Poets & Thinkers
Poets & Thinkers explores the humanistic future of business leadership through deep, unscripted conversations with visionary minds – from best-selling authors and inspiring artists to leading academic experts and seasoned executives.
Hosted by tech executive, advisor, and Princeton entrepreneurship & design fellow Ben Lehnert, this podcast challenges conventional MBA wisdom, blending creative leadership, liberal arts, and innovation to reimagine what it means to lead in the AI era.
If you believe leadership is both an art and a responsibility, this is your space to listen, reflect, and evolve.
Poets & Thinkers
The Dark Side of Empathy: On AI “Soul Gaps”, emotional commons, and the responsibility to develop humane technologies with Michael Ventura
What if the very technology that promises to make us more efficient is actually creating “soul gaps” – spaces where human understanding and meaning simply cannot be replicated? In this deeply insightful episode of Poets and Thinkers, we explore the future of humanistic leadership with Michael Ventura, founder of SubRosa, author of “Applied Empathy,” and a fascinating polymath who bridges brand strategy, alternative medicine, and human development. From his practice at Esalen Institute to co-founding a pet food company with Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, Michael brings a unique perspective on how empathy serves as the new language of leadership.
Michael takes us on a journey through what empathy really means – distinguishing it from sympathy and compassion – and why it's become critical for leaders navigating increasingly diverse, multi-generational workforces. He shares compelling insights about how AI can replicate the technical aspects of creativity but misses the essential human elements, like where to place the divine spark of light in a Renaissance painting. Through examples ranging from political manipulation to Meta’s disturbing targeting of insecure teenagers, Michael reveals both the light and dark sides of applied empathy.
Throughout our conversation, Michael challenges us to slow down in a world obsessed with speed, arguing that patience – not just efficiency – should be a core leadership skill. He envisions a future where leaders move from having all the answers to asking all the right questions, creating space for diverse perspectives and collective intelligence. And we’ll even get a little teaser for Michael’s upcoming book on “constellation thinking” which promises to revolutionize how we understand purpose in our complex, multi-faceted modern lives.
In this discussion, we explore:
- Why empathy is not about being nice – it's about understanding without conversion
- How AI creates “soul gaps” where human meaning and divine sparks cannot be replicated
- The difference between cognitive empathy used for manipulation versus authentic connection
- Why leaders must transition from answer-givers to question-askers
- How patience becomes a revolutionary skill in our hyperconnected world
- The loss of shared cultural moments and emotional commons in our fragmented media landscape
This episode is an invitation to reclaim the deeply human skills that technology cannot replicate, and to use empathy not as weakness but as a strategic advantage in building more connected, innovative organizations.
Resources Mentioned
- Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership by Michael Ventura
- “The Dark Side of Empathy” - Michael’s New York Times op-ed
- “America's Uncontacted Tribes” article by Michael Ventura
- Center for Humane Technology - led by Tristan Harris
- Kismet – pet food company Michael co-founded with Chrissy Teigen and John Legend
Connect with Michael Ventura:
Get in touch: ben@poetsandthinkers.co
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Welcome to Poets and Thinkers, the podcast where we explore the future of humanistic business leadership. I'm your host, ben, and today I'm speaking with Michael Ventura. Michael and I were first introduced by Lizzie Azzolino, who interviewed us both for her podcast. Now at Work. She thought we'd get along. And a few conversations with Michael later, I can say that I feel a sense of kinship and deep inspiration.
Speaker 1:Michael is an accomplished entrepreneur, leader, practitioner and educator. His website, consolidatedeggscom, points to the vast spectrum of Michael's impactful work. Spectrum of Michael's impactful work. As the former founder of strategy and design consultancy SubRosa, he advised organizations like the ACLU, goldman Sachs, google, microsoft, nike, the United Nations and the Obama-Biden administration, to name a few. And, together with John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, michael co-founded the pet food company Kismet.
