#287 Authenticity Over Algorithms: Reclaiming Connection in the Digital Divide With Charles Vogl

0:00:01 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO Show with Mehmet. Today I'm very pleased to have with me joining me from the US, charles VogVogll. Charles, the way, as I always say I like to do, is I keep my guests to tell us about themselves and their story for a reason because I don't think someone can tell someone's else's story better than themselves. So the floor is yours. 

0:00:25 - Charles
So you want me to introduce myself in a way that's relevant to what we're going to talk about. 

0:00:31 - Mehmet
Yeah, sure. 

0:00:33 - Charles
Okay, well, I'm best known now as the author of several books that have to do with developing leadership that helps people grow, to bring people together that are important to them around shared values and purpose, and in the United States, we call that community, and I define community in my work as a group of people who share mutual concern for one another. 

And this is particularly relevant right now because research shows that, at least in the United States and, I believe, other parts of the world, we're living in a particularly lonely time where the people we know are more disconnected and isolated than well, more than for more than a generation and maybe more than ever before, largely because we have the technology to do that. 

And this is really relevant to people in leadership, because in most organizations, if you want to know what highly skilled people need to cooperate, to do well and to be resilient and to adapt to a changing world, the rate that people are connected around shared values and purpose make a profound difference. And I've noticed that the organizations that reach out to me typically have something in common, and that is they're working on very high stakes challenges, which is code, for people die if they get it wrong. They're in a dynamic context, which is to say, the playbook from 2019 no longer applies and there are very skilled people that need to work together to handle the challenges they're working on, and for those organizations my work is particularly relevant. Great. 

0:02:07 - Mehmet
Thanks again, Charles, for being here today. I want to start a little bit from a place where I would say it would be like a critical moment maybe for many of us. That happens that let us shift our career or interest, because I know you were in the filmmaking and then you transitioned to an author and advisor. So what motivated these transitions and how have these past experiences shaped the current world on community building and leadership that you do today? 

0:02:51 - Charles
That's a great question. It's true that there were seven years of my life when I was a documentary filmmaker and I made independent work that aired on PBS United States, but that was just one chapter. Before that, when I was a young man, I lived and volunteered full time in a homelessness shelter in California. After that, I served in the US Peace Corps in Sub-Saharan Africa during the AIDS epidemic, working on human rights issues and health access, came back to the United States, I was largely burned down and cynical just because of the challenges that I'd faced while serving in Africa. And in that time I started making a film that would go on to be funded by PBS that told the story of a family surviving the Cambodian genocide and becoming American and creating a new life. And then I also, because I experienced worker abuse myself, started organizing restaurant workers in New York to hold businesses accountable for the abuses that were going on for restaurant workers. And those are all very disparate experiences working in homelessness issues, working on health challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa and, obviously, being a filmmaker but what the through line is is in that journey I had to learn how to bring people together around shared values and purpose to handle challenges that were bigger than I could handle and in all of those contexts I could not rely on transactional relationships to get things done. And that was the growth I had to learn from mentors and my own mistakes and a lot of crying to figure out how to make a difference in that. And after those many years I went to graduate school to study religion, philosophy and ethics, and when I was there I was privileged enough to study spiritual traditions that have been able to stick together for over a thousand years, and I remember being inspired in class, thinking I could leave that classroom in that moment and find people who are still gathering in those traditions a thousand years later. And so thereafter graduate school, I woke up and I had a fancy degree in religion and I had these experiences around the world. But I didn't want to do those things anymore and I didn't know how I was going to contribute in the world for the next chapter. 

And at one point I had lunch with a guy named Kevin Lynn who had recently just years before founded a company called Twitch. And I remember at that lunch Kevin told me that his organization, twitch, had 50 million that's five zero million members, but he was confident they would grow a lot, turns out he was right, but what he wanted to be better at was to connect the people that were already showing up on his online platform. And, for those who don't know, twitch is the largest online platform for gamers to come together with video, and they now have a quarter billion members. So after our lunch together, I went home and I had all these ideas to write down for Kevin, because he told me that was a challenge he was facing, and I thought well, gee, I've been studying this for a while. People come together and it turns out I had more to say than I thought. And it turns out it was book length, and it turns out the first publisher that saw the book wanted to publish it, and it turns out that book has done very well, and so I learned that those many years that I was doing things to make a difference really taught me skills and insight that leaders are learning today, because so much of what's called leadership development depends on transactional relationships, and transactional relationships are fantastic as long as you have enough transaction to keep people around. 

However, we're in a time where what used to work about bringing people together to do a good job or face the challenges or be dynamic or have resilience, is largely failing, and if you think about education, military service, the state of veterans affairs, health care, the health care industry, there's super challenges there, and we know that part of it is the people who are participating feel more isolated and more alone than ever before. And if we are going to make a difference in those industries, in addition to others, amongst things that needs to happen is leadership. Who do make a difference need to understand how we can address this trend of isolation and disconnection that is putting at least these industries in crisis and, let's be straight, people die when this is done poorly. 

