Brené Brown: We're In A Spiritual Crisis! The Hidden Epidemic No One Wants To Admit!

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And let me tell you, this has not been easy because we went to some hard places. But I don't think we'll ever talk about anything more important than this. Because it's not fear that gets in the way of us being brave with our lives and our work. It's the armor that we reach for to self-protect when we're afraid, and how that armor moves us away from love, connection, and our values. And the hardest work is being aware of what is my armor when I'm afraid.

Is that automatic?

Oh, f no, it's a training.

So let's start with that then.

Brené Brown is an icon.

Whose world-leading research in shame, vulnerability, and connection

Has inspired companies like Pixar, Google, and the U.S. Special Forces

to build stronger leaders and help the everyday person unlock their full potential?

Ready?

Is vulnerability important?

It is if we want to be brave with our lives, but we were raised to believe that vulnerability is weakness. Like in my family, we were allowed anger, but sad was not an option. You needed to be tough. And so when I get scared, when I feel anxious, disappointed, I'm just angry. And so when you're raised without vulnerability, it'll put you in jeopardy. Like, you want to know what vulnerability is? Joy. Joy is so vulnerable that people choose to live disappointed rather than to get excited about something and risk getting sucker punched by disappointment.

Like, there is no courage without vulnerability, because courage is the willingness to show up and be all in when you cannot predict the outcome.

Wow, I've never thought about that before.

But you can develop skills.

Like, it's four steps to courage.

Yes, we've taken 165,000 people through this work that included how to build trust.

And I've heard about your marble jar theory. Could you explain to me what your marble jar look at how excited you are?

I do. So this is how we teach trust to the most senior leaders in Fortune 100 companies. It's awesome.

Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. Means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24 of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app.

Here's a promise I'm gonna make to you. I'm gonna do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're gonna deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're gonna continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you, Brené. In order to, um, understand all the work that you have done and the perspective that you have on the world, and also who you are as a anomaly in many respects.

I think it's probably important that I understand your earliest context, where you've come from, what shaped you.

I'm stuck on a a am I a am I an anomaly?

I th Of course, you're an anomaly. Of course, you're an anomaly. That that should be of no surprise to you. I mean, if you look at your outcomes, your outcomes are anomalous. So one would assume that there's some form, there's something that made you an anomaly.

I would say that I'm a fifth-generation Texan. I came from a fair amount of dysfunction. Parents doing the best they could with what they knew, both coming from really, really, really tough upbringings that included, you know, poverty, addiction, and so probably a lot of the stereotypes you would think about fifth-generation Texan tough. Don't cry. We were allowed a very small continuum of emotions were approval, you know, were approved, which were pissed off or okay. Like anger was okay, but no, you know, couldn't be sad really, or vulnerability was not a thing.

Vulnerability was weakness and scary and put you in jeopardy. I felt like a real outsider at home and in school, but I was really good at reading people, reading situations. I think my I think a therapist somewhere along the way said, Yes, that's hypervigilance. You're hypervigilant. You know, I can see everything around me and everything that's going on. I can connect things very quickly that other people don't see. And there was laughter, and there was love, but there was a ton of unpredictability.

I was gonna say, isn't that typically what creates hypervigilance is some kind of need to be that aware when you're young?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think yes. Being fun-loving was very valued in my family, and being tough. These were the values. These are these are, you know, on the parental scorecard. This is what got you an A. If you're fun, easy, you can, you know, shoot straight, spit far, fish well, like, really, drive fast. And so those things were very valued. Athleticism was very valued. Um, but those fun things could turn really hard very quickly.

There was a big pause there, four second pause as you.

Yeah, I could just picture it like it's fun until it's fun until you've got a parent eject ejected from a game for being so hard.

And that was your father? Oh, he was really hard then, if he was ejected from a game. There's a photo I saw of you and your siblings where you're clutching your siblings, and I think you referred to it as you could see there was a certain fear in your eyes. Do you know the photo I'm referring to?

Am I on a couch?

You were on a couch?

Like a yellow velour couch, like from the 70s? I think about that picture, I like that picture, but there's definitely. I definitely had a protector role as the oldest, I mean, code name Sister Superior. It was jokingly, but it wasn't joking. Like, if things got hard between my parents and they would get in volatile fights, I would go get all my siblings, put them in my room. I'd go downstairs and handle it, you know, like I was definitely the protector.

physically volatile fights, Um, on occasion, but more emotionally volatile. screaming and shouting, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,

and same with my parents.

yeah, just loud.

There was a background in my whole house, for my whole childhood, was just screaming.

There was a yeah, we had a lot of screaming. And there's a certain like, if you grew up with screaming, hearing screaming through a wall, you know that sound, do you know that sound?

Of course, yeah, my God, it was my whole childhood. What was that? Seven and so, hours a day of screaming?

yeah, and so, yeah, I'm sorry, because I don't like to hear that about your childhood, and I don't like to know that about my childhood. But there was a lot of screaming. And so I think hyper-vigilant, protective, responsible, with a dose of be very fucking careful, because I will protect my siblings.

And and how did that change your model of love as a young person? It must have been. Because I mean, I obviously feel the same way about about my situation. And um, I think the lesson I learned was that love was like a prison, because it was my mom doing the shouting and my dad was the prisoner and he wouldn't respond. So this you've got a woman shouting at him for six, seven hours a day, and him sat there like he's a like an inanimate object looking at the screen.

And I remember thinking, Oh, okay, so if I get in a relationship when I'm older, then I'm gonna be a prisoner to a woman. Okay, doesn't sound doesn't sound appealing. And if you move to a different room, she'd follow him. So I avoided relationships like the fucking plague. I did well until about 27.

And then what?

And then someone got over the wall in corrected some of the evidence.

They got over the wall.

Got over the wall somehow.

Yeah, Steve got over the wall. Damn it.

Yeah, but that's your partner, not me. Just context.

No, not, yeah, not you. Although you're doing a hell of a job right now. Um, you're like, you've crossed a piranha-filled moat that I like, um, but the drawbridge is like, I'm see, I'm just see, I'm gonna see my Steve, my Steve, definitely, definitely got over the wall. Um, but it was like Game, Recogn, Recogn, Game, Recognizes Game, he had a wall. Yeah, and so we had long conversations about our walls, and and slowly, through those conversations, we just those walls crumbled with each other.

And we've been together now for 38 years. Yeah, um, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, bar none, dude, nothing has been harder. When I started dating Steve, well, when we got married, six months after we got married, this is, you know, you, you said for you, love was gonna be being a prisoner. And having to just shut down to survive, right?

Run away.

Run away, right?

Don't confront it. No conversations, no.

No, no. Um, for me, six months after we were married, I went to go see a therapist and I said, I cannot do this. I've got to get out of this marriage. And we had dated off and on for seven years before we got married. And I said, I gotta get out. And she said, I could. This is hard. I I could see how this is not working. And I was like, I had a twinge of defensiveness about Steve, and I said, What do you mean?

And she said, He likes you so much more than you like you. It must be terrible. It's like, fuck you, man, you're fired. I was like, I am so high. I thought, what? That's what I do. So if you, if I'm gonna give you one of my tells, if I do a really high pitched, what that means, I'm, uh, that means I'm looking for my purse and I'm g. I know where the door is. Um, I, I, I just kept thinking, What, what do you mean?

He said. It's gotta. It's gotta be very comf uncomfortable to be with someone who sees you and really knows you and loves you so much when you have not found a way to see you and love you so much. It's gotta be disconcerting. What an asshole man, like, Wow. And it was true. I had to get to this point where I was like, I maybe I should like me as much as he likes me. And then make a better decision about whether this is gonna work or not.

When you grow up and pissed off or shut down are your two emotional opportunities. Like the, you know, in Atlas of the Heart, I write about 87 emotions that I think are important to understand. Because the limits of our language are the limits of our world. When you have two buckets, then everything must go in those. And in fact, in our research over the last 15 years, we found the average person can accurately identify and name three emotions.

Happy, sad, pissed off. And so in my family, sad was not an option. That was weakness, so you could be pissed or okay. So when I get scared, when I feel grief, when I'm anxious, when I feel disappointment, when I feel anguish, I'm just angry.

There's two sort of outstanding question marks in my head, and they might be the same answer. But it's y. You said earlier on that you didn't fit in at school or at home, and I didn't understand why you didn't fit in at school at or at home. And then the other thing that's still a question mark in my head is the therapist said to you that you, well, asserted that you didn't like yourself as much as he liked you, and I wasn't clear on what made you not like yourself.

I wanted out of where I was raised. I wanted to leave everything I knew, and so I always felt like an outsider. I didn't, didn't wanna do. I mean, I wasn't popular, I wasn't dating a quarterback. That was a dream that my my parents and their parents and their parents, you know, you were, you were a bear cadet, and you dated a quarterback and you got a farm. So at I felt not cute, not popular, not understood, and then at home, I wasn't easy going.

I was an I was anxious and and always ready.

And the point about self-esteem, which the therapist sort of highlighted about not liking oneself as much as Steve liked you. Where did that come from? Or is that related in some way?

Oh, cause my parents parented with a very big heaping dose of shame.

Oh, okay. So if you accomplish something or you don't accomplish something, you're made to feel bad about it.

Yeah, and a ton of it was about appearance, being fun. Appearance. Yeah, yeah, like, you know, big blonde hair with hot rollers. The higher the hair, the closer to God. You needed to be tough and strong and throw on a baseball cap and get somewhere really quick, low maintenance, and you needed to be a beauty pageant queen.

