Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Honest Drink. I'm Justin. You've been enjoying the show. Go ahead, rate, comment, and subscribe. We are brought to you by Nespresso, our coffee of choice before recording this episode.
All right. We got a real special guest for you guys today. He is a communication coach and was one of the world's top English Chinese interpreters and co-founder of Next Level Communication, a high stakes communication advisory and cadence translate. Based in China, he has interpreted for multiple presidents, prime ministers, Hollywood celebrities, Fortune 500 CEOs, and Nobel Prize winners.
He has also served as communication coach to some of the country's most influential business leaders. Man, Justin, I can't even imagine the amount of pressure he had being in the same room as top world leaders.
trying to make sure the message didn't get lost. And it was fascinating to hear him explain that the art of simultaneous interpretation is not just about processing information at lightning speed, but also centers around bridging cultural gaps and ultimately building relationships. And I love learning from his experiences getting into a flow state and his belief that on both the biggest stages and in life, whoever is most present wins.
This was a really special one. So without further ado, please give it up for Jonathan Reckman. Did you go by Jonathan or John? If you'll take, if you'll make the effort, I'll appreciate the Jonathan. Okay. Perfect. That's a good way of putting it. It's up to you and I'm not going to be offended if you don't, but if you don't, if you don't have anything else going on. Okay, John. Yeah.
Asshole. Okay, ass. We'll just use ass. Yeah, just ass. I'm not even going to bother. I love it. I love this start. You're playing by the same rules that we do. Should we raise this glass? Let's go, Jonathan. Guys, thank you so much for having me on. Cheers. Thank you for being here. Love it.
I've been looking forward to you coming here very much and super excited to have you. Shout out to Zach Dijkwald who introduced us. The man. The man. And when he told me about you, immediately I was blown away and I was like, all right, we got to get this guy on the show. So I don't even know where to start with you. There's so much to talk about. The first thing that stood out to me was you're an interpreter, simultaneous interpreter, and
English, Chinese, Chinese English. So can you first just describe that time for you and what you did as kind of like a background for what you do now as well? So one of the difference between simultaneous interpreting, which is kind of like if you see the United Nations and all the world leaders have the little headsets in and then there's the interpreters in the back with the booth and they're simultaneously interpreting. And
The difference between that and consecutive interpreting, which is where you're sitting and taking notes and somebody is speaking and you're taking notes and then when they finish speaking, you proceed to interpret. It inserts the pause in between
Means that it tends to be this person talks for a long time and then that person talks for a long time and you're talking more at each other and simultaneous interpreting Really allows for dialogue something that is more organic and more fluid So that's that's kind of what simultaneous interpreting is my kind of practice of it I was recruited in 2008 by the European Union to train as a simultaneous interpreter in a training program
organized in conjunction with the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. And this is actually, there's a history to that program. It was the first China-EU joint cooperation program in the history of China-EU relations. When they first established a diplomatic relationship, their first order of business, first collaboration was to train interpreters. Now, for most of the history of that program, they trained primarily Chinese nationals, exclusively Chinese nationals, because
Really, the Chinese were far more bilingual than there weren't that many Europeans that spoke Chinese.
And by the time, by 2008, when I was recruited, the Europeans, really for diplomatic security reasons, wanted more European citizens to serve as interpreters. They wanted to be able to rely on their own people, so to speak. And long story, I'm born and raised in New York, but I have an Irish passport. We can get into that. And so I was recruited in 2008 to train as part of this program.
program. There were 10 European scholars that were given a scholarship to study in Beijing at Beijing and here in Shanghai at Shanghai. And we went through a very rigorous, extremely rigorous two-year training program to learn simultaneous and consecutive interpreting to serve as diplomatic interpreters.
At the end of the first and the second year, there were qualification tests. And ultimately, I wound up being the only European to pass both the tests and become certified in this program. Everyone else failed? Everybody else did not pass the test. Wow, it was that hard. Yeah. So it turned out to be the first and the last test.
non-native Chinese speaker to graduate from this program and be certified as an interpreter through this channel.
And that kind of led me to the first part of my career, which was 10 years practicing primarily as a freelance kind of private practice interpreter, serving first governments, doing diplomatic work, working obviously with the Europeans, the EU, most of the European national governments, the U.S. and Australia, Canada, Australia.
Basically, all of the English-speaking diplomatic delegations were clients. And then increasingly for the business community, for commercial delegations, also large conferences, World Economic Forum, UN, United Nations, APEC. Were these all interactions with Chinese counterparts that you were interpreting for?
All the countries that you just named, it was them interacting with China? Correct. So I was based in Beijing and would...
be hired both for kind of routine diplomatic meetings between embassy staff and Chinese government counterparts, as well as for kind of high level delegations. So, you know, visiting presidents and prime ministers, and then on the business side, CEOs that were either doing large public events or having kind of private negotiations with Chinese partners. And then the China Hollywood co-production team
kind of sweet, you know, honeymoon. And everybody was trying to do co-productions and there was, you know, planes of Hollywood celebrities coming over to China to do red carpet events. I got to work with a lot of them. It must be like such high pressure to have to like translate and interpret simultaneously as Hollywood
people, officials, whoever are having these discussions and conversations back and forth and having to do it accurately because it all hinges on how accurately and how well you interpret, right? Or something can get misunderstood. And the fact that, I mean, honestly, you are like, I feel like the top 1% of
English Mandarin interpreters in the world to have that level of clearance. So like the contrast between like high stakes situations where you're interpreting for like presidents, prime ministers, how do you get the clearance to get to those such high levels? And also be doing like kind of like celebrity interpreting as well.
So for the government work, we, besides taking kind of a technical skills test, which is administered by their, you know, the state, in the case of the US, the State Department and the EU Commission has like a dedicated commission for interpreters. Also have public trust clearance from the State Department. So for security, the question of like,
the stakes are high and you can fuck up. And like, what are the implications of that? You know, is definitely, you know, even just now, like I feel my heart racing thinking back to some moments I've been in where it's like, oh my God, this person is speaking with like a really thick accent really quickly. And like, everybody needs to know. And, you know, you can do like geopolitical stuff, security stuff, military stuff, but
these conversations have consequences. Just as a, you know, one example that I can share, one story of that kind of just always with you, you never forget, is at, I think, 2012 or 2013 APEC meeting in Vladivostok. And we had Hu Jintao was there, Hillary Clinton was there, and Putin was the host. And
Even from the interpreter's booth, you know, you can really get the energy of some of these leaders comes through, fills the room. Like there's a tension? Yeah. And especially around Putin, who like brings like a fierce sort of powerful intensity into the room. Really?
And so there's just – you can feel the hairs kind of rise a little bit on your arm. And he's doing an event. This is not like security-related. It's business. And he's talking – he's doing a talk for the gathered business and government leaders. And I'm interpreting through in what's called relay. So this is the –
Russians have a Russian-English interpreter from their Ministry of Foreign Affairs that is taking Putin's Russian and putting it into English. I'm hearing the English and interpreting it into Chinese. When Chinese audience members ask questions, which they do at the end, I take the Chinese question, interpret it into English, and then that gets interpreted back to Russian for Putin. So that's called relay interpreting.
