring for your fellow human being. As you travel the world, you realize that there are all kinds of different perspectives and ways of doing things. Some are better than what you've learned your whole life. Some are worse. And so I love travel because it opens up the possibility of expanding my mind. And in that mind expansion, I have the chance to grow and say, well, wait, why do I do these things the way that I do them? Because clearly these people don't, and it's working out just fine for them. And I think that's one of my great wishes. If someone asks me, you know, what would you highly recommend to someone who's 17, 18, I would say take a year and go backpack around the world because you're going to come back and you're going to look at your life completely differently. And probably every bit is equally important. You're going to look at the rest of the world differently. And it's very hard to have an us versus them perspective in life when you've actually spent time with the them. And that applies whether it's people of a different ethnicity, people of a different culture, people of a different geography. Because what you, the other thing you realize when you travel so much around the world is I'm sure you know, just, you know, parents care about raising their kids and giving them love and giving them opportunities. No matter where you go around the world, you see these commonalities that are so much bigger than the small differences that sort of become these reasons for why we should dislike each other. Exactly. Yeah. Thank you so much. That's very interesting. And that brings up two questions that I have. One, do you feel like you're a global citizen? Yeah. And what do you understand by being a global citizen if you have that feeling? And then two, we're really, even though we have these cultural differences and these kind of places we live and languages we speak, if you take the even more cosmic perspective or the earth view perspective, we're all on the same boat, the same planet, you know? Yeah. And I'd like to, that's kind of what you're touching upon as well, not only with the common about the hominids, but also seeing how other brothers and sisters, relatives, cousins of ours are living around the world, but we're all humans. We're all global citizens. Yeah. What do you have to say to that? One of the tremendous things that is transitioned for me in terms of having the opportunity to travel, choosing to go travel is exactly what you're talking about. The perspective that just because I was born in one spot geographically, so you drop out of your mother's womb and there you are and you get rights and privileges and benefits or non-benefits depending on where you drop out. And so I happened to be born in the United States and with that came basically a golden ticket passport that said the vast majority of the rest of the world will let you in to experience their culture, their people, simply because you were born on that spot on the planet. And oh, by the way, the economic system that you happen to be born into, John, also is quite strong. And so you, if you work hard, will have the opportunity to accrue a certain amount of financial wealth if you work hard and you do the appropriate things. But you know what? The other thing I realized as I travel around the world is there are people who work just as hard, but they dropped into an economic zone where they're not going to get nearly the payoff. And it's not because they're not diligent, it's not because they don't work hard, it's not because they're not smart. And so this really left me with some interesting internal dialogues. One was a little bit of, I suppose it's in the same category of like survivor's guilt, where I asked myself, well, why did I get this? You know, I remember being in Cambodia, I was there with my wife and my little daughter, my daughter was four and a half. We took her for a year when she was four and a half to go backpack around the world because I wanted her to really see what the world was and to understand that she was part of something bigger. And I remember walking into one of the temples in Anchor Wat and there was this little kid, you know, eight years old, and she's cutting up pineapples at like lightning pace. And she's eight years old, you know, with a machete blade, you know, that's super sharp. And I thought, my God, like this kid would be CEO of Ford Motor Company or IBM or Facebook, right? If she had the same opportunities. And so I feel a tremendous responsibility to live my life as authentically as possible, to do everything that I can possibly do to live an extraordinary life as I define it for myself. Because I've been given this gift and I think what a travesty would be if I was given this gift and didn't use it. So that's part of it. But I also feel equally important is that this this gift that I have comes with a responsibility because just because I got the gift, I didn't do anything special to get the gift. I literally just dropped out of the womb. I didn't contribute anything. I didn't add any value at that point, nothing. And so I feel a tremendous responsibility as a citizen of the world to make sure that that kid in Cambodia has the same chance. And you know, the child in Africa who's born into a township and whose parents have died of AIDS, and I was being raised by a community center in many cases, that they have the same chance because I didn't do anything to get this. And I think that's horribly unfair. If I don't, at least on some level, acknowledge that and do my part to help create that same opportunity for somebody else. And so yeah, I realized, and the other thing is I'm a big fan of history. And the more I study history, the more you realize like the borders are completely made up. I mean, 300 years ago in the United States, I mean, the Native Americans actually owned it. Thank you very much. And and you know, you can go to Europe and redraw the borders certainly less than 300 years ago, the Middle East lesson. So yeah, I think much bigger reality is that we're just all hominids walking the planet and the little lines, the imaginary lines, like those are made up. So we're really part of something bigger. And I love what you said about being on the planet, because one of my favorite things to do is when I'm in the midst of my own personal pity parties or thinking my issues are so critical, I go out at night and I just look up. And I did the math one time because I'm a little geeky in that regard. And so what you can see on a very crystal clear night, like if you're in the in a place where there's complete darkness and you can really see the stars like Namibia at night is just some of the most spectacular star viewing I have ever seen. And on a night like that, when it looks like there are just millions of stars up there, that what the naked eye can actually perceive is about 3000 stars. And to put that in perspective, if I remember the math right, that's like 0.0000005% of what is actually in our galaxy. And there's 150 more billion galaxies beyond, I mean, that is just like how do you even begin to comprehend that mentally? And so yeah, I think to myself, wow, we're on this one little planet, like maybe we could like team up together and do a better job. Exactly. That's so fabulous. You know, that's Carl Sagan's pale blue dot. That's where we're the one of the only mammals that sleeps on his back to gaze up into the stars to gaze out somewhere else because we feel secure enough to do that. There's a lot to that knowing of our smallness and also our connectedness to this planet. I say the evolution that we're on is this homo symbios that we're part of the symbiotic earth that we really realize how what an integral part of this earth that we play and we need to be caring about people in Cambodia and in Africa and everywhere around the world because they're part of our family and if they do well because of where they were dropped out of the womb at because something that they didn't choose to be born in a certain culture or religion or language place on this earth with different rights or abilities because of where they were born that we can kind of level the plane field make it a quality for all and make sure that everybody's getting what they need and that's what I mean you really have a strong message in all of your books that I kind of I relate it to and that's why I mentioned the similarities that we have is I think we both started working when we're very young age and work really born into a lot of wealth and success and that we you know which I live in Germany which is very unheard of that in Germany you would be working at you know 10 11 12 years of age or doing things because of the situation you were born in or the type of family you grew up in which also gives you a different perspective even though you weren't born in in India or Africa or somewhere you know I really I like how you know you you also touched upon big history how important it is to know the big history because it gives us that cosmic perspective of war of places and how we integrate with those other fellow human beings and that and so that really transitions me over to this this next point is are those similarities are the early beginning of how that start was there a moment where you would say you were struck by lightning or a change your life or was it a gradual thing over time that occurred or this the the lights went up or things became clearer for you that led to this yeah so there was there are definitely a combination of those two so there's been numerous defining aha moments one of the most profound was when I was as I said when I was 28 I was I was in this this unbelievable rat race of every minute being scheduled I wasn't training I was studying if I wasn't studying I was working I wasn't training I was in a competition you know so there was a plan for everything and everything was on a specific schedule and then I went down to Costa Rica and this is you know 20 some more than 20 years ago gosh I'm getting older yeah 20 some years ago and this was the first time I'd ever been down to Central America and when you're in Costa Rica it's a totally different pace and people would look at that time especially people looked at that type of pace and look what are you doing you know why are you doing and not in a judgmental way but really out of a state of huh that's different and so here I was backpacking through Costa Rica with a buddy of mine and the infrastructure was horrible at that time the roads were just abysmal oh my god to get from point A to point B the potholes and so after three weeks on the road or so with him I was sitting on a beach this beautiful beautiful beach we had spent the day body surfing you could rent a boogie board or a surfboard for like five bucks for the day and we'd eaten pancakes there was this little three walls building no roof that this woman was making pancakes a giant pancake for a dollar and it had just been a day of spectacular nirvana just hanging out with my body surfing all day and we were sitting there watching the sunset and I remember sitting on it literally sitting on this log and watching as the sky changed and there was a spectacular sunset and in those particular spot we were right just has these big nice waves it's just very relaxing and calming and I remember thinking to myself in that moment like this has probably been going on for millions if not billions of years and this is going to go on for another millions if not billions of years after I am gone and so if all the things I thought were so important and it's not going to matter whether I do myself or not do myself this is still going to be going on these waves are going to be crashing on this beach and so what that brought to my mind was if all the things I thought were so critically important aren't then what actually is important and this