0:07:19 - Mehmet
Unfortunately, yes, and you know you touch on something which, based on also what you were saying at the introduction as well, about how this pandemic also forced us to be isolated somehow because of remote work, and even some people, they lost their jobs. You know they were feeling alone now, but I think and maybe you would agree with me also, Charles like this problem that didn't just start with COVID, like maybe because we started to shift more into a digital world and where everyone is stuck just behind their screens. So we started to see, you know this, this gap, and what I want to hear from you, or I'm interested to learn, like you mentioned a couple of these challenges, but do you see, like some common traits that come across? All you mentioned which you know, as one example, but I know like you have work also with other, like some tech giants, like Google, LinkedIn and so on and so on. So have you seen you know a common trend that happens usually, that cause, this issue and or like, is it something that is unique for every organization over there? 

And you know how? How do you usually tackle, I would say, these challenges or your advice? You know the companies you work with to tackle these challenges, because when we are into a traditional setup, I think maybe there are like some best practices and so on and you can apply, but when, when, when you are in any kind of a fragmented digital world, things are different. I know like it's a little bit loaded question, but I'm very much interested to know like is it like first only covered? Was the cause? Is it unique across all the tech giants, and how we can, or you, as as as Charles, working with your clients, try to solve out this issue. 

0:09:34 - Charles
All right, so you've asked me a lot of stuff there, so let me just make three points then to speak to sugar inquiries. The first one, the first point I'll speak to, is is this a new phenomenon that started in 2020 with COVID? The answers absolutely not. So Robert Putnam, out of Harvard, wrote a book in 1990s called Bowling alone. That was a warning. The book was meant as a warning to America about the dissolution of our social fabric, and the title bowling alone referred to this idea that we're so lonely, we're so disconnected, we're even bowling alone. That was the 1990s, before the pandemic. 

The United States current surgeon general of, evik Murthy, wrote a front page article and Harvard Business Review which is not exactly a, you know, social commentary, you know belly button gazing kind of periodical, it's for business leaders Sort of front page article for Harvard Business Review a warning the business leadership of our economy that the crisis of loneliness was so grave that it needed attention right away. And he subsequently wrote an entire book, called together, about the loneliness crisis and the need for us all, including the US government, to address it. And then the pandemic hit and we saw radical changes in how we connected, which we all understand, you know why, and so it didn't start with the pandemic, but it certainly was exasperated. And just to give you a sense of scale, I don't know about the world research, but I didn't want the United States. In the United States, the research, the most recent research, shows that half of Americans have three friends or less. Or, said differently, half Americans do not have four friends and fully 15% of Americans are one in six. One in six American men, 13% of all Americans say they have no friends. Well, so that's the first point I'm going to make. It's a crisis. It's almost unbelievable and it's been a trend that's been building since, certainly in the 90s. 

I can go on for a long time about the forces that have gone on to make us more isolated. I don't know how important that is, but this didn't happen in a vacuum. So which reason? My second point is that an organizational problem? Well, I don't think it's any, given any organization. Obviously, there are some organizations that are doing better and worse jobs of connecting people important to them, be they inside or outside the organization. But everybody is listening to this podcast, is hiring people and collaborating with people who are operating in this unprecedented disconnection and lonely time, and that's why even Harvard Business Review thinks this is a front page topic to talk about. So any organization that understands the need to adapt and they need to have teams that can trust each other need to at some way get better at connecting people important to them, because we can't trust the greater culture is going to teach our team members how to do that, which brings my third point. 

We could become really desperate and we fill with the spare that there's this powerful trend. We can also acknowledge that people are coming together for far more than 1000 years and the principles, the ideas, the vision we need to have to make a difference with the people we already know or around us can be learned, and unfortunately, most people everywhere I go are very, very poor at it bringing people together in powerful ways and they often do many things that sabotage their own efforts. And that's an example. And one of the ideas that I write about is an idea I coined the campfire principle. It's my latest book and we just refer to this idea that the context that we need to create, the friendships that are really meaningful for us and that we can call when we have the worst days, are not the friendships we build in giant rooms with something loud going on with a great distraction. They're the kind of friendships we build sitting around a campfire, but we don't need to build campfires everywhere, just this idea that we those want to bring people together and need to create intimate experiences similar to campfire in that they're small spaces where a meaningful conversation, a possibly vulnerable conversation, can happen. 

And I'm often invited to events, very often hosted by companies, where they spend 10s or sometimes six digits creating an event and they confuse entertaining people with giving them a context where they can connect. And I was just at a very, very large dinner last month with over 120 people and someone got up to do a welcome and do a toast and nobody bothered to turn down the music so that we could hear that person. Well, well, we had 100 people standing around to join dinner and nobody created a context where we could even hear the person welcoming us. Just an example how they they're just doing it wrong. They're not even thinking what is the context we need for these people to have a comfortable experience and feel welcome? And I could go on and on in this. But the point I want to make is we can learn skills and they're very, very old and they're time tested, and that's why I write them down and talk about them. 

