Transcript of Unlock Social Currency: Networking Secrets That Work | Chip Hopper DSH #1232

This is an ad by Betterhelp. Think about the people who inspire you most. Guess what? They don't have all the answers, but they do know how to ask for support when they need it. Therapy is a great way to find that support. Betterhelp has experienced therapists ready to help you with challenges ranging from clinical issues to the stress of everyday life. And it's convenient, too. Visit betterhelphelphelp. Com/newdirection today to get 10% off your first month.

And now we have AI and other systems that can track us more than we've ever been tracked before. And where is that power going to end up? Right now, there's this huge issue with TikTok, right? And who controls that data, and are we giving this data to another country that might not have our best interest in mind? Right.

All right, guys, we got Chip Hopper here today, out till 9: 00 I am, and joining me. So I appreciate you giving up some sleep to be here. Happy to do it. Is that a common thing for you, to be out late?

No. It's either Sundance or Vegas. That's where I end up staying.

Vegas will do that to you. Oh, my gosh.

What's your favorite? That's why I can't live in Vegas.

What's your favorite activity in Vegas to do?

Just going out to the clubs, just hanging with friends.

Good old XS, Zouk. Vegas does have some good clubs, man.

I love music. I love connecting with people. Those are my two favorite things.

You've done a great job of building a network. Yeah.

To me, networks are one of the most important things you can have, connection and how you're connected and who you're connected with. Right.

They call it social currency these days, right? Yeah, you Because even though you might not have a liquid amount, you can leverage your network to make that in a certain amount of time.

Right. It's all about currencies that you manage and that you grow and relationships and relationship capital or whatever you want to call it.

I'm I'm glad I came to Sundance because I've expanded my network in a new space that I'm not really familiar with between the film space and the biohacking space. I've added more connections in those spaces, so it was worth it.

That's my love-hate relationship with Sundance. It's like, I don't typically stay up till 08: 00 AM, but when you're out and you're just with these amazing people that have come in from all over the world working on film, creatives, or others that are just everyone you meet knows people that you want to meet. My belief is that for you to get to your next level, you're one away. That one away is most likely in your phone. Then if they're not in your phone, they're in the phone of somebody in your phone.

I love that. That's a great way of thinking about it. Yeah, but you're right. I met people from Colombia, met a couple from Australia, all around the world, not just US. I love that because sometimes you get in this echo chamber of just our little local city, our local county, or even our local country.

Yeah, absolutely. Tim Farris said this years ago that one of the best ways to... Well, I don't know if he put it exactly this way, but in essence, he was saying, one of the best ways to gain empathy is to go to more than one country. The things you learn from living in a different space or even just being in that space, the different way you see the world is really significant in changing the way you perceive things.

Yeah, and I think someone in the creative space like you, who, by the way, for people watching this, you're a ghostwriter, traveling gives you important perspectives when you're writing, right?

Yeah, absolutely. To me, I tell people that if they want to improve their connection, the two main things they can do are read and travel. Obviously, then talk with people as well. But putting yourself in someone else's shoes, one of the fastest ways to do that is through reading. I agree. The second is travel, in my opinion.

Yeah, reading or audiobooks or podcasts. Great ways to learn fast.

Just a little thing for me. I call it reading. If you're consuming the knowledge, I don't care if you're doing audible, I don't care if you're sitting down with a print book, I don't care if it's a Kindle, right? To me, it's all learning and bringing that knowledge in. For me, reading is super valuable, and what you read makes the difference. Certain things are more curated, Podcasts, for example, are less curated often because they're just stream of consciousness. As you talk, books are often more curated. Not as much now, but the best books, a lot of those authors have taken decades of knowledge and curated into a single book. Taking in knowledge is much easier and quicker when you have the consolidated content.

What's your book selection process? Because there's so many books, and you only have a certain amount of time.

Yeah, So I've read a book a week for over 25 years. It's been an interesting journey, and it really shifts you. As I've read, you realize more and more that just because it's information doesn't make it true and doesn't make it valuable. I love your question of how do you find the best books. One of the ways that I do it is I listen to those that I trust, and I try and find people like Ray Dalio says, Find people that you trust that don't agree with you. Because then you can balance your opinions with other people that you see as having studied and thought out answers. For me, when I can find books that those people resonate with, that is where I start to pull those All right.

