The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 523: Derek Thompson - The Meaning Of Work, Responding To Rejection, Earning Your Dream Job, Impressing Bill Simmons, & How To Find The Next Great QB

Episode Date: April 23, 2023

Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." Join 10's of thousands of your fellow learning leaders and receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12   https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the books Hit Makers and On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity, and the host of the podcast Plain English.   Notes: Before graduating from high school, Derek appeared in several theatrical productions at the Folger Shakespeare Theater and the Shakespeare Theater. Why do Americans care so much about work? workism is "the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production but also the centerpiece of one's identity and life's purpose." Jobs, Careers, or Callings: One theory of work holds that people tend to see themselves in jobs, careers, or callings… The Bow and Arrow metaphor… We need stress, but we need to let it go. You pull back on the bow and arrow… Then you let it go. Stress + Rest = Growth "Happiness means being balanced between busyness and leisure." The mark of a good leader? Don't be afraid to ask the ignorant question… Have the confidence to ask it. Derek had breakfast with the prominent CEO… The CEO was deeply curious about Derek. Asked him a lot of questions, listened intently, and asked great follow-ups. Great leaders make their conversations about the other person. Follow your curiosity with great rigor. That same leader also had the emotional intelligence to not bother Derek Jeter while he was having breakfast. He knew there would be a better time to meet. The book, an anthology of Thompson's articles for The Atlantic, includes a new adaptation of his essay on workism, a term that he defines as "the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production but also the centerpiece of one's identity and life's purpose." "The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms," Thompson writes. "Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants." How Derek earned a job writing for The Atlantic out of college? After being rejected 30 times, he applied for a fellowship with The Atlantic and got it. He then earned a job writing about economics for them even though he had no background or interest in economics. "It's like the New York Yankees offered me to play second base even though I played catcher my whole life." How Derek earned a role as a podcast host working for Bill Simmons? "Bill had me on his podcast to talk about Covid after he read some things I'd written for The Atlantic. That was sort of an audition. After he had me on, he asked if I wanted to have my own podcast on his network. We eventually came up with the name Plain English." The name of the show is very important. You want people to be able to easily say, "Hey, I listen to Plain English." How to predict the next great quarterback? It's contingent upon their surroundings (their coaching staff, receivers, linemen, etc...) Life/Career Advice: Skin thickness -- It can't be so thin that you can't accept criticism, but it can't be so thick that you stop listening. You have be somewhere in the middle. Working hours — no large country globally averages more hours of work per year than the United States. Americans work longer hours, have shorter vacations, get less unemployment, and retire later.

Quick announcement before we get to tonight's episode with Derek Thompson, I want to address some feedback I received over the weekend. I got an email from a listener who shared some of his thoughts on me potentially editing the show. And so today, before this one with Eric, I'm going to read his email. I'm going to share then some of the feedback I've received from you. as I posted this email, I took out his name, but I posted the email on all of my social media over the weekend. And then I'm going to share my thoughts on it as well as what we're going to do moving forward. Okay, here is the email I received. Said, Ryan, I know you stated that you don't

edit out language because you want to keep it authentic. It is my belief that one who can't or won't control his tongue or temper likely has other issues that reflect on his character. In many professional settings, such language may constitute a hostile work environment. It would reflect poorly on my character and could result in punitive action for someone I might share it with. As a result, I review each show carefully before sharing and I can't recommend anyone follow your podcast, though I have not found anything better in your space. A recent podcast with a set of repeated F-bombs was likely one of the best, but rendered useless. You have every right to do you.

I have to do me. I thought you would like to know. Again, I posted this email on Instagram stories, my Instagram stories, and posted a quick ask, should I edit out language of the podcast? Yes or no. I also posted this on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. I wanted to get a wide variety of responses and gather what you, loyal listeners, think of this. And I'm also genuinely curious just to kind of see your thoughts.

So first, I'll cover the results of my poll on Instagram, as well as some of the other comments I shared. Some of the ones were public and some were public. and some were private. If public, I'll share names. If private, I will not because all of my social media is public for anybody to see. So, first, the results of the poll on Instagram. My Instagram handle is at Ryan Hawk 12. 84% of people voted no.

Do not edit the authentic language used on the podcast. 16% said, yes, I should. I also got a number of direct messages from you who shared a lot of emotion behind this. I was surprised. I wasn't quite sure I was, when I got this email, it was very early Saturday morning. I was at a volleyball tournament out of town. I'm in a hotel working out in gym. I thought, oh, let me just post this and see what people think.

I'm curious. I was a bit surprised at the amount of emotion. The number of F bombs I received in the DMs as how they felt for this person who sent the email was interesting. and I thought, well, it's worth addressing because this is feedback and I'm trying to learn. I mean, I'm trying to about the values of being a learning leader. So it does seem the majority of you want me to continue not editing out language on the show as I've done for a very long time. Now, I want to share more of the thoughts from you, some of your comments to my social media post. as well as my thoughts and then share what we'll do moving forward.

A few comments, Nate Waldron, who I respect and has followed my show. I know for a long time based on his emails and comments. Nate said, I choose not to listen to those episodes that are marked explicit. I should have said before, if Apple Podcasts, you do need to mark when you're going to upload them. I use Libson as my podcast hosting provider. When I upload it into Libson, I do mark an E for explicit. if there is any of the language that is mentioned in this email that I received. So I do mark them E, and you can clearly see that when you're looking at the podcast.

And it sounds like in this case, Nate chooses not to listen to those episodes that are marked explicit. Tyler Dickerhoof said, I've been on his podcast before. He said, I believe, and I know he works closely with John Maxwell, I believe I would have never had the opportunity to build a close mentoring relationship with John Maxwell if I used certain words as a part of. of my regular language. I would prefer people edit and look deeper into their heart to communicate rather than use words deemed offensive because, quote, that's who they are. Next, Dave Bricksey, somebody worked with for years and certainly respect. He said, Ryan, I feel this is a you decision based on your values.

If it were me, I would edit it as I find it offensive, unnecessary, and a mark of poor character and intellect. Not a popular opinion, I'm sure, but one I'm entitled to. Next, my good friend, former teammate Calvin, big circus blackman. I played with Calvin at Miami University. He was one of my receivers. He said, quote, I mean, it's year eight. And in the words of Lil Wayne, if it ain't broke, don't break it.

Thank you, Calvin, for adding some levity. But good quote, too. Amy Grubb, friend of mine who works at the FBI, was at my Learning Leader Growth Summit in 2022. She said, having been, quote, raised by wolves where I work, I hardly notice harsh language, but also I totally get that is not everyone's jam. I doubt any guess comes on with the intent to shock and turn off listeners. Next one is from my good friend Matt Hine. I've been friend with him for a long time.

He said, after all, they're only words. We decide the power we give them. In one of my group chats, I will keep this name private because it is a private message. He said, the world is wild. Resistance. If you don't like it, create your own. The doers are busy doing. And I'll share one more.

This came from Kelly Kell. She said, quote, I think there's a big difference between expletives being used as adjectives or as weapons, if directed at people. Yeah, I can see how it would be taken as triggering and hostile, but if it's an adjective, then I don't think it carries the same damage slash impact. I intentionally shared Kelly's note last because I think she makes a fantastic point. To me, I have never been offended by the use of F bombs or any other language like that, especially when they're used as adjectives.

