What Happens When You’re Naive Enough to Try with KIND Founder Daniel Lubetzky

19:50Daniel Lubetzky:They didn't buy the ingredients.

19:51Dan Schawbel:But you even ask yourself, why are you buying it?

19:54Daniel Lubetzky:We still buy these products thinking that they're magical because they were magical and they're not magical anymore. And you ask yourself, why would a big company pay so much money if they're not going to preserve it?

20:05Dan Schawbel:It's like this, because I noticed that up front from other observations, we're talking about Power Bar and Balance Bar. So Balance Bar have a value proposition that they were about a balance between protein, carbohydrates, and fiber. So I think something like that. It had like a formula. It had three circles, whatever. And then it got acquired, either Kraft or Mondelez. And they gave it to a junior manager. And the junior manager needs to put their stamp. And they find out that around that time, organic is big. So they create something called Balance Organic. Now, Balance, the original bar, is a very functional bar.

20:46Dan Schawbel:It looks like astronaut food and it's very functional. And all of a sudden, Balance Organic, nobody believes it. What is a brand? A brand is a promise. And a great brand is a promise well kept. And all of a sudden, you're doing the exact opposite because you have Balance Organic as opposed to the Balance Original and they have nothing in common. And then they launch, they see Kind coming up with ingredients. You can see a brand. They come up with one called, I think it was called Balance Bare. And B-A-R-E. And then they come up with the other one because there's the keto diet and then there's the functional diet and there's this.

21:22Dan Schawbel:And they have like eight different versions of balance bars and the consumer stops understanding what the brand stands for. That business went from like 250 million to 50 million to my bet is that it's zero now or close to zero. I haven't seen a balance bar in a long time. And they trade, every junior manager does the same sins. Every junior manager, they don't teach you, this is the essence that you need to respect. Like they teach you, hey.

21:48Daniel Lubetzky:Line extension.

21:49Dan Schawbel:Line extension and make a difference and be relevant so you can get promoted. And these guys get promoted by short-term results. And so whatever mess they're creating in the long term by destroying the brand, nobody notices it because by the time it happens, it's too late.

22:03Daniel Lubetzky:But we kind of got to this point in American business that I find a bit depressing, which is that companies aren't built to last. They're built to be sold. Right? Well, not all. Not all companies. I mean, your company, how many years did Kine? Because I would say that it was longer than most before they want to have their...

22:23Dan Schawbel:Yeah, but I wasn't being defensive about mine, but I'll answer mine, but then we should expand it. The interesting thing about my company is that I started in 1993, what was then called PeaceWorks. And my investors came into PeaceWorks, but they didn't like the PeaceWorks aspect. So we spun it off. But that same, my employee identification numbers was 133766029 because I used to write all the checks. I used to file all the tax forms. I used to do all the accounting. So I still remember my employer identification number from 1993. And I was doing the accounting, the bookkeeping, the collections, the deliveries, everything.

23:01Dan Schawbel:Every job I was doing at the beginning and there were two of us, then four of us, then two of us, then four of us, then two of us, then eight, and then before, you know, hundreds. When I launched Kind, I did not, I personally, I promise you, I did not think if only I could build something to sell. It never crossed my mind. And that's why Kind succeeded. Because Kind was just trying to fulfill that vision of something amazing. But just to your question, there are gigantic companies like the Amazons of the world. They do lose their way for other reasons. But they're not trying to sell. I think the stock market has a bit of that problem when you're trying to...

23:37Dan Schawbel:So I think one of the bigger questions is why do you always need to want to grow, grow, grow? Because when you are growing, growing, growing, and you need to demonstrate that measurable growth, I don't have a better solution. But eventually, you're going to value optimization and things that start destroying the brand in the long term.

23:56Daniel Lubetzky:This is the real root of the question, right? And I think you're articulating it better than I did, which is it's not so much about the sale. it's about you're building it to sell or you're building it to go public or you're building it to extract money in the short term and all the great businesses were built for the joy of building it, for the thrill of the build and if you decide to sell it or go public way way down the road that's a different conversation but the number of businesses that literally whether it's their own desire or the pressures they have from their investors that there has to be this liquidity event And that's the other thing that annoys me about the IPO, which is the whole reason of an IPO was it was one of the mechanisms available to an entrepreneur to raise money should they need it.

