It's nice to be standing at the Intersection with you Hitendra. Thanks for having me.

It was called 'The Little Book of Talent.'

It's been a lot of fun. Like you, I like to spend my life investigating big mysteries that matter to people. All of these subjects, whether it's individual talent or how groups perform, are endlessly fascinating and endlessly interesting and endlessly useful.

The big one was when I started, I had this idea that a lot of people share, which is that when you get to very high performing groups that everything is going to be very smooth and happy. If you work at Pixar, you sort of have this image or I have an image from outside of Pixar that says all the ideas are good ones and every meeting is filled with agreement, fresh creativity and fresh genius in the same as you. If you went with the Navy SEALs or if you went with the San Antonio Spurs or any high performing group, in fact, that's wildly wrong. They're good because they're really good at arguing. They're good at turning towards their problems, turning toward their tensions together. That's what makes them special. In bad cultures, when a problem pops up, people ignore it or turn away. They don't want to risk their reputation. They don't want to risk looking foolish.

In great cultures, people spot the problem and then gather around it and have high energy intensive discussions to try to make it better, to try to fix it, or to try to exploit this opportunity. This turning toward the tension makes these places. They're not filled with champagne bubbles as you might imagine them from the outside, but they're filled with a different sort of energy. It's the energy of solving hard problems with people you admire. Solving hard problems with people you admire is a very special experience in life. When you find a great culture, what you find is that people will orbit in and out of them. They might leave for a little while, but then they have a way of coming back because that's where they get that special feeling of solving hard problems with people you admire.

I guess that was the biggest mistaken impression that I had going into it. I thought I'd get there and it would be like Xanadu. It would be just magical and perfect, and it's perfect in a very different and unexpected way.

Family. They feel connected. They talk about their brothers and sisters and they feel connected into a community. That word is a double-edged sword at times. It captures the feeling. But, when you do find, some organizations use it loosely and in fact, when you have a job in a business, you can be fired. So that metaphor becomes ironically painful, the idea that you can ever fire your brother or your sister. I find smart groups now are going more toward words like community rather than family. But the feeling and the vibration you have is very familiar.

That is so true. It's interesting because when you see how good cultures handle off boarding departures, they handle it in a very signature way. They amplify the warmth around it. They create events around it. There was a football coach named Bill Walsh, who's probably one of the best football coaches ever in the San Francisco 49ers. When coaches left, he would hand them the playbook and say, “Here's your blueprint for success in your next job.” At most places that would be thought of as IP, like we can't give them the playbook. But he did.

I do some consulting with the Cleveland Guardians Baseball Team. When one of their assistant coaches gets an opportunity to be a head coach at another place, they spend hours prepping that person. Prepping them, doing practice interviews, telling them what suit they should wear. That is such a signature thing because you care about the person and you want that person to fulfill their potential and you want to express that care in a really simple way. So, it's amazing. There are so many things like the tension conversation that we just had, turning toward the tension instead of away. So many things about good culture are a matter of feeling your initial instinct to do something and then kind of doing the opposite because there's an initial instinct when someone's leaving to fold your arms and say, “Good luck, I'll see you down the road.” And not observe the parting, not spotlight the departure. Good cultures pause and they generate and amplify warmth about it and they actually flip it away from this sort of, “Well, don't let the door hit you on the way out,” to “How can I help you more in this new job that you're going to?” What that creates is a larger connection, larger sense of goodwill. It does create that orbital pattern that people have with cultures where you may be saying goodbye to them, but in a few years, they may come back and that relationship stays.

There are. The fascinating thing about trust, about the science of trust that we're really starting to understand, is that we normally think of trust and vulnerability as, I need to build up some trust before I can be vulnerable. But what all the science is showing us is that we have it exactly backwards. Those moments of vulnerability when they are shared are what create trust.

To go back to Zelensky, his action that he did prior to when he got elected was to ask everyone to take down his picture and put up pictures of their family. A very simple thing. Not a big thing that has any effect on policy. It didn't have any incredibly powerful effect. It was a small gesture and you can think of it as vulnerability. He could say, “I want to hang on to the status and the power and it must feel pretty good to have your picture in every office in a country, that's a power trip.” But he's saying that, “No, let's flip that. Let's do the opposite of that. Let's have 'you' put up.” That's part of a million little signals that any leader sends.

