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

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?

All right, guys, we got Chip Hopper here today out till 9 a.m.

and joining me.

So I appreciate you, you know, giving up some sleep to be here.

Yeah.

Happy to do it.

Is that a common thing for you to be out late?

No, no.

It's either Sundance or Vegas.

That's right.

Vegas will do that to you.

Oh, my gosh.

What's your favorite activity?

That's why I can't live in Vegas.

What's your favorite activity in Vegas to do?

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

Good old XS Zook.

Yep.

Yep.

Vegas does have some good clubs, man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love music.

I love connecting with people.

so those are like my two favorite things you've done a great job of building a network yeah i i love that 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 yep yeah 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 right every it's all it's all about currencies that you that you manage and that you grow and um relationships and relationship capital or whatever you want to call it yep 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.

And I've added more connections in those spaces.

So it was worth it.

Yeah, that's my love-hate relationship with Sundance.

It's like I don't typically stay out till 8 a.m., 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.

So my belief is that for you to get to your next level, you're one away.

Right.

And that one away is most likely in your phone.

And 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 U.S.

I love that.

Yeah.

Because sometimes you get in this echo chamber of just our little local city, our local county, or even our local country.

Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, Tim Ferris 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, right?

And 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...

you perceive things.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, absolutely.

uh to me i tell people that if they want to improve their connection the two main things they can do are read and travel right and and obviously then you know 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 and uh the second is travel in my opinion yeah reading or audio books or podcasts great ways to learn fast just a little thing for me i call it reading like if you're 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 a print book.

I don't care if it's a Kindle, right?

Like 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.

Like podcasts, for example, are less curated often because they're just a 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.

So taking in knowledge is much easier and quicker when you have the consolidated

agreement.

What's your book selection process?

Because there's so many books, right?

And you only have a certain amount of time.

Yeah.

So I've read a book a week for over 25 years.

Damn.

And

it's been an interesting journey and it really shifts you.

And I, you know, 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 so i love your question of of how do you find the best books and 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.

And for me, when I can find books that those people resonate with, that is where I start to pull those books.

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And for me, I'm always in the middle of reading four to five books at a time.

Wow.

And I have a belief that if a book's 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 months because they feel like they have to finish that one before they can start another one.

Yeah.

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.

And 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, it'll show you what books they've recommended, like all the top entrepreneurs and stuff.

So I'll do that.

I'll see what they recommended.

I'll look if multiple intelligent people have recommended that book.

And then I'll summarize that book on Chat GPT.

If I like the summary, then I'll get the book on Audible to X speed while I'm in 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.

And 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.

And you can see the books that they've rated highly compared to the books you've rated highly.

So 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, right?

If they loved a movie, you knew you were not going to like it.

So 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.

Like I can't trust those.

So I'd rather have ordinary people give me their opinion on movies yeah absolutely and people people you know and people you trust and uh that's probably one of the biggest concerns with with

the rise of ai right now is it i think it is uh degrading trust because you don't know if you're really speaking to a person or anymore or even listening to a person even with the videos that are coming out now uh they're getting better and better at you just not knowing they're so good they're almost to the point that they can fool me.

I like 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.

And 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.

Yeah, but it's going to get to the point where even me can't tell, right?

I mean, I just made my digital twin the other day and it's pretty accurate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of the one of the ways that they're still being able to distinguish right now is the iris print, your like your eye print is hard to replicate.

Wow, but eventually they'll probably figure that out, right?

You know, to me, it's 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 companies starting up.

I've seen a Joe Rogan podcast where it's just him interviewing dead people with AI.

So it'll be like him and Steve Jobs, stuff like that.

And neither one of them were speaking, right?

I mean, it's just taking, and they have a conversation, they're laughing, they're breathing, they're doing all that.

Yeah, it sounds pretty similar to the real podcast.

So I'm already preparing, thinking of ways on how I can kind of differentiate myself from AI.

I'm sure you're doing the same.

Yeah, very much so.

In the creative space,

you know, people used to think that creative space was one of the spaces that would be the last to be overtaken 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.

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

Yeah.

I mean,

when I look at movies, like for me, storytelling is about connecting.

And 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 like have that same experience.

Right.

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.

And so that's all in the realm of what's starting to be here and we'll be here, 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?

Right.

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 connection?

Right.

It's almost like that movie Ready Player One.

Yeah.

Like people are living in their headsets.

They don't care about their physical body.

That's a possibility, right?

I mean, all the movies, The Matrix, Ready Player One, all those have elements of things that could happen.

You know,

James Cameron, who did Terminator and many of those other movies,

he was in an interview recently and he's like, he's like, it's getting harder to write science fiction because we're actually doing

all of the things.

