The Highest Performance Strategy is Caring About People ft. Simon Sinek

In this episode of The Curiosity Shop, Brené Brown and Adam Grant sit down with their first-ever guest, Simon Sinek. Together, they explore the state of organizations globally, including the chaos hitting C-suites, the human cost of misaligned incentives, AI-driven layoffs, and leaders playing defense when they should be playing offense. They dig into what makes teams high-performing, why caring deeply about the people you lead isn't soft but essential, and what the military's culture of love and loyalty teaches us about business. The conversation also moves through nervous system regulation, shame and guilt in parenting and leadership, and what AI can or cannot replace about human connection. This episode is a reminder that the things we've been told to leave out of business, such as love, care, and human connection, may be the most important things we can bring to it. The Old Order Is Dead. Do Not Resuscitate — Sven Beckert, November 4, 2025, The New York Times A Friedman Doctrine — Milton Friedman, September 13, 1970, The New York Times Magazine The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy — David Gelles, 2022, Simon & Schuster ‘Take a simple idea and take it seriously’: Charlie Munger in his own words — Financial Times Jack Dorsey Blamed AI for 4,000 Layoffs. A Former Block Exec Says That’s Not the Real Story — Leila Sheridan, 2026, Inc. Brené Brown on values, vulnerability, and playing to win — Adam Grant, December 22, 2025, Knowledge at Wharton (Interview) Threat-Rigidity Effects in Organizational Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis — Barry M. Staw, 1981, Administrative Science Quarterly Finding our strong ground, part 1 of 6 [w guest Adam Grant] — Brené Brown, September 17, 2025, In Dare to Lead. Vox Media Podcast Network Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action — Simon Sinek, 2009, Portfolio/Penguin The mental game of tennis: A scoping review and the introduction of the Resilience Racket Model — Konstantinou, G et al., 2025, Sports The Inner Game of Tennis — W. Timothy Gallwey, 1974, Random House Suppose We Took Groups Seriously… — Harold J. Leavitt, 1975, in Man and Work in Society Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t — Simon Sinek, 2014, Portfolio/Penguin Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts — Brené Brown, 2018, Random House The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization — Peter M. Senge, 1990, Doubleday/Currency Developing Brave Leaders and Courageous Cultures — Brené Brown, Dare to Lead hub The Infinite Game — Simon Sinek, 2019, Portfolio/Penguin Brené Brown: Focus on guilt instead of shame — 60 Minutes, March 29, 2020, YouTube Children’s Proneness to Shame and Guilt Predict Risky and Illegal Behaviors in Young Adulthood — Jeffrey Stuewig (lead), 2015, Child Psychiatry and Human Development The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe — Samuel P. Oliner & Pearl M. Oliner, 1988, Free Press The Toxic Handler: Organizational Hero—and Casualty — Frost & Robinson, 1999, Harvard Business Review Jensen Huang Says an Incorrect Nine-Year-Old Prediction About AI Shows Why It Won’t Destroy Jobs — CNBC, 2025, CNBC Relational Job Design and the Motivation to Make a Prosocial Difference — Adam M. Grant, 2007, Academy of Management Review Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Brené Brown?

  Hi, Adam.

• 0:01Adam Grant?

  Hey, Renee.

• 0:02Brené Brown?

  I'm excited about this episode.

• 0:05Adam Grant?

  Me too.

• 0:06Brené Brown?

  Yeah, we have our first guest for you this episode. Adam will tell you all about our guest in our conversation. Before we get there, I want to let you know we are coming. This is the close to season one.

• 0:20Brené Brown?

  It has been. It has been a wild ride. We are so grateful to y'all for being on the ride with us. We're going to be, we're taking a hiatus for five weeks. During those five weeks, we're bringing you some best of podcasts that we think you'll really enjoy. And then we'll be back on July 30th with new episodes, including some really fun guests. We're going to try something new and interview some folks and then talk about what we're learning from our guests. So excited, but really, really want to make sure I'm clear that I'm, we're both so grateful for y'all coming to the Curiosity Shop and hanging out with us and learning with us. It's been really fun.

• 1:03Adam Grant?

  It has been. And speaking of fun, we're very excited to bring you a special conversation that we recorded at Brilliant Minds in Stockholm. It was last week with our friend, Simon Sinek. If you don't already know Simon, he's an ethnographer, TED Talker, author of books like Start With Why and The Infinite Game. He's also a podcaster and an optimist. We had a great conversation about the state of work in organizations, about how to build strong teams, how to get the most out of leaders, and we also got to do a live Q and A with leaders from around the world. Enjoy.

• 1:36Speaker 02

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• 2:08Brené Brown?

  Welcome to the Curiosity Shop.

• 2:10Adam Grant?

  A show from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 2:18Brené Brown?

  Hi, everybody. We are in Stockholm and we are at the Brilliant Minds Conference, joined by none other than Simon Sinek. Welcome to the Curiosity Shop.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  Nice to be here.

• 2:30Brené Brown?

  We're excited.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Thank you, me too. You're the first guest ever.

• 2:33Brené Brown?

  Ever.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  I remember you told me, you said, "Would you be our first guest?" And I was very excited to say yes.

• 2:38Brené Brown?

  I have questions for all of us, and we're going to round-robin them. So here's my thinking. The three of us have spent our careers inside organizations and working with leaders, but we do it in very different ways. So you build very deep and lasting relationships with leaders. You're with them over time. You are very relational in your work. Adam, you bring research, new findings, and you work with leaders, you work with teams. I go into organizations to lead transformation, so I'm there usually for two to five years, working specifically with the C-suite, and then I work with the level of leaders that report up to the C-suite.

• 3:21Brené Brown?

  So we all have very different interactions, but do very similar work. So I want to start with this question, and we'll go first to you. State of the org globally, how would you describe what you're seeing today?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  There is... Look, the good news is, is that there is demand for our work. There shouldn't...

• 3:44Brené Brown?

  I agree.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  No, no, but I mean it, like, there shouldn't be.

• 3:47Brené Brown?

  That's true.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Right? And none of us would have careers in the 80s or 90s. There would be no demand for what we do in that time period. And I think that there's this sort of mass rebellion around the world against capitalism, but it's the form of capitalism that exists now, this sort of Milton Friedman, Jack Welch form of capitalism, with short-termism and using people to balance the books and rewarding shareholders before you take care of your employees or your customers. Like, that's the form of capitalism that exists now that we all don't like and rebel against. And the good news is, there's a movement afoot where either enlightened leaders or younger leaders want that more human form of capitalism back.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  And the problem is, is there's still a lot of pressure for the old form. And so the thing that... The trend that I'm seeing right now, and the questions that I'm getting the most... I'm getting the most questions for is transformation. Right? Like, how do we go from this to that?

• 4:47Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  And the most common question I get is, what do you do when your boss is against all of this stuff we talk about? It's the most common question I get. And so, the good news is, is we're seeing the demand for change for the way we do business coming from the middle. And they want to be change agents inside their own organizations, rather than just say, "I'm out of here and quit and go somewhere else." But transformation is, is the topic. How to do it, how to do it in a way that doesn't create excessive pushback, rebellion, how to do it in a way that is considerate, but at the same time responsible to the business model. I mean, they, they still have to keep the doors open. And so, yeah, that's, that's the thing. But I'm, I'm proud of the fact that the, the three of us are on the front lines of this movement.

• 5:32Brené Brown?

  I love that framing, and I have to say, I think work would have been bleak for us during Welchian times.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  That would have been nonexistent.

• 5:39Brené Brown?

  Yeah, I think, you know, and what, what I mean by that is, during a period of time, when performance and humanity were cast as mutually exclusive, I think.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  So, true story, I did some work back in the day, long ago before this form of my career. I did some work for a division of GE, GE Silicons. And I'll leave out all the long stuff, but I came in with some recommendations on how to re-understand loyalty. And it was all about humanity and rewarding people for, for actual loyalty, not just how much they spend, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the guy who ran the division, he was, he was great. He said, "Simon, this is great work, and I think you, you've made some excellent recommendations, and I agree with what you're suggesting, and I just want you to know that we will implement none of it." And he says, "'Cause you have to understand, if I implement your stuff, I don't get a bonus." So, great work, not doing it. And that was, and they were very, they were honest and open about it.

• 6:34Brené Brown?

  Very straightforward, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  Very honest and open about it.

• 6:35Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  But, so, that, even, even if there was appreciation for the work, the incentive structure, they're just not going to implement it.

• 6:42Brené Brown?

  Yeah, Charlie Munger. Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:46Brené Brown?

  Yeah. Adam, state of the org.

• 6:49Adam Grant?

  Oh. I think there, there are two things that jump out at me. The first one is, a lot of leaders pushing their employees to adopt AI, while at the same time, planning to do major job cuts in the next two to five years, and not telling anybody. I think that's that's a travesty. And I think it's a mistake, too. I think I think there's no substitute for human ingenuity and human judgment. And I think a lot of these leaders, to Simon's point, are being very short sighted in just assuming they can get rid of a bunch of people just because because we have L L Ms now. That's probably the first one. The second one I'm seeing is related to that accusations of hypocrisy constantly by I hear it from my students. I hear it from junior people in the organizations I go and visit.

• 7:33Adam Grant?

  They say, we were told that we had a voice and then we brought concerns, we brought ideas and nobody listened or did a thing. So what was all of that lip service to inclusion? What does it mean? You obviously didn't care.

