The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant - Why Toughness and Kindness Need Each Other | The Curiosity Shop

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

In this episode of The Curiosity Shop, Brené Brown and Adam Grant explore what happens when trust, vulnerability, grief, and performance collide. Using insights from the San Antonio Spurs and Gregg Popovich's leadership philosophy, they examine why caring deeply is an act of courage, how shame quietly undermines teams, families, and organizations, and how psychological safety fuels excellence. The conversation moves through ambition and rejection, miscarriage and loss, community, emotional intelligence and empathy, and the ways people show up for one another through life's hardest moments. This episode explores how strength and kindness are not opposites and why building cultures of trust may be one of the most important things we do. Victor Wembanyama on having Spurs legend David Robinson and Tim Duncan in the building - 2026, Yahoo Sports  Armored Versus Daring Leadership, Part 1 of 2 - Brené Brown, 2021, Dare to Lead (Podcast) Victor Wembanyama Emotional After Spurs Advance to the NBA Finals - 2026, Bleacher Report  Goals research summary - Gail Matthews, 2015, Dominican University of California Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead - Brené Brown, 2012, Gotham Books Ring Theory Helps Us Bring Comfort In - Elena Sandler, 2025, Psychology Today  Atlas of the Heart - Brené Brown, 2021 (Book)  U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy & Adam Grant on Loneliness - Murthy & Grant, Authors@Wharton, 2024, YouTube  ​Andrew Garfield on grief and the loss of his mother – CBS, 2021, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert​ National Survey of Gun Policy - Center for Gun Violence Solutions, 2025, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health  Empathic Joy and the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis - Batson et al, 1991, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1992-05357-001 Human empathy through the lens of social neuroscience - Decety & Lamm, 2006, The Scientific World Journal  ​The Making of an American​ – Jacob Riis, 1901, Macmillan  ​The Coach–Athlete Relationship Questionnaire (CART-Q)​ – Sophia Jowett, 2004, Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports  ​Bad Is Stronger Than Good​ – Roy Baumeister, 2001, Review of General Psychology  ​Scarred for the Rest of My Career?​ – Erica Carleton (with Julian Barling), 2016, Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology  The evolution of shame and its display - Landers & Sznycer, 2022, Evolutionary human sciences  ​Moral Emotions and Moral Behavior​ – June Tangney, 2007, Annual Review of Psychology The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain - Brené Brown and David Eagleman, 2020, Unlocking Us with Brene Brown Podcast Unlocking the Mysteries of our Brain - Chris Anderson with David Eagleman, 2022, The TED Interview Winning coaches’ locker room secret - Blanding on the research of Barry Staw, 2019, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, everyone. In today's episode of the Curiosity Shop, Adam and I are, there's really very little that we're not talking about in this episode. I'm wearing my Spurs hat today. It's celebrating. And I think he's wearing a Pistons jersey because he looks cute in it, but who knows. But I will say that we are talking about everything from the incredible culture that the Spurs have built. We're talking about what happens when shame seeps into cultures, sports cultures, but also home. work, faith communities. We are talking about hard stuff. We're talking about gun reform. We're talking about grief related to everything from miscarriage, death by suicide, what grief looks like, why we need community, what it means to build families and cultures that are made equally of strength and kindness and how that's really missing from a lot of what we need today to deal with both the joyful things in our lives and the really hard things in our lives. We're glad you're here. Welcome to the Curiosity Shop. A show from the Fox Media Podcast Network. Hi, Adam. Hey, Renee. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Good. How are you? Good.

We were just doing this funny thing. I'm going to bring it into the podcast. Okay, you have to choose. Lego or Duplo? Lego. More creativity. Lego? Or Lincoln Logs?

I think when I was three, it was definitely Lincoln Logs, but since then it's been Legos. You? I'm going to say Duplo over Lego, Duplo over Lincoln Logs, and then Tinker Toys. Do you remember Tinker Toys? Yeah. Tinker toys were like long color-coded sticks. It almost looked like really skinny wooden straws.

And then the joining, the joining piece was a circle, a wooden circle that was wood-colored, that had circles all around it and a hole on the top. And those were my least favorite. Yeah, and they came in a big can. Similar, similar, I think, to Lincoln Logs came in a can, right? They did. Wait, why Duploes? I'm a rounded corner person because, remember, I see things in shapes, and I think rounded corners convey more emotional intelligence and regulation than square corners.

And less pain when you step on them. And less pain, yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, I grew up with very Lego-y kids. So I know the real pain of the, and it's not just the mound of them. It's the stray Lego that'll kill you when you step on it because you're not expecting it. It's the worst. Did you see the Lego slippers that got released a few years ago? No, what?

It's an extra padded pair of Lego-branded slippers so that if you walk around a room full of Legos, it doesn't cause you severe pain. Okay, two inventions that I think I wish I had with my kids. One, the Lego slipper for sure. Two, now they have these mats where you do your Legos on mats and then you just pick up the mat. Oh, it's so clever. The four corners of the mat tie up into a Lego, like a Lego basketball. basket thing. How long did it take us to think of this? I know. This is as obvious as a rolling suitcase. Oh my God, I love her. You mean, can you imagine? Which took forever. It did take forever.

