Author: Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People

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0:01:20 It can be particularly important for young people, for adolescents,
0:01:26 to have those intentional spaces that build up that sense of here’s who we are,
0:01:29 here’s who I am as a member of this community, here’s who we are,
0:01:33 and that can protect you some from at least the negative narratives
0:01:35 that may be coming from the external world.
0:01:39 That may not protect you from something like an unjust deportation order.
0:01:40 That’s another matter.
0:01:41 That’s a legal matter.
0:01:47 It’s a matter of political power, but it can protect you from a narrative perspective.
0:01:53 It’s Guy Kawasaki.
0:01:59 This is the Remarkable People podcast, and we’re on a quest to make you remarkable.
0:02:03 And today we have the remarkable Greg Walton.
0:02:06 He’s a professor of psychology at Stanford University.
0:02:12 He’s renowned for his pioneering work about wise interventions.
0:02:19 These are brief, evidence-based strategies that’s designed to address psychological barriers
0:02:24 and promote positive outcomes in education and really in life.
0:02:29 Walton’s research focuses on how individuals’ perceptions of themselves
0:02:35 and their social environments, influence, motivation, achievement, and well-being.
0:02:38 He’s the author of a really interesting book.
0:02:41 I just read it called Ordinary Magic.
0:02:47 The science of how we can achieve big change with small acts.
0:02:52 This explores the profound impact of subtle psychological shifts
0:02:56 on personal and social transformation.
0:02:58 How’s that for an intro, Greg?
0:03:09 So I have to start off with an observation that I have that on the Remarkable People podcast,
0:03:17 we have had Philip Zimbardo, Carol Dweck, Mary Murphy, and now you.
0:03:28 So can any other podcaster in the world say that they’ve had so many Stanford social psychology
0:03:29 professors?
0:03:32 I haven’t done the empiricism, but I’d say no.
0:03:41 Maybe Madison and I should rename this the Remarkable Stanford Social Psychologist Podcast.
0:03:56 So my first question for you because I’m a big fan of Carol Dweck and she’s been on this podcast twice and I’ve been to her house and she’s just such a lovely person.
0:04:03 Her book Mindset really changed my life when I read it in 2020 or whenever that was.
0:04:07 So my first question for you is what do you have against the word mindset?
0:04:13 Because you made a point that you’re not going to use the word too much in your book.
0:04:15 Carol and I are very close.
0:04:26 And her husband David in fact married my wife and myself and we have a joint lab at Stanford and I’ve done lots and lots and lots of research with Carol, maybe more than with anybody else.
0:04:32 The issue is that people misinterpret the word as she articulated it and defined it.
0:04:43 So all the time I have undergraduates come to Stanford and say they were told in high school that they should have a growth mindset, that if they didn’t have a growth mindset, it might be kind of their fault.
0:04:47 And that was never what Carol intended about the word.
0:04:49 That was never how she intended its meaning.
0:04:55 And it leads to this overly individualistic representation of the word itself.
0:05:07 Instead, in Ordinary Magic, what I came to feel is that the best way to understand this stuff, this kind of psychological space, is as a dialogue of questions and answers.
0:05:13 So you walk into a world, like a world in which there’s lots of person praise for intelligence.
0:05:20 Some kids are smart, it’s gifted and talented program, you take a standardized test, you’re told your percentile score.
0:05:26 And that’s a world that implies that there’s this thing, smartness, and you either have it or you don’t.
0:05:41 And then when you face a problem, like you don’t do well at something at first, you don’t understand something at first, you get a score on a standardized test that is disappointing to you, then it raises the question, do I have what it takes to do this?
0:05:43 And that’s where wise interventions come in.
0:05:49 Wise interventions are a way to think about those situations, to think about those questions, to think about answers that will serve you well.
0:05:59 So do you think that by using the word mindset and saying you have to have a growth mindset, in fact, you’re saying that you have a fixed mindset?
0:06:03 I think it just is taking all responsibility off of the context.
0:06:11 Like a really fundamental point is that the psychology that we all experience is coming from the world that we’re in.
0:06:17 So the question, like, can I do this, is coming from a world that has reinforced a fixed mindset.
0:06:32 That world has said there’s smart people, there’s less smart people, you have to be smart to succeed, and then if you don’t do very well at first, it raises the question in exactly the same way that, for example, a first-generation college student comes to college and they ask, can someone like me belong here?
0:06:36 Like, their family literally has not belonged in college before.
0:06:39 That’s a question that is coming to them from the context they’re in.
0:06:49 And when you just say something like, oh, you should have a growth mindset, anybody who’s an architect of a context is decrying any responsibility for making that better.
0:07:04 When we interviewed Mary Murphy, I thought it was a very interesting observation that, if I may paraphrase what I think I learned from Mary, which is that Carol was talking about this growth versus fixed mindset.
0:07:11 But it also matters what environment you’re in because you have a growth mindset in a fixed mindset environment.
0:07:13 You’re not going to do well.
0:07:26 Right. Yeah. So, you might have a growth mindset and then you walk into math class and the math professor is giving out short-time tests and talking about who’s brilliant at math and who, by implication, isn’t.
0:07:30 And it’s hard to retain that growth mindset in that fixed mindset world.
0:07:35 And we have direct empirical evidence that shows that from the National Study of Learning Mindsets.
0:07:50 So, what kind of wise interventions can foster, I don’t know how to say it right now, I’m afraid of using the M word, what kind of wise interventions can foster this growth mentality?
0:07:52 You can call them growth mindset.
0:07:56 In the context of growth mindset of intelligence, that’s a term that exists.
0:08:01 And there’s a whole body of research on growth mindset of intelligence interventions.
0:08:17 But I think that what you should understand in those interventions and many others is that these are essentially creating structured spaces for people to think about something that’s important and that matters to them,
0:08:22 but that they often don’t have time or don’t have space to really focus on in that way.
0:08:32 So, if you’re a student in a class and you’re getting hit by the professor who’s saying there’s some smart people and there’s some not smart people and here’s a time test and you got the 40th percentile,
0:08:43 like you’re not getting space in that context to actually think about what intelligence means, how it can be built, what good strategies are to do that, how you can get help from others.
0:08:47 And growth mindset interventions create that space to do that.
0:08:57 So, similarly, when we do belonging interventions with students in the transition to college, we surface things like how normal it is to worry about whether you belong at first in college,
0:09:05 and we create space for people to think about why that’s normal and what kinds of trajectories of growth they can achieve and how they can pursue those.
0:09:12 Two of the topics that you address immediately in your book are spiraling up and spiraling down.
0:09:16 So, what causes a person to spiral up?
0:09:17 Yeah.
0:09:29 So, wise interventions can do that in the scientific literature, but this is also something that we can do with each other in the course of normal, kind of supportive, empathic, what I would call wise conversations.
0:09:39 So, in the book, for example, I tell a story about a young woman I met when I was teaching at Stanford’s program in Berlin.
0:09:42 And I was the faculty member in residence there.
0:09:46 It was the welcome event for a new group of Stanford undergraduates to come to the program in Berlin.
0:09:50 And I sat next to her, and so I was just asking her about her life.
0:09:53 And she said that she was a very competitive gymnast in high school.
0:09:58 And then I blew my knee out, and then COVID happened, and I couldn’t see any of my friends.
0:10:01 And she was just very direct and honest.
0:10:02 She wasn’t complaining.
0:10:05 She was just laying out the facts of the situation to me.
0:10:11 And because she was so clear, I could be clear in my own thinking and then clear back to her.
0:10:13 So, I said, did that make you depressed?
0:10:16 And she said, for sure.
0:10:18 I was already seeing a therapist, but absolutely.
0:10:22 And in that conversation, we ratcheted each other up.
0:10:24 So, she put her situation on the table.
0:10:32 I was able to see that situation and reflect back to her what might be the consequence of being a person in that situation.
0:10:38 And in that ratcheting, she was very clear that she knew that I wasn’t judging her.
0:10:41 And in fact, I wasn’t judging her.
0:10:44 Like, we were just seeing the situation that was on the table for a person.
0:10:46 You’re 18 years old.
0:10:47 You can’t do what you love.
0:10:48 You can’t see your friends.
0:10:49 Would that make a person depressed?
0:10:51 Like, it might well, you know?
0:10:53 So, there’s nothing wrong with her.
0:10:56 She knew that I thought there was nothing wrong with her.
0:10:58 She knew that she thought there was nothing wrong with her.
0:11:00 We were just clear about the situation.
0:11:04 And then when you’re clear about the situation, you can start to make progress.
0:11:05 You can start to think about that.
0:11:10 In a way, I have found that to be true with my life, too.
0:11:19 Like, in the first 10 seconds of when I meet most people, I tell them I am deaf and I have a cochlear implant.
0:11:26 And even with a cochlear implant, it takes you from being deaf to just having really lousy hearing.
0:11:35 And I find it when I tell people that it allows us to spiral up because they understand where I’m coming from.
0:11:35 Yeah.
0:11:38 Can I tell you a funny story?
0:11:50 So, when I was a first-year professor at Stanford one day, I was coming home late at night and I had on my bike and I was going too fast through Menlo Park and I had a helmet on, but I didn’t have lights.
0:11:55 And suddenly, this car appears right in front of me, parked on the side of the road.
0:11:56 I have no idea how it got there.
0:12:01 And it had these spears sticking out of me, also known as a bike rack.
0:12:03 And I rear-ended this thing.
0:12:04 And I don’t know if you can see.
0:12:06 Can you see this scar on my cheek?
0:12:09 So, I sliced open my face.
0:12:11 I got home.
0:12:12 I found a neighbor.
0:12:14 The neighbor took me to the Stanford ER.
0:12:17 And the Stanford ER sewed me up.
0:12:21 It was a doctor from the class after mine at Stanford who was sewing me up.
0:12:23 There’s a very long, funny story about this.
0:12:29 I walk in and the ER attendant at a towel on my chin says, what’s wrong?
0:12:30 And I go like this and she gasps.
0:12:32 I’m like, you’re the ER attendant.
0:12:34 You don’t get to gasp at me.
0:12:40 But anyway, so then eventually I had this big bandage on my face and I’m walking around with this big bandage on my face.
0:12:45 And then I go to this talk at the social psychology conference and there’s this guy.
0:12:49 And the very first talk is about the stigma of having a scar on your face.
0:12:52 And I’m like sitting there with this big bandage and I’m in the front row.
0:12:55 And I’m like, I have so many questions.
0:12:57 Like I’m going to hand this up the whole time.
0:12:59 And he does this fascinating study.
0:13:04 So the study is he’s looking at like a job interview situation.
0:13:08 And there’s a candidate who either does or doesn’t have a scar on the face.
0:13:15 And he shows that people evaluate the candidate less positively when they have the scar on the face.
0:13:18 And then he also has this other really interesting data.
0:13:21 So he has this interesting data on eye tracking and memory.
0:13:31 So the eye tracking data shows that the people who are watching this job interview, their eyes are going back and forth between the eyes of the candidate and the scar.
0:13:33 And then they had the memory data.
0:13:38 And every time their eyes are looking at the scar, they don’t remember what the guy said.
0:13:39 Okay.
0:13:47 So then the researcher had this hypothesis that maybe it’s not a kind of animus, a kind of stereotype in a sense.
0:13:50 Maybe it’s that the people are actually just distracted.
0:13:57 So then what they do is they do this brilliant study where they have the same guy with a scar on the face.
0:14:00 But he acknowledges it at the very beginning of the conversation.
0:14:02 He says, I’ve got this scar on my face.
0:14:05 And he tells like a one-sentence story about how he got that scar.
0:14:07 So it’s like a not interesting story.
0:14:09 And then all the effects go away.
0:14:11 So people pay attention.
0:14:13 The eyes aren’t going back and forth.
0:14:18 They remember and they evaluate him just as highly as when he doesn’t have the scar on the face.
0:14:21 So that’s a kind of a wise intervention, right?
0:14:24 Like you kind of understand what’s happening in somebody’s mind.
0:14:27 Like actually what’s happening is that they’re distracted.
0:14:28 Like what is that?
0:14:29 I’m trying to understand that.
0:14:30 What’s going on here?
0:14:32 And you say, you acknowledge it.
0:14:33 You say, yeah, there’s that.
0:14:35 And then it becomes a non-issue.
0:14:38 So for years, I used that when I taught Psych 1.
0:14:43 In the early course in Psych 1, I would point this out and I would tell that story.
0:14:45 And then I would tell about the research.
0:14:57 So applying that lesson, I would say, so because I tell people that I am deaf in the first 10 seconds, they’re not wondering if I am stupid, right?
0:14:57 Right.
0:14:58 For example, right.
0:15:04 If you don’t hear something, they might have been thinking, oh, like he’s slow in the mind.
0:15:05 But actually you just didn’t hear them.
0:15:11 If people think I’m slow in the mind, they’re making a very big mistake.
0:15:14 I appreciate that.
0:15:19 So then a related thing would be accents.
0:15:22 So how do you think people react to accents?
0:15:23 Yeah.
0:15:26 I do think you could have something similar happen, right?
0:15:30 Where somebody you’re talking to is like, what is that accent?
0:15:31 I’m trying to place that accent.
0:15:33 I’m a little confused about that.
0:15:40 And then obviously the speaker has the choice of whether they want to acknowledge that or allay that.
0:15:42 This gets into a lot of identity issues.
0:15:45 There’s such a long history of where are you from?
0:15:46 No, where are you really from?
0:15:47 No, really, where are you from?
0:15:53 I’m like, I don’t care about your third generation, like American family, but where are you from in the fourth generation?
0:15:58 And that’s offensive to people because it questions their American-ness.
0:16:04 We do have the opportunity to answer that question and set it aside if you choose to do that.
0:16:05 Okay.
0:16:12 So today at 2.30, I’m making a speech and I’m going to start off by saying I am deaf.
0:16:13 I have a cochlear implant.
0:16:18 That means I have really lousy hearing as opposed to being deaf completely.
0:16:21 And I’m from Honolulu, Hawaii.
0:16:25 I’m third generation Japanese American, but I have a pigeon accent.
0:16:26 So that’s my accent.
0:16:29 I don’t have any scars to talk about.
0:16:34 I’m going to be like spiraling up the rest of my life from now on.
0:16:36 So now how do you spiral down?
0:16:39 What causes people to spiral down?
0:16:43 Yeah, I think a lot of downward spirals start with these miscommunications.
0:17:03 So if you think about that job interview study, right, just as a microcosm, if the scar doesn’t get identified and then the person thinks that the candidate doesn’t have a lot of interesting things to say because they can’t remember anything they said, and then they don’t give them the job, they suddenly don’t have the job.
0:17:06 Right. That’s the start of a downward spiral.
0:17:13 Sometimes I think it can happen in these cycles of miscommunication and self-doubts.
0:17:19 If the job candidate in that case, for example, could think, I didn’t get the job, maybe there’s something wrong with me.
0:17:22 Is there something wrong with me that led me not to get the job?
0:17:26 And that could feed the kind of self-doubt that makes it harder than to succeed.
0:17:30 And all of that is circumvented if you have that wise understanding.
0:17:36 One of the things that I had the pleasure to really think deeply about in writing Ordinary Magic was about identity.
0:17:44 And in particular, identities that are commonly represented as sources of weakness or stigma or disadvantage.
0:17:49 And I was deeply influenced by this book here.
0:17:52 This is Jacqueline Woodson’s book, The Day You Begin.
0:18:01 And in The Day You Begin, Woodson is talking about a girl in an elementary school classroom who feels different and deficient.
0:18:07 And then The Day You Begin in Woodson’s book is The Day You Begin to Share Your Own Stories.
0:18:18 And so, in Ordinary Magic, there’s a long section where I’m thinking about all of these different identities that are commonly represented as sources of negativity.
0:18:28 Like being a refugee, having a disability, being from a lower socioeconomic background, having experienced mental illness like depression.
0:18:42 And in all of these cases, there’s ways to ask people, even if this experience has been challenging and difficult in some ways, there might also be ways it’s been sources of goodness and strength.
0:18:51 And you can share stories with people, for example, about the goodness and strength that they’ve developed from contending with these identities themselves.
0:19:00 So, in like the depression case, for example, people with depression will say stories like, I really learned to understand myself better.
0:19:03 I really learned what negative experiences are.
0:19:05 And that’s helped me relate better to other people.
0:19:10 And then you can invite people to tell their own stories.
0:19:18 Like, what are the good things and the strengths and the sources of power, maybe, that you’ve gotten from contending with that challenge?
0:19:21 And how do you apply that to things that are important in your life?
0:19:27 So, Guy, I’m curious if you would like to answer that question about being hard of hearing.
0:19:33 What are the sources of goodness and strength that you’ve developed from contending with that?
0:19:36 And how do you apply that to things that matter to you?
0:19:36 Wow.
0:19:39 I could go on a long time about that.
0:19:44 First of all, I have developed an attitude of thankfulness, believe it or not.
0:19:52 Because, yes, being deaf is a bitch and a pain in the ass, but nobody ever died of deafness.
0:19:58 So, if you gave me a choice and said, Guy, you can either be deaf or have pancreatic cancer, guess which one I would pick, right?
0:20:00 So, that’s one thing.
0:20:02 It has helped me appreciate that.
0:20:09 It has helped me appreciate the work of medical science because a cochlear implant is a miracle.
0:20:19 The fact that 16 or 20 electrodes can go directly to my auditory nerve and help me here, it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around.
0:20:25 Like, how does the surgeon find the nerve to connect to my cochlear implant?
0:20:27 I do not understand that.
0:20:37 And also, you know, there are certain really tactical advantages that some people have to use AirPods and headphones and all that.
0:20:40 I don’t need to Bluetooth to my phone directly into my head.
0:20:43 It’s like I have a direct line to God in my head.
0:20:44 I don’t need a headphone.
0:20:46 I’m superior to you.
0:20:48 And then I surf a lot.
0:20:55 And in surfing, there is a lot of controversy where people yell at you for dropping on them or taking their wave or whatever.
0:20:59 But I am deaf, so I don’t ever hear that negativity.
0:21:01 So, I just keep surfing.
0:21:06 Madison can attest to the fact that, you know, you can yell at me all that you want in the water.
0:21:07 I don’t give a shit.
0:21:08 I cannot hear you.
0:21:10 So, there are some advantages.
0:21:13 So, here’s an extreme example about this.
0:21:17 Let’s say that in your youth, you were in a gang.
0:21:20 You got tattooed on your neck and your hands and all that.
0:21:30 So, are you saying that when you meet people for a job interview or maybe you’re a contractor or maybe you’re a waiter or something, do you say, listen, when I was young, I made mistakes.
0:21:32 I got all tatted up.
0:21:33 I had to serve some prison time.
0:21:35 That’s my story.
0:21:37 So, if you’re wondering about all these tattoos, that’s it.
0:21:40 Or is there such a point as oversharing?
0:21:43 There’s definitely a point of oversharing, right?
0:21:44 That’s not impossible.
0:21:58 But I think that all the time, especially in like worlds that are structured by power hierarchies, like people who are on the top have the power to speak, but they don’t listen very well.
0:22:03 And people who are on the bottom often don’t have power to speak at all.
0:22:06 And the people who would matter aren’t listening.
0:22:19 And so, in the day you begin, the teacher creates the space in the classroom for students, including the student who feels deficient and less than, to tell their own story.
0:22:22 And I think often we don’t create that space.
0:22:28 We tell stories for other people, and particularly powerful people tell stories for less powerful people.
0:22:36 And we don’t create that space where people can tell their own story in the way that’s right for them, their story of who they are, maybe who they’ve been.
0:22:49 But most importantly, who they want to become, where they want to go, in a way that can elicit the kinds of relationships and help and admiration and respect and trust from the people who would matter in that becoming.
0:22:54 I felt this very, very deeply in our work with justice-involved students.
0:23:03 So, these are kids who are almost all students of color, almost all boys, coming back to school from a period of time in juvenile detention.
0:23:15 And so, they face a kind of intersection of stereotypes in American society that is like almost physical, race, ethnicity, and gender, and incarceration status, and age.
0:23:26 In the very long design process in Oakland, we could feel like you would ask them about their experiences in school and their experiences interacting with teachers.
0:23:34 And often, they would just clam up, and they would put their head down, or they would pretend they wouldn’t hear you, or they would mumble, and you wouldn’t be able to hear.
0:23:46 So, what we ultimately created in partnership with them was a space, essentially, about a 45-minute session in which students first think about the values that are really important to them,
0:23:53 Like, genuine, deep values, like being a good role model for a younger brother or sister, making your parents proud.
0:24:05 We then shared stories with students about how reflecting on those values and building relationships with adults in school could help them make progress towards those goals, to help realize those goals.
0:24:09 We asked them for their advice for future students who might be in that situation.
0:24:13 Imagine an eight-year-old in Oakland today, maybe in a few years, they might be in a situation like this.
0:24:21 And then, at the end, we gave them that platform that Ms. Woodson gives to the young person in The Day You Begin.
0:24:27 We say, who’s an adult in school who isn’t yet, but could be an important source of support for you?
0:24:36 What would you like that person to know about who you are as a person, your values, the goals that you have, and the challenges you face that they might be able to help you with?
0:24:45 And in that context, kids write, it’s just the most beautiful and meaningful things that I’ve ever seen.
0:24:47 They start very simple.
0:24:57 They say, I want Ms. Johnson, my math teacher, to know that I’m a good kid, and I’m trying hard, and I want to be able to go to college, but I’m really confused.
0:24:58 I haven’t been in school that much.
0:24:59 I’m really confused.
0:25:02 I’m behind on the math, and sometimes I have trouble paying attention.
0:25:08 And then, we take that content, and we give it as a platform to that teacher.
0:25:18 So, the teacher receives a physical piece of paper, a letter, hand-delivered, and they’re told, all kids need strong relationships with adults.
0:25:21 And that’s particularly true when kids face difficulties.
0:25:25 This child has chosen you to be that person for them.
0:25:30 And here’s what this child would like you to know about who they are as a person.
0:25:32 Please help them in their experience.
0:25:33 There will be good days.
0:25:34 There will be bad days.
0:25:36 Help them in their relationships with others.
0:25:39 And then, we just say, thank you.
0:25:41 Thank you very much for your work.
0:25:43 You’re on the front lines for all of our kids.
0:25:45 And that opens up space.
0:25:51 It creates space between the two people, between the learner and the person responsible for the learning, the teacher.
0:26:00 So, would you advise a kid who had tattoos on his face and neck and hands to put that out there and explain how that came to be?
0:26:03 You would want to be able to choose how to do that.
0:26:10 And you’d want to be able to have a structured space to think about how do I want to present myself and how do I want to introduce myself here?
0:26:13 And if you’re the employer, you would want to be able to hear that.
0:26:16 You’d want to be able to offer that space, to create that space.
0:26:25 Whatever the particular story is and the background is, I would want that agency in the person who’s interviewing for the job.
0:26:31 And I also would want the emphasis to be on the future, not the past.
0:26:34 Who is it who you are now and who are you trying to become?
0:26:39 And how does that fit with whatever our organization is or doesn’t fit?
0:26:43 And that’s informed by an understanding of the past and the history.
0:26:45 But we don’t need to stay in the past.
0:26:46 The past is in the past, right?
0:26:47 We’re going forward.
0:27:08 Every business is under pressure to save money.
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0:27:57 Can you give us tips about the process to make sure that your interventions are wise?
0:28:00 How do you go through the formation of wise interventions?
0:28:01 Yeah.
0:28:04 I think there’s a lot of listening here.
0:28:09 I can’t guess what your experience has been like as a person with deafness, right?
0:28:15 I can ask you, and you can tell me, and I can start to learn a little bit, but I can’t guess that.
0:28:22 So, I think there’s a lot of value in real conversations, like real questions, honest, sincere questions.
0:28:23 Tell me what that is like.
0:28:26 And that’s part of the space.
0:28:37 Like in the Lifting the Bar intervention with justice-involved youth, it’s space for a young person to have voice, and then for a teacher to be able to hear that young person’s voice.
0:28:39 It’s space to start that kind of conversation.
0:28:42 Sometimes it’s easier than others.
0:28:46 Another picture book that I love is Robert Okloski’s One Morning in Maine.
0:28:54 And One Morning in Maine is a story that begins with young Sal who says, mama, mama, I lost my tooth.
0:28:56 I’m not going to be able to go to Bucks Harbor with daddy.
0:29:03 And for Sal, who’s four years old, losing the tooth is a calamity, and she’s not going to be able to have the good day that she wants.
0:29:09 And so, she’s very explicit to her mother about what her thoughts and feelings are.
0:29:16 Like, she puts it right on the table, and then her mother is able to address that, to say, when you lose a tooth, that’s when you become a big girl.
0:29:24 And the whole sort of first two-thirds of the book is Sal trying out that idea, thinking about that idea, playing with that idea.
0:29:38 And so, that’s the mother hearing Sal’s articulation and then providing a different way to understand that experience that’s going to be helpful for Sal, that’s going to let Sal actually have that great day.
0:29:40 But sometimes we’re not that frank.
0:29:43 Like, sometimes we’re not as frank, even with ourselves.
0:29:46 Like, we don’t understand ourselves very well.
0:29:50 And we certainly don’t put it out there on the table for somebody else either.
0:30:01 So, we have to create these spaces where we can see what the psychological situation that we’re in is, and then understand that with other people, like the Berlin story, for example.
0:30:08 And are there ways to make large-scale wise interventions?
0:30:15 Like, for example, what happens if somebody says to you, how do we encourage people to get out and vote?
0:30:20 What kind of wise interventions could you make on a society to get them to vote?
0:30:22 Yeah, that’s a great question.
0:30:26 So, there’s definitely lots of opportunities for scaling here.
0:30:33 And the opportunity comes because the psychology arises from the situation.
0:30:40 Like, whatever worry or doubt or feeling that you’re experiencing, there’s nothing wrong with you.
0:30:42 There’s no irrationality in you.
0:30:43 You’re not abnormal.
0:30:47 You’re experiencing the situation as it is presented to you.
0:31:04 And so, when you can understand that, and you can understand systematically how people are put into situations, what the situations are doing, then you can start to act at institutional levels and at policy levels, not just in a kind of one-on-one clinical therapy kind of level.
0:31:18 For example, with voting, Chris Bryan, who is a collaborator at UT Austin, ran a series of studies a number of years ago in which he theorized that sometimes we kind of default to this view of voting as just like a hassle.
0:31:22 Like, I have to go get the oil changed in the car.
0:31:24 I have to go pick up the kids.
0:31:25 And then I have to go vote.
0:31:27 And then I have to go get the grocery store.
0:31:31 And then I have to go deal with this annoying coworker I have to deal with and whatever it might be, right?
0:31:37 And he thought, well, what if you offer people a representation of voting as something at a higher level?
0:31:49 So, he handed out a survey, and the survey had 10 items, and it had exactly the same questions in two versions of the survey, except that in one, it was in a verb form, and the other, it was in a noun form.
0:31:55 So, the verb questions were questions like, how important is it to you to vote in tomorrow’s election?
0:32:01 And the noun form survey had questions like, how important is it to you to be a voter?
0:32:03 In tomorrow’s election.
0:32:11 And the idea is that if you use the noun form, you’re casting this as a kind of identity, a kind of person that you could become, if only you were to vote.
0:32:14 And that’s like getting an oil change.
0:32:19 That’s like a wonderful kind of person for many people, I think, in a democracy.
0:32:25 And that produced one of the largest gains in voter turnout ever, really, in randomized controlled trials.
0:32:28 Wow, that is fascinating.
0:32:30 But how do you come to an insight like that?
0:32:33 How do you think about these wise interventions?
0:32:46 Yeah, so I’m a social psychologist, and social psychology is a field that began in the early and mid-20th century, particularly in the context of the horrors of World War II.
0:32:51 A lot of the early research was trying to understand how things like the Holocaust could have happened.
0:32:59 And there was lots of research in field settings and group dynamics and productivity and factories, for example.
0:33:17 And then social psychology went into a very long cognitive revolution, where researchers did often very small-scale laboratory experiments, just looking at how particular change in a situation would change how people think and feel and then act in some kind of way.
0:33:27 And that is ultimately the foundation of knowledge and understanding that allows researchers today to do work like this.
0:33:32 For example, in the voting case, when I was in grad school, I entered grad school in 2000.
0:33:46 A senior faculty member at my grad program named Mazarin Banaji pointed me towards a 1999 study by a woman named Susan Gellman, who’s a wonderful researcher at the University of Michigan.
0:33:51 And what Susan Gellman had done was she was interested in nouns and verbs, but she was also thinking about kids.
0:33:59 And she gave kids a description of one kid who was a carrot eater and another kid who ate carrots a lot.
0:34:13 And Gellman observed that even young children inferred that the carrot eater had a stronger preference for carrots, that the child would like carrots more, that they would be more likely to keep eating carrots, even if their parents said, stop eating carrots.
0:34:20 And so Mazarin Banaji and I, when I was in grad school, thought, well, that’s really interesting.
0:34:23 I wonder if people do that for themselves.
0:34:31 Like, I wonder if you see yourself in that kind of light, in the light of the identity, would that also lead to stronger inferences?
0:34:37 So we did these studies where we had people say what their preferences were and then write answers.
0:34:40 So I would ask a question like, what’s a dessert you like a lot?
0:34:41 Somebody might say chocolate.
0:34:51 And then I would ask them to write either the sentence, I’m a chocolate eater, or I eat chocolate a lot, three times.
0:34:56 And after that, I’d ask them, okay, now tell me, how much do you like chocolate?
0:35:00 How likely is your preference for chocolate to stay the same over the next five years?
0:35:03 If all your friends like something else, would you continue to like chocolate?
0:35:13 And people reported that those preferences that they had described in noun form, they found them stronger, more stable, and more resilient.
0:35:27 So they were using, just as people were using the noun form to infer the qualities of another person, in Susan Gellman’s work, children were, we found that adults were using that noun form to infer their own preferences.
0:35:32 And that’s what led Chris Bryan to think about voting and being a voter.
0:35:39 So he read that work that we had done, which seems to have nothing to do with voting, and thought, oh, this is about identity.
0:35:45 And he thought, what if it was a future identity, not just like a preference that you have right now?
0:35:47 What if it was a future identity?
0:35:51 And suddenly he produces the be a voter studies.
0:35:57 So it comes out of this well of basic research in social psychology.
0:36:06 So if I told you that I am a writer, as opposed to I write, that’s a stronger identity for me.
0:36:07 Yes.
0:36:09 And there’s complexities here.
0:36:14 So I don’t know if you’ve ever run through growth mindset work into Marjorie Rhodes.
0:36:17 She’s a developmental psychologist at NYU.
0:36:20 So Chris, he didn’t just do the voter studies.
0:36:25 He also did, for example, a helper study with preschool age children.
0:36:31 So he exposed children to the language of being a helper versus helping.
0:36:37 And he showed that preschoolers are more likely to help after they’ve been exposed to the be a helper language.
0:36:38 Okay.
0:36:42 But in voting, there’s not a capacity issue.
0:36:49 It’s not like people can try to vote and fail apart from systems that make it difficult for them.
0:36:49 It’s not a skill.
0:36:56 But with helping, and then certainly with something like being a math student, it can get into that.
