The War on Kombucha, Oops, We Mean Dumb Bosses

All right. Hey there. Hi. This is my favorite kind of podcast. This might be my favorite podcast of all time. Why? Because Pierre is not in the Pierre chair. Pierre is sitting in my lap. And I actually went to a business meeting last night. I went to a meeting, a very fancy pants cocktail party that my consulting firm, Brunswick Group, which is a very, very acclaimed consulting firm, CEO Advisory. We had a big cocktail party in New York City, the summer cocktail party for all of our clients, a lot of incredibly wonderful, very smart people. And at this party, people actually came up to me and they said to me, how's Pierre? Okay. So my dog, Instagram famous and more famous than me was the topic of the discussion at, like, by many people who I didn't even really know very well, but I sort of know them through. There were, like, reporters from fancy newspapers and magazines there. They actually said things to me like, hey, how are you, Susie? How is Pierre? Did you actually rescue. I literally moved the conversation directly on to Pierre. So I want you to know in this podcast that Pierre is sitting on the Suzy chair, and Pierre on a chair being the main theme of our life. Always kind to get pictures. If you don't like dogs, have you already, like, turned off this podcast? I mean, are we annoying and boring with the dog stuff? Okay, Anyway, my rant today. God, why is there an endless source of rants for me? My rant today is against kombucha. Okay. And not the drink. I think the drink is fine. I think I had the drink once and I thought it was kind of tangy. Who's had kombucha here? Jorge, have you had kombucha? How was it? I really don't like that sort of fermented taste. Yeah, it's fermented. My daughter often has kombucha. She also goes to yoga a lot. She's got a lot of kombucha in the refrigerator when she's visiting. Okay? So I'm a nice coffee girl, you know, pretty much black. And that's my bag. I don't really put anything in it. And so I'm. But, okay, fine. If you like your kombucha, beautiful, go drink your freaking kombucha. I don't mind. Okay? But this is about kombucha and companies. And, you know, a company is in very deep trouble if it's got a lot of kombucha going on. Okay. If it's got really, really good snacks. Why? Because that's how they're getting people into the office. Okay? Now, I am not against Perks. I'm not against at all. A company having a kombucha bar, coffee, nice lunches. I mean, I myself gave a speech over at Meta in the Hudson Yards. And afterwards, the person who sponsored me for this speech asked me if I wanted to visit the Meta dining hall. I mean, it was. It. Does it have its Michelin star yet? I mean, it's insanity. I mean, it's crazy. I mean, there was a whole section, a whole station for people who just eat tofu. Okay? And as a vegan, I was like, are you kidding me? There's like a whole, like, section for us. And it was a. It was unbelievable. The food and it's all free. I mean, every day you're going to a restaurant, it opens at 6 in the morning. I mean, if you wanted to, like, live in the office, you could, because of the food. And it's in this gorgeous space. So anyway, I remember Quadio as we were really taking off and we started to do really well. I remember the head engineer coming to me and saying, it's time for a kombucha bar. Okay? And I was like, okay, yes, absolutely. Cause I didn't want to lose my engineers, but here. And eventually they all got fired on a day that we called the Red Wedding. Anyway, as they all deserve to. But I would say that companies bring in the kombucha when they are not giving people a purpose and a reason to work. They're not giving them either enough money, which is very, very important, or they're not explaining to them what the work means. Now, I again, there are companies where bosses are doing the right thing, managers are doing the right thing, and they explain to people what the work means and why they're working and their role in it and why it has meaning and why they should be fulfilled doing it. That's your job, Mr. And Mrs. Boss. Okay? That's what you're supposed to be doing. But when they don't want to do that because it takes a lot of time and energy and they haven't really figured out the meaning of the work, or that's just not who they are, that they share that kind of data. And that's a lot of companies don't want to tell the employees anything. Then you bring in the snacks, then you bring in the kombucha, and it's a kombucha. It's just a big bandaid. Okay, for you not doing your job generally. Now, I would say at Quadio, I took my role as chief meeting officer very, very seriously. And probably more than people could stand. We all worked in one big room. It was a classic startup, tons of energy. Because we were a music startup. There was constantly music going, and we just had a fantastic team. And I would almost every day pull everybody together and say, this is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. This. This is what's in it for you. I used to say helipad for every person. I mean, I was, like, trying to motivate everybody about. And what we were doing is we were trying to create an incredible platform where young artists who couldn't be represented by anybody because they were too early in their career trajectories could find each other and build careers. Our motto was, make music, make friends, and then eventually make money. Okay, make music. But all of our swag said, make music, make friends. I still have some of that swag. And I was talking about meaning all the time. And I needed to. To keep people energized at that. This is before the pandemic. It was really competitive out there to get good people. And I was really lucky. My head of marketing, until I promoted her to be the CEO, was a person who could have worked anywhere. And so meaning was important. And I did have the kombucha bar, but it was not. I had to. But it was not. In place of explaining what meaning was. And I've told this story before. I'll tell it again. I was running this startup, and I was learning how to run a startup because I had run plenty of business teams and I had plenty of business experience in the corporate world, but I'd never run a startup. So I was hungry to learn more about how to run a startup. Well, one day, the vast Internet, knowing that I was always looking for stories on how to run a startup, served me a article that was in an obscure. I think in a pretty obscure website, and it was by a manager of a punk band about how everything I learned about business I learned as a roadie, basically, is what it was called. And in this, not even the main point, he says. And he says it literally, okay. And I don't use it literally. He says, you have to tell the drummer what the words of the song are about. And he actually tells a story about how the drummer was just, like, missing the beat and singing different words and kind of screwing up the band on the road. And that the drummer was the problem. And then he met with the drummer, and the drummer was like, well, I don't know what the songs are about, man. I don't even know what the words are. And he says in very concrete, non abstract, non figurative terms, he says, well, you. We finally had to tell the drummer what the words of the song were about. He got so much better. Then he started singing the right song and really getting into the music. And for me, I have this taped to my computer. You, as a leader, have to tell the drummer, your team, what the words of the song are and what they mean, okay? And you, as a leader, you have to tell your people what the work is for, why you're doing it, how it connects to the cosmos and their role in it, okay? And if you're a leader and you don't want to do that, you shouldn't be a leader. Sorry. And that's why you're relying on kombucha. Now, listen, not all of you are leaders. And you may be working in an organization and you don't know why it doesn't feel good to you, and you don't know why it's not going well for you, and you don't know why you've got this vague angst. And I'm going to tell you right now, I bet it's because your manager is not telling you what the words of the song are and that you're the drummer and you don't know what the heck is going on. And that stinks. But you might have a lot of kombucha, okay? And that maybe you maybe keep on coming in again because the snacks are good or the food is good or the tofu station can't be beat and there's other perks and they're keeping you there. But at the end of the day, there's no substitute for telling people their purpose. If you're a leader and if you are a person who's not a leader, there's no substitute for being in an organization where your work has meaning. And that's really. I don't know, that's the point of becoming you. Take it or leave it is to help you get to your area of transcendence, where your work has meaning to you and meets your needs to be connected to something larger than yourself. Because it's a very rare person who wants to just be operating in a vacuum, just get them by. I know those people. I've met those people. I'm related to some of those people, okay? But it's not for everybody. And most people want to be doing work that has meaning, that's connected to something inside them, their values. And if you're not doing that, you're going to have this hungry hole in your chest that is not to continue. This long metaphor going to be filled by kombucha.

