The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant - What the Return-to-Office Debate Gets Wrong

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

In this episode of The Curiosity Shop, Brené Brown and Adam Grant dive into the return‑to‑office debate and argue that most conversations are stuck at the wrong level. Instead of asking “How many days in the office?”, they ask, “What problem are you actually trying to solve?” They explore evidence on hybrid work, weak‑tie innovation, culture and belonging, and why some leaders still cling to “butts in seats” as a proxy for performance. Along the way, they introduce a systems‑thinking “iceberg” tool for getting below the surface of policy fights to the patterns, structures, and mental models driving them. You can find The Curiosity Shop on ⁠YouTube⁠ and ⁠Instagram⁠ (@thecuriosityshop). 0:00 - What’s Surprising Us About This Podcast?  1:49 - Return to Office  22:06 - Challenging Your Return to Office Mental Model 34:15 - Birth Order 40:18 - Tradeoff Between Authenticity and Editing https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/peps.12641 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/worklife-with-adam-grant-the-dos-and-donts/id1346314086?i=1000565464077 https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/the-real-meaning-of-freedom-at-work-11633704877 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381373698_Hybrid_working_from_home_improves_retention_without_damaging_performance https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-employees-work-from-home https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/seven-truths-about-hybrid-work-and-productivity/ https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-effects-of-remote-work-on-collaboration-among-Yang-Jaffe/bff6dabad6d264c0f34678a788e20df1b015656d https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2041386614564105 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44605966_The_Strength-of-Weak-Ties_Perspective_on_Creativity_A_Comprehensive_Examination_and_Extension https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pub/papers/granovetter73ties.pdf https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1802407115 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361135288_Remote_Collaboration_Fuses_Fewer_Breakthrough_Ideas https://oms-www.files.svdcdn.com/production/downloads/academic/Disrupting-Science-Upload-2022-4.pdf https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401 https://www.atlassian.com/blog/distributed-work/intentional-togetherness-research https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/coming-to-a-new-awareness-of-organizational-culture/ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/10720537.2026.2613112?needAccess=true https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1956-04524-000 https://www.nber.org/papers/w30866 https://www.amazon.com/Originals-How-Non-Conformists-Move-World/dp/014312885X https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1506451112 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A show from the Fox Media Podcast Network. Hi, everyone. I'm Brne Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're having fun on the podcast. More than I expected. So what's been surprising to you about the pod so far? I think what's been surprising is how often we agree. That's interesting.

I think I'm surprised by how much I'm learning. You didn't expect that coming in. No, I mean, I expect it to learn, but I can feel it shifting my thinking. Oh, for sure. Yeah, in uncomfortable ways. I wake up thinking about things that we talked about several weeks ago thinking, oh, no, I missed a chance to ask about. Wait, we do this every week. We can follow up.

No, I, that's one of the biggest things for me is the hangover, the residual like, we should have said this, or I want to press him on this, or wait, how does that work? So I'm having fun. It's a productive hangover. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you. All right, we're going to do three things today. We're going to talk about the return to office debate. We've been avoiding this one for a while. I know. I actually don't know if we're in violent agreement. on return to office or really deep disagreement. But maybe both. Maybe both. The second thing we're going to do is I am going to introduce a tool from systems theory that I am obsessed with. We use all the time to look at problems. I thought we could apply it to this question about return to the office. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. To see at what level of the issue does our cohesion fall apart. Great. If it does. And then it's the third item, I've pulled some listener questions for us. Let's do it. Let's get started. Okay.

You launch us off. Return to the office. Yeah. Because you're very committed. I am committed to following the evidence, which I've been doing for the last decade. And I think the evidence is very clear that if you give people one to two days a week to work from anywhere, they are at least as productive, if not more so. They're more satisfied. they're more likely to stay, and there's no cost to relationships or collaboration.

This is going to be really boring. I think I agree. Really? I thought you were much more against that model of hybrid work. No, no. I think I agree with what you just said. One of the things that I, what I was anticipating disagreeing with you. on was that the frame of return to office just being about productivity is not the right frame. I think we're in agreement on that. Okay. So I have my 24-page lit review because I really came, I mean, I came like, you want to dance?

We'll dance. Oh, I'm ready to dance. Did you bring Nick Bloom's research? I did. Did you bring the Gagendron et al meta-analysis from last year? I did. Okay, good. But I also brought other things like MIT Sloan's Linda Grattan on kind of what productivity metrics miss.

