Our guest today is known globally as one of the foremost thought leaders of our time. Fast Company called him one of the top 100 people who will change the way the world thinks. Joey Reiman is a best selling author, filmmaker, TED speaker, playwright, businessman, philosopher, and professor at Emory University’s renowned Goizueta Business School.

He’s also one of the coolest people you will ever meet.

Be prepared to take notes on this one. Listen in on our conversation as Joey talks about everything from near death experiences, to a brush with royalty, to starting a company, to the coolest thing he’s ever done.

Recorded at his home in Atlanta, Georgia.

Learn more about Joey here.

This podcast is about the choices people make when they want to change something about their life.

Maybe to make it more meaningful or more satisfying.

Maybe more money, maybe just cooler.

Hey, friends.

This is Chuck Allen and I want to welcome you to cool change.

Our guest today is known around the world as one of the foremost thought leaders of our time.

Get this fast.

Company called him one of the top hundred people that will change the way the world thinks.

And you're about to hear why.

His name is Joey Ryman and he is a best selling author, a filmmaker, Ted speaker, a playwright, businessman, a philosopher.

He's a professor at Emory, and I'm happy to say, a longtime friend of mine.

For so many reasons, this guy is one of the coolest people you will ever meet.

So I think you're going to want to take some notes on this one.

Listen in on our conversation and Joey's going to be talking about everything from near death experiences to a brush with royalty to starting a fantastic company to the coolest thing he's ever done.

We'll get to that later.

And this conversation isn't just about all the stuff that Joey's done.

The fact is you can google that.

You can figure that out on your own.

It's everywhere.

What I'd like for you to do is listen in for how he thinks about change and about courage and our roles in this world versus our goals in this world.

I think he's on a different level altogether.

And I think you're really going to get a lot out of this show.

I know I did.

Before I forget, if you want to learn more about Joey and what he's up to these days, visit his website at brandnew studios.com.

so without further ado, here's my conversation with Joey, recorded in his beautiful home in Atlanta, Georgia.

When you think about who are the coolest people you know, and if I ask my small circle of friends, you're going to generally be at the top of the list.

Well, maybe I'm just top of mind.

You know, I think I stand for something.

I stand for change.

I stand for, you know, overthrowing the status quo.

I stand for what I'd like to think, doing things that are courageous.

But most importantly, I think what I've done is created my own narrative.

And that's what people need to do more than.

It's more important than anything to create your own story.

Because if you don't define yourself, someone else will define you.

That's what I've learned.

And I see it all around me.

I see it in business, I see it personally.

Human beings are meaning seeking creatures.

We are constantly looking to be part of a story, part of a narrative.

And to understand narrative is to understand a life, because that's what your life is.

And if you're stuck in one chapter, you can't close the book, you know?

And when I get stuck in a chapter, I just, you know, move on to the next chapter.

And I think that's maybe why I'm top of mind, because people see me as a.

A symbol of change.

You once said that, speaking of narrative, that all stories had four components.

Yes.

Generally, once upon a time, suddenly, fortunately, happily ever after.

That's really good, Chuck, that you remember that.

But that's so true, because that's what our lives are made of.

And we have lots of those stories.

I've had them all my life, where I started doing something that was like a.

Felt like a fairy tale, then something unexpected, maybe horrific, happened, which is going to happen to all of us.

But then, luckily, I either had a different perspective or someone shared their perspective with me, and then I got to live happily ever after until the next story.

So in your experience, what is it that moves us from suddenly, when the horrific or the hard thing happens, the traumatic thing happens?

What is the thing that helps you push past suddenly to luckily, perspective.

It is one's perspective to see life, really, we see life as we are, not the way it is.

And to have an optimistic perspective, to look at every challenge as an opportunity.

It sounds glib, or it sounds like a cliche, but cliches are just truths told over and over again.

And I think that if you see everything as a door instead of a wall, you're going to walk through lots of doors.

And I've had my share of suddenlies and.

But that perspective probably didn't just come out of thin air for you.

It was shaped, it was molded.

It came from someplace.

I'll tell you exactly where did it come from.

Yeah.

My parents, of course, being jewish, thought I was going to go to medical school or law school.

I did neither.

I took on an internship for Federico Fellini, the great italian film director.

Moved to Rome, Italy.

I wasn't paid a dime.