• 7:49Brené Brown?

  Thoughts?

• 7:50Speaker 03

  So the A I thing is funny. You got all these organizations laying off significant numbers of people claiming that A I can do the job of these people, which is a is complete nonsense. It's because they over hired. And if they come out to the marketplace and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we over hired. So now we need to correct because we've we're carrying too much, you know, expense on the books, then their stock price would go down because they were idiots. But if they say, I'm laying off, you know, thousands of people because A I can do their jobs, which is not true. A I can't do that yet, not for that quantity of people.

• 8:19Brené Brown?

  We have the data that support that.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  It just can't.

• 8:21Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  And so they can say, but they say to the market, you know, A I, and then they look like on their they're on the cutting edge. So their stock price goes up. But the problem is, is they are creating the narrative for A I. So now you have mass fear that A I is taking my job, which is not true. But these decisions, but more importantly, the narratives they're putting out to protect their own short term gains is creating a narrative that is creating the rebellion against A I. They don't realize the long term damage they're doing for the adoption of a very important technology.

• 8:52Adam Grant?

  So what do you both make then of I feel like every third post on LinkedIn says, your job won't be taken by A I. It'll be taken by someone using A I.

• 9:01Brené Brown?

  Somebody got a good tagline and went hard. I mean, I think so, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, someone just in marketing went hard and it was great. It's a meme.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  It's a good, it's a good line.

• 9:13Brené Brown?

  It's a good line. As a writer, we're like, we give you an A plus on the line. Like, we give you a D minus on the message, but an A plus on the line. I think for me. The state of the org for me can only, how many, raise your hand if you're in this room and you've ever watched five-year-olds playing soccer or football.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Swarm.

• 9:31Brené Brown?

  Yeah. So, this is the analogy that I would use to describe what I see in the C-suite right now. So, when you've got, both of my kids played, you've got five-year-olds on the pitch, the balls are coming in really fast and really high, and they're coming in like it's shoulder height. And so what the five-year-olds do is they lift up their little five-year-old feet, and they kick the ball at shoulder height, which immediately they fall over, right? And so, this is kind of what to me the C-suite looks like right now. A lot of balls coming in really fast, lifting little feet, hitting them, falling over, no control. Over time, what ends up happening with a developing football player is by about 14 or 15, if they stay with the sport, they can see the high ball coming

• 10:13Brené Brown?

  in, they anticipate the high ball, they jump, they chest the high ball, they drop the ball to the ground, they put their foot on the ball to maintain possession, because that's the game. Then they look down the pitch, they find the striker, they understand where the striker is in relation to the person in the goal, and then they kick the ball down the pitch to not where the striker is standing, but to where the striker's going to be in a minute and a half, or a second and a half. So, that's the evolution of on the pitch. So, I think, for me, if you think about what that skill is, to anticipate the high ball, chest the ball, drop it, maintain possession, look down the pitch, you're talking

• 10:53Brené Brown?

  about a very serious cluster of skills. You're talking about situational awareness, temporal awareness, anticipatory awareness, trust on team, training, and that's what we're missing for what we're facing.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  Leadership.

• 11:10Brené Brown?

  And what we're missing, even more than the gaffer or the coach, I follow a lot of football, I'm a big Liverpool fan, we can talk about that later. But, what they're really missing are the player leaders. In Liverpool terms, they're missing Gerard, they're missing the person who's actually on the pitch but is a player leader, which is a really under-explored, I think, position. So, to me, for the first time in my, you know, three decades of doing this work... The biggest relief that I hear when I'm in surrounded by the top senior leaders is when I say, don't worry, no one knows what the fuck is happening. That's the biggest relief I hear.

• 11:53Brené Brown?

  People are like, oh, God, it's not, we actually don't know what's happening. And so in order for that to work at that level of leadership, you have to be surrounded by people you trust and people who are very comfortable with productive challenge. People who are very comfortable saying, I see your enthusiasm for this play. I don't think it's going to work and here are the data I'm using to make that assumption. You have to have a ton of trust with a team that's not there right now for a million reasons, but high fastballs, little kicks, falling over.

• 12:27Adam Grant?

  Okay, so that makes me wonder, should we have team captains in organizations? Not formal leaders or managers, but somebody who's respected by their colleagues.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  They happen, they happen organically.

• 12:39Brené Brown?

  It happens organically. Yeah. And I think the minute you label them that, they cease to lose their authority and power as informal player leaders. As soon as you put the armband on, things change. But I think, I think it's for the first, that's the first thing, time in my career, I've seen people willing to not even pretend they know what's, because you wake up, what's the American fever dream today? Tariffs. What is it tomorrow? Straight up Hormuz. Like, it's like, people don't have, it's not even, it's too fast and too much.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Well, the good leaders are saying that out loud.

• 13:16Brené Brown?

  The good leader, that's the difference.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  The good leaders aren't pretending that they got it all under control. The good leaders being like, whoa, another one? I can't, you know, like, the, I think, and you're saying, sort of the high and fast coming at their head, that they're just honest about it and I, and, and they're looking to the team to help.

• 13:31Brené Brown?

  Ah, I love it. That's exactly, yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Guys, I don't know, I don't know, and it's so uncertain, but I'm, I'm open to suggestions and I'm looking for help and let's experiment and if it doesn't work, we'll pivot. And, and, and the, the willingness to try and not be the final decision. And I think there's this sort of weird thing that, you know, when a leader makes a decision, it has to be the right one and it has to be the final one, which of course is nonsense. But the idea of dipping your toe and trying things out and seeing what works. The good leaders are doing that. They're open about it. They're honest about it.

• 14:01Brené Brown?

  I have another metaphor that I think is really resonating right now with leaders, which is especially companies that are doing well before last year. There's this, I think I use a lot of times the, we've talked about this before on the pod, the metaphor of playing to win versus playing to not lose. And the difference between the behaviors of playing to not lose and the playing to not win. One of the things that's really interesting is unless you are scared most of the time, you are playing to not lose. And if you are playing to not lose, you are absolutely losing. Because even if you've had a string of great quarters or however, whatever your metric is,

• 14:44Brené Brown?

  you're standing on top of a mountain protecting a flag and the mountain is crumbling from underneath. Terrorists, geopolitical instability, market shifts, competition. You can't maintain a mountain that's crumbling. You've got to go. And so to me, show me a leader. The first thing I look for in a leader, because we say no to 70% of the transformations that people come in and ask for. The first thing I look for in the top leadership is what percentage of the C-suite can manage their nervous system? If you can't manage your nervous system, you cannot manage strategy or people.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  You're talking about defense and offense, right?

• 15:22Brené Brown?

  I'm talking about defense and offense.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  If you want to, you play, you have to play defense occasionally, but you want to play offense if you're building a business. And to your point, you know, too many people are playing defense as a means of building their businesses.

• 15:32Brené Brown?

  And because they're afraid.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  And they're afraid.

• 15:34Brené Brown?

  Yeah. The minute you, even if you have possession of the ball, the minute you're afraid, you're on defense with possession of a ball, which makes you useless.

• 15:42Adam Grant?

  Yeah. When I hear playing to lose, I think about the psychology of threat rigidity.

• 15:46Brené Brown?

  Oh, I love this.

• 15:47Adam Grant?

  I mean, the tunnel vision, the narrowing of, I'm just going to do the thing that I'm already good at.

• 15:52Brené Brown?

  That's it.

• 15:52Adam Grant?

  I'm not going to take any risks. I'm not going to experiment, Simon, to your point. I'm not going to innovate at all. And I think those leaders end up doing a ton of micromanaging because they focus on the little things they can control. Not realizing, like, in this sea of uncertainty, their job is actually to be macro managers, not micro managers, to help people make sense of the change that's happening, or at least be honest about the fact that they don't have the answers yet. And I think most leaders have not been trained in how to do that. Brene, I love your point about regulating a nervous system as a core leadership capability. Can you talk to us about how leaders can learn to do that? Because I see at least six dysregulated people in this room right now. No.

• 16:33Brené Brown?

  I would be one, so it'd just be five of y'all.

• 16:37Brené Brown?

  It's a skill set. I mean, it's when I was doing the research for Strong Ground, I really wanted to come up with a cluster of skills that were, how do we future-ready people? And I was really hoping it would be a great number, like eight or 10. It ended up being 38.

• 16:54Brené Brown?

  And I divided-

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Nice round number.

• 16:56Brené Brown?

  Nice round number. And you know, as a writer, that shit sucks. Like, you're like, welcome to the impossible cluster of future-ready leadership. The good thing is I use a lot of gym metaphors, like strength training metaphors. And I said, you know, this is 38, but we have five or six kettlebells. It'll hit 15 of them at one time, so we got it. But what I was surprised that emerged at the top, which I call the core, was five that I, again, did not want to be true because they're the ones that we would have never been working in the 80s. The first one, self-awareness. The second, metacognition. Do you understand how you learn and how you think? Three, emotional regulation and emotional awareness. Four, mindfulness, which...

• 17:42Brené Brown?

  Don't you hate saying it, though?

• 17:43Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Brené Brown?

  Do you hate saying it?

• 17:44Speaker 03

  I don't use it.

• 17:45Brené Brown?

  I don't use it either.

• 17:46Adam Grant?

  Great, you just did.

• 17:47Brené Brown?