One of the questions from the Chinese audience, and I have to say, I think all of these questions are probably scripted and planned in advance so that leaders all have their talking points in this particular situation. In one case, the question was asking about the business climate. I didn't hear the 音声.
I interpreted the question as, you know, President Putin, can you tell us about the, you know, what are Russia's plans on the climate? And you could, again, sort of through listening, sort of through visual cues, sort of through the energy question.
Even across these languages you could hear that like some things fucked up. This is he wasn't expecting that question. That was not the right question and instant all within the course of like an instant your brain Has like a cache a of like the audio like an audio memory of what was just said so in that split second where I'm seeing something not right or
my brain replays the kind of raw unprocessed audio of what I just heard and realizes that I've dropped two critical words, that it's not climate, it's business climate. That really what's being asked about is, you know, what are industrial policies? What are commercial policies? Probably for Chinese entrepreneurs. And in that, within the space of, you know, two or three seconds is able to realize that and then make a correction, which then gets relayed back to Putin and the meeting goes on. But there's definitely that like,
you know, moment of like, ah, this, you know, this show is about to go off the, it wouldn't have really, this is like a very low stakes example, right? Like this would not have caused a major international incident or anything. But it was, it was a moment of awkwardness that was put back on the right track. Again, the kind of interesting thing about simultaneous interpreting is just how simultaneous it is, right? It is just, we are constantly processing and converting and it,
When practiced well, it's like being in a sort of flow state. You're not thinking about what you're doing, you're just doing it. When I look back on my days as an interpreter and at the interpreting profession, what I think is most interesting is the idea that we are all simultaneous interpreters in the sense that we are constantly taking inputs from our environment, from our conversations, from the people around us, from the things that happen.
sensory input, intellectual input, spiritual input, whatever, the feng shui. And we are making meaning of it in a moment to moment on a simultaneous basis and outputting in the form of our lived lives.
And I think that's, uh, I don't mean for it to be like cute or, or contrived, but I think there is a real kind of poetry to the idea that we are all simultaneously interpreting everything around us. And some of us are doing it more intentionally than others in, in interpreting there's, um, there's inevitably going to be, uh, some semantic erosion, right? Some, some kind of, there's like a,
loss from the original. A moment ago, I talked about how simultaneous interpreting has an advantage over consecutive interpreting in that you can have a real fluid dialogue, but consecutive interpreting, you can get a higher quality. You get a higher fidelity because you have the time to make notes and organize logic and process a little bit more. Simultaneous interpreting, you're just looking for the ... It's like the difference between
between playing slow chess and blitz chess if you're your chess players like you're looking for the not necessarily the best move you're looking for like the best move that you can find right now and so I think if you accept that there's going to be some some transmission loss then the question is just like how how low can you get that loss how much fidelity can you can you achieve
And I think that is really interesting as a linguistics challenge for interpreters. And I think it's really interesting as an existential challenge for humans. It's just all of this stuff is happening around us. How on the curve of speed and fidelity, like how quickly and how vivid, right? Like, are we processing the world around us? Yeah. We're constantly reacting in our modern world and there's sensory overload.
Because we're getting, there's not, there's a lot of semantic erosion, I think, in transmission loss. And sometimes it's like intentional. It's not even semantic erosion. It's just intentional sort of distortion of the signals. So whether you're on Facebook, you're on social media, the pace, the speed of which things are happening and being interpreted. Yeah, there's this sort of simultaneous interpretation. A lot goes wrong. And I think that leads to a lot of polarization. Yeah.
because it's happening all the time just as you're saying but the the forces around us are exacerbating that like it's not like 100 years ago where you needed to write a letter so you could be like really fucking pissed off like okay motherfucker you know and then but you had to sit down and actually like write it and then you're like okay and then by the time the person receives it's like months later and like and so then you have all these kind of funny stories about
things weird things kind of happening by the time the letter got to the other person the situation had changed and and that kind of stuff but now it's instantaneous so in a sense like we're always in this mode digitally and and it can happen between any any other person so you're not just simultaneously interpreting like a to b but
you're looking at a hundred different things and doing that. And so I think it just creates massive, massive distortion. And a lot of the problems that we have these days are a result of that. So it's really inspiring to hear that everything that you were doing during that period of time runs counter to that. And so we can learn from it. So that's just the comment. I think it's really interesting. And yeah, I can imagine that the metaphor would be you're trying to
do a simultaneous interpreting and there's not one, but like a hundred voices talking all at once. And you're trying, you know, talking in your ear and making distracting noises and flashing lights. And that is really hard to make meaning in that environment out of anything. And it compounds. Exactly. Because you just mentioned a case where almost in it, like he didn't even start responding. So it didn't get off the wrong train track. But imagine this
this exponential effect. And then all of a sudden you just have chaos. And that's essentially what's happening now. And it's dynamic in the sense that your voice is also contributing to the voices that everybody else is hearing. So, uh, the inter, you know, interpreting simultaneous interpreting is this super abstracted, clean, dedicated abstraction of, of what communication of what the lived experience is. And that like you are literally in a soundproof booth, right?
wearing soundproof headset and talking into a microphone that has a channel tuned to people's, where they can choose which channel they want to listen to, which language they want to listen to. And they choose the channel and they hear that one voice. And so like that's as clean as it'll ever be. And you can just really focus on input, processing, output. And even in the best possible way,
the most ideal conditions, you can do that for about 20 minutes. And then the cognitive load is too much. And you have to, that's why interpreters work in pairs. So you have to switch every 20 minutes maximum. It's so it's, it's interesting. I was, I was,
I was wondering like how much you can sustain that intensity. It's like in sports, right? Like how long and it's like sprinting. Yeah. Like how long can you sprint? You don't know what the, you don't know what the person is going to say. That's the whole point. It's like you, you have to, you have to anticipate and that uncertainty causes a lot of challenges. So it's a completely like reactive state you're in, right? You're just reacting to, to what's coming through your headphones. And I think that's, that's worth attention because one thing that,
interpreting taught me about life is the relationship between forward-looking planning, tactical anticipation, and pure reactivity. Because these are each really critical parts of interpreting and really important parts of life. So I did a series of dialogues on
narcotic control drugs, specifically chemical precursors, like the kinds of chemicals that are used to make drugs. And this was between the Chinese, you know, the Chinese EU and American equivalents of the DEA.
And, you know, going in, there's going to be like this list of chemicals and drugs and policies that you're going to that are going to be talked about. Those aren't the sort of things that you can just like react to. You better be prepared. So that's where just research comes in. Preparation comes in. Planning comes in. But most mostly you are prepared.
Dealing with things as they come, you know somebody a speaker gets up and they start talking you're off to the races in its pure form That's like just reactivity like you have to just empty your mind of everything that you Everything that you knew or thought you knew and just really listen to the person without any, you know preconception or judgment Which I think obviously has a lot of you know implications for how we we deal with each other, right? Just can we be purely reactive? Not make a lot of assumptions
But then at a tactical level, there are certain, there's like tactical predictions that you can make about like, okay, you started the sentence. Where do I think it's going to end?