I got another job at a place called Fonoroma, dubbing pictures from Italian into English.

And I got a dollar a sentence, but I'd only get maybe 20 sentences a week.

But that was enough to sustain me.

And while I was there, I met a princess, a real italian princess, Rosella.

Frazza.

And, you know, talk about it.

Once upon a time, here I was with my script, working for Federico Fellini and going out with an italian princess, and I just imagined myself living in some castle in Rome and writing movies or making movies.

And on our first outing, she hit a bus.

She was driving.

She hit a bus at about 50 miles an hour.

That's what the newspaper said.

And she had a friend in the car.

Both girls were thrown in the car.

I covered my face with my right arm, and my right arm got caught between two bucket seats because I was sitting in the back and was basically severed.

I was paralyzed and rushed to the hospital.

The paparazzi was there, and basically my parents showed up.

And the doctors told my parents that I'll never be able to move my hand or my arm again.

But, you know, that's why you have two arms.

And they were making fun of it.

It wasn't funny at all.

I had, you know, dreamed about this, and all of a sudden, you know, the girls were fine, but I wasn't fine.

And, you know, I thought, nobody will love me because I'm paralyzed and I'll never get a job.

And I met a.

A minister there who wasn't trying to convert me.

He was actually a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi.

And he spent a good month with me in the hospital, and it changed my entire perspective on everything.

He.

He taught me that, you know, if you have an idea, which is the most important thing that you have in your life, and you create a habit with that idea, that idea will eventually.

Will eventually change your character and ultimately your destiny.

I had a miracle in the hospital.

I got everything back.

They said my hand would never move.

I got 100% back.

My arm wouldn't got 100% back.

It was not a miracle of medicine.

I'm positive about that.

It was the medicine of miracles.

And having a.

Suddenly, that happened when you're 22 years old and having this.

This font of hope and this minister, it just changed everything.

And I made a deal with God that I would.

That I would do something with my hand writing that would help the world, inspire the world.

That's where that came from.

So that was an.

It was very early in my life that I got a big.

Suddenly, when you think back over the life that you've lived, which has been extraordinary and it's been all over the world, are there other big pivotal changes, big suddenlies that came along, that when you look back, these were the key shapers of where you've arrived today?

Yeah, that's a great question.

Look, I think I repeated the story.

There were plenty of sudden leaves in my life.

The big ones were the hardest ones, where, you know, it had to be.

It was a courageous move.

I mean, I did very well in the marketing industry.

I was a chief creative officer of a billion dollar advertise global advertising firm.

And I started my own firm, which also became one of the top agencies in the United States known for its creativity.

And that agency would grow into a quarter billion dollar agency, and a great one.

I felt like marketing was wrong, that any gift I had for writing, all I was doing was selling stuff, and people can't get enough of what they don't need.

So that that was a.

I think that's the philosophy of advertising.

And I just put my life's work into it.

And I realized I just couldn't sleep at night because I was just wasting my time.

So I outplaced.

This was sort of a crisis of.

Meaning that you were having a total crisis of meaning.

The first was the crisis of the body and the crisis of the heart and mind.

But this was.

Yeah, this was a crisis in meaning.

And I realized I had to do something or I just could not sustain.

I outplaced over 200 people in my agency.

I fired all my clients except for children's hospital.

And I started a little company called Bright House.

And it was a radical concept because there was no advertising.

It was all based on selling ideas and turning them into.

I did it, and I figured that if the idea was good enough, people would pay enough.

And at first, you know what?

We just picked a number for an ideation platform, and it was much too high.

I think Red lobster was my first client.

And I asked for $450,000 and they said, we have 30.

I said, okay, but strong negotiation skills there.

Well, within ten years, we were for that same piece, that same strategy, that same the work of purpose.

We were charging a million dollars, and I no longer am with the company, but I understand the company now is charging a million, 6,000,007 for what Edna Morris, who was the CEO of Red Lobster, paid $30,000 for.

So.

But it was a big change, a big chance that I took because people thought, Joey Ryman is crazy.

And I think that's important.

Like when you hear that you're crazy from someone, that is the biggest clue that you're onto something.

You know, mediocrity is self inflicted and genius is self imposed.

And if you believe in what, what's in your heart instead of what is in your head, you are going to succeed tremendously.