  I know, but like, what am I supposed to do? Like, lie? It's the data. So I was gonna call it paying attention, because that's the term I use. But it's so funny, because how many of you in here would love to have a lecture for someone come into your organization about mindfulness? No, but like if I walked in and I saw that like up on a deck, I'd be like, dude, I got shit to do. I can't like, there's a butterfly and the grass is green.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  But this is a failure, this is a failure of that market, right? Because like when, when I started my work, I couldn't talk about purpose at work. That was hippie dippy stuff.

• 18:23Brené Brown?

  Purpose?

• 18:24Speaker 03

  No, no, when I started, if you use the term purpose at work, literally, I got either there's a small percentage who were already converted. But if you want to, if I wanted to move the needle, literally, that's like, like you said, I want to come and talk about purpose at your office. They'd be like, thanks hippie, no, you know? Um, and so part of, part of my journey.

• 18:43Adam Grant?

  They thought you were selling drugs.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. So part, part of, part of my journey was, was language. And so the reason I called it the why, um, the reason I called it the why is because I went around and asked people who believed mission was preeminent, or vision was preeminent, or purpose was preeminent, or brand was preeminent. We had all these different words, but nobody agreed on the definitions of these words. And I went to all the people who thought all of these things were the most important thing and asked them, what's the definition? And they all said, it's why we do what we do, it's why we get out of bed, it's why the company exists. I'm like, great, we'll call it the why, we can all agree. And it was the term, the why, that allowed the concept to then come into work because people weren't afraid of talking about their company's why. They were afraid of talking about their company's purpose. And so I think the same thing goes for mindfulness, which is the problem is it sounds like hippie dippy stuff.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  And so you have these people screaming and yelling from the treetops, saying you have to do it. But they aren't doing marketing 101 and finding language for the thing that the people actually want. Rather, they're bringing the thing that they think is important. And so, um, we do need new language for mindfulness. And then maybe in 10 years, we can talk about mindfulness and it won't be a big deal. I don't know what that term is, but we, we do need more, we need, we need, we need different words.

• 19:50Brené Brown?

  Synonymous, it's synonymous with paying attention, right?

• 19:52Adam Grant?

  I, I actually love the attention frame because we're all facing an attention crisis right now.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, but being fully attentive, whatever word we use it, but I think attention is in the right ballpark for sure.

• 20:02Brené Brown?

  Yeah, we, I can't convert that, this is one of the words, I mean, I, I, I was successful in converting shame. As a word. So I mean, like, in the beginning, people were like, can we call it Chamey? I mean, how many of you follow sports, any sport? How many of you watch the French Open? You don't think those folks have very serious mindfulness trainers?

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Oh, I saw a thing about tennis. I can't remember the exact numbers, but something like of the hundred top players, it's always the top fifteen or twenty that are always the top fifteen or twenty. It's not like other sports where it like bounces around a lot. It's always

• 20:35Brené Brown?

  It's hard, it's narrow.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  It's a very narrow band of always the top. And so the question was asked, how is it the narrow band is always the narrow band? When all the players have access to the same training, nutrition, coaches? It's an equal game for all of them. What is it about these top few? And I can't remember who did the research. I'm on brand.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  I can't remember who did the research, but but what he found was that the these these top few, all of them, had a different mindset than everybody else. And the mindset was absolute love and joy of the game. So if they won a point, they would say, oh, I love this game. And if they lost a point, they'd be like, lost this time, but wait for the next one. And what ended up happening by the end of the game after five sets, their stress levels were lower, so they had more energy. And so they they they just played better at the end of the game than the other players. But it was this, it's all mindset and absolute joy versus the frustration and the anger, which then sucks the energy out of you, which I found so interesting.

• 21:31Brené Brown?

  Okay, but you're such a good storyteller, so you're so on brand. This is so important because having worked with athletes, and probably some of the ones you're talking about in the band, that is not inherent.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Did they learn it?

• 21:46Brené Brown?

  That's what CEOs need to understand. That that they don't naturally

• 21:51Speaker 03

  They weren't born with it.

• 21:51Brené Brown?

  They did not self-select into a top band of mindful, positive people. That is P equals P minus I. That is a book that I I have read every year for forty years. I read this book and now I teach it all the time to leaders, which is The Inner Game of Tennis. Performance equals potential minus interference. So, so what ends up happening when you're working with high level athletes is performance equals potential. So we push and push and push and drill the shit out of, out of potential. You know, where are your volleys? Where are your baseline hits? Let's work on their shirt. Let's work on your return. What about your ball toss? And at some point, you're not moving the needle there.

• 22:33Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Brené Brown?

  Then, so you have to go back to it. So, performance equals potential. We've drilled that to death. Minus interference. What is your interference? And so what you're talking about is trained and you can track any of the top 20 tennis players in the world. And if you track them from the juniors, you will see the 12 to 18 months where they learn that. You will see the difference. If you watch film, you will see the difference in their game.

• 23:01Adam Grant?

  This, this reminds me, we were with Novak Djokovic last year and I think-

• 23:06Brené Brown?

  Great example.

• 23:07Adam Grant?

  I, I think he's an amazing example of this, but his, his emotional arc is different. He, he explained that he felt like when he entered tennis, the niche of the fan favorite was already filled. Federer and Nadal were kind of, they'd covered it, right? They had all the love. And he needed to do something to activate his energy. And so he decided he was going to make himself the bad guy and get the crowd to hate him. And the booing was going to fire him up around the energy to prove them wrong. And say, okay, you all think I can't do this? I'm going to show you. And he said it actually took the pressure off because he felt like nobody, nobody expects anything of me anyway. Nobody believes I can do it. So I have nothing to lose and now I can play to win. And I think that can be just as powerful as I love the game.

• 23:50Brené Brown?

  I think it can too, but if you hear Djokovic talk about the mindfulness training he's done and his ability to, I mean, even, I think all of us do special forces, we've all worked pretty closely with special forces military. The whole thing that when there's a mistake, it's, one of the most common ones I hear from them is data received.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  Well, I think, and I think you're touching upon the big mistake that happens in business consistently, which is we often talk about team performance. And people will interpret our work about high performing teams and apply it to individuals.

• 24:24Brené Brown?

  Okay, wait, I want you to slow down and say that again because it is like the number one infuriating, hard thing to get your head around.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  So what makes high performing organizations is high performing teams. And you, all three of us, talk about what makes high performing teams. And then people take our work and they try to apply it to individuals.

• 24:42Brené Brown?

  That's exactly right.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  And that's not how it works. And even these analogies that we're using, we're using them to our detriment, which is we're talking about an individual sport, an individual teams, an individual player's sport. And that's not what business is. Now, the analogy is that, hey, CEO, you're looking at this high performing athlete. They learned this, you can learn it too. That's sort of where the metaphor ends. I look at like, for example, I look at Mercedes, F1 Grand Prix. The way that Toto Wolff runs that organization is, first of all, it's a no blame organization. Right, which I find fascinating, which is mistakes get made and a kid on the, you know, changing a tire could lose the whole race, right?

• 25:25Speaker 03

  Because of, so, so they recognize that no matter how good the driver, no matter how good the car, it's the team that wins. And so when things go wrong, nobody will say, you lost the race. They'll say, something went wrong, how do we fix it? It's a no blame organization. And he cares more about consistency rather than best performance. So when the pit crew, they're not trying to go fastest, fastest, fastest, get it faster. He wants consistently 2.2 seconds. Doesn't need it to be quicker, doesn't want it slower. It's the consistency because that makes predictability and they train for consistency. But again, it's all about

• 25:58Brené Brown?

  The unity.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  It's all about the unity of the team.

• 26:01Adam Grant?

  Hal Levitt wrote a classic article half a century ago. It was called, Suppose We Took Groups Seriously. And his thesis was, if we really believed that excellence depended on having a great team, we would hire teams, intact teams that had already gotten to know each other and proven their ability to work together. We would promote successful teams. We would fire failed teams as opposed Opposed to placing all the responsibility on the individual. I don't know that I'm willing to go that far. I would be really interested in a model of what if we hired pairs? What if we promoted pairs? If we could find dyadic relationships where where people were more than the sum of their parts? That feels like a unit that's actually manageable.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  I mean, also the incentive structures. Most of the incentive structures in organizations are individual performance. Hit your numbers, you get the bonus irrespective of how everybody else does. We changed it in our organization where the the bonus structure is based on the company. Yeah. And if the company hits its numbers, everybody gets a bonus. And if the company misses its numbers, nobody gets the bonus. That's how we do it, too. And so and if and if one group is struggling, like when we look, you know, we sort of review. We don't we don't hold same thing, which is it's not like, whoo, sucks to be them. You know, it's not like one of those. We'll turn to everybody else who's doing well and be like, what are you doing to help them? Like, if they're if they're struggling, that means you aren't helping them. That means we're not helping them. And it's and I have to say, I mean, we hold ourselves to higher standards.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Because, you know, we're out there preaching it and we have to be able to do it ourselves. And we know too many people who don't practice what they preach. But I think one of the things I respect about you guys is that we all work very, very hard to practice what we preach. And so it's been it's been an education for me also to learn what team performance looks like and how you create team performance. Because individual performance is just much easier. It's easier to incentivize, it's easier to manage, it's easier to hire, it's easier to fire.

• 27:44Adam Grant?