And again, that comes in really handy when different languages have different grammatical structures and with the pressure of simultaneous interpreting, like you need to kind of take shortcuts in order to stay within a couple seconds of the speaker. Otherwise you fall too far behind and you get lost. So when a sentence starts,
you start thinking like you're, you know what it is? It's chat GPT, man. I was just going to say chat GPT. It's just based on these first five words, what are the most likely next five words and what are going to be the last five words of this sentence? Oh my God. And you get like pretty. Yeah. Can you guess at what my next word is going to be? Yeah. You get pretty. Good at it. Good at it. Right? Like, and we do this, we're all doing this all the time. Tactical prediction of, of where,
And that's why sometimes it gets frustrating if somebody like, you know, takes too long to finish their sentence. And you're like, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I know. I already know what you're trying to say. Like these intellectual shortcuts we take, right? So I just, you know, just to put a bow on it, I really think interpreting is a great grounding for finding the right balance between coming prepared and having the right context. That's the word, that's the critical word that I didn't use. It's like preparing yourself with the context of
and then being really open-minded and reactive and take things as they come, but also be able to make short-term tactical predictions as to how one thing leads to another. I'm going to draw an analogy and it might be completely off and I in no way want to compare what we do on the show with the level that you do it at. I mean,
I think you just, you said something, if I caught you correctly, there was like only a very small number, maybe one foreigner that ever graduated from this program and you were that person. We spent a lot of time on this show because there's three very different personalities. And I think that's what makes the show work.
we argue argued a lot, I think as I alluded to before, and we spent a lot of time trying to find that balance between preparation and then being in the flow. And I feel like these two things feed into each other. Recently I've been watching the, do you, do you follow basketball at all or do you not too much? You, you, you see after the result, like one team won, one team lost, uh,
Some of them were like, okay, they didn't get the preparation piece right. They're like, we didn't have the right mindset. So we went in there and tried to execute, just all fell apart. Like we just didn't have our head in the game. On the other hand, you've also see other cases where they started off, they had the preparation, but then they couldn't make the adjustment. And then the other team made the adjustment and they couldn't sort of make that adjustment. And so it is this very intricate sort of
virtuous cycle if you get it right. And I think it's an incredible metaphor of all the different things that have to come together in terms of your focus, preparation for you to get to that level. And I imagine that's why, I don't think you're like just in the 1%, you're probably in the point, you know, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, because it's,
You might have one skill, but then to put everything together. I don't know. What do you think of that? I think the metaphor to podcasting is entirely apt. I think the analogy with sports is entirely apt. I think there is a much bigger lesson here for life about the balance between preparation, tactical execution, and just balance.
being really present and performing reactively and dynamically. Let's call it dynamically, right? And I think it's a little silly to, you know, I would not present that as like a robust framework that like these three things exhaustively cover everything, but like, let's just use it as shorthand. And it's equally silly to assume that it's zero sum, but let's just give it some proportional numbers. I think that
preparations like 10, 15%. Yeah. The tactical, you know, anticipation or, you know, the, the, the, the little tactics that you employ might be like five or 10%, but I think 75% is going to come down to the, the, the vast majority of performance comes down to, are you there? Are you in the moment? Are you being really aware and intentional and adaptive of
to dynamic situations. And I think if we looked at like, you know, business or life, especially like, and I think it's getting more and more like that, right? Like the pandemic, if nothing else, hopefully taught us that
super forward looking planning is, is not necessarily like the greatest skill to have in a world where just things are changing so unpredictably and so quickly. And now AI is like, is making that even more, you know, it's very hard. You listen to all in and stuff. And like the smart, you know, the smart money is like, we don't really know what's going on or what's coming around the corner or what to do right now. So like, let's just forget all the plans. Let's just,
be here and be aware and be thoughtful and talk to each other and then find the best next step forward. It reminds me of something I've been, I read recently, there's a guy named Alan Fine and he's a pretty well-known leadership coach and built some different models. And a lot of it's the mindset. And one of the things he highlights, one of the themes is it's not a knowledge or even a skill issue. It's a focus issue. You pretty much know what you need to know to get even get in the door, right?
It's really a focus issue and being present and just using what you have in the moment. And I think we're always sort of thinking about, oh, I don't have all the information. I didn't make a good enough plan, but really even some of the numbers you put out, and I would imagine they differ by the situation, but... Those numbers were not meant to be scientific. Yeah, for sure. But I love how you put some...
general figures of what that pie chart would look like. And I would kind of, I would almost imagine in most disciplines that that execution piece, that being in the moment, being present is the determining factor because just to get to that point, you probably have done a lot of that groundwork. Jack Welch said the team that sees reality clearest wins. And I think the
you know the modern adage should be whoever's most present wins i love it and i think that is very soothing to me uh and and challenging to me because it's something that empowers us to be a winner at any any moment
At any single moment in time, whatever we're doing, even like if in the macro, we're like, I don't, I'm not crazy about my job right now. Or like, I don't want to be here. I don't know. You know, I'm lost in direction. Forget that. Are you present right now? If you are, you're winning. If you're not, you're losing life. Because if you pay attention to like in an hour, you're
how much of that hour are you really present and paying attention to what's going on around you? How aware and intentional are you? Like, I would like to make that a metric, right? For myself of just like in an hour or in a day or in a month or in a year or in a lifetime, like what proportion of the time are I really paying attention to what's going on? I think most of us would be shocked about how little we're in the moment most of the time. If like, if, you know, because like,
But they have those like trackers like on your, maybe like your watch or something. You can track how much you're sleeping or how much you're actually in REM sleep. If there was something like that, that could track like how much, like how aware are you or present are you from a minute to minute perspective? And you can, at the end of the day, you can watch a whole graph of that. I think we'd be shocked. Killer app. But because I think most of us were living either in the future or living in the past.
Because we're either anxious about something that's about to come that like is in the future, near future, far future, whatever it is. Or we're like anxious about something we did before or something someone said or some fight we had or something we regret or some embarrassment or humiliation we had right in the past. So we're constantly kind of fluctuating between the future and past without like rarely kind of staying and spending much time in the present. You miss it.
And you miss it all. And you're so...
You're so focused that you achieve all your goals and you die rich and you missed it all. And the classic example, I don't know if it's a classic example, but at least for me, like, and I know for many people is like the wedding example. Like most people don't really remember their own weddings because they're so like caught up in like all the guests and the planning and making sure the band is playing right. Make sure they're serving the food on time, you know, make sure everyone's seated in the right place. Like you're running around frantic because you're organizing this whole event for all these people you're inviting, right?
And then at the end of it, I didn't even get to enjoy my own damn wedding. Like I hardly even remember my own damn wedding, you know what I mean? Because I'm so, I was so caught up in like everything else, making sure the guests were having a good time. Justin, did I have a wedding? I don't even remember. Yeah, you did. Yes, you did. So I just had a wedding and I barely remember. And I remember that advice. I remember a really good friend and colleague of mine. And he said, he said, no matter what, just, well, he gave me two pieces of advice. He said, okay, if you're going to speak,
just make sure you jot down some notes so you don't totally like fucking bomb it. That would be bad. But more importantly, make sure that throughout the night at different moments, you actually go up to your wife and, and, and you soak in the moment a little bit. And it helped a little bit. I, I,
I did have a really good time, but I also felt a lot of anxiety through the evening as well. I think we're giving good examples of outstanding life moments, but this dynamic and this risk and this imperative to be present, it's like right now, right? It's like, there's no reason really why, you know, the birth of our child, our marriage, you know, our wedding, those are just moments like this is a moment, right?
