247. A More Just Future, with Dr. Dolly Chugh

Welcome to episode 247 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Dolly Chug, author of A More Just Future.

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You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I'm joined by Dr. Dolly Chug. Dolly is a social psychologist and management professor at the New York University Stern School of Business where she teaches MBA courses in leadership and management. Dolly is well known for her teaching and facilitation skills. She she was one of six professors chosen from thousands at New York University to receive the Distinguished teaching Award in 2020 and one of five to receive the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award in 2013. Her research focuses on bounded ethicality, which she describes as the psychology of good people. Her work has been published in the leading psychology, economics and management journals and and cited by many books and authors. Her first book, the Person youn Mean to How Good People Fight Bias, which came out in 2018, has received praise from Adam Grant, Angela Duckworth, Liz Wiseman, Billie Jean King, and many others. It's been covered on the Today show, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the 10% Happier podcast, the Goop podcast, NPR and other media outlets. Her TED Talk was named one of the 25 most popular TED Talks of 20 and has almost 5 million views. She has a popular newsletter, Dear Good People, offering bite sized evidence based zeitgeisty tips on how to be the inclusive person you mean to be. And yes, it's linked for you in the show notes. Her most recent book, A More Just Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change, is the main focus of our conversation today. Prior to becoming an academic, Dolly worked at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Sibson Company, Scholastic and Time, Inc. Dolly attended Cornell University where she majored in Psychology and Economics for her undergraduate degree and Harvard university for her MBA and PhD. Quite the resume for quite the person. And of course a big thank you to Katie Milkman for the recommendation and introduction. Over to Dolly. As you're going to hear about in the episode, this is a really personal one for me that hits home for a reason that I haven't really talked about much on the show. Hopefully it's well received and you understand why I brought it up today and why I intend to talk about it more into the future. Also, I know this topic is heavier than a lot of what we talk about on the show, but it's important, which is why I asked Dolly to join me to talk about her book. It isn't easy stuff to hear or read about. That doesn't mean we shouldn't experience it. So I hope you go into today's episode with an open heart and an open brain. Before we get into everything, I want to be sure you know there are links in the show notes for everything, including Dolly's books and contact information and related past episodes, all within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 247 now let's jump right in. Dr. Dolly Chug, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Oh my gosh, it's great to be here, Melina. Thank you for having me.

Of course. I'm so, so excited and as I think always happens and I end up saying here is we had a pre chat that could have lasted days and I had to cut us short because we have to make sure there's so, so much that we can be talking about and that we are going to talk about in the interview and conversation today. And I want to make sure everyone gets to be a part of it and we get to catch up in person at south by Southwest when we're both speaking there in March, which definitely talk about what you're going to be talking about there in the conversation. And for everyone who doesn't yet know you, can you share a little bit about your background and your work and who you are and what you do?

Oh, absolutely. Thank you. And I am excited for us to experience south by Southwest for the first time together again. My name is Dolly Chug. I'm currently a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business. I teach courses in management and leadership and my research focuses on what I call the psychology of good people. I'm sure we'll have a chance to dive into that. Prior to becoming an academic, I was in the corporate world. I started my PhD at 33. From ages 21 to 33, I was in the corporate world in jobs in investment banking and consulting and I have an MBA as well as undergrad. I double majored in psychology and economics, which I think is deeply relevant to what you're doing here and what your listeners are interested in because there was no field called behavioral economics and I didn't know, that's what I was interested in. I just found those two areas interesting. Psychology and economics independently. Bob Frank was one of my professors at Cornell University. He would of course go on to be one of the most interesting voices, I think in the early stages of behavioral economics. Sendul Mullinathan was three years behind me, junior to me at Cornell University. That's how early it was in the field. Richard Thaler I don't think had arrived at Cornell yet. At least I didn't know him. So, yeah, I don't want to take credit for the whole field, but maybe I will.

Why not? Love it, love it, love it. And yeah, such a common story of the. Looking for the thing. And I like this. And people told me they didn't go together, but I knew they had to go together. Right. I, right.

Yes. I, and I distinctly remember senior year of college going to all these interviews, you know, for, for my first full time job. And I, I can, I can like picture it. People holding my resume back in the days of paper resumes, holding my resume and being like, I don't understand this double major and me being like, no, no, it makes total sense. It's both about human behavior.