Now, if they're used to name call or to be hateful, I think that's different. And I do think there's an issue whether you're using that language or not with trying to be mean-spirited and put people down. I don't think that's a good thing to do, obviously. But when this language, when F-bombs and similar words are used as adjectives within the regular course of conversation, I have never, and I can't imagine a day that I would ever be offended by that. And quite frankly, I don't understand why someone would be offended by an F-bomb. But I'm generally open to change my mind. And I'm curious to hear from you. This is not a rhetorical question. If you are offended by someone who uses F-bombs, send me an email, Ryan at learningleader.com, and tell me why. Why are these

words offensive. Because at this point, I don't get that point of view. Again, I'm open to changing my mind. I'm curious to see it from all perspectives. I want to hear that. Maybe something happened to your life that makes those words triggering. I don't know. In my life, I was brought up, in fact, in a home with parents who rarely, if ever, used that language. I was also brought up in the world of playing sports. And from a young age, up through my time in high school, college, and playing professionally, I had coaches and teammates where it was a regular part of how we talked. The coaches to us, the teammates, the locker room, all of that was just how we talked.

It's not like you become numb to it. It's just the way conversation flows. And I don't think it really gets in the way of anything. And I rarely found, if ever, I can think of a person who was offended by that, maybe. I don't recall. But I thought as I transitioned out of the world of being an athlete, into the professional space, into the corporate America, my thinking was, well, this will probably change.

I would imagine that that language, it will not be used. And then I got into corporate America, and I may have initially been a bit surprised, but I found that the use of that language is very common. I work with leaders in all different size of companies and all different industries from multiple countries all over the world, whether they're CEOs, they're mid-level managers, they're running a professional sports team, they own their own business, they're a SVP at a Fortune 100 company. All those types of people have been clients of mine. I advise them. I work with them. I go to a lot of their meetings. In fact, I just was in a senior leadership meeting yesterday afternoon. I would say that, there was probably 20 to 30 F-bombs dropped within that two-hour meeting. And it did not get in the way.

Nobody stopped to say they were offended. It didn't seem like any of them were because there was a wide variety of people using that language. It was just normal. And so out in the world, it feels to me like this is how people talk. So that leads me to the decision that we've made moving forward. And that is we will not edit the language you. by the leaders that come on my show. When I meet with them prior to us recording,

I tell them I wanted to feel like there are two people having lunch together, genuinely curious about one another, trying to get to know each other and hearing fantastic stories that hopefully will help both of us, and that the listener gets to eavesdrop, and really they're the one sitting next to us having that conversation. That's what I want it to feel like. So moving forward,

I will continue to tell my guest to be themselves, to be authentic, to be real, to be genuine. And if that's how they talk, then I'm great with it. If they don't use that language, I'm great with it. I don't really care. I just want them to show up as themselves and authentically be genuine, not try to be a different person or not try to perform for the microphone, but just to be themselves. So moving forward, we will not edit. the language of podcast guests. I will not tell them to alter their language. I will just tell them as I always have, be yourself. For those of you who are offended by that or skip those episodes

that are marked with an E or will not refer those episodes to others, I'm genuinely bonned by that. I am. I wish you would. I think there are so many good episodes marked with an E that you are missing out on. I truly do. I would ask you to reconsider that thought and also to ask yourself why are you offended by F bombs and language like that? Maybe you have a good reason and if so, I'm all ears to hear it, but I would ask you to reconsider skipping those episodes because I think there's some really good ones. So moving forward, we will not edit language. We will continue as is. Thank you very much for your concern. Thank you very much for listening.

If you have any feedback, as always, send me an email. Ryan at Learning Leader.com. All right, let's get to the show with Derek. Welcome to The Learning Leader Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text, Hawk to 66866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world,

will receive a carefully curated email from me. each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, The Pursuit of Excellence, will help you become a more effective leader. Text, Hawk to 66866. Now on to tonight's featured leader, great one, Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic, an author of the books, Hitmakers, and On Work,

Money, Meaning, and Identity. He's also the host of a great podcast called Plain English. During this conversation we discuss, how you can earn your dream job. Then we talked about why work has replaced religion for some people. Fascinating topic. Then how to bounce back from rejection, how to ask better questions. And at the end, we even talked about why it's so hard to predict the next great quarterback.

This one was so much fun, so wide-ranging. Ladies and gentlemen, it's the great Derek Thompson. Derek Thompson, great to have you back on The Learning Leaders Show. Welcome, man. It's good to be here. Thank you. So in your latest work, a book called On Work, which On Work, Money, Meaning, and Identity, there's a phrase that you coined called Workism. And that's, quote, the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production,

but also the centerpiece of one's identity and life's purpose. And I don't know if there's this more an American thing, feel like it is, but what is it that you think about Americans that make us care so much more about work than perhaps we used to? It's a really good question. It's something that I thought about a lot since I wrote this essay several years ago. And when I coined workism, it's been really interesting that some people who hear the definition think that I'm holding it up as a good thing. And then some people who hear it think that I am holding it up as a purely bad thing. And the truth is that I'm holding it up as a sort of sociological phenomenon. and I'm trying to explore the ways in which it is good or bad.

And that, I think, touches very directly on America's character. This country has, for hundreds of years, been enmeshed in something like the Protestant work ethic in a way that other countries have not. You go back to the 1800s, and there are people talking about the American dream, this idea that only in America can somebody, shake off the ropes and bindings of genetics and environment and history and simply become whoever they want to be by simply working. You know, this is why, I think, books like The Fountainhead took off in the U.S.

in a way that they didn't take off in other countries. Why, you know, mid-century existentialism was very much into this idea that you are whoever you can become. You know, this concept of, you know, who are we? Is it nature versus nurture? In America, for many people, the answer is neither. You are however hard you work. And I became very interested in this concept of workism through a pretty interesting and esoteric piece of time use data. I realize that for the most part in economic history, the richer any group gets, the richer any country gets, typically it tends to work less. And this is true across Europe, and it's true to a certain extent in the U.S. too.

But starting in the 1980s, richer Americans started working more and more and more, even as lower-income Americans were working less. And so I asked myself the question, why is it the people who could do anything with their time are using their time to buy more work? And my answer to it was perhaps it's because work for them is an asset. It is the centerpiece of their life. And that's why the richest people are choosing to spend more time to buy work. And at a time of declining religiosity, I just found it really ironic and really fit in that people might, and especially less religious, cosmopolitan elites in major cities might kick God off the pedestal.

realize that something has to stand at the top of that pedestal and then put their work identity at the top. I think you quoted David Foster Wallace, right? We all worship something, correct? And in this case, it feels like the work is what has taken the place of that. And that's worshipped by more and more people every day. It does seem to be worshipped by many, many people. And not just in America. If you look at working hours in Scandinavia, you look at working culture in a place like Korea, I think it's really fascinating, the degree to which some groups, especially some higher

income elite groups, seem to be choosing to work more when they don't have to, seem to be choosing to make work this sort of tent pole of their identity. And the truth is that this, like so many other fascinating sociological phenomena, has, I think, good and bad things in it. So on the good side, I think it's important to point. out that work is a lot more fun than it used to be. You know, you and I are working right now. Like, what are we doing? We're just having a conversation. Like, we're just participating in a marketplace of ideas, having a conversation that we might otherwise have at like, you know, 5 p.m. over a beer. What are we doing? We're BSing about the nature of the world. This is fun.

