Where Is Simon Going? with journalist Cal Fussman

0:00The common thread in all of my work was a friend there to support me, was a friend there to hold me up, and I know who those people are. it's Jen it's Johnny Quest it's Johnny Bravo it's Kendra I'm writing about friendship now because it's my oh it's going to bring me to tears it's a letter of gratitude I'm writing this book to say thank you Hi I am not Simon Sinek I'm Cal Fussman and today I'm taking over for Simon to interview Simon It's been 15 years since the release of Start With Why, and so we thought it'd be fun to flip the script and let me interview Simon about where we've been and where we're going.

0:48I first met Simon in 2019 when he came on my podcast, and that conversation was a feast of epiphanies. Today, I came back for more, but my overriding question is, where is Simon going? And you're going to find out, but in a most circuitous way. You're going to hear two older gentlemen who are not technologists talk about AI. You're going to hear some things that may surprise you, even if you are a technologist. And in the end, you're going to run into the moment where Simon answers the question. This is where he's going. And of course, it contains a bit of optimism.

1:40The Takeover! I'll let Simon explain. So a bunch of years ago, The Infinite Game had just come out, and I was doing the podcast tour, interview tour, and I was invited onto your show, onto your podcast. you got more out of me than probably any interview I've ever done before. And probably since there were new ideas that were coming out revelations. And then when we thought about who we can have on this podcast, I thought I can't let Cal Fussman go to waste, you know? So we decided to do a podcast takeover where you are now the host and I am now the guest and we'll see how this goes. Oh, it feels good.

2:26It feels good. We'll pick up where we left off. Okay. When we last spoke, you had basically, in my words, climb the staircase from start with Y to leaders eat last, and then the infinite game, which was the one that really impacted my life the most. And there are reasons for all this. And right after that came COVID in 2020. And I'm wondering like where the staircase took Simon after that, because you had just impacted my life in such a huge way. And then the world kind of separated us. And only now do I get a chance to see where things have gone. Where things have gone. And I got something to tell you that I hope you will shed some light on.

3:27What was the impact, just out of curiosity? The Infinite Game was a message that allowed me to see myself in the largest possible way. Because, as you pointed out to me, when people introduce themselves, I might say, hey, I've been a writer for Esquire for 20 years, or I've written a book with Larry King, the CNN broadcaster that was a New York Times bestseller. And you helped me realize that it wasn't just being in a specific zone and making myself, that's who I am. It was part of a long road that I wasn't really conscious of because at the time, you know, things start blowing up in front of you.

4:32You know, all the magazines, you remember the newsstands in like Beverly Hills? They're not there. Or if they're there, many of them are selling Playboys from 1972. The world just changed. And so when you need to reinvent yourself, you have to understand the infinite game. If you don't understand that, it's going to be really hard to pivot. Okay. You are right. It is an age-old problem. And I understand why it happens, which is we confuse our identities or our value or our worth with our accomplishments or our job titles. Right? And you can see it, you know, when people write bios, for example, CEO of Oscar winning, right?

5:22They tell you something, a title they hold or something they did 15 years ago. and it becomes their identity. People give their resumes. Politicians give their resumes. They don't tell you what they believe. They tell you what they've accomplished, right? But as you said, whether by one's own doing or technology or culture or politics or tastes or whatever, whatever is the thing, the world changes around us. If your self-worth, your value, and your identity is wrapped up in a thing you do, and that thing goes away, then do you have no value? Like if you're a lawyer and you stop practicing law, who are you?

5:53And to understand that on the infinite game, along the infinite game, that there are places that you will stop to look at the view. There are places that you will have to struggle because it's steep. There are places that are easy. There are places that you'll meet up with friends, but it's all the journey. And I would never define my journey based on one stop. And so you can see it manifest. You can see it show up in my life where, for example, if I blurb a book, you'll see that I always insist that how they list me, it says, Simon Sinek, optimist, and dot, dot, dot. And then I can list the stuff I've done.

