We Are One and All: Getting Back Control & Purpose in Life, with a Google X Visionary
How do we define life purpose? You might feel powerless at times. You might be overwhelmed by work, the news, and ongoing disasters in the world. How do you take back control in your life? How do you get back purpose? Then you’ll want to hear from Tom Chi, in this encore presentation from Imagine Talks.
Tom Chi has worked in a wide range of roles from astrophysical researcher to Fortune 500 consultant to corporate executive developing new hardware/software products and services. He has pioneered and practiced a unique approach to rapid prototyping, visioning, and leadership that jumpstart innovative new ideas as well as move large organizations at unprecedented speeds. These approaches have benefitted over a dozen industry-leading companies. He most recently served as head of product experience at Google X developing technology such as Google Glass and Google’s self-driving cars.
To learn more about Tom Chi:
- LinkedIn: Tom Chi
- Twitter: @thegoodtomchi
- Instagram: @thegoodtomchi
- Facebook: Tom Chi
Visit his website 👉🏻 www.tomchi.com
Below is our edited transcript of Tom Chi’s talk, “We Are One And All,” at the Imagine Talks Annual Symposium.
Francis Kong: Hey, Tom, how are you doing, sir?
Tom Chi: I’m doing good.
Francis Kong: Great to have you back in the Bay Area with us. You are definitely one of my favorite TEDx talk speakers and I’m so honored to be able to talk with you today face to face via Zoom. Before I jump into any of my questions, would you be able to do with the honor to introduce yourself a little bit — where you came from? What are some significant milestones that went in through your life that helped you bring you to where you are today as an investor and inventor and just a wonderful thought leader?
Inventor Tom Chi has lived his life innovating
Tom Chi: Sure, yeah. So lifelong inventor — I’m a named inventor on 75 patents, and probably patented only about 3% of what I built because mostly had to go do it relative to things that were going to go commercial. You know, so I’ve been doing that my entire life, but like expressed through doing all sorts of research work, so I did scientific research in astrophysics, I did engineering research in robotics, sensor fusion, advanced computing architectures — a bunch of different areas.
And then I went into industry and worked at Microsoft — I was an executive at Yahoo! Also a senior leader at Google that helped to start the Google X team, where I got to work on the self-driving car, Google Glass, a bunch of things like that. And then after that, I wanted to go use these kinds of invention skills — and, you know, the skills around accelerating innovation — and point them not necessarily just cool new tech that we could make, but at things that we could make that could address major global issues.
So things like the climate destabilization that’s being driven by too many greenhouse gases or all the other ways that the economy is not compatible with the natural world. The idea of my current work is basically to use all of the invention and innovation skills, but apply them towards supporting companies that are radically shaking up the industries that are negative to nature. So we can kind of create an economy that both serves humanity and serves nature at the same time.
Francis Kong: I love that. All right, so basically doing what we’re constantly doing but being much more respectful, mindful, and responsible to our environment and our planet and obviously the world we live in. I love that.
At One Ventures: “Help humanity become a net positive to nature”
At One Ventures website
Tom Chi: Well, just one little tweak on that, like the actual tagline for our new firm, which is called At One Ventures. But the tagline for our new firm is to help humanity become a net positive to nature. So the idea is you eventually push for a civilization where the fact that humans on that are — the fact that humanity is on the planet actually helps nature become healthier every year.
Francis Kong: Oh, wow. OK, OK. What are some —
Tom Chi: It’s really pushing beyond that sense of like, “Let’s stop doing damage or just be more responsible or whatever.” It’s like we actually do what we are getting a better and better understanding overtime of how natural systems and cycles work and which activities we do are detrimental to it, and also which activities we do that can be actively additive to it. And if you kind of flip around the design problem, you basically say, “No. Actually, what if we designed an economy that was not only additive to humans, but was additive to all of nature?”