That noise you hear is Pierre digging a hole in his chair. Pierre certainly knows the meaning of life because we tell him every day that it's him. Pierre. It is him. You are the center of the universe. And actually everyone who works at Becoming youg Media understands that Pierre is the purpose of our lives. What do you guys say? Pierre forever. But actually we do just to be very serious here, and this is truly serious. What we're doing at Becoming youg, which we call Becoming youg Media, which is really basically five of us, when you add everybody in. Okay. Is that we are trying to democratize a methodology that we really believe in that helps people have lives of more purpose and flourishing. And we're doing it a bunch of different ways with this podcast, with the book that you keep on hearing me talk about, with the tool that I've developed. Because it feels really good to be part of people's self discovery and journey to authentic purpose. And it's what we're doing for the world that feels right. And some people are off inventing new medicines that are going to make lives better. You know, cure for depression, for instance, would change the world for everybody. Or anxiety or any number of diseases. But I can't do that because I'm not a doctor. But I can try to do what I can do. And my team is shoulder to shoulder with me in trying to do this work that feels important to us. And I wouldn't want somebody here who didn't feel this work was important. It's not for everybody. You gotta be a true believer because we're a mission based company now. There is work out there. Say you're in email marketing and you're saying, yeah, there is no purpose to email marketing. Okay? I market pretty purses and there's no larger purpose to that. But let me suggest that there is. I'm just gonna put it out there, okay? If I was a boss of a team that was doing email marketing for a purse, I would say, you know, we are creating a commerce platform for artisans, for people who produce the raw materials. We are creating joy for the people who purchase our products. And we are part of an ecosystem, a commerce ecosystem that makes people's lives better, okay? And people have to work and people have to make money. We create a system. We're part of a system that expands opportunity to the people who supply our product and increase the joy of people who willingly consume it. Nobody's buying these purses with a gun to their head. And so we are an important piece of a economic ecosystem that makes a lot of people's lives better. And we do that in our small way. But it actually then has lots of ripples where it builds up one of all of us altogether, even our competitors, and it creates an economy. And if you don't like the economy, try working in a country without one. Okay? It's like, it kind of stinks when people don't have opportunity. So that's how I would. I would do that if I was a boss of something that felt like, oh, there's no purpose in it. Yeah, no, but there's purpose in everything. And if you're working in an organization where they're not explicitly telling you the purpose, maybe you can come up with it and sort of see how it matters. Because to go to work day after day where you don't see any purpose, any meaning in your work, that's kind of. That's enervating. That's soul depleting. I mean, it really, really is. And in fact. And in fact, I'm just gonna spontaneously do a listen up here. This is our franchise, as I like to call it, little chapters where I make music suggestions. And I'm gonna say, go do yourself a favor and listen to Beyonce's yous Can't Break My Soul. And, I mean, I think that song came out right at the end of the pandemic. And I remember, oh, the timing of this song couldn't be better, because what did the pandemic do? It raised a lot of very profound questions about where we work, why we work, and how much we work. That had just not been raised because the economy up and going into the pandemic, it was as hot as a fireplace, and everybody was just working frantically. And then the pandemic was this gigantic reset, and people all went home, and they started doing work in different ways. And then suddenly, huge existential questions around work started to really bubble up. And right at the end of that, as people were struggling with where they go back to work and why they go back to work and how much they go back to work, Beyonce came out with that song. Okay. Which Jorge will insert a clip of right here. Again.