  Easier to measure, too.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  It's easier to measure. Team stuff is actually really difficult, which is one of the reasons we love the special operators is because. And and I mean, you guys already know this. So getting to spend time with SEAL Team Six, and we talk about their courage and their amazingness and all of this. And their team ethic and their team ethos is so intense that it's not that they have raw courage and that they have no fear of dying. That's not what it is. No. It's that they fear letting down their team. For sure. More than they fear dying. Think about that for a second. They fear letting down their team more than they fear dying. Now translate that into business. You know, we don't fear letting down our team. You know, we can you imagine fearing letting down your team more than getting your bonus?

• 28:31Speaker 03

  You know, that that ethos. And that's and by the way, these are the highest performing teams in the world. And this is what I don't understand, which is we're here, we we have this amazing access to look at these organizations and say, hey, general world, like, look at what they're doing, you can do this, too. And they don't.

• 28:52Speaker 02

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• 29:21Speaker 04

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• 29:44Speaker 05

  Check out Tiger Sisters on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Welcome to the Tiger fam.

• 29:52Brené Brown?

  I had a really weird experience, maybe five or six years ago when, no, no, it was longer than that. It'd been a decade now. Some new data had emerged from our research on courageous leadership, which was, and this is, this will be interesting and it's somewhat controversial, I think, but it was very clear in the data that care for and connection with the people you lead is a non-negotiable prerequisite for leadership. If you do not care for, genuinely care for, and genuinely find yourself able to connect with the people you lead, you can't lead them well. And that's hard because I've led some people that I didn't feel connected to them at all. And I actually, from because of the research and trying to practice what we teach,

• 30:37Brené Brown?

  I did end up moving their reporting lines, which is hard when you're the founder because it just feels like, but I'm like, we only have two options here.

• 30:46Brené Brown?

  Yeah, and this move is gonna be a better option for you.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Can I, can I share something that, that helped me soul for that?

• 30:54Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  Which was its narrative, right? So, when you're having a meeting with a bunch of whoever's in the meeting, let's say the senior leaders in the meeting, and somebody's name comes up in the company, and somebody go, "Ugh, such an idiot." Right? And like, it happens, like, the lazy one, the underperformer,

• 31:10Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  You know, the Debbie death of a party, you know, like whoever it is, Debbie Downer. Like, Donald Downer. Donald Downer is like...

• 31:18Brené Brown?

  I'm, I'm training Adam on the use of women's names and terrible things. Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Fair point.

• 31:25Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  So, but we do, we, we create narratives, and what happens is, is even people who don't work with them, that's the narrative they have of that person now, so when they do interact with them,

• 31:33Brené Brown?

  Oh, for sure.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  They're gonna start treating them based on the narrative.

• 31:35Brené Brown?

  Oh, for sure.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  And by the way, it happens everywhere, like, it, it happens when people are talking about their leaders, they're like, "Oh, you know, they're clueless, they're stupid, they don't get us," right, whatever it is. And so, I realized that we were doing it, right? And so, new rule, I said, you know, "We're human, we vent, it's fine, but if you're in a meeting where somebody is creating a narrative about somebody else, it is the responsibility of everybody else in the meeting to interrupt that narrative, and simply say, "Hey, they may be lazy, they may also be stressed, they may also have stuff going on at home that we don't know about, we may have put them in the wrong job, they may be under, undertrained, they may be overworked, or they may be lazy." It could be one of those things. And just by giving grace and allowing for more things to be on the list, we, we changed the narratives.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  And once we started doing it as a, as a senior team, because I, it was, became sort of a new rule, then I went to the whole organization and said, "Now, this is a rule for the whole organization. If anybody creates narrative about anybody else, it's the responsibility of everybody else in that meeting to interrupt the narrative." And it helped tremendously, because what it allowed for was when you have that tension with somebody and you just, sometimes you just have personality clashes,

• 32:41Brené Brown?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Personality clashes, even with people in your own team. It allows you, instead of to form narrative about them, to offer grace and be like, "You know what? We just don't get along, it's, it's probably me, uh, but why don't, I'm gonna let you manage this issue with them because I'm, I'm gonna get it wrong, just for personality reasons." And it just offers this magical grace, and it's so easy to implement. And it has such, such disproportionate positive impact on the performance of the team.

• 33:06Brené Brown?

  I like it because when you adopt a courageous system as opposed to asking some individuals to do that, you normalize it so the person that gets interrupted with it doesn't feel targeted. Like, they're like, oh shit, this is what we do. We just stop each other.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  It just becomes acculturated, yeah.

• 33:22Brené Brown?

  Yeah, and I think it's, yeah, so the care for and connected with, I didn't believe it at first, but then I saw it. And then I ended up on an air force base, working with a squadron of fighter pilots. And I went to the general, who was this very, very serious guy. And I said, listen, I just want to let you know that I'm gonna have to talk about care for and connection with as a prerequisite for leadership. And he said, why are you telling me this, ma'am? And I said, I'm a little concerned. I'm not concerned, I just want to make sure you know that this is coming. And he said, that is a very low bar for us. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, we don't require care for and connection with.

• 34:01Brené Brown?

  We require deep appreciation and deep loving relationship for the people you lead.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  Amen.

• 34:09Brené Brown?

  And I said, say more. And he said, that's how we stay alive.

• 34:14Brené Brown?

  And I was, I thought to myself, I have never, I can't even get care for and connection with.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Love?

• 34:22Brené Brown?

  I can't even get that by or through the corporate sector.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  This is what the corporate world doesn't understand. You know, like, I was hanging out with Marines and talking to a general who's responsible of all Marine Corps training, officer enlisted. And he's a warrior, he's infantry, he's been deployed multiple times over the course of his career, you know, he's a hardened dude. And I said, what is the secret to the Marine Corps? Why are you guys so good at what you do? And he said, love. Love of country, love of Corps, love of your fellow Marine. And the Marines are constantly referring to the intangibles. And what they mean is all this mushy mushy stuff, that they, you know, loyalty, love, and they just call them the intangibles because they're just hard to measure. He was unabashed about saying love was the secret sauce of the Marine Corps.

• 35:11Adam Grant?

  I think there's a nuance here that often gets overlooked, which is, you can dislike people and still care about them. I think it's one of-

• 35:20Brené Brown?

  I think that's true.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 35:21Adam Grant?

  It's one of the most important lessons I've learned as a teacher. I will never forget, one day our daughter Elena, I think she was eight or nine, she came and she said, "I wonder if I'm my teacher's favorite." And I said, "Elena, teachers do not have favorites. Your job is to like every student, just like you wouldn't have a favorite parent." And she looked at me and she said, "Or would I?"

• 35:44Adam Grant?

  And it was hilarious, but it also really got me thinking. And it was an uncomfortably honest moment for me where I realized, you know what? There are students I like more than others.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 35:53Adam Grant?

  Like the student who comes prepared to class, who raises their hand enthusiastically, who challenges constructively as opposed to, you know, just complaining about every idea that they don't like. Those students, obviously, are easier to like, but my job is to care about every one of them and try to help them grow and succeed. And the effort, the effort that it takes to figure out, okay, what is it about that student that is worthy of support? What can I do to help that student become better? Inevitably leads to something that makes them less dislikeable.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  I think this is a, I love this because what you're talking about is the dichotomy of two different things. It's kind of like joy and happiness, you know, or fulfillment and happiness, you know, where happiness is fleeting, you have a nice meal, you see a good movie, happy, you know, and it comes and goes. But joy and fulfillment can be more of a constant even on bad days, you know? It's like you love your kids every day, you don't like your kids every day. And so I think people think of these things as interchangeable where they're not, you know? And to your point, like you can like people more, that's okay. You definitely like some people more than others, but you can care for everybody-

• 37:03Brené Brown?

  That's true.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  -at the same time. Like they can coexist, these two lines. And I think it's really important to make those distinctions because people think they have to choose one over the other.

• 37:11Adam Grant?

  I think romantic relationships are the best example of this. How many of you like your partner every day? Those of you who have a partner? Okay, Pierre, your partner's in the room. You, where's these?

• 37:25Adam Grant?

  Very, very few people would honestly raise their hand on that.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 37:29Brené Brown?

  I've been with Steve for 40 years. Like, no. I mean, we don't, yeah, we don't. We love each other deeply.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Every day.

• 37:38Brené Brown?

  Every day. But do we like each other? No, we, you know, we frustrate each other immensely sometimes. I mean, I don't frustrate him, but like-

• 37:48Adam Grant?

  I have a friend Jared who said you just have to win the week. Like just be liked four out of seven days and that's a successful relationship.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  So here's a question for you, just changing, just sort of spur of thought. Do you want to win or do you fear losing? Like, do you like to win or do you fear losing?

• 38:05Brené Brown?

  In what domain?

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Just as a motivator, as a personality.

• 38:08Adam Grant?

  Yes.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  Like, I think it's different. Some people like hate losing and some people love winning. Do you know which one you are?

• 38:18Brené Brown?

  Oh, you know what? I am driven almost solely by mastery on the court. Like, and so for me, I'd rather, I'd rather lose a game where I learned than win a game that was easy.

• 38:34Speaker 03

  That, different conversation.

• 38:36Brené Brown?

  Maybe, maybe it's so foreign to me, this idea that you're.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  No, but like, when, like, do you get more excited by the win and you're like, okay, well, I lost? Or do you like hate losing, but when you win, you're like, I have one.

