The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant - The Highest Performance Strategy is Caring About People ft. Simon Sinek

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

In this episode of The Curiosity Shop, Brené Brown and Adam Grant sit down with their first-ever guest, Simon Sinek. Together, they explore the state of organizations globally, including the chaos hitting C-suites, the human cost of misaligned incentives, AI-driven layoffs, and leaders playing defense when they should be playing offense. They dig into what makes teams high-performing, why caring deeply about the people you lead isn't soft but essential, and what the military's culture of love and loyalty teaches us about business. The conversation also moves through nervous system regulation, shame and guilt in parenting and leadership, and what AI can or cannot replace about human connection. This episode is a reminder that the things we've been told to leave out of business, such as love, care, and human connection, may be the most important things we can bring to it. The Old Order Is Dead. Do Not Resuscitate — Sven Beckert, November 4, 2025, The New York Times A Friedman Doctrine — Milton Friedman, September 13, 1970, The New York Times Magazine The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy — David Gelles, 2022, Simon & Schuster ‘Take a simple idea and take it seriously’: Charlie Munger in his own words — Financial Times Jack Dorsey Blamed AI for 4,000 Layoffs. A Former Block Exec Says That’s Not the Real Story — Leila Sheridan, 2026, Inc. Brené Brown on values, vulnerability, and playing to win — Adam Grant, December 22, 2025, Knowledge at Wharton (Interview) Threat-Rigidity Effects in Organizational Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis — Barry M. Staw, 1981, Administrative Science Quarterly Finding our strong ground, part 1 of 6 [w guest Adam Grant] — Brené Brown, September 17, 2025, In Dare to Lead. Vox Media Podcast Network Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action — Simon Sinek, 2009, Portfolio/Penguin The mental game of tennis: A scoping review and the introduction of the Resilience Racket Model — Konstantinou, G et al., 2025, Sports The Inner Game of Tennis — W. Timothy Gallwey, 1974, Random House Suppose We Took Groups Seriously… — Harold J. Leavitt, 1975, in Man and Work in Society Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t — Simon Sinek, 2014, Portfolio/Penguin Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts — Brené Brown, 2018, Random House The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization — Peter M. Senge, 1990, Doubleday/Currency Developing Brave Leaders and Courageous Cultures — Brené Brown, Dare to Lead hub The Infinite Game — Simon Sinek, 2019, Portfolio/Penguin Brené Brown: Focus on guilt instead of shame — 60 Minutes, March 29, 2020, YouTube Children’s Proneness to Shame and Guilt Predict Risky and Illegal Behaviors in Young Adulthood — Jeffrey Stuewig (lead), 2015, Child Psychiatry and Human Development The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe — Samuel P. Oliner & Pearl M. Oliner, 1988, Free Press The Toxic Handler: Organizational Hero—and Casualty — Frost & Robinson, 1999, Harvard Business Review Jensen Huang Says an Incorrect Nine-Year-Old Prediction About AI Shows Why It Won’t Destroy Jobs — CNBC, 2025, CNBC Relational Job Design and the Motivation to Make a Prosocial Difference — Adam M. Grant, 2007, Academy of Management Review Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, Adam. Hey, Renee. I'm excited about this episode. Me too. Yeah, we have our first guest for you this episode. Adam will tell you all about our guest in our conversation. Before we get there, I want to let you know, we are coming. This is the close to season one.

It has been a wild ride. We're so grateful to y'all for being on the ride with us. We're going to be, we're taking a hike. us for five weeks. During those five weeks, we're bringing you some best of podcasts that we think you'll really enjoy. And then we'll be back on July 30th with new episodes, including some really fun guests. We're going to try something new and interview some folks and then talk about what we're learning from our guests. So excited, but really, really want to make sure I'm clear that we're both so grateful for y'all coming to the Curiosity Shop and hanging out with us

and learning with us. It's been really fun. It has been. And speaking of fun, we're very excited to bring you a special conversation that we recorded at Brilliant Minds in Stockholm. It was last week with our friend Simon Sinek. If you don't already know Simon, he's an ethnographer, Ted Talker, author of books like Start with Why and The Infinite Game, he's also a podcaster and an optimist. We had a great conversation about the state of work in organizations, about how to build strong teams, how to get the most out of leaders, and we also got to do a live Q&A with leaders from around the world. Enjoy. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing

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You can hear it now wherever you get your podcasts or watch at YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. Welcome to the Curiosity Shop. A show from the Fox Media Podcast Network. Hi, everybody. We are in Stockholm, and we are at the Brilliant Minds Conference, joined by none other than Simon Seneca. Welcome to the Curiosity Shop. Nice to be here. We're excited.

Thank you. Me too. You're the first guest ever. Ever. I remember you told me. You said, would you be our first guest? And I was very excited to say yes. I have questions for all of us, and we're going to round robin them.

So here's my thinking. The three of us have spent our careers inside organizations and working with leaders, but we do it in very different ways. So you build very deep and lasting relationships with leaders. You're with them over time. You are very relational in your work. Adam, you bring research, cutting new findings, and you work with them. leaders, you work with teams. I go into organizations to lead transformation. So I'm there usually for two to five years working specifically with the C-suite and then I work with the level of

leaders that report up to the C-suite. So we all have very different interactions but do very similar work. So I want to start with this question and we'll go first to you. State of the org globally. How would you describe what you're seeing today? there is, look, the good news is, is that there is demand for our work. There shouldn't. I agree. No, no, but I mean it, like, there shouldn't be. That's true.

Right? And none of us would have careers in the 80s or 90s. There would be no demand for what we do in that time period. And I think that the, there's a sort of mass rebellion around the world against capitalism. But it's the, it's the form of capitalism that exists now, the sort of Milton, and Freedman Jack Welch form of capitalism, of short-termism and using people to balance the books and rewarding shareholders before you take care of your employees or your customers. That's the form of capitalism that exists now that we all don't like and rebel against.

And the good news is there's a movement afoot where either enlightened leaders or younger leaders want that more human form of capitalism back. And the problem is, is there's still a lot of pressure for the old form. And so the trend that I'm seeing right now, and the questions that I'm getting the most, I'm getting the most questions for is transformation. Right? Like, how do we go from this to that? Yeah.

And the most common question I get is, what do you do when your boss is against all of this stuff we talk about? It's the most common question I get. And so the good news is we're seeing the demand for change for the way we do business coming from the middle. and they want to be change agents inside their own organizations rather than just say, I'm out of here and quit and go somewhere else. But transformation is the topic. How to do it, how to do it in a way that doesn't create excessive pushback, rebellion, how to do it in a way that is considerate,

but at the same time responsible to the business model. I mean, they still have to keep the doors open. And so, yeah, that's the thing. But I'm proud of the fact that the three of us are on the front lines of this movement. I love that framing, and I have to say, I think work would have been bleak for us during Welchian times. That would have been nonexistent. Yeah, I think, you know, and what I mean by that is during a period of time when performance and humanity were cast as mutually exclusive, I think. So true story. I did some work back in the day, long ago before this form of my career, I did some work for a division of GE, GE silicones.

And I'll leave out all the long stuff, but I came in with some recommendations on how to, to re-understand loyalty. And it was all about humanity and rewarding people for actual loyalty, not just how much they spend, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the guy who ran the division, he was great, he said, Simon, this is great work. And I think you've made some excellent recommendations. And I agree with what you're suggesting. And I just want you to know that we will implement none of it. And he says, because you have to understand, if I implement your stuff, I don't get a bonus. So great work, not doing it. And that's, And they were very honest and open about it.

Very honest and open about it. So even if there was appreciation for the work, the incentive structure, they're just not going to implement it. Yeah, Charlie Munger. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Yeah. Yeah. Adam, state of the org. Oh, I think there are two things that jump out at me.

The first one is a lot of leaders pushing their employees to adopt AI while at the same time planning to do major job cuts in the next two to five years and not telling anybody. I think that's a travesty. And I think it's a mistake, too. I think there's no substitute for human ingenuity and human judgment. And I think a lot of these leaders, to Simon's point, are being very short-sighted in just assuming they can get rid of a bunch of people just because we have LLMs now. That's probably the first one.