0:15:02 - Mehmet
That resonated a lot, charles, with something even I notice and I'm not an expert by any mean, but I like to notice things and ask people sometime for their feedback and exactly the thing you just mentioned now about companies when they do these, for example, annual gatherings, or maybe twice a year some of them, they do it and I asked some people, okay, like, how was it? What was the feedback? What did you do? Any team building activity? No, we just had some food, some drinks. You know they gave us some trainings and then we're back. So I lived it, by the way as well, you know when I was yeah. So now this is. 

This is something which I believe it's underrated. And you know, if we take a company that does this well, how do you think you know they can thrive both on the business level or on innovation level or maybe disruption level, when they go and do the community building in the right way, like if we need now? We talked about the challenges. We talked about you know the problems, but let's see if we apply things in the right way, what could be waiting us on the other side? 

0:16:30 - Charles
So just a couple of ways to approach this. First, let's approach it in the most intimate. If you have a child that is injured and you go in an emergency room in the middle of the night and that team doesn't know you or your child's name, my guess is you want that team to know each other, certainly know each other's names, have built some kind of trust to handle all of the challenges that come up in the first 10 minutes when a hurt child you know, enters their workspace. And it would probably horrify you if you found out that there had been no time spent, no skilled way to bring them together, to build that trust before. Your family's life depended on their cooperation. Now, that's a pretty cute example, but that's what's going on. When people deal with aircraft, you know factory design lives are at stake because of that cooperation. 

The other level we can look at it is the research. Marissa King, who was at the Yale School of Management and recently moved to Wharton School, she wrote a fantastic book called Social Chemistry where she laid out the research that showed that if there is a magic bullet for engagement and absenteeism and retention and reducing mistakes, it's having a friend at work. And when you have a bunch of people with friends at work. We call that a community and it's not rocket science. If you have friends at work, then you want to go to work. If you have friends at work, you're probably not looking for another job where your friends aren't. 

And, more importantly, when you have friends at work and you have a question, that could lead to a legal liability or someone getting hurt, but you don't want to look bad because someone thinks you should do something. If you have a friend at work, you can call and ask a question. When someone asks a question that saves disaster from happening, they very rarely write it down and say, Well, thank goodness I had this friend at work because they kept me from burning down the building. But that's exactly what happens, and the fancy way we talk about it is we say when teams are more connected, they have an informal communication network that is effective when the formal communication network fails. And hopefully anybody who's ever worked in a team or large organizations understands how critically important that there is a comfort, trust and respect in dynamic situations where there are high at stakes. 

0:19:16 - Mehmet
You brought something which actually was my next question and thank you for ending this with that one trust, right, charles? I think everyone who worked at some stage in a company they heard or they lived, you know the stories about trust and now you know I follow a lot of, even forums where employees they go and talk about what's happening inside their companies and the common thing I see is I feel the trust issues start between the leadership and the rest of the company and then we expect these teams which are now probably they are not physically together in the same office, they are distributed. Maybe they are some of them, they are working in a hybrid model and they are sitting at home. So how can we build the trust if it doesn't start from the top? Like, is it something possible to have? I know like I'd say naive question, but I want to trigger you to tell us, like about how do you think this trust thing is important to build? You know the community that we are talking about. 

0:20:38 - Charles
So let's be honest. My understanding is, when we look at the impact of leadership in organizations, the character of the top of the leadership pyramid profoundly affects the character of every organization and, while some people wish it were different, if the people at the top are jerks and they just want to extract and abuse, then that characterizes the whole organization and I just want to acknowledge that because it's not. We can't just simply talk to people in the middle of the organization, at the bottom, and say, well, it's up to you to make this organization better. And I'm certain there are people listening, you know, to your podcast, who are on top of organizations and you know what you can understand is there's a profound responsibility there and profound influence. With that said, there are always things that we can do amongst our peers and people around us to let them be more connected. 

And when I go into an organization and they want to be trained, the first idea I teach is what I call the distinction invitation. If there are no invitations happening, let us not be surprised that people aren't coming together and forming the relationships that matter, and in my work, I define an invitation as a request to spend time where the person invited knows that someone cares if they show up. We have a name for the kind of request to spend time where no one knows if anyone cares if they show up, and in my work we call that an announcement. And I can't tell you how many organizations I've gone to and I've simply taught this opening distinction and I watch people's faces go white because they then realize that everything they declare an invitation is really an announcement, and then they're no longer surprised that people don't show up or people don't care. Now there may be a bunch of boundaries and who can invite who you know. It's inappropriate for me to invite a bunch of you know, wives and other men that I don't know to dinner. Fair enough, there may be really good reasons for that, but there are people that I can invite to spend time together. And what I say is, if we're just starting the beginning, inviting others to do anything you like to do counts. If you eat meals, certainly sharing meals counts. If you walk around a park, walking around a park counts, you know, I know somebody. Then, when I taught them this distinction, they realized that every day at 330, they were walking their neighborhood with their dogs and they realized that they had never invited any of their neighbors to walk in the neighborhood with their dogs. So she started inviting neighbors to walk her dogs at 330. Well, none of them accept the invitation because they have lives, they have kids and they have jobs. 