• 38:47Adam Grant?

  A different.

• 38:48Brené Brown?

  Oh, no. I, I, I like to win.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  So you love the win?

• 38:52Brené Brown?

  I love the win.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 38:53Brené Brown?

  I mean, I'm gonna tell you this, I was playing pickleball just a couple of months ago. And it was open play, so you just stack your paddles and you go on with a random doubles partner. And I'm playing and we're down like 6-0 and this kid is like 30. And I look at him, I'm like, son, you need to lock in. And he was like, I'm sorry. I said, I need you to lock in, focus. And he said, man, it's a game. It's fun. And I was like, no, winning is fun. And he's like, okay. And I said, another thing, if you're gonna come across and get my ball, that's great. I love that move. Make sure you make it, otherwise I got the ball on this side. And he was like, got it, lock in, stay on my side unless I can make it. And he was like, okay. So they never scored again and we ended up winning 11-6.

• 39:37Brené Brown?

  And then we went back and I was like, let's stack our paddles together. And he's like, I don't think so. And I was like.

• 39:43Adam Grant?

  Wait, I'm, I'm learning now, we already concluded we can't play against each other. We can't play on the same team either.

• 39:49Brené Brown?

  It depends on your game.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  So do you, do you like to win or do you hate to lose?

• 39:52Adam Grant?

  I think I hate to lose more.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:54Adam Grant?

  You?

• 39:55Speaker 03

  Uh, I think I hate to lose more.

• 39:59Brené Brown?

  Really?

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:01Brené Brown?

  Oh, I don't mind losing. If it's a good fight, I love, I'd rather, I just want a good fight.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Trying to think. Because I, I'm not, I'm more competitive against myself than I am against other people.

• 40:13Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  And so if I'm, if I, if I do well, I'm like, all right, on to the next. Like, there we go, like, okay.

• 40:19Brené Brown?

  Oh, no, I got cellies for everything. I'm like, let's go, you wanna pet that dog? I'm like, I've got, oh, I've got a cellie for every move.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  I don't have any of that. I mean, I get the rush, of course, I get the dopamine rush of a win, of course, but it doesn't last very long and then I go home.

• 40:34Brené Brown?

  Let's go.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, don't care about trophies or medals or anything about that.

• 40:37Brené Brown?

  No, I don't care about those. I just care about the shit talk.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  The shit talk, yeah.

• 40:41Brené Brown?

  Yeah. That's my, that's my love language. My love language is, uh, sports trash talk.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:47Brené Brown?

  You're gonna sit next to me at UT football, baby.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  And the reason I hate to lose is because if it's on me, right, I'm like, I could've done better, but if I lose to somebody who genuinely played a great game and bested me, then there's lessons and I'm good with it. But, but I'm, because I'm pushing myself, I hate to lose. You're, are you, you're the same, you hate to lose?

• 41:02Brené Brown?

  I think you're, yeah. What are y'all, raise your hand if you're a love to win, driven by the love of winning. And then raise your hand if you're a hate to lose person.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  It's about 50/50.

• 41:12Brené Brown?

  Wait, just do that again? I just need to do a quick analysis. Raise your hand if you're a love to win. Hold them up? Okay, never mind. Okay. You're my people, first of all, but secondly, there, there's not a gender divide.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  No, there's no, no.

• 41:27Brené Brown?

  But I do wanna get a click real quick, one more time, about if I'm looking for like a paddle or pickleball partner, who, who, I'm picking the, picking the winners.

• 41:34Adam Grant?

  I don't know. I, I will say there, um, there are two personality traits that, that predict where people stand on this. Um, introversion, extroversion is one, and then emotional reactivity, stability is the other.

• 41:45Brené Brown?

  Oh, shit.

• 41:46Adam Grant?

  So, no, I, I think.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  Cause we're both introverts. Are you an introvert too?

• 41:49Brené Brown?

  Oh, yeah, I'm a, I, I test off the charts on introversion. Like, this is fun, but don't come up and talk to me afterwards if I don't know you, cause I'll get really anxious.

• 41:58Adam Grant?

  And I, I'm happy to talk to you afterward, but definitely not before, cause I don't know what we're gonna talk about.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  And I'm happy to talk to you, but not as a group, just one-on-one.

• 42:05Adam Grant?

  Cause we have a lot of rules throughout social interaction here.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  No, I'm just, I just, I just hate groups. Like, I went to a party last night.

• 42:14Adam Grant?

  You should probably study them.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  I went to, I know, I went to a party last night and I very quickly left when I realized there were a lot of people there.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  I've never been to an after-party in my life. You and I had that interaction last year.

• 42:26Adam Grant?

  You're just fucked up.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  There was a party and then there was an after-party. And Adam was getting ready to go to the after-party. And I went up to him and said, hey, I'm going back to the hotel. Good night. Good to see you. And he's like, you're not going to the after-party? I'm like, no, no, never going to the after-parties. And he says, how do you just leave? I went, you just leave? I have, I, yeah, and you went.

• 42:44Adam Grant?

  I felt like I was gonna let my team down otherwise.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know.

• 42:47Adam Grant?

  I told people I was going. They probably don't care if I should have.

• 42:50Brené Brown?

  No, it's really funny, because when I go do events, you know how they'll say the list of things that they'd like for you to do? And we have a standing policy, Brene doesn't do dinners. And then somebody will push back and say, wait, does she, does she eat? We had, we had a new person we hired. She returned an email, it was like a Fortune 20 company. And it was directly in the CEO's office. And she just put, yes, but not with y'all. I was like, so that's not how we answer that? But I, I do think it's like a social, like, this is fun for me. And we could talk about a lot of.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  But you and I are cheating, because we're like, there's, there's a, like, it's, I mean, it's the three of us chatting, which we like.

• 43:32Brené Brown?

  Oh, no, I do love that. And we, I can talk about work stuff all day long with people. But like, if, if a disco ball came down and people started drinking, I'd be like.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  It's not that I can't do it, it just, it drains the social battery much quicker. Like, one-on-one, I can go for quite a while. But if I've got a, if, if there's a group of people, like a dinner table or a, a room full of people and I have to speak louder, especially because it's noisy and loud. And it just drains the social battery a lot quicker. So I'll just have to go home sooner.

• 43:56Adam Grant?

  So introverts get overstimulated faster than extroverts. And one of the greatest stimulants in life is eye contact. Just having other people look at you.

• 44:04Brené Brown?

  Really?

• 44:05Adam Grant?

  Really.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  I'm exhausted.

• 44:09Brené Brown?

  I'm dysregulated, but I'm trying to be mindful.

• 44:14Adam Grant?

  Okay.

• 44:16Adam Grant?

  Can we, can we go back to one thing that, that I've been thinking about for at least 20 minutes now? Simon, you were saying, we, we study these elite organizations that teach us how to do things like care and build connection and how critical that is to performance. Why don't other organizations listen? And this is, this has been a frustration for me for two decades. My, my current hypothesis, and I would love to hear your reactions and yours, is a lot of them are falling victim to organizational uniqueness bias. They hear Navy SEALs, or they hear Pixar, or they hear pick your favorite, you know, extreme case. And they think, well, we're not like them. Like, we can't do that. They have a special culture. They hire special people. That doesn't apply to us.

• 45:01Adam Grant?

  Not realizing, it's kind of like saying, well, I can't learn anything from an Olympic athlete about how to improve my workout. That is the person you want to learn from, and then you have to tailor it to you. I wonder, is, how does, how does that track with what you see? What are, what are the barriers? How do you overcome that bias?

• 45:19Speaker 03

  I think it's simpler. I just think it's misaligned incentives. I think it goes back to the, you know, Charlie Munger, you know, show me how someone's paid, and I'll show you how they behave. You know, I, I think incentive structures are so screwed up. Good intentions, bad intentions, you know, biases. I don't think any of it matters. They'll do, they'll do what they're incentivized to do.

• 45:41Brené Brown?

  I think it's a greedy quarter issue. I think it's, I think it's, um, it's interesting because what we do specifically is we don't do adaptive change or incremental change. If I'm going into an organization, there's some, we've assessed them for a long time, and that they're ready for transformation and they want transformation. What people don't understand about transformation is you will break some shit if you're trans. That is the definition of transformation. You are going to assess existing systems and break the ones that do not serve, and desperately protect the ones that serve. And no one, even in your immediate team at the C-suite level, will agree what systems need to be broken and which ones you need to keep.

• 46:23Brené Brown?

  And then you're going to go through a very rigorous three-year, uh, the poet David White has this great definition of, and I might get it wrong, but it's the great definition of transformation.

• 46:34Brené Brown?

  To hit the wall at full velocity and watch things fall apart. That's how he defines transformation. And that's what happens in organizations. There's not, it's not unusual in a transformation for there to be a thirty to sixty percent churn of leaders that report up to the C-suite. Like, because what's happening, I think, and this goes to your question. It's systems theory, which was the fifth of the core, the top, when we were talking about the five top leadership skills. If you, if you are not engaged deeply in systems thinking right now, I don't think you can play to win. And if you were a systems thinker and you got away from it, you need to revisit the scholarship on systems thinking. But one of the biggest things, I think, that helps with systems thinking is this iceberg

• 47:15Brené Brown?

  model of problem identification, that above the water, we see a problem, and this is where, as leaders, we attack. We attack what we see. But underneath the iceberg are several other layers. One is behavior. The next one is structures and systems. The deeper you go for change, the more leverage and lasting and meaningful the change. The bottom layer is mental models. What is the mental model from which people work? And a mental model, when I go in and I'm talking to a CEO about a potential transformation, and we go through this assessment, and the second I hear that a mental model has to change in a collective, in a group of people, I'm like, this is going to take three years.