This is not the 19th century. We're not, you know, on a ship where we're dying of, you know, dysentery trying to hunt a whale so we can smash its head and climb inside of it to harvest oil that we can use to last light gas lamps like this is not shitty disgusting grueling work this is fun and so if people are falling in love with jobs they're just a little bit more fun than they used to be well like who am i from a distance to psychoanalyze them from afar and say you're actually secretly miserable and i know this because i have some theory in a article that i wrote at some point 2019. That doesn't seem very sophisticated. On the other hand, I do think that to the extent that people can only worship a certain number of things in their lives, I want to challenge them to ask the

question, is work worth the worship? Because work is falsifiable. It's falsifying in a way that other things are not. Like, when you have a steady partner, for example, in a monogamous relationship, you're hopefully not in a relationship where the relationship is based on a certain kind of per hour productivity, where you're getting quarterly feedback in terms of productivity is up, productivity is down, you can be fired, you can be demoted, there's a chance for promotion, but you're going to feel bad if you don't get it. The best relationships in life don't have that kind of sharp feedback loop that is constantly judging. And it's nice that God, I'm not a particularly religious person.

One thing I definitely admire about a lot of faiths and about deep faith in God is that God is unfalsifiable. There's no answer to the question, is there a God or is there not a God? How the hell would I know? So it's kind of lovely to put your faith in something that is a leap of faith to quote, Kierkegaard, a leap into an unknown. Work is no such thing, but many of us have made our desks our altars. We have chosen to place in work this kind of religious faith. And the truth is that those jobs that we embody often, we're not designed to give us sort of a religious kind of

self-actualization. They're designed to make money. And so it's a kind of misalignment within workism for many people. They imbue their working lives with a level of expectation that cannot be borne out by the job itself. I feel like though, when I look at analyze your career, you get hired by a big type company like the Atlantic right out of college essentially. You go to Northwestern and it would feel like you'd have to write for years and years and years and publish in many places before you get a job like that. But you, which I am curious how you were able to do that. But then you write books. You get recruited to join Bill Simmons Podcast Network, which he could literally choose anybody in the world,

and he picks you, and there's very few others. So you feel to me like an example of someone who works all the time and works constantly. Now, it's fun work, it seems. It's stuff you're deeply curious about, but it's become kind of your life I sense from measuring, or at least from my perspective of what you're doing. What do you think about that? you have me nailed. I, in the article, in the original essay about workism, say toward the end, I have to confess, this is a bit of me search.

I'm a workist by any meaningful definition of the term. I really do like my job. I have a very unusual job in which I am essentially paid. Jobs. I have a very unusual job portfolio. I'm essentially paid to write and talk about whatever I want. And there's both wonderful freedom in that job description and extraordinary anxiety. Because write about whatever you want so long as it is the most interesting thing in the world creates a kind of dizziness of optionality.

You know, Kierkegaard said anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Sometimes having too much freedom can lead to a little to a lot of anxiety. And that's part of the fun of it. and it's part of the anxiety of it. And one of the central challenges of my life is that because I literally can be working at any given moment, and this is true in two ways. One, I could just open up my computer or phone and send myself an email that becomes the lead of an article and a given second of the day, but also because my portfolio from a beat perspective is,

you know, tech and society and politics and culture, I can always be thinking about my job. and is therefore very important for me to learn how to and master the art of letting go of it, understanding that even as I'm out to dinner with my wife or hanging out with friends, I could be thinking about any article or any podcast. I could be lost in that moment somewhere else at the virtual desk inside my mind. But that's not life. That's not living. That's the act of being lost in workism.

And so to a certain extent, this essay was a kind of self-diagnosis and self-prescription to learn to let go of that easy ability to lose myself in work. That seems easier said than done. I know that feeling since leaving the corporate world in late 2017 now to do like the passion job, but it becomes your full-time thing. And it almost becomes all-consuming. I'm with you. I am thinking about podcasts. I'm thinking about, I was thinking about this conversation. I was just on vacation.

And I was thinking about it on the boat ride to go parasailing. Like I wonder where I start with Derek because I'm fascinated by his podcast, by his writing, by all these different things. And I'm actually thinking of the open writing in a boat. But I don't know. Is that a privilege or is that a problem? I'm not sure. But it does, I feel it sense, like I feel it in my mind almost all the time. I got to believe you have that too.

Absolutely. And my answer to you as an absolute non-clinical psychologist, although my wife is getting a PhD in clinical psychology, so I at least, you know, pretend that I absorb some byasmosis. The question to ask yourself is, does it feel good? Yeah. Is it adaptive? Does it help you get through your day? Or do you ruminate on the fact that you're too stuck up on work? Does it keep you from forming intimate relationships? Does it distract? and the intimate relationships that you do have. I feel most of the time when things are good that my cup is full and the meniscus is like touching the top of the cup. Like I am working, working, working until the cup is filled. And then, again, when things are going well, I have the restraints and wherewithal to just leave, to get up and go on with my day and have that second life, which hopefully is, you know, in terms of the ordering of my life, my first life, which is my wife and my family, my friends. And so I don't think that being obsessed with one's job is necessarily a bad thing if you can let go.

I had, on one of my podcast episodes with Oliver Berkman about his wonderful book, 4,000 weeks, we talked a lot about time and the nature of meaning and life, and it was one of these really wonderful, big, thinky conversations. And this metaphor occurred to me that has been rumbling around in my head a lot since we had that conversation, because we were talking about the interplay between stress in life and how important stress is, I think, in achieving excellence and in improving yourself, but also how, obviously, obviously, a culture built around maximizing stress can be bad for you. And the metaphor that occurred to me was a bow and arrow, that the point of a bow and arrow

is to create stress in order to let go. The arrow can't fly out of the bow without stress. You need to create an enormous kind of strain on that bow. But also, the arrow only flies at the moment that you let your hand release. and so much of life, I think, is a little bit like that bow and arrow, that I love having a stressful, high achieving job. But my ability to appreciate that gift is only measured by the degree to which I can be happy in the time that I'm not doing it. Otherwise, what's the point of working so hard if that hard work immiserates me, even as I'm doing it and when I leave the job? You have to learn the art about creating tension and letting tension go.

And I have just thought a lot about the duality of that challenge and how, at least in my life, it explains so much of the art of living well. I think it's the great equation from Brad Stolberg and Steve Bagnos, who you just had on, which is, stress plus rest equals growth. You think about in the gym, you lift weights, you stress your muscles, but they don't grow if you don't give them time to rest. The same could be true for this. I am curious though, Derek, do you ever have moments where you say, man, it might be nice to have a clock in, clock out, nine to five job?