People say, no, no, that doesn't fit. What do you mean? Yeah, and everything fits, I think. Right, Whatever. I, I love that aspect of the field, honestly, that everyone has such diverse backgrounds and the awareness and the connections within the brain that, that kind of brings to the way that we talk about things and you think about something like choice architecture. I mean, I don't want to say that it wouldn't have happened or couldn't have been possible without this sort of diverse background, but this thought process and you know, mutual friend, you know, Katie Milkman and her degree is in engineering, I believe.

Yeah. Undergrad and even her PhD. I don't want to misstate what it is, but it's not what you think it would be. It's like applied computer science or something. I am probably getting it wrong, but it's, it's not what you would think it would be.

Right. And I think it is just so powerful as we are, you know, building this, this field together. And human behavior is all the things. Right. We need all, all the things in there. So I love that it's this kind of melting pot of experience and background which I feel like is kind of a perfect backdrop going into your new book, A More just future. And as you look at this book, you know, you, you, you say in there that you're not historian and yet found yourself in this space of really digging deep into history. And I want everyone to know we are going to talk about how, or we intend. We intend to talk about how this ties in to business specifically and things that businesses can be keeping in mind. And this is just a really important topic when we're looking at, you know, businesses are made up of humans, regardless of what we want to think. And even if you have AI doing something in your company, you're. You're selling to humans. You have humans on your teams in your C suite there. It's all about people at the end of the day and human behavior. And so this all matters regardless of how much we talk about it, from what to do inside of a business. So with that caveat, can you share a little bit about, I guess, how the book even kind of came about as you started that process?

Absolutely, yeah. So the book, I would say if I had to pinpoint a moment of Genesis, it was as many things are, a moment of smugness, or maybe even a year of smugness as a parent where I had been reading to my kids who were sort of like six, seven years old, two children, and I was reading to them every night from the Little House on the Prairie book series. And I was very proud of this commitment I had to reading to them every night. Like, didn't matter, no matter what, we made it happen. And we were reading these long chapter books that were written by Laura Ingalls Wilder as a sort of autobiographical account of her family in the 1800s. And it's an eight book series, about 200 pages each book. It took a full year. And my husband and I then decided to take our kids on a family vacation to South Dakota and Minnesota, which is where the land where they were building, the Little House on the Prairie. And we went and saw all the places that are. They're not super touristy, but they are marked. And there are ways to sort of immerse yourself a little bit in the world that Laura and her family lived in. And so here we were on the prairie and, like, big blue prairie sky. It was just an amazing kids in prairie dresses, which they wore at their own insistence all week. Like, literally all week. So we're feeling pretty good about ourselves at this moment. And. And I remember standing on the prairie and suddenly being like, wait a minute, whose land was this before the Ingalls family were? I mean, the 1800s? It was. Somebody was here before that. And like, you know, it's sort of duh, Captain Obvious. But like, yes, somebody was here millions of people were actually here. And those millions of people were driven off this land through the colonizing forces that benefited the Ingalls family. And, you know, the genocide, and people view that word as strong. But the historical accounts I've read, that's how they describe the genocide of Native Americans that has sort of went on for a long period of time and then led to other ways of. Of sort of minimizing or actually kind of like squashing the culture of those families. Even in modern day, even people who are alive today can recall being sent away from their families into these residential schools where they weren't allowed to speak their native languages or see their families. This whole process that I'm describing was not at all in my mind when I read these books to my kids. There were a few little lines in the book where I was like, oh, that's not a nice thing to say. But, you know, that's pretty much all I offered my children as a historical context. And in that moment, standing on the prairie when I was having this, as you can hear, what is still a swirl of thoughts and emotions, I had no idea what to do with it. And I took my very excellent mental segmentation skills and just pushed it aside and didn't deal with it at all. Didn't invite my kids into thinking about it, you know, in an age appropriate way. I don't even think I mentioned it to my husband at the time. But a decade has passed since then, and I have felt that swirl of thoughts and emotions and questions come up time and time again, particularly in recent years when other things I don't know much about, that I have complicated feelings about that contradict the narrative I have about the country I love. The United States of America have come up Juneteenth the GI Bill, and it being for white veterans primarily and not black veterans of World War II, moments like this have led to this complicated set of feelings that I don't know what to deal with. And so as a psychologist, as a social psychologist, you know, this is what we do. We try to understand human behavior, human attitudes, human emotions. And so I decided I wanted to better understand what is our relationship with our past, what is our emotional relationship with our country, and how can I leverage what social psychologists and other social scientists know to offer us tools so we don't do what I did and just push it aside, right?

