EPISODE #902 High Performance Requires Radical Adaptability Keith Ferrazzi

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is fun because I'm interviewing a friend and a guy who's been called the Dale Carnegie of our, of our generation. Multiple number one New York Times best selling author and guy just wrote a new book about how to be radically adaptable in the world we live in today that includes things like biohacking, leadership, entrepreneurship and it's hard to put words to what he does here, but we'll call him an entrepreneur, expert in relational science, collaborative science, consultant on leadership to many of the Fortune 100 and I think a burner and burning man as well. Keith Farazi. Welcome to the Human Upgrade.

Yeah, a big time burner. 16 times. Very, very excited about this. And Dave, you know, this is, I hope it's just going to be a fantastic mutual admiration hour, but you know how much I admire what you've been doing for the world for so many years.

Thank you, my friend. Guys, I've been to dinner at Keith's house. He hosts these amazing salons overlooking la and just a cool community builder. And you might have heard of one of his books, the Never Eat Alone book. I think that's probably what your most famous book is so far.

So far. I mean, certainly hands down. It was interesting actually. I kind of ran away from that success early in my career because I didn't want to be known as the networking guy. It's not the work that I fundamentally do, it's how I live my life. No question in terms of authenticity and generosity, spurring growth and opportunity for yourself. But yeah, my work is, as you'll hear today is quite different than that. But I've come in my old age, which I'm, you know, almost at midlife crisis at 55.

I'm sorry, but how long are you Planning to live?

120.

So you're not at midlife?

As I said, almost a midlife Crisis. Almost.

But 120 is such a lame goal.

Yeah, I think it's approachable, but I. Look, listen, you and I need to hang a little bit more so you can convince me otherwise.

Just make it a 1/3 life crisis and you'll be happier.

Yeah, yeah. By the way, I totally believe in it. I have been inhaling you and Peter's exhaust fumes for so long that I totally get it. And Tony's and others.

So Peter Diamandis and Tony Robbins, just for people listening. So we know which Peters and Tonys we're talking about. Both just great human beings. We both had the honor of Spending lots of time with.

Now.

You'Ve definitely moved on from the networking guy. And the reason I wanted to have you on is a you wrote a new book. And anytime someone who spends all their time doing and thinking about stuff decides to write a book, they've committed to doing something that takes grueling thousands of hours to write a book. And the pay for authors is about equivalent to a Starbucks barista on an hourly basis. It is not a way to make money. It seriously is not. It is a way to share your life's work in a way that matters. It's always a labor of love, and maybe if you're Stephen King or something, it's a way to make money. But for nonfiction writers, this is about boiling information, almost uncountable information, down into a very few precious words. So it's most highly distilled stuff. So anytime someone with your experience says, I took the time out of my life to write a book, I'm like, I'm going to read the book. And that was the reason. That was our excuse for getting together. But the other reason I wanted to hit you up was you talk about finding what blocks big groups of people. You call them global organizations. You focus on companies, but it doesn't really matter if it's a company or community, like our audience, the Upgrade Collective here, who, by the way, is, for the first time ever, the audience is able to chat with you over a chat interface. So our live audience is, as I interview you, chatting with you and me and each other, which is super cool. So this is part of the membership benefits of the Upgrade Collective. Go to our collective dot com.

Oh, sorry, I interrupted your URL. Go ahead. Do that again.

I'd say we have different audio tracks. Chris, It'll work. So Chris can edit that out.

Okay. The reason I'm saying is I really am excited about doing this and what I would really ask everybody to do, give based on this intro, which will happen and, you know, it's happening now, but give me your most impactful question that you want to make sure we customize this interview for. Right. So hit us hard on what you want us to talk about and answer, and I'll make sure we'll try to weave in as much of it as possible. But we'll. We'll contextualize the conversation in the next five minutes and then hit us with the questions.

It's so good. Normally, what I do on these is I have usually about 8 to 10 pages of notes before an interview, and I have those prepared for you. And then I also ask the upgrade collective live audience, hey, the things I didn't think of do it here. But the fact that they can ask both of us is a new thing, so it'll be cool. And since you're at least as good at this as I am on being interviewed, it's going to be fun because we'll both weave these in. So guys, put your thinking hats on. And one of the first things that I'm concerned about is scalability of organizations. So you look at this and I look at scalability of complex systems, whether it's mitochondria or in plus one processing in cloud computing. The problem I see is that as companies get bigger, inevitably narcissists and people who are either lying to themselves or lying to other people consciously seem to rise up, take over and spread like cancer. And you get bad organizational behaviors internally that demotivate people. And you get external things where oh yeah, screw the environment, screw the customer, screw everybody. And I've not seen companies who are able to avoid that as they scale. And certainly I've had to deal with my share of narcissists in my companies, getting good at spotting them and firing them quickly.

But I mean, I've had to deal with my being a narcissist in my own company and firing that through plant medicine and ayahuasca journeys. But that's a whole different conversation.

It might not be the whole different thing.

Right.

Because if your CEO's a narcissist, if I talk about narcissism and what, what you, how you think of that and what that is. And let me just say this for.