I hope I'll cough out on the camera when he went like this. Yeah, no, I got a freaking lit review here, dude. So let's go. Okay. So Bloom and Colleagues, this is the 2024 nature, right? equivalent productivity, equivalent performance review scores, and equivalent promotion rates for hybrid workers compared to full-time office workers, correct? So quoting here from Bloom's HBR article, hybrid and fully in office showed no differences in productivity, performance review grade, promotion, learning, or innovation, hybrid had a higher satisfaction rate. Okay. So I'm going to go now to this is MIT Sloan.

Linda Groton, London Business School, three decades of workplace research argues that the productivity debate is largely fought with the wrong metrics. Yes. I'm doing it again. Oh my God, you're doing it. I'm skeptically intrigued. How about that? I really hope, Aaron, that you got to zoom in of this face.

All right. I want to hear it. Okay. Most roles, strategy coaching, creative work. lack easily verifiable comparative productivity measures. She's going to argue that hybrid work is better understood as a job design option. The question isn't where do people sit, but what tasks need which environment? Yeah, I agree with Linda.

You agree. Okay. Okay. Okay. So I think the key aspect of work design is asking how interdependent are people in their jobs. So in organizational psychology, there are three kinds of interdependence. they're called pooled sequential and reciprocal is easier to think about them as gymnastics,

a relay race, and basketball. So if your job is gymnastics where everyone does their own beam, vault, floor routine, and then you just add up the individual scores, you hardly ever need to be co-located because everybody can do their own thing and have their own focus time at home. But if you're running a relay race,

then you need to have some time with the people that you're handing the baton to, and receiving it from. And if your work is mostly playing basketball where you're passing the ball back and forth and doing a lot of dynamic coordination, that's, I think, when you need the most time physically together. Give me an example of the gymnastics.

Call center work. Sales teams are almost exclusively designed this way. Everybody has their own clients. They have their own customer base. They have their own industry, potentially. and the team's metrics are basically the sum of the individual metrics. Okay, so I'm trying to think through this rationally and calmly because... I wish you the best with that.

I think I disagree. Good. Tell me more. I should just say the Nick Bloom data often are looking at all center jobs. Right. where people are pretty independent. Yeah, I think do you, would you consider those knowledge workers? I think of them doing service work more than knowledge work, but maybe there's a mix. Yeah.

Okay, so let's go here. So this is, this is me making my case for in person, in person, culture, creativity, and mission. Okay, I agree right off the bat on culture and mission, definitely not on creativity. Okay. So the evidence for in-person work, I think, becomes strongest around three kind of interconnected organizational dynamics that I want to get into, and I want to talk about it, because I'm open to learning. Me too. Like a little crack in the door. Weak Thai innovation networks, tacit knowledge and cultural transmission, and shared mission organizational identity. Yes. Okay.

So let's talk about weak tie. Week ties is the hidden, as kind of, I think, the hidden engine of creativity and innovation. So weak ties, connections with colleagues outside your immediate team are the primary carriers of novel information, cross-disciplinary insight, and breakthrough ideas. Robust finding. Robust finding. So who are you? I'm Yang at all. 2021.

I mean, there are at this point. There's a Marcus Barra meta analysis that spans 50 years of evidence that, yeah, you get more fresh ideas from people you don't know well and don't talk to every day. Right. So I'm thinking that being in the office is less about socializing and more of a creative infrastructure that when it disappears, I think there's two things that happen. I think there's less innovation that is the product of those weak ties. And I think teams without weak tie inner, I don't know why we call it weak tie. Why do we call it? Classic Granaveta.

Yeah. Sociology. Yeah. Absin of strong tie. Yeah, like a loose relationship exposure. I don't know what's another way to say week tie. Yeah. I think they also help prevent teams both, I think all teams have to be innovative and creative

these days, but I think they reduce teams from turning into self-referencing systems. Yeah, they prevent groupthink. There's another way to say it. Yeah. Okay, so I agree with all that. And I think your instincts are right that when people are physically together in person, they're more likely to bump into their weak size. This is the whole kind of Steve Jobs designs the Pixar headquarters.

so that everybody has to walk by each other to get to the bathroom. Right. I think that there are counter arguments, though, that don't get weighed when people say, well, we need people to come in to have these creative collisions. The first one is there's no reason

why you can't structure that unstructured interaction in remote work. So there's research on pairing people up randomly for virtual lunches, showing that their productivity goes way up afterward because they end up just learning from weak ties. And you don't have to,

