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

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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. The hardest work is being aware of what is my armor when I'm Is that automatic? Oh, 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 US 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. In my family, we were allowed anger, but sad was not an option. You needed to be tough. 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. 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. 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.

Back at these four steps of courage. Yes.

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

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

I knew. So this 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. It 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. 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 going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you about this show. Thank you. Renee. In order to understand all the work that you have done and the perspective that you have on the world and also who you are as an 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 it. Am I an anomaly?

Of course, you're an anomaly. Of course, you're an anomaly. 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 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, really tough upbringings that included poverty, addiction. Probably a lot of the stereotypes you would think about fifth-generation text and tough, don't cry. We were allowed a very small continuum of emotions were approved, which were pissed off or okay. Anger was okay, but no, it couldn't be sad, really. Vulnerability was not a thing. Vulnerability 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 a therapist somewhere along the way said, Yes, that's hypervigilance. You're hypervigilant. I can see everything around me and everything's going on. I can connect things very quickly that other people don't see. There was laughter and there was love, but there was a ton of unpredictable.

I was going to say, isn't that typically what creates hypervigilance, is some need to be that aware when you're young? Yeah.

I think, yes. Being Fun Loving was very valued in my family and being tough. These were the values. On the parental scorecard, this is what got you an A. If you're fun, easy, You can shoot straight, spit far, fish well, really, drive fast. And so those things were very valued. Athleticism was very valued. 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.

It's It's fun until you've got a parent ejected from a game for being so hard.

And that was your father? Yeah. He was really hard then. He was ejected from a game.

Oh, yeah.

There's a photo I saw of you and your siblings, where you're clutching your siblings. 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're on a couch.

Like a yellow velour couch from the '70s? Yes.

Yeah.

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 named Sister Superior. It was jokingly, but it wasn't joking. 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. I was definitely the protector.

Physically volatile fights?

On occasion, but more emotionally volatile.

Screaming and shouting? Yeah. Same with my parents.

Yeah, just loud.

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

Yeah, we had a lot of screaming. 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? Seventh's Day of screaming.

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. I think hypervigilant, protective, responsible, with a dose of being Be very fucking careful because I will protect my siblings.

How did that change your model of love as a young person? It must have been, because I obviously feel the same way about my situation. 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. You got a woman shouting at him for six, seven hours a day, and him sat there like he's an inanimate object looking at the screen. I remember thinking, Oh, okay, so if I get in a relationship when I'm older, then I'm going to be a prisoner to a woman. Okay. It doesn't sound appealing. If he moved to a different room, you should follow him. I avoided relationships like the fucking plague. I did well until about '27.

And then what?

Then someone got over the wall and corrected to some of the evidence.

They got over the wall.

She got over the wall somehow.

Yeah, Steve got over the wall.

Damn it. That's your partner, not me. Just for context.

Yeah, not you. Although you're doing a hell of a job right now. You're like, You've crossed the pirana-filled moat that I like, but the drawbridge is like, I'm going to see. My Steve definitely got over the wall. But it was like, game recognizes game. He had a wall. Oh, okay. Yeah. We had long conversations about our walls. And slowly through those conversations, those walls crumbled with each other. And we've been together now for 38 years. Wow. Yeah. 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, you said for you, love was going to be being a prisoner and having to just shut down to survive, right? Mm-hmm.

Run away.

Run away, right?

Don't confront it. No conversations. No.

For me, six months after we were married, I went to go see a therapist and I said, I cannot do this. I got to get out of this marriage. We had dated off and on for seven years before we got married. I said, I got to get out. She said, This is hard. I could see how this is not working. I was like, I had a twinge of defensiveness about Steve. I said, What do you mean? She said, He likes you so much more than you like you. It must be terrible. I was like, Fuck you, man, you're fired. I was like, Are you so high? I thought, What? That's what I do. I'm going to give you one of my tells. If I do a really high-pitch, What? That means I'm looking for my purse and I know where the door is. I just kept thinking, What are you being? He said, It's got to be very 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 got to be disconcerting.

What an asshole, man. Like, wow. And it was true. I had to get to this point where I was like, Maybe I should like me as much as he likes me and then make a better decision about whether this is going to work or not. When you grow up and pissed off or shut down, are your two emotional opportunities? In Atlas of the Heart, I write about 80 seven 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 outstanding question marks in my head, and they might be the same answer. But 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 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 wasn't popular. I wasn't dating a quarterback. That was a dream that my parents and their parents and their parents, you were a bear cadet, and you dated a quarterback, and you got a farm. So I felt not cute, not popular. Not understood. And then at home, I wasn't easygoing. I was anxious and always ready.

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

Oh, because my parents parented with a very big heoping 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 a parents being fun.

Appearance?

Yeah. Yeah. Like, 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 need 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, my God, yes. I mean, I think not just them. I think having young girls and young women keeping them from developing threats to their self-esteem is not It's a parental thing. It's like asking them not to breathe because the air is poison. It's like every message from everywhere. The fashion magazines, you'd read them and you think, Wow, I don't look like this. How am going to look like this? You'd lather yourself up with baby oil and you put lemon juice in your hair, you put tinfoil under your chin, get as much sun cancer as you could because we didn't know. We all wore jeans that you had to put on with pliers for the zipper because they were so tight. Appearance mattered. This is a 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 I graduated from college when I was 29.