I know you don't have that. I don't have that. But it might be nice just to kind of punch the clock, do the work for the day, punch the clock, and I'm out of there. I'm going to go to happy hour sometime on Friday because we're going to get out a little bit early and I'm pumped for that. Do you ever have those thoughts? I do the thoughts, but I have the thoughts in the context of maybe I should turn this job into a punch-in, punch-out job. Does that make sense?

Because how would you do that? My job is not like being a teacher or being a doorman or being any job where it's, is defined by time spent, right? When you're a teacher, you have to be in the classroom from eight to three. When you're a doorman or when you're a neurosurgeon, you have to be at the door or at the hospital in a certain period of time. There are some jobs that are defined by their working hours. My job is defined by output.

When am I going to write my next book? No one who reads it cares. No one who reads it is going to care whether I wrote that book in the morning. in the afternoon or the night. It's not time defined, it's product defined. When someone's reading an article of mine on the Atlantic, do they care when I wrote it, a Tuesday or a Wednesday? No, they just care that the product exists. Same with the podcast. So I have a job that is not time defined, as many jobs are. I have a job that is product defined. And that means that the time is entirely up to me. If I sort of fall prey to, is it called Parkinson's Law, where work,

spans to fill time allotted. That's right. Essentially, if I give myself two weeks to write an article, it'll take exactly two weeks. If I give myself two hours to write an article, I'll probably write it in two and a half hours. I'll miss the deadline, but I'll at least read it in a matter of hours rather than weeks. Time expands to fill time allotted. And so for people who have product-based jobs rather than time-based jobs like I do, I think it's incredibly important to be diligent about enforcing the kind of schedule that you mentioned.

So to directly answer your question, do I ever wish I had a clock in at 9 a.m.? fuck out at 5 a.m. job. Yeah, some Wednesdays, that's exactly what I do. I say, I'm not going to start working until 9. I'm going to stop working at 5. At 501, I'm getting out of here, putting on my sneakers and going to the gym. It doesn't matter if I finish the article or if I don't finish the article, if I've had a great day or if I've had a terrible day. The day ends at 5. And whatever failure happened on Tuesday, I'll just deal with it on Wednesday. I try to give myself that kind of rigor because otherwise you just go crazy. You end up not creating any kind of schedule. for yourself. And as a result, Parkinson's law takes over and you end up spending all of your

hours working badly rather than a finite number of hours working well. I mentioned a couple of the jobs you have that I'm, I am fascinated by how people earn a job. So we're talking about work and people want, I had a conversation with a college student who's graduating soon. And I feel some of his fear. He doesn't have a job lined up yet because he's, he wants some meaning in it. And he's I haven't found it yet. And I'm like, I'm with you. So I was thinking about our conversation. So two jobs I want to ask you about.

And maybe you could take me inside how you earn them. The first one, I'll listen both and you can tell both stories here. The first one is the Atlantic job, right? Which, again, I was shocked to read, but maybe this is normal that you earned it basically right out of college. Now, you went to a great school, Northwestern, known for journalism. And then second, I've been listening to Bill Simmons for a very long time, more than a decade, his podcast. This is one of the original podcasters. And as I mentioned before, he can choose anybody to ask to come join his network. And you're one of those few people he's chosen and

you kill it on plain English. So how did you earn both of those jobs? So the first job, I'm 21 years old. I'm a senior at Northwestern majoring in journalism, but really just more interested in being an actor. I spent most of my time in college just doing plays and singing, which is, Frankly, when you're 20 years old, at least I would say, a lot more fun than reporting on the school cafeteria or Northwesterns administration and their reaction to some incredibly, you know, kicky-y-yoon student controversy. So I'm 21 years old. The years 2008 is probably the worst year of the century to apply for a journalism job. The first 30 magazines that I send cover letters to, I get zero replies. and including the Atlantic for an internship.

And I'm getting pretty scared. And I send an application to a new internship at the Atlantic, which is called a media fellowship. This is, it was not a writing internship. It was kind of like a consulting internship for the Atlantic, doing media consulting. The Atlantic wanted to branch into other businesses outside of the Atlantic proper. They wanted to experiment with other websites.

and they were going to have a bunch of 22-year-olds essentially serve as a kind of in-house, I don't know, McKinsey to help them figure it out. So I get that job to be an in-house McKinsey person. It is a nine-month fellowship, and about six months into the fellowship, we are in the process of trying to build a website that ends up becoming a website that was called the Atlantic Wire,

which was then folded back into the Atlantic several years ago. and I have a fateful meeting. I'm getting to change my life where my boss asked me, Derek, we just lost a potential writer and we lost a writer about economics on the Atlantic website. Would you like to write about economics

for the Atlantic website? And my response was, in this incredibly important moment in my life, no, don't make me do it. I was like, I love news. When I get the Washington Post, the only section of the newspaper

that I throw away is the business section. I hate business. I hate economics. Please don't make me do this. I remember telling my mom at the time, I was like, I feel like I'm like a baseball player who spent this entire life hoping to be drafted by the New York Yankees and have like played catcher

for 18 years of my life. And the Yankees are like, congratulations, you're drafted. You're our new second baseman. It's like, what? I don't know how to do this. I never played second base. So I told the Atlantic like, you know, you're going to be really embarrassed by how bad I am at this job. And they said, if you suck at this job, we'll just fire you back to your old job. So there's no risk in you sucking. And I decided to

treat my time as an Atlantic economics writer as a bit of like a forced, you know, self-administered master's program in issues in modern economics. But mostly, and this is, I think, finally arriving to the point of why I was lucky enough to find a little bit of a really success of the Atlantic. It occurred to me that I was normal in my distrust of economics as an interesting subject. I was normal in thinking business for people who aren't obsessed with business. It's like kind of boring and arcane. And so I tried to adopt what I called like the 9 a.m. mentality where I'd wake up, it's 9 a.m. there's a story in the world of macroeconomics.

Maybe it's something like, why is the unemployment rate so high? And I would call a bunch of economists, and they would say, here's why the unemployment rate is so high. And then at 3 p.m., I would start writing the article, and I would remember my 9 a.m. self. What are the questions I needed to have answered at 9 a.m. and how do I write my 3 p.m. article from the vantage point of my 9 a.m. self. And I think that perspective is so important because one of the hardest things to do as a reporter

is remembering who you were before you learn stuff. So another way to sort of recast the metaphor is like imagine that you're a pearl diver. You dive to the bottom of a body of water and you get this pearl. Well, you haven't done your job yet. You have to get back to sea level. You have to get back to land. You have to come all the way back to the surface with the pearl and then show all these people that didn't go on that subterranean journey.

This is what it's like under there. And so that approach to writing that economics that was plain-languaged, very normy, very filled with easy metaphors, because analogies are a wonderful way to explain complicated ideas to people that aren't going on that full subterranean reporting journey with you. That toolkit really served me well, and yada, yada, I'm still at the Atlantic. What did you learn through that process of writing about economics for such a prestigious place like the Atlantic? initially not wanting to do it and then being, oh, like I would imagine there were a lot of ahas throughout that time. Yeah, I want to answer two points that you brought up there. One, about the ability of writing to provide clarity to previously unclear thoughts and to

what I enjoyed by being forced to become an economics writer. And I'll take them in the opposite order. So two, I didn't think I'd like economics. I thought initially that economics would be boring and arcane and overly complicated and too numbery. And I realized that one of the things that I really enjoyed about economics as a field was precisely the fact that it was so filled with numbers. and there's something about numbers that at least initially, I found very comforting because statistics were something to hang an argument on. There was something empirical about a paper that I could write about or a unemployment figure that I could point to and say, here's a graph of unemployment. It's going up. We can all see that it's going up. Now we can ask why.