What I mean is you don't have to randomly bump into them, right? You could have just a, hey, every week, we're going to connect you with somebody that you don't know. And you're going to compare notes and you're going to learn from each other and we'll create that way. I think the second thing is we don't need constant weak tie stimulus. Because this is Ethan Bernstein's work. Intermittent interaction is actually better for creativity than constant communication. I can see that. Because we also need some distance from other people to not get sucked into their ways of seeing the work.

and that separation then allows us to develop divergent perspectives and then come together and get a good mix of convergence and divergence. Last thing is there's a study by science teams showing that up until around 2010, remote science teams that published breakthrough kinds of discoveries, they were less creative than teams that were co-located. And around 2010, that reversed. And ever since remote teams have massively out in teams that are in person. Why? We think there are two things going on here. Number one,

the remote technology was just bad before. We didn't have good systems for sharing files, editing documents together. We didn't have good ways of communicating for over distance. Now we do, right? Secondly and more importantly, you have access to the whole world's talent in remote teams, whereas you're stuck with the people who happen to be in your science lab if you're together. And so, I'm like, yeah, you could have creative collisions with the people who happen to be in your headquarters, but why not have creative collisions with the best people in your whole field wherever they live? Support for this show comes from Odu.

Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu, it's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-Doo replaces multiple expensive, expensive, platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odu for free at Odu.com. That's ODOO.com. Support for this show comes from

Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-F-Free at O-D-O-O-O-O-com.

That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. this is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different, locked in, loyal, invested. They're called fans.

Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify advertising. You're among fans. So when I'm listening to this, what I'm wondering,

and I know this is kind of a constant debate, that you and I have. Stepping away from the data, like stepping away from what you're citing, stepping away from my 25-page-let review. I can't step away from data. I know, but let's just step away from it. You're stealing my identity.

I know. All right, let's do it. Unwanted identity. Shame, episode six. How do you reconcile this with just who we are as human beings? Like, from mirror neurons to... Yeah, I mean, this is why I'm not saying,

we should work remotely all the time. This is why I want us to be co-located three or four days a week so that we can build meaningful relationships so that we can establish culture so that we can live experiences that become stories so that we can connect to the mission and identify with the organization. I think all of that requires shared time in the same room.

But I don't think we need to impose that five days a week. I think I know what you look like. We have a relationship built. we can have great conversations by text and phone and Zoom and email, right? And so I just, I think it's arbitrary to say all the time needs to be in the same place. No, I think I agree with that. It's just, it's so interesting to me, especially, you know, we're filming this while Artemis 2 is up and just belowing my mind. It's like I'm such a space nerd. I know you're a space nerd.

Yeah, let's go. You know, and I think I have, you know, as a Houstonian, I've got friends at work for DAS, obviously. Talk about remote work. Yeah, yeah, a lot. We're flying by the dark side of the moon. And it was interesting because we took all of the earthbound astronauts through Dare to Lead. And we talked about the ability maybe to do it remotely. And it was so important for them to get them in the same room.

For these three or four days that we spent together. And for my friends who are engineers, when they get to something that's very difficult, even if they're on remote teams, and these are globally remote teams, they find a way to get together in the same room. Yes. And so it's like I mean, I think we're in violent agreement because I actually am a big believer in hybrid. I'm not in a forced return to office five days a week. And I'm not at all a believer just as a human being that we never have to be together physically. Yeah. I think we're on the same page there. And just to I have to come back to the data now. Yeah. There's a ding and ma paper from 2024 looking at four years of return to office mandates showing that they fail to improve from financial performance metrics. but they reduce satisfaction and work-life balance. Yes. And then there's follow-up research showing that you also struggle to attack great talent

when you have a return to office mandate. So all the people who are claiming, well, but the tech leaders who are demanding everyone comes back to the office and the finance leaders who are demanding that, they were doing a whaling and calling strategy of trying to get rid of people who aren't committed without having to pay them severance. Guess what? You fail to attract great people moving forward. and also the people who are most likely to leave,

it turns out, are the most talented people who have options elsewhere and they want flexibility. So it sounds like we have mostly landed on the same page about this. NASA. Yeah, love. So I think it's one of both of our favorite organizations to study. I learned so much from John Kahnigator, who led, you could call it almost dare to lead beta

for NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts for years. And one of the really interesting ahas that I had when I was studying John's work and working with some of his teams was they did not care about making sure that astronaut crews were together for weeks at a time doing training. What they did was they picked short windows to do very deep dives. Yes. So they would get lost in the Utah wilderness. And John was a Noel's guide. and he would say, good luck, find your own way, and then disappear. And they had to navigate those situations together.