And every single moment that we're alive, this miracle that we have, that we get to exist, nobody tells us why or how. We don't understand why or how. The only thing we know is that it's pretty finite, at least in this consciousness. Oh, man. Well, okay. Let's not get too emo here. I will pour a little fuel on the fire, but then...
we'll try to shift the tone. So one really, have you read 4,000 weeks by Oliver Berkman? We've talked about this on the show. It's a fucking awesome. It's an awesome book. Basically it's like life is fucking short. And then how do you be in the moment? And it's very inspiring. One of the first sentences in the book is, is, is pretty scary. Um,
He's an incredible writer. He writes for The Guardian as well. And he says, the average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. I was like, wow, okay, that's pretty good, right? I think that's why we do this podcast sometimes. We're creating an experience for all of us, for in this moment, and then for others to kind of
um share in that moment now as well yeah so anybody listening to this podcast right now press pause take a break look around you look at the room around you if there's anybody in the room look them in the eyes take a deep breath
And then continue listening to us. By the way, actually just turn off this, this episode. No, just listen. No, no, no. Actually, I was going to say, I was going to say, do something different. Turn off the TV, turn off all your other stuff and just listen to my voice. Just us. This is the first, this is the only firsthand experience you need. But here, you know, so look, I think it's really good. I think this platform and every platform that we can ever get, we should, we should get this message out and we should pressure people a little bit.
to like, Hey, snap out of it, whatever you're doing, bring your attention to the present, bring the attention to you around you. There are like some stakes in the sense of how the 4,000, when you're like, this is pretty, this is pretty precious. Cheers to that. Cheers. I just poured out this one. By the way, do you, do you ever do any writing?
As a matter of fact, I do. Because I think, and maybe you're already working on this, I think there's a book in this, Lessons of Life from a Simultaneous Interpreter. Should we all be co-authors on this? Oh, yeah. We'll just put my name on there. It was Justin's idea. Yeah, of course. Yeah. I'll be the main face on the cover, obviously. You guys are like little icons on the bottom. Thank you for saying that. Look, I think I...
deep down, like I think my, my personal and professional mission is just helping people better understand each other and themselves. And I am, I've found lots of communication gaps in language and I've, you know, developed a practice of,
to solve that. And then later in my career, we can talk about, I've founded companies to solve, to deliver those solutions at scale. More recently, I work on kind of a more strategic level, strategic communications, consulting, investor relations, same problem of how do we communicate value? How do we share our perspective and build trust and build partnerships across not just language barriers and cultural barriers, but across economic barriers?
I think there are, for what is exciting for me is to constantly explore what are the gaps in understanding between each other and with ourselves, and then what are novel solutions that can be used to overcome those gaps? You mentioned this gaps, and I think this is something that is a theme of our show. So what I've
Noticed in media these days is that they're, they're less interested in understanding the gaps between different groups or different people. They're less interested in that than highlighting the schism between things, right? Like they actually want to show that massive, massive distance. Contrast. And contrast and polarize that.
and highlight that and not look at it from a solutions perspective or perhaps sort of blaming. When you look at whether it's governments these days or high level leaders, what are some of the elements of strategic communication? Where are the gaps in their actual strategic communication skills? What do you see in those types of patterns? And what do you wish they would do more of?
I think the biggest gaps that we see are gaps in awareness and gaps in intentionality. So you have a lot of people that are not reflecting on who they are and where they're from, their past, their present and their future. And a lot of people who are not really interested in who they're, who the other is and are not being very intentional about how they, about their
how they communicate. And the result is just a kind of a slugfest, right? And so we've made straw men of each other at definitely a geopolitical level. You see in America at a societal level, even at, you know, sometimes an organizational and interpersonal level, people treat each other as these ridiculous cartoons, these caricatures that are erected
sometimes intentionally, sometimes quite strategically and other times just through ignorance. - Reactively.
Uh, so sometimes just cause it's, it's easy. Right. And I mean the U S China relationship is, is so bad right now and getting worse. And, uh, both sides are treating each other as cartoons, as, as straw men, the taking the very worst side of one another and, you know, holding, putting a spotlight on it and, and just shouting kind of incoherently about how ugly, uh,
The other is. Like you said, it's almost cartoonish. It's cartoonish. Yeah. It's, I think, worse on the American side. It's a joke, except it's the least funny joke in the world. Where do you think this is coming from? Do you think this is like a collective...
the distortion that we were talking about earlier where these, these individual messages just get muddled and like, you've got this very complex chaos going on and then the whole system becomes emotional. Or do you think there is some type of intention behind it, but in a, in a, in a negative adversarial kind of way by a small group of people then that are trying to influence the
I've spent my whole career trying to help China and the West better understand one another. And so it's quite personal. For me, it's heartbreaking to see where we are right now. And I think it is that a lack of awareness of who we are and what we've been doing on the U.S. side, like we've...
whether it's economically or politically, uh, we've gotten ourselves into such a mess domestically that literally the only thing that, you know, two parties can agree on is that China's the enemy because that is... TikTok, by the way, is actually the enemy. Exactly. TikTok. I mean, that, that was the moment that crystallized it for so many where there's not a rational conversation here, right? Uh, I personally, I think, uh,
I think shows is one of the most talented communicators in, you know, alive today. I think he's really the CEO of tech. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's really talented. And, you know, went in with a lot of good faith and,
uh, I don't, was probably not the, I don't know that he was prepared well enough for how, how can you be prepared for that? Yeah. How can you be prepared for an ass whooping? Well, look, I mean, I don't know, like, I don't want to get into it, but I mean, there are a lot of law firms and lobbyists and, and PR firms kind of advising him on this. So I think he could have been better prepared, but like, you know, what,
It was such a stark demonstration of how strong and how unique the consensus is. There's no other consensus between Democrats and Republicans, anything near as tight as on this blanket idea that China is bad. And that is so painful to, I think, all of us that live...
between the countries that you know grew up between the countries that you know believe in these two countries and i don't know there's like the chinese concept of nidra right like of of fighting against yourself and like humanity is facing this huge nadran moment where uh the two you know most powerful nations in human history not only not working together but are working are kind of like actively working to undermine one another and it's
Like I don't, I don't, I typically avoid judgmental language, but like, come on, first principles, China's not going anywhere. The U S is not going anywhere. Like the, the basic logic of collaboration is so intuitive and necessary. The, the basic, you know, I know there's obviously a political advantage to everybody to blame the other. I'm not naive about that, but like,
We have so much that we can achieve together. And I think we are at a moment in history where things could go very, very in very, very different ways. And the distribution of outcomes really skew towards the extreme. Do you are you a student of history at all?
I'm curious. I'm not going to say yes to that question because that's like, I don't want to put you on the spot, but like, um, I imagine that with all this history, but I imagine that with all the emperors, all the conversations you're in that, that you're, you're fairly well, well read, but I was curious. I'm not really much of a student of history, but I'm just wondering, well, we are in a very small slice of the universe, um,
And we're even a very slight, small slice of sort of mankind or humankind, sorry. And I just wonder, like, is sort of war and conflict inevitable? You fight and then you experience the worst loss you can imagine. And then like, you know, then you're kind of like, oh, okay, yeah, no, we fucked up. Like, and then you go back and there's peace for a while. Yeah.