inspired me to ask the question which has been the profound question that I talk about in the first book I wrote called the cafe on the edge of the world and the question is why am I here and I suppose if you've been on that path for a long time you hear someone say then you're like well of course someone should ask themselves that question but it had never dawned on me mark I just thought you just I don't know you just do stuff you work hard I don't know it never dawned on me to ask the question why am I here why why did I get this gift of life why statistically am I going to get 28,900 days on the planet and therefore what do I want to do with my time while I'm here this awareness that I can actually be the master of my own destiny and so this was an incredibly defining moment for me to ask that question why am I here and I would love to say that from that moment on everything changed I totally had this sense of self-awareness but quite the contrary I remember coming back to the airport after my experience writing in my journal never forget that this exists this whole other world and then I promptly left back into corporate America and forgot for five more years but I finally had a revelation and went back out and saw the world and that's when it all sort of re-clicked and connected and that's what led to the books so that brings up the perfect point to a question so we get this aha moment we finally ask ourselves the question we kind of start to put things in a perspective and then we go right back to life we had before right it's like right oh grout and you cry maybe it's a deep emotional moment or even weeks but then you go right back to what you were doing before and it almost you almost forget it so the situation we're in now and you've touched upon a couple things that could be related to that and I don't like to to really discuss it too much except for the positives you and I many of the other leaders that we know that we've been living and working and functioning in the future for a long time because we've asked the why we've discovered and we didn't go back you even though you did go back we eventually made the curve and didn't go back and are on a different path and so we're now we're prepared so that brings me to why are you here how did you get here how how how was this time now for you are you still working and functioning and what do you want to have to say about that but a question I always ask is wtf what's the future yeah yeah the burning question I think one of the wonderful things that has come out of so first of all yeah my life really hasn't changed that much in terms of what's going on because I've been a nomadic traveler for quite a while now I'd say for about 20 years and you know one of the great joys of doing my backpacking trips when I was younger I say that I'm always so grateful for that was that I learned that I could exist with nothing more than what could fit in my pack and the rest of it had to be up here in my enjoyment of the day but in terms of physical possessions the only thing I had was what could fit in my backpack and really that's about five days worth of clothing a pair of hiking boots and some accessories is really not that much and one of the wonderful takeaways from that was that I really didn't need much to be happy quite the contrary what I needed to be happy was to be out there doing the things that made me feel fulfilled and that answer is going to be different for everybody for some people it might be literally working in the bakery that they came up with and they invented they love for somebody else who might be being in a classroom as a teacher everybody's answer is different but for me at the time it was out there seeing the world interacting with people learning about different cultures learning languages all of that stuff was what made me feel fulfilled and I didn't need a bunch of physical stuff to make that happen as a matter of fact to the contrary that was the happiest I had ever been in my life and I had the least possessions and so I'm so happy that I had that experience when I was younger in my in the late 20s early 30s because it could have been the rest of my life I didn't understand that and I then didn't have the opportunity to reap the rewards so that's one of the other things that I often recommend to younger people is to as soon as possible go get these experiences because it's going to shape you and once you learn something you have it for the rest of your life and so you know get out there and have these experiences so I think one of the benefits of what's going on now is sort of the situation has demanded that we all learn something and whether people were ready for it or not uh whether they were interested or not by default everybody's working from home and having to figure out what it's like to be a little bit more nomadic to live with less so you can't really go out chopping at the store right now and what does that mean to you how does it make you feel are you comfortable with that so I think this situation and this is interesting in the context of the the planet itself it's maybe maybe there's an essence of the planet being like I'm going to put a little halt to this massive like overkill consumerism pollution the rest of that we're just going to take a little break everybody everybody spend some time at home have a few learnings and then we'll sort of ease everybody back into the potential realities and see what you learned from the process because right now yeah a lot of people are being forced into a radically different reality and trying to adjust to it now there's always wonderful things that come out of this and one of the things that I think can come out of this is maybe everybody doesn't need to be commuting to work every day so maybe we can reduce our fuel fossil consumption and our carbon footprints because as much as people thought the idea that their employees could work at home and be be productive the reality is that very often people are far more productive in environments where they can control their own reality control their own pace if you are a parent and you love your kids it makes you feel really good to drop your kid at school and then pick your kid up from school and you really can't do that if you're forced to be at your job at 8 a.m. and then stay there until 5 p.m. so maybe one of the great things that'll happen is we'll learn that we can actually blend the work-life balance quite well without losing productivity and we actually pick up a lot for the planet because we reduce our footprints we reduce the fossil fuel consumption we reduce the congestion we actually have more time in our day like I think a lot of good things can come from this another one being the school thing I know that we and I you and I have talked about this offline so I have a daughter and as I said when she was four and a half weeks spent a year backpacking around the world at that point almost everybody else her her age was in kindergarten and so then when she came back she tried regular kindergarten for a little while loved that but then at some point decided she wanted to do homeschooling so we've done homeschooling we've done virtual schooling we've done regular school and I know that I talked to so many people around the world Germany in particular and they're like gosh we would love to do that but that's not the way our system is set up it's not actually even allowed well now it's allowed because everybody's learning remotely and so I think there could be this huge awakening that you know what for some kids sitting in a classroom is awesome like that is the best way for them to learn that is the best way for them to have the social connections but for other kids and this would totally have been me when I was a kid they can actually learn far more at a much faster rate by not sitting in the classroom all day and so that could be a fantastic takeaway from the situation that we're in and I would say the last one because you talked about the global community is this is one of those rare times mark where we're all in this together this is like that movie was that movie with Will Smith where the aliens invaded and so independence day independence day right yeah and so all of a sudden there was something bigger than our own squabbles to which drew the entire world together to see us as a global community this is it that didn't require aliens invading it actually took a microscopic virus that you actually can't even see to make all of us realize that whoa we're all in this together and so I think there is the potential to have really good stuff come out of this because it's no longer about the them right now it's about us yeah the the alien as comparison to the movie the alien is the virus it says this yeah this thing so you know we kind of in some respects it's sad that we need an alien or something else to bring us together to unify us I have another friend from Helsinki Finland Mika is his name and he I said you know how can we rally everyone on earth and break down these nations and borders and he says we need an alien you know we need an alien invasion and that that will unify us well I don't I don't think we need that I think we can do it or I believe we can rally and do it ourselves and come together we're we're not that different no matter what color or language we speak we're really not that different in your books I mean I know we kind of have touched a little bit on on some of the stories and things in your books but in your books there's a lot of lessons there's a lot of examples there's a lot of things that really could be seen as self-help but they're really all applicable to not only whether you want to live a nomadic life or whether you want to live a corporate life or whether you want to be an entrepreneur however you want to live that if you apply that you don't have that emotional experience and then go right back to the the old way business as usual the old way of living that you can actually apply those and that they work and they're more efficient and and it doesn't mean you're dumber or poorer or whatever that you learn to live more resiliently and so I think the way we live and the way you're talking about is not about minimalism or getting just scraping by it's about a different form of resilience and that's really what I take out of a lot of the lessons in your your book and it's a more efficient operating man model for not only for your life but for your business as well if you're looking from the aspect as an entrepreneur or a corporate that it's just more efficient resilient model to function under that you have that balance you talked about so I really appreciate you sharing those stories and I said the similarities as we both started working young and and your home school and your daughter and Germany that's really unheard of they're like that's neighbor you can't be working as a kid and you have to you know do a practicum when you're maybe in high school or junior high school age you can do kind of a practicum but other than that that's a you know you don't work until you're ready you go to school first and and there's some set guidelines and things and that's great but there's people in in Africa especially who uh women and girls who don't get an education they don't get a go to school they have to go harvest food and be farmers and work and haul water and do things and so that perspective of that you mentioned in the beginning of being in different locations and seeing how people live and our our our family how they live in other parts of the world is really important and I think what you touched on is is in a something you mentioned a few seconds ago is the key and that is all policies start off with good intentions I find and the thing is that it's a very hard to find a one-size-fits-all solution for anything and so what I talk about in my