Unlonely with Dr. Jody Carrington - The Roots of Bias and How to Uproot Them - Anu Gupta

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

They say old habits die hard, but some habits can—and should—be unlearned. In this episode, Dr. Jody Carrington dives into a powerful conversation with human rights lawyer and social scientist Anu Gupta, exploring the roots of bias and its profound effects on society. Gupta breaks down the five key drivers of bias—stories, policies, social contact, education, and media—while revealing how mindfulness is the secret weapon in dismantling it. Anu Gupta is an educator, lawyer, scientist, and the founder and CEO of BE MORE with Anu, an education technology benefit corporation that trains professionals across corporate, nonprofit, and government sectors to advance DEIB and wellness by breaking bias. His work has reached 300+ organizations training more than 80,000 professionals impacting over 30 million lives.Find more of Anu Gupta's work on his website:https://www.anuguptany.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At the beginning of every episode, there will always be time for an acknowledgement. You know, the more we do this, people ask, why do you have to do the acknowledgement in every episode? I got to tell you, I've never been more grateful for being able to raise my babies on a land where so much sacrifice was made. And I think what's really critical in this process is that the ask is just that we don't forget. So the importance of saying these words at the beginning of every episode will always be of utmost importance to me and this team. So everything that we created here today for you happened on Treaty 7 land, which is now known as the center part of the province of Alberta. It is home of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which is made known as the center part of the province of Alberta.

It is home of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which is made up of the Siksika, the Kainai, the Pekinni, the Tatina First Nation, the Stony Nakota First Nation, and the Métis Nation Region 3. Our job, our job as humans, is to simply acknowledge each other. That's how we do better, be better, and stay connected to the good. Oh my goodness. Anu Gupta is with us today. And I got to tell you, I have so many questions. All right. So the number one is there's a new book coming out September 17th around bias. And as a white, straight, able-bodied racist human being, I understand that you can't address what you don't acknowledge. And so we've spent a lot of time in this community here talking about bias and unconscious bias and implicit bias and how sometimes it's in our bones and we don't even know about it many times.

Right. how sometimes it's in our bones and we don't even know about it many times, right? When I read the beginning of your work, Anu, I was like, he's the answer. He's the answer to everything. My first question is really about belonging, because I know there's such a focus for you on that word. And the DEI space for such a long time has just held those three letters, right? Diversity, equity, and inclusion. And now you and so many other people say DEI B. We've added the B, and I think it might be the most important letter of the four. Tell me about why is belonging so important to humans these days?

Of course. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor to be here and to be able to share a little bit about what I've discovered on my own breaking bias journey. And, you know, as someone who's been in the field, you know, I was an attorney and trained as a human rights lawyer and worked as a social scientist for some time, really looking at the nature of bias itself, I began to really investigate within myself and, you know, my personal story that how would, like, how would I want to feel in a world where there was no bias? And the word, you know, it's the word that's describing a feeling, the word that's describing, you know, concepts, right? This experience, somatic experience that came up for me was belonging. I love that.

And that's why I think belonging is so important because that's really the aspiration. And one of the things that really inspires me around belonging as the aspiration is some words from Dr. King and so many of our other ancestors that we look up to. You know, he said that our goal is to build a beloved community. And what is a beloved community? A beloved community for me is a place where all beings feel a sense of belonging, regardless of who they are, you know, in the fullness of their diversity. And, you know, my prayer with my work, with this book, with everything that I do, is really to support people in building families, communities, workplaces where belonging replaces bias. Okay, I let me back it up, because I think you're right, this, this starts way more than just a friggin word. Okay. I, to your point, a lawyer, a scientist, you've trained in the most phenomenal

universities, Cambridge university, you got a master's, um, your JD from NYU law, you've been on Ted stages, you've got in Oprah stuff, you're doing all the things like, how do you switch to writing a book about bias? Okay. So as a human rights lawyer, and then here's what I also love stages you've got in Oprah's stuff, you're doing all the things like, how do you switch to writing a book about bias? Okay. So as a human rights lawyer, and then here's what I also love about you, right? Um, you say in your work, I'm a gay Brown man. I have felt and been pushed to the brink of the edge of feeling not what it means to not belong. What bias, how bias can not only change your life. It could could end it i understand where the passion for this work comes i understand how you would leave a law degree and be like you know what

i'm i'm all in in trying to get people to get it so tell me about that in your bones why did this become the thing that you've now committed your whole life to yeah such a great question. You know how you started some of the secondary identities, you know, about who you are as a white, straight, cis woman. You know, for me, that's kind of how I saw myself, like, you know, as a brown immigrant Indian man who's also queer, who's neurodiverse and a whole host of other secondary identities. And that really shaped my understanding of who I am in the world. But the world also shaped my understanding of who I am. So my family moved to the US from India when I was 10 years old. And right after moving here, I became an untouchable in my surroundings because of my name, because of the stereotypes that existed around people who are Indian, who are Hindu, who are brown, you name it. And I never spoke up against it. Rather, I just internalized a lot of those stories.