The second one I'm seeing is related to that, accusations of hypocrisy constantly. by, I hear it from my students, I hear it from junior people in the organizations I go and visit. They say, we were told that we had a voice. And then we brought concerns, we brought ideas, and nobody listened or did a thing. So what was all of that lip service to inclusion? What does it mean? You obviously didn't care. Thoughts.

So the AI thing is funny. You got all these organizations laying off significant numbers of people claiming that AI can do the job of these people, which is complete nonsense. It's because they over-hired. And if they come out to the marketplace and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we over-hires, and now we need to correct because we're carrying too much expense on the books,

then their stock price would go down because they were idiots. But if they say I'm laying off thousands of people because AI can do their jobs, which is not true. AI can't do that yet, not for that quantity of people. We have the data that support that.

It just can't. But they say to the market, AI, and then they look like on the cutting edge, so their stock price goes up. But the problem is, is they are creating the narrative for AI. So now you have mass fear

that AI is taking my job, which is not true. But these decisions, but more importantly, the narrows they're putting out to protect their own short-term gains is creating a narrative that is creating the rebellion against AI.

They don't realize the long-term damage they're doing for the adoption of a very important technology. So what do you both make then of, I feel like every third post on LinkedIn, says, your job won't be taken by AI. It'll be taken by someone using AI. Somebody got a good tagline and went hard. I mean, I think, so I'm going to, I'm going to, someone just in marketing went hard and it was great. It's a meme. It's a good line. It's a good line.

It's a good line. We're like, we give you an A plus on the line. Like, we give you a D minus on the message, but an A plus on the line. I think for me, the state of the org for me can only, raise your hand if you're in this room and you've, ever watched five-year-olds playing soccer football. Swarm. Yeah. So this is the analogy that I would use to describe what I see in the C-suite right now. So when you've got, both of my kids played, you've got five-year-olds on the pitch. The balls are coming in really fast and really high, and they're coming in at shoulder height. And so what the five-year-olds do is they lift up their little five-year-old feet, and they kick the ball at shoulder height, which immediately they fall over, right?

And so this is kind of what to me the C-suite looks like right now. A lot of balls coming in really fast, lifting little feet, hitting them, falling over, no control. Over time, what ends up happening with a developing football player is by about 14 or 15, if they stay with the sport, they can see the high ball coming in, they anticipate the high ball, they jump, they chest the high ball, they drop the ball to the ground, they put their foot on the ball to maintain possession, because that's the game. then they look down the pitch, they find the striker, they understand where the striker is in relation to the person in the goal, and then they kick the ball down the pitch to not where the striker is standing, but to where the striker is going to be in a minute and a half, or a second and a half.

So that's the evolution of on the pitch. So I think for me, if you think about what that skill is, to anticipate the high ball, chest the ball, drop it, maintain possession, look down the pitch. you're talking about a very serious cluster of skills. You're talking about situational awareness, temporal awareness, anticipatory awareness, trust on team, training,

and that's what we're missing for what we're facing. Leadership. And what we're missing even more than the gaffer of the coach, I follow a lot of football. I'm a big Liverpool fan. We can talk about that later. But what they're really missing, are the player leaders.

In Liverpool terms, they're missing Gerard. They're missing the person who's actually on the pitch, but is a player leader, which is a really under-explored, I think, position. So to me, for the first time in my, you know, three decades of doing this work, the biggest relief that I hear when I'm in, surrounded by the top senior leaders,

is when I say, don't worry, no one knows what the fuck is happening. That's the biggest relief I hear. People are like, oh, God, it's not, we actually don't know what's happening. And so in order for that to work at that level of leadership, you have to be surrounded by people you trust and people who are very comfortable with productive challenge. People who are very comfortable saying, I see your enthusiasm for this play, I don't think it's going to work. And here are the data I'm using to make that assumption. you have to have a ton of trust with a team that's not there right now for a million reasons.

But high fastballs, little kicks falling over. Okay, so that makes me wonder, should we have team captains in organizations? Not formal leaders or managers, but somebody who's respected by their colleagues. They happen. They happen organic. I guess they're culture carriers. It happens organically. Yeah.

And I think the minute you label them that, they cease to lose their authority and power as informal player leaders. As soon as you put the armband on, things change. But I think it's for the first, that's the first time in my career. I've seen people willing to not even pretend they know what's, because you wake up, what's the American fever dream today? Tariffs. What is it tomorrow?

Straight of her moves. Like, it's like people don't have, it's not even, it's too fast and too much. Well, the good leaders are saying that out loud. The good leaders, that's the difference. The good leaders are pretending that they got it all under control. The good leaders being like, whoa, another one. I can't, you know, like, I think, and you're saying sort of the high and fast coming at their head,

that they're just honest about it. And they're looking to the team to help. I love it. That's exactly. Yeah. Guys, I don't know. I don't know. And it's so uncertain, but I'm open to suggestions and I'm looking for help.

And let's experiment. If it doesn't work, we'll pivot. And the willingness to try and not be the final decision. And I think there's this sort of weird thing that, you know, when a leader makes a decision, it has to be the right one, it has to be the final one, which of course is nonsense. But the idea of dipping your toe and trying things out and seeing what works, the good leaders are doing that. They're open about it. They're honest about it.

I have another metaphor that I think is really resonating right now with leaders, which is, especially companies that were doing well before last year, there's this, I think I use a lot of times, we've talked about this before in the pod, the metaphor of playing to win. versus playing to not lose and the difference between the behaviors of playing to not lose and the playing to win. One of the things that's really interesting

is unless you are scared most of the time, you are playing to not lose. And if you are playing to not lose, you are absolutely losing. Because even if you've had a string of great quarters or whatever your metric is, you're standing on top of a mountain protecting a flag, and the mountain is crumbling from underneath.

Tariffs, geopolitical, instability, market shifts, competition. You can't maintain a mountain that's crumbling. You've got to go. And so, to me, show me a leader. The first thing I look for in a leader, because we say no to 70% of the transformations that people come in and ask for. The first thing I look for in the top leadership

is what percentage of the C-suite can manage their nervous system. If you can't manage your nervous system, you cannot manage strategy or people. You're talking about defense and offense, right? I'm talking about defense and offense. You have to play defense occasionally, but you want to play offense if you're building a business. And to your point, you know,

too many people are playing defense as a means of building their businesses. And because they're afraid. And they're afraid. Yeah. Even if you have possession of the ball, the minute you're afraid, you're on defense with possession of a ball,

which makes you use. Yeah. When I hear playing to lose, I think about the psychology of threat rigidity and how, I mean, the tunnel vision, the narrowing of I'm just going to do the thing that I'm already good at. That's it. I'm not going to take any risks. I'm not going to experiment, Simon, to your point. I'm not going to innovate at all. And I think those leaders end up doing a ton of micromanaging because they focus on the little things they can control, not realizing in this sea of uncertainty, their job is actually to be macro managers, not micromanagers, to help people make sense of the change that's happening or at least be honest about the fact that they don't have the answers yet.

And I think most leaders have not been trained in how to do that. Brene, I love your point about regulating a nervous system as a core leadership capability. Can you talk to us about how leaders can learn to do that? Because I see at least six dysregulated people in this room right now. No. I would be one, so it would just be five of y'all. It's a skill set. I mean, it's when I was doing the research for Strong Ground,

I really wanted to come up with a cluster of skills that were, how do we future ready people? And I was really hoping it would be a great number, like eight or ten. And it ended up being 38. And I divide. Nice round number. No, nice round number. And you know as a writer, that shit sucks.

Like, you're like, welcome to the impossible cluster of future ready leadership. The good thing is I use a lot of gym metaphors, like strength training metaphors. And I said, you know, this is 38, but we have five or six kettlebells that will hit 15 of them at one time. So we got it. But what I was surprised that emerged at the top, which I call the core, was five that I again did not want to be true because they're the ones that we would have never been working in the 80s. The first one, self-awareness. The second, metacognition. Do you understand how you learn and how you think? Three, emotional regulation and emotional awareness. for mindfulness, which don't you hate saying it, though? Do you hate saying it? I don't use it.