Wow. You become a research professor in 2001, and you've been a research professor and many more things ever since then. You get your PhD in social work at the University of Houston, Texas, between '96 and 2002. 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 media and podcasting and authorship. But over those, since 2001, we're in 2025 now, just over two decades. My first question is, how has your perspective on... How has the world changed in those last two decades, in your view?

Unions would say, before any great progression, there is a regression. I think that when you look at various 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 going to have to pause.

I was thinking about a conversation I had recently with my best friend. 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. 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 English channel on dinghies that are ruining your life. It seems to be a really effective narrative to empower both in the US and the UK. 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 coming over the border are the reason for the pain in your life. It seems to work, and that seems to be the thing getting power. That's what ran through my head when I had this idea of power and what you're scared of.

I actually think I inverted it. 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 more important than this, to be honest with you. That's why I thought your response was so interesting, because if I was going to do the text box above your face, it would have said, Well, holy shit. That's interesting. Because when you use power, especially power over, because there's multiple kinds of power. There's power within to and power within. So people that use power within to 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 got to 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 100 times out of 100.

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 going to be easy to see, you're not going to 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 and senior leaders. This is how it works in organizations, how it works in political, how it works in faith communities. This is how power works in general. Power over is a very specific 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.

There's four types of power you speak about in- 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 in 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 were 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 You're not neurobiologically hardwired to stay in fear for very long. So 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 going to happen for me neurobiologically. I am either going to just become numb to it, you're not going to 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 what I work in. This is crazy. This is it. But every now and then, you're going to have to do something that demonstrates to me how chaotic and cruel you can actually be. You're going to have to engage in periodic acts of cruelty to remind me that the fear is real and to put me back in it.

One of the things you're seeing right now, in the US, the deportation and immigration issues. This is not a president that has 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 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 holds power and who does not.

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

I'm a big systems theory. 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 theory, at least if you're leading an organization right now, you're going to fall behind because the complexity inside and outside organizations is such that we need a framework to understand how all of these individual systems are bumping up against each other. You probably bump up against 100 systems a day, right? Yeah. And so What I would imagine, the story I would make up about your success, because 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. I'm just going to give you a very 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. Just to be honest with you, Mary Claire is my doctor. Oh, really? Yeah, Dr. Haver. What is interesting is the system systems that just that podcast bumps up against, and the systems that would be sending feedback that, Hey, this is not for me.

I'm not clicking on this. I've shared that first one with 100 people because there's a reality to our lives that is uncomfortable for people. But those are your partners and your moms and your bosses, and it's real. I can guarantee if this was happening to dudes, Yeah. It'd be a gajillion dollar, whatever, over a trillion, gajillion. I don't know. But just thinking about that one podcast and the systems that you're touching, health, women's issues, Family systems are affected. 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? Yeah, 100 %. Yeah. Right. A healthy system 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. What happens to a system where the boundaries are no longer permeable? It atrophies. In the process of atrophying, the system becomes self-referencing. Are we good? We're great. Are we right? We're right. Are we on target?

We're on target because the boundaries of the system 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 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 boundaries permeable. We've got to keep learning, guessing, unlearning, relearning.

One of the added complexities is the rise in algorithms. 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 can see more adverts, which means probably the best thing to show me is either something really fearful or to confirm what I already believe.

A hundred %.

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 running a business and selling ads. So any company that takes that approach will go bankrupt. This is why TikTok, I think, have been so successful is the algorithm is... I don't use TikTok. I have a TikTok account. I don't have the app on my phone. But from what I hear, 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.

But people are driven by incentives, right? And your share price is going to tumble and you're going to be fired. You're going to lose your status and your power if you don't do that. I'm playing devil's advocate. Obviously, I'm not doing that.

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

It's complicated.

Well, I agree. I'm not looking for an easy answer. Go It hit me.

I just think it's complicated because 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, then China will. So even with AI now, you know 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 superintelligence strategy, then Russia and China get their first, then the United States, unfortunately, are going to end up being China's French Bulldog. Actually, I can't refute that. I go, No, you're right, because you'd have to literally lease the technology off them. It will be so powerful and give such an economic advantage that you will have to lease it off China. So I go, 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 going to be used against the United States. It's a prime example. China were like, Fuck it, we don't care. Yeah, right. Yeah. And they made an unbelievable algorithm called TikTok, which just captivate... The youth are all just losing their brains. I don't know. I don't know. It's tough. It's rough. Spiritual A social 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. I just believe that we are more good than greedy. I was in conversation with Trevor Noah at an event, and I mentioned this term that I was he's really excited about, and he challenged me on it. 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 talk to Trevor because he's always got an interesting point.