But the path from the mind to the heart is no easy journey.

It takes an unlearning.

You know, I told my kids schools when they were in grammar school that you have degeniused my children.

That was in the fourth grade, because they were learning about how much, when, where, but who, but not why.

And the why in your life is more important than anything.

Who was it Mark Twain said, my favorite quote of all time was Mark Twain's.

He said, the two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.

And I would add to that, that you don't remember the day you're born.

So the second day of finding out why is really the most important day in your life.

And I've heard that from some other interviewees who are creatives, who are artists, and in this case, musicians, who said, look, there's something inside of you that's much greater than you, that is just dying to get out, and you are stopping it or you're not allowing it to come out.

It sounded like you're saying as well, that the mind has ways of providing obstacles that the heart is trying to bust through.

That's right.

And is it an upbringing?

Is it a socialization?

Is it an education system that causes us to do that, that we can?

Yeah, our education system is completely absurd.

The idea of being taught the way we're taught is insanity.

You know, I always revert back.

I've been teaching at Emory now for 20 years at the business school.

And what I teach my students is I lifted from Aristotle when he taught his students.

He taught his students to identify and hone their unique talents and gifts.

That was a two year program.

The next two years, okay?

The next two years, he challenged all of his students to go out and find the needs in the world where they could mitigate the ills of the world or fill the needs of the world.

So if you think of it as a Venn diagram, in one circle are your unique gifts and talents, and the other circle is the needs of the world.

At the intersection is what Aristotle called vocare.

Vocare is a latin word for calling.

And it's an important distinction because he didn't use the latin word for job or career, because he knew that both of those were too small for your spirit, your heart, as you would say.

And Bokhare is a calling, and that's what, that's what calls us.

That calling comes from the heart.

Joseph Campbell, the great sociologist, is no longer with us, but was responsible for helping George Lucas put together Star wars.

He talked about the hero's journey, and I'm very, very big on the hero's journey.

We all live in ordinary worlds.

We get a call.

Most of us don't take the call, but if we take the call, that's when the fun begins, that's when the adventure begins, because you're reluctant, but hopefully you have a mentor, not a tour mentor, and they help you along with your allies, whether it's Harrison Ford or Harry Davis, it doesn't matter.

But you must go on the adventure, and you go through the cave, what Campbell called the cave.

And when you come out of the cave with the Excalibur or with the treasure, that's the treasure you bring to the world, and that's the hero's journey.

Speaking of the hero's journey and Joseph Campbell, I mean, mythology, he's a famous mythologist.

I've heard you refer to stories like the HErO's journey or to motifs like that.

To what degree has myth and mythology and stories like that played a role in how you approach Life and How you approach BUsiNESS?

100%.

Stories are my arrows in my Quiver.

And if I run out of arrows, I get more arrows.

They're called stories, and that's how I've lived my life.

We need to be part of Story.

I mean, story is one of the most Undervalued.

Well, it is the most undervalued concept in BUsinEss.

And again, if you're the author of your own story, and author comes from the same latin root as authority, you get to write your own story.

But we all have been taught to allow Other PeOPle to write our stories, and that is tragic.

And those PeoPle, those people that I tell my students, be careful of, I call them the ThrEe p's, your peers, they'Ll AlWays tell you what to do.

Your parents, they always want the best for you, which is not necessarily the best for you.

It's often the best for them.

And your professors, who seem to have some superior dogma, supernatural gift that's not real.

And for the most part, they just pontificate.

So again, it's very important to be with yourself and to explore your heart and not necessarily your mind, because your mind is really what makes you worry, and that's where fear comes from, and that's where the idea of competition comes from, and that's where the idea of otherness comes from.

But your heart is so pure, you just need to hear it.

And by the way, the word ear is in the word heart, so there's another clue for you.

I'm glad you said that.

This idea of narrative has been my mind a lot lately, because we've been learning about the difference between fact and narrative.

And Eckhart Tolle, in particular, has been really instrumental lately in helping me understand that this idea of the isness of.

Now, if we were to take the present moment into account and we were to eliminate the narrative from our head in that moment, all of the stories, the narratives, that generally, when we conjure up something, it's not always the most positive, glowing, proactive sort of story.

Sometimes we fill in that void with things which are not.

They are negative or they are scary.