0:37:08 And so then if you start to use that language, Marjorie Rhodes has a critique of the helper studies where she thinks that even if it might increase the odds that a child helps,
0:37:16 it could also represent helping as a skill that you either have or you don’t have, reintroducing in the back door a fixed mindset.
0:37:19 So that gets complex.
0:37:26 And how would you apply this knowledge of noun versus verb for something like vaccination?
0:37:29 What would be the noun for a vaccinated person?
0:37:33 I am a vaxxer.
0:37:39 It feels like in the public discourse, the noun form has been endorsed by the anti-vaxxers, right?
0:37:40 That’s the phrase.
0:37:41 It’s anti-vaxxer.
0:37:42 It’s a noun phrase.
0:37:45 It’s a minority identity, right?
0:37:50 Like most people still get vaccinated and most people still endorse vaccination.
0:37:55 And there’s this minority of people who are resisting that majority.
0:38:00 And they have used a noun phrase to define their movement and identity.
0:38:01 Anti-vaxxer.
0:38:03 Huh.
0:38:13 But what if you’re in El Paso, Texas, and you are not the majority, the anti-vax, the unvaccinated people?
0:38:19 I still think in places like El Paso, Texas, I think the problem is I’m not an expert in the measles epidemic, of course.
0:38:35 But my understanding is still that even though in places in West Texas where the measles epidemic is a problem and you have lower relative rates of school-age vaccinations, those rates are still well over 50%.
0:38:37 I think they’re more like 85%.
0:38:39 It’s still a strong majority.
0:38:50 It’s just part of the problem, I think, particularly with measles is how contagious it is and therefore how susceptible a population can be when the rates are not exceptionally high.
0:38:51 Like near 100%.
0:38:55 How about the noun, I’m not a spreader, I’m vaccinated?
0:38:57 I’m not a spreader.
0:38:58 That’s interesting.
0:39:00 I’d like to think about that.
0:39:11 My colleague Hazel Marcus and Jeannie Tsai have written about the way that cultural defaults affected responses to COVID.
0:39:17 And one of the things that’s characteristic of Americans is how individualistic we are.
0:39:20 We have a strong sense of individual self.
0:39:24 We say, I’m like this, I’m not like that.
0:39:35 We have a strong boundary between self and others as compared to interdependent cultures, like a lot of East Asian cultures, where there’s more of a sense of what is the community that you’re part of.
0:39:38 You have your qualities, but you’re overlapping and sharing with others.
0:39:49 And that kind of representation of the social world makes it easier for people to endorse identities like not being a spreader.
0:39:56 And they talk about that in their work about some of the advantages and disadvantages of that cultural default in contending with the pandemic.
0:40:01 So we’ve been skirting this topic, but let’s just dive right into it for a second.
0:40:03 And the topic is belonging.
0:40:08 So what makes people feel like they don’t belong?
0:40:13 When I was a kid, I loved baseball and I went to a University of Michigan baseball camp.
0:40:20 And I remember one of the coaches, one of the current Michigan players, he said, there’s a lot of ways to lose a baseball game.
0:40:21 There’s only one way to win.
0:40:24 You have to do everything right, but there’s a lot of ways to lose.
0:40:26 So I feel a little bit like that with belonging.
0:40:31 But at the end of the day, you feel like you’re not valued and respected in that space.
0:40:33 You can’t contribute to that.
0:40:39 Maybe you don’t have the skills to contribute, or maybe you do have the skills, but nobody’s listening and responding to you.
0:40:46 Sometimes it happens because you look at a world and you see just people who look really different from you,
0:40:49 like people who seem like they’re from really different backgrounds than you.
0:40:57 Maybe they have a different social identity characteristics, or maybe they’re just different kinds of people, different personalities that you don’t fit well into.
0:41:08 And I think one of the things that’s like really deeply true about people is how much we value working with each other towards goals,
0:41:18 to be part of something, to be part of a community, to be part of a school or a company or a society or a neighborhood where you’re working together to accomplish something that matters.
0:41:26 And if you feel like you can’t do that for whatever reason, then it feels like you don’t belong within that space.
0:41:37 And in your book, you discuss Sonia Sotomayor and Michelle Obama and, you know, how they did not feel like they belonged in their colleges.
0:41:38 Yeah, exactly.
0:41:45 Those are both first-generation college students going to Princeton, and both of whom were people of color.
0:41:56 And there’s a remarkable story that Michelle Obama tells that she told, the first I heard of it was in a telling when she was the first lady, where she says,
0:42:01 when I first came to college, I didn’t realize the sheets were so long.
0:42:06 I guess she’d gotten regular-sized sheets and Princeton beds were long.
0:42:10 And so then she says, I felt a little alienated.
0:42:11 I felt a little discouraged.
0:42:12 I felt a little off.
0:42:18 And it’s really a remarkable story because here she is, the first lady of the United States.
0:42:24 I think probably the most prominent woman in America, widely admired and respected.
0:42:29 She’s been professionally successful for decades, right?
0:42:32 Going back to her leadership in Chicago and nonprofit work.
0:42:40 And the incident that she’s recalling when she came to college is a non-incident, it would seem, right?
0:42:42 There’s no racist person in this scenario.
0:42:45 In fact, there’s not even another person in the situation.
0:42:47 It’s just that she didn’t know the sheets.
0:42:55 But as a first-generation student, as a kid from the south side of Chicago, as a woman whose ancestors were enslaved peoples,
0:43:02 going to an institution like Princeton that was built on the back of slave labor in many ways,
0:43:10 whose first presidents all owned slaves, would a person like her wonder whether she might be able to belong in that space?
0:43:13 It’s exactly like the story of the woman in Berlin.
0:43:17 Yes, that’s a worry you would have if you were a person in that situation.
0:43:23 And then when something bad happens, even something as stupid as that, like as trivial as that,
0:43:26 it feels like maybe this is evidence.
0:43:28 Maybe this is proof that I don’t belong.
0:43:33 So when she’s having that reaction to not having the right size sheets,
0:43:38 she’s not really reacting to the fact that she might have to go do an errand and go get the right size sheets.
0:43:48 She’s having a reaction to that history and that context and this worry that maybe people like me won’t belong in this space that I value,
0:43:51 that she wants to belong in, that could be so important for her.
0:43:53 Up next on Remarkable People.
0:43:59 If there’s a world out there that is particularly hostile, that’s sending negative messages,
0:44:04 that’s saying you’re less than, you’re not worthy, here’s all these stereotypes about you,
0:44:08 it’s particularly important then for people to have in-group spaces,
0:44:12 like in-group spaces that say, no, here’s who we really are.
0:44:22 Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners.
0:44:25 It’s our pleasure and honor to make the show for you.
0:44:31 If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate, and review it.
0:44:33 Even better, forward it to a friend.
0:44:36 A big mahalo to you for doing this.
0:44:40 You’re listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:44:46 If you’re having a Michelle Obama moment like that,
0:44:52 this is kind of the imposter syndrome, so what do you do if you don’t have the right sheets
0:44:55 or you didn’t know what the In-N-Out burger was?
0:44:56 Right, right, yeah.
0:45:00 So, I think the first thing to try to do is to understand.
0:45:05 So, if you have a big reaction to something that seems small,
0:45:09 you want to try to see what it is that you’re actually reacting to.
0:45:12 What is the meaning that’s beneath the surface?
0:45:16 And often, you can do some of that work yourself,
0:45:19 but often it’s helpful to talk to other people about that,
0:45:23 to think that through, to use your prefrontal cortexes together,
0:45:29 and to decide then how you really want to understand this space or this question,
0:45:30 how you really want to contend with it.
0:45:37 In this day and age, in 2025, what if you encounter a situation where people
0:45:41 intentionally are trying to make you feel that?
0:45:42 Then what do you do?
0:45:46 So, just like earlier, at the beginning, when we were talking about the word mindset,
0:45:51 I was describing the situation of going into a classroom where people,
0:45:55 like the teacher, for example, is spouting a fixed mindset,
0:45:59 and it’s hard to hold on to your growth mindset, at least in that space.
0:46:00 It’s hard to feel like it applies.
0:46:07 And I think similarly, you can offer people generally good and adaptive ideas,
0:46:10 like it’s normal to worry at first about whether you belong,
0:46:12 and it can get better with time.
0:46:18 But if you’re walking into spaces that are not offering those opportunities,
0:46:23 where people from your background actually don’t have that opportunity to belong,
0:46:26 then that becomes a lot less useful.
0:46:32 And the challenge at that point is to intervene upon the context, to change the context.
0:46:35 That’s one of the things that the lifting the bar intervention does.
0:46:39 So, in lifting the bar, in the original evaluation in Oakland,
0:46:44 we had a control condition where kids just thought about study skills.
0:46:49 And then we had the full experience for kids where they thought about the transition,
0:46:53 they heard stories from older students, they thought about their values and relationships.
0:47:00 And as compared to the control condition, that produced no observable improvement
0:47:03 in young people’s experience as they came back into school.
0:47:05 We got the improvement.
0:47:12 In particular, we got a 40 percentage point reduction in recidivism for justice-involved youth
0:47:16 when we actually delivered the letter to the adult.
0:47:22 So, lifting the bars, ultimately, its power is as an intervention on an adult in the school system
0:47:28 who is receiving the kid to open up their hearts and their minds to the young person coming back in.
0:47:33 And so, when you have situations where people are not being kind,
0:47:36 where people are being discriminatory, where people are biased,
0:47:42 I think just as we need to have grace, and I say this recognizing how difficult this can be,
0:47:46 but just as we need to have grace for ourselves, when, for example,
0:47:49 we might be in a situation that’s provoking an experience like depression,
0:47:54 we also need to have grace for people who are behaving in these ways
0:48:00 and understand why they’re doing that, and then help them to better, more pro-social ways of interacting.
0:48:07 And that’s really what lifting the bar is doing, is it’s recognizing that for a teacher,
0:48:11 if you’re teaching 10th grade English, and suddenly the principal’s,
0:48:16 hey, like, this kid’s coming back from juvie is going to be in your class, you’re like, oh my god,
0:48:17 like, I’m already overwhelmed.
0:48:18 I’m already behind.
0:48:20 This kid’s going to not care.
0:48:21 They’re going to distract other people.
0:48:23 They’re just going to cause me problems.
0:48:27 Like, you’re a person in the world, and the world is giving you those stereotypes, right?
0:48:28 That’s what it is.
0:48:29 Like, there it is.
0:48:33 And so, there’s no sense, like, you can’t suppress that.
0:48:35 Like, it doesn’t help to just say, I’m not going to think that.
0:48:37 I’m going to push away that thought.
0:48:38 That’s not contending with it.
0:48:39 That’s not working with it.
0:48:40 That’s not addressing it.
0:48:45 But if you get the letter then, and the letter says, here’s this kid.
0:48:47 He’s coming back in.
0:48:49 Here’s what he’s struggling with.
0:48:50 Here’s what he’s trying for.
0:48:52 He’s asking you for your support.
0:48:54 All of that stuff goes away.
0:48:56 Like, you don’t have to have those negative thoughts anymore.
0:48:58 You’re not burdened by them.
0:48:59 You’re not trapped by them.
0:49:04 You’re now free to be the kind of educator that you went into education to be, to make
0:49:06 a difference for a kid in need.
0:49:08 Can I ask you a more tactical question?
0:49:12 So, let’s say that you are of Hispanic background.
0:49:13 And let’s take the best case.
0:49:14 You’re Hispanic.
0:49:17 You are in America.
0:49:19 You are actually a citizen.
0:49:21 Like, best case, right?
0:49:27 But you feel like there’s a large component of American political leadership that do not
0:49:29 want you in this country.
0:49:33 And they’re not going to be sending you letters or anything to welcome you.
0:49:39 So, if you’re Hispanic and you’re thinking this, what do you do to feel like you belong in
0:49:39 America?
0:49:45 There’s a researcher in Tiffany Brannon at UCLA who has a model of belonging she calls pride
0:49:46 and prejudice.
0:49:50 And it’s basically, on the one hand, tamp down the prejudice wherever you can.
0:49:54 On the other hand, up the pride wherever you can.
0:49:59 And she shows in her data, for example, that focusing on African-American students who belong
0:50:06 to black student organizations, to African-American organizations in the theater and in arts and
0:50:13 in music and in general, black experience, black culture kinds of organizations, that seems to
0:50:17 predict much better outcomes for them in university spaces.
0:50:24 So, if there’s a world out there that is particularly hostile, that’s sending negative messages, that’s
0:50:29 saying you’re less than, you’re not worthy, here’s all these stereotypes about you, it’s particularly
0:50:32 important then for people to have in-group spaces.
0:50:36 Like, in-group spaces that say, no, here’s who we really are.
0:50:38 Here’s our values.
0:50:39 Here’s our strength.
0:50:41 Here’s our agency.
0:50:46 And sometimes that goes under terms like positive racial, ethnic identity development.
0:50:51 It can be particularly important for young people, for adolescents to have those intentional spaces
0:50:54 that build up that sense of, here’s who we are.
0:50:56 Here’s who I am as a member of this community.
0:51:03 Here’s who we are and that can protect you some from at least the negative narratives that
0:51:04 may be coming from the external world.
0:51:08 That may not protect you from something like an unjust deportation order.
0:51:10 That’s another matter.
0:51:11 That’s a legal matter.
0:51:13 And it’s a matter of political power.
0:51:16 But it can protect you from a narrative perspective.
0:51:21 Like earlier, I asked you about the strengths that you might have acquired from experiencing
0:51:24 deafness, but you could also do that in a community of deaf people.
0:51:31 Imagine you were 12 years old and you had just become deaf through some situation and you
0:51:33 might be having to have a cochlear implant.
0:51:38 Like, what if you were interacting with that 12-year-old along with a larger community of deaf
0:51:45 people and you could tell stories with that 12-year-old about your experiences with deafness,
0:51:49 the challenges of it, but also the strengths of it, the community of it.
0:51:54 There’s a reason why gay pride matters, for example, and gay pride parades matter.
0:51:58 And movements like Black Lives Matter or Me Too matter.
0:52:04 I’ll tell you a silly little story that makes me relate to this, which is I actually surf a
0:52:11 lot and I surf with a cover that enables me to have a cochlear implant while I surf in the
0:52:11 water.
0:52:20 And one day as I was getting ready to go into the water with my cochlear implant, this father
0:52:27 comes up with this little kid and he says, my kid has two cochlear implants and I see that
0:52:28 you can surf.
0:52:34 And he was so happy that, you know, here’s some old guy with a cochlear implant and he’s surfing.
0:52:41 So my son, who’s, I don’t know, two years old with two cochlear implants, he can surf someday.
0:52:45 And I never felt happier to have a cochlear implant.
0:52:49 It’s the McCloskey story a little bit, but on such a deeper level.
0:52:53 So you having the loose tooth doesn’t mean that you can’t have the good day.
0:52:57 You having the deafness doesn’t mean that you can’t surf.
0:52:59 You can surf too.
0:53:02 And you have the opportunity to share that with that child.
0:53:04 It’s beautiful.
0:53:05 And you know what?
0:53:10 After that happened and I was paddling out and I’m figuring, oh, that father and probably
0:53:13 he went and saw his wife and pointed me out.
0:53:14 I know they’re watching me.
0:53:16 So I really better surf well today.
0:53:17 You better hit it.
0:53:18 The pressure was on.
0:53:20 You better not flop that wave.
0:53:30 What is the significance that I can tell you with total certainty that my SAT, which I took
0:53:37 in my sophomore or junior year of high school, which is probably 1969, which is a long time ago.
0:53:42 I had a 610 in English and a 680 in math.
0:53:45 I know exactly what I had on my SATs.
0:53:50 So what is the significance of me knowing my SATs?
0:53:52 You’re a product of the world, right?
0:53:58 So Lewis Terman came in the early part of the 20th century, Stanford psychologist, who you
0:54:01 should not have on your show, even if he were alive.
0:54:08 And he told the world that there is this mysterious quality called intelligence and it was determinative
0:54:09 of life outcomes.
0:54:12 And it varied widely between people and between groups.
0:54:15 And you could assess it with short tests.
0:54:18 And the SAT is a descendant of those tests.
0:54:25 And it proclaims to you and to the world, like who you are and what your abilities are and
0:54:26 where you stack up.
0:54:30 And so that’s why it sticks with you.
0:54:34 I’ve spoken to educators who are as old as you are, not that you’re particularly old.
0:54:38 And I asked them, do you remember your SAT scores?
0:54:39 And they’re like, yes, I do.
0:54:45 Like after decades of experience, it’s Michelle Obama’s sheets.
0:54:47 It feels like this determinative thing.
0:54:50 And it was taught to us by people like Terman.
0:54:51 Okay.
0:54:56 So I got to bring in one more little story before I come to the big story I want to ask.
0:55:02 So you use the term TIFBIT, T-I-F-B-I-T.
0:55:04 What is a TIFBIT?
0:55:05 Yeah.
0:55:07 So your SAT score is a TIFBIT.
0:55:09 Michelle Obama’s sheets were a TIFBIT.
0:55:11 My in and out experience.
0:55:14 So TIFBIT is a tiny fact, big theory.
0:55:21 Like a little thing that happens that seems so big and important that you build a big
0:55:26 theory around it, around who you are and what you can do and what you can become and maybe
0:55:27 who somebody else is.
0:55:33 I just want to ask you one last topical question, which is there may be many married people who
0:55:34 need this.
0:55:42 Please explain the concept of this seven minute writing exercise to help couples actually remain
0:55:43 couples.
0:55:44 So you’re in a marriage, right?
0:55:45 Like, I don’t know if you’re married.
0:55:46 I’m married though.
0:55:52 And you have some, like all couples do some like longstanding conflicts, like some things
0:55:53 that are…
0:55:54 No, no.
0:55:55 That’s not me.
0:56:01 And you know how you think about it, right?
0:56:02 Because that’s how you think about it.
0:56:06 And you also know how your spouse thinks about it because that’s how they think about it.
0:56:10 And of course, they’re insane because that’s why this conflict is persisting.
0:56:12 So you’re both in that mindset and you’re locked against each other.
0:56:19 So this particular 21 minutes to save a marriage intervention led by Eli Finkel at Northwestern
0:56:22 asks couples to think of a third party.
0:56:26 Think about a third party who wants the best for all.
0:56:28 How would they understand this conflict?
0:56:34 And then the second question is, what barriers would prevent you from taking that perspective
0:56:37 in future conflict conversations with your spouse?
0:56:42 And the third question is, how can you overcome those barriers to take that perspective?
0:56:48 And the idea is to kind of break couples out of this loggerheads, to find each member of the couple does this.
0:56:50 They do it separately, but they both do it.
0:56:54 And to think about what would be a third way to see this situation.
0:56:57 And that stabilizes marriages.
0:57:03 No longer does the marriage decline in closeness and satisfaction and intimacy and commitment.
0:57:06 It stabilizes in a two-year longitudinal study.
0:57:08 Are you married?
0:57:08 Yes.
0:57:11 Can we interview your spouse?
0:57:13 She’s not available at the moment.
0:57:19 She’s hanging out with the dog because I yelled at her earlier.
0:57:23 We can come back another time.
0:57:24 All right.
0:57:24 All right.
0:57:25 All right.
0:57:27 All right, Greg Walton.
0:57:30 This has been most entertaining and informative.
0:57:32 And I’m proud to be deaf.
0:57:34 I’m proud to have my pigeon accent.
0:57:37 And maybe I’ll go get some tattoos now, too.
0:57:39 Go for it.
0:57:41 Maybe you can get a fake scar.
0:57:45 So I want to thank you for being our guest.
0:57:48 There’s a lot to learn from you and your book.
0:57:49 I hope people check out your book.
0:57:53 And we’ll let you go back to creating wise interventions.
0:57:56 Obviously, this is Guy Kawasaki.
0:57:57 This is Remarkable People.
0:58:00 I want to thank Greg for being on our podcast.
0:58:04 And also, we were recommended to him by Dave Nussbaum.
0:58:11 So without Dave’s intervention, wise as it was, we might not have had Greg on our podcast.
0:58:13 And wow, what a shame that would be.
0:58:15 So thank you, Dave.
0:58:23 And thank you, Tessa Neismar and our sound design team, which is actually Jeff C and Shannon Hernandez.
0:58:26 We are the Remarkable People team, Greg.
0:58:29 And we’re trying to make everybody remarkable.
0:58:31 Thank you very much.
0:58:38 This is Remarkable People.

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0:00:43 It turns out that people are not reliable readers of body language.
0:00:48 Even trained TSA agents in the airport are barely better than chance,
0:00:51 which doesn’t give you a lot of confidence flying, but it’s true.
0:00:56 Another piece of common advice we get is try to put yourself in their shoes,
0:00:57 but that doesn’t work either.
0:01:02 Literally, the research shows there’s only one way that reliably allows mere mortals
0:01:05 to find out what other people think and feel a no.
0:01:08 Of course, that’s to ask them, but it’s so much easier said than done.
0:01:16 Maybe we shouldn’t do this because I may disappoint you in real life.
0:01:20 I have a feeling you’re going to surpass the bar.
0:01:25 Oh, he writes a pretty good book, but man, he sucks at asking questions.
0:01:27 You’re a professional question asker.
0:01:34 Yeah, I’m not exactly a lucrative question asker.
0:01:40 This is Guy Kawasaki, and this is another episode of the Remarkable People Podcast.
0:01:42 We’re on a mission to make you remarkable.
0:01:48 And after reading the next guest book, I figured out that if you can ask good questions,
0:01:52 it’s a very important skill for being remarkable.
0:01:55 So the guest is Jeff Wetzler.
0:02:02 Now, he’s really a visionary leader in learning, really, and asking questions.
0:02:08 And he has written a book called Ask, which I love one word titles, right?
0:02:10 It’s like, what’s the book about?
0:02:11 Duh, it’s Ask.
0:02:16 He has spent decades, although he doesn’t look that old, helping organizations.
0:02:23 He even had a stint at Teach for America, which I think is just a great idea that kids after
0:02:28 they graduate serve one or two years teaching other younger students.
0:02:35 So I want you to get ready to rethink about how you listen and you ask and you lead and work
0:02:36 with those around you.
0:02:39 So welcome to the Remarkable People Podcast, Jeff.
0:02:40 Thank you, Guy.
0:02:41 It’s so great to be with you.
0:02:44 So let’s start with a very easy question.
0:02:53 And the easy question is, do you believe in the concept of this great white male purple cow,
0:03:01 black swan visionary who can intuit what people need or think what they need before they even
0:03:02 know it?
0:03:07 Which is to say that are there some people in the world, maybe people like Steve Jobs
0:03:11 or Elon Musk, who don’t need to ask questions because they’re so gifted?
0:03:19 I do believe that there are people who can take in signals and process those signals in very
0:03:22 interesting, insightful kinds of ways.
0:03:27 And, you know, across the spectrum, I think Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, other people have a lot
0:03:28 of talent at doing that.
0:03:30 Even they don’t always get it right.
0:03:33 And I think the rest of us are mere mortals.
0:03:39 And for us mere mortals, trying to guess, trying to go on our intuition, the research shows is
0:03:41 quite often pretty unreliable.
0:03:43 We end up with the wrong conclusion.
0:03:48 And sometimes we end up with the wrong conclusion, even or especially in relation to guessing what
0:03:53 the people who are closest to us in our lives actually know and think and feel, whether our
0:03:55 longtime spouse or our business partner or our colleague.
0:03:58 We get overconfident because we think, I’ve known them for years.
0:04:00 Of course, I know what they think, but we don’t get it right.
0:04:03 And why don’t we get it right?
0:04:09 Because you would think with that amount of exposure and the duration of exposure, we should
0:04:10 be able to get it right.
0:04:15 I mean, I think at the simplest level, we don’t get it right because we’re not them.
0:04:16 We’re us.
0:04:17 We see the world through our lens.
0:04:19 They have their own experience.
0:04:20 They are not a static person.
0:04:22 They’re changing all the time.
0:04:27 There’s really interesting research that shows that even the best advice that we often get
0:04:30 for how to do this doesn’t work.
0:04:34 So, for instance, one piece of advice we often get is try to read their body language.
0:04:39 If you can just read their body language, it turns out that people are not reliable readers
0:04:40 of body language.
0:04:45 Even trained TSA agents in the airport are barely better than chance, which doesn’t give
0:04:47 you a lot of confidence flying, but it’s true.
0:04:53 Another piece of common advice we get is try to put yourself in their shoes, but that doesn’t
0:04:54 work either.
0:04:59 Literally, the research shows there’s only one way that reliably allows mere mortals to
0:05:01 find out what other people think and feel a no.
0:05:04 Of course, that’s to ask them, but it’s so much easier said than done.
0:05:12 Wait, but Jeff, you just blew a hole into a lot of business writing about you have to develop
0:05:13 your skills of empathy.
0:05:15 Are you saying empathy is overrated?
0:05:21 Well, I’m not at all saying empathy is overrated, but I am saying that untested assumptions about
0:05:23 what’s going on for people can be dangerous for us.
0:05:28 So the idea of trying to imagine what they might go through, I think is super valuable.
0:05:30 If we say to ourselves, I’m imagining it.
0:05:32 And then what I’m imagining, I’m 100% sure is right.
0:05:33 That’s what’s dangerous.
0:05:37 We can imagine it to the point where we can actually have a conversation and ask them to
0:05:40 tell us more about what you’re going through and what’s that like.
0:05:41 And then we can, of course, connect emotionally.
0:05:45 I think that is the kind of empathy that is deep and powerful and valid.
0:05:49 But if it’s just, I’m guessing what you’re going through, I feel empathy for you.
0:05:50 It’s risky.
0:05:56 Is there a continuum where you have superficial empathy, where you’re guessing the next level
0:06:02 would be you actually watch people as they drive their minivan or as they open up a bottle
0:06:05 of pills and they can’t figure out how to open the bottle.
0:06:10 And then the third level is where you actually are the customer.
0:06:12 You are actually in the minivan.
0:06:14 You’re actually open the bottle.
0:06:16 So is that a spectrum that we can travel?
0:06:18 I love that spectrum.
0:06:23 And I think what I take from that is that the more information you have, the better your
0:06:24 empathy is going to be.
0:06:26 If you’re the actual user, you got all the information.
0:06:28 If you’re watching the user, you got some of the information.
0:06:31 If you’re sitting at a distance, you have less information.
0:06:35 And so the more you can get to actually getting the information that’s right, the more accurately
0:06:38 you’re going to actually have a chance of knowing what’s going on for the other person.
0:06:40 So I might borrow that little framework.
0:06:43 Feel free to rip me off.
0:06:43 I’ll be flattered.
0:06:44 I will credit you.
0:06:51 But let me in a rare moment of openness and transparency, I came across this concept from
0:06:53 a friend named Martin Lindstrom.
0:06:55 He wrote the book Biology, B-U-Y.
0:07:01 And he tells this story that he was retained by a pharmaceutical company because they wanted
0:07:07 to get closer to the customer, which that’s like a signal to McKenzie to charge them $5 million.
0:07:12 But anyway, so he had all the executives come in a room and they said, you know, we’re going
0:07:14 to get closer to our customers.
0:07:18 So he made them breathe through straws for a few minutes.
0:07:21 And at the end, he said, your customers have asthma.
0:07:24 That’s what it’s like to have asthma.
0:07:28 And I thought that was such a brilliant story.
0:07:29 Now I use that in my speeches.
0:07:32 I pass out straws in my speeches.
0:07:34 I think I read that story in your book as well.
0:07:38 And I literally took a straw and I tried it myself because I wanted to know.
0:07:41 I thought it was so brilliant and it’s really hard to breathe.
0:07:43 And so I love that example.
0:07:46 So now there’s going to be a run on straws.
0:07:46 That’s right.
0:07:47 That’s right.
0:07:53 So why is it that people don’t ask better questions?
0:07:58 I think most of us just assume we know how to ask questions.
0:08:00 You know, we’re born, we learn how to talk.
0:08:06 Most of us for a living, you know, talk, we make statements, we ask questions, we think
0:08:06 we know it.
0:08:09 So why would we even try to get better at it?
0:08:10 I think that’s a piece of it.
0:08:16 And I think the other piece of it is we often operate without the level of curiosity that we
0:08:16 would truly need.
0:08:20 We walk into situations, we size them up in split seconds.
0:08:23 We don’t even realize that we’re sizing the situation up.
0:08:25 We just think that’s reality of the way it is.
0:08:28 And so if I think I know what’s going on here, I know what your motive is.
0:08:29 I know what the right answer is.
0:08:31 I know what I’m trying to do here.
0:08:32 Why even bother asking a question?
0:08:35 It would be illogical to even ask a question if I’m certain.
0:08:40 And so we’ve got to figure out how to actually get ourselves more curious to open up the space
0:08:41 for more questions.
0:08:47 But couldn’t you make a case that it’s part of evolution that we had to make split second
0:08:47 questions?
0:08:48 A hundred percent.
0:08:48 Right?
0:08:53 If the saber tooth is chasing you, you don’t ask, are you trying to kill me or not?
0:08:54 I mean, you get up.
0:08:58 Even today, let’s say that you’re in a room and you’re starting to smell smoke.
0:09:01 You don’t think to yourself, I wonder if someone’s cooking.
0:09:04 I wonder if, you know, you just get the hell out of there or you put out the fire.
0:09:11 And so this mechanism of walking into a situation that has a lot going on, zeroing in on what’s
0:09:15 the one thing, quickly making meaning of it, quickly drawing a conclusion, quickly saying
0:09:21 what’s the action I need to take is a very adaptive thing for high urgency, emergency kinds of situations.
0:09:23 I’m sure that’s why it evolved in that way.
0:09:27 The problem is that much of the time we’re in complex situations.
0:09:29 We’re in fast moving situations.
0:09:32 We’re in ambiguous situations where the first thing that we jump to may not be the right
0:09:35 thing, where somebody else might see something different.
0:09:39 And if we still operate in that same, you know, there’s the tiger mode, that’s when
0:09:40 we get ourselves into trouble.
0:09:43 So how can people learn to be curious then?
0:09:44 Okay.
0:09:48 So this is what I’ve been studying and it’s been just a fascinating journey.
0:09:52 There’s what I would call a few different gateways into curiosity.
0:09:59 One of the most powerful gateways is to actually slow down our thinking so we can recognize the
0:10:00 narrative that we’ve just drawn.
0:10:04 So if I, let’s say that I’m walking into a situation, somebody says, I really don’t think
0:10:05 we should make that change.
0:10:11 My saber tooth tiger brain, my lizard brain might say they’re being resistant.
0:10:15 And the fact that they’re being resistant is because they are trying to thwart me as a leader.
0:10:18 And the fact that they’re trying to thwart me as a leader means I need to get them off
0:10:18 the team.
0:10:23 Just as an example, that process can happen in less than a second outside of my own awareness.
0:10:26 But if I can begin to realize this is how our brains work.
0:10:28 I’m starting to construct the story.
0:10:29 I’m selecting a small bit of data.
0:10:31 I’m making it mean something quickly.
0:10:36 I can begin to inject what I call curiosity sparks into that story.
0:10:38 I can say, all right, what else might be going on here?