I don't use it either. Wait, you just did. I know, but what am I supposed to do? Like, lie? It's the data. So I was going to call it paying attention because that's what the term I use. But it's so funny because

how many of you in here would love to have a lecture from someone come into your organization about mindfulness? No, like if I walked in and I saw that like up on a deck, I'd be like, dude, I got shit. to do. I can't like, there's a butterfly and the grass is green. But this is a failure,

this is a failure of that market, right? Because like when I started my work, I couldn't talk about purpose at work. That was hippie-dippy stuff. Purpose? No. No, when I started, if you use the term purpose at work, literally, I got, either, there's a small percentage you were already converted. But if you want to, if I wanted to move the needle, literally, that's like, like you said, I want to come and talk about purpose at your office. They'd be like, thanks, hippie. No, you know? And so part of my journey...

They thought you were selling drugs. Yeah. So part of my journey was language. And so the reason I called it the why, the reason I called it the why is because I went around and asked people who believed mission was preeminent or vision was preeminent or purpose was preeminent or brand was preeminent. We had all these different words, but nobody agreed on the definitions of these words.

And I went to all the people who thought, all of these things were the most important thing and ask them what's the definition. And they all said, it's why we do what we do. It's why we get out of bed. It's why the company exists. I'm like, great. We'll call it the why. We can all agree. And it was the term, the why, that allowed the concept to then come into work because people weren't afraid of talking about their company's why. They were afraid of talking about their company's purpose. And so I think the same thing goes for mindfulness, which is the problem is it sounds like hippie-dippy-dippy stuff. And so you have these people screaming and yelling from the tree-top saying you have to do it,

but they aren't doing marketing 101 and finding language for the thing that the people actually want, rather they're bringing the thing that they think is important. And so we do need new language for mindfulness. And then maybe in 10 years we can talk about mindfulness and it won't be a big deal. I don't know what that term is, but we do need more. We need, we need different words. Synonymous, it's with synonymous with paying attention, right? I actually love the attention frame because we're all facing an attention crisis right now. Yeah. Yeah, being fully attentive, whatever word we use it, but I think attention is in the right ballpark for sure. Yeah, we can't convert that this is one of the words.

I mean, I was successful in converting shame as a word. So, I mean, like, in the beginning, people were like, can we call it Chamet? I mean, how many of you follow sports, any sport? How many of you watch the French Open? You don't think those folks have very serious mindfulness trainers? Oh, I saw a thing about tennis. I can't remember the exact numbers, but something like of the hundred top top top 15 or 20, there are always the top 15 or 20.

It's not like other sports where it like bounces around. It's always the... It's a very narrow band of always the top. And so the question was asked, how is it the narrow band is always the narrow band when all the players have access to the same training, nutrition, coaches. It's an equal game for all of them. What is it about these top few?

And I can't remember who did the research. I'm on brand. I can't remember who did the research, but what he found was that these top few, all of them, had a different mindset than everybody else. And the mindset was absolute love and joy of the game. So if they won a point, they would say, oh, I love this game. And if they lost a point, they'd be like, lost this time, but wait for the next one.

And what ended up happening by the end of the game after five sets, their stress levels were lower, so they had more energy. And so they just played better at the end of the game than the other players. But it was this, it's all mindset and absolute joy versus the frustration and the anger, which then sucks the energy out of you, which I found so interesting. Okay, but you're such a good storyteller, so you're so on brand. This is so important because having worked with athletes, and probably some of the ones you're talking about in the band, that is not inherent. Did they learn it?

That's what CEOs need to understand. They don't naturally. They weren't born with it. They did not self-select into a top band of mindful, positive people. That is p equals p minus I. that is a book that I've read every year for 40 years. I read this book, and now I teach it all the time to leaders, which is the inner game of tennis.

Performance equals potential minus interference. So what ends up happening when you're working with high-level athletes is performance equals potential. So we push and push and push and drill the shit out of potential. You know, where are your volleys, where your baseline hits, let's work on their shirt, let's work on your return. and what about your ball toss? And at some point, you're not moving the needle there.

Yeah. Then so you have to go back to it. So performance equals potential. We've drilled that to death minus interference. What is your interference? And so what you're talking about is trained. And you can track any of the top 20 tennis players in the world. And if you track them from the juniors, you will see the 12 to 18 months where they learn that.

You will see the difference. If you watch film, you will see the difference in their game. This reminds me we were with Novak Djokovic last year. And I think he's an amazing example of this. But his emotional arc is different. He explained that he felt like when he entered tennis, the niche of the fan favorite was already filled. Federer and Nadal were kind of, they'd covered it, right?

They had all the love. And he needed to do something to activate his energy. And so he decided he was going to make himself the bad guy. and get the crowd to hate him. And the booing was going to fire him up around the energy to prove them wrong and say, okay, you all think I can't do this, I'm going to show you. And he said it actually took the pressure off because he felt like nobody expects anything of me anyway.

Nobody believes I can do it. So I have nothing to lose and now I can play to win. And I think that can be just as powerful as I love the game. I think it can too. But if you hear Djokovic talk about the mindfulness training he's done and his ability to, I mean, even, I think all of us do special force, we've all worked pretty closely with special forces military. The whole thing that when there's a mistake, it's one of the most common ones I hear from them is data received. Well, I think, and I think you're touching upon the big mistake that

happens in business consistently, which is we often talk about team performance, and people will interpret our work about high performing teams and apply to individuals. Okay, wait, I want you to slow down and say that again, because it is like the number one infuriating, hard thing to get your head around. So what makes high-performing organizations is high-performing teams. And you, all three of us talk about what makes high-performing teams, and then people take our work and they try to apply it to individuals. That's exactly right. And that's not how it works.

And even these analogies that we're using, we're using them to our detriment, which is we're talking about an individual, an individual players sport. and that's not what business is. Now, the analogy is that, hey, CEO, looking at this high-performing athlete, they learn this, you can learn it too. That's sort of where the metaphor ends. I look at, like, for example,

I look at Mercedes, F1, Grand Prix. The way that Toto Wolf runs that organization is, first of all, it's a no-blame organization, right? Which I find fascinating, which is mistakes get made, and a kid on the, you know, changing a time, could lose the whole race, right? Because of, so they recognize that no matter how good the driver, no matter how good the car, it's the team that wins. And so when things go wrong, nobody will say,

you lost the race. They'll say, something went wrong. How do we fix it? It's a no blame organization. And he cares more about consistency rather than best performance. So when the pit crew, they're not trying to go fastest, fastest, fast as, fast as, get it faster. He wants consistently 2.2 seconds. Doesn't need it to be quicker, doesn't want it slower. It's the consistent. Because that makes predictability and they train for consistency. But again, it's all about the unity of the team. It's all about the unity of the team. Howell Leavitt wrote a classic article half a century ago. It was called Suppose We Took Group Seriously. And his thesis was if we really believed that excellence depended on having a great team, we would hire teams intact teams that had already gotten to know each other and proven their ability to work

together. We would promote successful teams. We would fire failed teams as opposed to placing all the responsibility on the individual. I don't know that I'm willing to go that far. I would be really interested in a model of what if we hired pairs? What if we promoted pairs? If we could find diatic relationships where people were more than the sum of their parts, that feels like a unit that's actually manageable. I mean, also the incentive structures. Most of the incentive structures in organizations are individual performance. Hit your numbers, you get the bonus irrespective of how everybody else does. We changed it in our organization where the bonus structure is based on the company. And if the company hit the-

its numbers, everybody gets a bonus. And if the company misses its numbers, nobody gets the bonus. And so, and if one group is struggling, like when we look, you know, we sort of review, we don't, we don't hold, same thing, which is, it's not like, who sucks to be them. You know, it's not like one of those. We'll turn to everybody else who's doing well and being like, what are you doing to help them? Like, if they're, if they're struggling, that means you aren't helping them. That means we're not helping them. And it's, and I have to say, I mean, we hold ourselves to higher standards because, you know, we're out there preaching it. we have to be able to do it ourselves.