6:35And it's not just for public consumption, it's for me. I am an optimist no matter what I do until the day I die. It is my identity. It is part of my identity. And so when the world around us changes, you know, you wrote for Esquire for a million years and then magazines go away, kind of, you know, in the format that we know them, knew them. And then you think, well, who am I if I'm not doing that? Well, and then you start saying, well, I used to, I wrote for Esquire for 20 years, you know, and some people remember who Larry King is, you know, that's a part of, my niece does not know who Arnold Schwarzenegger is, right?

7:13Really? Why would she? I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard with all the stars. And I'm looking at the stars on the street of the most famous people in the world in entertainment. In our time. In their time. So I'm seeing somebody who's the Ryan Reynolds of the 1950s. Didn't know who they were. Half the names I'm walking over, I did not know who any of them were. And it occurred to me that I could walk over Ryan Reynolds and in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, no one will know who he is either. This is exactly where I wanted to take the conversation. And it leads us to Mike Tyson. Good segue. And Mike Tyson said, you know, 100 years from now, you're going to be lucky if somebody can remember your name.

8:05So that's a good way of seeing yourself. And for you, what strikes me is what you're leaving behind, for me specifically with that book, is going to apply in five years, 10 years. It applies more every day because things are changing more and more every day and because of artificial intelligence. If you were to say, and I did this with AI, I became big in AI in the last couple of years. And I have a lot of questions about where AI has been leading you because you would think that I am the last guy to be going in that direction. I was an old school guy. And I kind of missed the internet for a lot of reasons.

8:59When I went to college as a journalist, we were taught there is a separation between the marketing and between editorial. If you want to do the editorial, you can never step over that line towards sales or marketing. Nobody's going to trust you and you're going to lose what you love. Well, that was ingrained in me from the time I was 17. All right. Well, fast forward to the Kardashians. And the world is a completely different place. People are putting out their messaging on the internet and marketing themselves at the same time. I don't even have to go as far as the Kardashians. I mean, you can look at Fox News or CNN or all of these quote unquote news organizations.

9:50You know, they are technically news organizations, but the integration of the business side and the editorial side is fully integrated. And that's because their business model is advertising. When the whole system changed was actually nightline. Do you know about this? Ted Koppel. Yeah. Explain. Yeah. So back in the day when radio and television started to become a thing, the government owns the airwaves. And obviously the private sector says, we want to use the airwaves because we want to entertain people and make money. And the government said, fine, we'll make you a deal. You can use the public airwaves at no cost.

10:28You don't have to pay the government a fee. But the deal is, if you use the public airwaves to make money, you have to offer a public service in return. And that was the news, right? And so everybody knew that. And they made money off of the entertainment, the Lucille Ball show or whatever. And they never made money on the news. It just wasn't a thing. And that's why you could have people like Walter Cronkite, where everybody trusted Walter Cronkite, because there was no business model. It was just a public service that was offered as a part of the deal. And it all changed in 1979 with the Iran hostage crisis.

11:02And Ted Koppel was covering. And for the first time ever, the ratings for the news skyrocketed. Skyrocketed. Became some of the most popular television that there was. And so on the business side, they're going, huh? Oh, man. And it didn't happen overnight. But you started to see a slow disintegration of the separation of church and state. where things like the fairness doctrine, we used to have something that the FCC ran called the fairness doctrine, which is it did things like if you showed five minutes of a Republican candidate, you had to show five minutes of the Democratic candidate, right?

11:37You had to keep it equal. It was fair. It was a fair, it was part. And I can't remember which administration, I think it might have been in the Reagan administration, where in the name of corporate profitability, they started to break down. In other words, you started to see the break of business and news, right? And now we get to the point now where they rate the news like they rate any other TV program, and they sell advertising on the news like any other program. And so the incentive is to get people to watch no matter what you have to say. So it's no longer a public service. It's now part of a business model.