And for me, until I got to law school when I was 24 years old, where even though I was in the law to talk, to learn about social justice and human rights, bias was never addressed. We never talked about it in the classroom. We talked about it in a very cerebral, intellectual way, but not its impact, the suffering it causes. I mean, you're a psychologist. You were in the world, the realm of feelings, right? But in the legal environment, no, it's very clinical, very heady. And as someone who experienced so much bias

and also someone who is highly sensitive, I started to believe the stories that maybe there is something wrong with me because I'm gay, that I'm an immigrant, because I have an accent, because X, Y, Z. And that took me to the brink of almost killing myself, taking my own life. You know, I was on right before my second year was about to start. I lived in a high rise in New York City and found myself on the ledge of my 18th floor window about to jump off, like literally looking at the traffic below me. Stop it. Yes, I was. That's that was the night that began my breaking bias journey. But for whatever reason, I mean, I really feel it's a moment of grace. Instead of falling forward, I fell backwards into my apartment. And it was immediately the gravity of what I was just about to do, like, hit me that I called someone, a friend, who lived quite far away from me, actually. I would say about 45 minutes away. She happened to be walking on my block. No. Happened to be blocking on my block that minute, showed up in my apartment within minutes. And she talked to me for I don't know how many hours.

And the next day, my breaking bias journey really began, you know, with a whole host of therapeutic interventions and tools that I talk about in the book, but to really investigate what bias is about. I'd already been working on issues of human rights in different places around the world, in Europe, in South Asia, in Southeast Asia. So I'd known how awful bias is. I'd worked at the UN on women's rights issues for a long time. But I started to realize that my passion for this work also came from a personal experience. Isn't that how it works for many of us, right? When it means something to you, to your core. And I can see that in you. Can you define for us what bias means? Because I think that becomes the critical piece to this community.

So many of us don't even know we've got it. I mean, that we've in white privilege, we don't even know what's there. What is the definition of bias? Yeah. Yeah. And I think this was really important for me to discover because if you ask a hundred people what bias is, they'll give you a 100 answers. But I wanted to understand from a science-based perspective, from a neuroscience perspective, what exactly is bias? And I discovered that bias is a learned habit. And just as it's learned, it can be unlearned. And that's where the hope came, because I unlearned it myself. Like, I can't imagine who I was 15 years ago.

So you would say that really as a human who is the intersection of so many things happen in your body. Right. And so I often think when I'm doing this as a, as a, as a, as a cisgender white woman, I think about all the biases I hold. I think about, um, it's possible to unlearn it. Is that like all of it? Tell me more. Yeah more yeah well this is our work for this century for the next centuries to come to really evolve human consciousness you know i really believe it because a lot of these sub-bodies is a learned habit and they're it's rooted all forms of biases whether it's based on race or sexual orientation or gender or age or size or height, you know, you need a profession class, um, connected to them are five causes. So there's five costs to every form of ism and phobia in our world.

And the foundational cause is a story, a false story, a false story that is often embedded in the place. And, and I'm, I don't know if I'm letting people off the hook right now, but with people doing the best they can with what they got in any given moment, right. Generally speaking, when we start to say people with bias or you're, you're shitty for believing this about people, or like, how can you not understand the importance of like, where does homophobia, xenophobia, any of those things come from? It's like, we're so defensive in that moment. I'm not racist. I'm not anti-gay and like, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, just a second.

Like, let's back it up about the people that, the cultures we lived in, the people that we thought they were doing the best they could with what they have. Is that where bias begins? Okay. Yes. So basically a bunch of people,

sometimes we know who they are, sometimes we don't, created a story. And then the remaining four causes of bias is how that story of separation, of hierarchy, gets circulated and infects our consciousness. And that's what I talk about, like share in the book, how did the story of race become globalized in such a short period? How did the story of gender, right, this binary gender, you know, without any, you know,

plurality that's so rigid get, you know, globalized into our human consciousness? And the remaining four causes are really policies, you know, social contact, education, and media. So that's how our nervous systems

get trained in bias. And there are two forms of biases. There are conscious biases and unconscious biases, right? Conscious biases are learned false beliefs. So like I grew up, you know, in a patriarchal society where at some point I held these awful beliefs that women are weaker than men. Like fundamentally, they're weaker than men. Like no basis, no data sets behind it,