And when we sit in a moment and we have fear, fear based emotions, the idea is that if you could eliminate the.

Those stories out of your head for just a moment and understand what is, and you look around and you recognize that you're okay in that moment and that you're almost always okay in that moment and sometimes better than that.

And so the idea of narrative or creating stories is interesting to me when we talk about this storyline arc that you've just.

That you've mentioned to me many times.

Once upon a time, suddenly, luckily, oftentimes that feels like something that's happening to you.

Once upon a time, I was born here.

Suddenly, this thing happened to me, and then, proactively, luckily, this happened.

And I'm just, you know, thinking out loud here.

It makes me think, are there narratives that we can create for our lives which are not ones that happened to us?

Can we, or should we ever consider creating our own suddenly?

Is that even possible?

Yeah, I think that people do that.

I think, you know, I think back to building bright house that was my own.

I brought that on to myself.

You know, I thought I.

The last thing I want to do is become homogenized or pasteurized.

So when I feel like things are going swimmingly well, I bring a suddenly into my own life.

And we all do that sometimes you're not as fortunate to bring your own suddenly in and you have a car accident or you get ill, and that's from the outside.

But there are people who believe you bring that onto yourself as well.

We're all living through a huge suddenly right now, on several different fronts.

I wonder what your counsel might be for all of the listeners here who are going through this huge, suddenly, all of us together.

Yeah.

So there's terror in the world, there's sickness in the world.

The world many of many countries are on, are teetering economically, and our planet is in peril.

That's a lot of suddenlies.

But the worst suddenly of all is a crisis in meaning, and that is existential, pervasive and insidious and daily.

So forgive me, but I think that's what we need to be focused on.

Why are we here?

How can we mitigate the ills of the world?

By understanding what our role in the world is, not what our goal in the world is.

And that's how we get to the luckily.

The fortunately?

Yeah.

If you're insistent enough and persistent enough, you'll get to the luckily, because if you find out why you're here and it can help other people, as Aristotle pointed out, then you will have done your part in healing the world.

And that's what we need.

We need to search our hearts for kindness and compassion and empathy.

And when we do that, we are then equipped to heal.

Not sell, but heal.

And again, that's a big shift.

It's a pivot from what is my goal to what is my role?

But that's an enormous pivot.

And by the way, if you think about your role versus your goal, it's a lot more exciting.

I mean, you're in there.

You're in the great arena of possibility.

And what you can do from there is just.

It's remarkable and mystical and wonderful and enriching.

And the idea then is to focus more on the role than the goal.

Absolutely.

What is my role on this planet?

Not my goal on this planet.

I don't need to be an astronaut.

But how can I lift people out of this world and give them an idea of what the stars look like?

If you think, if you play the game of goal and roll, you'll find different words and a different narrative and a different story, a much more exciting story, a hero story.

You know, as you think about the pivots and the changes that and the suddenlies that you went through, did they always seem as though they were a step forward to you, or did it sometimes seem like it was a step sideways or maybe even backwards?

Well, all the above, because you get scared.

And, you know, it's not always easy to turn the word scared into excited, but actually, it's very healthy to do that when you're scared.

Cortisol is released in your body.

When cortisol hits your adrenal glands, that's basically the beginning of the end of your life.

My father actually died of adrenal cancer, so I know a bit about that.

When you're excited, the cortisol isn't released, but something called dopamine is released.

And dopamine is the best dope in the world.

It gets you.

It's attached to the word exhilaration.

So when you feel exhilarated, what's happening is that dopamine is being released in your body.

When you feel anxious, it means the cortisol is released.

So you pick your drug of choice.

I prefer dopamine.

Well, then it probably means that you're not scrolling through sort of doomsday feeds every night and every morning on your phone.

So instead of doing that, which many people right now can't help but just scroll through sort of the doomsday literature that comes across in the media right now, what are you filling yourself with inside, practically, what are you looking at?

What are you reading?

What are you consuming?

Inspiring biographies.

Other people's stories.

I love biographies because when they're really done well, you can see how we're really on the same path and basically walking all of us home.

And it's really.

I just love inspiring biographies, stories of heroes and iconoclasts.

You find that, you know, Walter Isaacson is very good at writing books like that, whether it's Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci.

He has both a historical and a mystical perspective.

And I think inspiring biographies are the antidote to this worry.

You know, I mean, worry is.