He's always got an interesting point. Damn it. He's funny, but he said, No, we need less cognitive sovereignty, Bernay. 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, The whole problem is that your For You page is completely sovereign. You Intellectually and spiritually, I'm paraphrasing what he said. I'm sure it was like, funnier and better-looking. Then I was trying to think about, I guess maybe that's not the right term. But let me tell you what scares me the most. I'm in some weird rooms because of the nature of my job. I'm in rooms where the people who run these platforms that own the CEOs of these business and the founders are in these rooms. I hear them talking, and I hear things that are so misaligned that it panics me. I hear someone say, Hey, tech billionaire, what should my kids study? I'm worried for my kids. Well, they should study coding, physics. Then five 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.

The same person will say, My A deep reading of philosophy in the stoics. And so then I'm thinking to myself, Well, which is it, dude? And then I start to extrapolate from there and wonder if there is a thinking class that's emerging, where they're like, We're going to read philosophy, and we're going to read the liberal arts, and we're going to study history. And the rest of you just keep scrolling. Don't worry about the big words. Well, We'll handle all the big words for you. It's like when they asked Steve Jobs, Well, 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 competence 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. It was probably a combination of 30 different mindsets and skill sets.

When I was done for commercial reasons, someone on my team immediately said, Jeez, if you can train people in these things, this is really important. And the first thing I thought was, Fuck that, my kids. Train Schmaine. I get it. It's important. We'll develop some instrumentation, 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 a 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 20 plus years of your career, what have you been exposed to from a 30,000-foot perspective? What are the wide range of reference points that you draw upon to be the person that you are today? Because it feels like you've got a very wide range of references. Clearly, you're someone that cares a lot about history. That comes through in your answers. But I'm wondering in your career, what are the experiences that you've had? Have you been working directly with patients? Is it academic reference points you're drawing upon?

No one's ever asked me this, which I've been grateful that no one's asked me. So what a pain in the ass. But because no one's going to like the answer.

I'm excited about the answer now.

Everything. Every single thing. Yes, 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. I read 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 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.

Yeah.

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 to me because I was reading the book series, The Rivers of London. In that book series, there are two gods of the Thames. The Teddington Lock, right outside of London and Teddington, is where custody changes for them. 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 narrow boats through the Thames. I learned how 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. 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. Why do we do that? Because we need a lock-through period. We 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. Cognitive, we would call it cognitive and domain shifting.

We need time. I looked at the lock master at 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. And you're like, Take me back to work where I'm the boss of everything. So where do I learn those things? Well, cognitive and domain shifting come out of psychology. Jemma, 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'm standing on the sideline at DKR, the University of Texas Longhorn Football Stadium, and I'm standing with Emmanuel Ocho. Do you know Emmanuel? No. Yeah, he's great. He played for the Longhorns. He played for the NFL. Now he's a writer. I'm standing there and we're watching the game and I look at him and I go, How would you define pocket presence?

And pocket presence is an American football term. Do you know American football? Okay. I'm a quarterback. I'm going to get the ball and 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? When the ball is snapped and the ball is put into motion. There's about 1,200 to 1,400 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 of line. The way they do it is they form a pocket around the quarterback. The quarterback uses that time to decide, Where am I going to throw the ball? Am I going to run the ball? And pocket presence is the ability of a quarterback to use the on average 2. 8 to 3 seconds he has to read the field, understand where the defenders are, and make a decision. When I asked Emmanuel Ocho, How would you define pocket presence? He said, 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 got to know how much time you have to get rid of that ball and get it down the field. They say Tom braided, who played for the Patriots. Is any of this ringing a bell? Yeah, that is. Tom braided, they said his pocket presence was so good, he could tell where his offensive linemen were by the vibrations through 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 Masala. You don't kick the ball to where the striker is. You kick the ball to where the striker is going to be. So situational awareness. Pattyrn recognition. Have I been in this situation before? Do I know where's the goalie in the cage? Where are they standing right now? I'll take my inspiration from sports all the time, which is why there's so many sports metaphors. I think there's not a better metaphor-described work right now than Premier League football.

One of the things throughout your work is this A figure of connection. I did a mushroom. I did Magic Mush with my girlfriend a couple of years ago, first time I've ever done it. The message that came through for me was about connection. That word has had a fond place in my heart ever since as really, really important. We live in a society that's more lonely than ever before, more disconnected in many ways, as you describe it when 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 do you think people need to ladder up further to their city, their town, their world, to the community, to something bigger? God. What does connection mean in this context? Yes.

I think the answer to that question is yes. We're neurobiologically hardwired to be in connection with other people. In the absence of connection, there's always suffering. Always suffering in the absence of connection. I think, I mean, just how we're built, mirror neurons, our ability to sync up neurobiologically when we feel connected and are hearing each other. 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 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. 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 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. It's different for other people. For me, faith is one of my values, and I'm a pretty serious God person. 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, belief systems, class. What is it that brings you to a common humanity place? For me, it's God. It's a big challenge because I try to work from an ethos where I try to find God in the face of everybody that I meet, even if I want to punch you in the throat. I try to... 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.

When you talk about belonging, it's interesting. In your book, Braving the Wilderness, which I think the question is summed up by the subtitle here, 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 why is it also important to stand alone?