even though everything around me, you know, was to the contrary. Yet, because that story was so pervasive, until I chose to question that story, and then transform that story in my own mind. Same thing when it comes to race or sexuality. I mean, I believe that being gay was wrong, even though I was gay this whole time, right, which took me so long to come out because I had believed that false story that someone had created. And it was kind of trained into my own nervous system and consciousness through those other four. Particularly by people you trust. So you believe that in your bones, right? Like that people of color are less than or, you know, and I think about this in race in particular, race is a social construct, which means, you know, our DNA as humans is 99. I would just say this to our community,

you know, it's 99.93% the same. So the heartbeats of my babies and the heartbeats of your babies are all the same. Yeah. And we think about that so differently. The first time I read that data, I was like, I mean, I'd been a doctor. I was already like, are you, what? And no one talked to me, right? Nobody talked to me about this. Well, this is why education is one of the root causes, because there's so many information gaps. There's, of course, misinformation, but there's also information gaps. So then the stories from our surroundings fill those gaps.

And that's where bias really manifests and why we see that until we get to the root cause of these challenges, we're not going to address, you know, whether it's violence that we're witnessing in Europe with the far right or in the US or Canada, wherever it is, right? It's the same exact reason. And those humans are also humans. They have a nervous system.

Isn't that people are hard to hate close up, you know, isn't this true? You have said, and I, and I love this when I was reading this, you know, cause I've never even considered how powerful bias can be until I read your work. You, you said you cannot overstate the impact that bias has and continues to play in this world. What do you mean by that? I mean, you're starting to tell us that, but like, tell me how deeply critical, timely, maybe even largely overdue it is to shed some light in understanding the role that bias plays on a global level. Yeah.

So three big reasons, you know, there are many more, but first bias is the root cause of every inequity and every injustice we see anywhere in the world. It's the root cause. So unless we address it,

you know, we're just, otherwise we're just going to be pasting a lot of Band-Aids. And I'll give you an example. I worked in the courtroom in New Orleans in the U.S. and basically worked for a sentencing court and saw the judge sentence predominantly poor black boys and men to three, four, five years of prison for petty, petty offenses. Trespass to property, breaking cell phones, five years of prison for petty, petty offenses, trespass to property, breaking cell phones, low possession of marijuana. My classmates in law school were not only possessing, but dealing in many more other

controlled substances and got away with everything. Why were these lives disposable, right? Black lives in this matter. But also looking at the judge the prosecutor and all the other officials in the court system many of them are not consciously racist yet this is where unconscious bias tell me about that unconscious bias learned habits of thoughts that distort how we perceive reason, remember, and make decisions, habits of thoughts, associations. You look at, you know, a poor black person,

what are the associations that come to your mind? Even before you can, you know, in the U S I want you to continue without that. Even before you have time to judge your own thoughts, they are there. And I think that's, that's the fairness in, in, in speaking about this is, is that it comes before you even know it. You don't want to be, I find myself in so many spaces and so many times, even after, you know, doing lots of work in this space and feeling very scared to get it wrong. So for a very long time, I was like, not talking about it, not doing it. I don't want to speak about indigenous issues. Um, I don't know, but I can't speak about being homosexual cause I'm not, and we don't want to get it wrong. And so then it's like, we're just going to stay away and stay ignorant to that place. But I think what I love is just unconscious bias is the awareness of

before you even get a chance to think you're not a bad person. If you are already making judgments about a housing insecure person or somebody who is of a different race than you. The point of your work, which I love so much, is we want to just bring some of that into consciousness without judgment. Notice it's, is that the, I don't want to get into, okay. That's it. Tell me that because it's such a critical consideration in this lonely world. Yeah. Like if you think about what Carl Jung said, we have to make the unconscious conscious.

And that's the beauty of the ways to break bias because we've learned those biases, even at an unconscious level, we've been trained in them through those five root causes. And we care to address them with the five solutions. But I want to kind of just finish off the other two big ways bias continues to play a role in our world. Second is bias is a huge waste of money. Huge, huge. I'll just give you two

numbers. Racial bias alone in the United States costs our economy $2 trillion annually. $2 trillion due to wasted costs and thwarted performance. These are economic analyses that economists have done for decades. Folks can go look at the report from the Kellogg Foundation, and these numbers are increasing. Similarly, gender bias in OECD countries, so countries of the global north by itself, costs these economies at least 6.6 trillion dollars annually so this is just like wasted in like lost opportunities lost wages lost people who could have ideas innovations creativity but because of what we believe to be true