Do you remember them ever being critical of your appearance in a way that has stayed with you?

Oh, me, God, yes. I mean, I think not just them. I mean, like, I think having young girls and young women keeping them from developing threats to their self-esteem is not just a parental thing. It's like it's like asking them not to breathe because the air's poison. Like, it's like every message from everywhere, you know, the fashion magazines, you'd read them, and you think, Wow, I don't, I don't look like this. How am I gonna look like this, you know?

And you'd lather yourself up with baby oil and you'd put lemon juice in your hair, you'd put tinfoil under your chin, get as much sun cancer as you could, cause we didn't know, you know, like, y, you'd. We all wore jeans that you had to put on with pliers with for the zipper, cause they were so tight. Appearance mattered. This is Texas, baby.

You go off to university eventually, and not a straight line, but eventually you get into university.

Not a straight line. That's the sweetest thing you've said to me. Um, I graduated from college when I was twenty-nine.

Wow, so you become a research professor in 2001, and you've been a research professor and many more things, um, ever since then. You get your phD. in social work at the University of Houston, Texas, between 96 and 2002. And really, for the last couple of decades, you've focused on research, understanding people. Obviously, there's so many more strings to your bow in terms of like media and podcasting and authorship. But over those since 2001, we're in 2025 now, just over two decades.

My first question is, um, how has your perspective on how has the world changed in those last two decades, in your view?

Union's would say, before any great progression, there is a regression. And I think that when you look at various admin, I know you have a very global audience. When you look at administrations, political administrations across the world, and you look at how power is being used right now, it will tell you a lot about what they're afraid of. But what is that face? We're gonna have to pause it.

I was thinking about a conversation I had recently with my my best friends. It must have been this weekend. Yeah, it was this weekend because it was my friend's birthday in Manchester, in the UK, so we flew in. Um, and we had a conversation about how the leading political narrative at the moment. This might be adjacent to what you were saying, but it's the way I interpreted it. The leading political narrative at the moment that seems to be getting people elected is if you say those people with that skin color are the reason for the pain and anguish in your life.

It's actually the people below you that are coming over the border or crossing the the English Channel on dinghies that are ruining your life. And it seems to be like a really effective narrative to to earn power, both in the US and the UK. Like the central narrative that is swaying elections, it seems at the moment in the UK and the US is those brown people on that boat, or CR coming over the border are the reason for the pain in your life.

And it seems to work, and that seems to be the thing getting power. So that's kinda what ran through my head when I heard this idea of like, power and what you're scared of. I actually think I inverted it to if I can tell you what to be scared of, or find the thing you might be scared of, or whatever, then I get power. But maybe it goes the other way too.

I don't think we'll ever talk about anything more important than this, to be honest with you. That's why I thought your response was so interesting, cause you, you, you may. If I was gonna like, do the text box above your face, it would've said, Well, holy shit, that's interesting. Because when when you use power, especially power over, cause there's multiple kinds of power, there's power within, too, and power within. So people that use power within too and power within work from a belief system that's completely different.

We believe that power is infinite and can grow when shared. People who use power over work from a belief system that power is finite, like pizza. And if I give you any, I have a deficit. So it's gotta be hoarded and protected and not shared. Power over is really important to understand, because when people are using power over, they're definitely letting you know what they're afraid of, because that's what they're focused on and they're tapping into.

And I think this is absolutely true. If you give people someone to dislike and blame for their pain, and they look different than the people who are voting, you will win a hundred times out of a hundred. If you say, I see your pain, I can tell you exactly the source of it, and I can fix this for you. And the source of it is gonna be easy to see. You're not gonna see yourself in them.

So that narrative that you are talking about, it is a full circle. People in power use power to address issues that they're afraid of. They gain power by leveraging fear and giving people an enemy. That's how this works. It works like this. I mean, I spend 95% of my time in organizations working with C-suite leaders, senior leaders. This this is how it works in organizations, how it works in political, you know, how it works in faith communities.

This is how power works in general. So power over is a very specific kind of power, and it's especially dangerous because in order to maintain it, you have to engage in periodic bouts of cruelty towards vulnerable populations. You have to remind people what you're capable of.

So there's four types of power you you speak about in, um,

Damn, you have that in your notes?

in strong ground, yes. Why are you surprised?

I don't know.

There's four types of power and leadership you speak about. There's the power over, which is controlling or exploiting others, power with finding common ground and building collective strength, power to, which is giving others agency and recognizing their potential, and power within, which is honoring differences and self-worth. So as a leader of a business, if I want to be successful, are you telling me that I need to stay away from power over and adopt another power within this list of four?

Yeah, I think what we've seen be very successful over time is power with, power to, and power within. So collaborative power, co-creation power, self-awareness, metacognition, knowing yourself, knowing how you think and learn, so power with and power to. Power over is excruciatingly difficult to maintain. We're not neurobiologically hardwired to stay in fear for very long. So if I work for y, if I work for you, and you're using power over to lead me, you're threatening me with my job, you're threatening me with consequences, you're threatening me with demotion.

One of two things is gonna happen for me neurobiologically, I am either going to just become numb to it. It's not, it's not gonna be able, you're not gonna maintain, I can't maintain that constant level of fear. It's just too demanding, just physically demanding. Or I might get hyper normalized. I might just like, this is, this is what I work in. This is like crazy. This is it, you know? But every now and then, you're gonna have to do something that demonstrates to me how chaotic and cruel you can actually be.

Like, you're gonna have to engage in periodic acts of cruelty to remind me that the fear is real and to put me back in it. And so one of the things you're seeing right now, I mean, like, we in in the US. The deportation immigration issues. This is not a president that has, you know, tightened his belt on immigration more than other previous presidents. But we've never seen masked people grabbing people off the street while children hold onto their legs, screaming, Mom, mom, mom.

We've, we've never seen that before, right? But we've had other presidents. Probably exceed the deportation numbers that we're seeing, but we've never seen that level of cruelty and display. That is a real display of cruelty as a reminder of who who holds power and who does not.

It also makes me think of relationships when you're talking about, you know, how people are controlled with power over. A lot of people talk about, like sort of narcissistic relationships or abusive relationships where they don't feel like they can leave, or, you know, they don't leave, and they end up becoming acclimatized to the treatment.

I'm a big systems theory thing, I'm a systems theory person. I think in systems theory, I was trained in systems theory. I think if you don't understand systems, systems theory, at least if you're leading an organization right now, you're gonna fall behind. Because the complexity inside and outside of organizations is such that we need a framework to understand how all of these individual systems are bumping up against each other. Like, you've, you probably bump up against a hundred systems a day, right?

And so what I would imagine the story I would make up about your success, cause this is true of any systems theory, is in order for systems to thrive and grow, they have to keep permeable boundaries, meaning they have to allow feedback to flow in and out from other systems to be aware. So I'm just gonna give you a very g good example. I'm very excited about the female, the experts you had on around menopause, women's life.

I mean, I'm so excited about that. Like, just to be honest with you, like, Mary Claire is my doctor.

oh, really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Dr. Haver. So, um, what is interesting is the systems that just that podcast bumps up against, you know, and the systems that would be sending feedback that, hey, this is not for me. I'm not clicking on this. I I've shared that first one with 100 people, you know, because there's a reality to our lives that is uncomfortable for people. But those are your partners and your moms and your, you know, and your bosses, and it's real.

And I can guarantee you if this was happening with the dudes, like it'd be a G bajillion dollar, whatever, over 1 trillion, gajillion, I don't know. Um, but just thinking about that one podcast and the systems that you're touching, health, women's issues, um, family systems are affected. Like that podcast hits 20 systems that I can think of in my head right now. The divorce rates of people of women in their 50s and 60s. I mean, right, yes or no, right?

So a healthy system has permeable boundaries, meaning feedback is flowing in and out all the time. What happens when the world gets complex is we start not wanting the feedback. The complexity is too big, so we start shutting down those permeable boundaries. Well, what happens to a system where the boundaries are no longer permeable? It atrophies, and in the pa, in the process of atrophying, the system becomes self-referencing. Are we good? We great. Are we right?

We're right. Are we on target? We're on target. Because the boundaries of the system is are no longer craving outside feedback, even when it's tough. And in businesses today, the geopolitical realities, the market changes, AI, I mean, it's crazy. And so our predisposition to shut down uncertainty and complexity is the biggest threat to the systems in which we work and live. The self-protect, close the wall, put up the drawbridge, fill the moat with piranhas. We just don't have that luxury.

We've got to keep the the boundaries permeable. We've got to keep learning, guessing, unlearning, relearning.

One of the added complexities is the rise in algorithms. And and actually, when I think about algorithms that are powered by AI, they're going to be even better at knowing what you want to see. So that you spend time, so that you consume more adverts, which means probably the best thing to show me is either something really fearful or just to confirm what I already believe. An algorithm that was doing the opposite probably wouldn't be an enjoyable experience for the average human brain.

It would cause too much dissonance, too much discomfort.

But great for democracy.

Great, yeah, fantastic, but terrible for for running a business and selling ads. So any company that takes that approach will go bankrupt. This is why TikTok, I think, has been so successful, is the algorithm is, uh, I don't use TikTok, so I have a TikTok account, I don't have the app on my phone. But um, from what I hear is it's so unbelievably addictive. People describe it to me and they're like, Oh my god, it's so addictive.

But this shit is the devil.

