The Exchanges

Q So at a high level, what does sort of treatment look like from your point of view? Are there sort of steps that people commonly go through, uh, you know, abstinence seeming to be one of them?

A So the treatment is a biopsychosocial treatment because it's a biopsychosocial disease, and that means there are biological origins and interventions, there are psychological origins and interventions, and there are social or contextual origins and interventions. So when I think about biological interventions, the first and most important step is to restore homeostasis or baseline dopamine firing, and typically the way we do that is we ask patients for 30 days of abstinence from their drug of choice. Now, importantly, we would not ask this of somebody who was at risk for life-threatening withdrawal. So, for example, um, people can have life-threatening withdrawal from alcohol, from benzodiazepines like Xanax, from opioids like OxyContin. So, in those situations where there was risk of that, we would want to medically manage detox to get people Off of the drug. Or in some cases, we would actually want to use a drug in order to restore homeostasis. The classic examples of that are using methadone maintenance or buprenorphine to restore a level balance in people with severe opioid use disorder. They're not getting high on those opioids. They're basically just getting a level playing field to be able to, you know, enter other aspects of recovery. Um, Um, so that, that biological piece is, is really important, but even after restoring homeostasis, um, you know, it's not like the sol…

AI assessment note: “the first and most important step is to restore homeostasis or baseline dopamine firing”

Q Alcoholics Anonymous seems to be sort of one of the best methods of treatment available for a lot of people. What is it and why is it so successful? What are the, the inherent components of it that make it more likely to succeed?

A So Alcoholics Anonymous was started in the 19 thirties by two men who themselves were, uh, addicted to alcohol, Dr. Bob and Bill W. And they came together in desperation and realized that by talking to each other and sharing their lived experiences, they managed amazingly not to drink, even when all these other medical interventions hadn't been helpful. So they essentially started going around and finding other alcoholics and talking to them about their experiences and having them talk about their experiences and found that through that process they were able to remain sober. So they founded Alcoholics Anonymous. It's, uh, it's got its own philosophy, the 12 Steps, as well as the 12 Traditions, um, and it's, um, not a religious organization, but a cornerstone of the philosophy is this idea of Of surrender to a, um, a higher power. Now that higher power can be really anything you want it to be, as long as it's not you. Part of the, um, philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous is that part of what drives addiction is what they call self-will run riot or narcissism. And letting go of being the person who's, um, willing our lives and instead surrendering it, surrendering it to a higher power, which can, you know, again, be a, a supernatural power, or can be just the fellowship itself, or can, as they joke in A, can even be the doorknob, as long as it's not you, is something that, that is…

AI assessment note: “realized that by talking to each other and sharing their lived experiences”

Q It sounds like focus is also important, and I'm sort of reading between the lines here. If, if, I focus on the gap between now and 30 days from now. That seems almost insurmountable. And so it's like, why bother trying? But if I focus on, uh, what can I do today? Talk to me a little bit about how, where people focus changes their ability to accomplish things.

A Yeah. Well, one of the very famous AA sayings is take it one day at a time. And there is something really biochemically important and magical about the 24 hour cycle. Our willpower is not, you know, an inexhaustible resource. We wake up in the morning, whenever our morning is, with more willpower than we'll have at the end of the day because we've tired it out. So we can't exclusively rely on our willpower. We have to really, um, you know, put what I call self-binding strategies or barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice that allows us to press the pause button between desire and consumption and But amazingly, you know, after sleep, after a night of sleep, we're renewed again, you know, we, we can start over. So there's something very, very powerful about just saying, if I can just make it through today without using, you know, I can start again and be reborn again tomorrow. And that really does happen biochemically.

AI assessment note: “take it one day at a time. And there is something really biochemically important”

Q Are there sort of benefits to this higher article management? You know, we've all seen these org charts and I know we're going to talk at length today about some of the disadvantages of this, but like, are there advantages to sort of organizing a workplace that way? Like, why is this lasted?

A Yeah, it works so well for certain things. And I think that is really the, the crux of it is recognizing that there are different contexts and different problem types that we encounter in the world. If somebody says I've got 40 pounds of, of pasta in the basement and I need to get it out to the truck as fast as possible. There is a Taylorific way of doing that. That's going to be optimal. You don't want a bunch of people brainstorming about how to do that and think about it for six hours and then try five different ways. Like you really just want to get the stopwatch out and, and basically make a line, uh, do a factory line and hand the, hand the pasta up. So I think there are problems in contexts where hierarchy makes sense. There are problems in contexts where you actually need command and control because of the nature of the environment. For example, in a fire environment, In a, in a chaos issue where you're dealing with some immediate emergency, there's no time for consensus. There's no time for let's all sit in a circle and talk about our feelings, right? We need someone to say, all right, whether I have it, you know, through virtue of power and position, or because you gave it to me, I'm the one that everyone's going to turn to in this moment, and I'm going to say we're going to go left or we're going to go right. And that way we can actually move as one and, and, and act…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it works so well for certain things.”

Q But has grown and evolved and nobody wanted to remove anything. How do we lose our way?