Speaker 1:His book Applied Empathy, published in 2018 by Simon Schuster, explores the intersectionality of leadership and self-development through the practice of empathy for each of us as individuals, for others and for society at large. He has served as a board member and advisor to Behance, the Burning man Project, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the United Nations Affiliated Tribal Link Foundation and a variety of growth stage businesses. As we explore in the future of business leadership, empathy is one of the key topics that keeps coming up. So speaking with Michael was a great way to dive deep into what empathy is, what it is not, how it's being weaponized and how leaders must acquire the skills to lead with applied empathy in the era of AI. If you like the show, make sure you like, subscribe and share this podcast.
Speaker 2:Michael, where does this podcast find you. Right now. I am in New York City and it is a real beautiful start of summer day here 88 degrees. I'm getting hotter.
Speaker 1:Why don't we get started and you tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, what occupies your time, what fills you up, all the things that make you you, before we jump into the many, many questions I have for you?
Speaker 2:Great. Well, first of all, thanks for inviting me. It's great to have these kinds of conversations. You know it's actually the hardest question to answer succinctly, which I hate because, like as a brand guy, like it should be an easier one. So I think, at like the most macro level, what I spend my time doing is trying to help individuals, teams, culture in some minuscule way that you can impact culture, to try to learn and grow, and I've done that a lot of different ways over the years. I was the founder and CEO of a brand strategy and design firm called Subrosa, which I ran for nearly 20 years. I was the founder and CEO of a brand strategy and design firm called Subrosa, which I ran for nearly 20 years.
Speaker 2:I'm the author and public speaker on a book and a topic that I refer to as Applied Empathy, which is really about how do we use empathy as a tool for personal development, leadership development, problem solving, etc. I've had an alternative medicine private practice for over a decade where I work with people one-on-one and also in group settings. I'm faculty at a place in Big Sur called Esalen where I teach this work, as well as in a private practice here in New York and writing a second book right now co-founder in a pet food business called Kismet, with Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, where we're giving dogs access to high nutrition at an affordable price, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think at the end of the day, that just makes me sound either schizophrenic or like someone who likes to build stuff, and I hope it's the latter.
Speaker 1:And I think that's why I am so excited to talk to you. Even from our first conversation, there was such a sense of kinship and inspiration, really seeing all the work that you do, and there is a through line and we'll get to that, from my perspective at least. So thank you for making the time to have this conversation with me. So the key theme of what I'm exploring with this podcast is figuring out what the future of humanistic business leadership looks like, and especially in this world that we're living in now and we'll probably continue to live in. One of the key themes, key words that keeps coming up is empathy and, as you mentioned already, you have literally written the book on empathy. So I thought it was a really good starting point to maybe just ask you, first and foremost, talk to me a little bit about what is empathy and what is it not.
Speaker 2:So empathy at the most macro level is the ability to, irrespective of your own lived experience, understand someone else's, and that understanding can lead to a lot of things, which we'll talk about in a moment. What it's not is sympathy, compassion or being nice, and I think that often those three other things get conflated, and so the way I often describe it for people is sympathy is I feel bad for you. There is no instance where you feel sympathetic for someone when they're having an exceptionally good moment in their life. It is usually a response to an adverse set of circumstances that someone else is having. Compassion is I want to help. I want to help you through this difficult situation you're in. Even if I don't understand it right, I can feel compassionate for Syrian refugees. I've never been a Syrian refugee. I have no idea what being a Syrian refugee might feel like, but I can still feel compassionate, I can still offer support. Empathy is I want to understand, and I want to understand comes in a lot of different flavors. There's lots of ways you can do that. There's some ways that you can do that that are more capable than others.
Speaker 2:People often talk about the golden rule do unto others as you would have them do unto you and kind of frame empathy like that.