Your audience, if you don't mind what I here's the promise that I want to give you by the end of the Dave and mice conversation. Number one, we have done the most robust research project known to anybody that I know of, including the large consultancies. We've got the number one picked research study coming out of Harvard on the subject of who do you need to be in a post pandemic world as a business leader? So if you're in business, if you work in an organization or you're a leader of an organization, what you're going to hear from us today is how do you need to reboot yourself so that you don't crawl out of the fucking rubble and go back to old work ways. But you, what I call don't go back to work, you go forward to work, how do you leap forward 10 years out of the pandemic? That's the conversation we're going to be having with you. The second thing you're going to hear from me is a lot of vulnerability and authenticity because I've done a lot of work on myself to be able to show up here in front of somebody as extraordinary as Dave and not be nervous as shit for not believing that I deserve to be here, but actually being excited about being the human that I am in front of you all because I think that's where the real learning opportunities are. So I'm going to share with you a lot of stuff personally. If Dave wants to go there, I'm happy to go there. So that's what I'm. Bottom line is it's going to be fun, it's going to be entertaining, it's going to be raw. And I really hope I leave you with some things that you need to do differently to have the kind of success you deserve.

So you got over imposter syndrome?

You know, I have and, and I'll tell you, it is, I say I have. It's still 8% there, right? I don't know that we can ever squeeze out the momentum of our, of our upbringings. And I have gone through so many different modalities of coaching and therapy and events and the people that I've mentioned, you know, have been very powerful in my transformation and the pass meditation, et cetera. But it really wasn't, to be honest with you, until I started doing plant medicine, ayahuasca and psilocybin, that it really re engineered the brain. It was like, it was like the chiropractic adjustment of my brain that I needed to land all of the stuff I knew, but I was still resisting. You know, it's like, it's one thing to know what you need to do, it's another thing to believe in it and to, and to have a practice. And you know, I would say, and it hasn't been a long journey. I know I was the anti drug. I mean I didn't do anything, even marijuana throughout college. And then all of a sudden I found plant medicine and, and I call it medicine. Pardon me.

How long ago did you start?

I was just going to say five years ago. Four or five years ago.

Yeah, I remember when you started doing that, your eyes were all dilated and. Okay, I didn't see that part. But you, you were, you were pretty, pretty excited when you discovered it. Like most people are, you know, listen.

I love my mother today. My mother, I love my mother today. And I, I suspect I always did, but she's a Real piece of work. And, you know, I gained empathy in ways that I didn't have before. I. I shaked off shame in ceremonies that went back to really core wounds, you know, of. Of childhood, you know, and I. And just as a backstory, I mean, really poor kid in an immigrant Italian family growing up in the 70s in Pennsylvania, where the entire steel industry was eviscerated and my dad was mostly unemployed. My mom had to become a cleaning lady, which she hated. I had to go to work myself at the age of 10. And the 20 bucks a day I made at the country club was meaningful because that's the same amount my mom made. The difference is my mom showed up and worked and she got the 20 bucks. I showed up and sat in the caddy yard sometimes for five days in a row and got out once. But the point is, that's where I came from. And yet I went to extraordinarily prestigious schools from a very early age because my dad got me into those early educational opportunities. Homeschooling for the melons, which was then a door opener for a private boarding school, which was a door opener to Yale and then Harvard Business School. And I spent most of my time not feeling I deserved to be in any of those places. So that's the imposter syndrome. And along the way, I don't know what, you know, people's religious beliefs are, et cetera. I happen to be a strong Christian myself, but along the way I found out I was gay. You know, it's like, Italian immigrant family, blue collar steel worker. None of that stuff coincided at all with the aspirations my family and I had for me. So to deal with all of that at once was a lot. And today I can say that the erosion of self esteem that, you know, by the way, the good news is I used all of that as fuel for extraordinary early success. Youngest partner ever elected at Deloitte. Youngest officer in the Fortune 500 at the time. Chief marketing officer of Deloitte before I was 30. Chief Marketing Officer at Starwood Hotels and Resorts in my early 30s. So all of that was extraordinary. It did not make me happy exactly.

I had a similar path where extraordinary success, mid-20s, running tech strategy, even for M. And as for publicly traded stuff, but miserable. Just absolutely miserable the whole time and with a lot of the same, you know, fear and shame and imposter syndrome and things like that. So I, I get it. And I also like you. I never even used cannabis till I was 26 and I flew to Amsterdam. At least I know what I'M getting. And I tried mushrooms. I tried Amsterdam or tried mushrooms in Amsterdam and pot, because it was legal. And then I did the same thing.

I only went, I only flew to places, even five years ago, I only flew to places where it was decriminalized or legal because I still, you know, I still have that belief system. Anyway, all of that said, folks, and I don't know how much time you've spent on it. What, what plant medicine did for me is, you know, the same it's doing today for returning vets who are using it to reverse their ptsd, for individuals who are showing up to clinics all over the world fighting depression. But for me, it was really about being a better corporate athlete. I did it because I wanted to be a better leader. Believe it or not, I had gotten to the stage of scale of my business where I knew that what got me here would not get me there. And I did. And at the same time, I was repeatedly managing a business with the same habits and rituals that got me here because they were, they were so ingrained in me and I needed to break the code. I needed to break the code independent of what coaching I had. And I knew what to do. I wasn't doing it. And as I said, the chiropractic adjustment I needed was that very first ayahuasca sit in Costa Rica that I did with a group called called One Heart. One Heart.

