How to identify great leaders & find your why

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Simon Sinek: I always treated my business like a social movement, still do. The people who are on the receiving end, it really becomes theirs. They take ownership.

Reid Hoffman: There might not be anyone in the world of business more synonymous with helping people find their purpose, passion, and reason for being than my guest, Simon Sinek. He calls it the “Why.” This week on Masters of Scale, author and visionary, Simon Sinek, and I unpack that old Silicon Valley aphorism about who is more likely to succeed in business: mercenaries or missionaries?

Sinek: I would venture a guess that the earlier days of Silicon Valley, you saw more missionaries, and the current days of Silicon Valley, you see more mercenaries. The true missionaries will tell the money to go screw themselves. The true missionaries are not afraid of the short-term losses.

Hoffman: We also discuss how to build great leaders, the ultimate hack for achieving success. And whether AI can never really be your friend, this is a fun one. Stay with us.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Reid Hoffman, your host. Simon Sinek just released a 15th anniversary edition of his bestselling book, Start with Why. I wanted to hear how he’s reflecting and reimagining his signature framework for finding purpose in this moment.

I’ve been looking forward to this, actually, I think, in fact, for years. So welcome to Masters of Scale.

Sinek: Oh, I’m really excited to be here. I’m such a fan, and as you said, this is weirdly the first time we’ve ever met, so I’m really excited to chat with you.

Copy LinkThe power of starting with why

Hoffman: First, congratulations on the new anniversary. Start with Why.

Sinek: Thank you.

Hoffman: What’s the original impetus of the Start with Why, and then what’s the update?

Sinek: So it all started out as an experiment, which I think you would appreciate. I had discovered two things. It was putting them together that was the big idea. So I discovered Everett Rogers’ work, which you know, the Law of Diffusion of Innovations where all populations, regardless of their size, sift across the standard deviation, the bell curve. And as Rogers explained, the first two and a half percent of any population are your innovators. Your big idea people, present company included. The next 13.5% of the population are your early adopters, high risk tolerance, willing to spend money, time, or energy to be a part of something that reflects their beliefs. Then you have your early majority and your late majority, more cynical, more practical. What’s in it for me? If it doesn’t work, will I get my money back? And then your laggards, the last 16%, the only reason they affect any change is because they have no choice, the world has changed around them.

As Rogers explained, if you want to have mass market acceptance of an idea, or if you want long-term success, you need the bell, obviously you need the majority. And what most companies and people do is they aim all of their advertising, all of their efforts, all of their sales towards the majority, because that’s where the market is. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. And what Rogers explained is that if you can achieve 15 to 18% market penetration, there’s a social phenomenon that happens, called a tipping point, and it just goes. The problem is how do you get 15 to 18% market penetration? And most organizations, if they’re fairly good at what they do, they can organically achieve about 10%. And so I knew that as Moore called it “crossing the chasm,” going from that 10% to that 15 to 18% was really damned near impossible and usually luck.

And then I discovered the concept of why. And when I first articulated this idea of a why, I realized it’s based on the biology of human decision making. Every single one of us knows what we do, the products we sell, the services we offer. You and I can easily answer that question, so can anybody else. Some know how they do it, the thing that makes them different, stand out from the crowd, whatever it is. But very, very few people and very, very few organizations can clearly articulate why they do it. They do that deep, deep-seated purpose cause or belief that’s deeply ingrained in who we are that inspires us to take risks, do things, trust our guts, whatever you want to call it. And what I learned was that if I can put the why into words, that is what appeals to the early adopters because it’s about them, not about me.

And so I had a marketing consultancy back then. I walked away from it to do this experiment. If I could learn to Start with Why, and I could learn to identify based on language and behaviors, early adopters, that if I only talk to them, if I had the discipline to only talk to them, I should be able to create my own tipping point, and that’s what I set out to do. And I remember my phone rang and it was a friend of a client. He says to me, “I heard about your work,” he says, “I’ve heard you’re good at what you do,” and then he said, “convince me why I should hire you.” He’s asking me to sell to him. And what I had learned was immediately, I realize this guy’s not an early adopter. And I said, “Don’t.” The reason most people in companies don’t use my work, because it’s all biology. It’s just how the mind works, it’s how the brain works. It’s just these social phenomena that happen. It’s just, it is what it is, not my opinion.