Speaker 2:The challenge with that is what's right for you might not be what's right for me or vice versa right. So the example I often give is let's say, you've had a really hard day at work, Some people will want to be left alone and other people are going to want to talk it out right. And so if I want to talk it out and I come over and you're the kind of person who wants to be left alone, I'm imprinting my bias on what I think would be right if I was standing in your shoes. But, Michael, standing in your shoes is not the same as you standing in your shoes. And so that's when we get into the metaphor of taking the golden rule to the platinum rule, which is do unto others as they would have you do unto them. And the way you will understand that is through inquiry, through listening, through being willing to change your intended behavior based on new information, all of the stuff that sometimes is a little harder for us humans to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's super insightful and it's a great segue into my follow-up question that I had. Why is this? As the subtitle of your book suggests, the subtitle is the New Language of Leadership. So why is this? I think you even describe it as a set of skills, not just one skill. Empathy is not one skill per se, I think from what I remember you saying. Why is this now more important than ever for leaders to really cultivate those skills and what are the effects that you are seeing? Because you're working with a lot of the largest, biggest, most known organizations on the planet. Why is this so important now, especially in the times we live in, for leaders?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. So there's two parts to that I would say. Part one is internally in organizations. The makeup of many companies is more diverse than it's ever been, and diverse in all ways diverse ethnically, diverse, demographically, age-wise. You know all sorts of different things and so when we think about a company, you know 30 years ago companies were a lot more homogenous.
Speaker 2:And when we think about a company today, your oldest employee might be of the boomer generation and your youngest employee might be an intern who's part of Gen Alpha, Right. And everywhere in between you've got, you know, you've got Gen Z, you've got millennials, you've got that weird generation that's in between, that some people call Xennials, and then you know, and then Gen X, right. So all of those generations have different lived experiences, in part because we've all encountered technology at different stages of its maturation. Boomers didn't get it until they were already in the workforce. Gen Alpha is born with it in their hand. Everyone else is somewhere in between.
Speaker 2:So I think internally, you've got that ability to practice empathy and understand each other's lived experience, and how to show up and manage and grow and collaborate is important. And then, externally, the world is smaller because of the same reasons, because of technology, because our interconnectedness, because of the way information travels and the pace at which things shift and change. And so if things are shifting and changing as quickly as they are, our ability to perspective, take, gather information, make sharp decisions pivot. All of that sort of stuff becomes more and more important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember when I was at Microsoft, we did a ton of research on, obviously, the future of work, and one of the key factors that was obviously related to technology but was a lot more important to understand was the fact that there are six generations still in the workforce and that in itself poses so many both challenges but also, of course, opportunities, if you manage to actually engage them in a way that, for every one of those generations, you bring out the best in individuals and bring out their best work. I wanted to talk a little bit about that sense of using the notion of using empathy as a leader to connect, to bring together people, and as I was doing research on your work, I went down a rabbit hole on reading a lot of the articles you posted on your website which I would encourage everyone to read, specifically this one which is called America's Uncontacted Tribes, and it is wonderfully written. It is what I thought incredibly timely and thought provoking, and it talks about tribalism. It talks about the extremely, I guess, fragmented, polarized society we live in, and it's really surgically direct but also hopeful. So you write in this and I put a quote here in my notes.
Speaker 1:You write coming together does not necessarily mean agreeing. The practice of empathy does not require conversion. So, coming at this from a leadership perspective, but also, more broadly maybe, societal perspective, how does one think about empathy in that context? How can, as a leader, can I connect with people, bring them together, not with the goal necessarily to agree, but certainly I mean, at the end of all of that is still the outcome of a bigger societal living together, working together right and striving for a bigger goal. I hope I formulated it in a way that it is a question yeah, no, I'm with you.
Speaker 2:Learning how to disagree without being disagreeable is a lost art for a lot of people, and we have to learn how to have those kinds of hard conversations.
Speaker 2:We in America right now are really struggling to be able to do that, in part because the echo chamber, the access to echo chambers, is so high, right, if I want to just live in a world of alt-right content, I can do that and never see anything else and fill my whole day with content, right?