I accidentally said basketball. I just would like some commentary on my hat today. Go Spurs. Can you stand it? I mean, I'm not, I'm not, I don't have a personal attachment to the Spurs, but I've, I've always admired the culture of human. that they built from the Admiral David Robinson to Tim Duncan, now into the Wembe era. I think it's a great team. Can we just say Popovich is just amazing? A legend.

Even as a native Pistons fan, I can admire all of that. Yeah, and you know, it's so funny because when you watch the sidelines, he's there now, but when you watch the sidelines, even when he was coaching, he was so loved by players from other teams, too. It was just, God, I mean, talking about the whole idea that love wins, such a Popovich ethos. Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways.

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So why not you? Try O-D-U for free at O-D-O-D-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com. Okay. I do want to talk about the Spurs today because I want to talk about a couple of things that I've seen all over social media. I definitely want to talk about that. Can we talk more about Popovich too? Oh, God.

Oh, I can, I will always talk about Popovich. Yeah. One of the things, are you a Wembe fan? Define fan. Do you just cry when you see his picture on Instagram? No. Do you? Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I just think he's, yeah, I really love the entire, I love the entire team. But one of the things that I have been really interested in, there is a clip from a press conference where it shows David Robinson and Tim Duncan sitting together in the audience. And the reporter at the conference at the press conference said, asked Wembe, when you look up and you see those legends, and you'll, you'll be.

also see pop there too. Does it feel heavy? And Wimby, who is so thoughtful, you know, just pause for a second and said, no, it feels safe. It feels like if I were to fall, there are people there to pick me up. Wow. And yeah, and I just want to talk about in hyper, you know, you and I both work with athletes and sports teams. In hyper-competitive environments, to build that level of safety, is, one, so intentional and two, I believe so related to performance. Thoughts? I think it's surprising to me how rare it is, given how important it is. What do you make of that?

I think it's, I mean, it's anti, in some ways it cuts against the current of masculinity culture and the idea that athletes are supposed to be tough. But are we, have we arrived at the place where tough and love, where kindness and winning, we're, you know, harken back to the podcast, you know, the last podcast on Paradox? Like, are we at this place where tough and love can't coexist where kindness and performance can't coexist? Yeah, I hope we get to a place where that's not even a paradox anymore. I mean, that's a skill set deficit. Big time. Right? Yeah.

So, I mean, this is so connected to your work on armor. I want to hear you talk about this. Yeah. No, yeah, because one of the other things that I thought was interesting, and this is me putting two things together, there was also when the Spurs beat Oklahoma, there was some footage of Wimby's like sheer emotion just sobbing hugging people and now there's been this real flooding of social media around this meme of nonchalant is over caring is in

and to me his ability to be emotional and to care out loud is inextricably connected to the safety he talks about in that team culture. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, it does because he doesn't have to worry about being judged for what he's expressing, whether it's an apologetic ambition or the joy of victory or the disappointment of defeat. I mean, that's exactly it. It's interesting because we joke about shalant, nonchalant, in our organization all the time because they're always, you know, and I had to look it up.

It's the definition is coolness and difference and unconcern from 16, the 1670s from French, nonchalant, meaning careless. And it's like, my team has told me on a number of occasions. You try very hard to be nonchalant about things and you are, you are shallont a. F. Bernet. You are as shalant as it gets. That's so true. Yeah, so I have come into my ownership of being chalante. But I think it's interesting because, you know, both of my kids played sports and it mattered to my kids a lot. And I remember, and they had to try out for teams and they had to go up for captain and they had to, you know,

You know, Charlie really, Charlie had some college offers to play, and he had to do a lot of hard thinking. But I often told them, letting the people around you that you trust know how much you want something is courage. That is brave. To say, I want this. And it's important to me when you can't control the outcome to me is one of the best. indicators of the relationship between vulnerability and courage. Wow, that's fascinating. Okay, I've never thought about this.

So once you put your goals out there, you're taking a risk because... Huge. Then if you fall short, everyone is going to know that not only did you fail, but now you're going to feel something that you might not have been comfortable revealing. People will know you're hurting. Yeah. Yeah. I've never thought about that as courage to put it out there.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it wasn't, it was like for me where my kids applied for college or tried out for a team or, you know, Ellen ran for president of the student council, like, whatever it was. You know, it, I had to pull them aside and interject the pause that I talk about all the time and just say, I know you're caught up in this moment and you're grinding to achieve something. but I want to pause you here and talk about how brave it is, not only to put yourself out there, but to let people around you know something's important to you. And it didn't always go their way for either one of my kids. You know, and so then to do it another time,

it's just, it doesn't go our way every time. for any of us. And I think, I think Wimby let the world know. And I think I'm probably, you know, I talk a lot about the relationship between vulnerability and boundaries, and I don't think you have to let the world know. But letting the people who are real marble jar people, the people with whom you've built a lot of trust,

letting those folks know what matters, I think is real, it's just, I find it very admirable and very courageous. This is such a, it's such a new way of thinking about sharing your goals for me. And it's actually helping me resolve actually a puzzle that's bothered me for a long time. So there's, I'm sure you've seen decades of research on the power of making your goals public. That when you tell the people around you what you're trying to accomplish, you get a great combination of support and accountability.