It kind of puts it like nature instead of being the — on the other side of the table, like a resource we’re drawing from, we’re kind of like all on the same side, like we’re working together because humanity wants to be prosperous and it wants nature to be prosperous at the same time, because that’s the most prosperous world we could end up with.
Francis Kong: I love that. I love that. Then can you share with us within, obviously, confidentiality and understanding, are there any particular projects that at One Venture’s working on that you’re especially excited about?
Dendra System: Revolutionising Ecosystem Restoration
Tom Chi: Let’s see, I’m wearing the sweatshirt from one of them, this one’s called Dendra Systems, and they’re basically able to restore ecosystems about a hundred times faster, three times cheaper than anything we’ve ever done now. And they’re already working up at like ten thousand hectare restorations, so already quite large areas and they are on a trajectory that they could credibly be restoring a hundred thousand hectares in a single project within 18 months. They’ve already planted — they’ve already restored ecosystems all around the world — mangroves, tropical rainforest, temperate forests, arid lands like the mixture of grasslands and light tree cover.
Dendra Systems website
So they’ve worked in lots of different settings on four different continents. And all those settings they have dramatically reduce the cost and very dramatically reduce the time to go restore ecosystems.
Francis Kong: Fantastic. OK. I also want to ask you this, if you don’t mind. I understand that you also had a powerful personal journey that really helped you see the importance of not taken life for granted and making sure, “Do you live every moment to its fullest and not and not waste any of it?” And Chi, what was one reason why I think that you are constantly working nine hours a day, but you’re doing it with things that I think you love and are passionate about, would you be willing to share with us something that incident you’ve gone through that really made you appreciate your time here on Earth and not wasting any of the opportunities presented to you?
A life lived to the fullest by pursuing a passion
Tom Chi: Sure, I mean, I guess the very short version of it is I effectively died or almost died when I was 29 and the reason that that happened was I was an executive at Yahoo! And I had been just taking on more and more responsibility, because the entire way that I kind of built up my career was just to take more responsibility, learn more, work harder, just kind of push through it. And I think that works fantastic if you’re an individual contributor, there’s only so much that you would expect a person to be able to do.
So I was always doing more than what you’d expect a single person to be able to do and that got me a lot of visibility, so I got a lot of great work done. It also got my name in the mix in terms of like, “Oh, who should be leading people?”
And I remember when I first started out, like, my first team was about five people. And that’s not too hard from the management perspective.
But I had this habit, which was great for my employees in a way in that — let’s say you were somebody who worked in my team and 90% of the job is going well for you, you’re really locked in doing a fantastic job of it, 10% of it you’re struggling with.
Well, a lot of times, like when my employees would come to me with that, I’d be like, “You know what? We just got to get the mission done. I’ll take on your 10%.”
How too much work stress impacts health
And look, when you got five people, you grab 10% from this person, 5 [percent] from this person, 10% from that person, it increases your workload a bit, but maybe it goes from 100% to 130% and that was something I could still handle.
But I basically kept that habit going as my team became 20 people and 50 people and yeah, and like when you grab 5% from 50 people, all of a sudden you have more than any human being can handle. And I did not recognize that this was the case, but I was exhibiting all kinds of stress behaviors, like I would — I would come in in the morning and then fill up like a 24oz cup just with ice and I would just chew on ice in the morning while I was doing my emails and kind of clearing out lots of things for the day and which is, by the way, terrible for your teeth. I had great teeth until I did that so don’t do that, if you are tempted to chew ice take it from me, that will ruin your teeth.
Tom Chi: But I had all these stress behaviors to kind of try to manage the stress of taking on the workload of, I don’t know, three or four people. But what was actually happening is that my body was very negatively responding to all that stress, just like, you know, stress can be related to digestive issues and ulcers and all that sort of thing then something like that was happening for me and my lower GI tract.