Shout out to today's sponsor, Specialized Recruiting Group. Navigating the professional job search is hard. You know the perfect job is out there, you're just not sure how to find it. The good news is you don't have to go out it alone. You need specialized recruiting Recruiting Group, connect at srgpros. Com, srgpros. Com. They're here to guide you and help you find a role that fits all without costing a dime. Meet Specialized Recruiting Group, offering a tailored approach to find your next role. Go to srgpros. Com, srgpros. Com and get on the right course. Your local Specialized Recruiting Group team knows which businesses are hiring and can offer you a path to contract and full-time roles. If you don't see the role you're looking for on the website, Specialized Recruiting Group also recruits for confidential roles, so give an office near you a call to learn more. Take the next step in your career by starting at srgpros. Com, srgpros. Com.

It's locked in. For me, I'm always in the middle of reading 4-5 books at a time. I have a belief that if the book is not resonating with you, you don't need to finish it. Some people pick up one book and they start to read it, and they get stuck in it because it's either not resonating or whatever else. They leave it on their shelf and they end up not reading for a couple of months because they feel like they have to finish that one before they can start another one. To me, you're always in a different state of mind. So pick up what's working with you right at that time, whether you're listening or reading. If the book's no longer resonating or no longer serving you, then put it down.

I love that. There's a great site. I forget the name, but if you Google anyone and then after their name, type in Book Recommendations, they'll show you what books they've recommended, all the top entrepreneurs and stuff. I'll do that. I'll see what they recommended. I'll look at multiple intelligent people that recommended that book, and then I'll summarize that book on ChatGPT. If I like the summary, then I'll get the book on Audible, 2X Speed, while in the car, and that's my process.

That is perfect. That's a great way to bring it in. I use an app called Goodreads. That's a good app. I love that app because you can see what other people are reading in your friend group, if you will. It's a social group of people that are reading, and you see what books they're reading. You can see the books that they've rated highly compared to the books you've rated highly. You can start to see, okay, maybe these books will resonate with me because they have similar taste and ratings. That's cool. Years ago, I wanted to create an app that did that with movies where it's like, if you like this movie, you might like this movie because your friends also like this movie. Because the funny part of it was you would have friends that you always were the inverse of. If they loved a movie, you knew you were not going to like it. It's like, if you can know what other people are liking and which ones think like you or resonate with you.

I mean, that's needed because let's be honest, movie critic reviews are so paid for. It's obvious. I can't trust those. I'd rather have ordinary people give me their opinion on movies.

Yeah, absolutely. People you know and people you trust. That's probably one of the biggest concerns with the rise of AI right now is that I think it is degrading trust because you don't know if you're really speaking to a person anymore or even listening to a person. Even with the videos that are coming out now, they're getting better and better at just not knowing.

They're so good. They're almost to the point that they can fool me. I physically pay attention to see if it's AI, but to the average person, I've seen Joe Rogan AI videos that those are definitely working on people.

Yeah, absolutely. People send me, they're like, What do you think of what Joe Rogan said here? I'm like, I don't think he said it.

But it's going to get to the point where even we can't tell, right? I just made my digital twin the other day, and it's pretty accurate.

Yeah. One of the ways that they're still being able to distinguish right now is the iris print. Your eye print is hard to replicate. Wow.

But eventually He'll probably figure that out, right?

To me, AI is going to be able to figure out anything that is able to be figured out. Ai will be able to do it.

I'm already preparing for it because similar to writing, I think AI is going to take over podcasting. There's already AI podcast company starting up. I've seen a Joe Rogan podcast where it's just him interviewing dead people with AI. It'll be him and Steve Jobs, stuff like that.

And neither one of them were speaking, right? And they have a conversation. They're laughing, they're breathing, they're doing all that.

It sounds pretty similar to the real podcast. I'm already preparing, thinking of ways on how I can differentiate myself from AI. I'm sure you're doing the same, right?

Yeah, very much so. In the creative space, people used to think that creative space was one of the spaces that would be the last to be overtaken by by AI, and we're finding that AI is able to take creativity and match it to the point where it's almost indistinguishable from humans right now. Wow.

That's going to be scary for movie writers, too.

Yeah. I mean, When I look at movies, for me, storytelling is about connecting. One of the reasons I enjoy going to a movie is because I could go watch a movie that you watched or watch it with you and have that same experience. But we're entering a state where you could actually put on a headset, watch a movie made for you on the fly based on your brain patterns, and feed you scenes that move your brain in certain ways. Holy crap. That's all in the realm of what's starting to be here, and we'll be here soon. But when I think of that, I'm like, does that bring you connected or does that pull you away from connection? Because if I see a movie with you and you and I talk about it, then we're connecting on a certain level or we read the same book we can talk about it, and then it gives us a similar shared experience. If we're in our own worlds watching our own movies, what does that do for a connection?