Because I don't think you can truly belong to anything 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 skillset 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 look back at Braving the Wilderness, that was maybe the only prophetic book that I think I've ever written. 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 going to get to a place where I don't even know you, but I'm going to 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... Because we don't believe in the same things, you have no meaning in my life.

It's like we have gotten to the place where ideological bunkers, and those are so dangerous because here you and I, let's say that we have the same belief around immigration. So we're going to flip this table over and we're going to get behind it in our ideological bunker. We're going to be like, Yeah, we're right. These guys are fucking crazy. Thank you all. Then one day, I'm going to turn to you and say, One thing I'm wondering about is, how are we going to solve the problem with the folks coming over in the dingies from France? Because I don't think we're going to be able to go without solving it, because we do have an employment issue and a housing crisis. Then you go, You're out. 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? I got to know what's going on in your mind because your face is like, We got to play poker. 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. I had Kamala Harris sat here three, four days ago, and I'll have someone on the right sat here. Then I'll have Michelle Obama, then I'll have Jordan Peterson, then I'll have opposite of whatever Jordan Peterson is. I was just thinking about how that's also 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.

No. Yeah.

Then Kamal Harris after that. I didn't manage to scare Michelle off. I didn't scare Jordan off. You get attacked from both sides.

Oh, I mean, look, 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.

Period.

But it's tough.

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, is winnow the right word? It will narrow your belonging, your true belonging, down to a very few people.

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

Well, because there's an ideological bunker, because we flip the table over.

A hundred %. At any point, 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 no man's land is It's not the place you want to be. I know I'm never going to succeed in this. I know I'm never going to succeed in 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 going to be a bunch of people that didn't listen. Within the first three minutes, the comment section is just going to be, Fuck, are you? Part of me is trying to win that war with my audience, where they, too, will listen. I know that you don't agree with a person, but can you just listen? Because 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'm right wing in my kitchen or left wing in my kitchen.

Genially, the way my brain works is, Oh, I see this good in this individual. Then I meet someone else who's on the other side and I say, Oh, there's a couple of points of good. I agree with them on this. That's how I am. It feels so weird because when you go on the internet, you don't find yourself being compelled by either side entirely.

No. Sure. No, and I think it's really confusing. The only limit I have, really, is I am not probably going to have a conversation with you if your beliefs question my humanity.

Okay.

That's going to be my line. That's going to be the line for me is going to be if you're cruel or name-cauly, or if your core beliefs about who I am or who other people are are dehumanizing. That I can't do because now I betrayed myself in order to make a political point about nuance. Because dehumanization is a really interesting and hard thing when you look at the research of people who studied dehumanization, and we talked about earlier 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. We're not wired for it, actually. In order to do that, 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. 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.

You hear people in this administration calling a community of immigrants an infestation, the same way we would talk about animals or rats. My only limit to hard conversation is if you're operating from an ideology where women are dogs, immigrants are illegals, 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. It's nice to hear, though. It's really nice to hear that that is We've talked about it quite a lot, me and Jack, who's been producing this show since the very beginning. We've talked a lot about how we understand the temptation to pick a side. Actually, one of the greatest compliments of journalists has ever given me is they wrote in the article, and this wasn't a journalist that liked me, they just said, We're unable to ascertain which political party he is part of. I thought that was a great compliment because it means that- 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 in a not very nice piece they'd written about me, whatever, they said that we were unable to figure out what side he's part of. I think that's a compliment because it's true. I think it allows me to do my job better that I don't have too many preconceptions when I meet people. I try to meet people for the first time, which I enjoy.

I think you're pretty good at that because you are insatiably curious. 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 it out recently because I had a conversation. I think if someone's uncomfortable with vulnerability, then I'm like, the fucking worst nightmare. You are.

Which is interesting because I don't expect to meet you. She was super vulnerable.

Really?

Maybe not. Carefully optimistic, vulnerable. Yeah, that's probably okay. 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 quality, especially when it comes to science or those things, of what their guest is saying?

I think that the school of podcasters haven't really... We don't have the the training that journalists do. We're almost catching up in that regard, especially if you become a big podcaster, because you're held in a different level. More recently, one of the things we do is 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 It is a decision. 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 goes to what I said earlier about the political stuff. You're forced to really get clear on what you believe and what matters to you. One of the things that matters to me is that the stuff we put into the in the world, we feel like it's helping people, even if it's not nice. It goes to something that I read in your work, which is our objective isn't to be nice, it's to be kind. Oh, yeah. Say, for example, the conversations we have about AI, I'm well aware that that's not going to necessarily make you feel great. But I think the avoidance of discomfort through history hasn't led to great places. If you think there's a bus coming, I can pretend there isn't. But if I I think that there might be a bus coming, and if experts are telling me there's a bus coming, I think we should have a conversation about the bus coming. 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 what my job is here, and I think we can push people further towards...

We can create progress through honest conversations. When the podcast got bigger and you get more and more, you get a act more for any of your guests that you have on, you have to get clear on what matters to you and what your job is. 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 for the listener who might be confused because it's a confusing world in this new world of democratized media.