And that allowed me to break my thoughts into, and I talk about this breakdown on the podcast from time to time, evidence versus interpretation. That is evidence. This is the real world we can all agree on. This is objective reality. And objective reality, by definition, replicates. If we're all looking at a dog, we can all say it to dog. If we're all looking at an unemployment graph, we can all say it's an unemployment graph. That's the replicability of objective reality.

That's something that anyone can understand. But then you get into the fun stuff. And the fun stuff is what's not objective and what's not obviously shared. Why is this happening? And this ability to break down complicated ideas into what is the evidence that we can all agree on. And now that we agree on the evidence, let's start to think through the interpretations together with the understanding that we're going to disagree about all this stuff, but we can agree on objective reality.

I loved thinking about the world from that lens. And I found that economics really helped to sort of concretize that perspective when I was writing about other things. So, for example, I started writing about cultural products with hitmakers. Why do certain cultural products succeed? Again, there's a body of information we can all agree on. And then there's the fun stuff that's interpretation. I just really enjoyed that as a general framework. on writing as a means of creating clarity.

David Perel is really fantastic on this, and so everything I'm going to say from now on is probably paraphrasing him in some way. But, you know, we self-talk to ourselves in our minds at a rate of about, I heard, a thousand words a minute. So we think much faster than we can talk or we can write. And as a result, our thoughts can deceive us with clarity because the thoughts are this like swirl of words that are barely even joined together. There's barely even a predicate in our thoughts sometimes.

It's just like, oh my God, five things that came to mind. And they do just appear in your mind all of it at the same time. And their appearance sometimes has like the sheen of truth to it. Oh, I thought it. Therefore, it must be true and persuasive to anyone. But then you take time to actually write down, like make concrete what you thought. And you realize upon looking at the thought and actually reading it verbatim that it makes no sense in the world. And it takes some time, I think, to sort of have a relationship with your thoughts that is, I've never, I haven't articulated it as before.

So it's all sort of like at the moment. But have relationship with your thoughts. On the one hand, doesn't trust them, right? Don't think that anything that you just thought is true. Like, take time, write it down. Read what you wrote. Think about it. Have a relationship with it.

And let's say, do I really think this? Do I really think this is true? building that kind of relationship with your thinking, I think is very important. But also, so you don't want to trust your thinking too much, but you also really want to pay attention to it. I think one of the skills of most writers that I know and admire is that they're very good at watching their thinking. That is, they're passing through the world. And little questions just occur to them. Why is that the way it is?

Why is that the way it is? And they actually end up hooking into lots of quiet thoughts that millions of people, people have had about the world. Like many people have had the exact same quiet verbatim self-talk thought. They just didn't think to write an article about it. And some of the biggest articles, I think, are essentially unveiling this silent majority of thoughts, if that makes sense. Like taking this thought that millions of people have had, but no one has actually

articulated and been like, I think everyone's kind of thinking this, right? And then the shock of recognition happens at the scale of a million people where they all say, oh my God, yes, I have thought that. This is exactly, hey, wife, hey, friend, this is exactly what I've just been thinking about this thing that's happening in the world. And, you know, I think that my best pieces do that. I think workism did that. I think the abundance agenda did that. I think my piece about what I called hygiene theater during COVID did that. Like my best articles looking at like my quiet little thoughts and then trying to like pull them out and then put them on paper and say, do I think I might be expressing sort of the unspoken thoughts of many other

people. This is what the best standout comedians do. They say something, usually in a funny way, but it's usually from, I mean, Seinfeld talks about this all the time. They are some of the best noticers in the world. Seth Godin writes about that. We as writers and thinkers need to be professional noticers. I think leaders need to be professional noticers of things. And then you take the extra step of what are you noticing and you start writing about it to get a more clear thought and view and then when you share it then you get the ah you know that type of thing which i was thinking of but i didn't really put it to words and then Derek did it for me that creates that i'm falling along now i'm right there it's like being a noticeer of things yeah and to jump back

to uh my first book hitmakers yeah one of the key elements of an a plus noticing is familiar surprise. What you want to do is to click in to a observation or experience that many people have had and then give it just that little bit of a twist so that they, the audience, confronts both the novelty of the observation and the underlying familiarity of the context that it's referring to. I think is what makes the best comedians so gifted. Most recently, I guess it's been for a few years now, but plain English is a fantastic podcast.

I love that you're able to do this cold open. I assume you write that, or maybe you work off of notes cold open and then you tackle a topic. Sometimes it's for what's going on right now. A lot of times it is and sometimes it's more evergreen. But I'm curious how you earn that role. The Ringer, I remember since Bill Simmons started that. company. It was after he left the SPN. It was kind of a wild story. It's a really cool startup story that is still going strong now with Spotify. How did you earn that role working for them and for

specifically the guy who founded the company? Yeah, this story is much less involved than the story of how I ended up working at the Atlantic. The simplest way to tell it is that in 2020 or 2021, somewhere around the turn of 2020, 2020, 2021. Bill Simmons reached out to me and said, I really like what you're doing. This was partly about my work on COVID,

but partly about my just sort of sociological essays. I think he enjoyed that I tend to write about things happening in culture and society and then like turn the dial like one notch toward where is this going. in the future. And I think he sort of liked the where is this going aspect of my work at the time. And he reached out and he said, hey, you know, do you want to come on my podcast and I came on his podcast to talk a little bit about COVID? And we just kind of kept talking. And he said, you know, I really think that it would be fun for you to start a podcast with us. And I was in the, I had for years wanted to do a talk podcast and was really excited by the opportunity. And the Atlantic was really wonderful by essentially

saying, look, you know, we want to be the home of your writing. We hope we'll remain the home of your writing. But this sounds like a really cool opportunity. And as long as he'll keep your writing with us and, you know, not write significantly less, you know, go forth essentially. And so I went forth and that was the beginning of plain English. The interesting thing about plain English is, So in that sense, I guess it's kind of an extremely, not boring, but like ordinary recruitment story, right? Just I guess he enjoyed my writing, asked me to do a little audition. And then it was like, hey, he can talk and write.

And so maybe he can do a podcast. That's me ventriloquising Bill's potential thoughts. He's never actually explained to me his actual thinking in so many words. But one funny little wrinkle is that it took us a long time to name the show. we went through a bunch of different names and I don't want to share any of the rejected names because a lot of the rejected names that I came up with were really embarrassing me bad

and I just sent like a list of like 15 to 20 and I remember like the email of the text from Bill where he said I can imagine he was like I can something like I can imagine someone saying quote, oh yeah, I listen to plain English, end quote. And that was the email. Like he, right, he could, it mapped on to his sense of how people might talk about a future podcast.