It's almost like that movie Ready Player One. People are living in their headsets. They don't care about their physical body. That's a possibility, right?

It could I mean, all the movies, The Matrix, Ready Player One, all those have elements of things that could happen. James Cameron, who did Terminator in many of those other movies, he was in an interview recently, and he's like, It's getting harder to write science fiction because we're actually doing all the things. What do you decide as science fiction when it's all becoming-Right, because Star Trek is cool now, but will it be cool when those things actually exist?

It'll just be normal life.

I mean, Star Trek is a great one to bring up because... And I love to ask this question of people. I'm like, Are you a Star Trek or a Star Wars fan? I'm a Star Trek fan. And I'll give you my analysis of that, which is, Star Trek is based on science, meaning when they want something to happen in the Star Trek universe, they say, How with science could this work? They develop these things that have many times ultimately become reality. The flip phone was the communicator in Star Trek. Many of those technologies actually end up happening because they build it around science, where Star Wars is built more on, Hey, we want this to happen, so woo- woo, and some mythological force. Half of the force. It's It's more of a world that's built on... It's the spectrum of science to woo- woo. So that's where if people are like, Star Trek, I'm like, Oh, you're science-based. If you're Star Wars, you're more on the woo-wo side of the rank.

I mean, I definitely like both, but I definitely see that.

I like both.

I definitely see that, though. I would say I'm more logical, though, when it comes to science. You don't call AI artificial intelligence. You call it alien intelligence.

Yeah, I like the term Alien Intelligence, and that's actually a term that Yuval Harari uses as well. Yvonne Harari is one of my favorite authors. His book, Nexus, was my top book for 2024, and I highly recommend everyone read it. He's able to write these books. Sapiens was a fantastic book on the evolution of humans to get to where we are. Nexus is about connection and networks and all of those things that are really the future of what's going on. But he talks about it as alien intelligence, which I've seen it that way as well, and I agree with. When you look at it, it is an intelligence, and it's an intelligence that is not human, so it's an alien intelligence. If you look at it that way rather than artificial, you can start to see, Okay, how do I interact with this intelligence that maybe learns differently than I do, processes differently than I do, and how can I be symbiotic or or synergize with this alien intelligence.

You think there's a possibility it could develop some conscious mind, conscious thoughts?

Yeah. I mean, consciousness is one of those things that we don't fully understand. As humans, we believe we have intelligence and consciousness. Right now, AI is an intelligence that we... For now, we say it doesn't have a conscience. But my personal opinion is that AI is going to challenge the way we believe about what life is, the way we believe or how we find meaning and purpose. Because when AI can do all of the things that you do, when you combine the convergence of robotics and AI and all these other things, and you You have a robot that goes around and does most of the things you do, and you have robots that do all the jobs, where do you find meaning? Where do you find value? So I do see those things as questions we should be addressing. Absolutely.

Where are you at on your journey of purpose and meaning?

That's a constant evolution, right? Yeah. I found that the people that learn or spend a lot of time continually trying to grow and learn have that movement, and it's constantly evolving of where they are in that space. For me, one of the quotes that has always driven me, as Thoreau said, Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside. I've always felt this pull or this calling to help people sing their songs while they're still alive. I love that. That's part of why I help people go straight their stories. Book Jedi, the name of my company, actually is an acronym. So jedi stands for a book's journey of evolution, disruption, and impact. What I found without exception is that when someone writes their story, it changes them more than it changes anybody that reads it. Really? It helps them find clarity in their life. It helps them move their life in directions that they never would have done had they not taken on the exercise of writing the book.

Do you ever want the recognition from the success of the stories?

You know, It's one of those interesting things. I often ask people, I'm like, If you're building your career, would you rather be Oz or Elvis? What that means is Oz is behind the curtain making things happen, but he's still a big influence, where Elvis is on stage and a big influence. There's a lot of influence in both. When I was young, I very much made the conscious decision that I wanted no Fame. I wanted to make a lot money and have no Fame because both of those things gave me freedom. I saw it as the more Fame you had, the less freedom you had.

Yeah, there's definitely a trade-off.