That song is basically saying to your employer, you can have everything but my soul. That's what I think it's saying. That's how I interpret it. Then again, I'm a professor of management. Okay? But that's how I heard that song, and it Was this sort of defiant anthem saying, as we come back from the pandemic and we all have rethought work, I'm not gonna work if my soul is not being fed. And that's the whole kombucha problem, is it's feeding your body and not your soul. God, has anybody ever actually milked a metaphor more than I have this one with kombucha? Because I have really nothing really personally against kombucha, so I wouldn't drink it myself, but I would drink some iced coffee at my office. And actually, we have iced coffee right here in our office for anybody who wants it. But it's not enough. It's not enough sustenance. And that is the point of this, with some Beyonce thrown in. God, she's great. I went to her concert last summer with two of my close girlfriends, and we got really good seats, but somebody gave them to us. They were up in a box. And I realized that was a concert where you had to be right next to the stage, but still, no complaints. She's insanely great. She's one of the great, great, great artists of our time. All right? And that is what I'm saying. Does your work have meaning? If you're a manager, are you telling the drummers what the words of the song mean? Okay. Do you know them yourself? And if you are the drummer, are you in an organization where you know what the words of the song mean? And you're. You're being brought into that conversation? Because if you're not, it's kind of on you to either raise that conversation or go find a place to work where you are part of that conversation. Okay, that. Is that on that. And we're going to go on to everything else that we do in this podcast. Pierre has finally calmed down, and I've got all three dogs with me right now. Jesus, that feels good. Okay. All right. We'll be right back.