• 47:58Brené Brown?

  It's going to be very difficult transformation. Because a mental model is the way we make sense of the world, and it's how we assess our value in a corporation or in any organization. To change mental models is absolutely, to excavate them to begin with is hard, but then to change them is very hard.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  You're touching upon something that I think is also essential, because you're talking about three-year as the, as the timeframe, whether, you know, which is ish, right?

• 48:27Brené Brown?

  Ish, yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  It should happen within three years. But I, I think the insight there for me is the letting go of, I can't predict when. I mean, the, the, most, most companies don't implement my work. And the reason is, is because I can't tell you when it's going to work. I know. Know 100% it works like if I know that if you work out every single day for 20 minutes, 100% of people will get into shape. Can't tell you when and neither can any doctor. And you just have to sort of, you have the discipline and you stick to it and you can have good days and bad days and can take days off, but it will work. And so when we go through these, these transformations that we're able to sort of guide people through or guide organizations through, the big challenge they have is they want or need it to work by the end of the calendar year, the end of the fiscal year.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  And so it might, but I can't promise that it will. And because I can't promise that it will, then they want a model that, that will at least appear that the change has been made on their timeframe. And that's like saying, it's like going on a first date and saying, on this date on the calendar, you and I will be in love. It's like, it may happen that way, but I can't predict that it will. All of the things that you and the, the three of us talk about, we talk about process and discipline and sticking to it. Good days and bad days are allowed. Like you can have chocolate cake even when you're in a diet, just don't do it every day. And the minute you can let go of when it has to happen and just stick to the process, invariably it almost always happens.

• 49:50Brené Brown?

  And I'll tell you that, I mean, this is, you, you cannot predict it. And this is, but this is

• 49:54Speaker 03

  But most people kind of let go of that.

• 49:55Brené Brown?

  They can't let go of it.

• 49:56Adam Grant?

  That's a failed mental model.

• 49:57Brené Brown?

  It's a failed mental model.

• 49:58Adam Grant?

  I need to know within 90 days or six months that this is gonna work.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  This has to work in 12 months. Otherwise I've wasted my money. It was like, well, it might, but I can't, I don't know.

• 50:07Brené Brown?

  Here's what's shocking to us. When we do a Dare to Lead transformation, we only measure for 18 months on performance metrics. No cultural metrics. We're everything from organic growth, stock price. And we start to see them within six to nine months on those metrics. Cultural metrics are like the falling in love. That takes a lot longer, but we measure performance metrics right off the bat. And those we can see change because we're teaching people how to have hard conversations. We're teaching people how to

• 50:32Speaker 03

  You're starting to see the evidence towards

• 50:34Brené Brown?

  Very quickly.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  Those performance metrics are evidence towards the cultural change.

• 50:37Brené Brown?

  Right, that's it.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  But they're not, but they're not the change themselves. And the problem is, is because you can measure those in the short term, too many organizations will only measure those in the short term, declare a success, end the process and the whole thing collapses.

• 50:47Adam Grant?

  Yep.

• 50:47Brené Brown?

  Yeah, that's, yeah, that's, I'm telling you, it's

• 50:51Speaker 03

  This is infinite thinking.

• 50:52Brené Brown?

  It's infinite thinking.

• 50:56Speaker 02

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• 51:26Brené Brown?

  All right, let's take some questions.

• 51:29Adam Grant?

  We will cold cough, we have to.

• 51:31Brené Brown?

  I will not, but...

• 51:32Adam Grant?

  I will.

• 51:33Brené Brown?

  Yeah, he will. Yes.

• 51:35Speaker 06

  I have a question regarding shame and talking about it and getting people to think about it and stuff, which I find very, very helpful when it comes to leading organizations. My question is, how do I talk about it with kids?

• 51:50Brené Brown?

  Okay.

• 51:50Adam Grant?

  Renee, how do we talk about shame with kids?

• 51:54Brené Brown?

  So the question is, I find the work interesting about shame and how it applies to leadership and talking about it in organizations. How do we talk about it with kids? Did I play that back correctly? Okay. So one of the things that's really important just right now, I will say, about shame in organizations, you have to remember, I don't have to do anything, but I would suggest it's really important to hold in mind right now, that the number one shame trigger professionally for us is the fear of irrelevance. So imagine the levels of shame in organizations right now. And it's not just about AI. It is about everything that's happening at one time and people not understanding. I will tell you this, this is one of the questions I had was,

• 52:39Brené Brown?

  what are you seeing for the first time that you've never seen before? And my answer is, for the first time in over 25 years of doing this work, I am seeing the C-suite more frustrated with the level, the leaders that report directly to them than any other level of leaders in the organization. Not the frozen middle, not the folks that report up to the senior leaders underneath, but those senior leaders and why? Because they are really the mental model of the senior leadership right now. is the most painful to excavate because they put their value on being knowers, not on being learners.

• 53:21Brené Brown?

  And their learning agility is lower right now than any other level in an organization.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 53:28Brené Brown?

  100% and so it's a really scary time for very senior people. With kids, I think the most important thing is to not mystify it. Just to say, I was at a conference and I talked to this woman who studies shame. And this is what I'm learning. I think it's interesting. Shame is, I think the easiest way to talk to kids is the basics. It's the same way I talk to adults, really. Shame is I am bad. Guilt is I did something bad. Shame is a focus on ourselves. Guilt is a focus on behavior. So if you get a bad grade, you get a paperback and you look at it and you got a D. And you say, God, I'm so stupid. That's shame. If you get the paperback and you get a D and you're like, wow,

• 54:13Brené Brown?

  going out last night and not studying for this test was really stupid. That's a focus on behavior and that's guilt. Why is it important in parenting? Because in the first longitudinal nested cohort studies of kids, we see that shame-bound kids are more likely to have significant struggles with alcohol, drugs, sexual irresponsibility, aggression, depression, suicidal attempts, I mean, across the board. Guilt prone kids, this is what the crazy part of the study is, even less likely to engage in those behaviors than the general population.

• 54:56Brené Brown?

  So the way we measure shame and guilt is by self-talk. When something goes wrong, how do I talk to myself? We believe that the number one variable that presented, but that the predicted self-talk was parenting style. So your kid does something and you say, "God, you're so stupid," versus riding your bike up that ramp with your friends was a really stupid thing to do. Very big difference. Today, I think we're beginning to question whether the parenting style is the big predictor or the only one, because we can have siblings within one family that are wired different for it.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  There's a great leadership lesson here as well. It's a military story. There was, on base, a bunch of young officers who were in an elite school went out partying, and they took a junior enlisted with them. And they came back on base, and one of the young officers was driving the car and was afraid of getting stopped by the cops on base for drunk driving, so they told the junior enlisted, "You drive." And so she took the wheel. They got pulled over by the cops, she got breathalyzed, she was over the limit, she got arrested. And it turned out also later on that the officer, one of the officers and the enlisted were dating, which is forbidden military code.

• 56:17Brené Brown?

  This just keeps getting worse.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Right. So as a result of all of this happening, these young officers were ejected from this elite program. And their senior officer had to sit down with them, and, you know, they got in trouble. And you think about sort of how people get in trouble from their parents, or people get in trouble from their bosses at work. We say things like, "How can you be so stupid? You have destroyed your career. What were you thinking?" Right? We say things like that.

• 56:46Brené Brown?

  We do.

• 56:47Speaker 03

  And what I found was so amazing when I heard this story was, these wonderful human beings are driven by service, giving of themselves to others, and the pride of sacrifice for others. And that same mentality works the other way. And the way they got in trouble, the senior officers sat down with them and said, "Do you have any idea how many people you've let down?" You've let down your parents for believing in you. You've let down your team members for believing in you. You've let down me. Like, do you realize how many people you've let down because of your actions? And this idea of, like, you take risks to support the team, but you manage your behavior because you'll let down the team, as opposed to, how can you be so stupid? And the idea of connecting it to the greater good,

• 57:28Speaker 03

  I thought was way more powerful, so intense to hear that. And to your point, which is, the idea of guilt is more likely to regulate the behavior, rather than calling you stupid, or calling you this, or calling you that. I found it so fascinating.

• 57:43Brené Brown?

  So what's interesting there is how that message hits. So if that message hits, I've engaged in a series of behaviors that let down people that are important to me. That's probably an indicator of behavior change.

• 57:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:59Brené Brown?

  If that message, which is as likely hits as, I am a disappointment to the people I care about most, that is a super detrimental, trauma-based response. So it really depends on... That's why the parenting piece is really important, because by the time you're this person, and you're probably in your early twenties.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  They're probably in their early thirties.

• 58:21Brené Brown?

  Early thirties?

• 58:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:23Brené Brown?

  You're gonna have a filing system internally for whether you're going to accept that as, I made some decisions that disappointed a lot of people, or I am a disappointment.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:33Brené Brown?

  And that, how do you change what you inherently are?