And so that was, that was it. That was plain English. And it's very interesting how important names can be. I used to think that names weren't important because at a company level, pretty much anything that surpasses a certain threshold. of non-terribleness is going to be fine? Like, is Twitter a good or bad name? Is Facebook a good or bad name? Is Microsoft a good or bad? It doesn't matter. These names aren't the greatest names ever necessarily, but like the companies, they clearly pass a certain threshold of non-terribleness that allow the companies to become relatively famous. With plain English, the name became a North Star.

because once I knew how audiences would confront the vibe of the show, it gave me a purpose more articulate than just say stuff that isn't dumb about the news. It gave me a purpose of, no, take big, complicated questions about the news cycle and about humanity and the world and America. and break it down, make it understandable, make the complex simple without losing the nuance. And that has been a really useful North Star for the podcast. I think that's one of the toughest things to do is to take something complex. Another recent guest you had on that has been on this show and is coming on next month is Tim Urban. I think he'd be the best in the world at this, one of the best in the world that I've read,

at taking something insanely complex and writing it with humor and at a level that I think a third or fourth grader could understand. And I just think that's so hard to do. And I feel like that's something you do really well. You know, talking about process is hard because sometimes I don't know whether I'm telling a story about my process that isn't necessarily true. It's just like sort of the rationalization of that which comes naturally to me. But it's a great question, and I'll try to answer it sincerely.

I don't think I'm a very complex thinker. I think I'm a pretty simple-minded person who's interested in complex ideas. And so, you know, I'm, you know, the world occurs to me, the world, I process new ideas very visually. You know, I'm writing a long, doing a long project right now on clean energy abundance. how we can decarbonize the electric grid. And there's a lot of questions that I have about how energy works. When I'm talking to people, I'm like, can you explain this to me simply? Like, what is electricity?

What does a power plant do? Like, what is a transformer? What are transmission lines? What's a meter? Can you tell, like, how a bill becomes a law story about how, like, a jewel of energy comes from underground as natural gas and ends up allowing me to turn a light bulb on, like how a jewel becomes a light bulb. Like, tell me that story as simply as possible.

That's a very simple-minded question. And I hope that, you know, what I would say, I think maybe having done this for a while at a place like the Atlantic, I have confidence in the non-stupidity of my ignorance. Does that make sense? I think a lot of people when they're trying to It's sort of like A lot of people think their ignorance is stupidity

Right? Asking a question like Hey man I'm sorry How does electricity work? That's a fucking dumb question. Well it takes a lot of I think it takes a lot of security in yourself and confidence to ask that question.

That's what I'm saying. Have confidence in the non-stupidity of your ignorance. Right? You're starting a job. Sorry, what's this job? What does this company do, by the way? What does my company do? What is this company for? What's my job for? That's a stupid question. No, I'm sorry, it's an ignorant question. But have confidence in the non-stupidity of your ignorance. Have confidence to ask the ignorant questions without thinking it's going to make you look stupid. And it took me a while to feel like I could ask really simple questions without being a of the person on the other end of the call saying,

you're an idiot for asking that. The truth is, sometimes I do get that. I remember a call where I was talking to someone about how social security payments were calculated, right? And basically, TLDR, the richer you are, the higher social security payment up to a level. And there's a certain like bend point calculation in terms of like exactly how social security payments are calculated.

So I never having this conversation with someone, like how, like, how does this work? And they were like, you don't really know very much about this, do you? You don't know a whole lot about Social Security. I would suggest that you do a little bit of research and then call me back. And at the time, I was like really pissed off. It was like, what a rude thing to say? Then I was like, well, you know what?

Actually, as long as you're saying and then call me back, maybe I'll just do that and then call you back. And now when someone says something like, I don't think you understand this, I don't think you, I don't think you understand where I'm coming from. you know, as a 37-year-old who's not, you know, 22 or 23 anymore and doesn't feel like I'm going to get fired by, you know, simply not understanding some incredibly complex piece of economics or, you know, energy physics. I can just say, you're right. I don't get it. Explain it to me. And hope that they're not going to hang up. And the truth is, if they hang up, just call someone else. They'll explain it to you. Like, wait until you find someone who's who can do the explain it to me like I'm five thing. So yeah, have the confidence in the non-adign ignorance of your, not. stupidity of your ignorance. I think that's a big-time leadership quality is have the confidence to ask those questions. And I bet other people have those questions. They may be afraid to ask them. So it's a form of leadership to ask the questions, to get it out into the open in the meeting

instead of using all the jargon or the complex words or my biggest pet peeve in corporate America, which is acronyms, right? Stop using them. I love the Elon Musk email about acronyms from like 100 years ago, but it still was great. Like, we're not using them anymore because nobody understands and people are afraid to ask what they mean. That's another big one. There are a few podcasts I just wanted to drill down on. One, I like to make this timeless, so this is not a timeless question.

But last year before around the NFL draft, you asked a question about, I played quarterback in college a little bit after college, so I'm fascinated by college or by quarterbacks. And you did a podcast episode titled, Why is it so hard to predict the next great quarterback? And usually these things kind of once you, that you jog your memory of, oh, yeah, I remember that one. What was it? I'm just curious to drill down in a few of them.

And that one has piqued my curiosity. Now, I remember listening to it a while ago, what you learn from doing an episode like that, that is not within the normal realm of what you do, but you're going to go down another rabbit hole because you kind of have to for each of these episodes or for an article. Do you remember that one and like what you learned from that and who you do? talked to and how that made you maybe wiser beyond just that realm of predicting the next great leader of a football team. So what's fascinating about quarterbacks, what makes them, I think, so hard to predict is that quarterbacks are dropped into systems of contingency and context that's very rare within sports. If you're a great basketball player, you know, if you're Wenbaniyama, right, who, as you

maybe know, and I hope many of your listeners know, is this absolute ridiculous phenom who, in France who clearly first speak, maybe the best draft prospect of the last 20 years since the Bronjames, seven foot three, but can essentially dribble like a point guard and make threes like Steph Curry. It's just a ridiculous. It's like a video game character. He's going to be able to score.

There's no question. A three point shot is a three point shot. He can make it. He can beat people off the dribble because he's so big. And his stepback shot is hard to block. That's true no matter what. It's just hard to think of the analogy for quarterbacks. Okay, you've got a really great big arm.

Do you have a fast receiver on your team? Because if not, it doesn't matter. Okay, you're really good at standing up straight in the pocket and making accurate passes. Does that matter? Well, on some teams, with a good offensive line, it does. On some teams with a terrible offensive line, if you're Peyton Manning, you're screwed. Peyton Manning with the bad offensive line. Like, what's he going to do?

He can't run. He's just going to take a thousand sacks. and make a bunch of force passes. So it was a really interesting conversation about the degree to which different positions in sports and to a certain extent, by analogy, different positions in the economy, fall along a spectrum of contingency

in which some jobs, like mine, frankly, or maybe like yours, are relatively independent. Are you asking good questions? Are you giving good answers? Some jobs are incredibly interdependent and contextual. Your success is exquisitely defined by the quality of the workers around you. That leads me to believe or leaves me to think of a question on hiring leaders.