You have people encouraging you. you also have people checking in with you to make sure that you're, you know, you're not, you're not falling off the path that you're trying to take. And yet, despite that, so often people are reluctant to put their goals out there. And they end up kind of dreaming in private. And I've never understood why that is until now. I've never thought about the risk of having to say, yeah, like, I wanted to go to that school and I didn't get in. I wanted that job, and I got rejected for it. I wanted to win and I lost.

That's a hard thing to put yourself out there for. Oh my God. It is, it is. And I've been on every side of it that I can think of. I have expressed something that I really wanted. And, you know, it was interesting. I go back to when Daring greatly came out. I told Steve, I might cry, I don't know, I'm going to see if I can work through it,

but I told Steve how much I wanted the real New York book tour experience. And so he got a fancy hotel room for me and surprised me for launch day in New York. And I got there and I got a new outfit and I went. and I remember waking up on Pub Day and Murdoch calling and saying everyone turned down the opportunity to interview you. There's nothing, yeah, there's, and I, in that moment, I sat in my hotel room for two days

and not a single media interview. Oh, no. And, yeah, and I remember, oh, I cried and crying, and cried, and I remember, like, having so many moments of regret about telling, you know, in my fancy hotel room that Steve surprised me with, like telling how much I regretted telling him and my kids and Murdoch how much I wanted that. But then at the same time, they were the ones that were like, fuck everybody. It's a great book, you know, and I'll say probably including my children. But, but.

But then it, you know, caught on later. But in that moment, it was, it was so tough. And I remember kind of the shame of, would this have been easier had I acted like it was no big deal? Because I was raised in a family where you never ever act like anything's a big deal. So that if you lose, you can say you didn't care. Wow. It's hard. That is really hard.

One, I'm sorry that happened. That's just, I mean, the image of you sitting alone in a hotel room is so sad. In a fancy hotel room too. Then I was like, I don't think we can afford this. And I definitely can't afford the room service. Oh, that's painful. It's a little bit easier to stomach knowing ultimately what happened. Obviously, you've done the New York book tour more than once.

Yeah. And are probably over it by now. I never take it for granted anymore. Yeah, clearly. I mean, right, that must be burned into your brain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sensation. But it is a, it's a bit of a paradox because at some level, you're right.

If you hadn't told them, you wouldn't have been in that situation to begin with. But on the other hand, if you hadn't told them, you would have missed out on their understanding and empathy and compassion. I mean, it's true. And I remember the first, I remember getting pregnant with Ellen and calling my sisters. my mom. I told them like we went to go eat Mexican food in Houston and I gave them these little James Avery charms as a surprise. And I said, it's really early and I'm scared to tell you. And I wanted to wait to tell you until, you know, we got further along through the first trimester. But I figured if it, if something happens to the pregnancy, I'm going to need you to know because you're the

ones I'm going to need to call. So here's a charm and don't get it soldered on, the very historic James Avery charm bracelet. Here's the charm, but don't get it soldered on until I get to like 16 weeks. But I want you to know now and celebrate now because if things go wrong, you'll be the people I call. Wow. And then my mom was very, you know, so should we tip her our responses? Because this was the first grandbaby. I said, no, no, no, let's celebrate. But just know that this ride will go both ways. if it, and if it does. This is, this is such a, this is such a challenge around pregnancy. Because, yeah.

So, you know, I, I never thought about it through this lens, but Allison comes from a healthcare background. And so when we were expecting, like, her first thought was, don't tell anyone in case something is wrong. Because then you don't have control over who you share your news with, right? you're then forced to tell everybody, yeah, we lost the baby. So what happens? You wait. But in our case, Allison ended up having a miscarriage. And then no one knew. Like, no one knew that she was pregnant to begin with. And then it was this extra burden to have to say, yeah,

we kept this from you. And like, now we're grieving this loss that you didn't even know we had. God, it's hard. It was, it was definitely. it was painful on multiple levels. And I think once we finally started sharing it with a few people, we discovered tons of people we knew had gone through miscarriages and never told anyone. And this was, it was a topic that there's so much silence around. I'm like, okay, there will come a day when we are grateful this happened because we will have a child that we wouldn't have had, if not for this. But until that day comes, this is going to hurt. And nobody talks. And nobody talks. about it. Everyone is grieving in silence.

I think first, I'm sorry that you and Allison went through that. I think it is one of the most complicated griefs that we don't talk about. So I'm really sorry. Thank you. That's, it's hard. I have to tell you that miscarriage and infertility was the hardest shame research that I did in my career. potentially combined with living through death by suicide as a family member. But I mean, that level of grief, shame, silence, judgment, the cognitive and emotional,

who do we tell, who do we not tell? You're right. It's just, and I don't, I don't know why. That's why I do, I think we have to think about. it in a more granular way maybe, like concentric circles. Like, here's the core group of people that we want to celebrate with and that we will also grieve with. Here's the next group that we maybe don't, you know. And we think about the roles that people play in our lives. I don't know. Oh, okay. So a couple of things that jumped in mind on this. The first is I'm thinking about the

the kvetching circle. Do you know this? Yeah, yes, yes. Like the Yiddish word kavis. Yeah, there's a, there's a circle that a therapist draws where you look at the person who's closest to the pain, and then you draw the concentric circles around it. And the principle that I loved was you comfort in and you dump out. And I'm like, oh, people, like, people need to be taught this because so often. Walk us through it, though, before, because I, I'd heard of it, but I had only heard the end part. walk me through the circles. Well, I mean, I think it's like if we take the example of miscarriage, like Allison's at the center of that circle. And so my job as, you know, as her husband is to comfort the person who's closer to it and make it clear to her that I am there to support her. And then not lean on her to support me because she's suffering more intensely than I am.