The pattern I've seen is, this consistent ability to be fallible and to be vulnerable. Those moments, which I call vulnerability loops in my work, when a group of people can have this habit of telling the truth, it's not some emotional thing where you're talking about your parents and your emotions. It's just saying, “Hey, this is my first draft. I think it needs help or I really need your help on this.”

When you get to Pixar, they have a screening room and they invite all the new employees who are getting trained at the same time. There are baristas in that room. There are filmmakers, there are engineers, there are janitors and the president of Pixar stands up on the stage and he says, “Wherever you were before, you're a filmmaker now. We need your help to make our films better.” Then they have these meetings, they call them when you're plussing, they'll show a draft of a movie and if someone has anything they think could be added, they're free to voice that suggestion.

I met a guy who worked as an engineer, he wasn't on the creative side at all, but he made a suggestion on the medals that the boy scout wore in the Pixar movie Up. He suggested a visual joke and they put it in the movie. Wherever you were before, you're a movie maker now. We need your help to make our films better. That's a signal of fallibility. It would be very easy for any leader to say, “Welcome to Pixar. We are really good at what we do, and we want to achieve high standards and we need the best of your efforts.” No, that's not what he said. He said we need your help. And that's a very different thing.

That idea, those signals of fallibility and vulnerability are what allows a group to have situational awareness, to have voice, to be able to navigate a very complex landscape together. That vulnerability isn't just some extra good feeling, warm fuzzy vibe, it's cognitively essential because it creates awareness of what's actually going on. If you walk around saying, “No, this presentation is great, it doesn't need any help and you should keep my picture hung in your office and we're great. We don't need your help to make a movie.” When you don't spread that signal, you don't get the shared participation in the group brain that you need to be better.

It's so true. I think David Brooks put it well. He said, “What efficiency was to the industrial era, relationships are to today.” I think that really puts a nice structure to it because groups today, they're not like an army marching across a landscape or an American Football team playing plays and deciding what scheme they're going to use. It's much more like a pickup basketball game or it's much more like a flock of birds flying together through a forest where you don't have one bird saying, “Turn 10 degrees to the left here and then turn 20 degrees to the right here.” They've all got to see it and they've all got to be able to react in time and be situationally aware and still know where they're going, still know where North is.

Those qualities are the ones that I end up writing about. Because we're now asking every group to do two things that are difficult together, stay connected and learn in real time. That's a heck of a thing to do. That idea that you must be malleable, you must stay together, but you must reform your relationships around new goals. We have had some beautifully vivid case studies of that during COVID. One of my favorites is, you had Peloton who was perfectly set up to succeed during Covid. They had a product everyone was craving; they had a good product. On the other side, my local restaurant here is called Edwin's. When COVID happened, everybody thought, “Oh, they're going to go out of business. How can they survive? People can't come in there to eat.” And then we fast forward to today. Peloton is augering because of bad leadership. They made a set of assumptions. Those assumptions were wrong. They made wrong investments. They made bad investments all over the place. They're coming in. And my local restaurant is making more money than ever because they were malleable. They were able to reform and self-organize. I think that's an important idea. This idea they could self-organize around this obstacle and say, “Oh no! We can sell dinners for whole families for $40, and we can have our waiters park cars instead. We can build an app.” They'd literally in real time reorganize themselves like that flock of birds. As a result, they're still around.

Peloton didn't have a group brain. They had one or two people making big decisions and those decisions ended up being wrong. I think a group brain will always beat a single command and control operation. So, you're right. That's the landscape we're living in. It's a fascinating time.

That's so true. That's so deep. The irony of it, to layer something on to what you just said is, we are educated as individuals. We are trained as individuals. We're hired as individuals. We are assessed as individuals. We're promoted as individuals. And yet, all our success, all of our team's success depends on this weird set of skills that we never talk about. The skill of sport and skillset of building strong relationships and of figuring out what our purpose is and of being vulnerable to build trust and amplifying our warmth, to build safety. In some ways, I think this is a golden age for this skillset, which we don't spend enough time thinking about, talking about and celebrating. I think it's an opportunity to see ourselves and our teams in a new way.

I love that.

Yeah, only anecdotally. Just like you, I see that same pattern. You certainly see it with many skill sets. It even extends into the physical world where the fastest sprinters in the world are usually on average fourth born in their family. There's never a first born in the finals of the 100 meters ever. It's not whether you're from West Africa or East Africa or the UK, it's more about where you are in your family and that windshield that you have that you're competing against.