we do not look at their job applications. We do not give them opportunities. We assume that because you're an immigrant, immigrant worker, you will be working in the hotel versus the fact that you, you have a PhD. Might be an engineer or PhD or something. So trillions of dollars. Okay. So making unconscious biases, you said number two, was it's a huge waste of money. Reiterate number one for me. Yeah. It's the root cause of every inequity and every injustice around the globe. And I want to slow down just a little bit there because when I think about, you know, bias, it's never before until I read your work was I like, okay, yeah, bias was something I really have to address in myself. And I'm embarrassed about it. I don't really know how to talk about

it. There's often pushback around it because people don't want it. It's a thing you don't want, right? It's a thing you claim to don't, you don't have. But I think if we can agree just for a second, even if hypothetically, we all have a deep bias. What's wrong? Uh-oh. That's okay. at some form, here's the cost of it, not just individually, but the cost is, here's the huge kick in the pants. It's the root cause of all of the major dysfunctions in the world. Okay. And then secondly, it's a huge waste of money. Like it is B it is so critical for you as an organization, as a school board, as a police agency, as a institution to just even consider how this might be affecting the way that you operate. Yeah.

Those two things. Give me three. What's the three? Yeah. And the third is it causes unnecessary human suffering. Like so much time wasted on how we judge ourselves and judge others without even being aware of it, how we limit our own potential. We limit the potential of other people around us because of these perceptions, these stories, these habits

that we remain unaware of, even though we carry them and they're dictating how we perceive, reason, remember, and make decisions on a day-to-day basis. And I just feel that, you know, for me, as I came to this work, to my own breaking bias journey, you know, who would we be as a species? What would we what would we do with ourselves and with others? If we didn't live in ideas of one another, if we actually lived in the presence of one another? Okay, so I want to dive into that one second before that, because I really want this community to feel this from somebody who has felt it to their core. I want to tell me about the undeniable reflections of bias in the healthcare system, in the justice system, in child and family services departments, political perspectives.

Can you give us some insight, you know, as a lawyer, as a Brown gay man, as somebody who has not only lived it, but tried to facilitate it? How do we see those inequities? Because I, I'll tell you this story real quick as a white woman, not very long ago. And I will tell you this. I mean, you know, this, I have a PhD. Somebody said to me, you know, in an interracial couple, she was the white woman. And she said, I have to drive down the freeway. They were in LA. And she said, because it's safer. And I was like, Oh, what do you mean? And she said, no, really? Like, don't you understand? Like as a black man driving in the United States, you are significantly at higher risk. And I was like, Oh, come on. Not an idea that me and somebody else, exact same education, an indigenous woman and me walk into the same superstore.

I get treated very, very differently. There is undeniable data around that, right? Can you, can you tell us more about that? Because I think so many people are, are unaware of what it's like, you know, if you're not, um, able-bodied, uh, if you identify in any kind of way? Like how, is there some things that are quite clear around that? Absolutely. I mean, I think just, you know, two examples that come to mind in the healthcare context, I've worked in healthcare a lot, you know, Serena Williams, Beyonce, we all know who they are. Big fans. Both of these women almost died giving birth to their daughters. What? Because the nurses and doctors around them didn't trust them while they were giving birth. Now, those nurses and doctors were likely fans of these two women, just as we are.

But the unconscious association between what it means to be a black woman and what she's saying about her pain. And then responding to that is how we almost lost these, you know, incredible creatives. But they stood up for themselves because they had broken their own biases. Because they knew that they were going to confront such biases in a healthcare facility. And this is really important to understand because, you know, the other thing you said is that it can be so embarrassing. It could be so shameful. That is the core of why a lot of the DEI efforts, you know, haven't been effective. Because they're rooted in shame and blame and guilt.

And for me, like, we ought to break those boxes altogether. We need to talk about this honestly, because we're all experiencing it. If it's not about race, it's about size. If it's not about size, it's about height. It's about being a middle child, being divorced, being, you know, being a cancer survivor, you name it, we have so many identities, right? We've all experienced otherness and marginalization. And what we need to do around this work is hold it in a shame-free, trauma-informed, and compassionate container. Because as humans, we have learned this thing. It's not personal.