What do you decide is 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, you know, Star Trek is a great one to bring up because, and I, and I love to ask this question of people.

I'm like, are you a Star Trek or a Star Wars fan, right?

I'm a Star Trek fan.

Because, because, 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?

Right.

And they develop these things that have many times ultimately become reality.

The flip phone was the communicator in Star Trek, right?

And 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 forms happen the fort, you know, right?

So it's, it's more, it's more of a world that's built on like,

you know, 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-woo side.

Yeah, right.

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

I like both.

I definitely see that, though.

Yeah, I would say I'm more logical, though, when it comes to science.

Yeah.

So 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.

Yval Harari is one of my favorite authors.

His book, Nexus, was my top book for 2024.

And I highly recommend everyone read it.

It just, he's able to write these books.

Sapiens was a fantastic book on kind of the evolution of humans to get to where we are.

Nexus is kind of 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.

And

when you look at it,

it is an intelligence, and it's an intelligence that is not human.

So it's an alien intelligence.

And

if you look at it that 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 synergized with this alien intelligence?

So 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, right?

And as humans, we believe we have intelligence and consciousness and right now AI is an intelligence that we

for now we we say it doesn't have a conscience right

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 have a 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

on that channel.

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

You know,

that's a constant evolution, right?

Yeah.

And,

you know, 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 is Thoreau said, most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their songs still inside.

And I've always felt this pull or this calling to help people sing their songs while they're still alive.

I love that.

And that's part of why I help people ghost write their stories.

And Book Jedi, the name of my company, actually is an acronym.

So Jedi stands for a book's journey of evolution, disruption, and impact.

And what I've 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, right?

Like, I often ask people, I'm like, if you're building your career,

would you rather be Oz or Elvis?

And what that means is Oz is behind the curtain making things happen, but he's still a big influence, right?

Where Elvis is on stage and a big influence.

So there's a lot of influence in both.

And when I was young, I very much made the conscious decision that I wanted no fame.

I wanted to make a lot of money and have no fame because both of those things gave me freedom.

Yeah.

The more fame, I saw it as the more fame you had, the less freedom you had, right?

Yeah.

It was definitely a trade-off.

Yeah.

And but I, but I found I've always had income and impact directly correlated, right?

The more income you make, the more impact you can have.

The more impact you make, the more income you'll make.

And 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 kind of that third eye of bringing in that

recognition and that fame so you can actually move even more.

Yeah.

Right.

Um I've been asked to be on some super big podcasts over the years and turned them down and turned down other opportunities because I was like, you know, I'm cool being the guy.

doing the ghost in the background.

And a lot of me still loves part of that, right?

There's a lot of freedom in going out and playing in that ghost space.

And,

you know, I've, I've had many people that I've written books for compare me to people like Michael Jordan and things like this.

And it's, I'm the Michael Jordan of ghosts, right?

And whatever else they say, right?

But it's, it's interesting because it's like, I've rarely put foot on a public court.

And, 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 like, okay, well, what's going to happen?

Like, if everybody's expecting Jordan to come out, I get it.

Yeah, a little anxious about how people are going to react to it, right?

Yeah.

Because you've held off for so long.

Yeah, it's been a long time.

Yeah, because you started writing how long ago.

So I started writing actually in high school, which was

like mid-80s, late 80s.

Damn.

And 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 son, who is 15, has written about 350 pages of his first novel.

Holy crap.

And he wants to get it published before he's 16.

So 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 ghostwritten to this point and haven't put my name on the cover of any book.

Yeah, yeah.

You're going to need a memoir 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?

Yeah.

But yeah, we'll see.

Yeah, hats off to guys like you behind the scenes that don't want the spotlight.

Cause I feel like that's rare these days.

You know, I feel like a lot of people, because of social media, it's easy to compare yourself.

So you kind of want the spotlight.

It's kind of natural, right?

Yeah.

And it's definitely been an interesting dynamic for me, which I think all of us are, right?

We, you know, not to go too far on a tangent, but I love the new direction of like Marvel movies where there's not like this hero and this villain.

We all have these dynamics within us that move back and forth in that range.

And uh, I've realized through assessments, which I love assessments, um, there's one called Wealth Dynamics, where I actually come out of wealth dynamics as a star, which is an interesting opposition to being

behind the scenes, ironic, right?

And as I've allowed myself to step into that space of being in front of the spotlight, uh, more often, um,

it really creates a space of potential beauty, right?

And

so

it is interesting to have been behind the scenes for so long and have that shifting for sure.

I like Hormozzi'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 Hormozzi.

And that's why he sort of came on the scene.

And he just said the pros outweighed the cons, basically.