The reason most people in most companies do not use my work is because I cannot tell you when it will work. I can’t tell you it’s going to happen exactly at the end of the quarter or on the date you need it to work. It may, but I don’t know. And so one of the things I had to let go of was my own goal setting, my own arbitrary timeframes, and allow the process to do its thing. So to go back to your question, what makes me proud is that I architected one of these things and it continues to grow without me. And when I had to go reread it, I cringed a little bit at some of the repetition and the language. I’m a more mature writer, now, and my original TED Talk, the quality is terrible. The video quality is terrible, the audio quality is terrible, my microphone breaks. I’m drawing on pieces of paper.

By all standards, it’s complete crap. But somebody said, you need to watch this. And so we trust our friends. And so the thing that I’m proud of is that I could even get to have a 15th anniversary edition.

Hoffman: In engaging with leaders, what were some of the surprises, delights, weirdnesses in these engagements?

Sinek: The thing that surprised me the most and continues to surprise me to this day is how it becomes deeply personal for somebody else. People would say to me in the early days, they would come up to me after I gave a Why talk, for example, and they would say to me, “I’ve been trying to put this into words my whole life. You gave me the words for the thing that’s in my mind that I couldn’t get out.” And so it’s deeply mutual, which is, I have a message and a movement that I’m trying to share because I can’t throw money at the problem. Message is everything and how deeply personal it becomes for some. And if you look at any social movement, and I always treated my business like a social movement, still do. We don’t talk about is this good for the company? We talk about is this good for the movement, is that the people who are on the receiving end, it really becomes theirs. They take ownership.

If you think about Martin Luther King standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, they weren’t there for him. They were there for themselves, the America that they believed in, it’s the America that they want to live in. I think that’s the thing that people miss, which is we can motivate people with money and promotions or threats, and there’s many ways to drive behaviors. But when it becomes deeply personal for someone and they’re now doing it for themselves and not for you, the risks that they’ll take, the sacrifices that they’ll make, and most important, the stickiness. That’s the difference between a fad and a movement. It has deep lasting impact. And I think the things that surprised me the most were the people who they didn’t know me, and yet, they were taking career risks to tell their boss and their boss’s boss that we should bring this guy in to talk. That was what was mind blowing.

Copy LinkHow to identify great leaders

Hoffman: A principle lesson that I think about in the world is that everyone wants to be the hero of their own journey. And if you give them a chance to be that hero of their own journey, it’s a good thing. In Silicon Valley, one of our aphorisms is missionaries build enduring companies, mercenaries don’t. And it doesn’t mean that everyone holds that aphorism, but it is an aphorism that is repeated amongst me, others, and it’s tied to the why and it leads this, what the balance and the integration of the why, with the other incentive structures we have within our capitalist society: promotion, title, money, other kinds of things. And what is some of the things you have found about balancing those things?

Sinek: Where it starts to go sideways is when you hear business people say, “We incentivize performance. We’re a performance driven organization.” We say you can’t incentivize performance, performance is an outcome. You can only incentivize the input. And so this performance obsession, efficiencies obsession creates incentive structures that actually undermine the movement, the mission. You know a lot better than I do on this, but I would venture a guess that the earlier days of Silicon Valley, you saw more missionaries and the current days of Silicon Valley, you see more mercenaries because it’s largely a venture capital incentivized model where the venture capitalist wants their money out in a reasonably short period of time. And the mission very often goes very counter to the incentive structure of the investor.