But invitations are so powerful that even if someone doesn't accept the invitation, maybe because they have a job, doesn't mean that they don't want the invitation. It doesn't mean that it's not making a difference and letting others know that someone thinks they belong and that they're connected. And what I love about the example is she was already walking her dogs and she likes to walk her dogs and she'd love neighbors to join her walk her dogs. And if they don't, she's still going to walk her dogs. And we all know exactly what it costs to invite neighbors to walk a dog and she can do that as many times in the year as she wants. And even if nobody ever accepts, every time her neighbors see her. They know well, that's the neighbor that invites me to walk her dogs. Right, and we don't know at what point someone will accept A very simple example. Obviously that's not in an organization, but the principle stands. 

There are these very simple things and I don't know if we have time to talk about it here, but I've now advised several organizations and I know somebody who started inviting people at work to play ping pong because there was a ping pong table at work. It's not rocket science and very few accepted. But she told me how, because she had started those conversations. That's, inviting them to ping pong how it transformed her relationship and the perception of familiarity she had with those co-workers and none of it had anything to do with ping pong. Right, and now we could talk literally for days about principles of community and bringing people together in Powervoys, but what I really want to leave people the beginning is it doesn't have to be complicated. The first question we ask is who's getting invited to what? And if the answer is nobody's getting invited to anything or we're inviting some people to things that are what we call arena events and not campfire events, then let us not be surprised that we're not seeing that connection happening. And part of the challenge that many organizations don't want to hear is it takes time, and so if you want your teams to be connected, then it's going to take time. It's going to physically take them time to spend that time doing it, and if the organization doesn't value that, then they never schedule the time, they never make the time and remember how I said. 

People are doing it wrong. I can't tell you how many times I've heard. Well, we do a happy hour on Friday nights. We have everybody go to a bar. Well, mehmet, you know, when you go to a bar there's probably several TV screens with commercials on it where people were literally collectively paid millions of dollars to grab our attention because that sound like a good venue to take people that you want to connect with, absolutely. And then a lot of people have families and the last thing you want to do is stand in the loud bar around televisions on a Friday night to try to make friends. They're doing it wrong, whereas, quite frankly, you know, simply walking around a park would be far better than asking parents on a Friday night to stand in the loud bar around sports games and try to make friends. So I hope this is helpful. It's the kind of thing we can touch on in the very beginning without getting too deep absolutely makes a lot of sense. 

0:26:55 - Mehmet
Absolutely and now, because, as I was telling you before, we start our discussion, so I like also to focus not only on the tech folks, I like to focus only also on startups, and I'm curious to know, charles, and this is, maybe would be an advice you know also, if someone is just starting, or she's just starting, her company, when they are a small team and I repeated this question maybe I don't know how many times with many of my guests when they are a small team, I think this is by default, because they are like still maybe three, four, five, maybe 10 people, so they are spontaneously into a circle right. 

Then at some stage, things start to break up. Many of my guests, each they had their own views on why this happens, and this is not why I'm asking why it happens. This is a human nature. We know the more we have people who start to have politics and so on, but when they have as the leader of the organization, as the founder, and of course they will have in the culture, like we are a family company, everything family comes first and so on, all these things, but at what stage? There should be kind of a barometer, if I can say it this way, that once things start to go beyond something, oh hey, we need to bring this circle back before it becomes something that we cannot control. So, from your experience, when actually founders, they need to start to think about this concept before it becomes too late. 

0:28:37 - Charles
So I'm a little bit confused about the specific moment of challenge you want to address. What I'll speak to is I think any founder needs to think about who are the people important to me and how am I investing to make sure that they have contexts where they can build relationships of trust with the people that I'm asking them to work with, which includes me? And if there is no investment on that, then let us not be surprised that those relationships don't form and or relationships that form deroded. And you know use an interesting term, and that is families. In the beginning it's like a family and it may have felt like a family, but one of the things that made those relationships feel like a family is probably this idea that the relationships are at least perceived to be beyond transaction, that the trust, the commitment, the welfare of each other went beyond a strict calculation day to day. And then, at some point, that perception was lost that there was simply a transaction going on, and then that's when that feeling of family left. And the sad truth is, in the economy that we've built, many managers are judged and rewarded by how much they can transact out of other people, and the more they can get out of that transaction, the more they're called good leaders. Well, that's a fantastic recipe for burning out the people who don't just want to have relationships with leaders, that want to get as much from them as possible, and then they're going to leave and go somewhere else. 