All right, moving right along, we're going to do some questions from the community. I love these so very much. As I said last week, I wake up to the questions from the community every morning. And I look at the Times quickly, and I look at the Wall Street Journal quickly because it's very important to stay relevant, isn't it? That's one of my main points. Is your currency. Is your currency how current you are, how much you're in the conversation about what's going on with your company, your industry, the economy in general, that keeps you really valuable to your organization. So don't. Even though the noise Coming out of the. Of the vast Internet is loud and filled with chaos. You still got to stay. So I read the Journal in the morning. I read the New York Times in the morning. I have a couple other things I read. I read a newsletter from Semaphore, I read the Daily Beast. I have my favorite places that I go. But then to reward myself, because it feels so good, I look at the questions from the community. What have we got?

Hi, Susie, I'm in a bind. Would you take a job where you feel comfortable performing the work with a manager you enjoy working with, or would you take a risk and start something new which you believe may be above your skill level, but the hiring manager approached you to apply?

Oh, interesting. Okay, so here we've got somebody who's really in the comfort zone. They've got work that they can do, and they've got a boss that they like. And then they've been approached by a hiring manager who says, this is a big leap for you. This is a stretch. And you're saying to yourself, I'm not sure I can really do this work. Now, I'm going to make the assumption right here that this work that you've been approached about pays you more. Otherwise, you would. I don't think this question would have come to me, but maybe it doesn't. But this is asking you, do you want to go into the state of scarephoria? Okay, that's the term I used that combines scared and euphoria. I live in a state of scarephoria. I put myself there, and guess why I do that? It's one of my values. Okay? I. I'm a person who values a life with a very large scope. I desire a very large radius. I want my impact to be large. I'm happy to sacrifice predictability and calm for those things. I'm happy to sacrifice harmony for those things. And I value belonging a lot. Belonging often comes when you're starting something new. And so there's a sense of energy and connection between people that's unusual and heightened. And so I mention that because the answer to this question lies in your values, I can't give you. There's no absolute answer to this. The answer is, what do you want for your life? And if what matters to you, if your value is harmony, predictability, lack of chaos, Those are all 1000% valid values. Okay? And if that's what they. If your value on. Of the. On those is high, then I would say going into the state of scarephoria is something that I would do with great trepidation. Because why? Because it's not aligned with your values. Do I think that you can do this work? Stretch work? Of course I think you can do it because the hiring manager saw something in you. And also, I just get the feeling you can. Okay, Based on What? Based on 50 years of experience. All right? And so I think you could probably do it. And if you fail, oh, well, you learned something, all right? You learned it, and then you pick yourself up and you keep going. You obviously are successful at what you're doing right now. You can go back to it or you can do something that is adjacent to it. And so it's not a matter of whether or not you can do it. It's a matter of whether you want to do it and whether you want to do it is driven from your values. My new tool, which I keep talking about, will be available completely for free in about five weeks. And you'll be able to identify your values exactly, probably for the first time in your life. Why? Because I happen to know from doing a ton of research on this that there's no way that we ever really get to codify and identify our values. That's why I created the tool. And this is not a plug for it. So you buy it because you're going to get it for free anyway. It's just a simple say, hang in there, the reinforcements are coming. But you can without the tool, because people have done it for, you know, eons. Get a sense of how much you want your life to be filled with stimulation and challenge and how much of that is of value to you over or compared to predictability and comfort that's in you. I mean, I hear. Look at me with my desire for this vast, complicated, chaotic life. And my own sister Ellen was, who is a spectacular person with a spectacular life, has a strong desire for predictability and lack of chaos and harmony. And she likes to know where she's going to be a year from now. And I would find that just not to be something that I care about. Okay? We're two people from the same family, and we just have very different values around this. And we also happen to be incredibly close friends. I talked to her yesterday. Doesn't mean you can't be friends with people with different values, okay? This is not. There's no value judgment in it, okay? It's just we're different human beings. So that's what I would ask you to ask yourself. Would you please, when you make your decision, let us know and we can update the community on what your decision was. Good luck. We got one more question. What is it?

Could you explain how a value could be in conflict with your identity? I think of values as part of making up our identity.