And it's one of those moments. And we do this all the time with particularly difficult topics like that. And you look at the moment and say, this is such a beautiful Moment. We'll revisit this when we get home.

Right. Time and place to our kids. All the time. Time and place.

Right. We don't need to dampen this amazing trip by talking about this other thing. Or again, in the work meeting or someone, someone says something, the, the comment and you go, oh, that seems weird. But I won't call them out in front of everybody or I won't bring it up right now. I'll. I'll make a note and I'll do that later. This is getting a little bit out of order, so hopefully that's okay with you.

There is no order.

Oh, good. O the. In the book, toward the end and you talk about how the distance to the past feels longer than the distance into the future. Can you talk a little bit about how that all kind of comes together? Because I think that is something that definitely comes up when we're looking at. I'm definitely going to say something about that tomorrow. But once the act of today has become an act of yesterday, it feels less important to. To bring up.

Oh my gosh. I just love how you articulated that. By the way, I am going to re. Listen to this and write it down and steal it.

Please do.

I love that. You know, you should write a book.

Hey, wait.

You just did.

Yay. Thanks.

Can't wait to read it.

Yeah.

So this is a work of Eugene Caruso and co authors that help me think about what they call these wrinkles in time, these asymmetries that the temporal asymmetries and how we view the past, the present and the future. And you would think mathematically like something that happens, like you said a day ago versus a day in the future should sit the same in our memory, in our. In also our vision. Like how we see those things, our perceptions. But their research shows. There is another research shows that it's actually really different. Like we see the past, as you said, is like farther away. It's also blurrier then the future, which is so counterintuitive because the future thing hasn't happened yet. So I'm literally having to make it up in my imagination versus the past thing has already happened. So you would think that would be clearer. But their studies have actually showed that we have a blurrier vision of the past than the future. We also tend to blame the victim more for the past thing bad thing than the victim of the future future bad thing. Again ironic given that the passing of the past is already done. So these differences in how we perceive the past and the present and the future as you said, can affect kind of the actions we take. It also affects how we understand today. That for me was the big learning was. Understanding today requires me to understand yesterday. There is no way to understand, you know, the society we live in, the business we work in, the neighborhood we live in. None of those things make sense if you don't know what happened literally yesterday and the yesterday before that and the yesterday before that. But if this wrinkle in time makes it blurrier and kind of twists our perception of what happened and actually kind of just makes us sort of view it as like off to the side, like, you know, it's sort of like our zoom rooms, you know, what's out of. We all have gotten really good at keeping things out of the frame. It sort of puts things out of the frame just like in our zoom windows. And that makes today confusing. We don't then understand what we see today. It's like reading. It's like picking up a book in the middle, you know, and like, particularly like a fiction book and like reading, reading page 100 without pages 1 through 99 and then being like, well, I don't understand what's happening. It was like, right, why would you. And I think that's kind of what happens with the world we live in now. Does that metaphor work? I just came up with that.

Yeah, I like it. It lands for me. I get that. And I think when I was reading about this in the book, I was really thinking about some, some work and research that Nuala Walsh has done. And she's been on the, um. She's a co founding member of the Global association of Applied Behavioral Scientists. Amazing, amazing person. And she has written an article. She wrote an article and when she was on the show, we talked about whistleblowing at work and how people in the moment would feel, say they were enraged and they were absolutely going to do something about this. And it was a large amount of people saying, I can't believe I'm definitely going to go do something. But it like less something, just staggering. Like 1% that actually took the next step, which the next step was to go find out how to do something.

Okay. It was like a low stakes next step, right?