And what the astronauts would always come back saying is one or two days with a group getting lost in the wilderness and having to navigate our own way, the stress we underwent together, the problem solving we did together, so much more meaningful than if we had sat at desks next to each other for a year. And so I'm curious to hear how you think about this idea of, atlasian does this right they've shown in their data that how often you come to the office has no bearing on on how much belonging you feel but attending a quarterly three to five day offsite is very powerful for connecting you to your team and to the firm what do you think about the idea of

we do we do a deep dive together and then we go off and do our own focused work and then we reconvene it's probably the way i think about the future of medicine which is personalization personalization, personalization. I want to, my objection to return to office, not return to office, bring him together for offsides, not bring him together for offsites. My objection to the whole vat of that discussion comes down to an overwhelming frustration that I cannot pin leaders down to a why that makes sense. It's not intentional.

They're not examining beyond the problems they can see. They're not getting underneath to mental models. They're not getting underneath to. And so for people who, I think, I'll be honest with you, I think it would be, I would be very challenged to understand anyone that says everyone's back all the time for everything. And I'd be very challenged, even if it was called. center work to say no one ever has to do anything. Because I worked in a call center in Spanish. Thanks for your mom. Ah, excellent. But we'll have that in Spanish. Yes. See. And so that is brutal

work. The churn in that work is huge. So I don't, I come into that research with a different understanding of what that work is. And I do think it's gymnasts. Oh, yes. And I think we're in agreement there too. My first real job was in ad sales. and I needed other people around me after the 19th rejection in a row to process that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also after studying call centers, it is really easy to see how people are better able to focus when they don't have to be surrounded by a cacophony all the time. Oh, yeah, just, you know, we were just like hundreds of us in, like, you know, in cubes.

So I think it really comes down for me to what is driving your decision? What are, you know, maybe this is a good place to introduce this. So this is a, this comes out of Dana Meadows work from, she's a systems theorist. I'll link to her book and her work and I'll share the PDF with you that we use to teach it. So it's basically a problem solving method with systems theory where you have the iceberg, which is the problem you see. So leaders are like, okay, here's the problem we see. Do we let them work remotely?

Do we force them back into the office? Do we do a hybrid? And they're just looking at the top. with the iceberg. They're not getting under what are the patterns of behaviors that we need to build, de-emphasize, strengthen, get rid of, like what are the patterns of behaviors that we need? Underneath that, what are the systems and structures of support that lead to performance and impact? Yeah. And then even below that, at the deepest level in this iceberg, are the mental models. So what, you know, if I ask a leader, like if you're running a company, Flowers Inc., let's

say, or, you know, I'm looking at the wallpaper, pink flowers, ink. And I, you know, and you're like, I'm having everyone come back to work. Why? Because I need to see them. They need to be there. Like, what kind of strategy is that? What kind of strategy is that? And I want to, so tell me what your mental model is. Tell me how you're making sense of work. Well, how do I even know if they're working? Well, you don't know if they're working if they're in the office unless you're staying over them or you're, you know, you don't know either way. So I don't get that. You know, they need to have friends, well, that's not really work does, and they could have a lot of friends. It's better for them. Have you asked them? No. Yeah, right. And the thing I love about this problem solving with systems

thinking iceberg is we know from the research that the lower you go in the iceberg to answer the questions, the greater leverage and more lasting and meaningful to change. Yes. Does that make sense? It does. It's very similar actually to the shine culture iceberg. Oh, God, yes. Which, I mean, it's almost identical. You see the artifacts and practices that are the most visible manifestations of a culture. Those ideally are created to reflect and reinforce a set of values, but the values themselves are not as transparent. And then underneath those values are these deep assumptions that are rarely even articulated. And they're just taken for granted. Those are the hidden mental models. The mental models. Yeah. And mental models, man, people always say, when you go in to do work

in a company, Brune, how do you know whether it's going to be incremental change or transformative change, real, and I said, listen, if you have to change mindsets and mental models, you're talking about transformation because you're going to have to break very sacred things. Yeah. So let's take a concrete example of this. Last year, I was at an event where a CEO who had very publicly announced a return to office mandate was on stage. And the moderator asked for questions.