books is that one of the unique opportunities challenge certainly but opportunity more so as a human being is to figure out what is the one size that fits you and I think overall we tend to look for as I said solutions that apply to everyone but very very rarely I can think of almost nothing in life that works for everyone even you know medicine on an individual basis something that works for one person may not work for someone else because of their unique body chemistry or blood type or whatever and so if you extrapolate that concept out you can say again you know sitting in a classroom might work perfect for one type of child and not being allowed to work until they're 18 might be perfect and certainly that's better than having five and six year olds working in factors a hundred percent at the same time it's important to realize that you know for some kids who are really entrepreneurial it might be a good thing that when they're 10 12 14 that they have the chance to test the waters in that space a little bit because that might be the thing that really kicks their creativity in motion that might be the thing that gets them fired up about learning I remember being in school and one of the things that I always struggled with and my teachers hated me for this I always was asking them so what is the point of this like you know you're having me learn arc sign cosine tangent the rest of that how am I going to practically apply this in my life and I know that there are jobs that need that engineering in particular like you need to understand those things but it was their inability to explain back to me how what I was learning was going to be applicable to my life that I felt frustrated about and so I envision a world in which if you could allow a child and I've worked with a lot of kids over the years of all the kids and adults of all different ages to help them identify what I call that your big five for life one of the five things you most want to do see your experience during your lifetime and when you can help a child identify those five things well now you can help them understand how why this piece of academia is relevant to their life not relevant to the life path that I have told them they need to go take but relevant to the life path that they have chosen it's a whole different world at that point and it's the same for us as adults too when I know with the direction that I want to go so that I can live an extraordinary life by my own definition of extraordinary now I can start to understand my role in the global picture now I can start to understand why it's important that I am a contributor why I don't take the plastic bottle and just pitch it into the ocean I mean I love the ocean I'm constantly by the water when I have a chance and I see stuff like that and I think how can someone be that idiotic well that's just my filter but the truth is that for whatever reason they don't understand that throwing the bottle in the ocean creates the problem that it does they don't understand how their life goals their desires which might include to spend a beautiful day at the beach is not sink and sink with just pitching the bottle into the ocean and so I think the more that we have the opportunity to help young people especially identify this is the life that I want to live oh and here's how all this stuff is relevant you know here's how that makes me part of a global community that's an opportunity right there it is that's probably one of the world's biggest opportunities so and we have a lot of global grand challenges and when when we have challenges those are also the biggest opportunities to do and make a change and so I there's a question I wanted to ask a little bit later but it's a it's a relevant point so and you brought we brought it up earlier most people wait until a older age or to ask them the questions why or what is the meaning of life and that to ask these deep questions and what I've come across is many haven't asked it at all or they have asked it they get that aha moment and then they go right back to the regular life and then over time there's just like a zombie transformation or a desensitization we almost become numb to the world we gain weight we eat we watch tv we do whatever else that kind of distance us from nature and our world and then we're on a different path or we get off the path that we possibly could take with reaching children so one I'm a sustainable development goal advocate you know that and one of the sdgs the 17 sdgs is quality education good health and well-being zero hunger no poverty quality education to give youth the young children and youth the ability to read but also to discover their own big five for life their own purpose for existing is so vital honestly being totally honest when I finished high school when I graduated high school did very well and college credits and everything I was ready to go work at McDonald's I didn't know what my purpose was I didn't know I mean I traveled the world it was global citizen but I didn't I was I was lost I didn't get the tools I didn't get the knowledge and wisdom from from from that education and it's it becomes overwhelming and depressing and and so the year in spot inspirational books your message the way you speak people are not only ready now not only during this time have we kind of got this reset and I'm busy or never because people are saying hey what can we do what can we do what can we apply how can how can we do it how does it make sense to me and so my my question for you is what's the message that you would give them but I want you to answer it in the form of this question what does a world that works for everyone look like to you so I reflect back on my experiences with a combination of younger people as well as people who are in the situation you're talking about where they've worked for many years and now they're just trying to cover up the pain and so I'll try and hit both of those so I think for the youth the opportunity is to help them identify the life that they would love to live and then it's this is going to sound simplistic but I've seen it work it's simplistic because I think it is simple I think life is designed actually to be simple we make it very complex so from a very simplistic perspective if you help children identify the five things that they most want to do see your experience in life that would make them feel like they are really living an amazing life and then you match them up with someone who can demonstrate the path to that so if they want to be a filmmaker help them identify I call them their who's it's not about how do I do this it's about who who's already done this and so many times in life we try to figure it all out but in truth if we were able to just have a one hour conversation with someone it would save us literally months if not years of trial and error not recreating the will kind of thing totally constantly all the time and so and I use this example in terms of travel when someone says I'm interested in backpacking around the world I say well let's sit down for lunch because in an hour I can tell you so many of the things that are going to be tremendously useful so it's helping kids identify where they want to go in their life matching up the academic criteria that align with that because honestly if they're going to do something that is in the creative arts and the visual arts they really don't need to know our cosine and tangent I've never used it since I was a junior in high school never right and so I think aligning the intellectual inputs with their interests keeps them fired up and excited and interested in learning because the whole goal of learning should be the love of learning it's the joy like that's cool right and I think every kid has experienced that you learn of something ridiculously cool about a platypus and the fact that it's the only mammal that lays eggs except for the acne and then you see kids get so excited about something because they're interested in it and so again if you can help them identify the path they want to walk then you align their inputs academically with that and you help them understand why math is important why reading is important so the core subjects and then the external subjects and then you max them up with great mentors and who's and we live in an unprecedented era of technology to do that if you're interested in being a world traveler who's passionate about animals within seconds mark you and I could help connect a kid to a half dozen great ebooks probably 50 youtube videos from you know people throughout the last hundred years where their stories have been told or documented through documentaries or they actually have them live everybody from Jane Goodall to the you know the guy who did all the underwater stuff from France Jacques Cousteau Jacques Cousteau his story is amazing his biography is absolutely amazing we would have nothing that we have in terms of our ability to see the underwater world if it wasn't for Jacques Cousteau and a limitation he had on his physicality yeah so that's a big part of the story right understanding these biographies of these who's to know the hurdles and the challenges enabling the kids with that totally sets them up for success and what I love I didn't even think about it until you were talking about this earlier what I love about that is so imagine you've got a kid who is passionate about learning the jellyfish migration patterns right and they grew up in an area down by me so Florida coastal region but you can link them up technologically with a kid who lives in Melbourne Australia and another one who lives in Cape Town South Africa and the three of them in seconds especially now because we know this because everybody has to do it with the current situation they can get on a zoom call and they can talk about what they're learning how is it going the rest of that now all of a sudden when somebody says hey uh you know all the people in Africa they don't know this or they don't know that or all those Australians that no because I know people in those countries and I know what they're like I know them on a human to human level so imagine the chance to expand our understanding of what it's like to be a global citizen and to expand our database of knowledge because of these things and now you've got people who are passionate about what they're doing so the the growth rate in knowledge the growth rate in major breakthroughs is exponential compared to what the example you were giving which is so true which is and I have been there so trust me I'm not in any way judging this because I lived so much of my life in this space but I get in my car I drive to work I get to the job I look at the clock and I think if I could fast forward that to 530 I literally would close my eyes and do it right now and then I go home and I'm burned out because of that job and so I make my dinner I sit on the couch I have a couple of beers to dull the pain I watch some TV I go to bed and I do it all again the next day I mean how much are we learning how much are we progressing how many great discoveries come from that is our state and again I have been there I have lived that life I know how depressing that feels and so that was it for the kids but for the adults it's a really similar picture it's about identifying you know what no matter what my starting point is from this moment on here are the things that I most want to do see your experience in my lifetime all right who's living my ideal life who's got my ideal job and what was the path they took to get there what academic training did they have what major obstacles did they overcome what things that they need to learn and then I start slowly transitioning my life to more match that life that I want to live and maybe this isn't dramatically cutting the ties and go backpack around the world which is what I did and