0:00:03 It’s valid that you want to protect them, but is helicoptering protecting them?
0:00:06 No, because they’re not developing the skills they need to do it themselves.
0:00:11 So what you need to do is be able to step back and let them fall.
0:00:18 You have to trust in the wisdom that growth happens through quote-unquote failure, that
0:00:22 when you try and protect your kids from failure, you’re ultimately protecting them from growth.
0:00:27 I’m Guy Kawasaki.
0:00:31 This is the Remarkable People Podcast, and today is a special edition.
0:00:34 We’re coming to you from Honolulu, Hawaii.
0:00:38 So what you see behind me is not a virtual background.
0:00:39 That’s a real background.
0:00:41 That is Waikiki.
0:00:43 I’m near Diamond Head.
0:00:46 I’m looking towards Waikiki the other way.
0:00:48 Usually Diamond Head is that way.
0:00:50 Queen Surf is that way.
0:00:54 So I’m not here to be the Hawaii Visitors Bureau.
0:01:00 I’m here to help you be remarkable, and we have found a very remarkable person.
0:01:02 She is in California right now.
0:01:09 If I were in California right now, we’d be only about 20 miles apart, but now we’re 2,500 miles apart.
0:01:12 So our guest is Caroline Fleck.
0:01:17 And I got to tell you, her book is the most interesting.
0:01:22 And I have to tell you, Caroline, I felt convicted in your book many, many times.
0:01:27 And yeah, I feel like I’m a bad parent, bad spouse, bad everything.
0:01:28 So anyway.
0:01:28 No, no.
0:01:38 So Caroline is a clinical psychologist, and her practice is really focused on emotional resilience and communication.
0:01:43 And she kind of bridges psychology and real-world challenges.
0:01:47 And she’s very famous for this concept called validation.
0:01:49 So that’s what we’re going to talk about.
0:01:50 Okay, Caroline?
0:01:52 Yeah, I got to tell you.
0:01:59 So, you know, first of all, I often go off the rails when I start a podcast, and that’s going to be true today.
0:02:03 So I have to tell you, there’s one sentence in your book.
0:02:07 When I read it, I stopped.
0:02:09 I was reading the PDF.
0:02:11 I selected it.
0:02:12 I quoted it.
0:02:13 I put it in my notes.
0:02:18 And you will not guess what quote I took, but I love this sentence.
0:02:23 I’ve never read a sentence like this in a business book, and I have to read 52 books a year.
0:02:24 Oh, my God.
0:02:31 The quote is, an anecdote isn’t a substitute for scientific evidence.
0:02:32 Oh, my God.
0:02:33 Oh, my gosh.
0:02:37 Basically, you just indicted every nonfiction writer.
0:02:39 My God, especially business book.
0:02:43 Malcolm Gladwell is turning over in his grave right now.
0:02:45 Oh, I love that.
0:02:46 I appreciate it.
0:02:50 And then we’re just going to fanboy out a little bit for a while.
0:02:50 Let’s do it.
0:03:00 So then I come to the end of your book, and I have to say that I think your epilogue is the best epilogue I have ever written a book.
0:03:02 Oh, my gosh.
0:03:05 I hope I don’t get in trouble with Madison for saying this.
0:03:10 And it starts with the sentence, I have no boobs.
0:03:11 And I read that.
0:03:15 I said, you know, that is not a typical epilogue start.
0:03:18 And then you go in to discuss cancer and all.
0:03:20 I’m like, wow, what a powerful epilogue.
0:03:21 Anyway.
0:03:23 Oh, my gosh.
0:03:24 You are so kind.
0:03:25 Thank you.
0:03:28 And thank you for reading the epilogue, actually.
0:03:32 Because a lot of people, they don’t even finish the book, much less read epilogues these days.
0:03:33 So I appreciate it.
0:03:39 I loved in the middle of the book where you said something like, well, if you’ve gone this far, I really thank you.
0:03:44 And you don’t have to read the rest of the book because you probably read more than most people ever read in a book.
0:03:47 I looked at that and said, that’s probably true.
0:03:53 I’m going to put that line in my next book because one of the key skills you talk about is copying.
0:03:56 And I know how to copy people.
0:03:57 I work for Steve Jobs.
0:03:59 If anything, I learned what to steal.
0:04:02 And that is a concept worth stealing.
0:04:04 Oh, I love that.
0:04:05 I love that.
0:04:06 What to steal.
0:04:09 I hadn’t thought about copying in those terms, but you’re exactly right.
0:04:10 It is.
0:04:18 Well, I think there’s a very famous Picasso quote, something along the lines that real artists steal or something like that.
0:04:18 Yes, yes, yes.
0:04:19 I know what you’re saying.
0:04:19 I know.
0:04:21 And it rang true to me as well.
0:04:25 Thank God for Xerox Park is all I can say.
0:04:29 So listen, let’s just start off really basically.
0:04:33 Could you just explain what is validation?
0:04:36 And I don’t mean for your parking ticket at the restaurant or the hotel.
0:04:40 What is validation to a clinical psychologist like you?
0:04:52 Validation is simply a way of communicating that you’re there, you get it, and you care, and that you accept the other person non-judgmentally.
0:04:57 It’s the feeling of feeling seen or feeling heard.
0:05:04 When we have that experience, what we are experiencing, according to clinical psychologists like myself, is validation.
0:05:06 We feel validated.
0:05:09 We feel like somebody sees us.
0:05:11 They understand us.
0:05:16 They see the rationality not just in our thoughts, but also in our emotions.
0:05:23 And it’s probably that latter part, seeing the rationality in our emotions, that really does something for us.
0:05:28 Now, are you telling me that everybody’s feelings are valid?
0:05:32 Are there not cases that you shouldn’t validate them?
0:05:35 Leave that to the psychologists.
0:05:47 And I mean that so seriously because, and this is serious, the effects of invalidation on children, on adults, on everybody, it’s devastating.
0:05:59 So coming from an environment in which a child, for instance, was exposed to pervasive invalidation, meaning when they said they felt sad, the parents said, walk it off, right?
0:06:02 If they were frustrated, it’s your being a baby.
0:06:06 Basically, whatever emotion they expressed was dismissed or criticized.
0:06:15 That type of invalidation leads to some of the most serious types of psychopathology or psychological disorders that we know of.
0:06:17 So it’s not small stuff.
0:06:22 And so if you don’t understand where someone’s coming from, you can disagree with their thoughts.
0:06:24 You can argue with their reasoning.
0:06:29 Just don’t be in the business of telling people that they don’t feel what they’re telling you they feel.
0:06:31 A psychologist can unpack that.
0:06:32 You just focus on something else.
0:06:37 You haven’t been talking to my children, have you?
0:06:41 Well, yeah.
0:06:41 Okay.
0:06:47 So just give me like a definition of what are the qualities of what’s valid.
0:06:50 You raise a good point, which is, is everything valid?
0:06:57 As psychologists, when I’m working with patients, I need to form a relationship and I need to do that quickly.
0:07:02 And the quickest, swiftest way to form a relationship is through validation.
0:07:03 Okay.
0:07:04 It’s by validating them in some way.
0:07:07 And I’ve got three things I could validate.
0:07:11 I could validate their thoughts, their emotions, or their behavior.
0:07:12 Okay.
0:07:14 Thoughts are valid if they’re logical.
0:07:16 Behavior is valid if it’s effective.
0:07:19 Emotions are valid if they fit the situation.
0:07:20 All right.
0:07:23 But you only need to focus on one of those.
0:07:24 Does that make sense?
0:07:25 It does.
0:07:28 But let’s hypothetically say…
0:07:28 Do it.
0:07:28 Do it.
0:07:29 Yeah.
0:07:34 Let’s hypothetically say a politician shows up in your office and says,
0:07:39 I believe it’s Jewish space lasers that’s controlling the weather.
0:07:41 Are you going to validate that?
0:07:42 No, I’m not.
0:07:43 Those thoughts are not valid.
0:07:51 However, if they say to me, and I am terrified about the implications of that, I want to get
0:07:57 out and raise as much money and get as much support as I can to protect us from this manipulation,
0:08:02 that emotion, I understand that emotion based on what they’re thinking.
0:08:09 The thoughts are not valid, but the emotion makes sense in light of what they’re thinking.
0:08:14 That is my whole job, both as a clinical psychologist, working with folks who have
0:08:19 thought disorders and all sorts of things, and frankly, as a parent to a young kid, a lot
0:08:21 of what they’re saying, I’m like, that’s not rational.
0:08:22 That does not quite make sense.
0:08:25 And yet her emotion is real, right?
0:08:28 I don’t need to validate the thought to speak to the emotion.
0:08:30 And this is the critical thing.
0:08:38 You stand no chance of changing someone’s opinion, of getting through to them, of challenging
0:08:42 their assumptions if they don’t feel accepted by you.
0:08:52 So, are you telling me that validation is not at all the same thing as agreement?
0:08:54 It is not.
0:08:57 I’m so glad you flagged this because this is where folks get stuck.
0:08:58 We’re afraid.
0:09:00 Well, I don’t want to say that I agree, right?
0:09:01 I don’t agree.
0:09:02 I’ll give you an example.
0:09:07 I’m a vegetarian for animal, ethical, and environmental reasons.
0:09:13 That said, I see a lot of valid reasons why somebody would choose to eat meat, okay?
0:09:14 I don’t agree with them.
0:09:16 I make a different decision.
0:09:22 But if I just wanted to validate what’s logical there, there’s tons that I could focus on.
0:09:26 Now, if I wanted to try and change their opinion or change their position, I could come at that a
0:09:33 different way, but I don’t have to agree with someone to see the facts that they’re building
0:09:37 off of and to see the logic in what they’re saying, presuming it’s there.
0:09:42 In the case of the politician that you described, the logic wasn’t there, and so I couldn’t validate
0:09:42 that.
0:09:44 But this is the game.
0:09:46 It’s trying to find the kernel of truth.
0:09:52 What’s valid in this person’s perspective and zoning in on that first, rather than what
0:09:57 do I disagree with and let me hammer that over and over again until I get through to them.
0:10:04 So I’m going to ask you to tell the story, which was my favorite story of the whole book,
0:10:06 because I felt convicted.
0:10:10 I’ve done things like this, of Havana and the tick.
0:10:11 Can you please tell that?
0:10:13 That is a great story.
0:10:16 Every parent will be able to relate to Havana and the tick.
0:10:19 Havana is my daughter.
0:10:22 She’s 11 now, but I think she was maybe seven.
0:10:24 And we were going on a hike, all right?
0:10:27 And I was very excited going down to one of my favorite places to hike.
0:10:29 And it’s a drive.
0:10:31 It’s like 30, 40 minutes.
0:10:35 And we get there and Havana is in a mood, right?
0:10:39 Like, you know that feeling when you open, like one of your kids is off and it’s just like
0:10:43 the entire afternoon hangs in the balance, like which way is this going to go?
0:10:46 And she was feeling a little carsick and she was crabby.
0:10:50 And so we start hiking and she’s kind of dragging, but she’s doing it.
0:10:51 We’re not even five minutes in.
0:10:54 And she screams like she has been shot.
0:10:55 Okay.
0:11:00 And she says, oh my gosh, this tree, mom, it stabbed me.
0:11:02 And I kind of, I’m like, where?
0:11:03 She lifts up her shirt.
0:11:04 I don’t see anything.
0:11:05 I’m like, let’s keep going.
0:11:07 You know, come on, come on.
0:11:09 And that’s it.
0:11:11 Like the trip is over from that point for her, right?
0:11:14 Every five minutes she needs to stop to rest her back.
0:11:16 And she wants us to carry her.
0:11:19 And I find myself being like, we got to keep going.
0:11:20 Come on, come on.
0:11:21 I don’t want to reinforce this.
0:11:24 I don’t want to just give into this.
0:11:25 I’m a behaviorist.
0:11:26 I understand how this works.
0:11:28 And then, oh golly.
0:11:29 Oh boy.
0:11:33 We get home and she’s still complaining about her back.
0:11:35 So she goes to get in the shower.
0:11:36 I’m helping her get in the shower.
0:11:38 She says, it hurts too much to lift my arm.
0:11:40 And I’m like, oh my golly.
0:11:47 I lift off her shirt and I see she has this huge tick lodged in her back.
0:11:51 I actually had a picture of it that I was going to include in the book, but it was too grainy
0:11:54 because it looks so gnarly.
0:11:55 Okay.
0:12:02 And all of a sudden I realized that the emotion, the frustration, the pain that she
0:12:04 was describing was valid.
0:12:11 And I had spent the last however many hours invalidating her with, we can’t be overdramatic.
0:12:15 If you’re upset, you can use your words, but like all the traditional parenting stuff.
0:12:19 And I just had this moment of like, well, I stepped in that one.
0:12:27 Well, in a sense, I’m glad to hear that even a clinical psychologist, an expert like you
0:12:28 blows it.
0:12:30 Oh, that’s, that’s the whole name of the game, right?
0:12:35 I mean, it, but it really is about, as you describe in your book, that growth mindset that
0:12:37 I can do better.
0:12:43 I think it’s critical to look at skills like validation as skills.
0:12:45 You develop them over time.
0:12:50 You grow into them through practice, through exposure and through understanding.
0:12:53 And so, yes, please go screw it up.
0:12:55 That’s the whole point.
0:12:56 That’s the only way you learn.
0:13:04 Now you draw a very clear dichotomy between validation and problem solving.
0:13:05 Yeah.
0:13:09 So let’s explore the relationship between those two things.
0:13:11 We’ve talked about validation.
0:13:17 Is validation now a precursor to problem solving, or is it a substitute for problem solving?
0:13:20 Or is it a foundation for problem solving?
0:13:22 Oh my gosh.
0:13:26 The relationship between the two is almost like a, a Zen cone.
0:13:30 If you try and validate someone, a Zen cone, like a riddle.
0:13:33 I know what a, I know what a shave ice cone is.
0:13:35 I don’t know what is a Zen cone.
0:13:36 It’s like a riddle.
0:13:43 And it seems like two things don’t go together, but to figure out the riddle, you have to understand
0:13:46 how they can coexist, but it doesn’t make sense because they seem kind of diametrically
0:13:47 opposed.
0:13:55 And at the core of this is the idea that acceptance, accepting someone is actually critical to helping
0:13:56 them change.
0:13:58 And so how is that?
0:14:01 I mean, if you accept someone, you can’t also want them to change.
0:14:02 That doesn’t work.
0:14:04 And yet it, it does.
0:14:12 So problem solving, problem solving is an attempt to change how someone feels, how they’re reacting,
0:14:14 whatever outcome they had.
0:14:16 It comes from a good place.
0:14:17 Our kid comes home.
0:14:18 They didn’t do well on their quiz.
0:14:20 They’re so upset.
0:14:22 We jump in with, it’s okay, right?
0:14:23 It’s not that big a deal.
0:14:28 Which is a subtle attempt to change how they feel.
0:14:32 I’m challenging their thoughts in that moment.
0:14:33 I’m trying to reframe it.
0:14:38 I could then come at it and say, next time, let’s just review your words on the drive into
0:14:38 school.
0:14:44 There I am trying to problem solve or change their behavior so that we get a different outcome
0:14:45 next time.
0:14:48 That is all change focused.
0:14:52 It’s very different from saying, ah, you must be devastated.
0:14:58 When I was your age, I failed a math quiz and I remember crying in the bathroom at school.
0:14:59 I was so upset.
0:15:01 And my mom had to come pick me up.
0:15:03 And right, really just leaning into that.
0:15:06 That is a very different response.
0:15:13 And usually, and I can say this with some authority, as someone who speaks to people day in and day
0:15:14 out about their problems.
0:15:20 When folks come to us with an issue, they are seeking validation and not problem solving.
0:15:22 At least initially.
0:15:28 They need to trust that we understand if they’re going to listen to us down the line anyway.
0:15:29 Right?
0:15:33 Like, I don’t take the advice of people if I don’t think they understand the situation or can
0:15:34 relate to where I’m at.
0:15:36 So where do you draw the line?
0:15:37 Okay.
0:15:39 So I understand the validation part.
0:15:40 You had a bad quiz.
0:15:41 I understand.
0:15:42 I had the same thing.
0:15:45 You know, you’re attending, you’re copying.
0:15:46 Yes.
0:15:47 I got the whole acronym.
0:15:50 I got all eight stages right.
0:15:51 Okay.
0:15:54 So you attend, you copy, you do all that.
0:16:01 But then after you do all that, then do you suggest ways to study for the next quiz or you
0:16:03 just lay off that completely?
0:16:04 It depends.
0:16:06 It’s the most frustrating answer in the world.
0:16:08 It depends for several reasons.
0:16:16 The first of which is that if you do this well, you will be surprised by the other person’s
0:16:20 ability, oftentimes, to come up with solutions themselves.
0:16:21 All right.
0:16:25 So you’re all ready with your arsenal of things that you think they should do.
0:16:31 But just in feeling accepted or understood, as they start to talk it out, they often, not
0:16:33 always, but there are times when they get there themselves.
0:16:39 If not, then I have to decide, is this the right moment?
0:16:42 So we’re really eager to get that problem solving in there.
0:16:49 But sometimes, in the example with the spelling test, it’s fine to just let that sit.
0:16:53 I can circle back the next day and talk about study strategies.
0:16:55 I don’t need to do it right then.
0:16:59 So it’s just, I know I need to get there.
0:17:04 It’s about being intentional and focusing on being effective rather than just getting it
0:17:05 out there.
0:17:08 There’s no point in getting out your great ideas if they’re not going to be received.
0:17:10 It’s just, it doesn’t matter.
0:17:14 Did you just put every tutor out of business?
0:17:18 No, because tutors are hired for problem solving, right?
0:17:20 That’s what they’re asked to do.
0:17:21 It’s very clear.
0:17:26 But when someone comes to you for support, they’re not necessarily asking for you to solve
0:17:29 whatever it is they’re dealing with.
0:17:33 They might just want to hear, yeah, it’s really hard raising teenagers, right?
0:17:36 Not, you need to validate your kids more if you want them to, right?
0:17:44 If you were a high school tutor and you started off with validation, you would become a better
0:17:46 tutor in general, wouldn’t you?
0:17:47 I think so, yeah, I do.
0:17:54 I think, this is a weird language perhaps to use in the context of tutoring, but validation
0:17:56 is really at the core of relationships.
0:18:02 It is what it means to feel loved in a sense, right?
0:18:03 Because it communicates acceptance.
0:18:08 And if we don’t feel accepted, it’s hard to feel loved.
0:18:14 And I think that’s a really, really critical point that we confuse or lose in the shuffle.
0:18:18 That acceptance is critical in that sense.
0:18:23 As soon as this recording ends, I’m going to start validating Madison.
0:18:25 I’m going to practice on Madison.
0:18:26 So I get good at validating.
0:18:29 Then I’m going to go to my kids and my family.
0:18:31 Oh, just do it all.
0:18:32 Do it all at once.
0:18:33 Don’t hold back.
0:18:34 Don’t hold back at all.
0:18:54 So have you noticed a difference in validation skills by gender?
0:18:54 Wow.
0:18:56 What a great question.
0:19:02 So in my book, I talk, there’s, you know, about eight different validation skills that
0:19:03 we as therapists are trained in.
0:19:04 We learn these skills.
0:19:09 We have to master them so that we can go out and validate our clients and
0:19:14 establish a therapeutic alliance and trust and everything else.
0:19:18 Of these eight skills, one of them is called taking action.
0:19:22 And it’s weird because it sounds a little bit like problem solving in that it has you
0:19:25 intervene, go in there and do something, right?
0:19:29 If somebody got a flat tire and they call you and they say, I’m on the side of the road.
0:19:33 And you say, oh my gosh, you must be so upset and worried, right?
0:19:34 They can validate all day long.
0:19:39 But if they don’t take action and come and get you, you’re not going to feel like they really
0:19:40 appreciate the situation.
0:19:46 And my hypothesis, I don’t know if I ever formulated it in this way, but I always assumed
0:19:51 that men would be more receptive to taking action.
0:19:56 In other words, that they would be seeking taking action more from their partners, perhaps,
0:20:00 as opposed to like emotional or verbal types of validation.
0:20:03 And that has not proven to be true.
0:20:09 On the contrary, I’ve just, and this is just, again, anecdotal from my clinical work.
0:20:10 I’ve observed.
0:20:16 Wait, you said anecdotes is not a substitute for scientific.
0:20:18 It’s true.
0:20:21 And if we had data on it, I would refer to that data.
0:20:24 In the absence of it, I will just give my anecdotes.
0:20:27 And that did surprise me.
0:20:33 And so in my work with couples, it’s often about helping them figure out what it is they’re
0:20:39 actually seeking, what actually helps them feel seen and heard, because it’s not often what
0:20:40 the other person would expect.
0:20:46 And have you also noticed differences for validation by culture?
0:20:50 Are there different cultures that validate more or validate less?
0:20:54 There’s huge differences in the extent to which we validate emotions.
0:20:59 And even within American culture, there’s been somewhat of a revolution, right?
0:21:04 We didn’t talk about emotions forever, much less validate them, or make an effort to really
0:21:06 go out of our way to validate them.
0:21:09 So I think there are differences.
0:21:16 The most meaningful thing, however, is within your culture, is if you are receiving
0:21:23 more or less validation than is typical of, say, a child in that culture, if that makes sense.
0:21:30 In the same way that we see punishment, different types of punishment may be perceived as more
0:21:37 damaging, more abusive to a child who is being raised outside of a culture or raised in a country
0:21:41 where the cultural practices do not apply in the same way.
0:21:45 And so they feel more targeted, if that makes sense.
0:21:46 Yes, it does.
0:21:49 Okay, so the last variable is age.
0:21:54 As you get older, do you get more able to validate people?
0:21:56 Oh, do you get better at it?
0:21:57 That’s interesting.
0:22:00 I thought you were going to ask, do different ages require different types of validation?
0:22:02 Well, that’s a good question too, yeah.
0:22:04 Just to validate your question.
0:22:11 That one, I think you know the answer to, because you have four kids.
0:22:13 Depends how you define adolescence.
0:22:15 Out of adolescence or in adolescence?
0:22:18 Depends how you define adolescence.
0:22:19 Adolescence, that’s right.
0:22:27 Well, I’m sure you notice that when your kids are younger, they just want all sorts of, I see how hard you tried.
0:22:30 All of that type of like warm, fuzzy, right?
0:22:32 You really worked hard on that.
0:22:39 If you try that with a 15-year-old, right, they are going to just squirm inside.
0:22:41 They are not feeling validated.
0:22:43 They are feeling annoyed.
0:22:51 And so as they get older, they need much less in the form of that like, I see you type of stuff.
0:22:53 Because they don’t really want to be seen.
0:22:55 They want to be respected, right?
0:23:05 And so validating their thoughts or their rationale goes a lot further than going in with the like, I see your effort there.
0:23:06 I see what you did.
0:23:11 And then they kind of move back out of that into adulthood a little bit and become more balanced.
0:23:15 Do we get better at validation as we get older?
0:23:17 It really depends.
0:23:19 It depends on what is modeled for you.
0:23:30 And I say this because we know, as I said, with folks who are exposed to chronic invalidation and then have different disorders where they end up in treatment,
0:23:39 one of my jobs as a psychologist is to teach them how to validate themselves and others because it was not modeled for them.
0:23:44 And validation is very much like a language.
0:23:51 It is a language we should be teaching kids at a young age because they pick it up so fast.
0:23:59 It is fascinating to me trying to teach a 10-year-old versus a 20-year-old how to validate themselves or another person.
0:24:02 The 10-year-old picks it up.
0:24:05 The 20-year-old, it takes two, three times as long.
0:24:09 They don’t develop that language capacity in the same way.
0:24:12 Your practice is in Silicon Valley.
0:24:17 And we can edit this answer out.
0:24:27 But do you look at these, what has been labeled the nerd Reich, do you look at these nerd Rikers, these tech bro billionaires?
0:24:30 They are the richest people in the world.
0:24:31 They have everything.
0:24:32 They have wealth.
0:24:33 They have power.
0:24:34 They have visibility.
0:24:35 They have everything.
0:24:44 And yet they seem to be primarily concerned with long-term capital gains rates and, you know, making crypto successful.
0:24:50 Why aren’t they taking the high road and helping society instead of just trying to make more money?
0:24:57 Do you think it’s because they weren’t validated when they’re young or, you know, am I just trying to criticize these shitbags?
0:25:02 Yeah, yeah, yeah, and there are so many shitbags, let’s just be clear, in Silicon Valley.
0:25:06 I think, again, we search for validation in different ways.
0:25:13 And I think that money is a sense that we are valued and that we are valuable.
0:25:20 And once you’ve had that hit, right, that little dopamine hit of, ooh, I’m valuable.
0:25:21 People see my worth.
0:25:23 You continue to seek it out in those ways.
0:25:30 But as you will see, it’s an insatiable thirst because you’re not actually giving yourself water.
0:25:32 It’s like coffee, right?
0:25:33 It dehydrates you more.
0:25:42 And so they’re actually seeking validation, acceptance through the wrong sources.
0:25:48 And therefore, they consume more and try and get more and more because it just keeps dehydrating them.
0:25:55 So is there a fine line between too much and too little seeking external validation?
0:25:59 I mean, I would think it’s healthy to seek external validation.
0:26:02 It’s kind of reinforcing its feedback.
0:26:08 On the other hand, I would say that maybe our current president is just obsessed with external validation.
0:26:12 So where’s the fine line between too much and too little?
0:26:15 How can you tell if you’re trying to get it too much?
0:26:16 Good question.
0:26:19 We talked about the difference between validation and agreeing, right?
0:26:21 I said it’s not the same as agreeing.
0:26:24 It’s also not the same as praise.
0:26:27 Praise is a positive judgment.
0:26:29 It’s positive, but it’s a judgment nonetheless.
0:26:31 It says, good job.
0:26:32 You’re great.
0:26:35 It’s a heart emoji on Instagram, right?
0:26:38 And it reinforces facades.
0:26:45 It reinforces us for exceeding expectations and tweaking ourselves and filtering ourselves, right?
0:26:49 To be seen as better than, to get that positive.
0:26:51 Validation is about acceptance.
0:26:56 It says, I accept you independent of how you look or perform.
0:27:03 So when people say we shouldn’t rely too much on external validation, they’re really talking about praise.
0:27:05 Praise can be good, right?
0:27:08 You need that feedback as you were describing in some ways.
0:27:12 But if you build your life around it, it’s hollow, right?
0:27:17 Because you will have to distort yourself to continue to get it, right?
0:27:21 You have to just keep putting yourself out there and pushing and pushing and pushing.
0:27:24 There is no sense that you’re accepted just as you are.
0:27:34 So radically, I would say, no, there is no amount of external acceptance that is too much.
0:27:37 That has not been my observation.
0:27:45 The more accepted we feel, the greater the sense of belonging, the more we flourish.
0:27:52 That has been consistently my observation, and it is what the evidence supports.
0:27:54 Again, I can’t say that for praise.
0:27:58 If you go around chasing praise your whole life, it’s going to get Trumpy and very quickly.
0:27:59 Okay.
0:28:00 Yeah.
0:28:08 Now, what happens if validation doesn’t necessarily address the underlying causes of issues?
0:28:14 Are you saying that validation puts you on the path to address the underlying causes?
0:28:15 That is right.
0:28:16 That is right.
0:28:22 So in my line of work, I work with folks who have severe behavioral issues, folks who
0:28:25 are suicidal, folks who are hurting other people.
0:28:30 I need to change that quickly, right?
0:28:33 It’s not like, oh, I just hope I go in there and I accept them and everything.
0:28:36 Like, I need to make sure that that behavior changes.
0:28:39 And so acceptance is a piece.
0:28:40 It is a piece of that puzzle.
0:28:42 It puts me on the right track.
0:28:49 It opens the door for collaboration and feedback so that when I do give advice or skills training
0:28:53 or whatever it may be, the other person listens to me.
0:28:57 That is, at least in a therapeutic sense, that’s kind of the name of the game.
0:29:05 But is there no role for friction and conflict and struggle and, you know, shame and healthy
0:29:05 development?
0:29:11 To put it in parental term, what if you’re a helicopter parent or a lawnmower parent?
0:29:12 I’m a lawnmower parent.
0:29:13 Are we defeating ourselves?
0:29:14 How so?
0:29:21 Well, I mean, if we are helicopter parents or lawnmower parents and we always are in problem
0:29:22 solving mode.
0:29:25 how does a person become their own problem solver?
0:29:27 How do you become your own problem solver?
0:29:28 No.
0:29:33 How does my kids or, you know, people who work for me solve their own problems?
0:29:34 Yeah.
0:29:36 You need to back off of the problem solving.
0:29:40 That’s 100%.
0:29:40 It’s problematic.
0:29:42 Absolutely.
0:29:43 I would subscribe to that.
0:29:47 Now, the question is, the question, do you need feedback on that in order to get there?
0:29:53 I think your whole book was feedback, to tell you the truth.
0:30:00 I bet a lot of people listening to this podcast can relate to this concept of helicopter or lawnmower
0:30:01 parenting, right?
0:30:05 So, like, where’s the line?
0:30:05 Yeah.
0:30:09 I think, again, the emphasis is on effectiveness.
0:30:14 You had someone on your podcast recently that was talking about neurologically what happens
0:30:18 in a young person’s brain when they hear nagging.
0:30:24 And the short of it was that the parts of their brain that would actually be needed to take in that
0:30:28 feedback and do something with it shut down.
0:30:31 And just hearing that nagging, they shut down.
0:30:37 And that’s the point with the helicoptering is that at some point, your background noise, right?
0:30:39 You’re always in their face telling them what to do.
0:30:45 And they listen to you less over time, and they don’t develop the capacity to do it themselves.
0:30:46 So those are the costs.
0:30:48 We have to call them what they are.
0:30:52 Now, there are valid reasons you’re helicoptering.
0:30:54 And it’s important to see that as well.
0:31:00 You’re trying to keep your kids safe in a world that has become incredibly dangerous psychologically.
0:31:06 I think as parents, the world feels dangerous for our kids with social media and the internet
0:31:07 and all of these things.
0:31:10 The question is, what’s going to be most effective?
0:31:14 And the answer is that helicoptering is not it.
0:31:15 Okay.
0:31:17 Helicoptering is not it, but what is it?
0:31:20 How would you define helicoptering?
0:31:21 Let’s break it down.
0:31:28 I would define helicoptering as always hovering over your kid and making sure that it’s like
0:31:32 the golden dome of parenting that no missiles get through.
0:31:34 Okay.
0:31:38 Does it include lecturing, in your opinion?
0:31:39 Lecturing the kids?
0:31:40 Or is that separate?
0:31:49 I would say it unavoidable because every time you fire an anti-missile missile, it’s a lecture.
0:31:49 Okay.
0:31:51 Again, I will reiterate.
0:31:53 It’s valid that you want to protect them.
0:31:55 But is helicoptering protecting them?
0:31:58 No, because they’re not developing the skills they need to do it themselves.
0:32:03 So what you need to do is be able to step back and let them fall.
0:32:09 You have to trust in the wisdom that growth happens through, quote unquote, failure.
0:32:14 That when you try and protect your kids from failure, you’re ultimately protecting them
0:32:14 from growth.
0:32:22 Once you accept that, that is the mantra you have to return to again and again to come out
0:32:23 of that helicoptering mode.
0:32:26 Now, does that mean no oversight whatsoever?
0:32:27 No, of course not.
0:32:31 But it means challenging yourself because when we get into a mode like helicoptering, it’s become
0:32:32 default.
0:32:34 We’re not thinking, is this effective?
0:32:35 It’s just what we do.
0:32:36 They ask, can I go out?
0:32:37 No, no, no.
0:32:40 Not unless so-and-so goes with you and like all these other things.
0:32:41 Just stop.
0:32:43 Is this a moment where I could loosen up?
0:32:45 What’s the worst that could happen here?
0:32:54 Okay, now that we solved all the parenting issues, let’s move on to self-validation.
0:32:56 How does one self-validate?
0:32:58 Yeah, such a great question.
0:33:00 We don’t learn this, do we?
0:33:04 This is something that really, really strikes me.
0:33:09 Working with folks as an executive coach, you’ve got these, like you said, tech billionaires,
0:33:10 right?
0:33:12 To folks struggling with severe psychopathology.
0:33:17 And what I see across the spectrum, honestly, I have yet to have someone come into my office
0:33:24 who was really good at validating their own emotions, be it tech billionaire or person struggling
0:33:26 with bipolar disorder, right?
0:33:35 What we do instead is we tend to criticize ourselves and lash ourselves into doing better.
0:33:42 And this is incredibly problematic because we don’t trust our emotions.
0:33:55 We see shame or sadness as indications of failure, again, failure, rather than opportunities for compassion.
0:33:58 The belief that we should treat others the way we would want to be treated.
0:34:02 And I think actually the reverse is true.
0:34:07 We should treat ourselves the way we would treat somebody else who was struggling.
0:34:10 Wow, that’s interesting.
0:34:10 Right, though?
0:34:15 Because if someone was to come to you feeling deeply ashamed, you wouldn’t, like, twist the
0:34:20 knife and say a bunch of other things that they did that proved how worthless they were, right?
0:34:22 But that’s often what we do to ourselves.
0:34:28 We go through our history and collect all the supporting evidence as to why we suck and we’re
0:34:29 never going to X, Y, or Z.
0:34:31 But you would never do that to a friend.
0:34:33 That would seem cruel.
0:34:39 So one of the reasons, back to children, one of the reasons I am so adamant about validating
0:34:45 children is because I want them to develop the capacity to validate themselves.
0:34:51 That doesn’t mean that everything they think or do is correct, but it means that they should
0:34:53 be able to see the validity in what they’re feeling.
0:34:57 So I’ll often say it’s not okay to yell or scream or whatever.
0:34:58 It’s okay to be upset.
0:35:00 It’s okay to be angry.
0:35:01 It’s okay to be frustrated.
0:35:03 All right.
0:35:05 The behavioral expression is different from the emotion.
0:35:10 So being able to validate your own emotions, being able to see, why does it make sense
0:35:11 that I feel this way?
0:35:14 Up next on Remarkable People.
0:35:16 There’s some of this in what you do as well.
0:35:23 You’re trying to help the guest message, get that message across as effectively as possible.
0:35:26 And it’s reflected in how you listen and the questions you ask.
0:35:28 And that’s what we’re going for here.
0:35:31 It’s not about like, haha, I’m so much smarter than them.
0:35:34 These idiots, let me come in and do this better than they’re doing it.
0:35:39 No, it’s more just, you would ask questions differently if you were trying to flesh out
0:35:41 your understanding or their point.
0:35:51 Do you want to be more remarkable?
0:35:57 One way to do it is to spend three days with the boldest builders in business.
0:36:02 I’m Jeff Berman, host of Masters of Scale, inviting you to join us at this year’s Masters
0:36:05 of Scale Summit, October 7th to 9th in San Francisco.
0:36:12 You’ll hear from visionaries like Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya, celebrity chef David Chang, Patagonia’s
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0:36:24 That’s mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.
0:36:27 And Guy Kawasaki will be there too.
0:36:32 Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People.
0:36:37 It’s found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
0:36:42 Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:36:47 Let us get to the validation ladder.
0:36:53 I would like you to explain the validation ladder so that people have a sort of a framework to
0:36:55 understand your work.
0:36:56 So please explain the ladder.
0:36:57 Yeah.
0:37:00 So this is a collection of skills.
0:37:04 We’ve got eight different skills that you can use to validate someone.
0:37:07 These are basically just little communication tactics.
0:37:11 If you use this skill, it will convey some degree of validation.
0:37:15 And to understand this, it helps to break down validation.
0:37:21 I said it really quick at the beginning, but the key components are mindfulness, understanding,
0:37:22 and empathy.
0:37:23 All right.
0:37:28 You’re trying to convey those qualities in such a way that the person feels accepted.
0:37:30 And you’re like, how do you do that?
0:37:31 How do you do it in such a way that they feel?
0:37:33 This is how with these skills.
0:37:39 So the first set are just what we call mindfulness skills.
0:37:42 They’re just helping you project that mindful awareness.
0:37:43 All right.
0:37:56 If I am sitting across from, let’s say, Donald Trump, and he is, let’s just say, and he is, I’m just trying to picture myself debating this guy.
0:37:56 It would just be so.
0:37:58 I would honestly love it.
0:38:02 I feel like it would be the ultimate test of my validation skills here.
0:38:07 But he’s going to be saying, inevitably, a lot of stuff that I do not understand.
0:38:10 Not just don’t agree with, but logically do not understand.
0:38:14 And when that is the case, all I can do is be mindful.
0:38:15 Okay.
0:38:18 All I can do is attend or copy.
0:38:23 These are the two skills we have to be mindful and to show that we’re mindful.
0:38:26 And that’s a pretty low level of validation, you might think, right?
0:38:27 It’s just awareness.
0:38:29 But a couple of things there.
0:38:33 One, awareness is incredibly powerful.
0:38:38 Attention is one of the most reinforcing experiences that we can provide.
0:38:49 If we want to torture somebody in this country, the method we use is to deprive them of attention by putting them in solitary confinement, right?
0:38:56 When we remove attention, people struggle, and they struggle deeply, all right?
0:39:00 But now, like, negative attention doesn’t necessarily feel good, right?
0:39:04 The task is just to be just non-judgmentally aware.
0:39:08 And that’s what these two skills help us do, attending and copying.
0:39:15 I got the basics of attending about it’s contact, it’s proximity, it’s gesturing, and it’s nodding.
0:39:19 So I love all those things.
0:39:23 But what do you do in a virtual world where it’s Zoom?
0:39:26 This is such a great question.
0:39:36 Again, as a psychologist, someone who’s working with emotion and people every day, the pandemic was such an immediate and visceral.
0:39:39 It created this visceral sense of disconnection.
0:39:43 And I think we all experienced it over time.
0:39:46 As a psychologist, I got to tell you, it hit me right away.
0:39:50 Because these tools that I rely on to connect were taken away.
0:39:57 And if you’re Zooming or whatever the case may be, you have to just be more intentional about those cues.
0:40:04 For instance, I will make a point of leaning in and make it clear that I’m leaning in.
0:40:13 I will adjust my monitor so that my eyes are as close to the camera as possible, so that it’s as close to eye contact as possible.