And you know, when I talk to people who have gone into healthcare, very few of them went into healthcare because they did a spreadsheet and thought that was the best place to spend lots of hours with sick people in a broken system to make lots of money. They usually went into healthcare because they wanted to make a difference and they had their own experience of the pain of either being sick themselves or having family members sick and then to manage them. To put them in context where it is simply transaction and extraction leads to burnout and disengagement, which is exactly what's going on in at least the American healthcare system. And so when you say when do you pay attention to this? Well, I think the first day you better consider how are people important to you treated such that they understand there's something beyond strict extraction and transaction going on? And they continue to invest in that, and I'm sorry that it is fundamentally against many of the standards of good so-called leadership and management and company leadership, because it leads to ends that most of us don't want to participate in. 

0:31:47 - Mehmet
Yeah, again, you're touching on things that either I personally lived or I heard you know someone else lived it. So, and you know I like your way, charles, like being straight to the point Now, you mentioned leadership a couple of times and we talked about leadership a couple of times, and I know you have your book, storytelling for Leadership. So what I'm interested to know is how is the power of storytelling can help actually you know these leaders to leverage? You know that skill, let's call it to build the brand and the community and even take, you know, the business to a much better place. 

0:32:38 - Charles
All right, it's hard for me to respond to that question when you say take the business to a much better place, because some people may interpret that as making more sales and having a better market. 

0:32:48 - Mehmet
No, no, no, no, no, no. 

0:32:50 - Charles
Let's keep it, and that's a really good measureable, but that's, you know, a very particular way of describing taking the business to a better place. You know, when I wrote that book, I wrote that because, as I was advising people leadership roles, what I learned was many of them wanted to communicate what brought them to their field and made them someone worth paying attention to and even joining, say, an entrepreneurial endeavor, and they didn't have the skills to share that in a way where that experience, their personal journey, landed emotionally, in an emotional resonant way. And it's only one part of leadership. But my guess is, mehmet, if you think of the people you deeply admire of last 100 years, that did something that you could describe as leadership, amongst the things that you know about them right this minute, about what they did, was what changed them or, said differently, what formed them in their experience that made them ready to live the life that you now admire years later. Am I right about that? 100%, 100%? Well, that means that somebody, somewhere, was good at sharing that story so that when you learned it, you would be inspired and hopefully, they were honest about it. Right, it wasn't a construction of fiction. 

Nonetheless, it had to be crafted, and part of that crafting is recognizing what is worth telling, and when I see bad storytelling, leadership being taught, I hear people say things defective. You've got to be vulnerable. Tell your vulnerable parts, your vulnerable selves. People want to hear vulnerability. You know there is truth. 

Very often people want to hear vulnerability, but they just don't want to hear vulnerability for vulnerability's sake. 

It sounds like whining, and if people aren't ready to hear parts of your lives that are vulnerable, then it's also off-putting. 

Which is to say, there needs to be some skill in understanding what's relevant to share that might be vulnerable at some level. That the person that's hearing it recognizes that I'm someone who shares that value in my journey in life so far has prepared me to be someone worth paying attention to and even collaborating with. So that's how that's important in making company better, because when people show up, they're following somebody, they're doing something, and either they're just doing it because there's a strict transaction they can't wait to do as minimum as possible and get out of there or they're really committed to make a difference. And if you remember, when we started this conversation, I mentioned the industries that approached me our healthcare, military service and education. Those are fields where people better show up committed and they better not be looking out the door, waiting to run out the door as soon as the clock ticks, because someone's going to be sick, there's some kids are going to need help and the military lives are at stake every freaking day. So, yeah, I think good storytelling is critically important. 

0:36:02 - Mehmet
I love the part when you said like as long as it's not like made up and it's not like just for the sake of you know, winning. 

0:36:12 - Charles
Let me say here, when I have heard it said, if you don't have a good story, good formation story, make one up, and all that tells me, as a former filmmaker, is that tells me that person doesn't know how to tell a story Because anything that was important enough that it changed your life, enough that you're doing what you're doing now, speaking to me creating media, sharing with people, literally in several time zones to help them form a leadership, whatever you experience that inspired you to make this commitment and then put in the time to get good. If that's not interesting, then that just tells us we can't tell a good story. There shouldn't, we shouldn't have to see an iota of fiction, and it just shows that we're bad at our jobs 100%. 

0:36:59 - Mehmet
And the second thing about you know how much you expose the vulnerability. It's. I believe it's very much tricky here. It's not easy, and I'm talking here from personal experience, like the audience knows sometime I share. 

You know my personal experience here because you're right, some people sometime will think you are doing this to make Agitation, I would say, but the matter of fact, no, it's not always like for doing agitation and you need to be very I Think it's needed skill by itself, right, even if you are doing it, whether in a storytelling format, or you're doing it just as a, you know, non-story telling format, whatever that is called. 