Not like have the meeting and have the conversation. And so I think it might have been that it was like 10, less than 10% that actually then go find and figure something out even when they were enraged about it. But then now that it's a little bit past, so I'm curious. I'm going to connect with her and see how she, if she read some of this research as she was working on that or if this will be or it might have come out kind of after, I don't know with timelines of things.

But I love that and that that ties to George Loewenstein's work on like hot and cold emotions. You know that, that we're in when we're in a hot emotional state of any, any direction, we're more action oriented.

Right. And you think you're gonna feel this way the same, I'll have the same anger and the heat we, I think with that the cold hot empathy gap and the hot cold empathy gap as we kind of go both ways here. My episode I'm going to actually be doing on this, I'm calling Mind the Gap and it's gonna come out I think in January, so a little bit after this. But with that we, we talk a lot about you're in the cold state and you don't think about how you're gonna feel in the hot state. Right. So when I'm in the cold state state and I say I'm going to be able to resist dessert and then the dessert comes around and I'm eating it right, then that's hard to have an awareness of. I think people talk less about the flip of that, which is what we're saying here is in the hot state when it's. The thing is happening and I'm upset and I think I'm going to feel this way forever and I'm going to take that action in the same way I feel like I'm going to now. And there's definitely like time discounting layered.

In here and all these affective forecasting.

Yep. Yeah. So then we get just even. But what I think is so interesting and surprising is even just this tiny, tiny bit of distance from the thing. And what that drop off level is, is really fascinating and important to know as we're actually going to do the things we intend to do that are really important in creating that more just future again too.

That's a brilliant insight. It really is. I mean that definitely helps me understand these temporal asymmetries in a richer way because then the next step is system justification theory or what I call the good guys win mindset. This is work by John Jost and others kicks in because in that what our minds unconsciously do is invest in the status quo even when it doesn't benefit us, it sort of protects the default or default being the way things are now. And so if as you just described, I'M in the hot state. I'm outraged. Wait, now it's a day later, I'm in a cold state and I haven't done anything. Then I've got to create. You know, our minds need to find that coherence. So then system justification theory will do it, I guess things are fine the way they are, and maybe the victim was a little bit to blame anyway, so.

Right.

Whoa. Nice.

Right? Yeah. And like, was it really that bad? And that's like, you know, and this is when we think about leaving. Leaving jobs or leaving partners or whatever it is. And you say, you know, the next time this happens, do something about it.

Yeah, no, I mean, very relatable. Like, with all of these, like, my hot state versus cold state to do list is so different.

For sure. For sure. Well, you mentioned the good guys win theory here. Can you share a little bit about that and how that ties in?

Yeah. So this work by John Jost and colleagues, I think, helps us understand the challenges I know I experience when I think about where we are and why we are where we are. So we're in the United States with massive racial disparities. On almost every meaningful outcome you can think of, there is a racial disparity in the United States. And I think most people would say that's not the vision, that's not the narrative about the United States, that if we really are a melting pot, it shouldn't be. It should be a little more of like a roll of the dice, kind of who kind of is on which end of a disparity or whether there are disparities at all, as opposed to something where you can literally just bet every time and win the bet. And so if we agree that that's not what most people would like to see in the country, then the question is sort of, how did we get here and why is it like that? And it's difficult to answer that question if you don't know what happened before, which we just talked about. Like, if we don't know what sort of got us here. So if we don't have that knowledge in a meaningful way, our brains have to do something with that disparity sort of confusion. And one explanation is that our brains will justify the systems around us. That's the system justification theory, or what I call the good guys when mindset. Well, like, well, this must be the way it should be, or this is sort of how, you know, I guess what's happened in the past has worked out as it should, because the good guys usually win like that's usually how things work out. The good overcomes evil and that light, you know, overcomes dark. And. And so I guess things are more or less, you know, we could tweak it on the margins, but more or less the way they should be. And so this is unconscious, I suspect, but it kind of leads us to accept things as they are.

Right. And then we have our identity gets tied in with whatever, you know, kind of group that we are associating with in that space. And if they're bad, am I bad? And this kind of juxtaposition. I love what you say about paradox in the book. And, you know, there's a whole chapter about kind of embracing paradox and understanding this duality and talking about, you know, how our brains like to see things in binary versus this like five point rating scale, I think was just so well positioned and put together. I know I Talked about about 500 things there, but can you share a little bit knowing? Of course everyone can read the book.