And the true missionaries, the true missionaries will tell the money to go screw themselves. The true missionaries are not afraid of the short-term losses. The true missionaries will take less money from a less famous venture capitalist than the big money from the big venture capital so they can tell their friends, “Look who I got,” or find alternative ways, bootstrapping bank loans, credit card debt because they don’t want anything or anyone to muddy the waters, and they will figure out incentive structures internally that find the right balance also. Because we don’t want to make it all about money, then we’re going to get that internally.

I’ll share one quick story that comes to mind. I went to visit Quantico Marine Base. This is where the Marine Corps selects its officers. They have something called the LRC, the Leadership Reaction Course, which is 20 mini obstacle courses, 10 wet, 10 dry. They’re basically problem solving courses. They’re timed. They run it through twice. The first time, they don’t assign anybody to be the leader, and the second time they do assign somebody to be a leader, and then they watch. They watch what happens. And I’m standing next to the drill instructor as this is going on and I’m looking at his grading sheet. Nowhere on the grading sheet does it say if they made it to the other side or not. Not even a checkbox, yes or no, they made it to the other side or not in the time period.

And I said to the drill instructor, “Don’t you care if they succeed in the mission or not?” And he said, “No, we care if they are good leaders.” I said, “Well, how do you know that?” He goes, “We measure the characteristics of good leaders.” And he said, “We understand that sometimes good leaders suffer a mission failure, and sometimes bad leaders enjoy mission success. So the success or failure that they have in the mission doesn’t tell us if they’re a good leader or not. But we know that if we select the people who have the qualities of good leadership, that over time, they will enjoy mission success more often than not.” In business, we do the exact opposite.

Hoffman: I just have to ask, is there a précis of what in that context, what the measurement of good leaders are?

Sinek: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have things like willingness to hear, ideas of others, decisiveness. Do you take the ideas of others, but at some point you’ve got to make a decision.

Copy LinkScaling simple, understandable, and repeatable ideas

Hoffman: Simon’s Start with Why relies on a simple framework. You may have seen it if you’re one of the 68 million viewers of his 2010 TED talk. He calls it The Golden Circle. On the outer ring, what you do, on the middle ring, how you do it, but the core, why, your purpose, mission, and reason for being. I noticed Simon never trademarked The Golden Circle or his Start with Why framework. I asked him why not do that?

Sinek: I knew when I had this idea that it resonated with people, and I knew that if all I did was chase people who were using it without my permission that sure, I’d make a little more money, I’m protecting the IP, but at the end of the day, the message won’t spread, or people will just change the name and keep the concept and there’s nothing I can do. And so my attitude was I’d rather people share the idea and use my language than change the language and use the idea anyway. My attitude was I treat it like a social movement. And I looked at Microsoft versus Apple, as well. So Apple wanted total control of their operating system because they wanted to maintain the highest quality possible, which is great. In those days, undoubtedly, indisputably, it was probably the highest quality product on the market. They also had 4% market share of computer operating systems in the world. Even less, actually.

But then I looked at Microsoft that was willing to clone and share it and let the OEMs make changes. It was not as good and they lost some control, but they had 90-some percent of the world’s computer operating systems. And when Gates said, “I want a PC on every desk,” he understood that scale, you have to accept some loss of quality and control. If you want maximum quality and maximum control, you’re restricting scale, which is why the highest quality products on the market, Couture and all of these the best lambs wool, blah, blah, blah. You can’t scale those. If you want scale, you go to Target. And so I accepted that I had to just make a choice. Do I own max quality, max price, max control, but then I lose scale? It was more important to me to spread an idea, so I accepted a loss of control and I accepted a loss of quality.

Hoffman: And what have you discovered about the general scaling of ideas? And I have a deeply personal interest in this. I’ve discovered some little tactical hacks like I call it blitzscaling. Blitzscaling, in part because it created some heat and controversy so people would talk about it as part of it. But what are some of the techniques for getting the ideas to spread?