you know when I was 32 33 maybe it's a slower transition for people but you know what hey if you just transition one minute a day right so if you say to yourself mark you know what I've always wanted to learn more about kite surfing and you challenge me you say all right John so what I want you to do is I want you to find one minute of the time that you're spending doing something else today and I want you to spend that one minute on kite surfing you can watch YouTube videos you can look at a magazine whatever but at the end of the day today John you say to me I would like you to be one minute smarter about kite surfing all right I can find one minute mark the next day you say to me John can you find one minute really because now I've already figured out a way to reallocate the previous one minute at the end of this at the end of a single year a single year six and a half hours of my day has now been realigned in the direction that I want my life to go that is unbelievable progress and all it all it takes one minute yeah and I like how you break that down into not only data numbers minutes hours years you know the 28,900 uh there's there's that done a lot in your books but also in in your talks I really think that's so important because it's talking about productivity and inefficiency but also for one's life to put into perspective we hear a lot of data and numbers but we don't realize how it's uh those those steps that compound over time which is the exponential function and after you've taken 30 of those exponential steps it seems pretty linear growth but then the next thing you know you're here and we're seeing it with COVID we're seeing everything um that that is such a beautiful thing to put those those into perspective on how you can really get there and what what helps with that mark because you're so right this is what you're talking about before is why is it that we can take three steps forward and seeing we seem to be making great progress and then the next thing you know we're right back at the starting line and it's like anything in life that we're looking for reinforcements we're looking for positive reinforcement that things are going well and also it's because we don't understand the journey we don't understand the obstacles along the path but what i've learned over time is that the more of these who's that you have and the more you understand their journey the more you realize that it is not a straight shot to victory it's not that i start on day one and on day six i'm a millionaire and on day 20 i'm on the cover of time magazine it's a process and when you know the process it makes it so much easier to slog through it's it's just like you know that there's steps one through 28 and often somewhere in steps one through 28 is step 14 which is everything goes to hell you know that's the chaos day and understanding that one of the days will probably be the chaos day then when it happens you know how to deal with it so to me this totally applies to kids but it absolutely applies to adults as well as having an understanding of that process is what enables us to not fall backwards and end up back into starting line five years exactly i mean there there's a couple things that that occur in there one doing something over and over and over and over again hoping for different results is the definition of insanity so going back to something that we already know didn't work is not going to be different results the second thing is some days we will wake up or say i just don't want to get up to go work out or to go on an adventure or to read that book or to do that i'm tired i want to drink a beer and watch tv and just veg out yeah majority of your days as as a youth or an adult are steps in the right direction and you have a couple bad days the majority of those will eventually achieve that compound effect in that that place you want to be not every day is going to be great no i talk about that with the ascending life curve yeah the ascending life curve is so important i love that so yeah and so for people that aren't familiar with the idea is simply that and most people go through life and their curve is pretty similar so you've got time on the bottom of the graph and you've got satisfaction on the left axis on the vertical axis and so most people have highs and they have lows but the highs are about the same high the lows are about the same lows and then as they physically and mentally decline towards the end the highs get lower and eventually we just die and this was certainly the way that i was going through my life for for decades and what i realized is that there are always going to be highs and lows that is part of the human experience so it's never going to be again a straight shot every day is perfect 365 days of the year 24 by seven wow couldn't have been better mark like that that's just not realistic however what can happen is that the more minutes of our day of our 24 hours that are in alignment with this life that we want to live that at some point although you still have lows your lows are now higher than what used to be your highs and the example i often give for this is there was a time i was working a job i didn't love i was getting you know doing the commute showing up at the job i worked on the 11th floor of a building that had no windows if you can possibly even fathom that right so literally i would get to the building i'd go up in the elevator and then for the next nine hours i would be in the middle of the fluorescent light bulb world not a window to be found in the middle of this building and then i would go back down and in the winter time because it gets dark earlier i would go outside and there was darkness again it was like darkness to darkness and inside the rest of the time and i remember that i was very poor at that time and i remember thinking to myself i would go down to this deli and i would i would go down there and i would buy all the ingredients and then i would make my sandwich right and uh so every week i'd get all the ingredients i'd take it home and make my sandwich and bring it to work and i remember going down to that deli and thinking to myself i wish that i had enough money that i could buy a sandwich every day like that was going to be my high point at that at that moment in my life right and now a low for me is wow they'd like me to come back and speak of this event and i'm going to be really well paid for it but it would mean i'd have to get on another flight i'm already going to be on a flight that's cross-continental that month i just don't think i want to do that and and you know i hate to say no it's a good event but my low is that i have to say no to getting paid a lot of money to fly to a country that i couldn't even imagine someone was going to pay me to fly to let alone pay me to speak at when i was so much younger and this is what the ascending life curve looks like yeah and that i think is my dream for every young kid every adult is that they're transitioning in this way so that they're hot they're still have lows with their lows are now so much higher than what used to be their highs that's perfect and i i love how how you explain that it ties into something that i'd like to get your feedback on so we're we're obviously a little older we both have children and i have grandchildren so i'm the grandpa and we've been around the block for a while but yeah really what i when i was younger when you were younger there was media whether it was good bad or sci-fi star track is one media that i kind of like tricky fan i guess and it gave gave a vision and hope of the future interracial couples uh transporter hologram room uh tricorder all sorts of cool gadgets and nobody smoked on the film and everybody looked healthy and they did cool never thought about that that's so true yeah i just there was a lot of cool things we've been able because of that to be creative engineer do movie magic or somehow create something very similar to what that was like today but our media that we have today doesn't really give us that vision of what the future will look like we don't know what uh a resilient desirable future will look like we know very well what a dystopian future will look like one of doom and gloom water world and total recall and fighting over resources and one that's not very nice to live in we know that very well you know zombie apocalypse whatever it is but we don't have any any visions this vision or this hope at a young age to say you know here's that ascending curve here's how it goes here's how we can reach it but also let me give you some media something visual a story a book an example so that you can envision what it will look and feel like to actually be in the future and that's something that you as a creative and architect an engineer a designer can create for whether at first it's movie magic and eventually we do the engineering to make it happen make it real maybe you know like Elon Musk or you know whoever the inventor or super guy is who's who's who's kind of creating some of that but to even give us that feeling or vision of of something to work towards to be hopeful and optimistic towards instead of man that's we we don't even know where we're going and so that's what i read out of your books but also what i'm hearing in your stories and experiences do you have anything that kind of your thoughts or feelings in regards to that uh what what is that true do you think we need more of that do you see hope i totally see hope i think that it this goes back to the individual thing and probably this is part of the yin and yang of technology so back in the time you're talking about when we were younger there were only three channels on the entire television and you couldn't DVR it and so you had to basically watch what was on or not watch it uh there was a limit to the amount of selection we had about the inputs that we would receive and so it was a great way to keep us entertained and often educational i remember the sundays sunday nights the show about animals uh mutual of Omaha which i was glued to the tv to see that that was my only input that visually could help me understand this is what Africa looks like etc but we are so far beyond that now and so now we're much more in the situation where we as individuals and as parents this is part of our our responsibility but as individuals to identify what is that future that i want to experience and then to find this goes back to the discussion we're having earlier about finding those examples of people who have done it and so if i want to go travel around the world if i want to experience africa to experience safari then it's up to me to find someone who can help me paint that picture and if i want to be uh the next inventor of the great technology then it's up to me to find those people who have walked that path who can help me understand this is what it's like to be an entrepreneur this is what it's like to get venture funding this is what it's like to do the creative process for your invention and release it to the world so it's much less to me about finding one example that fits everybody these days and and i love that because it gives us the chance to find the examples that are relevant to us now that said i would love to see some categorization of the information to help people and so if you know imagine a world in which you had a deep passion for sustainability and so you could actually access the archive of 10 great stories of people who have marched the path of sustainability with incredible results you and i were talking offline in our previous call about farming i am deeply enthusiastic and passionate that the answers to the world hunger and world consumption issues are actually in existence already it's simply a matter of providing the resources so for example and this is what we were talking about previously when i was backpacking