How a near-death experience can shape your life purpose
And basically, when I was 29 during Christmas break, I was hanging out with my friends and we’re just playing video games like old times and I was going down the hall to the bathroom and I collapsed in the hallway before I could get to the bathroom and my friends called the ambulance because they couldn’t revive me. And what had happened is my lower GI tract actually burst open — I was doing massive internal bleeding.
Of course, you don’t look like anything’s wrong, you just like look like you collapsed. So the EMTs picked me up, we got me to the hospital within about 20 minutes, and then they started to check out my vitals, and very quickly it went from, “Doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong.” To like, “Oh, this person is about to die.”
And then they called a lot of people over and, you know, sometimes you’re losing blood, they’ll give you a blood transfusion to kind of stabilize you. I had lost so much that they had to do four simultaneous transfusions. And then after that happened, then I was still not enough, they had to immediately do another four simultaneous transfusions. And before they started the transfusions, like, I knew that stuff was really, really wrong because I could basically feel myself dying. Like when you are almost out of blood, what your body does is it shunt all of the blood to just the heart and the lungs.
Life was saved by 10 blood transfusions
Tom Chi: They said, “Well, we can give up on literally everything else as long as we’re able to go run those things.” But some of the things that it gives up in the process is all of your internal organs — so those can fail from lack of oxygen and it also gives up on your brain, gives up on your brain before your heart and lungs. And I actually felt that happening to me in those minutes before the transfusion, I felt my extremities going like ice-cold because all the blood was coming into the core.
I felt like effectively my body shutting down. And I kind of knew in a way that I was dying, though it was not confirmed until the next morning when the doctor told me that I was about a minute away from irreversible brain and organ damage. Eventually, after that, you die.
So — so, yeah, I basically was about a minute from death and I — I got to feel the experience of dying very clearly, and it — and there’s a whole story around that which led to my everything-is-connected talk, but the most immediate lesson was basically I woke up the next morning and ultimately they gave me 10 blood transfusions because they gave me a couple more even after those four simultaneous, plus four simultaneous.
But I woke up the next morning, you know, most of a human being is liquid, most of that liquid is blood, and I had most of my blood switched outright in the course of a night. And I kind of woke up that morning and I was like, “I might be more other people than I am myself this morning just by mass.”
Support from others makes life possible
Right? Because you’re mostly liquid and that was liquid blood. And I’m only alive right now because of the generosity of like 10 people that I’m never going to be able to meet or thank.
Francis Kong: Right.
Tom Chi: And there’s something about that which was exactly the message that I needed, because what’s implicit in the message of, “Oh, when times get tough, just like buckle down and work harder, take more responsibility,” that sort of thing, is this implicit sense that the world is not there supporting you, right? That you need to take on more to go support others only, that’s the only direction the arrow flows.
But when you wake up the next morning and there’s 10 people that without which you would already be dead and you don’t even know them, you can’t even thank them that — and they not only helped you like their blood — the stuff that their lives created is now in you, like allowing you to breathe and live.
And there’s no kind of deeper sense of support than you can have than you’ve given me the fundamental chance to live and it made me like, reset and reflect a lot about, like, my model of what a strong leader was and what it meant to do anything in the world and the ways that we are constantly relying on each other. But we have this kind of hero mythology around the journey that we must take and all the trials that we must overcome, not realizing that 99% of your life is possible and is happening because of the support of others.
The gift of life given by others
And yes, we should be bold and we should push on the 1% that is ours. But like if you think about it differently, you don’t feel so alone actually when you know that 99% of your life, you know, is — comes through the — it is kind of like the blessings and the work of others that have come before or are concurrent to, you know.
Francis Kong: Wow, that was so powerful and you’re right, like, that life-giving blood came from their body that they generated the genesis of their bodies and it’s now or at that moment time to transfer its life-giving properties to you, right? And kept you alive to go on and do great things. So, wow, that is so insightful and so powerful. Thank you for sharing that story, Tom.
Tom Chi: Yeah. No problem. Yeah.