0:40:17 You can see it in this interview, in the recording.
0:40:18 I do a lot of gesturing.
0:40:22 And I’m making a point of doing it up here, right?
0:40:25 I’m showing that I am engaged through those nonverbals.
0:40:27 But you have to be more intentional about them.
0:40:28 That’s the key.
0:40:31 The worst is to do the camera off.
0:40:33 You’re just listening or something and people can’t see.
0:40:34 That is like the absolute worst.
0:40:37 And yet, that is where many of us reside.
0:40:41 So with the nonverbals over virtual, you just have to be more intentional about it.
0:40:42 That’s all you can do.
0:40:51 You made a point, and I cannot remember which one of the eight skills it was affiliated with.
0:41:02 But I love this point, which is that you should find a way to help the other person make their point.
0:41:02 Oh, yeah.
0:41:06 So first of all, refresh my senile mind.
0:41:13 What is this concept of helping people be a better communicator by suggesting things?
0:41:15 What is that associated with?
0:41:17 So there’s two things at play there.
0:41:18 One of them is attending, okay?
0:41:20 So that’s that we were talking about.
0:41:21 You can use these nonverbals.
0:41:25 And then the other way to attend is in how you listen.
0:41:33 And it’s a little game that you play with yourself where you’re thinking as you’re listening, what’s this person’s point?
0:41:35 And like, why does it matter to them?
0:41:37 You’re streaming information, trying to figure that out.
0:41:43 And then, and this is critical, how could I do a better job of making this person’s point?
0:41:46 Again, not do I agree with it?
0:41:48 Not how could I defeat it or argue it?
0:41:49 What’s my rebuttal?
0:41:49 No.
0:41:53 It’s how could I articulate this better than they’re doing right now?
0:41:59 But isn’t that going to create hostility?
0:42:03 Who the hell is this person to tell me, you know, how to do this better?
0:42:04 Sure, sure.
0:42:05 At this point, you don’t tell them.
0:42:08 This just informs how you are listening.
0:42:16 And if you watch great late night show hosts, you will see that they are all playing some version of this game.
0:42:19 They are trying to get the best interview they can.
0:42:23 As a podcast host, I imagine you, there’s some of this in what you do as well.
0:42:30 You’re trying to help the guest message, get that message across as effectively as possible.
0:42:33 And it’s reflected in how you listen and the questions you ask.
0:42:35 And that’s what we’re going for here.
0:42:38 It’s not about like, haha, I’m so much smarter than them, these idiots.
0:42:41 Let me come in and do this better than they’re doing it.
0:42:47 No, it’s more just you would ask questions differently if you were trying to flesh out your understanding or their point.
0:42:54 I have to admit that I slightly misinterpreted this thought.
0:42:57 And then I said, okay, so this is a great thought.
0:43:03 What can I constructively offer Caroline about her book?
0:43:06 So I came up with some ideas.
0:43:09 But now that you tell me that, maybe I should just keep them to myself.
0:43:11 Oh, no, no, I want to hear them.
0:43:14 Okay.
0:43:19 Okay, so take this in a spirit of one author to another.
0:43:20 Oh, please.
0:43:23 Some slight changes that I would do.
0:43:24 Yeah.
0:43:25 Okay.
0:43:27 Positively.
0:43:29 I want to validate your great book.
0:43:29 I love you.
0:43:32 You wouldn’t be on this podcast if I didn’t like what you did.
0:43:37 So I have one idea.
0:43:40 In the back of your book, you have this appendix.
0:43:43 And this appendix lists like, you know, these are the eight skills.
0:43:44 This is a summation.
0:43:46 This is an example, right?
0:43:47 There’s a one-page appendix.
0:43:53 I think you should move that up into the first time you discuss the latter.
0:43:59 Because when I read about your latter, I have to admit, I had some mental fog.
0:44:04 I had to go back several times because it was like, she just said there’s eight things.
0:44:07 But then she’s talking about three things, mindfulness.
0:44:08 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:44:11 So I said, so is it the three or is it the eight?
0:44:12 The eight, right.
0:44:18 And it took me quite a while to figure out the three contain the eight.
0:44:23 The eight is divided into three sections of mindfulness, understanding, and empathy.
0:44:27 And those eight things add up to those three things.
0:44:28 So that took me a while to figure it out.
0:44:33 But your appendix, when I saw that appendix, I said, aha, now I get it.
0:44:39 This is such frustrating feedback because between you and me, this was such a fight.
0:44:41 Like, I agree.
0:44:44 I wanted that earlier in the book.
0:44:48 And the concern was that it would be too much content too soon.
0:44:51 I have to invalidate your editor or publisher.
0:44:53 They’re wrong about that.
0:44:55 Right, because you need to see it all.
0:45:00 Yeah, I mean, you need to understand the big picture that, you know, these three subsections
0:45:03 are made out of eight skills, add up to the latter.
0:45:05 I have one more comment.
0:45:11 I got to tell you, when I read this, I thought, this is the most interesting story.
0:45:13 This cannot possibly be true.
0:45:17 So I went to chat, GPT, and I asked this question.
0:45:19 And of course, it is true.
0:45:24 You say in your book that there’s a golden rule.
0:45:32 And the golden rule is that in a court case, a lawyer cannot suggest to the jury, put yourself
0:45:33 in this person’s place.
0:45:35 Isn’t that how you would react?
0:45:38 You cannot appeal to empathy.
0:45:40 It is illegal to do that.
0:45:41 And I read that.
0:45:43 I said, that cannot be true.
0:45:44 And it is true.
0:45:44 It’s true.
0:45:47 It is really, really true.
0:45:48 I had no idea.
0:45:49 So can you explain that?
0:45:51 Because that was shocking to me.
0:45:51 Yeah.
0:45:55 So this is getting at some of those understanding skills.
0:45:59 Like, how do you understand and connect with someone else’s experience?
0:46:02 And one of the things we’re always told is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes.
0:46:06 But really, that is quite effective.
0:46:11 It is a skill to be able to say, how would this feel to me?
0:46:14 Like, in that same way that we were talking about, do they need acceptance or problem solving?
0:46:15 Put yourself in the kid’s shoes.
0:46:18 What do they want to hear after getting a bad grade?
0:46:19 Do they want to hear how to study better?
0:46:23 Or do they want to hear, that sucks, right?
0:46:25 How awful, X, Y, or Z.
0:46:32 So when you do that, it immediately changes your perception of the experience.
0:46:38 And interestingly, it’s so effective in doing so that, yeah, you’re not allowed to do that
0:46:42 as a lawyer in appealing to the court.
0:46:48 You can’t ask jurors to think from that angle because it could make them empathize.
0:46:52 And that could influence their decision, right?
0:46:56 Isn’t the whole point to be tried by a jury of your peers?
0:46:58 I know, right, right?
0:47:05 But there seems to be this concern about objectivity being tainted by emotion.
0:47:08 I don’t know if I agree with that per se.
0:47:14 I think that’s part of the reasoning is the emotional logic that goes into it.
0:47:20 I see them as very equally important in making smart judgments and wisdom.
0:47:26 If you were a prosecuting attorney and you said, put yourself in the place, there’s three cops
0:47:27 holding you down.
0:47:29 One has his knee on your neck and you’re choking.
0:47:31 Put yourself in that place.
0:47:31 Yeah.
0:47:38 Or how about if you are an immigrant and you’ve been here 40 years, you’ve raised kids, three
0:47:39 of them are Marines.
0:47:42 And now you get arrested in Home Depot for what?
0:47:43 For what?
0:47:45 I mean, you pay your taxes.
0:47:46 You do everything, right?
0:47:46 Yeah.
0:47:51 Again, another really visceral, I don’t know why I keep coming back to kids on this podcast.
0:47:57 I’m not usually this kid focused, but I think of often tell parents, like, especially a big
0:48:05 guy, you’re 200 pounds yelling at somebody who is three feet tall.
0:48:08 Think about how that would feel.
0:48:13 Do that kind of perception shift and let that inform your reaction.
0:48:18 Because you may not feel like you’re being scary, but that’s terrifying.
0:48:24 We are at the one hour mark.
0:48:26 Oh, I can’t believe it.
0:48:32 Maybe I should change this podcast to the Remarkable Parenting Podcast.
0:48:32 I know.
0:48:35 I don’t know why I went so far in that direction.
0:48:37 No, I took you in that direction.
0:48:39 I wanted to go in that direction.
0:48:41 What else is more important than parenting?
0:48:41 I know.
0:48:42 Yes.
0:48:44 I’ve come to believe that more and more.
0:48:47 I have so much more faith in our children than in us.
0:48:49 I hate to say it.
0:48:52 Maybe I should interview Havana.
0:48:55 Havana, listen, your mom says she validates you all the time.
0:48:56 Is that true?
0:48:59 Does she problem solve for you, Havana?
0:49:01 Or does she let you figure everything out?
0:49:02 You know what Havana says?
0:49:05 She says, I know you’re validating me.
0:49:08 And it feels good, but I know what you’re doing.
0:49:12 She’ll say, it feels good, but I know what you’re doing.
0:49:21 She’s going to read this book someday and say, my God, Ma, couldn’t you have used the pseudonym or something?
0:49:22 Yes, exactly.
0:49:26 Okay, so I have one last question, and it’s about Havana.
0:49:28 Why Havana?
0:49:30 There must be a story.
0:49:36 You know, you didn’t call her Houston or Dallas or Mar-a-Lago or Los Angeles or Portland.
0:49:37 Why Havana?
0:49:39 Are you a socialist?
0:49:43 My mother fled communist Cuba, and she grew up in Havana.
0:49:52 And her middle name is after her grandmother on my husband’s side, and then her first name is after, not after my mom, but speaks to her experience, yeah.
0:49:55 You don’t meet many kids in Havana.
0:49:57 I know, and we’ve found one.
0:50:00 We have found one, and it’s like through Instagram or something.
0:50:04 And I feel just like such a kinship to this young child that I’ve never met.
0:50:08 All righty.
0:50:09 All righty, Caroline Fleck.
0:50:13 As you can tell, I really learned a lot from your book.
0:50:17 Now, we only did attending, really, and copying.
0:50:17 Yes.
0:50:19 And there are six more skills.
0:50:26 I really recommend this book, and I hate to tell you, Caroline, but I recommend that you start with the appendix.
0:50:30 If you start with the appendix, you will really understand.
0:50:31 Yeah.
0:50:32 I agree.
0:50:33 I support that.
0:50:36 So, read this book backwards.
0:50:39 Basically, what we’ve said is the appendix is good and the epilogue is great.
0:50:42 So, just start at the end and go backwards.
0:50:51 I’m all about the recency is more important than primacy or whatever the opposite is.
0:50:51 That is right.
0:50:52 That is right.
0:50:55 All right, Caroline Fleck.
0:51:05 Thank you so much for being on this podcast, and I think people listening to this and reading your book will have a very good tool to be remarkable.
0:51:08 So, thank you for coming on my podcast.
0:51:10 Thank you so much for having me.
0:51:11 This was an absolute blast.
0:51:15 I bet you say that and validate all the podcasters.
0:51:16 No, no.
0:51:18 Just you.
0:51:20 Yeah, I believe you.
0:51:25 Because, you know, I need validation so much.
0:51:27 We all do.
0:51:29 All righty.
0:51:38 So, now I want to validate the rest of the Remarkable People podcast staff, which is Madison Nisner, this ace producer and co-author.
0:51:43 Tessa Nisner, who are a researcher and co-producer, JFC.
0:51:46 And finally, sound designer, Shannon Hernandez.
0:51:49 That’s the Remarkable People team.
0:51:54 So, until next time, be remarkable and go out and validate somebody.
0:51:59 Actually, start by validating yourself and then go out and validate people.
0:52:04 This is Remarkable People.

0:00:04 If you read the emotion in the room, it tells you everything you need to know about a team.
0:00:12 I learned quite early that emotion is an indicator in teams. So later on when EI came out
0:00:17 and the focus was on developing emotionally intelligent people, just because you stack a
0:00:24 team with emotionally intelligent people doesn’t mean you get emotionally intelligent behavior.
0:00:31 And the reason for that is that the environment in a team makes a huge difference.
0:00:40 Hello, I’m Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast. We’re on a mission to make you
0:00:46 remarkable. And we found another person in New Hampshire. Her name is Vanessa Druskat,
0:00:52 and she’s an organizational psychologist and associate professor at the University of New
0:00:59 Hampshire. And believe it or not, she co-developed this whole foundational concept of emotionally
0:01:06 intelligent team. And that’s what we’re going to discuss today about trust and collaboration and
0:01:13 performance. And I dare say her research has influenced hundreds of thousands of people in
0:01:18 teams and thousands of organizations. So welcome to Remarkable People, Vanessa.
0:01:22 Thank you, Guy. I’m really happy to be here with you.
0:01:29 I’ve been on companies that had innovative teams. I’ve had companies that had well-performing teams
0:01:37 or whatever, but nobody ever said, Guy, that is an emotionally intelligent team you’re on. So just as a
0:01:44 basis, can you tell us what is an emotionally intelligent team? I kind of know what an emotionally
0:01:51 intelligent person is. Not that I am one, but I don’t understand the concept of a team like that.
0:01:58 You bet. So to do that, I’m going to have to back up a little bit and tell you that when I was in
0:02:02 graduate school interested in studying teams, I didn’t hear anything about emotion at all. This was
0:02:11 pre-emotional intelligence time, 1990s, early 1990s. And one of the things I learned when I reached out
0:02:19 to learn outside of academia is that if you read the emotion in the room, it tells you everything you
0:02:26 need to know about a team. So I took this two-year course at the National Training Laboratories on how
0:02:34 to facilitate teams, and that’s what they taught me. And so I learned quite early that emotion is an
0:02:41 indicator in team. So later on when EI came out and the focus was on developing emotionally intelligent
0:02:47 people, I knew enough about teams to know that just because you stack a team with emotionally intelligent
0:02:57 people doesn’t mean you get emotionally intelligent behavior. And the reason for that is that the
0:03:04 environment in a team makes a huge difference. And for example, it doesn’t matter how empathetic you are
0:03:10 or how much self-control you have, if you walk into a team and no one else is being empathetic
0:03:17 or people are being disrespectful, you’re not going to be very emotionally intelligent. Does that make sense?
0:03:26 Your empathy is just going to go out the window. And so skills and personality and attitudes tend not to be a
0:03:34 great predictor of behavior in complex teams. A far better predictor is the environment that you’re in
0:03:41 and the norms and routines and the way people behave around you. And so emotionally intelligent teams
0:03:48 build environments that lead to trust and psychological safety and they build relationships
0:03:54 and the positive constructive emotion leads to higher performance. And there’s much more in that,
0:04:03 but we can peel apart. Now, as I understand it, aren’t there nine norms that define an EI team?
0:04:10 Yes. I’m not going to ask you to explain all nine, but I know that they cluster into three different
0:04:16 groups. So can you just explain the clusters so people have an idea about what makes up a team?
0:04:21 Sure. So first, let me again back up for a second and tell you how I came up with those three clusters.
0:04:28 So I went on this quest to figure out what differentiated the truly highest performing teams
0:04:36 from average performing teams. My mentor in my doctoral program was the first person to talk about
0:04:44 competencies and competencies. And so competencies were defined as the behaviors that lead to performance,
0:04:50 the behaviors that differentiate the greatest performance. So I asked him to do that with me with teams.
0:04:54 So I went into many organizations. The first one was a manufacturing organization.
0:04:59 Another one that I can talk a lot about is the drug development teams at Johnson & Johnson.
0:05:06 And we singled out the top 10% performing teams. For example, Johnson & Johnson was heavily invested
0:05:11 in figuring out why is it that some of their drug development teams are so much better
0:05:19 than their average performers than others. And so we identified those top 10% and we interviewed them
0:05:25 and we surveyed them. And in other organizations, I videotaped teams, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway,
0:05:32 what I’ve found in 30 years of doing this kind of work is that there are three categories of behavior
0:05:41 that differentiate the top 10% from average. Okay. And these fall into the three categories. The first
0:05:48 category is about focusing on individuals, how we help one another succeed, but it’s really about
0:05:54 getting to know one another, giving one another feedback, figuring out what distinctive
0:06:02 capabilities you bring to the team and valuing those. So the first cluster is about the individuals and
0:06:07 about relationship development. The second cluster is something that I think you’re going to like
0:06:12 because I’ve heard you talk about the growth mindset quite a bit. The second cluster is really all about
0:06:20 learning and adapting and changing. And so in the second cluster, it’s how you assess yourself.
0:06:28 And again, these are norms. So this is part of the team’s culture. So their routines, habits. And so in
0:06:35 the great teams, they periodically, routinely step back and say, what could we be doing better? What’s going
0:06:40 well? What do we need to change? What’s coming down the pike? Have we heard from everyone? They make
0:06:45 sure that everyone has a sense of control over this conversation and input into the conversation.
0:06:49 So that’s the second cluster. I can talk more about that if you’re interested. But the third cluster is
0:06:57 about reaching outside the team for new ideas. This involves talking to your boss’s boss, to your clients,
0:07:02 your customers, to people in other industries who have information that can help you. And so this cluster
0:07:07 reminds you, it’s used by the high performers, because the high performers recognize they don’t
0:07:12 have all the information they need, and that there’s a lot of information out there that can make them
0:07:16 better. Again, they’re interested in that growth mindset. They’re interested in continuous improvement.
0:07:21 But it all begins with the first cluster, which is about understanding one another.
0:07:28 As I’m listening to this, I’m in Silicon Valley, and let’s just say we’re not the center of the humility
0:07:36 in the world. I think that people, when they hear about the first cluster, their first reaction is,
0:07:42 I don’t want some kind of touchy feely exercise about people explaining their background and where
0:07:47 they’re coming from. I just want to be in this meeting. Let’s figure out how to get sales higher.
0:07:52 Let’s figure out how to get rid of the low performers. Why are we doing all this touchy feely
0:07:57 getting to know each other? So maybe you can shoot down that skepticism.
0:08:07 Yeah, I can shoot that down in two ways. First, we now know that there are a set of social needs
0:08:14 that are activated when people enter groups. And the need that rules them all is one that we’re unaware
0:08:21 that we have, and it’s the need to belong. So let me define belonging for you. It means that first,
0:08:30 we’re genuinely accepted, known, understood, valued, and supported. Okay. That rises above
0:08:38 needs like a need for control, the need to feel valued, the needs for information, the need to be on the
0:08:44 in. It drives things like gossip, because we want to be on the in. We want to know what’s really going on around
0:08:51 here, because we want to maintain our status. Status essentially means you belong, means that you’re
0:08:58 secure. Now, this is a need we don’t know we have, but we certainly know when we don’t have it. And
0:09:06 that’s when we’re ignored or feel like we’re invisible, treated like we’re irrelevant. And that’s the kind of
0:09:14 behavior that will reduce participation and keep a team from being as creative as it could be.
0:09:20 So that’s one piece. One piece is that we’ve got these social needs. They are involuntary, Guy. This
0:09:25 is not a need that we can negotiate where you can tell me that I have it or I don’t. I actually have
0:09:34 an interesting list here, if I can find it, of how the need to belong or our reaction to feeling invisible
0:09:41 affects everyone, regardless of your attachment to your mother, regardless of your personality,
0:09:49 regardless of your social anxiety, regardless of any proclivity that you have, we all have it.
0:09:54 And we know this through neuroscience, and we know this through all kinds of things. So anyway,
0:09:57 that’s the first thing. I just want to plop that there. Hopefully, I’ve convinced you
0:10:02 slightly that that matters. I also want to draw your attention to a book that was written
0:10:07 about the Silicon Valley. It was about Bill Campbell. Are you familiar with Bill Campbell?
0:10:12 We overlapped at Apple, and yeah, I knew him well.
0:10:18 Okay. I read with great interest the book that Eric Schmidt and colleagues wrote about
0:10:24 Bill Campbell’s philosophy. And one of the things that he, at least you can tell me whether this is
0:10:29 true or not. I love that. Eric talked about how at the beginning of meetings, he would do something
0:10:35 called trip reports, where people would check in about where they’d been, what was on their mind,
0:10:42 this kind of thing. Trip report is how we get to know one another. That’s basically what it is.
0:10:50 I get to see how Guy thinks, what he’s noticing. I want you to think of a sports team or team of musicians
0:10:57 I love you. I love your example in the book about, I can’t never pronounce his first name.
0:11:04 I get to know one another’s proclivities. I love your example in the book about, I can’t never pronounce
0:11:09 his first name. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing that we see in the very best teams.
0:11:14 We see that they do that. They get to know what one another’s proclivities are, if you will.
0:11:22 I love your example in the book about, I can’t never pronounce his first name. It’s Chara is his last name,
0:11:24 the Boston Bruin defenseman.
0:11:26 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:11:32 And so you tell the story about how he stopped rookie hazing and all that, because basically,
0:11:38 he illustrates your concept of he wanted rookies to feel like they belong, right?
0:11:44 Yeah, yeah. He wanted everyone’s energy to come out in that locker room. He wanted everyone to feel
0:11:48 like him and he didn’t use the word belonging. Yeah, there are a lot of organizations where I won’t use
0:11:55 that word because it sounds so touchy-feely, but he wanted everyone in. He didn’t want status or experience
0:12:00 to override the way the rookies felt they needed their energy.
0:12:09 You use the word norm so frequently in your writing. Could you just back up and define what norm means?
0:12:15 Yes, absolutely. It’s a tough one because so many people have asked me to use a different word. I also
0:12:25 try to use the word habits or routines, but norms define normal behavior in this environment. So this is
0:12:32 how we do it here. So one example is when you walk into a meeting, do people greet one another?
0:12:36 Another norm is do you acknowledge people when you pass them in the hallway?
0:12:44 Do you look people in the eye? Do you pick up your phone during meetings and answer things? And here’s
0:12:49 more importantly, when do you pick up your phone? You certainly don’t pick it up when the boss is talking,
0:12:55 but who are you allowed to pick up the phone during their speech while they’re talking? Those are norms.
0:13:01 You’re either going to like this or not like this, but I’ve been called the Jane Goodall of teens. I know
0:13:06 Jane’s a friend of yours, so I don’t mean to insult her in any way, but it’s because I’ve spent so much
0:13:16 time observing team cultures. I go from team to team, teams doing the same task, and I look at the
0:13:24 different ways they interact. What’s normal? Teamwork is about interactions. It’s not about my interaction
0:13:31 with the boss. It’s about our interactions together. And the way team members treat one another and interact
0:13:37 together determines the level of motivation, how much people will speak, the kinds of things they’re
0:13:43 going to say. And if you don’t feel like you belong, then you have to do things that are going to get you
0:13:51 in, which basically means conform. And already we know that when you’re about to disagree with someone,
0:13:56 if you’re going to disagree with the boss or someone with status in the team, your brain sends you an
0:14:03 error message. Yes. So we used to think people just conformed. They would just say,
0:14:08 I think I’m just going to go along with the group. It’s not how it works. The way it works is your brain
0:14:14 wants you, and we can talk about evolution if you’re interested. I’m fascinated by how we’ve evolved to
0:14:22 live in tribes and clans and evolve to collaborate. It’s the collaborative clans that survive longer.
0:14:30 But anyway, we also learn to fit in. Kids learn that in high school, right? They have hormones
0:14:35 that kick in so that they’re interested in fitting in. They build those skills that they use for the
0:14:41 rest of their lives. You don’t want people in your teams behaving in ways to fit in. You want to check
0:14:47 that box, move it to the side, let them know they’re valued, and then encourage them to share their crazy
0:14:55 ideas. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes terrific sense. Now, can you tell me how are these norms
0:15:01 formed? Is it top down from the leader? Did Bill Campbell say, okay, everybody, we’re starting every
0:15:08 meeting with an update about a trip report. So now when you guys conduct meetings, you also start with
0:15:14 updates. So was it Bill Campbell in leadership, or is it more organic and from the bottoms and the
0:15:20 middles of a team? First of all, there’s norms in every team. There’s no such thing as a team without norms.
0:15:25 The question is whether or not they’re effective, whether or not they suit the environment and the
0:15:32 objectives of the team. Typically, we watch the formal and informal leaders, people with status in the team.
0:15:38 And I got to tell you from what I read about Bill Campbell, I never met him. He was instrumental in
0:15:46 creating these relational, high performance norms. So it’s not just about relationships and getting to
0:15:54 know one another. It’s about giving your best, putting the team first, and performing well. He would ask,
0:16:00 what’s getting in your way? Talk about a way of growth mindset. So anyway, those norms come from
0:16:07 the people who are in charge. Let me tell you a story, a great story about norms in high schools.
0:16:11 This is the kind of thing that captures my attention these days, because I’m constantly trying to figure
0:16:16 out how to explain the power of norms to people. Anyway, wonderful researcher named Elizabeth Pollack
0:16:23 at Princeton, decided to study bullying in middle schools and high schools in New York state. So she
0:16:28 went to 56 schools. And most schools, when they’re trying to stop bullying, what they do is they try to
0:16:34 teach empathy to kids. So in my kids’ school, they brought in these speakers, they made them sign things
0:16:39 that said they were going to be empathetic. Unfortunately, teaching people empathy and putting
0:16:45 them into a system that doesn’t value empathy, where the norms don’t support being empathetic,
0:16:52 doesn’t change behavior. So what Elizabeth Pollack did was she identified who were the influencers,
0:16:59 who were the popular kids. She pulled them out. She did some workshops with them around whether they
0:17:05 wanted bullying, and if they didn’t, to come up with messages that could change the norms. She put them
0:17:13 back in the school. These popular kids shared anti-bullying messages that changed the acceptability of mean
0:17:21 behavior in the school systems. It reduced by 30%. So this is exactly what we see in organizations. And I
0:17:29 can tell you more research done in organizations, including my own, that it’s the norms that predict
0:17:38 how much grit is shown. I know you’re a fan of grit. How much empathy is demonstrated. Whether the growth
0:17:44 mindset is in place is in place. It’s how we do it here. We are social animals. We look to the left,
0:17:52 we look to the right, we figure out what people with status are doing. And we do that too. Right? Unless
0:18:00 we’re encouraged to be ourselves. Okay? And if that’s the norm, that’s what we’ll do.
0:18:08 I’m not sure I got the answer. So are you saying it’s the Bill Campbell’s of the world? Or it’s the
0:18:14 team? Team leaders. It’s the team leaders are the people with status. And Bill Campbell was given that
0:18:18 power. Who’s got the power? Informal leaders, formal leaders are who we look to.
0:18:36 So I’m sitting here, I’m listening and I’m thinking, can you give me some quick diagnostic tips so that I
0:18:42 can assess whether my team is emotionally intelligent or not? It seems to me that should be pretty obvious,
0:18:51 but just in case. Sure, sure. Well, the first thing I would ask is, what’s the emotional context like in
0:18:57 your team? Are people leaning in? Or are they leaning out? In terms of emotion, we tend to lean in or really
0:19:02 tend to lean out. But then what I would do is I would assess your team. What’s working? What’s not
0:19:08 working? But the way we’re working together right now. In the book, I give a sort of a quick survey
0:19:13 that I use with a lot of team leaders. But we have an assessment that we use when we were studying teams
0:19:20 and organizations that ask about the norms. So are you listened to when you speak? Do we respect everyone
0:19:25 equally in this team? Do we stop and reflect on our performance and talk about what we could be doing
0:19:33 better? So we ask about the nine norms in our model, and we look at the level that’s currently being
0:19:39 displayed. We don’t just look at the mean. We look at the range, okay? Because typically what we find is
0:19:45 that if you’ve got status, you think everything’s golden. If you don’t, then you’re at a lower level
0:19:52 of whether or not people are actually heard, and respected, and understood, and supported in this
0:19:58 team. And that’s like a canary in the mine. There’s two questions I get asked all the time from leaders.
0:20:05 One is how do I fix my problem people? And the second one is how do I compose the perfect team?
0:20:11 And so I can answer both of those for you. But first of all, you can’t compose the perfect team.
0:20:16 Everyone who’s ever studied that basically finds that you can’t compose it because it depends on
0:20:24 the norms that emerge. Anyone who’s treated like they don’t matter behaves badly at some level.
0:20:31 And so that links to the second thing. How do you stop that bad behavior? It turns out that we are
0:20:37 funky people. It’s easy to be emotionally intelligent and control our emotions when we have some level of
0:20:44 status or we feel like we matter and we’re valued in a team. When we don’t, we lose our ability to
0:20:50 self-control. It’s fascinating. There have been meta-analyses on this. People like myself who study this stuff
0:20:58 are flabbergasted about how badly people behave when they feel disrespected, when they don’t feel like
0:21:05 they’re in. And these are your outliers. And it’s your outliers that you need to investigate
0:21:12 to figure out how to improve. Innovation comes from the outliers. Improvement comes from hearing from the
0:21:19 outliers. I have helped more leaders turn around their teams by paying attention to outliers. Let me
0:21:25 give you an example. We had one team that we worked with. This was a team, actually it was the British
0:21:30 Football Association, Wembley Stadium folks. I don’t know how much you follow soccer, but it was a
0:21:36 leadership team in their organization. And the leader had a team that she knew wasn’t meeting its potential.
0:21:42 And so she put them through all this kind of training. They had individual coaches,
0:21:47 they had emotional intelligence training. Nothing helped improve the team effectiveness,
0:21:52 the way they were working together. So she brought us in. And the first thing we noticed was there was
0:22:00 this one guy, the bad guy, who every time we used to call him the knee scratcher, because he would scratch
0:22:10 his knee before he would do something that was outrageous. As soon as we got in there with him
0:22:17 and we evaluated the norms, and he had an opportunity to share that he didn’t think things were going
0:22:25 well and that he wasn’t getting listened to and shaping new norms and help create new norms. Six months
0:22:30 later after that workshop, he met me at the door when I was arriving and gave me a big hug and was going
0:22:39 “tee me, I, tee me!” Now that’s a pretty extreme example, but there are people in teams that want to give more
0:22:47 that can’t because they don’t have the opportunity to assess the norms and change the norms. And we know
0:22:56 that human beings are unique in the sense that we are capable of building the environment we want. Animals
0:23:01 are born with instincts. They’re stuck with environments. But Lisa Feldman Barrett, who’s a neuroscientist,
0:23:07 says this is our superpower as human beings, is that we can define the environment we want and we can
0:23:14 create it if we want it. And so what I’m asking for in the emotional intelligence team is you to look at the
0:23:21 model we’ve got, use it as a starting point, and adapt it to your own team. It’s a best practice model. We can
0:23:26 learn from the best. And if they’re building relationships, if they’re figuring out the time,
0:23:31 full collaboration doesn’t happen unless you have everyone in.
0:23:40 Is there a real world limit on the size of a team that can be emotionally talented? Are you telling me
0:23:47 that you could take an IBM with 150,000 people and make it to an intelligent team, or are we only talking
0:23:52 about small pockets within large companies? Yeah, it’s a good question. When a team gets
0:23:59 beyond the size of, say, 12, 13 people, you have to subgroup it a lot, right? And so I’ve worked with
0:24:03 teams that are bigger than that. We’ve changed the norms and it’s improved a little bit. Once you get
0:24:11 to the size of about 20, it becomes unwieldy because people are in subgroups and they subgroup off. And so
0:24:16 you pretty much need to create subgroups in those groups. And so then I talk about,
0:24:21 let’s build norms in those subgroups and then build some vague norms about how we’re going to work
0:24:25 together when we come together. But I can give you another example if you’re interested, but let me
0:24:34 let you ask questions. Vanessa, if I wasn’t interested in your examples, you wouldn’t be on this podcast so far away.
0:24:40 Okay. So let me give you a couple of other examples. I want to give you though, an example
0:24:48 of my mentor, who was Richard Hackman. He’s passed away, but he was a professor at Harvard. Whenever
0:24:52 I mentioned his name, I get a little distracted because he was such a big influence on my life.
0:24:59 But anyway, after 9/11, the FBI and the CIA came to him and said, “We need to work together better. We can’t
0:25:06 get along.” The CIA is a bunch of PhDs in IT and things like that. And the FBI is a bunch of sort
0:25:12 of cops on the beat culture mentality. And they just could not work together well, and they knew that
0:25:19 they could. So Richard, with all of his wisdom and a lot of his research was on norms. He basically ran
0:25:24 leaders through all kinds of leadership development programs, did all kinds of things. But what really
0:25:33 helped the team beat out simulations of terrorists. So what they did was they got a group of MIT PhDs
0:25:38 to play the terrorists, and they ran simulations with these folks, was building norms where they
0:25:43 could actually get along and share their information. And this is the problem with subgroups is that you
0:25:49 have to link them together somehow because they will compete. They won’t share their knowledge with one
0:25:57 another, unless you create norms that encourage you. Wow. Okay, so we answered that question. So now,
0:26:04 well, let’s cross your fingers, hope to die. We read your book, and we achieve this. We achieve a state of
0:26:12 success, as it were. Now, how do you maintain this? Is it a different skill set than achieving it?
0:26:19 Yeah, it’s built into the model. The model tells you what to do. Each norm is quite actionable.
0:26:24 And that middle bundle where it’s all about how we’re going to learn and advance together is about
0:26:29 continuous assessment and continuously tweaking the culture and checking in what’s working well,
0:26:34 what’s not working well. You and I both know that there’s no such thing as the perfect team.
0:26:41 Teams wax and wane, right? And there’s no such thing as a team without problems. And so the best way to
0:26:50 alleviate that is to build in to your routines, into your norms, a continuous assessment process. So we
0:26:56 worked with one team that started off, everyone was competing because they were all wanting to replace
0:27:01 the boss. It was a very high level team. And we helped bring them together and we helped align them around
0:27:06 their goals by helping them learn how each person could contribute. We built these norms essentially
0:27:12 in the team. And they continued those norms through several different iterations of leaders.
0:27:18 That leader left. Another one came in and they said, “Hey, we’re an emotionally intelligent team. We want
0:27:23 to keep up this assessment. We want to keep up this spending time, better understanding one another,
0:27:30 giving one another feedback, helping one another succeed, which is that first bucket.” And so I think we
0:27:36 went through three different leaders that were replaced with this same team until we basically burned out and
0:27:43 moved on and stopped doing that work. But yeah, you can keep doing it. And once you learn it, you pass it on.
0:27:53 So are there any teams that you can highlight for us that’s in the Vanessa Druskat Hall of Fame of
0:28:00 Emotional Intelligence? Like you hold them up as these great examples besides the Boston Bruins?
0:28:08 I want to talk about one team that’s one of my favorite teams that I write about. I can’t tell you the
0:28:14 company that it’s in, but it was a team of engineers. They came to us because their performance was
0:28:18 tanking and they were starting to lose market share. Their competitors were beating them out
0:28:25 and their boss got fired and they were angry and they were blaming one another and they were behaving
0:28:31 really selfishly. And so when we walked in there to help them, their new boss hired us, my colleague and
0:28:37 I, we came in and they immediately started screaming at us. What makes you think you can help?
0:28:41 You know, wait, wait, wait, wait. They screamed at you.
0:28:53 Yes, it was. They were so angry. Okay. They were so angry with one another. So of course we had to break.
0:28:57 What do you do when you, when this is happening, we have to break, take a deep breath, come back,
0:29:05 start over. And we realized that they were too angry to do anything, but get out of their own heads and
0:29:09 start to talk about what their future could hold, what they wanted from their team.
0:29:13 Was this the Tesla cyber truck team by any chance?
0:29:19 Yeah. Could have been. Could have been. What happened?
0:29:28 We spent, I would say at least three hours getting them out of their heads and talking about what
0:29:35 they wanted from a team. We got them talking about what they wanted from one another and they started
0:29:39 getting to know one another. And for example, one guy, this is an international team, by the way,
0:29:44 people from all over the world. One guy said, you know, I don’t talk on the phone. I hate phones.
0:29:49 I do texting, but no phones. And one other guy said, well, oh, well, no wonder you’re not answering
0:29:55 my phone calls because now I know I thought it was something about me you didn’t like. And so this is
0:30:00 the kind of thing that happens, right? Because we interpret people’s behavior. So they got this all out
0:30:06 and they finally selected some norms they wanted to develop. One of the norms was they wanted to
0:30:13 build more respect, more optimism, more proactive strategic thinking amongst the members.
0:30:17 And let me tell you how they decided they were going to demonstrate respect because one of the
0:30:21 things we do is we say, okay, what does respect look like here? What does it mean? They decided that
0:30:27 they were going to put down their phones and they were going to look one another in the eye and they
0:30:35 were going to nod their heads when someone was talking. And it was funny. Yeah. It was hilarious.
0:30:43 A bunch of these guys, these engineers, many of whom had PhDs, they were kings of the world of their worlds.
0:30:48 But guess what happened when they started listening to one another, they started sharing more. They started
0:30:54 helping one another. They had similar challenges, right? And they started sharing and it was a huge
0:31:00 breakthrough. All of a sudden the communication improved. And they took one guy who was the
0:31:06 curmudgeon of the group and they made him the ambassador of optimism. And he was the one that
0:31:14 opened every meeting talking about what he was hopeful for in the team. And hope is a motivator,
0:31:21 as you may or may not know. And we’re wired to need a little bit of optimism periodically so that we can
0:31:28 realize why we’re moving forward, why we’re engaging in this grit, right, together. And anyway, they started
0:31:34 getting more proactive and they really turned themselves around. This team was so great. And we
0:31:41 went on to work with their bosses, their bosses team, and they kept shuffling us up to higher and higher
0:31:47 levels. And it was a beautiful thing, especially when you can shift those norms down. It affects everyone.
0:31:56 Vanessa, is there any such thing as too much emotional intelligence? Can we overshoot the optimal level?
0:32:03 Yes, absolutely. So in the book, for every of the nine norms, I have a table that shows if you’re
0:32:08 doing this too much, are you doing it the right amount? Are you not doing it well enough? You can
0:32:13 spend too much time getting to know one another and it gets in the way of the task at hand. It’s one thing,
0:32:18 if you’re going on trips, Bill Campbell’s in the room and he’s helping facilitate you to get to the point.
0:32:25 But I think the important thing is that people take the leap of faith. Like you, like all your friends
0:32:32 that you talked about, people don’t think this stuff is important. They just don’t. And yet there’s so
0:32:38 many bad teams out there. If we can’t look to the greats and say, what’s going on in the greats
0:32:44 that we can replicate? Who can we look to? We have to learn from them. I set out on a quest. I was in
0:32:51 so many bad teams myself that I said, I need to help. The book is basically a road map that helps people
0:32:56 learn how to do that. And I would also be remiss if I didn’t remind you that there’s a foundation to all
0:33:00 this, which is that you got to have a clear purpose and people need to know what their roles are.