And I couldn't resist. I put my hand up. And I summarized the evidence we've been talking about. and I asked the CEO, what do you know that organizational psychologists and economists don't? And he said, well, I just believe that we're better at mentoring and innovating when we're all in the same room together. And I just thought that was such a primitive mental model. Like, okay, yeah, but how many hours a day do we need to be in the same room together? How many days a week do we need to be in the same room together?

Have you thought about different ways of solving for mentoring that, you know, deal with the fact that, you know, deal with the fact that you are a multinational company and some of your most important roles are not physically in the same country as the people that you expect to be doing the mentoring. What do you do when you work with someone whose mental models are not flesh out? Because I just wanted to smack that down. Yeah, I think what's really hard is in my experience, no matter who that leader is, and I could take a while guess about who this leader is and be so right. You know exactly who it was.

Yeah. I think the problem is it's the parenting equivalent, and I don't like to use parenting stuff with work because it infantilizes work, but here, you know, it's the parenting. How are you going to say infantilizes parents? It's the parenting equivalent because I said so. Yes, exactly. And it actually creates a lack of respect and destroy. It really creates distrust. And I think what we've seen working, because we were working so closely with leaders

during the pandemic and right afterwards as they were making these decisions, that if you believe it enough to mandate it, then you should have the discipline to get under the mental model and walk people through it. Yes, and explain why. Right. And if you can't be bothered by that and you're going to rely on just because, I said so, say goodbye to your top talent. Yes.

And not because even they have to go in because they don't want to work for someone who's treating them infantilizing them. Yeah. With because I said so. That's a great meta argument. I wonder what would have happened if I made that point. Say that again. What do you mean?

Well, just to even say back to the CEO, that sounds a lot like when a parent says, because I said so. Can you walk me through? What is your evidence and what is your, what's your proof that you? this is so important. So here's where I think I would differ in the way that I would challenge someone like that. I don't think I'd ask for evidence.

No one's going to be able to out-evidence you. I know. That's why I'm going there. But also, that's the highest quality information available, right? But I think I've never had experience using that to get to someone's mental model because they immediately get defensive. Yes.

So I think what I would say is, what are your core beliefs about what happens when people are at home and what are your core beliefs about what happens when people are at work? Yes. What are you, what keeps you up at night when people are working from home? Oh, that's so helpful. Okay. And then, you know, one of the core beliefs is, you know, I think this is obviously easy to debunk,

but, you know, there's still a, you know, well, people are, you know, they're slacking off at home. And once somebody says that to me, I can say, you know, that, that, that, that, that, That's interesting because what Nick Bloom has shown in his experiments is that when people are given a chance to work from anywhere a day or two a week, they save about an hour on average of commuting time. And guess how much of that time they spend working more than half of it? Yeah, I've read that. So you just got an extra half hour of work plus out of your employee. And guess what? The other 24 or so minutes they get to use on family time, health, hobbies, friends.

That's a win-win. Deliberate recovery. Yeah, which I'm like, wow, you have literally found a way to do something that biologists and physicists told me it was impossible. You created more hours in the day. And I can't have that conversation without them being defensive until they've told me here's what my belief is. Yes. So I think the way that you get to that is the question about what's on your heart and mind. What are you afraid of?

What do you make up is happening? I think if you can get on the table the things. fears, the mental model, the how people make sense of their world, how people think people contribute value. And you can say to them, that makes sense. Are you open to challenging it with what we know to be true from research? Yes. Or complicating it even. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think if you missed the step of, I've never successfully had anyone, including myself, like we just did this with our company, we got into some mental models, and one of them was super painful. It took us like three hours. We had to stop. People had to walk out. People went like under the line and to get back up.

But one of the mental models that we uncovered was that we make excuses for our behavior during unique situations. And when we gave three examples of unique situations, there was nothing unique about that. Right. There's a pattern. There's a pattern. Yeah. We had handled things. exactly like that in different context for 10 years. Yes. But we use uniqueness as a smokescreen. A smoke screen. Yeah.