Speaker 2:And so what we lose in that is productive conversation and the ability to understand the to, to, to to quote myself, right Like. This isn't about conversion, right? This isn't. This isn't about me convincing you that my view is right and your view is wrong, but learning how to ask the kinds of questions that help get at a deeper understanding, a greater sense of empathy for where you might be coming from and where I might be coming from, because if you tell me you have a strong point of view and I say that's really interesting that differs from mine, where did you read about that? How did you research that? Where did that come to you from? You might get a lot of different answers you might get. Oh well, this is what all my friends tell me, or you might get I've read some articles about it or you know. Whatever it is, when you're intellectually curious and emotionally stable enough to respond instead of react when someone says something that challenges your worldview, you can start to get to a deeper level of understanding.
Speaker 1:How would you, when you advise leaders, when you work with organizations, how do you advise people to leverage these empathy skills to eventually then create a place and a culture and a way of working together where all of these different lived experiences can exist and yet, at the same time, you coalesce and rally around a common cause so that the organization as a whole is still functioning right? Because, ultimately, the way I've so far looked at the skill set of empathy, from what I understand and what you've talked about, it is ultimately to ensure you're creating a place where people can bring their best self to work in order to do their best work individually and together. So how do you advise leaders go about doing that?
Speaker 2:So one of the things that's really important for leaders is to accept and acknowledge that they became leaders because they had the answers. Someone asked them a question, someone had a problem. They solved it. They got promoted. Then they got promoted again, then they got more headcount. Now, all of a sudden, they're in a leadership position because they've had all the answers and now it's your job to have all the questions.
Speaker 2:Now it's your job to decondition yourself from being able to solve everyone's problem and have all the right solutions and be able to ask the questions that empower the next rung of leaders to learn how to solve it for themselves. And that's really hard for a lot of leaders to do, because what got you to this point was not doing that, and now you've got to learn how to do that.
Speaker 1:I had to chuckle and laugh because that is exactly I've been. I went through the same thing in my career and I recognize and I totally remember the moment where that clicked and it's a very uncomfortable position to be in at first right To then not just let that uncertainty and not having the answers and only having a lot of questions and actually becoming really good at asking questions becomes your core value add instead of having all the answers, that's right, and people will surprise you with the way they decide to solve something if you don't tell them how to solve it.
Speaker 2:And there's often many different ways to solve a problem. And so just because that's the way you would have done it when you were in their shoes. Going back to the example earlier, when you give them the opportunity to do it from their shoes and with their lived experience, they may find a different way to do it. That's just as effective, if not more.
Speaker 1:So I want to switch gears. We need to talk about AI. It's 2025. So we need to talk about AI. So, as I'm exploring the future of humanistic business leadership, one of the big questions that I'm asking myself and I'm asking my guests is how do we lead in this space AI everything future specifically? How do we lead humans in this AI everything future specifically for you, of course? What role does empathy play in this and what other inherently human qualities do you think do we need to cultivate in our organizations in order to really thrive? And I'm coming at this from a perspective of we've actually, over the last 100 years, created organizations and companies and structures that essentially trained out of us a lot of these inherently human qualities, because it was all about predictability, repeatability, so we made humans actually work a lot more like machines, and so I think it's a really interesting inflection point and I would love to hear perspective on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence as a combinatory topic is really interesting to me because I've specifically been sucked into a couple of different conversations over the last few years on this that have made me think differently, maybe because this is my bias, a little optimistically. You know I'm not super doom and gloom on this topic, which I know some people are, a lot of people. I was at a salon session, kind of round table thing, not that long ago and people were talking about how, you know, ai is going to be answering all the questions on the test for my kids before they go and do it, and you know, or like it's going to be writing all the copy that I used to do as a copywriter. And I stopped the room and I said do you remember when we were all growing up and people were like you can't use a calculator, you're never going to have a calculator with you everywhere you go? Guess what? You all have a fucking calculator in your pocket right now. You know? Or like you know, like when, like the printing press was getting made and people were like, well, you know, now everyone's going to be able to read and that's going to create new, like there's always been some new evolution of technology that people have lamented in its introduction and then accepted and found a way to work with and grow from in the long tail. That makes our lives and our ability to grow as humans more capable, right, like the fact that I don't have to know how to do long division and that I could just open my calculator app and do it when I need to divide. Something is great. I mean like and so like. That speeds up time and allows me to do other things. But I guess, what, what? What's interesting to me is where are the? The phrase I used. I wrote an article about this not that long ago. I refer I referred to it as where are the soul gaps in AI? Okay, so like.