0:33:07 And so there’s a foundation of your typical stuff. But what we don’t talk about often enough is the
0:33:10 environment that brings out the best in people.
0:33:20 Can I ask a very theoretical question, which is if a company or a team is doing well in terms of
0:33:26 revenue, can it not be that they think we’re a well-functioning team, we’re emotionally intelligent,
0:33:34 blah, blah, blah. And that’s because everything is going well, but really they aren’t. And as soon as
0:33:40 things don’t go well, everything falls apart. So which came first, an emotionally intelligent team
0:33:49 begat success or success begat at least a belief in emotional intelligence, which comes first, which
0:33:57 is the chicken and which is the egg? Emotion is the motivator, right? There’s no motivation without emotion.
0:34:04 And so you can have an awful lot of fear or you can have a bad guy in the wings. The cheapest way to
0:34:12 motivate a team is to have a bad team that they’re fighting against, but it can burn people out. So the
0:34:19 question is whether or not you want to build a resilient team that’s capable of adapting constantly
0:34:26 to the next thing coming around the pike. And that’s an emotionally intelligent team. And that’s a team where
0:34:33 everyone’s in, or at least they’re in most of the time. So let me just tell you that I embrace this
0:34:39 concept that Stephen Covey came up with, which is what he called the emotional bank account, which is that
0:34:46 I need to treat you guy like you belong and value you and listen to you and nod my head when you talk
0:34:53 most of the time, or at least enough so that, you know, I care about you, that I really genuinely
0:34:57 want you to succeed. And I’m supportive of you, but there are going to be times when I’m going to have
0:35:04 to say, guy, that’s enough. Move on. We’re getting out of here. And so you need to deposit into this bank
0:35:10 account often enough. And so this is what you need to do in order to build an emotionally intelligent
0:35:15 team, which is put things in people’s bank accounts that let them know you want to hear from them.
0:35:21 I want to give you another quick example of a norm that’s in our model that is quite useful.
0:35:28 You can’t have an emotionally intelligent team that doesn’t have people wanting to participate.
0:35:35 So I can go in and I can observe a team, back to me observing team cultures, and I can see, I can tell
0:35:42 you a lot. Like I told you earlier, what I learned when I was 25 is that you can look at the emotion in
0:35:50 the room and tell a lot. How exhausted are they? How supported do they feel in here? What kind of emotion
0:35:57 are they feeling? But what you’re aiming to build is an environment where people know that their
0:36:04 contribution is something that people want to hear. So here comes back to the norm I was going to tell
0:36:10 you about. We have a norm that’s called support expression. And again, we learn this from our best
0:36:15 teams. All of these norms are from what the great teams did. It falls in that middle bucket of how we
0:36:22 learn in advance. But the way one of the leaders supported expression was he had a hat, a construction
0:36:29 cap that he put on the table where the teams met in his boardroom on that long table. And he said,
0:36:33 anytime you don’t feel like you’re getting heard or that there’s an elephant in the room that’s not
0:36:39 getting talked about, I want you to put that hat on your head and flip the lights on because it was one
0:36:46 of these things that had these light bulbs. That’s support expression. And that’s a reminder when it sits
0:36:53 there that people’s voices need to be heard. Okay. So that’s an emotionally intelligent team. And this is a
0:36:57 resilient team. This is a team where you’re going to have new ideas coming up. You’re going to be
0:37:04 learning from one another constantly. Everybody’s in, everybody’s going to catch you when you fall.
0:37:09 That’s an emotionally intelligent team. Madison tells me when I’m wrong all the time.
0:37:17 Excellent. Excellent. She knows you want to hear it. She knows. I see that in you guy. You have that
0:37:26 openness. You have that growth mindset. Not everyone has. Speaking of Madison. So is a team that’s led by a
0:37:34 a woman more likely to be emotionally intelligent? I have to say that, honestly, I haven’t worked with a
0:37:42 lot of teams that are led by women, unfortunately. What I can tell you is something that I’ve learned,
0:37:52 that a lot of these norms are somewhat feminine, relational. And if you don’t have a leader who embraces that sort of
0:37:58 feminine piece, the relational piece, then you’re not going to build some of this. I have to talk a lot
0:38:05 of team leaders into taking that leap of faith, because I hear it all the time. These are not babies.
0:38:13 These are adults. They don’t want to do this. And yet they come to me because their team’s not meeting their
0:38:19 potential. Teams are people. They’re human. And we have social needs that have to be met.
0:38:25 I suspect that I’m going to get a similar answer to this question, which is,
0:38:32 are teams that are more diverse, more likely to be emotionally intelligent?
0:38:37 teams that are more diverse are more likely to be higher performing. That’s what the research tells
0:38:45 us. The biggest problem with diverse teams is not hearing from everyone. Diverse teams need emotional
0:38:52 intelligence more than other teams. They’re not necessarily that they need it. This is a hot topic
0:38:57 these days, right? I don’t want you to lose all the federal funding for the University of New Hampshire.
0:39:02 Right, right, right. Without a doubt, you want to have a more innovative team. People always tell me,
0:39:06 how big does my team need to be? And I always tell, well, if you’ve got two people with the same
0:39:11 background in your team that think the same way, you’ve got redundancy. You need the smallest team
0:39:15 possible. You need a diverse team so that you can come up with different ideas. We’ve known that for a long
0:39:22 time. The problem is that in diverse teams, not everyone gets hurt all the time. Not everyone has
0:39:29 the influence they need. So the biggest issue has been creating an environment where everybody’s in
0:39:34 and people aren’t holding back. But certainly you’re not saying,
0:39:39 don’t create a diverse team because there’s not enough time for everybody to be heard. You’re saying,
0:39:43 create a diverse team and let everybody be heard. That’s exactly what I’m saying.
0:39:52 I am saying you need a diverse team and you need all those perspectives on the table.
0:39:59 We know that even perspectives that are off, that are outrageous, have an impact on how other people
0:40:05 think. We know this. Team researchers have known this for a long time, that the more ideas you come up
0:40:13 with, even the outrageous ones, impact the way other people think. Again, it’s the outliers that create
0:40:17 innovation. If people are all thinking the same, you’re not going to have that innovation. I want to
0:40:22 add something that’s similar to your question. I think that the more diverse your team, the more you
0:40:27 got to have emotionally intelligent norms. But also, if your team is working remotely,
0:40:33 you got to have clear norms. So the teams that we worked with that had emotionally intelligent norms
0:40:39 during the pandemic were set up. They had that middle bucket of norms, which is that we’re going
0:40:45 to talk, what’s going on here? They learned about one another’s situations quickly. They got up moving
0:40:51 again faster. And they set new norms for how they were going to work together when they weren’t face to
0:40:59 face. Up next, on Remarkable People. I wouldn’t ignore interpersonal skills. Let me take a backstop.
0:41:05 I believe hiring is the most important thing you do. You have to hire. You should prioritize
0:41:17 interpersonal skills, but you should not prioritize them over the skills you need. That’s what I think.
0:41:24 Do you want to be more remarkable? One way to do it is to spend three days with the boldest
0:41:30 builders in business. I’m Jeff Berman, host of Masters of Scale, inviting you to join us at this
0:41:36 year’s Masters of Scale Summit, October 7th to 9th in San Francisco. You’ll hear from visionaries like
0:41:43 Waymo’s Takidra Mawakana, Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya, celebrity chef David Chang, Patagonia’s Ryan Gellert,
0:41:52 Promises’ Phaedra Ellis Lampkins, and many, many more. Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com/remarkable.
0:41:58 That’s mastersofscale.com/remarkable. And Guy Kawasaki will be there too.
0:42:05 Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It’s found on Apple Podcasts
0:42:12 or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:42:22 My next question was going to be, what is the impact of the virtual team and are there special
0:42:28 techniques? But I think you’ve already answered that question. Yeah, let me say just a couple things
0:42:32 about that. Yeah, I’ve answered the question, but I also want to say some interesting research on eye
0:42:39 contact shows that eye contact matters more in virtual teams than it does in face-to-face teams.
0:42:43 Now, you know, what does eye contact mean? Does it mean you’ve got to look right at the camera,
0:42:48 which is hard for all of us, right? I think it just means that you’re showing, we see each other so
0:42:55 clearly. So are you paying attention? We can tell very easily whether or not people are attending to us.
0:43:00 When people make eye contact, when they attend to us, it’s a gift. It’s a way of saying,
0:43:07 I accept you, I value you. It’s a small act with a big consequence. There’s so many small acts like
0:43:11 that, that make a difference. I have a friend that used to work in a team where everybody would be
0:43:16 typing the whole time on their computers. And it was like the norm was that if you weren’t typing,
0:43:21 you didn’t have enough work to do, you’re wasting your precious, come on. I mean, I’ve been in meetings
0:43:22 like that before.
0:43:30 As a podcaster, I think maybe I conduct one interview a year in person and every one of
0:43:40 them is virtual like this. And I have the squad cast window behind a teleprompter.
0:43:46 Yeah. Because if I didn’t have a teleprompter and I was looking in your eyes, I would not
0:43:52 be looking at the camera. So this is just technology that I have a teleprompter. And right now I’m
0:43:59 looking right into your eye, but I can also see your face. And so I’m looking in the camera and I’m
0:44:03 looking in your eye because your eye is in front of the camera on the teleprompter.
0:44:05 Sure. Interesting. Yeah. It’s powerful.
0:44:07 It’s worth every penny.
0:44:09 It is. Yeah.
0:44:10 Okay.
0:44:13 So what’s it like for you to be online all the time? How is it exhausting for you?
0:44:19 I have to say that because we’re trying to incorporate more and more videos,
0:44:27 being a virtual interviewer is easier because there’s a camera on you. There’s a camera on me.
0:44:32 If we were in person, we would have to have two cameras. We’d have to have a crew
0:44:38 changing who’s live and all that. It’s much harder. And the other thing, believe it or not,
0:44:46 is I am deaf. And as a deaf person, an in-person interview is much harder because being deaf,
0:44:53 I can have the audio feed come directly into my cochlear implant. If I were just sitting in an office
0:45:02 with you, I would have to depend on the implant microphone picking up your speech. But in this
0:45:07 case, your microphone is coming directly into my head, which is much better for me.
0:45:10 Wow. That’s powerful. Yeah.
0:45:12 So that’s my story.
0:45:13 Yeah. That’s great.
0:45:19 What about return to office? People say return to office. Now we can hang around the water cooler,
0:45:26 we can interact, we can learn more about your trip report, whatever. But there’s a lot of pushback
0:45:29 on return to the office. So where are you on that?
0:45:34 That’s such a tough one. Yeah. One of the things you have to realize is that I’ve been working with
0:45:40 a lot of remote teams. And so for the last 20 years, I think that my colleagues and I were the
0:45:47 first of the Zoom contract, because we worked with so many remote teams. And so I know you can do this
0:45:52 remotely, but I know you have to get together periodically. And when you do get together,
0:45:57 you got to spend a lot of time interacting. You got to spend a lot of time getting to know one another,
0:46:03 breaking bread together. So I should fall on getting people back into the office, but I don’t.
0:46:10 I fall on thinking that you can build relationships. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen high-performing
0:46:14 teams. I’ve interviewed high-performing teams. I’ve been doing team-building exercises
0:46:23 online, on phones for 25 years. You can do it. It’s harder. You have to be more intentional.
0:46:28 You have to have your cameras on. And what I can’t stand are teams that meet that people don’t put
0:46:34 their cameras on. That’s my, that’s my thing. Vanessa, can I point out something to you?
0:46:41 You don’t use a teleprompter, right? No. But I am telling you, you make excellent eye contact.
0:46:47 You are really disciplined and you are always looking at the camera. Huh? That’s good to know.
0:46:55 I mean, nobody does it this good. You may be the best person I’ve ever interviewed at looking at the
0:47:03 camera. Oh my gosh, it’s so interesting. Thank you for that feedback. Well, part of it is, I think I’m a good
0:47:09 listener. I’m so curious. Actually, what I would love to do is start asking you questions, both of you.
0:47:18 You want to hear about your team experiences. I’m telling you. Okay. So I’m not imagining it because
0:47:25 Madison would know as much as I would. You win the contest for the best eye contact in the history
0:47:29 of remarkable people podcasting. Wow. That’s great to know. Thank you.
0:47:35 Yeah, that and a quarter will get you a cup of coffee.
0:47:39 I know. I need a sip of water.
0:47:46 All right. A few quick questions and then I’m going to drop a bomb on you. So the quick questions are,
0:47:52 how do your findings impact recruiting? Do you change how you recruit based on wanting to build
0:47:59 the emotionally intelligent team? I still think you need to hire people with interpersonal skills. I
0:48:04 think that those skills are irreplaceable. I think they’re really important in teams. I also think you
0:48:14 need to hire for the skills that you need. So I would lean toward getting the talent, the skills you need
0:48:20 ahead of the interpersonal skills. If you can, if there’s a trade off. That’s the opposite of what
0:48:28 I expected you to say. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think the environment you create can bring the best out of
0:48:35 people. It’s the environment. What I see happening far too often is the wasted talent. Some of those people
0:48:42 with the great interpersonal skills you hire can’t get a word in on your teams. Wait, you threw me for a loop
0:48:49 here. So you’re saying hire the best talent and you can fix their interpersonal skills or you’re saying
0:48:56 hire interpersonal skills and you can fix the talent. I wouldn’t ignore interpersonal skills. Let me take a
0:49:03 backstop. I believe hiring is the most important thing you do. You have to hire. You should prioritize
0:49:11 interpersonal skills, but you should not prioritize them over the skills you need. That’s what I think,
0:49:18 because I think you can create an environment. So let’s just say that you hire somebody who never
0:49:24 shuts up. They dominate conversations. You can get rid of that in your team by managing it. I mean, I have
0:49:31 helped teams do that. That’s a team norm. Next quick question. How do your findings affect
0:49:38 onboarding of new employees? What’s special about onboarding for an emotionally intelligent team?
0:49:45 So much easier to onboard. So let me tell you why. You have a set of norms that define your culture.
0:49:50 This is how we behave in this team. This is what makes us unique. And something about one another,
0:49:55 something about one another’s roles. Some of the things I haven’t talked to you about are some of
0:50:00 these interventions that we use to build these norms. But one of them is sharing information about
0:50:05 one another’s roles, sharing information about one another’s personalities or proclivities,
0:50:13 ways they like to work. And what I recommend is putting that in a charter that you pass on to new
0:50:19 people that are being hired. And I’ve seen teams do it. I’ve helped teams do it that I’ve worked with. So
0:50:24 emotionally intelligent teams. One of the things that I recommend is that if you’re going to build a new
0:50:30 norm, you’d have a couple of team members get in charge of that norm. And so let’s say that one of
0:50:35 the norms is that you’re going to get to know one another better. The classic way to get to know one
0:50:41 another is to take surveys, personality surveys, work style surveys. You pick it. Oh yeah. You’ve
0:50:45 never done that in a team? Oh my God. That’s a riot. That’s what everybody does.
0:50:50 It only works if it’s one of many things you do.
0:50:53 Are you talking like Myers-Briggs and that kind of stuff?
0:50:56 Yeah. That kind of stuff. Yeah. Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
0:50:59 Yeah. I’m a no-vert.
0:51:04 Yeah. Well, you’re probably like I am, which is that you’re an ambivert. You can be either.
0:51:10 Oh, whatever it takes. This is why personality doesn’t predict behavior in teams. It’s because
0:51:16 we adapt to what’s going on around us, but it impacts the way we like to work. And the people
0:51:22 who are in charge of that get to know you norm, put this section into the team charter that’s handed on
0:51:27 to people who are onboarded. I’m not making this up. I didn’t even come up with the idea. This is what
0:51:32 teams I’ve worked with have done. And the new members are up to speed fast. They know what the
0:51:38 norms are. They know how you run your meetings. They know what your goals are because the goals
0:51:45 are on there too, by the way. And it’s beautiful. Okay. The last quick question is how do your
0:51:52 findings and your research affect methods of compensation? People ask me that all the time.
0:51:55 And it’s the questions are really about, was that the bomb you were going to drop on me?
0:51:57 No, no, no. The bomb is coming.
0:52:01 Oh, that’s not the bomb. Okay. Okay. The bomb is coming. It’s circling right now.
0:52:07 Okay, good. I’m looking forward to the bomb. You know, people are not dumb. We’re all compensated
0:52:11 differently. Some of us have more experience or less experience. Some of us have been
0:52:17 negotiated higher salaries when we came in. I’m not talking about having equal compensation
0:52:24 and amongst your team members. I’m not talking about getting rid of individual performance
0:52:31 plans. But what I am talking about is building an environment that supports the people in the team.
0:52:38 It supports the I, it supports the individual, and it supports the we. It can’t only be about the I.
0:52:45 And I got to tell you, in environments where we support one another, people do better. I’ve seen
0:52:52 people get promoted out of these teams because of the feedback and the support they get from their
0:52:56 team members. I’m trying to guess what you’re really thinking about or asking about compensation.
0:53:02 People are going to be compensated differently. They’re going to be promoted differently. And that
0:53:06 one team that was a pretty high level leadership team, the person who was promoted out of it,
0:53:12 people were thrilled for that guy. And the guy, basically, I saw the guy a couple of years later,
0:53:20 and he said to me, “Vanessa, I’m at a loss in this new role because nobody gives me any feedback here.
0:53:26 I don’t know what I’m doing well and what I’m not doing well.” In that emotionally intelligent team,
0:53:34 people would tell me what they wanted to see more of from me. We had that environment. They wanted that
0:53:40 environment. I gave them the building blocks and they wanted it. They created it. That’s what you do in a
0:53:41 great thing.
0:53:51 So let’s say your phone rings and it’s area code 202.
0:53:53 Okay.
0:54:00 And you get to pick how big a bomb you want to bite off. It’s either Hakeem Jeffries,
0:54:08 Mike Johnson or Donald Trump, and they’re saying, “My team is dysfunctional. I want you to come on board
0:54:16 and make my team emotionally intelligent.”
0:54:25 First of all, are you interested in the job? And second of all, can it be done? And third of all,
0:54:32 what would you do? I love that question. So let me say, I work with a lot of teams and there have
0:54:40 been a couple of teams that I have not succeeded with. And those are teams where the leaders won’t let go.
0:54:52 And by the way, I’m the one that’s left. Because I’ve said, “I can’t help you anymore.” They’ll be like,
0:55:00 “Can we redo the contract?” And like, I remember with one leader, I said, “Your team members are afraid
0:55:05 of you. They need you to let go of some control.” And he said, “There’s nobody who’s afraid of me. Why would
0:55:11 they be afraid of me?” And so back to this original question you asked me, which is who’s in control
0:55:18 of the norms? It’s the leader. It’s the people with status. And to build an emotionally intelligent team,
0:55:24 you have to let go of some control. Now, I would be willing to work with Mike Johnson.
0:55:29 I would not be willing to work with Donald Trump.
0:55:31 And how about Hakeem Jeffries?
0:55:32 Sure.
0:55:38 Okay. That’s the bomb. And I like how you answered that question. That was a
0:55:40 very good answer. I appreciate that very much.
0:55:44 Well, thanks. I keep thinking I need to write something on it, but there’s been so much written
0:55:50 about it. Because you want people to share their truth in a team. And that’s not what Donald Trump wants.
0:55:52 It would be hard to convince him to do that.
0:55:56 Careful. I don’t want your university to lose all federal funding.
0:56:06 That’s why I want to tell you something. I told you that you are the best eye contact person
0:56:14 in the history of remarkable people. I will also tell you one more thing. I cannot be as definitive
0:56:24 in what I’m about to say, but I’m pretty sure you may lead the pack here. I read roughly 52 books a year,
0:56:32 a year, because just about every podcast involves reading somebody who’s remarkable has a new book
0:56:39 coming out. Like you have a new book coming out. And I will tell you that your book is one of the best
0:56:52 laid out and the best headings and the best subheadings of the books I have read. I constantly tell Madison,
0:57:02 oh my God, this guy’s book, this gal’s book, it’s pages and pages and pages of paragraphs. There’s no
0:57:08 headings. There’s no subheadings. It’s like reading Tolstoy or something. And this is a business book.
0:57:15 There’s no subheadings, no breaks, no nothing. And I picked up your book and it was like, oh my God,
0:57:21 thank you God for sending me this book. It’s so much easier to read. And I noticed in your
0:57:27 acknowledgments in the back about Harvard Business Review Press and you thank your editor and you thank
0:57:34 your team and you thank your designer. Tell her that Guy Kawasaki says he really likes the design of your book.
0:57:41 You know, I have a lot of books that are similar. I think you and I like books that are similar.
0:57:48 When I write a book, I use Microsoft Word and I have a template for everything. And every section
0:57:57 is a style and I can shift between text and outline so I can see all my heading threes and it’s completely
0:58:02 organized. So I know exactly where the heads and subheads are. And so I’m a little bit OCD that way,
0:58:08 but your book is beautiful. So I congratulate you so much. Yeah, I’m OCD that way to myself.
0:58:16 I get it. I appreciate it. If you ever want a Microsoft Word template that’s completely laid out
0:58:23 for every paragraph, every bullet, every everything that has a style, I’ll be happy to send you my word.
0:58:30 Cool. Cool. I love it. All right. All right, Madison, we’re going to let Vanessa off the hook
0:58:36 so that you can tell me what I did wrong today. Tell me what I did wrong too. I hope I answered your
0:58:41 questions. I hope I didn’t go off too much. You absolutely did it. Good. This was a master class
0:58:47 in looking at the camera. As part of your practice, you could say from now on to improve the emotional
0:58:54 intelligence of your team. I want you to buy every member of your team, a teleprompter.
0:58:59 And for $200, I guarantee you, you will get the value out of that.
0:59:03 I am going to tell them. That’s going to be in my next book and I’m going to cite you on it.
0:59:10 Listen, guy, I just want to say you’re such a positive force in the world. I really appreciate
0:59:16 what you do. Well, I can honestly tell you, I could not do it without Madison. So all right,
0:59:21 Vanessa, we’re going to let you go. Thank you very much. And I want to thank the rest of the
0:59:27 Remarkable People team. And of course, I’m going to thank Madison and also Tessa Neismar,
0:59:33 who’s a researcher who helps him with all the background research. And we have a co-producer
0:59:39 named Jeff C. And finally, we have Shannon Hernandez, who is our sound design engineer. So that’s
0:59:46 the Remarkable People team. This is Remarkable People.

0:00:03 If the police showed up at your front door and said, Guy, you know, we’re really worried
0:00:06 there’s a lot of break-ins in the neighborhood. So what we want you to do is to leave your back
0:00:11 door open so that if the burglars break in, we can catch them easily because we don’t want to
0:00:15 have to bound down your front door in order to do it. Like you’d look at them and tell them they
0:00:20 were crazy. But when that’s happening in the context of digital devices, where it’s a little
0:00:26 more abstract and they use language to obscure what they’re doing, like this gets put forward
0:00:31 as if it’s, oh, law enforcement absolutely needs this. It’s crazy. And it’s bad for all of us.
0:00:41 Good morning, everyone. It’s Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast. And we’re on this
0:00:46 mission to make you remarkable. So we go all over the world looking for remarkable people. And we
0:00:52 found one really close to us in San Francisco, California. Her name is Cindy Cohn, and she’s
0:01:00 the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Wow. And in my humble opinion, that’s
0:01:08 probably the leading defender of civil liberties in the digital world. She has led this great case of
0:01:15 Bernstein versus Department of Justice, which established that software programming is protected
0:01:22 speech under the First Amendment. And the National Law Journal named her one of 100 most influential
0:01:29 lawyers in America. And I love this quote about Cindy, man. I hope somebody says something like this about
0:01:38 me someday. The quote is, if Big Brother is watching, he better watch out for Cindy Cohn. Oh, my God.
0:01:44 I got to go back in your history. I noticed something doing research about you. So you got
0:01:53 your law degree in 1989 or 1990, right? Yes. And then in a mere four years, you were lead counsel for
0:02:00 Bernstein versus Department of Justice. How did you get to that position in a mere four years?
0:02:07 Well, you know, I kind of fell into it, to be honest. You got to remember, 1989, 1990 to 1994,
0:02:14 there was no World Wide Web. Technology was being done mainly by people who had high technical skills
0:02:20 out of universities and research institutions. And I happened to meet some of them. And one of them was
0:02:26 EFF’s founder, John Gilmore. And I literally met him at a party in Haight-Ashbury. And we became
0:02:32 friends. And for a while, I dated one of his friends. And he was putting EFF together, the
0:02:38 Electronic Frontier Foundation. A couple years later, he called me up. And he said, do you know
0:02:44 how to do a lawsuit? And I just a couple years out of law school, really not the right person for this
0:02:49 said, sure, I know how to do a lawsuit. He said, good, because we’ve got this guy and he wrote a
0:02:55 computer program. And he wants to publish it on the internet. And he’s been told that if he does,
0:03:00 he could go to jail as an arms dealer. And I said, what does it do? Does it blow things up?
0:03:06 And he said, no, it keeps things secret. And I said, that sounds like a problem and a First Amendment
0:03:12 problem at that. And he said, I think so too. Will you take the case? And I said, yes. I had never been
0:03:17 online. I didn’t really know very much about what these guys were doing. They were my friends. But
0:03:23 I wasn’t even, as you pointed out, I’m kind of a baby lawyer, right? I’d never done a constitutional case
0:03:31 of that magnitude. But I got lucky. And between John and some of the other early internet people,
0:03:37 and then very kind people like cryptographers, computer science professors, Hal Abelson at MIT,
0:03:44 and a bunch of others, they’ve actually taught me enough about how the internet works, how coding works,
0:03:50 and how cryptography works, that we were able to mount this challenge and do so successfully. But to me,
0:03:55 I just was in the right place at the right time and had the good fortune to think my friends would
0:04:00 think I was cool if I did this lawsuit. And then the patience and support of a lot of people to be
0:04:05 able to sit at the, I always call it driving the big truck, right? To be able to sit in the driver’s
0:04:09 seat of this big truck that we drove through the government’s cryptography regulations.
0:04:17 So Cindy, are you basically saying to me that in one of the most pivotal cases in intellectual
0:04:20 property, you are faking it until you make it?
0:04:26 Totally. Absolutely. Now, I had the good sense and the luck to have a lot of people around me and to be
0:04:31 able to pull in people. By the time we got deep enough in the case, we had a guy named Bob Corden
0:04:37 Revere join our case. He’d already argued a First Amendment case in the Supreme Court. And he saw what
0:04:42 we were doing and came in and was like, let me help ground you in this kind of long history of the
0:04:48 Constitution. It’s more like we were kind of this rolling tumbleweed that started with just me. But
0:04:54 as we went along, we picked up people with expertise and support so that by the time I was standing in
0:04:59 front of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal arguing this case, I was standing on the shoulders of lots
0:05:04 and lots of giants who had thrown in to help us. But yeah, the very start of it was quite literally,
0:05:07 I thought my friend John would think I was cool if I said yes.
0:05:13 Wow. Listen, when I saw that four years after your law degree, you were leading this case,
0:05:20 I did a search on ChatGPT and I asked for examples of lawyers who had huge cases early in their careers.
0:05:29 Wow. And it came up with this list of Neil Katyal, Gloria Allred, Sherilyn Eiffel, Preet Bharara,
0:05:35 whatever. Yeah, very famous lawyer, very good lawyer.
0:05:41 Yeah. And I looked at that list and you were faster than all of them. So I said, oh my God,
0:05:45 Cindy is the Caitlin Clark of civil liberties. My God.
0:05:52 Oh, as an Iowan, you could give me no higher compliment than comparing me to Caitlin Clark.
0:05:53 Yeah. She’s from my home state.
0:06:01 And Cindy, I will confess to you that I checked to see if you related to Roy Cohn to see if there
0:06:07 was any nepotism involved, but there is not. No, no, no. I don’t want to be related to him,
0:06:12 but yeah, my family doesn’t come from that. Neither of my parents went to college and I was lucky enough
0:06:16 to get to go. I would not brag about being related to Roy Cohn.
0:06:21 No, I do not want to be related to him, but I did not come from highly educated, lawyered up family.
0:06:26 While we’re on the subject of Bernstein versus Department of Justice, if the Department of
0:06:30 Justice had prevailed, what would be different today?
0:06:35 I think that what would be different today is that we’d have even less security online than we do
0:06:41 now. Now we still have a lot to do. I don’t claim that this is an ongoing fight and the attacks on
0:06:47 encryption keep coming. The UK is horrible right now. Australia passed a bad law, but we have signal.
0:06:54 We have HTTPS, right? The ability to go from your browser to a website without that information being
0:07:01 in the clear so you can access information without it being immediately tracked. We have basic security,
0:07:05 right? When you turn off your phone, it’s encrypted. So if you lose your phone, you don’t lose all your
0:07:11 data or access to all your data. That’s because Apple put encryption into the actual device so that
0:07:16 your data is encrypted. When you turn the device off, the same thing’s true for most computers and
0:07:24 phones now. Encryption is really baked into so many things we do. And I think it would be not baked
0:07:28 into nearly as many. I think the government would have ultimately had to let us have some security
0:07:35 online, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as pervasive and we wouldn’t be able to continue to
0:07:41 deploy it without government approval. And parts of governments really understand the need for strong
0:07:46 security. I would say NIST and some of the other parts of government. But when you get over on the
0:07:52 law enforcement side, they’re really, really hostile to it. And we’ve had an upper hand in that fight since
0:07:59 the 90s because it got taken off the munitions list and it wasn’t regulated. So we could go ahead and
0:08:05 innovate first and not have to go to the government on bended knee and beg for permission. And I think
0:08:10 that’s benefited all of us in terms of even having the security we have now online.
0:08:17 Now, when you refer to the United Kingdom just now, is that the request they’re making of Apple so that
0:08:21 there’s a backdoor to the encrypted iCloud files?
0:08:27 Yes. It’s hard because the UK has even more secrecy around these things than we have in the US. So we
0:08:33 don’t know exactly what’s going on. What we know is that Apple offered something, I think it’s called ADP,
0:08:38 Advanced Data Protection, or it might be APT. I might have that wrong. But basically, you could turn on a
0:08:43 switch and have advanced protection. And that would mean that your iCloud backups were encrypted. Now,
0:08:48 we think that should be the default and not a switch you have to turn on. But that’s okay. At least they
0:08:52 offered it. And that’s really important for human rights defenders, for journalists, for people who find
0:09:01 themselves targeted for espionage as well as by governments. And we know that the UK government has
0:09:07 demanded that anybody who provides you with a service or a device have access to the plain text of
0:09:12 everything you do on your device. And this is the way they talk about they don’t say we’re going to ban
0:09:15 encryption. They always say, Oh, we love encryption. We’re not banning it. But we’re just going to make
0:09:20 sure that the people who provide you with services and devices always have access to the plain text. And
0:09:24 there’s no way to read that as anything other than denying you encryption, right? Real encryption.
0:09:30 So we know that the UK government provided something to Apple, we think it’s that they had to provide
0:09:36 access to the plain text, and that Apple reengineer the device so that they could always have access to
0:09:40 the plain text. And we know that what Apple did in response is say, Well, we’re just not going to let
0:09:46 anybody turn on this extra protection in the UK, because I think they didn’t want to have to downgrade
0:09:52 it. It’s pretty hard to downgrade it just for UK people. And of course, if they downgrade it for
0:09:57 people in the UK, that’s anybody who’s talking to anybody in the UK. So that affects all of us,
0:10:03 or most of us. So we think that’s what’s going on. We haven’t seen the actual documents yet. But I
0:10:08 think it’s a safe bet. That’s what’s going on with Apple. And I really appreciate Apple because
0:10:12 they’ve been pretty public about it as public as they can be. We don’t know what kind of orders have
0:10:17 been issued to the other companies who have been very quiet. But I think it’s highly unlikely that
0:10:23 the UK government just picked Apple. They’re not even the biggest operating system. The Android is
0:10:28 bigger when you go global. So I suspect that something similar could be going on to Android
0:10:34 and other devices that would that is not as visible to us. Again, I don’t know. It’s all secret. But I
0:10:37 think in time, we’re going to figure it out. And it’s problematic. People should be rising up like
0:10:43 we need strong security and privacy. And it’s not just because of law enforcement access. If the police
0:10:47 showed up at your front door and said, guy, you know, we’re really worried. There’s a lot of break-ins
0:10:51 in the neighborhood. So what we want you to do is to leave your back door open so that if the burglars
0:10:55 break in, we can catch them easily because we don’t want to have to bound down your front door in order
0:11:01 to do it. Like you’d look at them and tell them they were crazy. But when that’s happening in the context
0:11:06 of digital devices, where it’s a little more abstract, and they use language to obscure what
0:11:12 they’re doing, like this gets put forward as if it’s, oh, law enforcement absolutely needs this. It’s
0:11:21 crazy. And it’s bad for all of us. Wow. So if Apple were to agree with the UK, then logically,
0:11:26 the FBI in America would say, well, you did it for the UK, you should do it for us. And then
0:11:31 none of us have encryption anymore. That’s correct. And even if you think the UK,
0:11:36 they’re a Western democracy, they have rule of law, and they have due process. It’s not just the US
0:11:41 that’s going to be following. It’s all the countries of the world, right? You’re going to have Nigeria,
0:11:46 which has a tremendous problem with corruption in their government and attacking political opponents.
0:11:51 All of the countries in the world are going to say, well, you did it for the UK, you should do it for
0:11:56 us. And I think it’s terrible in the United States. It gets even scarier as you go around the world.
0:12:00 Okay. So can we back up for a second? Sorry, I scared the pants off you, didn’t I?
0:12:07 No, no, no. I mean, it is a time to be scared. So could you, we just back up a little bit and could
0:12:10 you explain for us what the EFF actually does?
0:12:16 Yep. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the oldest and the biggest online digital rights
0:12:22 organization. We’re based in San Francisco. We’re now 125 people strong. And essentially,
0:12:27 we work to make sure that when you go online, your rights go with you. So we are civil liberties
0:12:35 organization. We’re focused on law and rights as they relate to digital technologies. And we really
0:12:40 center ourselves on the users of technology. So making sure that the users of technologies have a
0:12:46 voice and are protected as we’re moving forward. Now, our tools are, we’re a lot of lawyers. I think
0:12:50 that’s still my biggest team. We do impact litigation. So we take cases like my Bernstein
0:12:56 case to try to set the law, especially constitutional law, because that’s the province of the courts in
0:13:02 the right place to protect users. But we also have an activism team. And we have a tech team. We call
0:13:08 them the pit crew, the public interest technology team. And we build some technologies. So we build a
0:13:14 Firefox, we build a plugin for Firefox and Chrome called Privacy Badger that blocks tracking cookies,
0:13:19 those cookies that follow you all around the web and blocks other kinds of tracking. We build a thing
0:13:25 called Certbot, which is part of the process for certificate authorities for making sure that when
0:13:32 you go to visit a website, your traffic to that website is not trackable because it’s encrypted.
0:13:39 So we build technologies, we bring lawsuits, we do activism, all of these kind of towards this goal
0:13:43 of trying to make sure that your rights are respected when you’re using technologies.
0:13:46 Steve McLaughlin: And how do you pay for all of this?
0:13:52 Speaker 1: We are member supported. We get no government money. We get a little bit of foundation
0:13:56 money. We get a little bit of corporate money, but not from the big guys. That often comes with too
0:14:03 many strings about our advocacy. So companies that are a little smaller and that might be running a VPN
0:14:08 service or a privacy service, we get some support from them, but mainly it’s individuals. Over half
0:14:14 of our money comes from individuals. And a huge chunk of that come from people who are ordinary members,
0:14:20 who give us 60 bucks or a hundred bucks or a thousand bucks and get t-shirts and hats and stuff. I think
0:14:26 EFF has been a marker for people that they love tech, but they also love rights that they’re trying
0:14:31 not to use tech to crunch on people. And we have a pretty good membership inside the big tech companies,
0:14:36 the Facebooks and the Googles and Alphabets and other companies, even inside the government,
0:14:41 we have a lot of members because I think it’s a way for people to show that they’re trying to be in
0:14:46 this for the right reasons and that they really want to build and support tools that support people
0:14:50 rather than oppress people. We’re member supported and always have been.
0:14:57 So member supported is like NPR where you’re a member of KQED or something like that.
0:15:03 Correct. Only we have much cooler t-shirts, hats and stickers, but yeah, it’s a lot like that. I kind
0:15:07 of joke sometimes at EFF, we work for tips, right? We’re going to go out there and do what we’re going
0:15:11 to do. And if people think that what we’re doing is important and it’s important to have kind of a
0:15:16 foothold and a voice out there to counterbalance the governmental voices or the corporate voices that
0:15:22 might, you know, be in shittifying your tools or not really on your side. We’re one of those people
0:15:26 who show up and try to fight for it. And there’s a lot of digital rights groups now. And I really
0:15:31 love when I got into this, there was just us. And now there is a whole constellation of people doing
0:15:37 really good work. I think what makes us different is that we do have this tech team. We’re really grounded
0:15:44 in how the tech actually works. We don’t fly off and pretend or tell the scary stories about how tech’s
0:15:50 going to eat your children or any of those things. We’re really trying to stay very grounded in how
0:15:55 things actually work. And we’ve developed a reputation in the courts and in Congress and in various
0:15:59 administrations going all the way back to the nineties as the people who show up and will tell
0:16:04 you the truth about how technology works and how it doesn’t work.
0:16:11 So this is a dumb question. And I know the answer already, but I got to ask it just to make sure.
0:16:19 So theoretically, if Elon or Mark calls you up and says, we want to give you a $10 million donation,
0:16:25 the answer is it’s probably no, it’s probably no. And this has actually happened. Some of those people,
0:16:31 not ones you’ve made, but some of those companies have offered us a lot of money. And historically,
0:16:35 in the past, there was a time when we were more aligned with them, especially the early days with
0:16:40 Google. We were pretty aligned with them because they were trying to free things up, especially in
0:16:45 some of the copyright fights that we’ve done and IP fights where they were really trying to give users
0:16:50 access to information and stuff. Those days are kind of gone. There is a different leadership and
0:16:55 they’re much bigger and they have a different viewpoint. Right now, if one of those companies showed up and
0:17:00 said, let us shower you with money, I would take the call. But if there were any strings attached,
0:17:04 if there was anything that made it look like it, and honestly, for some of them, I think at this point,
0:17:09 I probably would just say no, because there’s no way it wouldn’t be perceived that way.