To come out of our integrity and what we know is best in terms of leaving sometimes. Yeah. No, that's really helpful. And it makes me think about what this also unlocks is a chance to then even redirect the conversation away from what might be a bit of a red herring. So I'm thinking about George Kelly's classic work on slot rattling. Are you familiar with this? No, I don't know it.

So George Kelly studied the mental models. He thought of them as goggles that you wear to make sense of the world. And I always remember this case that he wrote about of there was a guy who got discharged from the military and his life fell apart. And Kelly was analyzing why. And it turned out he had spent his whole career in the military. analyzing things through that lens. His mental model was military good,

non-military bad. And so once he was even honorably discharged, he had put himself in the bad category. So what most people do when one of their constructs is violated, when one of their mental models is challenged, is Kelly described as slot rattling, where he's like, oh, okay, well, now I have to convince myself that non-military is good.

And maybe military is bad. Demonize the military. Right. Yeah. And you just kind of end up playing this, you're on a seesaw. And what Kelly said is, no, you need more mental models. You need more lenses. You need other ways to see the world beyond military, non-military, in order to complicate your worldview. Wait, wait, I got to stop you there. Yeah. This is so interesting. So

the mental model made something good and something bad. The answer is to not just switch them. Yes, exactly. But to get a whole new pair of goggles. Exactly. You need more mental models. And I'm thinking about this in the context of the hybrid work debate because we're doing this slot rattling right now. It's often a tug of war between leaders saying, I want you in all the time and I'm going to force it. And employee is saying, no, you can't. And I don't want to work here if you do that. And then, well, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to measure. But can you really measure? And are you really going to fire me if you value me? And it's a wrong conversation. The conversation should be, how do we achieve organizational goals in ways that are respectful

of individuals' lives? If we have that conversation, I mean, one thing that jumps out in the data very clearly is the flexibility people want most is not where they work. No. It's when and how much. Yeah, that's it. They want to control their time, not their place. And so if a leader were to realize that, it would be very easy to say to somebody,

Hey, are you telling me that if I let you leave the office at three o'clock so you can be home with your kids? Carpool, yeah. You will come to the office every day. Maybe that works. That requires another mental model. I mean, this is so interesting because it's getting caught in the binary, even if you switch sides. Classic binary bias. Binary bias.

Yeah. So this is why I love this tool because this is how I spend so much of my time that I get asked to come in and see a problem. And my work is really so, you know, I have to get on my scuba gear and do this deep dive to be like, you know, are we, can we go below the patterns of behavior, below the systems and structures to figure out how do you make sense of the world? How do you think people contribute value? And if you think they contribute value, by with mentoring, coaching, feedback, there are many ways to build that into remote work. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, what's the old joke about consultants that, do you know this one? No, I don't know. A consultant is somebody who borrows your watch, tells you the time, and then charges you for the privilege.

I think that gets something really fundamentally wrong, which is when I'm not good at consulting, But as an advisor or a researcher, when I come into an organization, I am holding up a mirror and helping them see their mental models. And once I've done that, they are much better equipped to solve their problems than I am. Yes. And that's why, you know, someone that asked me at the day, they're like, when did you become an expert on manufacturing and supply chain? And I'm like, that's the problem you see. That underneath it is mental models. And there's a finite group of those, you know, that, We have to challenge, and then we use data. But getting underneath there, even challenging my own mental models is really hard. So this is interesting.

So violent agreement. Yeah, I mean, a ton of it. Have your why. Understand the middle models from which you work. Challenge your middle models with evidence and data. And I think that lands us at we want people to be together a reasonable amount of time and not all the time. For the right reasons. Yes.

I do think the one thing I would say about companies that, and this is not a endorsement or our criticism of how Alassian does it because I am not familiar with it. But what I would say is for purely remote organizations that rely on all hands, the one thing I would say that I see consistently being helpful is scheduling in more white space and more open time and not scheduled plan time for people who don't always get to get to. Yes. Yeah, they need time to actually incubate ideas. It's not programmed. Yes. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Okay, good. Go to questions. Yeah, let's go to questions. 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? So there were two that I thought were really interesting.