There's. There's a variety of ways to do ayahuasca. I did it, I think, in 1999, before tourists were doing that sort of thing. I went down to Peru and tracked down someone who would do it. I would just for listeners, if you're going to go the plant medicine path, everything that I know now would say, start with psilocybin and see if it opens the door and shows what you need to do before you do ayahuasca. I think ayahuasca has a higher risk, higher risk ratio. And for me, I've had more experiences like that using neurofeedback. It's one of the reasons I do the 40 years Zen program, where a lot of the overcoming that stuff, you can see it with plant medicine. Plant medicine can turn on neuroplasticity. But in terms of doing the actual work, there are some techniques. For me, the six months I've spent of my life now with electrocell in my head over the last 15 years have been really helpful, at least as much as the plant medicines. But it's all about developing awareness. And as a leader, there's awareness of what's going on internally in an organization and you're a leader in your home. We're all leaders somewhere in our life, whether it's a small group or a big group. So this applies to everyone. But there's understanding what's going on inside of you, but then there's also reading what's going on outside of you. And those seem like they're very different skills. And the best leaders have. And this is actually a question, so I think the best leaders have their internal wiring mostly done, so they're less reactive and they can be more conscious in their actions, but they're also really good at reading other people. Is that a true statement from the research you've seen?

Yeah. I love the questions coming into the chat room and a lot of them really are adjacent to this issue. Great leaders recognize that it is not authority or control that defines their leadership. It's what I didn't know when I was at Deloitte and I'm sorry, what I didn't know when I was at Starwood Hotels, even though I had learned it early on in Deloitte, which I can explain what I mean by that. Great leaders are movement leaders. Think about, think about leadership and about community and the enlistment of people to a shared mission. And I'm using those words very specifically, leadership isn't even about your mission. It's about enlisting people to their mission. Let me say that again. Leadership isn't about your mission. It's enlisting people to their mission. The very first person you invite into your team, whether they report to you or not, you still have to invite them and earn their invitation. In the very first person you invite into your team, you're inviting them into their team. Which is what I learned in the research in the past two years, is that real transformation occurs through co creation. Real transformation occurs when leaders open up a space for dialogue and debate and truth and transparency. And what was powerful about the pandemic was the pandemic gave people courage to shoot through the shit and state the truth because there was an emergency going on. And we rose to an occasion and we didn't give a shit about silos. We broke all the barriers down and we got stuff done because we were working in weekly sometimes I was working with the Delta airlines organization, lost 90% of the revenue. We were working in daily agile sprints. Daily sprints. What the hell's going on? Okay, let's do it. Let's sprint for the day. What happened? What do we need to do better what are we going to do tomorrow? Let's do it. Literally it was daily sprints. Now most organizations that do it right work on weekly sprints or every other week sprints. But the positivity of agility is a group of individuals who are empowered, who are, who are driving to a very clear shared agenda and then they stop and they bit the shit out of each other and they stress test and they bulletproof and they innovate and then they go on another sprint, right? And that's what transformation is about. And we did it in the pandemic and I'm starting to see us lose it as we come out and we're going back to these old lethargic ways of working. So a lot of people are asking the question about leadership and you know, and their roles. What I would, what I would highly invite you to do is very simple. Number one, look around the world that you're working in, no matter where you are in the organization, from the top to the bottom, and, and find an aspirational goal that you think would be meaningful to the business that you believe should manifest. It doesn't matter that you have authority over it. That's not what's important. Find that manifestation of this is the mission, this is the goal, and then enlist a few individuals who believe similarly to co create the path to get there. Even if you've got the path in your head, don't reveal that as a, as a fader complete. You could add it as an input, but then you invite people. I always say the beginning of a transformation starts with a person who has a curious question and 30% of the answer and is enlisting other people to get to 60%. Right? So what I love about Dave, your movement is you are constantly co creating with your community and you're constantly learning and growing. You don't say you know the answer, you're constantly evolving the answer. And I love watching you constantly evolve the answer. And that's what movements are built of. Because the community needs to feel and needs to be a part of the creation of building it. And then the movement becomes the acolytes. I guarantee you, Dave, you've got individuals probably here who are as big an acolyte as the highest paid employee that you could ever possibly have. Because they believe in the movement and they're evangelists of the movement. This is what happens in businesses. When you do it right as a leader, you're finding the acolytes and you're, you're infusing them with, with celebration. You're infusing them with, with a place to call home, a place of belonging and then you're sending them out in the world to be evangelists of the movement that you've co created. That's how we've been, that's how we've been manifesting the work in the transformation of General Motors with, with that team that's moving from a mechanical engineering company to an electronic software firm. Right. You know, it's all about building movements of change. Everything is. And you're right, Dave, it's all about empathy at the beginning starts with that empathetic understanding of that human. You're inviting into the co creation, you're inviting into the co leadership, you're inviting in to being a leader of the movement with you.

So the biggest mistakes that I've made in business have been inviting people in who are unconsciously or consciously sabotaging, stealing, taking credit for other people's work, blocking people out of things, stuff like that. Where, and this happens in every company all the time. So how do you choose who to bring in and how do you know that someone you brought in actually is a high integrity person versus someone pretending to be a high integrity person?

I love it.

I've taken a lot of hits from people like that.

That. So I'm going to tip my hat to a dear friend who passed away not long ago. Dave, I'm sure you know him as well, Tony Shea.