To learn more about all of that, but yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, this has been. One of the things that's been really important in my own mindset is to think about our brains. You know, natural tendency to want consistency and coherence, to straighten the crooked picture on the wall, to get the puzzle piece to sort of click into place. That's a natural. We know that from so much of the work we're all interested in. But we also know that our brain can handle it if we tell it to. Sort of harder cognitive tasks. And one of those things is the cognitive task of accepting that two contradictory statements can both be true. The following statements are both true. The forefathers of the United States had an extraordinary vision, overcame extraordinary odds, wrote extraordinary documents. True. The forefathers of our country while writing those extraordinary documents with that extraordinary vision of liberty, equality and justice, most of them were enslaving other human beings. They were torturing them if they tried to escape or resist. And they were separating children from their parents. Also true. And even when I, like, I kind of had to, I just noticed myself kind of sit back after I said that, because it was like a lot. My brain does not know how to sit with that. And I have to keep reminding myself, two contradictory things can be true, not just in history, but in human behavior, in companies about our customers. Like, it is the nature of the human condition that contradictory things can be true. And so the research by Wendy Smith, Marianne Lewis and others that they summarize beautifully in their new book, Both and Thinking, reveals that we can if we activate what they call a paradox mindset, that is simply remind ourselves that two contradictory things can be true. We actually are more resilient in the face of setbacks. We're more creative when facing a problem. It really, like, unleashes us mentally if we're not just trying to always force things to fit when they don't fit. And so the paradox mindset that you just referred to, I think, is this really powerful tool that we can use when we're trying to understand all these contradictions in our. In our past and our present, when we're trying to think about kind of, well, wait, my company does a lot of great things. My company was built by these heroic founders. My company has been fueled by the love of generations of loyal customers. True. It may also be true that that came on the backs of people who were not well served by the vision or who were not welcome in the company or who were not viewed as potential customers. Both of those things can be true.

Right. And the, you know, makes me think here a lot of the, I guess, proverb maybe, but where it's, you know, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now. Right.

So I love that.

Yeah. Like, sure, it would be nice to say, you know, we could look back and say, oh, I wish that. If only they would have done something differently. And then don't stop there though. Right. So what's the one little thing that you can do right now that might be the spark of something new and being able to make that change?

Yeah. And that speaks, you know, to all the research we know about our future self, you know, how we tend to deprioritize our future self. And that's probably the kind of the key underpinning of so much of the work in behavioral economics is what do we do about that future self? And can we sort of bring them into our present day thinking and actions?

Yeah, for sure. Well, I know I mentioned this to you a little bit before we started the interview and the conversation in that. This book was a very interesting personal journey for me as well, which I think everyone should have a very deep personal journey throughout reading this book. For sure. Because there's a lot there in my case, from like sentence one, it starts, it resonate with the, you know, the Little House on the Prairie stuff, which I never read, perhaps because of this, that I'm going to be talking about here. And I don't talk about this a lot, like I said to you. So I am Alaska Native and The bulk of my family on my mother's side lives on the reservation. It's a little island called Metlakahtla in southeast Alaska. And the rest of my family lives in Ketchikan. So I am Tlingit and Tsimshian. And I. While I was born in a native hospital in Anchorage, I didn't grow up in Southeast with the family on the reservation. And so it's. I have a little bit of a different history to it, even though I spent my summers there. And so reading about the history of Native Americans as you talk about in the book, and knowing that Alaska Native had a lot of similar, you know, weren't able to go to school unless you separated from your culture and assimilated into the white culture that was there. And after my grandma died, I had some conversations with family and all the language that's lost a lot of culture that's been lost, totem poles that were burned and things that you learn about through. Through history and that I found out after my. My grandma had died that she went to. That they had segregated schools and segregated movie theaters, you know, signs that said no dogs and no natives allowed on different buildings and things. And so obviously she never talked about it with me. You know, I didn't know that that was a thing. And my grandma was this really strong willed, super fun, very sparkly person. And I always loved spending time with her. And it's just when you talk about how the past isn't that far away, like it's not that long, it's just a really difficult thing to realize. What, you know, she and my. My aunts and uncles, you know, extended great aunts and uncles, went through in that whole process. So it was just an interesting thing to relate to and be reading about in the book.