Speaker 2:For example, in the early days of mid journey, I was super excited about it because I was like, oh, this is so great Cause I'm not. I'm great Because I'm a good creative director. I'm a terrible art director, right, I'm not the most well-trained designer, but I know what I'm trying to accomplish. And so Midjourney was an interesting play thing for me early on, because I could give it direction and then get something, and one of the things I asked it to do.
Speaker 2:I was asking it to make really intricate, prompt responses, so one of them was do an alien autopsy painting in the style of Lorenzo Lotto, who's one of the Renaissance painters, and it would spit out these amazing representations that looked like Lotto's work, but in a lot of Lotto's work there's this little burst of light that is meant to express God or the soul or something bigger than the people in the painting, and the journey didn't know where to put it. There would just be like these people, and then there'd just be this like flash of light, like off on a coffee table on the side and like, if it's in Lotto's work, it's over the heart or it's over the like the crown of their head or something like that. And so that was the soul gap. Right, it didn't know where does this thing that is not part of my LLM, where does it belong? What is it like to be human?
Speaker 2:If you ask an AI to make a Nick Cave song, it'll make a song that is written like Nick Cave, but it's not going to know what it feels like to be sad and moody, like fucking. Nick Cave does right. And so there's a gap, and that gap is the gap that we embody, and if it can help us think about our lived experience in different ways, that's wonderful. But if we're farming out our lived experience to a instead of experiencing it for ourself, that's when we sell ourselves short as humans.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, in that regard, that mid-journey example is actually the perfect metaphor, right, it could not find a way to place that spark of light in a way that it actually connected with a bigger meaning, which is something I've heard from a lot of the poets and artists that I've interviewed who have a similar kind of sense for what really will make the difference in the way we use the technology.
Speaker 1:I have a follow-up question that just popped up for me, because I know and you mentioned this earlier your training and your involvement in traditional healing practices. It's the one thing that I find incredibly interesting to explore with regard to AI that I feel is unlike most of the other big technology shifts or jumps that we've made that you've also some of them you've mentioned is the fact that with this technology, it seems like we are able to very quickly manipulate or change people's biochemistry. You know, some of those examples that I keep talking with people about are these character AI? You know digital boyfriend, girlfriend experiences. How do you think and feel about those? Because I feel like that adds complexity to the technology and the impact of that technology and the way we might have to want to lead through, you know, or into this future, future. So what's your take on that?
Speaker 2:yeah, there is a extremely high need for ethics and for moral responsibility as these products get developed and deployed. I was reading an article a couple weeks ago that on some of the meta platforms, if they detect that a like this was this. This is not to say this is the only way they do it, but the example they were giving was if a teenage girl deletes a selfie, they had an algorithm running that would look at the selfie that was deleted, look at the girl's age, complexion, hair color, hair type, and then serve ads to them from cosmetic brands that solve for their unique look. So so if you got insecure and you deleted a photo off your off your Instagram because you didn't like how your hair looked, and now you're getting ads with a girl who's your age, with your hair type, for the next three days, that's in insanelyethical and manipulating use of technology, right.
Speaker 2:So I think there's a lot of work being done in this space. I would say probably the best folks I know who are at it is the Center for Humane Technology. It's run by a guy named Tristan Harris, and I think they're looking at these problems the right way. But these problems are systemic problems that require legislative influence, they require corporate influence. They require individual responsibility. They require parents to monitor what their children are doing in a way that, like, creates some responsibility at that level too. So, yeah, these are sticky, sticky, sticky moments in time, but I think they're solvable, yeah no, I agree.