So we do that. I really respect that. I just want to say 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 going to 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. 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. I'm married to a physician. I'm a social scientist. I'm not going to be the golden child of this administration when it comes to science, for sure. I have an I Love Science shirt that I wear with a DNA scarf. I'm very real about that. I also don't think that everything that we see that is projected as peer-reviewed clinical trial, 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. 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 just think it's an interesting way to do it.

I think I launched the podcast and it became very big during COVID.

Oh, got it. Yeah.

And so Houston is home to the biggest medical center in the world, in the world. And I live in the medical center area. In the beginning, there never stopped being funerals for physicians and people working on COVID. To hear on podcast that it doesn't exist or that you can use Windex or some bullshit like that. Then I got into a little dust up around it in my own situation. I'm always interested as we enter this world in platform and podcast responsibility.

It's a slippery slope. It's- Very. And there's no perfect outcome. You don't want to go too far either way, right? No. You don't want to go, Oh, fuck, the government, get involved and tell you what truth is. But you also don't want to stray into conspiracy land and away from science because...

There are things that are knowable.

Yeah, there are things that are knowable.

But I don't know. 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. I think if you're doing the best you can to make decisions based... What is the question that drives your decision making?

For me?

No, just in general. Oh, in general. Yeah, I got yours. You want to help your listeners, and you want to do good. That's a different thing than downloads.

You can do both.

You can do both. But if your only filter- You'd go for fucking total conspiracy. Right. 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. We're not journalists here, so we don't really understand the rigor. I've got a lot of respect for journalists and the effort they've put in to understand the journalistic method and all those things. I feel like we're somewhat catching up. This podcast went from zero to 17 million people a month in four and a half years or something. And we're just holding on. Me and Jack didn't run a podcast before, so I didn't run one before. So we're now catching up. And part of the way that we're shaped is with feedback. You get lots of feedback, Don't have this person. I'll never speak to this person again. You bat that stuff off. But if there's ever anything that actually feedback, that actually is in contradiction, that does test your own mission or your own values, then you listen and you can start to innovate. 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. It's a balancing act. We don't want to completely discredit everything the guest has to say, but we also just want to Give context.

That's context to what they're saying. If something's ridiculous, we'll just remove it. We will not publish the episode. It's probably a better way of saying it. We had a couple of episodes where some guests said some things which were just absolutely fucking crazy. You don't need a PhD to know that. You can't exercise by lying on the ground. This one guest had said to me, But 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, it doesn't work.

It was for Jack shit.

I think Jack made that point.

I can be your PhD on the just laying still. No, I think that I respect the approach, which is one of the reasons I decided to come on because I respect the approach.

We're not perfect, but we're trying, and it's tough.

But that's the thing, that you're walking a path.

The world of business looks entirely different today than it did 15 years ago. Back then, building a brand meant having huge budgets, warehouses, office space, and lots and lots of staff. But now you can start a business with your laptop, an idea, and the right tools. I would know more so than anybody else because that's exactly what I did. Shopify is one of our long-standing sponsors on this show, and they're a brand I often refer people to when they're starting their businesses because it's a tool that contains many more tools within itself. When you're starting out, everything is everywhere. It's messy and it's confusing, so having everything in the same place is incredibly useful. Shopify puts store design, payments, inventory, shipping, and even AI tools all in one place. You can sell directly from your website or on social media, essentially wherever your customers spend their time. It's truly a brilliant business tool. If you want to give it a go, head to Shopify. Com/bartlet and sign up for your $1 per month trial period. That's Shopify. Com/bartlet. On that point about me and vulnerability, is vulnerability important? Because there's a lot of performative vulnerability taking place in the industry.

For sure. Is it an important thing for my health, happiness, my future to be a vulnerable person?

Well, let's define it. Vulnerability is the emotion we experience when we are up against uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. So vulnerability is what I feel. It's the cringe, the awkward, 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 we were 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 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 want to be brave with our lives. 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 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. 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. You want to know what vulnerability is? I love you first. Have you ever said, I love you first?

I'm not sure. Yeah.

It's been a while. But it's hard. It's- Sorry, I need to give context.

It's been a while since I've been in that situation.

Well, you've had to go first. Yeah, we've had to go first. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's this great story that I tell about... I gave a talk here. It was actually in LA. And afterwards, a kid came up to me. He was 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 crowd God grew around. And this is the last time I ever got pinned, not being able to exit a stage because it was such a traumatic... It wasn't dramatic, but it was like... He said, Well, I was dating this woman, and I was so crazy about her. I took her to eat to our favorite restaurant, and I waited until the dessert came because we love this chocolate volcano. I ordered it, and I said, I love you. She looked at me and she said, I think you're awesome. I think we should date other people. Then she Ubered home. I was like, God damn, 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 I was like, When's the turn on the story? 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. They looked up and said, Dude, what's going on? He said, I told her I loved her, and she told me I was awesome. One of my roommates looked at me and said, What was the fuck were you thinking? That's not how it works. When you are going toward them, they go away. So you're always going away. So they come toward you. And he goes, Oh, no. No. I don't want to 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. 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 speaking to someone yesterday who was cheated on a bunch of attachment issues in their early childhood. Funnily enough, when I was talking to her about... I was asking her questions about... Because I'm a very deep person, this carries over into my personal life. I was asking her questions about the things she'd been through whenever else. She just shuts down, and she told me that she... What were the exact direct 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. I think this is a trend you see across a lot of people. 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. That results in them being single, alone, unhappy, so on and so on.