24:42Daniel Lubetzky:You can take a loan from the bank. You can raise money from friends and family. Or you can sell some of the equity of your company to the public market so that you can raise money to reinvest. But that's not what it is. Now an IPO is a way to cash in, pay yourself and pay your investors. And it has nothing to do with a cash infusion to reinvest back in the business. that has nothing to do with it. And that is one of the downfalls, I think, of the modern American business, which is all of the companies, even the good ones are built, so many of them, too many of them are built simply for the short term.

25:12Dan Schawbel:And to make matters worse, a lot of the value that's being, quote unquote value that's being created is just financial engineering, right? There's a lot of companies buying over other companies, squeezing everything they can, then leaving them near dead and then going on to the next one. Like a lot of private equity companies, what they do is, this is like the model that's been used over the last 10, 20 years, is they identify pool maintenance companies that are such a disruptive, the more fragmented, the more they see the opportunity. So they start buying all of the pool companies or the roof.

25:45Dan Schawbel:There was an article in the New York Times about the roofing companies and they identify all these tens of thousands of small business entrepreneurs. They're not finding synergies. Let's start acquiring all of them, roll them up, and then make them more synergistic, which means fire all the people, just hire a smaller group of people, use centralized branding. But they're not thinking about creating value. By the way, if you acquired all of them and you introduced best practices and elevated the game, fine, but they don't want, they just want to turn it around. And so they buy them at 3x profits, they sell them at 6x profits.

26:21Dan Schawbel:Then the next guy buys them at 6x profits, sells them at 9x profits and then they go public at 12x profits but along the way you're killing entire companies because you squeeze so much value out of them and then you no longer trust them because they're just worrying about the money

26:39Daniel Lubetzky:so you built you said you wanted to make a food product that was a healthy snack there was a reason to build a company and your business was the delivering of a healthy snack, that was the business The companies that we're talking about, the private equity companies, their business is making money. Exactly. Like their only product is to make money. 100%. Not to make anything that has value to anyone in the world. And if I hear another finance person tell me that the value they provide is they provide employment to an economy and help drive an economy, then why do you promote layoffs so fervently?

27:14Daniel Lubetzky:No, no, they're actually destroying all the jobs. They're completely full of shit.

27:17Dan Schawbel:That is one of the imperfections of capitalism because free markets are very efficient. And the interesting thing for me, because I think communism, socialism, you see their imperfections and they're greater than capitalism. But capitalism, even conscious capitalism has a lot of problems that the free market wins and the free market will always, efficiency will always win.

27:41Daniel Lubetzky:I think this version of capitalism, this is not the capitalism that exists today is not the capitalism that made America great. This is not Adam Smith capitalism, right? Where the customer is the center of the value. And, you know, what Adam Smith said, which is the bread maker makes the best bread to compete with the other bread makers. And the butcher makes the best meat to compete with the other butchers. And the cheese maker makes – and you get the best sandwich. Yeah. Right? And that's not what has happened because of Milton Friedman and Jack Welch, which is they've completely changed the capitalism that we have and popularized short-termism, the metrics of incentivizing.

28:20Daniel Lubetzky:Milton Friedman popularized short-termism? Milton Friedman was an economist in the 19th century.

28:24Dan Schawbel:I know Milton Friedman, but I didn't know about his short-termism.

28:26Daniel Lubetzky:So Milton Friedman, so it's this combination of theories where Milton Friedman, this is what he wrote. The purpose of business, purpose, the purpose of business is to maximize profits within the bounds of the rules, which means make as much money as you can without breaking the law.