Francis Kong: So, the whole talk — and I understand even more now when you talk about the talk of how everything is connected and I have to ask this question because this is such a timely question. If everything is so connected, which I truly believe it is at this point now more than ever, 2020 in our — in 2021 was a huge psychological, historical, just philosophical and obviously financial health — everything — which has impacted by this — by this one phenomenon. If everything is connected, what kind of ripples do you see that this kind of phenomenon that’s happened in 2020 — the start of 2020 is obviously continuing on in 2021 — what kind of potential ripples, or effects do you see [in] this connecting with everything else in things that you feel like is worthy to mention in this talk that 2020 has basically started as a ripple effect in the pond?
A pandemic’s ripple effect on connections with others
Photo licensed from Yayimages
Tom Chi: Yeah, I mean, the thing about a pandemic disease is it obviously started in one location, there was a person that was the very first infected and over the course of like, you know, a little over a year, it’s reached one hundred million people, and in order for that to happen, humans had to be directly in contact with other humans. It’s not like you can put that on a Web server and then somebody like five thousand miles away gets it. So, like that actually just shows you that there is a direct in-person line of connection between that one person and the one hundred million people in less than a year.
Francis Kong: Yeah.
Tom Chi: And I think there’s a lot that you could take from that, though, it’s very highlighted by a pandemic disease because it gives you like this acute negative response that you’re going to remember. But like what’s true about that is actually true of all the stuff that we do.
We might think like, “Oh, I’m just dumping some pollution in this one river and it’s really just around my town and whatever.” And then it rolls out to the ocean and it’s affecting fish that people are going to eat, you know, 20,000 miles away and the more that we just have those concrete examples, because there’s basically been a push for — per consumerism and individuality — as like these dual ideals. And one of them says, “Oh, well, consumerism is going to go drive the economy and the economy is going to lift all boats and da, da, da,” and I think we are — 2020 the breakdown of the economy in 2020 also made it clear that, like, the lifting of all boats is definitely not very well distributed.
Becoming your own person
So it’s definitely not all boats, like we should go challenge that notion around, this consumerism — the whole kind of thing. And then around individuality, individuality is kind of like held up like a, “Oh, when things go amazingly, then you get all this extra all these extra choices and agency in life and then you can strike out and be your own person and not — ” but, there’s something about that, that doesn’t really acknowledge that you get to be your own person because so many other people are thriving, right? Those are the situations where a person really gets to be their own person.
If you are trying to be your own person and then you’re just surrounded by misery, or you end up needing to take care of folks that have been let down by the system, then all of the sudden individuality is, well, basically individuality is not a value that you can go and pursue in the abstract.
That, and it’s also something that might lead us into a type of illusion around like, “Hey, I made enough money, I got mine. I’m basically covered.” It’s like, “No,” I mean, if you really look at this, you are still feeling the shocks of this now, maybe not as economically, but like not being able to go out and eat at a restaurant or not being able to go watch a movie or see a play or what have you like — or go out and listen to music, right? Like there [are] things that start to encroach that make you recognize that kind of — the myth of being separate and this individual with agency and that — and holding that as a really high goal above caring about the co-flourishing of everyone around you, that’s misguided as well.
The global perspective
So I think there’s a bunch of things and these are more kind of like Western-centric sensibilities. Obviously, in the US, like, individuality and capitalism are very highly regarded. But I say, like, we got to go look at those pretty seriously like to the extent that we keep doing them, then we can’t — we definitely can’t keep doing them the way we have been doing.
Francis Kong: Right.
What are some things that you think — that you hope, from a national and hopefully global perspective as a global village, using the term that we have learned going forward into 2020 that will do differently — that we’ve seen ourselves do for the last several decades, the same way over and over again?
Tom Chi: Well, I mean, this is still a big open question, but the fact that we had multiple relief bills for Coronavirus — 2.3 trillion dollars one, in abidance about to propose in like a 1.4 trillion-dollar one. And then we had like 800 billion one in between — something like that.