So but there's a like, very thin line in the difference between you know, making it for just showing you are vulnerable, versus you are trying to convey a message. I lived this myself and I was lucky enough that you know when I showed my variety because I need to make it, to make a Cause, not because I was complaining about something. So I 100% agree with you on this charge. Now, one of the things that you, you, you, you mentioned and you know I see it in, in, in when preparing to the episode today about, like using Spiritual traditions, I'm pretty much very Like I would say, curious to know what are like these traditions and ancient traditions that you you talk about and how they can be relevant in the modern era. 

0:38:41 - Charles
So I've traveled to several continents now to formally, and then to some level, informally, study Spirit Christians, have been around for a long time, meeting with leaders of these faith Christians and visiting sacred sites. And you know, I've I've learned enough about religious traditions and rituals that now, when I travel, I can recognize similarities Through lines will call about how people come together in the spaces they create in what have you but I'll give you an example about you know how this influences. I was talking with A gentleman who has a company that helps American veterans who've been at war Create new lives after military service. And you know, unfortunately, as is the case with with people go to war, there's a lot of hurt there, both physical and then mental, and then very often they're. You know, if you spent your entire adult life at war, there may be missing skills on how to create a civilian life, certainly in the beginning of civilian life. And he told me how they had found some success Taking the guys out at night. And they had. They took him around a fire and they did some stuff out there and it was just the veterans and then the veterans were leading it and it was really successful in the program. And and I said to him this all sounds fantastic and I absolutely believe that you're finding this is really powerful for participants and healings going on there. 

Do you have a general sense Of how long men have been gathering, going out in the dark, standing around a fire and telling stories and supporting each other to heal After A great deal, after a great deal of pain? And you know, he, he stopped in that conversation and realized that he had, almost accidentally, you know, recreated things men, and specifically warriors, have been doing For more thousands of years and will know, and he had never recognized that. He had refound the importance Of this kind of gathering and and no, I have names for these kind of things right, I think that there were um Right to passage going on there and rituals of bonding Uh that we could, you know, start naming it or not, but what I'm getting at is, um, he didn't need to invent anything new and, in fact, the more he would understand how people have been coming together and healing Uh, the more he would understand there were traditions to dip into to create the Impact and the healing he wanted with the men and they are men that he was working with. So when you say you know? You know how does this influence it? Well, I don't think we have to invent anything. 

I think quite the opposite. I think that we have distracted ourselves, thinking we need to invent new things and use new technology and look at new research and look at where it's gotten us. Uh, it's really united states. We are more divided than we are in more than a generation. Our wealth disparity is flying apart Faster than it ever has in the last three generations. Um, our healthcare system is collapsing, um, and we're more lonely than then. Research has ever shown we've been lonely. We don't need to invent new ways to do this. We need to remember, uh, what has brought people together and made them strong For literally thousands of years, and revisit that. And it's not rocket science. That's why I write it down. 

0:42:19 - Mehmet
I will be a little bit controversial here. Do you blame Charles technology for this? 

0:42:26 - Charles
I don't blame technology. I blame our dependence to use technology to get us results, that we can only get that in the most simple and ancient of ways. And you know, now the research is coming out, um, you know, the most research shows a you know a duh finding that, uh, we don't connect very well over video conferences. Um, my understanding is it takes five times the amount of time to develop relationship Digitally mediated than it does just sitting a room together. Five times, and the irony is, um, you don't want to spend as much time with me on a video call, like you are tonight, as you would if we just sat down with pizza. You might sit with me for pizza from six o'clock to nine o'clock and think nothing of it. You might look down and discover it's 10, 30 and like don't know where the time went. But if I got you on a video call, you wouldn't sit on a video call with me for two and a half hours, right, and yet it takes five times. Well, if we, you know, at one point it's public I was advising google and google's a global company. 

Uh, when you worry about how 100 000 people are connecting and you realize, because you see the research, it takes five times the amount of time to do that in video. You should start getting worried, unless you have times and places where those people that need to be connected Sit down together and, quite frankly, that's one of the things I was advising google on is how and in what formats we would bring people together to have those conversations so that it wasn't just a catering bill. But in fact, it was an experience that created relationships and, uh, you know, fortunately, a colleague of mine was able to release a white paper on that and it's on my website for free download and the results are um. Participants said that they started considering the others in the program, their work family. They started using the word family when we just created the right context for them to connect. 

0:44:28 - Mehmet
Looks like a lot of work to be done, charles, and you know I think this whole concept need to be spread more and more, especially in the age you are living in. And again, like I'm positive by nature, you know I like to be optimistic, but I believe I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think we have hard work to do to close this gap and to do it. You know I can get people to talk again together and to your point. You're mentioning the US, like I don't have statistics about any other place in the world, but I don't think it's much difference from you know the way people interact with each other. I have a. You know the reason I asked you about technology. I didn't meet the technology in the sense of the scientific point of view of it, like, or you know the medium of something we use today. For me, you know like it's us that we leverage technologies to create. 