28:43Dan Schawbel:And your point is, if you're doing that, you're destroying value because the purpose of business should be to create value in the long term. That means respect the brand, respect the consumer, respect the stakeholder. that's how kind became an extraordinary by the way kind created more value on a multiples basis than any company i know of like from the my early investors like we almost didn't need capital we grew grew grew grew because we're thinking with the right way we created like 3 000 x returns for

29:14Daniel Lubetzky:our investors but just think about that right like the current the business and you see it all the time make as much money as you can within the bounds of the rules so you see these companies do horribly unethical things because ethics is a higher standard than the law.

29:26Dan Schawbel:But I think your point - And they get dragged in front of Congress and they all say the same thing. We broke no laws. But to take it away from just the moral compass, to take it into the business compass, your point is right because by playing that game, in the long term, you're destroying value. Yes. By playing that game, people don't trust your brand, they don't trust your business and they don't trust the system.

29:47Daniel Lubetzky:And I think this is where we have to take a hard look at capitalism. And I'm not talking about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But you see the rise of populism on the left and the right, whether it's Bernie Sanders or Mandani or Trump, it doesn't matter if you're on the left or right of the political spectrum. You see the rise of populism that is mistrustful of the institutionalized powers that be, right, and the status quo. And rightfully so, because we have traded what Goldman Sachs used to call long-term greed, which was totally fine, with short-term greed. It's not so Pollyanna and idealist that there's no such thing as greed.

30:25Daniel Lubetzky:The reason communism fails is because humans are greedy, right? But to believe in long-term greed, which is how can we build a company that will outlast us for the good of the long term, you actually make really good decisions. And we, for some reason, seem to be okay with the short-term extraction at the expense of the customer, the employee, the environment, our health. There's a very large food company who shall remain nameless. I went to this conference and they had the chief environmental officer of this company give a presentation on how much water they were saving and how much electricity they were saving.

31:01Daniel Lubetzky:And it was a beautiful presentation about what they're doing. And because I'm a cynical bastard, I went up to the chief environmental officer at the end of the talk and I went up to them and I said, hey, love that you're saving water, love that you're saving electricity, love that you care about the environment. Question for you. If I'm really cynical, I could say you're only doing it because it saves money, you know, less water and electricity saves money. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt you're doing it for good reasons. But here's my question for you. I love that you care so much about the environment, but how come you put chemicals that kill people in your food?

31:38Daniel Lubetzky:You have a chief environmental officer at your food company how come you don't have a chief health officer just curious and the

31:48Dan Schawbel:whole then the the logic of what these companies say unravels i think um i want to strengthen what you say and then ask you a question when we took the fateful decision to bring a strategic partner which is speak for saying sell a piece of kind which is the beginning of the process where we ended up where we ended up. But when we were evaluating it, one of the companies that presented to us literally said to us, we love that our products don't kill you. They don't make you sick. That was their standard because they were not helpful products, but their standard was like, at least our products don't kill you.

32:22Daniel Lubetzky:At least our products don't kill you. I swear to you,

32:25Dan Schawbel:was their definition of success. When we debriefed that at that meeting, it was one of the many moments when I told my team, what are we doing? But anyway, that's a different conversation. But I have solutions about how to handle the problems of populism in the civic space. I've thought about it in the private sector and I have not come up with them. Do you have solutions? Like the point that you point out to about short-termism and short-term value extraction, other than teaching people to be smarter and to build for the longer term, do you have any structural or any other?

33:01Daniel Lubetzky:I think it's a generational answer, right? Like it was the 80s and 90s where they were experimenting with short-termism, incentivizing executives with equity, not performance of the company, layoffs on an annualized basis to balance the books. I mean, this is all 80s and 90s. Prior to that, there was no such thing as mass layoffs in the United States, right? Unless it was for existential reasons, like we're going out of business. It was popularized in the 80s and 90s. And then that style of management was taught and continues to be taught in business schools. And that's what got you promoted. And so that's why it became the standard because a generation was taught to run a business that way.

33:38Daniel Lubetzky:I think now with the rise of populism and the cynicism that young people have, that there is a generational shift where I think young people are okay making slightly less money to do the right thing. And I think that they like companies who are willing to make less money this quarter because we're going to make the right decision for the next five years. May I challenge you for a second? Yeah, please.