• 58:37Speaker 03

  But we know this, like, when there's somebody that we admire, like, you know, when we look up to our boss or to a friend and they say, I'm so disappointed, you know? Like, that, when we want to do right by people, like, that hurts more than,

• 58:48Brené Brown?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  You're a disappointment, or you're an idiot, you know?

• 58:50Adam Grant?

  I have to drop in a study here. Do you know the study by the sociologist Olinor and Olinor on Holocaust rescuers? Oh, I love this study. So this husband and wife sociology team, they look at hundreds of of non-Jews who rescued Jews, sticking their their own necks out and putting their lives on the line during the Holocaust, and compared them with bystanders who were in the same towns and did nothing. And the question was, what what differentiated the people who were willing to engage in these potentially self-sacrificing heroic acts from their peers? And many, many hypotheses not supported. Basically, the adults were similar in many more ways than they were different. One of the differences was when

• 59:30Adam Grant?

  you looked at the parenting that they'd been exposed to as kids, the rescuers were punished at lower rates for misbehavior than the bystanders. But the parents didn't do nothing. When the rescuers did something disappointing, the parents highlighted the consequences of the behavior for others. It's exactly the point you're making. They said, hey, like, when you when you stayed out late,

• 59:52Speaker 03

  These are the ripples.

• 59:52Adam Grant?

  I was really worried. And I didn't know where you were, and I didn't know if you were safe, and I didn't know if I could reach you. And they taught the kids to reflect on the impact of the behavior on of their behavior on others, and realize, wow, every action I take has consequences for other people. And you fast forward the clock 20, 30 years, and you see someone who's being persecuted, and that message sticks.

• 1:00:15Brené Brown?

  There's got to be some kind of confounding variable of empathy in there, too. Because, I mean, one of the things we teach kids around your what you do has can affect other people. Like, that's that's a really big part of how we teach empathy, which, by the way, is the antidote to shame. So if you put empathy in a Petri dish, I mean, if you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: judgment, secrecy, and silence. But if you put shame in a Petri dish and you douse it with empathy, you've created a hostile environment for shame. Shame cannot survive empathy. So that that kind of connection and disappointment.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  It teaches it teaches everything we're talking about in this entire podcast, which is we're talking about service. We're talking about that your actions have repercussions for others.

• 1:00:57Brené Brown?

  And connection.

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  Good and bad. We're talking about connection. We're talking about that this is a team sport. You know, business is a team sport, life is a team sport, you know? It's it's it's a beautiful, it's sort of ties a nice little bow on it.

• 1:01:08Adam Grant?

  We should take some more audience questions and also give shorter answers.

• 1:01:12Brené Brown?

  Here and then here.

• 1:01:14Speaker 07

  You just talked about empathy as the antithesis to shame. What about a human that has deep, deep empathy? But the self-talk is always shame-oriented. So in the same body, you have deep empathy, a deep feeler, but also someone who's very, very self-critical.

• 1:01:34Brené Brown?

  So let me play back the question to make sure that I've got it right. You are asking, what about someone who has a deep capacity for empathy, but also has kind of internal shaming messaging?

• 1:01:47Speaker 07

  Empathy almost to a fault, like, yes.

• 1:01:50Brené Brown?

  So empathy to a fault often stops being empathy. So empathy to a fault almost becomes enmeshment and taking care of others. And that's really quickly a very short walk to shame. Does that make sense? So I am no longer, Simon calls me. And so this is really, this is one of the things we talk, Adam and I talk about a lot, because there's a big attack on empathy right now, especially in the US, which would make perfect sense politically. I mean, it'd be easier to get away with the bullshit if no one cared for anybody else. So I understand the attack on empathy, personally, not speaking for my co-hosts.

• 1:02:35Brené Brown?

  But empathy, cognitive, there's two types of empathy. And when you hear people attacking empathy, they use a type of empathy that is actually fairly detrimental. And the types of empathy are cognitive empathy and affective empathy. So cognitive empathy is you call me and you say, shit, do you have a minute? I'm like, yeah, what's going on? And you tell me something really hard and I'm like, oh, God. What a shit show. I'm so sorry that happened. I'm unloading the dishwasher when you call. I am not feeling what you're saying. Affective empathy is taking on the feelings of another person. I'm not like, if you're, if you are calling me with a sense of despair.

• 1:03:17Brené Brown?

  I am not all of a sudden in my kitchen, unleaving the dishwasher, putting myself awash in despair so I can connect with you. I am cognitively connecting to my understanding of what despair is. And I'm going to be there with you and for you, but I'm not taking on your emotion. So that is cognitive empathy. What it, what leads to burnout and compassion fatigue is affective empathy. I'm going to feel what everyone's feeling. So when you say really, you know, so it's affective empathy. Then what happens is you call me, you're in despair. I'm labeling that as an emotion because it's a hard one. I take on your despair.

• 1:03:57Brené Brown?

  And now I'm filling myself with shame self-talk because I can't fix you. You called me from a dark, deep hole. My job is not to jump in it with you. My job is to, is to say, I see you. Let me really see you. I take a ladder out of my backpack. I put it in the hole. I go down, I see you. I say, I care about you. I say, you're not alone. And then I get back on my ladder and I go. Otherwise, we just have two suckers in a dark hole. So that's how shame is related to over, to enmeshment, or what I would say is taking on the emotions of other people.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  Little red flag here. I've seen this in businesses and companies where we, we, we had somebody quit. And one of our, one of our great, like, we loved her, we were like, amazing, amazing, amazing human being. And she quit and we were like, what's the reason you're quitting? She says, I'm burnt out. And we're like, we know your workload, like, what? You know, like, well, how's burnout? And what we discovered, when we sort of like went and sort of investigated, is she's an empath. And when other members of the team discovered she was an empath, they all went to her with their problems. And, and so she was taking on everybody's problems and everybody loved to go and dump their personal problems. I've had a fight with my parents, I'm having a fight with my parents. My spouse, whatever it was, and she took on everybody to the point where she couldn't hack it anymore and she left.

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  And I've talked about it publicly and people have come up to me and said, oh, my God, I go to somebody, I take advantage of them. I'm dumping all my problems on them and it's creating burnout in companies, even though it has nothing to do with their workload.

• 1:05:32Brené Brown?

  Yes.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  Oh, sorry.

• 1:05:33Brené Brown?

  Go ahead. No.

• 1:05:33Adam Grant?

  Peter Frost studied this. He called it being a toxin handler. And found that that role is critical for an organization, but if it gets located in one person, that person is going to burn out.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Brené Brown?

  It reminds me, what was the, what was the series that I might be aging myself here for sure, I'm aging myself. What was the?

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  Bonanza?

• 1:05:51Brené Brown?

  No, but no, of that genre. You're right. Hey, I loved Bonanza.

• 1:05:55Speaker 03

  I love Bonanza too.

• 1:05:56Brené Brown?

  Okay, watch it.

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  I can hum the theme.

• 1:05:57Brené Brown?

  I can hum the theme too. I love Bonanza. No, but it's of that black and white television, kind of weird and freaky things would happen.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Twilight Zone.

• 1:06:05Brené Brown?

  Twilight Zone. There's an episode of The Twilight Zone where there's a character called the Sin Eater. And he just goes to, from village to village, eating the sad stories of the village. And I always think about that when I think about the wrong use of empathy. Okay, next question.

• 1:06:23Adam Grant?

  Can we just, can we just send a ladder down to the person so they can climb out ever? Because that's what I always want to do.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  No. I mean, you have to ask them. Like, this is the thing that I've learned about, like, doing the right thing for somebody in the time that they need it. And like, the thing that I found remarkable is A, people know what they need, and B, you can adjust in the middle. So I remember I was in a, I was in a bad place. I called a friend. I'm like, hey, do you have a minute? Can I just talk it through with you? And she started fixing. And I said, I don't need you to fix it right now. I just need you to like, shut up and listen. I just need to, and she, and, and the adjustment was made. I was good. Or if she couldn't, then I had to get off the phone. But, and I've now learned that, so when somebody comes to me and says, blah, blah, blah, blah, I need to talk, I go, do you want me to fix or do you want me to hold space? And they go, uh, I need you to hold space.

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  And so they, I find that it's, we don't have to guess. Like, people know what they want in the time and you can just ask.

• 1:07:17Brené Brown?

  Huge. But I only see this in organizations or on teams where there's high levels of trust.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23Brené Brown?

  Like, I have sisters, so it'll be, my sister will call and be like, hey, do you have a second? And I'm like, yeah. And she goes, I'm really upset. And I was like, listen, fix, or bury a body. She goes.

• 1:07:34Brené Brown?

  Man, grab a shovel. I'm like, on my way. I don't even need to know who you killed or where we're going. I got the shovel and a big trunk. You know, like, but that requires, or sometimes my sisters will call and say, do you have a minute? I'm like, yeah, this is gonna be hard. And I said, okay, I'm gonna tell you what's going on and I'm gonna hang up and don't you fucking call me back. And I'm like, well, what do you want me to do? Just listen to it and I'll call you back when I want to talk to you. But I just need to say it out loud. I'm like, go. Then I'm like, and then she's gone. So, so I, I think asking.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  It's so, it's such a magical thing. And people know what they need.

• 1:08:08Brené Brown?

  And it's a trust earner.

• 1:08:09Speaker 03

  And they can change. They can change. Okay, I've now said it. Now can you give me some fixings?