0:10:40 What’s another way to look at the situation?
0:10:42 What might they be overlooking?
0:10:46 And that’s essentially a way of loosening the grip that our story has on us.
0:10:51 Not to say we’re wrong, but to make room for more possibilities going on.
0:10:58 But I would suspect that 99% of people listening to this would say, yeah, that’s true for most
0:10:59 people, but not me.
0:11:01 I am perceptive.
0:11:02 I really know what to do.
0:11:06 I would say, if that’s you, then you really need to learn.
0:11:10 You really need to listen to this because every single one of us is human.
0:11:12 We all have that evolution behind us.
0:11:13 We all have to do that.
0:11:17 And generally, what I tend to say is, if you’re getting all the results you want in your life
0:11:20 and in your work and in your relationships, maybe you don’t change anything.
0:11:25 But chances are, every single one of us has areas where we can actually be making better
0:11:28 decisions, where we can prevent errors, where we can grow fast, where we can deepen relationships.
0:11:32 And that’s the motivation to say, what can I learn from this other person?
0:11:34 I will say, it’s not easy to do.
0:11:36 Sometimes curiosity is a team sport.
0:11:41 And it can be helpful to say, and I say this to my own business partner a lot, I’m really
0:11:42 worked up about this person.
0:11:44 I think this person’s not being a team player.
0:11:45 I think X, Y, Z.
0:11:48 And he’ll say to me, maybe take a little of your own curiosity medicine here.
0:11:50 Let’s slow this down a little bit.
0:11:53 And so sometimes we’re so in our own story that we don’t see it.
0:11:57 So using colleagues, friends, mentors who are willing to challenge us a little can be
0:11:59 a great way to make space for curiosity.
0:12:05 It also turns out I’ve discovered in writing the book, and increasingly so, that friend can
0:12:07 be your favorite AI chatbot too.
0:12:13 You can take your rant about your least favorite politician or your enemy or whatever.
0:12:16 You just dump it in and you say, how could anyone like this person?
0:12:19 How could I, you know, and then you just write at the end, what might I be missing?
0:12:25 And in the privacy of your own desk, your office, your phone, whatever, you get back some very
0:12:29 interesting considerations, not to say that your story is 100% wrong, but to say, here’s
0:12:31 some other ways to understand what’s going on.
0:12:34 And those other ways of looking at it can give you some degrees of freedom to ask new questions,
0:12:35 to learn more things.
0:12:36 Okay.
0:12:40 I’m typing Elon Musk into chat GPT right now.
0:12:43 And add, what might I be missing?
0:12:43 What else?
0:12:45 That was another way to look at this.
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0:13:49 You built a case about slowing things down, using AI, getting your friends and colleagues
0:13:51 to push back on you.
0:13:55 But the next question is, who do we ask questions of?
0:13:58 Because there’s a lot of people around me.
0:14:00 How do I pick who to ask?
0:14:00 Yeah.
0:14:05 Well, so first of all, I’ll say, a lot of people say to me, it’s great to ask questions, but
0:14:08 there’s a lot of people that I have no interest in asking questions to.
0:14:10 I have no need to ask them questions.
0:14:12 I just completely disagree with what they have to say.
0:14:18 I think that they’re even dangerous, and my contention is there is something important
0:14:19 and interesting to learn from every single person.
0:14:24 If you’re talking to your enemy, someone that you actually think is quite dangerous, the thing
0:14:27 you need to learn from them is what’s their next move going to be so that you can figure
0:14:28 out what to do about that move.
0:14:33 If you’re talking to someone that you deeply disagree with, the thing that you need to do
0:14:35 is understand where did they get to their views in case you want to influence them.
0:14:42 And it’s a very well-documented phenomenon in social science that you’re actually more influential
0:14:46 at influencing someone else if you know where they’re coming from, if you demonstrate curiosity
0:14:46 to them.
0:14:51 They even perceive you as more reasonable, more likable, and more influential just by asking
0:14:52 them questions.
0:14:56 So even if you don’t care about learning from anything, from anyone, just by asking them
0:14:58 questions and learning, you’re going to influence them better.
0:15:03 But chances are there’s going to be something in there that’s also going to be interesting and
0:15:04 important to you as well.
0:15:09 So that’s why you can learn something from an Uber driver with a flag that is…
0:15:11 Exactly.
0:15:11 Exactly.
0:15:14 You watch the TED Talk, I take it.
0:15:16 Or maybe read the epilogue of the book.
0:15:17 It’s both.
0:15:17 It’s in both.
0:15:18 Yeah.
0:15:23 You think this is the kind of podcast where the producer hands the Wikipedia entry to the
0:15:25 podcaster and says, OK, have at it, bro.
0:15:27 You did your homework.
0:15:28 I did my homework.
0:15:29 Absolutely.
0:15:36 So now, as the Japanese say, we have a word for this, as a maven, as a maven in asking
0:15:38 questions, what do you think of polling?
0:15:40 Because talk about asking.
0:15:41 Polling is asking.
0:15:44 I would say that anything is better than not asking.
0:15:49 And so if you’re doing a survey, if you’re doing polling, that’s good.
0:15:50 That’s better than the alternative.
0:15:53 But it’s only going to get you the surface level.
0:15:55 It’s going to get you, I like this person.
0:15:56 I don’t like this person.
0:15:58 I would buy this product again.
0:15:59 I wouldn’t buy this product again.
0:16:00 That’s really good to know.
0:16:01 You could start to do that.
0:16:05 But I would say to me, the poll is just the door that you have to open.
0:16:06 And then you have to walk through the door.
0:16:10 And walking through the door then requires, I think, a level of dialogue of like, how come?
0:16:12 Tell me the story why.
0:16:13 What would make it better?
0:16:16 What would have to be true for you to actually change it?
0:16:21 So there’s all kinds of deeper things that I think surveys and polls are less good at getting to.
0:16:23 But they can be the opening for you to go deeper with someone.
0:16:24 All right.
0:16:29 So why don’t you just give me like the methodology for optimal asking?
0:16:31 You gave us optimal curiosity.
0:16:36 Just go down to the Jeff Wessler checklist for optimal asking.
0:16:39 I will just give you the kind of at the high level what I call the ask approach.
0:16:52 This is the five strategies or the five steps that essentially gives you the greatest possible chance of finding out the things that other people think and feel and know that they are likely to not tell you otherwise, but that you might otherwise need to know.
0:16:53 And we can talk more about that.
0:16:57 But at the highest level, number one, I call choose curiosity.
0:16:58 And we’ve been talking a bit about this.
0:17:04 But basically, nothing else I would say matters if you’re not genuinely curious to learn from the other person.
0:17:06 It will just seem like a gimmick or a technique.
0:17:06 It will not be authentic.
0:17:17 On the other hand, if you’re genuinely curious, if you really want to understand someone, you will radiate an energy that they can tell you’re interested, that makes them more likely to want to actually share with you.
0:17:22 And I don’t look at curiosity as a trait that some people lack and other people have.
0:17:26 I look at it as a choice, as a decision that’s always available to us.
0:17:27 So we can talk more about that.
0:17:29 But that’s number one, choose curiosity.
0:17:34 Number two is a recognition that let’s say even I am wanting to learn from you.
0:17:35 I am curious.
0:17:44 If you don’t feel safe to tell me your truth, especially if it’s a hard truth, and this is where a lot of Amy Edmondson’s research comes in, I’m not going to learn from you.
0:17:46 I learned this the hard way as an operating leader.
0:17:48 You mentioned I was an executive at Teach for America.
0:17:52 I came in from the business world, and I figured if I have a question for someone, they’re going to tell me.
0:17:54 If they’re struggling, they’re going to let me know.
0:17:59 And I quickly learned, especially as I was working across many different lines of difference, people were intimidated.
0:18:01 They didn’t actually feel safe.
0:18:02 And I’m thinking, it’s just me.
0:18:03 I’m here to help.
0:18:06 And they’re thinking, this guy could fire me.
0:18:07 Why would I tell him the truth?
0:18:11 And we had some near collisions because of people not telling me the actual truth.
0:18:19 So Make It Safe is all about lowering those barriers, making it more comfortable, easy, and appealing for people to share with you their real truth.
0:18:20 And we can get into what that looks like.
0:18:24 Number three is called pose quality questions.
0:18:26 This is the heart of the ask approach.
0:18:30 This is basically to say not everything that has a question mark is a quality question.
0:18:35 My definition of a quality question is simply a question that really lets you learn something from someone else.
0:18:39 And I distinguish between crummy questions versus quality questions.
0:18:42 And in the book, and we can talk more, I share a set of strategies.
0:18:44 And it’s not like there’s 50 or 100.
0:18:51 If you can learn maybe a 10 or a dozen strategies, you will radically expand your repertoire of what you can actually learn from someone else.
0:18:52 So that’s posing quality questions.
0:18:57 Wait, before you go on to number four, give me an example of a crummy question.
0:18:58 Isn’t that right?
0:19:04 That’s one of my favorite crummy questions, because people will say something and they’ll be like, right, right?
0:19:07 They may genuinely want to know, do you agree with them?
0:19:12 But when you say it like that, it makes it much harder, especially if they don’t feel safe to tell you.
0:19:15 I’ll give you another one that I talk a lot about with groups.
0:19:16 I did this yesterday.
0:19:19 Just to question this, does that make sense?
0:19:23 So you give someone some instruction or some explanation.
0:19:24 Does that make sense?
0:19:27 And a lot of most people in the room say, I ask that question all the time.
0:19:29 But it’s a crummy question for a couple of reasons.
0:19:33 One is it can make someone feel stupid if they don’t understand it.
0:19:35 Two is when someone says, does that make sense?
0:19:39 Are they asking, do you agree with them or do you understand what they say?
0:19:40 So if you ask, does that make sense?
0:19:46 And someone nods, you have no idea if they’re just nodding because they agree, but they understand, but they disagree or the other way around.
0:19:53 You can very easily redesign that question to make it higher quality by saying something like, so what’s your reaction to that?
0:19:54 How does that land with you?
0:19:55 What does that make you think?
0:19:56 How does that sit with you?
0:20:04 Any of those are questions that are much more likely to help you understand the other person’s thinking about your own thinking.
0:20:11 So if they disagree, if they see gaps, you’re far more likely to be able to do that because it makes room for what the fancy term is disconfirming data.
0:20:15 It lets disconfirming data come into you so that you can then have a conversation about it.
0:20:20 Hey, Madison, do I ever ask you if something makes sense?
0:20:22 Um, yeah, sometimes.
0:20:28 Oh, that’s a lesson there.
0:20:31 Be careful what you ask on a podcast recording.
0:20:36 But anyway, I’ll tell you, I think it’s so common.
0:20:36 We all do.
0:20:40 When I first learned to redesign that question to say, what’s your reaction?
0:20:46 I was a new manager and I had just given somebody a set of instructions for what I was hoping that he would do.
0:20:47 And I remembered it myself.
0:20:48 Just ask him.
0:20:50 And so I said, what are your reactions to that?
0:20:59 And he got quiet for a minute and then he said, if you really want to know my true reaction, I’m completely demoralized by what you just asked me to do.
0:21:00 And I was just like that.
0:21:02 I was flabbergasted because I thought we were good.
0:21:08 But he said, what I discovered is he had a whole different set of information about what our clients needed and were asking for than I did.
0:21:15 And so what I asked him made no sense to him to do based on the information he had within the span of about five to seven minutes.
0:21:16 We cleared it all up.
0:21:17 We got back on the same page.
0:21:22 But had I not taken that literally the three seconds to ask the question, what’s your reaction to this?
0:21:25 He would have gone either done the wrong thing or just not done it.
0:21:26 He would have resented me.
0:21:27 Our relationship would have suffered.
0:21:29 We wouldn’t have served the client well.
0:21:31 And so people say, I don’t have time to ask questions.
0:21:33 And I say, it doesn’t take long.
0:21:39 Just, you know, three seconds to ask a question and you can save yourself weeks and I think a lot of heartache and money too.
0:21:44 I think that I will add to my Macintosh a keyboard macro.
0:21:50 So I just type like something like Z reaction and it’ll spit out the whole sentence.
0:21:52 What’s your reaction?
0:21:52 So I love that.
0:21:54 I can ask that all the time.
0:21:55 Okay.
0:21:58 Madison, get ready to always tell me your reaction.
0:21:59 I’m ready.
0:22:00 Sorry, Madison.
0:22:03 Okay.
0:22:05 So I think we’re on number four now.
0:22:07 Number four is called listen to learn.
0:22:13 And basically, once you ask a question, it’s, it all comes down to, do you hear the answer?
0:22:17 How well do you actually listen to what someone has to say?
0:22:25 And a lot of times we’re listening to look smart, listening to prove a point, listening to get someone to do something, listening to look like we’re listening.
0:22:27 None of that is listening to learn.
0:22:35 Listening to learn is like truly taking a vigorous interest in what someone else has to say so that you can actually get to the essence of what they’re talking about.
0:22:40 It’s listening, not just for the information, but also for the emotions and also for the actions.
0:22:47 And when I talk to groups, I say to them, I say to people like, give me on average, what percent of people that you talk to you think is a good listener?
0:22:54 On average, people say it’s about 10 or 15% of people that they, but many polls think that the vast majority of us think we’re good listeners.
0:23:00 So, there’s a massive gap between how good we think we are as a listener versus how we’re actually experienced as a listener.
0:23:04 But there’s some very simple things that we can do to increase our listening.
0:23:06 Should I give you an example or two?
0:23:10 Yeah, that’s why I have you on the podcast.
0:23:11 All right, I’ll go there.
0:23:13 That makes sense to me.
0:23:20 Yeah, so for the book, I interviewed professional listeners, including journalists and also including psychotherapists.
0:23:22 Psychotherapists sit there and they listen all day long.
0:23:30 And one of the things I discovered is that psychotherapists universally experience this phenomenon called the doorknob moment.
0:23:31 Have you heard of this?
0:23:52 So, if there’s a session that is 50 minutes long, what happens quite often is that someone will sit there, have the therapy, have the conversation, and then at the very last second, at minute 49 and 59 seconds, right when they’re standing up, their hand is on the door, they’re about to leave the room, only then is when they actually say the real thing that’s going on.
0:23:58 And it’s like, that’s when they say, I’m thinking about leaving my spouse or, you know, whatever the thing is that’s going on.
0:24:01 And these therapists, they’re like, why didn’t they tell me this during the whole session?
0:24:02 We could have talked about it.
0:24:03 And they have all kinds of theories.
0:24:10 Sometimes they think, well, maybe they were working up the courage, or maybe they were waiting to see how I reacted, or maybe they were just getting their thoughts straight.
0:24:14 One of them recently said to me, I think they do it because they want me to think about them all week.
0:24:16 So, they just say it’s the last thing, hoping that I’ll think about them.
0:24:23 But the takeaway is that you can’t assume that when you ask a question and someone answers it, you’re getting the most important thing they have to say.
0:24:30 Often, the most important thing they have to say is two or three layers back, and it’s not the thing that comes out when you ask them.
0:24:33 And yet, many of us will ask a question, and then we’ll say, okay, I got my answer.
0:24:37 Now, next question, or I’m moving on, and we miss the actual real thing.
0:24:44 So, there’s a listening technique that I just call pull the thread, which is if you just pull it a little bit more and say, that’s interesting, can you elaborate on that?
0:24:46 Can you say a little bit more about that?
0:24:46 Tell me more.
0:24:48 What else?
0:24:54 Any of those things are just ways to increase the likelihood that the real thing is going to come out when you ask someone the question.
0:25:00 Sometimes, I will even say to my own team, if we’re having a conversation or I’m asking them for ideas, I’ll say, what else?
0:25:01 And what else?
0:25:04 And then I’ll even say to them, I’m going to keep asking you, what else?
0:25:06 Until you tell me, that’s it.
0:25:09 Because the ideas keep getting better and better each time I say, what else?
0:25:11 That’s one of the strategies, pull the thread.
0:25:16 And what happens if you pull the thread at the 50th minute or the 59th minute?
0:25:20 If you’re in a psychotherapy session, you can’t because it’s over.
0:25:22 And so, that’s the thing.
0:25:24 It’s like by not doing that, they’ve missed the chance.
0:25:26 But we don’t have that constraint usually.
0:25:27 Usually, we’re still in the conversation.
0:25:29 We can continue to do that in a conversation.
0:25:30 So, that’s one.
0:25:38 The other one I would just share with you that I would say is, if there’s nothing else that anybody who listens to this episode remembers for this entire episode, it would be this thing.
0:25:40 It’s just called tellback and test.
0:25:49 And so, when you’re talking to someone and they answer your questions, before you give your response or before you ask the next question, just simply say, I think this is what I heard you say.
0:25:49 Let me just check.
0:25:50 Did I get that right?
0:25:52 Or here’s what I think I’m getting from you.
0:25:53 How close is that?
0:25:54 Whatever it is.
0:26:06 It’s very rare that we do it, but research shows that it is actually one of the biggest distinguishers of high-performing teams versus low-performing teams, the degree to which they just check if they understood what each other said.
0:26:07 It’s sort of the magic move.
0:26:09 It has many benefits.
0:26:12 The first and most important, of course, is simply you get better information.
0:26:15 So, when I do this, half the time when I say to someone, let me just check.
0:26:16 I think this is what you’re saying.
0:26:17 Is that right?
0:26:20 They will say, kind of, but that’s not exactly what I meant.
0:26:23 Or that is what I said, but now that you tell me, this is what I really think.
0:26:25 I just get better information.
0:26:26 It saves a lot of time.
0:26:29 It also just changes up the tempo of the conversation.
0:26:32 So, let’s say we’re having some kind of an argument or whatever.
0:26:34 It’s like a ping-pong match or a counterpoint.
0:26:39 If I just stop and say, before I react to you, guy, I just want to check if I understood where you’re coming from.
0:26:40 Is this what you mean?
0:26:41 Is this what you’re saying?
0:26:42 It just slows it down.
0:26:44 It gives us a chance both to breathe.
0:26:49 But I think the most important benefit is that it also sends you the message, I care about you.
0:26:58 I care about you enough to take my own time, my own words, my own breath to check if I understand where you’re coming from, what’s important to you.
0:27:00 And that changes everything as well.
0:27:04 So, like the magic move, the power move, just check your understanding.
0:27:05 Tell back and test.
0:27:07 Man, I don’t know if I can get to number five.
0:27:11 Okay, number five, I will tell you, is my favorite of them all.
0:27:16 And the reason why it’s my favorite is because it’s called Reflect and Reconnect.
0:27:20 And as you said at the beginning in your kind introduction, my passion in life is learning.
0:27:23 And I believe that reflection is how we learn.
0:27:30 Reflection is how we convert our experiences into takeaways or insights and our insights into actions.
0:27:38 I think reflection is the difference between somebody having 20 years of experience doing something versus having one year of experience 20 times over.
0:27:39 It’s how well they reflect.
0:27:43 And I think that reflection often gets a bad rap.
0:27:44 People think, I don’t know how to reflect.
0:27:47 I don’t have time to go on a meditation retreat.
0:27:49 I would have to, you know, start whatever, going into the hills.
0:27:51 But reflection can be very simple.
0:27:55 So, I have a method I suggest that I just call sift it and turn it.
0:27:59 But sift it is just to say, let’s say someone told you 30 things in the course of a conversation.
0:28:02 Just sift it and say, you know, take a second.
0:28:04 What were the three or four most important things I took away from that person?
0:28:06 And I can release some of the other stuff.
0:28:09 In fact, some of the stuff that people tell us, we don’t need to take it.
0:28:10 Maybe it’s not even healthy for us to take it.
0:28:11 So, sift it.
0:28:15 And often it can be helpful to sift it with a friend or a colleague so you’re not sifting out the wrong stuff.
0:28:18 And then just turn it over in your mind three times.
0:28:23 The first time, I would say, is turning it over to see how does this affect my story about the situation?
0:28:25 Maybe it gives me a new piece of information.
0:28:28 Maybe it shows me a wrong assumption I was making or whatever it is.
0:28:30 How does it affect my story?
0:28:33 The second time you turn it is to say, based on that, what steps should I take?
0:28:35 Maybe I want to apologize.
0:28:36 Maybe I want to double down.
0:28:38 Maybe I want to make a right turn with it.
0:28:39 But just ask yourself.
0:28:44 And then the third is the deepest turn, which is there anything that I learned here that affects my own stuff?
0:28:51 Like maybe it revealed to me that I have a bias or a way of being or some deeper held assumption that this just kind of questioned a little bit.
0:28:54 So, sift it and turn it for your story, your steps and your stuff.
0:28:57 And then the reconnect part is the closing the loop.
0:29:02 It’s basically to say this whole ask approach is not just about me taking things away from myself.
0:29:06 It’s about connecting back to the other person and saying, thank you for taking the time.
0:29:08 Thank you for taking the risk if it felt risky.
0:29:10 And by the way, here’s what I learned from you.
0:29:12 And here’s what I’m going to go do with what I learned from you.
0:29:16 And is there something different than you were hoping or additional you were hoping I would learn from you?
0:29:21 And that act of closing the loop, I was just literally with a group of executives yesterday.
0:29:27 And they said, our whole organization is cynical because we ask them for so many suggestions and then they have no idea what we do with these suggestions.
0:29:28 And so, they say, what’s the point?
0:29:32 But closing the loop lets people know they didn’t waste their time.
0:29:35 They’re powerful because they’ve influenced you.
0:29:39 And I think it just deepens the connection so that they’re going to want to share and you’re going to want to share more together over time.
0:29:41 I’m exhausted already.
0:29:49 You’re changing my entire conversational style, my God.
0:29:51 Well, there you know what?
0:29:52 You just reflected back.
0:29:53 You reconnected back to me.
0:29:54 You told me something.
0:29:56 Some impact that it had on you.
0:30:05 Can I ask you, do you value either, even if it’s performative, people taking notes?
0:30:13 I think that whatever people need to do to make sure they get the right takeaways is valuable.
0:30:20 Nowadays, more often, I am using an AI note taker, whether it’s on my phone, if it’s in person or online.
0:30:21 If it’s on Zoom, I can use any number of them.
0:30:27 And for me, that’s a way that I can actually just fully stay present with the person but know that I’m going to still have the takeaways.
0:30:36 But if someone doesn’t have that or if that’s their style, I think that’s great as long as they’re not so buried in their notes so they’re not able to make some eye contact and look across time.
0:30:40 But if it helps you to make sure you’re getting the right takeaways, I think that can be valuable.
0:30:50 So are you saying that I could take a transcript of a conversation, put it into an LLM and ask it, what are the takeaways?
0:30:51 How should I reconnect?
0:30:53 It can use it as a coach.
0:30:54 You can do that.
0:30:56 In fact, there’s some really fun things you can do.
0:30:57 For example, you can take that transcript.
0:31:04 You can say to AI, what are some questions I didn’t ask in this conversation that I might have asked?
0:31:09 Or what are a few follow-up questions that I could ask in my follow-up email or in the next question?
0:31:11 So it can actually help you generate questions.
0:31:15 But the other really fun thing that you can do with a transcript to help you practice listening,
0:31:20 I mentioned very briefly earlier that you can listen for content, emotion, and action.
0:31:22 So content is the information that someone’s saying.
0:31:25 Emotion is what are the feelings that they were expressing or displaying.
0:31:29 And actions are what are the behaviors that they were doing in the conversation.
0:31:32 You can literally take a transcript and ask it to help you listen for those three things.
0:31:38 So you can say at a content level, what were the most important facts and arguments that were being made?
0:31:40 At an emotion level, what were they expressing and displaying?
0:31:43 At an action level, what behaviors were they doing in that conversation?
0:31:46 And you can check it against your own listening to that.
0:31:52 And in a way, it can really help you to train your brain to not just listen.
0:31:54 Because most of us just listen through one of those three channels.
0:31:58 For me, I default to content and I can sometimes miss the emotion or the action.
0:32:02 But if I can do that, I can start to train my brain to be listening for those other two things too.
0:32:05 Let’s get a little more granular here.
0:32:10 So are there differences when you’re talking to women versus men?
0:32:13 Are there differences when you’re talking to old versus young?
0:32:17 The five things were generic across all human beings, right?
0:32:22 Do you have to change things up for old, young, gender, stuff like that?
0:32:26 I will say I do believe that they are generalizably applicable.
0:32:37 But there is some interesting research about the ways in which lines of difference can exacerbate some of the challenges that the ask approach is trying to solve.
0:32:43 So the biggest problem that the ask approach is trying to deal with is people not telling us the real truth.
0:32:46 Is people actually knowing and feeling and thinking things that they don’t have any bad things.
0:32:48 They could be ideas too, but just not telling us.
0:32:59 There is a phenomenon called protective hesitation that someone named David Thomas, who was a researcher at Harvard Business School, is now the president of Morehouse College.
0:33:10 He coined the term and it basically refers to the idea that women and people of color are less likely to get honest, direct developmental feedback than other people.
0:33:26 It’s because their colleagues, their bosses and mentors are engaging in this protective hesitation, which means that they are both trying to protect the women and people of color from getting feedback or input that might be biased or that might perpetuate some kind of oppression.
0:33:29 But they’re also protecting themselves from getting accused of that as well.
0:33:33 And so for both of those reasons, they’re not learning as much.
0:33:40 And so that can be especially important situation in which to be using some of these ask methods.
0:33:50 And then the other thing that is well documented is that psychological safety can go down across any lines of difference, whether that’s a cultural difference, power difference, gender difference, race difference, etc.
0:33:55 And so those are the ways in which I would say that kind of dynamics of difference play into this.
0:33:58 Are there telltale signs?
0:33:59 I’m listening to this.
0:34:00 I’m using I generally.
0:34:13 People are listening to this and they’re saying, can you just give me some tells that obviously I should figure out that I am a lousy question asker.
0:34:16 You know, how can I self-diagnose?
0:34:17 Definitely.
0:34:18 There’s a few.
0:34:30 I would say if you look at any conversation, you could take a transcript from AI or you could just listen to a conversation and you could literally plot out the ratio between two things, statements and questions.
0:34:36 You can divide everything into statements and questions and you can look at the ratio of statements to questions in a conversation.
0:34:47 If your ratio is a lot of statements and very few questions, overall, you are a lousy asker because you’re just not asking many people that question.
0:34:51 Now, of course, if you’re being interviewed or you’re giving a lecture, then that’s one thing.
0:34:58 But generally speaking, in conversations, if your ratio is very heavily tilted towards statements and very low towards questions, you’re off.
0:35:14 I will tell you that at least mentally, I try to achieve a ratio of my talk to the guest talk at 90, 10, 90, 10 being 90% Jeff, 10% me in my podcast.
0:35:15 I’ve seen that in your episodes.
0:35:16 Yeah.
0:35:20 And I think the way that you get that done is by asking questions.
0:35:28 And so if your ratio is flipped the other way, or if your ratio of statements to questions is the other, you’ve got some improvement to do.
0:35:29 I would say that’s one.
0:35:30 I’ll just give you two others.
0:35:46 If you’re a leader and you’re not getting critical feedback from the people around you, chances are you’re not asking the right questions or you’re not asking the right questions in the right ways because the people around you undoubtedly have observations and feedback and ideas of what you could be doing better.
0:35:49 So if you’re not hearing that, that’s something that you should take notice of.
0:36:05 And then the third thing I’ll just say is if your questions generally start with words like do or don’t, would or wouldn’t, is or isn’t, chances are you’re going to be getting surface level answers because you’re getting yes, no answers.
0:36:09 Versus if your questions are starting with what, how come, those are going to be open.
0:36:11 Those are going to give you richer information.
0:36:19 So if I’m a manager, can I paraphrase what you just said, which is to say that.
0:36:19 I love this.
0:36:20 Yeah.
0:36:21 You’re a fast learner.
0:36:25 No news is bad news.
0:36:27 No news is bad news.
0:36:29 And by the way, that’s not just true if you’re a manager.
0:36:44 That’s also true, let’s say, if you have any kind of professional service, if you’re a client, if you’ve got clients and your client is not giving you critical feedback, if you’re a startup founder and your investors are not giving you critical feedback, it really goes 360 degrees around.
0:36:49 If you’re only getting affirming feedback, chances are you’re not asking the right questions in the right ways.
0:36:54 You heard Madison say that I often ask her if something made sense.
0:37:00 But I also heard that you have a relationship with Madison because I observed it where she’s also willing to tell you a little bit more.
0:37:01 And I think that’s probably healthy.
0:37:07 There is no question that Madison is willing to tell me negative things.
0:37:08 Yes, that’s a real deal.
0:37:11 So you’re doing something right.
0:37:14 Up next on Remarkable People.
0:37:25 One of the things that he truly did well is that he would just spend a ton of time going all around the state, having conversations with people, listening to people, asking them what’s on your mind.
0:37:30 And I think it really informed his policies in a much more grounded kind of way.
0:37:39 Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners.
0:37:43 It’s our pleasure and honor to make the show for you.
0:37:48 If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate, and review it.
0:37:51 Even better, forward it to a friend.
0:37:54 A big mahalo to you for doing this.
0:37:58 You’re listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:38:04 Much of our discussion has been focusing on asking the right questions.
0:38:07 So now we also have to answer the question.
0:38:09 So how do I optimize my answers?
0:38:17 I would say to optimize your answers, you want to be speaking directly to the question as opposed to speaking around the question.
0:38:24 If you receive what I would call a crummy question, so let’s say someone just asks you a surface level, do you believe X or Y or whatever?
0:38:28 Sometimes you can go further than just giving the surface answer.
0:38:33 And sometimes you can also say to them, but this is my simple answer, but is there a deeper part of your question?
0:38:35 Or is there a question behind the question?
0:38:40 Sometimes people will ask you questions that are really them trying to get you to agree with them.
0:38:42 And then you can say, I’ll share my thoughts, but I’m curious.
0:38:44 It sounds like you might have a view on this.
0:38:45 What are your views on these questions?
0:38:55 And so I often say to people from the perspective of answering, even if someone doesn’t come at you with a quality question, you can help make their question better in those kinds of ways.
0:38:58 And that will get a better answer out of you, too.
0:39:08 Is there a Jeff Wetzler Hall of Fame that you say, this person really knows how to ask questions?
0:39:09 It could be a journalist.
0:39:11 It could be a broadcaster.
0:39:12 It could be a CEO.
0:39:14 It could be, I don’t know, Oprah Winfrey.
0:39:15 Do you have a Hall of Fame?
0:39:18 I have different people in different categories.
0:39:20 So for the book, one category was CEOs.
0:39:23 And I tried to interview iconic CEOs.
0:39:29 And the reason I did is because CEOs are notorious for getting lied to.
0:39:36 People tend to tell CEOs what they think the CEO wants to hear, what they think is going to make themselves look good, what they think is going to get their agenda through.
0:39:44 And so I said to CEOs, and this included people like Bill George of Medtronic or Irene Rosenfeld, who ran Kraft for a while.
0:39:50 I said to them, how did you get the truth out of people, especially several layers away from you?
0:39:53 And I’ll never forget, there was one common theme.
0:40:07 They basically said, if I want to get the truth out of someone, I’m not, especially someone junior, I’m never going to bring them to my office and make them sit across the intimidating CEO desk from me and assume that they’re going to tell me the truth.