34:02Dan Schawbel:We agree 100 % on the fact that if you build a brand for the long term and do the right thing for the long term, that's how you create enduring value. And what you're doing for a short term, you're actually destroying value. We agree on that. On the thing about the layoffs, I ask myself this question all the time because I notice it happening. I get proposals for me to invest in these roll-ups. And I struggle because to your point, there's no value being created or added. My answer is, well, why don't we do, to the extent that we consolidate, let's make it in a positive way. I will create a brand that people can trust and help empower the small business entrepreneurs for them to become stronger and be part of the family and create the culture to that.

34:41Dan Schawbel:I struggle with that. But broadly speaking, unlike you, I don't oppose layoffs because I notice what happens when industries are not efficient and that doesn't happen. Then your lunch will be eaten by others. In other words, what's happening in Europe, Europe resists the layoffs and it's slowly but surely going to die. Because that's what I struggle with, a competitive market system, that at some point somebody else is going to be, and the Chinese most likely will be, more ruthlessly efficient. And how are you going to compete?

35:19Daniel Lubetzky:My friend Bob Chapman would say that an over-reliance on layoffs is proof of a poor business model. 100%. Right? And so it's not that I'm against layoffs because sometimes companies are stupid and overhire. I mean, we saw it during COVID, the number of businesses that because, you know, and they thought this would survive and last forever. And so they overhired, the numbers corrected, and there's no way you can sustain the business, right?

35:44Dan Schawbel:Your point is you shouldn't have layoffs as your business model.

35:47Daniel Lubetzky:You shouldn't have layoffs as your business model. And to embrace layoffs on an annualized basis, you know, and my standard line is, you know, we missed our arbitrary projections. So in order to make the numbers work, you get to lose your job. Our arbitrary projections. We're profitable, not as profitable as we promised. Well, you're going to have a lot of not fun in the coming years. And people ignore the ripples. Great. You got a little, one of the companies, a big tech company, made the announcement that we're going to lay off 10 ,000 people, we're going to do 1 ,000 people every month. How much productivity do you think there was that year?

36:18Daniel Lubetzky:The stupidity of even that strategy. And we incentivize HR leaders. An HR leader is supposed to be the voice of the people at the desk of the C-level executives, the voice and the champion of the people. Nope. We incentivize too many HR leaders. They get their bonus for doing the layoffs efficiently. And we've eviscerated even the concept of what the value of human resources is.

36:42Dan Schawbel:The culture and the, yeah, no. Getting very heated. I agree with what you said in the business world because it reminds me of why, like something that I observed in the market world that bothered me and that I think we did differently that is connected to your same philosophy is in most of corporate America, there is no trust in the system and they fire you, which means you're given two weeks notice, but you're shown a box that you put the stuff in your box and you're shown the door because you're not trusted to be there. And I observed there was a very, very big problem in that model of kind because everybody that took the struggle to bring into our team and taught them our culture and they taught us and we worked and built together.

37:36Dan Schawbel:Maybe in my entire existence, there were three examples out of thousands of people that I hired. It actually merited showing them the door because they engaged in illicit behavior or they really crossed the line that really engaged in stuff that was completely inappropriate. But it's three people out of thousands. Yeah, of course. In the vast majority of situations, the reality is that most times when things don't work hard is because you fail to communicate with your team member and that because you fail to create a bond of trust so that people can communicate with one another. I don't know if you found this to be true, but almost always if you share feedback early on, the person can course correct and fix it.

38:21Dan Schawbel:So the essence for a higher order work environment is to create trust. Because if you create trust, you can create open communications. If you create open communications, you have much less likelihood that things don't work out. That means, for example, that instead of firing people, showing the door, we had a system at kind where if you were planning to leave or if we were planning to let you go, first you were required to have a conversation and let the other person know transparently. Think what that takes. It takes enormous amount of trust. If I'm planning to leave, I need to trust you that you're not going to do something bad with that information.