And I'm kind of asking you to speculate, but you've been around so many amazing leaders. You've studied them. You've written about them. If you were advising a CEO who's hiring a C-Suite, a leadership team, and saying, you know, based on my experiences from studying all these different people who have done well and some who have not and whatever that may be. What are some of the piece of advice you'd give to that senior leader as he or she is trying to build a great leadership team, meaning those people are going to be leading of whatever

company X that we're talking about here. Yeah, for whatever reason, the way that you frame the question made me think of like a very specific interaction that I had with a, I can't say his name, but really prominent CEO of a meteor tech company. And we were having breakfast in New York. It was an absolutely fascinating breakfast. He asked me so many incredible questions about my book. He could talk.

I seemed to want to talk. I was reading a bunch of novels at the time, and he really then wanted to talk about his favorite novels and asked me a bunch of questions about what I liked in a novel. And we got up after this breakfast, And we're in this sort of fancy New York hotel. And Derek Jeter was sitting right behind me. And he goes, are you a baseball fan?

And I was like, yeah, I mean, huge Yankees fan. He was like, well, Derek Jeter is sitting right behind you. And, you know, my name is Derek. So like, you know, and I started following baseball in the mid-90s. So guess who my favorite baseball player of all time was? Like, you know, obviously Jeter. And I was like, oh, my God, this is such a crazy moment, like stuck between these two luminaries.

And I said, are you going to say hello? And he thought about it. And he goes, You know, I don't think people like that enjoy being bumped in private moments, even by people like me. I've actually really wanted to contact him for a while, but I'm going to get in touch with someone else. And so he had this moment to like make this connection. And then, at least to me, put himself in the mind of Jeter and said, no, that's not what he wants right now. And then everyone went on with their day and there was no interaction.

And one thing that I've always taken from that is that the guy that I got breakfast with has every reason to be the most or one of the most like mega maniacal people in the world to believe that he is like one of the most brilliant executives in America. And typically that would lead one to get stuck in their own head and process the world in a very like dualistic sense of like everyone's like an NPC and I'm just like trying to make my way through it. And he immediately and instinctively was like, no, what is, what is Jeter one? What is, what is his other guy one? And then later, in reflecting on the conversation with us, he did the same thing with me, right? A relative nobody compared to Derek Cheater. The conversation that he had with me was entirely about my interests. And he was extremely good at essentially asking good questions and being curious about, like, the emotional and psychological

climate of the person at the other end of the table. And I feel like that must be an incredibly important quality in a leader. Like sometimes leadership is about literally leading. It's about like taking people who need to be led and being like, this is what we're doing. But it seems like a lot of the job is not just making decisions and asking people to lead. It's about managing psychologies and emotions. And that requires an ability to practice sort of, you know, telepathic empathy in many different contexts in order to, when you make the final decision to lead, know the people around you are going to trust that they have your interest in mind. You have to ask a lot of questions for your work. I do too. I'm constantly reading and thinking

about questions. I mean, it's like a 24-7 thing. How do you think about questions? How do you go about whether preparing or asking them on the fly or both, what do you think about follow-up questions? What's your overall philosophy on the art and some of the science of asking questions? I don't always get this right, but the philosophy that I'm trying to operationalize is start simple and then dilate toward greater complexity.

I think the best interviews that I do are interviews where, so for example, one of the last shows that we did was about an incredibly interesting and profoundly important piece of analysis showing that the U.S. mortality rate at practically every age is double the rate in Western Europe, which is to say at any given age for any American, you have two X the risk of dying this year as someone at your income level in age in Western Europe. The U.S. just is not very good at keeping people alive, which is a profoundly profound failure of, of, I think the country, even though I'm, you know, relatively patriotic.

And the conversation that we had about this, why? Why do Americans die so much more and so much younger than Europeans? You know, we try to break down all the reasons. And what I try to do is every, the beginning of every reason. Let's say, you know, let's start with cars. Americans die more in cars. They die more on a per malgivant basis. All right.

Tell me why do so many Americans die in cars. All right, that's a simple question. But then it leads more complex questions. Is it something about our built environment? That, for example, it's not just that Americans drive more, but also as a result, we walk less. Podometer analysis show that Americans average about 5,000 steps a day versus about 7,8, 9,000 in Switzerland, France, and Japan. Okay, well, that might lead to obesity issues. That might lead to cardiometabolic disease.

And so this simple question about tell me about cars. All right, now I told you about cars. All right, now let's dilate into what is displaced by America's relationship to cars. Is walking displaced? Yeah, maybe walking is displaced. So this ability to sort of like start simple and then dilate to greater complexity, I think it's a really important thing in the podcasts that I do and in the interviews that I do because it allows me to get the kind of,

to get what I want for most conversations, which is I want the evidence, I want the facts, but then I want the interpretation. I want the framework. How do we think about this? How do we remember this story? How, you know,

if Ryan asked me about the difficulty of drafting quarterbacks nine months after I do this podcast, what's the framework that will allow me to remember the core insight from the, episode. Bam, the framework is contingency. Some jobs are highly contingent upon the performance of others, and some jobs are less contingent so that people can be more of a, you know, one man on an island. That ability to dilate from simple questions to framework questions, I think, is really

served me well. So before the interview, great episode, just listened to it yesterday. Before that one, what's your prep process like? Do you write the simple questions down? Do you just have bullet point in notes, like, what's it look like? I script the episodes a lot. I write down my questions. I write down potential follow-ups. I write notes of potential statistics that I want to introduce that I might hope that the guest introduces, but if they don't, then I'll just, whoop, put it right into

the follow-up and say, what do we make of this little piece of context? And as you anticipated, I do write almost to the word most of my intros. I don't, I want the interest to feel very smooth. I want people to feel like they're clicking into a product that is polished. And if I just write a bunch of notes, which sometimes I'll do for, you know, talks when I do talks about my work around the country, I'll just basically write a couple notes down and vibe. But on the podcast, I really wanted to feel polished. And so I try to script as much as I can while remembering a line from Hamlet, my favorite play, the readiness is all. You have to be prepared to pivot.

If you ask question one and the guest jumps to question nine, all right, what are you going to do? I'm going to tear up the whole script and go straight to question nine. Or are you going to say, let's put a pin in that and return to my question two? It depends. You have to be ready for chaos. You're not the person you're talking to. They're their own individual. They're going to do what they want to do.

Writing a script allows me to have both the confidence in the outline of the podcast and the freedom to deviate from it, knowing that any deviation I can always just come back to the script. It feels, well, I should ask, your background as an actor and a singer and a performer. It almost feels like a performance, not in an authentic way. I think it feels very authentic, but it feels a bit like a very professional performance, especially your opens. That's exactly why I think about them. I'm writing a script for me to perform. Absolutely for sure. And I don't think theaters is inauthentic. No. Theater is authentic. People are sitting down to watch other people pretend to be other people. there is perfectly there's perfect symbiotic sincerity there everyone knows what they're there for right someone's singing a beautiful operatic aria is not doing so insincerely they're giving the audience exactly what they want and i want the audience of plain english to expect that the beginning of these shows they're going to get a a professional rendition of my opinion my effort to put

today's story in some kind of global context. Well, you make it sound super easy. I know it's not. One more question, Derek, before we run, dude, I'm curious for that person, similar to I was speaking with last night, recent college graduate, they really want to do good, right? They want to do good in the world, and they want to leave a dent in a positive way. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you give to that person? I wrote a piece called Simple as Smart for the Atlantic, which was basically a rundown of my answer to this question, what's the advice I typically give to journalists. And there's a lot of good advice that's a cliche. So I wanted to come up with pieces of advice

that weren't cliches. And one is, think about skin thickness. When I was a young writer, I had really thin skin. Anything that people said that was negative would get me down. And I remember hearing from a fellow journalist that an older writer who I really respected, but it was maybe past his prime. The story that that older writer never read letters to the editor anymore, never looked at the feedback. And at first I thought, oh my God, what a wonderful way to protect oneself against my thin skinness.