Yeah. I think what you said was so loaded with so many things. So first of all, 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 share, Hey, Nice to meet you, Steven. Here's my darkest, horrible, most painful trauma. Because that litmus testing is actually a form of armor. I'm going to throw something at you that our relationship in no way has been built long enough to hold. You're going to go away, and I'm going to use that as verification that vulnerability is dangerous. That's litmus testing. Let me prove to you that you're not trustworthy. 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 small?

Okay.

Vulnerability, trust. Vulnerability, trust. Vulnerability, trust. I think in my work, we call that the smash and grab. I'm going to hit you with something really big and then watch you go away and use it as evidence. It takes a really skilled person to say, Yeah, I'm taking in what you told me. I want to be respectful and honor that. I don't have a way to file it right now because I don't know you well enough. I appreciate the share. We also call it spotlighting. If I had a military-grade spotlight that they use in the wilderness, I work with the military a lot, and I picked it up and put it in your face right here, what would you do physically? That's our reaction too much vulnerability too fast. Yeah. Like, yeah, I don't know you. So you're talking about the slow stacking of courage, a vulnerability and trust. And then you're also talking about that 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. We have to get help to be able to open up and take off of the armor that we put on, because sometimes that armor that we put on is freaking survival.

You want to start adding variables like race, gender, like anything where there's social systems also at play. That's survival. Telling me right now in my career, Hey, you should be vulnerable with your new team and talk about your previous failures. Well, of course I could do that. 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 a team and say, Hey, don't tell anybody shit. Develop trust first. See how trust your own instincts about the accountability of this group to hold themselves accountable for their behavior. Vulnerability is not more necessary for any of us than anybody else, but certainly more difficult 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 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? I lost my mom two years ago. My kids, it's like having your heart live outside of your body. To love is to be vulnerable because it's to risk grief and losing. Belonging is vulnerable. 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. It's so vulnerable that we don't even let ourselves feel joy because we're so afraid someone's going to rip it away and we're going to get sucker-punched by disappointment. Yes or no? People choose to live disappointed rather than to feel, risk feeling disappointed and get excited about something. It's like the first time my kids shared with me when they were young, certainly not the way I was raised, but I really, really want to make this team, mom. I said, I want to 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 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 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. We call it foreboding joy. That joy is so good, just waiting for the other shoe to drop. People who have trauma histories are really like that. For me, because of the way I was raised, when something good happens, I'm I'm like, Oh, God, now what's going to happen? Statistically, bad shit is going to roll around any second now. It's interesting because the group of people that we research, the only group of people that could take that... There's a bodily quiver, a vulnerability 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 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 prom, right? And I'm standing there and I'm like, Oh, God. And he What am I worried about? Prom night. Like, car wreck, right? When I tell the story, the military is always like, Pregnancy. I'm like, No, no, no, no, no. Car wreck. And so I just remember staying there and she gets in and I'm staying next to Steve and Charlie, my son, at this time, he's 10. 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 boutonier over here. I'm grateful that I got to help pick out the dress. I'm so grateful. Charlie goes, looks at Steve, What's wrong with mom? And Steve goes, She's practicing gratitude. Let her do it. Otherwise, she's going to get on a crazy train. It's going to be all health. Because part of me wants to say, Oh, God. Oh, God. It's so beautiful and so joyful.

And get in your truck and follow them right now. If he's speeding, I want to know about it. If he's not stopping fully to stop sign, follow them until this date is over. That's what I want to do because I'm afraid because the joy of that moment was just too much for me. Too vulnerable.

It appears you've overcome various traits of old Renee Brown.

No, I'm Overcoming. Overcoming. No, I have not overcome.

Have you overcome anything?

Yes, the belief that I will overcome anything. 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 am mindful all the time. I try to stay very mindful that I am scary when I'm scared, that I catastrophize very easily, and that's painful for everybody around me. I don't need to be liked. I just need to be myself. But those are things... Because I will sit down. Two days ago, I'm be like, Oh, my God, it'd be so freaking easy to be liked here. I was like, 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 be yourself?

To be myself. Yeah.

Why?

Because now the person I'm going to 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 two, might never cure parts of themselves that they're desperate to change. I think people, they often come to podcasts like this or read books like yours looking for fixes to not liking myself, to the way that I react to my emotions. They want to fix it. Because 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.

You I think it creates a form of empathy for others?

Yeah. I have really serious boundaries. I'm a very boundary person. But when I see someone behaving in a certain way, I was like, My asshole sees your inner asshole right here. I get what you're doing. I'm not going to tolerate it. I'm going to set a boundary around it. But I'm not really judging you for it. It's just that behavior is not okay right here.

But you like yourself now? Yeah.