Thank you so much, Melina, for sharing that with me. I feel very honored because I know you did tell me this is not something you've typically spoken publicly about your family, and I appreciate that I got to be in conversation with you about it. And I am sorry for the loss of your grandmother. Can I ask you a question about that?

Of course, yeah.

Because I'm. In my book, I'm. One of the things I think a lot about is how do we connect the dots between the past and the present? And as I did lots of reading about that topic, there were lots of ways that I learned about the past spills, if you will, into the present through our words, our beliefs, our trauma, which apparently can literally be carried through our bodies, genetically through the epigenetic research that's coming out and many other ways. So I'd be curious to learn now that you understand things you didn't know about your grandmother's life. What do you notice in your own family or your community or culture that you hadn't noticed before about how the past is living in the present?

It's been an interesting journey as I was mentioning to you because I have. It's a. Something that people don't think about when it's not part of your. Your background, I guess. But so blood quantum has to do with whether you get to kind of like claim your tribe or not and whether. So there's a. In Alaska there's a corporation called Sealaska and you get to be kind of part of this. And in a way that blood quantum perhaps was used against people to say you have too much native blood so you don't get to own land or have these different things. It also is you don't have enough and you can't show the. The right ties. And so you don't get to be fully part of the. The tribe and get benefits and things that might be there if you don't have enough of the blood quantum at these days. It's been an interesting thing reading a lot about this now as I, I do care about this and I don't know how much is because with my, my son, which most of the audience knows, I have now a 15 month old and took the kids up to Alaska for the first, for the first time and seen the totem poles and my husband has been very interested. My other children, I did not produce those humans. I have stepchildren but I consider them to be part of the family in the same way. But having that now this blood quantum question for my blonde haired, blue eyed baby as we go up into Alaska and you know, what does that mean for him? And this tie back into the. The culture and the society. And when we were just up there a few months ago and hearing that the. They're teaching now some of the Tlingit and the Tsimshian language in the schools and I was able to get some books Baby Eagle for my son, which is as we're, you know, tying in that kind of background. So wanting that to be a part of his life and, and more of. For me it's become really important to preserve that culture as the elders are getting much older. You know, before that gets lost is something that's important to me. But knowing that I have, I'm so distanced from it. But that I don't want to be is kind of an interesting quandary for me, you know, conundrum.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's. That's really interesting. Are there, like, you just mentioned sort of the loss of culture, loss of language? That's a good example of, like, the way our brain will normalize that. Like. Well, of course, you know, those things die off, but that's not. Like. There is no. Of course there. They are dying off because of the actions that were taken, sadly, by our government and often sort of more informally, sort of by the dominant culture that is leading to those things dying off, like, they would have continued otherwise. And I'm curious, kind of what, within the conversations in your family, like, how that's discussed? Is it. What is the cause and effect that you understand informally as to why that's happening?

Yeah, I haven't had enough conversations about it yet, to be sure. And I think that there's the. Your. Your book has helped me to take a step forward where I might have let it simmer for a long time in my own mind, and to say, no, you know, that's not okay. It's, you know, time to start having some of these conversations and see what's. What's happening, how the culture is being preserved and what's. What can we be bringing back, you know, having those connections for, you know, my own family and history in Southeast Alaska. And I think it's, you know, important for everyone kind of around the world. I really like that you shared about the background of. Or the. The show where people are learning about their genealogy, you know, the celebrities and being able to see the stories that are there. And this question of being a better historian, and I forget what the word was when it's the person who asks the better questions and the historiographer, that one. Yeah.

Historian who studied how he studied history.

Yeah, yeah. So being able to look for the deeper stories and ask questions and know that while my grandma is. Is gone, so I can't ask her about her experience. And I believe all of her siblings, you know, we've lost that whole kind of generation at this point, but there are some others that I can be having conversations with and just taking that time to be more thoughtful and ask good questions and learn a little bit about what I don't know yet and what could be lost but is important to save. Whether it's art or other forms of culture or just those stories, it's important, and I think we all have that, regardless of what our background is.