What I'm supposed to do is dump out, find people who are in outer rings of the to tell them what I'm going through. And I think people really struggle with this because, like, in a relationship, like, we're supposed to be grieving together. And so, you know, my, my, I guess my impulse in that kind of situation would be to say, like, hey, here's, you know, here's how I'm struggling. But she's already caring a lot. And so I don't want to burden her with having to take care of my emotions at the same time

that she's managing hers. And so I think this, I mean, I think about this all the time when any of, whenever somebody goes through something hard, I'm like, okay, like, yes, I think we all know to comfort the person who's closer, but let's dump outside the circle, the inner circle, so that that person is not stuck in a position where they're having to care as well as be cared for. That seems like it gets missed a lot. I think, yeah, I have to, it's going to take me a long time to process this, because I think in some of my hardest moments, it was interesting because I go to when my sisters and I were caregiving for my mom through her dementia and how it was so, we really, I think,

because we've been in a lot of therapy together and we worked together, so we've learned how to talk about hard things together, how we said to each other, that we're all in our own grief, which makes taking care of each other in this situation almost impossible, that we can be empathetic with each other and we can share stories, but none of us are in the position to care for each other because we're each, like, I'm having a hard time putting you on my back and carrying you because my grief is about 50 cinderbox tied around my shoulders right now. And so I think, I mean, I think it's lucky that we all do therapy. And I can say that because we talk about, we've talked about it on the podcast before.

So it's not like I'm outing my sisters that, I mean, one of my sisters is a therapist. So, but I think, I think it also explains the rates of divorce after the death of a child. That I think, how do you, how do you care for someone else when you're, you know, which is miscarriage too. I mean, you know, which is, I think about the definition we use of grief in our work because I was trying to figure out the best definition in the literature. And then when I did the qualitative analysis, it was like three things, kind of longing, lost. Like, there was this like very deep sense of,

I don't have a mooring. I've lost, like, I'm untethered from what I would define as my ordinary life, which I thought was ordinary till now, and now I'm desperate to get back to it, and this kind of unmet longing for something. It's really hard to be grounding for someone when you don't have footing. Yes. Say that way. Say that again. It's really hard to provide a source of grounding and tethering. for someone when you are completely not grounded or tethered to your own life? Like, how do you, this is just not the way gravity works. So gravity, neither gravity nor grief work that way.

No. And I think this is one of the reasons why I feel like I know a lot of couples who basically are each other's primary and sometimes only source of all emotional support. and you need other people that you can both rely on, not just to complain about each other, but also because there will be times when you're both hurting, and one of you is not in a position to care for the other or in both directions for that matter.

Yeah, I think the whole, I think finding, that's why, you know, and again, I think it's such an access issue, but finding good therapists, good coaches, if I could wave a health care wand, it'd be in my top three things that I would want to provide for everybody, just access to to be able to sit across from someone who, when you're untethered and you can't find the ground, can provide an opportunity to talk through how to get back there, you know, that's not directly connected to your own grief, you know, or fear, anxiety, whatever. it is. I think it's, that should not be privileged.

No. And we've lost community. We've lost community and we've lost multi-generational living and we've lost a lot of the things that provided it before it became professionalized. So I do think it's part of the loneliness. Yeah, I think so too. And I think one of the things that that community used to do was give you an outlet for the longing that you're describing. A lot of, I've noticed that when people go through loss, whether it's, you know, the death of a loved one, or like even, you know, in some cases, like, just a relationship that ends and it's more, you know, ambiguous loss, no one asks you about it. they and it's strange because they think that they're being polite and maybe even respectful

to not remind you and the reality is that then you never had to have a chance to share it you never have a chance to talk about those memories to to reminisce about the person and I'm just thinking about the great psychologist Andrew Garfield spider man who I thought had the most beautiful reframe of grief that I've ever heard when I remember seeing him Uncle Bear actually I think

when he lost his mother and he said that for him grief was unexpressed love he was overwhelmed with all of the feelings of love that he was never going to be able to show to her which yeah one heartbreaking but two

people need to express that love. I'm sure he would want to be asked about her so he could talk about why she was so special to him. And I'm just thinking, you know, your comment about the loss of community, like, if you're not around people who also knew the person you lost, then when are you going to talk about them? When are you going to express the love that you didn't get to share directly? Support for the show comes from Quince. Is there anything better than summer? Long days, warm nights. The barbecues, the beach days. You just have to make sure you have the right wardrobe for the occasion, one that's both chic and breezy. For that, look no further than Quince. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses and tops, with style starting at $32. Their

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One was we started doing research. We were doing Dare to Lead, and we started basically a five-year research project asking leaders, what do the people who report to you do to gain trust? And number one, didn't surprise me at all. It surprises people all the time, but it didn't surprise me. One is ask for help. I trust somebody who asked for help. The wildest thing that held over five years of asking this every time we went to an organization to work with the cohort of C-suite and the direct reports of the C-suite. Do you know what number two was? No, but I want to.