Sinek: I think when people invent entirely new words, all they end up doing is running around trying to explain to people what the definition is. We want things to induce curiosity or have some level of familiarity, and we also want to reduce semantic debates. And I think where most people settle on, they’re so obsessed with having something proprietary and IP that they make it so difficult to understand, that they don’t induce curiosity or they don’t have a level of familiarity. By the way, even the concept of why, in the early days, I remember talking to people and there was this debate, what comes first, vision or mission? And I would sit in meetings watching people have these debates, and the reason was there’s no standardized definitions. And so we infused our own meaning and then had semantic arguments about my meaning versus your meaning rather than actually trying to understand.

And so I went to the people who said, “Vision is primary.” And I said, “What’s vision to you?” And they said, “It’s the reason we get out of bed in the morning. It’s why we get out of bed in the morning.” I said, “Okay, to the people who believe mission or purpose or brand, whatever word they wanted to use, what was it to you?” And they said, “It’s why we do what we do. It’s why we get out of bed. It’s why we sacrifice.” I said, “Great. Let’s call it the why, and now we can all agree.” The coup of my work wasn’t that it was, I wasn’t the first person to start talking about purpose. It’s that I found language that made us stop having semantic debates and we could actually just focus on doing it now. Things have to be simple, understandable, and repeatable. If your message is simple, it means someone else can understand it. And if somebody else can understand it, that means they can repeat it, even imperfectly without you in the room, without your PowerPoint.

And so the coup of any movement or idea that spreads is that somebody else can put it into their own words and their friends will understand it without any technological aid to support it. Because very often, you can always tell when it doesn’t work. You have this amazing meeting with this amazing inspired person with this amazing idea, and you leave the meeting and somebody goes, “What was the meeting about?” You’re like, “So you’ll have to call them. I don’t know.”

Hoffman: Yeah, no, exactly.

Sinek: And that’s what we need to avoid. We want people to be able to repeat our ideas in their own words.

Hoffman: Still ahead. I talk with Simon about how to scale optimism in tumultuous times and what he thinks is the ultimate hack for success.

[AD BREAK]

Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel.

Copy LinkWhat it means to be optimistic

So one of the other mission zones that I think you do a excellent scaling idea leadership in is optimism. And obviously we’re in quite troubled times. How should people cultivate their optimism even in difficulty?

Sinek: So let’s first define the term. Optimism is not blind positivity. “Everything’s great, everything’s amazing, look how good everything is” is not optimism. That’s not healthy, because especially when times are difficult and a leader is like, “Look how good everything is,” because they think they have to, to keep morale up, it backfires because it makes people feel worse because they’re like, “I’m struggling and my leader is so positive, there must be something wrong with me.” Or you lose trust. You’re like, “That guy is blind.” So it is not that. Optimism is not naive. It is the undying belief that the future is bright. And an optimistic leader can say, “Look, these are the most difficult times we’ve ever had to operate in. There’s a lot of uncertainty. I don’t know what’s going to happen and I don’t know how long this is going to last, but I know one thing for sure, that if we take care of each other, if we work together, we will come through this and be stronger when we come out than when we went in.” That is optimism.

And so you can see one is the undying belief that the future is bright, that there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. That’s number one. And as my colleague says, “Every storm runs out of rain.” That’s number one. And there’s the very, very, very important part, which is the social relationship. It’s very hard to maintain optimism in darkness when you’re alone. It’s very hard to find that energy. But if you have one person that you can say, “Hey, we got this.” Whether you’re the one saying it or you’re the one hearing it, that sense of camaraderie and teamwork is what allows for optimism to flourish. I don’t think you can have optimism without relationships.

Copy LinkWhen “failing fast” doesn’t work

Hoffman: I agree with Simon. There’s an important distinction between being blind to risks and being optimistic. As I’ve often said, starting a company can feel like you have to jump off a cliff and assemble the plane on the way down, which requires optimism, and Simon actually had a riff on that idea.