38:59Dan Schawbel:I'm telling you, I'm leaving in one year because I want to go study for graduate school or I'm going to get married and move somewhere else or I want to retire. You don't want the company as a consequence to cut you off early. Most big companies, when we try to introduce this methodology to them, they do the wrong thing with that information. They're like, oh, they're leaving. They're no longer valuable to me and they're not going to be loyal to me and they're going to sell my secrets. Let's fire them within two weeks. So then the next person won't share that with them. Sure. So instead you create a relationship trust and you do it both ways.

39:29Dan Schawbel:It was very weird. At kind, every single team member was an owner. Everybody that was there more than six months was given stock options. If you were the janitor or the president of the company, everybody was an owner. And with that ownership came the responsibility that if you chose that you were going to leave, not only were you needing to give us notice you needed to replace yourself you needed to find we trust you enough that if you want to leave you need to find your replacement it's very hard to achieve that but when you trust the person because you hired them in the first place they are doing the right job and it elevates the culture so that everybody's in there for one another and most times it worked almost always it worked not always but almost always the person had that responsibility to pass the baton to train their replacement and think about how much more synergies you get.

40:19Dan Schawbel:If you achieve that higher order of functioning, instead of you fired and everybody doesn't trust each other, you're hiring your replacement, you're overlapping. And then if you decide that you're going to leave, you can ask for a letter of reference. You can ask for a very warm testimony and endorsement. And so that was what we aspired for. My direct reports, guess what was their notice they needed to give me? What? Two years. Two years notice. like john leahy the president of my company like for the senior people that reported to me it was two years and in exchange they had undying loyalty from me yeah like and if i ever was unhappy that meant also i can't fire people i have to talk to them talk through them work it out try to work it out and do everything possible to make it work and if not create a transparent process so that they can start looking for an opportunity while they're still finding their replacement let

41:11Daniel Lubetzky:me change tacks here you're fascinated by peace i mean the original brand name of the company was peace works and you are committed to arab israeli peace as well in the middle east we're working really heavily on it right now where you know where did that come from where did like where did the desire to the drive for peace come from and and what are you doing to make that naive

41:39Dan Schawbel:naive vision real it started uh when i mean that as a compliment right you're right but you know no no i mean i know i do which is which is the ones who succeed are the ones who are naive

41:50Daniel Lubetzky:are naive enough to believe that it's possible i know i was teasing you i appreciate it very much

41:57Dan Schawbel:when i was nine years old my father started talking to me about what he went through in the holocaust he was a concentration camp survivor and he shared horrible things that i think i impacted me more than I realized. Only in the last few years I've processed how much those conversations like.

42:15Daniel Lubetzky:Nine is young.

42:16Dan Schawbel:Yeah. My mom said, Roman, why are you telling him this stuff? He's nine years old. And he said, you know, he needs to hear this. I was nine years old when I needed to live through it. He just needs to hear through it. And so he was nine years old when the war started and 12 when he was sent to a concentration camp, 15 and a half when he was liberated by American soldiers. and what's interesting about him is that in spite of the horrors of what he went through he weighed 70 pounds and was six feet tall when he was liberated wow and like there's a youtube interview of him roman lubetzky you can look it up on on youtube and and it's it's very very interesting but what's fascinating about him is that in spite of all of what he went through he just saw the kindness in others and he lived his life with kindness and that we named the company kind after him he passed away the year that we launched kind which was a very interesting difficult year for us for me ever since i was a kid having experienced that in mexico i promised myself that i would do what i can to prevent what happened to my dad from happening to other human beings And I thought that my singular mission back then was to make peace in the Middle East.

43:38I thought that's how I was going to contribute, that the way I was going to build bridges was by bringing Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Turks together. And when I was in college, I stumbled upon the field of the business of peacemaking, of how you can use commerce to bring people to trade with one another.