0:17:14 The answer is no. I really want our support to be who the people we are, who we’re standing up for.
0:17:19 And I’m not in this to stand up for Jeff Bezos. I’m not in this to stand up for Mark Zuckerberg.
0:17:23 I’m in this to stand up for all the people who are, you know, in some ways feel like they’re
0:17:28 hostages to these people. And you can’t really do both, right? You can’t stand up for the people who
0:17:33 are locking you in with a surveillance business model that tracks everything you do and ranks you,
0:17:38 and the people who are being tracked. You kind of have to be on one side or the other. At this point in
0:17:44 time. I’m sad about that. Those companies used to side with their users a lot more. And one of the
0:17:51 sad things that I’ve seen in the 35 years that the organization has been in existence is the sliding
0:17:59 away from those kind of tech and user roots towards a more adversarial position towards their users.
0:18:05 I would use a stronger verb than sliding away. But yeah, we agree.
0:18:10 I’m trying to be a little kind, but yeah, no. And I think it’s problematic, right? Because I worry.
0:18:15 It used to be people came to Silicon Valley because they had a cool idea that they really wanted to
0:18:19 make happen. I know he was a difficult guy, but even Steve Jobs, like he was a problem solver,
0:18:23 right? He was trying to solve interesting problems that would help people. And again,
0:18:27 didn’t know the man. I don’t claim to know everything. Now it just seems like it’s like,
0:18:32 how do we exploit people’s data to make as much money as possible? And that’s a very different
0:18:37 framing than what I lived through in the 90s and the 2000s.
0:18:42 From the outside looking in, because I’m not inside the tech bro community,
0:18:46 I think that all they care about is long-term capital gains and crypto.
0:18:52 Yeah. And it’s about money for them and power for them. And it’s not really about giving us
0:18:56 anything better anymore. It’s more about exploiting us so that they can maintain their positions.
0:19:02 And it’s so disheartening, right? Because again, I was in the Silicon Valley in the 90s and the 2000s,
0:19:08 and I know there was another vision. I know that there was another thing that a lot of people were
0:19:14 doing. And the good news is, there are people doing that now. We’re seeing with decentralization,
0:19:20 with signal exists, it’s strong, it’s powerful. It’s so powerful that the people in the federal
0:19:24 government use it when they shouldn’t. There is, it’s just the rest of the internet is still there.
0:19:31 It’s just been completely overshadowed and underfunded because of the rise of these tech giants and their
0:19:38 surveillance capitalism business model. But if you peel it back, you can still find people with those
0:19:43 ideals and those visions. And if you look in Macedon in the decentralization space or Wikipedia
0:19:50 is still here, it still exists. It’s under threat right now. But those places still exist. Just all the
0:19:55 air gets sucked out of the room by the tech giants. And some of what we try to do is to point out that the
0:20:00 the internet isn’t Facebook, there’s a whole set of other things that aren’t in the tech giants. And if
0:20:06 we turn our attention towards them, there are people there who could use a little support and coding and
0:20:09 lifting up to build a better version of our world.
0:20:30 Of all these things that are going on right now, what scares you the most?
0:20:36 : I think it’s hard to be alive in America right now and not be worried about authoritarianism. I
0:20:43 think that’s the scariest thing. The scariest thing is we’re seeing the takeover of both our business
0:20:50 side and our civil liberties side by an idea that one guy gets to make all the rules for all of us and
0:20:55 that there’s no questioning that, this kind of king-like mentality. I think unless we fix that,
0:21:01 we can’t even get at most of the other problems. And we’re seeing it in kind of rule by executive
0:21:05 order. Executive orders have always existed, but they weren’t the law of the land. And they shouldn’t
0:21:11 be, right? We’re supposed to have checks and balances and due process. And for me, as a civil liberties
0:21:17 lawyer, these are our tools, right? Like we need tools to go into court or to have a Congress that’s
0:21:23 actually willing to pass a law that protects us as opposed to just doing the bidding of one guy.
0:21:28 I think until we get past the rule of King’s mentality, it’s hard to deal with any of the
0:21:33 other problems. And that to me is the scariest thing that’s going on right now is watching these
0:21:39 institutions that we need in order to protect us not step up to the moment and do it.
0:21:45 : You mentioned Signal several times now, so obviously you must use Signal. But
0:21:51 I have some really tactical questions to ask you about Signal from someone who is in the middle of
0:21:51 this, okay?
0:21:52 : Yeah.
0:21:59 : So first of all, what time period is your default disappearing messages set to?
0:22:04 : It depends on the conversation. I try to set it for a week, but if it’s something where we’re
0:22:09 planning something over a longer time, I will sometimes keep it longer than that. But I have
0:22:14 occasionally used Signal to develop an expert witness in a case or something like that. And then I keep them
0:22:19 longer because I want to be able to go back and make sure that my memory isn’t so great. And different
0:22:20 things have different needs.
0:22:29 : So what happens if a Department of Justice lawyer says to you that you have signals set to automatic
0:22:35 disappearing messages and that’s spoilage, you are destroying evidence?
0:22:42 : It depends on the situation. If something isn’t privileged and is evidence in a case, then you have to turn it off,
0:22:48 just like anything else. If you’ve got auto deletion of your email or anything else. The law requires that if
0:22:54 something is at issue in a case, then you can’t get rid of it. But I don’t think you should live your life as
0:22:59 if you’re always under a litigation hold because I think that can end up being its own problem on its own side.
0:23:04 : So certainly if something is looking like it’s going to be evidence in a case that’s actually
0:23:09 pending or threatened, then yes, you should put a litigation hold in place and you should not get
0:23:14 rid of it. But I think that it’s still better in the rest of your life, which shouldn’t be all your life,
0:23:20 to only keep things for as long as you need them and get rid of them. And this is our advice to companies
0:23:25 too, right? People shouldn’t be just gathering up data and keeping it in case it might be helpful
0:23:31 someday. That way lies a lot of problems. I used to joke at that EFF that we had become an anti-logging
0:23:36 society, not in terms of trees, but in terms of your logs, that you should really think hard about
0:23:40 what you’re logging and why, because it can end up being a vector. And as people who’ve been through
0:23:46 litigation know, it’s really, really expensive if you’ve kept everything all the time and you have
0:23:51 to turn it over in litigation, whether it’s even remotely useful or not, because sorting through
0:23:57 what might be relevant to a litigation hold and what isn’t is its own huge burden. So you may not
0:24:02 be saving yourself money or hassle or time in the long run by defaulting to keeping everything.
0:24:08 : I don’t want you to think I’m obsessed with the topic of spoilage, but I have one more
0:24:10 spoilage question. : Did something happen to you Guy? What happened?
0:24:20 : If you set your default for every new chat to disappear after a week, can you not make a case
0:24:27 that as a course of routine use of signal, I make everything disappear. I didn’t do it to destroy
0:24:33 evidence in anticipation of litigation. : So this is not legal advice. I am not your lawyer,
0:24:39 but once you have a clear indication that litigation is coming, whether that’s because you’ve gotten a
0:24:45 demand letter or you’re in negotiations with someone, somebody showed up, or you reasonably
0:24:49 know it’s coming. And that can be a little vague at times, but the courts will generally think very
0:24:53 specifically. If you’re going back and forth saying, we know we’re going to get sued for this,
0:24:57 but I think we can defend it. That’s the time you ought to turn your little light on. And certainly,
0:25:03 once you get a demand letter, then a good lawyer will send out what’s called a litigation hold
0:25:08 letter to you, your entire organization, and say anything that’s about this dispute,
0:25:15 we need to stop getting rid of it and we need to start keeping it. So yes, putting in an automatic
0:25:20 thing that gets rid of communications and stuff that you don’t need is useful and it can help protect
0:25:27 you that it is your automatic thing. But you can’t then pretend like you don’t know litigation is
0:25:31 coming. Once you know litigation is coming, you need to change course for stuff that’s related to that.
0:25:35 : Okay. Two more tactical questions. : Okay.
0:25:42 : Because, you know, this is a rare opportunity to speak to an expert like this. I know that you must
0:25:49 probably not use biometric authentication for your phone, not your fingerprint or your face, right?
0:25:51 : No, I do. I do. : You do?
0:25:59 : Yeah. : Okay. So explain that to me because it seems to me that, not that I am a lawyer, but it seems
0:26:06 to me that under the fifth amendment, if they cannot compel you to give them their passcode, but they can
0:26:14 compel your fingerprint or face. So isn’t it better to use a passcode instead of your face or fingerprint?
0:26:19 : I think if you’re at risk of being arrested, then that’s important. I think if you’re going
0:26:24 through a border, if you may be going to a protest, if you’re engaged in something where you think law
0:26:29 enforcement is likely to stop you, then you’re right. You should turn off the biometrics and you’re exactly
0:26:35 right. The fifth amendment for what I think are some pretty dumb reasons, actually, distinguishes between
0:26:40 putting in a password or showing your face for purposes of the fifth amendment. And honestly,
0:26:45 I think that whole case law is pretty stupid, right? I think that the constitution should reflect how
0:26:51 people live and not have this, you know, did it require the contents of your mind or not analysis,
0:26:56 but whatever, that’s where we are with the fifth amendment right now. So yes, if you think something’s
0:27:01 coming, then that’s a really good idea. But you know, the rest of your life, people can’t follow
0:27:06 ridiculous instructions. I want technology that makes my life better, that makes it easier.
0:27:11 And so does everybody else. So what security people call this is threat modeling, right? You need to
0:27:15 figure out who you are, what are you doing in the world and what’s your threat model and make your
0:27:23 security based on that. EFF has something called surveillance self-defense, ssd.eff.org or
0:27:28 So look for surveillance self-defense. And we have playlists based on who you are and what you’re
0:27:33 thinking about. So if you’re a journalist or you’re a human rights defender, you’re attending a protest,
0:27:39 you’re helping people who might be seeking abortions in America today, you have to worry about that,
0:27:44 then you might have a different set of things you do to protect yourself than people who aren’t at risk.
0:27:50 And so I think everybody has to do their own analysis. For me, most of the time walking
0:27:57 around, I’m pretty unlikely to be picked up by the cops in the street and asked to have my phone
0:28:01 seized. If you’re really worried, you can do that. And there are times and places where I make sure my
0:28:06 phone is off or that I’ve turned those biometrics off. There are other times and places in my life where
0:28:12 I just want to be able to open it up and look at maps and make sure I’m not lost. And I really don’t
0:28:16 want to have to fumble with putting in a password. So everybody has to make those decisions for
0:28:20 themselves. And we have tools to help people make them intelligently.
0:28:31 But Cindy, okay, so what I find almost incredulous is you are the executive director of EFF and you’re
0:28:38 saying that you feel pretty comfortable walking around with your face or fingerprint opening up your phone.
0:28:43 As the executive director of the EFF, you’re saying that I am astounded.
0:28:49 I think that everybody has to make these decisions for themselves. I love technology,
0:28:53 right? I mean, look, if I was the most paranoid person, I wouldn’t be carrying around a smartphone.
0:28:57 If you’re going to take this to the end of what makes you absolutely the safest
0:29:02 in every situation, I don’t know why you would carry around a beacon that’s tracking you all the
0:29:06 time in the first place. But we all have to make these trade-offs. And I would not say that my trade-offs
0:29:11 are the ones that other people should make. I have this interesting position where, you know,
0:29:16 right now we’re suing Doge. EFF is suing Doge under the Privacy Act for access to the Office of Personnel
0:29:22 Management records. Now, in some ways that may make me worried that at some point the Trump administration
0:29:27 doesn’t think lawyers are off limits for purposes of targeting them. On the other hand, there’s a
0:29:33 federal judge who knows that I’m counsel in the case. It’s not a good look for the government to be
0:29:40 attacking, harassing, and tossing in jail the people who are suing over the Privacy Act in the thing.
0:29:47 And I have always felt, and this is just my threat model, that being high profile and being somebody
0:29:53 who’s laboring in the courts to try to bring justice makes me probably not the first people
0:29:57 they’re going to go after if they go after. Now, things are changing fast in this country,
0:30:04 and that might not be the right threat model today as it was 10 years ago or even 20 when we were doing
0:30:08 the Bernstein case. And believe me, the NSA and the national security people were not very psyched
0:30:12 about us attacking cryptography. I did not for a minute think that they were going to come after
0:30:17 me personally. That was a different time and it was off limits. And I think that it would have
0:30:22 completely backfired on them in the courts. I still think it would backfire on them in the courts
0:30:28 if they did this kind of direct attack. Now, other people should make their own evaluations. And again,
0:30:34 I wouldn’t say that this is my position everywhere all the time, but it is my position when I’m walking
0:30:39 out my front door and going to the grocery store or all the other things that I do. The other piece
0:30:43 of this, and I think it’s really important because you’re asking me personal questions about my own
0:30:49 decision-making, about my own security, and I think that’s useful for people. But we have to fix these
0:30:55 systems. This isn’t a set of individual decisions that anyone should have to make. We need to have a
0:31:00 comprehensive privacy law. We need to have strong encryption built into our tools so that we don’t
0:31:04 have to mess with settings or turn things off in order to have strong encryption. We need to have
0:31:10 laws that protect our ability to have security and privacy and make it something that the government
0:31:16 just can’t do to do these kinds of things. So I think on the one hand, individual choices are really
0:31:21 important. And on the other hand, sometimes in privacy specifically, people get caught up in their
0:31:26 individual decisions as if it’s their responsibility to make sure that they’re as protected as possible.
0:31:30 And I think that makes no more sense than, you know, if you buy a car, you expect it to have
0:31:36 brakes and that those brakes work. And nobody expects you to go out and search for, find and install your
0:31:42 own brakes. I think basic security and privacy is like brakes on a car and all of our devices and tools
0:31:49 and laws need to have them baked in to protect us rather than the responsibility being foisted on us
0:31:56 to find all these tools, pick the right ones and use them in the right way. That’s broken. And a lot
0:32:01 of what we do at EFF is try to give you individual advice about how to do what you’re doing. But the vast
0:32:07 majority of what we do is to try to set the laws and the policies and pressure the companies to make this
0:32:15 not your responsibility anymore. Cindy, knock me over with a feather. If you want to use the brake analogy,
0:32:24 yes, a Porsche may break from 60 to zero in 125 feet and a Ford 150 may take 250 feet. You need to know that
0:32:30 not all brakes are created equal and you still put on a seat belt, right? Yeah, absolutely. All of those
0:32:35 things are important. You don’t have zero responsibility. We have a regulatory system
0:32:40 that says brakes must be within these normal tolerances, right? Same thing. We need a privacy
0:32:45 act. The privacy act isn’t going to say, it’s not going to be a one size fits all thing. It shouldn’t
0:32:49 be. That would hurt innovation, but it should set the boundaries. You can’t put something out on the
0:32:56 marketplace that spies so dramatically on your customers that they can’t possibly turn it off.
0:33:02 They can’t possibly control it. They have no agency about that. And I think of it again, like the way
0:33:08 a good regulation will set the tolerances of what can go out there. So yeah, you might have much
0:33:15 better brakes on a car that has a much bigger engine, but there is an outer boundary, right? You can’t have
0:33:22 no brakes on a car and regulation does some of that. Consumers do some of that by the consumer reports or
0:33:26 other things telling people, watch out, this car doesn’t have very good brakes. You got to have a
0:33:33 mix of markets and smart regulation. I’m not a big fan of regulation. I think it can be very bad and it
0:33:40 can help prop up oligarchies and monopolies. But smart regulation, my classic example of this is when
0:33:45 you know, there’s a decision by the FCC that the phone companies were saying you could only plug their
0:33:51 phones into the wall. And the FCC said, no, you have to let people plug modems into the wall. And
0:33:56 that’s how we got the home internet revolution. That’s smart regulation, right? That’s regulation
0:34:03 that is not only creating the outer tolerances of what we can accept, but also making sure that there’s
0:34:06 a competitive and other options for people within that space.
0:34:14 Are you trying to convince your friends and family to use Signal instead of WhatsApp or you think it’s
0:34:16 irrelevant for most people?
0:34:23 I think WhatsApp uses the same security, it’s the same encryption under the hood as Signal. So I don’t
0:34:28 think WhatsApp is a bad choice in terms of end-to-end encryption. What I don’t like about WhatsApp is
0:34:33 because it’s a Facebook property, they know who you’re talking to, even if they don’t know what you’re
0:34:38 saying. And so on that measure, Signal is better because Signal is designed not to know who you’re
0:34:44 talking to at the level that WhatsApp is and is trying to monetize. But as a matter of encryption,
0:34:50 WhatsApp is not a bad choice. But Facebook Messenger, for instance, is not end-to-end encrypted. I think
0:34:54 they’re fixing that, but it was not end-to-end encrypted. And let me tell you the consequences of
0:35:01 that. So there’s a woman and her daughter in Nebraska who are both in jail right now. And they’re in jail
0:35:06 because they use Facebook Messenger to talk to each other about the daughter needing an abortion.
0:35:13 And that’s illegal in Nebraska. And as a result of Facebook having the plain text of that communication,
0:35:18 because it was not end-to-end encrypted, and Facebook got a warrant that required them to turn
0:35:23 over the copy of the communications that it has because it’s a centralized system. So Facebook has a copy of
0:35:27 all those communications. Both the mother and the daughter went to jail.
0:35:33 If that same communication had happened over Signal or probably even over WhatsApp,
0:35:38 the mother and daughter wouldn’t be in jail right now because the plain text of that conversation
0:35:43 wouldn’t have been available to law enforcement. Many more people are having to pay attention to that
0:35:48 fact, which might not seem at all when you’re just using these technologies. You’re just using whatever’s
0:35:54 easiest for you. But now that we have a world in which some communications are illegal at a level
0:35:59 that I think was not true before, say, the Dobbs decision and all of these states started passing
0:36:04 things, there’s a whole new community of people who need to understand the difference between the
0:36:09 securities and the securities of their communication techniques than did before. Now, this was always
0:36:14 true for people who are human rights defenders, people who are working with immigrants, people around the
0:36:19 world who come from marginalized backgrounds have known this for a while, and now there’s a whole new
0:36:25 community of people who are starting to wake up to these differences. So, yeah, it’s important that people
0:36:31 move to end-to-end encrypted services, and it’s important to more people now than ever before.
0:36:39 Cindy, I would make the case that WhatsApp, which is end-to-end encrypted, but it doesn’t encrypt the
0:36:45 metadata. And there’s a lot you can figure out from metadata that the mother and the daughter
0:36:50 communicated. At this point, they contacted this abortion service and all that. You don’t know what they
0:36:54 said, but it’s little markers on the trail, right?
0:36:59 Yeah, no, you’re right. And EFF fought the NSA over metadata. One of the things that we learned
0:37:05 is that the Patriot Act had a section in it called 215 that let the government demand everybody’s
0:37:11 telephone records from the telephone companies. And one of the things that we learned and that we learned
0:37:16 in 2006, but then everybody learned in 2013 with Mr. Snowden, is that this was actually happening,
0:37:20 that the phone companies were handing over the metadata of our phone records. And you’re
0:37:25 exactly right, that you can glean a lot from those. The reason I’m a little soft on WhatsApp,
0:37:29 but I think it’s a perfectly reasonable choice not to use them, is that it is
0:37:35 how people around the world really use it at a level. And I’d rather not shame them for the
0:37:40 differences between the two of it, but really kind of encourage them to come away from the things that
0:37:48 are entirely unencrypted or that are fake encrypted. Telegram, as we’ve learned, while it sells itself as
0:37:53 being encrypted, it really isn’t at the level that gives people protection. In the world of secure
0:37:59 messaging, I agree with you that Signal is more secure and a better option. I just want people
0:38:04 to pick something that’s a little more secure, even if they don’t go to the maximum secure. And on that
0:38:10 scale, especially, again, around the world, Signal is still so small compared to the reach of something
0:38:15 like WhatsApp. I don’t want to shame people who are using the one, even as we encourage them to
0:38:21 come to a little more. So that’s more strategy than it is like hardcore security advice. But
0:38:27 it’s certainly better to use Signal, but it’s better to use WhatsApp and stick them with the metadata than
0:38:34 it is to use something that’s completely in the clear. You brought up the Nebraska case, and I am
0:38:42 familiar with the Nebraska case, and it opens up a whole nother can of worms that I never figured, which
0:38:49 is the narrative seems to be that if it wasn’t for Facebook and them using Messenger, they wouldn’t be in
0:38:57 jail. On the other hand, the facts show that she did have an abortion after the period permitted in
0:39:04 Nebraska, and they did try to burn the fetus and all that. So in a sense, they did do what they were charged
0:39:12 with. So it’s not like they were falsely imprisoned, or did I get this wrong? Well, it depends on your view of
0:39:19 the law. I think that this is a law in Nebraska that most people think is tremendously unfair and wrong.
0:39:27 And disconnected from the reality of people in America and women in America. I think that
0:39:32 in a world in which every law is perfect and wonderful and should be celebrated and supported,
0:39:36 you might be able to take the position that they broke the law, so therefore they got what they
0:39:42 deserved and how they got found is irrelevant. I don’t think we live in that world. And I think that
0:39:48 when the law is unjust, making sure that people can still live their lives and have protection and have
0:39:55 security is tremendously important. And we live in a world with a lot of laws that are not just right
0:40:00 now and a lot of things like executive orders and other sorts of things that are just ignoring the
0:40:05 law. They’re just snatching people off the street and sending them to El Salvador. This is one of the
0:40:11 reasons that we need privacy and security is because not all governments are just and not all laws are
0:40:17 just. The other reasons we might need it is just basic human dignity and having the space to be able to live
0:40:23 your life without being tracked all the time. But I would maintain that there’s a lot of people in
0:40:28 America who are very uncomfortable and unhappy with some of these laws. They were not passed
0:40:34 in ways that I think people feel very good about. And I think that giving people the ability to have the
0:40:40 level of privacy and security they need to live their lives and not making a world of perfect enforcement
0:40:46 of every single law regard is how the law has generally been. And that’s to stop things that
0:40:50 I think shock the conscience. And I think in this particular instance, this was a mother and daughter
0:40:55 who I believe were having conversation inside their own home. Traditionally, the Fourth Amendment would
0:41:00 say that what happens inside your home is completely not available to law enforcement, right? That’s why they
0:41:07 need a probable cause warrant to come into your house. But because technology meant that this third party
0:41:14 company had the plain text of the communication, suddenly what happens inside the home between a mother and
0:41:19 daughter is available to law enforcement. So you have to look at how is technology changing
0:41:26 everything? And this is a situation in which the founders of America would never thought that the
0:41:31 government would be able to prosecute you even if you were violating the law based on a mother-daughter
0:41:35 conversation and beside the home. And because of the way technology has happened here, that actually
0:41:42 was able to occur. You have to balance all of these things. It’s not just one thing that changes. And
0:41:48 technology has made changes to the way that we communicate in ways that the Constitution needs to catch up.
0:41:56 Up next on Remarkable People. But we’re going to start to see weaponized takedowns at a level that I
0:42:00 think we haven’t seen before because this law facilitates it. And it creates the incentives for the
0:42:07 companies to take things down if they get a complaint. And again, I don’t think that those complaints are
0:42:11 going to be about non-consensual sexual imagery. They’re going to be about people saying things they don’t like.
0:42:21 Do you want to be more remarkable? One way to do it is to spend three days with the boldest
0:42:27 builders in business. I’m Jeff Berman, host of Masters of Scale, inviting you to join us at this
0:42:33 year’s Masters of Scale Summit, October 7th to 9th in San Francisco. You’ll hear from visionaries like
0:42:40 Waymo’s Takidra Mawakana, Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya, celebrity chef David Chang, Patagonia’s Ryan Gellert,
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0:42:55 That’s mastersofscale.com/remarkable. And Guy Kawasaki will be there too.
0:43:01 Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People.
0:43:05 It’s found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
0:43:10 Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:43:20 So it’s obviously 2025 and now we have someone in charge of homeland security who
0:43:27 cannot even define the writ of habeas corpus. So I’m asking you like if somebody says to you or
0:43:35 your family or friends says to you, “I’m not worried. I have nothing to hide.” Is the “nothing to hide”
0:43:41 statement true these days or does everybody have something to hide at this point?
0:43:45 I haven’t done a demographic survey, but I would suggest that most people,
0:43:48 even if they don’t have something to hide, talk to somebody who does.
0:43:55 Do you have somebody in your life whose papers have expired, who’ve overstayed their visa?
0:44:00 Do you have someone in your life who’s a person of color, who’s trans, who’s LGBTQ of any kind,
0:44:06 not just trans? Do you have somebody in your life who’s a person of color who may think that diversity
0:44:11 and equity are important values and have said something about that? The line over who has
0:44:15 something to hide is really changing. And I would argue that by the time you go through all the lists,
0:44:22 just of the things we know, there aren’t very many people who wouldn’t be impacted by this. And again,
0:44:28 this is why security and privacy are so important. I also think they’re important regardless of whether you
0:44:33 individually need them. I think that one of the problems that we have in privacy is people think
0:44:38 about it in individual personal terms. And so they can come to the, “Well, I have nothing to hide”
0:44:44 kind of position. But privacy isn’t just important for each of us. It’s important for all of us.
0:44:48 And that’s an important distinction. Like most people don’t want to stand on a street corner
0:44:53 and shout out what they think ought to happen in this country. But I think all of us understand that
0:44:56 the First Amendment protects us all, even if we don’t want to speak.
0:45:03 The Fourth Amendment and privacy do work the same way. Giving everybody the shelter of privacy means
0:45:06 that even if you don’t personally need it, somebody who you love, somebody who you know,
0:45:12 or somebody who’s going to help change the world for the better does. And I’m going to give you an
0:45:19 example. In my lifetime, being gay in this country was very, very dangerous. Saying that gay people
0:45:24 ought to have the right to marry, they ought to have the equal right to love who they want to love,
0:45:28 that could get you killed. And in fact, it’s still pretty dangerous, right? We’re moving backwards.
0:45:34 But there was a time in which those conversations had to happen in private. This idea that maybe
0:45:38 loving who you want to love as opposed to the traditional heterosexual thing isn’t such a bad
0:45:43 thing. Maybe we should normalize that and make that okay. That was a very dangerous conversation.
0:45:48 Those conversations had to happen in private and in secret. And in my lifetime,
0:45:52 those have gone from conversations that had to happen in private and secret to something where
0:45:59 we’ve really changed the law. We’ve changed a lot of people’s minds about it. We’ve changed attitudes.
0:46:04 And that public part of the conversation couldn’t have happened unless there was a private part of
0:46:08 the conversation. And I think the same is true if you look at most social movements. If you look at
0:46:14 the anti-slavery movement in the United States, like way back, if you look at some of the anti-immigration
0:46:19 sentiments in this country, where we had the Chinese Exclusion Act and other kinds of things,
0:46:24 and we shifted into a world where we thought differently about differences in America,
0:46:28 the public part of those conversations couldn’t have happened without the private part. So it may
0:46:34 not be you. It may not even be the people you love, but it may be the people who are going to help us
0:46:39 make change for the better. And I think we need to stand up for the rights of all of us because this
0:46:44 is what a human right is. This is what a human value is. It’s not something that’s just dependent on you
0:46:48 and your everyday life, although I think most of us have an increasing need in our everyday life for
0:46:54 privacy and security. But these are values that we should stand up for, even if it’s not
0:47:01 right now visible individually to us, that we need them because this is how society self-governs.
0:47:07 This is how we make changes. This is how we have the space to decide that we don’t like the guy
0:47:11 who’s the president right now and we want to vote for someone else. Increasingly in this country,
0:47:16 those conversations can be pretty dangerous for people to start talking. We’re not all the way to
0:47:21 the kind of repression of other systems where they put the opposition candidate and anybody who’s friends
0:47:27 with them in jail. You can see that on our horizon right now. We need to stand up for privacy and
0:47:35 security even if we don’t need it right now because we may need it pretty soon. One of the big activities
0:47:42 of the EFF right now is involved with the Take It Down Act. And I would like if you would please
0:47:49 explain what is that act supposed to do. Yeah, we spend a lot of time with this particular problem
0:47:54 where there’s a harm online that people agree is a harm. In the instance of the Take It Down Act,
0:48:01 it’s non-consensual sexual images. Your ex posts your sex tape online or other kinds of situations in
0:48:08 which sexual imagery of people is posted online without their consent. It’s a real problem. So people will
0:48:15 take a real problem and then they’ll propose a legal solution that is not good. So the Take It Down Act
0:48:21 says that if somebody tells you that you as a platform or a host of a site that you have to
0:48:26 take something down, you have to take it down immediately or you’re liable. And it is not limited
0:48:33 to non-consensual sexual imagery. Even if we could agree what the definition of that is and that can get a
0:48:38 little fuzzy. It just means that people have to take it down if they get a complaint. And the worry
0:48:44 is that those complaints get weaponized. President Trump, his big speech that he gave in January or early
0:48:49 February said he can’t wait to use this law, that we should pass it. He can’t wait to use it. I don’t
0:48:54 think that what President Trump is worried about is non-consensual sexual imagery. I don’t think that’s
0:49:00 what he meant. But there’s a classic example of how a law that is passed for one narrow purpose can be
0:49:07 used to create a censorship regime for far broader speech than just that. This is why we really
0:49:12 oppose it. This law, I don’t think it’s going to help for non-consensual sexual imagery. The problem
0:49:16 for most of that imagery isn’t that the platforms don’t take it down. They take it down pretty fast
0:49:22 all the time. It’s that they can’t keep up because there’s so much of it. So it’s not even responsive to
0:49:27 the problem because I don’t think the problem is that platforms don’t care about this. I mean,
0:49:31 some might, and that’s important, but we didn’t need a federal law for that piece of the problem.
0:49:37 But instead, it opens it up so that there could be a censorship machine from anybody with power
0:49:42 to take down anything they don’t like, or at least a wide, wide range of what they don’t like. And
0:49:45 again, when you’ve got the President of the United States saying he can’t wait to use this power,
0:49:51 it ought to be a pretty good sign that maybe this law is doing something different than the people who
0:49:55 proposed it do. And to the point where at the very end of it, some of the people who
0:50:00 originally proposed the law flipped and said, “This is a bad idea. This isn’t the right thing.” We had
0:50:05 been opposed to it all along because we worried that it could be misused. But by the end, some of the
0:50:09 very people who started proposing, a couple of law professors who were big fans of this and who proposed
0:50:15 it issued blog posts saying, “Don’t support this. This is not what we meant. And this is a bad thing.”
0:50:21 Nonetheless, it passed and it got signed into law. It’s about a year or two before it really gets
0:50:27 implemented. So we won’t see right away, but we’re going to start to see weaponized takedowns at a
0:50:32 level that I think we haven’t seen before because this law facilitates it. And it creates the incentives
0:50:38 for the companies to take things down if they get a complaint. And again, I don’t think that those
0:50:42 complaints are going to be about non-consensual sexual imagery. They’re going to be about people
0:50:49 saying things they don’t like. Cindy, I don’t know if you realize this, but I think you just said one of
0:50:58 the funniest things I’ve heard in five years of podcasting, which is I don’t think Trump is concerned
0:51:07 about non-consensual images. I would say that if that was said at the white house correspondence dinner,
0:51:19 it would be in the words of Barack Obama, a mic drop moment. But anyway, I’m still recovering from that.
0:51:28 And when you see something like that in a bill and the possible perversions of how the bill is used,
0:51:36 is that something that Mike Johnson snuck in and with that intent or is this unintended consequence?
0:51:41 Am I being paranoid? They’re putting shit like that in purposely or it’s unintended?
0:51:47 I think that it’s a mix. I think for some of the people, it might be unintended. This is a bill that
0:51:54 was sponsored by Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. And I suspect that she’s a very smart person. And it’s not
0:51:58 like people haven’t tried to tell her. I don’t want to give her too much credit, but I think that
0:52:02 people come in with a pretty honest intent to try to address the harms. They’re just more interested
0:52:08 in the harms than they are in the actual impact of how things are going to work in the real world once
0:52:13 they get passed. So some people are dishonest. I don’t think that Mr. Trump is honest in his support of
0:52:19 this, that he really wants to make a stand about non-consensual sexual imagery. Other people are cynical and
0:52:24 some people are well-meaning. There’s another law coming along that I want to flag that has a similar
0:52:31 problem. It’s a law called COSA. It’s the Kids Online Safety Act. And again, this is trying to get at an online
0:52:37 harm, which is kids online and them having access to information that could be dangerous for them.
0:52:43 But what it’s going to do is it’s going to create a requirement that you provide credentials to get
0:52:51 access to most information online. It’s going to require you to show your ID at some level in order
0:52:56 to get access to things online. This is going to age gate everything online. It’s going to make it harder
0:53:01 for people online who don’t have credentials. And that’s a lot of people in this country to actually
0:53:07 get access to the internet in any meaningful way. It’s not going to stop kids from having access to
0:53:12 stuff that they don’t want to have, but it is going to age gate everything on the internet. It’s going to
0:53:16 require a lot of things. And then it’s going to create these huge companies that have everybody’s
0:53:22 identity information that are going to be sitting ducks for data breaches. It’s going to be the mother
0:53:27 load for people who want to do spying, who want to do identity theft or other sorts of things,
0:53:33 because they’re going to create this. And so I think COSA is another one where there is a real harm
0:53:39 of kids having access to stuff that they shouldn’t have online and that the solution that is being
0:53:44 proposed in this law is not going to solve the problem and is going to cause a whole other set of
0:53:49 problems. We know the things that work for kids online and having them not have access to harms,
0:53:55 but they’re a lot more expensive and require a lot more thought than simply just requiring companies
0:54:01 to put in an age gating thing, either on your device or otherwise. And this is something where we live a
0:54:08 lot, especially on the legislative side, which is good intention, bad idea. And it’s hard because I think
0:54:14 a lot of lawmakers really want to respond to this problem and they just don’t pay as much attention to
0:54:18 whether the thing that they’re championing is actually going to solve the problem and what the
0:54:19 collateral impacts are.
0:54:27 So you mean to say that the Speaker of the House and his son cannot maintain control of each
0:54:30 other and take care of this problem. We need other ways to do this.
0:54:36 I think there are other ways to do it. I was a kid. You were a kid. Is the idea that you had to show an
0:54:42 ID, was that a thing that actually kept you out of anything that you really wanted to have access to?
0:54:48 No. So why do we think that’s going to work online where it’s even harder, right? It’s not like fake
0:54:52 credentials were just made up yesterday, right? I just don’t think that’s really going to be the way
0:54:59 to do it. Again, if it caused no collateral problems at all, then okay, whatever, let’s give it a try. But
0:55:03 it’s going to cause a lot of collateral problems and those problems are going to fall on the people who
0:55:05 otherwise don’t have resources.
0:55:09 Isn’t Australia already doing this? Is it causing problems there?
0:55:13 Yeah. You know, I haven’t seen the research yet. Australia is doing a version of it. They’re also
0:55:19 doing a version of blocking encryption. And I haven’t seen the research yet, but I would be shocked if it
0:55:26 was actually having a significant impact. We know that it’s a mix for kids online, right? We know that
0:55:32 there’s a certain percentage of kids who have a hard time online and react badly. There’s another
0:55:36 percentage of kids, and I want to be clear about this. This is LGBTQ kids. It’s kids from marginalized
0:55:41 backgrounds, kids who don’t fit in where they’re growing up, for whom having access to information
0:55:48 on the internet is literally a lifeline. EFF did a survey and it’s convenience data who filled out our
0:55:53 survey, but we asked kids to tell us, you know, what’s their experience online and how has it helped
0:55:58 them? And we had so many, you should read these, they’re on the website, heartwarming and terrible
0:56:03 testimonials from kids who said, if it weren’t for my online community, I would have killed myself
0:56:10 by now. Because nobody in my house or in my community understands what it’s like to be LGBTQ, gender
0:56:17 queer. And it’s the online world that saved my life. And there are a lot of those kids. And I think that
0:56:24 people who are thinking only about one kind of harm and legislating based upon one kind of harm that
0:56:30 definitely impacts a segment of kids online, especially a certain segment of young girls online.
0:56:36 But only legislating based on that and not seeing the other people that they’re going to harm with
0:56:41 it, which includes a lot of gender queer kids and other kids who don’t fit in, whether that’s religiously
0:56:47 or otherwise in the place that they grow up. Like, that’s just bad legislation. We have to save all the
0:56:48 kids, not just some of them.
0:56:52 But maybe they want to harm those kids.
0:56:56 Well, this is one of the things that the Republicans have been pretty clear about. Marshall Blackburn has
0:57:02 been very clear about. Like, when they talk about online harms for kids in a segment of the conservative
0:57:06 side, they mean kids shouldn’t have access to information about this. They’re talking about
0:57:14 their view of harms is if kids have access to information that isn’t the very narrow Christian
0:57:20 infused version of things, that’s the harm is getting access to DEI information or other kinds
0:57:25 of information like that. And so when we talk about online harms, if we don’t specify which harms we’re
0:57:31 talking about, we’re talking about people who really just want to censor what other people’s children can
0:57:37 see. And I think it’s very vulnerable to that. That again, Marsha Blackburn, who is, you know,
0:57:43 or the Heritage Foundation have both said that’s what they want to pass COSA to do. And for the Democrats
0:57:49 and the other people who are really focused on this one area of online harms that I think we could all
0:57:54 agree are not great. To empower those people as well, like it’s wrong and it’s scary.
0:58:03 I have to ask you tactical questions because who better to ask tactical questions? So this is a
0:58:11 very tactical thread we’re going to go into now, which is, let’s say that you are a US citizen,
0:58:17 born and bred, you have no criminal record, you return to the United States from overseas,
0:58:26 and border patrol asks for your phone. Do you give it? Is it your regular phone or do you take
0:58:34 another phone overseas because you knew this might happen? Is it locked? Do you unlock it for them?
0:58:41 Or do you hand it to them and you say, have added boys, try to decrypt this phone. What’s your
0:58:42 attitude at the border?