And we know too many people who don't practice what they preach. But I think one of the things I respect about you guys is that we all work very, very hard to practice what we preach. And so it's been an education for me also to learn what team performance looks like and how you create team performance. Because individual performance is just much easier. It's easier to incentivize. It's easier to manage. It's easier to hire. It's easier to fire.

Easier to measure too. It's easier to measure. Team stuff is actually really difficult, which is one of the reasons we love the special operators. is because, and I mean, you guys already know this. So getting to spend time with SEAL Team 6, and we talk about their courage and their amazingness and all of this, and their team ethic and their team ethos is so intense that it's not that they have raw courage

and that they have no fear of dying. That's not what it is. It's that they fear letting down their team more than they fear dying. Think about that for a second. They fear letting down their team more than they fear dying. Now translate that into business. We don't fear letting down our team. Can you imagine fearing, letting down your team more than getting your bonus?

That ethos. And by the way, these are the highest performing teams in the world. And this is what I don't understand, which is we're here. We have this amazing access to look at these organizations and say, hey, general world, look at what they're doing. You can do this too. And they don't. Support for this show comes from Odu.

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leadership, which was, and this will be interesting, and it's somewhat controversial, I think, but it was very clear in the data, that care for and connection with the people you lead is a non-negotiable prerequisite for leadership. If you do not care for, genuinely care for, and genuinely find yourself able to connect with the people you lead, you can't lead them well. And that's hard, because I've let some people that I didn't feel connected to them at all. And I actually, because of the research and trying to practice what we teach, I did end up moving their reporting lines, which is hard when you're the founder because it just feels like, but I'm like, we only have two options here. Yeah, and this move is going to be a better option

for you. Can I share something that helped me solve for that? Yeah. Which was, it's narrative, right? So when you're having a meeting with a bunch of whoever's in the meeting, let's say, the senior leaders in the meeting, and somebody's name comes up in the company, and somebody go, ugh, such an idiot, right? And like, it happens, like the lazy one, the underperformer, you know, the Debbie Death of a Party, you know, like, whoever it is, Debbie Downer. Like, what happens? Donald Downer. Donald Downer is like... I'm training Adam on the use of women's names and terrible things. Yeah.

Fair point. Yeah. So, but we do. We create narratives, and what happens is even people who don't work with them, that's the narrative they have of that person now. So when they do interact with them, they're going to start treating them based on the narrative. And by the way, it happens everywhere. Like it happens when people are talking about their leaders. They're like, oh, you know, they're clueless, they're stupid, they don't get us, right? Whatever it is. And so I realized that we were doing it, right? And so new rule. I said, you know, we're human, we vent. It's fine. But if you're in a meeting where somebody is creating a narrative about somebody else, It is the responsibility of everybody else in the meeting to interrupt that narrative and simply say, hey, they may be lazy.

They may also be stressed. They may also have stuff going on at home that we don't know about. We may have put them in the wrong job. They may be under-trained. They may be overworked. Or they may be lazy. It could be one of those things. And just by giving grace and allowing for more things to be on the list, we change the narratives.

And once we started doing it as a senior team, because it became sort of a new rule, then I went to the whole organization and said, now this is a rule for the whole organization. If anybody creates a narrative about anybody else, it's the responsibility of everybody else in that meeting to interrupt the narrative. And it helped tremendously, because what it allowed for

was when you have that tension with somebody and sometimes you just have personality clashes, personality clashes, even with people in your own team. It allows you instead of to form narrative about them, to offer grace and be like, you know what, we just don't get along. It's probably me, but I'm going to let you manage this issue with them

because I'm going to get it wrong just for personality reasons. And it just offers this magical grace. And it's so easy to implement. And it has such disproportionate positive impact on the performance of the team. I like it because when you adopt a courageous system as opposed to asking some individuals to do that, you normalize it so the person that gets interrupted with it

doesn't feel targeted. They're like, oh, shit, this is what we do. We just stop each other. It just becomes acculturated, yeah. Yeah, and I think it's, yeah, So the care for and connected with, I didn't believe it at first, but then I saw it. And then I ended up on an Air Force base working with a squadron of fighter pilots. And I went to the general who was this very, very serious guy.

And I said, listen, I just want to let you know that I'm going to have to talk about care for and connection with as a prerequisite for leadership. And he said, why are you telling me this, ma'am? And I said, I'm a little concerned. I'm not concerned. I just want to make sure you know that this is. coming. And he said, that is a very low bar for us. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, we don't require care for in connection with. We require deep appreciation and deep loving relationship for the people you lead. Amen. And I said, say more. And he said, that's how we stay

alive. And I was, I thought to myself, I have never, I can't even get care for and connection with. Love? I can't even get that by, are through the corporate sector. This is what the corporate world doesn't understand. I was hanging out with Marines and talking to a general who's responsible all Marine Corps training, officer and enlisted, and he's a warrior. He's infantry. He's been deployed multiple times over the course of his career. He's a, he's a hard, hardened dude. And I said, what is the secret to the Marine Corps? Why are you guys so good at what you do? And he said, love, love of country, love of core, love of your fellow Marine. And the Marines are constantly referring to the intangibles.

And what they mean is all this mushy-mushy stuff that they, you know, loyalty, love. And they just call them the intangibles because they're just hard to measure. He was unabashed about saying love was the secret sauce of the Marine Corps. I think there's a nuance here that often gets overlooked, which is you can dislike people and still care about them. I think that's true. It's one of the most important lessons I've learned as a teacher. I will never forget. One day, our daughter Elena, I think she was eight or nine. She came and she said, I wonder if I'm my teacher's favorite. And I said, Elena, teachers do not have favorites. Your job is to like every student. Just like,

you wouldn't have a favorite parent. And she looked at me and she said, or would I? And it was hilarious. But it also really got me thinking. And it was an uncomfortably honest moment for me where I realized, you know what, there are students I like more than others. Of course. Like the student who comes prepared to class, who raises their hand enthusiastically, who challenges constructively as opposed to, you know, just complaining about every idea that they don't like.

Those students, obviously, are easier to like, but my job is to care about every one of them and try to help them grow and succeed. And the effort that it takes to figure out, okay, what is it about that student that is worthy of, support. What can I do to help that student become better? Inevitably leads to something that makes them less dislikable. I think this is a, I love this, because what you're talking about is the

dichotomy of two different things. It's kind of like joy and happiness, you know, or fulfillment and happiness, you know, where happiness is, you know, is fleeting, you have a nice meal, you see a good movie, happy, you know, and it comes and goes. But joy and fulfillment can be more of a constant even on bad days. You know, it's like you love your kids every day. You don't like your kids every day. And so I think people think of these things as interchangeable where they're not, you know,

and to your point, like you can like people more, that's okay. You definitely like some people more than others, but you can care for everybody at the same time. Like, they can coexist these two lines. And I think it's really important to make those distinctions because people think they have to choose one over the other. I think romantic relationships are the best example of this.

How many of you like your partner every day, those of you who have a partner? Okay, Pierre, your partner's in the room. Where's these? Very, very few people would honestly raise their hand on that. Yeah, of course. I've been with Steve for 40 years. Like, no.

I mean, we don't, yeah, we don't. We love each other deeply. Every day. Every day. But do we like each other? No, we, you know, we frustrate each other immensely sometimes. I mean, I don't frustrate him, but like. I have a friend Jared who said,

you just have to win the week. He liked four out of seven days, and that's a successful relationship. So here's a question for you. I'm changing. You just sort of spurred a thought. Do you want to win or do you fear losing? Like, do you like to win or do you fear losing?

In what domain? Just as a motivator, as a personality. Yes. Like, I think it's different. Some people like hate losing and some people love winning. Do you know which one you are? Oh, you know what?

I am driven almost solely by mastery on the court. And so for me, I'd rather lose a game where I learned than win and game that was easy. That different conversation. Maybe it's so foreign to me this idea that you're... No, but like, do you get more excited by the win and you're like, okay, well, I lost? or do you like hate losing but when you win you're like, I have one. Oh no. I like to win.