And then things happen and we need an enemy to blame. And we're still, we're starting to think short term and then we fight again. Is it inevitable? Yeah, man. I mean, right. Like I do believe there's a pendulum. And in that sense, you know, as, as, as, as tragic as it is, it's not surprising in any way. I think the only, you know, the only difference is in the extent of suffering and like how much you get, you know, there's always going to be, you ever read the foundation by Isaac Asimov?
No, I want to. And there was a TV series too. So big premise, not to go on a big tangent, is just like... Please, please go on. You know, Rome is collapsing. The Middle Ages, the Dark Ages are coming. There's always going to be Rome and there's always going to be the Dark Ages. There's always going to be peace and there's always going to be war. The question is...
How long are the dark ages going to last? Is it going to be 50 years, 50 years or 500 years? How, how much human suffering is going to take place to the extent that human suffering matters and we're all just, you know, dust and none of this, blah, blah, blah. It's all a simulation or whatever, but putting all that aside, like how, you know, how bad is this going to be? And I think that's where I do feel like I don't feel empowered to, to avert, you know, us China rivalry. Yeah.
it's we're here, but I do think that all of us that care can, and it's like flatten the curve and COVID, right? Like I think we can, you know, make it a shorter and less wrenching, less existentially damaging experience for our human body politic with, with, with a lot of heart and a lot of effort. And, and that can, you know, and that, that can make a lot of difference. Like we could, we,
I want to believe that in my lifetime, we will have another era of engagement where the U.S. and China are friends and allies and brothers in humanity for a greater cause to do great things. And I hope that at that time, I and all of us are remembered as those that promoted dialogue when it was hard, not...
you know, that just like we were here for the good time for the Olympics and we made a quick buck and then we, you know, F'd off because it became too politically sensitive or, you know, it wasn't cool anymore and it wasn't as easy to make money. So we all just, you know, picked up stakes and, you know, did something else. I really care. And I think that if enough people care and are open-minded and,
and put themselves out there and are constructive that no, we're not going to totally head off this, this, this rivalry where, you know, we can't snap our fingers, but I think that we can make it shorter and better. Yeah. Can we, can we, can we cheers to that first? Yeah. Yeah. I mean that, and I think this also ties into Jonathan, what you do in terms of like, cause I, I know, I know you've said before something to the effect that like knowing, like knowing more than one language, um,
is like having like more than one like personality. You're taking on like a different persona in a way. And you're thinking through a different lens, through a different culture and through a different context, different references. So, I mean, there has to be a big element of empathy. Interpreting definitely trains your empathy in the sense that if you don't understand where somebody's coming from, you can't understand what they're saying. And...
I think today I'm very interested in how we apply that empathy to not only getting a message across, but to building and executing partnerships across language barriers, cultural barriers, business barriers, economic barriers, all these different boundaries between us.
So in the business that we have now, it's called Next Level Communication. And it's a consultancy that helps multinational executives and investors to build stronger stakeholder relationships overseas. And so before we get to...
How do I craft my message? How do I deliver my message? What's the right format? What's the right content? What's the right channel? We get all to that, but starting from an understanding, that empathy of what's this person's context? What language do they speak? Not in a linguistic language, but like what, you know, how do they, what does the voice in their head sound like? What does the voice with their friends and their colleagues internally sound like?
And one thing with next level communication, as I was reading up about it beforehand, a keyword that jumped out to me repeatedly was that not only are you coaching kind of communication, great communication mindset,
to people, but you're doing it for people who really need to use it and leverage it in high stake situations. Can you kind of elaborate a little more on that? Yeah. So as we were, you know, I was doing a lot of this interpreting at a pretty high level and got to meet and serve a number of multinational executive, Chinese multinational executives. These are companies like DD and Mobike that were building their businesses overseas and their C-suites needed to, you know,
tell their story to foreign audiences, to speak at Davos, to raise money from SoftBank. And they hired me to work as a communication coach to help find the right message, present those messages and develop this sort of mindset of how we can use, I like to say, be aware and intentional of how we communicate in every conversation with every person every day.
And so that was the sort of this start of next level communication came from this belief that better communication is always going to lead to better outcomes, that anybody can reach their next level as a communicator. And we see this most, you mentioned the kind of high stakes nature of it. We always start...
at the top of the organization, usually with the C-suite or founding partner. And the use cases that are most common for us are ones in which an incremental improvement in communication can have absolutely decisive outcomes. So I'll give the example of a fund manager raising money from an international investor. So you're a Chinese hedge fund manager and you are trying to raise money
$200 million from international pensions and endowments. The quality of your communication, its relationship with the outcome, the amount of money that you raise, is not linear in the sense that 15% better communication leads to 15% more funds. It's actually binary. It's this pension is going to write you a $50 million check or they're not.
Whether or not you get that check is going to determine on the amount of trust and influence that you're able to build with their investment committee. It doesn't matter where you start.
core belief, anybody can reach their next level as a communicator. If that 15 or 20% improvement that, you know, we can help through, through coaching or consulting and, you know, obviously we try and be ambitious and make it more than that. But, um, even if the point is that even a modest improvement in how you communicate meaningfully improves the opportunity that you, the, the, the, the, the probability that you clear that barrier and get the whole check.
So the way that we, you know, the way that we define high stakes communication and on the multinational side, it's usually board of director meetings or global leadership meetings. It's like these conversations are going to, are really your primary channel for developing the trust and influence that you need to, to do what you set out to do. And we want to put all of the,
your, your people resources, the, the mindset, the skills, the abilities, the knowledge, the experience, as well as all of the collateral resources, whatever the presentation documents you have, um, to try and, and, and maximize the trust and influence that you're able to exert in those situations. So first of all, high stakes, when I think about high stakes, and there's a lot of ways of looking at it, and you've obviously defined this, these scenarios that your clients are
agree with you on a line so that you have this common premise. For me, high stakes is exactly what you said. There's a couple hundred million dollars on the line. You're not the only person in the game. You're not the only company in the game. There's always someone else because everyone wants to make $200 million. There's a lot of competition. And your primary channel of being able to convey why you're better, why you should be chosen is through how you communicate.