through uh south africa very very dry regions and yet they were growing peaches and pineapples and i couldn't understand how that was possible because peaches i had always seen grown in much more friendly climates um and so if we could identify what the key factors are that enables someone to grow products whether it's soil acidity soil makeup rainfall the rest of that and come up with this so this is sort of my 10 examples and so if i'm a farmer living somewhere where this is what i got to work with i got this type of soil i got this type of rainfall but hey holy cow like look at this i can grow this here i had no idea about that right and so sort of combined with these categories of database not a thousand examples but just 10 good examples right and here's 10 more good examples if you want to be an entrepreneur just fantastic stories something to kick start the process of finding your who's so that i as an individual whether i'm an adult or i'm a child i'm not just looking at google and like whoa i don't even know where to start so it's not that it's required criteria but it's at least a starting point for someone who's interested and i think you could probably come up with maybe 10 categories and 10 examples in each category and man oh man that would be awesome to jump start the process i've actually thought in that vein that you know i think you could put so i i'm totally about helping a kid identify what are their big five for life and therefore really focusing it on but i really think you could do a generic one that says listen if you're starting off it's such a tough spot and what you want to do is just be a millionaire like you know you want to but you want to do it in a sustainable way like you don't want to crush people you don't want to be hurting people but you want to just get yourself out of the economic situation you're in to get some breathing room i think you could probably come up with 10 degree programs that match up with the kid's interest and you could help them understand here's how you budget here's the scholarship programs that are available to you and you could get this kid launched on a rocket ship to success so that they could start to have an income stream which was relevant to living a lifestyle and then at that point when they've sort of cleared the atmosphere and they've got some breathing room then you get all right so now let's start picking what is it you really want to do in that field but this to me is the future mark this is the great opportunity that we have to create these opportunities now i will say because i think this is a critical piece of it i struggle with what to do with my own child in terms of when is the right time to start work because i did i started working when i was 12 years old doing physical labor jobs i don't necessarily recommend that but one of the things i learned from that was to have a tremendous work ethic and i don't think it functions well this system that i'm talking about when you provide all the resources but you don't help the kids understand or the adults for that matter that you got to work hard you can't just have it handed to you because then nobody learns anything all you learn is to be a constant recipient of free stuff there's nothing gratifying in that to just constantly have everything handed to you i think it's there's this great quote i can't remember who said it but one of the great opportunities in life is the chance to do work worth doing and so to me you can provide the vehicles you can give all the infrastructure but at the end of the day it's critically important to help everybody who's involved in that to understand that you got to do your part you got to work hard and there's the reason you work hard is because the payoff is you enjoy what you're doing you enjoy contributing you enjoy learning and and that's maybe a piece of the puzzle that has been missing because previously like yeah you work hard at a job you hate so what's the joy in that you know but i think if you sort of were able to combine all these pieces together like that's it that's the future that really is going to be discoveries like we have never seen discoveries before in the fields of medicine and the fields of sustainability and the fields of philanthropy discoveries in the field of how to protect our oceans in a way that we can have all the food that we want to have and yet we're not destroying the tuna population to the point where they cannot procreate anymore that's the future yep i totally agree there there's a few themes and what you're talking about one and you mentioned it earlier is um kind of this cell phone the rising billions there's been talk that we're going to have three billion people come online with smartphones in the palm of their hand that they can ask this question who is the best person at electric vehicles at solar panels at farming who's the best person at doing blockchain or ai or whatever to to get that knowledge so that this collective intelligence that we get it together and we're not repeating the same mistakes but also that we're learning differently we're finding out those people who invented the wheel or invented certain things that we want to be a professional at as well or that we find interesting to do and and then we do it so i i believe there's um that's something that i would like to have as a as a real-time update of collective intelligence i think that's something that that makes us different than all the other wonderful species on on our planet is we can pass on through videos like this through books through learning um this collective intelligence and and to our children and to other generations and leave it behind so that they're not repeating the same mistakes but also um this this golden rule to leave the world better than we found it to treat people and planet how we would like to be treated this this really true golden rule and um that's i that's why i love your books is because they give this this new form of collective intelligence or or this wisdom this great even though they're short and concise and and they're a great read and they give people hope and aspiration and also things that can be applied to their lives to to make that change and so um that kind of ties into this collective intelligence but there's a gap not everybody knows about your books not and everybody's heard about you and not everybody's heard about me um and we talked about this offline before that there's also a point in time where each of us individually um is ready to have an aha moment or to ask the question why yeah that's one reason but the other is that our systems and our civilization framework that we're currently in is not um not one where that information and that equality of knowledge is always dispersed evenly around the world depending on where we're born and so um one i'd like to know what your feelings are on that and how um you're yeah you're already pretty much been living in the future for a long time but how are you going to do you have any hopes or future aspirations to increase that more do you have any ideas or things you'd like to say on how we can kind of close that gap and bring us together as global citizens to get this information uh out to people so i think one of the big challenges i have is accepting the fact that not all people are nice and uh i think in my heart of hearts i really want to believe that all people are nice and i suppose maybe at a soul level maybe everybody is nice but i've also realized and i talk about this a bit uh a story that i wrote set in africa called life safari that maybe the way it works is that when we enter this experience we have certain challenges like why why do we exist as humans so it's going to be a long answer to your short question that's fine please uh so why do we get our 28900 days is there actually meaning behind our existence or is it just like no your parents had sex and nine months later you were born and you just live it out and then you die and that's it so this questioning this line of questioning you're asking leads us down a very interesting pathway which is is there more to life than just the 28900 days and the answer i've come to is there's one of two possible answers to this either there is so you're something before you're born then you're born you go through this human experience for some reason and then you die and you go back to being something else a spirit and energy i don't know uh or there's not but really no matter which one is true you might as well live an extraordinary life that is less fear built because if this is truly all there is and there's nothing before there's nothing after then you might as well live your life in a very special way which is to find the things that you love to do and then make you feel fulfilled and that and sometimes people get caught up in that question like well yeah but if that was the case and everyone would just be purely hedonistic but i really don't find this to be the case mark i find that the vast majority of people when you ask them what do you want to do almost always it involves helping their fellow human being in some capacity why because it makes them feel good to make a contribution to the life of another um so i think their definition of hedonism is a bit different compared to what people's perception is that when people have the choice to live the life that they want to live it's not that they go around shooting everybody else or doing destructive behavior 100 the opposite that living the life they want to live is for the most part being a very unbelievably contributing member of the global community now that said there are these people who just no they're not right and i've struggled for a long time to understand that but what i've come to realize is that i think actually my answer to how does this all work is that we are something before we're born then we have this experience so why i think we're here to learn something and the best way to learn something sometimes is by having someone be the counter projection of what we're trying to learn and the analogy that i use is if you are given a soccer ball and a goal and you ran up and down the fields it would be fun for a while and you'd be kicking goals for a while but at some point it becomes boring and so what do you do to make it more interesting well you add teammates and then you work collaboratively and then you kick a bunch of goals but at some point that gets pretty easy and boring too and so what the system creates is the opportunity to have a defender and when i kick a goal and i score because i was able to get beyond the defender now i really feel like i have accomplished something and so and it's more fun and so in life we have the defenders and i think that historically certain people have played the role of the villain so that others can play the role of the hero but i have a vision of the world in which we actually as human beings don't need to be the ones who play the role of the villain that maybe there's enough other things out there that exist in our world structure that are the villain that we could collaborate as humans to be the heroes and medicine is a perfect example of that what we're going through is a perfect example of that to me that what if we could what if we could all be teammates on this one instead of requiring one of us to be the villain so that we learn something the virus is the villain will overcome that collectively as teammates and if we start looking at the planet from that perspective who isn't that interesting isn't that a game changer that there's enough challenges that exist already we don't need to be the human challenges to be the villain and the hero we can all be the hero and let the other stuff be the challenge and i like that because i asked myself what would the world look like if we were able to find the cure for cancer you