12:09And this is part of the problem, which is so people control about, you know, fake news or the traditional news media. The problem isn't the journalists. The problem is the business model because you get the behavior you reward. And if you reward eyeballs over everything, then you have to say and do anything. And the news is now competing against each other, which has created a business competition thing. But you can imagine somebody who grew up in that old school way of thinking. back in the in the 70s i was taught you know there is this world and you can never cross this line and right try to it was sacrilege yeah you just don't do that you'd lose your job that's right you'd lose your job and so that that stayed with me all those years even as the internet came about and like everybody there's no line there anymore right i can't cross this line that doesn't even exist.

13:05When you talk about the infinite game, you can see how helpful that is because it says, hold it. You're not that person. You're not identifying yourself as a University of Missouri journalism school graduate and president in 1978. You had that experience. You learn from it. It's part of your story. Exactly. But that is not you labeled anymore. It's not who you are. That's right. It's not who I am. I am well beyond that. Yeah. So how have you embraced AI? You old school journalists, you're even wearing a hat that says press on the side of it. Okay. The little card. You can see. I'm still that same.

13:54You're a throwback. I'm still that same guy, but I'm a throwback, but now I'm ahead of the curve. Say more. When AI came about, I would have been one of those people who got frightened by it. I mean, the first time you're at the screen, you ask it a question, and then there is this dump of information, like faster than you could possibly read, think. Oh, my God. Well, how am I going to compete with this? And of course you can't, but it's scary at the moment. But what I realized when I started to get into it was hold it. This is going to remember everything. And not only what happened to me, but what happened to everybody whose information gets dumped into it.

14:55And I saw that as this amazing power and not as something to be afraid of. Mm-hmm. And so at a time where a lot of people shrunk from it, I kind of dove into it. It's a good metaphor, right? Which if you think Google, Google is kind of like your high school library or Library of Congress is probably more accurate. Like it's got one of everything. You have to go searching, but it just gives you the book. Like what is the thing? Well, here's the book. Here you go. That's right. Here's the article you're looking for. That's right. Right? That's all it is. That's right. It's the world's greatest Dewey Decimal System, right?

15:37Whereas AI is, okay, I've read the book for you. I'm going to tell you all about the book you are interested in reading. And here's the best part. I've read every other book too, and I can tell you what's important that you need to know. And so it's like the librarian. Instead of going to the card catalog, you're going to the librarian who's read every book. And you just sit down with the librarian and be like, can I ask you a question about that topic? And you don't even have to worry about which book was read. You didn't have to worry about it. I'll just tell you what the book said. And I think that's the astonishing thing about it because it's doing the work.

16:08Whereas before, Google didn't do the work. It just gave you the book. Right. So we're seeing a complete collapse of time from the day you had to go to the library, actually go to the card catalog to hitting Google to all of a sudden now it's in front of you. You can ask it for an opinion. And what a lot of people don't seem to get that I caught very early, it's a little kid. It's not this odd Wizard of Oz that knows everything. In fact, it really doesn't know anything outside of if you put this word down here, it's highly likely that the word that should follow is this. We have to be very clear what an algorithm is.

16:57An algorithm is nothing more than a formula. If this, then that. That's all an algorithm is, which is why there's fallibility, because somebody programs it, or if it self-programs, then mistakes can exaggerate. It is fallible. I think AI is fascinating. Like everything, I think there's positive and negative. You can say that about any tool, and every tool comes at a cost. Some of the times those costs are worth it. Some of those times, those costs are not worth it. And if the costs become too extreme, then you have to manage those costs. So, you know, for example, cars are amazing. And putting lots of cars on a freeway is amazing and helps us get from A to B.

17:37But if you leave it unchecked, bad things can happen to people. Like, this is why we have speed limits. But this is why we have signaling laws and lanes. That's right. Right? That's right. And it's simply to say, we understand the value, but we're going to put some checks and balances. And people are like, you can't tell me what to do. It's like, no, the government can. they tell you to wear your seatbelt because we know statistically that if you don't, you're more likely to die. We also know that if you don't wear a seatbelt, the costs on the healthcare system of trying to repair your broken ass body because you didn't wear a seatbelt is vastly higher.