Anecdotally, I have the same sort of thing where these skills are a wonderful experiment that I write about in 'The Culture Code' called 'The Bad Apple Experiment,' where psychologists purposely put people in groups and implanted someone to be a complainer to add negative energy and that bad apple was able to drastically diminish the performance of every group. As we know, bad apples are incredibly toxic to group performance except for one group. This drove the researcher crazy because there was one group where there was a guy in it and he began to call them the 'Good Apple' because he would persistently redirect the bad apple and change the topic and listen to him and use that energy in a positive way. That guy turned out to be the son of a diplomat. He had been around all these sorts of situations.

So again, to your point, if we've learned anything about skill, it is that it doesn't come from nowhere. It's not magic. To build a skill, you must get reps, you must get feedback. You must have been motivated to try to enjoy those reps and those feedbacks. To me, it makes perfect sense. The other thing that your question opens up is, how difficult is it to build those skills in the modern era, where so much of our media, so much of our consumer life is built around individualizing us and so little of it is built around groups and teams. Again, it strikes me as like there is an opportunity to define a vocabulary, a skillset for people to start to see the dimension of their skillset, which can be far more powerful than your IQ or whatever measure of intelligence you might have. There are so many people that are very smart now. Smartness is never the limiting factor. It is almost never. The limiting factor is, are they a good teammate? Can they combine with people in a way that is joyful, open, productive, purposeful, safe or not? I think these two traits cut against each other very often. When you're told you're smart and focused on smart, you end up closing down your awareness of other people. What you see with good groups is always this broad awareness of, “How's the team doing right now? What do I need to do to help that person?” And yet, we're often ignoring those skill sets. So again, I think it's a huge opportunity.

Oh really! interesting.

That's true. I love that. Even building on that, I think language can sometimes be our enemy with this thing too. The more skilled we are in language, the more skilled we are in storytelling, the more skilled we are at narrativizing whatever situation we're in and so much of culture really doesn't have anything to do with language, it has to do with behavior. If we're going to be a good teammate, those things are not things we say or things we type. They are things we do. The intentional actions to support each other where we need it, to turn toward problems and figure them out, to lend a hand and those behaviors go way beyond language. That's one good measure of whether a good culture exists or not. Imagine if you were looking at it from space and you could only see the movements of each individual and how they would help each other, and every good culture would have the same x-ray pattern. You would see behavior of people looping out and exploring and then bringing the information back to the group. Then you'd see people grouping around a problem and words wouldn't matter because down deep, they don't.

It's a good way to frame it, fill those gaps. This has a few dimensions. One is that I don't think that gap can ever be filled. We are not wired to build deep, lasting, real relationships online, purely virtually, purely through these little windows that we're using now. But you can use it. A hybrid idea does work. Most of the effective experiments I've seen in this time right now have to do with toggling, where you have short bursts of physical presence with longer bursts of virtual. So, the relationship is founded in real life, forged in real life, and perpetually renewed in real life like a booster shot, but it doesn't exist purely in virtual life. Then the other thing I've seen done, which is interesting is, trying to create a virtual space to connect, where you don't try to pretend that virtual is physical. A lot of times we come to these Zoom meetings and we just act like it's physical.

There's a man named Glenn Fajardo. He's at Stanford and he's written a book about virtual rituals. The big point that he makes that I think is very true is that virtual is deep down voluntary. If we're physically together and we walk in a room together, I must pay attention to you, and you must pay attention to me. But in virtual, you don't. You must be interested. You must be engaged. So, it's important before a virtual meeting to create some shared space and the advice that Glenn gives in his book is very wide ranging. But some of them are as simple as eating together on camera or everyone doing something physical together, or someone plays a piece of music and people try to guess whose favorite song it is, or everyone bites a lemon at the same time. You come up with anything. But if it's not directly related to the work you're doing and as long as it creates some genuine sharing and insight and some empathy back and forth so that you're not trying to make virtual a substitute for real, you're trying to inject virtual with new energy that makes virtual as good as it can be.