Yeah, I agree And I mean, that's definitely what I'm hearing from readers of this book. You know, it's. I say, like ad nauseam, I'm not a historian, because I'm not, and I'm not even really much of a history buff, honestly. But I am a psychologist, and psychologists are interested in how people relate to others. And that's all this is, is like we all have some family history that either we cherish or we don't know, or we are embarrassed of or whatever. We all have that. And sort of understanding kind of how that lives in the present is, I think, really interesting. And we absolutely bring that to work with us, you know, and so when we're, you know, asked you very nicely at the beginning of this conversation, asked me to say my name the way I pronounce it and the way my family pronounces it. And that's a very actionable example of something that doesn't happen in most organizations is we often aren't capturing how people say their names, what their name means to them. And that's a place where a lot of family history sits, is in that name, which for many people was the first decision, you know, or at least the first big decision that was made about them by the people who were going to be critical and central in their childhood. So I think your journey through this book is very specific to you journey, but also a very universal to everyone who's sort of reflecting upon what past they bring into the present.

Yeah. Well, I appreciate you tying that in a little bit. And as you said, I think you and I will have many, many more conversations offline now because we're sadly coming up on the time that we have allotted here for today. But I appreciate even, like you said, it can be something small like giving people the room to tell you how they pronounce their name or to tell a little bit about their story at work, just to learn a little bit more about things that we don't yet know. And embracing that paradox of two things that are opposite can both be true. And to be seeking those out, to find as many truths perhaps as we can in our organizations and find which ones we want to embrace and which ones it's time to let go of.

I love the way you put things. I cannot wait to read your book.

Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. And, and Dolly, you know, thank you so, so much for joining me on the show. I'm guessing we might have you back on at some point to continue the conversation. And again, everyone who wants to hear More from Dolly. Come to south by Southwest. You can see her presentation here in March. You can meet us both in person. We'll be there in Austin. And just. And, and please do connect. Dolly's gonna share a little bit about your newsletter. Yeah.

Oh yeah, I'd love to. Yeah. My website is Dollychug. That's D O L L Y C H U G h dot com. And once you're there, you can also check out my newsletter, which is called Dear Good People. All the past issues are online. It's free, it's zeitgeisty. It's only once a month in your inbox. Readers really seem to enjoy that. I take whatever I'm obsessed with at the moment. Last month it was Pickleball. I'm still pickle, by the way.

Yes, we're talking about that next time, too.

Oh, good. And then somehow I, I managed to weave it into some sort of insight or action around being a more inclusive person and manager. And so plus there's pictures of my puppy often showing up in there. So you can subscribe to Dear Good People at my website and you can also learn about the rest of my work, including the book. We just discussed a more just future.

Perfect. Well, we'll definitely link to that in the show notes. I'm going to go read up on Pickleball, which I believe was created and founded just like down the street from my house here in Olympia.

Right. In fact, I will tease the piece and say it is the fable of Pickleball's origin that I managed to tie back to Rachel Fables and how.

Oh, interesting. I'm checking it out right now and everyone else should too. We'll put the link for that in the. In the show notes. And again, thank you Dolly, for. For joining me on the show today. It was. It's been really great to chat with you.

Same for me, Molina. Thank you for having me.

Thank you again to Dr. Dolly Chug for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation for me, as you can probably appreciate the way this made me feel about my own life and the experiences of my grandmother and the rest of my extended family are really resonating with me lately. As I mentioned on the show, I was already starting to focus a lot on my native heritage recently, very specifically over the last year or so. And so this book got to me at the right time to kick that all into gear. I'm not sure what actions I will take or what it will all mean, but I care about my culture and those of others. I care about the future and making it one that is just for everyone. I highly recommend that everyone read this book and check out Dolly's newsletter. Both are linked for you in the show notes along with other related articles and past episodes, as well as ways that you can connect with Dolly. This book matters and while its content is heavy, it is important as you look toward the next year. Ask yourself what you can do to create a more just future for yourself and every other human out there. Those show notes with easy links are waiting for you within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 247 and thank you again to Dr. Dolly Chug for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You won't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com them.