Yeah.

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.

And here's the thing about privacy, though.

It's gone anyway.

It's gone for everyone, right?

I mean, we are 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.

So yeah,

if you're wanting 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 it came out.

And the social credit score one is always in my brain.

Yeah.

I mean, it's very much a thing that's coming, right?

And

how we apply that, how we look at it is going to be really interesting.

We look at government types and totalitarian governments often ruled by the amount of information they could know about people.

And one of the most effective ways they could know information about their people was to create this environment where people reported on each other.

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?

And 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?

And 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 and I'm like,

you know, Trump made a proposal that someone buy TikTok and then give half to the U.S.

government.

And to me, I'm like, okay, so you're going to strong-arm a company by saying they're worthless unless they comply with the U.S.

by giving the U.S.

half of the value of the company.

I'm like, that's a dangerous precedent.

And it starts to put a lot of data in the hands of the government.

And 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.

Yeah.

Because

I believe creatives color outside the lines.

And 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, right?

There's a part in your mind that if you know there's always cameras on,

you know, for a while, it really changes your behavior.

And some of that behavior sticks.

Like ultimately, you forget a lot that cameras are on, but there'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?

And so it's all those things.

It's like, are we going to weed out creativity out of the system if we...

if we go down that path.

Yeah.

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 sit in front of one person who tells them what to do, and there's no like 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.

And 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 then the percentage of creative geniuses that were in the group went from something in the 90s to something in like 5%.

Holy crap.

And

the study concluded that the main factor was the education system.

That's super concerning.

You'll have to find that a link in the video.

And 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.

And I mean,

I did okay in English, but it like 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 like air spell.

But I can look at a paper and I can see kind of where it's off.

So it's funny to to be a writer and even an editor and have these

kind of a different approach than most do.

Like I'm blessed because I grew up in a family where like my father was very good with grammar.

So I know what feels right, even if I don't necessarily know why it's right.

Yeah.

But but yeah, when it comes to spelling and things like that, like

I didn't get great scores in English before I knew other languages.

And now, you know, speaking Spanish, especially, it's like very challenging to like spell in the first place.

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

And I actually see them as superpowers, right?

I believe every great military leader had ADHD

in all of history, right?

Because it allows your brain to focus on more things at once.

And in the battlefield, that's a huge asset.

And they paint you as like

disabled when you get labeled with those conditions, and then they medicate it.

Right.

So it's like they're suppressing these abilities.

Yeah.

I um, I went through that with my own kids and, uh,

you know, almost lost my first one because we were, we were trying to move him into the system, medicate him into the system.

And, and I have now shifted where I'm like, look,

I am not going to medicate my kids to fit the system, right?

I'm going to build what works for my kids.

And, uh, you know, I homeschool my youngest, and it's not a traditional model of homeschooling, right?

He's, he's 15 and his focuses right now are he's writing his book, right?

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, we go over it.

He watches, he loves to watch shows and he'll deconstruct those shows as like he'll write them as a story.

So he'll take an episode and write that story like the walking dead's one of his favorite shows and he would take an episode and he would just write the whole thing as a narrative and then uh that's cool actually yeah i mean it was super cool but he can't he like he doesn't like to sit down and read a book yet he would that's something he enjoyed was how to bring that out and when he would do that he would uh he started to get into the fan fiction side where he's like i want to write some things for fan fiction and 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.

And that's what was kind of the catalyst for the book that he's doing now, right?

Yeah.

So he's doing great things with that book.

He runs a business of breeding Bernardoodle puppies.

And so he's creating value and monetary value for himself at school.

But it wouldn't necessarily fit that traditional school model, right?

So 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.

And 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, you know, us continue to ask those questions of how can we make it better.

100%.

And gotta realize, not everyone has the same learning style, right?

Your son doesn't like to read, but in school, they make you read five books a year.

And not every kid wants to do that.

And two of my kids loved that.

Like two of my kids were, they fit the system really, really well.

And two of them didn't, right i've got four kids and my oldest and my youngest just did not fit in the system and my two middle ones excelled in it so it's you know it's that same thing of of everything it's a spectrum it depends on what what fits yeah that's super cool man well uh chip what are you working on next where can people keep in touch with you man yeah uh working on um a number of books right now for that are that are really exciting.

I've 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 kind of have that as something that feels like it's calling to me, and I'm allowing that now.

And uh, the best places to find me would be uh chip hopper.com or chip hopper on pretty much any new platform out there.

Uh, but we'll see, we'll see where those social media platforms go with AI.

Who knows?

Yeah, we'll see, man.

Well, we'll link it below.

Check out his work, guys, and I'll see you next time.