Yes, this. What a fantastic question. Are you a PhD student someplace? That's what I want to know. This is a very, very high brain question. I saw it and I thought, ooh, I love that one. Thank you for finding this one to ask me today. Okay, so your values are what you truly want and desire, unfettered, unedited, what you want your life to be like, and that's one thing. And then you've got your aptitudes, what you're actually good at. All right? And so let me be clear here. Sometimes your values are in conflict with your identity, but that's less common than what I should have said when I think you're referring to a previous clip of our podcast or what much more often comes in conflict with your identity is your aptitudes. Okay? So the example I like to use is a person who had all these aptitudes that when you looked at them very closely, rolled up into a profession that was very predictable. Like a dental hygienist, frankly. Okay, would be a perfect example. Somebody whose work is pretty much the same and just the patients change every day. Now, this person also had values that were aligned with being a dental hygienist, okay? In that they really valued predictability and they really valued lack of chaos, okay? They really valued a world scoped quite small. They did not care at all about radius. They did not want to be famous. They had a very low value on status. Again, values that are very much aligned with, say, becoming. I'm just using this one randomly. A dental hygienist, along with the aptitudes, process oriented fact checker, okay? Their identity was that they should be the editor of Vogue magazine, okay? I don't know why where they got that growing up, that image came to them and they were like, that's a really cool thing to be totally misaligned with values. And true aptitudes. Identity is sort of a. Can be a little bit imposed, like, oh, I'm not that kind of girl. I'm in the horsey set. But maybe you're really just not, okay? So you can have an aspirational identity, an aspirational identity that is absolutely in conflict with your true aptitudes and your true values and that you get a red flag for that. And that's hard. You spend your life working that out and one day you just sort of Say, you know what? I'm never going to be the editor of Vogue. I really like my job as a dental hygienist. That usually happens when you're around 42 years old. Okay. And you've had some hard times up until then, struggling with mismatched identity values and aptitudes. And I hope that helps answer that question. Let me ask my team. Was that clear enough? Okay. All right. Well, they're satisfied. I hope you are. And if you're not, write me again.

Okay. It's time for that part of the podcast where I talk about my secret mentor crush. I've crushed on a lot of people here, but I want to talk to you about Professor Frances Milliken. She is a professor in the Management Organizations department at nyu. I was lucky enough to meet her when I started on the faculty at nyu. And she's actually, the biggest thing I'm grateful for is that she agreed early on, not knowing me very well, to come on board the faculty advisory board for the initiative, the NYU Stern Initiative, on Purpose and Flourishing, of which I am the director. And look, she is a very, very renowned academic. Her area of expertise is the future of work and the role that agenda plays in work. She has written incredibly important academic papers on the glass ceiling. I urge you to look her up. And she has, over time, distinguished herself as an incredibly, well, brilliant, a researcher and thinker about work. And in fact, I saw her in action. I went recently to a conference sponsored by NYU and run by two brilliant young professors, Juliana Pelimer and Callan Anthony, who are both young professors at nyu. And they sponsored this Future of Work workshop, bringing in academics, young academics from all around the country, who presented papers on the future of work. And the whole thing was presided over with an unbelievably deft touch by Frances, who clearly, to my eye, was trying to give a lot of rein to the two young professors who were running the actual show. I mean, I was looking at her with great admiration because she inserted herself just the right amount. She was sort of guiding them, but also letting them guide the proceedings. And it was an absolutely brilliant conference. I learned so much from the papers being presented, and I saw her sum up what were you were hearing about the future of work with such deliberation and such intelligence. And there's just something about the way she speaks and acts that you want to listen to her. She shows great maturity and great poise and gentleness and humor. But you also never lose sight of the fact that this is a person with genius and a Mind like a paring knife. And so she's my mentor in that combination of gentleness and correct questioning and knowing how to be a leader and a mentor. I just watched her. It was like watching a gold medal gymnast just go through a routine or ice skater. It was so beautiful. And, you know, look, I know, I know. I mean, if I'm going to be honest about it, I know I'm a mentor to people myself, but it doesn't mean that I'm not being mentored. Does Frances knew that she's my mentor crush? Absolutely not. No way. If I told her, she'd be like, what? We're about the same age. And I don't have to tell her. You don't have to tell people who are mentoring you that they're your mentors. You're just learning from them. And I watched her in awe. And I asked myself, am I enough like her when I'm mentoring people? Do I let go enough? Do I listen enough? Am I deliberate enough in the way I'm speaking to them? And I'm just going to keep watching her with both my eyes so wide open in awe as she continues to do her thing. So she runs the center for the Future of Work at nyu and I am a new director of my initiative. And so I have a lot to learn from her. And I. I'm just watching her with such learning eyes and a learning heart, and I bow down to her, go look her up and read stuff she's written. She's.