0:40:11 Irene Rosenfeld from Kraft basically said, I’m going to go to the cafeteria.
0:40:12 We’re going to have lunch together.
0:40:16 Bill George said, I’m going to do a ride along and we’re going to take a walk, whatever it is.
0:40:24 And there was no single answer other than what makes them feel safest, what makes them feel most comfortable.
0:40:25 And so it was so interesting to me.
0:40:28 And this is why I would name both of them as heroes, for example.
0:40:30 It’s not even about the questions yet.
0:40:35 It’s about the setting that they create, the safety that they create for people to then open up.
0:40:45 And then when you have that right tone and that right setting for connection, it takes a little pressure off of do you have the perfectly worded question because you’ve got the level of safety there.
0:40:46 And I know you have kids.
0:40:52 I have a teenage daughter and I find that this applies to my relationship with my daughter as well.
0:40:56 When she comes home from school and I say to her, how was school?
0:40:58 I get stonewalled.
0:40:59 I get absolutely nothing.
0:41:02 When I say to her at dinner, what did you learn today?
0:41:02 Nothing.
0:41:07 If I want to actually get the truth out of my daughter, I have to stay up until 11 p.m.
0:41:12 When she’s done with her homework and she’s done talking to her friends and she wants to hang out with me in her room.
0:41:15 And at that hour, my body wishes that I was asleep.
0:41:18 But if I want something from her, that’s the setting.
0:41:24 And so that’s what I learned, actually, from these question heroes is that it’s about the other person and you’ve got to go to where they feel most comfortable.
0:41:26 And then you’re going to learn what you want to learn.
0:41:29 OK, so that’s the category of CEO.
0:41:33 But how about the category of journalist or TV personality?
0:41:36 So in the category of journalists, I will name two heroes here.
0:41:38 One is Jenny Anderson.
0:41:40 She is an award-winning business journalist.
0:41:42 She actually also just wrote a great book that came out.
0:41:49 And what she said to me is that when she does an interview, she usually asks the person that she’s interviewing for permission to record the interview.
0:41:52 And then she will go back and listen to the recording.
0:41:56 And she’ll listen to it two or three or four times, literally the same recording.
0:42:03 And she said, every single time I listen to it, I hear something completely different than I heard the first time.
0:42:06 And I think to myself, she is a professional listener.
0:42:09 And she’s not getting the most important stuff the first time.
0:42:11 She takes her two or three or four times.
0:42:12 The rest of us barely ever do that.
0:42:14 We just have our conversation and we move on.
0:42:20 But to me, she’s a hero for just recognizing the limits of her listening and all of our listening and to go back.
0:42:23 And then the other journalist I’ll just mention is Amanda Ripley.
0:42:27 She recently came out with a book called High Conflict, which is a great book.
0:42:34 And what I learned from her is the way that she creates safety when she does journalism stories with people who have different backgrounds than her.
0:42:37 She’ll basically say, look, I know I’m from the East Coast.
0:42:39 I know my life is different than yours in many different things.
0:42:40 I’m truly ignorant.
0:42:43 And I would love for you to help me to understand what I might be missing.
0:42:48 And so she just confesses that in a way that’s completely disarming to people and also creates that safety as well.
0:42:54 OK, so now the last category I’m going to ask you is about politicians.
0:42:58 Is there any politician you respect for asking questions?
0:43:01 So I don’t know if you know who Deval Patrick is.
0:43:04 He was the governor of Massachusetts a couple of terms ago.
0:43:16 And one of the things that he truly did well is that he would just spend a ton of time going all around the state, having conversations with people, listening to people, asking them what’s on your mind.
0:43:21 And I think it really informed his policies in a much more grounded kind of way.
0:43:23 That’s a short list of politicians.
0:43:29 It doesn’t get a lot longer on that category, although I’m sure that there are many that I’m not aware of, too.
0:43:32 Yeah, I’m sure.
0:43:38 Do you have any favorites on your end that you think are role models of great questions or listening, whether politicians or any other categories?
0:43:40 Jeff, I’m from Silicon Valley.
0:43:46 In Silicon Valley, we don’t have to ask questions because we’re omniscient and omnipotent.
0:43:47 Have you not learned that?
0:43:48 Oh, that’s true.
0:43:49 I completely forgot.
0:43:53 Think of my history.
0:43:54 I work for Apple.
0:43:56 Okay, enough said.
0:43:58 End of discussion.
0:44:00 Did that make sense?
0:44:03 Perfect sense.
0:44:06 All right.
0:44:08 So three more questions.
0:44:17 First of all, because I know in your book, the whole book is about asking questions, but at the end, you drove it home by asking about mastery.
0:44:22 So question number one is how do you master asking questions?
0:44:32 Yeah, I would say that the way that you master it is really no different than how you would master any other important skill.
0:44:39 And it starts with recognizing the limits of where you are right now, recognizing where you might not be as good at it.
0:44:51 So for example, paying attention to what is my ratio of questions to statements and if I start to see that ratio is often, then I get a little insight or starting to actually look at or audit the kinds of questions that I’m asking.
0:44:56 And in the book that we see high quality questions versus karma questions, I start to see that I’m asking karma questions.
0:44:58 So some of it just starts with awareness.
0:45:01 And the fancy term for that is conscious incompetence.
0:45:06 It’s recognizing is becoming more conscious of the ways that I’m incompetent in this.
0:45:09 And then the thing to do is just to start to pick it off little by little.
0:45:13 So maybe you want to start by learning how to better ask for people’s reactions instead of saying, does that make sense?
0:45:16 You just start to force yourself to say that.
0:45:19 You might even write it down on a card and have that card in front of you.
0:45:21 You might even tell other people, hey, I’m trying a new kind of question.
0:45:27 And then you practice that enough times that you start to see how to make it your own and that it starts to become fluid.
0:45:30 Then maybe you want to go to the next cycle and you say, all right, now I’m going to try to become a little bit better listener.
0:45:32 Let me start by practicing pulling the thread.
0:45:36 And you just do that over and over again for each of the different chunks that you want to do.
0:45:39 And that’s how you start to build your repertoire.
0:45:41 And then what I say is you’ve got to level up.
0:45:43 It’s one thing to do that in low-stakes situations.
0:45:46 Then you say, what’s the next higher-stakes situation I can do that in?
0:45:48 And you don’t start in the high-stakes situations.
0:45:51 But once you’ve gotten better, you try that again and again and again.
0:45:53 And that’s how it starts to become more of a superpower.
0:45:57 And that’s when I’m consciously competent.
0:45:58 That’s right.
0:46:02 And you want to get to the place where you’re unconsciously competent.
0:46:05 To the point where you don’t even have to think about it anymore.
0:46:07 It just comes naturally to you because it’s built into your repertoire.
0:46:11 And are we getting Malcolm Gladwell-ish?
0:46:14 It’s like 10,000 hours of this and, you know.
0:46:18 Yes, but it has to be 10,000 hours of actually the right practice.
0:46:19 It’s not just 10,000 hours of practice.
0:46:26 It’s 10,000 hours of practice, watching how it went, feedback, tweaking it, adjusting it, leveling up, those kinds of things.
0:46:30 I have surfed for about 10,000 hours and I’m not getting any better.
0:46:35 I have a feeling you’re probably a lot better than when you started, though.
0:46:38 That’s not hard to say, but yeah.
0:46:39 Okay.
0:46:45 So how do I teach other people to become masters of asking questions?
0:46:45 Yeah.
0:46:51 So the easy answer is the best way to teach it is to role model it yourself.
0:47:04 So the more that if you’re a leader, the more that the people on your team are seeing you admit that you don’t know something, ask a follow-up question, shut up and listen instead of just taking over the meeting and telling them what to do.
0:47:10 Any number of those things, that sends a super powerful message to people about what you value.
0:47:12 They will imitate your behavior.
0:47:18 You can also, of course, actually put people in situations where they’re being taught this kind of stuff as well.
0:47:21 You can call people out to reward that.
0:47:27 So not just rewarding, hey, you hate your sales goals, but also, hey, you asked the best question that we haven’t thought about yet.
0:47:28 That pushed our thinking.
0:47:31 And so what you actually elevate, you can even hire for it.
0:47:38 I remember in my first job out of college, I worked for a company called Monitor Group that literally was hiring for a proclivity to do this stuff.
0:47:45 And after they made me do a whole performance task and presentation in front of a group of people, somebody sat me down and they gave me a bunch of critical feedback.
0:47:50 And I thought they were giving me this feedback to tell me why they were about to not give me the job.
0:47:52 And I said, so does that mean I don’t get the job?
0:47:57 But really what they were trying to do is they were trying to see, was I going to be defensive or curious about the feedback?
0:48:01 Was I going to try to like push back on it or was I going to say, that’s interesting?
0:48:01 How come?
0:48:02 And tell me more.
0:48:04 And so you can literally build this into your hiring practices, too.
0:48:06 All right.
0:48:15 And the final and most important question about master is how do I help my kids become master question askers?
0:48:16 Yes.
0:48:18 Maybe we should interview your daughter.
0:48:18 You should.
0:48:23 You could interview my daughter or my son who is actually now working out at Silicon Valley as well.
0:48:30 But first of all, the thing to say is that kids are born curious and by age four, they’re asking between 25 and 50 questions per hour.
0:48:34 And parents of young kids nod and they say, absolutely, that’s what they’re doing.
0:48:39 What’s fascinating is that those same exact kids in school ask two questions per hour.
0:48:43 And so there’s something very different going on when they’re not constrained.
0:48:48 I think it’s because schools basically have a model where we tell kids sit down and shut up and give me the right answer.
0:48:50 Stop asking so many questions.
0:48:59 And I was talking to a group two weeks ago and somebody said to me, when I was a kid, my parents were so sick of my questions, they offered to buy me an ice cream cone if I would stop asking so many questions.
0:49:05 So the thing I would say to parents, if you want curious kids, is don’t beat the curiosity out of them.
0:49:08 When they ask the questions, take the questions.
0:49:10 Give them honest answers to those questions.
0:49:12 Admit to them when you don’t know the answer to the question.
0:49:14 And say, that’s really interesting.
0:49:15 Let’s go find out together.
0:49:16 What could that be?
0:49:20 The way in which you respond to their questions will send a lot of messages.
0:49:27 One of the exercises I do with groups is I say to people, stand up if as a kid someone discouraged you from asking a question.
0:49:30 Yesterday, 80% of the people in the room stood up.
0:49:31 Usually it’s about half the room.
0:49:36 But just the amount of things that we do to tell kids, stop asking questions, to me is tragic.
0:49:41 And so if you’re a parent and you want your kids to be curious, encourage those questions.
0:49:42 Fuel that fire.
0:49:46 I have to say, Jeff, that we have interviewed about 260 people.
0:49:52 And probably this episode, I feel the most convicted in doing things wrong.
0:49:55 I feel like I owe you an apology.
0:50:00 I look at this as a turning point opportunity.
0:50:04 I appreciate your learning spirit to the whole thing as well.
0:50:07 And especially because I’ve learned so much from you and your book and your episodes over time.
0:50:15 I hope I didn’t shatter any delusions you had about my competence by coming on my podcast.
0:50:16 Not at all.
0:50:20 All right, Jeff.
0:50:23 Thank you so much for being on Remarkable People.
0:50:24 I’m serious.
0:50:27 I got a lot of thinking to do after this episode.
0:50:31 From now on, when I meet people, Jeff, I’m going to say, hi, my name is Guy Kaosaki.
0:50:31 What’s your name?
0:50:35 And they’re going to say, and then my next question is going to be, what’s your reaction?
0:50:37 What’s your reaction to that?
0:50:42 Thank you for having me on for such a great conversation and also for listening so seriously
0:50:44 and taking it all in as well.
0:50:44 It means a lot.
0:50:51 And everybody out there, if you want to be a better manager, leader, or parent, you definitely
0:50:53 need to pick up this book.
0:50:55 It’s called Ask by Jeff Wetzler.
0:50:58 So thank you for being on this podcast, Jeff, obviously.
0:50:58 Thank you.
0:51:04 Thank you, Madison, for dealing with my incompetence as a question asker.
0:51:11 And thank you, Tessa Neismar, for the research you did on Jeff and also to the sound design
0:51:14 team, which is going to turn this into just a great sounding podcast.
0:51:17 That’s Jeff C. and Shannon Hernandez.
0:51:18 And so that’s it.
0:51:21 That’s today’s episode of Remarkable People.
0:51:31 This is Remarkable People.

0:00:04 In my years of entrepreneurship, I’ve seen countless startups.
0:00:06 And here’s the truth.
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0:00:14 Brex isn’t just a corporate credit card.
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0:00:35 In fact, 30,000 companies are trusting Brex to help them win.
0:00:39 Go to brex.com slash grow to learn more.
0:00:43 AI is a tool for spiritual enlightenment.
0:00:48 It can’t get you enlightened, but it can show you the maps.
0:00:51 And there are many maps on spirituality,
0:00:53 just like there are many maps in any terrain,
0:00:56 but they all lead to the same destination,
0:00:59 which is spiritual realization.
0:01:05 I’m Guy Kawasaki.
0:01:07 This is the Remarkable People podcast.
0:01:10 And I know I say this every episode,
0:01:13 that we found some remarkable person to inspire you.
0:01:16 But today, truly, we have a remarkable person.
0:01:18 His name is Deepak Chopra.
0:01:21 And I bet every one of you have heard of him.
0:01:24 He’s world renowned for his integrative medicine
0:01:27 and personal transformation work.
0:01:29 He’s the founder of the Chopra Foundation.
0:01:32 And I mean, how much do I have to introduce you?
0:01:35 And he has touched millions of people’s lives
0:01:38 with his writing, his speaking, his podcasting.
0:01:43 And I met him in Hawaii at an EO conference,
0:01:46 which was a very special moment for me.
0:01:51 And Deepak, you were wearing like a really cool jacket.
0:01:54 That made a very big impression on me.
0:01:57 And so I think we discussed it.
0:01:59 Was it an Issey Miyake jacket?
0:02:01 It was Issey Miyake.
0:02:03 Yeah, those are, they’re cool,
0:02:05 but also easy to travel in, right?
0:02:06 Yeah.
0:02:09 So I came right home and I told my wife,
0:02:12 I met Deepak Chopra and he was in an Issey Miyake jacket.
0:02:15 She was also impressed.
0:02:20 So I want to dive right into your latest book, okay?
0:02:22 You’ve written 90 books and you have podcasts
0:02:25 and YouTube videos all over the place.
0:02:27 So people will understand the basis.
0:02:30 But I have to tell you that I read your latest book
0:02:36 and I was just, I guess the right word is astounded, Deepak,
0:02:38 because of all the people in the world
0:02:39 who have embraced AI,
0:02:42 I would not have thought it would have been you.
0:02:45 And so that was particularly enlightening to me.
0:02:47 So I’m going to start off with a quote, okay?
0:02:49 The quote from the book, quote,
0:02:52 I believe that no technology in decades
0:02:57 can equal AI for expanding your awareness in every area,
0:03:00 including spiritual and personal growth.
0:03:03 Can you just explain to me
0:03:06 how you came to have so much faith in AI?
0:03:07 When I read that, I thought,
0:03:08 next thing you know,
0:03:11 Warren Buffett is going to tell me he’s buying crypto
0:03:14 and Greta Thunberg is driving an SUV
0:03:17 and Jane Goodall loves ribeye steaks.
0:03:19 Deepak Chopra has embraced AI.
0:03:22 So can you just explain this for me?
0:03:27 I have my own definition of what is called reality.
0:03:34 So what we call the divine or God doesn’t have a form.
0:03:36 And not having a form,
0:03:40 that every spiritual tradition says God doesn’t have a form.
0:03:42 The divine doesn’t have a form.
0:03:43 Then people say, well,
0:03:46 what all these pictures of God did in the Vatican
0:03:47 and this and that.
0:03:52 the Hindus have hundreds of deities as do the Buddhists.
0:03:57 And those are symbolic representations of what we call divine.
0:03:59 Divine is infinite.
0:04:02 And being infinite doesn’t have a border,
0:04:08 is outside of space-time and has no cause.
0:04:10 In the world of space-time and causality,
0:04:12 everything has a cause.
0:04:16 But God transcends all causes
0:04:19 and all concepts and all definitions.
0:04:22 So I came up with a formula.
0:04:26 God has a digital workshop outside of space-time.
0:04:32 And the formula is zero is equal to infinity is equal to one.
0:04:36 So think of this workshop outside space-time,
0:04:38 which is divine.
0:04:43 And it’s spilling out zeros and ones in infinite combinations.
0:04:47 And the only difference between you and a mountain
0:04:53 or the earth and a star on this iPhone and AI
0:04:56 is a different combination of zeros and ones.
0:04:57 That’s it.
0:04:58 And it comes from one source.
0:05:01 So that is God’s language.
0:05:04 It’s not English with an Indian accent.
0:05:06 I would have liked to believe that.
0:05:11 But God’s language is digital language.
0:05:14 And once you get that understanding,
0:05:19 then you see, how did we create the human experience?
0:05:21 You and I create the human experience.
0:05:25 And it all began 40,000 years ago
0:05:29 when there were eight different kinds of human species.
0:05:31 So we call ourselves Homo sapiens,
0:05:34 but then we gave ourselves that name.
0:05:36 It means the wise ones.
0:05:38 We were humble enough to do that.
0:05:40 But we gave names to other humans.
0:05:45 Homo habilis, Homo erectus, fluences.
0:05:47 We gave names to other species.
0:05:50 Giraffes, elephants, this, that, the other.
0:05:54 So all started with naming experience.
0:05:57 And that created a language for stories.
0:06:02 And that is how the human evolution began.
0:06:02 Stories.
0:06:05 To be human is to have a story.
0:06:07 Right now, we’re sharing a story.
0:06:14 And then that way of telling stories evolved into what we call models.
0:06:20 So models means giving reality a stamp through the human mind.
0:06:25 Latitude, longitude, drainage, main time, North Pole, South Pole.
0:06:29 We can’t live without these concepts, even though we made them up.
0:06:31 But then we created more languages.
0:06:40 We created language of philosophy, science, anthropology, history, astronomy, biology, mathematics.
0:06:43 These are all human languages.
0:06:57 And we call AI a large language model because it has access to all these languages that humanity has created to look at what we call the human experience.
0:07:03 And now there’s no single human being that can compete with this kind of database.
0:07:21 So, in fact, we can’t compete with it, but we have access to the entire database of knowledge and wisdom from Jesus Christ to the Buddha, to Plato, to Socrates, to Einstein, to Tagore, to the prophets of the Old Testament.
0:07:25 AI is a tool for spiritual enlightenment.
0:07:30 It can’t get you enlightened, but it can show you the maps.
0:07:35 And there are many maps on spirituality, just like there are many maps in any terrain.
0:07:52 If I want to go to Boston from New York, I can use an aerial route, I can use a contour map, a road map, go by the ship, take a helicopter, but they all lead to the same destination, which is spiritual realization.
0:07:54 So I’m using AI as a tool.
0:07:55 It’s not just a book.
0:07:57 I have my own AI.
0:07:59 It’s called DeepakShopra.ai.
0:08:00 Try it out.
0:08:01 DeepakShopra.ai.
0:08:13 Ask any spiritual question or any dilemma that you have, spiritual, or about health, or about longevity, and you’ll get information from 96 of my books,
0:08:21 from every conversation I’ve had from every conversation I’ve had, from every discussion I’ve had, from my meetings with spiritual luminaries.
0:08:31 So, yes, AI is a tool for enhancing spiritual well-being, but also emotional well-being and physical well-being.
0:08:34 And my AI, DeepakShopra.ai, is the coach.
0:08:51 Every business is under pressure to save money.
0:08:55 But if you want to be a business leader, you need to do more to win.
0:09:01 You need to create momentum and unlock potential, which is where Brex comes in.
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0:09:24 More than 30,000 companies use Brex to make every dollar count towards their mission, and you can join them.
0:09:31 Get the modern finance platform that works as hard as you do at brex.com slash grow.
0:09:43 So, the irony is that this quote-unquote technology is really democratizing spirituality, right?
0:09:53 It represents all the knowledge as opposed to just whatever narrow slice you had access to before, depending on what book or what person you knew.
0:09:55 Now you get everything.
0:09:58 Yeah, I’ll send you three short videos.
0:10:03 Feel free to show them on your program, my conversations with the Buddha on AI.
0:10:13 So, this is better than the conversation in 1930 with Albert Einstein and, God, I can’t remember the other fellow’s name.
0:10:17 The Buddha not to go to the Indian sage, yeah.
0:10:24 Here’s my next quote from the book, because I found this also stunning in a sense.
0:10:39 So, this is the quote, “The function of the guru needs to be overhauled in modern times, getting rid of the cult of personality, stepping away from superstitious beliefs in the magical attributes of enlightened beings.
0:10:45 AI can step in to renovate a time-honored role almost immediately.”
0:10:59 Now, Deepak, when I read that, I said, “Dipak is the mother of all gurus and he’s telling us that the function of a guru is being overhauled by AI.
0:11:02 Isn’t that, in a sense, putting you out of business?”
0:11:03 See?
0:11:05 Spell the word guru for me slowly.
0:11:08 G-U-R-U.
0:11:09 G-U-R-U.
0:11:20 So, the ultimate guru is you, and AI is helping you to discover your own guru, which is the only real guru.
0:11:29 others are deep fakes like me and so the concept of guru means that you’re like removing darkness
0:11:37 right so now you can remove darkness yourself with ai correct and so what does that mean for
0:11:43 all the other people who hold themselves out as gurus guru is a big industry i know it’s going to
0:11:49 slowly fade out but you know there are human beings who like to look up to other human beings
0:11:57 and they will never get enlightened if if jesus or the buddha are pointing their finger at the moon
0:12:03 i shouldn’t be worshipping the finger i should be looking at the moon and saying how can i get there
0:12:14 so a true guru is not into self-adulation a true guru allows you to become your own guru and that
0:12:21 happens only once in a few thousand years the rest are all deep fakes wow you earlier mentioned the
0:12:28 fact that there is i forget the name you use but let’s just for my purposes just let’s just call it
0:12:39 chopra gpt chopra.ai the data in that is only your stuff it doesn’t go outside so it cannot hallucinate
0:12:45 it’s only your data what you put into it or have you opened it up to the whole internet it’s only my
0:12:53 data and it does not hallucinate although there are advantages to hallucinations because anytime you have a
0:13:01 hallucination data it gives you creative ideas so i think hallucinations also have a role
0:13:11 but my ai doesn’t hallucinate its databases all my 96 books every conversation i’ve had publicly my youtube
0:13:19 videos my discussions my talks with luminaries etc yes can i interrupt really quick it sounds like there may be
0:13:26 some construction going on i can’t tell if it’s on your end or deepox end nothing happening on my side but
0:13:32 let’s just do it and then whatever happens we leave it up to the divine matrix i love it all right
0:13:38 there’s no construction on my side it’s a hallucination
0:13:44 madison is making her own reality
0:13:54 i have to mention that maybe i’m flattering myself but great minds think alike because
0:14:02 i also with madison’s help we created kawasaki gpt and kawasaki gpt has all my writings my podcasting
0:14:10 all that kind of stuff too and i swear deepak kawasaki gpt is better at being me than i am and
0:14:19 i often use it to draft newsletters to draft blurbs to figure out what to do on my podcast it’s better
0:14:26 at being me than me do you think your gpt is better at being you than you it is because it’s also
0:14:34 something called a rag model retrieval augmentation in a generation which means anything that’s obsolete
0:14:40 it automatically deletes it automatically deletes it and upgrades it yes it’s more effective than i am
0:14:46 you could have easily done this interview with my deepak chopra dot yeah yeah it could have been kawasaki
0:14:55 gpt talking to your gpt and it would have been interesting so you know have you thought that because you
0:15:02 created this you you are in a sense now immortal that for the rest of time people can ask you questions
0:15:09 yeah not only model it can keep updating as the years go by whatever i’ve said can be upgraded to
0:15:15 a new level of understanding and are lots of people asking and stuff and interacting with it a lot
0:15:27 yeah yeah now it’s available in four languages english hindi spanish and arabic and soon we’re introducing it in
0:15:38 china as well wow wow okay the next mind-blowing quote from the book is this to me ai is a mirror to the user’s
0:15:48 consciousness so can you please explain what that means and you know how in a sense what you ask ai reflects
0:15:56 what you are yeah because if you’re going to ask what kind of shoes i should buy or candidate do i prefer
0:16:07 democratic or or republican then my ai will not participate in that conversation my will only participate in
0:16:16 conversations about health longevity health span emotional and spiritual well-being so the way you
0:16:27 ask the question obviously reflects your own issues obviously so then ai becomes a mirror and depending on
0:16:36 how much experience it has from your asking it questions it actually knows more about you than you
0:16:46 know about yourself i agree so from a technical standpoint what you or your team has done is it
0:16:55 has constricted the answers of your gpt so that it only answers stuff that you care about or that you
0:17:01 feel you’re relevant to it won’t answer a question about how do i become a better surfer it will say
0:17:10 i cannot answer that question it will say yeah go you can consult chat gpt for that i only want to offer
0:17:20 to the world what i think i’ve spent my life doing otherwise i would be a hypocrite and getting outside of your
0:17:35 and so you can’t worry about that once a child is born it can’t return to the womb
0:17:44 so this child is born it’s not going to return to the womb and so we have to decide now whether we use it to
0:17:51 risk our extinction or we use it to create a more peaceful just sustainable healthier and joyful world
0:17:58 and that was the goal every technology can be used for harmful purposes a knife can be used to kill a
0:18:06 person but in the hands of a surgeon it heals a person and so too with every other technology ai can be used for
0:18:14 poisoning the food chain cyber hacking interfering with democracy causing a nuclear plan i don’t want
0:18:20 to give too many ideas somebody is listening but it can also be used for good purposes but it’s here you
0:18:25 can’t stop it it also seems to me deepak that you know when you read these doomsday articles about ai
0:18:35 they are comparing a worst case of ai against the best case of humans and to me that is an unfair
0:18:43 comparison if you compare best case ai best case human or worst case ai worst case human but you know
0:18:50 in this doomsday scenario that what if two ais get angry with each other and launch a nuclear war i would
0:18:56 say it’s much higher probability that some fascist dictators will do that than an ai will do it yeah
0:19:04 correct correct yeah it doesn’t have emotions yeah it doesn’t have subjective experience you can program
0:19:14 it to simulate that but it inherently does not have emotional experience therefore it cannot act out of
0:19:22 emotions now you can as a human being program it in a way that it simulates that and that’s a danger
0:19:29 because there are enough people who are crazy in the world i noticed in your book that sometimes you’re
0:19:37 citing chat and sometimes you are citing other llm so you know how do you pick when do you use which
0:19:45 one which is your favorite how do you decide which one to use right now my favorite is my own which is
0:19:54 deepak chopra dot air but perplexity is a good one because it gives you references and data and now this
0:20:01 deep seek that has come from china which came much after i wrote the book is actually far superior to anything
0:20:09 i’ve seen and as we move into the future we’re going to have all these different ai companies competing
0:20:14 with each other and that’s a good thing because you’re going to see something much more creative and
0:20:22 leapfrogging us into a new future so when i see in your book that sometimes you use one llm and sometimes you
0:20:30 use another in the writing of the book did you ask the same prompt of several llms and then pick the answer you
0:20:38 like the best or did you just ask one i asked you several llms and then i would also see how i could
0:20:46 corroborate the information with research and that’s how it happened okay and i never in a million years
0:20:55 thought i would be asking deepak chopra this question but how do you create great prompts what’s the art of a
0:21:05 deepak chopra prompt you act as if you’re speaking to a personal friend number one to a coach number two
0:21:17 to a research assistant number three and number four to someone or an instrument that can access the minds of
0:21:25 the greatest luminaries that humanity has so you assume those things and then you go back and forth back
0:21:35 and forth and actually you can train your ai ultimately even chat gpt or perplexity to actually have a
0:21:46 reasonably good debate or even argument without any contentiousness without any emotional engagement
0:21:53 then you get to the right answers but it’s called generative ai for a reason it generates new
0:22:00 information based on the context and the art of the prompt so in my book you had there’s a whole
0:22:06 chapter called the art of the prompt and basically if i figure out this prompts and i embrace this is going
0:22:13 you’re going to put me on my path to dharma yes for people not familiar with the term can you just
0:22:19 quickly define dharma dharma means purpose in life so there are many stages of dharma
0:22:30 first is survival and safety second is material success third is maximizing the delight of the senses
0:22:38 fourth fourth is love and belongingness fifth is creative expression sixth is intuition and higher
0:22:46 consciousness and the seventh is self-discovery or self-realization so these are stages of dharma
0:22:57 not purpose and how do i use ai to get myself down this path ask my ai this question deepakshopra.ai say
0:23:05 how do i get on the path to dharma see what it comes up with but ultimately it will resonate with you
0:23:13 what’s my unique talent how does it help the world and how can use my unique talents to be of service
0:23:23 and be in a state of gratitude then you’re in dharma
0:23:42 if you’re listening to remarkable people it’s a good bet you want to be more remarkable yourself
0:23:49 one way to do that spend three days in a room full of the sharpest minds in business i’m jeff berman
0:23:54 co-host of masters of scale inviting you to join me at this year’s masters of scale summit where you’ll
0:24:01 see bold leaders like reed hoffman fawn weaver andrew ross sorkin kara swisher dara treceder
0:24:09 asa raskin and more take the stage apply to attend at mastersofscale.com slash remarkable again that’s
0:24:19 mastersofscale.com slash remarkable deepak i took your spiritual intelligence tests in your book okay
0:24:27 yeah and maybe with what i’m going to tell you is going to show that i haven’t reached my dharma
0:24:33 but i have to say that i answered every question often or always
0:24:44 so does that mean that i’m doing pretty well spiritually it means you’re on the right track yes
0:24:51 that’s good to know and then i i asked madison if i answered all these this way am i deluding myself and
0:24:58 she said i wasn’t but then i asked her if i was deluding myself would you dare tell me that i wasn’t
0:25:02 and she said she would tell me so right madison that’s correct
0:25:10 i have a thought for you on the name of one of the chapters in the book and
0:25:18 let me be so bold as to offer this thought okay i realize i’m talking to deepak chopper but you know
0:25:29 so you have a chapter called trust the process and as i read that chapter i think that it would be more
0:25:36 accurate to call that chapter trust the processing as opposed to the process
0:25:43 because to me a process is like a sequence of steps and i think the point of that chapter is
0:25:52 not so much to to trust the documented steps but to trust the processing of the steps to going through the
0:26:00 processing not the process steps itself yeah no that’s good the process though is about self-reflection
0:26:08 and contemplative inquiry that’s the process but processing is good oh so i can say that i made a
0:26:11 good suggestion to the next edition
0:26:21 okay my life is complete my life is complete um so now next question for you because a lot of people
0:26:28 listen to my podcast including people like mark benioff they’re really into meditation and can you
0:26:35 just explain to people how ai could possibly help with meditation because most people’s initial reaction is
0:26:44 ai is the opposite of meditation it’s technical it’s staring at a screen it’s all this so how can ai help
0:26:51 meditation so there are many kinds of meditation there is meditation that is called contemplation
0:26:58 creative inquiry there’s awareness of the body there’s awareness of the mind there’s awareness of the
0:27:05 ego there’s awareness of the intellect there’s awareness of what’s happening inside your body
0:27:12 there’s awareness of relationship there’s awareness with the divine and there’s awareness
0:27:20 awareness with their own self so those are all the different disciplines of meditation ai can help tailor
0:27:29 meditation for you very precisely so you might go to my ai and say deepak i have a lot of stress
0:27:38 i’m in a relationship that is getting toxic can you help me with the meditation and my ai will give you a guided
0:27:46 meditation you don’t have to stare at the screen you just have to listen to me guiding you through the
0:27:57 meditation so that’s how it works okay do you think that science and spirituality are opposing forces
0:28:08 no science always asks what’s happening out there and spirituality asks who is asking and why science is
0:28:14 about the objective world and spirituality is about the subjective world and they go together you can’t
0:28:20 have an object without a subject and you can’t have a subject without an object they go together so they’re
0:28:28 complementary to each other so then you know how does one find spirituality are you just going to say use
0:28:35 ai ai but people are searching for spirituality how do they do it you start with four questions who am i
0:28:42 what do i want what is my purpose and what am i grateful for and then you sit in silence
0:28:52 and listen to the answers who am i what do i want what is my purpose what am i grateful for and that’s the first step
0:29:04 do you have any people that you would say this person really has integrated spirituality and leadership and
0:29:12 are there some shining examples that people should not necessarily worship they should be inspired by what
0:29:19 people have accomplished or who are people you hold up as they have their act together in recent times i would say
0:29:29 people like martin luther king jr nelson mandela mahatma gandhi mother theresa bishop tutu these were people
0:29:36 who had integrated their lives in a very spiritual way and made a big impact on the world and is there
0:29:45 anybody alive who would you put in that category i would have to think about that i would be interested based on my
0:29:50 limited knowledge of your work i would say the only person who qualifies is jane goodall
0:29:58 she does good i’m glad you mentioned yeah i would just like to know for you at this point in your life
0:30:04 how do you define success success is the progressive realization of worthy goals
0:30:12 it’s the ability to love and have compassion and it’s the ability to get in touch with your soul the
0:30:20 creative center from where everything happens by that the division of success there are many people who are
0:30:26 very rich and very famous and are failures yeah some people are so poor all they have is money
0:30:36 all right there has been some skepticism about you know your work and from quote unquote science in
0:30:43 medicine and stuff so how do you approach when you hear skepticism about your work and your alternative
0:30:48 medicine and things like that what what goes through your brain when people can flick you this way used
0:30:58 to get very defensive but now i ignore my critics and they can’t stand it and do you think are they flawed
0:31:04 or they’re ignorant like what’s going on with them they come from a different world view that’s all we all
0:31:11 express our world views how we were conditioned as children and then the schools we went to the education
0:31:18 we got and right now the world view in science is very physicalist and so anything that’s
0:31:25 non-physical is denigrated but that’s okay you need all kinds of people because it makes for maximum
0:31:33 diversity of opinion leads to creativity and how do you figure out sometimes you ignore people but sometimes
0:31:40 they have valid feedback so how do you separate the two you can’t ignore everybody who’s you don’t get
0:31:47 personally offended and you have always are open to feedback don’t take it personally emotionally
0:31:57 okay and i have one last question for you okay yeah and that last question is do you ever have moments of
0:32:07 personal doubt too i live in the wisdom of uncertainty at all times and without uncertainty there is no creativity
0:32:17 so yes doubt is a very important part of our creative process the more doubt you have about your habitual
0:32:26 certainties the more room there is to grow spiritually and how do you keep pushing through that uncertainty
0:32:32 i always ask what’s the creative opportunity here so you have these moments of uncertainty
0:32:42 you ask what the moment of not knowing not knowing is the highest knowing because if you know everything
0:32:54 then there’s nothing to know wow okay that is the way to end this podcast so the highest knowing is no no i’ll let you say it again deepak will you say that again that was a very
0:33:04 inspiring not knowing is the highest knowing is the window to infinite creativity
0:33:09 i can’t ask for a better end to the podcast than this thank you very much deepak
0:33:18 great pleasure to speak to you i hope we can speak at another event again soon maybe someday we can be on
0:33:26 stage together that would be great thank you guys i’m guy kawasaki this has been the remarkable people
0:33:33 podcast and truly we have had a remarkable episode today with the one and only deepak chopra and so i want to
0:33:40 thank you thank you again thank you madison for making this happen and tessa neismer her sister
0:33:48 and ace researcher jeff c and shannon hernandez our great sound design team and above all thank you deepak
0:33:54 chopra it’s been a very special moment for us thank you very much and i hope to see you again and
0:34:03 i hope you’re wearing that isse meyaki jacket because i just love that jacket thank you god bless oh god bless you too
0:34:09 this is remarkable people

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0:00:42 As a product, large language models are kind of interesting.