Yeah.

So Tony died tragically after a year of fighting his mental well being and imbalance and he's one of the great innovators in the world of work. By the way, my foundation has started with his family and Alfred Lynn of Sequoia, we've started the Tony Hsieh Award which is identifying. If anybody here is interested, by the way, go to the tonyshayaward.com and take a look at the winners. This past year we have now have thousands of people applying, raising their hand and saying I am radically innovating around human capital in my, in my team or in my company. And, and if you want to be a part of that movement, let us know. We're actually meeting in Vegas this weekend to celebrate Tony's birthday and to convene and commune around this topic. Anyway, I say all of this because the way Tony used to hire was using community. So there's two things he did which was really extraordinary. The first thing Tony did was he made sure that all of the interviews were group interviews and he would literally practice group interviews where multiple people would interview the person together. So that you would really have triangulation on questions and it would be in multiple times. And then the assessment process, it wasn't a full black ball, but it was pretty close. If anybody felt very strongly that this person wasn't a fit. That weighted very high. That weighted very high. Because a lot of. A lot of times people have really good sniffers for the kind of bullshit that you're talking about. That you've seen more than we might. Right. As the bosses interviews.

I don't have any, as far as I can tell, given my amazing track record of hiring people who wreck my work. And that's what I do is I know the people in my organization who have good radar. And I'm like, you interview them, I'll interview them for other.

Something else. But do it as a group. Let them do it. You be even in there as a group because then you'll start to see the questions to ask and the reactions. You'll have empathy. And then get that group together to talk about it. And then the last thing Tony would do, which was just crazy, once they decided that they were going to hire somebody, then they would go to them and say, hey, one other thing, we'd like to give you one month of salary not to take this job. Wow.

So that's even more than paying people to quit. You pay people to not take the job.

People pay people. If people are willing to forego one month salary to not take the job, you know, they're deeply committed for it. Isn't that crazy? I mean, that's so amazing. And then of course, all the work that he's so well known for, and if you read his book about happiness, all the work he's so well known for in terms of. In creating an engaged employee base, etc. Is legendary. But I mean, those are the kind of innovations that I'm excited to find going forward in his legacy. Nobody, we always say that nobody can walk in Tony's shoes, but maybe thousands of people combined could begin to fill them.

Very, very powerful statement. And there, there is something to be done there. I'm reminded of a book by Jeff Smart called I think it's who. It's a book on how to do interviewing process where he actually has multiple candidates in the room at the same time. So you have three candidates all interviewing for the same job at the same time to see how they behave in groups. What do you think about that? Is that a good way to sort out the. Sort out the narcissists?

First of all, it's crazy enough That I love the idea. And, and I would like to see. I mean, what I would say about that is I like it because you begin to see who has the chutzpah versus deference. You'd begin to see how people show up in a competitive framework. Like what parts of themselves show up in a situation like that. I actually like it a lot.

It's an interesting idea.

I'm actually very transparent when I'm hiring people. I'll talk about the other candidates. Smart. I'll be very transparent. I'll say, listen, you know, I've got three candidates right now. And what I'm weighing between the three of you is this, this, and this. You have this attribute. This person has a different attribute. Where I really respect. What do you think about that? Like, I'm very transparent because I want them to help me co create the solution.

I've hired hundreds of people across my different companies. We're growing upgrade labs right now pretty quickly. And one of the things that's caused me the most pain is when I don't hire someone, I would love to be able to call them up. And I would do this. I would like to anyway come up and say, you know what, the reason you didn't get the job is there was another candidate who just kicked ass. Right. But if you really tell them, well, it's because you did these four things during the interview that were seriously not okay, and you should go work on those, okay, that would be worth five minutes of my time. But if you say that even with just honest, honest assessment feedback, you open yourself up to lawsuits, even if it's.

Not the legal issue associated with that. But I can tell you this. I say it during the interviews.

Yep, that's smart.

Well, I don't know if it's smart. It's. But it's my culture. The culture of our company is we are radically transparent because we give a damn. The mission is too important. We care about each other and we believe that everybody can be lifted to a higher level than we are all today. I mean, you. You'll learn. Dave, you and I connect because we're both seekers. And I am such a seeker. I will always embrace criticism. I may not always agree with it, but I will always embrace criticism because it's critical data to my. My elevation. And I came up with a word that I'd love to give you all around. Community and team co elevation. You, I believe you can't elevate by yourself. You need to elevate as a group. You need to collaborate. You need to wrestle. You need to debate co elevate. And it was the. It's a principle in competing in the new world of work, which is at some point, a book I want to tell you guys about, because it is why I'm here. Actually, I'm here to see Dave, but it's one of.

We're talking about some of the aspects.