0:58:48 Sadly, our border is largely a constitutional rights free zone. EFF did a case a few years ago
0:58:53 where we tried to get the Fourth Amendment to apply to the border and we were not successful. We’re not
0:58:59 done. We’re going to keep trying. But you’re pointing out something really true, which is you have many
0:59:05 fewer rights to protect your phone at the border than you do otherwise. You still have to do some
0:59:10 threat modeling and figure out your situation. If you’re an American citizen and you’re coming back
0:59:15 into the country, they can detain you for a while, but they can’t kick you out. You have a right to
0:59:20 come back, but they can make you sit in detention for four or five hours while they try to open your
0:59:25 phone if you don’t open it for them. And you have to decide for yourself, is that something I want to
0:59:30 do that can be very uncomfortable? Other people are like, sure, that’s fine. But I think, do you have
0:59:34 another plane to catch? You’re going to miss another, you’re going to miss your connection. What is
0:59:39 your life like? Are you trying to make it to your daughter’s wedding? Even as an American citizen,
0:59:42 you still have to think about your threat model as you’re coming into the country. And that should
0:59:49 inform what you decide to do. I do recommend that if you’ve got stuff on your phone or accessible
0:59:54 through your phone that you really do need to keep private. Think about taking a second phone. Think about
1:00:00 getting a burner phone that you use for that or a device like an empty Chromebook so that when you get
1:00:07 overseas, you can use a lot of your services that are cloud-based so you can log back in. You don’t need all that
1:00:13 information on the computer you carry. And same for coming back into the country. Wipe this stuff off
1:00:18 of it and then just sign back on again once you get back safely home. And the cloud computing revolution
1:00:23 has made that a lot more accessible to a lot more people than it used to be. The other thing I recommend
1:00:30 is if you are going to carry your own device through the border, turn it off. Turn it off. Because all the
1:00:36 devices require when you turn it back on again, that you put in a password, that you turn off the biometrics,
1:00:41 that you put in a password to open it up again. And it’s encrypted at the time. They can break into most
1:00:47 phones, but it takes a lot more effort and a lot more money. And so you put them in a position where they
1:00:52 have to decide how much work they want to put into entering into your phone. And I sometimes say,
1:00:57 make them fish with a line and a pole. Don’t let them drift net fish through everything. And I think
1:01:02 for a lot of people, unless you’re really the target, that will mean that it’s not worth it to them.
1:01:07 They’ll troll through what’s easy, but they’re not going to deploy the thing that they have to buy from
1:01:11 in order to actually collect information from your phone. Again, it depends on what kind of target you
1:01:15 think you are and how important it is. But I always maintain you should make it a little harder on them.
1:01:19 Make them have to go through every step, even if at the end they might be able to have access.
1:01:24 Make them go through every step because a lot of people just wash out of the process through then.
1:01:27 And I think that’s important to put them through it.
1:01:32 But what about the logic that if you refuse to unlock your phone,
1:01:34 that’s an admission that there’s something you’re hiding?
1:01:38 I don’t think it is an admission. I mean, at the end of the day,
1:01:42 they got to convince a jury or a judge. And I think as long as enough of us do it,
1:01:47 and it’s not just the guilty, then we need to combat that. Like privacy is a human right.
1:01:51 It’s your right. It’s your right not to have the law enforcement go
1:01:56 rifling through your stuff, unless they’ve demonstrated that you’ve done something wrong.
1:02:01 Where do we lawyers call a probable cause finding in front of a judge, right? That’s why we have the
1:02:04 Fourth Amendment the way we have it, which is they have to go to a judge. They have to say there’s
1:02:09 probable cause that you’ve violated the law. And then the judge has to agree with them. That’s what a
1:02:15 warrant is. If they haven’t done all those steps, then it’s your right to say, no, I’m not going to
1:02:21 voluntarily let you do this. That’s why I have a doormat that one of my interns gave me a long time
1:02:25 ago that says, come back with a warrant. And the EFF has them actually stickers for your phone.
1:02:32 That due process protection is important. And if you just decide that you don’t want that protection
1:02:36 anymore, of course, that’s your right. But that doesn’t mean that you’re doing something wrong if
1:02:41 you avail yourselves of the protection of the law. And I think we all need to stand up for that. This
1:02:47 idea that by not letting police just blow past all the protections that people fought and died for us to
1:02:54 have is somehow standing up for our rights as a citizen in order to do what we’ve done. To me,
1:03:00 that’s a patriotic thing to do. That’s why we did a war against a king to have our own country was so
1:03:06 that we could set our own rules. And when we could have a government that abided by them, holding the
1:03:10 government by the rules to me is the more patriotic thing to do, not less.
1:03:19 A few seconds ago, you used the phrase stuff that you might want to hide. But what is the definition
1:03:25 of that? I would think that on almost anybody’s phone, you could find a place where you said,
1:03:31 these tariffs are stupid. It’s going to ruin our economy. Are we at a point where, oh my God,
1:03:37 what if the border patrol saw me say that on social media because they opened up my phone? Am I going
1:03:42 to be deported or something? Yeah. Where are we on that? Well, I think it’s getting more and more
1:03:47 scary. And the Trump administration is trying to require people who want to come to the United States
1:03:52 and get visas to open up their social media to turn everything to public that used to be private. It’s
1:03:57 horrible. And we need to fight this proposal as best we can. I don’t think it’s constitutional,
1:04:02 but yeah, I think one of the things about the time we’re living in, which is really, really scary,
1:04:07 is that the needle is moving so fast and so unpredictably that I think when you ask me,
1:04:14 what if I have nothing to hide? I don’t think anybody can feel safe right now that their presumption
1:04:19 of what that means for them personally, much less for all the people they talk to. Remember,
1:04:23 what’s on your phone isn’t just what you say. It’s what other people say to you that you have.
1:04:28 Even if you might not implicate yourself, you might implicate your friends who got pissed off and wrote
1:04:34 a text about being angry about something that now law enforcement is looking at to try to decide
1:04:40 whether they get to stay in the country or whether they get detained. We often say privacy is a team
1:04:44 sport. The other thing people have to remember is it’s not just them. They have information about all
1:04:50 the people who they communicate with, who they love, who they follow. And so I do think it’s a time where
1:04:58 that story ought to be going away pretty fast. Everybody has reason to want to avail themselves
1:05:04 of their constitutional rights to privacy, to avail themselves of due process. Even if you can’t think
1:05:09 of what you have that might be at risk, that story is changing so fast that I don’t think anybody can give
1:05:16 you an accurate, up-to-date risk profile for yourself. And you ought to take that into consideration.
1:05:24 What does it mean if you are threatened, you or Wikipedia or NPR is threatened with the loss
1:05:28 of a not-for-profit status? What would it mean to you if you lost that?
1:05:35 Oh, it would be terrible. Again, EFF gets support from individuals and many of those individuals get
1:05:40 a tax deduction for supporting us. Now, lots of people don’t. And I think that there is a community
1:05:45 of support that ought not be dependent on nonprofits. And we ought to think about that a little hard,
1:05:51 but we’ve built up this system for civil society, for nonprofits like NPR and otherwise,
1:05:58 that is really based on the idea that there is a tax protected status for our donations. That if that
1:06:03 goes away, people are going to have to get funding in a way that isn’t tax protected. And that’s okay
1:06:08 for individual donations, as again, there are wealthy individuals who itemize for whom this is an important
1:06:14 thing. And that’s a big source of funding. But there’s a lot of poor people who support charities even if they
1:06:20 don’t get a tax deduction. So we need to think about that. But when it comes to foundations and
1:06:26 other kinds of money, many of those foundations can only give to organizations that have C3 status.
1:06:30 So if the MacArthur Foundation or the Ford Foundation, or even the foundations on the right
1:06:36 wanted to give money that wasn’t tax-free, they can’t. They have to change their whole charters and
1:06:42 ways of being in order to do that. So it’s a huge drain of money and support from these organizations
1:06:48 that do everything from soup kitchens and being in the court to religious organizations. They’re all C3,
1:06:55 those kinds of things, as well as people like me who do civil liberties and civil society protections to
1:07:00 people like NPR and other things who provide us information. It’s a huge blow and a huge risk to
1:07:06 this entire sector. Again, because we built up a system that is all interlocking and is all based
1:07:12 on the idea that the IRS C3 protection means that something is in the nonprofit side.
1:07:20 So how do you think this all plays out? There’s like some possibilities, like we all wake up,
1:07:27 there’s a midterm slaughter, we all go, phew, we duck that bullet. That’s one possibility. Another
1:07:34 possibility is Margaret Atwood come to find out wasn’t a novelist. She was a historian. She got it all right.
1:07:41 Another possibility is we have this performative democracy with a constitution and separation of
1:07:47 powers and balance of power, but none of that is really true. What’s your prediction for what’s
1:07:52 going to happen? I’m so bad at predicting. I’m really not good at it. We’re going to work really
1:07:57 hard to make sure that we end up in a position where we are still a self-governing, constitutionally
1:08:02 protected society. We’re going to pull all the levers we can. I would say, look, I was a person who
1:08:09 told the founders of Wired Magazine that the country didn’t need another tech magazine. I am so bad at
1:08:14 predicting the future, but I can say that we won’t get to a better future unless people lean in and try.
1:08:19 We’re not going to be able to just sit back and have this magically fix itself. We didn’t get into this
1:08:24 problem overnight. I don’t think we’re going to get out of it overnight. And we need people to vote,
1:08:30 to lean in, to support the organizations that are working to do this. Of course, EFF is one of them,
1:08:35 but we’re not the only one. Whatever speaks to your heart. We need people to show up. We don’t have an
1:08:43 armchair democracy anymore. We need people to show up to make their voices heard because without that,
1:08:48 we will definitely lose. Sometimes people ask me, are we just going to lose no matter what? And I’m
1:08:54 like, we could lose today or we could fight and lose in the future. And those are the only two choices,
1:08:58 because if you just sit back, it’s not going to get better magically. So I think people need to lean
1:09:03 in. They need to engage. They need to find what speaks to their heart and really show up for it.
1:09:08 I hope for some people that’s EFF because I think we do show up and we have done it. We know how to push
1:09:14 right now. But if that’s not the thing, find the thing that works for you because we’re not going to get
1:09:19 out of this by just sitting back and magically thinking things are going to get better. Tech’s
1:09:25 not going to solve this all on its own. Tech needs people who are willing to step in and make sure that
1:09:29 our tech and our world support us rather than suppress us.
1:09:36 Wow, Cindy. So listen, I want to thank you. I want to thank you in two senses. The first sense is,
1:09:42 of course, for the simple act of coming on my podcast, because it’s been a very remarkable
1:09:49 podcast. But even bigger, I want to thank you and the EFF for the work that you’re doing to preserve
1:09:56 democracy. The work you’re doing is so important. And as soon as I hang up, I’m going to send you money.
1:10:00 Thank you so much. Oh, guy, that’s wonderful.
1:10:05 Thank you very much, Cindy. And just let me thank the Remarkable People team. That would,
1:10:13 of course, be Madison Nismer, who is our producer. Jeff C is our co-producer. And we have a sound
1:10:19 design engineer named Shannon Hernandez and a researcher named Tessa Nismer. So, Cindy,
1:10:24 that’s all the people on the Remarkable People team. And we’re trying to make this a remarkable,
1:10:25 long-lasting democracy.
1:10:32 This is Remarkable People.

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0:00:48 Here on Remarkable People, we know that complexity can be the enemy of efficiency.
0:00:51 That’s the philosophy behind Freshworks.
0:00:55 While legacy software stacks can slow teams down,
0:01:01 Freshworks builds intuitive tools that can help your team do their best work without the clutter.
0:01:06 And when it comes to AI, it’s not about replacing humans.
0:01:08 It’s about amplifying what makes us remarkable.
0:01:31 I find it remarkable that on a daily basis, all of us are frequently challenged with having to manage our emotions in some fashion.
0:01:38 Whether it be to turn up the volume on our happiness a little bit or turn the amplitude down on our anxiety or spend a little bit less time ruminating about something.
0:01:43 These are frequent experiences that characterize a human species.
0:01:49 We know about tools, science-based tools that exist that can help people.
0:01:57 And we do not share these tools in a systematic way with folks in the same way that we share physical exercise tools with folks.
0:02:00 I had my first gym class in first grade.
0:02:04 I knew how to do a push-up and a jumping jack in first grade.
0:02:06 Why don’t people know about how to shift?
0:02:11 Why don’t our kids know about the Batman effect or how to strategically deploy their attention?
0:02:13 I think it’s a huge problem.
0:02:18 Hello, everybody.
0:02:19 It’s Guy Kawasaki.
0:02:22 This is the Remarkable People Podcast.
0:02:24 We’re on a mission to make you remarkable.
0:02:27 Today’s remarkable guest is Ethan Cross.
0:02:34 He’s a psychologist, a neuroscientist, and he’s the author of two very great books.
0:02:38 And we’re going to talk about one of them, his latest, called Shift.
0:02:43 He’s an expert on emotion regulation and inner voice.
0:02:48 He directs the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan.
0:02:54 I must say, that is a very unusual name for a lab, emotion and self-control.
0:02:58 But anyway, that’s not something that would work out well in Silicon Valley.
0:03:02 So the name of his two books are Chatter and Shift.
0:03:12 And basically, he works on building bridges across science and practical tools to help people harness their thoughts and emotions.
0:03:14 And so welcome to the show, Ethan.
0:03:16 Hey, thanks for having me, Guy.
0:03:17 It’s an honor to be here.
0:03:25 I hate when podcast hosts go off the rails from the very start, but I’m going to do that right now.
0:03:32 I hate to admit it, but one of the stories that you start Shift with, I’ll summarize the story.
0:03:33 Correct me if I’m wrong.
0:03:40 Because somebody found this Incan skull that was hundreds of years old and they sent it to the experts.
0:03:55 And there was a square hole in the skull and you attribute this operation that some Incas had done in an attempt to modulate the emotion of whoever’s head they drilled.
0:04:03 As I read that, I said, how can you possibly know that the Incan doctor did that to regulate emotions?
0:04:04 And I was wondering that.
0:04:07 So can you just clear that up for my foggy mind?
0:04:09 Well, it’s not a foggy mind.
0:04:10 It’s a precise mind.
0:04:25 And so the statement in the book wasn’t about that particular skull on its own, but rather I was referring to the intervention and why we think historically that intervention was used in some cases.
0:04:30 So the intervention was trepanation, carving holes in people’s skulls, often while they were still alive.
0:04:41 And medical historians believe that one of the reasons why that technique was used was to help people manage big dysregulated emotions.
0:04:42 Why might that be the case?
0:04:48 If you go back in time, our theories of emotion dysregulation were quite different from what they are today.
0:05:04 If you’ve got a person who’s acting out in seemingly irrational ways or maybe is totally withdrawn, perhaps the source of that malady is an evil spirit inside you that you need to purge yourself of.
0:05:08 And so ergo, cutting a hole in people’s skull to let that spirit release.
0:05:13 That idea was actually quite common throughout much of human history.
0:05:32 Eight to 10,000 years ago, we were carving holes in people’s skulls, but in the Middle Ages, we were slashing people’s forearms and letting blood drip out of their system, cleansing the humors, cleansing the blood of toxins that might be creating emotions run amok.
0:05:35 So just to be clear, your question is a great one.
0:05:39 I absolutely do not know that it was that one specific skull, nor does anyone.
0:05:46 It’s rather the intervention more broadly that we think was partially used for that purpose.
0:05:46 Okay.
0:05:59 Now, Ethan, what happens if 10,000 years from now, people are going to say, do you realize that people 10,000 years ago were sticking students inside these big machines they called MRIs,
0:06:05 and they were bombarding them with magnetic waves and figuring out what part of their brains are active?
0:06:09 Like, isn’t that the equivalent of drilling square holes right now?
0:06:13 It’s a question I’ve asked myself many, many times.
0:06:31 Like, I love history and dug deep into the history when I was researching Shift, and it does make me think about whether the things that we ask people to do or the prescriptions we are providing for things that can help people may be causing harm or not.
0:06:39 And in all cases, we think really carefully in modern days about ensuring that we are not doing any harm.
0:06:45 And the good news is that we actually have guideposts to steer us.
0:06:58 And we’re using practices to determine that before we have a student do something, that it’s not going to create harm, at least to our awareness, which did not really exist back then.
0:07:07 And so the other thing I’d point out is there are, of course, lots of other things we’ve done historically to help folks that have not resulted in carnage.
0:07:13 And much of Shift, much of what I talk about, like, there are dozens of tools.
0:07:14 Maybe we’ll talk about some of them.
0:07:14 Maybe we won’t.
0:07:24 But these tools that we have used scientific techniques, neuroimaging being one of them, but lots of other interventions as well to help us identify.
0:07:30 What I love about these tools is they’re relatively non-invasive.
0:07:31 They’re actually not relative.
0:07:33 They’re just non-invasive, right?
0:07:41 These are changes in the way we think or behave that science shows can put people on different emotional trajectories.
0:07:45 And so I think the risk in these cases is pretty, pretty slim, but always good to ask.
0:07:51 My interpretation of Shift is that emotions can be tools.
0:07:53 Is that correct, first of all?
0:07:56 Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, you’ve got it.
0:07:57 I would just clarify one thing.
0:08:14 All emotions are tools, even the quote-unquote bad ones, which is a point that we often lose in contemporary society when we talk about emotions because we often hear, oh, you should try to live a life free of negative emotions.
0:08:17 A, not possible, B, not desirable, because they’re tools.
0:08:21 Now, first of all, I had to wrap my head around that.
0:08:28 So to me, a tool is something that gets you from point A to point B.
0:08:35 But it seems to me that for many people, emotions is the point B, right?
0:08:36 So I want to be happy.
0:08:39 I want to experience the emotion of happiness.
0:08:44 But now you’re telling me that happiness is a tool to get somewhere else.
0:08:47 So where am I trying to get if not happy?
0:08:49 It could be trying to get to.
0:08:57 It can also be a motivational force that puts you in specific situations or contexts that actually serve you well.
0:09:05 They’re motivational forces that are activated in particular situations that orient us to excel in those circumstances.
0:09:08 So you chose happiness as one candidate of emotion.
0:09:10 Let me give you a dramatically alternative.
0:09:12 Let’s say anxiety.
0:09:17 Anxiety is an end state that I think most people don’t aspire to be anxious.
0:09:19 There are some people who do like living in that zone.
0:09:21 But I think most people do not.
0:09:27 But it can be a tool that helps prepare us for potential threats.
0:09:40 So when I think about instances in my career where a presentation didn’t go as well as I liked, where a meeting didn’t go as well as I liked, there were instances in which I felt zero anxiety beforehand.
0:09:50 Because I felt no anxiety, there was no force that was motivating me to zoom in on the situation at hand and to start preparing for it.
0:09:55 When experiencing the right proportions, those negative emotions can, in fact, be quite useful.
0:09:56 Anger is another example.
0:09:57 Guy, when was the last time you were angry?
0:10:02 How long can the podcast go?
0:10:03 I mean, yesterday.
0:10:08 If we were to break down, like, when do people become angry?
0:10:13 They become angry when their sense of right and wrong is challenged.
0:10:15 So your view of the world is challenged.
0:10:20 And there’s something you can do about it to rectify the situation.
0:10:25 So when those conditions are met psychologically, we experience this response of anger.
0:10:26 What does anger motivate us to do?
0:10:27 You zoom in.
0:10:31 You approach the situation and now you try to fix it.
0:10:34 That can be helpful in those circumstances.
0:10:39 So it’s a way of getting us typically to a desired point.
0:10:49 You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the fact that you named your book Shift means that these emotions and tools help you shift.
0:11:00 So there are three facets of shifting refers to shifting refers to shifting refers to when your emotions are no longer serving you well.
0:11:09 And we can all easily think about shifting, shifting involves being able to turn the volume on that emotion up or down.
0:11:19 It involves, in other instances, shortening or lengthening how long you sit in a particular emotional response.
0:11:28 And in some cases, it can involve moving from one state, happiness, to another one, contentment altogether.
0:11:34 So Shift captures those three psychological jiu-jitsu moves, if you will.
0:11:41 And the entire premise behind it is we evolve this capacity to experience emotions for a reason.
0:11:43 They give us an advantage.
0:11:45 They help us quickly prepare for different situations.
0:11:48 But they’re a very blunt tool.
0:11:54 They can easily be triggered out of proportion to the circumstances we’re dealing with.
0:12:06 And the amazing thing in my eyes about human beings and the human brain is we also co-evolved the capacity to rein in these emotional responses.
0:12:10 But we don’t get a user’s guide on how to master that capacity.
0:12:12 And that’s what the book is all about.
0:12:15 I actually want to throw a question back to you, if I can, Guy, though.
0:12:28 But you said when we started that emotions and self-control, those two terms in Silicon Valley might be a little bit, I forget the word you used, unfamiliar or people might have trouble.
0:12:31 I’d love to just get a sense of what you meant by that.
0:12:32 I’m fascinated by it.
0:12:36 I’m being sarcastic about the current state of Silicon Valley.
0:12:54 It seems that the only emotions that’s coming out of many of the most successful people is self-survival and optimization of my own particular case, right?
0:12:59 So I want low rates of long-term capital gains.
0:13:02 I want crypto to be successful.
0:13:05 It’s all about me, myself, and I.
0:13:09 And I am turning into someone who is amoral.
0:13:16 And I will suck up to whoever I have to suck up to get long-term low-capital gains and make crypto successful.
0:13:20 And I don’t view that as the high road, Ethan.
0:13:24 Yeah, you’re not putting me in a positive mood state thinking about that.
0:13:27 Got it, got it, got it.
0:13:34 Okay, so it’s a kind of instrumentality towards just optimizing financial benefit.
0:13:49 Every business is under pressure to save money.
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0:13:59 You need to create momentum and unlock potential, which is where Brex comes in.
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0:14:38 If it were as easy as playing them a good song, you psyched up your daughter, I would play them that good song.
0:14:42 So let’s talk about some of the mechanisms of shifting.
0:14:48 So you brought up that great story about getting your daughter ready to play soccer by playing a song.
0:14:52 What are the methods to catalyze shifts?
0:14:54 So I like to break them down.
0:14:58 You know, I think it’s easier for us to wrap our head around categories of tools.
0:15:05 So you can bin the shifters, which are tools to push our emotions around, into two broad categories.
0:15:10 Internal shifters, which are tools we, they’re in-built tools.
0:15:12 We take them with us wherever we go.
0:15:20 And then there are external shifters, which are a more, in some ways, complex set of tools that exist in the world around us.
0:15:23 If we start with the internal ones, there are three categories there.
0:15:34 The first one are sensory shifters, which are probably the lowest effort shifters in our toolbox that we often overlook.
0:15:41 And so sensory shifters refer to all of the different senses that we possess, sight, sound, touch, smell.
0:15:43 What do our senses do?
0:15:47 They allow us to take in information about the world around us.
0:15:54 I like to describe the sensory shifters as like, imagine having satellite dishes mounted all over your body.
0:15:56 They’re constantly taking in information.
0:16:02 And one of the reasons we take in that information is we need to know, like, how to navigate the world in a safe way.
0:16:11 And so emotions, the experience of emotions are intertwined with our process of making sense of the world.
0:16:14 One of the most powerful examples out there for me is music.
0:16:18 I’ve been listening to music from a time I was five years old.
0:16:21 I remember I got my first cassette tape.
0:16:22 I’m dating myself now.
0:16:26 I never stopped to think about, like, why I listened to music.
0:16:27 I just always did it.
0:16:36 And then I had this experience with my daughter that I describe in the book where I realized the value of music as an emotion regulation tool that can be strategically hard.
0:16:38 Because my daughter is young.
0:16:39 She’s playing soccer.
0:16:40 I’m coaching the team.
0:16:43 I look forward to this soccer match every week.
0:16:45 And she wakes up in a funk.
0:16:47 She doesn’t want to go.
0:16:50 Nothing that I do to cheer her up is getting her excited.
0:16:52 I’m beginning to get depressed.
0:16:54 We get in the car.
0:16:58 And just randomly, a pump-up song comes on the radio.
0:16:59 Journeys Don’t Stop Believin’.
0:17:01 I start jamming out.
0:17:02 I start singing.
0:17:04 I look into the rearview mirror.
0:17:06 I see my daughter’s bopping her head along.
0:17:08 And we both are invigorated.
0:17:19 If you ask people why they listen to music, almost 100% of participants will say, I listen to music because I like the way it makes me feel.
0:17:25 But if you then look at, hey, the last time you’re angry or anxious or sad, what did you do to make yourself feel better?
0:17:30 Only between 10% and 30% of participants across studies report using that modality.
0:17:36 Music is an incredibly fast way of modulating your emotions.
0:17:40 It’s not going to solve your greatest problems.
0:17:54 But what it can do is put you on a different emotional trajectory for a little while, opening you up to the possibility of then using other tools to help you go deeper into solving that malady that you are experiencing.
0:17:55 And that’s just one example.
0:17:57 What are your favorite foods, Guy?
0:18:03 Oh, my favorite foods are, I’m going to have to get pretty local.
0:18:09 There’s a Hawaiian dish called laulau, which is, it’s this pork wrapped in leaves.
0:18:10 It’s really salty.
0:18:11 I love laulau.
0:18:12 I love poi.
0:18:15 I love spam musubis.
0:18:16 We could have a whole show on food.
0:18:20 And I’ve actually had Andrew Zimmerman and Roy Yamaguchi.
0:18:21 I love musubis.
0:18:23 There you go.
0:18:26 You’re using love to describe these experiences.
0:18:38 Few things are as decadent and transportive for me as eating a dark chocolate covered peanut butter cup after dinner each night.
0:18:40 Little one, not too excessive.
0:18:42 But taste.
0:18:43 Think about smell.
0:18:52 You go into nice hotels, they pump fumes to change the way you feel about yourself and the places around you.
0:18:54 So that’s one type of shifter, our senses.
0:18:56 Well, how about when you get a new car?
0:18:59 Yeah, the new car smell.
0:19:01 It’s so simple and obvious on the one hand.
0:19:06 On the other, we know that people just overlook this stuff.
0:19:11 Like, you go to the airport, like, you go into the duty-free shop.
0:19:14 This is an emotion regulation emporium.
0:19:17 People are just selling perfumes and colognes.
0:19:20 Like, what is the purpose of these substances?
0:19:28 They are managing the way you feel about yourself and they are managing the way other people feel about you.
0:19:30 That’s the senses, right?
0:19:31 And a touch.
0:19:33 Like, that’s another powerful one.
0:19:35 Touch is the first sense to develop.
0:19:37 It develops while we’re in the womb.
0:19:44 The first thing we do with babies to comfort them, to regulate them, is we hold them.
0:19:48 I don’t know about you, but I love to be held, even to this day.
0:19:50 My kids are getting older.
0:19:51 I’m still trying to grab their hand.
0:19:53 They’re like, get away from me.
0:19:54 What’s wrong with you?
0:20:00 But even the fist bump with a colleague at work, a hug of my partner.
0:20:06 These are regulatory experiences that are available to us.
0:20:11 And so it’s just low-hanging fruit to build into your shifting repertoire.
0:20:19 Now, of course, that’s not, again, going to help us deal with the really big bouts of anxiety and depression.
0:20:20 It’s going to contribute to it.
0:20:25 We know, by the way, that when people try to shift in their daily lives, they typically don’t do one thing.
0:20:32 On average, they use between three and four different tools at any given moment in time to push their emotions around.
0:20:42 We did these large studies during the COVID pandemic where we wanted to see what are the tools that are really helping people manage their anxiety from one day to the next.
0:20:45 It was not one thing.
0:20:46 It was combinations of tools.
0:20:50 So your sense is that’s one set of tools you can use.
0:20:56 Another big internal shifter are what I call attention.
0:20:59 You could think of attention as our mental spotlight.
0:21:09 And one of the things that we often get wrong about attention is we often tell people, you should never avoid the things that are bugging you.
0:21:11 Like, you got to work through them.
0:21:14 And I mean, this is one of the first things that we’re taught, right?
0:21:16 Like, when there’s a problem, what do you do?
0:21:19 When you’re a little kid, your parents say, run away.
0:21:20 Don’t address it, right?
0:21:22 They roll up your sleeves and you get to the bottom.
0:21:25 You confront that issue, right?
0:21:26 So we’re taught that from a very young age.
0:21:32 We’re often here as we get older that avoiding things chronically is harmful to us.
0:21:39 And so as a result of those different experiences, a lot of us develop this heuristic, this decision-making rule.
0:21:41 Hey, when we’re in trouble, don’t avoid.
0:21:42 Approach.
0:21:44 Here’s what we’ve learned about this.
0:21:53 If your approach to managing your emotions involves always, the moment something happens, I’m going to just repress it, suppress it, avoid it, never come back to it.
0:21:55 If that’s all you do, this is not good.
0:22:01 Tons of data showing that chronically avoiding our things leads to negative outcomes.
0:22:10 But that doesn’t mean that you can’t be flexible with your attention when you’re dealing with a problem, right?
0:22:13 Chronically avoiding things can be bad.
0:22:25 But moving back and forth between focusing on a problem for a little bit, taking some time away, coming back to it, going back and forth in that manner, that can be really, really useful.
0:22:40 If you’ve ever gotten an email and it provoked you and you decided, you know what, I’m not going to respond right now in the moment I just received that, I’m going to come back to it tomorrow or next week.
0:22:44 You have experienced the benefits of strategic attention deployment.
0:22:49 And that is an example of how powerful attention can be for modulating our emotions.
0:22:53 You know, I never thought about that with email.
0:23:02 And I’ll tell you, I have an even better system than waiting a day, which is when an email really pisses me off.
0:23:10 I send it to Madison and Madison answers as me much better than I would ever answer.
0:23:17 So she is my strategic attention, what was the phrase, strategic attention deployment?
0:23:18 Yeah.
0:23:21 But that also touches on another powerful tool.
0:23:27 It’s actually a perfect segue guide to the final category of shifters, like boom, which is perspective, right?
0:23:32 So sometimes you can’t divert your attention away.
0:23:34 We don’t have the luxury to do it or we don’t want to.
0:23:37 And you got to stare at something in the face and deal with it.
0:23:44 And what we’ve learned is that shifting your perspective, looking at the bigger picture can be very helpful.
0:23:46 But that’s often really hard to do.
0:23:51 It’s easier said than done to just change the way you’re thinking about something.
0:23:58 And so you just said that you, when you’re provoked, you’ll send it to Madison and have her respond to it, right?
0:24:06 Why is Madison so adept at responding to your provocations and you’re not?
0:24:16 The reason is we know it’s a lot easier to be wise and rational about someone else’s problems than ourselves.
0:24:22 We don’t have the same level of immersion in the problem, so we can think about it with more clarity.
0:24:38 What we’ve also learned is that there are tools you can use to shift your perspective, to adopt the perspective of another person when thinking about your problems that can make it much easier to not fire off the email that you will later regret.
0:24:42 As an example, there’s a tool called Distant Self-Talk.
0:24:43 It’s one of the first tools I use.
0:24:48 It involves trying to work through my problems using my own name and you.
0:24:51 All right, Ethan, what do you think you should do here?
0:24:53 How are you going to manage this situation?
0:24:56 Now, that may sound strange.
0:24:58 Number one, I’ll point out a disclaimer.
0:25:02 I typically do that silently, not out loud in front of other people.
0:25:05 But think about it for a second.
0:25:09 Kai, when do the word you, when do you typically use that word?
0:25:11 This is not a trick question.
0:25:18 I would say that it’s usually used in an accusatory sense.
0:25:23 But even more basic, when you’re using that word, it’s usually about someone else.
0:25:24 It’s someone else.
0:25:33 So, the vast majority of times that you use the word you, it’s when you’re thinking about or referring to another person.
0:25:34 Right?
0:25:39 We just said, like, other people, they’re much better at dealing with our problems often than we are.
0:25:43 So, when you use the word you to refer to yourself, it’s not like.
0:25:45 It’s switching your perspective.
0:25:48 It’s putting you in this frame of mind as, now I’m coaching someone else.
0:25:49 I’m giving someone else advice.
0:25:50 It’s no longer me.
0:25:53 You get some space from the ego in that sense.
0:25:56 Like, all right, what do you think you should do here?
0:25:59 Guy, I am really good at giving advice to my buddies.
0:26:03 Much better than I’m often about giving advice to myself.
0:26:05 So, Ethan, what do you think you should do here?
0:26:07 Here’s how I think you should manage it.
0:26:16 It’s putting you in this coaching frame of mind that research shows leads us to make wiser, emotionally intelligent decisions and helps us regulate.
0:26:25 And so, that’s another kind of very subtle tool that you can use to shift your perspective when you’re trying to grapple with a big emotion.
0:26:33 Okay, then you are opening up another whole can of worms is a negative, but I mean.
0:26:34 Yeah, bring it.
0:26:35 It’s good.
0:26:36 This makes it more fun to talk.
0:26:46 Okay, so, if Madison is a great modulator for me, imagine what AI is, right?
0:26:48 So, I get this email that pisses me off.
0:26:53 I upload it to AI and I say, draft the response.
0:26:56 Isn’t that the ultimate use?
0:26:59 Not exactly.
0:27:00 Here’s why.
0:27:06 I thought one of these days it may be and with a proper training, I think it can absolutely be.
0:27:15 Madison is someone who, to be clear to all of you who are listening, I don’t know much about Madison, right?
0:27:17 I don’t know the background.
0:27:21 I don’t know how she came into your life.
0:27:27 But I’m going to guess that there was some screening involved, that you were careful in your selection of Madison.
0:27:35 She wasn’t someone that just showed up all of a sudden and is responding to the most important people in your life who are pissing you off.
0:27:42 Other people, as I point out in both of my books, because this is such an important issue,
0:27:52 other people can be a remarkable asset or a tremendous liability when it comes to our emotional lives.
0:28:01 And so, I encourage people to think really carefully about who they are sending their emails to respond on their behalf.
0:28:07 Like, that’s a very intimate and privileged request that you are making of her.
0:28:09 You would not let anyone do that.
0:28:17 And so, if AI is amalgamating lots of information from the internet and assuming that, I don’t know what the weighting factors are,
0:28:27 but these are the best ways to respond, my sense is that we can actually get a lot more nuanced and tailored to identify the best types of responses.
0:28:34 Now, if you trained all of Madison’s responses into an AI chatbot or whatever, then we’re getting a lot closer.
0:28:37 And that might well be a bionic response for you.
0:28:42 Madison, do you want to set the record straight or speak up for yourself or do anything?
0:28:46 I think we benefit one another and we balance each other out really well.
0:28:50 Madison, though, are your services available to respond to my annoying emails?
0:28:53 We can try it out.
0:28:56 Madison, GPT.
0:28:58 There we go.
0:29:12 In your book, I read about this case of the woman whose baby had this peanut allergy and almost died and stuck an EpiPen in her thigh and saved her.
0:29:16 And then for years, she was traumatized by that.
0:29:24 So now you could make the case that the emotion of fear and reaction and all that saved her daughter’s life.
0:29:29 But you could also make the case that those things lived on and became a very negative thing.
0:29:32 So how does one get past that?
0:29:38 You read a story about how Jean Hackman’s wife had Hantavirus and died and then he died later.
0:29:41 And so now you’re afraid of mice all the time.
0:29:43 Like, how do you deal with those kinds of emotions?
0:29:52 I was fortunate to have a really wonderful mentor in graduate school who, you know, you come into graduate school and you look at the scientific literature.
0:29:54 And it’s like, your mind is going to explode.
0:29:55 There’s all this complexity.
0:29:58 And my God, how do I wrap my head around it?
0:30:00 And he sat me down in the first couple of weeks.
0:30:03 And he says to me, Ethan, at its core, it’s really simple.
0:30:11 When you get to the topic of self-control or emotion regulation, I use those phrases somewhat synonymously.
0:30:14 It’s about feeling the way we want to feel, thinking the way we want to think.
0:30:17 There are really two core components.
0:30:19 Number one is motivation.
0:30:21 And number two is ability.
0:30:27 So number one, you have to believe that you can control yourself.
0:30:28 Right?
0:30:32 And the reason for that is, let’s use exercise in this example.
0:30:33 Let’s use surfing as an example.
0:30:36 We were talking about surfing before we started recording.
0:30:50 If I don’t think there’s any way that this uncoordinated human being can get up there and surf a wave, it doesn’t make, like, why am I going to wake up early to even try?
0:30:53 Why am I going to spend the money on the lessons, get the surfing board, whatever.
0:30:55 So you’ve got to be motivated.
0:31:08 Number two, just having the motivation is not enough because I can tell you there was an instance in which I was motivated to surf.
0:31:13 I went to Hawaii on a family vacation several years ago and I showed up and I got the surfboard.
0:31:17 And before I got the lesson, I tried to surf.
0:31:19 And let me tell you, it did not go very well.
0:31:22 You also need tools.
0:31:27 You need to know what are the tactics that allow you to achieve those different goals.
0:31:44 So if we go back to the mom whose fear response saved her child from dying but then had that fear response overgeneralized, now she’s concerned about anything that could potentially happen to the child negatively and it’s consuming your life.
0:31:49 Number one, you’ve got to believe that this is something you can get a handle on.
0:31:54 That may seem like a simple idea, like why is this guy even emphasizing this?
0:32:03 But if you look at the research literature, some studies report that approximately 40% of people do not think they can control their emotions.
0:32:05 40% guy.
0:32:10 If you don’t think you can control your emotions, why are you even going?
0:32:11 You’re not going to try.
0:32:15 So step one is you’ve got to believe that you can do this.
0:32:27 And then number two is if you’re finding that you are constantly experiencing emotions being triggered out of proportion, you need to learn the tools that are out there to help you rein these responses in.
0:32:29 That is what the book is all about.
0:32:47 I find it remarkable that on a daily basis, all of us are frequently challenged with having to manage our emotions in some fashion, whether it be to turn up the volume on our happiness a little bit or turn the amplitude down on our anxiety or spend a little bit less time ruminating about something.
0:32:52 These are frequent experiences that characterize a human species.
0:32:59 We know about tools, science-based tools that exist that can help people.
0:33:08 And we do not share these tools in a systematic way with folks in the same way that we share physical exercise tools with folks, right?
0:33:11 I had my first gym class in first grade.