Yeah, yeah, but it's people are driven by incentives, right? And your your share price is gonna tumble, and you're gonna be fired, and you're gonna lose your, your status and your power if you don't do that. I'm playing devil's advocate, obviously, I'm not

No, I mean, but I I. No, I agree. What do you think the solution is? And what responsibility do the bros who run these tech platforms have?

it's complicated.

Oh, I agree, I'm not looking for an easy answer. Go ahead, hit me.

Well, and I just think it's complicated because what, what an objective party would say, who's just looking at the incentives of these groups of people, is if they don't do it, someone will. So even with AI now, like, you know what I mean? I'm like, I've sat with all these experts and I keep hitting up against this wall, which is okay. If we just banned people in the United States from pursuing this super intelligence strategy, then Russia and China get there first, then the United States, unfortunately, are going to end up being China's French bulldog.

And actually, I can't refute that. I go, No, you're right, because we'd you'd have to literally at least the technology off them. It would be so powerful and s give such an economic advantage that you will have to lease it off China. So, okay, I guess Sam Altman does need to crack on, or else, so it's complicated.

I mean, this is where I end up every time.

I mean, look what happened with TikTok. China made an algorithm, it was unbelievably addictive, the United States have just had to buy it off them. Because they were scared that the data was gonna be used against the United States. The prime example, like, China were like, fuck it, we don't care. Yeah, and they made an unbelievable algorithm called TikTok, which just captivate, you know, the youth are all just, I can use in their brain, so I don't know, I don't know.

It's tough, it's rough. Spiritual crisis.

Yeah, I mean, you just laid it out, you just laid it out. We're emotionally dysregulated, we're distrustful of each other, we don't trust ourselves very much, and we're disconnected. I can't give up on people, though. I'm not built that way. Like, I just believe that we are more good than greedy. You know, I, I was in conversation with Trevor Noah at an event, and I mentioned

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As a founder building a business when I was in my early 20s, I think I always had a deep sense of imposter syndrome because there was something that I wasn't good at. And that thing was finances. Finance and understanding your financial position as a small business is the great enabler of all of your dreams. I was running from it until I discovered a platform called zero. zero is an accounting and financial management platform specifically for small businesses, and it brings accounting, payments, payroll and analytics all into one place, even for people that don't love doing finances.

zero wants to do the financial work for you, but its core ambition is to go beyond keeping the financial record because zero wants to help you understand what's happening in your business. And increasingly, and this is maybe the most important thing, is help you make decisions. Finally, we have a partner who can enable us in a simple way for those people that are both left brain or right brain and enable our dreams. You can learn more about zero by going to zero dot com.

Thank you to zero, thank you for sponsoring this podcast, but also thank you for helping me to scale my business as somebody that quite frankly has never loved finances that much.

term that I I was really excited about, and he challenged me on it. And I said, I think what we need is cognitive sovereignty. We need to wrestle control away from the algorithms and decide what we consume, what we read, how we think, think critically. We need to think about our attention and our focus as commodities that people are after, because they're after them, right? He had an interesting point, though. He always has interesting points, don't you think?

It's so tough to to talk to Trevor because he's so he's always got an interesting point.

He's always got an interesting point, damn it. Um, and he's funny, but he said, No, we need less cognitive sovereignty, Brené. And I'm like, What do you mean? He goes, Everything's about the for you page, everything's for you. We need communal sovereignty. He's like, you know, the whole problem is that your for you page is completely sovereign. Like you, intellectually and spiritually. I'm, I'm, I'm paraphrasing what he said. I'm sure it was like funnier and better looking, but um, but he, he, and then I was trying to think about, like, I guess maybe that's not the right term, but let me let me tell you what scares me the most.

I'm in, I'm in some weird rooms because of the nature of my job. I'm in rooms where the people who run these platforms and own and, you know, that own the CEOs of these business and the founders are in these rooms. And I hear them talking, and I hear things that are so misaligned that it panics me. So I hear someone say, Hey, you know, tech billionaire, what? What should my kids study? I'm worried for my kids.

Well, they should study coding, physics, you know? And then 5 minutes later, as if that answer didn't happen, someone will say, To what do you attribute your success? I mean, deeply when you think about it, and the same person will say, My deep reading of philosophy and the Stoics. And so then I'm thinking to myself, Well, which is it, dude? And then I then I start to extrapolate from there and wonder if there is a thinking class that's emerging where they're like, we're gonna read philosophy and we're gonna read the liberal arts and we're gonna study history.

And the rest of you just keep scrolling. Don't worry about the big words. We'll, we'll handle all the big words for you. Like, it's like when they asked Steve Jobs, Boy, your kids must love the iPad. Steve Jobs said, My kids don't have an iPad. And then his biographer, who spent time with his family, said he wasn't kidding. There's no technology at dinner, they're talking about art and history. The hardest chapter I've ever written in my life of any book was the chapter on grounded confidence and strong ground.

What is the set of skill sets and mindsets that I think we're going to need to future-ready and future-proof ourselves to be leaders moving forward? And I think what was hard about it was the complexity of it was probably a combination of 30 different mindsets and skill sets. And when I was done, you know, for commercial reasons, someone on my team immediately said, Geez, this is like a if you can train people in these things, this is really, this is like really important.

And the first thing I thought was, fuck that, my kids. Train train Schmrain. Yeah, I get it, it's important. Like we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll develop some instrumentation and measure it, we'll train folks in it. I think it's trainable, it's teachable, it's measurable. But really, I want this for my kids. I want my kids to know systems thinking. I want my kids to know anticipatory thinking, situational awareness, temporal awareness. I want my kids to have this complex set of skills.

Do I want them to have jobs one day where all they're worried about is shareholder value? Really, no. I want them to own their mind, own their intellect, own their attention, and own their focus. I want them to read. I want them to understand history. I want them to develop pattern recognition skills, because these are the skills of the future. I want them to be able to hold the tension of nuance and paradox when everything in their brain is saying pick one, pick one, reconcile.

I'm uncomfortable. pick one, reconcile. I'm uncomfortable. That's neurobiology.

In those twen, in those 20 years of your 20 plus years of your career, what have you been exposed to from a 30,000 foot perspective? Like, what, what are the the wide range of reference points that you draw upon to be the person that you are today? And, you know, because you've had, it feels like you've got a very wide range of references. Clearly, you know, you're someone that cares a lot about history. That comes through in your answers.

But I'm wondering, in your career, like, what are, what are the experiences that you've had? Have you been working directly with patients? Is it ACA academic reference points you're drawing upon?

Yeah, um, no one's ever asked me this, which I've been grateful that no one's asked me. Um, so what a pain in the ass, but um, because no one's gonna like the answer.

I'm excited by the answer now.

Everything, like every single thing. Um, yes, I, you know, I love history. Yes, I read academic papers all the time. Yes, I wake up in the morning and I read because of the nature of my work, I read the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, the Financial Times. Like, I, yeah, I mean, I, I, I read an a lot. But there's a chapter in the book that was one of my favorite to write on the transitions home from work.

And how, how, how tough they are. And how, if you're like me, you've had a very frustrated partner look at you more than once in your life and say, Hey, I know it was stressful. I don't work for you. Change gears. Have you ever had that?

no comment.

No comment? Yeah, I use a metaphor in that book, in this chapter, of a lock. And how did that come to me? Because I was reading the book series The Rivers of London, and in that book series, there are two gods of the Thames. And the Teddington lock is where, right outside of London, in Teddington, is where custody changes for them. So I went to the Teddington lock because I was interested. I met the lock master that runs the lock.

She gave me a three-hour lesson that day. We let narrowboats through the Thames. I learned how a lock works, and that's the metaphor that I use to talk about the research on. What do we do when we spend all day locking in, hyper-focused, compartmentalizing, getting shit done? And then, instead of going home to our partner, when we get home, we spend 30 minutes in the garage on TikTok because we can't bear to go in. So why do we do that?

Because we need a lock through period. We need time to go into a chamber, metaphorically, change levels, let go of where we were, lower ourselves to the rhythm of what we're doing now. Cognitively, we would call it cognitive and domain shifting, and we need time. So I looked at the lock master at, Uh, Teddington and said, This shit is taking a long time. Can we get this chamber filled up a little bit quicker? And she said, Locking through takes what locking through takes.

If you rush it, you risk capsizing. We get home and then we walk in the back door, and it's like, I can't find my shin guards. I think I left them on the pitch. Where are my goggles, mom? Oh my god, you didn't sign the permission slip. I had to sneak into the zoo, you know, and you're like, take me back to work, where I'm the boss of everything, you know? So where do I learn those things?

Well, cognitive and domain shifting come out of psychology. Gemma, the lock master at Teddington, there's wisdom everywhere. I put it together through stories and metaphors. I mean, another thing in the book, I mean, I'm standing on the sideline at DKR, the University of Texas Longhorn football stadium, um, and I'm standing with Emanuel Acho. Do you know Manuel? Yeah, he's great, he, he played for the Longhorns, he played for the NFL, now he's a writer. So I'm standing there and we're watching the game and I look at him.

I go, How would you define pocket presence? And pocket presence is an American football term. So do you know American football? Okay, so I'm a quarterback. I'm gonna get the ball. I have to throw the ball or run the ball or hand off the ball to get the ball down the pitch, down the field, right? And when when the ball is snapped and the ball is put into motion, there's about twelve to 1400 pounds of really angry people trying to drive me into the ground.