know what would the world and i don't think it's that far away actually i think with some creative thinking and looking at the world through a different lens it's there so i get excited about that kind of thing i get excited about that future and i love this this you've shared with me your perspective about living in the future and i so love that and i think to me this is what that future can look like a world in which we are inspiring people to love learning to work together maybe there will always be some humans who are the villains i don't know i hope not i hope that we can rise beyond that but if so if that's the case i learned something really powerful in the field of education by a guy and he said you do not you do not inspire people to change their behavior by telling them that they're wrong said it never works and this guy had been in education forever working with kids you know as a principal working with teachers he said you inspire people to change by building a better mousetrap and so maybe that's the other big takeaway in this regard is that if we want the world to be a cleaner place where the sea turtles have better nesting zones then i have to somehow inspire people to that not just tell them that they're wrong you you do that in your books but you do that in many different ways um where you give examples of the last the big fight for life continued dl gl uh a company that you mentioned in there that kind of yeah shows a different way to do it and the results that come out of that and and the feeling that you have i really like that i i um i think is so vital because no matter how we choose to work or to earn our wage or to live our life um the majority of us are currently uh working roughly 40 hours a week for someone else besides our family and our loved ones and the statistics the are showing that there's a higher job dissatisfaction yeah unhappiness yeah than ever before so what does that say we're actually spending the majority of our time our 28900 days with people and doing something that we don't enjoy and don't like it what a miserable way to live so um and here's the key piece of that to me so we could uh we could we could aggregate a committee right to solve this problem for everybody and we could spend years studying stuff and the rest of this to try and find the solution for everybody but this to me is one of those where this isn't about everybody i mean it's about everybody but not about everybody if that makes sense so it's about everybody in terms of trying to create something enable something which enables each individual person to get out of that rat race but it is not about finding one solution that everybody has to go do because to me at the end of the day this is where the hard work comes in this is where the personal choice comes in this is where if you want to transition your life from where it is because it's not great to where you want it to be i'm a hundred percent on board for that but if somebody says i just want you to hand this to me on a silver platter i don't think it works i really don't and so this is where if you are in the context of what you're talking about if someone watching this is really good at what they do whether it's it or human resource management or accounting work or whatever and they work in an organization that they feel is really the evil empire whatever that means for them right um it's destroying the planet it's dumping toxic chemicals somewhere the onus is on me as an individual if i'm working in that environment to take my skills and my talents and my genius and apply that in a company that's actually doing great things i can't wait for somebody else to fix it all i have to be partly responsible for fixing what i can fix and that means taking my genius and applying it in a way that has a pot the kind of positive impact i want to see because this is the vision i have for the future that i really get psyched on in terms of the workforce and you're seeing some of this take place now and dlgl is a great example of that imagine if the best and the brightest the most talented most creative hardest-working people said you know what i am not interested in applying my contributions towards organizations that are doing things that are having a negative impact on the lives of others having a negative impact on the planet i instead insist as an individual that i apply my talent skills and genius towards something that has a higher power contribution right better for the planet clean drinking water sustainable energy whatever if every one of the super talented people did that who's left to work for the the evil empire whatever that is right the basically we each have the opportunity to make that transition apply our skills our genius towards a better reality and if everybody who's super talented does that we're going to get to the better reality it's just going to happen by default who do the micromanagers have to manage if all the great people have left the company the micromanager has no one left to manage and so we each are not shackled to this situation we can make our choice we have a choice yeah we can make our choice we can um take a step where we want to go and i know i'm not saying that that's necessarily 100 easy i get that and if you got obligations as a family member you're paying the mortgage you got the car payments the rest of that but you know what it's not that hard either because great companies and great leaders and great organizations are always looking to hire the best of the best the most talented the most driven the hardest working always yeah i agree it's all it's really truly also a journey and discovery process for many people they have to be right ready they have to get to the point to to make that transition where they feel secure and stable enough to do that and self-confidence and knowing who these companies are but to me this is where technology has come so far like we were talking about how in the world would you know who these amazing companies are 30 years ago 50 years ago like that would require going to the library talking to the library and trying to get a study of like i don't know you know great companies nowadays it's easy to find who the companies are they're doing amazing things both for the people that work at those companies and in terms of the output that they're contributing to the global community it's super easy so then it comes down to just personal choice you know am i am i now i know the places that i would like to go who are the who's who can i connect to that can help me get an intro at those companies what am i going to contribute this to me is a great opportunity for young people you're coming out of college right you got this skill set you got the drive you got the hustle you're willing to work hard don't just take the first job that's offered to you like be willing to be selective in choosing the job that you're going to apply your genius in a very positive and powerful way yeah it's a it's a big choice because if you choose wrong you could be miserable you could be working for someone and you find out really quick what am i doing at the top floor of this building with no windows yeah buying and buying sandwich fixings to make my own sandwich you know and then you're like this is insanity it's crazy and so yeah but i didn't know there was i think and this is maybe where a lot of people are i didn't know there was a choice yeah i was so clueless at that point in my life that i thought this is just the way it works you this is what you do you go to the job that you hate this is what everybody does that's what i knew um what i know now is that's totally not the case and that would be my my dream for the future is that these young people who choose to align themselves with companies and projects and endeavors that actually have them excited to wake up to go to work you know money through friday and they're probably not even going to work because as we talked about at the start of our call you know maybe they're completely working from home or they're working remotely or there's a combination of the two but the lifestyle is wonderfully balanced with the contribution yep it's so possible mark i guess that's what gets me excited in this call it is so because it is so doable yeah i'm gonna move on to a couple other questions because we're getting close on time we'll take the time as it goes if you if you bear with me sure a few other things do you have a favorite book or inspiring author that you've read in the past that you'd like to say you know this that's one and kind of give us the reason why so a couple leap out of me one is uh i read i was given a book called illusions by an author named richard bach and i i read it probably every year and i find something new in that story every year it's like magic it's uh it's amazing how you can read something and then your life situation changes and you read the same text a year later and you see something you didn't see before it's a very small book but it was a great inspiration for the first book that i wrote the cafe on the edge of the world because i wanted i wanted the reader of the cafe on the edge of the world to have a similar experience afterwards is what i get when i read illusions and uh so i would recommend that and i've had the experience i've given that book away to many many people richard bach wrote it by the way richard bach and jonathan living since seagull so it's also my favorite that's wonderful oh awesome um and and i've given it away to some people and they come back to me like yeah not my thing which is fine right but uh for some people it's going to be like a profound epiphany changer um i struggled to read non-fiction because non-fiction to me just requires a lot more focus than fiction but one of the books that was profound in my way of thinking about economics was a book called how rich nation how rich nations get rich and why poor nations stay poor and i'll summarize it super quick but i highly recommend reading it because the case stories and examples and they're really good um but in essence it is if if all you are is a contributor of raw materials then you are forever going to be a slave to whatever system you are part of and an example of this in my world as an author is if all you do is create the raw material which is the story but you have no input into what happens after that then you're always going to be required to write another story to mine more raw materials and you will always be at the bottom of the economic pyramid and you really don't want to be at the bottom of the economic pyramid and really there has never been a better time for you to not be at the bottom of the economic pyramid because you can be an entrepreneur these days you can have a youtube channel you can control your digital rights so reading that book and asking yourself how does that apply to my life and whatever my contribution is is really useful and so i would highly recommend that anything if there's another one i love a book called blue ocean strategies which someone else also gave me just in terms of if you're doing something entrepreneurial and by entrepreneurial like you can even apply that to like you want to go work in another company so you want to be a member of a company but keep in mind that you're still an entrepreneur because you're choosing where to apply your genius and so that book actually would be useful even for the person who wants to work for someone else about where am i choosing to work where am i choosing to add value but i love the book because it uh it just it challenges the reader to think about doing things differently and i'm totally wired for asking myself how do i do what nobody else has ever done before in a way that nobody else has ever thought to do it thank you that's fabulous that's uh yeah great well i'll also try to put in the link for that so that