In your book, and CO elevation becomes a big principle. We saw co elevation land big time during the pandemic. We saw people come together in ways that they put things aside that were previously inhibiting collaboration, and we saw it happen. And again, my whole point and my message is we became some of our best selves during the pandemic, and I don't want that to be lost. I want us to be a very conscious and proactive at taking the best parts of this into the future. So the question that got us, sort of got us off on this is what I will. I will say to people. Listen, you know, what you just said, you know, is not landing well with me. Help me understand why I should be wrong. Right. And like, I'll. In the stock, you know, I will be critical in interviews because I'm critical to myself and I'm critical with my team, and they're critical back to me. That's our culture. And if somebody can't handle that. I've had people storm out of interviews in virtual meetings. I've had people be very upset by being being given criticism during the interview. And I'm like, great, God bless you. But, you know, this is not going to be a good place for you. And I'm glad that that level of resilience was something that was tested. I'll tell you something. There's one chapter in the book about resilience, and we did so much work. I worked with the. The CEO of Headspace, cece, before she merged it into Ginger. I worked with cece. I worked with Mindy at Weight Watchers. I worked with a bunch of different companies. And we did a massive study of what does resilience look like in the workforce during the peak of the stress of the pandemic. And we published in Fast Company, we published in a number of different places. And that chapter, interestingly enough, teased out a number of things. One of the things that it teased out was the number one drain on our personal resilience in the workplace was the of trying to get done in companies where it was bureaucratic and difficult. Yeah. Interestingly enough, you could actually have an organization that. That gives, you know, all of all of your services to their employees for free, right? That that gives meditation time in the afternoon that you know, has flexible work, etc. But if all of that, all of those HR programs are given and getting done is difficult, you will have a non engaged employee base. So it's interesting that the subject of resort of resilience when we did our data boiled down to is this a team that truly knows how to co elevate and work together to get to better outcomes because we're there to be productive. And the lack of productivity that's caused. Now the other thing that we found was that too many people blamed the organization for their, their inability to work through the network. And the reality is it's about us. We have to learn to stop working in the org chart. We have to learn to start working across the matrix. Once we realize that the organization doesn't owe us shit, that the organization doesn't have to lay out the red carpet and make our ideas easy for us to execute. Once we learn that, and we learn that all of the challenges that people put in our place are nothing more than what I call market forces. They happen to be peers, but they're just market forces. And to you being an agent of change, to you being a transformational agent, if you awaken to your agent tree and the lack of victimization and what does it mean to be a change agent? That it's not always easy and that you have to earn those relationships and you have to navigate that. Once you learn that then you will be able to be an engaged employee and you'll be able to find. And so a lot of this is really down at the personal level. It's not pointing up that the culture of the company. How do you create an environment around yourself that gets stuff done? And that's what one of the. And a lot of people get a little upset about that. When I say it it's like well you don't understand my boss, you don't understand whatever. Like I don't give a working change. Like Gandhi wasn't easy. You know, it's like it's not easy to be a change agent. And the question is, do you want to be that? And if you do want to be that and you have the resourcefulness. The one thing I'll end with is I started thinking this is very politically incorrect. I started thinking that we're going to get to the stage where and I don't know that they'll say it out loud, but I think companies are going to the stage where they're going to start testing. And they want to hire resourcefulness. Right. There's a lot of employees that are not resourceful, that are not resilient. And I would argue that, that there are organizations that are going to start to awaken at the fact that I can't babysit weak individuals. I want to build an organization of resilience and resourcefulness. And a lot of that has to do with the personal work you've either done or not done outside of the workplace. And I'm just saying this, this is not, it's not, that's not in the book, by the way, but this is a personal view that I believe. Each of us has got to do the hard work ourselves.

I look for that evidence. And one thing that will get someone removed from the company or not hired is the victimization thing. And people who come in, I do my best to get all of them. When there's open spots to do 40 years of sentence. Like, this is a $15,000 highest end executive program on the planet. If we're going to spend time together, you might as well go through and drop. All of us have little droplets of victimization. But Scott, Barry Kaufman came on the show and talked about a new concept called victim narcissism. So we all know about grandiose narcissism where I'm so good, therefore I deserve. And you mistreat other people and tell yourself a story. But then there's the victim narcissism, which is I have suffered, therefore I deserve. And when you get someone like that in a company, it sucks energy from everyone else because instead of going out and doing what you just described, instead of being resilient, they sort of, they see themselves as a victim even when they're not like, well, you could just step up and do it, but oh, I can't. And that sort of thing, it, that's what creates a lot of the bureaucracy and a lot of the slow stuff. But the questions from the Upgrade collective.

Coming through here, by the way, I have seen people come back from your Zen work with a fundamentally rebooted way of thinking about themselves and their victimization. And I've seen agentry achieved from people who have done the work with you. And I have to say on a personal basis, it's one of the things that I still have in my bucket list of total transformational experiences that I want to come to is to work with you on that. I've seen enough people's, I've seen enough people's witness that I know it's a big Deal.

It comes down to understanding that view of yourself. And for a lot of us, it's like, in your case, you have a parent, okay, You're. Your mom's pissed off. She has to work if she's not spending time with you. Like, okay, like I was two or five or whatever. And you get other people who've been bullied. I certainly got bullied. And it's very common. Right. And that's another thing that happens. And so you get all this stuff that's in there. None of it's conscious. And so I was just looking for ways to tap into it in the least possible amount of time. Because I don't want to. Yeah, because like, every three months, if I do vipassana to do this, that would suck. I'd miss 10 days of work and family and all that. It's like, how do we do it in the least AM time? Because otherwise it is a world going.