0:00:47 I despise them for the environmental damage they do and the fact they steal from people.
0:00:49 The actual things they can do, pretty cool.
0:00:52 The problem is they’re not being sold as this is pretty cool.
0:00:57 They’re being sold as this is the revolution that will change everything about business forever and ever.
0:00:59 That is my problem with that.
0:01:02 That and literally the stealing of the environmental damage.
0:01:06 I’m Guy Kawasaki.
0:01:09 This is the Remarkable People podcast.
0:01:14 And we found another remarkable person to help you be remarkable too.
0:01:16 His name is Ed Zitron.
0:01:20 And he is a media and PR expert.
0:01:22 And, well, that’s understating.
0:01:31 He is so opinionated about AI and what he calls the rot economy that I just wanted a kind of new voice,
0:01:35 a new perspective on AI and tech bros and all that stuff.
0:01:37 So welcome to the show, Ed.
0:01:38 Thank you for having me, Guy.
0:01:45 Listen, Ed, I have noticed in your podcast and your writing and stuff that you don’t exactly hold yourself back.
0:01:47 So I’ve got to ask you this question.
0:01:49 I think I know what you’re going to say.
0:01:55 But tell me what you think of this Blue Origin flight with the women into space.
0:02:02 It’s one of those things where I think Katy Perry came back and she was talking about Mother Earth and loving Mother Earth.
0:02:05 And it’s like, how many fossil fuels were necessary to get you up and down?
0:02:05 How many?
0:02:07 Did you fly there on a private jet?
0:02:17 I think it was just it was PR and it was marketing and it was just one of those meaningless things that I think it’s cool that we send people to space.
0:02:20 But this one was unnecessary and a little strange, frankly.
0:02:22 And let me ask you something.
0:02:29 Do you think that this advanced women in STEM and kind of diversity in space at all?
0:02:33 I think that those are extremely important issues.
0:02:41 Like women and people of color, LGBTQ, making sure that they have presence in all industries and in STEM and everything is extremely important.
0:02:44 I do not think the Blue Origin flight had anything to do with that of the sort.
0:02:55 I think it was just a Blue Origin marketing campaign and it sucks that it really was exploiting women in STEM far more than it was helping.
0:02:58 I don’t think anyone saw this and went, oh, that’s a good idea now.
0:03:03 I wasn’t into women in STEM before, but I saw Katy Perry in space and now I’m just gaga for it.
0:03:06 And her quote was putting the ass in astronaut.
0:03:09 I mean, good stuff, Katy.
0:03:11 Good for her, but also what?
0:03:13 Could have said anything.
0:03:14 Could have said anything.
0:03:19 I saw an interview with her where she claimed she was reading about string theory as well.
0:03:22 Good for her again, but it’s like, what is this even about?
0:03:23 Is this about women in STEM?
0:03:28 Is this just about feeling good in a kind of vague and unattached way?
0:03:29 I don’t know.
0:03:30 It just all feels cynical to me.
0:03:41 I was talking to my wife about this and I said, if it was up to me, the women I would include would be people like Jane Goodall, Dolly Parton.
0:03:45 One of the many women who works at NASA.
0:03:45 Yeah.
0:03:46 Yeah.
0:03:47 I don’t know.
0:03:50 Like one of the many incredible women in science.
0:03:52 I’m not saying, I don’t know.
0:03:58 I feel like that felt like a fairly obvious one, but it was the big name thing that feels so cynical.
0:04:01 It’s not even like you had a celebrity and a few actual scientists.
0:04:03 You just had celebs.
0:04:05 And it’s like, okay, what’s this for?
0:04:06 Who is this for?
0:04:07 Yeah.
0:04:08 Is this just for, I don’t know.
0:04:12 I would have loved to see Jane Goodall and Greta Thunberg.
0:04:13 That would actually make sense.
0:04:14 This does not.
0:04:17 I mean, it makes sense in a kind of marketing sense.
0:04:21 And like, we’re just doing things to get headlines because that’s what it was.
0:04:23 But headlines for, that’s the thing.
0:04:25 It’s just very kind of specious.
0:04:27 Like, why are we doing this?
0:04:28 I don’t know.
0:04:30 So many better things we could have done.
0:04:31 Okay.
0:04:33 And we have better things to discuss.
0:04:38 What is the gist of your analysis of OpenAI?
0:04:40 My God, what a diatribe.
0:04:47 So OpenAI is a company that burned $9 billion to lose $5 billion in 2024.
0:04:49 They have no path to profitability.
0:04:52 Their software does not have significant business returns.
0:04:54 And they’re on course to bear.
0:04:59 Their estimates are like they’ll burn $320 billion in the next five years.
0:05:02 And this generative AI has petered out.
0:05:05 We are not seeing significant gains in any way.
0:05:06 And we’re definitely not getting AGI.
0:05:10 So my view of OpenAI is it’s one of the most successful cons of all time.
0:05:14 I believe if you look at the way it’s structured, it is an incredible con.
0:05:20 He has all of his infrastructure provided by Microsoft, provided by CoreWeave, if they ever build it.
0:05:21 Stargate as well is never going to happen.
0:05:25 But nevertheless, he has managed to take all of the risk and put it on other people,
0:05:27 including Masayoshi, son of SoftBank.
0:05:31 My analysis is the entire generative AI boom is OpenAI.
0:05:35 And OpenAI itself is a runaway train of over promises.
0:05:43 It is, in reality, probably more like a $5 billion valuation SaaS business.
0:05:45 It is the equivalent of Docker.
0:05:45 I don’t know.
0:05:49 I’m sure maybe they have a higher valuation than that in the case of Docker.
0:05:50 It’s cloud software.
0:05:51 It’s cloud compute.
0:05:52 That’s all it is.
0:05:56 But it’s been turned into this massive, meaningless, empty hype bubble.
0:05:58 And I think you’re seeing people pull away from it.
0:06:01 Johnson & Johnson has reduced all of their generative AI efforts.
0:06:03 For example, Microsoft’s pulling back on data centers.
0:06:09 OpenAI is just, it’s not a nothing burger, but it’s definitely much less than people claim it is.
0:06:16 So are you impugning OpenAI specifically or AI in general?
0:06:18 So that’s the thing.
0:06:19 There’s AI.
0:06:21 There’s all sorts of AI over here.
0:06:22 You’ve had people on your show.
0:06:23 You’ve talked about AI.
0:06:26 AI can mean a hell of a lot of things and has been around for decades.
0:06:29 OpenAI, I’m referring to with generative AI.
0:06:31 The current AI hype boom is based on that.
0:06:39 There are lots of people that conflate AI writ large with generative AI because it allows them to sell things and pretend they’re in the future.
0:06:45 And so do you use AI in your podcast and in your writing and stuff at all?
0:06:46 No.
0:06:48 Not one bit?
0:06:49 No.
0:06:49 Why would I?
0:06:50 That’s the thing.
0:06:52 Like, I write my scripts.
0:06:54 My scripts are edited by someone.
0:06:55 I speak into a microphone.
0:06:57 It’s edited by a producer.
0:06:58 Yeah.
0:06:59 I don’t have any reason to.
0:07:02 Okay, let me tell you one of my use cases.
0:07:14 I was writing a book called Think Remarkable, and I wanted examples of people who really made big career changes, not just going up the hierarchy, but completely changing what they did.
0:07:21 So I asked ChatGPT that question, give me examples of successful people who made really great career changes.
0:07:28 And ChatGPT told me, Julia Child was a spook working for the OSS until her 30s.
0:07:33 She got married, they moved to Paris, she fell in love with French food, and she became the French chef.
0:07:38 I would have never have heard of that example were it not for AI.
0:07:41 I mean this nicely, Guy, but did you try looking otherwise?
0:07:43 Like, you could have just…
0:07:45 I don’t see how that is an AI use case.
0:07:47 You’re describing search.
0:07:50 You’re describing search, and also, did you check the citation?
0:08:01 The reason I say this is, even here, in this example of where you give me an example of how AI changed things, you basically refer to something that already existed, that I would love to say it was better.
0:08:10 But it’s, Google search has become so mediocre that I don’t think it’s possible to say it’s worse, but at the same time the propensity for hallucinations.
0:08:19 But even then, this magical industry of AI, this magical generative AI, after all of this, the best we’ve got is, it’s kind of search.
0:08:22 I feel like you also would have come to that example had you looked harder.
0:08:28 I don’t mean that as an insult, but just had you not taken the first thing that popped up when you typed into ChatGPT.
0:08:31 Now, I assume you went and did in-depth research on her afterwards, right?
0:08:32 Yes, definitely.
0:08:33 So that’s the thing.
0:08:35 Like, why didn’t AI do that for you?
0:08:43 Well, in a sense, if I am worried about ChatGPT hallucinating, I’m not going to ask ChatGPT, are you hallucinating?
0:08:44 I agree fully.
0:08:47 I’m just saying that, shouldn’t it not do that?
0:08:48 Shouldn’t it be reliable?
0:08:49 Well, this is the thing.
0:08:51 We’re two years into this, hundreds of billions of dollars of CapEx.
0:08:53 All of these things.
0:08:58 And you, yourself, you’ve been around in tech pretty much since I started my career in 2008.
0:09:00 You’ve been on the forefront of these movements.
0:09:02 You’ve been looking at these things.
0:09:05 It just feels like this should be more than it is right now.
0:09:09 And that’s because this is all generative AI is, even in these examples.
0:09:10 I’m not even criticizing.
0:09:13 I’m just saying that, why would I use AI in my podcast?
0:09:14 Why would I use it in my work?
0:09:16 Because you can’t trust it.
0:09:17 You can’t really.
0:09:19 It’s a better search engine now.
0:09:22 But even then, I used the search engine the other day to look up earnings reports.
0:09:27 And it didn’t even give me the right, it gave me an earnings report from 2023 when I asked
0:09:27 for 2025.
0:09:33 It’s just frustrating seeing everyone say this is the future when it isn’t.
0:09:34 Or it’s barely the present.
0:09:36 It’s mostly the past, but more expensive.
0:09:38 Oh, wow.
0:09:45 I can tell you, we have a little different opinions of AI, but hey, that’s good.
0:09:47 That’s why I want you on my podcast, right?
0:09:48 I don’t want an echo chamber.
0:09:49 Indeed.
0:09:57 What if somebody said to you going back a few minutes here that, yeah, open AI at this point doesn’t look sustainable.
0:09:58 It’s burning cash.
0:10:04 You know, it’s losing money on every even paid customer, 200 a month or whatever.
0:10:11 But can’t you make the case that at the start of a revolution, most revolutions don’t look sustainable?
0:10:14 You can make that case as long as you ignore history.
0:10:19 So Jim Covello for Goldman Sachs, the head of global equities research, said in the paper
0:10:24 at the end of June of last year that basically it’s a trillion dollars of capex to make this work,
0:10:25 but where are the returns?
0:10:31 One of his big points he made was two parts of this, the smartphone revolution and the original internet.
0:10:37 The original internet, the argument people make is, yes, there were these $64,000 Sun Microsystems servers.
0:10:41 And the argument is, well, those existed and thus this is the same thing.
0:10:41 It isn’t.
0:10:46 The amount of capital expenditures behind anything to do with Sun Microsystems’ original servers,
0:10:51 even the basic cable outlays of the early 2000s, were minuscule compared to this.
0:10:54 And on top of that, you could still see what it was going for.
0:10:55 There was a roadmap.
0:10:59 Furthermore, when it comes to the smartphone revolution, people said the same thing.
0:11:01 Well, people said smartphones wouldn’t be a big deal.
0:11:03 That’s also a historical.
0:11:08 Covello also said that there were thousands of presentations that showed you a roadmap of,
0:11:12 okay, once we get smaller Bluetooth radios, smaller GPSs, smaller cellular modems,
0:11:16 we will see this, this, this, this, this, all the way up to the iPhone and beyond.
0:11:18 There’s nothing like that for AI.
0:11:19 There’s nothing.
0:11:23 And on top of that, the CapEx comparisons are completely different.
0:11:26 And even the businesses are completely different.
0:11:30 The only comparison point of a company that’s burned as much as OpenAI is Uber.
0:11:34 Uber’s largest burn was 2020, $6.2 billion, if I’m correct.
0:11:37 Now, they did that because they literally could not run their business.
0:11:40 People could not get in cars and go places due to COVID.
0:11:43 There is no historical comparison with OpenAI.
0:11:45 People have tried railroads.
0:11:46 Doesn’t make sense.
0:11:47 Doesn’t make sense at all.
0:11:48 Just isn’t a comparison.
0:11:50 Electricity grids doesn’t make sense.
0:11:53 There are no historical comparisons with what OpenAI is doing.
0:11:59 On top of that, all of the others, every single one, there was a theoretical concept even
0:12:01 of how this would get cheaper.
0:12:05 The only thing that people have right now is they are saying the cost of inference, so
0:12:07 when you put a prompt in, is coming down.
0:12:11 There’s proof that’s happening, but even OpenAI has increased their cost of inference with their
0:12:12 new image generator.
0:12:15 It feels like a death cult.
0:12:19 It’s genuinely worrying that society is not looking at this as a problem.
0:12:25 Anthropic, they burned $5 billion last year, and they make a minuscule amount compared to
0:12:26 OpenAI.
0:12:28 It’s frightening.
0:12:31 This cannot continue as it is.
0:12:37 It is not numerically possible unless something completely unprecedented happens.
0:12:39 But I see no sign of that happening.
0:12:45 Well, but I could make the case that the fact that you can’t see something unprecedented happening
0:12:47 doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.
0:12:50 Lots of unprecedented things happen, right?
0:12:52 Sure, but I could become a wizard.
0:12:53 I could learn to teleport.
0:12:55 If a frog had wings, it could fly.
0:13:00 There are all sorts of things we could say that are just, what if this happened?
0:13:07 But what I mean by unprecedented and all this is for OpenAI to survive, they have raised $40
0:13:07 billion.
0:13:11 What they’ve actually done is they’ve got $10 billion up front from SoftBank, then they get
0:13:12 another $30 billion by the end of the year.
0:13:18 And they only get $30 billion if they convert to a for-profit entity, which means if they don’t
0:13:19 do that, they’ll only get $20 billion.
0:13:24 The for-profit, non-profit thing is dodgy enough, but SoftBank has to borrow all of the
0:13:25 money to fund them.
0:13:27 Private deals of that size are rare.
0:13:35 You’ve got a $35 billion infrastructure loan happening with Polo and Meta right now, but
0:13:36 that’s Meta.
0:13:39 Meta has the credit worthiness to stand this up.
0:13:40 OpenAI doesn’t.
0:13:45 The fact that they are having to raise from one company, SoftBank, is such a bad sign.
0:13:49 Nevertheless, putting all that aside, how do they keep burning all this money?
0:13:50 It’s not changing.
0:13:51 It’s getting worse.
0:13:55 There’s only so much money in the world that is going to go into this company, especially
0:13:56 as the AI trade is suffering.
0:14:02 The unprecedented thing would have to be a scientific breakthrough that would then have to immediately
0:14:03 become silicon.
0:14:06 Because even if they came up with something that would make inference dramatically cheaper
0:14:10 on the silicon side, it would take years to actually file into physical silicon.
0:14:10 I don’t know.
0:14:16 I realized that the idea that a company of this size, of this importance, being this
0:14:22 financially unstable and this potentially destructible is scary and it’s hard for people
0:14:23 to get their heads around.
0:14:26 But at some point, something has to change.
0:14:28 And I have no idea what that could possibly be.
0:14:31 And I’ve not had a single person come up with an answer.
0:14:35 Okay, so let’s suppose that you’re right and OpenAI dies.
0:14:36 So what?
0:14:42 If you go to Gemini now and you ask a question, you don’t get the old Google sort of search
0:14:44 results of a quarter million links.
0:14:46 You get an answer as opposed to links.
0:14:49 So if OpenAI died, so what?
0:14:51 Generative AI will stick around.
0:14:53 We’ve already got models that run on device.
0:14:55 They’re not as good, but they’re getting there.
0:14:58 My argument is not that generative AI will die.
0:14:59 The hype cycle will.
0:15:03 Because right now, no one wants to admit that generative AI is not going to give the business
0:15:05 returns that they promised.
0:15:06 It’s not revolutionary.
0:15:13 It is an evolutionary product of deep machine learning and deep learning and stuff like that.
0:15:15 It is a next step.
0:15:17 It has some functionality that’s useful.
0:15:18 It has been trumpeted.
0:15:19 That’s the thing.
0:15:22 As a product, large language models are kind of interesting.
0:15:27 I despise them for the environmental damage they do and the fact they steal from people.
0:15:29 The actual things they can do, pretty cool.
0:15:32 The problem is they’re not being sold as this is pretty cool.
0:15:36 They’re being sold as this is the revolution that will change everything about business forever
0:15:37 and ever.
0:15:39 That is my problem with it.
0:15:41 That and literally the stealing and the environmental damage.
0:15:43 So you’ll see Gemini hang around.
0:15:44 I’m confident of that.
0:15:48 In fact, if OpenAI collapses, I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets absorbed into Copilot because
0:15:53 Microsoft owns all of their IP and all of their research.
0:15:56 They’re pre-AGI stuff, by the way, which they’re never going to make it.
0:15:57 But that’s the other thing.
0:16:03 Everyone is talking about AGI now, and that is just one of the most craven and disgusting
0:16:07 things I’ve seen in tech and tech media in a while because we are not even close to the
0:16:08 beginning of AGI.
0:16:11 It is a farce and a lie to suggest otherwise.
0:16:14 And it’s nice to sit there and dream about it and say, oh, what if we had AGI?
0:16:15 Wouldn’t that be interesting?
0:16:17 But we don’t.
0:16:18 And we’re not going to.
0:16:19 We may never.
0:16:20 AGI is a cool idea.
0:16:23 The idea of the conscious computer is so cool.
0:16:24 I love the idea.
0:16:27 But no one seems to want to actually have that discussion.
0:16:30 They don’t want to talk about the fact that we’d have to give these things personage.
0:16:32 That we’d have to give them rights, potentially.
0:16:33 They don’t want to do that.
0:16:39 They just want to vaguely say AGI is coming so that Wario, Mario Amadei of Anthropic can
0:16:42 raise more money or so that Sam Altman can get a third Kona SIG car.
0:16:47 It’s frustrating because you’re taking the cool stuff about tech, the dreaming, the new
0:16:51 innovations, the things that change society, you’re putting that to the side so that you
0:16:54 can create something that can raise more venture capital and you can hold up the stock
0:16:54 market.
0:16:57 It’s boring on top of being not that useful.
0:17:02 Ed, don’t feel constrained and tell us what you really think.
0:17:04 I know, I’ve been holding back, guy.
0:17:06 I’ll be honest now.
0:17:13 So does the existence of DeepSeek make you feel better because it’s cheaper?
0:17:18 I think DeepSeek is a good thing because if we’re thinking about the problems of the generative
0:17:20 AI bubble, it’s the getting…
0:17:23 None of the American companies have been pushed to be efficient.
0:17:28 They’ve been building larger and fatter and nastier large language models that burn more
0:17:29 capital, use more energy.
0:17:32 DeepSeek, however, has not…
0:17:34 I don’t know if it really cost them $5 million to train.
0:17:37 I don’t necessarily buy that, but it was definitely cheaper.
0:17:43 I think DeepSeek has started pushing some of these corporations to get cheaper.
0:17:45 Google, there’s some Gemini stuff.
0:17:47 I don’t mind Jeff Dean over at Google.
0:17:47 He’s all right.
0:17:51 But they’ve been pushing for cheaper models that can run on a single H100.
0:17:52 Even that’s not…
0:17:58 Anyway, DeepSeek has put pressure on a lot of them to lower these costs, but it also kind
0:18:05 shook the market and said, hey, look, look, maybe it doesn’t need to have the latest Blackwell
0:18:05 chips.
0:18:10 Maybe we don’t need to give Jensen Huang billions of dollars every single quarter just in case
0:18:12 the stock market gets hurt.
0:18:14 So DeepSeek’s good.
0:18:18 I think people got very xenophobic over it in a disappointing way.
0:18:21 I think people were very quick to go, ah, it’s the Chinese.
0:18:23 They’re doing something boring and honestly cowardly.
0:18:28 If that’s the best you’ve got against DeepSeek is to just be xenophobic, it’s boring.
0:18:33 It’s just dull and it doesn’t actually suggest that anyone cares about technology.
0:18:35 I personally am very excited.
0:18:36 I love my tech.
0:18:37 I really do.
0:18:38 Cool stuff.
0:18:44 That’s why I get up in the morning and you see this and it’s just dull and at least DeepSeek’s
0:18:46 pushing them to make it cheaper.
0:18:47 I don’t know.
0:18:50 It’s just disappointing to see that this is what everyone’s obsessed with.
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0:19:46 All right.
0:19:53 So let’s segue a little bit into a little larger topic, which is I love the concept of
0:19:57 the rot economy, R-O-T for those of you listening.
0:20:01 So please explain the rot economy.
0:20:07 So our economy, the public markets in particular, but it’s played into the private markets as
0:20:09 well, has been obsessed with growth, growth at all costs.
0:20:12 It’s not about making sustainable businesses.
0:20:14 It’s not about making businesses that will last the test of time.
0:20:17 It’s about each quarter showing a high percentage growth.
0:20:19 10% would be considered bad.
0:20:22 20% ideal, more than that, even more ideal.
0:20:26 The rot economy is something I refer to specifically for the tech industry.
0:20:30 It fans out, but the tech industry is one of the best, especially software, one of the
0:20:32 best vehicles for growth ever.
0:20:38 Software can proliferate infinitely, theoretically, and as a result, it can create growth in all
0:20:41 sorts of places without having to build physical things or have labor.
0:20:44 It’s actually why the generative AI situation is so bizarre.
0:20:50 Nevertheless, when you have companies that for decades have been oriented around growth rather
0:20:54 than making happy customers, making people come back to the service because it’s good,
0:20:59 not because they have a monopoly over it, not because it has the cheapest prices, you chase
0:21:00 out the people who innovate.
0:21:05 You chase out those people who are sitting there thinking, how can I solve someone’s problems?
0:21:07 You’re thinking, how can I solve a problem?
0:21:12 And that problem is that my stock needs to keep, we need new crap to sell here and there.
0:21:17 And thus, the tech industry has been obsessed with growth for years and years and years, and
0:21:18 they’ve been rewarded for it.
0:21:20 Tech stocks have never been worth more.
0:21:23 It’s never been easier for these companies to promote growth.
0:21:28 Up until a few years ago, so they got desperate and they thought, we don’t have a new hyper
0:21:33 growth market because they really haven’t since smartphones, the cloud computing boom, there
0:21:35 was a brief virtualization trend, didn’t really work.
0:21:36 AR, VR didn’t work.
0:21:37 Metaverse didn’t work.
0:21:38 Smart home didn’t work.
0:21:41 Amazon lost billions of dollars off of that.
0:21:42 They’re still losing money.
0:21:46 Smartwatches, IoT, 5G.
0:21:50 These are all things that they all wanted to be the next type of growth thing, except there
0:21:52 hasn’t been one for a long, long, long, long time.
0:21:54 And thus, they’ve got desperate.
0:21:56 And the people running these companies all have MBAs.
0:22:01 Sundar Pashai, Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Andy Jassy.
0:22:02 MBAs.
0:22:04 And no offense to MBAs.
0:22:10 It’s just when you are a business growth man, inspired by Jack Welch of GE, who is a great
0:22:12 book, David Gellis, The Man Who Destroyed Capitalism.
0:22:17 When the conditions are that you must grow every quarter, you’re no longer thinking innovation.
0:22:19 You’re no longer thinking value creation.
0:22:22 And so, you don’t really know what it looks like anymore.
0:22:27 You look at the smartphone generation, you say, that was big because it had lots of market
0:22:28 opportunities.
0:22:32 But versus the fact that you remember very well, the first iPhone was incredible because
0:22:34 it combined all of these distinct devices.
0:22:35 You had this one thing.
0:22:40 It brought home the idea that we saw in Palm and Compaq and things like that with the miniature
0:22:40 computer.
0:22:41 It made sense.
0:22:43 And it made sense for us as people.
0:22:48 You look at Generative AI, and it’s very much a square peg, round hole situation.
0:22:52 But it makes sense if you look at it, that these companies were trying to create something
0:22:56 that would sell software, that would allow them to sell cloud compute with Azure, that
0:23:00 would allow them to sell API cores with OpenAI, that would allow them to sell subscriptions with
0:23:01 OpenAI.
0:23:07 The problem is the underlying costs are so severe, and it’s always worked in the past to throw
0:23:07 money at stuff.
0:23:09 They’re all growth-oriented.
0:23:12 They’re not innovation-oriented, and I don’t think they know what to do.
0:23:18 And do you hold any companies that we would have heard of as positive examples?
0:23:24 Not in tech, truthfully.
0:23:26 In tech, it is just a slop fest.
0:23:28 NVIDIA’s interesting.
0:23:33 So NVIDIA, Jensen Huang is technical, and he sounds like monstrous to work with at times,
0:23:35 but he is a technical guy.
0:23:36 He is a hardworking guy.
0:23:37 Clean toilets as a kid.
0:23:39 He is a real working stiff.
0:23:44 But regardless of the fact that Jensen jumps from trend to trend, they at least make physical
0:23:45 things that are good.
0:23:47 They’ve screwed over consumers with GPUs right now.
0:23:48 They’ve done terrible things.
0:23:51 Pretty much because of the rot economy.
0:23:52 Pretty much the same thing.
0:23:57 Growth at all costs, which means melting wires because they’ve sent all the powers down to
0:23:59 cable for GPUs.
0:24:04 Point is, NVIDIA is about one of the better ones, but right now, our crop of public tech
0:24:06 stocks are really horrifying.
0:24:09 It’s really disappointing because I would love it to be different.
0:24:11 I want a better tech industry.
0:24:14 I deeply want tech to make cool stuff that makes people’s lives better.
0:24:16 I just don’t see them doing it.
0:24:21 Costco is probably my one company that I think is in line with the idea that growth is not
0:24:22 the only thing.
0:24:26 But in tech, and I understand, on some level, I understand why.
0:24:31 I understand if you’re the CEO of a public company and the market wants growth, what are
0:24:32 you meant to do there?