As humans, we have learned this thing. It is not personal. Tell me more about that. Because I also want to tell you listeners, I mean, this, this human is deeply Buddhist, the Dali frigging Lama. I don't know if you're allowed to put frigging in between Dali and Lama, but like, so don't tell them that. But I, when I was like, I was like, okay, cool. You're just hanging out with the Dali. So tell me about, I mean, your, your deep

work around meditation, you invested so many hours in meditation. And when I read that statistic, I was like, okay, I need more of this human in my life because it's in the stillness in this very noisy world is where the answers live. Is it, is this true? Because so many of us, I believe all of us, I've never met a bad human. The ability to be still in this very noisy world is the thing that we're missing so much. Hey, tell me what lives there. Tell me where the answers live in the stillness. So, you know, when I talk about unlearning bias, right, there are five tools that I discovered through, you know, research in neuroscience and social behavior that I've put together and called the PRISM toolkit. That's right. And PRISM is basically changing the prism of how we perceive the world, right? It's a nice like

Yeah, I love it. But it's an acronym for five tools, perspective taking, pro-social behavior, individuation, stereotype replacement, and mindfulness. And mindfulness really is the bedrock of all prism tools. What we're doing with prism is really integrating the experience of bias, not just in our heads, because I think we're in a really head heavy society. What we need to do is really take the journey from our heads into our hearts. And that journey really takes us into the field that is our life. And that's breaking bias. Okay, so that's breaking bias. Because I will tell you as a psychologist, I was trained for

many years in the cognitive behavioral space, which I detest to my core. And I, and I mean that with all due respect to, you know, my fellow psychologists who work in this space. The idea is you can't get there though. For me, my question all the time in individual work,

particularly when I work with trauma survivors, which PS is all of us asking you where you feel it, what happens inside of you is much more important to me than what has happened to you. And can you tell me the connection with mindfulness and our first step at sort of unlearning bias? Why is that the bedrock of Prism? Yeah. So mindfulness really is present moment awareness of whatever's happening and without judgment. But if judgment arises, if shame arises, if blame arises, we also make that the object of mindfulness. Oh, I feel judgment.

I'm like feeling embarrassed of myself. That's great. That's a thought. That's a concept, you know, feeling embarrassed, that we've put onto a somatic experience, that we've put onto body sensations. Now, can we begin to feel, slow down, feel those body sensations? What's beneath that? And then we get to like the juicy stuff of investigating what may have happened to us,

right? And that is our journey of breaking bias and healing. Hey, everyone. We all know how draining cold and flu season can be. Waiting rooms, missed appointments, and that worry about whether a fever is something serious. But there is a better way. Maple gives you access to Canadian doctors and nurse practitioners in minutes, right from your phone. Get the medical care you need, including prescriptions when appropriate, 24-7 without leaving home. One membership covers your whole

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how do I use mindfulness in that moment? What does that look like? Well, I think for the first, what I will acknowledge is that what your experience is a learned habit, right? Possibly from the stories you've heard, stories you've read, what you've seen on TV, what you've heard from social contact, education, media, but it could also be from personal experience, right? So I'm not discounting or denying any of that. Irrelevant, right? It's there. Irrelevant. Yes. What I'm saying is in those moments, become mindfulness of what the contraction is. Become mindful of what the contraction is. Where is it in the body? What is the fear? And still do what you need to do to feel safe in that moment. Because in that interaction, you're not really making any decision that directly impacts this person.

Right. But I'll give you another example. In the U.S., at least, we've had quite a few instances of Black people being shot dead by law enforcement. Most of them innocent, many of them in their own homes. We had another incident like that, Sonia Massey in her own home. So imagine being the police officer who goes to her house responding to her who called at 911 for some help and sees a Black woman holding something in her hand. What happens in this person's nervous system? What is the somatic experience of that, that he has to shoot to kill? And forgetting the surroundings he's in, forgetting why he's there or she's there or they're there, right?

And that is the core of bias. And for me, it's so important for our law enforcement officers or anyone who owns a gun to be trained in these somatically informed tools, because we're not going to get to the other side just by like having arguments and intellectualizing bias. We have to feel it. We have to experience it and learn how to regulate our bodies. We learn how to regulate our bodies. We learn how to regulate our emotions. And we're capable of that because I know that when we do that, not only are we going to be better citizens to one another, we're going to be better humans to ourselves. Because just as we do that to others, we do it to ourselves.

A hundred percent. And here's what I speak to police officers. My PhD is all around police psychology because I have such a love and there is such a misunderstanding. I think of this space of judging your bias because we've got in this place of let's just defund everything that will get us nowhere. The idea from my perspective is how do we understand when we're asking you to serve dysregulated, often marginalized humans, that we first regulate your body first so that we lose. We don't lose access to your good.