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

For anyone that doesn't like themselves, what work has had to go into getting to the point where you like what 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. I think the hardest work is, for me, constantly being aware of what is my armor? What am I grabbing for when I'm afraid? What am I grabbing for when I want to protect my sense of self-worth, my ego, and how heavy that shit is. At some point, I had to wear it because that was survival for me growing up. But this is the big developmental milestone of middle age, which you are squarely entering, which is when the universe grabs you by the shoulders and pulls you really close and says, I'm not fucking around anymore. They 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. 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.

Is that where vulnerability comes into the picture? Oh, for sure.

Because all the armor, all the armor is about vulnerability.

It requires a huge amount of, I was going to say self-awareness. Yes. That some people just could probably never accomplish.

That's why I think metaphor is helpful. Most of us can understand, if you back me into an emotional corner, what are you going to get? 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 When I feel vulnerable, is control, control, control. Take over all the chest pieces.

But that's not a good idea.

It's not possible. It's just pretend. That's called anxiety. Pretending that you can control the chess board of other people's lives, 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 15 years ago, and I was really, really nervous because 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 hypothesis or a theory based on data. And then as you collect more data, does the hypothesis hold? We collected that data pre-pandemic, pre a lot of things. I was really worried about the four skill sets of courage, which are identifying and understanding your core values. I would love to do this exercise with you sometime. Two, understanding what gets in the way of you wrestling with vulnerability, 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 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 I've seen it really change an organization, is how to get back up after failure and disappointment, how to reset, how to manage your own bounce when hard shit happens.

Those are the four skill sets of courage. Again, evidence-based, observable, measurable, and teachable. We've taken a 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, because this is where we do our work. I'm not a therapist or clinician. I don't work with families or individuals. I have a therapist, but I'm not one. I think you can develop courage skills.

The third point is braving trust. I've heard about your marble jar theory, so I got a jar of marbles.

I saw that.

Could you explain to me what your marble jar? Look at how excited you are. I know.

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 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 in my mind was, damn straight, not a fucking person. You trust your mama, and that's it. 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. Baucham, had a marble jar. 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, because I'm describing trust, 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 something with someone that's confidential and they don't share it, they get a marble. Every time you build trust, when you want to share something really private and personal, you look for a friend whose jar is full of marbles. Do you have any marble jar 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. I said, tell me something they do to earn marbles. Oh, well, 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 we just share one seat, and I can sit at the table. 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 husband, came to my soccer game, and Hannah looked over and goes, Oh, my 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 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. Yeah. I mean, just like, yeah. So I go to the Gottmans research on trust, and I read right off the bat where Gottmans say, Trust is earned in small moments every day. He tells a story. It's my favorite story that he tells. I've had them on my podcast, and I've done blurbs for their books and written forwards. They're just 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. Who did it? And he jumps up to go brush his teeth. And he 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 to your book. And he's like, That's a sliding door moment. I have a choice in that moment to build trust and stop and say what's going on or 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 we teach trust to the most senior leaders in Fortune 100 companies. That trust is a marble It's earned. Leaders believe, and you're a leader, so you know the temptation. Leaders believe that in the middle of a crisis, 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've got a revenue line that's in crisis. Then you can just look at your people and say, Hello, everyone. This is like back to the executive presence. Trust me, here's what we're going to 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, Steven. 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 has often plagued my mind is, as a leader, sometimes you say things and those things can't happen for whatever reason. Things change. 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 going to 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 going to bullshit you. You've been working your ass off on a priority that literally really 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. Then I'm going to 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 better off for us.

That's right. Go like this, the eyelash or something.

Oh, no. One marble. There you go.

Oh, yeah. Is that a marble?

Yeah, it is. Yeah. Because you didn't have to say that. I think that sometimes people say you got some shit on your shirt. I'm like, Thank you so much, because it would have 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.

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, Hmm.

That's good. That's That's like a...

That's a...

Right? Yeah. It's a good metaphor, though, right? Mm-hmm. The trust in the marble jar has been very helpful for us. 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 has a more ragged edge of grief and distress than even cheating, which is just slowly disengaging.

Emotionally disengaging. Yeah.

Yeah, gosh. That's a ragged-edged break on that marble jar. It just happens over time. As Other people think that they're nuts, and it makes them question their own judgment.

Working in the sales team at a startup can be a strange experience because one month you're chasing leads, like the future of the business depends on it, which often it does, and then the next month, you're buried in them. Pressure builds up and eventually it starts clouding your judgment. Then you end up making a reactive decision instead of an informed one. Our sponsor, Pipedrive, is the number one CRM tool for small to medium businesses made by salespeople for salespeople. It helps you get brutally clear on exactly where your focus should be. It shows you what opportunities have stalled and what is worth your time and focus. My team have been using the new Pipedrive Prospector tool, which uses AI to search through over 400 million profiles to find verified decision-makers and shares their contact information with you. If you're interested in learning more, head to pipedrive. Com/ceo, where you can get a 30-day free trial. That's just for my audience, pipedrive. Com/ceo. It's time to join the 100,000 companies that are already using Pipedrive by going to pipedrive. Com/ceo now. I did something at 24 years old that has had a profound impact on my life.