The people that are protecting me from those defensive guys are called my offensive line. And the way they do it is they form a pocket around the quarterback, and the quarterback uses that time to decide, where am I gonna throw the ball? Am I gonna run the ball? And pocket presence is the ability of a quarterback to use the on average 2.8 to three seconds he has to read the field, understand where the defenders are, and make a decision.

And so when I asked Emmanuel Acho, How would you define pocket presence? he said, And I want you to think about this in terms of your business, the ability to read the field without seeing all of it and trusting your team well enough to make a move, even though you can't see everything. What are the skill sets you need right there? One temporal awareness. You gotta know how much time you have to get rid of that ball and get it down the field.

They they say Tom Brady, who played for the Patriots, is any of this ringing a bell?

Yeah, that name sounds.

Great Tom Brady. They said his pocket presence was so good he could tell where his offensive linemen were by the vibrations through his his cleats on the field. So temporal awareness, situational awareness, what's going on, anticipatory awareness. Think about a great football player, right? Think about Mosala. You don't kick the ball to where the striker is, you kick the ball to where the striker is gonna be. So anticipatory and situational awareness, right? Pattern recognition. Have I been in this situation before?

Do I know how, you know, where's the goalie in the cage? Where are they standing right now? Like, and so I'll take my inspiration from sports all the time, which is why there's so many sports metaphors, right? I think there's not a better sports, a better metaphor to describe work right now than Premier League football.

One of the things that, um, perhaps is is throughout your work, is this idea of connection. I did a mushroom, I did magic mushrooms with my girlfriend a couple of years ago, first time I've ever done it. And, um, the message that came through for me was it was about connection. And that word has had a fond place in my heart ever since as being really, really important. And we live in a society that's more lonely than ever before, more disconnected in many ways, as you describe, or you're referencing the spiritual crisis that we're living in.

This word connection, what does that mean? Does it mean, on an individual basis? Does it mean me having friends and relationships? Is that connection? Is that the type of connection I should be looking for? Or does it need? Do I need to like? Do you think people need to ladder up further to their city, their town, their world, to the community, to something bigger? God, what? What does connection mean in this context?

Yes, I think the answer to that question is yes. We're neuro neurobiologically hardwired to be in connection with other people, and in the absence of connection, there's always suffering, always suffering in the absence of connection. So I think, I mean, just how we're built, mirror neurons, you know, our ability to sync up neurobiologically when we feel connected and are hearing each other. So, to me, connection is the ability to be in a relationship where we can both give and receive, where we feel seen, heard, believed, valued.

That is, that human connection is really important on a micro level, one on one with other human beings. I think a sense of belonging and a sense of place, and I don't know that that necessarily needs to be a location, but a sense of being a part of something bigger than you, I think, is also important. So love and belonging, connection, irreducible needs. I I think spirituality, I define spirituality is being inextricably connected to other people by something bigger than us.

Maybe that's love, maybe that's God, maybe that's fishing. Like I, I, you know, it's different for other people. For me, I'm faith is one of my values, and I'm a a pretty serious God person. Um, I'm a pretty deep person of faith. I guess I would ask somebody, what is that thing that transcends difference, political difference, ideological difference, race, gender, you know, belief systems, class? What is it that brings you to a common humanity place? Like, for me, it's God.

That's a it's a big challenge, cause like I, I try to work from an ethos where I try to find God in the face of everybody that I meet, even if I wanna punch you in the throat. I try to like, like, like, that's my thing. In some way, I'm connected to you, whether I like it or not, and whether I like you or not.

And when you talk about belonging, it's interesting in your book, Braving the Wilderness, which I think, uh, the question is kind of summed up by the subtitle, Yeah, the quest for true belonging and the courage to stand alone. This appears to be a dichotomy or a contradiction to belong, but also to stand alone. Why are both of these important? Why is it important to belong? What does that mean? And and why is it also important to stand alone?

Cause I don't think you can truly belong to anything or any or or any group if you don't belong to yourself first. True belonging requires us to be who we are, not to change who we are. That's fitting in. Fitting in is the greatest threat to belonging, which takes us both back to our childhoods, right? Yeah, fit in, fit in, fit in, fit in. The problem is that that chameleon kind of skill set means that in order to fit in, the first person you betray is yourself.

We've got to be able to stand alone, and that's what's happening right now in the world. I mean, if I, if I look back at Braving the Wilderness, that was maybe the only prophetic book that I think I've ever written. Like that, like, like that, I don't think I'm prophet like, but man, did I call what was happening in terms of the big sort into ideological bunkers where we are gonna get to a place where I don't even know you, but I'm gonna call you friend because we hate the same people.

And you over there, I actually do love you. You're a family member of mine, but I'm not, you know, because we don't believe in the same things. You have no meaning in my life. Like, it's like we have gotten to the place where ideological bunkers, and those are so dangerous, cause here you and I, like, let's say, let's say that we have the same belief around immigration. Um, so we're gonna flip this table over and we're gonna get behind it in our ideological bunker, and we're gonna be like, Yeah, we're right, and these guys are fucking crazy and thug y'all, you know?

And then one day, I'm gonna turn to you and say, You know, one thing I'm wondering about is how are we gonna solve the problem with the folks coming over in the dinghies from France? Cause I don't think we're gonna be able to go without solving it because we do have an employment issue and a housing crisis. And then you go, you're out. My my care for you, my connection with you, completely dependent on you not questioning anything we agreed to back here.

Well, that's counterfeit connection. What's real connection? Like, I gotta know what's going on in your mind, cause your face is like, we gotta play poker te. We have to put that on our agenda. What are you thinking?

I was just thinking about being a podcaster, and I sit here with all types of people. So I had Kamala Harris sat here, uh, three or four days ago, and I'll have someone on the right sat here. And then I'll have. We had Michelle Obama, then I'll have Jordan Peterson, then I'll have the opposite of whatever Jordan Peterson is. And I was just thinking about how, um, how that's also kind of made me feel like I don't belong, because that is quite rare.

There's probably not a podcast on earth that has had both Michelle Obama and Jordan Peterson. Yeah, and then Kamala Harris after that. Like, I didn't manage to scare Michelle off, I didn't scare Jordan off. And so you get, you kinda get attacked from both sides.

oh, I mean, look, if you're not, if you're not getting threatening shit from the far here, the far left or the far right. If you're not getting both, you're not doing your job. Amen, yeah, Period. but it's tough, because, Oh God, it is heartbreaking. It will break your heart, and it will remind you of why standing alone is on the front of that book. Because what it will do, I is it is winnow the right word, it will narrow your belonging, your true belonging, down to a very few people.

yeah, I mean, I completely understand how it happens that a podcaster like me will end up picking a side because there is safety in numbers.

Well, cause there's an ideological bunker, cause we flipped the table over.

100 at any point, you know, when the left attacks you, I'm like, Wow, the right looks pretty good. When the right attacks you, you go, Oh, the left looks pretty good. Because standing in the in no man's land is it's not the place you wanna be. I know I'm never gonna succeed in this, like I know I'm never gonna succeed in converting people, converting people to be nuanced, and to not get viscerally angry when I have someone on the show who's on the right, or viscerally angry when I have someone on the show who's on the left.

I'm already aware that when the Kamala episode comes out, it's just gonna be a bunch of people that didn't listen. And within the first 3 minutes, the comment section is just gonna be fuck. And I'm like, I, I. Part of me is trying to win that war with my audience, where they too will just listen. And I know that you don't agree with a person, but can you just listen? Cause that's what I do, and it's not some act I'm putting on.

It's not like I walk out there and I start, but I, I'm right wing in my kitchen or left wing in my kitchen. Genuinely, the brain way my brain works is, oh, I see this, this good in this individual. And then I meet someone else who's on the other side and they say, Oh, there's a couple of points of good that I agree. A part agree with them on this, that's how I am, and it feels so weird.

Because when you go on the internet, you don't find yourself being compelled by either side entirely.

no, no, and I think it's really confusing, and the only limit I have really is I am not probably going to have a conversation with you. If your beliefs question my humanity, that that's gonna be my line, that that's gonna be, that's gonna be. The line for me is going to be if you're cruel or name cally, or if your core beliefs about who I am or who other people are are dehumanizing. I, I, I can't, I can't that I can't do, because now I've betrayed myself in order to make a political point about nuance.

Because, uh, that, because, you know, dehumanization is a really interesting and hard thing. When you study, when you look at the research of people who study dehumanization, and you. T we talked about earlier with the with immigrant populations, there is a circle of moral inclusion. We are not built, we are not hardwired to hurt each other, to kill each other, assault, rape, beat. It's not we're not wired for it, actually. So in order to do that, you, you've got a person here inside your moral inclusion.

In order to be okay with that, you've got to push them outside of moral inclusion. To be morally excluded from somebody you see as human and worthy of moral inclusion. And the first step to moral exclusion, moving people out of a safety zone where you don't do horrible things to them. The first way to move people out is language. Throughout history, as long as people have lived, so you hear people in this administration calling, uh, a community of immigrants, an infestation.

The same way we would talk about animals or rats, you know? And so my only limit to hard conversation is if you're operating from an ideology where women are dogs, immigrants are illegals, you know, if you're operating from that place of moral exclusion, you are too dangerous for me. But other than that, I'd probably be willing to have a conversation with anyone, but I can understand why people pick sides. I tell you what, it is lonely.

yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's nice to hear, though. It's really nice to hear that, that that is, um, yeah. We've talked about it quite a lot, me and Jack, um, who's been producing this show since the very beginning? Uh, we've. We've talked a lot about how we understand the temptation to pick a side. And actually, one of the greatest compliments a journalist has ever given me is they wrote in the article, and this wasn't a journalist that liked me.