Speaker 1:I think that and that's one of the reasons why I like having these conversations because we need to add more nuance like that to the conversation, from a place, as you said, not doomsday scenario, simply just addressing them and say, look, these are coming from a very human, humane, humanistic perspective, to the table and say, okay, yes, of course we want to build technology and we want to deploy it and want to make money off of it, but let's do it in a way that, ultimately, we're leading into a generally better, more humane future and believing in our creative ability to solve those problems together.
Speaker 1:That's right. To solve those problems together, that's right. So you also which is a great segue to my next question that I had you also actually published an article of yours in the New York Times just a few weeks ago, and that one is called the Dark Side of Empathy, which you know you and I talked about already briefly, but I would love to hear about the article, the main points that you're making, and I have some questions for you and some quotes that I pulled for us to talk about.
Speaker 2:Sure Happy to so. First, just as, like a quick nerd aside the title of, we had two titles for that op ed. And when they decided it was going to run on the Sunday Times, which happened to be May 4th, which is Star Wars Day, we went with the dark side of empathy, which was just like a little kiss to me personally, because I was just like God, I could not be nerdier, but it was perfect, great. So, yeah, the reason why that article came to bear was I had read an excerpt from an interview Elon Musk gave with Joe Rogan where he blamed, in part, empathy for the demise of Western civilization. Yeah, I saw those snippets and so I was like all right, maybe there's something to say about this.
Speaker 2:And the thing is that sociopathy requires cognitive empathy. If you want to be a good sociopath, you have to understand the people you want to manipulate, otherwise you're going to be a good sociopath. You have to understand the people you want to manipulate, otherwise you're going to do a poor job of manipulating them, right? So what we're seeing, with the dog whistles and the coded language and the hand gestures from stage and all of these things that we've seen in the last few months, is a degree of cognitive empathy to whip up the fervor of a base that they're trying to really get support from. And I say that all in a disparaging direction toward the alt-right. But I will also say that the alt-right are not the only people doing that. On any side of a political spectrum, people are finding the ways to code their language and whip up awareness or attention around a particular thing.
Speaker 2:Brands do it all the time too. Like what is product market fit if it's not empathy for empathy for the customer? So, like, we understand we're using it, but it is. To what end are we using it and to what degree of transparency are we using it? That really matters because, if you know, I know about you and I tell you because I know this about you, I have made this great product that meets your needs. We feel seen and heard. That's why Nike is a good brand. Nike has been able to do that. Everybody is an athlete Okay, great. Let's figure out how to meet those different people at their different skill levels and be a brand that a professional athlete as well as someone who's trying a sport for the first time can trust. When you're noticing I'm deleting a selfie and then serving me a cosmetic ad a day later, and I don't know that, but somehow it's hitting my psyche and causing me to think a kind of way about myself. That's a very different practice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, does this have to become? Because there's a quote that you're making in the article that is about the entrepreneurial choice and the choices you mentioned product market fit, so we can use this for good. Does this need to become just required teaching, essentially for any business leader to say, look, you can use this for good, but if you don't, you know it becomes. It is manipulation and it is morally at least questionable because that's not part of the typical business school teaching these days.
Speaker 2:No, I mean, I think I think I do agree with you. Yes, I think it should be something that people start to think about more, and I've taught it at a couple MBA programs and exec ed programs and things like that, so it is starting to become a bit more of a topic. But I think of it kind of like GDPR for trust right. It's sort of like be transparent about what you're going to use this for and help people understand that, if you are going to give me this information, I will not weaponize it down.