I mean, think about worry for a moment.

It's really a form of atheism.

It's, as I tell my students, stop being warriors, be warriors.

And the literature you're reading better be about warriors, not warriors, because those are the real haves and have nots.

The ones who become warriors have fire.

They've been struck.

They almost have an instructive spark of fire that they learned from someone or something came up in the middle of the night, or they read something.

And that instructive spark of fire is what creates a flame in your heart or a spark in your heart which actually provides warmth in your life, but it also provides light in your life.

And again, you mentioned mythology.

Mythology is magnificent to read because it's really the early narratives of life, the wisdom from the ancients.

And I'm big on reading about the ancients, too.

The reason their words echo today is because they were so profound yesterday.

So for me, biographies ancients, the classics, the humanities, that's where, that's where the, that's where you can step.

That's what the precipice of optimism and a better, bigger life are.

So that's where you're finding warriors oftentimes in mythology.

But are there warriors that are alive and walking among us today?

And if so, who do you point to as being those warriors today?

Most of them, the new superheroes for me are scholars and academics.

I think that's where I go.

I'm not a modern day philosophers.

Yeah, modern day philosophers.

I'm Alan Boudin and Esther Perel.

You know, you want to go to an Esther Perel YouTube.

You listen to her.

She's a warrior.

She's a warrior.

And there are warriors in business, too, the heroes in business.

Part of what's happened with COVID is that it's awakened the hearts in so many, in so many chief executives.

And what we're finding, what I'm finding is that at the heart of every great organization is a CEO with a heart, and that's very different.

Again, going back to goals and rolls from a CEO who's got collateral damage because of some economic downturn.

This is not about economics.

It's about humanity.

Let's shift gears a little bit, because something that's been fascinating to me about you is that wherever you have ever been lived, worked that I've witnessed, you've created an environment, this ethereal environment, oftentimes marked by white, bright, stark colors, but beautiful design.

Can you help me understand, and therefore our listeners understand the role of place, the role of design and aesthetic in your life?

Because it seems to me that it must play a pretty key role, enormous role.

You know, we're all flowers in some pot, and it's important what the pot looks like and feels like.

And, you know, I've, wherever I've worked, I've tried to create an environment that's open.

You say white, stark white, so that there aren't the kind of distractions or the kind of somberness that you often find in law firms.

Law firms are somber.

That's not heavy.

Heavy and somber.

And, you know, I don't, you know, it's a great question.

I do think environment is important.

Fresh flowers are important.

Fresh juice is important.

A place where you can have an unconditional response is important.

Let me give you the best example.

You know, being jewish, and I love being jewish.

I go to temple.

There's one big, big downside of being jewish, though, from an environmental point of view, synagogues, are not usually architecturally inspiring, though.

I'm jewish, when I need an idea or I need inspiration, I go to one of three or four churches in Atlanta that are designed.

Well.

They're designed based on Noah's ark turned upside down, but the spires inspire me, and I feel.

I feel a bigger connection with what people can't see.

Love, faith, courage.

You know, all these things are ineffable.

But in church, I feel like I'm connected.

And it has very little to do with Jesus or Moses.

It's really the environment.

I mean, if I could build.

You know, I've often thought about in my early days, early career of moving my company into a church.

It never really worked out.

Tried it a couple times, but any place that I'm part of, I want to feel inspired and design.

You know, Steve Jobs made design really famous.

I mean, that was his whole thing, that well designed and is well told.

And it's very, very important to get a good interior designer or decorator and be mindful of what you're looking at all the time.

You know, if you look at my artwork, most of it's pretty optimistic, and I want to smile.

And it's uncluttered.

I mean, the sense is, look, when we think about the coolest spaces I've seen, these have been spaces that you have designed and created or had designed and created and then thrive inside those spaces.

I don't think it's any accident that these are spaces that are uncluttered, that they are bright, that they are hopeful, that they're inspiring, because it seems to lend something to the person who created it, that that is the way that they think.

Well, and plus, we have so much clutter in the world.

There's so much noise.

And another key attribute of creating is this notion of being in quiet.

People have stopped listening to people and including them, their own selves.

And I, again, I tell my students the word listen and the word silent have the same letters, and that's another clue.

There's so many clues in words that people are not mindful of.

I think you were just born with a natural knack to twist words, to have puns.