0:24:36 You could push back, but the pushback would include your stock going down, which might
0:24:37 lead to a board revolt.
0:24:42 So you’re in this catch-22 situation, but you look at people like Sundar Pichai, who is a
0:24:45 former McKinsey guy, and that guy does not care.
0:24:46 That guy’s not thinking innovation.
0:24:48 He’s thinking, line go up, number go up.
0:24:55 Do you think that Dave and Bill are turning over in their grave right now?
0:25:02 I think that if you look at the elder generation tech founders, those living,
0:25:08 and those not, you can really see that there is something that shifted in the mindset of
0:25:09 the people that run these companies.
0:25:13 I also think that there are some of them, like Bill Gates, who were always like this.
0:25:18 Microsoft had an antitrust case, was it in the 90s, over MS-DOS and Windows?
0:25:22 Some of these guys, like Eric Schmidt, they’re rot economists, and they always were.
0:25:24 I don’t think that was always the case.
0:25:25 But at the same time, it’s hard to tell.
0:25:29 Because it was the Munger quote, where it’s like, look at the incentives.
0:25:34 I forget the exact one, but the incentives back then were to build stuff so that it would
0:25:35 be valuable.
0:25:38 There was not the inherent assumption that it always would be.
0:25:43 The early days of Apple, as horrible as Steve Jobs was, the early days of Apple were very
0:25:45 much like, crap, what do we put together?
0:25:46 What would be useful for people?
0:25:47 What problems can we solve?
0:25:52 And yes, Steve Jobs had his aesthetic choices and his proclivities, but ultimately it was about
0:25:54 solving a problem, and then that would be value.
0:25:55 Bull.
0:25:57 Now it’s, can I sell an idea?
0:26:02 Now can I put a concept together that will convince the markets that something is happening, which
0:26:07 is inherently different to showing the markets that we have created something of value, which
0:26:07 will then grow.
0:26:15 So I think that when you look at the elder founders, living and dead, I can’t say for certain whether
0:26:19 had they been born into a different generation and founded their companies today, whether they
0:26:20 would do any different.
0:26:27 It’s the wills of the markets and the incentives at play, they are what dictate things.
0:26:29 And I think that it’s hard to tell.
0:26:34 And I don’t feel much good for these executives, but I understand why they’re doing it.
0:26:37 I just can’t speak to their, what’s up here.
0:26:44 And the why they’re doing it is because they believe they have shareholder responsibility and
0:26:46 their whole goal is to up the stock.
0:26:48 And that’s shareholder supremacy.
0:26:53 That is Jack Welch of GE, where he, shareholder capitalism took hold thanks to him and Milton
0:26:54 Friedman.
0:26:57 The idea that we must make the shareholders happy.
0:26:59 We must improve the stock price, stock buybacks.
0:27:01 It becomes such a big thing now.
0:27:03 It’s anti-business as well.
0:27:07 The incentives are no longer around creating businesses that create value.
0:27:12 It’s around creating businesses that provide value to not the customer.
0:27:16 And it’s so frustrating because it is going to drag our economy down with it eventually.
0:27:18 It is going to drag society.
0:27:23 I’m not saying apocalypse, but it is always going to be negative for society when we have
0:27:24 shareholder supremacy.
0:27:27 And I wrote a piece about this last year as well.
0:27:30 It’s just frustrating because you can see the direct results.
0:27:32 You can see the human capital.
0:27:34 You see the tens of thousands of people laid off.
0:27:37 Microsoft alone, tens of thousands of people in the last few years.
0:27:40 And that happens not because the companies are unprofitable.
0:27:41 These companies print money.
0:27:44 $10 billion in profit, I think.
0:27:46 A quarter with Microsoft, probably more.
0:27:50 Yet they lay people off just so they can make another number go up is all that’s important.
0:27:59 What do you think happens to people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Andreessen and
0:27:59 Peter Thiel?
0:28:05 Were they good and they got corrupted or were they corrupted and now because they’re powerful,
0:28:06 their corruption can come out?
0:28:12 Can you explain those kind of changes that they seem to have gone through?
0:28:17 So I think there is a universal theme with billionaires.
0:28:19 I think there are very few exceptions.
0:28:22 Steve Wozniak, I think, is probably an exception.
0:28:27 A very, very rich people that they get where they get without ever enjoying a single moment.
0:28:33 They don’t have anything that they truly love and are attached to that brings them joy that
0:28:38 isn’t money related, that isn’t to do with business, that isn’t to do with conquest.
0:28:44 So when they eventually get to a point where they have everything, they really feel like
0:28:44 they have nothing.
0:28:47 I can’t speak to whether Bezos or Musk.
0:28:50 Musk sounds like he’s been pretty horrific for a long time.
0:28:52 I don’t know much about the history of Bezos, but I know this.
0:28:56 The way these men act is depressed.
0:28:58 These men are not happy.
0:29:02 They’re not saying these things because they have a deeply held ideology that means something
0:29:02 to them.
0:29:06 They’re saying out of grievance that they feel the world has taken something from them
0:29:11 when they themselves have been arguably the biggest beneficiaries of the world’s resources.
0:29:16 They could go and do anything and they choose to do what it is they’re doing.
0:29:24 They act with malice and aggression and judgment and hatred and that comes from a place of emptiness.
0:29:28 That comes from a place of not really enjoying a single damn thing.
0:29:32 When you have all the choices in the world, you choose to go online and get angry.
0:29:34 You choose to go online and attack women.
0:29:41 You go online, attack trans people and attack minorities and attack DEI.
0:29:44 You do that because you are miserable and isolationist.
0:29:46 That’s what it is at the heart of these men.
0:29:48 The way they’re acting is disgusting.
0:29:53 It’s really putrid and it’s also pathetic and cowardly.
0:29:56 And the opposite of manly, it’s the opposite of masculinity.
0:29:59 It’s so cowardly.
0:30:04 When you have power and you use that power to attack people who are powerless or marginalized,
0:30:05 that is weakness.
0:30:07 And that’s what these men are.
0:30:08 They’re weak.
0:30:11 They have all the power in the world, but deep down in their hearts, they’re weak.
0:30:15 I have to say, I scratch my head.
0:30:17 I scratch every part of my body.
0:30:24 I just do not understand when you have infinite resources, infinite money, why are you not
0:30:26 taking the high road?
0:30:29 If there’s a time to take the high road, it’s now, right?
0:30:34 And like I said, you could eat whatever meal you want cooked by your favorite chef with your
0:30:36 favorite band playing anywhere.
0:30:39 You could do any of these things, but you choose this.
0:30:41 And that only comes from a place of deep unhappiness.
0:30:45 That only comes from a place when there isn’t anything you actually want to do at all.
0:30:48 When you yourself feel this echoing emptiness inside you.
0:30:54 Because if they felt anything for themselves, if they felt anything joyous or happy that they
0:30:57 could attach to, they would attach themselves to that.
0:30:59 But they attach themselves to anger.
0:31:01 Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan was a joke.
0:31:03 That’s ridiculous.
0:31:06 You go, I got no, it’s not masculine enough anymore.
0:31:06 Where?
0:31:08 You got billions of dollars.
0:31:09 You want chunks of Hawaii.
0:31:10 What are you doing?
0:31:11 Why are you here?
0:31:12 Why are you on a podcast?
0:31:15 You could be in Hawaii doing anything.
0:31:16 Hawaii is an incredible looking place.
0:31:19 You should just be there and stare into the distance.
0:31:21 There’s so much beauty there alone.
0:31:23 You have all of this stuff and you choose to do this.
0:31:26 And it must just not feel like much to them.
0:31:29 They must just feel nothing but anger.
0:31:31 Anger and resentment.
0:31:33 Resentment after they’re given everything.
0:31:34 Everything.
0:31:35 They must have more.
0:31:36 They must take more.
0:31:38 It must be the empty inside them.
0:31:38 The void.
0:31:46 But would you make the case that if they were not like this, they would not have achieved success?
0:31:47 Which came first?
0:31:54 I think that you’re right that there is definitely a degree of if they did not have.
0:31:55 Actually, no.
0:31:56 I take that a step back.
0:31:57 I don’t know if I conflate the two.
0:32:02 I think the single-minded focus on success, absolute success.
0:32:08 I mean, in many of these cases, when you look into their actual past to success, it wasn’t like they had great business acumen.
0:32:10 They stabbed a few backs a few times.
0:32:12 Musk is an incredible leverage guy.
0:32:13 That’s really it.
0:32:15 He knows how to leverage assets.
0:32:16 That’s about it.
0:32:19 Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t written a line of code since 2006.
0:32:22 Mark Zuckerberg knew who to go to.
0:32:26 Sheryl Sandberg is probably more responsible for Mark Zuckerberg being a billionaire than Mark Zuckerberg.
0:32:29 There are people that attach themselves to these people that help.
0:32:34 I think that, sure, whether or not billionaires should exist is pretty obvious.
0:32:35 You don’t need a billion dollars.
0:32:36 Just come on.
0:32:39 But I think that what got them there was that, to an extent.
0:32:43 But what did they do when they weren’t making money?
0:32:44 Did they not have fun?
0:32:46 Did they ever watch JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure?
0:32:49 Did they ever listen to Jack, like Charles Mingus?
0:32:53 Did they not do anything cool or fun in between now and then?
0:32:54 Was there nothing that made their heart sing?
0:32:57 And I think the answer is no, there wasn’t.
0:33:02 And I think this happens to millions, billions of people all their lives.
0:33:05 Plenty of people who end up dirt poor who also find no joy.
0:33:11 It’s just more obvious with these people because they have so many more choices that they don’t choose.
0:33:19 So if I am a young entrepreneur and I’m listening to this podcast, like my head is exploding right now.
0:33:22 You’re basically ripping all my tech heroes.
0:33:24 So what is a young entrepreneur supposed to do?
0:33:27 What is a young entrepreneur’s north light?
0:33:30 Cling to helping people.
0:33:32 I don’t necessarily mean helping people in the vocational way.
0:33:35 Make something that people need that works.
0:33:37 Be good to your friends and family.
0:33:42 Love the people closer to you harder while working on whatever you’re doing.
0:33:49 You can work incredibly hard while also putting love and joy into the world by being there for your friends, by being an available person.
0:33:50 Go to therapy.
0:33:52 It’s the best thing that most people don’t do.
0:33:56 Exploring oneself is one of the most beautiful things a human can do.
0:34:05 And young entrepreneurs are so commonly told to aspire to be these billionaire types when you look at their history and you say, this isn’t something to aspire to.
0:34:07 This is something they fell into.
0:34:13 So the advice for young entrepreneurs is focus on the most valuable thing you can do that’s easiest for you.
0:34:14 That’s the best I can say.
0:34:16 The closest you can get.
0:34:18 Something you’re naturally good at that pays well.
0:34:21 And I internally dial that in just as a job thing.
0:34:24 But if you’re going to build something, solve a real problem.
0:34:29 Find something that pisses people off or that frustrates them within their life, within their job.
0:34:32 And truly solve that in a way that involves them paying you.
0:34:34 Because there’s nothing.
0:34:34 That’s the thing.
0:34:37 It’s okay as long as you’re up front with the incentives.
0:34:40 Not being like Mark Zuckerberg.
0:34:41 Not being like Larry Ellison.
0:34:43 Not being like Jeff Bezos.
0:34:44 Isn’t a bad thing.
0:34:48 And also these men grew up in vastly different times to today.
0:34:53 Their lessons, even if they were positive, would not be relevant to a society where it’s harder to accumulate wealth.
0:34:55 Where most young people can’t buy a house.
0:34:58 Where most housing and rent is way higher.
0:35:03 Where we, as Americans, burn so much money on healthcare.
0:35:05 The world is different now.
0:35:09 So appending yourself to these people isn’t necessarily the right thing.
0:35:11 Focusing on the reality.
0:35:18 Focusing on the tangibles of helping people with good software or hardware or what job you do.
0:35:21 Find a way to be useful and monetize that.
0:35:23 You can be a creative too.
0:35:25 That will be a grind.
0:35:26 But you can do it.
0:35:28 Just whatever you do.
0:35:30 Actually give a crap.
0:35:37 You are basically rewriting every business book written in the last 25 years there, Ed.
0:35:39 Yeah, I’ve read a lot of them too.
0:35:42 And a lot of them are written like they were written 25 years ago.
0:35:45 The Effective Executive by Drucker is still pretty good.
0:35:49 Because a lot of his lessons come down to, hey, when someone’s good under you, treat them well.
0:35:53 If you have good people working for you and they work on a product that people like, people will buy it.
0:35:55 Be a good boss.
0:35:57 Be a boss that respects the labor of other people.
0:35:58 These are timeless lessons.
0:36:02 The problem is that modern business writing has got so far away from that.
0:36:09 It feeds into this culture of easy answers, of quick fixes, very obvious kind of try it.
0:36:14 But it’s to try and get people away from having to have responsibility for others and themselves.
0:36:20 Not to say that circumstances don’t happen that change things, but it’s, there are no easy answers.
0:36:25 Sometimes the answers involve you not making as much money because you’re spending it on other people working for you.
0:36:30 Sometimes it means you work harder and you have to spend more time working and investing in the people and the processes.
0:36:32 I actually really like Rework.
0:36:34 Rework by the Basecamp guys.
0:36:36 That was a very good book as well.
0:36:39 But a lot of the modern business books are just naff.
0:36:41 They don’t really say much.
0:36:46 They’re trying to give you little tips that you could hopefully copy, but you can’t copy someone else’s homework.
0:36:49 I may be part of that indictment, but…
0:36:51 I just haven’t read it.
0:36:52 I’ve not read your books.
0:36:53 Guy, I’m very sorry.
0:36:58 Oh, at this moment, I would say I’m lucky you haven’t read some of my books.
0:37:01 But also, I should be clear.
0:37:05 10, 20 years ago, these books were written for 10, 20 years ago.
0:37:09 And even then, when you write a book, it takes a year or so to come out.
0:37:11 Everything is going to time out over time.
0:37:15 The idea that the books might need to be rewritten is just the process of history.
0:37:19 And yeah, there are some bad ones, but yeah, of course, old books are going to be…
0:37:22 Like, I wrote two PR books, and they are terribly out of…
0:37:23 Like, they make sense.
0:37:29 The core tips are good, but there’s some social media stuff in there that does not make any sense anymore.
0:37:38 I have to tell you that The Effective Executive, I read that in college, and I loved the writing of Peter Drucker and his other book.
0:37:43 The Management, that really thick book, was just formative in my mind.
0:37:45 And there was like an MBA one as well.
0:37:45 It’s funny.
0:37:53 I remember reading The Effective Executive on one of the few books I read on the subway when I was living in New York in 2009, actually.
0:37:56 And I remember reading it, crouched into a corner, being like, this is good.
0:37:58 A job I hated.
0:37:59 I was so unhappy.
0:38:01 I was just like, is there anything in here that will help me?
0:38:03 I was just like, oh, these all make sense.
0:38:04 But no.
0:38:11 Nothing will help me from this book to fix the situation, because workers are so often deprived of industry.
0:38:14 But it’s good, I think, for young people to enter.
0:38:22 My dream would be that young people internalize lessons like this, because I think that the future of business needs to involve more love for the workers.
0:38:24 Workers need to be less disposable.
0:38:26 There needs to be more training.
0:38:30 Managers need to be fired en masse and replaced with managers who actually know what they’re talking about.
0:38:34 There is just so much rot that’s crept into all businesses.
0:38:37 Up next on Remarkable People.
0:38:40 I think that in general, Apple products are very good.
0:38:43 I think the App Store is an abomination.
0:38:47 And I think the way that they promote horrifying microtransaction-filled stuff is disgusting.
0:38:51 I think their physical products, I think their silicon is fantastic.
0:38:52 I genuinely do.
0:38:54 I think Meta is horrifying.
0:38:57 I think Microsoft, like I would never work Meta, Google, or Microsoft.
0:38:59 No, absolutely not.
0:39:28 It’s our pleasure and honor to make the show for you.
0:39:36 Ed Hoffman, Fawn Weaver, Andrew Ross-Sorkin, Kara Swisher, Dara Treseder, Aza Raskin, and more take the stage.
0:39:40 Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.
0:39:45 Again, that’s mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.
0:39:48 Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners.
0:39:49 Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners.
0:39:52 It’s our pleasure and honor to make the show for you.
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0:40:00 Even better, forward it to a friend.
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0:40:07 You’re listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:40:19 I think my favorite lesson from the effective executive, and I use it whenever people talk to me about what’s the role or purpose of a company is.
0:40:28 I believe Peter Drucker said that the purpose of a company is to create customers, which is very different than optimize shareholder return.
0:40:34 I think that it’s a great lesson, but the meaning has been misinterpreted.
0:40:43 Because creating customers, it has been turned into creating businesses, creating problems, and then creating solutions for the problems.
0:40:50 Versus what I think Drucker meant, which was finding customers that need problems solved and solving them.
0:40:54 And that conflation is at the root of a lot of our problems.
0:41:04 Because when you really look at what’s happening, it is creating customers, by which I mean forcing something upon a current customer or a new customer.
0:41:09 Making them have to work with you, rather than appealing to them in any way.
0:41:11 I like how Drucker put it.
0:41:14 It’s just, you should earn their business.
0:41:18 That is the scary thing that I think has left a lot of modern capitalism.
0:41:22 While we’re on the subject of the effective executive, you open the door here.
0:41:28 Do you have any other books you would like my listeners to read to provide a guiding light?
0:41:31 So Rework, Jason Freed.
0:41:35 It’s been a long time since I read it, but that book was really good and it was like quite modernized.
0:41:40 And a lot of it is about doing the things that make sense rather than doing the things that people are telling you to do.
0:41:44 I have a small agency, only a couple of people work with me, and I’ve always kept it like that.
0:41:48 And one of the big things when I was starting out was people would say to me, well, when are you going to scale up?
0:41:51 I’d always say to them, why?
0:41:52 To what end?
0:41:53 Well, then you’d be bigger.
0:41:55 I’m like, why?
0:41:56 Am I going to make more money?
0:41:58 The business will be bigger.
0:42:00 It’s like you go back and forth with people.
0:42:02 And there are all these things that people do in businesses.
0:42:05 Software they have, the processes they choose.
0:42:07 They do it because they think they have to.
0:42:11 And Rework is really good at focusing on, hey, what do we actually need to do here?
0:42:13 What roles do we need in an organization?
0:42:16 What should each person in an organization do?
0:42:17 And it’s very good like that.
0:42:19 It’s been a while, but I really love that book a lot.
0:42:21 I also like Atomic Habits.
0:42:29 It’s cliche, but I think that over time we all develop habits and the ways we work kind of by accident.
0:42:31 We just bumble our way through lives.
0:42:33 Atomic Habits, it has some annoying bits.
0:42:41 It’s quite repetitive, but making you a little more conscious of the way you build the world around you professionally and otherwise is really something.
0:42:42 Like, that’s a good one.
0:42:54 My last topic for you, because you are a PR and media expert, let us talk about what it means to be in PR and media today.
0:42:59 It’s a very different world of pitching stories and getting coverage and social media.
0:43:03 So what is the state of the business these days?
0:43:08 So every single year since 2008, someone has told me that media relations is dying.
0:43:13 My business has been around since 2013, 2012, 2013, I think.
0:43:15 Yet to die yet.
0:43:16 Doing very well.
0:43:18 Media relations is still a big business.
0:43:20 Pitching stories to reporters is as well.
0:43:23 The reason that PR people want to kill it off is it’s difficult.
0:43:24 You have to studiously read.
0:43:26 You have to keep up on everything happening.
0:43:29 You actually have to know what you’re talking about, and you have to read all the journalist stuff.
0:43:33 That never goes out of style because companies want third-party approval,
0:43:37 and they want it on honest terms that people will read and then approve of the company.
0:43:38 That’s a very basic thing.
0:43:39 Never really changed.
0:43:42 The thing is, PR has bred it out of the industry.
0:43:45 PR people have been told not to do media relations.
0:43:48 They’ve been told it doesn’t work anymore, that the company is the media now.
0:43:49 Never been true.
0:43:51 Not even once, Guy.
0:43:54 These people, it’s like, oh.
0:43:56 Every year they say the same thing.
0:43:57 It’s like social media is taking over.
0:43:58 Content is taking over.
0:43:59 It’s not 2013.
0:44:01 But they say the same things.
0:44:06 But in reality, that media relations is one of the few parts of PR that still works and still gets paid.
0:44:11 The rest of it, content creation, yeah, it’s probably the most threat thing from Generative AI.
0:44:16 When it comes to writing anodyne business copy that no one really reads, but everyone internally feels good about,
0:44:18 that’s what Generative AI does.
0:44:18 You want slop?
0:44:19 We’ve got slop.
0:44:21 PR has too much slop in it.
0:44:31 So I think that really, specialist PR is going to continue ripping just because as social communities get more bifurcated,
0:44:33 as we have less media outlets, as media outlets get more specialized,
0:44:38 you’re going to have more people that want to get in front of specialized audiences,
0:44:39 which requires a specialist.
0:44:42 And media relations are specialists.
0:44:45 They’re the highest revenue part of the business other than the scammy parts,
0:44:48 where you just have someone sign up for 100 services and they can’t fire you.
0:44:49 I’m talking about Edelman.
0:44:54 And it’s a situation where PR people don’t know what to do.
0:44:56 Less people are going into PR.
0:44:58 They go into it because they think they’re going to be running events.
0:45:01 I went into PR, completely lied to about what it would be.
0:45:02 And I’m happy.
0:45:02 I stayed.
0:45:04 I love doing media relations.
0:45:05 I get to talk to journalists all day.
0:45:06 I get to know all their stuff.
0:45:07 I get to read constantly.
0:45:09 I get to be smarter and get paid for it.
0:45:10 It’s awesome.
0:45:14 I think that PR will keep going that way.
0:45:18 I think that PR is going to see some astronomical changes in the next few years, though,
0:45:20 because what else is there right now?
0:45:22 Crisis management, great specialist industry.
0:45:26 The specialist PR firms, the specialists, the people that know those industries,
0:45:30 and the PR people who are incentivized to learn them.
0:45:32 Not these PR people who know a little bit about a lot.
0:45:34 They’re unworthy.
0:45:36 The people that know what they’re talking about.
0:45:38 Look at the sports people.
0:45:40 Look at Sarit over at the Atlanta Braves.
0:45:44 You can see the people who are really good in this industry, and it’s because they know
0:45:45 and love their subjects.
0:45:49 And I think PR as an industry has so many generalists.
0:45:53 And I think that you’re going to see that shift or you’re going to see agencies die.
0:45:55 So let me ask you something.
0:46:01 Could you just, for the people listening to this, how do you define media relations?
0:46:06 Is it your ability to call up iJustine or Marquez Brownlee?
0:46:08 Or 20 years ago, you could call up Watt Mossberg.
0:46:14 So iJustine and Marquez are interesting because they’re so big now that you really can’t pitch
0:46:14 them.
0:46:15 You can, but you can’t.
0:46:18 Like, you have to have a thing specifically for them.
0:46:23 So media relations is getting people to write coverage about your client or put your client
0:46:25 on television or put your client on a podcast.
0:46:31 Now, what this means in practice is PR people think it means spamming them and just hoping
0:46:31 for the best.
0:46:35 What it means is a really tailored pitch for them, but also knowing them.
0:46:40 And I don’t mean this kind of nasty, greasy, ooh, I’m going to pretend to be friends with
0:46:40 you.
0:46:43 None of them is, I’m mates with a lot of them, but they don’t run anything extra because I’m
0:46:44 their mate.
0:46:47 They run it because I actually read their stuff studiously.
0:46:49 Media relations is getting coverage.
0:46:50 That really is it.
0:46:52 It’s the thing that people have always paid for.
0:46:53 I think people always pay for it.
0:46:57 It means getting people on podcasts, on TV, in newspapers.
0:47:01 It means finding the right report for a story and getting them to write it.
0:47:03 There are the greasier kinds.
0:47:06 There are the people that do the kind of place stories, the rumor mill stuff.
0:47:09 That’s on the side of it.
0:47:12 It’s not what I peddle in, but it’s interactions with journalists.
0:47:15 But Ed, how do you make a judgment?
0:47:19 Like on the one hand, you are condemning the rot economy.
0:47:23 On the other hand, you’re pitching media stories.
0:47:28 Aren’t those two things overlapping and in conflict sometimes?
0:47:34 I’m really lucky to have clients that are, I pick my clients quite carefully.
0:47:37 And there’s a reason I don’t work with any crypto companies as well.
0:47:39 But look at it like this.
0:47:43 Journalists here from, I do the writing stuff, the podcast stuff.
0:47:44 I do it for the love of the game.
0:47:47 I had 300 subscribers when I started in 2020.
0:47:49 I have 60,000 now.
0:47:50 I did that because I love writing.
0:47:52 And if I don’t write, I’ll go crazy.
0:47:53 The cats in my brain will keep meowing.
0:47:57 So I think that it helps that I do that.
0:48:02 My clients seem to really like it because they understand that journalists are going to connect
0:48:04 with me because they understand my work and they know who I am.
0:48:07 And they know that I wouldn’t bring them something rubbish.
0:48:09 Also something that wouldn’t embarrass me.
0:48:11 I don’t want to embarrass myself.
0:48:13 I have a very public profile, but even before when I didn’t.
0:48:17 So I think there is a challenge.
0:48:22 I’m sure there is definitely a degree of, oh God, what if these two sides touch?
0:48:23 But I firewall them quite aggressively.
0:48:27 No client gets any coverage on my newsletter or podcast.
0:48:30 I separate those worlds incredibly carefully.
0:48:32 I take on clients that I like and I respect.
0:48:37 And when I pitch reporters, I’m very clear, hey, if you don’t like this, that’s totally fine.
0:48:40 And I get turned down for stories all the time, as any PR person does.
0:48:43 The important thing is to not use one on the other.
0:48:49 I would never, ever use anything to do with the show to do with my PR work.
0:48:53 In fact, during CES, I had a live radio show thing I did.
0:48:57 And I intentionally invited journalists on before I pitched them.
0:49:00 So that there was never a chance where anything was contingent.
0:49:03 And then I had one that I invited on that then said no.
0:49:06 And I had zero reaction to it because those are two separate things.
0:49:09 If you do things with intentionality, things tend to work out.
0:49:20 Are you saying to me that if Amazon or Google or Apple or Meta came to you and said we would like to retain you for media relations, you would turn them down?
0:49:21 I’d probably take Apple.
0:49:23 I like Apple stuff.
0:49:24 Like, I’m a happy Apple customer.
0:49:32 And I feel like Tim Cook, despite him being like a supply chain guy, I think that in general, Apple products are very good.
0:49:34 I think the app store is an abomination.
0:49:39 And I think the way that they promote horrifying microtransaction filled stuff is disgusting.
0:49:42 I think their physical products, I think their silicon is fantastic.
0:49:43 I genuinely do.
0:49:46 I think Meta is horrifying.
0:49:49 I think Microsoft, like I would never work with Meta, Google or Microsoft.
0:49:51 No, absolutely not.
0:49:59 Like those companies, Microsoft alone, the monopolies they hold do such damage to and make, they make software worse.
0:50:02 They make the software industry worse with their monopolies.
0:50:06 They make millions, hundreds of millions of people miserable every day with Microsoft Teams.
0:50:11 There are real consequences to what Microsoft does.
0:50:13 I think Apple, by and large, does a good job.
0:50:15 I think the app store is evil.
0:50:18 And I think that they run it in an evil and craven way.
0:50:20 And I’ll keep saying that even if they did hire me.
0:50:23 So what is evil about the app store?
0:50:24 Okay.
0:50:27 Open up the app store and look at how they’re monetizing it.
0:50:32 Because what they do is they promote things like Hinge, Bumble, and these very microtransaction heavy dating apps.
0:50:35 They promote microtransaction heavy gaming apps.
0:50:42 They monetize heavily on things that are built on the principles of gambling and the principles of addiction-based psychology.
0:50:44 They monetize misery.
0:50:46 And they do so with a deliberate hand.
0:50:51 Apple could have chosen at any time to punish companies that monetize in this manner.
0:50:54 Instead, Apple chose to make billions of dollars off it.
0:51:01 Go and look up anything around how gacha games, referring to these games where you give them a little money and then you might get an item for your character.
0:51:06 Those games are based on actively harmful psychological principles, deliberate ones.
0:51:09 Apple makes money off them.
0:51:10 Billions and billions and billions.
0:51:18 Apple, a company that deliberately made the app store so that they could claim there was some kind of quality control, that they could stop consumers being harmed.
0:51:21 Actively, they profit off of consumer harm.
0:51:24 And there’s no reason for them to do it other than profit.
0:51:26 What they could do, and Apple has a history of doing this.
0:51:28 Remember what they did to Flash?
0:51:32 They could crush the life out of these businesses.
0:51:33 They could just go, no.
0:51:35 Supercell cannot do this.
0:51:38 I hinge Tinder.
0:51:40 They cannot make money off of the way.
0:51:44 Like, Hinge, for example, they gate the best-looking people behind microtransactions.
0:51:45 It’s insane.
0:51:46 It’s an insane company.
0:51:50 Apple could very easily just say, we don’t allow you to make money like that.
0:51:52 Or we put a hard limit on these things.
0:51:56 We allow these principles, but there is a hard limit on what you can extract from a customer.
0:51:57 That’s the thing.
0:52:01 These incentives, trickle-down economics I don’t think really works, but trickle-down incentives do.
0:52:06 If Apple just said, no, you can’t make money in this manner, they wouldn’t be able to.
0:52:10 Others would copy, or they would, then theoretically they’d go to Android, sure.
0:52:12 But it’s a question of, do you want their money?
0:52:14 And the answer is, yeah, they do.
0:52:15 They’re happy to.
0:52:16 They’re really happy to.
0:52:25 They are happy to take that money, hand over fist, make the GDP of a small country off of people putting money into Clash of Clans or Candy Crush.
0:52:27 It’s gratuitous.
0:52:31 There’s the concept of entropic doom.
0:52:35 And I think what you’re describing is enrotic doom.
0:52:35 Yes.
0:52:36 Right?
0:52:37 When growth takes everything.
0:52:38 It’s like we’re all doomed to rot.
0:52:39 Yeah.
0:52:47 It’s very frustrating because a company like Apple, for example, the Vision Pro, I like it.
0:52:49 I loved it at times.
0:52:52 I always describe it as when you put it on and it works, it’s magical.
0:52:54 But it only works like 20% of the time.
0:52:56 It’s insanely broken.
0:53:00 Had they left it a few more years, that would have actually been really good.
0:53:02 But they rushed it out because the growth had to show something.
0:53:03 They had to show a new doodad.
0:53:07 And had they waited, I think it would have been significantly better.
0:53:09 I think that there is promise there.
0:53:11 It’s cool watching someone try.
0:53:12 That’s the thing.
0:53:13 I love seeing them try.
0:53:17 But even with the Vision Pro, you can see how they rushed it and they had to rush it.
0:53:22 And it’s like this erotic entropy.
0:53:24 It’s too close to erotic for me.
0:53:26 But you see it crush the life out of joy.
0:53:29 You see it destroy things that could be cool.
0:53:31 The Vision Pro could be cool.