It doesn't mean it might not change the drawing of your weapon, that you have to keep yourself safe and the people you're serving safe. That that's the issue is what are we doing to invest in the emotional regulations? We have access to our biases in those moments. And it's so important. to invest in the emotional regulations we have access to our biases in those moments and yeah it's so important and even in our in the u.s in particular like that's why like you know the all this arguments about right and wrong good and bad they are not getting to the root cause of the problem because most of our law enforcement officers are suffering yes Yes. They are. Are good people. The amount of addiction, spousal abuse, mental health challenges, depression, anxiety. They're humans. They're

human beings. They just happen to have, you know, armor and, you know, weapons on them. But they're humans like you and I, and they need training. So what we need to do is instead of kind of training them in more fear-based tactics, this is where the systemic biases and institutional biases come into place, we have to incorporate these prism tools, these emotional and somatically informed tools, so they can be more effective at their job and also more effective as humans, as fathers, as mothers, as parents, as caregivers, because they are all of those things outside of their 95. Exactly, right? And so tell me more about Prism. So mindfulness is the bedrock. Tell me about the other four. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me just say one thing about mindfulness,

why it's important, because when it comes to stereotyping we become aware of the beliefs and the stereotypes that arise in our minds so for me for example i had to become aware of those stereotypes and false beliefs i learned about being gay where do those come from you know from my mom my dad my teachers the media right oftentimes it was like insinuated and never said verbally but i felt it like don't be that because you're weak you're awful or scary or you're gonna attack me to don't be that right i want you yeah that's so gay that's so gay i grew up hearing that right which which is why a lot of people that are millennial and younger don't like the word gay. Like, you know, we identify as queer instead, which is triggering for older generations, because they were called queer when they were younger. So for them, they like the word gay. Exactly. We're all talking the same thing here. Potato, potato. Same thing here. We're talking about trauma. We're talking about trauma right exactly where that lives in your body and i think this is just a great example of you as you're listening to this in this moment you know you hear the word

gay where do you feel it in your body you hear the word queer where do you feel it in your body homosexual right like i think those are the things that all of us will carry a story to your point in what that means and whether that was safe and you know i often think about this i wrote about this in feeling seen uh marty's daughter taught me this once. You know, when you identify, how you identify matters, because we were all trained that you need to identify one way. And her conversation as an 11-year-old was like, I identify as bisexual because why would you cut out 50% of the population? Right? Like, that was never an option.

That was never an option. That was never an option. And so as we evolve in this space, know that where you came from will dictate, and it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. And so the call to mindfulness is just pay attention. You don't have to change anything. There's nothing that if you don't have to respond differently, you can believe differently because you can give me a million examples of why this is bad or why people like this are people like this, whatever that is, are hurtful or harmful or why you need to keep your shoulders up. I know that you will tell me all of those because bias is really fascinating. You can find it.

You can find anything to make it fit if you're looking for it. Yeah. The challenge in your work is to find the things that don't make it fit. Yeah. Exactly. And also how to transform it, right? So once we become mindful of it, so if you're a teacher, if you're a doctor, you're a human resource manager, just become aware of the stereotypes and not make decisions based off of it, right? Because we've made it conscious. So that's how we're kind of interrupting it. You know, neurons that fire together, wire together. So bias is something we've really kind of,

the neurons have wired together because of the training, but we're interrupting that and now relearning and re kind of wiring new neurons. So that's where stereotype replacement really begins, which is a mindfulness practice. Neurons that fire together. No, I'm so sorry. Neurons that fire together, wire together. And when you have fired the set of neurons, you're almost think about them as pathways to believe that housing insecure people are bad, that gay people are weird. If that's the piece that's been in your body, that's just now your question is, how do we just challenge that belief a little bit to recreate some of those pathways?

Just do it. It's nothing. You can always go back. It's easy, but some of those pathways. Just do it. It's nothing. You can always go back. It's easy. But let's just consider. Yeah. Nope. Let's consider it.

So next time people think of, you know, gay people are weird. If that's coming to mind, right? Oh, they're different. Think of me. Right. Think of someone else. Right. Harvey Milk.

Think of thousands of other examples, right? Who don't live up to that stereotype. So that's what in the lab they tested. It's like we basically replaced that association. The second we become mindful of it with a real life example. You know, you know, Muslim women are subservient. Malala Yousafzai, you know, is she like not a global movement for girls education, right?

You know, whatever, right? So basically, we're beginning to shift through stereotype replacement. So this is, again, we're rewiring the brain and expanding the aperture of, you know, basically curiosity around human identities. And then we move to the third step, which is individuation. That's really about curiosity, where we investigate where these stereotypes came from, but also treat people as individuals versus their group-based associations. The fun with Jodi, with the unique human Jodi is not the woman, the Canadian, the cisgender, all the things.

