What do you mean? Just called 'em up?

Uh, I would talk to you, and I'd be like, "Okay, who else do you know I should talk to?" You give me three names.

I talk to them.

I was just, who are the experts? Who are the individuals? Who wants to talk about this? I logged over 2,000 calls just trying to hear the stories on top of my dinners to understand, like, what existing researchers were doing.

Like, I just wanted to understand and get my head around it.

And then out of that, we commissioned a study to be able to look at it from a quantitative standpoint and look at, like, what's actually going on here.

And what had come out of those calls was that there really are six things that people need to do in their lives to thrive, um, in a sustainable way.

[laughs]

into-So ironically, the chamber of connection and the chamber of commerce are not that disassociated

We have...

It's a Venn diagram, like everything, where two different pieces come together.

But I think the bigger shift, so we actually have this group of people we put together across the country, 'cause we're trying to figure out how to talk about this, 'cause narratives matter.

And I have to tell you about the narrative piece we did in Seattle in a second, 'cause it was really, really fun.

Um, we were like, "What, what are the consequences?" 'Cause social connection, people have a hard time getting fired up about.

They get it, they feel sadness around it, but like we said, what's at stake? If we lose social connection, like, what's at stake? And we had a really interesting conversation about, like, what is it that we lose if we don't have social connection anymore? And woman on, um, as part of the coalition said, "We lose our humanity.

... because they have two jobs or...

Yeah.

Happy to.

So, yeah.

So I, after I, just to quickly bridge to that, after I left Taproot Foundation, we had sort of scaled that globally.

I also love writing and decided to take a lot of articles and things I was working on and publish a book and wrote The Purpose Economy, really predicting the rise of purpose as a driver of economic value creation and created a venture-backed startup around that, which was really fun and I just burnt out.

Um, and that was a couple of years ago and, you know, we exited that startup and I was about to turn 50.

So Chuck, I'm a year younger than you.

Yeah, yeah,

It, it definitely sounded like [laughs] it could've gone that way.

I know.

And that would be its own story if that happened, but thankfully it was not.

And he opened up a box, and it was a piece of paper that said Adolf Hitler at the top of it.

He'd actually, as a naval officer, was one of the first officers in Hitler's bunk at the end of the war, and had stolen it off his desk.

And he used that piece of paper to tell the story of what he saw rebuilding Germany after the war, and being able to actually bring two enemies that have been killing each other together to actually rebuild a country through shared purpose.

And he realized that if we wanna prevent further conflict, we need to find a way to build shared purpose.

Okay