All right. It's time for an exercise that I. I don't do this exercise in class because very luckily in class we do a 360 feedback evaluation, which takes five weeks and costs some money. And I actually am also, in my quest to become Steve Jobs, inventing a tool where everybody has access to 360 valuation very inexpensively. Yeah, I'm doing that. It's whack a doodle, but whatever that's down the road. But I have a little tiny hack. Because here's the thing. You need to know how the world experiences you, and here's why. You need to know that your personality is not the list of words you would use to describe yourself. Or maybe it is. I mean, if you're very, very self aware, if you're a very self aware, mature person, you know how the world experiences you. But sometimes you're 60 years old when that finally all comes together. Most of the time we think we give ourselves a big pat in the back and we say things like, I'm kind, I'M generous, I'm a good listener, I'm a good friend, all these things. And. And we don't have anybody who's telling us right to our face whether or not that's true. Now, then we get married and somebody tells us right to our face, but. Or, you know, or we have honest friends. But usually our friends are very encouraging. That's why we have them as friends. And so the 360 feedback tool, which you get in a corporate setting when you've been around and you're working at a big enough company, you know, they go out to 20 people who work all around you, above you, below you, beside you, all these other things, and they give anonymous feedback. And you find out for the first time in your life, often in a very shocking event, how the world actually experiences you on 13 different dimensions. We do that in class. My students go through that, okay? And it's a good day for some people and a not so good day for other people as they find out for the first time how the world really experiences them. It's really important to do becoming you as a process that you know how the world experiences you. Because if there are certain things you need to learn and you're thinking about a certain kind of work, you need to know how the world experiences you. So, for instance, to use my favorite example of a nurse, I mean, if the world experiences you as just, you know, too candid, too abrupt, no bedside manner kind of stuff, don't be a nurse, okay? You may be, though, inside your head saying, I know how to deliver hard messages. I am very empathetic. And the world is not experiencing you that way. You're just experiencing yourself that way, okay? You know, the gap between what we think we are and what the world experiences as that is one of the biggest danger zone that exists. And it's probably the reason for more friendships ending and more marriages ending and conflict at work. I mean, I had a student one time who couldn't get promoted, and she complained to me, I can't get promoted. And I said, well, what are they telling you about why you can't get promoted? She was a fantastic performer. Her numbers were unbelievable, okay? Clients loved her. And she said, they say I'm rude. They say I'm blunt. And I said, arguing. She said, no, I'm just honest. They all have thin skin. Then we got her 360 back, and guess what everyone said about her. She was rude and she was blunt. And I said to her, which is it? Is it what you say you are or what Everyone else says you are. To which she replied, in my heart, famously replied, you're blowing my mind. Okay? And we tried an experiment where she started to treat her co workers the way she treated her clients. And she got her promotion. She did. Okay. So I think we have to understand how the world. So here's the hack. Here's the hack. It's very hard to do this hack, but it's. There's two different ways to do it. One is that you ask everybody to anonymously tell you the first word that comes to their mind when they see your name pop up on their phone. All right? And you want to be kind of anonymous because they're going to game it otherwise. And so you have to figure out a way to do this. Do you just have them write it on a piece of. Of paper and put it in a hat? And then you get 20 of them and you look at it? Or you can just ask them, like, when you see my name pop up in your phone, what's the first three words that come to mind? All right? And I actually did this, and I got a lot of beautiful responses. Loving, caring, helping. I asked a lot of people, but one person wrote down machine. And this is a person who works for me. And I get it. I am a machine. I push people so hard. I push myself harder than anybody. I don't ever rest. And I was very. I don't want to say humbled, but I was very informed by that feedback, and it really informed me as I went forward, saying, okay. You know, I think when I come on to people, I often come on as a machine. I need to know that, you know, because I'm not going to sit here and say to myself, I'm a machine. What I'm saying to myself is, I'm incredibly hardworking. I'm super efficient. I never let up. And I'm not using the word machine, but that's how I'm experienced. Okay? And so this is a hack to ask enough people that it matters and ask them to be honest, to give you the first two, three, four words that come to their mind when they see your name pop up on their phone. If you can get this anonymously, it's even better because people will be more honest and only, you know, if you have a way of doing that, or you can wait for my tool to come out or don't do that. Do this thing, this hack, give it a try. But even if you don't, and I hope you do, I do want you to ponder, if you would, this gap between the words we use to describe ourselves and how the world experiences us. And I wonder if you were to write up that list of five or six adjectives that you used to describe yourself and you showed it around to people who you trusted and you trusted to be honest with you and you said to them, are there any words you would take off this list or is there any word you might add to this list? And that's just another way of getting at it. This requires hard work on your part. This requires a certain kind of deliberate investigation into self. That's not normal. It's not how we usually go about life. Do I think it's worth it? So, so, so worth it. So I highly recommend you try some version of this. And you have to give people complete amnesty beforehand, saying, I'm doing this in the spirit of growth and self awareness and nothing you say will be used against you in a court of law. Don't be mad at them if they tell you hard news. Love them more if they tell you something you didn't want to hear. Thank them and appreciate it. Otherwise you're not being trustworthy. Okay? If you ask people for honest feedback and then they give it to you, you got to thank them, not punish them. This is a public service reminder.