0:53:32 It’s nowhere near there.
0:53:34 You can see it, though, sometimes.
0:53:39 And it’s like, goddammit, if you weren’t so rushed, imagine how good this could have been.
0:53:47 I would say that because of my history with Apple, very few people have had a relationship with Apple like I have.
0:53:49 I have loved the company.
0:53:54 And I have to tell you, this is my last question for you because I’m just so curious what you’re going to say.
0:54:02 What do you think when you see Tim Cook donate a million dollars to the inauguration and is in those pictures on that stage?
0:54:08 This is like, yeah, he’s doing what’s right so that tariffs against China doesn’t affect him.
0:54:10 He’s representing the shareholders.
0:54:12 He’s doing his fiduciary duty.
0:54:16 Or has he basically sold out?
0:54:19 How do you wrap your mind around that?
0:54:20 All of the above.
0:54:22 Tim Cook’s a gay man.
0:54:28 The idea of donating to this administration as a gay man, I can’t imagine it was fun or easy.
0:54:30 It’s also kind of craven.
0:54:38 I don’t feel any sympathy for someone that rich and powerful, but I can understand the value judgment there must have been really difficult.
0:54:40 Really, like, quite tough.
0:54:43 I also think he shouldn’t have done it, but I can understand why he did.
0:54:45 What was he meant to do?
0:54:46 It was a shakedown.
0:54:48 A classic mob shakedown.
0:54:49 What was he meant to do?
0:55:00 I do think that Apple as a company is in a better direction than most, but man, when I saw him do that, actually, when the others did it first, I’m like, Tim Cook’s absolutely going to do this.
0:55:01 And people are saying, he wouldn’t.
0:55:02 It would go against his morals.
0:55:04 And it’s like, he’ll do it.
0:55:06 And it sucks.
0:55:06 It sucks to see.
0:55:08 But I think Steve Jobs would have done it.
0:55:10 I think Steve Jobs would have absolutely done it.
0:55:11 He would have done it in two seconds.
0:55:16 And I think that had he survived, had he beaten cancer, he would have been only…
0:55:25 I think I put him in the same bucket as if John Lennon was still alive, except I think that Jobs was far more noxious, but Lennon would have been more annoying.
0:55:37 I think that Cook is in, like, this bind where he has to deal with an international concept of trade now on a level that was the reason he took over from Steve Jobs.
0:55:43 So he had to make this very difficult but necessary choice that sucks, sucks so bad.
0:55:44 He shouldn’t have done it.
0:55:44 It sucks.
0:55:46 But also, I get why he did it.
0:55:48 Yeah, yeah.
0:55:54 Listen, on the other hand, Steve Wozniak gave quite a powerful interview, too, right?
0:55:57 I’m seeing basically the opposite of that.
0:55:58 What do you mean?
0:55:59 I didn’t see the Wozniak interview.
0:56:02 Oh, check out what Wozniak said.
0:56:06 He was, I think, in Europe, and he gave an interview about…
0:56:14 Let’s just say the two of you are aligned, not necessarily on Tim Cook, but about how people are taking a knee.
0:56:24 Wozniak, I met Wozniak a year or two ago, and he gave me hope, mostly because I talked to him about just tech in general.
0:56:30 We were backstage for a client thing, and we were talking about how Lucid Motors, and he had a problem with a car.
0:56:33 And then he just turned to me, and he said, you ever hear of iCab?
0:56:35 I’m like, what’s that, Steve?
0:56:39 And he goes, it’s an open source web browser that he uses.
0:56:46 And it was this, like, a 10 euro made by a guy in Germany, I think, this incredibly fast and slick web browser.
0:56:49 And the way he talked about it, he was so excited.
0:56:58 And it made me think, it’s like, you see people, these rot economists, like Satya Nadella and Sundar Pashai, you see the people in tech like that, who don’t really care.
0:57:00 There’s no joy in the computer.
0:57:02 I’ll never forgive them what they’ve done to the computer.
0:57:06 And you see someone like Wozniak, you’re like, you know what?
0:57:13 There are people who work in this industry, even though Wozniak has filed out of it, who do care, and who do find the computer fascinating.
0:57:16 And they give me hope.
0:57:20 I believe, genuinely, there are more people like that than there are Elon Musk.
0:57:23 And I think, long term, they will win out.
0:57:25 We will win out, too.
0:57:34 That’s the way to end this podcast, because I think Wozniak is the purest form of engineering I have ever met.
0:57:35 He is a tinkerer.
0:57:36 He really is.
0:57:42 I had never met him, but he seemed so happy to talk about a little web browser.
0:57:44 And it was so lovely.
0:57:45 It was so lovely to see.
0:57:49 This guy didn’t need to do this, like, have a conversation even, but he didn’t need to care about this.
0:57:52 But he was so happy to share it with someone.
0:57:55 And it’s just like, it really does give you hope.
0:57:58 Yeah, I completely agree.
0:58:02 Let’s end on that high note, Yahoo, for Steve Wozniak.
0:58:03 Yes, agreed.
0:58:08 Ed, thank you so much for being on my podcast.
0:58:11 Let’s just say that you’re making my head explode.
0:58:17 I’m going to have to reevaluate some of my perspectives and values after this podcast.
0:58:19 But that’s the whole point of a podcast, right?
0:58:19 Yeah.
0:58:22 And I hope you found it interesting.
0:58:23 I had a great time.
0:58:23 Thank you for having me.
0:58:26 Thank you for being on this.
0:58:27 I’m Guy Kawasaki.
0:58:29 This is the Remarkable People podcast.
0:58:32 You’ve been listening to the Remarkable Ed Zitron.
0:58:36 And lots to think about from this podcast.
0:58:39 So let me thank the rest of the Remarkable People team.
0:58:46 It’s Madison Neismar, Tessa Neismar, Shannon Hernandez, and the one and only Jeff C.
0:58:50 So we’re the Remarkable People team trying to make you remarkable.
0:58:52 Thank you very much for listening.
0:58:59 This is Remarkable People.

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0:00:42 The team that was studying the company said,
0:00:45 you know, the average age of our user is between 18 and 22,
0:00:48 and the median age of our employees is 48.
0:00:51 And the whole room kind of went quiet.
0:00:53 It was like, what are we maybe missing?
0:00:56 And that started our really fruitful conversation about
0:01:00 what is changing among those 22-year-olds that we should be paying attention to.
0:01:04 I’m Guy Kawasaki.
0:01:09 The remarkable person who is my guest today is Rita McGrath.
0:01:14 And she is one of the foremost thinkers in strategy and innovation.
0:01:17 She’s a professor at Columbia Business School.
0:01:23 We have a mutual admiration for Clayton Christensen, you know, the innovator’s dilemma.
0:01:34 So she’s going to talk about strategy and inflection points and innovation and stupidity and all kinds of stuff like that.
0:01:36 So welcome to the show, Rita.
0:01:38 Such a pleasure to be here.
0:01:39 Thank you for inviting me.
0:01:52 First question for you is today, 2025, is there such a thing as a large, singular, semi-permanent, at least, competitive advantage?
0:01:53 Is there such a thing anymore?
0:02:03 The closest to it would be what I’d call network effects, which is when you’re running a platform and you have the two sides that are connected because each one is there for the other.
0:02:11 So if you think about something like Google’s business model, it’s a virtuous circle in that they get the views, they get the searches, therefore they get the advertisers.
0:02:15 But you can see storm clouds on the horizon even for that model, which is a very powerful one.
0:02:29 Talking about that as a competitive advantage, I have now made a Chrome extension that makes whenever I search in the Chrome search bar, it’s actually searching chat GPT.
0:02:42 So now instead of getting a Google search with its, you know, the paid stuff on top and then 250,000 links to YouTube videos, now I just get an answer, right?
0:02:45 And the answers are much better than their search results.
0:02:50 If you’re saying that’s a competitive advantage for Google, I would be worried if that’s the best example.
0:02:53 It’s been a really good example for a long time.
0:02:59 I don’t know how long you would give a long-term competitive advantage, but certainly that would carry Google for many, many years.
0:03:02 What do you think Apple’s competitive advantages are?
0:03:06 Well, Apple is a platform slash product company.
0:03:11 I’ve always thought that their competitive advantage was their focus on product rather than content.
0:03:18 And they’ve built this whole platform around everything being connected to everything, but they’re physical things and they’re beautiful physical things.
0:03:22 And people that are loyal to Apple are really, really, really loyal to Apple.
0:03:27 So I think it’s that notion of design, the way the products just work together.
0:03:28 You don’t have to think about them.
0:03:32 The design is intuitive, which isn’t to say Apple hasn’t had missteps over the years.
0:03:39 But I think the Apple that people really love is that one that produces these delightful experiences we didn’t even know we wanted.
0:03:42 That’s what we call evangelism.
0:03:45 I know a thing or two about this.
0:03:46 I bet you do.
0:04:04 So, you know, I read your book, Seeing Around Corners, and it, correct me if I’m wrong, but I got the impression, and this book is five years, six years old now, I got the impression that you were saying that there were big storm clouds on the horizon for Facebook.
0:04:13 And you go into this list of everything they’re doing wrong, and here we are, 2025, and it seems like none of that bad stuff happened.
0:04:15 Yeah, I was surprised.
0:04:17 How do you explain that?
0:04:21 I think they’ve been super smart in the acquisitions that they’ve done.
0:04:32 They’ve taken real advantage of a lack of Department of Justice activity in terms of being allowed to acquire their competitors, certainly WhatsApp, certainly Instagram, genius.
0:04:33 I have to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg.
0:04:42 He really saw that inflection point that Instagram was going through when they first opened up to Android phones, and they had a million subscribers like day one.
0:04:47 And he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, company in our space starting right at the beginning of that inflection point.
0:04:50 And that’s why he was willing to pay so much for that company.
0:04:57 The thing about inflection points, and I’d be a super billionaire if I got this right, the thing about inflection points that’s difficult is the timing.
0:05:00 So if I think about our friend Paul Krugman, right?
0:05:04 So in 2004, he said, you know, there’s a dangerous bubble building up in the housing market.
0:05:08 And then he said in 2005, he said, you know, there’s a really dangerous bubble bursting up in the housing market.
0:05:12 2006, you know, there’s a dangerous bubble bursting up in the housing market.
0:05:15 And everybody’s like, Paul, for God’s sake, let it go.
0:05:18 And then, of course, 2007, 2008 happened.
0:05:20 And he was right, but it’s hard to tell about time.
0:05:29 If you’re saying that the lack of enforcement of the Department of Justice six years ago, it’s open season now, right?
0:05:31 There is no Department of Justice.
0:05:34 They’re so busy looking for terrorists attacking Tesla dealers.
0:05:36 How can they address meta?
0:05:39 They’re bigger fish to fry like Tesla dealerships.
0:05:40 What can I say?
0:05:49 So listen, you draw a really great distinction I never thought of before, which is what is the difference between an arena and a market?
0:05:57 So an arena is basically surrounding the resources that you need to run your business effectively.
0:06:03 And when you think about it, there’s many, many, many other players that could potentially be in that arena.
0:06:10 So as opposed to thinking about a market or an industry, which is the way we normally think about things, you need to really broaden your aperture.
0:06:11 So I’ll give an example.
0:06:16 I’m working right now with a company that’s very much in the logistics area, you know, moving stuff from place to place.
0:06:20 And they think of their arena as logistics or trucking or whatever.
0:06:22 And yet I said to them, I don’t think so.
0:06:25 I think your arena is really enabling consumption.
0:06:32 And so anything that shifts consumption patterns, reduces consumption, this whole idea of dematerialization, right?
0:06:33 Where we take songs, right?
0:06:36 We used to have to buy albums and then we had to buy CDs.
0:06:38 And now we don’t even buy songs.
0:06:40 We rent them and they fly through the air and land on a device.
0:06:47 All those trucks that used to ship CDs from ports to record stores and, you know, dematerialization is going to be a real thing.
0:06:55 So the concept behind arena is that your competition may not actually people or organizations that do similar things to yourself.
0:06:59 They might be people that are just going after the resources that you’re going after.
0:07:01 So one of my favorite examples at the moment is weddings.
0:07:02 Weddings.
0:07:03 Weddings.
0:07:13 I don’t know about your circles, but in my circles, I have two kids who have literally spent like just about two or three times a quarter at weddings since 2021.
0:07:18 So in 2020, right, the pandemic, a lot of weddings got scaled back or didn’t happen or whatever.
0:07:24 And then come the end of the pandemic, all of a sudden the floodgates opened and then we had every and every other month there’s a wedding.
0:07:33 But if you think about it, if you’re trying to sell something to anybody between the ages of about 22 and call it 40, you’re competing with weddings because every wedding is what?
0:07:34 It’s a trip.
0:07:35 It’s an outfit.
0:07:36 It’s a gift.
0:07:36 It’s expensive.
0:07:41 And the people that are that age often don’t have a huge amount of wealth built up yet.
0:07:44 So, you know, they’re going to be cutting back their spending on other things.
0:07:51 I got to ask you, since I have such a academically respected person on the line, I’ve read the story of Kodak.
0:07:56 And in 1975, Steve Sesson invented the digital camera.
0:08:02 But obviously, Kodak did not exactly penetrate the digital camera market.
0:08:10 And so is that a case of Kodak was looking at competition in terms of chemical companies putting chemicals on film?
0:08:14 And really, they were in the arena of preserving memories.
0:08:21 So they got just absolutely slaughtered by something they didn’t see, even though they invented it.
0:08:25 I think there’s a few wrinkles on the Kodak story that often get overlooked.
0:08:28 The first wrinkle is that they overlooked digital.
0:08:29 They didn’t.
0:08:32 Kodak was for many years in the mid-0s.
0:08:35 The number one selling digital cameras were Kodak cameras.
0:08:38 The trouble is, Guy, that it was an awful business.
0:08:47 I think their CEO is quoted as saying this is a really crappy business because the way that the digital images were captured was basically off-the-shelf parts.
0:08:51 And this is why, like, an 18-year-old surfboarder could start a company called GoPro.
0:08:54 And all of a sudden, he’s disrupting the electronic digital market.
0:09:05 But the bigger problem for Kodak to me was that in politics, what happened was there was a gentleman called Antonio Perez, who was very famous for having built up the printer business at Hewlett-Packard.
0:09:11 And he did not get selected as that company’s CEO because they picked Carly Fiorina instead.
0:09:13 And now Carly’s got a problem and he’s got a problem.
0:09:16 He’s feeling nose out of joint that he should have gotten that job.
0:09:17 She needs to do something with him.
0:09:21 And so she sort of sends him off to do this joint venture with Kodak.
0:09:23 He tried to talk HP into buying Kodak.
0:09:24 The board said no.
0:09:29 And then eventually, when the CEO role opened up at Kodak, he was given that job.
0:09:37 And what he missed, I think, was that screens and pixels were getting so good that nobody needed to print anymore.
0:09:44 And what he did was he aimed that company directly at the printing business, even as the need for printing was beginning to go into decline.
0:09:54 And I suspect observers at the time said this was a political move to try to reclaim his former glory is the guy who legitimately built up HP’s printer business, which was magnificent.
0:09:57 So I think there’s a piece of the Kodak story that we don’t hear.
0:10:01 And a really interesting counter example is what Fujifilm did.
0:10:06 And Fuji was in the same business, same problem, which is the need to print was getting less and less and less.
0:10:08 Demand was just dropping by leaps and bounds.
0:10:11 But what Fuji did instead was they said, hey, wait a minute.
0:10:13 We are a capability-centered company.
0:10:14 There’s stuff we know how to do.
0:10:20 And they created a special task force to go and find new markets where those capabilities would be relevant.
0:10:23 So they got into imaging in healthcare.
0:10:34 They got into cosmetics because apparently if you are really good at putting goop on thin pieces of film to make a smart image, it also is relevant to things like your skin and your hair.
0:10:37 And so Fuji today is a thriving company.
0:10:40 Kodak, the shadow of what it once was.
0:10:41 But I think it was a strategic decision.
0:10:46 And I don’t think it was just sort of the standard things, poor, dumb, stupid company that missed digital.
0:10:49 I think what they missed was something quite different.
0:11:09 So wait, are you saying that it’s not as black and white as Kodak was just wanting to stick with film as much as they didn’t understand that printing was not necessary at all because the quality of displays, people would just share pictures.
0:11:11 They would never print pictures.
0:11:13 Well, and they tried to get into that business.
0:11:15 If you remember, they bought a website called Ophoto.
0:11:21 You may recall that, which was, if you look at it through the lens of today, in its day, it was the Instagram, right?
0:11:23 The place you went to share photographs.
0:11:28 But they never really succeeded at figuring out what the consumer use case was.
0:11:29 And it didn’t last that long.
0:11:42 It seems to me that depending on which book you last read, one book says focus on the customer.
0:11:45 The other says don’t focus on the customer.
0:11:50 They can only describe better film as opposed to digital camera.
0:11:55 Some people say you focus on your competition to see what they’re doing.
0:11:57 Other people say ignore your competition.
0:11:59 So what are the dangers here?
0:12:00 What are you supposed to do?
0:12:02 There’s so many possibilities here.
0:12:09 Well, I think one of the biggest strategic choices that company leaders have to make is what are you going to center your company on?
0:12:11 And there’s many different candidates for that.
0:12:19 So some companies, George Stalk years ago wrote a book called Hardball about companies that were really centered on we are going to clean our competitors’ clocks.
0:12:25 Other companies, I mean, Amazon in its original incarnations would be famous for its focus on the customer.
0:12:28 Fuji, very focused on what its capabilities are.
0:12:31 Now, I don’t think you can apply equal focus to all those things.
0:12:37 So I think one of the big strategic choices you have to make is what are we going to center this company on?
0:12:37 What’s our mission?
0:12:41 How is that supported by what we do, by our brand, by our behavior?
0:12:47 And so I think once you’ve made that choice, then a whole series of other consistent choices flow from that.
0:12:54 So if you’re Fuji and you’re focused on where are all the places where our technology is useful, you honestly don’t care that much about the competition.
0:12:59 Because what you’re looking for is a technical buyer who’s looking for a technical solution to a problem they haven’t been able to solve yet.
0:13:04 And that’s a completely different conversation than, hey, what’s Fujitsu or somebody doing?
0:13:09 And if you’re focused on the customer, right, everything you do goes through this lens of is this better for the customer?
0:13:10 Does it provide a better experience?
0:13:12 Is it going to lead to something?
0:13:18 And a framework I like to use to think about that is something that, in fact, it was Clay who used this a lot.
0:13:19 It was called the jobs to be done theory.
0:13:28 And he said, if you think about it, any customer, any partner, any supplier does business with you because there’s something they’re trying to get accomplished in their lives.
0:13:33 And honestly, for many companies, if they could accomplish that thing, they would prefer not to do business with you.
0:13:37 I had a conversation the other day with somebody from, oh, they make filters.
0:13:39 This company makes filters.
0:13:40 They’re a very well-known maker of filters.
0:13:44 And we’re having this whole conversation about what the future of filters look like.
0:13:46 And I said, you do understand nobody wants your product.
0:13:48 And they were like, what?
0:13:49 Of course they do.
0:13:49 They want that.
0:13:54 And I said, no, what they want is the impurities to be removed and they want the outcome.
0:13:55 Yes, absolutely.
0:14:02 But if there was some different way of getting that outcome, you guys that are so anchored on selling filters, that could be a problem for you, right?
0:14:09 So are you essentially saying that there is no single path to success?
0:14:12 Sometimes you focus on the competitor.
0:14:13 You want to clean their clock.
0:14:15 Sometimes you want to make the customer happy.
0:14:22 I mean, you’re supposed to simplify things for my listeners and just say, this is the way, the McGrath way.
0:14:24 What is the McGrath way?
0:14:30 I like to talk about five Cs that I take into account when I’m trying to do a strategic situation analysis.
0:14:33 And so the customer is the top one.
0:14:34 Then your complementors.
0:14:40 So who is in your ecosystem that makes what you do more valuable in terms of customer willingness to pay?
0:14:41 Then obviously your competition.
0:14:44 Then your own company and its capabilities.
0:14:46 And lastly, the strategic context.
0:14:53 So what I try to do is I go through the five Cs and I say, what are the big patterns in each of those that we should be paying attention to?
0:14:58 And what you find, Guy, when you pull them all together, there’s a gestalt that starts to emerge.
0:15:06 It says, wait a minute, this thing over here on customers connects to that thing over there on competition, connects to this over here in our own company.
0:15:07 So I’ll give you an example.
0:15:10 I was working with a company that does a lot of software for college campuses.
0:15:14 So they do behind the scenes learning management systems and stuff like that.
0:15:18 And the company team, I had them break into teams around each of these Cs.
0:15:23 And the team that was studying the company said, the average age of our user is between 18 and 22.
0:15:26 And the median age of our employees is 48.
0:15:28 And the whole room went quiet.
0:15:30 It was like, what are we maybe missing?
0:15:37 And that started a really fruitful conversation about what is changing among those 22-year-olds that we should be paying attention to.
0:15:41 You’re saying that the customer is on top of this heap.
0:15:47 But what if you truly believe you are creating customers that don’t exist yet?
0:15:51 You could make that case, although AI is, I don’t know, 100 years old.
0:15:58 But five years ago, you would have said that chat GPT created customers who never knew they wanted an LLM.
0:15:59 That’s true.
0:16:00 Yeah, that’s true.
0:16:05 So how do you run a company when you’re trying to create something out of thin air?
0:16:11 I think what you’re trying to do in that case is anticipate, and this is really an inflection point story.
0:16:18 So what’s the boundary condition that gets shifted given shifts in the state of what’s possible in technology?
0:16:24 You remember back in 2011, 2012, everybody was all about, oh, my God, the direct-to-consumer revolution.
0:16:25 Do you remember that?
0:16:34 And it was Harry’s, and it was Dollar Shave Club, and it was Glossier, and everybody was selling everything direct-to-consumer from mattresses to dog food to you name it.
0:16:37 And this went on for about 10 years.
0:16:39 And then everybody figured out, well, wait a minute.
0:16:41 There’s something to be said for going direct-to-consumer.
0:16:46 And consumers started to say, hang on, I want to be able to try on that pair of pants before I click buy.
0:16:54 And so what we came to realize was direct-to-consumer was great and had its advantages, but it wasn’t going to be a long-lived advantage.
0:17:03 One of the co-founders of Warby Parker said, it’s never been easier to start a company, and it’s never been harder to scale it, which I thought was a great quote.
0:17:10 The bottom line is, I love this concept of an inflection point, but Rita, how do I spot this thing?
0:17:14 Oh, that’s a great question, and one that I spent years mulling over.
0:17:18 So you remember Ante Grove, right, and his fabulous book, Only the Paranoids Survive, back in the 90s.
0:17:22 And it was about Intel’s journey through this inflection point.
0:17:27 So his book was, the inflection point has happened, and now here’s all the things we had to do to navigate through it.
0:17:32 And I was tortured by this because I thought, oh, it’s such a powerful concept.
0:17:38 If an inflection point comes out of nowhere and bops you on the side of the head and you didn’t see it coming, what do you do with this as a strategist, right?
0:17:45 And then a friend, saved my life, sent me this wonderful article, and it was called, What If You Changed the World and Nobody Noticed?
0:17:52 And the article, the central story in the article, is about the Wright brothers and their initial flight at Kitty Hawk.
0:18:02 And you would think, discovering manned flight, like if you’d said to somebody 150 years ago, in the future, human beings are going to put themselves in metal tubes and hurtle through the air,
0:18:10 and you’re going to be able to get from Australia to New Zealand or Australia to Alaska in a matter of hours, people would have looked at you as though you had two heads and said,
0:18:13 This person’s delusional or possibly even dangerous.
0:18:17 And so you would think, the Wright brothers, this breakthrough, next day in the newspaper, nothing.
0:18:20 Following month, nothing.
0:18:21 Next year, nothing.
0:18:28 It took five full years before any serious newspaper went out and started covering what the Wright brothers were doing.
0:18:37 And I think this is a fascinating innovation story because the smart money was on Langley, right, who got his craft up in the Potomac and then it crashed 20 seconds after takeoff.
0:18:38 Who were the Wright brothers?
0:18:42 They were these bicycle repair guys out in the middle of nowhere in Akron, Ohio.
0:18:47 So they weren’t plugged into these social networks where the smart money was spending and all that kind of thing.
0:18:49 And I think a lot of innovation happens like that.
0:18:52 It happens when nobody’s really looking and paying attention.
0:18:55 And it happens because people are tinkering, not just having great thoughts, but tinkering.
0:19:03 Anyway, so what it made me realize was the whole process of inflection points coming to be was a lot like the line in the old Hemingway book,
0:19:06 The sun also rises when one character says to another, well, how did you go bankrupt?
0:19:10 And the answer was, well, two ways, gradually and then suddenly.
0:19:17 So I think to answer your question more directly, all these things are burbling along for years, sometimes decades.
0:19:18 Think about it, Guy.
0:19:25 We had the Jetsons in 1962 and we’re still sitting around waiting for robot servants and flying cars and stuff like that.
0:19:27 And so it takes a really long time before these things matter.
0:19:30 And then when they matter, they start mattering a lot.
0:19:41 So you could look at ChatGPT, for example, as an accumulative function of learning about human machine interaction that finally reached a tipping point when these guys,
0:19:43 I mean, this clearly was not the marketing department.
0:19:46 Who in the marketing department released a product called ChatGPT?
0:19:52 It was clearly just an experiment they were doing to see how human beings interacted with these large models.
0:19:54 And that opened the floodgates.
0:19:55 And here we are now.
0:20:03 In your book, you talk about the initial hype and then the dismissal and then the emergence and then the maturity.
0:20:13 We often mention cases where in the dismissal stage, people will make fools of themselves because they dismissed something that became very true.
0:20:22 But I got to also believe, Rita, that everything that people dismiss isn’t going to be a success.
0:20:25 So some people dismiss stuff and they are right.
0:20:32 So what do you think the percentage is of false positive dismissal or false negative dismissal?
0:20:35 I think it depends on the nature of the inflection point.
0:20:46 So I think things that are truly changing the boundary conditions of what’s possible are going to be much less successful dismissing those.
0:20:53 Things that are more like a manufacturer’s wet dream are the things that I think are much more likely to be dismissed.
0:20:57 And remember when we were all going to be sitting watching television with 3D glasses on our faces?
0:21:00 And that was supposed to be this major innovation.
0:21:01 And a lot of people said, no way.
0:21:03 And the people that said, no way, we’re actually right.
0:21:16 But when you think about something that fundamentally changes almost the physics or the possibilities, if you think about the major advances in capitalism that we’ve had, so the original industrial revolution changed everything, right?
0:21:21 It changed how we made the agricultural patterns that changed the agricultural patterns that changed property rights.
0:21:26 If you think about steel railroads that expanded the world, it really did change things.
0:21:33 So I think part of the skill of knowing when to be dismissive and not is really understanding how deep this transformation could be.
0:21:43 And I’m in the camp that believes that we’re just at the very, very earliest stages of figuring out what digital is going to create in our economy, in our society.
0:22:03 So if you think about the post-World War II consensus between government, business, ordinary people, then what we really wanted as a society was to create a rich, prosperous middle class.
0:22:07 And tax rates at the time were upwards of 90 percent.
0:22:11 You could support a family on a manufacturing job throughout much of that post-war period.
0:22:12 We had suburbs.
0:22:13 We had highways.
0:22:15 We had oil and plastic and all that stuff.
0:22:18 We were kind of getting to the end of that era.
0:22:29 And now what we’re looking at is a real inflection point towards what does a truly digital, oil-free, non-petroleum-based, potentially even not free trade, what does that all look like?
0:22:30 We’re just beginning to figure that out.
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0:23:32 I would love to hear your analysis of the crypto arena.
0:23:35 We have definitely gone through the hype stage.
0:23:38 It seems we’re in the dismissal stage.
0:23:44 But is this going to be emerging, or you think it’s going to really crater?
0:23:48 I am not a believer in crypto, so I may regret saying that.
0:23:51 But I don’t understand crypto.
0:23:52 Do you understand crypto?
0:23:54 I can’t claim to understand it.
0:23:54 Not at all.
0:24:02 But I think a lot of what you’re seeing now is the crazy capital went into that because it looked like one of those high, high, high upside opportunities.
0:24:03 And it’s a gambling thing.
0:24:05 You can think of it as the casino economy stage.
0:24:07 That hype stage is like a casino.
0:24:08 But here’s the thing.
0:24:14 I think if you think about money and you connect crypto to the idea of money, cash is pretty stupid, right?
0:24:22 Like the cash you’ve got in your pocket doesn’t know where it’s been, doesn’t know what it’s been used for, can’t report on who is doing good or badly with it.
0:24:36 And so if you think about money as we’ve traditionally had it in terms of just cash, what you’re seeing now is we’re laying layers of intelligence on that original kind of concept of gold coins or whatever.
0:24:44 So now we’ve got we can track transactions, you can pay for things seamlessly, your credit card knows a lot about you, your bank knows a lot about you.
0:24:55 And so if you think about crypto as being this distributed, smarter way of understanding what’s being done with money and who’s doing it, there could be some very interesting future applications for that.
0:25:01 Blockchain more broadly, I think we’re, again, at the early stages of figuring out where that’s going to fit into our lives as well.
0:25:04 How do we know when we’re in the middle of this?
0:25:09 I think you don’t, but there are smart ways of not knowing and there’s not so smart ways of not knowing, right?
0:25:12 So I think a smart way of not knowing is to say, what is my hypothesis?
0:25:15 So let’s take a hypothesis about crypto, right?
0:25:21 So crypto is going to represent, I’ll call it 2% of the world’s transactions in X, Y, Z time.
0:25:24 Before that could be true, what would we have to see, right?
0:25:26 We’d have to see regimes of trust around crypto.
0:25:33 We’d have to see efficient trading with transparent rules around it so that people didn’t fear getting ripped off.
0:25:38 We’d have to see some kind of authority sign on and say, yes, this is legit.
0:25:39 Why does money work?
0:25:44 Money works because governments have agreed that this is how we’re going to do business and this is what its value is.
0:25:49 And, you know, there’s a lot of social and institutional things that have to be in place before that thing could be.
0:25:59 So what you can do then is start to do some experiments and you can say, okay, before I measure this whole global effect of crypto, let me see if I can use crypto at a lemonade stand.
0:26:04 And if I can make that work, then maybe it’s got some possible applications after that, right?
0:26:13 So I think the smart way of approaching these vast unknowns is to try to learn your way into them, but in small steps and with hypotheses that could be right or you could be wrong.
0:26:15 Let me tell you something.
0:26:21 If crypto succeeds, they used to say you’ll eat your hat, but that doesn’t work anymore.
0:26:23 I will start using Windows computers.
0:26:25 Oh, wow.
0:26:26 That’s a penance.
0:26:27 That is a penance.
0:26:30 That is hell.
0:26:32 Yes, yes, yes, yes.
0:26:43 I would love to hear, speaking of hell, what are the predictive and telltale signs that your company is too stuck on the market?
0:26:45 It’s not considering the arena.
0:26:49 It’s not noticing the snow melting around the edges.
0:26:53 What are the signs that I’m setting myself for a big failure?