people can look look for those books as well and for pure entertainment value because i just talked about three books that will sort of progress you but for pure entertainment value because i totally believe that what you said before was right you don't maintain that ascending life curve by constantly pushing to contribute like you need to take downtime whether that's riding in your kayak which is something i love to do taking a walk on the beach whatever is your thing like it's important to fill both you know put the oxygen mask on first to use the airplane example you got to keep your tank full i love nelson demille i think he is one of the most spectacular action thriller writers on the planet i love his works and so if someone is just looking for a decompressed pure entertainment amazing writer that's fabulous thank you yeah you need that balance you also need some probably create some great visuals uh as you're reading those and kind of a not a detox but a journey of discovery of a new world and which is really important we we've read a lot of the same books or i think we like a lot of the similar books i've done my homework on you and i've i i was that's why i said we've got so many similarities what's what's that i don't interrupt your question but i'm darn curious to know like what's on your short list of ones that you recommend well uh i'll tell you there's a few i mean i it's really hard for me to just pick one because i'm a reader i read a couple books a week and and i really as an entrepreneur first and foremost an activist i want to stay up to date but i also am inspired by the stories and the things that come out that keep me abreast of things there's a theme that we've talked about and it ties to a book it's called the business romantic is the book by tim liberic he's from humberg but he lived in the u.s now he lives in berlin and he wrote this book called the business romantic and it you know ties to you you spend 40 plus hours working for someone else is that time where you find it inspiring romantic wonderful beautiful is it a true business romance not anything wrong or bad but do you enjoy it is that time well spent or are you miserable and not enjoying it that's the time your most valuable time you can be spending with your daughter your wife your your family whoever your loved ones and uh and not regretting it down the road in any way so how how do you find that team that you can enjoy to work with or to be around and go to dinner with and talk with and celebrate with and when you're sick or your family's sick that you know you have a team to rely upon to to be with and you're not just playing this all by yourself so that's a good one by tim liberic but some real ones that inspired me obviously the the very first one was by richard boch illusions and jonathan living since seagull on a big uh napoleon hill fan cleaver or not thinking grow rich i love self-help books as well that's an amazing book to this day written in the 1930s or 40s right yeah cellar amazing and things and there's been some evolutions of the thoughts and applications today that are great but the top three i would say for me if i were to make a choice is the hero's journey by joseph cambell it's applicable in any story any movie any life situation any speech or presentation that's hero's journey that we all talk it's basically that diffusion of innovation the gaussian curve the bell curve that you you spoke about you know this this the s-curve the the curve of life that we all go through and how how do we make that one a journey uh that that's going in the direction we want um yeah uh and he came up with a saying uh follow your bliss right and i've lived for that forever i used to do a joseph can cambell like a circle uh and have meetings and talk about uh mythology and different things because there's a lot of mythology these stories or narratives of life of humankind and so he's a big one i'm a big fan of and uh all his books but that hero's journey is real good the other one is paul hawkins book drawdown so and he just came out with the review drawdown review just recently but it's how can we draw down global warming so it's an action plan a book of actual physical things and actions we can take to draw down global warming and um that's just a fabulous book you know it's not a bunch of talk it's not about we're hoping for charity or politics or something this is what we can do today to draw it down and uh it's a fabulous and this he's the editor of the book but there's like 200 scientists and researchers that contributed to this factual that's an absolute uh fabulous book um awesome so i was not familiar with the two of those so that's uh love that i'll be adding those to my reading list yeah they're they're absolutely wonderful books and i really um also like i mean there's so many it's hard for me to i can't i go into pauli's book the blue economy is very similar to draw down which i like as well but i'm a book worm i just absolutely love books and all all facets and i truly do love yours and i i think you know they're they're on that shelf as far as inspiring and and uh that i've given away many of them will continue to do so because i believe that if people are in the right place and ready to take that journey of discovery there's not only a way to apply what you talk about into self-help but to apply that into complete life-changing things that have aspects for your own person but for your business your your organization as an entrepreneur and my passion sustainability and environment because i believe those are uh tied together uh they're linked together they're not separate things so yeah what i do is tied to my life as a homo symbios and so uh when i read it i read it with a different classes or different lens i read it in the form of how can i apply that into principles of sustainability how i live my life as a good steward because and this is what we we've touched upon and we're not passengers on this spaceship earth and that's what you've said in multiple ways during our our discussion that we're a team member we're part of an integral part of this big big system and we also need to take the gears and drive and make sure we're good steward and uh nobody's here just for a ride and we're going to drop them off on spaceship mars or spaceship jupiter or wherever uh they're part of what happens on our planet whether they're good or bad yeah yeah so and i think a piece of that that is uh one of the big takeaways in my life uh i didn't think that when i was younger and and i suppose this is a comment that i'll make especially relevant to younger people but it can certainly apply to anyone but i didn't think i was very important i didn't think my contribution was relevant i didn't think that i had much to add and my message to everyone who's who's listening to this or watching to this is that's so wrong that everybody as you just said has something to add everybody has something to contribute and it's about finding your your niche finding the place where you're going to make that contribution and uh so everything we've talked about sort of in circles around that i just want to hit that one key point is if you're out there and you're thinking to yourself well yeah easy for for you to say you know you got a book on the best stylist and you know well it was only when i finally realized that i had to i had to start believing in myself that maybe there was something that i had to contribute and to acknowledge that fact that i was able to get to where i've got to and so i want someone who's out there questioning their own self-worth to realize no you you've absolutely got something to contribute absolutely you sure do and in many many ways and so do so does many other people and i think they'll find their big five for life and inspiration through things you talk about i wanted to circle back to africa one last time because you have a lot of examples for for africa and inspiration i have several projects going on there as well all over and it's dear to me as well just did the beginning of this year a tour with the the princess aabsa absa digma from bakina faso and uh was a world economic forum and did a tour before and done projects with her and many other things um why is africa an inspiration to you and also oprah and maybe is it a tie that something you've also touched upon with um uh noble laureate there as well or this educating the youth of people about the big five for life is that have anything to do with africa the so the concept of the big five for life is based on an experience i had in africa and so when you're in africa and you're on safari to see the animals everyone talks about the these five specific animals and people gauge the success of their safari experience based on how many of these five they see and that was the major aha epiphany i had when i came back from my travels around the world and where this concept came from that so if i see three of the african big five i would rate my safari as a c if i see four it's maybe a b and if i see all five of the african big five it's an a plus nirvana exactly what i came to africa for type experience and that was my my wonderful epiphany that well what if we were identify our own big five for life so it's not about the african big five animals but our own big five for life and uh and then we could evaluate our own existence is it going to be a c a b or an a plus plus and so that's where it comes from and i suppose i suppose there's an element of that's why i love africa is because i had such a major epiphany that has transformed my life and i've you know i've had the great experience of seeing it transform the lives of other people kids adults even people as old as in their late 70s early 80s who've gone through the experience of even at that stage of life figuring out what are their big five for life and how do they want to adjust the minutes of their day to be in alignment with that and so i i'm sure for the rest of eternity i will hold that sweet spot in my heart for africa and what that experience brought to me um i don't i don't know why else it's there i just yeah it is it's a magical experience to spend time in africa and uh to see the animals and experience the people and to see i mean that the the natural offerings of africa are truly spectacular also you know i mean just the the coastlines and everything about it is is special so if great i always i always say to a live audience you know if if any of you here has the calling to go find a way to make it happen because you you won't be disappointed i've never met a person who said i went and didn't use the expression it changed my life like almost everybody says that exact words it changed my life in some capacity do you have a feeling that um africa the future of africa is going to be a lot different than we we see it from the u n or the current position today you know i think the challenge that we as humanity face is that many of the people who would be the best leaders do not get the chance to be the leaders because they don't have the power hungry drive to crush everybody underneath them the best example of leadership ever in africa in my opinion is nelson mandela and mandela suffered for decades in prison to arrive at a place where he had this unbelievable state of empathy for all people i mean it was almost like saint like in the way that he was able to look at people who had oppressed him and oppressed some of the things he believed into arrive at a place where he was able to see everyone's role in the story for what it was and say we can work collectively towards this in a better and more positive way how many mandela's how many mother chorises how many gandhis do you get in a lifetime i don't know i just don't know and and the infrastructure needs to exist where that type of person is allowed to to foster and grow and develop and