So you love the win. I love the win. Okay. I mean, I'm going to tell you this. I was playing pickleball just a couple months ago and it was open play so you just stack your paddles

and you go on with a random doubles partner and I'm playing and we're down like 6-0 and this kid is like 30. And I look at him and like, son, you need to lock in. And he was like, I'm sorry? I said, I need you to lock in. focus. And he said, ma'am, it's a game. It's fun. And I was like, no, winning is fun.

And he's like, okay. And I said, another thing, if you're going to come across and get my ball, that's great. I love that move. Make sure you make it. Otherwise, I got the ball on this side. And he was like, got it. Lock in, stay on my side unless I can make it. And he's like, okay. So they never scored again. And we ended up winning 116. And then we went back. I was like, let's stack our paddles together. And he's like, I don't think so. And I was like Wait, what? I'm learning now, we already concluded we can't play against each other.

We can't play on the same team either. It depends on your game. So do you like to win or do you hate to lose? I think I hate to lose more. You? I think I hate to lose more. Really? Yeah.

Oh, I don't mind losing. If it's a good fight, I love, I'd rather, I just want a good fight. I'm trying to think. Because I'm not, I'm more competitive. head out of against myself than I am against other people. Yeah. And so if I'm, if I, if I do well, I'm like, all right, on to the next. Like, there we go.

Like, okay. Oh, no, I got cellies for everything. Yeah, no. I'm like, let's go. You want to pet that dog? I'm like, I've got a cellie for every move. I don't have any of that. I mean, I get the rush, of course.

I get the dopamine rush of a win, of course. But it doesn't last very long and then I go home. Let's go. Yeah. Like, don't care about trophies or medals or anything about that. Now, I don't care about those. Yeah. I just care about the shit talk.

This shit talk, yeah. Yeah. That's my love language. My love language is sports trash talk. Yeah. You sit next to me at UT football, baby. And the reason I hate to lose is because if it's on me, right, I'm like, I could have done better. But if I lose to somebody who genuinely played a great game and best of me, then there's lessons and I'm good with it.

But because I'm pushing myself, I hate to lose. You're the same. You're hate to lose? I think you're, yeah. What are y'all, raise your hand if you're a love to win, driven by the love of winning. And then raise your hand if you're a hate to lose, per person. It's not 50-50. Wait, just do that again.

I just need to do a quick analysis. Raise your hand if you're a love to win. Hold them up. Okay, never mind. Okay. You're my people, first of all, but secondly, there's not a gender divide. No, there's no gender. But I do want to get a click real quick one more time about if I'm looking for like a paddle or pick a ball partner. Who, who, I'm picking the winners.

I don't know. I will say there are two personality traits that predict where people stand on this. on this. Introversion, extroversion is one, and then emotional reactivity, stability is the other. Oh, shit. So, no, I think...

Because we're both introverts. Are you an introvert? Oh, yeah. I test off the charts and introversion. Like, this is fun, but don't come up and talk to me afterwards if I don't know you, because I'll get really anxious. And I'm happy to talk to you afterward,

but definitely not before, because I don't know what we're going to talk about. And I'm happy to talk to you, but not as a group, just one-on-one. We have a lot of rules. social interaction here. No, I just, I just hate groups. Like, I went to a party last night.

You should probably study them. I went to a party last night, and I very quickly left when I realized there were a lot of people there. I mean, I've never been to an after party in my life. You and I had that interaction last year. You just, what, that?

There was a party, and then there was an after party. And Adam was getting ready to go to the after party. And I went up to him and said, hey, I'm going back to the hotel. Good night. Good to see you. And he's like, you're not going to the after party. I'm like, no, no, never going to the after parties. And he says, how do you just

leave. I went, just leave. I have, yeah, and you went. I felt like I was going to let my team down otherwise. I told people I was going. They probably don't care if I should. No, it's really funny because when I'd go do events, you know how they'll say the list of things that they'd like for you to do. And we have a standing policy, Bernan, doesn't do dinners. And then somebody will push back and say, only, does she eat? We had a new person we hired right out of college who returned an email. There's like a fortune

Twinton Company, and it was directly in the CEO's office. And she just put, yes, but not with y'all. I was like, so that's not how we answer that. But I do think it's like a social, like, this is fun for me, and we could talk about a lot of... But you and I are cheating because we're like, there's a, like, it's, I mean, it's the three of us chatting, which we like. Oh, no, I do love that. And I can talk about work stuff all day long with people, but like if a disco ball came down

and people started drinking, I'd be like... It's not that I can't do it. It just drains the social battery much quicker. Like one-on-one I can go for quite a while. But if there's a group of people, like a dinner table or a room full of people, and I have to speak louder, especially because it's noisy and loud, and it just drains the social battery a lot quicker.

So I'll just have to go home sooner. So introverts get overstimulated faster than extroverts, and one of the greatest stimulants in life is eye contact, just having other people look at you. Really? Really. I'm exhausted. I'm disregulated, but I'm trying to be mindful.

Can we go back to one thing that I've been thinking about for at least 20 minutes now? Simon, you were saying we study these elite organizations that teach us how to do things like care and build connection and how critical that is to performance. Why don't other organizations listen? And this has been a frustration for me for two decades. my current hypothesis, and I would love to hear your reactions and yours, is a lot of them are falling victim to organizational uniqueness bias. They hear Navy SEALs or they hear Pixar or they hear pick your favorite, you know, extreme case. And they think, well, we're not like them. Like we can't do that.

They have a special culture. They hire special people. That doesn't apply to us. Not realizing, it's kind of like saying, well, I can't learn anything from an Olympic athlete about how to improve my workout. That is the person you want to learn from, and then you have to tailor it to you. I wonder, how does that track with what you see? What are the barriers? How do you overcome that bias?

I think it's simpler. I just think it's misaligned incentives. I think it goes back to the, you know, Charlie Munger, you know, show me how someone's paid and I'll show you how they behave. You know, I think incentive structures are so screwed up, good intentions, bad intentions, you know, biases. I don't think any of it matters. they'll do what they're incentivized to do. I think it's a greedy quarter issue. Yeah.

I think it's, I think it's, it's interesting because what we do specifically is we don't do adaptive change or incremental change. If I'm going into an organization, we've assessed them for a long time and they're ready for transformation and they want transformation. What people don't understand about transformation is you will break some shit if you're trans. That is the definition of transformation. You are going to assess existing systems and break the ones that do not serve and desperately protect the ones that serve. And no one, even in your immediate team at the C-suite level, will agree what systems need to be broken and which ones you need to keep. And then you're going to go through a very rigorous three-year. The poet David White has this great definition of, and I might get it wrong, but it's the great definition of transformation.

to hit the wall at full velocity and watch things fall apart. That's how he defines transformation. And that's what happens in organizations. It's not unusual in a transformation for there to be a 30 to 60% churn of leaders that report up to the C-suite. Because what's happening, I think, and this goes to your question, it's systems theory, which was the fifth of the core, the top when we were talking about the five top leadership skills. If you are not engaged deeply in systems thinking right now, I don't think you can play to win.

And if you were a systems thinker and you got away from it, you need to revisit the scholarship on systems thinking. But one of the biggest things I think that helps with systems thinking is this iceberg model of problem identification, that above the water we see a problem, and this is where as leaders we attack. We attack what we see. But underneath the iceberg are several other layers.

One is behavior. The next one is, structures and systems, the deeper you go for change, the more leverage and lasting and meaningful the change. The bottom layer is mental models. What is the mental model from which people work? And a mental model, when I go in and I'm talking to a CEO about a potential transformation, and we go through this assessment, and the second I hear that a mental model has to change in a group of people, I'm like, this is going to take three years. It's going to be very difficult transformation because a mental model is the way we make sense of the world and it's how we assess

our value in a corporation or any organization. To change mental models is absolutely, to excavate them to begin with is hard, but then to change them is very hard. You're touching upon something that I think is also essential because you're talking about three year as the time frame, which is, which is, right? It should happen within three years. But I think the insight there for me is the letting go of I can't predict when. I mean, most companies don't implement my work. And the reason is, is because I can't tell you when it's going to work. I know 100% it works.