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Ly/steven and get started with Adobe Express. That's adobe. Ly/steven. You have been in a relationship much longer than me, but we share a lot of similarities in many ways. I was wondering 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, because 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 10%, and I heard you say this. Oh, yeah. I don't communicate to my girlfriend that I've got 10% left. Then she might want to try and work through some You can't do it. It's going to go bad.

It's going to go bad.

Yeah, it's going to go bad. Yeah. Let's not do this at 1 AM. No. 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 But is there anything else that 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. A couple's work is so incredibly powerful and helpful. I think the Gottman's work is really... We read the Gottman's work together sometimes. I think that's helpful.

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

Oh, yeah, no, for sure.

What, you weren't?

No, I was willing. Oh, really? Okay. 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. They got my number. I'm like, damn. They just called a thing a thing, and it hurt my feelers. But I guess the biggest thing is that neither Steve even nor I had any modeling of what a healthy relationship looked like at all. 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. 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.

The help being, you turn to him and ask for help or extend?

Well, Well, we get external help, but we read, we try new things, we try new tools. We don't ever want to be done learning and trying to be better for ourselves and for each other. That's a lot. I mean, 38 years together is not just like the slow roll movie of a life and a family, but we've buried parents. We've gone through illnesses. We've raised kids. We've gone through seasons in our own lives where we were not synced at all. It's really, really hard. But I'm more proud of it than anything I've ever done because my set up for success was zero.

You've buried parents. Yeah. Christmas Day?

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

Four years.

I wouldn't wish shit on the people I hate the most. I try not to hate people, but God gives me grace for it on occasion. But I would not wish that on anybody. There's the reality of it. She gets there, there's an accent, you're showering your mom, you're bathing your mom. She knows just enough to be humiliated by it. But this is life. This is caregiving. It's a tremendous emotional, physical, mental weight that falls primarily on women who are also in the workforce. Thank God, I had two sisters, so there's three of us. And many people have zero. It's like you and your PhD researcher. I resources, a lot of resources, and I think it almost killed me.

It almost killed you.

I mean, yeah. To lose someone that you love, like I love my mom in bits and pieces, in chips and bones. Then there was a day when she just got incredibly, incredibly cruel. My mom was the fulcrum. Our family changed on her back. She was the first person to go to therapy. She left my dad. She got us into therapy. She worked three jobs. She changed everything. She talked about the long history of addiction in our family, on both sides, everywhere. She changed our family. To say she was somebody who I respected and revered is an understatement. We did so much healing work around how she showed up as a parent in her marriage with my dad. Then the one day I went to go take care of her, and I saw that thing that hadn't seen since I was 14, and I'm 54. It literally, I couldn't drive. It brought me physically to my knees. My husband had to come and get me. I can't talk about it without getting emotional because it's not like I blamed my mom because she's in the middle of this disease. But it was like, I didn't see her for two months after that.

Steve kept saying, I can't. He's like, You got to heal from that. Just imagine being dropped back in a worst-case scenario situation when you were 13 or 14. Then you're just like, I can't. My sisters were like, We got this. Then they'd go through a period where they were like, I can't right now. Then, Okay, I got it. But Steve always had it. She was like, I got the diaper. I'll take him to dinner. I'll meet with the doctors. That's partnership. You know what I mean? That's partnership.

How did you deal with the grief?

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

I've heard this. I've never not heard that from someone that had a parent struggling with dementia and passing It was complete relief.

I mean, the day before she died, I think we had a really important time with her. I'm sure she is playing dominoes with Anne Richards and Molly Ivins and great other female Texas politicians. Democrats. Because my mom was very radically political. The window of grief was just years of... There was, 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 got into her master's program. That all just went away just every week. That's why the whole Strong Ground book, there's a sentence 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, dementia. I took care of my grandmother with dementia with my mom. 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. I looked down and I said, Okay. And he goes, Not the floor, the ground. Take your feet, push in to ground. Use your mind to connect with your body. Push into the ground and then tell your mind you're going to be using fucking lats. I was like, Okay. So I did it and I felt them. I started whispering every time I would do a weight lifting thing, Strong Ground. Strong Ground.

Strong Ground. An unbelievable, unbelievable book. 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 During Leadership, the Tenacity 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 mugger like me. That's much. We're at a time, and the team we're going to run through the door if I'm not careful. 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 You actually know this person.

I do? I know the next guest?

No, you know the one that left the question for you. Oh, got it. 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 The Lessons of During Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human spirit. You are. I was trying to think if there was any others. You are the single most requested guest, and you have been on the show 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. They say your name because of the incredible work you've done through your own podcast, which I'm going to 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, 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, but also to check out this book, Strong Ground, which I'm going to link below. Also, Dare to Lead, I think 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.

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. You're a wonderful human being. Actually, one of the things you've inspired me to be is myself, because that's exactly what I find you to be. Thank you so much, Brené, for your time today. It's deeply, deeply appreciate it more so than I could 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. Thank you. Meaningful. Thank you.