• 1:08:13Brené Brown?

  You did this the other day. I called, yeah, I called you and I was like, I'm so upset. And you're like, what would be helpful right now? And I said,

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  Call me back when you're ready for a ladder.

• 1:08:22Brené Brown?

  No, and I think I, it's, you know, my husband's a pediatrician and it's really interesting because he said he has to ask because even with the same patient and the same 10 minutes, a parent will be like, I just, I like it when you just listen and you're, you know, and then sometimes he'll just say, I'm just gonna listen. They'll be like, is this why I'm here? I'm paying you for just listening? What's the answer? And he's like, oh shit, have we moved on from the just listening empathy? He's like, yeah, we're in the godlike doctor state now. How are you going to fix this? He's like, shifting gears. Question?

• 1:08:51Speaker 06

  I have a question regarding your view on the impact of AI. Earlier you said about, you know, AI isn't gonna replace your jobs by somebody using AI. And I think a couple of weeks ago, at a conference in Palo Alto, where the main investors and leaders in the space were talking about it in a very different opinion. And James SuPuan was interesting because he said, it's more about purpose of a job versus the task of a job. He, he named the example of a radiologist, which the task can be tightly replaced by analytic

• 1:09:31Speaker 06

  part, which takes most of the time. But the purpose of the job, like healing disease, is elevated to now there are more radiologists than ever before. So I was just wondering, About your view on the impact of communications.

• 1:09:48Adam Grant?

  Okay, so the question is, how is AI going to affect our jobs? I think that Jensen is on to something. We were with him not too long ago. And I think, look, I've been studying job design for 25 years. Most leaders define a job as a collection of tasks, and that's only half of the puzzle. Jobs are also collections of relationships. And so when we map what somebody is supposed to do at work, we have to think about what is each project and assignment that needs to get done, but also what is all the communication and coordination that needs to happen? I think the radiologist's job is such an interesting example of this because what I think even three years ago, as soon as generative AI burst onto the scene, people said radiologists are going to cease to exist.

• 1:10:33Adam Grant?

  And it is true that a large language model can substitute for some of the tasks that a radiologist does, but there are other tasks that still require human judgment. I know I would not go to an AI radiologist solely, right? I want a human to look over it, just like I want a human in the cockpit, even though autopilot is doing most of the work on a plane. But also, there's a whole collection of relationships that really matter there. There's the radiologist seeking a second opinion from another radiologist. There's the coordination with a whole team of experts. There's the interaction with the patient. I don't think we're ready to outsource that. And so I think that's an evolution of a job to maybe subtract a task or two and add a task or two and maybe increase the interaction complexity as part of it. And I think that's probably where jobs are going, but I don't have a crystal ball and

• 1:11:17Adam Grant?

  anyone who says they do is lying to you or themselves.

• 1:11:21Brené Brown?

  Or they have a vested interest. Yeah, I mean, you were in the mothership.

• 1:11:28Brené Brown?

  I agree 100% with everything you said. I think that I'm a tech optimist and an early AI user, so I interact with AI. I mean, I wake up in the morning. The first thing I do is I get a Four-page brief from an agent that knows me better than I know myself, sometimes it was weird, that I get a four-page brief from an AI every morning that gives me the geopolitical impact on all the organizations I'm working with, any news that I need to understand, stock, analysis of investor calls, things that I need to know for my job. And I've used it for a while. I also have an agent, like a personal agent, that will, I'll say, is it true, I saw on Instagram that I can stop using retinol if I eat more carrots?

• 1:12:13Brené Brown?

  And then it'll come back and say, sometimes it's hard for me to believe you're a social scientist. You are the biggest sucker. Stay off social media and keep using the stack we put together a year ago. Like, that's what it'll say to me. Or I'll say, there's a new paddle out. I need to buy it. And they'll say, you need to work on your game. You don't like drilling. But this is, so I'm a fan and I use it for things. What it will never replace, at least not, I don't think, I don't think it'll ever replace this, is discernment, is deep discernment. And so the radiologist is really interesting, because let's say you have a film that is alarming, and it can give you percentages and predictions about

• 1:12:56Brené Brown?

  that film. But what I need is that radiologist talking to my primary care doctor, who's also talking to my cardiologist, who's also talking to this person in a consult about the real, not just statistics of what we can do and what different protocol outcomes are, but here's what's important to Brené. She talks in terms of health span more than lifespan. She, you know, she's on a court six days a week. This is what, you know, this is what makes sense for her. That I don't think will ever be able to replace. The thing that I think is most alarming to me is that people say, and this goes back to our very beginning, people say over and over, we don't need to worry because what

• 1:13:40Brené Brown?

  will save us from AI taking over our world and our jobs is what makes us human. But we are shit at what makes us human. The Welchian era brought in a deep-seated belief, you and I have talked about this before, that actually what makes us human is a detriment to performance. And that has turned out to be wholly false across all of the research studies.

• 1:14:08Adam Grant?

  Which is why there are more radiologists today than there were pre-AI.

• 1:14:12Brené Brown?

  Right.

• 1:14:12Speaker 03

  Technologists, God bless them, always leave the people out. You know, when the rise of internet and we're all old enough to remember this, you know, they were saying it's the death of bricks and mortar, but they forgot that human beings like to hunt and gather and we like to go shopping, you know? And so the business model of bricks and mortar is different. That's a numbers game, but we like to go shopping. And you saw these stores that Amazon put up that are now going away because there's no people in them. And like, we would rather go to a supermarket and ask the kid who's stocking the shelves, like, hey, where's the mustard? Than we would just like pull out our phone and look up mustard. We want that human interaction. You know, Whole Foods had a thing where you could do a palm reader, like at the checkout.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  And all you do is do your palm, it connects to your Amazon account, gives you your discounts that you're supposed to get, connects with your credit card, and you just pay. And it's great and wonderful, and they got rid of all of them because of low adoption. And people still stand in line for a human being checkout where we could all could just go to the auto checkout, but we don't, we don't. We like human interaction. And going back to the radiologist, medicine is not just about data. Medicine is human. That's my life you're talking about. And we always complain about the doctor that has a terrible bedside manner. Well, imagine having a doctor with no bedside manner, right? Where here's the data, here's the prescription, go. You know, you want the compassion, you want the doctor that cares. You know, you want the customer service agent that cares. You want to feel that somebody cares about you.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  A human being cares about me. I feel seen and heard. And that is irreplaceable by technology. So technology living alongside the human being, we all love that. But these grand prediction of replacement, none of us want that. That leads, if you want any prediction, I'll make one prediction about the adoption of AI. If it goes according to what the technologists and the AI zealots say, my prediction is you will see massive increases over the course of the next 10 years of depression, anxiety, and suicide. Massive rates of suicide going up. Why? Because you took the people away from social animals. And we're completely forgetting that it's not making our lives easy. What it's doing is making us more productive, which means there's going to be greater demands in our time. So I have a friend who's a photographer.

• 1:16:23Speaker 03

  So when she takes, she does a photo shoot, then she does retouching for the client. She's using AI. Photoshop has amazing AI tools. She can do massive amounts more, much quicker, much better, much, much easier. I said, do you have more time? Isn't it better? Don't you love AI? She said, absolutely not. Now my clients want their deadlines shorter and they want more work. And now there's just an expectation, instead of doing, you know, 10 photographs in a week, I have to do 100 photographs in a week. So all it does is change the bar of expectation. But her workload, she's working exactly the same amount. She's just producing more. So I think, I think the, the, the one thing I would just be cautious of is like, human beings want human beings in our, in our lives. And it's totally fine to have technology help us, but it's not going to replace us. We will rebel against it.

• 1:17:06Speaker 03

  Or watch that suicide number go up.

• 1:17:09Brené Brown?

  And we're rebelling now. Look at the commencement addresses in the United States.

• 1:17:12Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Booing.

• 1:17:14Brené Brown?

  Where technologists took the stage and got booed by students who, we did, we did our last podcast on it. Like, why? I mean, we've been college professors. I'm going on year 30. Like, what people want is moral imagination.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  What connection and belonging. You want to feel seen and understood.

• 1:17:31Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  Everything we're talking about, you know, it's so funny when you're talking about it in a business context. People are like, that's mushy. That's not productive. But when you, as soon as you take it out of a business context, everyone's like, that's what I want. You know?

• 1:17:43Brené Brown?

  This is a good place to end. Thank y'all for coming and Simon, thanks for joining the Curiosity Shop. Thank y'all.

• 1:17:53Brené Brown?

  I loved our conversation. It was, it was fun. And I love the conversation from the folks in the room. What do you think, Adam?

• 1:18:00Adam Grant?

  Yeah, I'm still thinking about a few of the questions. We might have to do a follow up.

• 1:18:04Brené Brown?

  Oh, we should. That would be, that would be great. Um, just a reminder to y'all that we're going on hiatus, but stay on because we're going to give you five of our best kind of, um, Adam and I together, another one with me, Adam and Simon. Um, so stay on the feed. We'll be back July 30th. And if you want more information about Simon, including where you can find him, where you can follow him, where you can learn more, go to thecuriosity shop.com, our podcast website. And we will see you. Have a wonderful five week summer and we'll be back.

• 1:18:39Adam Grant?

  Can't wait.

• 1:18:41Brené Brown?

  The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to The Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app.

• 1:18:52Adam Grant?

  We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

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