Attend funerals. Really? If you can geographically to attend the funerals that matter to the people with whom you work. Wow. And I just remember doing a dare to lead. intervention at a big tech company and hearing a story about I think I don't know if this matters but to me for some reason it brought we can obviously it mattered because she was the only woman on a software engineering team and her sister died by suicide and very few people

showed up at the funeral which is not unusual in a death by suicide. And it's, and I don't, I think sometimes we can say it's because people think they're being respectful or not by not wanting to bring it up, but sometimes it's people being comfortable in their own, you know, people privileging their comfort over other people's grief and needs. And she said when she walked in, her entire team was there, including two people who'd flown in. Then when she, oh yeah, she said, she said it was one of the most important moments of her life. Then she said on her first day back to work, she was so stressed out about how to bring it up. But her team leader said, we want to let you know that we are excited that you're back.

We've all talked. And we are ready to talk about this and we are ready to not talk about it. But we are comfortable talking about it and we are comfortable not talking about it and we will follow your lead. Like... That's a masterclass in emotional intelligence right there. Oh, yeah, it's just, it's incredible. The second experience I had was maybe in the top, if not that, maybe, yeah, maybe the most difficult professional experience I've had in my life, which was being invited to spend

some time with the parents at Sandy Hook. And I have very strong feelings about gun reform. As someone who was basically raised in a hunting blind, like I am not anti-gun ownership. I shot skeet growing up. Thought for a while I'd go to college on a shooting scholarship. Like I, I, you know, like I was raised in a gun family, a hunting family, a skeet and trap family. But I have always been a huge believer in gun reform as a result of that, actually, not despite that. And so when Sandy Hook happened, they were first graders who were killed, and my son was in first grade. And so when I got invited to go, I was in a car going to Sandy Hook from New York, and I had kind of

one of my first professional full-blown panic attacks. And I called Steve, and I was like, I can't do this. I can't. It's too close. I can't do it. I'm scared. I can't do it. What am I going to say? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if this is, I don't know if this is how to do this. And I was like, I don't know if this is helpful, but I'm going to just, I'm going to believe it anyway. So when I got there, they had pictures of their kids who had been killed. And I fumbled in my bag and pulled out my phone and showed them a picture of my kids. And just intuitively and responsibly, what's what I'm looking intuitively and reflexively? Like in her it just there was a reflexive because we were sharing pictures of children. And two of the parents started crying. And I said, I'm so sorry. Because my children are still alive, right? And I thought, I've done something. And they said, you are the first person that we've showed pictures.

of our kids to who looked at us in this very normal human way and said, let me show you pictures of my kids. And we want to see pictures of your kids because it helps us understand that you know what it means to show the picture of our kids who have been killed. And it was just this moment where like, I remember one of the parents saying to me, if I go to a restaurant and I'm crying, everyone looks at me with pity. And if I go and I'm laughing, they look at me like, don't you care about what happened? And so it's like this loss of normalcy where we participate by not saying things like, wow, I had a really big memory of so-and-so today and how he used to run down the soccer field. Like as if if we say that, they'll

I'll be like, oh, I forgot completely that I had, you know, this happen. So it's what you're saying about community and a way, it's like what we try to mimic with in social work with wraparound services. You know, it's like we try to mimic community with wraparound services where community is the ultimate wraparound service. Right? That's right. I can't believe you went. Just imagining going into that room. The, I mean, just, I think about the, like, the empathic distress of sitting with people who have faced the most unimaginable, horrific thing.

And then also feeling like, well, how do I help? What could I possibly offer here? What did you do? Listened, cried, laughed, told stories, listened to stories, listened to stories. and talked about how one of the things that we don't talk about with grief a lot is the loss of ordinary, the loss of normal. The thing that we diminish the whole time when everything's going okay, how we're resentful of our small lives and the rituals that make up our small lives until the moment those things are gone. And then all we really want is the ordinary part of our lives back. And so I don't, I, the only thing I'm sure of, the only thing I'm 100% sure of about that work, and I, I went several times is it changed me more than I could ever change them. And look, if we're not willing to consider gun reform after Sandy Hook, then I'm clear, don't, don't talk about our love for children as a nation. Like, don't, don't, don't.

Don't waste your bullshit on me. Take it somewhere else because there's a way to think about gun ownership as a responsibility, not a right. And as someone who's raised again in a family where you couldn't shoot anything you couldn't take apart and put back together again and you couldn't kill anything that you didn't feel dress and eat. there's probably a big collection of us that grew up like that that are probably the biggest supporters of gun reform. Especially in a country where the overwhelming majority of both Republicans and Democrats favor simple interventions like universal background checks. I mean, that's, yeah, like, yeah.

Like, we're well above 80%. Right. Like, this should not be hard. No, it's just, yeah. So I think it was a very meaningful experience for me. I still am in touch with several of them, and I think about it all the time. And I think about what a privilege to be invited. Yeah.