Then, you know, forever, we have been saying that we can’t tackle the big problems like climate destabilization, we can’t tackle the big problems in the world because it’s too expensive. But, like, all the proposals to go and address those big problems, were way cheaper than what we spent on Coronavirus this year and not even necessarily to improve anything. It was basically just like, “Oh, like you guys are all out of work like we want to make sure that you don’t starve.” Like, well, not starving is very valuable to go after, but it’s not like the system is like way stronger than it was before. You’re just trying to have it not collapse.
Francis Kong: Right.
Increasing the fundamentals of human welfare
Tom Chi: And like when you think about the sort of budgets that we argue about and all the rationales for why we had to wait a bit longer to go address the big issues in society, that I think that it’s going to be harder to make those excuses after we have, you know, in the course of a year, spent 3 trillion or more doing stuff that is not necessarily increasing the fundamentals of the — of human welfare or the economy, like, it is really just preventing a collapse, like I said.
Now, that’s said, you’ll just say, “Well, preventing the collapse, like it would be more expensive if we collapse for sure.” But it would also be way less expensive to build something that was robust, that didn’t have that type of possibility of collapse, where collapse wasn’t so eminent when something goes wrong for a couple of months.
Francis Kong: Right. I couldn’t put it in words, I think of anything — what I’ve learned this past year was that, we’re all living pretty much on almost like a — I teach my students the three little pigs, right? I think we’re all living in that house of straw, right? And the minute and, you know, as long as there’s no wind and no storm, everyone is fine and happy, right? Because there’s no reason not to build a stronger house. But the minute something like this comes and finds that Achilles heel, it brings the whole straw house down instead of trying to build another straw house, we’re trying to keep the straw from falling. You’re right. We should be looking at what a brick house looks like.
Individualistic cultures where individuals strive for self-realization in their life purpose
Tom Chi: Yeah, and it is, of course, like the hard stuff in how you design the economy, but it’s also the soft stuff in terms of like, you know, have we become so individualistic that we don’t have people around us that can care for us?
Francis Kong: Right.
Tom Chi: It’s like that is way more of a question of how one envisions like socially what success looks like. And this has been a long-standing trend. But there’s like a study that was done that was talking about, how many close friends that people have? And like since the 1980s, that number has decreased by a half. So people have half as many close friends now than they did in the 1980s, 1990s, it’s like, “Oh, well, yeah, no, I think we all feel it. We feel the social isolation.” We feel trying to use social media to kind of like fill in the gap. But that doesn’t necessarily create close friendships. Maybe it helps you to stay in touch with some close friends. But yeah, that kind of — is illustrative of [an] erosion that is happening in terms of a really well-nourished emotional life.
Francis Kong: Right. And so, what I’m also getting here and understanding is that, this is not a problem that can be solved by money or finance a quick fix. This is something that we need to — like you said, we get to take a good, hard look at our deeper philosophies.
Life purpose: basic nurturing values
What are some fundamental things that if you could share with the audience that you think we need to do, hopefully at least as a nation [inaudible] — at least a nation to work towards in the next several years, decades to try to fundamentally shift our understanding of how we’ve lost some of these basic nurturing values along the way. What are the things you think we should start focusing on to get back to the human basics again of being a person?
Tom Chi: Yeah, so just to be clear, there are some external things that can be addressed with smart allocation of capital and investment and money, broadly.
And then there are a bunch of internal things which I think as you are raising will certainly not be solved with money or at least not money alone. You know, when it comes to things like that, that there is a significant kind of breakdown, you know, in being able to go assess where the truth is coming from and historically science, journalism, things like this have been the things that we kind of look to, to say, “Well, look, there is a way that we can establish scientifically what happens when a virus does this or that.” Or journal — journalism-wise like that an event specifically took place or didn’t take place, right?