I mean, you're formidable when it comes to a pun war.

I've tried.

It's the copywriting skills gone wild.

Gone amok.

Yeah.

Let's talk a little bit about and help our listeners understand.

What are you up to today?

Well, for 25 years, with the building of Bright House, I created and perfected the methodology for finding for a company excavating their own purpose, articulating that purpose and activating that purpose today.

Or as in the last 18 months, I've opened a new firm with the former president of Turner Entertainment, Brad Siegel, who created Turner classic movies, TNT, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network.

He's made over 300 films, and he, too, feels that the world, that business, can be more purposeful.

We got together 18 months ago and decided to open a company that would reflect a new order in the world, hence the name brand new World Studios, because it's a brand new world.

And our thought was that instead of making or focusing just on internal programs around internal purpose, that the idea of purpose had to escape the four walls of an organization.

So we hypothesized, and it's come true, that Fortune 500 companies would actually pay to create stories based on their own purpose.

So purposes of courage, compassion, endurance, perseverance, heroism, not necessarily about their company, but about, again, their role in the world.

And these films would positively impact people's lives.

And these films would be shown at the box office, at theaters, they would be streamed, because we've got a whole new thing called streaming platforms.

And companies could finally tell their story externally to inspire people to live brighter, better, brand new lives.

And we have two films in production.

One is a documentary about the Swarovski family.

People know the story, but they don't know the story.

It's a remarkable story of one family over six generations that basically brought sparkle to the world.

And in times like this, times like Covid, that's what people want to see.

It goes back to my notion of biographies.

This is a living biography on the screen.

The other film we're working on is a film with BMW about the race for the electric car and saving the planet.

Because it's not necessarily the race.

It's certainly not a car race film.

It's a race for the car.

But it, but what it led, what it will lead to is actually saving the planet by electrifying the world.

And the film itself is electrifying.

So those are two productions going on right now, and in addition to another one that we're co producing with Fortune magazine about the new renaissance that's coming.

A new renaissance.

We had the 15th century Renaissance.

It was an explosion of creativity.

Out of it came printing and shipping and arthem, public space and architecture.

We're about to have that again.

So for those creative people out there, this is going to be an incredible few decades coming, because all the factors that led to the renaissance in the 15th century are happening once again.

And this film, it's called why is Mona Lisa smiling?

The reimagination of the corporation.

And the reason, by the way, that Mona Lisa was smiling is that Leonardo da Vinci did something no other painter ever in our history did, which was put a smile on a person because he believed that a new era of optimism was coming, as I believe that, too.

You have been called the father of purpose because you have written books on it, you've spoken about it.

You've been in Davos, you have helped organizations and built organizations around purpose.

What about the role of purpose in Joey Ryman's life?

To be proposive or to have purpose buffers you from all the suddenlies.

I mean, you'll get through them if you have a purpose.

Nietzsche said, if you have a why, you can deal with any what, who, when or where that comes at you.

I'm an enormous believer in that.

And my purpose is to inspire others to excavate their own purpose.

You know, I do this with my students.

You know, it's a class called ideation 441 about corporate purpose, but it's really a class about them finding their own purpose, finding their own why, you know, blocking out the barbs of their parents and their professors and their peers.

Brighthouse.

It was all about finding a company, finding their purpose.

And now, brand new world, I believe, is a world where people have greater purpose and people are more compassionate, and kindness is much more important.

Or I should say the prophets, p r o p h e t s, are more important than the prophets.

P r o f I t s.

That's what people need today.

They want leadership, they want friendship, they want kinsmanship.

I mean, this is.

All the ships are sailing and they're all incredible.

Well, look, if I were.

This is not a scientific question, but if I were to ask you, what is the coolest thing you've ever done?

What comes to mind?

Being witness to birth.

The birth of my two boys.

That's about the coolest thing I've ever done.

I mean, there are things way down the ladder, but that you can't.

You can't beat that.

You just.

That's divinity.

That's.

That is the ultimate, that the children are up there.

I mean, way down the list.

You mentioned Davos.

That was just as a career piece of a career, to speak, to be the keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum.

Yeah.

A bit of a high watermark.

Yeah, that was a high water mark.

500 CEO's looking at you very discerningly.

And that was surreal.