18:06And so we've decided that a very small cost to you, taking away your freedom, that we will legislate that you have to wear a seatbelt. And we believe this is a net good. That is a small cost to pay for a greater net good. And this is what life is. It's just a question of costs. And sometimes I said the costs are worth and sometimes they're not. Sometimes we debate those costs. And so I think unfettered, uncontrolled AI, the cost is probably too great. And we're already seeing Europe has more controls over the internet than we do in the United States. China has way more control over the internet than we do.

18:41Not just, I'm not talking about like big brother here, but like kids cannot overuse social media because the phone physically won't work for younger ages. They've left the parent out. And the state has taken control, which some people find abhorrent, but we're pretty shitty at controlling our kids' access to the internet and social media. But the point is, is only in America have we said no controls at all whatsoever. And we're the ones who are struggling with massive amounts of fake news, massive amounts of manipulations from ne 'er-do-wells. We're the ones dealing with massive amounts of addiction and all the challenges that go with addiction to social media.

19:20Other societies, less. It's bad, but they're at least experimenting and trying. We've kind of said the cost is too great, which I think maybe is worth questioning. And now with the rise of AI, I think there has to be at least some debate about it. Now, for me, as a writer or somebody whose business is kind of ideas, AI can only tell me what I've already thought. You know, it can't tell me what I'm going to think. It's so interesting you say that. Right? And so if you say, write something in the style of Simon Sinek and pick any topic, it will go on and on about why this and why that and purpose.

20:02But I don't talk about why anymore. That book came out 15 years ago. I live my life by it. It's the foundation of how I do things. But I don't make reference to it in any of my new work at all. Zero. So that's number one. It doesn't know what I'm going to think. It doesn't have curiosity. I have curiosity. And the other thing that I think it's missing out on is we are a results-obsessed society. We care about the output, not the journey. Now, everybody knows the trope. Like, it's not about the destination, it's about the journey, right? Like, we all know that we're being constantly being told that about our lives.

20:38And yet, if you look at our work, we're still results-oriented. it. It's not that a book has my name on it. That's important. That's an output. So yes, AI could write my next book for me. It might be pretty decent. Maybe not. It'll be derivative. It won't be new curious thoughts, but it could probably do a half decent job if I wanted a serialized start with why, start with why for, you know, farmers, start with why for small business. It could do that for me. And it could do a fairly decent job, I'm sure. What we completely neglect here is that I am smarter. I'm a better problem solver. I am more resourceful.

21:16I am more curious. I'm a better pattern recognizer because I went through the awful process of writing the book myself, of having to organize my own ideas. And it's not the fact that the book was written. It's that I wrote the book. The choreographer, the composer, the painter, AI can make a painting. It can make a piece of music. It can make a piece of dance. And some of it will be half decent, threatening even to some whose livelihoods are based on those things. But what it's missing is that the choreographer becomes better at understanding the human body from producing the dance themselves, that the painter is better understanding color and life, their own life, from doing the painting.

21:55It's the struggle that makes us a better version of ourselves, not the product. And so yes, everybody can do all the things, but you're not growing as person. And the question is, do you want to grow? Do you want to be a different, better version of yourself when you're 20, when you're 30, when you're 40, when you're 50, when you're 60? Or do you want zero growth? And you have to struggle and you have to do some of the work yourself. That is, in a capsule, the infinite game. Are you going to grow? And you're right, that the core to the infinite game is constant growth. Think about a relationship.

22:35right? Let's say there's a marriage. Let's say your wife, okay? You have a fight with your wife, right? You feel guilty. You may have been irresponsible. You may have dropped the ball. She's upset for legitimate reasons. Maybe you said some stupid things. You want to put it right, okay? You go to chat GPT and be like, I'm an idiot. This is what happened. Please tell me what I need to say to do the right thing, please. And it gives you, based on all the therapy and all of the listening skills, it gives you the perfect thing to say to your wife to do the repair. And you go to her and be like, babe, I take full responsibility.