One has, I thought it had nothing to do with our conversation from the first part of the episode. But it does relate to mental models because I think a lot of our mental models are wrong on this. The question, this comes from Brie, was can the two of you talk about, birth order. So where do you want to start on that one? I just feel like there are some things where you and I are not going to see I die, which is birth order, enneagram. We'll probably see the same on horoscopes, but astrology, because I'm not for that,

unless it's a good one for the day. But I think birth order can be very significant and very helpful. I don't think it's predictive, but I think it can be, I date a point. How did you know I was going to land in a different place that meant? Because the research is so not compelling. Yeah, it's a mess. Yeah, but the lived experience is super compelling. I think it's hard to study. I think it's hard to study. And I think it's, there's so many complex variables that interact with birth order. Right. Well, let's put something on the table then. I think there are a lot of theories that people hold about birth order that just

do not stand up to evidence. But there are a couple that are supported in some very careful large-scale studies. One is that there is convincing evidence that laterborns are more likely to take risks than firstborns. What do you think of that one? I think that's true. And I think, I mean, what would you say about the studies that show disproportionate number of firstborns

in certain roles in certain leadership roles, for example, high achievement? I mean, I think it's the converse of that, right? And the standard explanation of that is, as a firstborn, you are drawn toward conventional ways of pleasing your elders and, you know, kind of being the model, oldest sibling. And so you get good grades and you run for student government. And that niche is not available anymore to laterborns. And so they need to find a different way to stand out. And they often do that by rebelling, by differentiating, taking risks, trying things that are not proven. And then also, I think there might be a parenting component of this, too,

which is parents are much more controlling with their first child than they are with their fourth. I mean, my younger sisters were juggling knives at five. And I'm the oldest. But I will say that, I don't know, I get, this is where I get really frustrated

because there's such, you can say something that's very emotionally resonant. For example, I came across a meme on Instagram that said, were you really really? a pleasure to have in class, or were you just the firstborn daughter with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder? I saw that?

Yeah, and I was like, here. But then I think what ends up happening is I think this is fine, this is true. You know, firstborn daughters, I could read a room before I could read a book. You know, like, you know, just there were things that are both resonating, helpful, and painful about some of that.

And then all of a sudden, the grifters get a hold of it, and now there's a trauma protocol call based on, you know, this. And then now there's a, you know, and now if you take this supplement. So it's like, then you're like, this is why we can't have nice things. This is why we can only have research. People bastardize studies. Yeah. And they turn it into like, if you sleep this way, this is your diagnosis. You're like, dude, fuck off. Like you don't, you don't have any idea what you're talking about. What is your background? Like, so then it's, then you just go to this

world that I don't live in as a deep person of faith, that if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. Like now, I believe, like, if you could accurately measure it, is it really that important? That's a great question. Okay, so let's go back then to the birth order finding on, you know, kind of conventional achievement versus risk taking. I think part of what's interesting about that is it's a really small effect in most studies. It doesn't show up in all studies. And it depends on how many siblings you have and also on age spacing. So one I think common way of trying to make sense of this is, well, if laterborns are separated by five or more years from their older sibling,

they kind of get a fresh start in terms of they don't have to compete with that older sibling. And so they can go more in the conventional achievement route. If they're only a year or two apart, it's anybody's guess how that might play out. And then you look at this, but you're lumping all. all later borns together? What about being the last born versus a middle child? Middle child never gets covered in these studies. The peacekeeper, like on Instagram, that would be the peacekeeper.

It would be. It's a possible truth to that, but families are so complicated. Why do you want to reduce everything to the order in which you arrived? I don't know, because we're desperate to make meaning. We are. We're desperate to make meaning and to make things make sense. And, you know, it's like, and then when we see something that deeply resonates, it gives us a sense of belonging and place. And like, you know, I'll see all the Gen X, you know, shut up, we drank out of a water hose.

We left on our bikes at 6 a.m. and came back at 10 p.m. Well, that's actually true. We did. I got dysentery playing Oregon Trail. Yeah. So it's like, so it's also a way for us to meaningfully connect with humanity. and each other and tribal in a way. And so I have this like really unspoken connection to other first born daughters. And, you know, so I think it's there's something very human about it. It's just that anything that emotionally resonates

and gives us something is very vulnerable to being misused. Yeah, and exploited. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. Okay. Let's go to the other question. I thought this was an interesting meta question that actually a bunch of different people have submitted. The basic question, as I tried to synthesize across them, was how do you think about the tradeoff between authenticity and just releasing a podcast as you run it and editing to deliver your best material?

And I don't know that we have fully figured out how we're going to do that moving forward, right? I'm a no edit person. And I am a not editing disrespects the listener's time person. Let's cut out the fat, which might be a third of the episode. And I'm more of a believer that we're trying to challenge each other in caring, respectful ways. We're trying to think of new ideas. We're trying to challenge ourselves. And I want a podcast that reflects the fact that they're.