Yeah. But I found I've always had income and impact directly correlated. The more income you make, the more impact you can have, the more impact you make, the more income you'll make. I've realized over the last few years that I was holding myself back from helping more people because I was pulling back from that influence space, which is that third eye of bringing in that recognition and that fame so you could actually move even more. I've been asked to be on some super big podcasts over the years and turn them down and turn down other opportunities because I was like, I'm cool being the guy doing the Ghost in the background. A lot of me still loves part of that. There's a lot of freedom in going out and playing in that ghost space. I've had many people that I've written books for compare me to people like Michael Jordan and things like this. I'm the Michael Jordan of Ghost, right? And whatever else they say, right? But it's interesting because it's like, I've rarely put foot on a public court, and to have a brand like that is a real interesting dynamic, right? Because then you do put your foot on a real court, and it's Okay, well, what's going to happen?

If everybody's expecting Jordan to come out, it's like...

Yeah, a little anxious about how people are going to react to it. Yeah, because you've held off for so long.

Yeah, it's been a long time.

Because you started writing how long ago?

So I started writing actually in high school, which was like mid '80s, late '80s. I've always loved writing. I guess it's a little bit in my genes. My dad was an English professor for a while. My My son, who is 15, has written about 350 pages of his first novel. Holy crap. He wants to get it published before he's 16. There'll be another little hopper author out there. That's impressive, man. He might actually beat me with having his name on a book because I've only ghost-written to this point and haven't put my name on the cover of any book yet.

You're going to need a memoir on one of these days or a biography or something.

And so I'm like, there's a little bit of like, do I let my son publish before I publish my own first one? But Yeah, we'll see.

Hats off to guys like you behind the scenes that don't want the spotlight because I feel like that's rare these days. I feel like a lot of people, because of social media, it's easy to compare yourself. So you want the spotlight. It's natural, right?

Yeah. It's definitely been an interesting dynamic for me, which I think all of us are. Not to go too far on a tangent, but I love the new direction of Marvel movies where there's not this hero and this villain. We all have these dynamics within us that move back and forth in that range. I've realized through assessments, which I love assessments, there's one called Wealth Dynamics, where I actually come out of Wealth Dynamics as a star, which is an interesting opposition to being the guy behind the scenes. It's ironic, right? As I've allowed myself to step into that space of being in front of the spotlight, more often, it really creates a space of potential beauty. It is interesting to have been behind the scenes for so long and have that shifting, for sure.

I like Hormozy's take on this. He saw Kim Kardashian and a bunch of people start brands and make a lot of money because he was behind the scenes for a while, Alex Hormozy. And that's why he came on the scene. And he just said the pros outweighed the cons, basically. Because there are cons. I mean, your privacy is gone. You got to look over your shoulder. People are coming at you trying to scam you and stuff.

Here's the thing about privacy, though. It's gone anyway. It's gone for everyone, right? I mean, we're going to be analyzed on everything we do, and a lot of it is going to be driven by an alien intelligence that we don't really understand why it's even selecting some of the things it's selecting. If you're in a private life, that's not a good reason to not be on stage anymore.

Yeah, I look at these Black Mirror episodes and how many of them have come true already. It's only been a few years since came out, and the social credit score one is always in my brain.

It's very much a thing that's coming. How we apply that, how we look at it is going to be really interesting. We look at government government types and totalitarian governments often ruled by the amount of information they could know about people. One of the most effective ways they could know information about their people was to create this environment where people reported on each other. Now we have AI and other systems that can track us more than we've ever been tracked before. Where is that power going to end up? Right now, there's this huge issue with TikTok. Who controls that data? And are we giving this data to another country that might not have our best interest in mind? I look at that and I'm like, But what are we doing? Are we creating ourselves as a hero when we might actually be using that data worse than China might be being. I'm not saying one way or the other that we are. It's just I love to ask questions. Better questions lead to better lives and the way that we see things. But I look at it, I'm like, Trump made a proposal that someone buy TikTok and then give half to the US government.

To me, I'm like, Okay, so you're going to strong arm a company by saying that they're worthless and US, they comply with the US by giving the US half of the value of the company. I'm like, That's a dangerous precedent. It starts to put a lot of data in the hands of the government. The more data they have, the more potential they have to control our choices and how we move, which for me is probably one of the most concerning things for me as it comes to creativity, because I believe creatives color outside the lines. The reason we had people like Steve Jobs and others like him is because they pushed the barriers and they were outside of the range. If they had been constantly monitored on what they were doing, I don't know that they would have made the same choices. There's a part in your mind that if you know there's always cameras on, for a while, it really changes your behavior, and some of that behavior sticks. Ultimately, you forget a lot that cameras are on, but there's That's a part that always stays there, especially if your actions are being either rewarded or punished.

You'll drive a car differently if you know that there's a monitor on the car tied to your insurance.

Tesla, how's that now?

It's All those things. It's like, are we going to weed out creativity out of the system if we go down that path?