They just said, Um, we're unable to ascertain which political party he is part of. I thought that was a great compliment because I mean, it means that

that's, that's a journal, that's a journalistic ethos.

I think they would want to pin me down and say he's fucking. They'd love to say I'm right wing or something else. But they said, Um, in a not very nice piece they'd written about me or whatever, they said that he. We are unable to figure out what side he's part of. And I think that's a compliment because it's it's true, and I think it allows me to do my job better. That I don't have too many preconceptions when I meet people, I try and meet people for the first time, which I enjoy.

I think you're pretty good at that, cause you are insatiably curious. It's it's lovely and terrible.

Why terrible? It's terrible for an avoidant. I found this out recently. I've known it my whole life, but I found that out recently. Cause I had a conversation. If someone's, I think if someone's uncomfortable with vulnerability, then I'm like, the fucking worst.

You are, which is interesting, cause I don't think she was super vulnerable.

Oh, really. Hm, maybe not. carefully optimistic, vulnerable, Yeah, that's probably it.

like, like, you're co. You're cognitively a believer and trying to move the rest of you to it. You've got the journalistic ethos of equal opportunity, insatiable, curious guy, right? What do you think? The responsibility is of someone who has a platform to vet or understand the credibility, especially when it comes to science or those kind of things of what their guest is saying.

I think that we w the school of podcasters haven't really. We don't have the um, the ex, the training that journalists do, so we're almost catching up in that regard, especially if you become a big podcaster. Because you're kind of held, you're held at in a different level. So more recently, one of the things we do is we we've hired, I mean, this recently, it was a year and a half ago, we hired a PhD. who does exactly that.

Who? After this comes out, will go through everything that you said and then put on the screen things that were not within scientific consensus.

But that in itself is a decision.

Yeah, yeah, it is a decision.

It's not a choice without consequence either.

No, some people don't like it.

What led you to that choice?

When your podcast reaches lots of people, you're forced, it's kind of going goes to what I said earlier about the political stuff. You're forced to really get clear on what you believe and like, what matters to you? And one of the things that matters to me is that the stuff we put into the world, we feel like it's helping people, even if it's not nice. And it kind of goes to something that I read in your work, which is like, our objective isn't to be nice, it's to be kind.

And so, for example, my convers, the conversations we have about AI. Like, I'm well aware that that's not gonna necessarily make you feel great. But I think the avoidance of discomfort in in through history oh God, hasn't led to great places. So, like, if you think there's a bus coming, I can, you know, it's, I can pretend there isn't. But if I think that there might be a bus coming, and if if experts and are telling me there's a bus coming, I think we should have a conversation about the bus coming.

And actually, me having that conversation, I get messages all the time, which is like, please stop talking about this subject, it doesn't make me feel good. I'm very anchored to like, what my my, my job is here, and I think it's we can push people further towards, uh, we can progress, we can create progress through honest conversations. So when the podcast got bigger and you get more and more, you get attacked more for any any of your guests that you have on, you have to get clear on what matters to you and what your job is.

And so one of the things I thought is actually when we have these conversations, I want them to be as accurate as they possibly can be. It's for the listener who might be confused, cause it's a confusing world in this new world of democratized certain. ME media. So we do that.

I really respect that. I just wanna say, um, I don't think that that choice is the easy choice.

What is the easy choice? Do you think?

The easy choice is I'm gonna let you say whatever you want, and I'll let my listeners sort out if it's real or not. And I'll take no responsibility for the credibility or the facts that are being presented. Um, what I think is interesting about what you're doing is it just seems like a very solid approach. Where I'm a big believer in science, you know, I'm married to a physician, I'm a social scientist, like, I'm, I'm. I'm not gonna be the golden child of this administration when it comes to science, for sure.

Like, I have a I love science shirt that I wear with a DNA scarf, so like, I'm, I'm like, I'm very real about that. I also don't think that everything that we see that is projected as peer reviewed clinical trial, you know, I think challenges to that system are also important. I think science cannot be a self referencing system any more than any other system can be. So to have people that have different opinions or new opinions on.

But to let your listeners or your viewers know that this is not an opinion where there's a lot of data collected, or that this is a controversial opinion is respecting people's cognitive self determination. I I just think it's a it's. It's an interesting way to do it. I just I. I think I launched the podcast and it became very big during Covid. oh, gotcha, yeah, And so Houston is home to the largest

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Center in the world, like in the world. And I live in the medical center area. In the beginning, there were just, you know, it just there never stopped being funerals for physicians and people working on Covid. And so to hear on podcasts that it doesn't exist, or that you can use, you know, Windex, or, you know, like, simple shit like that. I, I just started to, and then I got into a little dust up around it in my own situation.

And so I'm always interested as we enter this world in platform and podcast responsibility.

it is a. It's a slippery slope and it's, um, Very, and there's no, there's no perfect outcome. Like you don't wanna go too far either way, right? You don't wanna like, Oh fuck, the government get involved and tell you what truth is, or. But you also don't wanna stray into, um, conspiracy land and, um, away from science, because, you know,

There are things that are knowable,

yeah, there are things that are knowable, but yeah,

but I don't know I. I. I just think it's an interesting question for this time, and I think it's an interesting question. When you have a platform that's powerful and I think if you're doing the best you can to make decisions based, what? What is the question that drives your decision making? for me, No, like, just in general, oh, general, but yeah, I got yours, you want, you want to, you wanna help your listeners, and you want to do good.

That's a different thing than downloads.

you can do both. You can do both, Yeah,

but if you're only filter,

well, oh, you'd, you'd go for fucking con total conspiracy, yeah,

right, right, right. And so I just think it's, I just think it's an interesting question. I don't have an answer, I just know that it's an important question.

yeah, and you know what? I'll be honest, so as, um, I mean, we're not journalists, we're not journalists here, so we don't really understand the rigor. And I've got a lot of respect for journalists and the the effort they've put in to understand the journalistic method and all those things. I feel like we're somewhat catching up. We didn't. This podcast went from zero to 70 million people a month in four and a half years or something.

So, and we're just again holding none like me and Jack didn't run a podcast before, so I didn't run one before. And so we're now catching up. And part of the part of the way that we're shaped is with feedback, and you get lots of feedback. Don't have this person, I'll never speak to this person again, don't. And you kind of back that stuff off. But if there's any ever anything that actually feedback that actually is in contra contradiction, that does test your own mission or your own values, then you listen.

And you, well, you know, you can start to innovate. And one of the things that we thought was smart was to have the pop-ups on screen, which everybody is probably familiar with by now. And it's a balancing act. We don't wanna completely discredit everything that a guest has to say, but we also just wanna give context, and that's kind of context to what they're saying. If something's ridiculous, we'll just remove it, like if something's abs, we will not publish.

The episode is probably a better way of saying it. We had a couple of episodes where people said some guests said some things which were just absolutely fucking crazy. That you don't need a PhD to know that you can't exercise by lying on the ground. Like, uh, this one guest said to me, Uh, that you can build your muscles just by laying on your back or whatever and not doing anything. We just didn't publish the episode.

I can just say as a PhD. that I have attempted that

Yeah, yeah, it doesn't work.

and it was for Jack shit. I I think Jack can, I can, may have been I can be

pointing at you.

a PhD. on the just laying low. Yeah, no, I think that I respect the approach, and it's which is one of the also reasons I decided to come on, cause I respect the approach.

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Well, let's define it. Um, vulnerability is the emotion we experience when we have, when we are up against uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. So vulnerability is what I feel. It's the cringe, the awkward, the thing that I, the emotion I feel in times of uncertainty, risk, or emotional exposure. So it was really interesting because I had a hard time helping people understand because there's we're so raised to believe that vulnerability is weakness. That it took a trip to Fort Bragg, working with special forces, to ask soldiers a question.

Give me a single example of courage in your life, one example that you've witnessed or you you yourself have done. One example of courage that did not require uncertainty, risk, or emotional exposure. No one could answer it. Finally, a young soldier stood up and said, Three tours. There is no courage without vulnerability. So is vulnerability important? It is if we wanna be brave with our lives, if we, if we want to be able to manage ourselves in a way that's values aligned and courageous, we have to be able to reconcile how we feel when we're uncertain, at risk, or exposed.

I mean, and really weirdly, the next week after the trip to Fort Bragg, I was with with Seattle Seahawks, the football team, NFL team. Ask the players, Give me an example of courage on the field or off that did not require vulnerability. They said that it's not possible. There is no courage. Like if you're doing things in your life, in your work, and there's no risk, no uncertainty, and no exposure, then they're not brave. If you know how it's going to end, that is not courage.

Courage is the willingness to show up and be all in when you cannot predict the outcome. Courage is saying, I love you first, that's you, you wanna know what vulnerability is? I love you first. Have you ever said I love you first?

uh, I'm not sure. It's been a while.

but it's hard, it's, you know,

Scientists could give context. It's been a while since I've been in that situation.

well, you'd had to go first. Yeah, we Yeah, yeah, yeah,

had to go first. Yeah,

yeah. I mean, there's this great story that I tell about I w. I gave a talk here, it was actually in L. A. And afterwards, a kid came up to me. He's probably 22 or 23, and he said, Can I tell you a story about your work and how it's really changed my life? And I was like, Sure. And a kind of a crowd grew around, and this is like the last time I ever got pinned, like not being able to exit a stage.