Speaker 1:the line, yeah. And speaking of GDPR, it seems to me like and I've had some conversations also with some of the professors here at Princeton, it seems to be like those we cannot solely rely on the moral compass of a whole society, or actually societies around the world. There needs to be legislation around this in some form, and some have been passed, but it seems like there's a lot more that will need to be done here, especially because the technology is becoming so powerful, as you. That example that you gave illustrated so well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and we are also. I guess the best way of putting it is like I think there is a part of human humanity that's also becoming a little more that's being affected. I don't want to make a value judgment on if it's good or bad yet, but like, for example, people are becoming more skeptical more quickly about content and if this content is AI or if it's real. And in some ways, skepticism is probably good, but it also kind of steals the light sometimes out of just being able to see something and appreciate it for what it is was a real photo that a real photographer took, that took technique and timing and probably, you know, 10 over 10,000 hours of getting it wrong to get that photo right. And the first like three or four biggest comments in the comment section where this is AI and it's like no, it's not, it's actually someone who's just really fucking done the work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is a very interesting perspective to think. It actually even challenges my own thinking because I've been banging the drum on. We need to teach critical thinking. We need to teach the foundation so that you can apply critical thinking in this all kind of generative AI world. But if you take that to the extreme, you might actually lose a lot of the sense of wonder and awe that comes in the moment where you encounter something that is really entirely human, made and took a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of, I guess, ability to get it to that point. That's a really interesting provocation.
Speaker 1:So you know, I wanted to ask you because I know which I found out through our last conversation you also taught at Princeton. You taught students and since I just mentioned the critical thinking part teaching the foundations in this world in which we're already living in but we'll live in the future what are some of those skills that you would teach today and in the future that you think we didn't teach in the past or we didn't teach enough in the past? How do you think about that coming from an educator's perspective? What do we need to equip future leaders especially with, and how do we go about?
Speaker 2:it that it may be a little abstract as a first answer to that, but the pace and the speed at which we operate our day-to-day lives is so fast and so millisecond-based that we are losing the perspective on how valuable patients can be.
Speaker 2:I was talking about this not that long ago with a team. There was a study done about the time between someone finishing a sentence and someone else starting a sentence based on their geographic location. So, like in the US, the time between someone ending a sentence and someone else starting a sentence is less than one second. Typically, in a business conversation, there's no gap because, as that person's speaking, the other person is not wholly listening. They're planning what they want to say and then, the moment that that person takes a half breath, boom, they jump in and they get their point out. Whereas if you look at indigenous cultures, if you look at some Eastern cultures, the pause is a part of the conversation. It allows for signaling, contemplation and respect and processing and the stuff that has to go into giving a more thoughtful response, and so I think patience is actually a skill, particularly in the Western world, that we could benefit from a little bit more.
Speaker 1:That is not what I expected you would say and that is what makes it absolutely fascinating, especially because in some of the conversations I've had recently, this whole topic of the dopamine hits and that is now embedded also in a lot of these AI experiences. But also just culturally, I think you're absolutely right. Especially in the US, especially in Western civilization, it's become so. You know everything from the Instagram Reels and the TikToks we consume. So that requires actually building a real skill set of cultivating, all the way down into the embodied experience, the ability to rest and pause and reflect before you jump onto the next hit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and as the world is only getting faster and as we saw with OpenAI last week and other things that will happen in the weeks and months ahead, like the move from this technology to being out of a device and on us, whether it's in a contact lens or a pair of glasses or a sensor or a thing that we hook over our ear we're just going to be getting more and more real-time updates and data and information, and so the ability to slow that down and remember our humanity is really important embodied focused education.
Speaker 1:I'm asking because a friend of mine just did a course, a short seminar, with students on mind, media and matter and it was a course that was a creative class media design but it had big parts of it were actually embodied exercise and experiences that come more from traditional Asian martial arts, meditation. Do we need to think more about bridging the gap between essentially the rational side of the teaching and the knowledge accumulation and our ability to, as this technology becomes closer to the body, to actually regulate and be more in control of the body?
Speaker 2:Yes, I think it's important for us as a society, as a global society, not just as one country versus another to be able to have done that inner skill building so that we can meet other people who are not like us with the right level of connection and curiosity.