Really, just, yeah. But it was scary because this is the whole thing about empathy and love and community is when we choose. our own comfort over being there for someone else. Things break. Just things break. Big things. Hard things. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough.

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You already see oil prices from a high of 120. $26 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 America? 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? What a wild ride this has been from the Spurs. Spurs.

I'll tell you what, though. I actually have infringed back to that, which is I will walk over it with you, Adam Grant. Here we go. Ready? Yeah. I was actually thinking that one of the ways that you know whether teammates really trust each other is whether they show up for each other when something hard happens personally. I think that's true.

And here's the other thing. You can also evaluate the leadership of a team by how willing they are to excavate the grief that's in the locker room and not just about losing, but I mean, like, I think about, you know, I'm a big Liverpool fan. Arnie Slott was just let go by Liverpool. And I think about the work that needs to be done with that team, not on the pitch, but off the pitch, about the death of one of the closest brothers on that team and his younger brother that were killed, you know,

and how much of that work did they surface and do? And this is everything we're talking about right here. If you'll allow me just a one-minute siliquet here. This mythology that if I don't mention the miscarriage, it won't hurt. hurt. Wrong. The idea that if I say something to you when you come back from leave about I'm really sorry to hear about your dad, that that's being, you know, generous. And then the idea that if we don't talk to the players about the grief they're drowning in about the loss of a teammate,

that it's better for performance. Like this is mythologies of comfort. these are not, this is not how we work as humans. Not even close. And, you know, it's, I mean, this actually takes us back to Greg Popovich as a coach. One of my favorite things that he did was when looking at who he wanted on his team, obviously taking talent into account, he said he looked for players who enjoyed other people's success, who were sitting on the bench cheering when their teammates scored. And in psychology, that's called empathetic joy.

And the idea that you could be as excited for somebody else's success as you were for your own is just a core signal that you are interested in being a good teammate. And I think you could pay just as much attention to do you hurt when other people are hurting. I mean, I, and let me ask you this. Because this is an important distinction. I want to, I want to, I want us to dig in here. Do you hurt when other people are hurting? And is that different than do you show up for other people when they're hurting?

Is it a difference between cognitive and affective empathy? Yes. Say more. Yeah. Do you have to hurt when other people are hurting? No. Or do you have to hold space for other people who are hurting and be with them in their hurt. I think we're both all in on the ladder. You do not have to feel other people's feelings to

care about their feelings. And sometimes it's easiest to show care for their feelings when you don't feel it personally. Because then you're not carrying the cinderblocks that you were talking about earlier. Right. Right. And if you are because you're affected by it, then you have to acknowledge the cinder block. So I think I think this is a really strong point on what happens if you have, you know, so affective empathy and cognitive empathy, just the quick differentiator. Cognitive empathy is understanding, you know, intellectually what you're going through and being with you in that, affective empathy is taking on what you're feeling. And that can lead to burnout and really hard in hard things. And so, and I think it's really interesting, empathetic joy is such a Popovich move.

the other Popovich move that I think goes along with that. There are so many we could be here all day on, on great things he does. He also scouted for diversity in playing styles in, did you, have you only played in U.S. college or did you come from international play? Becky Hammond, first woman, to be an assistant coach in the NBA, brought her on. He also, and he, and his coaching staff, he hired intentionally. people who disagreed with him. He did not want people who just, out of reverence, agreed with everything he said. I want to talk about something that's on, it's like 30 feet long and 20 feet high in the Spurs locker room. And it's been there for three decades. And it's a quote that Popovich had made into a wall. It's from Jacob Rees, who was an early 20th century, Danish-American photographer, reformist. And here's what the quote says. I think you'll love this. Do you know it? No. Tell me. Adam, you don't? Okay. When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stone cutter

hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet, at the hundredth and first blow, it will split in two. And I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. Oh, God. It's such, it's so good around, I think kindness and love wins when coupled with discipline and commitment.

And the thing, you know, as, you know, I'm a San Antonio. My parents were from San Antonio. I was born in San Antonio. I think as long as I can think back on the Spurs and Popovich, the three words that come to mind are discipline,

commitment, not compliance, but commitment, and love. And every team I've worked with that worked from that ethos has had incredible winning experiences. Not every season and not all the time because it doesn't work like that.

But to me, We started this conversation, interestingly, about the paradox of toughness and kindness. You know, I think that's when you're sitting with someone in grief or you're the spurs. It takes toughness to sit with someone in grief, and it takes deep kindness. Yeah, it does. And I think so many people still see kindness as a sign of weakness when they don't recognize what they should realize, is it's a source of strength. But to your point, that strength doesn't always show up right away.

It's something that, that it's like an investment in building, it's an investment in building a cohesive team and culture in the long run. But you can't expect an immediate payoff. Like, I was, I was kind to you today and therefore you played better tonight. Maybe. Maybe not. Do you have a better season knowing that there's somebody on your team who has your back? Probably.

Oh, God. Yes. That is actually, that is not, I don't think that's a probably, that is the 3C model, closeness commitment and complementary skills. That, that is, that's research. I think you just hit on research. Well, I'm just thinking also the absence of kindness is, in, In some ways, I'm thinking about the well-documented pattern that bad is stronger than good. Having an abusive or toxic coach or teammate may do more harm even than the upsides you get of, you know, of somebody being unusually kind and caring. I'm thinking about, have we talked about the research on NBA players who had abusive coaches? You and I have offline, but we should talk about it here.