do we as a world society create those opportunities for that type of personality at a governmental level i don't know not sure so it can happen in extreme circumstances which is what happened in south africa coming out of apartheid but i don't know if it exists otherwise mark i really wish i could say what certainty that it did but it just seems like to get to the top it's about the blood thirsty cry i don't know i'm not sure you know but i but i still go back to i'm always a person of hope i i firmly believe that again maybe it's maybe so maybe it's this uh maybe if the best and the brightest and the most talented can apply their skill sets in a direction and with leaders that they firmly believe in then maybe that potentially can become the new norm um i don't know one of my personal heroes from africa was one gary mattai who was the leader of the greenbelt movement and uh i was asked to write a forward for a book that's a biography about her life and so i was rereading her story i don't know it's just kind of depressing it's like you have you have someone in charge who is just crushing the population doing all the things wrong and you have this surge of of of the society that says we want it to be different but then when it comes down to picking a candidate who they collectively agree will be the one to make a difference at that point it's like the five top people end up all about themselves it becomes again that ego kicks in and then nobody can agree and then it doesn't work so i don't know wow it requires such a massive collective letting go of egos and belief in the common good i don't know man it's like what we were talking about so what has done that recently this virus has done this recently finally stopped fighting each other and we work towards a collective community good it's sad that it requires something like that but that's sort of the vision i guess is can we get beyond that without requiring the major obstacle i hope so i really do but i don't know well thank you for that it's i'll tell you what mark i i'm willing to lens part of my minutes on the planet towards that and i think a lot of other people are too so so that gives me hope i i see you as a one global citizen in many ways you have the power to influence people's ability to find big five for life without even knowing it just by having a book out there that can inspire people and that you that you have some visions there and i see not only africa but i see the entire world coming together in a much different way in the future i have a very i've been living in the future for a long time and so that's why i'm pretty prepared for where we're at today and and can give people inspiration hope because some of the things i do with the sdgs and and other things are based on models through back casting of what does that future look like and what will it look and feel like when we reach it and um so i have a lot of hope and optimism that we we can do it we will do it we should do it and what it will look and feel like when we get there regardless of the pandemic and the situation we're in um right now um some it's not really personal but we're feeling this civilization framework discomfort right now on a global level the the pandemic but also that our current civilization frameworks are not working for us anymore that economies are not working for us anymore and governments and whether it's the putans the bolsyn arrows or the trumps or whoever it's not working for us anymore on a global level but we have to keep that economy afloat or those old system afloat long enough till we can transition to something else and this has given us a wonderful time to take a pause to do a reset to use this time to rally around our loved ones to think about what we need to do to do that reset to to not go back to business as usual or the life before the pandemic but the one that's this much more resilient desirable future and i believe that you provide these tools uh in your books and in our conversation of hope and inspiration and what people can do on an individual basis to make that transition it's not hard it's not painful it is work and we can do it and it'll be good or bad days um but uh if we stick to it we can definitely do it um this is where i'll kind of end but i want i want you to try to put the positive spin on it at the end here is well as big historians we have seen that uh civilization frameworks in the past um no longer exist today not only the way we started out this conversation that hominids eight of them aren't here anymore but homo sapien is well we have not too distant civilizations mesopotamia aztecs mias inkas roman empire greek empire you know 12 plus huge civilizations that were advanced and had infrastructures they're not here anymore all that is left is ruins and we go to those ruins and we take selfies and and that's not really what i do when i go on vacation i don't think you do it either um but but as a big historian we say what what are we seeing here with these ruins what are we learning about in school when we learn about history and civilizations they're not here anymore well why aren't they here anymore all but two are not here anymore because an environmental um ecological collapse and and two of them aren't here because of uh some kind of a conflict or other kind of uh uh issue for a collapse so right now we've got a pandemic could it be a collapse could be at a civilization framework i don't know but i believe we have the tools and just because we have technologies aren't going to save us from a collapse but i believe that we really have the wherewithal to come together as global citizens and to move forward to this much greater resilient desirable future so that in the future we don't have to worry about our resources we don't have to worry if we have enough toilet paper we don't have to worry if we have enough food that we have a framework that works for everyone and that's why i asked you the question what does a world that works for everyone look like for you because that's really we need something that works for everyone as long as there's poverty inequality bad education and this collective consciousness is not out there if people don't know about your books or previous mistakes that's not a desirable future and so i leave it to you to kind of leave your final words and remarks on on how you feel about that and how our positioning is moving forward and what your suggestions are maybe as well sure yeah so uh a number of things come to mind and so i'll i'll try and be brief you don't have to be brief you got time all right i think giving everybody a shot right i think everybody deserves a shot and by that what i mean is yeah it would be awesome if the things we talked about were able to be implemented and successfully implemented so that the kid is is worked with so that they can figure out their big five for life examples role models collectively they plus someone who's a mentor type person helps them figure these things out that's their shot now it's up to them so to create an environment where people are given a shot so that's what applies to kids and i think you'd apply to adults as well if the person decides not to take the shot that's their call you know i mean i don't think anyone would want to be forced to do something in life and so if you give someone an opportunity and they say i'm not interested i totally respect that that's maybe not their path it's maybe not the right time it's maybe not the right circumstances but i do think everybody deserves to get a shot and so if we can create a situation where people are given their shot that would be awesome then it's up to the individual to do the steps to do the hard work to make a come a reality i think and i love these types of conversations because just when i'm i'm thinking i don't see the answer like i'll hear you say something i'm like oh wait a minute like we can do that and so when i was giving you my answer in terms of africa and what i see for the future of africa and just to be to be clear i think the the context in which i was setting about leadership etc is really a worldwide phenomenon it's not just africa by any stretch but i then i was hearing you talk about something and i said and i thought to myself well that actually is the answer the the answer is if if i as a global citizen see a place where things are being done really well and that's where i go on vacation and that's where i spend my tourism dollars well then in essence i'm supporting the thing that i think is being done really well if i choose to go to um no matter the way in which i contribute my minutes my resources of time my resources of financial how i allocate all of that is going to determine what the future of the planet looks like yeah so i guess the big happy takeaway from our conversation as it relates to that topic is that it is always our individual choices how we allocate our time our financial resources all the other resources that we have at our disposal that determines the future of the planet of our lives and so if i spend my tourism dollars at a place that is tremendously sustainable in terms of africa and that the people are treated well within the country and the animals are respected the environment is respected if i choose to allocate my money there then i'm making that difference and if if the majority of people spend their money there then that place grows in terms of its ability to make positive contributions and to do things well so that is probably the big happy side of that discussion is that our individual contributions no matter how small they may seem are actually critically important in terms of determining what the world looks like and that's empowering and that's inspiring and i love that aspect so thank you mark for for bringing that to light in our conversation you're most welcome thank you so much for your time and it's been absolute pleasure to to have this discussion with you feel like i'm sitting right next to you even though we're thousands of miles apart we'll do that in the future yeah we'll have to definitely do it and i'm glad that you and your family are well in that we've had this time i'm going to be posting this uh this is a piece as editor at large for innovators magazine and 1.5 media who does a lot for the united nations and the european union and the world economic forms so there are other entrepreneurs and environmental activists and and activists and and people can see and hear about your uh wonderful ideas and our discussion i hope there'll be some wonderful takeaways and that they'll take the time to to dive into this is there anything that you would would like me a message specifically for them that would be important to that you want to give them that maybe i don't got out in this time uh just you know i always say to people i can't guarantee that i'm available because i have lots of projects running on my own but if someone has something that is a passion project and they say wow i think i think john could be a who on this for me to use the vernacular we've been talking about in our earlier discussion you know don't hesitate to reach out if i if i can't do it i will be i will be very honest and let you know that i just don't have the bandwidth at the moments but if i can be of assistance i like you said i want to leave this planet and on the day that i die i want to be able to look back and say i left it just a little bit hopefully just a little bit better than when i got here i made my contribution i made a difference and so when people are passionate about something about making a difference if i can be of assistance don't hesitate to reach out and if i can help i will thank you so much john we'll we'll put those links of the books and your website on as well i appreciate your time thank you very much thanks so much mark thanks for what you're doing i appreciate it