Those are things that she is too. But there are many, many other things that I can be curious about, that I can connect with her around her humanity. And all of us are like that, all 8 billion of us. And that's where kind of the curiosity piece is really important. And that is where the body comes into place because what prevents us from being curious is our inability to inhabit our bodies when we get stuck in our head isn't it you i mean and i love this i often we have to talk about this around here you got to name it to tame it because part of trauma is you get stuck at the scene you get stuck in the memory you get stuck at the scene. You get stuck in the memory. You get stuck in the fear. And naming it, identifying it, bringing that back into your body, just where do you feel? And people say this

to me all the time. How do you bring it back into your body? You answer this question, where do you feel it? And I think that's part of it, that really in that moment allows you to sort of start to integrate some of those things, right? So mindfulness, perspective taking, individuation, what else is, where else does prison teach us? Yeah, that's right. So start with mindfulness, stereotype replacement, individuation, then we move to pro-social behavior, which is, and perspective taking, which are basically heart-based tools, active cultivation of compassion, kindness, empathy, to really shift the negative emotional affect that's connected with being gay, with being black, with being indigenous, whatever it may be.

Transgender, how you identify, the pronouns, anything that gets you. Yeah. So we're replacing that by really cultiv know, really cultivating these states. And there's so much research around the types of tools that can be used, particularly meditation, to help us really transform that negative affect. So if you think about neurons that fire together, wire together, it's not just the stories that firing together, it's an emotional response that's also firing together of like a houseless person, for example, a housing insecure person or an indigenous person who happens to be houseless on the street, the intersectionality of that. There's an affect attached to it. So with pro-social behaviors, one of the best tools, the most effective tools, let's say, that scientists have found is something known as loving kindness meditation.

I don't know if you've ever heard of it. Tell me more. But it's basically where we cultivate the feeling of loving kindness within our bodies for ourselves and slowly expand that circle of kindness toward people we love, to people we don't know,

what is known as neutral people, eventually to even people we hate, to then all beings everywhere. So it's the capacity of the heart that we're expanding. And the way we do that is by sharing very earnestly well wishes to ourselves and others. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be safe. May I live with ease.

And changing that over time to you, to they, to us. May I be happy? May I be healthy? May I be safe? May I live with ease? And changing that over time to you, to they, to us. And if you think about it, at a neural level, what's happening is these positive emotions are being generated in the body. And it's transforming that negative affect that accompanies bias. And it's transformative. i will speak from personal example in a room with him like as as we're talking i'm telling marty this i'm like i just so you as you lead me through this i mean it's here's here was my response as you talked about this you're like we just need to give love and kindness to the world i was like oh shit here we

go i'm sure people like i can listen to you know the people my i always think about my dad and my brother being like oh and then as you said that right this is not for anybody else but you feel what it's like when you're in your car in this moment or you're sitting listening to these words first of all your voice is healing even in of. But this idea that if you can just initially think, I wish for myself health and growth and healing and joy and insight, and then wish that for the people you love, right? The people you're mad at right now. You want to throat punch your husband. You think your kids are assholery-ish. Think about spreading that to them in that moment and just notice the shifts in your body. And then the next step, as you suggested, is even, even to the people you hate,

you don't have to sit, they're not receiving any of it necessarily. I want you to just notice in your body, what happens, what happens to your shoulders, your heartbeat, even the heaviness of the weight of the world that you carry. What a beautiful intervention, Anu. No, it's transformative. You know, for me, I did this practice just for myself. So may I be 20 minutes a day for two years. And it was a huge part of lifting up that depression and anxiety and the self-loathing I experienced. Because what happens is when you do it, you hit a lot of roadblocks.

You're like, but I'm not deserving. Keep on doing it. you do it, you hit a lot of roadblocks. You're like, but I'm not deserving. Keep on doing it. Persistence, persistence, persistence. And you're just softening the heart. Yeah, just noticing with mindfulness, noticing there it is. There's that guilt. There's that shame. May you be, you know, happy and healthy too. And then begin to really transform that. And this is the power of interiority, right? In a world that's constantly pushing it outward, we go inward and we build a strong, solid foundation. And then this takes us to perspective taking, which is really imagining being in the shoes of another,

not as how we would be, but how they would be. So breaking those boxes of bias all together. Wow. So what I'm reflecting on right now, right, is is the idea of, as you know, you're on this podcast called Unlonely. It is like the the segue to Unlonely is through really discovering our biases, is really being in this place of like, how did I get here? What are the stories in my head around why I look this way, feel this way, talk to myself in this way? How did I get here? I don't have to change any of them, right? Pressure's off. It's okay.