0:27:02 I think the first thing I would point to is that you don’t have a reliable, repeatable innovation proficiency.
0:27:04 I think that’s the first thing.
0:27:08 And so one of the early questions I always ask companies is tell me what your innovation governance process is.
0:27:12 And, you know, eight times out of 10, I get what innovation governance process?
0:27:13 There isn’t one.
0:27:24 And you’ve kicked around enough companies to know what happens over time is the real core innovators eventually get outnumbered by the operators and the people that keep the wheels turning.
0:27:26 And to some extent, that’s unavoidable as you scale.
0:27:33 But what ends up happening is sometimes those folks just take the company and over-index it on just what’s working today.
0:27:38 And if you think about it, that’s where their library is, that’s where their expertise is, that’s what they’re famous for.
0:27:40 And the innovators often end up getting shut out.
0:27:52 And the pleasures of having a reliable source of revenue today really outweigh the uncertainties of saying, maybe we should take some of that revenue and put it into something that’s uncertain but might tend us toward the future.
0:28:00 So I think the big Uber theme is when you’re looking so hard at the market that you’ve got, and especially if things are going really well, what ends up happening is you end up like BlackBerry.
0:28:01 That’s it.
0:28:02 That’s the sign.
0:28:05 There’s got to be more signs than that, Rita.
0:28:06 Well, that’s the big one.
0:28:07 That’s the one I look for.
0:28:09 Maybe I’m just biased by that.
0:28:16 I think others are that there’s too many layers and that the senior folks are not connected to what’s really going on in the markets.
0:28:18 I have this image of them all looking at each other.
0:28:24 They’re all talking to each other in their corner offices, and they’re not getting that input from what’s going on at the front lines.
0:28:36 So if you look at what’s happening at Bayer right now, an 18-layer bureaucracy that their CEO is now trying to hack his way through to get at least a little bit more decision rights and a little bit more what’s going on.
0:28:46 The other thing that I look at is when you look at the sort of percentage of time people are spending at work, how much of that is externally focused and how much of that is internally focused?
0:28:57 Because if, again, over time companies accumulate these layers of stuff just to keep the wheels turning in the company, it doesn’t keep them focused on the external environment.
0:29:08 And one of the things that’s a consequence of that, and I’m sure you’ll have seen this in your career, is the messages from outside get turned down and the messages from the hierarchy kind of get turned up.
0:29:19 So more and more people in the company are doing what important people in the company think is valuable, and they’re not really as clued into what’s going on at the edges as I talk about in the book.
0:29:33 And so that sort of sense of serving itself, when Lou Gerstner, very famously, came into IBM in one of its near-death experience moments, he said what he found was a whole circle of decision makers with their face pointed to the office of the CEO.
0:29:40 And one of his famous sayings was, well, if your face is pointed to the office of the CEO, what part of your anatomy is pointed at the customer?
0:29:48 Of all Gerstner’s quotes, that’s one of the most memorable to me.
0:29:59 Okay, so maybe you’re not Lou Gerstner, and I hope people are old enough to know who Lou Gerstner is, but maybe it’s only me and you.
0:30:03 I bet you Madison has no idea who Lou Gerstner is.
0:30:08 We did interview Ginny Rometty on this show, the first female Lou Gerstner.
0:30:20 But let’s say I’m running a 10,000-person organization, and you’ve convinced me, I’ve got to think of the arena, I’ve got to watch the snow melt, and I’ve got to watch my competition.
0:30:24 I’ve got that, I take that whole checklist, but Rita, what do I do?
0:30:28 I’ve got 30 senior VPs and executives around me.
0:30:30 What do you want me to do?
0:30:33 You want me to go to a Coachella music festival?
0:30:37 What am I doing, actually, if I buy into your concept?
0:30:49 Well, I think one of the things I’m observing with a lot of these digitally-oriented leadership teams that is different than you might have seen in a more industrial era is they’re quite broad spans of control.
0:30:53 They’re not even called spans of control, but quite broad connections among people.
0:31:04 So if you look at, for example, the way NVIDIA is run or the way Airbnb is being run by Brian Chesky, they’ll have leadership groups that could be 30, 40 people, and they spend a lot of time together.
0:31:10 And they spend a lot of time looking at issues that are coming up at what I would call the edges.
0:31:14 So Airbnb very famously recently broke apart their product management function.
0:31:22 And so what they’ve got now is somebody, one set of people whose job is, by quarter three, this has to be delivered and shipped, and it’s got to be good quality, and it’s got to be compliant.
0:31:24 So that’s what the product management job is.
0:31:32 But there’s another parallel track, which is what’s going on in the outside world, and how do we think about plugging into our ecosystem, and how do we think about doing that?
0:31:39 So what I’m seeing these leaders doing is spending a lot of time sense-making with the groups of people around them.
0:31:44 And it’s not micromanaging, and I think this is where a lot of people get this wrong.
0:31:46 It’s asking questions together.
0:31:47 It’s sense-making together.
0:31:53 It’s getting to a good decision, not by telling people what to do, but by saying, hey, if this is our objective, what are our options?
0:32:00 What are the best ways we could go there, and how do we now collectively bring the organization along with us to do that?
0:32:02 So I think it’s a different kind of leadership.
0:32:19 And if you imagine a railroad or something, right, the classical mass market production company, those were run as hierarchies because the dominant competitive advantage in many of those sectors was you do mass market stuff incredibly well, really cheaply, and with levels of quality.
0:32:23 So what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to drive out variability in the system as a leader.
0:32:25 So that’s where command and control is very useful.
0:32:27 That’s where having a well-owned bureaucracy is great.
0:32:38 And if you’ve got a stable, growing market that you can count on, again, go back to my post-World War II example, if you were an appliance maker in 1955 in the U.S., you were going to sell every refrigerator that you could produce.
0:32:46 And so the operating principle was do that very well, do it precisely, do it with quality, clean out all of human variation, and so forth.
0:32:49 Digital companies are really different.
0:32:50 Every day is different.
0:32:51 Every day is changing.
0:32:56 And what you need is almost a company that can adapt and morph as stimuli come from the environment.
0:32:58 So it’s a different kind of leadership.
0:33:05 So to come back to the short answer, you need to make time to really align your senior leadership team around your thought processes.
0:33:08 You need to be very clear on what your purpose is, what your objectives are.
0:33:13 The greater clarity you can bring to things, the more decisions can be made without you having to make them.
0:33:14 I think that’s one big thing.
0:33:23 And I think you need to leave space and time to take in information that may not seem at first to be important, but might well be.
0:33:30 So one of my CEOs that I really admire is a guy named David Cody, who ran Honeywell for many years, 17 years.
0:33:33 And what he used to do is he had X time, he called it.
0:33:37 He would have a paper calendar and he would put a big X in his calendar proactively.
0:33:43 And that time was for visiting plants, for talking to customers, for just thinking.
0:33:48 And he made sure to put, I think he said, 25% of his personal time as a leader.
0:33:52 I was in that kind of moment where he was making sense of things, not doing stuff.
0:34:03 So I want to know, Rita, what is in the Rita McGrath Hall of Fame of Leading Indicators at a very tactical level?
0:34:08 What are the leading indicators I should be watching for?
0:34:14 Well, I think change in customer behavior or preferences is one that is very important.
0:34:23 So if I take Estee Lauder, just as an example, three years ago, I was talking to them about the younger generation is looking at this whole idea of makeup very differently.
0:34:24 They think differently about brands.
0:34:27 They’re looking for authentic voices.
0:34:31 The lady in the department store that chases you around with a perfume and it’s not the experience they want.
0:34:39 And, you know, so you really need to be thinking about what are those customer segments and how are they changing?
0:34:42 So if you look at Estee Lauder, they’re in deep, dark trouble right now.
0:34:43 And yet, who’s on the upswing?
0:34:45 It’s companies like ELF.
0:34:46 It’s companies ultra makeup.
0:34:57 And so the leading indicator is once you start to see small behavioral changes in what your customers are looking to accomplish with you, that to me is always a big kind of blaring, whoa, whoa, whoa, pay attention to this.
0:35:01 And a lot of companies have set themselves up so that they miss those signals.
0:35:03 They just don’t, they don’t see them.
0:35:05 So changing customer behavior would be a really uber one.
0:35:10 Second one is a change in the fundamental basics of what holds your business together.
0:35:24 So if I take a company like Gillette, right, and they had, and you are asking about durable competitive advantages, these guys had a 70-year, 70% market share dominant position because making razors at scale is really hard.
0:35:25 They had a lot of patents.
0:35:27 They invested a lot of R&D into it.
0:35:30 And then other companies that kind of looked at it went, oh, too difficult.
0:35:31 We’ll just leave Gillette there.
0:35:33 So they had this great business model.
0:35:36 It was invest in R&D, allows us to make better products.
0:35:40 We can then use our armies of people to get those products into the retail channels.
0:35:43 And it worked like a clockwork for decades and decades.
0:35:53 But, right, just as an idea of proportion, when Procter & Gamble bought Gillette in 2005, they paid $57 billion for it.
0:36:00 When Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club in 2016, so not that long later, they paid a billion for it.
0:36:03 And, you know, with Dollar Shave Club, what was it?
0:36:06 It was razors made by a Korean manufacturer.
0:36:12 But what they did was they took all the infrastructure that Gillette had built around mass market advertising and brand building and all that stuff.
0:36:15 And they said, no, we can use YouTube for that.
0:36:16 We can use Facebook for that.
0:36:17 We don’t have to buy servers.
0:36:18 We’ll just run our stuff on the cloud.
0:36:24 At the time they started, which was in 2012, I believe, you could buy off-the-shelf e-commerce software at that point.
0:36:27 There was no need to hire programmers and do all that stuff.
0:36:34 So another big sort of inflection point is when the cost of doing the same thing shifts by an order of magnitude because of what’s now possible.
0:36:37 My ears perk up when I see something like that happening.
0:36:45 I’m so glad that I’m the podcaster, not the CEO.
0:36:49 It’s so hard to be a CEO these days.
0:36:56 Well, you know, what’s interesting, too, is there’s this whole new trend about Gen Z people not wanting to take managerial jobs.
0:36:57 I think that’s fascinating.
0:37:02 Well, I’m a baby boomer, and I don’t want to take a managerial jobs.
0:37:05 I think you saved your dues like that.
0:37:12 In a sense, the bigger picture you were talking about is, Rita, how do I keep my company agile?
0:37:14 Good news, bad news.
0:37:15 Good news, we’re successful.
0:37:16 We’re growing.
0:37:18 We have lots of cash, blah, blah, blah.
0:37:21 Bad news is we’re growing.
0:37:22 We’re successful.
0:37:23 We have lots of cash.
0:37:26 What’s the Rita McGrath agility plan?
0:37:33 Well, I think it really starts with the agenda of the CEO, and it’s almost that simple.
0:37:41 It’s like if you don’t have innovation in the future as item number one, two, or three, literally on your agenda, which is what do you talk about in meetings?
0:37:43 What meetings do you go to?
0:37:44 Who do you meet with?
0:37:52 If it’s not in that top bucket of priorities, then you’re very much at risk of eventually the success formula runs out and you become obsolete.
0:37:57 So if you think about Goodnight that founded the Zas Institute, they were big data before big data was big data.
0:38:03 Every Tuesday, he and his senior team got together to talk about what the next innovation was going to be.
0:38:12 Now, a lot of other stuff happened behind the scenes at that company, consistently ranked best place to work, incredibly high employee retention, beautiful campus, great lifestyle.
0:38:14 I mean, it was a lot of other supporting stuff.
0:38:18 But every Tuesday, without fail, and everybody in the company knew it.
0:38:20 So it was literally on the agenda.
0:38:25 And with a lot of companies, I find CEOs come in and they’re just all about exploiting.
0:38:32 But if you just do a STEM education, those skills go obsolete.
0:38:34 Technology changes all the time.
0:38:39 So unless you’re continually bringing yourself to the cutting edge of whatever it is you’re in, you’re going to get obsolete.
0:38:44 Whereas the liberal arts folks, OK, so they spend their first three years standing by the copy machine.
0:38:53 But it’s the soft skills, the political skills, the ability to influence people, sort of sensing what’s going on in the organization, that as you get more senior, you become more rewarded.
0:38:57 And I think that’s an interesting thing to reflect on when you think about what are we educating kids for?
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0:40:04 You’re listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:40:10 I want to really shift gears on you, Riva.
0:40:17 So let’s pretend that the United States is an organization.
0:40:33 And I want to know from your kind of perspective, is the United States focusing too much on its competition, if you consider that Russia or China, or is it not looking at its customers enough?
0:40:43 If you were to do an assessment of the United States, what would you say to this company called the United States about what it’s doing right now?
0:40:47 I think, and we’re back to how do you center an organization.
0:41:01 And really since the end of World War II, the U.S. made a very conscious decision that it was going to be Pax Americana, that it would pay to have other countries within our sphere of influence.
0:41:18 And if that meant supporting Europe militarily, if that meant forging these very tight trade bonds, whatever that was, there was a very clear idea that America was going to take over from, if you think about the economies prior to, call it prior to the Second World War.
0:41:23 So, you know, America was up there, but a lot of other countries were very, very influential as well.
0:41:24 I mean, China was really nowhere.
0:41:25 India was nowhere.
0:41:29 So you have really European countries that were quite dominant.
0:41:35 And after World War II, America made a very conscious decision that we’re going to be at the center of this fulcrum.
0:41:40 And the Marshall Plan, we’re going to spend money to rebuild our competition.
0:41:41 Imagine that, right?
0:41:51 We’re going to spend money in Japan to not only help them recover, but we’re going to create a whole new governmental system, which is a democracy that was unheard of before.
0:41:56 So the decision was very consciously to be at the center of an ecosystem.
0:42:04 And with the financial and other burdens that meant, that implied, because we said, look, if we do this well, we’re going to generate a lot of wealth.
0:42:09 And some of that wealth is going to have to go into creating the ecosystem, protecting the ecosystem.
0:42:12 And where I think we are now is a couple of things.
0:42:19 The old ecosystem, petroleum, highways, suburbs, appliances, all that stuff, is starting to lose its power.
0:42:24 It’s starting to not be able to deliver the same productivity gains that we’ve gotten accustomed to.
0:42:27 And the new ecosystem, we’re not sure what that looks like.
0:42:36 And where I think America’s been really smart is having a fairly light regulatory touch relative to, say, Europe, in things like digital.
0:42:39 Well, there’s a reason so many of the tech giants come from America.
0:42:44 So I think it’s done a good job kind of supporting entrepreneurship, entrepreneurialism.
0:42:48 People come from all over the world to go to our schools and start our businesses.
0:42:53 Now, where that goes at risk is if we’re not continuing to make investments in the universities,
0:43:06 if we mess up the entrepreneurial ecosystems that have emerged because of inconsistent policies that make it very hard to have confidence in what the next set of business decisions are going to make, that could be very dangerous.
0:43:15 So I think we’re on the brink of seeing is you certainly got China wanting to supplant the U.S. as that sort of dominant player.
0:43:17 You’ve got the U.S. not really wanting to give up its position.
0:43:22 You’ve got the other large countries rattling their chains about protectionism.
0:43:28 And this free trade assumption that we’ve been operating under for quite a long time is now being up for grabs.
0:43:36 So if I were and I’m not a particularly political person, but I would be inclined to say, let’s understand what are the incentives we’re creating.
0:43:41 And I’ll draw here on the work of a wonderful late economist called William Baumol.
0:43:50 And what Baumol said is if you think about the structure of incentives that you’re creating in your society, and that could be your society, that could be your company, that could be your team.
0:43:51 There are three kinds, right?
0:43:54 There’s productive incentives where you’re rewarding productive entrepreneurship.
0:43:57 People can win big.
0:44:00 People who seek to better themselves start a company.
0:44:01 It succeeds.
0:44:02 That’s what they’re driven to do.
0:44:03 That’s productive entrepreneurship.
0:44:04 It’s creating value.
0:44:06 Then you’ve got what you can think of as unproductive entrepreneurship.
0:44:14 So if I were to compare Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as an example, right, you could make the argument that Warren Buffett just moves value around.
0:44:20 Like he’s a brilliant, brilliant investor, but he’s not inventing the next generation of software that’s going to put a computer on every desk.
0:44:21 That’s a different thing.
0:44:22 That’s not bad.
0:44:23 It doesn’t create new value.
0:44:26 Then you’ve got destructive entrepreneurship.
0:44:39 And destructive entrepreneurship happens when you have a set of incentives that reward things like gangs, that reward drug smuggling, that reward cybercrime, that reward scams.
0:44:49 And if you imagine that the level of entrepreneurial talent you have in any society is about the same, your structure of incentives is going to determine where that talent gets applied.
0:44:52 So why is it we have so many scammers from Eastern Europe?
0:44:57 Because there’s no place for them to use those skills except in illicit activities.
0:45:07 So if I were to think about doing a real analysis of the U.S., I’d really want to be thinking through, for the different sectors of the society we’re trying to create, what in fact is the structure of incentives?
0:45:17 Because historically, where the U.S. has really excelled is individualism, entrepreneurship, being willing to start stuff, being willing to take risks, being to some extent tolerant to failure.
0:45:19 We love a comeback story.
0:45:23 We love it when somebody’s screwed up and then gets rescued and then eventually triumphs.
0:45:25 And a lot of parts of the world, that would never happen.
0:45:26 That would not be enough.
0:45:29 So I think there’s a lot that we have that’s really strong.
0:45:33 I just don’t think we’ve been clear-headed enough about what it is we’re trying to drive here.
0:45:41 If we love a comeback story, we’re certainly setting ourselves up for the necessity of a comeback story, let’s just say.
0:45:44 I wish we wouldn’t have to come back so far.
0:45:46 So let’s say it’s 20 years.
0:45:49 Let’s say it’s 100 years from now.
0:45:53 What will historians say, well, the United States was just blindsided.
0:45:59 It was like digital cameras blindsided Kodak.
0:46:04 But, you know, the U.S. could have been Kodak or it could have been Fuji, but it stayed Kodak.
0:46:10 What ended the American century, if you can put yourself in a place like to look back?
0:46:12 So let’s say there are different scenarios, right?
0:46:16 So one scenario would be American century ends and what caused that.
0:46:19 But there are other scenarios I’d want to think about.
0:46:20 What ended it?
0:46:29 I’d say not making fundamental investments in the core human capital that we depend on for innovation and growth.
0:46:34 And here I’m thinking of public education, health care, housing.
0:46:41 If you look at inflation in those sectors, they’re all much more expensive and much less quality than they have been historically.
0:46:51 So if we were to blow it, I would say we did not really build that human capital that would need to be successful in the future.
0:46:52 That’s where I would start.
0:46:55 So an interesting counter example would be a country like Ireland.
0:46:57 So if you think about Ireland, what does Ireland have?
0:46:57 Nothing.
0:46:58 It’s got people.
0:46:58 That’s about it.
0:47:00 It’s this tiny little country.
0:47:09 And after the Second World War, they made very conscious decisions about providing really high quality education to a very large young population of young people.
0:47:15 And they made a very clear decision to be an open country and to attract foreign direct investment.
0:47:17 So they were very strategic about that.
0:47:22 So I think part of our issue is if you think of us as an organization, first of all, we think always of the federal government.
0:47:25 We keep forgetting it’s the United States.
0:47:27 So we have 50 flavors of everything here.
0:47:31 So the good news about that is it fosters experimentation and it can be good for innovation.
0:47:34 But the bad news is it’s very hard to get everybody moving in the same direction.
0:47:39 And so that’s where the federal government perhaps can provide some leadership.
0:47:45 But education, human capital, if you start ignoring those things, that’s really the beginning of the end.
0:47:53 I cannot make the case that I believe that the United States is investing in education when it closes the Department of Education.
0:47:55 How do you put two and two together there?
0:48:02 I think part of what is constructive and, you know, I mean, I have a lot of I’m in New York, right?
0:48:03 So I have a lot of friends that are liberal leaning.
0:48:08 And yet if you get them in a quiet corner and sort of say, well, so what do you think of what’s going on?
0:48:15 I literally had a very, very oat crunchy, barefoot lefty saying, well, the Department of Education did need reform.
0:48:22 So part of what I struggle with is clearly we need to rethink how we’re educating young people.
0:48:33 And I think one of the promising things about AI is we now have a platform which perhaps could help us open some really interesting ways of helping people gain skill and knowledge.
0:48:37 But I think we need a way of looking at that that isn’t wedded to our current system.
0:48:38 So what’s our current system built on?
0:48:49 Our current system was built in the 1800s to basically create a knowledgeable enough society to work in factories, to work agrarian models and stuff like that.
0:48:53 And so the idea of basic literacy was that was what we were trying to achieve.
0:48:56 So our goals for education today are quite different.
0:48:58 We need people who have soft skills.
0:48:59 We need people who can reason.
0:49:02 We need people who can think through prompts.
0:49:08 We need people who can not just do calculations, but actually become the directors and guides of the future.
0:49:11 It was a really interesting study I ran across just a couple of days ago.
0:49:18 And those researchers were looking at the career prospects of people studying STEM, so science, technology, engineering and math,
0:49:20 as opposed to liberal arts.
0:49:26 And what they found was in terms of earnings, the first few years, the STEM people nailed it.
0:49:26 They were great.
0:49:31 But then at about five to 10 years in, the liberal arts people started to overtake them.
0:49:37 And the hypothesis behind this research, which validated at that point, was that in the early years of your career,
0:49:40 you’re kind of rewarded and promoted for what you can do.
0:49:44 But if you just do a STEM education, those skills go obsolete.
0:49:46 Technology changes all the time.
0:49:51 So unless you’re continually bringing yourself to the cutting edge of whatever it is you’re in, you’re going to get obsolete.
0:49:56 Whereas the liberal arts folks, OK, so they spend their first three years standing by the copy machine.
0:50:00 But it’s the soft skills, the political skills, the ability to influence people,
0:50:05 sort of sensing what’s going on in the organization, that as you get more senior, become more rewarded.
0:50:10 And I think that’s an interesting thing you reflect on when you think about, what are we educating kids for?
0:50:19 I’ve heard this theory and it’s hard to argue against a really robust STEM education system,
0:50:30 but it is also hard to argue against a system of empathy and a system of social psychology and behavioral economics and all that.
0:50:32 Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to, right?
0:50:41 Well, if you think about what’s going to get automated, and I’m not an AI expert, but it’s pretty astonishing some of the things that are being automated right now.
0:50:46 But the people that are really taking great loops forward are people who are already experts.
0:50:49 So they’re using the technology to enhance their capability.
0:50:53 And I think we have some big questions about where do the younger people get their training?
0:50:58 If the AI is writing all the press releases, where does the intern get their training and how to do that?
0:51:01 So I think we’ve got some really interesting skill questions coming up.
0:51:07 So you must get this question quite often from CEOs you’re talking to, which is,
0:51:12 Rita, how do I prepare my organization for an AI world?
0:51:17 Yeah, I think the way to do it is to do it.
0:51:19 You have to get people using the technology.
0:51:21 You have to have them experimenting.
0:51:25 AI right now, to me, is just such an interesting example.
0:51:27 Go back to inflection points, right?
0:51:30 We definitely have been through like hype, hype, hype, hype, hype.
0:51:33 And there’s a whole bunch of people saying, oh, AI, it’s never going to be anything.
0:51:35 People saying, oh, it’s going to save me costs.
0:51:36 It’s going to save me this.
0:51:40 A lot of that just hasn’t come true yet because we’re still at the early stages of doing it.
0:51:47 So my advice would be set up some experimental time, encourage people to try stuff out, share
0:51:50 what they’re learning, give people time to experiment.
0:51:55 The thing that I think prevents people from picking up new skills or picking up new capabilities
0:51:59 is that they’re under such time pressure in many, many roles that they just don’t feel
0:52:01 they have the time or the permission to learn.
0:52:05 And what I think we need to embed in companies is this learning permission.
0:52:10 So one of the projects I worked with was with Fidelity Private Insurance, private investment.
0:52:13 And they decided to go to a really different way of working.
0:52:16 We would think of that as lean, agile, however you want to call that.
0:52:21 But they really reformatted their organization, formatted around the customer rather than their
0:52:25 products and broke people into these small teams where every team had everything it needed
0:52:30 to accomplish, say, an update to the website or whatever, and started working in shorter
0:52:30 chunks.
0:52:32 So breaking down the bureaucracy, doing things very differently.
0:52:38 But one of the things they did as well as all this was they said every Tuesday, it’s a
0:52:38 learning day.
0:52:40 So that could be book learning.
0:52:42 It could be an online course.
0:52:45 It could be you go off and get yourself educated at a place like Columbia.
0:52:48 It could be spending a day doing a ride by ride with the customer.
0:52:49 But you block off that time.
0:52:51 That is not time to be doing your job.
0:52:53 That is time to be learning something new.
0:52:57 And I think that’s a model that we’re going to see more and more forward thinking companies
0:52:57 adopt.
0:52:59 That’s great.
0:52:59 That’s great.
0:53:01 So this is my last question.
0:53:06 So now that we solve the problems for the United States and we solve the problems for
0:53:11 all these large companies, let’s say that I’m listening to this and I want to know how do
0:53:20 I, a person, not a company, not a CEO, for my own personal career, my own personal benefit,
0:53:27 my own personal development, how do I, as a person, see around corners?
0:53:28 Great question.
0:53:30 You need to make the time for it.
0:53:33 And I think that’s the first watchword.
0:53:37 Even if it’s just a couple of hours a week, stop with the treadmill, stop with the to-do lists,
0:53:41 take a step back and say, what are some things I should be paying attention to?
0:53:43 For me personal, that might matter to me.
0:53:44 So that’s one.
0:53:51 Second is, I think people struggle with feeling powerless and feeling like they couldn’t possibly
0:53:51 make a difference.
0:53:57 And yet, if you think about it, there are things in your community, in your surroundings, in
0:54:01 your world that you can elect to make a difference in.
0:54:07 So, you know, there was a great story about a retired couple that retired to a community,
0:54:08 which was not a retirement community.
0:54:11 And when they got there, they noticed that there were no real walking.
0:54:13 The area was beautiful and full of woods and everything.
0:54:18 And so they decided to start a walking trail club and people that were interested, they had
0:54:19 regular meetings.
0:54:24 And then what started to happen was people who were artisans had skills that were able
0:54:25 to make these trails happen.
0:54:28 People who were carpenters, people who were gardeners.
0:54:32 They started this little mini movement and today there are walking trails where there weren’t
0:54:33 any before.
0:54:40 And so I think giving yourself a sense of agency with whatever it is you care about is, first
0:54:41 of all, it’s an antidote to despair.
0:54:46 I think all of us sometimes feel like we’re just too insignificant to make a difference.
0:54:51 But finding something that you care about and that you think you can make an impact in with
0:54:54 the people that are fellow travelers that are like you.
0:54:57 And so, you know, Guy, you talk about planting oak trees, right?
0:54:59 You’re not doing that alone, right?
0:55:03 There’s people that are interested in this for the long term.
0:55:08 And so I think thinking about how you can create some agency and some ownership with
0:55:11 yourself and with the people who you draw into your community, I think that’s a really
0:55:17 super way of helping yourself feel that you’ve got connection to something that matters.
0:55:25 You mentioned in your book what I thought was a really clever idea, which is to write the
0:55:26 article.
0:55:30 So this is the last, I promise you, this is the last question.
0:55:37 And tell me why writing an article about yourself is a good idea.
0:55:38 Yeah.
0:55:43 So what that idea is, is to say, and it was put in a business context, but you could do
0:55:44 it in a personal context, too.
0:55:47 You say, OK, it’s five years from now or 10 years from now, you pick.
0:55:49 But sometime in the future.
0:55:51 And there’s an article being written about you.
0:55:54 So if it’s a business context, it’s like cover of Fortune magazine.
0:55:57 If it’s a more personal context, maybe it’s USA Today.
0:56:02 But somebody is writing about you and what they are writing with great admiration about
0:56:03 is what did you accomplish?
0:56:06 What were the critical decisions you made along the way?
0:56:07 Who did you bring with you?
0:56:10 What happened to your family while you were doing all these great things?
0:56:13 And what are the lessons the rest of us could learn?
0:56:17 And if you really force yourself to do that and take it seriously, what you will uncover
0:56:20 in that process is what really are your values?
0:56:21 What is it that you care about?
0:56:24 What is the impact you want to have in the world?
0:56:27 How do you want to think about that and who should be in that picture?
0:56:28 For example, are you ignoring your family?
0:56:32 Are you not paying attention to what is the useful thing?
0:56:33 In a way, it’s very similar.
0:56:34 And I’ll come back to Clay again.
0:56:39 He had a wonderful speech book series of articles called How Will You Measure Your Life?
0:56:44 And the way he kicks off that book is by talking about coming back to successive Harvard
0:56:45 NBA reunions.
0:56:48 And the fifth reunion, everybody’s doing great.
0:56:49 They’re all masters of the universe.
0:56:51 Tenth reunion, we’re all some cracks are starting to show.
0:56:55 Twentieth reunion, we’ve got divorces, we’ve got people from their kids.
0:57:00 And he said, was that their strategy to get divorced and be estranged from their kids?
0:57:00 No.
0:57:04 But they never took that time, which is what I’m recommending you do in the article, to
0:57:07 really think through what would be satisfying for me.
0:57:10 And I’m not saying make me happy necessarily, but what do I think would be fulfilling and
0:57:14 satisfying and meaningful in that period going forward?
0:57:21 Not to be morbid or anything, but I think every day about what people will say in my obituary.
0:57:22 Oh, do you?
0:57:28 Seriously, I want people to say that I empowered people with my podcasting, my writing, my speaking,
0:57:31 my investing, my advising.
0:57:33 All righty, Rita McGrath.
0:57:36 Thank you very much for a most remarkable interview.
0:57:41 And we’re going to just have a little sign off here and then we’re going to let you go.
0:57:42 And thank you very much.
0:57:45 And please come visit us in San Francisco if you’re here.
0:57:46 I’d love to.
0:57:50 I’m going to be out there with a very large tech company that we both know and love a couple
0:57:50 of times.
0:57:52 So perhaps I’ll give you a ring.
0:57:53 Please do.
0:57:54 Please do.
0:57:54 All right.
0:57:57 So this is the end of this episode of Remarkable People.
0:58:01 And as you’ve heard, we’ve had the remarkable Rita McGrath.
0:58:08 And now you learned about strategy and implementation and inflection and all these I words.
0:58:10 And what a wonderful episode.
0:58:11 Thank you very much.
0:58:15 I’m going to go write an article about myself right now and see what it comes out.
0:58:22 So I just want to thank Madison Nismer, the future titan of industry, her sister Tessa Nismer,
0:58:24 Jeff C. and Shannon Hernandez.
0:58:27 And this is the Remarkable People team.
0:58:29 And we’re on a mission to make you remarkable.
0:58:33 And someday you look back and you say, I heard Guy and Rita.
0:58:35 And that was a turning point in my life.
0:58:38 Yeah, that would be very satisfying.
0:58:40 Thank you, Rita.
0:58:41 Take care.
0:58:42 You too.
0:58:42 Thanks very much.
0:58:48 This is Remarkable People.