I think it's important. Julian Barling and his colleagues published this study where they looked at coaches who were consistently berating and belittling their players and compared them with coaches who didn't. And so you have a, every coach gets a score on how abusive they are. And then you track what happens to players' careers if they happen to have a coach who was higher on the abusive end of the spectrum. And it turns out those players go on to perform worse for the rest of their careers, even when they're not under that coach's thumb. anymore. Yes. And one of the key mechanisms there seems to be that they have more emotional outbursts. They are more dysregulated. They commit more technical fouls. They end up struggling more to coordinate with their teammates. And in the paper, the researchers talk about it as, like,

these players are a little scarred for life. Like that, that, they never fully healed the wounds of feeling like if I don't perform today, it means there might be something wrong with me. And I never thought about it through a shame lens until you brought shame into this conversation. But I think part of that scar is those abusive coaches are leaving these players with a lasting sense of shame

that interferes with their ability to concentrate on performing their best. I mean, 100%. A hundred percent. Shame impairs performance. performance. I am actively working with teams right now who we're talking about this a lot. And it's interesting because there is, there's so much data on it. And there's some top reasons. Increasing fear of failure, promotes negative team atmosphere, inhibits creativity and innovation, increases burnout,

reduces autonomy. But one of the things that I think I wanted to bring into this conversation, because I really was so excited about these findings. One of the most operationally significant, I think, findings from the shame research around shame and coaching is shame drives concealment. They stop asking questions. They stop taking risk. They stop disclosing struggles. They stop seeking feedback. Shame drives hiding.

because when, when, and this is the parenting truth, this is, this is, you know, one of the places that where I do more work than I do with athletes is in hospital settings and with physicians. And one of the core issues around shame-based medical school and residency programs is concealment. because when something goes wrong, physicians can grapple more with shame from their peers than how it impacts patients or patient families. So what ends up happening is concealment and hiding mistakes. And so, but this is also true in every milieu,

in a classroom, in a locker room, in our living rooms with our kids, when I connect your very, value and your lovability and your worthiness for belonging to your performance, I am driving bat-shit levels of scarring. Like you can get you can come through it and change the trajectory of your athletic performance or your human performance or your personhood, but it will require deliberate repair. Yeah. You have to deliberately go through work, hard trauma work. Shame is trauma. Shame is being told,

this makes you unlovable and unworthy of connection and belonging. It's so serious. Why don't people get how serious it is, Adam? I don't know. I've never understood why anybody thinks this is an effective philosophy of leadership, of parenting, of teaching, pick, pick, environment. I think one of the reasons that people screw this up is shame is powerful. And they see a short-term response. And they think, oh, like, I just shamed my team and all of a sudden they train harder. I just shamed my kid and they stop misbehaving. I am learning that this works. And they don't see the wound. They don't see the long-term detrimental effect it has. All they see is the immediate action. I think it's the same reason why leaders think fear is an effective strategy.

And a lot of parents operate from a position of fear is you get reinforcement for the behavior that elicits an immediate response. And it seems like it's being rewarded because that's what's visible in the short term. And the long-term cost is much more difficult to connect the long-term cost to what I did as a leader or a parent. No, you're exactly right. I remember one of the things I used to say all the time early in the shame research when I was talking, speaking about it publicly, is you can change a child's behavior with shame on a dime. Yep. But you are forever changing who they are. Wow. Yeah. That, that, and you don't see the ladder and you see the former. Or you don't see the ladder until it's too late. Yeah, I mean, this could take me into a really terrible place with things I love like college sports, you know, where are we treating players or some, are some, are shame-based coaches treating players as talent assets and commodities versus as people? I remember being at the end of my freshman year of college. I was a diver, and one of the swim coaches came in and said,

all right, according to NCAA rules, I can't obligate anybody to be here more than, I think it was 15 hours a week. Oh, yeah. And he said, I can't tell anybody to be here more than 15 hours a week. But I can tell you this. If you're not here at least 30 hours a week, I will assume you're not on the team next year. Okay, first of all, I mean, at minimum, the athletes who prioritized school in the off season are getting shamed. more likely they're getting cut. Yeah, this is, this is, you know, I have a question that I don't even know is answerable, but

I do, I do have, but if anyone could answer, it's probably you. Or maybe we could call a phone a friend, maybe David Eagleman, I don't know who we would call, but here's my question. Shame served a biological, an evolutionary biological function, right? You bring danger to the community. We shun and stigmatize you because you're bringing threats to the community, and now we're going to get rid of you. Over time, as we've developed as humans, shame has become far too blunt of an instrument to use because the detrimental effects of it are so, it's so positively correlated with violence, addiction, aggression, suicidal ideation, these things that don't, you know, are really. horrible markers for humans.