44:01Dan Schawbel:And when they trade with one another, it shatters stereotypes because they're interacting as fellow human beings. They're breaking bread together. And they have common interest. and their common interest. They have cementing relationships because they have vested interest in growing together. And so I decided after law school to start PeaceWorks, a company that had Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Turks trading with one another, run by a confused Mexican Jew getting all of these guys together, running a brand called Moshe Pupik and Ali Mishmumken's World Famous Gourmet Foods.

44:36Dan Schawbel:I still don't know why it didn't work out. I made all the mistakes in the world, but I was so enamored with the concept, but I launched a venture in Sri Lanka between Sinhalese and Tamils, in Indonesia between Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist women, in South Africa, in Chiapas, Mexico. And the concept was always to use market forces and Americans as, I'm a very romantic American, to use American optimism, to use your words, to bring people together and help them discover each other's humanity. and that's been a big part of and still today after this horrible painful war we're now working really hard at PeaceWorks 2.0 trying to find a way to help the people in Gaza and the people in the envelope on the Israeli side improve their lives and start building back working together right now the step is just give them a sustenance and a better future and help them take baby steps.

45:39Dan Schawbel:I think working together today is too much of an ask, but as an aspiration, I want to align incentives so that Palestinians, Israelis, other Arabs, internationals, everybody can work towards the same goal.

45:53Daniel Lubetzky:Well, what I love is you're taking everything that you've learned and you know about building a remarkable brand and a remarkable company like Kind, and you're applying that to the social good, and it's all the same thing. And so, you know, I think anybody who doesn't bet on you is naive because there is empirical data here to show that you actually know what you're talking about. And if anybody can succeed in actually producing a lasting peace in these conflicts that seem intractable, I think you're the one. So this is pretty cool. Thank you so much. Pretty amazing.

46:36Dan Schawbel:The reality is that we have no other option but to figure it out. There's a lot at stake. And so I appreciate you saying that. But even more important, we need to give agency to everybody listening for them to understand they have to be the ones leading the way. You have the most popular TED Talk out there. I have one that's nothing like that. But I did experience something interesting when I gave mine and I talked about how everybody in this room, when I talk to the community understands this problem of growing division and rigidity, but they see it on the other side. They don't see it happening to them and their side.

47:16Dan Schawbel:And that's, I think, the opportunity that we all have to understand that this is a threat against all of us and all of us need to join.

47:22Daniel Lubetzky:Well, we need to get over this ridiculous notion that I'm right and they're wrong because everybody thinks they're on the side of right. And both sides think the other side is wrong. And so until one can accept that I am part of the problem and they are part of the solution. You know, the reason for a peace movement is you can't make peace with your friends. You can only make peace with your enemies. And so to accept that we are part of the problem and they are part of the solution is the only way to arrive at peace because you can't get to peace with one side. I notice sometimes that somebody

47:57Dan Schawbel:that I respect a lot does something wrong and a tool that helps me enormously that I realized that it's a super good tool, every time I find that, I ask, how am I also doing that problem? Like for example, I was with a person that I admire enormously and I asked for time with him to consult on an issue and he started talking nonstop and I couldn't get an award in edgewise and I have very important things to share that could have calibrated his feedback to make it even stronger, but it was a little senior to me and so I just listened. but I started reflecting oh my god I'm that person 99 % of the time because I'm with team members of mine and I need to if I only spoke 10 % less the quality of my feedback would be infinitely greater every time I notice that somebody else did something suboptimal I'm like oh my god I must have the same problem and I try to detect it and find it and it's hard it's hard to find it's so easy to observe in somebody else when they're doing it wrong it takes harder work for you to find it in yourself but that's how we grow it's good advice

49:03Daniel Lubetzky:for peace talks it's good advice for relationships it's good advice for for corporate culture and i'll go back to what i said before which is even in a relationship you know if you want your relationship to work or you want your corporate culture to work and you want your work relationship to work you know i am a part of the problem and they're part of the solution you know that's your mantra versus i'm right and they're wrong or i know and they don't and they need to listen and I need to talk. If you just flip all of those, I love what you said, I could do better at that, which is talk 10 % less, listen 10 % more.

49:32Dan Schawbel:No, you're a very good listener.