This is, that's not a fast moving process, that there are empty spaces that people are uncomfortable with and the rush to fill them is one of the greatest barriers to deep thinking, deep conversation and meaningful. So I don't want to edit something. It would be like, you know, asking someone to take my wrinkles out. Like, you know, it's like, this is, this is it. You know, I've earned all of these, the smiles, the cry, but, you know, and so for, for, me, I don't think of it as being disrespectful to the listener. I think about it as being honest. I love that framing of it. How do you think about then the dilemma of, I've gotten messages over the years from people saying, yours is the only podcast I listen to because

every minute is well used and I feel like I can fit it into my day. I don't want to lose those people. No. The biggest fans, the people who read all. all of our stuff are probably going to listen regardless. I don't know. I mean, I guess finding a happy medium, I think one of the things that we're doing is we're trying new structures. So we're doing like 30 minutes of this and we're giving people the playbook at the top. I'd be open to listener feedback.

I would have a very hard time and I know this is like, this is my number one enneagram, which I believe in, that I make everything a moral issue as a number one. You're a huge moralizer. It's true. What the frick? Jesus. It's one of your best and also most challenging qualities. Okay.

Whatever. For fuck sake, y'all. But I would almost feel unethical to take a conversation where there were pauses and it was hard and we were trying to figure it out and we were looking like we're struggling to be respectful and make it sound like, do, to do, to do, to do. Because that's not the way the world works and everyone's need to do, do, do, to do. to do to do is dangerous. And so I guess where it comes in for me is maybe the, I've been thinking about this. Maybe it's more structure,

letting listeners know what's going to happen, being explicit why we leave some pauses in and finding a happy medium. Like one thing that is, like one thing that's for sure, I hope that people don't confuse organic conversation with a lack of preparedness because I,

I'm always prepared, you're always prepared. Like, no, we don't prepare together on purpose. At all. This is much more interesting not doing it. The only thing we've done so far is just a line on the topic. That's it. And so I think that's important because I think that's how conversation is real. Yeah.

Like I don't say, hey, Steve, babe, at 6 o'clock, I want to have a conversation about these things. Let's prep it together. I'm going to say this. And actually, I don't always need Steve for my conversations. I just have them with him. And then I let him know whether he's in the shit house or not. But yeah, I think we're just trying. to get it right. I think there's value in maybe a distinction that just became clear to me,

which is there are conversations where the process is important to show, and there are conversations where we're trying to share useful content. And I think the former requires more let the episode run. And the latter, if we went down a 17-minute rabbit hole, maybe people only need to hear 10 minutes of that. I think it's a huge watchout for us. Big time. Yeah, because I could, I could go down a 70 minute. I mean, I was, I wanted to look at which studies you full. I know, wait, wait, wait, but let's talk about that one more. Yeah, yeah, I know. We'll just keep practicing. And we, I love the feedback. I get a lot of good feedback, um, constructive and positive on LinkedIn, which is where my comments are open and I like to get in there and respond to people.

So yeah, I'm open to it. But I do think it's meaningful. to show that if you're actually actively, and I have to do this with leaders a lot. When we teach active listening, the hardest thing that we have to break is you preparing your response while someone else is talking. I don't want to miss anything you're saying

when you say it. Therefore, if I'm gonna respond in a meaningfully respectful way, I need a minute to think about what I'm gonna say that. So I brought my notebook. Yeah, that's why I bought, yeah, I mean like, yeah.

I need to capture that so it's not taking up space. my brain so that I can listen to you. Yeah. And maybe there is something about edits to make it easier for a listener. I'm not convinced that people, in fact, I've seen a lot of feedback for both of us, that people, one person use this term exactly. Thank God you're not insight machines. That's not what we need.

We don't know how to talk to each other. I thought that was the compliment. I want to be an insight machine. Yeah, I do not. I want to be like a, huh. But happy medium? Yes. Let's real try.

And we'll experiment and correct. Yeah. Based on data. Of course. And if you're pulling from LinkedIn, I'm going to draw from Spotify and Instagram. Oh, perfect. That way we'll have a range. Yeah.

And we'll use the one I like best. The one we like best. See you next week. Yep. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brunay Brown, Education and Research Group, and granted productions. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop. YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app.

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