Into a deep psilocybin journey. I'm not talking about parting on mushrooms. I'm talking about blindfolded with the right guided journey, the right guided music, the right intentions, the right wraparound processing of it afterward. Right. And. And having a psilocybin journey that truly reroutes all of those past traumas. What I found and is empathy, not just letting go, but I have gone as far as to be empathetic to those bullies, to be empathetic to those injustices. And once you have that level of forgiveness, you've really elevated yourself to a whole different plane. And your heart goes out to the next set of people that are difficult because you can process them differently than you've done in the past without the reaction and the defensiveness and the. And the projection back onto yourself as to whose responsibility is their bad behavior. Well, it must be my fault. Even though you're not saying that out loud, your reactions are imposing that right. I deserve this and therefore fight it.

The forgiveness is at the very core of the process that I work on when I'm doing it with people, just on my. With myself. And, um. And forgiveness is really hard to do. But. Okay, so you have compassion. And there's. There's three stages. There's. There's. Empathy is kind of the lowest level. Compassion's the next level. Empathy, you feel it. Compassion, you. You feel compassion for. You don't have to feel it. And then there's equanimity, where you know it can happen, but it doesn't unseat you. And you're still just fully present.

Yeah.

And I Work on that. But most people, especially when you care deeply, if there was, you know, someone in, in your company who is sabotaging your work, let's say. Right. That's a different kind of thing. Because if it's an ongoing clear and present, it's, oh, I felt compassion because this person was mean to me in seventh grade. Who the hell cares, right? End of the day, okay, you got over it. But when there's active skullduggery going on, how do you practice forgiveness? How do you teach a CEO of a Fortune 100 company who knows one of his SVPs or board members is undermining him or whatever? What's the process there? Because everyone in the question thread here is being undermined and feeling this. And this is what your book's about, really? But you didn't write it this way, so answer that question.

Yep, sunlight is the greatest disinfectant. And the answer is there's a social. There's a social contract that we have in business today that causes a situation like you're talking about to both be acceptable and to be castrating. Somebody's being an asshole over on the left and you're dealing with what does that mean to me? How do I deal with that? They're undermining me. Etc. First of all, there is a reasonable assumption that that kind of behavior is acceptable in business because it happens all the time. So obviously it's a social contract. Everyone's talking about it. So for whatever reason, it is allowed in business. And it's interesting because nobody is sitting here talking about everybody stealing on their expense accounts. Right? We kind of know that's not allowed. Right? We know that thieving is not allowed. But thieving from shareholders through this kind of abhorrent behavior of lacking collaboration and sabotaging each other, that is acceptable. Bullshit. It's not acceptable. So the key for us is to make sure that first thing we do is we begin to be a movement leader inside of our companies as to what behaviors in an organization are high performing professional behaviors and what are low performing professional behaviors and what I do in the chapter called inclusion. So I have four chapters at the beginning of the book called Competing in the New World of Work. And I think we may have had the wrong URL listed earlier, but I posted the newer URL in the zoom.

We'll have it in the show notes. And so if you're listening to this, Keith Ferrazi, Competing in the New World of Work. And I do think there's a lot in here because stuff is different Post pandemic, there's censorship and there's all sorts of fearful people not thinking and all kinds of weird stuff going on. And there's a lot of knowledge in here and it comes from the highest level.

So there's four fundamentals that we see we need to reboot in the new world of work. We've talked a little bit about resilience and the importance of resilience. There's a section in Resilience that is very Dave Asprey which is about our personal routines and how do we take agentry for that. Dave, you just follow anything in Dave's and that's there. There's a section as well. And that resilience piece is what is the resilience of the actual how we're working? Right, I'll give you a very quick hijack of that one. We're throwing meetings at collaboration, thinking that collaboration means meetings. That's bullshit. The reality is that if we keep thinking that meetings are collaboration, we're going to be over inundated and over indexing on meetings where we're constantly in meetings one after another, not getting things done. And still what we find in our data that shows if you have 12 people in a meeting, only four people feel that they've been heard. So you have an entire ethos of working grounded in meetings that is not working. And so there's two elements of that. We talk about it in the book, both in the resilience chapter and we also talk about in the book, in the chapter called inclusion, the two elements of rebooting the way you work and the way you collaborate. One is adopting something called asynchronous collaboration. So instead of having, instead of calling a meeting that says, hey, we have this problem, let's have a meeting about it instead, what you do is you say we're going to post a document which is a shared document that everybody can see. And the person who would have called the meeting says, here's the problem we're trying to solve. Here's a bold ass solution that I'm going to try. Here's who I know is going to hate it and here's who I think have a voice. And the people who have a voice are the people you would have invited to the meeting, by the way. Only 8 would have showed up. Only Only 3 would have had a voice in the room. Instead, send it to the 12th. Now they get to write underneath and argue in the cloud. No, that's not the problem. The real problem is this. No, how about this solution how about this? Oh, you've forgotten Jane and Joe. Now we send the thing to Jane and Joe. What. What started as a meeting of 12 people that you would have invited. Eight people showed up, three people been heard. You now have 30 people arguing transparently in the cloud where everybody is accountable for what they have to say.

Is this Slack or what tool set do you like to use for that?

You know what? You can use Microsoft Teams in a SharePoint document, or you can use a Google Doc, a shared Google Doc, very simple free tools that are available to you.

You probably don't want to use a Google Doc anymore because Google is now monitoring things and censoring things in a very dirty way. So I, I am moving away from Google and even as a search engine, I can't write my books on Google anymore. So I'm going to suggest we strike that one because of privacy and behavioral issues at the highest levels in the company. Google, you can also go to slide search results.