Culture happens so naturally that we assume it's sort of magical. We assume it's kind of in our gifts. We assume it's an extension of our personality. That's how we think about it with other cultures. When we think of Walt Disney, we think, “Oh, that's just Walt Disney. That's how they are.” Or we think of the Navy SEALs, “Oh, that's just how they are.” But in fact, as the ups and downs of all cultures reveal, culture is a living thing. It's not like your genes. It's much more like your health. As with health, you can't just lay back and let it happen. You have to have some intent. You have to say, “Well, I'm going to eat, I'm going to move my body and if I do certain things, certain calisthenics or certain forms of diet, it will make me stronger and healthier.” Those behaviors are what create health. Health doesn't happen automatically. It happens because of those actions. Because these cultures are living entities, I think the best model for it is that it's like a giant brain. It's like a being. Like with any being, you need to have a heart that is pumping energy. You need to have eyes to figure out where to go. You need to have muscle so you can perform and do things and that's why these behaviors of connection and safety, trust and vulnerability and of purpose and direction are so important because they're functional.

The one that you mentioned is a classic one. We've used that word culture fit many times. What we've basically meant by that, I think, is that it'll be easy on-board. He's one of us. She's one of us. She gets it, she gets us, we get her. What we're testing there is just bias, right? We like people who are like us. We love people that are like us. So, we tend to over hire people that are like us. Having a culture fit doesn't make you a better group. It makes a more comfortable group. It makes you easier to banter, it makes it easy to be around. But, the best brains are diverse brains. The best brains are drawing from a variety of perspectives to look at problems from a variety of angles. The question to ask isn't, “Is it a culture fit?” Because if you do that, you're headed for a monoculture, the deadliest group of all, the most boring, predictable group of all. Maybe Peloton was a monoculture. That might be why they failed. But instead you're getting who can contribute? What perspective don't we have? What voice do we need to have in this room? What creativity could we tap into? That's the kind of thing that is more uncomfortable around the water cooler. It's not as easy, and they're not wearing the exact same shirt you're wearing, and it doesn't feel like a fit. But that kind of discomfort, just like with any exercise, makes you stronger. And so many of these exercises in the books and other places involve a little bit of discomfort. They involve just a little pause where you say, “Wait a minute, let's have a conversation about how we're doing.” They are these short, simple things or let's talk about what went wrong and what we might do differently next time. They're uncomfortable pauses that take you out of the flow of your work. But actually, they're massive investments because you're building and strengthening the health and the strength of the body of your culture. Just like any calisthenics, it's painful. But that pain is a sign of gain. That pain is an inescapable, important signal that you are getting stronger together. That's how we're built physically and that's how we're built culturally.

It's so true. Science bears that out, too, in terms of patterns and in terms of the impact that our diversity has had on our creativity and our perspective. There are some challenges now when it comes to the political landscape. But I agree with you that down deep, it's a strength morally, but it's also a strength for our nation's brain. Our group brain is a lot smarter for having all the different groups that can be in it and fully participating.

Harmony and alignment. Those are nice words. It's true. If we're to bring a bunch of people together on a team to do a project, we might all be coming from a different point of view. I might be really interested in learning some of it. You might be really interested in the impact piece of it, but that's why that function of safety, that first step of building a platform of safety is so important. Because, the root of safety is not comfort. The root of safety is not wrapping everyone in a fleece blanket. The root of safety is voice. The first thing that we would do when we came together is talk about our various interests in it and figure out how we're going to harmonize those and align those towards some higher goal. Making that explicit is one of the most powerful things we can do.

The idea of a mantra, I think, is a powerful one. It is kind of cheesy. We always hear these catch phrases. But when you walk into great teams, they use catchphrases. The Navy SEALs do it all the time. They talk about how the only easy day was yesterday and we shoot, move and communicate. We're the quiet professionals. They always use these sort of catch phrases because they orient the mind, they stick in your brain, they're easy to share, and they create a cognitive GPS that lets you navigate toward what's important and ignore what's not important. Having that conversation around purpose in some ways, in which I talk about it in the book, is building a mantra map or making a team charter where you just take a minute before the team starts to work and say, “Let's have this conversation about where we're going and how we want to work together.” The design company IDEO, one of the best design companies on the planet. They have ritualized this into three meetings. Every project team has three meetings. Their analogy is that it's like taking a trip together. We have a pre-flight meeting, a mid-flight meeting and a post flight meeting. At each one their attention is pulled. They stop working on the project and they turn their attention toward the team. How are we doing? In the pre-flight meeting it might be, what are you most interested in? Where are we headed? How do you want to work together?

Then in the mid-flight, sort of check in, how is it going? Are we on track for this? Who else do we need to involve? What's gone missing? What have we done well?

Post-flight, what did we learn the most? Who do you want to talk to about it? What relationship got strengthened the most? They are these short meetings, but they're incredibly powerful because they're putting attention where it's at.