Sinek: You can jump out of a plane with a parachute or you can jump out of a plane with a backpack. Both amazing thrills, but only one you can do again. And so there’s the idea like, yes, take the risk, but just check the pack. It’s all I’m asking you to do is just have a little look inside. Is it a canteen or is it a parachute? I think we have to distinguish between big ideas and small ideas or big decisions and small decisions. They’re not interchangeable. Little decisions with little consequences that can be fixed quickly. Sure, let the market decide and then tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak so that the software mentality. But big things like reorgs or asking somebody to leave your team because, for whatever reason, make those slowly because those have ripples and consequences and you can’t undo a reorg with another reorg.

And I think one of the aphorisms in tech that has been overused and misused and now abused, is this concept of fail fast. That appeals to a very small percentage of a population’s mentality, and yet, you come into a company and say, “Fail fast,” and people don’t don’t know what to do. They don’t know what it means. Nobody wants to fail. If I fail, I’m going to get fired. I’ve also seen you have layoffs every year, and you look at your performance, then that fail fast, but I have to perform. What are you talking about? The words are all screwed up. There are failures that are very hard to fix with just another reorg or just whatever you do, and there are failures that are near easy and don’t really matter. And so I think the problem is we need two words.

So I do not use the word fail fast. I don’t agree with it, and I don’t like it, and I think it scares people who don’t have a high risk tolerance, and yet, I want them to come on board and I want them to innovate. I talk about falling. I say, fall fast. You’re going to try things, you’re going to fall, I need you to get back up. I need you to go. I do not want you to fail, but I do encourage you to fall.

Hoffman: I agree with you, because the fail fast is like failure is not the target. Learn fast is what I use. Learn fast. So why are you moving fast and you’re risking falling is because you’re optimizing for learning speed.

Sinek: So much better. When you say fail fast, you make fail the target. We’re doing something in order to fail to prove that I can do it quickly.

Hoffman: Yes.

Sinek: Such a great insight.

Copy LinkFriendship is “the ultimate hack”

Hoffman: Yes. It’s like, nope, not the target. So one of the things that we also share is a passion about friendship. So say a little bit about why friendship is something that needs so much more serious attention. Why friendship is important.

Sinek: Most people think they’re good friends, but if we peel the onion just a little bit, would you cancel on a friend for a meeting or would you cancel on a meeting for a friend? “Oh, but my friend would understand.” And you realize very quickly that we’re actually pretty shitty friends and we de-prioritize friends too often and we take them for granted. And if you think about some of the challenges and stresses that we’re having in the world today, increased levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, obviously, inability to cope with stress. If you want a happy career, if you want a happy marriage, you need friendships to underlie. In fact, friendship, I would call the ultimate biohack. It’s the ultimate hack, that if you master friendship, all these other things just disappear, even the obsession with longevity we have. People are looking at blue zones and they’re looking at the fact that they’re walking and what they’re eating and what their diets are, and they’re neglecting the fact that they eat together.

Hoffman: Yes.

Sinek: Every single night, and they go for the walks with their friends, show me happy people, and I’ll show you a lot of friends, and happy people live longer and cope with stress better. We work so hard on all these other relationships and we neglect or take for granted friendships.

Hoffman: Most people are startled by the question of saying, “What are the skills to friendship?”

Sinek: The irony is friendship is a relationship. Work is relationships. Marriage is a relationship. So if I say to somebody, “Tell me what your leadership skills are.” Listening, empathy, they’ll list them off for me. If I say, “What are the skills needed for successful marriage?” They’ll give me that list. But if you say, “friendship,” they freeze like a deer in the headlights, and yet, the irony is it’s the same set of skills as all those other relationship skills. We just don’t apply them.

Hoffman: Yes.

Sinek: And also feels like, well, but if you’re thinking about it explicitly, are you being manipulative? Are you doing, it’s like, no, no, no. Look, we think about these explicitly to get better, and being manipulative is an intent.

Hoffman: Of course.

Sinek: If our intent is how are we better together and you care about the other person, is what you’re doing, then being explicit is helpful, not manipulative. One of the things that I tell people, I say, “Look, with the people that are your friends, if you’re not every so often talking about the friendship, you’re failing as a friend.”