F. Because it was such a traumatic, it wasn't traumatic, but it was like, he said. Well, I was dating this woman and I was so crazy about her, so I took her to eat to our favorite restaurant. And I waited until the dessert came, cause we love this chocolate volcano, and I ordered it. And I said, I love you. And she looked at me and she said, I think you're awesome and I think we should date other people.

And then she Ubered home. And so I was like, Goddamn, this is the worst story I've ever heard. This is not a good story. And he said, So I got in my car and I drove home, and the whole way home, I just kept saying to myself over and over, Fuck Brené Brown, fuck Brené Brown. Fuck when, when does this? when? when's the turn on the story, you know? And he said, I got home and I walked into my apartment and I pushed the door open and both my roommates were wired in.

And they were on their computers and they looked up and said, Dude, what's going on? And he said, I told her I loved her, and she told me I was awesome, and one of my roommates looked at me and said, What the fuck were you thinking? That's not how it works. When you are going toward them, they go away, so you're always kind of going away, so they come towards you. And he goes, Oh, oh, no, no, I don't wanna, I don't wanna be that dude.

I was daring greatly, and he said, both of his roommates just got teary eyed and went right on, man, right on. Like, there is no courage without vulnerability. How can you say you're brave if you're not putting yourself out there?

so many people have been through things which have made it very, very difficult for them to be vulnerable. I was actually speaking to someone yesterday who was cheated on, bunch of attachment issues in their early childhood. And funnily enough, when I was talking to her about, I was asking her questions about, cause I'm a very deep person, like this carries over into my personal life. I was asking her questions about the things, you know, she'd been through, whatever else.

She just shuts down and she told me that she, she, um, what were the exact words? She said? That she finds vulnerability to be a form of intimacy that she tries to stay away from because she needs to really, really, really trust the person before she opens up. And I think this is a trend you see across a lot of people. They they won't open up enough to form a connection because they've been hurt before by opening up, and it feels too scary to do that.

And that results in them being s single, alone, unhappy, so on and so on.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's there, what you said was so loaded with so many things. So, first of all, there's the the. There's this very interesting relationship between vulnerability and trust, and how does that work? And people always ask me, what comes first, trust or vulnerability? Do I trust you first? Then I'm vulnerable, or am I vulnerable first? And then I trust you? And I think it's a very slow stacking. We get to know each other.

I share a little bit, I don't, I don't share. Hey, nice to meet you, Stephen. Here's my darkest, horrible, most painful trauma, you know, cause that that is actually that kind of litmus testing is actually a form of armor. I'm gonna throw something at you that our relationship in no way has been built long enough to h hold. You're going to go away, and I'm going to use that as verification that vulnerability is dangerous, like that's litmus testing.

Let me prove to you that you're not trustworthy. Da Da. Oh, I see you're backing away. That's what I thought. I'm backing away because we haven't built a relationship that can bear the weight of this story. Can we start? Can we start small? Vulnerability, trust, vulnerability, trust, vulnerability, trust. I think I go in that in my work, we call that, like the smash and grab, like, I'm gonna. I'm gonna hit you with something really big and then watch you go away and use it as evidence.

Yeah, and it takes a really skilled person to say, Yeah, I'm really, I'm taking in what you told me. I wanna be respectful and honor that, and I don't have a way to file it right now, cause I don't know you well enough. So I appreciate the shit. I mean, we also call it spotlighting. So like, if I had a military grade spotlight that they use in the wilderness, I work with the military a lot. And I, I picked it up and put it in your face right here.

What would you do physically? That's what that's our reaction to too much vulnerability, too fast. Like, Yeah, I don't know, I don't know you. Um, so you're talking about the slow stacking of courage and, uh, vulnerability and trust, and then you're also talking about that. When, when we've had a lot of hard things happen to us, I think this is where I really believe in the democratization of coaching and therapy. That a lot of times we have to work with people like we have to get help to be able to open up and take off some of the armor that we put on, because sometimes that armor that we put on is fricking survival.

I mean, and you wanna start adding, you wanna start adding variables like race, gender, like, you know, any anything where there's social systems also at play, that's survival. Like telling me right now, at my career, like, Hey, you should be vulnerable with your new team and and talk about your previous failures, you know? Well, of course, I could do that, and I would do it, and everybody would clap and they'd think, Oh, man, she's so brave.

And take the new person who's a young black woman or the new first LGBTQ person on the team and say, Hey, tell, tell every, don't, don't tell anybody shit. Develop trust first, develop, uh, see how, how, trust your own instincts about the accountability of this group to hold themselves accountable for their behavior. Like, vulnerability is not more necessary for any of us than anybody else, but certainly more difficult for other, for CER, for some people, for sure.

And I think what's hard about that, what's so painful, probably the most painful part of my career, is that regardless of why the armor is on, without vulnerability, you cannot access the experiences that are the most meaningful in life. Love to love someone is to be vulnerable from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. You know that you're in a relationship to love is to be vulnerable, right? And have you ever buried someone you loved?

Like I lost my mom two years ago? Like my kids, it's like having your heart live outside of your body, like to love is to be vulnerable, cause it's to risk grief and losing. Belonging is vulnerable, the most, the most vulnerable human emotion. Joy, joy is so vulnerable that when some of us get close to it, we dress rehearse tragedy to prepare for disappointment. Like it's so vulnerable that we don't even let ourselves feel joy because we're so afraid someone's gonna rip it away and we're gonna get sucker punched by disappointment.

Yes or no? Like people choose to live disappointed rather than to feel disappoint, risk feeling disappointed and get excited about something. You know, it's like the first time my kids shared with me when they were young. Certainly not the way I was raised, but, you know, I really, really wanna make this team, mom. And I said, I wanna pause you for a second and tell you how brave it is to talk openly about something you want so much when you don't have control over whether you get it or not.

I want, I want it for you because you want it, but regardless of what happens, I admire your courage for wanting something and sharing out loud that you want it. Because if you don't get it, I'll know that it was a crushing blow, but that's so great because I'll be here for you when that happens, either way. So we and I, and I'm really, I'm a really, I'm, I'm. We call it foreboding joy, that joy is so good, just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And people who have trauma histories are really like that, like, for me, cause the way I was raised, when something good happens, I'm like, Oh God, now what's gonna happen? Statistically, bad shit's gonna roll around any second now. And it's interesting, cause the group of people that we researched, the only group of people that could take that. But you know, there's a bodily quiver, right? Of vulnerability. Do you have you felt it? Yeah, the only people that can really lean into joy consistently are people who use that vulnerability quiver as a reminder to be grateful, to be able to practice gratitude in that second.

So gratitude is a huge enabler of joy.

is that automatic? Or can one train that?

No, it's a training. Oh shit, no, I had to. I I. I mean, standing at my front door, watching my 16 year old daughter walk down the sidewalk with her boyfriend in high school and get in his truck for for prom, right? And I'm standing there and I'm like, Oh God, and you know, what am I worried about? You know, prom night, like car wreck, right? Of course, when I, I tell the story, the military's always like, pregnancy, I'm like, No No car wreck.

And so I just remember staying there and she gets in, and and I'm staying next to Steve and Charlie. My my son's, you know, at this time, he's ten, and I'm like, I'm so grateful, I'm so grateful, I'm grateful for this moment, I'm grateful that I'm a part of it. I'm grateful that they did the corsage and the boutonniere over here. I'm grateful that I got to help pick out the dress. I'm so grateful. And Charlie goes, looks at Steve, What's wrong with mom?

Um, and Steve goes, she's, she's practicing gratitude. Let her do it, otherwise she's gonna get on a crazy train and it's gonna be all hell. And you know, like, cause part of me wants to say, Oh God, oh God, like, it's so beautiful and so joyful. And get in your truck and follow them right now. If he's speeding, I wanna know about it. If he's not stopping fully to stop sign, follow them until this date is over.

You know, that's that's what I wanna do, cause I'm afraid, cause that the joy of that moment was just too much for me, too vulnerable.

It appears you've overcome various traits of old Brené Brown

No, I'm overcoming. overcoming. No, I'm not over. I have not overcome.

Have you overcome anything?

Yes, the belief that I will overcome anything. I have overcome the belief that I have overcome the belief that I will ever arrive. I am grateful for the skills that I have that are new skills that keep me more aligned with the person, the mom, the partner, the leader that I want to be. But I I am mindful all the time. I try to stay very mindful that I am scary when I'm scared, that I catastrophize very, very easily, and that's painful for everybody around me.

And I don't need to be liked, I just need to be myself. Like, but those are things, cause I will. I will sit down. Like two days ago and be like, Oh my God, it'd be so freaking easy to be liked here. I was like, this, this'll be, this would be a piece of cake, and I'm like, shit, I don't do that anymore. Bummer, Two days ago, Yeah,

ahead of what?

just with a group of people that I knew what it would take to be liked

And you made the choice to

to be myself.

be yourself? Why?

because now the person I'm gonna betray last is me. Yeah, I hope I see you again, but not that important.

Some people might find that somewhat demoralizing to know that they they too might never cure parts of themselves that they're desperate to change. I think people, you know, they often come to podcasts like this or read books like yours, looking for solution fixes. To not liking myself, to the way that I react to my emotions, they wanna fix it, cause if they can fix it, then they can be happy.

I don't think that's in the consideration set for a very beautiful reason. That if we could fix it and never have to wrestle with it again, we would be so short on grace for other people that we would be tyrants.