You could do it. You could do all of this also in a Slack channel, but it's a little more difficult to read. But you can do it in a Slack channel. You can. You know what you can do on a mural board? There's a wonderful tool, Mural, which is a really great whiteboarding tool I love. You can post it on a mural board. And the point is, everyone's gonna be able to see everybody else's point of view around these things. And that's the key, that sunlight is the greatest disinfectant. So now what you've done is you've had the debate. We did this with a large manufacturer that had been struggling with a particular problem for a year and a half. We did this in two weeks. People debated. We squeezed everybody's insight in one place. And by the way, some people had been holding back their insight politically because they would rather law. They would rather skulk around and lobby in the shadows for their point of view. They don't want it to be out in the open because someone might disagree with it authentically instead of lobbying the CEO behind the scenes. But now they're forced to put their fucking point of view right out there. And so now all of a sudden, we've got full transparency and sunlight on these issues. We step back, we looked at that, and we're like, oh, wow, that's an idea that came from a place we never expected. And this is something that somebody addressed that, boy, we didn't realize would be a risk. We had two meetings with six people in it each, and we closed this issue in literally those, in less than three and a half weeks that they've been struggling with for a year and a half. So that's, that's an example of what I was saying to you when I said how you work can be fundamentally transformed in this new world of work that actually breeds a level of engagement, a level of innovation and inclusion and ideation and risk taking and candor. All the superfoods of a high performing team, which we do. It's what we do. We coach teams. All the superfood of a high performing team can be done and that's what we try to. So two of the chapters so far, I've only talked about two of them. One of them is, is the resilience chapter. One of them is the inclusion chapter and really crowdsourcing innovation in companies. The other two I'll just throw out there in case you're interested. One of them is how do you teach an organization to look around corners? We call it the first foresight chapter. How do you constantly recognize volatility exists? And how do you look around corners? And then the other one is agility. How do you run an agile company? All of this comes under the framework we call radical adaptability. Radical adaptability. So how are you a radically adaptable leader?

So one of the things that came out from reading, competing in the new world of work is I've done personality testing. You've done, I'm sure, probably at least as many as I have. And they reveal that I am a very quick decision maker. I can look at something, I need to have about an average amount of information. And I'm like, all right, I'm happy to do that. And it doesn't cause me fear and pain. So agility is built into my personality and it allows me to do some of the innovative, transformative things. You're an active. I'm a computer hacker too. I'm like, I don't just go around that. It's not that hard. It's a firewall put up by some douchebag. We'll just hack it. But the problem is when you have an organization that's not full of people like that, that level of agility from leadership creates fear and uncertainty with people who are not rapid decision makers. How do you make people feel safe when the company's like weaving and dodging to avoid, you know, so give you a couple of.

I'll give you two vantage points if I'd answer that. One is from an engineering point of view, which we study engineering the process. Yeah, and the other one is a humanistic point of view. From the engineering point of view, what we find is that if we change the way we work, so the people who are castrated and frightened are individuals that don't think they have enough data and then not enough analysis has been done. Well, the reality is you're, you're very capable of making decision on limited data using your instincts and then recognizing that you're agile. So if you have to undo that decision in a couple of weeks when you get new data, you're comfortable doing that too, right? So you're a, you're capable of working that way. Other people need additional insight, additional data. When you bring that ability to crowdsource information. This is where Peter Diamandis and all of his work with XPRIZE comes in. If you look at crowdsourcing, the answer right, you can. We. We had a meeting with one of the largest consumer packaged goods companies in the world out of the uk and business planning used to be done by a small subset of executives in a strategic planning group. Instead, we took the 300 leaders of the company and said, where should growth come from? And when we asked that question and we broke into breakout rooms, we opened shared documents that people were discussing bringing them back in, we were able to crowdsource triangulation on where growth should happen. Now, what might have taken an analyst group months to do, we were able to extract from the wisdom of the actual people doing the work, the geographic leaders, the product leaders, et cetera. And then we were able to use the data of the crowdsource solution. Now, we didn't. You don't let the. It's not a democracy where we're voting. And then all of a sudden we're doing it. But with that data, we were able to get more data in a shorter period of time to triangulate on an answer than would have been the traditional process right now. In advance of that, we even told them, here's the question we're going to be asking. Work with your teams to have a point of view. So now we've even crowdsourced, even among the teams, to the leaders who are 300 that are present. We ultimately, you know, estimated we had over 10,000 people involved in the growth creation process. Now that's a data set that makes people feel more comfortable. And we did it in literally less than a few weeks. So that's the, that's the, the answer that I would give to you in an engineering perspective and how to work differently. The, the answer I would give you is you do have to adopt slightly higher degrees of empathy for those who get castrated and those who feel that fear. And that's very difficult for guys like you and I who are, you know, I wouldn't say impetuous, but. But activators. We're activators. It's very easy for us to move and to make decisions and go. And the challenge is now this is where, again, transparency of behaviors are important. The team needs to be able to protect each other. So in a team where I am activating and pivoting and somebody else is wringing their hands and fearful, it's up to Jane, who's a peer of. Let's. Let's call this person Joe, who's the frustrated person. Jane's able to call a flag in the play because she has permission and say, keith, you just made a pivot and you didn't describe enough why. I know the data is in your head. It's not out in the open. And I could see the body language of Joe over there. Would you please pause for a second and maybe take us through your logic? Because I was. I was just making assumptions that everyone was following my logic. And it. And this is where a co elevating team is really important because we all have strengths and weaknesses, but we got to take care of each other. And that's the social contract. We have to have a social contract. I call it the CO elevation social contract. And I delineate it in the book, and it's. We have to decide. We do take care of each other. We have 20% of our brain is on each other's success. Most teams show up. Most teams show up looking at their own success and knowing, I got. I'm good. Now if I'm good, everybody else's job is to plug in and be good. But we got to shift the contract.