The truth behind science
And, you know, for a number of reasons that are way too long to get into than a number of powerful people around the world have been pushing to erode the confidence in things like science and things like the press and journalism and so on and so forth. And that is like the natural first step: to be able to manipulate people because you kind of take away their ability to see what’s true and then you can pop in there — whether it’s through social media, which is one way, one avenue that people have been manipulating folks or whether it’s through speeches or whether it’s through in-person stuff. The most important underlying arc is that kind of erosion of the sources of truth.
So, like, the way to go fight this — fight back on this, you know, you want these sorts of things to be fixed quickly but, like, in seeing how far things have gone askew, then you just got to presume it’s going to take a generation. And that generation is a generation — we’ve already pushed to say, “Oh, there should be more people in STEM careers or STEAM careers.” That’s great.
Tom Chi: Absolutely more people with good literacy and numeracy and a foundation in science absolutely helps a good amount on the science part of it.
What can lie generating machines do
On the journalism part of it, yeah, we probably need to go adjust some things in terms of the business model of journalism because the — yeah, we keep rewarding the organizations that spread lies because they get the ratings and they get the views and clicks and all that sort of thing. So like that’s basically like a lie generating machine and whether you point at the social media companies as being like the root of all the problem or you point at the business model of modern media as the root of all problem, or you can pin it on the people, too, it’s like, “Oh, we keep on clicking on those things.”
It almost doesn’t matter exactly what the root is. Like, we can identify that the dynamic overall is creating confusion and misery and that we got to go in and stop the dynamic overall and around truth.
Truth #1 — Scientific Truth
Tom Chi: Man, this is getting into a whole kind of mini-lecture but like, you know, I think people need to understand that there’s three different types of truth: so there are scientific truths about the natural world and you can tell these types of truth because they were true even before humans were around, right? Like the laws of physics, electromagnetism, you know, like all of biology, these are things that worked away, even before — work the way that they do even before humans were around ecosystems, all that kind of thing. And then — and there’s [an] entire set of things that you can really verify about the world that fit into that first sensibility of truth, which are resolvable via scientific truth.
Truth #2 — Social Truth
Then there’s the second type of truth, which is social truth, and this has a lot more to do with consensus. You know, is Madonna or Prince like the best pop star in the whole world? In history? It’s like, well, that would be a social truth. Like, if you said it was Prince or you said it was Madonna, it’s because just a bunch of people said like, “Oh, we really like that music. Therefore, this is the queen of Pop and this is, like, Prince would be the prince of Pop.” Who knows? Right?
So it’s like — so something like that is true, but it’s true because of consensus: it’s not absolutely true. Like, in all of history, there has never been a musician more skillful than those two musicians. It’s like, “No, there’s lots of musicians with all these different skills.” But if the majority of the populace is kind of agreeing on a thing, then then it works well enough for social truth.
Truth #3 — Personal Truth
And then there is the third type of truth, which is personal truth and personal truth are things like a person grows up in unconservative household, but maybe they’re queer and they kind of personally know that that’s the case and their local social truth might be like, “No, that’s not allowed,” like, “Our community isn’t like that,” or “In our church, we don’t allow that,” or “In our religion we don’t allow that.” And this is where the rub comes in, right? It’s basically like — and personal choice, the only person that can go verify a personal truth is that person, because like, you know, even if you had a social consensus that said, “Oh, we don’t think so-and-so is gay.” That’s like, it doesn’t matter. It’s like it — only that person can go verify that that’s their personal truth.
Tom Chi: And like most of the problems that we’re having about truth come at the collision points between those three different types of true. And what — so now remember, the scientific type of truth works with or without human beings like, “That one’s really, really stable.” And that’s the one that I spend most time on in my career. And because of it, I have felt more comfortable in these times because there is a way for me to go figure out, at least scientifically, what is true.