Speaker 2:And so an example I talk about with this in the context of empathy work is maybe you're fortunate enough to have never lost a parent and then a friend of yours loses one of their parents. It will be very natural for you to be sympathetic and compassionate. It will be hard for you to be empathetic because you don't have that lived experience yet. And it doesn't mean that if and when you lose a parent you will assume that their experience is the same as yours, but you will have a deeper appreciation for how difficult it must be, because you have also been through that. And so when you turn that lens inward, as you said, and kind of do that self-work on any level, whether it's about your insecurities, whether it's about a relationship dynamic that you've struggled with All of those things pay dividends in how you see and connect with other people as well. Your skilling up yourself allows you to meet other people with more skill.
Speaker 1:So, to sort of wrap us up, I wanted to go to one of your recent newsletters where you wrote about and I first saw the picture actually before I read the title but you wrote about sitcoms, sitcoms and the shared cultural moments we had in the heydays of broadcast television around sitcoms, and one of the ideas that you mentioned in there that stood out to me was this notion of emotional comments, and I thought that would be a really great way for us to kind of bring it all around and together, because I believe that in this future that we're going to lead into, that seems to be one of the key themes that we need to remember to create, and I would love to hear your thoughts and your take on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, as you mentioned, like back in 30 decades ago time when we all would sit down and watch broadcast TV at Friday night at 8 pm and we'd all tune in and watch this particular show, we had a shared experience because we didn't have the amount of choice that we do today, which, as I mentioned in that article, it is a good thing to be able to have more choice and more diversity in our content and to be able to see more representation of different lifestyles and people and ways of being and all of that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:However, when you came back into work on Monday and you know that all of your colleagues were also crying at 8.58 at the end of that episode, when something big happened and you had that shared emotional connectivity, there was something that let you see beyond your differences and connect at a human level, and I have found this to be true in another context that I've been working in a lot over the last few years, which I mentioned at the beginning, which is with pets and specifically with dogs. You can put two people with vastly different political views on a street corner while their dogs are sniffing each other's butts and they will smile and they will laugh and they will ask what's the name of your dog and what's the name of my dog? And they will completely forget that one is like concealed carry, second amendment advocate, and the other is uh, you know, is not right, because they just get that humanity cuts through like a hot knife through butter and I think we need more of those moments.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I thought it was a really great article and I think it was a fantastic metaphor, and there's a few and fewer of those moments that really connect us, and I think it's a really thought provoking piece and really thinking as leaders about how can we create more of those moments in our organizations, but also for those of us who make products or create experiences in all sorts of ways. How do we keep that in mind as we're trying to create the stuff that we're creating and putting it out into the world Because we are a social species? You know, the stuff that we're creating and putting it out into the world because we are a social species and if we want to ensure our survival as a species, that seems like a really important thing to get right instead of dividing us as more and more so. Before we wrap up, what's next for you? What are you working on? What's the next big thing that you're tackling?
Speaker 2:So I have a new book that will be out next year around April, and the premise of that book is to take a systems thinking approach to looking at purpose and purpose building and acting on purpose in our lives, both as individuals as well as organizations. And historically we have often talked about purpose as this singular thing. Right, this North Star, this, why and I think that's really hard in a multivariant, side hustle, you know, distractible world that we live now. And so, taking a systems thinking approach, can we move from North Star thinking to what I refer to as constellation thinking, and can we start to look at our lives and the ways we show up as constellations, points of light in the sky, that when we connect the dots as an individual looking at them, we start to understand and mythologize what we're actually here to be and do. And so that's what that book's about.
Speaker 2:I've been spending a lot of time talking with people about it. I've been spending a lot of time researching it. I am pushing on the first third being completed now. So the clock is ticking loudly, but it is. It's going well and I'm looking forward to having it in the world.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic, great topic, maybe for another conversation. Michael, thank you so much for all your insights, for sharing your work, for sharing your knowledge. I've learned a lot, love our conversation, so thank you so much for being here, thank you for having me, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thanks, all right, that's a wrap for this week's show. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks, all right, that's a wrap for this week's show. Thank you for listening to Poets and Thinkers. If you liked this episode, make sure you hit follow and subscribe to get the latest episodes wherever you listen to your podcast.