23:10I didn't hear you. No, no, no. And then she finds out that you got that from CHAPGBT. Now you said everything right. I guarantee you it does not repair the relationship. But if you get some advice from CHAPGBT and then put it away and then bumble and fumble it, and it's the bumbling and the fumbling and trying to do it yourself that makes her feel loved. It's not that you had the perfect words that made her feel loved. It's that you tried and you cared and you wanted to do it that made her feel loved. Right? And this is what we're missing, which is it'll give us all the answers. Again, two results oriented, but we're not doing the work.

23:49You know what? ChatGPT told me the same thing in its own words about you i asked it i said you know i'm going out to talk to simon and like i'm wondering could you give me a parallel in history between simon's life and artificial intelligence like what's transpired since simon was born right and and it went through possibilities. I don't think it knew you well enough. At the end, this is what it came up with. In a way, Simon represents what machines still can't do. Build trust by feeling purpose. AI, no matter how advanced, still relies on inputs and outputs, not belief. It seemed to me to be so on point.

24:46That's good. It understood you pretty well. It's good, but it's good. Anything you'd quibble with there? I mean, again, sort of the irony is it's sort of doing exactly what I said it would do, which is it can only talk about me and refer to purpose. And my most famous book is Start With Why, but it's not the only part of my work and it's not the only thing I talk about, though it is foundational. And so it did exactly what I expected it would do, which is it cannot talk about me without talking about purpose. It can't think one step further, but it's accurate. You know what? It needs to be the infinite game again.

25:22It's pretty good. What it's doing is it's saying it's the human elements. And that's, you know, if somebody gave you a wedding speech that they wrote with ChatGPT, it wouldn't make you feel loved. ChatGPT is like money, right? Money is a redeemable commodity. We make money, we spend money, we waste money, we make more money. AI is like money. It's a redeemable commodity. It just spits it out, spits it out, spits it out. There is no sacrifice of time or energy on the part of the person who's trying to do something, which is why getting advice from ChatGPT, totally fine. I'm totally fine with using technology for shortcuts, for efficiencies.

25:59It's all great. But at the end of the day, the thing that makes people feel loved is that someone went through the difficult journey of trying to be your friend. I can hijack and shortcut all of those things with chat GBT, but it won't make me feel loved. Like I said, I'd rather have a bumbly fumbly fight with you. Imperfect. Because at the end of the day, I know we're both trying to get to resolution versus you reading me the perfect script. And I guess this goes to the core of authenticity. Do you know the Japanese design concept of wabi-sabi? No. Wabi-sabi is a Japanese design concept that means beauty in that which is temporary or imperfect.

26:46So a sunset, it comes and it goes. If the sunset was there 24-7, it would cease to be beautiful. It's the temporariness. Life, one of the things that makes life beautiful is it has a temporariness to it, right? Japanese ceramics, if you've ever seen Japanese ceramics, they're imperfect, they're bumpy, they're not smooth, the glaze is very often imperfect and messy. And they're the most beautiful things in the world because you can see that it was made by hand. Things that come off machines may look perfect and they may be perfect, but they lack a certain beauty. Where the things are made by your children, that ugly clump of clay that we call a paperweight because there is no other use for it, is the most beautiful thing in the world because it was made with love and it was made with someone's hands.

27:31And if you think about it, made by hand or infused with humanity, the sad part for me is it's become a luxury. So I fly Delta Airlines too much, right? And what that does is it gives me status. That's what they call it. You have status. I have a certain level of status with all my mileage. one of the things I get with my status is I get a phone number. So that if I need to change my booking, I call the phone number that they gave me. And you know what I get when I dial that phone number? I get a person. Oh, yeah. I get a person. A concierge, white glove. It's not so much concierge and white glove.

28:12I just get a person. And if you have no quote unquote status, you get a machine. And so we're now reached the point where talking to a person is a luxury that you have to earn. Wow. Wow. Right? Yes. Yes. Everybody else gets pottery barn. But if you can afford it, or you've flown enough, or you've done enough, you've accumulated enough air miles or credit card points or whatever the currency is, we will give you a person. And it's all because of cost, because it costs more for a person than it does for AI, right? But we now live in a screwed up society where talking to another human being is considered a luxury to be earned.