Determining what’s true for life purpose
But like a lot of times, people will go and try to muddle the scientific world to social where it’s like, “Well, a lot of people are really concerned about so-and-so.” Or, “People are really concerned that the virus didn’t come from animals. They came from this other thing.” It’s like, well, that’s the thing that you can actually just scientifically established. You don’t try to go and put it up to an appeal to social truth. That said, if enough people like this post, then it must be a real thing that’s happening.
And because people don’t have that clarity of distinction, then it becomes a conspiracy theories abound all over the place. Because they’re like, “Oh, man, well, 3 million people like this post. Then they’re probably — it probably is true, right?” And that’s them using their social truth, you know, monitoring system as opposed to understanding that something like a virus is primarily governed by scientific truth. So, first off, you should be able to identify what type of truth is applicable here.
And secondly, if there is a conflict, then you need to ask yourself, “Well, OK, where did the where the source of the conflict come from?” Because what is mostly happening in the modern day is powerful leaders and people that are looking to take down existing systems of organization for their own gain are basically appealing to social truth to go overwrite personal truth and overwrite scientific truth. That’s mainly the vector of damage that’s happening here.
What are the steps we can take to create a better world?
Francis Kong: I can — understand that, I can tell — I see how that’s how that is happening and I can relate. And it’s been so prevalent, obviously, in this past year, and I knew this was going to happen. We are literally out of time, that’s when I knew I could talk with you all day on this — everything. But this is pretty much approaching the last minute. So do you have anything that you want to share with our viewers before we close out any last words of wisdom that you want to give them as we go forward in 2021 right now?
Tom Chi: You know, there’s a lot of things that are worth doing to build a better world, and what I would advise folks to do is as much as possible get your hands directly on it.
And because a lot of folks were like, “Oh, you know, I really care about so-and-so but I don’t really know what to do.” And in that case, it’s like: call up the organizations that are getting their hands directly on it and see how you can be helpful, even in the smallest ways, because I feel like a lot of folks either give up the power and they basically say, “Well, if only I could elect the right person or if enough people saw my post or if I could earn enough money in my careers so that afterwards I could retire and give a little money to the stuff that I might be able to go help with these problems.”
Regaining control and searching for life purpose
I’m just going to say we don’t necessarily barely have the time. And those problems are our longing for your skills, and when I left Google to start working on, you know, social and environmental good, I went to a bunch of villages where people live on less than two dollars a day. I went to the places where the ice caps were cabbing and the palm oil plantations were coming up after mass deforestation.
And it’s like and it actually turned out there that there were a bunch of useful things that I could do and that I did do. But there was no way for me to know that I could be useful or not before actually just saying, like, “You know, let’s just roll up our sleeves and give it a shot.” I don’t even know if I can be useful or how I can be useful. But let me just get roughly in the territory, try to listen and learn from the people that are making a difference, and then roll up the sleeves and pitch in in the ways that I can.
Tom Chi: And I think something like that goes and pushes against that malaise and that sense of powerlessness that people are struggling with, like the attraction to conspiracy theories is part of the sense of trying to get a little bit of control and power-back from a situation that seems to be spinning out of control. But another way to get control and power back is to be able to directly work on fixing or taking care of the things that really matter to you.
Engaging directly in the process
So that’s what I would advise: if there’s anything that really matters to you or it breaks your heart that the world works in a particular way, get directly involved, even if it was for four hours a week, you know. Get directly involved with organizations or people that are concretely working on it. Not just talking about it or trying to do a social media campaign about it. Like, get into the real-life that that actual human beings are clearly being helped on the other side or actual organisms in nature are being actively helped on the other side. Like, make sure that the doing is happening and not just the talking. And stay around the organizations where they have more doing than talking.
Francis Kong: I love that. Thank you so much again for all your words of wisdom, Tom. I always learn so much every time I spend time with you. I hope, I hope I get a chance to meet you sometime in person this year or at the very latest beginning of next year. But until then, please take care of yourself, your family and I will hopefully talk with you again soon. OK?
Tom Chi: Absolutely.
Francis Kong: Take care, Tom. Bye-Bye.