And the time you spend. And sometimes it is not, like you're not working with these people, let's say, like every single day. We're not on podcasts together building relationships. You're meeting them kind of on their turf. You got 50 minutes. You got 50 minutes or whatever it is. It's like a pitch, right? Yeah. Or whatever it is. I mean, there's probably other ways of influencing, but this is a very, very important one. So you've got competition and you kind of mentioned like,
incremental improvement can have the decisive outcome. And to me, and I know we, you said earlier, you don't follow sports that much, but we know the notion of sports is to score more points or whatever it is. Typically in golf, it's the opposite score, less points, but it sometimes comes down to the last five minutes. And how do you crunch time? Like in every sport. And then the last five minutes, your mindset, your execution, what we talked about earlier, your present being present and,
All these things factor in. And if you can get just a little bit of an edge, you don't have to score a thousand points more. You just need to score one more point
And it's binary because they're not going to split it and say, oh, you know what? You did a good job. I'll give you $99 million. Or you did an okay job. We'll give you half the dollar amount. Like that doesn't work. Either they invest or they don't. Winner takes all. A hundred percent. And the fund pitch is actually one of our kind of core offerings, fund pitch coaching. And it's where a lot of our clients start with us. And it's really, you're going into that room, you got 15 minutes and this person
before and after you are 10 other GPs, 10 other fund managers asking for that, that $200 million. And so, yes. How do you start strong? Ladies and gentlemen, right? How do you finish strong with, with, you know, leaving somebody with peak experience? How do you differentiate in, you know, a world where all professional services is, I've got a great track record and I've, you know, got, my team is really smart and I'm,
Uh, we have some kind of proprietary methodology, right? And everybody's kind of telling the same story. How do we identify something that is really unique about you? And we spend a lot of time with our clients. That's the, the self-awareness part of the, of, of, you know, in a, of an EQ quadrant is kind of like in, in the communication space that, that self-awareness is your narrative. Where do you come from? What makes you special?
Where are you going? What's the vision? And to be able to articulate that in a way that is clear and compelling and confident and really leaves somebody with an impression. Now, what I think about more and more these days is even beyond all of the, beyond the pitch and beyond the brand and the marketing, how do you really, how do you leverage experience to communicate clearly
across these perception gaps that we're talking about. And so I'll give you an example, like a story that I saw several years ago that really left an impact on me. I was in a meeting with the CFO of Haiti, Xichang. And this is before, this is your pre-pandemic. They were still pre-IPOs, private company. And they were meeting with a bunch of fund managers from the US. And the fund managers had been in China
They'd been in meetings all day. They're kind of in this stuffy hotel room in Shenzhen. They'd done like eight or nine management meetings and they were just like, uh, exhausted. They were zoned out. They were tired. It was like the worst time to like, it's like really tough to talk to them. And the, um, you know, the CFO of Haiti comes in and first he shows him the little WeChat mini app and is like, look, I'm going to order you guys some teas and you can try it out. Uh, and then they, you know, sit down and start the meeting.
And it's kind of a disaster from the very beginning. Like he's trying to explain to them why Haiti is interesting. And he's like, there's cheese foam on top of grape pulp. And then we put Corona beer in it. And the, and the Westerners are like, this sounds terrible.
Like literally laughing, like this sounds awful. And then, you know, they're telling the, the kind of the founder story of like, he sat alone in a kitchen for, you know, three years trying to make this home brew. And it sounds like moonshine. And because it's not public yet, he's being a little cagey with the numbers. So the, the Westerners just aren't getting what they want. And the, they're totally writing off this meeting. And then the tea shows up and they,
stick the straw in, right? It's that nice tactile feeling of sticking a straw in a bubble tea. And they take the first quarter
cool sip of like a nice cheese foam, great pull Corona laced Haiti. And they're like, Oh my God, this is so refreshing. So good. This company's incredible. How did you do this? Have you ever tasted anything like that? Right. And it's just, it's like such a simple reminder that yeah, picture's worth a thousand words, but like an experience is worth a gazillion of them. And, and I'm talking to, and you're talking to a guy that is like spent my whole life and career, uh,
deeply believing in the power of language and the power of words and the impact of stories. And I do believe in all of these things. But I'm also thinking a lot these days about in a world where, for example, the US and China are talking less and less. How do you communicate through new and novel ways to sort of
Joke people out of what they of the conclusions that they drawn right just like these these investors had written off Haiti like you know if so many people have written off the possibility of collaboration between between the US and China or Between different different stakeholders. I don't want to make it all about us in China This is not all about that right, but how do we joke people out of what they know what they think they know and
enlighten them to some new perspective, possibility of something new that is also really great. And I think about that a lot. And I think that's kind of like a trillion dollar frontier for communication advisory is how do we really break people out of their mental models? So how do we do that? Because I want to make this relatable, right? Because like,
Talking about high stakes, and I think if we look at that term through the lens of relativity, I think it doesn't have to be the scenarios that you're describing in terms of high stakes investor meetings, millions of dollars on the line. Obviously, those are high stakes, but most people aren't in that situation. And most people are just living their day-to-day lives in
But in relativity perspective, they are also confronting what is high stakes in the context of their own lives, right? And I think anything that can be defined as high stakes can be defined as any decisive moment. Whatever that decision is, it doesn't have to be for a million dollars. It can be any kind of decision. That's high stakes for you. When you tell your crush...
that you like her, right? - Exactly. - Like that's the high stakes pitch. - Exactly. - For you know, a billion teenagers out there. - Exactly, right? - And 20 and 30 year olds out there. - So like these decisive moments that we're faced with, that everybody is faced with in their own lives, whether it's kind of what you were just saying about jolting people out of this kind of like, this zombie like state that cognitively like we're in sometimes,
Or it's certain kind of like key principles that we can take away in terms of perfecting our communication. Um, whether even if it's incrementally, because like you said, like even an incremental, a modest change can, can put you over that critical mass where that high stakes situation from becomes from a no to a yes. Right. Yeah. Uh,
First of all, there's no magic words that's going to make a no into a yes. Let's be real honest with ourselves. If they're not going to invest, they're not going to invest. If she doesn't love you, she doesn't love you. But assuming that most things are not so binary, most things, there's a chance and you want to give yourself the best chance. And so that's what we're optimizing for. I think...
two parts of your question. Like part of it is how do we,
Create that aha perspective that that freshness really wake people up a little bit. And then the second is, you know, generalized principles for communicating. I think the the way the waking up really comes back to our conversation about presence is can we if you're trying to ask somebody on a date or ask somebody for $50 million and they're thinking about.
you know, something in the past or they're like thinking all about something in the future and they're not really there with you, this conversation is not going to go very well. Right? So what can you do to bring yourself and them and bring yourself together in this present moment? And that can be, it can be really simple stuff. It can be looking them in the eyes and saying their name and commenting on something that like,
a shared reality, right before I say, Justin, look at this cork here that we have like this, this whiskey, you know, this, this whiskey cork that has been sitting here in my line of vision for an hour. And I've never noticed before. And like, wow, like little, little things, um,
taking those deep breaths, getting that fresh air. Or do people like do gimmicks, like a gimmick, like if you were to walk into the room and just do a cartwheel, for example, like something like totally out of the blue and random. It would definitely take people out of their commonality. It kind of wakes people up like, oh, okay, what's up here? I haven't advised any gymnastics approaches, but all sorts of stuff. And you see this is a long established practice, both in
in the showmanship and you know, industry, but also in the meditation and kind of, you know, spiritual awakening industry, uh, of what are, you know, what's the equivalent of like a big clap to just like snap out of it. Right. And, and, and bring us back to the present because we, because yeah, exactly. The gong, right. Cause we were so focused on bringing ourselves into the moment, uh,
that I completely forgot about in the context of like, let's say, quote unquote, high stakes situation. You need to bring your audience into the moment with you. Otherwise, you're just alone there. Exactly. It is not just hyping yourself up, you know, the kind of that meditative practice before you go into the interpreter booth or before you start the game where you look in the mirror and it's just you and you're like, okay, I'm going to be my best. When you're communicating, it's not just you, right? It takes two to tango. So the question is, how do you start that
conversation in a way that both you and your partner are like bringing your best to this conversation. That's a good tip. Yeah. I want to, I love this. I love where this is going. I want to share a couple of, when you walked in the room about two hours ago. Okay. I don't think intentionally we're trying to do any kind of showmanship or anything like that, but there's a little bit of showmanship going
around the way Justin designed this room. It's pretty fucking cool. But I could tell that you look at the room and you're like, wow, there's these beautiful curtains. There's this soundproofing. There's like an Andy Warhol or I don't know, some shit here, a knockoff probably from Taobao. But there's like a Statue of Liberty over there. There's this wonderful oak table, the rugs from different parts of China. How many things in this room are you going to go through? A lot. Before you get to your point. Okay. All right.