Welcome them in, but really know that there's so many of those stories that are deeply felt in your bones viscerally that maybe even you inherited that deserve a little light, that deserve a little renegotiation because you need more freedom to make a bigger difference in this world. Yeah, and loneliness is a consequence of bias, internalized bias and interpersonal bias, right? And it's so beautifully said, you know, Jodi, am I getting emotional listening to you? Because as someone who's been in the trenches with loneliness, it was because I failed to connect to my deeper aspirations, my dreams, my wants, and all the ways I denied myself those simple things, right? Which was also a learned habit. It was learned. It was over practice, right? And then being in this exquisite way of finding connection with myself and then connecting with other humans, right? Because just as I was experiencing these things, so many others were experiencing the same things. And when I was vulnerable with them. That's where connection and trust began to be created. And I just love that, you know, I love that you taught me that again today because it really is that sense of like, do not underestimate your power when you can be brave enough to go still to even give yourself 30 seconds of being able to say, I am powerful.

I am loved. I deserve so much kindness. I can give so much kindness and to be able to just do that. And to yourself, as you said, for two years, like do not underestimate the need to undo what you've been told your whole life. You're too big, you're too fat, you're too skinny, you're too anxious, you're too, you know, brown, you're too black, you're too gay, whatever that is that we, that resonates in our bodies. And we've had so many biases. We had, um, Joanne Finkelstein on, um, a little while ago, just talking about like what we do

that between, you know, sexuality and, and how we do that with our boys and our girls unconsciously about, you know, speaking about money and to boys and not to our girls and sports about, you know, all of that, just notice those things. And one more question I have that before we wrap up, cause I so appreciate your time that talk to me about bias in business, because how does it impact our work, our growth as entrepreneurs or organizations? Because when we bring this into the workplace where we're spending the vast majority of our waking hours, do you what do you what's your perspective there?

It's huge, right? And, you know, what I've done is I looked at all the ways bias impacts business, right? Whether it's racial bias, gender bias, age bias, you name it. And it's three big buckets. One is, of course, what's known as HR. But the way I like to define HR is human relationships. Because we are human beings. We're not resources.

We're not like just a line item on a budget somewhere. That's really dehumanizing. But it's relationships. Relationships across colleagues, relationships with our supervisors, with people that report to us. And that's where bias interrupts it because those stereotypes affect the way we perceive,

reason, remember, and make decisions, create conflict, lead to discrimination lawsuits, you know, a whole host of other challenges. So that's one, which is within the workplace itself and organizations itself. The other two are service delivery. So that's what happens between a doctor and a patient, a teacher and a student, a police officer and a civilian, you know, a judge and a defendant, a therapist and his client or her client. So that's service delivery. People that are actually, and most of them aren't,

like most nurses don't wake up being like, I want to be racist today. Of course not. They've dedicated their lives to caring. Yeah. This is the nefarious ways unconscious bias troubles that service delivery and so important for us to really break it.

And the third, which is becoming more and so important for us to really break it and the third which is becoming more and more important is product development so this is for people that are you know basically incredibly creative um out there but they're building algorithms like facial recognition technology you know that are building fashion brands, you know, companies are creating or there was a luxury brand that created a $800 scarf that looked like blackface and folks were like uh how did this go through the entire product development cycle end to end with hundreds of people at a huge luxury brand oh and no one noticed it unconscious bias right and you know to your to your point i read some of your work that says you know people who create band-aids and created band-aids for years are black marginalized peoples who just didn't realize that you could say, hey, second, this this this doesn't match our skin color.

There's an unconscious bias around the fact that this is a band-aid and this is how it goes. Right. One of the most dangerous phrases in the English language, Grace Murray Hopper said this, is it's always been done this way. Yes. And I love that part of your work and just how inclusive it is across our own personal lives, what we are teaching and showing the next generation, how we bring ourselves to work. Anu, thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you. When this comes out into the world, your book, Breaking Bias, will be on the shelves. And I'm just so hopeful that the listeners,

I want you to follow this human. I want you to read this book. I think there's so much in there, Anu, that is going to be the answer to so many things that people are desperately seeking answers for. Right. In the world themselves. But knowing that right here we have so much we can do and we can harness. So I cannot wait to watch it blow up. I cannot wait to, you know, just now I am a big, biggest, your biggest, hugest fan up here in Canada. We're going to spread this word of a new Gupta changing the world.

You're precious. And thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much, Dr. Jodi. This has been such an honor and your support means the world to me. You know, my prayer really is that we heal this world, this hurting world of ours. And I know we can because there's so many good people like you and I. Yeah, just together. We were never meant to do this world, this hurting world of ours. And I know we can, because there's so many good people like you and I. Yeah, just together. We were never meant to do this alone, hey?

Amen. Thank you. All right, everybody. Thank you. I hope you are feeling it like I am today. That was something special. So take care of yourself, take care of each other, and I'll meet you right back here the next time.