Okay, our last section is rapid fire questions in which my team tries to stump me. And I think they kind of did a little bit last week maybe, but let's try it again. What do you got?

What do you think your greatest fear is?

What is your greatest. What's my greatest fear? This is a huge question. It's a question on the Proust questionnaire and it's also a question on the Proustis questionnaire, which I use in class, which is an update of the Proust questionnaire. My greatest fear, like all mothers, is that some harm or sadness would come to my children. That is a great fear every mother lives in and anybody who loves somebody lives in it. And it's actually, it's come to pass for me recently to be honest, in that one of my beloved children lost her best friend very unfortunately.

In a very sad way. And I was with her when she found out and for the past couple of months have been by her side as she has experienced the extreme grief, the extreme grief of losing a best friend in a way that, look, there's no good way to lose a best friend. But when your best friend is 29 years old, there's worse ways than others. And this was, was the worst. And so I don't know what to say, except for about that way of passing. You are so loved. And if you are a person who happens to be at this moment, at that place, please know you're loved and literally reach out to me and I will call you. And don't do that, because there's people who love you. But I would also say as a person who's had her worst fears realized, the loss of my husband and seeing my children go through terrible things and losing close friends, life is filled with fear. And that's why we have to lean into the joy that we have and the purpose that we have. And it's. You know, it's never. Never. I saw a bumper sticker once. It actually, you know, bumper stickers, it changed my life. It said, don't postpone joy. And this is a real weakness of mine. I was watching the Today show the other day, and Jenna was saying that right before her grandfather died, he said to her, jenna, her grandfather being George Bush, the president, first president said to her, jenna, don't forget to enjoy the game. And it changed how she saw. And I wrote her a note saying, because I've been on the Tay show enough times to be able to have her email, and I wrote her and I said, this is a very important reminder for me. Don't forget to enjoy the game, because your worst feels do sometimes come true. And this is the reason why, when joy is available to us and love is available to us and kindness is available to us and gentleness is available to us, that we lean into them and we seize them, because fear and things we fear will also come to pass. And. And that is the deal that God handed us, basically, whether you believe in God or whatever. But that is the. That is the deal that life handed handed us. And that's our game to play. We don't get to make the rules. If only we did. So that is my. You did not stump me with that one. So go ahead, I'll do one more. What's. Then that will be the end of us today. What if you had the power to enforce one law globally, what would it be? I would like to enforce many laws globally. I have so many. But I'm just gonna go with the first one that came to my mind. Okay. And it would be, stop hurting animals. Just stop it. They cannot speak for themselves. This podcast has gotten very dark very fast. I'm gonna come up with a funny one next. Okay. But I would say, stop hurting animals. Animals are great, and they don't hurt us generally. Okay, well, snakes do. And I Don't like snakes at all. You can be as mean snakes as you like. You know that. There's an island off of Brazil. This is how much I fear snakes. This is how much I hate snakes. TikTok constantly feeds me posts about snakes. Somehow it has entered my mind. It's now, oh, we found one. We found a hot one. She ha them. Let's give her as many posts about. I get posts about snakes constantly. People have been bitten by snakes. People who found a snake in their. In their sock drawers or. Cause, I mean, every snake video comes my way, and I try to scroll them out of my life as fast as I possibly can so they'll stop feeding me posts on snakes. But they know me. They know me. The algorithm knows me. So there's an island off of Brazil. They have to close to human beings. I found this out yesterday on TikTok because it has 4,000 of the most poisonous snakes in the world, okay? And I thought to myself that if you wanted to. If. If you wanted to punish me, put me on a boat off that island, that would be enough. I would die, okay? So where in the world was I going with this? Where did we start? It was about enforcing a law, okay?