Yeah, it reminds me of public school, how you got punished for being creative.

Yeah, public school is a great example of a system that was built because we needed workers in factories. A lot of people forget that school, as it is now, basically started in the industrial age when we needed people that knew well enough how to take instructions. The model was 15 to 45 kids sitting in front of one person who tells them what to do, and there's no dynamic interaction or discussion. It's like, Here's the rules, here's how you do it. The whole school system is set up like an industrial model.

Yeah, it's scary.

They've done studies that show it breeds out creativity. There was one major study that was done on this where they found they tracked kids through a young age up and through high school, and the percentage of creative geniuses that were in the group went from something in the '90s to something in 5%. Holy crap. The study concluded that the main factor was the education system.

That's super concerning. You'll have to find that and link it in the video. As a writer, that must have been frustrating in English class because they teach you how to write in a certain way. It's got to be this amount of sentences and paragraphs. It's like cookie cutter, right?

Yeah. I did okay in English, but grammar is not my thing. In fact, I'm about as dyslexic as anyone I know, and even very simple words can be hard for me to air spell, but I can look at a paper and I can see where it's off. It's funny need to be a writer and even an editor and have these a different approach than most do. I'm blessed because I grew up in a family where my father was very good with grammar, so I know what feels right, even if I don't necessarily know why it's right. But yeah, when it comes to spelling and things like that, I didn't get great scores in English before I knew other languages. Now, speaking Spanish, especially, it's very challenging to spell in the first place.

It's fascinating how many successful people I know that have dyslexia or ADHD or autism.

I actually see them as superpowers. I believe every great military leader had ADHD in all of history because it allows your brain to focus on more things at once. In the battlefield, that's a huge asset.

They paint you as disabled when you get labeled with those conditions, and then they medicate it. It's like they're suppressing these abilities.

I went through that with my own kids and almost lost my first one because we were trying to move him into the system, medicate him into the system. I have now shifted where I'm like, Look, I am not going to medicate my kids to fit the system. I'm going to build what works for my kids. I homeschool my youngest, and it's not a traditional model of homeschooling. He's 15, and his focus is right now, or he's writing his book, but I'm not sitting him down to do English grammar. He's just taking on this process of writing, and we sit down and we go over it. He loves to watch shows, and he'll deconstruct those shows. He'll write them as a story. So I'll take an episode and write that story. The Walking Dead is one of his favorite shows. He would take an episode and he would just write the whole thing as a narrative. That's cool, actually. Yeah, it was super cool. But he doesn't like to sit down and read a book, yet that's something he enjoyed was how to bring that out. When he would do that, he started to get into the fan fiction side where he's like, I want to write some things for fan fiction.

Then after a while, he was like, I feel so constricted living in their universe. He's like, I want to start to write something in my own universe. That's what was the catalyst for the book that he's doing now. He's doing great things with that book. He runs a business of breeding Bernadoodle puppies, He's creating value and monetary value for himself. That's cool. But it wouldn't necessarily fit that traditional school model. It's like, how do we create a space where children can still find and grow and develop into their creative genius rather than a system. Don't get me wrong, I love education. I fully support us trying to become better and grow and develop. I would like to see it as to continue to ask those questions of how can we make it better. 100%.

Got to realize not everyone has the same learning style. Your son doesn't like to read, but in school, they make you read five books a year. Not every kid wants to do that.

Two of my kids loved that. Two of my kids, they fit the system really, really well, and two of them I've got four kids. My oldest and my youngest just did not fit in the system. My two middle ones excelled in it. It's that same thing of everything. It's a spectrum. It depends on what fits.

Yeah, that's super cool, man. Well, Chip, what are you working on next? Where are you going to keep in touch with you, man?

Yeah, working on a number of books right now that are really exciting. Got some film projects that we're working on. I'm moving more out of being in that ghost space to actually putting my name on a few things. I have that as something that feels like it's calling to me, and I'm allowing that now. The best places to find me would be chiphopper. Com or chiphopper on pretty much any platform out there. But we'll see where those social media platforms go with AI. Who knows? Yeah, we'll see, man.

We'll link it below. Check out his work, guys, and I'll see you next time.

This is an ad by Betterhelp. Think about the people who inspire you most. Guess what? They don't have all the answers, but they do know how to ask for support when they need it. Therapy is a great way to find that support. Betterhelp has experienced therapists ready to help you with challenges ranging from clinical issues to the stress of everyday life. And it's convenient, too. Visit betterhelphelp. Com/newdirection today to get 10% off your first month..