49:34Daniel Lubetzky:Oh, you're very kind. You've never worked with me. I talk a lot. I think out loud. That's part of my challenge. And so for me to process, I need to say things. And very often in a meeting scenario, it comes across as me doing all the talking, which it's not, it's me thinking. And so I have to learn that it's okay to process out loud, but I can process out loud at the end of the meeting, not at the beginning.

49:59Dan Schawbel:Or create the permission structure because I have the same issue, but I haven't processed that as well as you have. Create the permission structure for people to understand that just because you do that doesn't mean... Yeah. Like I'll give you...

50:11Daniel Lubetzky:I say very frequently, I'm thinking out loud here because I don't want people to think that I'm giving instructions or making conclusions. Kindness isn't just one of your values. It's the foundation of everything you've built. was there a moment when someone's kindness towards you made a profound impact

50:26Dan Schawbel:all the time but i mean i feel bad to come up with a really silly example right now but just yesterday before for some reason i had i was having a a kind of like not a great moment or day i was in a how do you say in a rut yeah and one of my team members taylor just said something really kind to me and it just elevated me and made me sore and my reflection again to the point that's like when I noticed like like oh my god I don't do enough of that because I'm always running running running running and I don't take the time to thank team members and to elevate them and if it had such an impact on me and I'm the boss if I could do that for my team how much more effective would we all be and so i think the power that every one of us has in our lives to make this a better world is insane like and oftentimes we we we forget that you may be walking on the street and just look at that person's eyes and and give them love and smile and at a minimum you've given them something positive but sometimes that person has really dark thoughts about what they're going to do with their life or somebody else's lives.

51:46Dan Schawbel:Sometimes you being kind to that person could save that person's life or somebody else's life. You never know how powerful those tiny, tiny little interventions of kindness, how big

52:01Daniel Lubetzky:they can play, much bigger than you realize. All of us have so much going on. You often say that business can be a force for building bridges. What responsibilities do you think entrepreneurs have in a divided world?

52:13Dan Schawbel:The way I think about it is everybody, I don't want to be preachy. Everybody has to find what gives them meaning. For me, in this world, I find it imperative to build bridges because I don't want to inherit to my children something worse than what I found. I feel like our generation, and I think I'm a little older than you, but directly we're in the same age. I'm 57. But it's insane how good I've had it. and in the last 10-20 years I feel like things are moving in the wrong direction and I owe it to my children and every entrepreneur owes it to future generations to leave the world better than you found it so I just think it gives you so much more meaning so much more agency, much more purpose I'm not doing it to be preachy it is more fun to be solving these problems and to try to help make this a better world that's what drives me

53:06Daniel Lubetzky:I think one of the things that you have an advantage of is you have a father who told you his story. And I don't mean because it's a traumatic story that he went through, but there's data that shows that when we understand something about our ancestry or even where our grandparents came from, that we don't see ourselves as beginning now. We see ourselves as continuing something that somebody began before us. The data shows that people who have a sense of where they come from make better long-term decisions. Because when people say, oh, I'm doing it for my children, no, that never happens. No politician or nobody's doing it for their children, and they're doing it for themselves.

53:39Daniel Lubetzky:But when there's someone who came before them and sacrificed for them to get to this point, they don't want to let down the person who came before them and they want to uphold that honor. And so that your father sat you down at nine and said, I need you to know where you come from and what I did before you. You feel this responsibility to your own history. You cannot let your father's legacy go in vain. And I think to teach people where they come from and to uphold that legacy, I think, is vital for us to make better long-term decisions.

54:12Dan Schawbel:I love that, and it's very true. And it helps not just for that. It also helps for young people to reach good decisions about their health and about their well-being, to understand that they have something to give and a responsibility to give it, and that they need to be mindful about how the decisions they reach.

54:29Daniel Lubetzky:Daniel, thank you so much. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company, lovingly produced by our team, Lindsay Garbenius, Phoebe Bradford and Devin Johnson. Subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. And if you want even more cool stuff, visit simonsynic.com. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.