0:33:15 I knew how to do a push-up and a jumping jack in first grade.
0:33:17 Why don’t people know about how to shift?
0:33:23 Why don’t our kids know about the Batman effect or how to strategically deploy their attention?
0:33:24 I think it’s a huge problem.
0:33:36 So, I mean, you touched on it before, but continuing with this woman with the EpiPen and her fears, what are the tools she could throw at this problem?
0:33:40 To help her, well, she could use distant self-talk, right?
0:33:41 That’s number one.
0:33:50 If she finds herself over-dramatizing a situation, say, what would you tell your sister if she was going through this with her kid?
0:33:51 That’s a way of shifting a perspective.
0:33:54 You could zoom out and look at the bigger picture.
0:34:03 So, oftentimes, to correct people’s, in particular, anxious response or their worry response, you can get them to think like a scientist about the situation.
0:34:09 Hey, what’s the probability that this negative experience might actually befall someone?
0:34:17 Thinking through the probability of a negative outcome occurring can be really powerful for folks.
0:34:27 Like, when you think about the probability of, for example, your plane crashing as compared to getting hit by a car or getting into a car accident, it is a striking comparison.
0:34:30 You are much, much more likely to get hit by a car.
0:34:33 Those kinds of experiences often have weight.
0:34:37 You could encourage them to activate their senses.
0:34:42 You could encourage them to activate their emotional advisory board.
0:34:49 We haven’t talked about that yet, but who are the people in your life who are skilled at doing two things for you when you are struggling?
0:34:54 Number one, they provide you with a sense of comfort and support.
0:34:55 They validate what you’re going through.
0:34:56 They empathize with you.
0:35:01 Yeah, you may recognize at some level that what you’re going through is irrational.
0:35:02 It’s embarrassing.
0:35:04 I may not want to share it with you.
0:35:10 But these are people who you can confide in, who will make it clear to you that, you know what?
0:35:14 We all experience those embarrassing kinds of reactions at times.
0:35:15 It’s normal.
0:35:16 But they don’t stop there.
0:35:23 They also then work with you to broaden your perspective, to help you get a handle on the situation.
0:35:25 That’s a really powerful tool.
0:35:31 So lots of different tools that mom can leverage to help herself.
0:35:39 Now, what if the mom counters and says, listen, humans have been evolving for millions of years.
0:35:41 It’s our maternal instinct.
0:35:43 It’s our desire to be safe.
0:35:45 I cannot suppress this.
0:35:50 In fact, I should not suppress this because that’s what helps us survive.
0:36:01 I think what you want to do is, in that case, point out, look, no one is asking you to suppress these maternal instincts you have.
0:36:13 You are talking to me because you are telling me that these maternal instincts are actually getting in the way of you living the life that you want to live.
0:36:13 Right.
0:36:17 And it’s not because you’re having the instincts in the first place.
0:36:19 It’s because they are metastasizing.
0:36:26 They are becoming so big and by your own recognition out of proportion with the situation at hand.
0:36:39 So why don’t we just try a little experiment to see what might happen if we try to rein those emotional responses in just a little bit and see if that’s something that you like or not.
0:36:47 And so it’s simply offering an invitation to folks to experiment with these tools to gauge the impact they have on their lives.
0:36:53 Ultimately, what I care about doing is helping people self-regulate.
0:36:54 What is self-regulation?
0:37:00 It’s about aligning your thoughts, feelings and behaviors with your goals.
0:37:05 It’s about getting you to live the life that you want to live.
0:37:12 Now, that might not be the life that I would want for myself or even for you if there’s someone that I care about, but that’s what it is.
0:37:23 I don’t think someone’s coming to me or someone else if they think that their responses are exactly the way they should be and life should be because they should be happy in that situation.
0:37:25 Up next on Remarkable People.
0:37:30 How do you know that avoidance is working or not working?
0:37:31 Here’s how you know it’s working.
0:37:42 You put it in a box, you go, you distract, you look at other things, and you don’t find yourself thinking about this thing once you put it in the box and move away.
0:37:44 You’re living the life you want to live.
0:37:54 Do you want to be more remarkable?
0:37:59 One way to do it is to spend three days with the boldest builders in business.
0:38:07 I’m Jeff Berman, host of Masters of Scale, inviting you to join us at this year’s Masters of Scale Summit, October 7th to 9th in San Francisco.
0:38:20 You’ll hear from visionaries like Waymo’s Takidora Mawakana, Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya, celebrity chef David Chang, Patagonia’s Ryan Gellert, Promises’ Phaedra Ellis Lampkins, and many, many more.
0:38:25 Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.
0:38:29 That’s mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.
0:38:31 And Guy Kawasaki will be there too.
0:38:37 Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People.
0:38:41 It’s found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
0:38:46 Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:39:01 So who is in the Ethan Cross Hall of Fame for people who are really good shifters that, you know, you can hold us up as a hero that emulate this guy or this gal.
0:39:03 They’re great at shifting.
0:39:04 You can learn a lot from them.
0:39:08 My wife is unbelievable at shifting.
0:39:11 Actually, we were on a walk last night.
0:39:14 I was saying like, are you ever worried about anything?
0:39:17 Because I don’t hear very much about it.
0:39:23 And mind you, this is someone who I’ve been in a relationship with for 25 years, quarter of a century, right?
0:39:24 It’s a long time.
0:39:36 I, of course, know that she can worry about things at times, but she’s amazingly adept at being proportional about when the worry begins to percolate.
0:39:42 She quickly looks at the bigger picture like, well, is this something that I need to worry about right now?
0:39:49 And maybe if it is something that’s significant, she comes to talk to me or someone else about it.
0:39:51 She’s really, really good at shifting.
0:40:05 But here is something that is very important, and that stems from your question that we haven’t talked about yet, that I think, don’t think I want everyone who listens to this conversation to know.
0:40:15 You can look at my wife as a shifting role model, but the tools that work for her may not work for you.
0:40:24 So one of the truisms that we have discovered as a field is that different combinations of tools work for different people.
0:40:33 I wish there were three or four things that I could tell everyone to do, and it would lead them to experience a life of nirvana.
0:40:36 The science simply does not support that.
0:40:38 In some ways, that might be deflating to folks.
0:40:47 On the other hand, I think it might also be a welcome message that, hey, if meditation doesn’t work for you, no worries.
0:40:51 Because there are lots of other options you have available to yourself.
0:40:59 So I think that’s just something important that people keep in mind when they search for the right tools to try in their lives.
0:41:02 Things that work for your friends may or may not benefit from you.
0:41:05 The challenge is to figure out what tools work best.
0:41:12 And do you have any explanation for how your wife got to this point, besides being married to you?
0:41:16 No, no, that’s definitely not the reason why it’s a marriage to me.
0:41:22 I think some of it is genetic, that she’s predisposed to not be overly reactive.
0:41:24 She had a wonderful upbringing.
0:41:29 We know that adverse childhood experiences can make it more challenging for folks later on in life.
0:41:34 So she grew up in a family with wonderful, positive attachments and love.
0:41:40 She also has some intuitive understanding of the different tools that exist.
0:41:49 She has both stumbled on tools that work for her, in her ability to perspective shift, in her ability to have a great emotional advisory board.
0:42:03 She also is a psychology major as an undergrad, has learned about other tools that are out there, and has been discriminative in how she has folded different tools into her repertoire.
0:42:06 The stuff that works for her, she leans on.
0:42:08 The other tools that don’t, she doesn’t.
0:42:19 She, to give you it by way of analogy, to stay in physical shape, she likes to walk and do Pilates, and occasionally she does spin.
0:42:20 I like to walk.
0:42:33 She has learned which exercise regimens contribute to her physical fitness, and the same is true when it comes to her mental fitness.
0:42:38 But I think that’s the challenge we all face, to learn, hey, what do we got to do to be mentally fit?
0:42:47 Since we’re discussing all members of your family, now, let’s glean some wisdom from your grandmother.
0:42:57 Now, it seems to me that kind of her path was she put these bad memories into a box and kept that box closed.
0:43:04 Is that a good practice, or is that dysfunctional in that box?
0:43:08 It’s somehow going to open up someday, and, you know, what should we do?
0:43:15 And the dysfunction we’re talking about is, of course, the Holocaust, which is a big thing to put in a box.
0:43:20 So when do you put something in a box, or when is that advisable?
0:43:23 I’d give one caveat to the description of my grandmother.
0:43:30 She put things in a box, but she didn’t seal it airtight and leave it buried for the rest of her life.
0:43:34 She would actually open that box a few times a year.
0:43:42 She’d have a Remembrance Day that was organized with co-survivors, where they would let that box open and just dig into it deep.
0:43:52 And on the rare occasion that she’d bump into another survivor in between the yearly Remembrance Day events, they would sometimes talk about these experiences.
0:43:55 At all other times, though, it was locked shut.
0:44:09 That was an approach that worked for her, and there’s research which shows that ability to, like, compartmentalize an experience and then come back to it on rare occasions, that that can work for other people, too.
0:44:15 We cannot predict yet for whom and when that is going to work.
0:44:18 We’re doing the science on precisely that issue right now.
0:44:26 What scientists have done a pretty good job at doing is identifying specific techniques that can help people or harm them.
0:44:34 What we have not yet done is identify the specific contingencies that explain when you should use different techniques.
0:44:40 Hey, if someone with guys’ background is in this kind of situation, they should do these three things.
0:44:43 But if they’re in this other situation, they should do these four.
0:44:45 I cannot give that prescription.
0:44:47 I don’t know of any scientists who can.
0:44:48 We’re doing that work.
0:45:00 Having said that, if you want to start experimenting with this approach to boxing something up for a while and then coming back to it later on, there are a few tips that I provide people with.
0:45:04 Like, how do you know that avoidance is working or not working?
0:45:06 Here’s how you know it’s working.
0:45:17 You put it in a box, you go, you distract, you look at other things, and you don’t find yourself thinking about this thing once you put it in the box and move away.
0:45:18 You’re living the life you want to live.
0:45:23 If so, no need to go back and re-engage with that experience.
0:45:27 As many would argue, this is not the case.
0:45:33 I mentioned an anecdote in my book, like actually a point of conflict in my relationship with my dad.
0:45:38 You know, you brought in my grandmother, my kid, my wife, but I might as well bring in my dad here.
0:45:40 My parents got divorced when they were 12.
0:45:43 It was painful when it happened.
0:45:46 I dealt with the situation, moved on.
0:45:49 I think it was good for the family that it happened.
0:45:52 I never think about my parents’ divorce.
0:45:53 I’m 45 now.
0:45:54 Never think about it.
0:46:02 The only time I go back there is when my dad tells me, hey, we need to talk about the divorce.
0:46:05 And my response is, I’ve got nothing to really say.
0:46:07 This doesn’t bother me at all.
0:46:08 I think it was a good thing.
0:46:10 He hasn’t let go of it.
0:46:12 And that can create some conflict.
0:46:16 And so this can show you how there are individual differences here, right?
0:46:21 If you put it in a box, but you find yourself keep thinking about it over and over,
0:46:26 that’s a cue that this strategy of compartmentalizing is not working.
0:46:32 And then what you want to do, use some other strategies or maybe even open up the box and
0:46:36 figure out why it’s intruding into your current awareness.
0:46:42 Since you open the can of worms, I don’t mean that in a negative way, but since you open up
0:46:49 the can of worms about your dad, isn’t this a case of the shoemaker’s dad has no shoes?
0:46:53 Can’t you give him advice about what to do with that situation?
0:46:56 Yeah, that’s another really interesting phenomenon.
0:46:58 Of course, I can give advice.
0:47:04 The question is whether the advice is uptaken, right?
0:47:11 And we know when you go from kid to parent back or parent to kid, that can often get a little
0:47:11 bit dicey.
0:47:13 Yes, absolutely.
0:47:17 These are tricky situations and we otherwise don’t have any conflict.
0:47:20 But on this particular issue, there’s still some lingering emotion.
0:47:22 Ethan, I have to apologize.
0:47:26 I had no intention of making this the Ethan family show.
0:47:27 I mean…
0:47:33 Hey, once this airs, I might be sleeping in the hotel for a little bit.
0:47:36 But guy, no apology needed because you know what?
0:47:40 Everyone in my family is a human being.
0:47:49 And part of the message of this book and something I believe devoutly in is that emotions and the
0:47:55 trickiness that surrounds managing them, this is something that we all experience in our own
0:47:57 unique ways, right?
0:47:58 All of us.
0:47:59 These are universals.
0:48:04 I’m not talking about anything that isn’t relevant to any other person who is listening
0:48:04 right now.
0:48:09 The bottom line is it’s a messy situation for everybody.
0:48:12 I was on book tour for about two weeks, went all over the place.
0:48:18 And I came away from that book tour both with the recognition that it doesn’t matter who you’re
0:48:23 looking at and how put together their life seems on the outside.
0:48:26 We are all dealing with curveballs at times.
0:48:31 And that was actually not something that I found to be disheartening.
0:48:34 To the contrary, there was something very normalizing about that.
0:48:36 And I shared that message with lots of folks.
0:48:37 We’re all trying to stumble through this existence.
0:48:43 And what’s great is that more so than any other point in my adult life, there’s a recognition
0:48:50 that paying attention to these issues is important and actually matters, and that you can use scientific
0:48:53 methodologies to weigh in on them.
0:48:59 And so that’s an exciting message for a guy who runs Emotion and Self-Control Lab to bring
0:49:00 us full circle here.
0:49:02 Yes, yes.
0:49:06 So I think that is a perfect place to end this episode.
0:49:13 I think we’ve given just enough insights and perspective into your book and your work that
0:49:15 more people will want to read that book.
0:49:16 The book is called Shift.
0:49:23 And I mean, Ethan, give your pitch for people to read Shift and let your emotions ring true
0:49:24 here.
0:49:26 Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You.
0:49:27 That’s the name of the book.
0:49:35 If you’re curious about what emotions are, why we have them, why it can at times feel painfully
0:49:40 difficult to manage them and want to learn more about how to do so according to science,
0:49:41 pick it up.
0:49:42 That’s why I wrote it.
0:49:43 All righty.
0:49:44 That’s terrific.
0:49:49 And clearly managing your emotions is part of becoming remarkable.
0:49:52 So it fits right in line here.
0:49:58 Ethan, thank you very much for this most shifting episode and shift happens.
0:50:03 And, you know, it’s a very fascinating read and very fascinating episode.
0:50:05 Thank you so much.
0:50:10 And my best to your grandmother, your wife, your kids and your father.
0:50:10 Oh, my God.
0:50:13 I’m glad they all made it on our show.
0:50:15 It’ll be a family event.
0:50:18 We’ll have a dinner as we listen to this one at launch as well.
0:50:20 True honor to be invited on.
0:50:22 And it was an immensely enjoyable conversation.
0:50:23 So thank you.
0:50:25 Well, thank you very much.
0:50:34 And just let me thank Madison, the good side of Guy, who has clearly figured out how to be better at being Guy than Guy.
0:50:40 And Tessa Neisman, our researcher, our researcher, Jeff C and Shannon Hernandez, our sound design engineers.
0:50:42 And that’s the Remarkable People team.
0:50:49 And with guests like Ethan and his book, Shift, that’s how we’re trying to help you be remarkable.
0:50:50 Thank you.
0:50:51 Until next time.
0:50:52 Bye-bye.
0:50:59 This is Remarkable People.

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0:00:48 Here on Remarkable People, we know that complexity can be the enemy of efficiency.
0:00:51 That’s the philosophy behind Freshworks.
0:00:55 While legacy software stacks can slow teams down,
0:01:01 Freshworks builds intuitive tools that can help your team do their best work without the clutter.
0:01:06 And when it comes to AI, it’s not about replacing humans.
0:01:08 It’s about amplifying what makes us remarkable.
0:01:27 When liberals and conservatives in the U.S. watch the same news stories, for example, news clips about immigration,
0:01:34 even though they’re watching literally the same movies, the same sentences are being said,
0:01:36 the same images are on the screen.
0:01:43 People who share the same political ideology brains are more in sync with their in-groups
0:01:46 and not as much in sync with their out-groups.
0:01:54 Hello, it’s Guy Kawasaki, and guess what?
0:01:56 It’s the Remarkable People podcast.
0:01:58 We’re trying to help you become remarkable.
0:02:02 And today’s guest is the remarkable Emily Falk.
0:02:06 She’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
0:02:12 And that’s a nice way of me saying that she’s part of this mafia from Pennsylvania.
0:02:17 That’s Katie Milkman and Angela Duckworth and Emily Falk.
0:02:22 They’re like the next Bob Cialdini’s, the father of influence.
0:02:28 If I could do my career all over again, if I could go back to school, instead of majoring in psychology,
0:02:32 I would major in the kind of stuff that they study.
0:02:35 So she holds appointments in communication.
0:02:37 Wait, get a load of this list.
0:02:45 Appointments in communication, psychology, marketing, operations, information, and decisions.
0:02:47 That’s all she’s an expert in.
0:02:56 And she directs the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Climate Communication Division at the Ann and Rudd Public Policy Center.
0:02:59 Man, that’s a mouthful, Emily.
0:03:00 You should do a lot.
0:03:04 I’m really excited to be here today.
0:03:05 Thank you for having me.
0:03:11 Listen, I’ve been on both sides of this kind of interview where, you know, you have a new book.
0:03:14 Emily’s new book is called What We Value.
0:03:19 So we’re going to talk about how people make decisions about what they value today.
0:03:27 As I understand it, and correct me if I’m wrong, there are three components to our decision-making.
0:03:34 And those components are the value system, the self-relevant system, and the social-relevant system.
0:03:43 So first of all, if I have those three things right, could you explain what each of them are and the interplay between the three?
0:03:44 Sure.
0:03:48 So there are lots of different systems in our brain that work together.
0:03:50 And in the book, I chose to focus on those three.
0:04:03 The value system, which offers this final common pathway for decision-making and takes inputs from lots of other brain systems, including our self-relevant system that helps us figure out whether things are me or not me.
0:04:08 Our social-relevant system that helps us figure out whether it’s our social-relevant system that helps us understand what other people might be thinking or feeling.
0:04:14 And actually, lots of other brain systems as well, like our sensory systems that help us take in information about the world.
0:04:22 And our deliberative processing systems that help us think through things and regulate our feelings, our emotional processing systems.
0:04:26 So there are a lot of different brain systems that are all contributing to our value calculations.
0:04:49 And the reason that I focused on the self-relevance and social-relevant systems in particular as inputs to that value calculation are because they’re such powerful inputs and because they constrain and also open up possibilities for how we think about ourselves and other people in our relationships, which are some of the most fundamental things we do as people.
0:04:53 So it’s three of many systems that are really important for our decision-making.
0:05:07 And just walk us through a simple kind of decision and how those things would interact with each other as we come to our final conclusion, our final action.
0:05:08 Sure.
0:05:18 So when you started out by saying three parts, one of the things that I thought we might talk about is that there are these different phases that unfold in our decision-making.
0:05:28 When we’re making a conscious choice between two options, let’s say, between whether you want to eat an apple or an orange, the first thing is that we decide what we’re choosing between.
0:05:38 So we identify what the possibilities are, and then our value system assigns a subjective value to each one of those possibilities.
0:05:51 We choose the one that we think is going to produce the most reward or that our brain implicitly has decided would be most likely to produce reward for the person who’s right here, right now, me.
0:05:54 And then we keep track of how it went.
0:05:59 So when things go better than we thought that they would, that’s called a positive prediction error.
0:06:04 Let’s say I choose the orange and it’s one of those like really juicy, delicious oranges.
0:06:07 And I don’t know if that was even better than I thought it was going to be.
0:06:12 Then our brains store that information and inform the choice for next time.
0:06:18 When things go worse than we thought it would be, let’s say that the orange is like a little bit mealy, maybe really sour.
0:06:22 We get a negative prediction error, and then we’re less likely to do that in the future.
0:06:28 So it’s an iterative cycle where we are making these decisions and then learning from them.
0:06:38 But sometimes we’re so focused on the outcome of what happened that we fail to notice all the stuff about the process that we could have control over.
0:06:47 Like which things did we imagine were our possibilities in the first place where our self-relevance and social-relevance systems shape and constrain those things?
0:06:51 And then what parts of the decision are we paying attention to?
0:06:55 What parts of the choice are we focusing on?
0:06:58 Because that’s going to change the subjective value that we assign to each option.
0:07:01 And then finally, that outcome.
0:07:15 Now, in this rather simplistic decision that we’re making between an apple and an orange, the second step you stated was placing a valuation on these options.
0:07:30 Now, are you saying that as we choose between these two fruits, I’m thinking to myself, well, if I pick the orange and my hand is dirty, I got to stick my fingernail in there and peel the orange, but apple I can just eat.
0:07:39 But then I want to say, I want to get more vitamin C because it’s cold season, so maybe I should eat the orange, but maybe I should eat the apple because apple has higher fiber.
0:07:42 Are all those things happening in my brain?
0:07:47 And finally, I say, I picked the orange because it looks more delicious.
0:07:59 So I think the things that you listed are a good example of the fact that this is a subjective, context-dependent calculation.
0:08:08 And so some people might do what you’re doing, which is say, I’m in a situation where my hands are particularly dirty, and so that’s a factor.
0:08:19 In some other situations, let’s say you’re at a restaurant and you’ve just washed your hands and there’s a buffet and the fruit’s all peeled and prepared for you, then that wouldn’t be a factor, right?
0:08:38 And so in the early days of this research, which is actually pretty recent, the past few decades, it wasn’t obvious whether there would be this final common pathway that would be able to integrate all of these disparate kinds of information or whether there would be different brain systems that would compute, like, how much fiber is there in this food?
0:08:40 How much sugar is there in this food?
0:08:45 All of the different things, what’s the color, the attributes that you just listed for an apple and an orange?
0:08:57 One possibility from an evolutionary standpoint is that there are certain kinds of objective features of a food that your brain might want to keep track of and therefore that we would consistently prioritize.
0:09:10 But in fact, what scientists found in monkeys and also in humans is that’s not what happens, that on a Tuesday, we might make a different choice from the one that we make on a Friday.
0:09:17 And that depends on the parts of the decision that we’re paying attention to and our recent experiences.
0:09:18 Are you totally satiated?
0:09:21 Did you just chug a gallon of orange juice?
0:09:22 Maybe you never want to see an orange again.
0:09:28 And so even with this very simple example, you can see all of the different kinds of things that might go into it.
0:09:32 And then what was really amazing is that it’s not just apples and oranges.
0:09:37 It’s not just choosing between different kinds of foods, which are in some ways more easily comparable.
0:09:42 But also, would you rather have an orange or would you rather go for a walk with me?
0:09:46 Like those are not even both food choices.
0:09:52 It’s an experience of one kind, a social experience, an experience of a different kind, getting a primary reward of eating the food.
0:10:01 And likewise, we can abstract away even more and think about inputs like our moral values or how much the different things cost.
0:10:08 And all of those different things get integrated relatively seamlessly for many of our choices in these value calculations.
0:10:19 And so when we understand how those are unfolding, I think it can be useful because there are systematic biases in the kinds of things that our brains prioritize.
0:10:30 For example, rewards that happen immediately are easier to vividly imagine and get weighted more than rewards that we have to wait for, let’s say.
0:10:38 A lot of these, we are on the borderline of ridiculousness about the factors we’re considering between an apple and an orange.
0:10:51 Are you saying that these things are going on subconsciously and basically at one point we just pick an orange or are you saying that there are different kinds of people?
0:10:55 And some people like me are thinking about how dirty your hands are or how much fiber does it have?
0:10:58 Do I need vitamin A or vitamin C?
0:11:08 So there’s a couple of different parts of the question that you’re asking.
0:11:13 So one is, of course, there is variability across people, like people’s brains work somewhat differently.
0:11:16 Your experiences and my experiences might be somewhat different.
0:11:20 And so the factors that are going to go into our value calculations are a little bit different.
0:11:27 Psychologists have studied things like need for cognition and how much people tend to maximize versus satisfy.
0:11:31 So there’s going to be some differences in the way that we do this.
0:11:39 But also importantly, and the thing that I like to focus on the most is how much variability there is within a given person,
0:11:46 depending on the situation that they’re in, the context that they’re in, what their recent experiences are, what their goals are,
0:11:51 like how much they have attention and motivation to pay attention to what’s happening.
0:11:59 So for many of our decisions, we’re not going through and deliberatively weighing like all of the different things that you’re describing.
0:12:05 Of course, I look over at my counter and I’m very lucky that I have both apples and oranges in the house right now.
0:12:07 And I’m not going to agonize over that decision.
0:12:17 But if I wanted to shape the choice for myself, let’s say, between whether I choose an orange or whether I choose a bag of potato chips,
0:12:19 maybe I’m thinking about my health.
0:12:24 But thinking about something that’s far in the future, like whether I’m likely to get heart disease,
0:12:32 is working against that kind of priority that my value system puts on immediate rewards.
0:12:38 And so instead of thinking about, you know, well, I know the orange is better for my health in the long term,
0:12:46 that’s not really salient or a big priority for the me that’s right here right now in terms of how my value system is going to respond.
0:12:53 And having the oranges out on the counter and the potato chips somewhere that’s much more annoying to access,
0:13:03 focusing on how juicy and delicious the orange is going to taste for me right now and how sweet is something that is a feature that I really love.
0:13:11 So I think it’s not that every single decision we’re consciously going through all of those different attributes.
0:13:12 Does that make sense?
0:13:20 Yes, I hope not, because I’m getting tired just thinking about picking between an apple and an orange here.
0:13:24 So, you know, we use the word value, singular, right?
0:13:27 The highest value option.
0:13:35 But picking the highest value option, you have to kick in values plural.
0:13:43 So what happens if your values are, shall I say, skeptical or evil or bad?
0:13:45 What if your values are bad?
0:13:46 Then what?
0:13:48 What do you mean by if your values are bad?
0:13:49 Say more about that.
0:13:52 Maybe not in apples or oranges, but I don’t know.
0:13:57 Pick something like sending people to El Salvador without due process.
0:13:59 So what if your values are bad?
0:14:10 And so you value, I don’t know, supporting your base, but the values that make you support your base in this way is kind of suspect.
0:14:13 So then what happens between value and values?
0:14:22 Are you asking about like how a person might make a decision that’s really counter to what some of us might think of as like humane?
0:14:29 Yes. And I mean, what you value is influenced by your values, right?
0:14:43 Sure. So I think what you’re getting at is if you think about moral values, like what we think of as right and wrong, which might come from different sources like our spirituality, our religion, our upbringing, our education,
0:14:50 like those kind of big V values of what’s right and wrong contribute to this value calculation.
0:15:01 And I think sometimes when people think about a value calculation, that’s what might come to mind for them is like, what are your values, like your core values, your moral values?
0:15:07 And it goes back to the same thing that we were just talking about, that like when that is what you’re thinking about,
0:15:16 when you take a step back and you have a minute to think about how you align your day to day actions with those bigger picture values, that that is something that often we can do.
0:15:21 Of course, sometimes we have different values that are in conflict with one another.
0:15:25 And philosophers have thought about these kinds of questions for a very long time.
0:15:40 And what I would say is that we also end up in lots of situations because we are not necessarily taking a step back and thinking about what our bigger picture values and the big V sense are,
0:15:47 And instead choosing things because they’re easier because they’re popular or because we’re not giving it a lot of attention.
0:15:56 And so it’s not necessarily that moral values are going to be the most salient attribute in every single calculation for every single person.
0:16:10 I think that’s a little bit different than the example that you’re bringing up where you and I might have one set of moral values that are core for us and that seem self-evident for us.
0:16:17 And that then give way to a bunch of different assumptions about what kinds of behaviors would be the right behaviors to choose.
0:16:27 And those might be different from what somebody else would think of as their core moral values and how that relates to a particular situation.
0:16:37 You were mentioning questions about immigration policy in the U.S., I think, or alluding to that when we think about how might we treat other humans who are here.
0:16:44 And in brain scans, if you just indulge me for a second, I will come back to the political question.
0:16:54 But in brain scans, scientists have looked at how people’s brains come into sync with each other when they’re watching media, when they’re engaging with different kinds of ideas.
0:17:01 And early work in the space showed that when people watch the same movies, that their brains came into sync with each other.
0:17:16 So if you watch the good, the bad, and the ugly, like a Western where there’s the director is really directing your attention and in training your brain to go up and down in the same way as the rest of the audience, it’s really captivating you and transporting you into this world.
0:17:32 We also see that when people have more sort of similar experiences or closer to each other, when they’re friends, when they live close together, then their brains tend to show more of that kind of synchrony going up and down in the same places at the same times.
0:17:45 And then experiments have shown that when people are communicating, if I tell you a story and you are making the same meaning of the story that I’m making, our brains are going to be in sync with one another.
0:18:07 And finally, when scientists bring groups of people into the lab and some of the people are told one backstory and other people are told a different backstory, the people who share assumptions about what’s happening in the story, their brains are in sync with one another, but out of sync with people who are told different information coming into it.
0:18:27 And so I think where that comes back to these questions about what we think of as incontrovertible positions, moral values, and so on, right now we’re at a moment where there’s a lot of polarization about how we should think about what is right and wrong and how we should be and what we owe each other.
0:18:52 And when liberals and conservatives in the US watch the same news stories, for example, news clips about immigration, even though they’re watching literally the same movies, the same sentences are being said, the same images are on the screen, people who share the same political ideology, brains are more in sync with their in groups and not as much in sync with their out groups.
0:19:01 And one possibility is that the assumptions that we’re bringing to the table are really shaping so that we’re having a different experience of what we’re seeing.
0:19:03 We’re making totally different meaning of it.
0:19:09 And I think there’s behavioral research that complements this about where that might come from.
0:19:26 For example, when people swap out the news source that they’re watching, when folks who are reliable Fox News viewers watch CNN for some period of time, it changes what issues they’re paying attention to, what beliefs they have about some of those issues, and so on.
0:19:38 So I think the media that we’ve already consumed are shaping the assumptions that we’re bringing into these new experiences and then bringing us into sync with some people and out of sync with other people.
0:19:41 So does that get a part of what you’re asking about?
0:19:56 So with this knowledge about, first of all, you figure out what options you have, then you pick the one with the highest value, and then you track how it’s rewarding.
0:20:04 If you go with that model, how do we optimize our choice making process?
0:20:10 If I know that’s what’s happening in my brain, how can I optimize my decision-making?
0:20:17 Let’s talk a little bit about what it might mean to optimize decision-making, because I think for different people, it might mean different things, right?
0:20:24 So in the book, the starting assumption that I’m making is that different people have different preferences.
0:20:34 They might have different hopes and dreams and goals, and that there’s not necessarily always an objectively good decision or bad decision.
0:20:40 Going back to these very much more simple kinds of decisions, should I eat chocolate cake for breakfast?
0:20:41 I don’t know.
0:20:49 If I do that every day for many years, it’s probably not good for my health, and it’s probably not going to set me up to have an amazing feeling in my body.
0:20:58 But once in a while, let’s say that something really amazing just happened, and that feels like a really special way for me to celebrate, or it’s my birthday, or something like that.
0:21:04 There might be situations where that’s a perfectly reasonable decision to make, right?
0:21:09 So I think we have to get clear about what we mean by good decisions and bad decisions.
0:21:24 And part of what I hope people take away from the book is a little bit more compassion for themselves and others about why we might do the things that we’re doing and then try to set up our decision-making so that more of it makes sense to us, right?
0:21:28 Sometimes we make decisions where, in retrospect, we’re like, why did I do that thing?
0:21:32 And so how might we do that in a different way?
0:21:46 And thinking about back to some of the political examples or how should we treat each other, I think that right now, for me, I’m in a moment where it feels like it’s hard to make good decisions.
0:21:47 There’s so much going on.
0:21:56 Every day I’m at the University of Pennsylvania, where the Trump administration has frozen $170 million in research investments to Penn.
0:22:01 I know the people whose clinical trials are getting paused.
0:22:03 Like, I know the people whose jobs are at stake.
0:22:05 There’s a lot going on right now.
0:22:12 And still, even just thinking about what are the options that we’re choosing between, what might we do in this situation?
0:22:14 What is a good decision about how to spend my day?
0:22:17 Is the good decision to focus on my kids?
0:22:18 I’ve got twin 10-year-olds.
0:22:21 Is it really to lean into those immediate connections?
0:22:35 Is it to try to do everything that I can to help people understand the value of science and what’s at stake for the future of our democracy and our health and our innovation infrastructure?
0:22:36 There are so many possibilities, right?
0:22:46 And so, getting more concretely back to, like, how understanding what’s happening in our brains might then help shape the way that I think about that kind of problem.
0:22:56 Like, one thing is that noticing that, like, having such a wide array can be paralyzing.
0:23:01 I can think about, like, well, okay, what are a few concrete things that I might choose between right now?
0:23:04 What are the things that are possible for me to do right now?
0:23:16 And then, let’s say, calling my representatives is something that is likely to be effective in the sense that it’s an individual action that I can take right here, right now.
0:23:19 It takes two minutes, three minutes.
0:23:27 And I believe that the congressional aides tally, at the end of the day, how many people called and talked about a particular issue.
0:23:36 So, it’s something where, when I think about, like, my bigger picture self-relevance system, that’s something that’s an identity that’s important to me.
0:23:41 Like, being a person who participates in our community and tries to make things better.
0:23:55 When I think about, then, the social implications of that, like, doing stuff in collaboration with other people is another thing that directly impacts our value calculations and can produce a sense of reward.
0:24:14 So, like, when I’m feeling alone, when I’m feeling like, I don’t know if there’s anything I can do, remembering that there are these sources that can make something distant and abstract and not vivid, like participating in a political process, feel more immediate, more concrete, more compatible with who I am and what I value.
0:24:17 And then, also, more enjoyable by doing it with other people.
0:24:20 That’s one thing that’s been on my mind a lot recently, for sure.
0:24:24 And plus your two kids, right?
0:24:27 You’ve got a lot on your mind right now.
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0:25:36 So do you think that in step one, which is considering the options, let’s posit that there is this theoretical wise decision.
0:25:46 Do you think that the danger to making a wise decision is the consideration of too many options or too few options?
0:25:48 Which way is the better way to go?
0:25:51 Oh, I don’t think there’s one right answer to that.
0:25:55 Because we know that this is not necessarily even from the neuroscience literature.
0:25:57 This is from behavioral economics and psychology.
0:26:06 We know that having too many decisions that we’re considering can make people throw their hands up and just say, I don’t even want to do this.
0:26:13 There was a famous set of studies where having too many different jam flavors to choose from goofed people’s decision making up.
0:26:29 On the other hand, going back to this question of, is there anything that I can do in this situation or that we imagine that our possibilities are constrained because we automatically take things off the table because people like me don’t tend to do this.
0:26:36 That’s where I think taking a step back and thinking about like, why are these the assumptions that I’m making?
0:26:38 Why are these the possibilities that I’m choosing?
0:26:45 So in the book, I talk a little bit about a decision about whether to go and visit my grandmother who lives in Philadelphia.
0:26:48 She’s 100 years old right now.
0:26:49 She’s amazing.
0:26:52 And so she’s one of my very favorite people.
0:26:59 But knowing that she’s 100, I know that like I’m not going to be able to go for walks with her forever, right?
0:27:09 And yet, sometimes I feel so hard to even consider that as a possibility with all the other things that are demanding my time and attention, right?
0:27:12 My job that’s very important to me, my kids that are very important to me.
0:27:27 And so one of the things that I realized actually listening to a podcast that I really loved called How to Save a Planet was that one of the things that was getting in the way was like I wasn’t even considering going to visit Bev because the traffic is really bad.
0:27:33 And like the transit time just felt like too much of a barrier and I’d like totally taken it off the table.
0:27:44 And on this episode of How to Save a Planet, there was an episode about bikes where people were just like having such a delightful time, giggling on their bikes and enjoying their bike rides.
0:27:58 And that possibility of getting to my grandmother’s house in a way that felt more easeful, more joyful, more like me time, getting to move my body, be outside a little bit.
0:28:16 That really unlocked something for me, being able to figure out how to get across town in a way that like the time felt good in and of itself, made it possible for me to say, actually, this is something I want to consider doing multiple times a week.
0:28:22 It’s not something that I want to do once in a while when all the stars align to make it possible.
0:28:35 And doing it one time, going back to that process of seeing how straightforward it is to do that, and then remembering how enjoyable it is to spend time with this person that I care about, made it easier to make that choice again.
0:28:52 And so sometimes just like being able to take that first step to see that something that we hadn’t really considered as an option could be an option if we figure out like how to remove the friction and how to instead tip the value calculation in favor through something like biking instead of driving.
0:28:57 That’s a place where I think we sometimes want to put possibilities back on the table.
0:29:13 So this is the Katie Milkman theory of bundling something you enjoy, but something that, you know, maybe, well, you still enjoy seeing your aunt, but it’s putting these two things together like Katie, you know.
0:29:16 You’re thinking about this in terms of temptation bundling.
0:29:20 Yeah, like exercising and listening to her podcasts.
0:29:32 Yeah, so Katie Milkman coined the term temptation bundling to say that when we’re making choices and this maps on to the idea that our value systems prioritize immediate rewards.
0:29:36 So she talked about this a lot in terms of getting exercise.
0:29:46 So if you don’t want to go to the gym and it feels really effortful for you to go to the gym, then as you mentioned, Guy, she gave people the opportunity to listen to really exciting audio books.
0:29:56 And so if you’re only able to listen to the Hunger Games when you’re at the gym, then all of a sudden that process of being at the gym can feel much more enjoyable.
0:30:05 And I think extending that logic and knowing that our brain’s value systems really prioritize those immediate rewards, we have a lot of different options.
0:30:09 So one is temptation bundling, like Katie’s research highlights.
0:30:14 Another is figuring out how to make the thing that we’re doing inherently enjoyable.
0:30:24 For example, choosing an exercise that is more fun for you, like maybe going dancing is actively fun for you, whereas running on a treadmill isn’t.
0:30:41 And so in the same kind of way, I think it’s a little bit nuanced, but temptation bundling says let’s bring in an external reward, like the podcast, or I’m going to eat a chocolate right afterwards, because that makes it really fun for me to know that reward is going to come with this hard activity.
0:30:47 I think that’s a little bit different than figuring out how we can make the thing itself enjoyable.
0:30:54 And so I think you can imagine that the biking could be conceptualized as temptation bundling.