So you think it it creates a form of empathy for others,

Yeah, I mean, like, I'm not gonna. I have, like, really serious boundaries, I'm a very bounded person, but when I see someone behaving a certain way, I was like, ugh, my asshole sees your inner asshole right here. I get, I get, I get what you're doing. I'm not gonna tolerate it, I'm gonna set a boundary around it, but I'm not really judging you for it. It's just that behavior's not okay right here.

but you like yourself now.

Yeah, yeah, I do. I, I. Yeah, I do. I do. I can, I can. I can think I can say that pretty. I like what I'm becoming.

And for anyone that doesn't like themselves, what? What work has had to go into getting to the point where you like what you be, you're becoming?

I think the hardest is maybe one of the biggest findings of my research over the last 25 years is. It's not fear that gets in the way of us being brave with our lives and our work, it's armor. Everybody's afraid, it's okay to be afraid. What's dangerous is the armor that we reach for to self protect when we're afraid, and how that armor moves us away from love, connection, and our values. And so I think the hardest work is for me, constantly being aware of what is my armor.

What am I? What am I grabbing for when I'm afraid? What am I grabbing for when I wanna protect my sense of self worth, my ego? Like, and and how heavy that shit is, you know? At some point, I had to wear it because that was survival for me growing up. But this is the big, this is the big developmental milestone of middle age, which you are squarely entering, which is kind of when the universe grabs you by the shoulders and pulls you really close and says, I'm not fucking around anymore.

I gave you gifts. Choosing not to grow into them is not benign. There's a consequence for that, and your armor is getting in the way. You're a grown ass person now, you have different choices. Let go of what doesn't serve. And that is the big milestone. I think that we have to wrestle with in midlife, what no longer serves, that's preventing us from growing into who we want to be.

And is that where vulnerability comes into the picture? Cause that

Oh, for sure, cause all the armor, all the armor is about vulnerability.

it requires a huge amount of, um, I was gonna say, self awareness that some people just don't could probably never accomplish. I mean,

that's why I think metaphor is helpful. I mean, most of us can understand. If you back me into an emotional corner, what are you going to get? Like? As a leader, I know my armor, perfectionism, micromanagement. I get super intensive, I get recklessly decisive. I know my armor and my team knows my armor. I think my armor in my personal life, especially when it comes to my kids, when I get, when I feel vulnerable, is control, control, control.

Take over all the chess pieces.

but that's not a good idea.

It's not possible. It's just it's just pretend. That's called anxiety, like pretending that you can control the chessboard of other people's lives, maybe your own, much less other people's lives. But I think I do it out of fear.

is fear the opposite of courage, or is it?

No, I think the opposite of courage is armor. Armor? Okay, I think the opposite of courage is self protection.

to be courageous in this context, whether it's as a leader or in another environment, you talk about these four steps to courage, you talk about it in strong ground.

Yeah, this was research that emerged like 15 years ago, and I was really, really nervous. Cause I'm a grounded theory researcher, I'm a qualitative researcher, so a grounded theory is only as good as its ability to work new data. So you develop a hypotheses or a theory based on data, and then as you collect more data, does the hypothesis hold? And you know this, we collected that data pre pandemic, you know, pre pre, a lot of things.

And so I was really worried about the four skill sets of courage, which are identifying, understanding your core values. I would love to do this exercise with you sometime. Um, two, understanding what gets in the way of you wrestling with vulnerability, kind of owning it and moving through it constructively. Three, how to build trust and how to become super important, trustworthy to yourself, self trust. Because one of the first casualties of failure or disappointment or setback is we lose our, oh, our ability to trust ourselves, our ability to make good decisions, our ability to take care of ourselves.

And the last one, which is my favorite, because it can really, I've seen it really change an organization, is how to get back up after failure and disappointment, how to reset, how to be, how to manage your own bounce when hard shit happens. So those are the four skill sets of courage again, evidence based, observable, measurable and teachable. We've taken 165,000 people through this work across 45 countries, collected data on all of it. It's so exciting and it withstood all of the complex changes over the last five years, including AI organizationally, cause this is where we do our work.

I don't, I'm not a therapist or clinician, I don't work with like families or individuals. I mean, I have a therapist, but I'm not one. Um, so I think you can develop SC courage skills.

The the third point is bra braving trust, and I've heard about your marble jar theory, so I got a jar of marbles. I saw that, Um, could you explain to me what your marble jar? Look at how excited you are.

I know, um, so this comes, you know, where, where is where? Where do I get my information? Ellen's in fourth grade, my oldest, she comes home from school. The front door closes, she slides down the door into a heap, sobbing, Oh my God, Ellen, are you okay? are you hurt? What's going on? She says that something hard happened. She shared it, like, very confidentially, with one or two of her friends during recess. When she got back to the classroom, they had told everybody in her class, all 30 kids, everybody was laughing and pointing and making fun of her.

And she said, I will never trust anyone again. And my response immediately to my, in my mind, was damn straight, no fucking person, you trust your mama, and that's it. Like, that was my response. But again, that's not the right thing to do, right? You want a kid who can develop trust with others. So I said, trust is really hard, she said. I don't understand it. And her teacher at the time, Mrs. Baugham, had a mar a marble jar.

And when the tea, when the when, the class would collectively make good decisions, she would put marbles in this empty jar. And when it got full, they'd have an extra recess and party. And so immediately what came to me, cause I'm describing trust, which is a hard concept to a fourth grader. I said, Trust is the marble jar. She's like, What do you mean? And I said, Every time you share somebody, something with someone that's confidential and they don't share it, they get a marble.

Every time you build trust, when you wanna share something really private and personal, you look for a friend whose jar is full of marbles. Do you have any marble?

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F friends? She's like, not the ones I shared with today. And I said, Who are your Marble Jar friends? and she said, Hannah and Lorna, and I said, tell me something they do to earn marbles. Oh well, like, if I get to my tray late at lunch and there's no place to sit, Lorna will scoot over and give me half her seat, and then we just share one seat and I can sit at the table. And then the other day, when I had strep throat, Hannah was worried about me.

So remember, her mom called and said, Hannah's worried about Ellen. Why wasn't she at school? But then the biggest thing that Hannah did was the other day. Oma and Opa, my parents, my mom and her, her husband, came to my soccer game. And Hannah looked over and goes, Oh my God, your oma and Opa are here. And I said, Why was that a big deal? And she goes, because everybody's divorced and remarried, and I've got eight, you know, four sets of people, and she remembered their names.

And what was shocking to me is that Ellen was conveying that these marbles were being earned on these very small. She knew my grandparents name, she gave me a seat to sit at, she checked on me when I was missing school. And so it made me start thinking about the literature on trust. So I immediately go to the Gottmans. Have you had the Gottmans on here?

Oh, twice, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, just like, Yeah, so I go to the Gottman's research on trust, and I read right off the bat where Gottman's say trust is earned in small moments every day. He tells a story, it's my favorite story that he tells, and I've had him on my podcast and I've done blurbs for their books and written forwards, which is great. So he tells a story about how he's also a mystery lover like me. He's on the second to last page of his mystery.

He's like, Oh my God, oh my God, like, who did it? And he jumps up to go brush his teeth, and he get gets, walks to the bathroom and he sees his wife crying and brushing her hair. He's like, shit, don't look, everything's good, just go to the bathroom and get back in your get, get back to your book. And he's like, that's a sliding door moment. I can. I have a choice in that moment to build trust and stop and say what's going on, or to build betrayal and pretend like I don't see her hurting.

So I stop, I take the brush out of her hand, I start brushing her hair and say, what's going on? That's a sliding door moment that we have all the time, right? And so to me, trust is built slowly over time, a marble at a time, and that's how that's how we teach trust to the most senior leaders in Fortune 100 companies. That trust is a marble jar, it's earned. Leaders believe, and you're a leader, so you know, you know the temptation.

Leaders believe that in the middle of a crisis, you know, you put the numbers together. And there's a fever dream in the United States, and there's new tariffs, and you wake up and you know, you're, you've got a revenue line that's in crisis. And then you can just look at your people and say, Hello, everyone. This is like, back to the the, uh, executive presence, trust me, here's what we're gonna do. And it means nothing to people.

What matters is the leader that walks past you in the morning and says, Hey, good to see Stephen. How's your mom's chemo going? Marbles, marbles. Then, when the crisis happens, you don't need to say, trust me, you just need to say what's on your mind. They trust you.

The other thing I think, uh, has often plagued my mind is as a leader, sometimes you say things and those things can't happen for whatever reason, things change. And um, and I think leaders sometimes think that trust is always being correct, always predicting everything correctly, always being right.

No, trust is, man, did I think we had nailed this? I thought this was how this was gonna happen. We were wrong. You've been working your asses off for six months on this, and I've got to deprioritize it today. Standing right here in front of you, but I'm not gonna bullshit you. You've been working your ass off on a priority that literally does not exist today. I want to stop and say thank you. I saw what you were doing.

I want to be completely transparent about why the priority has shifted, and then I'm gonna ask you for the same level of work on the new priority. Yes or no,

Yeah. And in the blame and responsibility, often rear their heads that's right, for for better or for worse.

that's right. They're like this by eyelash or something.

oh, no one marble. There you go.

Oh yeah, is that a marble? Yeah, it is, yeah, Yeah,

cause you didn't have to say that, you know, I think that sometimes people will say, you got some shit on your shirt. I'm like, that's thank you so much because it would've been much easier for you not to point out the bogey on my face or whatever, you know what I mean?

I don't trust somebody that doesn't do that, so I guess it is a marble.