During the Formula 1 races, they don't just race. Occasionally, they pull into the pit and they check on the team, they check on the car. That's how good teams operate, too. They take that time away from just racing and getting things done and they pull into the pit and they say, “I think we need more fuel. I think we need to change the tires, maybe change the driver. Let's stop and see how we're doing.” And those sorts of productive pauses are really at the core of keeping a team both autonomous and aligned. That's where the flock of birds' image comes in again. We can navigate this forest together. But we need to talk amongst ourselves regularly and talk explicitly about where we're going. That's the conversation that sometimes gets taken for granted, where everyone will just say, “Well, we're going to try to do our best. That's what we're going to try to do.”

I think the takeaway is, you need to be as explicit as possible. You need to really try to think about the impact you want this project to have, to really think about the impact you want your team to have, the learning you want it to have, the end state that you want to create. Define that end state that you want to create and once you define that, it does function like a magnetic North that you can use to navigate by.

I like that. We don't have giant monocultures. We have all these micro ecosystems of cultures, all these little ecosystems. I just did an event at a big tech company and they sort of broke down to their smaller teams and they were building their mantra maps. They were building what language really captures where we're going and how we want to do it. One of them came up with the mantra, 'do epic shit.' It's kind of funny. It's almost meaningless. But to that group, it had massive orienting power because it evoked the shared story that this group had. It evoked all kinds of very specific ideas, characters, voices and ambitions in their minds. It was incredibly powerful to them. It works in that ecosystem. Would that mantra work for everyone? Absolutely not. But the point is that they got together, they circled up, and they created that language.

As Peter Senge says, “It's not what the vision is, it's what the vision does.” I think that's very powerful. It's the function of the vision to orient a line and allow you to navigate together. Is every vision perfect? No. Are you going to continually rewrite it? Absolutely.

That's really fascinating. It's fascinating because it's an example of how fast things are changing. I think there's a time, not very long ago, where this would be unthinkable. But recently, some executives at Genentech made videos about their own mental health challenges and talked about anxiety, depression and things they had struggled with and shared those under the hashtag of Let's Talk, vividly modeling the types of openness, vulnerability that creates trust and connection.

Another group at Google came up with something they call an anxiety party, where you get together with a small group of 4 or 5 people that you work closely with, probably not your boss, and each of you share something that you are anxious about. The rest of the group rates that anxiety between 1 and 5 with 1 being, don't worry about it, 5 being that's worthy of concern. Then they brainstorm every 3, 4 and 5 score, they brainstorm ways to make it better.

People are inventing these sorts of ways to bring these issues around anxiety and other mental issues into the center so that people can talk about them, share about them. We're starting to realize, we really know as a society that if your coworker walks in with a broken ankle, you'll see it. Mental health stuff is no different. Figuring out those ways to talk about that and continually normalizing that ends up being one of the more powerful approaches any culture can take.

I think it is. I think there's increasingly language awareness leaders that really help us get better at that. When we think about one of the more effective things that anybody can do as a reflection. This whole time we're in is really a time where it's spotlighting the power of reflection. Life has never been busier than it is now. It serves us with so many things we can do. And to stop and reflect on who are the best leaders I've ever known, and why are they so good? Creating conversations around these big dumb questions like that which help you get at the intangibles. What's the best group I've ever been in? Close your eyes and think about the best, most cohesive group you've ever been on. Maybe it was a choir, maybe it was a sports team, maybe it was family. What made that so good? Reflecting on these big mysteries helps us get our hands around these skill sets.

Well, overarching, incredibly fortunate in every way to be born in the family I was born into, just sheer luck. Two brothers, either side, so very competitive, very interested in performance and competing at a very young age, whether that was in the classroom or in the sports field. The other big factor in my life is that I grew up in Alaska and moved there when I was 3. This idea of living outside the mainstream and looking at the world from a bit of a remove ended up being very useful as a writer. Whenever I came down to visit family in the Lower 48, as we called it, it seemed very exotic and strange. Shopping malls and things like that seemed as bizarre as if I had lived on the moon. That was a big factor.

The other thing is that I came from a family of engineers and doctors. My dad was a radiologist and he was always looking at x-rays. So at an early age, I was sort of determined to be a doctor, but I had this sense that it was possible to look underneath the surface of things, that there were bones, that there were systems that you couldn't see that were really at the core of what made something work. When I decided at the last minute not to be a doctor and to go into studying the science of performance from a journalistic perspective, that core belief and that curiosity really was there. The idea that, “Okay, people look magical and their performance is very magical, but it's not actually magic. Actually, if we could x-ray it, maybe we could see what the systems are that are causing that to happen.” I guess that has been my approach throughout to say, “Go to something that looks magical and then sort of probe it and see what's really there.”