Like, I know that if you work out every single day for 20 minutes, 100% of people will get into shape. Can't tell you when and neither can any doctor. And you just have to sort of, you have the discipline and you stick to it. And you can have good days and bad days. You can take days off, but it will work. And so when we go through these transformations that we're able to sort of guide people through or guide organizations through, the big challenge they have is they want or need it to work by the end of the calendar year, the end of the fiscal year.

And so it might, but I can't promise that it will. And because I can't promise that it will, then they want a model that will that will that will that will at least appear that the change has been made on their time frame. And that's like saying, it's like going on a first date and saying, on this date on the calendar you and I will be in love. It's like it may happen that way, but I can't predict that it will. All of the things that you and the three of us talk about,

we talk about process and discipline and sticking to it. Good days and bad days are allowed, like you can have chocolate cake even when you're in a diet, just don't do it every day. And the minute you can let go of when it has to happen and just stick to the process, invariably, it almost always happens. And I'll tell you that, I mean, this is,

you cannot predict it. And this is the, People can't let go of that. They can't let go of it. That's a failed mental model. It's a failed mental model. I need to know within 90 days or six months that this is going to work.

This has to work in 12 months, otherwise I've wasted my money. It was like, well, it might, but I don't know. Here's what shocking to us. When we do a Deer to Lead transformation, we only measure for 18 months on performance metrics, no cultural metrics. Everything from organic growth stock price, and we start to see them within six to nine months

on those metrics. Cultural metrics are like the falling in love. That takes a lot longer, but we measure performance. metrics right off the bat, and those we can see change because we're teaching people how to have hard conversations, we're teaching people how to... You're starting to see the evidence towards... Very quickly.

Those performance metrics are evidence towards the cultural change, but they're not the change themselves. And the problem is because you can measure those in the short term, too many organizations will only measure those in the short term, declare success, and the process and the whole thing collapses. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's... I'm telling you, it's... This is infinite thinking. It's infinite thinking. Yeah.

The U.S. and Iran say they've agreed on terms to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. You already see oil prices from a high of $126 a barrel down to about $80 a barrel today. That's a lot of progress. The war, of course, drove up the price of gas and other essentials and has led to some ugly polling for President Trump. 61% of adults polled by NPR PBS and Marist disapprove of his handling of the economy. His handling in a certain light makes sense. His priority was preventing Iran from getting nukes. But Trump's messaging was unusual, unusual for a president.

Last month, the reporter asked Trump, to what extent was he thinking about Americans' finances when he negotiated with Iran? I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think about anybody. What's he doing coming up on today, explained from Vox? Consider the lobster roll. Tender chunks of lobster bathed in butter or mayo. sandwiched between two slices of a squishy bread roll. Are you drooling yet?

Lobster is a summertime staple in New England, a fixture on casino and cruise ship buff, and a steady partner for steak in the classic surf and turf. This episode of Gastropod, the American lobster industry is one of the most valuable fisheries in the country, but it wasn't always the case. Just in time for summer, we're cracking the lobster's many mysteries, including how it went from prison fair to fancy food. find gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's take some questions. We will cold cough, we have to.

I will not, but... I will. Yeah, he will. Yes. I have a question. Regarding shame and talking about it and getting people think about this stuff, which I find very, very helpful when it comes to leading organizations. My question is, how do I talk about it with kids? Okay.

Renee, how do we talk about shame with kids? So the question is, I find the work interesting about shame and how it applies to leadership and talking about it in organizations. How do we talk about it with kids? Did I play that back correctly? Okay. So one of the things that's really important just right now, I will say, about shame in organizations. You have to remember, I don't have to do anything, but I would suggest it's really important

to hold in mind right now that the number one shame. trigger professionally for us is the fear of irrelevance. So imagine the levels of shame in organizations right now. And it's not just about AI. It is about everything that's happening at one time and people not understanding. I will tell you this. This is one of the questions I had was what are you seeing for the first time that you've never seen before? And my answer is for the first time and over 25 years of doing this work, I am seeing the C-suite more frustrated with the leaders that report directly to them

than any other level of leaders in the organization. Not the frozen middle, not the folks that report up to the senior leaders underneath, but those senior leaders and why? Because they are really, the mental model of the senior leadership right now is the most painful to excavate because they put their value on being knowers,

not on being learners, and their learning agility is lower right now than any other level in an organization. That's good. 100%. And so it's a really scary time for very senior people. With kids, I think the most important thing is to not mystify it.

Just to say, I was at a conference and I talked to this woman who studies shame and this is what I'm learning. I think it's interesting. Shame is, I think the easiest way to talk to kids is the basics. It's the same way I talk to adults, really. Shame is I am bad. Guilt is I did something bad.

Shame is a focus on ourselves. Guilt is a focus on behavior. So if you get a bad grade, you get a paperback and you look at it and you got a D. And you say, God, I'm so stupid. That shame. If you get the paper back and you get to D and you're like, wow, going out last night and not studying for this test was really stupid,

that's a focus on behavior and that's guilt. Why is it important in parenting? Because in the first longitudinal nested cohort studies of kids, we see that shame-bound kids are more likely to have significant struggles with alcohol, drugs, sexual irresponsibility, aggression, depression, suicidal attempts, I mean, across the board. Guilt-prone kids, this is what the crazy part of the study is, even less likely to engage in those behaviors than the general population. So the way we measure shame and guilt is by self-talk. When something goes wrong, how do I talk to myself? We believe that the number one variable that present it, but the predicted self-talk was parenting style. So your kid does something and you say,

God, you're so stupid. Versus riding your bike up that ramp with your friends was a really stupid thing to do. Very big difference. Today, I think we're beginning to question whether the parenting style is the big predictor of the only one, because we can have siblings within one family that are wired different for it. There's a great leadership lesson here, well. It's a military story. There was on base a bunch of young officers who were in an elite school went out partying and they took a junior enlisted with them and they came back on base and one of the young officers was driving the car and was afraid of getting stopped by the cops on base for drunk driving so they told the junior enlisted you drive and so she took the wheel.

They got pulled over by the cops. She got breathalized. She was over the limit. She was over the limit. she got arrested. And it turned out also later on that the officer, one of the officers and the enlisted were dating, which is forbidden military code. This just keeps getting worse. Right. So as a result of all of this happening, these young officers were ejected from this elite program. And their senior officer had to sit down with them and, you know, they got, they got in trouble. And you think about sort of how people get in trouble from their parents or people get in trouble from their bosses at work, we say things like, how can you be so stupid? You have destroyed your career. What were you thinking? Right? We say things like that. We do.

And what I found was so amazing when I heard this story was these wonderful human beings are driven by service, giving of themselves to others and the pride of sacrifice for others. And that same mentality works the other way. And the way they got in trouble, the senior officer sat down with them and said, do you have any idea how many people you've let down? You've let down your parents for believing in you. You've let down your team members for believing in you. You've let down me. Do you realize how many people you've let down because of your actions? And this idea of, like, you take risks to support the team, but you manage your behavior because you'll let down the team as opposed to how can you be so stupid? And the idea of connecting it to the greater good, I thought was way more

powerful, so intense to hear that. And to your point, which is the idea of guilt is more likely to regulate the behavior rather than calling you stupid or calling you this or calling you that. I find what's so fascinating. So what's interesting there is how that message hits. So if that message hits, I've engaged in a series of behaviors that let down people that are important to me.

That's probably an indicator of behavior change. If that message, which is as likely hits as, I am a disappointment to the people I care. about most, that is a super detrimental trauma-based response. So it really depends on, that's why the parenting piece is really important, because by the time you're this person and you're probably in your early 20s. They're probably in the early 30s. Early 30s.