Hoffman: Hundred percent.

Sinek: We beg our bosses to have reviews, not even about our numbers, reviews of how am I doing? We talk about the relationship we have at work. We have 360 reviews so that we can tell people their blind spots so that we can be better served and better service. Marriage, we talk about the marriage. Sometimes we go for therapies. We don’t invest any time talking about friendship. For years, my friends would tell me, this is embarrassing. They’d say, “Simon, you’re a terrible listener.” And I’d be like, “Do you know what I do for a living? I’m fine.” So I took a listening class and I discovered something, which is I’m a phenomenal, phenomenal listener with people who I will never see again for the rest of my life, but with my friends, abysmal.

So my point is, I’m learning the skills for work, and I’m not applying them to friendship. I’m learning the skills in a marriage, but I’m not applying them to friendship. We fail to recognize that they need nurturing and investing, which then begs the question, AI friendships.

Copy LinkThe danger of AI friendships

Hoffman: Yes, indeed. I was going to ask about AI.

Sinek: Can’t talk about friendship without talking about AI friendships. So here’s one thing we know: AI friends are a hundred percent more reliable than our real friends. They are. They’re there whenever we want.

Hoffman: 24/7.

Sinek: Whenever we need them, three o’clock in the morning, my bot there for me. They don’t have their own feelings. So I feel like I’m the center of attention always. It’s also trained to affirm me. In other words, all those listening skills that we’re talking about, the bot’s been trained by them. So I say “Oh, I’m feeling sad.” “Oh, it must be hard to feel sad.” But what it lacks is the ability for us to serve, for the ability for us to invest energy, for the ability for us to learn how to sacrifice. It’s a parasocial relationship. It’s a one-way relationship. And the problem is, it’s we know a lot of tech hijacks our reward structures. We know that social media, we know that cell phones, we know that gaming hijack our dopamine system, make us feel good and usually closely associated with gambling, we can create addiction to all of these things because it’s hijacked our internal reward structures. We know that.

The danger of an AI friend is forget about the dopamine that’s in there, as well, but now it’s hijacking our oxytocin, which is all the warm and fuzzies. So when I have real emotion with my bot, those emotions, they’re real. The chemicals are flowing, but for the fact, the bot has no feelings for us, hence the parasocial. And the analogy I would give, it goes back to what we were saying before. We’re so performance obsessed. We’re so output obsessed that that’s all we think about. And so we talk about how AI can do the PowerPoint, write the code, write the book, write the article, write the song, make the painting. By the way, it’s getting better and better and better, does a pretty good job.

But what we’re failing to recognize is that it’s not the output that makes us better, stronger, smarter. A painter who has the torture of the painting, it actually doesn’t matter what the painting is, that’s for you. But for me, and I can tell you this just from writing my own books, I’m smarter, I’m a better problem solver, I’m more intuitive, I’m better at seeing patterns. And you can see the maturity of my own thinking if you go from book one to book two to book three. It’s the torture of writing a book and organizing thoughts in a linear fashion that other people can understand that’s making me better at my own craft. If we just simply rely on AI to make the outputs, there’s no torture, and growth requires struggle.

A marriage gets stronger because of conflict, not the absence of it. Even at work, the deadline, the product crashing, the team forced to come together. We come out of those. It’s not when everything went right that the team coalesces, it’s when everything goes wrong that the team coalesces. And it’s the same for friendship. It’s the struggle of friendship. It’s the complication, it’s the messiness. It’s that I want to talk about my shit on the day that you want to talk about your shit, one of us is going to have to compromise. It’s the messiness that not just makes the friendship stronger, it makes us better at being us. It makes us truly, deeply happier. And so that AI friendship is good until the power goes out. But we never get the joy of service. We never get the joy of looking after someone. It is so rewarding to the person being the friend.