0:30:58 I get to do this fun thing while I’m also doing another fun thing, visiting my grandmother.
0:31:08 I was thinking about it a little bit differently, which was like the transit itself, the process of getting there went from being really unpleasant and a thing I didn’t want to do.
0:31:20 And it was essentially like counterweighting a thing that I knew was something I wanted, going to visit my grandmother, replacing that with an activity that’s inherently enjoyable for me, biking.
0:31:35 And so I think the value of the neuroscience here in some ways is to say that although there’s some theories about temptation bundling and there are other theories about how vividly we imagine future events, like bringing that psychologically closer in that way.
0:31:40 And some theories about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and those kinds of things.
0:31:53 And when we look at what’s happening in our brains, I think it simplifies things in some ways because it says, whatever the thing is that you need to do to figure out how to make this more rewarding now, there are so many possibilities for how you might do that.
0:32:14 Pick one of them, and then once your brain realizes that the reward is psychologically closer in time or in geographic distance or in social distance, which are all processed in similar ways in our brains, then we can be more successful in making that decision in a way that feels straightforward, if that makes sense.
0:32:20 Yes, since you opened the door here with Grandma Bev, let me ask you a question.
0:32:31 So it seems to me that the seminal moment with Grandma Bev talking about how visiting with her, you were on your phone and defocused and all that.
0:32:40 The seminal moment to me was that Grandma Bev brought it up to you and said, you’re here, but you’re not really here.
0:32:48 So how do we catalyze those kind of moments with set the whole thing in motion?
0:32:50 Yeah, so you’re right.
0:32:55 I didn’t give her due credit when I was just talking about the transportation and the podcast.
0:32:59 It is true that one night she was over at my house and she’s fantastic.
0:33:05 She’s figured out how to use ride sharing apps and how to come over to my house and spend time with me.
0:33:14 And one night when we were out on the block, she said to me, I come over to your house, but we’re not really spending time together.
0:33:19 And in the moment, initially, I felt really defensive about that.
0:33:20 I was like, yes, we are.
0:33:22 Like, I make you dinner all the time.
0:33:25 Like, you know, you come over, we’re in the same room.
0:33:26 You’re hanging out with me in the kitchen.
0:33:28 Like, we’re spending time together.
0:33:33 And of course, what she was saying was like, I wasn’t giving her my focus.
0:33:35 When she comes over to my house, there’s a lot going on.
0:33:37 There’s my kids who need attention.
0:33:42 And there’s often other family members, my mom, my brother’s wife, his baby.
0:33:45 There’s a lot going on at my house when we’re all together.
0:33:49 And so that’s different than having time where we’re just focused on each other.
0:34:06 And so that was the initial catalyst, you’re right, for me saying, okay, how am I going to shift the way that I’m making this decision to be able to make it a frequent possibility rather than just something that I do once in a while when it occurs to me?
0:34:08 And I think there are a couple of different pieces to that.
0:34:11 So one is, I was saying, I felt really defensive when she first brought that up.
0:34:19 So how do we let go of some of that defensiveness to be able to connect with people that we care about?
0:34:30 Another piece of that is how do we think about what other people might already know or not know so that we can ask for those things, right?
0:34:42 That was, in some sense, really important that she told me what she was actually thinking instead of just continuing on feeling resentful or feeling frustrated or feeling disconnected.
0:34:54 And so in the later part of the book, I talk a little bit about some of the things that motivate us to share ideas or information with other people, which also go back to these value calculations, right?
0:35:07 I imagine that if my grandma had thought that I was going to be fully dismissive or closed off, then it might not be worth her energy to try to engage me about that.
0:35:14 And likewise, she has a lot of wisdom being herself and her age.
0:35:19 So like sometimes when we’re younger, we worry about things like, what’s the other person going to think about me?
0:35:27 So the social relevance system can both work in our favor, helping us understand other people’s motivations and helping us connect with them.
0:35:32 But it can also bring up these questions like, what is this going to say about me if I say da, da, da, da, da, da.
0:35:37 So what’s your advice to the Bev’s of the world?
0:35:46 Is it like, let it rip, speak up, or maybe part of what’s going on with Bev is I’m a hundred, time is running out.
0:35:47 I can’t be dicking around.
0:35:50 I got to tell Emily to get her act together.
0:35:51 Yeah.
0:36:00 And you know, that, that in and of itself is a great example of like how different context changes our value calculations, right?
0:36:06 As we get older, maybe we’re less concerned about whether we say it in exactly the right way or not.
0:36:12 And we’re concerned with the things that matter the most, like getting to have the time with the people that we love while we have that opportunity.
0:36:16 So yeah, I think I really appreciated that she did that.
0:36:21 So I don’t know that I’m well positioned to give advice to the Bev’s of the world because she’s doing great.
0:36:30 But I think not being afraid of making those suggestions, but when we do it, doing it in a way that people can hear.
0:36:39 Because like I said, like that defensiveness is such a powerful force also in shaping our openness to change.
0:36:48 So there’s a lot of research that highlights the endowment effect, the idea that we value things that we think of as ours.
0:36:55 And that includes things like people demand more money for an object when they’re going to sell it.
0:37:01 And they think of it as theirs compared to when some outside person says how much they would be willing to pay for it.
0:37:06 But the same logic happens with our behaviors, like things that we’ve done in the past.
0:37:09 And we think of as this is what I do, this is me.
0:37:22 We can then sometimes jump to the conclusion that if I admit that what I did in the past wasn’t optimal, or maybe I did something that was even bad, that can very easily get conflated with like I’m a bad person.
0:37:26 And then we come up with all kinds of reasons why that isn’t true.
0:37:32 If somebody made a request like, you never come and spend time with me, like, why don’t you ever call me?
0:37:35 Those kinds of framings, right?
0:37:50 If Bev had come to me and said, you never spend any time with me, and you’re a terrible granddaughter, or something that I heard in that way, then it would be much harder for me to figure out like how to shuffle things around to actually hear what she’s saying and do the thing.
0:37:59 So I guess my advice is like, make those requests, but do it in a way that helps people connect with their bigger picture of goals and values that puts on the table.
0:38:06 We both want to spend time together, like we love each other, like how can we figure out a way to do that in a way that is actually doing it, right?
0:38:15 I have four kids, and I’m always telling them, you know, I’m 71 years old, I ain’t gonna last for it, or you better surf with me now.
0:38:16 And it works most of the time.
0:38:20 But anyway, well, I mean, you’re making an offer of surfing, right?
0:38:21 That sounds amazing.
0:38:22 Who doesn’t want to do that?
0:38:26 So we’ve been talking about value formation.
0:38:33 So could you shed some light upon the factors that influence our values?
0:38:37 There’s parenting, there’s education, there’s culture.
0:38:45 So if I’m a parent, you’re a parent, you have these two kids, and you’re thinking, how do I instill them a good value system?
0:38:47 What is it?
0:38:48 What do parents do?
0:38:50 What do you want from education?
0:38:51 What do you want from culture?
0:38:53 What are the factors here?
0:38:58 There are so many fields that have thought about that more deeply than neuroscience, right?
0:39:10 There’s many, many, not only academic fields, but historical traditions and cultural traditions that have thought a lot about how we do that well.
0:39:23 And so what I would say is that one of the things that we haven’t talked as much about explicitly in this conversation yet is the role of the social relevant system in shaping our value calculations.
0:39:35 And so we have a social relevant system, which scientists sometimes call our theory of mind system or our mentalizing system, which helps us understand what other people think and feel.
0:39:49 And paralleling that, social rewards are really powerful in shaping what we think is good and bad and, by extension, what we think of as me and not me.
0:39:59 And so when we think about how we instill those values in our kids, I think there’s a good amount of evidence that role models matter quite a bit.
0:40:09 So what we actually do is going to inform what other people think is appropriate, what other people think is likely to be rewarding, and so on.
0:40:13 And so we serve as those role models for other people.
0:40:18 Sometimes this gets phrased in terms of how powerfully social influence influences us.
0:40:38 So when we see what faces other people think are attractive, or when we see what foods other people are eating, or when we see how other people are consuming energy in their homes, or whether they’re voting, those things influence our value calculations to make us more or less likely to make those same choices.
0:40:51 And then when you flip that around, like the question that you’re asking about how do we shape our kids’ choices, how do we shape our neighbors’ choices, how do we shape the choices of people on our teams at work?
0:41:07 And so when we make choices that are aligned with our bigger picture goals and values, other people see that, and it makes those choices seem more rewarding in their value calculations as well through this social influence mechanism.
0:41:21 My grad student, Ray Pei, who’s at Stanford now, ran a study that I thought was really interesting when she was at Penn, that looked at how adolescents and young adults change over time.
0:41:33 And one thing that some scientists had asserted was that over the course of adolescence and into young adulthood, that people become more and more independent.
0:41:35 They become more resistant to peer pressure.
0:41:43 And it’s certainly true that during adolescence, our reward and value systems and our social relevant systems develop very quickly.
0:41:47 But it’s also true that we’re soaking up the culture that we’re part of.
0:42:00 And so what Ray’s data suggested was that it’s not just exclusively in all places around the world that teenagers become linearly more and more resistant to peer influence.
0:42:12 When we look at Western cultures like the U.S. that prize independence and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and becoming this solo, unique individual, that pattern is true.
0:42:29 But Ray collected a bunch of data in China where there’s more of a cultural focus on interdependence, on our relationships to each other and the relative ways that our communities are constructed and how we interface with each other.
0:42:42 And there, what she found, that as people developed over the course of adolescence, they showed a different pattern where it seemed more like they were soaking up the values of their culture.
0:42:57 So by the time they’re in their early 20s, they actually were becoming more interdependent again, like they were susceptible to peer influence and thinking about what other people were thinking and feeling in a way that seemed reflective of that cultural value.
0:43:04 So what I would say is, as individual parents, we don’t have sole influence.
0:43:10 Anybody who’s been a parent knows, like we are definitely not the only forces that are shaping our kids, but we do have some role.
0:43:15 And what we do is going to shape their value calculations.
0:43:44 In another study that we ran, which was inspired by a parenting dilemma, we found that disrupting function in lateral prefrontal cortex and parts of the brain that typically help us reason, people whose brain function was temporarily down-regulated, temporarily disrupted, were not as able to reason about information that was presented as didactic facts.
0:43:49 So things like, if you smoke for 30 years, you’ll develop lung cancer.
0:44:08 But even disrupting that function in these parts of our brain that help us reason, stories allowed people to continue to be able to make use of the information, to be able to generate ideas in response, to reason about those facts when they were bundled as information about people.
0:44:11 Like, John smoked for 30 years, like John smoked for 30 years and developed lung cancer.
0:44:20 And they said that was inspired by a parenting dilemma because there’s a lot of accounts of successful use of stories in many cultures around the world.
0:44:27 So there was an article about how Inuit parents use stories to help their children manage their feelings.
0:44:42 Anecdotally, like when my kids were little, they were not great at regulating their emotions or reasoning about the situation that was happening.
0:44:47 Let’s say they were fighting over some toy and I’d be like, what do you think our options are here?
0:44:48 And they’d just be losing it.
0:44:57 But if I told a story about two other children that were in a very similar dilemma, they’d be able to pause and think about what these two other people should do.
0:45:03 Back to your question about, like, how might we shape the values that folks have.
0:45:12 I think that what we see descriptively, empirically and consistent with how we understand the brain to work is like the things that we do matter, the stories that we tell matter.
0:45:18 And those kinds of social roots are much more powerful than just a list of facts and figures.
0:45:20 What do you think?
0:45:21 How do you think we should do it?
0:45:23 What’s been successful for you with your four kids?
0:45:28 Listen, I know what I don’t know.
0:45:33 At 71, I’ve come to that conclusion.
0:45:42 And the concept that you can truly control your kids and make them into what you want to make them into is a delusion.
0:45:44 Let’s not get into that.
0:45:46 Up next on Remarkable People.
0:45:55 Like some of the work I’m most excited about right now is with a collaborative team of scientists at Princeton and other universities.
0:46:03 Where we’ve been scanning two people having real-time conversation in that very bizarre foreign environment.
0:46:04 And they do it.
0:46:08 They have deep, wonderful, connective conversations that they enjoy.
0:46:14 Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners.
0:46:17 It’s our pleasure and honor to make the show for you.
0:46:23 If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate, and review it.
0:46:25 Even better, forward it to a friend.
0:46:28 A big mahalo to you for doing this.
0:46:32 You’re listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:46:43 This story is not necessarily a logical follow-on from what we were just talking about.
0:46:50 But I have to include this story because it is my favorite story of your book.
0:46:59 And the gist of the story is that when you were giving your kid a reward, I think it was even monetary reward.
0:47:03 And basically he said, Mom, how about just writing me a note?
0:47:05 Like, can you please tell that story?
0:47:07 That’s a great story.
0:47:08 Yeah.
0:47:11 I think that is actually related to what we were just talking about a little bit.
0:47:15 That sometimes we get so focused on one way of thinking about things.
0:47:17 When the social rewards can be so much more powerful.
0:47:25 So the story was my kid, I think it was like spelling homework or something that he was supposed to be memorizing various things.
0:47:31 And back to the temptation bundling thing, I was trying to figure out a way to incentivize him to just do the thing.
0:47:37 And I offered him a quarter, which at the time he knew he could buy.
0:47:45 There were these like penny candies at the store near our house to lure kids in and get them to want to buy more stuff at the store.
0:47:49 And so I had offered him this bribe, basically.
0:47:52 And he was like, I have another idea.
0:48:00 If I do all of this, will you make me a certificate that says, good job, Theo, and you can put today’s date on it?
0:48:05 And basically, like you said, he wanted me to make him a little piece of artwork that he could have.
0:48:08 Because those kinds of social rewards are really powerful.
0:48:13 Because I think that kind of identity motivator can be so powerful.
0:48:14 This is a thing that I did.
0:48:16 This is something that I can feel proud of.
0:48:23 And this is something that then like it was important to him that it have his name on it and that it reflect that he had done this thing.
0:48:25 So, of course, I said, yeah, great.
0:48:26 I’m happy to do that.
0:48:32 We’ve made a lot of those kinds of things for guitar homework, playing music.
0:48:38 And like at the end of the week, if we’ve had a really great week, sometimes I’ll make a little piece of artwork to celebrate that.
0:48:46 If we had this interview or I had read your book a few decades ago, it would have saved me thousands of dollars.
0:48:51 But do you think there’s an upper limit on the age when certificates no longer matter?
0:48:54 Because my youngest is 19.
0:48:55 Is it too late?
0:48:59 There’s different things that are like certificates, right?
0:49:05 I don’t think there’s an upper limit on our wish to connect with other people and to get positive feedback.
0:49:08 It’s performance appraisal season right now at Penn.
0:49:09 So that feels really salient to me.
0:49:11 What kind of feedback are we giving each other?
0:49:17 And making sure that we’re expressing the appreciation for the things that we do really, truly appreciate.
0:49:19 Like that’s what that is.
0:49:27 A certificate of appreciation is something that’s a tangible acknowledgement of something that somebody did that you thought was amazing.
0:49:29 So yes and no.
0:49:32 Like I think it gets so much more complicated as people get older.
0:49:40 And like we talked about, there are so many other peers and sources of influences in a 19-year-old compared to, say, a five-year-old.
0:49:42 Really?
0:49:57 So I cannot pass up on this opportunity to ask this question of the Pennsylvania mafia of Duckworth, Milkman, and now Falk.
0:50:00 I love the work of Bob Cialdini.
0:50:10 And I have to ask you, from a neuroscientist perspective, what makes a person persuasive and influential?
0:50:11 Thanks.
0:50:12 Yeah.
0:50:13 And I love Bob Cialdini too.
0:50:19 And I was just like so excited when he gave positive feedback about the book.
0:50:23 There are so many fundamental principles that he described early on.
0:50:30 Like I think many people have read Influence, like millions of people have read Cialdini’s classic Influence.
0:50:33 And so you’re asking me about what makes somebody persuasive.
0:50:45 One of the things that we see is that people who tend to use their social relevance system more when they’re considering information, that information gets shared more.
0:50:51 So that kind of ability to engage in perspective taking, I think, is one piece of it.
0:51:06 And that resonates with some of the principles that Cialdini initially described, like related to the social influence that we were talking about before, where we look around and we see what other people are doing and thinking and that that influences our preferences.
0:51:21 Of course, there are decades of psychology research and thousands of years going back to Aristotle as well about what makes somebody persuasive, thinking about rhetoric, like logos, ethos, and pathos.
0:51:28 But when we think about the modern neuroscience research about what makes people persuasive, I think there are a couple of different pieces to that puzzle.
0:51:42 So one is that activation of our own social relevant systems as we’re considering the ideas can help us frame information in a way that then resonates with others and they go on to share.
0:51:48 And yet, as we gain more power and status in organizations, we do that less.
0:52:01 Neuroscience research highlights that people who have more social status sometimes do less of that thinking about what other people are thinking and feeling spontaneously than other people.
0:52:08 In terms of what makes people want to share information, also when we can connect it to ourselves.
0:52:22 So in a study where we looked at what made people want to share New York Times headlines and teasers about health and climate relevant topics, when we just asked people to describe the content itself, that was our control condition.
0:52:32 But when we gave people the chance to say, say why this matters to you or say why this is relevant to you, that increased their motivation to share the information.
0:52:46 And when we said, talk about why this matters for people in your social network, talk about why this is relevant to people that you know and care about, that also, to a similar degree, increased their willingness to share the information.
0:53:03 So giving people that opportunity to connect ideas and information with their own identity or with the social relevance of the information for people around them are two kind of straightforward extensions of what we’ve been talking about so far.
0:53:20 In a sense, the fact that I wanted to highlight the story of making a certificate for your son and the fact that we brought up the story of 100-year-old Grandma Bev, that’s exactly what you said, right?
0:53:22 Yeah, exactly.
0:53:27 There’s no better example of social relevance than your son and your grandmother.
0:53:41 Yeah, and you’re an expert interviewer trying to make these ideas resonate not only with me as a conversation partner, but with other people who might have kids and grandmas as well.
0:53:44 Yeah, and I often buy jam.
0:53:50 And when I buy jam, if there’s too many jams to buy, I just buy apricot.
0:53:56 I used to live about a mile from Drager’s, which is where that study occurred for Stanford.
0:54:09 So I got to ask you about MRIs because in a sense, I’m reinforcing what you did because in your book, you had a section about MRIs way up front.
0:54:18 And so my understanding of MRIs is that it measures the blood flow and oxygen to particular places in a person’s brain.
0:54:34 And first of all, are we talking about the kind of MRI that I’ve had MRIs to check my hearing and they put you in this big thing and the thing is right in front of your face and it’s going ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.
0:54:39 And it is the most disturbing, pain-free experience I’ve ever gone through.
0:54:43 So is that the kind of MRI that neuroscientists use?
0:54:44 It is.
0:54:54 The setup that neuroscientists use is a little bit different in that you would have headphones like the ones that I’m wearing right now and ear protection.
0:55:01 And there would be a screen or goggles that you would wear that would show you stuff like you could see on a laptop screen.
0:55:13 So if you’re going in to have your hearing checked or if you’re going in to, let’s say, have a structural image of your knee taken, then you’re just going to be looking at the plastic tube that’s around you, right?
0:55:14 No kidding.
0:55:27 And so that is a little bit even more bizarre than the experience for the neuroimaging version of it, where you’re in that same kind of machine and it is very noisy and it is a foreign environment.
0:55:38 And so in some ways, it’s amazing that anything that happens in that environment relates to the behaviors that people have in the real world outside of the scanner, which they do, which is incredible.
0:55:51 But yeah, we’re setting people up with headphones, goggles, usually a button box or a mouse pad or some kind of way that they can communicate responses for certain kinds of tasks.
0:55:55 If we’re making judgments about whether something’s me or not me, that’s just a button click, right?
0:56:02 I show you an image on the screen that says intelligent and then click this button for me, click that button for not me.
0:56:15 But new technology also is allowing us to do much more naturalistic things like coming up with noise canceling, headphones and microphone technology so that we can have a conversation.
0:56:31 Like some of the work I’m most excited about right now is with a collaborative team of scientists at Princeton and other universities where we’ve been scanning two people having real-time conversation in that very bizarre foreign environment.
0:56:32 And they do it.
0:56:36 They have deep, wonderful, connective conversations that they enjoy.
0:56:45 Is the assumption that a region of the brain lighting up is actually causing behavior change?
0:56:47 Is it correlation or causation?
0:56:50 It depends on the study.
0:57:00 So for the MRI studies that we do, they’re correlational in that we’re looking at correlations between, well, taking a step back.
0:57:06 If we’re talking about research on behavior change, there are a bunch of different kinds of studies that have been run.
0:57:10 My early work in grad school, for example, was fully correlational.
0:57:21 We looked at what happened within the self-relevance and value systems as people were exposed to coaching messages, encouraging them to do things like wear more sunscreen or reduce their smoking.
0:57:32 And what we saw was that activation in those brain regions was associated with people changing their behavior in the time periods that followed, say, a week or a month afterwards.
0:57:40 There are some studies that we’ve done where we push around the brain activity using interventions.
0:57:49 Like, for example, in a study on defensiveness and values affirmation, we brought people into the lab who are relatively sedentary.
0:57:58 And we randomly assigned one group of people to get to do a values affirmation where they reflect on their core values, like we talked about earlier.
0:58:07 Stepping back, zooming out, thinking about those things that really matter to us can make us less defensive and more open to new ideas and information.
0:58:21 So in that study, we had an experimental group that’s getting this intervention of getting to reflect on the values that matter most to them and a control group that’s reflecting on other values that don’t matter as much to them.
0:58:25 And then everybody’s seeing the same coaching messages afterwards.
0:58:33 Things like, according to the American Heart Association, your level of physical inactivity puts you at increased risk for heart disease.
0:58:44 And there what we see is that the intervention that we’re doing causally changes how much their brains are receptive to this kind of information.
0:58:54 So we see more activation and self-relevance and value systems when people did the values affirmation before the coaching than when they had the control intervention before the coaching.
0:59:04 And then we also can link that level of activation to the behavior change that follows using accelerometers, like a Fitbit, basically, that doesn’t give you feedback.
0:59:19 So there are different kinds of studies, different kinds of experimental designs where we make different kinds of claims about the relationship between the tasks that people are doing, the brain activation that they’re experiencing, and then the behaviors that they do later.
0:59:44 So my last MRI question is this, that is there any concern that we are drawing so many conclusions about neuroscience based on what I think is a population of experimental subjects that’s undergraduate students trying to get credit or make a few bucks by being a subject?
0:59:53 Are we taking that limited slice of the population, sticking them in an MRI and drawing generalized conclusions?
0:59:55 Yeah, for sure.
1:00:07 And at the beginning of the book on the note on the research, like especially the older MRI research and social neuroscience is limited in the sense that it’s about a very limited swath of the population.
1:00:27 And there have been many large scale efforts, particularly more recent efforts, like, for example, the Human Connectome Project or ABCD is a developmental large scale collaborative endeavor to try to understand what happens in people’s brains more broadly.
1:00:44 So colleagues and I have written about this question of what is a representative brain and how can we even find out when many of our early research studies were focused on these primarily Western, relatively well-off, high education samples.
1:00:52 And so it’s definitely an area that we have to continue to explore and expand, like what happens when we go outside of college student populations.
1:00:57 And for some kinds of questions, we’re doing a good job of digging deeper into that.
1:01:00 And for some kinds of questions, we need a lot more research.
1:01:02 So that is definitely a caveat.
1:01:20 So now my last question for you, unless you bring up something that makes me ask another question to follow up, is in social media and current marketing theory, so much is dependent on influencers influencing people.
1:01:26 So what’s the neuroscience take on can influencers truly influence us?
1:01:27 Sure.
1:01:47 I think that that goes back to the same thing that we were talking about before, where when people scanned the brains of college students learning about what faces peers thought were more attractive or less attractive or what foods people thought were tasty or what art people think is beautiful.
1:01:55 Those are relatively anonymous peers, and they exert influence on us by changing our underlying value calculations.
1:02:12 So when scientists randomly assign some faces or some foods or some pieces of art to get the feedback, your peers liked this more than you did, that doesn’t just change what we say on the surface, that changes our underlying reward value calculations.
1:02:18 When people are relatively more famous and have a following, I would imagine that would amplify that effect.
1:02:21 So, yeah, I think they can influence us.
1:02:31 And so can other people online who are doing and saying all kinds of things that we may or may not want to be shaping who we are and what we value.
1:02:43 So as soon as I hang up, I am going to create a certificate for my son about how happy I am with his first year in college.
1:02:59 So again, the name of our guest is Emily Falk, and she has written this book, What We Value.
1:03:05 And if you want to learn about how people come to value things, it’s recommended reading.
1:03:09 And thank you very much for being on our podcast.
1:03:11 Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
1:03:12 It’s been so great to meet you.
1:03:19 As you’re biking through Philadelphia, and if you see Katie or Angela, please say hello for us.
1:03:19 I will.
1:03:22 What kind of bike do you bike on?
1:03:25 These days, I use the Indigo Bike Share.
1:03:26 It’s so convenient.
1:03:32 The Bike Share in Philadelphia has e-bikes, which makes it really pleasant to ride them.
1:03:36 And you can ride from one place to another and then leave the bike there.
1:03:44 And if you want to walk or have a drink at happy hour and then not have to bike home, take the subway, like you can do that.
1:03:46 So I am a big fan of the Bike Share.
1:03:53 And are you taking different paths all the time so you see different architecture like you mentioned?
1:03:56 I do try to do that, yeah.
1:03:59 You see, Emily, I really did read your book.
1:04:02 I’m not just working off a Wikipedia entry about you.
1:04:03 I appreciate you.
1:04:07 So this is Guy Kawasaki.
1:04:10 You’ve been listening to the Remarkable People podcast.
1:04:14 And our remarkable guest today was Emily Falk.
1:04:17 And she’s the author of this book, What We Value.
1:04:24 So if you want to learn about what people value and how they came to value things, check that book out.
1:04:30 And I want to thank the team of Remarkable People who I really value them.
1:04:40 I value Madison Neismar, producer and co-author Tessa Neismar, our researcher, Jeff See and Shannon Hernandez, our sound design team.
1:04:42 So that’s the Remarkable People team.
1:04:46 And I hope you value what we’re doing for you.
1:04:50 Until next time, amhalo and aloha.
1:04:56 This is Remarkable People.

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0:01:26 Every entrepreneur needs to look at themselves and say, in what way am I weird?
0:01:30 In what way am I the best in the world at something, even if it’s a strange something?
0:01:37 And how can I combine a few of those traits together such that it’s A times B equals 10,000x,
0:01:42 where it’s really well suited to a product, a market, a moment in time, a leadership style,
0:01:48 a business strategy, a culture that I can create something to make jazz, to use a different example.
0:01:50 How do I use my raw components to create jazz?
0:01:54 So that’s one thing is you can never say, well, I need to be like Apple.
0:01:56 Therefore, I should parrot Steve Jobs.
0:01:57 That’s just never going to work.
0:02:02 Hello, I’m Guy Kawasaki.
0:02:05 This is the Remarkable People Podcast.
0:02:09 And today’s remarkable guest is Ben Gilbert.
0:02:16 He is co-founder and co-host of a very famous podcast called Acquired.
0:02:24 And this podcast is known for extremely deep dives, like two to four hour deep dives into
0:02:29 the strategies of legendary companies like Rolex and Meta.
0:02:31 And oh, my God, we’re going to get into it.
0:02:34 He has millions of listeners around the globe.
0:02:37 He’s also a pioneer and entrepreneur.
0:02:39 He’s launched successful ventures.
0:02:44 And he continues as a venture partner, shaping innovative startups.
0:02:50 Believe it or not, he was recognized by GeekWire as the young entrepreneur of the year,
0:02:54 which is something I never even was considered for.
0:02:57 I’m neither young nor entrepreneurial at this point.
0:03:05 But anyway, and he blends really deep technical expertise, a great sense of humor and visionary
0:03:05 leadership.
0:03:14 And this enables him to reveal the untold stories of just some great companies and not just tech
0:03:16 companies, as you’ll soon find out.
0:03:18 So welcome to the show, Ben Gilbert.
0:03:20 Thank you so much for having me.
0:03:28 So listen, I’m going to go a little bit backwards first, because I just need to know something.
0:03:33 You were kind of responsible for Microsoft Word or Office on the iPad.
0:03:41 And I just want to know, is Word on the iPad ever going to have style sheets?
0:03:47 Can you just place a call or email and say, guy needs style sheets on the iPad Word?
0:03:52 It’s so funny you started here because, first of all, responsible for is not true.
0:03:59 I was a part of a 200 person team that built the versions of Office for Mac in the 2011,
0:04:00 12, 13, 14 timeframe.
0:04:05 And that code base, we ported over to build the first version of Office for iPad.
0:04:14 That was one of the coolest career experiences of my whole life, up until the moment where we were ready
0:04:19 to ship and company leadership said, actually, you’re not shipping.
0:04:22 This has been a hedge the whole time.
0:04:24 We don’t want to make the iPad better.
0:04:25 We’re the Windows company.
0:04:26 Are you kidding me?
0:04:29 I’m euphemistically saying company leadership.
0:04:35 That was a decision made by the CEO, Steve Ballmer, who yesterday we interviewed on Acquired
0:04:41 for our next episode and got to talk all about the strategy of that sort of crucial moment
0:04:41 in time.
0:04:45 How long should we stay the Windows company versus how long should we look to the future?
0:04:48 So this has been on my mind a lot this last week.
0:04:53 And obviously, that team did eventually ship when Satya came in as CEO and the rest is
0:04:54 history.
0:04:57 I have no idea on style sheets to directly answer your question.
0:04:59 Oh, Bomber.
0:05:01 It was actually awesome.
0:05:03 I loved doing that interview.
0:05:05 And I think very highly of Steve as a person.
0:05:10 At the time when I worked at the company, I think I disagreed with the strategy, but I think
0:05:11 very highly of him as a human.
0:05:17 We’ll get into this a little later, but Steve Ballmer is one of the billionaires who has not
0:05:18 gone dark.
0:05:19 Shortlist today.
0:05:23 And his work about InfoUSA is very interesting, too.
0:05:24 Yep.
0:05:24 Yeah.
0:05:26 Steve Ballmer is like Jimmy Carter.
0:05:28 He’s getting better with age.
0:05:31 I’m sure he’ll appreciate that.
0:05:32 All right.
0:05:37 So many of your episodes are about the stories of the origin of a company.
0:05:39 So let’s just repeat your story.
0:05:48 So the story goes that you and David started Acquired to learn about successful acquisitions
0:05:50 to be better venture capitalists.
0:05:53 And then is this a true story?
0:05:59 Because I’m also aware of the Pierre Amidyar story where he says he started eBay so his girlfriend
0:06:01 could sell Pez dispensers.
0:06:04 And that’s basically a bullshit story.
0:06:09 So is this story about you wanting to be better venture capitalists, the reason for starting
0:06:10 Acquired, true?
0:06:11 Yeah.
0:06:18 I think that was in the back of our minds of a sort of logical reason to do it in a way
0:06:24 we could justify spending the time because the thinking was most companies that have successful
0:06:25 exits get acquired.
0:06:26 Most actually don’t IPO.
0:06:31 And so if we want to start and invest in companies that have successful exits, then what we should
0:06:36 do is study what makes acquisitions great and very value accretive for the acquiring company
0:06:38 and then work backwards from there.
0:06:44 And obviously that’s expanded dramatically today to telling the entire story of a company from
0:06:46 founding all the way to where it is today.
0:06:49 And actually most of the companies we study didn’t get acquired because they didn’t need
0:06:50 to.
0:06:53 And they could run independently and get very large over a long period of time.
0:06:57 But in practice, why did we start doing it?
0:07:03 David and I, we had a budding friendship, but we were never making the time.
0:07:04 We would keep saying, oh, let’s get drinks.
0:07:07 And then another month would go by and we’d say, shoot, we really need to get drinks.
0:07:12 And so this was a forcing function for us to actually spend more time together.
0:07:19 And we’ve always both had this excitement around tightly scoped ideas, an idea where you can
0:07:22 envision what the whole product looks like.
0:07:28 You’re capable of making it yourself or with a small group and shipping it and saying this
0:07:31 provides value to people in a very tight, discreet way.
0:07:37 And I’ve always been allergic to the startup ideas that are really big and really hand wavy
0:07:38 and hard to follow.
0:07:43 Sometimes those change the world, but I’d rather ship something small and say, we made another
0:07:44 acquired episode.
0:07:49 In this episode, you will learn the entire history and strategy of a company, why it worked, get
0:07:49 their whole story.
0:07:52 And this is the canonical piece on that thing.
0:07:53 We hope you enjoy.
0:07:55 And it just has a nice bow on it.
0:08:02 Just sitting here, Ben, I cannot think of a company that started with hand waving and the
0:08:05 big picture and worldwide domination that succeeded.
0:08:10 I can think of one where the two executives are in jail now, but that’s about it.
0:08:13 We were very lucky on a lot of things, including timing.
0:08:15 We were very early to podcasting.
0:08:20 In fact, we launched the year before AirPods came out, and I think we all know it was really
0:08:21 weird for like a month.
0:08:25 And then suddenly the whole world was like, oh, actually, we accept the fact that everyone’s
0:08:28 wearing headphones all the time and listening to podcasts and audio books.
0:08:29 So a lot of luck involved.
0:08:35 But there was definitely pretty quick product market fit with this idea that we had for a
0:08:38 narrowly scoped show and a listener base that wanted to hear it.
0:08:47 So the quick summary of the origin of Acquired is it was because of alcohol and AirPods, basically.
0:08:48 Basically.
0:08:49 Okay.
0:08:51 Well, at least we got to the truth here.
0:08:58 So now it seems to me that this 2015 timeframe where you started and for next couple of years,
0:09:04 it was mostly about acquisitions and then shifted to IPOs in 2018.
0:09:09 And then in 2020, it was basically any iconic company.
0:09:13 So is that kind of the arc of life of Acquired?
0:09:16 Hey, your information is very good.
0:09:21 Either you just did great research or you listened all the way through that period of time, which
0:09:24 would make you one of few people, because for a long time, not many people listened.
0:09:26 I don’t want to burst your bubble.
0:09:30 Did AI help meaningfully in this research?
0:09:30 Absolutely.
0:09:40 So now from a marketing perspective, if you could do it over, would you name your podcast
0:09:42 something different than Acquired?
0:09:52 Because to draw a parallel from your podcast, imagine if the people who created Rolex called
0:09:55 your company Pocket Watch, right?
0:10:01 And so you stuck yourself in a corner of acquisitions, but now you’re far beyond that.
0:10:04 So with hindsight, would you have picked a different name?
0:10:05 I don’t know.
0:10:13 There’s a few reasons why I think I wouldn’t, aside from all the obvious reasons why you think
0:10:13 we should.
0:10:20 One, for a very long time, all podcast players ranked the podcasts alphabetically.
0:10:21 Okay.
0:10:25 So if you don’t know what you’re going to listen to and you open your podcast player, we have
0:10:26 prime placement.
0:10:31 And now things are a little bit more algorithmic and they’re delivering and hey, here’s the
0:10:32 latest episode.
0:10:39 But 90% of our audience for a long time was on Apple podcasts and that we’d show up front
0:10:39 and center.
0:10:43 So that was a pretty funny hack that I don’t think we anticipated.
0:10:49 Two, I think people underestimate the importance of path dependence in entrepreneurship.
0:10:58 I think if we had come out with a show today that looks like Acquired, it might not have worked
0:11:03 because it might not have found the right audience out of the gate.
0:11:11 A thing that we did really well early was have a really valuable, really intelligent, critical
0:11:12 thinking listener base.
0:11:18 And the initial acquired product was valuable to them.
0:11:21 And the only way that we’ve ever grown is by people telling their friends.
0:11:23 We’ve never done any meaningful advertising.
0:11:28 So it’s all been organic doubling year over year of audience, which means that it’s all word
0:11:28 of mouth.
0:11:35 And so you need to start with a passionate kernel that is representative of the group you
0:11:37 ultimately want when you’re large.
0:11:43 And I think naming acquired, having that format, having that early listener base is the reason
0:11:47 that we were able to have the license to expand into what we are today.
0:11:50 So does the name make total sense today?
0:11:53 No, but it also doesn’t seem to have held us back.
0:11:57 We’re the number one technology podcast on Apple and Spotify.
0:12:03 And I don’t know, it seems like the name is a little bit amorphous enough that people
0:12:06 are like, I don’t really get why it’s called acquired, but sure, whatever.
0:12:07 You know what?
0:12:15 I like to point out that what you just said, I am friends with Meredith Whitaker, the CEO
0:12:16 or president of Signal.
0:12:21 And when I, I am like, I’m just got a lot of information going to come.
0:12:23 I am deaf.
0:12:25 So I read your transcripts.
0:12:28 So first of all, thank you very much for doing transcripts.
0:12:34 So I read the transcript of the meta that we have two episodes, but the Facebook episode,
0:12:40 and there was a part where you said that when people joined the Harvard Facebook thing,
0:12:45 there was already a lot of activity, and you said that if you were in the middle of Ohio
0:12:54 and you got people to join Facebook and they joined it and there’s nobody from Ohio, because
0:12:57 at that point you didn’t have critical mass at Facebook.
0:13:02 And so in a sense, what you just said is the same thing, right?
0:13:09 That you had this critical mass because you had a very narrow specialty, just like when Facebook
0:13:14 started, if you were at Harvard, you got on at Harvard and there were lots of people from
0:13:15 Harvard already.
0:13:21 So I took those three paragraphs and I sent it to Meredith and I said, this is the challenge
0:13:22 for Signal.
0:13:27 If you just try to get random people who are paranoid about privacy, they’re going to join
0:13:29 Signal and there’s nobody else they know.
0:13:31 And I think that’s holding Signal back.
0:13:32 That’s interesting.
0:13:38 The question then becomes, how has Signal accomplished having such a large user base?
0:13:39 If it’s really holding them back.
0:13:45 I guess they’re not everywhere, but it has to be tens of millions, maybe even a hundred
0:13:46 million users at this point.
0:13:47 Yeah.
0:13:53 I think it’s more like 60 or 70 million, but 60 or 70 million, if you compare it to messages
0:13:55 or WhatsApp is totally fair.