You're going to have a filing system internally for whether you're going to accept that is, I made some decisions that disappointed a lot of people or I am a disappointment. And that, how do you change what you inherently are? But we know this. Like when there's somebody that we admire, like, you know, when we look up to our boss or to a friend and they say, I'm so disappointed, you know? Like that, when we want to do right by people, like that hurts more than you're a disappointment or you're an idiot, you know? I have to drop in a study here. Do you know the study by the sociologist O'Linner and O'Linner on Holocaust rescuers?

Oh, I love this study. So this husband and wife sociology team, they look at hundreds of non-Jews who rescued Jews sticking their own necks out and putting their lives on the line during the Holocaust and compared them with bystanders who were in the same towns and did nothing. And the question was what differentiated the people who were willing to engage in these potentially self-sacrificing heroic acts from their peers? And many, many hypotheses not supported. Basically, the adults were similar in many more ways than they were different. one of the differences was when you looked at the parenting that they'd been exposed to as kids, the rescuers were punished at lower rates for misbehavior than the bystanders. But the parents didn't do nothing. When the rescuers did something disappointing, the parents highlighted the consequences of the behavior for others.

It's exactly the point you're making. They said, hey, when you stayed out late, these are the ripples. I was really worried. And I didn't know where you were, and I didn't know if you were safe, and I didn't know if I could reach you. and they taught the kids to reflect on the impact of their behavior on others and realize, wow, every action I take has consequences for other people. And you fast forward the clock 20, 30 years, and you see someone who's being persecuted, and that message sticks.

There's got to be some kind of confounding variable of empathy in there, too. Because, I mean, one of the things we teach kids around what you do has, can affect other people. Like, that's a really big part of how we teach empathy, which, by the way, is the antidote to shame. So if you put empathy in a petri dish, I mean, if you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially. Judgment, secrecy, and silence.

But if you put shame in a petri dish and you douse it with empathy, you've created a hostile environment for shame. Shame cannot survive empathy. So that kind of connection and disappointment. It teaches everything we're talking about in this entire podcast, which is we're talking about service.

We're talking about that your actions have repercussions for others. In connection. Good and bad. We're talking about connection. We're talking about that this is a team sport. You know, business is a team sport. Life is a team sport.

You know, it's a beautiful, it ties a nice little bow on it. We should take some more audience questions and also give shorter answers. Here and then here. Really quick. You just talked about empathy is the antithesis to shame. What about a human that has deep, deep empathy, but the self-talk is always shame-oriented. So in the same body, you have deep empathy, a deep feeler, but also someone who's very, very self-critical.

So let me play back the question to make sure that I've got it right. You are asking, what about someone who has a deep capacity for empathy, but also has kind of internal shaming messaging? Empathy almost to a fault. Like, yes. So empathy to a fault often stops being empathy. So empathy to a fault. fault almost becomes emmeshment and taking care of others. And that's really quickly a very short walk to

shame. Does that make sense? So I am no longer, Simon calls me. And so this is really, this is one of things we talk, Adam and I talk about a lot because there's a big attack on empathy right now, especially in the U.S., which would make perfect sense politically. I mean, it'd be easier to get away with the bullshit if no one cared for anybody else. So I understand the attack on empathy personally, not speaking for my co-hosts. But empathy, there's two types of empathy. And when you hear people attacking empathy, they use a type of empathy that is actually fairly detrimental. And the types of empathy are cognitive empathy and affective empathy.

So cognitive empathy is you call me and you say, shit, do you have a minute? I'm like, yeah, what's going on? and you tell me something really hard and like, oh, God, what a shit show. I'm so sorry that happened. I'm unloading the dishwasher when you call. I am not feeling what you're saying. Affect of empathy is taking on the feelings of another person. I'm not like, if you're, if you are calling me with a sense of despair, I am not all of a sudden in my kitchen unloading the dishwasher, putting myself awash in despair so I can connect with you. I am cognitively connecting to my understanding of what despair is,

and I'm going to be there with you and for you, but I'm not taking on your emotion. So that is cognitive empathy. What leads to burnout and compassion fatigue is affective empathy. I'm going to feel what everyone's feeling. So when you say really, you know, so it's affective empathy. Then what happens is you call me, you're in despair.

I'm labeling that as an emotion because it's a hard one. I take on your despair. And now I'm filling myself with shame self-talk because I can't fix you. You called me from a dark, deep hole. My job is not to jump in it with you. My job is to say, I see you. Let me really see you.

I take a ladder out of my backpack. I put it in the hole. I go down, I see you. I say I care about you. I say you're not alone. And then I get back on my ladder and I go. Otherwise, we just have two suckers in a dark hole. So that's how shame is related to over, to a meshment,

or what I would say is taking on the emotions of other people. A little red flag here. I've seen this in businesses and companies where we had somebody quit. And one of our great, like, we loved her. We were like, amazing, amazing, amazing human being. And she quit, and we're like, what's the reason you're quitting? She says, I'm burnt out. and we're like, we know your workload.

Like, what? You know, like, well, how's burnout? And what we discovered, when we sort of like went and sort of investigated is she's an empath. And when other members of the team discovered she was an empath, they all went to her with their problems. And so she was taking on everybody's problems

and everybody loved to go and dumped their personal problems. They've had a fight with my parents. I'm having a fight with my spouse, whatever it was. And she took on everybody to the point where she couldn't hack it anymore, and she left. And I've talked about it publicly and people have come up to me and said, oh my God, I go to somebody.

I take advantage of them. I'm dumping all my problems on them. And it's creating burnout in companies, even that has nothing to do with their workload. Yes. Oh, sorry. You go ahead. No.

Peter Frost studied this. He called it being a toxin handler and found that that role is critical for an organization, but if it gets located in one person, that person is going to burn out. Yeah. It reminds me. What was the series that I might be aging myself here, for sure, I'm aging myself. What was the, the weird? No, but no, of that genre.

You're right. Hey, I love Bonanza. I love Bonanza too. Okay, watch it. I can hum the theme. I can hum the theme too. I love Bonanza. No, but it's of that black and white television.

Kind of weird and freaky things would happen. Twilight Zone. There's an episode of the Twilight Zone where there's a character called The Sin Eater. And he just goes from village to village eating the sad stories of the village. And I always think about that when I think about the wrong use of empathy.

Okay, next question. Can we just send a ladder down to the person so they can climb out ever? Because that's what I always want to do. No. I mean, you have to ask them. Like, this is the thing that I've learned about, like, doing the right thing for somebody in the time that they need it. And, like, the thing that I found remarkable is, A, people know what they need, and B, you can adjust in the middle. So I remember I was in a bad place.

I called a friend. I'm like, hey, do you have a minute? Can I just talk it through with you? And she started fixing. And I said, I don't need you to fix it right now. I just need you to like, shut up and listen. I just need to. And the adjustment was made.

I was good. Or if she couldn't, then I had to get off the phone. But, and I've now learned that. So when somebody comes to me and says, blah, blah, blah, blah, I need to talk. I go, do you want me to fix or do you want me to hold space? And they go, I need you to hold space. And so they, I find that it's, we don't have to guess. Like, people know what they want in the time.

Huge. And you can just ask. Huge. But I only see this in organizations or, on teams where there's high levels of trust. Like, I have sisters, so it'll be, my sister will call and be like, hey, do you have a second? And I'm like, yeah.

And she goes, I'm really upset. And I was like, listen, fix, or bury a body. She goes, man, grab a shovel. I'm like, on my way. I don't even need to know who you killed or where we're going. I got the shovel and a big trunk. You know, like, but that requires. Or sometimes my sisters will call and say,

do you have a minute? I'm like, yeah, this is going to be hard. And I said, okay, I'm going to tell you what's going on and I'm going to hang up. and don't you fucking call me back. And I'm like, well, what do you want to do? Just listen to it and I'll call you back when I want to talk to you.

But I just need to say it out loud. I'm like, go. Then I'm like, and then she's gone. So I think asking. It's such a magical thing. And people know what they need. And it's a trust earner. And they can change.

They can change. They can change? Okay, I've now said it. Now can you give me some fixings. You did this the other day. I called you. Yeah, I called you. I was like, I'm so upset.