Is it a company's job to keep.

Employees safe, psychological safe, physically safe? What do you mean?

Well, right now, there's so many people who are walking around saying, what are you going to do to keep me safe? And I believe what they're actually talking about is psychological safety, but they believe it's physical safety. And you see companies everywhere saying, you know, safety is job one. Anyone who thinks knows if safety was job one, you shut the business down because someone might get hurt at the business. Like, no actually being safe enough so that everyone has psychological safety and the correct amount of physical safety. I mean, you worked with Delta airlines, airline companies. All they know how much they spend to keep someone safe because there is an upper limit to it. But it feels like some of this victim narcissism, stoked by media and other things like that. There's a lot of people saying what are you going to do to keep me safe? And you see six hand sanitizers, you know there's one every foot walking in the door. These are dysfunctional money wasting, fear spreading behaviors. But it's because of the psychological lack of safety. So what's an employer's role there?

I. You just blew my mind. You just brought something up and blew my mind. And I want to write a piece on this. So first of all, let me. You've just. I'm a methodology creator, that's why I write books. You just created a three level methodology on a very important subject that I don't think most people are aware of. First of all, I think we have to. You just conflated and made, made me recognize the critical importance of physical safety and psychological safety.

They're different.

How? Well, they're different, but they're not. I mean they're, they're. The reality is one triggers the other. And it's interesting that, you know, I'm sure that a scarcity and a fear of physical safety will, will, will breed psychological, a sense of psychologically unsafe. But what you're talking about is a community which we're breeding today because of media etc. Are breeding psychological unsafe and people are seeing it everywhere, including in physical unsafe. Right. It's a manifestation that's growing both ways. So I think there's an interesting conversation to be had in front of people. Part of, part of what I really believe is when you uncloak things, this is that point of sunlight is greatest disinfectant. When you uncloak things, they don't control you. Right. Whatever it is, whatever controls you, controls you because it's not, it doesn't have the sunlight against it. And so on this issue, I think that's a. I would love to navigate a beautiful conversation of psychological and physical safety. And what's the obligation of an organization and what are the root causes? That in and of itself is something to unpack. Check the box and we'll come back to that.

And you're so well equipped with Ferrarisi Greenlight, your research organization to do that. And your point? Hey, if, if I'm feeling psychologically unsafe even though I'm safer than most humans have been throughout all of human history, but I'm not feeling that way, all of the things I do to increase my feelings of safety will suck business results and probably create a less safe environment unintentionally.

I mean, how many of us have ever been home at our own homes at night by ourselves and watching a movie, and then all of a sudden, little cricks downstairs mean something? Right? You're absolutely. It's like all of a sudden, I'm getting goosebumps in myself right now just even thinking about that fear manifestation. Right. So fear manifestation can certainly come from a psychological and emotional standpoint and then manifest itself in real physical. A sense of lack of safety. So I think it's so powerful. It's a very powerful conversation. But I also want to talk a little bit about, you know, I do know you talked about Delta Airlines. Delta Airlines, while I was working with them, reported a death on the tarmac in New York. And. And I saw an organization. Wow. I saw an organization with such sincere concern, sadness, obligation. You know, it's like I was. Because I had worked with Dow back in the day when they had one of the worst safety records, and I saw the movement that they created around safety. I mean, Dao did beautiful things on Come Back to Delta D did beautiful things where in the back of everybody's swipe card, you know, door swipe card, they had a picture of your family laminated.

Wow.

And they started every meeting with a safety message where everybody pulled out and looked at their picture of their family and they had a safety message, and they said, this is why we're having this safety message. So they grounded the safety message in. In what was emotionally powerful. Right. Why we're doing this now you move over to that. And you and I saw how an organization was willing to be humble and open to, why did this happen? What could we have done? Where are we at fault? Right. The question of. And, you know, there wasn't like there were lawyers in the room saying, well, you shouldn't you say that out loud? Where are we at fault? But the answer really was, what could we have done to make that not happen? And not to get into the details, but it. It's not about the policies. Right. It's about the. It's about the unspoken social commitment among the team. Right. Why was it that somebody saw something and didn't say something?

It's mindfulness and processes and things that are necessary, but they're mindful versus reactionary.

It's mindful. But then the flip side is, of course, the wonderful AA phrase, which is, you don't think your way into a new way of acting. You act your way into a new way of thinking. You know, I'm a behavioralist, and I believe that you don't preach mindset and think that someone will transform mindset from preaching mindset. You actually act on something, get a positive outcome and be like, oh, shit, that was good. I want another one. And then, you know, it's Pavlovian, right? You're going to act your way into a new way, behaving through positive practices. And so.