You know what happened is I started talking about snakes, and I completely lost my mind, okay? So I would say stop being mean to animals. If you possibly could adopt more dogs and give them all the love that you can. And cats, like, cats are fine people. I know people who love cats, but if there were other laws, I mean. Wait, I've got a funny one. I've got a funny one. Here's one. Look, can I. I'm just speaking to you very directly and out of love. If you're listening to this, this is a law I'd like to enforce, okay? This is very, very important to me. And I'm not joking around. If you're walking in a city, don't just stop abruptly on the sidewalk, okay? To quote Fran Liebowitz, act like it's a city. Pretend it's a city, okay? I live in New York. I walk like a New Yorker. I'm walking along some I love you tourists. Some bozo tourist just stops dead in front of me, and I, like, smack into them. What is wrong with you? Do you understand? Sidewalks in cities are like super highways. Just think you're on i95. When you're walking in New York City, what are you doing? Stopping and taking a picture of a bagel restaurant, okay? There's bagel places everywhere. So truly a law walking into city. Pretend it's a city and keep walking. If you're going to stop, pull over to the side, okay? Put your freaking blinker on, okay? And pull over to the side. Walkers. And. And. And make it safe for the rest of us who know how to operate our vehicles.

Am I a jerk? This is a very. This is a very, very jerky thing for me to say, okay? It just. I am like, a true city denizen. And, I mean, I want to tell you, this is my. Okay, we'll finish on this one. I went to DC For a board meeting, and. Oh, I still am not over this. I need to be medicated. I. I'm still not over this. And I pull into the Amtrak, okay? Amtrak pulls into the. Into Penn Station. And everybody's pouring out of the Amtrak, and there's an escalator up and. And, like, a throng of people coming out of the Amtrak. We're all going up the escalator at once. And I'm right behind a elderly couple, obviously coming to be tourists in New York. And the pouring. People are pouring up the escalator. They get to the top of the escalator, and they stop dead at the top of the escalator so nobody can literally go by them. And they're, like, looking in wonder at the train station, like, literally saying things like, look, Elmer, it's been renovated. I wonder which way we go. And I literally screamed at them, move. Because people were, like, banging into me, okay? And I was like, what? And I was, like, rude person. I was like, what is wrong with you? Look at these people. Like, people were, like, slamming and tripping behind us, okay? As the queen of the universe, I'm gonna say, if you're coming up off an escalator into the train station and it's been renovated, big effing deal. Move your bodies. Please step aside and admire the renovation from the privacy of, like, a place near a pillar where nobody can smack into you and you don't kill everybody because you do not know how to move your body. And it's the city. I. Okay, everybody who's now hates me, officially. I want you to know something. Guess what. I love you. Okay. All right, that's it for today. We will see you at next week's podcast. Big hearts and hugs to all of you listening, and I'll be back.