And you're like, what would be helpful right now? And I said, Call me back when you're ready for a ladder. No, and I think I, you know, my husband's a pediatrician, and it's really interesting because he said he has to ask because even with the same patient and the same 10 minutes, a parent will be like, I just, I like it when you just listen and you're, you know, and then sometimes he'll just say,

I'm just going to listen, they'll be like, is this why I'm here, I'm paying you for just listening? What's the answer? And he's like, oh, shit, have we moved on from the just listening empathy? He's like, yeah, we're in the godlike doctor state now. How are you going to fix this? He's like shifting gears. Question.

I have a question regarding your view on the impact of AI. Earlier you said about, you know, AI is not going to replace your job by somebody using AI. And I think a couple of weeks ago at a conference in Palo Alto where the main investors and leaders in the space were talking about it, and very different opinion. And James Swann was interesting because he said it's more about purpose. of a job versus the task of the job.

You name the example of a radiologist, which the task can be tightly replaced by analytical part, which takes most of the time. But the purpose of the job, like healing disease, is elevated to now there are more radiologists than ever before. So I was just wondering about your view on the impact of the population. Okay, so the question.

question is, how is AI going to affect our jobs? I think that Jensen is onto something. We were with him not too long ago. And I think, look, I've been studying job design for 25 years. Most leaders define a job as a collection of tasks. And that's only half of the puzzle. Jobs are also collections of relationships. And so when we map what somebody is supposed to do at work, we have to think about what is each project and assignment that needs to get done. But also, what is all the communication and coordination that needs to happen. I think the radiologist's job is such an interesting example of this because what, I think, even three years ago, as soon as, as generative AI burst onto the scene, people said radiologists are going to cease to exist. And it is true,

right, that a large language model can substitute for some of the tasks that a radiologist does. But there are other tasks that still require human judgment. I know I would not go to an AI radiologist solely, right? I want a human to look over it, just like I want a human in the cocked it, even though autopilot is doing most of the work on a plane. But also, there's a whole collection of relationships that really matter there. There's the radiologist seeking a second opinion from another radiologist. There's the coordination with a whole team of experts. There's the interaction with the patient. I don't think we're ready to outsource that. And so I think that's an evolution of a job to maybe subtract a task or two and add a task or two and maybe increase

the interaction complexity as part of it. And I think that's probably where jobs are going, but I don't have a crystal ball, and anyone who says they do is lying to you or themselves. Or they've a vested interest. Yeah, I mean, you were in the mothership. I agree 100% with everything you said. I think that I'm a tech optimist and an early AI user. So I interact with AI.

I mean, I wake up in the morning. The first thing I do is I get a four-page brief from an agent that knows me better than I know myself. Sometimes it was weird, that I get a four-page brief from an AI every morning that gives me the geopolitical impact on all the organizations I'm working with, any news that I need to understand,

stock analysis of investor calls, things that I need to know for my job. And I've used it for a while. I also have an agent, like a personal agent, that will, I'll say, is it true? I saw on Instagram that I can stop using retinol if I eat more carrots,

and then it'll come back and say, sometimes it's hard for me to believe you're a social scientist. You are the biggest sucker. Stay off social media and keep using the stack we put together a year ago. Like that's what it'll say to me.

Or I'll say there's a new paddle out. I need to buy it. And they'll say, you need to work on your game. You don't like drilling. So I'm a fan and I use it for things. What it will never replace, at least not, I don't think you'll ever replace this,

is discernment, is deep discernment. And so the radiologist is really interesting because let's say you have a film that is alarming and it can give you percentages and predictions about that film. But what I need is that radiologist talking to my primary care doctor, who's also talking to my cardiologist, who's also talking to this person in a consult about the real, not just statistics of what we can do and what different protocol outcomes are. But here's what's important to Brunet. She talks in terms of health span more than lifespan.

She's on a court six days a week. This is what makes sense for her. That I don't think will ever be able to replace. The thing that I think is most alarming to me is that people say, and this goes back to our very beginning, people say over and over, we don't need to worry

because what will save us from AI taking over, over our world and our jobs is what makes us human. But we are shit at what makes us human. The Welchian era brought in a deep-seated belief, you and I have talked about this before, that actually what makes us human is a detriment to performance. And that has turned out to be wholly false

across all of the research studies. Which is why they're more radiologists today than there were pre-AI. Right. Right. Technologists, God bless them, always leave the people out. You know, when the rise of internet and we're old enough to remember this, you know, they were saying it's the death of bricks and mortar, but they forgot that human beings like to hunt

and gather and we like to go shopping, you know. And so the business model of bricks and mortar is different. That's a numbers game, but we like to go shopping. And you saw these stores that Amazon put up that are now going away because there's no people in them. And like, we would rather go to a supermarket and ask the kid who's stocking the show. like, hey, where's the mustard, then we would just like pull out our phone and look up mustard. We want that human interaction.

You know, Whole Foods had a thing where you could do a palm reader, like the checkout. And all you do is do your palm. It connects to your Amazon account, gives you your discounts that you're supposed to get, connects with your credit card, and you just pay. And it's great and wonderful. And they got rid of all of them because of low adoption. And people still stand in line for a human being checkout where we could all just go to the auto checkout, but we don't. We don't.

We like human interaction. And going back to the radiologist, Medicine is not just about data. Medicine is human. That's my life you're talking about. And we always complain about the doctor that has a terrible bedside manner. Well, imagine having a doctor with no bedside manner,

right? Where here's the data, here's the prescription go. You know, you want the compassion. You want the doctor that cares. You know, you want the customer service agent that cares. You want to feel that somebody cares about you. A human being cares about me. I feel seen and heard.

And that is irreplaceable by technology. So technology living alongside the human being, we all love that. But these grand prediction of replacement, none of us want that. That leads, if you want any prediction, I'll make one prediction about the adoption of AI. If it goes according to what the technologists and the AI zealots say, my prediction is you will see massive increases of the course of the next 10 years of depression, anxiety, and suicide. massive rates of suicide going up. Why? Because you took the people away from social animals.

And we're completely forgetting that it's not making our lives easy. What it's doing is making us more productive, which means there's going to be greater demands in our time. So I have a friend who's a photographer. So when she does a photo shoot, then she does retouching for the client. She's using AI. Photoshop has amazing AI tools. She can do massive amounts more, much quicker, much better, much easier.

I said, do you have more time? Isn't it better? Don't you live AI? She said, absolutely not. Now my clients want their deadlines shorter and they want more work. And now there's just an expectation instead of doing, you know, 10 photographs in a week. I have to do 100 photographs in a week. So all it does is change the bar of expectation.

But her workload, she's working exactly the same amount. She's just producing more. So I think the one thing I would just be cautious of is like human beings want human beings in our lives. And it's totally fine to have technology help us, but it's not going to replace us. We will rebel against it. Or watch that suicide. number go up. And we're rebelling now. Look at the commencement addresses in the United States. Oh, yeah, yeah, booing. Where technologists took the stage and got booed by students who,

we did our last podcast on it, like, why? I mean, we've been college professors. I'm going on year 30. Like, what people want is moral imagination. What connection and belonging. Yeah, and love. And we don't feel seen and understood. And everything we're talking about, you know, it's so funny when you're talking about it in a business context, people are like, that's mushy, that's not productive. But as soon as you take it out of a business context, I was like, that's what I want, you know? This is a good place to end.

Thank you all for coming. And Simon, thanks for joining the curiosity shop. Thank you. I loved our conversation. It was fun. And I love the conversation from the folks in the room. What do you think, Adam? Yeah, I'm still thinking about a few of the questions.

We might have to do a follow-up. Oh, we should. that would be that would be great just a reminder to y'all that we're going on a hiatus but stay on because we're going to give you five of our best kind of Adam and I together another one with me Adam and Simon so stay on the feed we'll be back July 30th and if you want more information about Simon including where you can find him or you can follow him where you can learn more go to the curiosity shop.com our podcast website and we will see you have a wonderful five-week summer, and we'll be back.

Can't wait. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Bray Brown, Education and Research Group, and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.com. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if, like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old.

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