Hm, someone said to me a couple of weeks ago on the podcast, they said, I trust people who say things in public that is against their near term interests. And I thought, Hm,

Oh, ah, that's good. Uh, that's, that's like a, that's like a, that's a right. Yeah, it's a good metaphor, though, right? It's the trust in the marble jar has been very helpful for us. And let me tell you, there are behaviors. This is plastic. There are behaviors in relationships where you take this whole thing and just slam it on the ground. cheating, I think that's an obvious one. There's one that's more has a more ragged edge of grief and distress than even cheating, which is just slowly disengaging.

emotionally disengaged. Hm, yeah, gosh.

that's a ragged, that's a ragged edged break on that marble jar, and it just happens over time. And every the other people think that they're nuts, and it makes them question their own judgment.

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That's Adobe dot ly slash Stephen. You have been in a relationship much longer than me, but we share a lot of similarities in many ways. I was wondering if, um, if you were to give me any relationship advice that might hold my shit together over the next 30 years. I mean, you could give me so much, I know, cause I've seen, I've seen so much of the incredible. I've actually stolen so much advice. One of the things I stole recently, which me and my girlfriend talked about, was sometimes I'd come home and I'm on like 10, and I heard you say this, and I just, I don't communicate to my girlfriend that I'm on.

I've got like 10 left. And then she, you know, she might wanna try and work through some shit, but she's gone, dude, it's gonna go bad, it's gonna yeah, yeah, it's go bad.

gonna go bad.

Yeah, let's not do this at one am. And I saw you talk about how you communicate, you vocalize what you have left in the tank to give context to the other person, I guess, to create some empathy for both of you. But I've stolen that. But is there anything else that, um, you think might help me over the next 30 years to have a good relationship with my girlfriend with all the risks that you see?

I'll just start by saying, I think therapy, couples work is like, so incredibly powerful and helpful. I think the Gottman's work is really like we read the Gottman's work together sometimes, so I think I think that's helpful.

I'm surprised you were willing as someone that struggles with vulnerability.

Oh yeah, no, for sure.

What you, you weren't.

No, I was willing.

Oh, really, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I struggle with vulnerability, but I really respect humility in people so much that even if I'm not feeling humility, I will fake humility and be like, I need help. And then I'll say, shit, this is real, this is hard. This, they got my number, like, God damn, they just called a thing, a thing, and it hurt my feelings. Um, but I, I guess the biggest thing is that neither Steve nor I, nor I had any modeling of what a healthy relationship look like at all.

And I think one commitment we made is to just keep showing up. I think these are the three commitments keep showing up. Don't buy into the bullshit that it's supposed to be easy. It'll be the hardest thing you ever do and ask for help, and that's not there's no. I wish I could give you like, a here's the secret to it, but the secret to us is we keep showing up. We know it's not supposed to be easy, and we get help.

And the help being you turn to him and ask for help or external

Well, we, well, we get external help, but we read, we try new things, um, we try new tools. We're just we don't ever want to be done learning and trying to be better for ourselves and for each other. And that's a lot. I mean, 38 years together is not just like the so slow roll movie of a life and a family, but we've buried parents, you know, we've gone through illnesses, we've raised, you know, kids. we've we've gone through different seasons in our own lives where we were not synced at all.

It's really, really hard. But it's I'm more proud of it than anything I've ever done. Cause my setup for success was zero.

You've buried parents. Christmas Day?

My mom died on Christmas Day after my sisters and I were th- her primary caregiver for four years with dementia.

Four years.

I wouldn't wish that shit on the people I hate the most. I don't. I try not to hate people, but I God gives me grace for it on occasion. But um I would not wish that on anybody. You know, there's the reality of it. You know, she gets there, there's an accident, you're showering your mom, you're bathing your mom, you know, and she knows just enough to be humiliated by it. But this is life like this is this is caregiving, you know?

And it's a tremendous emotional, physical, mental weight that falls primarily on women who are also in the workforce. You know, thank God I had two sisters, so there's three of us, um, but and many people have very many people have zero. It's like you and your phd. Reso- PhD researcher, I have resources, a lot of resources, and I think it almost killed me, you know, and so

It almost killed you.

I mean, yeah, it it to lose someone that you love like I love my mom in bits and pieces, in chips and bones, in, you know, like that is, you know. And then there was a day when she just got incredibly, incredibly cruel. Like my mom was the fulcrum. Our family changed on her back. Like she was the first person to go to therapy. She left my dad. She got us into therapy. She worked three jobs.

She she changed everything. She talked about the long history of addiction in our family, you know, on both sides, everywhere. She changed our family. And so to say she was like, you know, somebody who I respected and revered, like was is an understatement. And, you know, and we did so much healing work around kind of how she showed up as a parent in her marriage with my dad. And so then the one day I went to go take care of her, and I saw that thing that I hadn't seen since I was fourteen, you know, and I'm fifty four.

You know, and it literally like I couldn't drive like it brought me physically to my knees. Like, like my husband had to come and get me. And I don't like like I can be I can't talk about it without getting emotional cause it's not like I blamed my mom cause she's in the middle of this disease, you know, but it was like I I didn't see her for two months after that. And Steve kept saying, I I say I can't, and he's like, you gotta, you gotta heal from that.

I mean, just imagine being dropped back in a worst case scenario situation when you were thirteen or fourteen. And then, you know, you're just like, I can't, I can't. And, you know, my sisters were like, I got we got we got this. And then they'd go through a period where they were like, I can't right now. And then, uh, okay, I got it. But Steve always had it. Steve was like, I got the diaper. I'll take him to dinner.

I'll meet with the doctors. Like, that's partnership. You know what I mean, that's partnership.

How did how did you deal with the grief?

Well, don't send me your hate mail, fuckers. But, you know, when she died, it was nothing but relief.

I've heard this. I've I've never not heard that from someone that had a parent with struggling with dementia and passing away.

was complete relief. I mean, the day before she died, I think we had a really important time with her. And I'm sure she is, you know, playing dominoes with Ann Richards and Molly Ivins and great other female Texas politicians, um, Democrats. But, um, cause my mom was very radically political. But, uh, the window of grief was just years of there there was, you know, very early on, there was no calling her to say, oh, Charlie got a really cute date.

Let me show you the homecoming pictures. Or, hey, Ellen, you know, got into her master's program. That that all just went away. Just every week. And so that's why, you know, the whole the whole strong ground book, there's a there's a sentence in the in the first chapter that said, I have a sticky note on my window on my mirror in the bathroom that says I'd rather be the oldest woman in the gym than the youngest woman in assisted living.

Because I do believe in the connection around exercise, d you know, dementia, th- and I I took care of my grandmother with dementia with my mom. And my mom and my grandmother made a lot of different lifestyle choices than I've made, but the whole strong ground metaphor is that I went to go see a trainer. And one day he looked at me and he said, he called me Brown. He said, Find the ground, Brown. And I looked down and I said, Okay.

And he goes, Not the floor, the ground. Take your feet, push in to the ground. Use your mind to connect with your body, push into the ground, and then tell your mind you're gonna be using fucking lats. And I was like, Okay. So I did it, and I felt them, and I started whispering every time I would do a weightlifting thing, strong ground, strong ground.

Strong ground. An unbelievable, unbelievable book. So y- we we didn't cover everything in this book today, which is a great shame, but hopefully we'll speak again in the future. But it's the lessons of daring leadership, the tenacity of of paradox, which is something I was keen to talk about, and the wisdom of the human spirit. All of your books are amazing. You said earlier on that someone called you a wizard when you were younger. That's exactly what I think you are.

I think you're a wizard.

Why?

I think you're a wizard. You have an unbelievable pattern recognition, understanding of humans. You have so many wide reference points that it appears to be magic to a muggle like me. Which one? We're a at a time and the team we're gonna run through the door if I'm not careful. But but we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for.

You actually know this person. Um,

Did you? I know the next guest.

no, you know, the one that left the question for you. If they didn't know it was for you, dear beautiful and highly intelligent next guest, what are you optimizing for right now?

Strength and longevity. Mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally.

Strong ground. The lesson, the lessons of daring leadership, the tenacity of paradox, and the wisdom of the human spirit. You are you are I was trying to think if there's any others. You are the single most requested guest. Um, and you have been on the show for for a long, long time, for three or four years. When we ask people who they want me to speak to, they say your name, and they say your name because of these, the incredible work you've done through your own podcast, which I'm gonna link on the screen and below right now, but also through some of these incredible books which have changed people's lives.

If you're unfamiliar with Brené's work, um, I I think people will understand after listening today how much they're missing out on. I'd highly recommend you go and listen to Brené's podcasts. Um, but also to check out this book, Strong Ground, which I'm gonna I'm gonna link below. Um, also Dare to Lead. I think all of, um, all of the leadership team in my office reference Dare to Lead so often, which is an incredible book about brave work, tough decisions, and whole hearts.

You make the most beautiful artwork. I consider these books to be artwork again because they pull on so many different reference points to make something that feels so original. And you've helped so many people. The fact that my audience have demanded I speak to you for so long, I think is testament to that. And, um, you're a wonderful human being, and actually one of the things you've inspired me to be is myself because that's exactly what I find you to be.

So thank you so much, Brené, for your time today. It's deeply, deeply appreciated, more so than I can say. And I think you're a wonderful human being. Please come back again soon.

I will. I have enjoyed every minute of this. I would say it has not been easy because we went to some hard places together, but it's been meaningful. Thank you.

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