Give me some air time. Where do you think he's going with this? Yeah. You know, we made it an experience and I'm kind of putting this together now and it's like, shit, man. We had a guest, Larry Wong actually said, dude, you don't need to invent like a lot of new shit. Like most people have already figured it out. You just got to learn from like, who knows about this? What are some great ways of doing things? What can I learn from them?
And it's just brings us back to human being a human being. Essentially that's where we're just trying to break them out of this fucked up world and
And so that tea just snapped them out. In our case, we had some nice whiskeys that like you happen to not be allergic to alcohol. Well, it was also this delicious coffee from Nespresso. I gotta say, this Nespresso coffee that I just had, that was transformative. That was transformative and transformative. It took me to where I needed to be to have Nespresso. What's that coffee you had again? It's Nespresso coffee. It's the only coffee I drink when I do podcasts. I don't drink coffee, but when I do, I drink Nespresso. Yeah.
It's really good. But like, we don't need to kind of reinvent things or sometimes you just got to bring people back to being human. And there are different ways to do that. And sometimes just busting out a fucking cheese tea, I don't need to go up there. And it reminds me of Einstein. We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we use to create them. Eric, you like, honestly, it is this idea of,
remembering, like waking people up to being human again. We operate in life, in our day-to-day life, almost in the zombie-like state of routine and rigmarole, where we're locked into this routine, we're robots in a system. We all know humans are very pattern-oriented. As individual and as creative and as special as we think we are, we're actually very pattern-oriented in behavior. We just
We have like very simple operating systems. And from a macro level, if you look at like, like human behavior, it's like pretty much all the same across the board. But anyway, like on an individual level, we get locked into this, this routine, this rat race, and we just operate like on automatic. And until you really stop to think about it, to like, honestly think about it intentionally, you don't realize that,
how much of the time you're not like really awake, you know, you're not really being human. And I don't think that can go understated. I think that's exactly right. I think we tend to
We fail to humanize each other and we fail to humanize ourselves, especially in high stakes environments when we think we got to be like so super buttoned up and everything has to go exactly according to plan. And it's like we were talking about earlier. It's like all the planning and none of the in the moment planning.
you know, reactivity. So I'll give an example. One of, one of our fund manager clients, when we first started working with him, he had this, like we worked on this presentation that he wanted to give introducing his fund and his portfolio. And every time he would meet a potential investor, he'd,
He would just like jam it with the presentation and they'd ask questions in the middle and he'd be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm trying to finish this presentation. Right. Like, and he would just like be so focused on, no, I practiced this with my coach. I got to like make sure that I'm delivering it right. And when we heard this, we were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
No webinar will ever be as good as a good podcast, right? Where like the ability to, uh, to engage for it to be, to, to be alive, to be alive and alive between humans is where trust and influence is built. If it was just a matter of the data, uh,
you'd send them an Excel sheet and they'd write you a check. If it was just a matter of the bullet points, you'd send them the deck and they'd write you a check. It doesn't work that way. You're having this meeting, you're having this conversation. The only reason you've been invited to have this conversation is because at the end of the day, it's at least as of May, 2023, it's not computers making the final decision. It's humans making the final decision. And, yeah,
The extent to which you can build trust with humans is really the directly decisive factor of how successful you will be on whatever endeavor you set out to pursue, whether it's, you know, a company or an investment or a date or whatever. It's just like, can I build trust and influence with this human being? And how do I do that? Yeah.
I think that's really well said. Going off of what you just brought in, the idea of, because I've been meaning to kind of ask you about this as well, you know, I think for some people we're right now on the precipice of a new era that humankind has never been there before. You have the advancements in AI. And I know we're taking like a big pivot here, but I think it does matter in your field, or at least in your former field in terms of interpreting. I mean, how have you seen AI affect people
that industry and what you do and how much of that is, has motivated you to kind of pivot and start the businesses that you're in now and how much of it scares you. Yeah. In 2014 or 15, uh,
I was well into my interpreting career and living this great life. You know, it was a good time to be an interpreter. We were paid well. We've flown around the world in business class to meet like fancy people and fancy events and feel really important. Even if you're, you know, a utility service provider, you're there, you're part of it and you're necessary. And in...
Sometimes, like, you know, over drinks, interpreters would ask, do you ever think, like, you know, AI will be able to replay Google Translate? And we tell ourselves, no, it's impossible and never do. Nobody can do what I can do. Right. And and then in 2015, AlphaGo, the Google AI company.
completed this incredible upset of the world go champion, Lisa Dole. And it was really a, it was a landmark. I mean, there's, I feel like landmarks in AI advancement are happening every other week right now. So we're kind of desensitized to it, but it was, it was really a watershed moment. Nobody thought that this was possible. It was a huge breakthrough for self-learning, you know, for, for self-learning models.
So AI beat the current world champion at Go? Yeah, at Go. And at the time it was thought that Go is as complex as like language. It is a really, I mean, there's orders of magnitude more complex than chess. Yeah, like AI was able to beat the top chess player years ago. And this was like the last frontier. Yeah, this was really a breakthrough. It was something that even, not just,
Go players, but AI experts didn't think could be done until boom, it was done. And what I took away from that was all of the things that we've told ourselves are unique to humans, that are unique advantages that humans have are not. We should very much question that confidence or arrogance that we have. And for me, very directly in my career, I said, look,
I'm telling myself nobody can do what I do now, but it's only a matter of time before AI or machine translation, machine interpreting is able to solve for a lot of these problems. And when it comes, my logic was like, as an individual freelancer, I'm liable to get replaced by technology. As a platform, I'm in a position to leverage technology.
and capture some of the, hopefully a lot of the value that comes from that productivity gains.
That was a big shift for me in moving from an individual practitioner to a platform operator. And I think about the same, you know, when it comes to the business that we do now of advising clients on message strategy and collateral, you know, creation and working on their decks. If I were doing that as an individual practitioner,
I think we'd easily be wiped out. I think as a company, as a platform, we have an opportunity to leverage technologies as they're being developed and put them together in innovative ways for our clients. Now,
these technologies are getting really good and increasingly intuitive to use. So it's not clear that clients will always need a service provider. The end users might not always need a service provider to bundle them in clever ways. They might just be able to use natural language and be like, hey, you know, hey, ChachiPT, grant every wish that I ever had. Or be like an app on their phone. Yeah. And so not just us, but
the entire knowledge economy is the middleman that gets cut out between human desire and fulfillment. Like that is the maximalist vision of what this becomes. And that's the maximalist abundant vision. That's the utopian vision is that labor and productivity gets abstracted and there is zero friction between human desire and fulfillment. That anything we want
We can just communicate in natural language, or maybe we just think it and the neural link kind of gives it to the AI agent, which goes and makes it happen. And we, and it's just genies in bottles or genies out of bottles. And we live in this world where all of our wishes are fulfilled. And then the biggest challenge for us is, you know, man is condemned to be free and we have incredible wealth and we don't know what to do with ourselves.