Then I thought about it and I was like, no, wait, maybe that's why he's bad now. It's because he never takes any feedback. And so just as you can be too thin-skinned, you can absolutely be too thick skin. You can develop a sense of self that is such a impenetrable exoskeleton that you don't allow yourself to become better through the input of others.

That's no good. There's no growth that comes from that. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about the appropriate amount of skin thickness. When someone says something really mean about me on Twitter or on Reddit or wherever, I do my best to watch my own emotional hormonal reaction to that comment.

You know, I watch my cortisol, rise and, you know, I can feel myself get like flush with with anger. And, okay, that's going to pass. That's going to pass. This person was really mean. But embedded in this meanness, is there maybe some truth? You know, do I make too many metaphors sometimes? Maybe. You know, have I talked too much about Elon Musk in the last few weeks? Yeah, actually, maybe I, maybe I have. And I think it's really important to develop that kind of equanimity, that cool approach to even fiery feedback so that you can sort of deal with the kernel of insight that might live at the heart of it. I assume you listen to all your own stuff.

Oh yeah. Every once I hear a podcasters say they don't and it blows my mind because I'm thinking like, how do you get better? I mean, you've got to listen your own, you know, you've got to listen and take some feedback. Do you listen to 100%? Do you listen to every minute of every episode that you, okay, no, now that do I, right. I don't listen to every episode of out to every minute every episode. I don't even necessarily listen to every single episode back, but I do listen to absolutely the majority of the minutes that I have published. And sometimes it's because I'll think back, oh, did that moment work? You know, and then I'll listen to it and I'll be like, nope, it didn't. I get probably more mad than happy when I listen back. Because I always, there's always something

that could have, the question could have been tighter, that transition could have been better. I should have stayed longer on that topic instead of moving to the next one. It happens every time. So in a way, there are moments from like, oh, yeah, that was pretty good. And then there are other moments from like, oh, you know, like it happened. We're probably our hearts as critic. But that to me is part of the process of, okay, well, I do need to listen, though, and try to learn. But no, not, not 100%, but definitely the majority of it in order to take notes to say,

this is how I could have done it better. moving forward, remember this so that I can do it better. I think it's just a way that we grow, right? It's also an important signal when I don't want to listen to an episode because it's often telling me I don't think this episode is particularly good and I don't want to feel bad about how bad this episode was. And so if there's too many weeks where I don't want to listen back to the episode, I try to pay attention to that bit of feedback too, right?

Not for my harshest critics on Reddit, but rather from my own self, from my aversion to my own podcast. And like, that's, that's not a good sign. I want to make episodes to proudly listen back to and to ask my wife. Did you listen to that? Because I'm proud of it. And I want to talk to you about it. I've had somewhere I've turned off after like 15 minutes of an hour conversation, never

gone back, so mad because it's not good enough. And we shouldn't have released it. We should have shelved it or something. But I did. But then you get some of those emails. like I really liked, you know, fill in the blank. And it's like for minute 30 of that pie. I'm like, well, maybe it's not so bad.

You know, like you start telling yourself, maybe you feel a little bit better. So it's weird. We dance for the satisfaction of strangers, you know? We will never truly understand. You like to think that you don't, but that's part of it. Like, it just, it's impossible for it not to be. Like I wanted to help people.

I wanted to change their lives for the better. So when you hear that it does or it doesn't, I mean, I'd be a crazy person to say like, doesn't impact me or affect me. Of course it does. I want someone to listen to hear some of, hear this episode right now with you, Derek, and they'll say, oh, I didn't think of it that way. Or that analogy of the pearl and diving deep and then coming back up, I never thought of it that way. That actually changes my perspective. I love that stuff, man. That's what this is all about is trying to first follow my own curiosity

and then hopefully for the benefit of other people. That's why we publish these things. So, yeah, man, I just think it's really, it's really, it's really, rewarding work, but it doesn't mean it's not hard. It also doesn't mean there aren't moments where you kind of hate yourself, at least like in the moment and you can get over it, but of saying, I could have done a lot better. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, just in keeping with the metaphor, I would just go back to the bow. You know, if you're not feeling stress, the arrow is not flying, but you do have to find some way to let it go. If you're going to, there's going to be a distribution of quality across episodes. There's not, there's no such thing as uniformity.

You have to live with it. You have to let it go. And you also have to let go. And you also have to let go of the good stuff too because you get too high on the good episodes well then that is poison you know what did nick say even call it's rat poison you believe too much in your own greatness there this is awesome man the the latest book so the first book's called hitmakers which we talked about before but i love hitmakers and then the most reason books called on work money meaning identity and then the podcast is called plain english which i highly recommend people check out you're already listening this podcast so i think you'll like derricks and hey man i would love to continue our dialogue as we both progressed.

This is a lot of fun. A lot of fun. Thanks, man. All right. Thanks, Eric. All right, it's the end of the podcast club. A few takeaways from my notes. I love this talk with Derek. The bow and arrow metaphor. We need stress.

Like when we pull back that arrow, it stresses the bow, but we need to let it go. Stress plus rest equals growth. Brad Stolberg and Steve Magnus, both who've been on this podcast. We talked about the importance of stress plus rest equals growth.

And I think the bow and arrow is a great metaphor for that. Then don't be afraid. In fact, have the confidence to ask the ignorant questions. Some of the best leaders I've ever been around, they ask some of the most simplistic basic questions, and they have the confidence to ask it, knowing that if they have that thought, there's probably others who do too,

and just a simple fact that they're curious they want to know. So don't be afraid to ask the ignorant question. I love Derek touching on that. And then that breakfast he had with a prominent CEO and how that CEO showed so much interest in Derek. And this was somebody who's very notable and famous. And yet at the breakfast, what happens? Well, that person is asking all about Derek, ask great questions, was a deep listener and asked even better follow-up questions. I think that's something for all of us to think about as leaders when we're with others is how we're showing interest in them and what questions we're asking them and how we're listening to them.

And then when he had the emotional intelligence when they saw Derek Jeter to pause for a second and say, there's probably a better time in place for this interaction to happen, not right now while he's having breakfast. That emotional intelligence is critical, I think, to be an effective leader. I want to say once again, thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leaders Show with Derek Thompson. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to tell all your friends and you continue to go to ryanhawk dot net which launches this podcast into iTunes apple podcast and once you're there you write a thoughtful review and you rate the show

hopefully five stars by doing that you are continuing to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis and for that I will always be grateful thank you so so much talk to you soon can't wait