And I got to tell, coming full circle here, I got to tell not just my story, but the story of purpose and how important, you know, the notion of being focused on the business of life versus the life of businesses.

And I think it had some real impact.

And it was one of the sparks that created that perpetuated this tsunami we call purpose.

Because when I started selling purpose, people thought, I remember the CEO of Home Depot.

I went to see him, and he thought I was selling him a multipurpose cleaner.

I mean, he had no idea.

Nobody knew anything about burp.

Now I go into Kroger, and there's a sign that says, peace with purpose.

So we've come a long, long way.

Right?

The vernacular has changed through corporate America, for sure.

Well, as we wrap up here, missed opportunities along the way.

Were there any.

How did you miss them?

If there were?

I don't.

You know what?

I don't know what?

I don't know, and I'm sure there have been, but I don't know them.

My life, you know, been a bunch of chapters and has been really exciting and remarkable.

I've got to meet some of the most incredible people in the world, and I've.

So I don't know what I've missed.

I'd love for you to put a plug in for a minute about your son Julian, and what he's doing right now, because when I think about some of the coolest projects going on right now and what he's up to and how young he is and how much energy is going into this and how much support, can you just give us a sense of what he is up to right now?

Yeah, he's up to a lot.

You know, he's a yemenite getting his master's at Trinity College at Cambridge, which is.

I'm very proud.

And he's proud.

We're all proud of him.

And he's looking to be a intern for one of the candidates running this November.

But what he's doing right now is putting together a show.

I think it's eat with your mouth full.

Eat with your mouth full.

Yeah, eat with your mouth full.

And his notion is that the distance that we have among us, among peoples, can be mitigated by just sitting across a table and having a meal.

It's sort of Anthony Bourdain meets millennials meets.

Meets immigration policy.

Meets immigration policy.

It's about immigrant chefs, if I'm.

That's right, immigrant chefs who make these amazing meals invite a disparate group of people who all have.

Who have conversations, delicious conversations, over delicious meals, and learn from that meal.

And I think it's so beautiful.

And he's about to launch it.

He's talking to some investors now.

But it's just a beautiful show created by two beautiful people, my son, Julian Rymandae, and his partner Farah, who's syrian, and of course, Julian's Jewish.

So it's got a lot of great pieces to it.

Yeah, yeah.

I can't wait to see what comes out of that.

Well, I was going to ask you as a final question, what is the next coolest thing that you're going to do?

Sounded like, though, it might be this project with BMW, with Swarovski and also with the Renaissance project.

Yeah, I'm doing a, what I was meant to do, you know, again, as we wrap up to go full circle, you know, I started with Federico Fellini and my script called RSVP.

It was a story about 200 international debutantes who get kidnapped by two jewish terrorists and they're held hostage at the Plaza Hotel until the Middle east would come to an agreement.

That film never got made.

It got me to Rome and it got Fellini's eye.

But when I went there, something in me wanted to make films I didn't want to.

Something in me prevented me from going to law school or med school.

And I got somewhat diverted.

Now, advertising was a great industry and I got to make hundreds, almost probably a thousand small films called tv commercials.

But I really always wanted to make films and make stories that would.

That would change people's lives and get them to stand up and cheer.

And so for those of you who think you have to find your purpose, like today, in a way, it's taken me over 60 years to find mine.

So just be patient, but be mindful and most importantly, be heartful.

Well, Joey, thank you for your time.

I can tell you that every time I spend any time at all with Joey Ryman, one thing is for sure, and that is I leave thinking differently and I leave thinking bigger and more inspired, not just because of the spaces that we get to sit in, but because of who you are and how you think and we love you and your energy.

I love you, too.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So what did you think about that?

What did you take away from that?

One of my favorite parts was the idea that we focus more on our role than our goal.

And that aligns a whole lot with some of my own teachings and what I study.

And I just absolutely love the conversation.

And I'll be listening to this several times more and seeing what I can apply.

I'd love to get your feedback what was helpful for you.

If you put those in the comments or send me a note directly and I'll share with Joey anything that you'd like for me to share with him as well, or reach out to him directly.

You've got his website again.

That website is brandnew worldstudios.com.

i really want to thank you for joining me today.

This is a brand new podcast and so any feedback that you have for me is much appreciated.

Thanks again and join me next time as we find some more folks who are embarking on their own cool change.