The other possibility that a lot of AI experts are warning about is that this all goes terribly wrong and we die. To me, I don't hear a lot of experts saying that things are going to stay the same. It seems like we are headed towards- It's mostly pessimism that I hear. I hear a lot of pessimism. I hear cautious optimism. It sure seems like an extreme range of outcomes where things could get really awesome or really terrible.
To me, it brings back either way, the positive expected value bet here is really appreciate what we have in the present and be really critical about what we're doing with our lives. Because the last thing that I want, the only really negative outcome for me is what if this was the last years in which human labor was
was the driver of human meaning. You know, Marx told us that so much of our identity, so much of our existential significance comes from our work. And I think we all feel that in different ways.
Just like the example of like, if you ask someone typically, like, who are you? They'll probably describe like their job title. Yeah. Right. Because we spend so much of our waking time and it's a whole other question of, of should we, you know, not do that, but, but we do. And for some good reasons, but what if that's about to no longer be true? What scares me is like, what if we're the last generation or these are the last years in which that is true. And we spend our time worrying about,
you know, the, the, the margins on this PowerPoint and like the getting the deck right. And all of this stuff is about to not matter at all. And we miss our, our daughter's first years, or we miss the most important parts of our lives, or we, or we just, just miss being with each other or we start dehumanizing each other because we're, you know, too busy with our stuff and with our work to, to care. And, um,
And we just throw away these last precious moments. It's like watching, it's like the sun is setting and we're looking at our phones. It's not bad. It's just sad. I think an interesting question is about purpose and significance. I think this is a question that will, was the purview of philosophers and idle wanderers
It was a very first world question for most of human history. And it's about to maybe become a very mainstream question of what is the point of being human. I think it's about to become very relevant to a lot of people, a big portion of the population that felt insulated from it before. And maybe you're going to be asking that question later.
and be asked that question in society for the first time really seriously and not have anywhere to run from that question. I think for a long time we've been able to kind of like squirm out of it and we're gonna have to face it in a really stark way in coming years. And I like my favorite, one of my favorite pieces of art is this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon
Where Calvin is out looking at the night sky. First panel, just him looking at the stars. Second panel, just him looking at the stars. Third panel, it's him cupping his hands to his mouth and shouting at the stars. I'm significant. It's this six-year-old, this childish child.
insistence that we have this screaming into the night that we have a I have a purpose I haven't really defined it yet and you know I'm gonna work on that next week but I do I know that I have a purpose right we're just telling ourselves more than the universe and
The other story I like is a classic from my uncle. I don't know where it's originally from. He tells the story of a young British man that goes off to college. It has to be British for the accent. He goes off to college and gets his head full of big ideas and grand ideals. And during a holiday break, he comes home and finds his old dad who's a bit older and wiser and world-weary. And the young man says, Oh, father, don't you know everything matters?
And his father says, yes, everything matters, just not terribly. And I think we're, you know...
You see it even in our culture, right? Like in, in, in the generations where like the millennials and Gen Z's, everything matters, like social issues and just, just, and just like after the slacker culture of the nineties where nothing matters terribly. Right. It was like now, like everything matters. This is really pressing. And here we are, we're on the edge. We're on the precipice. This is a historical, like, you know, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for humanity and it could go real different ways. And so we just have to care more. Right. And, and,
We should balance that out with, you know, maybe it doesn't matter terribly. And maybe that's a form of courage, a very scary form of courage to think that like, maybe it doesn't. It's a great sentiment and maybe it doesn't have to be that significant to matter. So we build things up and build things up
And at the end of the day, hey, let's just have a drink and have a chat. And that's what matters. And it's maybe not that significant. And this is, I think, where it comes full circle to the interpreting as an act of making meaning of what's around us. Is there some fundamental part of human beings we have evolved to be interpreters, to create significance?
to give things significance, to make meaning where there was none. And maybe that's our jam. And I think to kind of tie this all up in terms of how we interpret all the signals that are coming to us in our daily lives, how do we interpret all this fucking shit coming at us
thousand miles an hour every single day, every single second left and right, 360 all around us. And we can't. The honest truth is our bandwidth and our mental capacity to really process literally every single input, we can't. So what do we do? We create cognitive shortcuts. We create intellectual shortcuts. We put things into baskets. We stereotype. We do all these things so that we can process the environment around us.
And a big part of that is the filter. Like Eric always likes to bring up the idea of filters and decision filters, which I think is very apt. And so what we end up having to do is we have to kind of refine our ability to filter and the ability to filter through the things that decipher through sift through all the bullshit and
and find like the golden nuggets that really do, really should mean a lot to us. And that's different for everybody in the context of their own lives and what to let go of.
And that in itself, I think, is an art. And it's an art that I have no idea how to do, but I do feel like there is some innate ability in all of us to decipher or to decide how best to do that for ourselves. And you do this when you simultaneously interpret, like the speaker is going at a million miles per hour and you are falling behind, like you can't keep up with them anymore.
You're going to have some transmission loss, but not all loss is equal. You're going to have to take some shortcuts. You're going to have to cut, but you know, do you cut the filler or do you cut the core? And if you drop the core, it's going to mess everybody. It's going to mess up the whole meeting, but you can drop a lot of filler and, and just get that capture the essence and, and you're fine. Right. And so, so much of our human experience is like, what's the filler and what's the core? Right.
And if we're overwhelmed or if we're being, you know, having parts of, of what we do replaced, how do we make sure that we're focused on the core and cutting the filler? I think that is probably one of the most important, like that judgment, the ability in real time and simultaneous to make these decisions on the fly of like all the stuff that's happening around me. What matters?
What is really moving the conversation forward? What is really building the relationship? What is building the trust and the influence? And what do we just cut because there's too much noise? Look, Jonathan,
John, like we're friends now, John. We're best friends now. Yeah, you can call him Jus. I'm Air. Guys, I'm a big fan of saying I love you. And- Love that. Between bros, between everywhere and everywhere. And I've only just met you, but I really love you. And I'm really glad that we got to spend this time together. This has been a really, and I just want to just call out like,
You've created a really special space. And I admired the physical space that you've created here in the studio, but I think more of the intellectual space and the relational space that you've made is something really special. I feel really honored to be
In this space, it's like you've created a camp at Burning Man that's really cool. This whole world that we live in is pretty wild. We can go out this door and into any other Nongtong and find something really interesting happening. But what's happening in this little space that you've created and that happens every week and gets published on the internet and you broadcast the space out, it's magical. And that's a real achievement.
Thank you. That's beautiful. That means a lot. Thank you. And that's the thing with doing the show. We get to have these really cool moments. And this one definitely stands out to me. I love it. I really love it. All right. That was Jonathan. I'm Justin. I'm Eric. Be good. Be well. Peace. Peace.