0:13:55 Yeah.
0:13:58 That’s a tangent.
0:14:03 And I just want to express how impressed I am with acquired, because I’m going to have
0:14:05 to take you back in history.
0:14:13 So before you were born, Ben, probably, if Harvard Business School did a case study on your company,
0:14:19 assuming it wasn’t a negative case study, it meant you arrived.
0:14:25 And then a few decades later, if Walt Mossberg wrote an article about your company for the
0:14:29 Thursday issue of the Wall Street Journal, it meant you arrived.
0:14:34 And now I would say Marques Brownlee is the new Walt Mossberg.
0:14:37 If Marques Brownlee covers your product, you’ve arrived.
0:14:46 And I would say in my mind that acquired is the equivalent of a Harvard Business School case
0:14:49 being written about your company.
0:14:57 I looked at your episodes and my God, it’s such a rich mind for entrepreneurial information.
0:14:59 My hat’s off to you, Ben.
0:15:01 It was just fascinating.
0:15:08 And in particular, what’s fascinating to me, of course, you cover semiconductors and social
0:15:09 media and all that.
0:15:14 But my favorite stuff was about Rolex and Porsche and stuff.
0:15:20 So I just want to fan guy a little bit, if you don’t mind.
0:15:25 Well, look, I have been shocked that it has ended up this way.
0:15:33 I think what David and I did acquired effectively represents our learning journey.
0:15:39 And so if you go back and listen to the ones from 2015, 16, 17, there’s a real naivete there
0:15:46 that I would go poke lots of holes with the 10 years of learning that I’ve done since then
0:15:47 in our analysis.
0:15:52 And I’m sure 10 years from now, I’ll feel the same way about our current body of work.
0:15:58 But I think the reason that the show has evolved and the reason why the storytelling and the
0:16:03 analysis has gotten so much better, and I appreciate your comparison to the Harvard Business
0:16:06 School case study or a Marquez Brownlee video.
0:16:11 I certainly don’t think of them that way yet, but I understand why they can be viewed that
0:16:11 way.
0:16:15 It’s just our evolving aha moments.
0:16:21 And I feel like we get kind of bored every two years or so where we feel like, oh, we’ve
0:16:27 learned the core mental models that you need to know to understand the kind of thing that
0:16:28 we’re doing right now.
0:16:30 What could we move on to next?
0:16:36 And I think that is why we moved to IPOs, why we moved to whole company stories, why we studied
0:16:41 luxury businesses for the first time, why recently we’ve been obsessed with these private family
0:16:43 owned companies that don’t go public.
0:16:49 It’s this every once in a while, I think it’s about every two years, there’s a yearning to
0:16:55 understand a whole new set of mental models and business principles illustrated through these
0:16:56 new batch of stories.
0:17:04 I would say that my friend Carol Dweck would just basically say that you personify the growth
0:17:05 mindset, right?
0:17:06 You don’t have a fixed mindset.
0:17:10 If you had a fixed mindset, you would have stuck to acquisitions.
0:17:14 So you truly personify the growth mindset.
0:17:20 So now you’re 10 years into this and I can tell that you guys are really good at pattern
0:17:21 recognition.
0:17:28 So how about giving us some pattern recognition about key factors that make these companies
0:17:28 successful?
0:17:32 Obviously, David, and I think about this a lot.
0:17:40 The biggest thing we’ve learned is that each of these extreme outliers that we study, these
0:17:45 most successful businesses in the world or most successful businesses in any given category
0:17:48 are successful in a unique way.
0:17:55 The founders had some specific skill set that was well tailored to that industry, that product
0:17:58 set, that moment in time, and that leadership style.
0:17:59 You knew Steve Jobs.
0:18:05 If you look at Steve Jobs and you compare him against Frank Mars from the Mars M&M Snickers
0:18:16 candy company, or you compare against the Dumas family at Hermes or Ingvar Kampra at Ikea, it’s
0:18:22 a pretty different set of principles and a different strategy to create these outlier successful
0:18:23 companies.
0:18:24 And I think that’s the point.
0:18:29 I think it’s that every entrepreneur needs to look at themselves and say, in what way am
0:18:30 I weird?
0:18:34 In what way am I the best in the world at something, even if it’s a strange something?
0:18:40 And how can I combine a few of those traits together such that it’s a A times B equals
0:18:46 10,000 X where it’s really well suited to a product, a market, a moment in time, a leadership
0:18:52 style, a business strategy, a culture that I can create something to make jazz, to use a
0:18:52 different example.
0:18:54 How do I use my raw components to create jazz?
0:18:59 So that’s one thing is you can never say, I need to be like Apple, therefore I should
0:19:00 parrot Steve Jobs.
0:19:01 That’s just never going to work.
0:19:09 Another thing that I think has become really obvious to us is everyone says they operate
0:19:13 with a long-term mindset, but most people don’t.
0:19:16 And in most cases, most people are not incentivized to.
0:19:21 And if there’s anything that we’ve learned from Acquired, it’s that everybody ultimately
0:19:26 follows the incentives, whatever incentive structure you set up, it’s the old Charlie
0:19:30 Munger aphorism, you show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.
0:19:33 It’s highly predictable how people will behave.
0:19:41 Whenever you’re able to take a company with a single person thinking with a 20, 30, 50 year
0:19:46 view who has their view of what needs to happen, they may not be right.
0:19:50 And the world is littered with companies that have died because you had one crazy person
0:19:52 who believed in something that just wasn’t true.
0:19:58 I think there’s a bunch of examples like the DeLorean or kind of nutty folks that incorrectly
0:19:59 predicted the future.
0:20:05 But then you also need that exact same characteristic where you need to be contrarian and right and
0:20:12 have an incentive system set up where you actually can pursue your vision of the way the
0:20:13 world needs to be.
0:20:16 I think these dual class share structures allow for it.
0:20:21 You look at the New York Times or Hermes or Meta or Google where the founders can maintain
0:20:29 control or these companies that stay private like Ikea or Rolex or this mechanic of singular
0:20:35 control by a person or entity thinking with a multi-decade lens really does enable you to
0:20:39 make bets differently than if you have the whims of quarterly reporting.
0:20:42 So those are those I think are a few of the big ones.
0:20:50 But you make a point that it’s all about being a contrarian but also right.
0:20:55 And it seems to me that the contrarian part is easy.
0:20:58 It’s the right part that’s hard.
0:21:03 So do you have any insights on what’s the pattern recognition for being right?
0:21:04 It’s self-selection.
0:21:07 You only interview the successful companies.
0:21:13 So you don’t really investigate the people who are contrarian and wrong.
0:21:20 I think you are exactly right that it is much harder to be, of that equation, it’s much harder
0:21:21 to be right than it is to be contrarian.
0:21:24 There’s lots of contrarians running around that are never successful.
0:21:32 The dirty secret I’ve acquired is that it is totally the study of survivorship bias.
0:21:35 We’re talking about these companies that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
0:21:41 We’re not talking about the guy with an equally wackadoo idea to what Bill Gates thought that
0:21:44 the personal computer was going to change everything and see a PC on every desk.
0:21:46 But their vision was just wrong.
0:21:47 We aren’t covering those.
0:21:54 But my personal view on the lessons learned from that and how to tackle it is if you’re a
0:22:00 passionate entrepreneur, the only way you’re going to succeed in creating something world-changing
0:22:04 is to do the thing that you are irrationally passionate about.
0:22:13 And I don’t really think you should moderate or temper that instinct.
0:22:15 You could say, geez, what if I’m wrong?
0:22:19 What if you’re wrong and now you have to go and work on something that you are not lit up by?
0:22:21 That’s not an exciting life.
0:22:26 And so, yeah, you should be smart around the margins and position your company so it
0:22:26 can be successful.
0:22:33 But history is made by the people with really obsessive, crazy ideas.
0:22:41 And we have this natural selection process where the world figures out what the right ideas
0:22:43 are, and then those are the ones that become big.
0:22:46 It doesn’t work that well for the individual entrepreneurs who are wrong.
0:22:51 But as a society, it’s actually a pretty good mechanism for everybody to run hard at a crazy
0:22:51 idea.
0:23:09 Every business is under pressure to save money.
0:23:14 But if you want to be a business leader, you need to do more to win.
0:23:19 You need to create momentum and unlock potential, which is where Brex comes in.
0:23:22 Brex isn’t just another corporate credit card.
0:23:24 It’s a modern finance platform.
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0:23:35 Think credit cards, banking, expense management, and travel, all integrated into one smart solution.
0:23:42 More than 30,000 companies use Brex to make every dollar count towards their mission, and you
0:23:43 can join them.
0:23:50 Get the modern finance platform that works as hard as you do at brex.com slash grow.
0:23:59 Obviously, my podcast is called Remarkable People, so I kind of don’t look for people who
0:24:02 failed or people who are mediocre, right?
0:24:05 In a sense, a choir does the same thing.
0:24:22 So there are times that I sit around and I think, you know, Guy, to use a metaphor, a lot of people, they listen to this wisdom that a college degree isn’t necessary because Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg didn’t get a degree.
0:24:38 But that misses the case of, what about the people with college degrees who did succeed, and what about the case where people without college degrees didn’t succeed?
0:24:41 And you’re only highlighting three people.
0:24:49 And I have a little bit of guilt and a little bit of concern that I’m only telling stories about successful people.
0:24:57 And so the data, it’s not exactly a scientifically valid sample and conclusion.
0:25:00 Do you ever have weird thoughts like that?
0:25:01 Absolutely.
0:25:03 But you’re not expressing that it is.
0:25:08 I can probably count five plus episodes in the last couple of years where I’ve said the phrase survivorship bias on acquired.
0:25:10 I think you wave your arms around.
0:25:11 You acknowledge it.
0:25:11 It’s a disclaimer.
0:25:19 You’re not saying I studied 10,000 companies from their founding and here’s what I learned from those that didn’t make it and those that did.
0:25:20 You’re saying I’m studying remarkable people.
0:25:32 I also think there’s a funny comment that I made to a group of startups recently, which is you really need to stop looking at the $5 trillion companies.
0:25:36 The big tech companies that are out there, the big tech companies as your North Star.
0:25:47 Those are such extreme outliers and their founders are such extreme outliers that it’s so improbably you become one that you should not try to learn from them.
0:25:54 It’s what, five, six standard deviations from the mean when you look at the founders who became the most fabulously wealthy people in the world.
0:25:58 So, yeah, a few of those are going to exist.
0:26:03 Of the seven billion people, no, you’re almost certainly not going to be one of them.
0:26:16 And so you’re much better off figuring out, like, well, of all of the wonderful going concerns out there, are these profitable businesses that delight customers, that grow at a reasonable rate every year, that are going to be around for the long term.
0:26:20 What can I learn from those businesses and apply those practices in mind?
0:26:26 And I think you can kind of always maintain optionality to become the next NVIDIA if you want to.
0:26:28 In fact, NVIDIA is a great example.
0:26:39 They were an uninteresting company to most investors and most employees other than people doing video game graphics cards for the first 20 years of their existence.
0:26:49 And so I always counsel entrepreneurs, go build a good business, doing something that you think delights customers and maintain your optionality should you want to pursue the crazy lottery ticket.
0:26:50 Okay.
0:26:59 I’m not sure Jensen would look at it like that because it seems like the victors have the ability to reinvent history.
0:27:04 So he always knew that AI was coming and he was prepping for 20 years.
0:27:14 Yeah, but they had a few missed shots on goal along the way of bets they made that were not AI, that were just wrong timing or wrong vision or they’ve messed a lot of stuff up.
0:27:30 And frankly, what became AI that started as scientific computing and academic computing was something they were working on for, I don’t know, eight years or so before the AI revolution.
0:27:38 No, even longer, over a decade and truly it was not getting traction and investors were selling the stock and their stock was in the dumps because of it.
0:27:40 Jensen’s up there saying this stuff is the future.
0:27:48 I’ve been working with these supercomputing labs and these professors and when the future we’re going to have these models that do X, Y, and Z and the market just didn’t believe him.
0:27:52 The company wasn’t doing terribly well in the early 2010s because of it.
0:27:59 I also don’t think he really knew that AI was going to change the world in this transformational way.
0:28:05 I think he thought, oh, we can accelerate computing on GPUs in a way that can’t be done on CPUs.
0:28:08 But exactly what the products looked like, I don’t think he saw that.
0:28:15 Now a lot of people are going to be wearing leather jackets and the whole world is going to change it.
0:28:26 Unless you consider this giving away trade secrets, one podcast to another, I would love to ask you some of the nitty gritty of Acquired.
0:28:26 We’re open book.
0:28:36 For example, have you ever totaled up about how many hours of work goes into a four hour episode of Acquired?
0:28:37 Yes.
0:28:44 So David and I each do about 100 hours of independent research before recording.
0:28:45 Then recording day.
0:28:46 100 hours?
0:28:47 100.
0:28:55 And then recording day is an approximately 10 hour session where we’re each in our home studio.
0:29:00 And that 10 hours gets edited down to about four hours of content.
0:29:13 And that editing process, we have a great audio engineer editor that we work with, and then David and I are saying, not this sentence, yes, this sentence, rearrange this to go here, cut these three words, they’re extraneous.
0:29:14 We’re sort of editing a transcript.
0:29:25 That process takes probably about 25 person hours for each David and I, and probably 40 person hours for our engineer.
0:29:31 So in total, that’s what, 200 hours of research, another 20 hours of recording.
0:29:36 So that’s 220 plus 50 plus 50.
0:29:37 Yeah.
0:29:39 It’s a lot of work going into one episode.
0:29:52 When you spend 10 hours recording through a day, is it because you’re constantly doing retakes of the same thing, or are you just discussing Rolex for 10 hours?
0:29:58 There are whole segments that get cut, where when we’re listening back in the edit, we’re like, you know what?
0:30:06 That whole side story we told is just unnecessary, and it makes the plot drag, and it doesn’t pay off in any great way in the analysis later, so let’s just cut it.
0:30:09 The other part, as you mentioned, is retakes.
0:30:15 Sometimes David will tell a 10-minute chapter of a story, and I’ll say, I think we can do that in four.
0:30:22 Or I will give a long-winded explanation of the way a mechanical watch works, and David will say, you lost me in here, here, and here.
0:30:23 Can you say it tighter?
0:30:31 And so our four-hour episodes are really our attempt to tell the complete story in as short as we possibly can.
0:30:35 And yeah, there’s bathroom breaks, there’s, can you pause for five minutes?
0:30:35 I want to eat a sandwich.
0:30:40 Sometimes we have to start over because we feel like the magic’s not happening the way that we want it to.
0:30:46 You know, there may be a future for either one of you in Congress to give.
0:30:49 It’s true.
0:30:55 I’ve learned to stand here in this exact position at this desk, in this room, for 10 hours straight, speaking.
0:31:07 So you decide to do an episode about XYZ Company, and then the two of you just pour into it, and you read every book, you watch every video, you’re just doing research.
0:31:08 That’s exactly right.
0:31:14 Think about if all you had to do in an entire month was make a podcast episode, how good could you make it?
0:31:19 And that is, like, the thing that wakes me up in the middle of every night is, did I leave it all on the field?
0:31:21 Did I turn over every stone?
0:31:28 And you’re right, it’s every YouTube video, we read really every important book or every book that’s been written about the company that we’re studying.
0:31:38 Recently, since we’ve become bigger, we have a lot of access, so sometimes we’ll talk directly to the company, but oftentimes that’s not fruitful, and they’ll try to just steer it in a direction.
0:31:44 So talk to a lot of former executives, former employees, folks that have held the stock for a long time.
0:31:52 You read old investor transcripts, you watch their annual presentations every year at developer conferences or things like that, talk to customers.
0:31:56 Yeah, it’s like the investment process.
0:32:14 And how do you decide that this company is worth doing this for?
0:32:21 Once the decision is made, do you ever get 100 hours into it and say, there isn’t enough there there?
0:32:23 We’ve gotten pretty good.
0:32:24 We used to.
0:32:25 That was really bad.
0:32:30 It was a big waste of time and heartbreaking when we had to walk away from doing an episode.
0:32:42 We’ve gotten pretty good at saying, hey, let’s each take two hours today and do initial research, and then we’ll come back together and commit to, hey, we’re for sure doing this as our next episode.
0:32:51 We’re in that process right now where we have an idea for what the June episode is going to be, but I’m not committed yet.
0:33:01 And so I have a two-hour block later today to look around at what other work has been done on this company and figure out if I think it’s a thrilling narrative and there’s unique mental models to take away.
0:33:04 And at this point, are you buying or selling?
0:33:12 Are people reaching out to you and say, please do my company, or are you begging them to cooperate with you?
0:33:22 No, we probably get 30 emails a day suggesting episodes or just fan notes.
0:33:29 I’ve blocked most PR firm email addresses, so I actually don’t know what their domains, so I actually don’t have a great sample anymore.
0:33:40 15 of that 30 is crap, pure PR firm garbage, where they just say, this person is going on a bunch of podcasts, and they can talk about this, that, and that, and you should have them.
0:33:43 I’m sure you get these same emails, and you’re just like, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.
0:33:54 But then there are very interesting ones where a company we admire and have heard of, it’s the CEO reaching out, or it’s the chief communications officer or the CFO saying, hey, I think there’s something really interesting here.
0:33:57 That is usually not what leads to an episode.
0:34:02 We always are a little bit nervous when the company reaches out and says, hey, you should cover us.
0:34:04 That’s usually sort of a negative signal.
0:34:11 But we add it to our suggestion spreadsheet nonetheless, and we’ve got 500 potential episodes in the hopper at this point.
0:34:19 And the process is always David and I coming together after we finish one episode to say, all right, is there anything in the spreadsheet that lights you up?
0:34:23 Is there any conversations you’ve had in the past week with friends or listeners that lights you up?
0:34:30 Or is there anything that has some recency bias to it that you’re just currently excited about that we’ve never talked about before?
0:34:45 So if let’s say I am the chief evangelist of a company named Canva, and I say, listen, two people, students, Western Australia, they’re teaching kids how to use Photoshop.
0:34:52 And then all of a sudden they start a yearbook company in a spare bedroom and they figure out it’s too hard to make a yearbook.
0:34:53 So they create Canva.
0:34:55 Canva is such an incredible story.
0:34:55 Up against.
0:35:00 And so I’m being semi-facetious here.
0:35:04 So they go up against Adobe and they pitch 300 times.
0:35:09 They get rejected because they’re in Florida or it’s a female executive or whatever.
0:35:11 So do you tell that kind of story?
0:35:14 And now it has 300 million active users.
0:35:18 Is that the kind of arc of a story you’re looking for?
0:35:21 That is totally the type of arc of a story we’re looking for.
0:35:33 We, for Acquired, for our main show, we tend to tell these older company stories at this point because we view ourselves primarily as historians.
0:35:37 So we really can put on our historian lens and kind of dive back.
0:35:41 In the case of an Hermes, 170 years ago.
0:35:43 In the case of New York Times, something similar.
0:35:51 There’s always these strange ones with Meta and NVIDIA that are only 20 and 30 years old where you’re like, gosh, that company’s only 20 years old.
0:35:58 But there’s a feeling you have that Meta is more of a stalwart in our world today and not a startup.
0:36:10 And I think we’re waiting until we can tell a story of a company that feels like it’s just a fabric of our world, but nobody really knows how it got here.
0:36:15 And my feedback for Canva would be, I don’t think people feel that way.
0:36:23 I think people feel like, wow, this is a really interesting, innovative company that is better than its sort of incumbent competitors.
0:36:25 And a friend just recommended it to me.
0:36:32 I would rather tell a story on Acquired of, hey, everyone just assumes Costco has been Costco forever.
0:36:33 How did Costco come to be?
0:36:35 And why is it different than the rest of the world?
0:36:41 And so we do actually have a second show called ACQ2 that is actually pretty big in its own right now.
0:36:50 I think about 75,000 listeners where we talk to founders who are sort of building the next innovative disruptors in real time to dive into stories like that.
0:36:51 It’s fascinating.
0:36:58 And the number that I hear bandied about is like a million subscribers to acquired.
0:37:04 And the most difficult thing I find about podcasting is getting subscribers.
0:37:05 Now, you’ve been at it for 10 years.
0:37:07 I’ve been at it for five.
0:37:09 Like, when does the magic happen?
0:37:15 Did you, like, break the formula for advertising or social media?
0:37:16 I mean, what happened?
0:37:17 Are you just organic?
0:37:21 Your quality is so great that it just took off.
0:37:23 What’s the formula here?
0:37:27 It’s such a good question, and I think it’s one that David and I ask ourselves a lot.
0:37:33 When you look at the chart, it is true that it doubled every year since founding.
0:37:37 And that’s all organic word of mouth.
0:37:39 So the question is, what causes that?
0:37:45 And we have one exception, which is a lot of the growth last year came from this fantastic write-up in the Wall Street Journal.
0:37:54 It’s the only press I’ve ever been a part of in any startup or investment firm I’ve been in where one single article massively moved the needle.
0:37:59 And it was literally hundreds of thousands of new subscribers came from one article.
0:38:01 So there was some step change from that.
0:38:23 Other than that, the entire growth of Acquired has been, I listened to an episode, I went even deeper in the back catalog, I realized I like this format, and it lights up something in my brain, and I want to share it with friends so they can learn something too, or so I can be perceived as smart for having recommended this.
0:38:24 I get some social capital from it.
0:38:31 So it’s telling their friends, it’s sharing in Slack communities that they’re a part of, it’s sharing with their coworkers, it’s sharing on social media.
0:38:37 And what drives it, I think, is the fact that it’s a pretty unique product.
0:38:41 Most podcasts follow one of three formulas.
0:38:48 A, it’s two friends chopping it up, having done almost no research and bantering about something of the week.
0:38:52 Two, it’s scripted drama, so think true crime and stuff like that.
0:38:56 And three is interview shows, one person interviewing another person.
0:39:08 And almost no one does the format that we do that we call a conversational audiobook or conversational storytelling, where it’s two people having done deep independent research and through conversation telling a story.
0:39:26 And I think there’s something about the uniqueness of that format and the chemistry between David and I and the fact that people are genuinely interested in these companies that are fixtures of our world, but they’re fascinating and hiding in plain sight, that I think comes together to make someone go, whoa, that was cool.
0:39:27 I want to share it.
0:39:31 And like I said at the start of the show, Ben, I am not worthy.
0:39:35 I am just in awe of what you have accomplished.
0:39:35 Guys, stop.
0:39:41 So let me ask you, you quickly said, you guys, edit audio.
0:39:46 By any chance, do you do something like use the script and edit text to edX audio?
0:39:53 Or do you like literally listen to the audio and move the slider gently and edit that way?
0:39:55 Yeah, it is actually the waveforms.
0:39:58 And I did the first 50-ish episodes.
0:39:59 I should look at the exact number.
0:40:01 Myself in Adobe Audition.
0:40:03 Wow.
0:40:05 Trying to learn sound engineering.
0:40:06 I was okay at it.
0:40:14 And then we brought on this really fantastic person that we work with him as a contractor, and he is the best in the world at this.
0:40:23 And so the way we do use the script, but we use it to highlight to our editor, hey, here’s the parts that we want to cut.
0:40:33 And can you go in with your immensely skilled ear and work in a waveform editor and make it sound natural?
0:40:35 To make the cut sound natural.
0:40:36 Yeah.
0:40:38 But there’s a thousand plus cuts an episode.
0:40:43 The way that you go from 10 hours to four is immense surgery on the acoustics.
0:40:44 Wow.
0:40:49 Madison is listening to this, and she’s having palpitations right now.
0:40:54 I think it’s not necessary for most types of podcasts, like this Steve Ballmer interview we did yesterday.
0:40:56 We won’t edit that that much.
0:41:02 I think conversations require less editing than we’re effectively trying to create an audio movie.
0:41:06 And I think that you need to spend a lot of time in the edit room to do that.
0:41:07 Okay.
0:41:13 Ben, this leads me an off-the-cuff remark that I have another metaphor for you.
0:41:24 So not only are you the Harvard Business School of the modern age, I would also say that you are kind of like John McPhee, if you know who John McPhee is.
0:41:26 Heard the name, but please remind me.
0:41:28 Yeah, you check out John McPhee.
0:41:37 He’s written entire books about oranges and entire books about a tennis match and an entire book about making a birch bark canoe.
0:41:39 It’s a fascinating.
0:41:43 I mean, if somebody said, how can you make the story of Rolex fascinating?
0:41:48 They might also say, how can you make the story of making a birch bark canoe fascinating?
0:41:51 And John McPhee did that for canoes.
0:41:55 And you definitely have done this for some older brands.
0:42:02 One last question about the techniques you do, which is, how do you do your transcripts?
0:42:05 Because your transcripts are extremely well done.
0:42:07 And I love them because I’m a deaf person.
0:42:14 So can I ask you, before I answer this question, how do you do a podcast as a deaf person?
0:42:15 This is amazing.
0:42:17 I didn’t know this about you before we started recording.
0:42:18 It’s really impressive.
0:42:22 Well, I have a cochlear implant.
0:42:27 So the implant takes you from being deaf to having really lousy hearing.
0:42:35 And in fact, it is much easier for me to do an interview like this because I have audio directly into my head.
0:42:42 It’s much harder to do it in person where I’m trying to listen without a direct feed into my brain.
0:42:45 And it’s not easy.
0:42:49 There’s also a real-time transcription happening in Chrome.
0:42:50 So that helps me, too.
0:42:59 But let’s just say, not that I’m comparing myself to him, but if Beethoven can compose the fifth, I can do a podcast.
0:43:01 That’s my logic.
0:43:02 It’s really cool.
0:43:03 It’s very impressive.
0:43:05 And thanks for sharing that.
0:43:08 The way that we do, I mean, we’re such Luddites.
0:43:22 I’m so interested in AI that we actually use Claude for a whole bunch of things, but there are certain things that I think I just want to have the highest possible quality with no errors.
0:43:37 And so we have a human go through and listen to the final podcast episode and create a full, correct transcript with correct proper nouns and some research to try and figure out what company that is defunct from 30 years ago that Dave and I are referencing.
0:43:38 How do you spell that?
0:43:44 We want that sort of accuracy, which is why it tends to take about a week before that shows up on our site after an episode.
0:43:49 I feel your pain, Ben, because we interview a lot of professors.
0:44:04 And when professors are on the podcast, they start spouting off these studies of Haskins and such and such and such and such came up with this study at Columbia in 1965.
0:44:09 So the first pass on our transcripts is a service called Rev.
0:44:19 And then the second pass is a very intelligent woman who is looking for all those proper nouns and is trying to figure out how do you spell that?
0:44:20 Who the hell is that?
0:44:27 You know, who is this person from Columbia that this other professor from Wharton just spouted off about?
0:44:29 It’s a very challenging thing.
0:44:30 It is.
0:44:32 Up next on Remarkable People.
0:44:35 This company moves like water.
0:44:36 It finds a way.
0:44:52 It figures out how to run downhill, where it needs to go, and it will adapt its product suite and its position and the role that it fills in people’s lives in order to do whatever it needs to do to be successful.
0:45:08 This summit allowed space to connect with people on the human level.
0:45:10 This woman sat down next to me and I was like, oh, what do you do?
0:45:12 She’s like, oh, I’m the CEO of HubSpot.
0:45:14 And I was like, what?
0:45:15 She wasn’t in the VIP area.
0:45:17 She was sitting next to me in the audience.
0:45:18 It felt different.
0:45:26 That’s Jacob Martinez, CEO of Digital Nest and an alum of the Early Stage Founders cohort at the Masters of Scale Summit.
0:45:38 And if you want to be like Jacob, you too could be one of the 40 bold first-time founders who get to attend our Masters of Scale Summit for free this October 7th to 9th in San Francisco.
0:45:45 If you’re ready to scale with purpose, apply by June 13th at mastersofscale.com.apply25.
0:45:49 That’s mastersofscale.com.apply25.
0:45:54 Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners.
0:45:57 It’s our pleasure and honor to make the show for you.
0:46:03 If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate, and review it.
0:46:05 Even better, forward it to a friend.
0:46:08 A big mahalo to you for doing this.
0:46:12 You’re listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:46:20 I don’t spend anywhere close to 300 hours on an episode, my God.
0:46:28 I think it’s a clear message to me that the longer you spend and the harder you work, the better the podcast.
0:46:29 You’ve proven that.
0:46:33 But is there a point of diminishing returns?
0:46:37 You could spend infinite time making this high-quality podcast.
0:46:39 Where do you draw the line?
0:46:40 And if we’re not careful, we will.
0:46:46 At some point, we’re going to make a podcast episode every year if we sort of continue with this philosophy.
0:46:51 There are examples where we did too much research.
0:46:54 I think the Nike example is probably one.
0:46:57 We read, between David and I, 12 books on Nike.
0:47:00 And we kind of lost the story a little bit.
0:47:04 And so that was one where we actually needed to restart recording.
0:47:07 I think we got two, three hours in and bagged it and said,
0:47:09 all right, let’s tell the story a different way.
0:47:10 We got two wrapped around the axle.
0:47:15 Our whole life became knowing random things about the history of Nike.
0:47:17 And we had not done an episode the previous month.
0:47:18 And so we spent a lot of time on that.
0:47:23 Another one that I think we might have gotten a little bit too deep on was Meta.
0:47:29 We had just had Mark do this big interview with us at our live show at Chase Center.
0:47:32 We had 6,000 people live in the audience and were interviewing Mark.
0:47:35 So I prepared heavily for that conversation.
0:47:47 And we got to know 10-plus Meta executives as a part of preparing for that that I also then went and interviewed to prepare for the Meta episode.
0:47:49 And David and I each read three books.
0:47:51 And we released a six-hour episode.
0:47:54 We’re never going to release a six-hour episode again.
0:47:58 And I think we found sort of the limit of we were over-researched.
0:48:03 We felt like we needed to tell too many stories.
0:48:06 The episode actually, if you listen back to it, I think it’s a great episode.
0:48:15 But because it’s six hours, it’s not the most distilled version of the story that we could have told if we had just said, okay, we’re going to stop now.
0:48:15 We’re just going to record.
0:48:22 Is the Nike episode the one where both your wives said, finally, I get my husband back?
0:48:24 I think that’s right.
0:48:25 I think that’s right.
0:48:31 By any chance, did you interview Tinker Hatfield for the Nike episode?
0:48:32 I didn’t.
0:48:34 I watched a bunch of footage of him, but I didn’t interview him.
0:48:36 You had him on the show?
0:48:39 I have not had him on the show, but he’s a personal friend of mine.
0:48:42 If you ever want to do Nike 2, I’ll sit you up with Tinker.
0:48:44 Awesome.
0:48:55 One of the things I find most fascinating about Acquired is that, in a sense, the two of you have to become experts on so many different things, right?
0:49:01 From Birkin handbags, Rolex watches, Porsches, semiconductors, social media.
0:49:04 How do the two of you do that?
0:49:06 It’s funny.
0:49:15 We become experts up until the moment we do an episode, and then we tend not to keep our expertise.
0:49:27 Sometimes we’re able to follow these storylines even after we release the episode, but our life is mostly putting blinders on so that we can do the best research we can for the current episode.
0:49:34 And so I haven’t stayed up on all of the latest in chip bans with NVIDIA.
0:49:35 I couldn’t tell you the current state.
0:49:38 I can tell you exactly where they were when we did our episode.
0:49:41 I can tell you exactly where they were before we interviewed Jensen afterwards.
0:49:44 But there’s this trail-off period.
0:49:51 I can tell you a lot about the new Rolex watch, the Land Dweller, that has come out since we released our episode because it was still fresh.
0:49:53 It was within a month of when we released our episode.
0:49:56 But man, way back in the day, we did Activision Blizzard.
0:50:00 And I know that Microsoft has since bought Activision Blizzard.
0:50:03 Could I tell you anything about their product portfolio or any release dates?
0:50:03 No.
0:50:18 When I was, in my case, reading the Rolex episode, and you guys were talking about all your watches, and I have to say, this thought crossed my mind, and maybe you can talk me in or out of it.
0:50:23 So when my father was alive, one of the things he cherished was a Rolex.
0:50:27 So my sister and I bought him a Rolex President.
0:50:28 Oh, so cool.
0:50:34 And so, yeah, this is an 18-karat gold Rolex President, and he never used it.
0:50:39 So it’s in the original box in our house for, I don’t know, 40 years or something.
0:50:49 And I know it’s extremely valuable, but after I read your episode about Rolex, I said to myself, screw it.
0:50:53 Maybe I should just start using his watch in his honor.
0:50:55 What do you think I should do?
0:50:57 You think I should use his Rolex President?
0:50:59 Watches are meant to be worn.
0:51:08 It’s worth probably taking it to an appraiser or a dealer so you can make an informed decision on whether you want to change its value or not.
0:51:10 Just by wearing it might change shit some.
0:51:14 By wearing it, if you risk scratching it or something, that’ll change it a lot.
0:51:28 But to me, you only have precious moments on this earth, and if you can enrich your moments on this earth by having something that makes you feel closer to your dad and your family and his memory, what is money?
0:51:29 Okay.
0:51:43 Maybe I’ll become so famous because of this episode with you that me using the Rolex and discussing it on the podcast will make the Rolex even more valuable, even though it’s used.
0:51:44 How’s that?
0:51:45 Could be.
0:51:46 We’ll see.
0:51:47 We’ll see.
0:51:51 So listen, I need to get a little dark for a little bit.
0:52:13 All right, so I just want to know something like you did two episodes about Facebook in 2016 and 2024, and if somebody had told you Mark Zuckerberg is going to end all the DEI programs, he’s going to stop supporting DEI causes, and he’s going to donate to Trump’s inauguration.
0:52:17 He’s going to be part of the inauguration photo shoot.
0:52:19 What would you have said?
0:52:23 Would you have said that as inconceivable or, you know, I mean, that’s just Mark.
0:52:28 His whole skill is to set himself up to be successful and lucky.
0:52:36 I think my final words on our big six-hour meta episode last year were, this company moves like water.
0:52:38 It finds a way.
0:52:53 It figures out how to run downhill, where it needs to go, and it will adapt its product suite and its position and the role that it fills in people’s lives in order to do whatever it needs to do to be successful.
0:52:58 With that lens, basically nothing Mark does would surprise me.
0:53:07 I think he’s always trying to build the best company he can, and there is a lot of things that he’ll do or not do to achieve that end.
0:53:14 So the underlying question, therefore, is what is the duty of the management of a company?
0:53:22 Is it to the shareholders, the employees, the customers, or more esoteric things like art and fashion and innovation?
0:53:29 The duty is to the people you just mentioned, to the shareholders, to the employees, to the customers, and to your community.
0:53:31 And I think often those things are in conflict.
0:53:33 In fact, in every case, they’re in conflict.
0:53:37 I want to run a better business so I can actually generate some profit.
0:53:39 I’m going to charge you more money.
0:53:40 That is anti-user.
0:53:42 That is anti-customer.
0:54:01 So I think you are witnessing in real time the tension between the things that he is trying to do to stay in political favor to make sure that there’s nothing that happens to his company that would put its future at risk, while also trying to do the things that he needs to do for shareholders, for employees, for customers.
0:54:07 And they certainly don’t always get that right, and they certainly change their mind on things.
0:54:09 I think you’ll talk to a lot of people who are a big critic.
0:54:12 Oh, so-and-so shouldn’t have donated to this inauguration.
0:54:13 I’m not a critic of that.
0:54:26 I think it’s in vogue right now to be a critic of things like that, and I think every narrative is always a little bit overbought and then a little bit oversold, and I just try to stay a little bit more moderated.
0:54:29 And I’m not a superhuman, so I’m not that great at that.
0:54:40 But whenever everybody is all worked up about something, I always try to remind myself, there’s something here, which is why people are worked up, but the something here is probably not as big a deal as everyone is making it out to be.
0:54:53 I think it is possible for a company to cozy up too much to administration to try to curry political favor, and I think the more cronyism happens, the more that happens and that erodes our democracy.
0:55:05 But, like, I don’t think showing up at an inauguration and donating a million dollars, which is insignificant, actually, to both the donor and the recipient in this case, is that big a deal.
0:55:24 I have one last question for you, and I’m taking a cue from what I read on your podcast, which is, if I don’t ask about a particular topic, what would that topic be that means that I whiffed this interview?
0:55:28 This is a good question that I should have been prepared for, because this is my question.
0:55:37 Don’t you hate it when you get your own wisdoms put back in your face?
0:55:38 It happens to me all the time.
0:55:43 I think the most interesting one is, okay, acquired has had 10 years.
0:55:48 What would need to be true for it to have another 10 great years?
0:55:50 Or is this peak acquired?
0:55:53 And that’s the thing that Dave and I are always asking ourselves.
0:56:02 So, my answer to that is, acquired will continue to need to change to not be stale.
0:56:08 And the scary thing is, we never know exactly what it needs to change into.
0:56:21 And so, it is always somewhat of a gut decision at any given point to expand or try a different focus or try a slightly different format.
0:56:26 And we try to take as many cues from the audience and from the data as we can, but it’s ultimately a gut decision.
0:56:37 So, I think the success of that, or the answer to that question, will be judged by how good is our gut at continuing to evolve and change and stay fresh and stay interesting over the next decade.
0:56:40 Well, Carol Dweck is up at Stanford right now.
0:56:46 She’s smiling at that answer, because that basically says it’s all about the growth mindset, right?
0:56:49 To be relevant and to be successful.
0:57:01 Ben, this has been a most educational episode of Remarkable People, because as you can tell, I’m really curious about how you do your work.
0:57:09 And not everybody who listens to this podcast is a podcaster, but if you are a podcaster, you heard how much prep goes into his work.
0:57:18 And I don’t know anybody who works that hard on the podcast, which is why Acquired is such a great, great platform.
0:57:19 I just want to thank you, Ben.
0:57:25 I want to thank Buzz Bruegerman for helping me get to you and get you on this podcast.
0:57:30 And my podcast staff is Madison and Tessa Neisman.
0:57:35 I have two sound engineers that I love my sound engineers.
0:57:37 It’s Shannon Hernandez and Jeff C.
0:57:38 So that’s my crew.
0:57:41 And you are my hero, Ben Gilbert.
0:57:43 So thank you very much again.
0:57:45 Thanks so much, Guy.
0:57:46 I appreciate having me on.
0:57:52 This is Remarkable People.