Hoffman: I think it was powerfully stated. And I think part of the thing about, for example, co-founded this company called Inflection. We have this AI called PI, pun intended, Personal Intelligence. And if you go to PI and say, “You’re my best friend,” it says, “No, no, I’m your AI companion. Let’s talk about your friends.” Precisely because the theory of human wellbeing is actually in fact, that grittiness of the engagement where, whoa, I wanted to have this lunch about me. And it’s like, well, but actually, your friend’s having trouble, too. Let’s figure it out. And figuring it out together is the important thing around friendship. Most people don’t think about the why of friendship enough, which is, well, I trust the person will be good for me, et cetera. It’s like, well, but actually, the why is, why are you going on this journey together? Yes, you’re looking after each other. Yes, you have trust. Yes, you have loyalty, but why are you going on this journey together? It’s like, well, I enjoy watching the football game together. It’s like, well, do more in your friendship.

Sinek: And not all friendships have to be deep, meaningful relationships. We all have friends that are, they’re just fun.

Hoffman: Of course.

Sinek: I’m not going to go to this person in a time of difficulty, they were just fun. But there’s a couple of nuances that I’ve learned as I’ve been learning about friendship. We all know that amongst our friend groups, there’s only a small number that we would go to when we’re really struggling, when things have gone really sideways, and we really need to be super vulnerable. You know the names of those people you would call, I know the names of those people I would call. What I’ve learned is that there’s even a smaller group, ironically, when things go unbelievably well. The person you want to call and just brag and be like, “I fricking nailed it. This is the best thing I’ve ever done.”

My friend calls me, I was the first person he called, he sold his company. I was so excited for him. No jealousy, no envy, just pure joy to share in his happy moment, he can brag and compliment himself and pat himself on the back and big up himself all he wanted. I thought it was the best thing in the world. And what I thought was so amazing is, that friend group is even smaller than the friend group we go to when things go wrong. The friends that we can brag about ourselves. And then you realize you want those people in your life who don’t judge you and think you’re an egomaniac and know who you are, and are proud of your accomplishments and want to support you. And you realize good is more difficult than bad.

I did a thing where I asked ChatGPT, and I love that you’ve programmed your PI to be able to distinguish. So I asked ChatGPT, “Can I make friends with AI? Can AI be a good friend?” And it started going down this path of like, “They’re inherent dangers. You have to remember the company’s a for-profit. They’re designed to keep you.” It’s telling me all of this stuff and then all of a sudden it interrupts itself and it says, “Error.” And I thought it was my internet went out or something. I didn’t know what it was. I wish I’d take a screenshot because it’s literally telling me, don’t trust this run, run, run.

Hoffman: Yes.

Sinek: Literally telling me not to do it. And it breaks and I get this red alert. And so like I said, I wish I took a screenshot of it and it said, “Would you like to save the answer?” And I was like, oh, yeah, because it went dead, so I’ll just download the answer. So I click yes, and the answer gave me completely different, sanitized, completely sanitized AI is a wonderful companion, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I typed the question in again, got the sanitized answer, and then I couldn’t get it to do it again. They can be a help, but they’re not your friends.

My favorite definition of community, it’s a definition that I use all the time, which is a community is a group of people who agree to grow together. And I think if you just take that down to two, which is a friendship. A friendship is a partnership or is a combination of two people who agree to grow together. And so what kind of society can we be if I am validated and I have no idea how to validate. I am smarter because of technology. I’m more efficient because of technology. But I am a better version of myself because of my friends.

Hoffman: Amen.

Sinek: Oh, Reid, I could talk to you forever.

Hoffman: Likewise. We will really literally have to do this again.

Sinek: Please.

Hoffman: Was so much fun, I am buzzing right now.

I love Simon Sinek’s insistence on clear-eyed optimism. His dedication to helping others find their why is an inspiring idea worth scaling. The new 15th anniversary edition of Start with Why is available now wherever you buy books, and it’s hard to think of a better read for any newly minted graduates in your life.

I feel like Simon is such a kindred spirit. It’s hard to believe we’ve never talked before this conversation, and I truly hope it won’t be our last. I’m Reid Hoffman. Thank you for listening.