Is it possible today that there is an old school coaching, parenting, leading philosophy that has become increasingly excruciating neurobiologically because we have developed amygdala wise and, you know, do you understand? what I'm asking? Yeah. Yeah, is the, is the, if you think about the adaptive origins of shame or the reasons why it, why it existed in the first place, is it increasingly maladaptive given the way that we operate in the modern world? No, I know. I, I think it's, I definitely, they think the use of it, the weaponization of it. Yes, I think it's increasingly maladaptive for sure. I guess what I'm asking, is there, would there be brain changes? Like, the reason why I'm asking this is kids today, college students today,

in my experience, are like, nah, we're not doing that. I'm not, there's some interesting intergenerational, but not super great studies on, you know, our grandparents use more shame than our parents. But is there over time a real physical and neurobiological cognitive response to maladaptive behavior? I am not qualified to answer that question. We should definitely phone a friend. But isn't an interesting question? It's such an interesting question. I'm pretty skeptical. Are you? I'm skeptical. I just, I think the, you know, if you take one conclusion from social cognitive,

of neuroscience, as an outsider who just reads casually in this literature. Neuplasticity is my big takeaway. And I think that our brains evolved to be highly adaptable. And it's hard for me to imagine that there's a generational shift in, you know, the, I guess to me it seems more like a learned psychological response. than an underlying neuro, an underlying neurological response, but I'm outside of my expertise on that one. So your guess is as good as mine. I think it's probably, I think it's probably psychosocial cultural.

Yeah, that's where I would lead. Yeah, and not biological. And I think the resistance, you know, as a very solid gin. Excer. Everybody that I know, myself included, was raised with a pretty healthy dose of shame at home in the classroom as athletes. I think today the kids' rejection of that where they can, and power is a hard thing there, is more psychosocial cultural than it is biological. I'm just wondering if there's, you know. Yeah. It's interesting. I think it's interesting. I think so too. And I think that it's, I guess I look at that question and I think it's surprising to me that anyone believed that it worked even, you know, in the medium term. Even in the short term in some cases. Because you're right, shame does change behavior. But, you know, I'm thinking about there's a Barry Stahed-all study on angry halftime speeches by college basketball coaches. Do you know this one? Oh my God. I don't. I'm so excited I could die. It's such a cool study.

So you look at what happens to a team after the coach goes in and gives the angry half-time speech or not when they're behind. And it turns out that the team is more likely to win if the angry half-time speech happens, but only under two conditions, only under two conditions. The first condition is the coach has to be only moderately angry, not too angry. So they're not berating you to the point of shaming you. They're kind of firing you up. by saying, we got to do better.

Like, this was not good enough. Yeah. And secondly, and I think this is the real kicker, they have to be not normally angry. So they're not tyrants. Oh my God, I love this. They're not typically out of control. Yeah.

This is a situationally appropriate response from somebody for whom this is out of character. And so, wow, we must be really blowing it that our level-headed, calm coach is now a little bit worked up and we need to rise to this occasion. And I mean, to me, that research just decimates the Bobby Knight style of, you know, of coaching and leadership.

And says, you actually want the person who, to the point you were making earlier, you want the coach who makes the team feel safe and sets high standards of discipline and performance. That's it. Oh, my God. I love this. I love this. One of the best angry halftime speeches that I've ever heard in, like real time because I was there working with this team was a coach who rarely if ever raised

his voice and he said and he had tears in his eyes and he said I'm so effing angry you're letting yourselves down you're disappointing yourselves I don't want this for you you have trained for this and I was like I am suiting up let's go Brayne Brad is playing center. I could take it from here. She will be blocking all the shots. Oh, yeah, no, yeah. You will want me out there.

Yeah, so I, that's just incredible. This has been, this has been a roller coaster of emotion. Seriously. What are you doing to me, Bray? I don't know, but I like it. We're both like, hands up, woo, strapped in. I like it. I will say that I'm not using any roller coaster

metaphors right now because they're a roller coaster in Galveston that my kids, that's over the water, got stuck. Did you see this in the news? No, oh no. Yeah, it got stuck 100 feet up, 105 feet up,

and I know it was 105, with people backward for four hours. Oh. And the firefighter ladder was 100 feet exactly. No. And they were stuck 105, and they got them. out. So it's like, and I'm a roller coaster rider, but I don't do like, but I don't do the ocean.

So I got to pick, you got to pick too scary as hell things. Are you a roller coaster rider? We'll end with this question. I've, I was afraid of heights as a kid. And I tried to cure myself by going on every ride at Cedar Point, my senior year of high school. And it partially worked. Exposure therapy. It was exposure therapy 101. And, It worked in the sense that I've told our kids, I will ride any ride with you that you want to ride. And I do it, but the fear has never gone away. It's so interesting that you, that Steve does not love a roller coaster. Steve hates a roller coaster, but has told my kids, I'll ride anything with you that you want me to ride.

Is that, is that dad school? Where do you get that? Yeah, this is dad bravado. I don't want my kids to be scared like I was, so I'm going to put on a tough front. Yeah, because when I, before we had kids, I said, ride this with me. He's like, I'll hold your purse. But with the kids, he's like, he just looks at me and he's like, God damn it. All right.

That sounds fun. Here we go. Yeah. I like that. Okay, this was a good conversation. I have had all the feels. Have you had all the feels? I've had more feels in this conversation than I have in a typical week.

You're welcome. Thank you, I think. Oh, you love it. All right. See you next time. 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.

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