You know these concepts that made us divided first and then you know, like they it made the world appears to the people who are, like, not very knowledgeable, I would say, and I cannot blame them all, like you know. See, this guy is doing this and I'm talking about the social media very frankly, right. So I think social media and I'm not saying all of it is bad, but what it did it caused Largely this. And to your point about when you know we sit together on a pizza and you know we look at the watch and you say, oh, like three hours for hours past. If we can do it without having our phones, that would be fantastic. But you know, I was reading something else, I think, yesterday night about you know how people know you know they go to restaurants, even as families, and you know they spent all the time on your screens, right so Well, let me tell you a minute. 

0:46:30 - Charles
In my home we have a device it's called the phone basket, and when my friends come for dinner, my home, beginning the meal, the phone basket comes out and my wife and I are the first to put our cell phones in and we invite everyone in the room to put their cell phone in as a ritual. 

And I say out loud that we are doing this to be with the people in the room Instead of the people outside the room. 

And then, once everybody's put their phone in, we literally walk that basket into another room where it can't be seen, and then we get to sit down for several hours and share a meal, as people have for thousands of years, and not once check the weather, check the news or get a message from somebody outside their room. 

And I'll tell you I have a friend who created a unicorn startup tech company and he came over dinner with his wife one time and I was surprised to find out who was his birthday. And it was just the four of us, my wife and me and his wife and him, and, and we knew each other, and so I asked him his name is Monty. I said you choose, do you want to use the phone basket today and he said yes, and we put our phones away in another room and it really meant something that this person who had created a unicorn company and was just spending his dinner with us in our home. He wanted a space where we would all put our phones and just share a meal together. It doesn't matter how rich or powerful or famous you are. There's something magical about sitting around a table and knowing that everybody there is there to be with the people at the table, and everybody who's listening to us right now has the power to create that over and over and over again. 

0:48:24 - Mehmet
Absolutely, you know, and I know it's hard at the beginning. You know I developed this habit of not checking my phone for the first. I will not exaggerate just one hour, you know, but of course. But it started with the first five minutes and then the 10 minutes, and then the 15 minutes and I start to keep building on top of that until I convinced myself I don't need to see my screen, at least for the first. You know, first hour of the day, because it's a lot of distraction that happens and you know your brain start to work, you know. 

And the other thing I, like Charles, is like we have a lot of things in front of us which, you know, sometimes we call it we have to go back to basics. Yeah, so the basics are actually available to us every single day, whether it's the table in our homes that we can sit and we have a conversation, whether I don't know, going out to the nature and have a walk. You know we have plenty of options actually, and not all of them. And I know like it's looked like a bit funny or ridiculous because it's a CTO show, but yeah, because I believe, at the end of the day, technology should be leveraged, used for the sake of better health, both mentally and physically, for humans, not the opposite. 

And because from the statistics you started with that you know we are living in a lonely world today where everyone is just you know. Maybe they have, as you said, maximum three friends, which is, you know, back in the day they say, like you are the medium of the five people you know. So, even if you don't know five, you know only three, so you still have missing parts. So you are completing probably this from the junk you see on on the social media or whatever, you know where you, where you spend your time. Charles, like as final, and I would like to call it from your side, word of wisdoms for the next generation, right, the next generation of leaders, founders, if you want to keep them with something today, what you tell them? 

0:50:28 - Charles
So I feel a lot of people talk to me. They want to listen to what I have to say and think of it, on how they can put it in a in a profit making context, like why is this guy worth listening to? Because how is it going to help me make more money or make more profit or get to my goals faster? And that's, you know, a lens you can use, certainly, and and some of the most famous companies in the world, you know, use my work for their teams. Fair enough. But so, final ideas, I just want to share that everybody that we work with, that we know that we live around, wants to be connected to other people, and it doesn't need to be motivated by profit to invest in creating those relationships which, at the end of the day, are what make us more resilient to handle the challenges of our lives. And so you don't need to wait to find out what the ROI is before you start investing in that. And let me just take that out of the abstract At some level, building these relationships and these friendships comes down to math. 

If you only invite people you know to 10 events a year, a dinner walk around the park, then at that end of that year you're going to have a certain number of successful experiences. 

If you make it 12 or 24, you're going to have another level of success. 

I don't know any reason why everyone listening wouldn't schedule two times each week, six o'clock to eight o'clock, noon to 2pm, twice a week, and then you put in your calendar is a time that you know you're going to spend with people you want to spend time with, doing something you like to do. Eating french fries counts. And when you know that you're going to schedule those 100 times a year and you put in your calendar, then it's just a matter of inviting people to spend that time eating french fries. And maybe there will be many times where nobody shows up to eat french fries. Fair enough. What's important is, out of those 100 days, some percentage of them, others going to show up and I promise you research is clear about this the people who show up are going to enjoy that time and it's going to be a bigger deal for them than you'll ever know. And if you start this year just scheduling those times each week, I promise you in one year your life will look radically different, because the friends we make make our lives radically different. 