The moving and then the sense making for sure. I'm sure there are 10 different stories I could tell. There would also be dots to connect about this journey like with anybody. That's the fascinating thing to me, that I'm sort of wrestling with and wondering about now. That instinctive part and that urge. There is a fundamental energy that every human being has. There's something about it that sounds very woo-woo, mysterious and mystical when you talk about it. We've talked about character and soul and we've used all kinds of words to describe that over the years. But there's something there, some pattern of energy, I guess, is the best way to think about it.

What a great question. It's one that I continue to have to wrestle with because I must reinvent it a little bit for every project. Every project is a little bit unique. But if you think scan is a really good word that you just used; it is sort of a prolonged scan pattern recognition where you're looking for something. In some ways, you're looking for tension, you're looking for opposites. You're looking for examples where there's a surprise. That's what I'm looking for when I go to research comedy troupes and I find out that many comedy stars that are in the world today, work in this very particular way. They all came out of this very particular school. When I found out that there is a tennis academy in Russia that had produced more top 25 women than the entire United States. Moreover, it was a rundown kind of trashy place, I couldn't resist it. I had to go there. Somebody told me once that journalism is a license to be curious. I think having that license and letting your curiosity roam, but you're always looking for tension and opposites. You're always looking for something that is unexpected and a little surprising. That's something that I end up thinking about.

If I find myself thinking about something when I'm not actively doing it, that's kind of I'm paying attention to my own attention that ends up being big. The process is very inefficient. I might look at 100 places to find 5. I might look at 100 potential case studies to find 10. It is that long needle in a haystack process. Then you are sort of sifting them and seeing which ones look good next to each other, which ones create tension, there's an element to it that's sort of musical where you're trying to put things into counterpoint with each other. Which story will illuminate the other story? You're also doing the block and tackle fundamental things of journalism, such as let's call the people who know the most about this. Let's call the people who have been studying this for a long time and talk to them. Talk to them about their interests. What are they lit up about? What are they curious about? What are they surprised about? So, you are following emotions for a lot of this.

When it comes to getting in the door and I do bump into this from time to time, there are many places where people are excited to share. When you say, “I'm fascinated by what you do and by what you've accomplished,” Most people will say, I'd love to talk to you. There are some places, though, especially in culture, where they say, “Well, the thing that makes our culture great is that we never brag about it and we never appear in the press.” When it comes to those times, you must be a little more inventive.

I found that what has worked in the past is to appeal to their desire to learn. When I went to some of these cultures, a lot of them said, “No, it sounds like an interesting project, but we don't want to be involved.” Then I would try to have a conversation with them about what they might learn from the conversation. And sure enough, most of them took me up on it.

When I spent a few days with the San Antonio Spurs, the general manager ended up picking me up at the airport and then he proceeded to interview me for 3 days. He was so interested in the Navy SEALs. He was so interested in the comedy troupe. He was so interested in the jewel thieves. He was so interested in IDEO and Zappos and Pixar, that's what makes them great. And so, in each one you're trying to find a conversation to have, you're trying to find what's a useful conversation to have. I realized that as I get older in this, I think the more I focus on that conversational element because it shouldn't be the case that I parachute in, observe a bunch of stuff and leave and then sell a book. I think it should be relational. It should be the case that I can come in and offer some frames or some mental models or some insights to what they do and we both can have a learning conversation as part of that. That's ended up being the fondest part of writing the book, being a solo endeavor, but it does end up creating conversations like the one we've had today where you leave a little bit smarter than you came in and you connect new dots.

That's what I'm grateful for. That's what I'm continually grateful for this type of work because it creates those conversations.

Too many ways to count. I think ultimately the idea that you really must look at everything twice. You get an instinctive response and you can judge that, or you can zoom out and look at it from a larger point of view. I think when I was young, I was very quick to judge, quick to understand what was going on. That's been sort of a softening of judgment. I think, it is what happens over time. You realize how much you don't know. It is a cliché. It really is. But it is a very deep and real one too because when you actually tune in to what is really happening, you end up taking a much more empathetic and humbler stance toward it.

Thanks for all you do. I really appreciate the conversation and I have a feeling it won't be our last.