0:53:07 - Mehmet
What an advice. And it's spot on because we're still in Jan, so it's good I'm going to start to do it because I need this. Again, it's not about we were talking about vulnerabilities and I'm not making this to make any agitations or anything, but again, yeah, because I am one of the people that I kind of faced it. I would say, charles, and this is very good advice. I really really appreciate mentioning these words of wisdoms and I like when you said don't always look for the ROI. Sometimes things need time to get the results out of right. So it's not like something I do today. Tomorrow I will see the result. 

0:53:56 - Charles
Remember. I already know how many people you want to meet this year. They're going to spend time with you. Simply because they calculated what they're going to get out of you if they spend time with you. I already know how many of them you want to meet this year. How many. Do you have a rough number? Not much, Not much. Somewhere around zero. 

0:54:18 - Mehmet
No, maybe one or two, maybe one or two, maybe one or two, one or two out of 12 months? 

0:54:23 - Charles
Right? How many people would you love to spend time with this year? That would like to have a friend, and if you need to borrow something in the middle of the night and you know they have it. They want the call. As much as they can as much as they can, which is a really great example on how much other people want us to show up calculating ROI. What? 

0:54:51 - Mehmet
an example Nice, that's really nice. I'll leave you this minute. 

0:55:01 - Charles
Maybe this is the advice I should have said earlier. You asked me what I want to leave. We are all living in a terribly lonely time and I wish it were different. I wish my work was less relevant let's put it that way. But here's what I've come to believe, and those of us who have traveled have experiences at some level. 

I discovered that I'm surrounded by people who want to be generous and want to make a difference. When I'm in the grocery store, I'm surrounded by people who want to be helpful and very often they just don't know how and they don't know that they have an invitation to do that. And when we start understanding that everywhere we go, there are people there that want to be generous with us, all of a sudden, the opportunity to have a friend or a partner, all of a sudden, the opportunities to create those friendships and invite people to have the experience that could develop into a conversation, that could develop into a friendship, that could develop into an important resource when we need help. All of a sudden that starts looking differently. And that's my actual life. I'm surrounded by people who want to be strong, healthy and resilient. 

0:56:12 - Mehmet
That's absolutely, you know, like very touching, I would say, charles, and I wish and this is one of the things, you know, that motivates me. So, when I speak with someone like you, charles and I managed to get the chance to speak with them on the podcast and knowing that this is, as they call it, an evergreen content, so people can go later and find it and listen to it, and if I can touch someone, even without knowing them, you know, this is a blessing for me and this is why I love to do this. And people ask me, like why you kept doing this for one year, and you know you were like showing every day and they said, yeah, because when I have guests like you, charles, today, and even after a couple of months from now, they can't say, hey, we listen to this episode and you know what. We heard some words which touched us and changed our life and for me, you know it's I didn't finish my mission, but it's a big part of, you know, keeping for people something to, you know, to get inspired by. 

So, and by saying this, charles, I really, really enjoyed the conversation with you today. I know like it's not like any other, you know, episode on the show. We didn't discuss much tech, and I did this on purpose. I do from time to time this on purpose because we need a break, I would say, to go back to the basics that you mentioned so we can have, you know, our lives on track for success, whether it's in business, on personal, family, friends and so on. So thank you very much, charles, for your, for your time today. I know you. You know your website is where people can go find about the books, right? 

0:58:01 - Charles
Yeah, and then we have blogs there which are shorter than the books, and we have free downloads, and then I recorded a podcast with the wise people that I wanted to learn from, and that's all free on the website. So yeah, just go. Just my name is Charles Vogl VOGL. You just searched on the internet and you should find it. It's free, yeah sure I will. 

0:58:22 - Mehmet
I will make make people's lives easy by putting that in the show notes so they can find it easily. Again. Thank you very much, charles, for the time today and for staying a little bit late in this time, for recording this episode to me, and this is usually how I end my episodes. So this is for the audience. If you are first time here and you just discovered this episode and this podcast, thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed. 

I appreciate if you can subscribe and share this, this podcast, with your friends and your colleagues, if you are one of the loyal fans that always keep sending me their notes and their messages. Thank you very much for also keep listening to the podcast and keep your feedbacks and comments coming. I really appreciate that and if you have an inspiring story, you know that you can change something by just coming here and say what you want to say. Don't hesitate to reach out to me. I would be more than happy, whatever your background is, wherever you are in the world. As I used to say always, geographies are not boundaries for me. I can arrange any time zone and you can come to this podcast. I can open arena for everyone who has an inspiring story and inspiring idea that you want to share about. I would be waiting for you. Thank you very much, and we'll meet again in the next episode. Thank you, thank you.