A Essentially, we lose our way because we believe in a false choice. So most people believe that the pattern of organizational evolution is from chaos to bureaucracy. So you start in chaos with a startup. You have a handful of people around the kitchen table or the kitchen door in the case of Amazon. And everybody's doing a lot of different things. It's, there's no clarity about roles. There's no clarity about what we do for a living. We don't have product market fit yet. Everything is about search and figure out an experiment and try. And so the, the level of chaos is quite high. And some people are, you know, kind of off put by that, but a lot of startup folks are like, that's what I thrive on. I thrive on that energy of like all hands on deck. And then you figure something out usually, otherwise you die, right? So either you go out of business and that's that, or you figure something out. Oh, people like it when we do this. Oh, we have, we have 10 engineers. We better have somebody to manage them. Oh, we have, you know, a process that's starting to emerge. How do we hire people? We better figure out a hiring process. And as you figure things out, you dial them in because you think I want certainty. I want control. I want reliability. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to nail this stuff to the wall. So like, this is the hiring process. This is the, you know, business mod…

AI assessment note: “Essentially, we lose our way because we believe in a false choice.”

Q you told me earlier, as you were saying that, that a few years ago, a friend of yours noticed that you were saying things like, I need to check in with the kids, or I have to get home right after we finish up, which prompted a conversation on the need to's versus want to's. Can you explore a bit of that to me and the language that you're using?

A Yeah. So, uh, I have a couple of go-to interventions. Um, I'll call them interventions. They're basically a kind of a something that disrupts our normal patterns and language, uh, noticing and disrupting language patterns, I find to be very, very helpful as a developmental move. That story happened about, you know, 10 years ago when my children were younger and I was, um, I was really torn a lot of the time because I was traveling around the world. I was really feeling like, um, I was experiencing the most exciting period up until then of my professional career and all parts of my life, and I had these three children at home and a husband who was there with them most of the time because he's a teacher, so he didn't travel, he was around more, and I felt torn, you know, between these two parts of my life, and a good friend of mine noticed, That I often, when talking about my kids and my family, just as you said, um, used the term, have to get home, uh, I need to check on them, I need to call, and, um, so this, I already had, had this idea that our, that our language is not just an expression of our meaning making, but it also shapes our meaning making. So when this friend of mine noticed my, that language pattern, I began to ask a question, like, what could I, what words could I use, um, that might actually change the way I make sense, make me, help support me to be less torn ab…

AI assessment note: “noticing and disrupting language patterns, I find to be very, very helpful”

Q What is the difference between compassion and empathy?

A Yeah, so let me give an image. Suppose you're on the edge of a schoolyard, and there's a kid who's being bullied by a bully and some other kids around him being taunted or, you know, hit or whatever it is. Empathy arises when you feel for that kid And maybe, maybe even when you feel for whatever the other kids, the bully had to go through to become that bully. So there's this kind of recognition, um, and you get it in yourself. Uh, it's like, you know, neuroscientists talk about mirror neurons. And if you put a violin on a table and then take another violin in your hand and bow it strongly, the strings on the violin and the table will resonate. With the strings of the violin in your hand, and that's how we're tuned to one another, so that part is empathy. Compassion is a verb. When you empathize, then, and you feel compassion, it also moves you to either walk over, if that's the right thing, or go talk to the teacher, or the principal, or something, and say, hey, you know, there's this suffering. Let's, let's do something to make this better. And so compassion is, combines empathy with the heart's response, To alleviate suffering.

AI assessment note: “compassion is, combines empathy with the heart's response, To alleviate suffering.”

Q in drama, and we're healthier. Calm in this sense isn't the absence of conflict or stress, but rather the ability To deal with it in healthy ways rather than destructive patterns. It's time to listen and learn. Let's jump right in. You trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, Burma. What was the experience like and what memories stand out as transformational when you look back?

A I went there right after university. I'd graduated from Dartmouth College, and it was during the Vietnam War, and I didn't want to go in the military. It was still the draft. I didn't either want to kill people or get killed, so I asked to go in the Peace Corps to a Buddhist country, because I've been studying all of that. They sent me to Thailand. I learned to speak Thai and Lao, and I found this great teacher. And I said, can I come and be, learn from you? And he said, sure. You want to come as a monk? And I said, all right. It was a wild forest on the border of Thailand and Laos, pretty far out in the middle of what was still then quite unmodernized world. And I'd been there a few times as a lay person and got some teachings. And he said, okay, now you're coming as a monk. Um, I hope you're not afraid to suffer. And I thought, that's a pretty weird greeting. And he just laughed, and he said, there's two kinds of suffering. The kind you run away from that follows you everywhere, and the kind that you face, and that's the gateway to freedom. If you're interested, come in. It was an ascetic forest monastery. We lived it quite scheduled in a certain way, and very rigorous training of the kind you might read about as a monastery as well. The bell in the forest would ring at three or three 30 a.m., and we'd walk these narrow paths. In one of the forest monasteries, we would use th…

AI assessment note: “It was an ascetic forest monastery. We lived it quite scheduled in a certain way”

Q Is there a way to go about planting those seeds where we can acknowledge or recognize our story? We can sort of see the impact it's having on us. We can even witness it. But then how do we go about substituting one story for another? Maybe a destructive story for a more productive story.

A So the first step, of course, is just to recognize them, and then to tune in a little bit to the fear or the pain that's behind them. So you drop from the story down into the emotion that keeps it going, and to acknowledge that, oh, there's worry or fear or grasping or Confusion, or those kind of states, and you bring a kind attention to that, and you say, okay, almost as if to pay respects, thank you for trying to take care of me. I'm okay for now. Um, you can relax. Then the next step, um, is, uh, so that's sort of the mindfulness response, where you step out of it, or you become bigger than that. You become a field of awareness, of loving awareness. Then the next step comes from a complementary practice, which is loving compassion, and that's a training in which you practice regularly, envisioning one at a time, starting wherever it's the easiest, people that you care about, and wishing them well. And you picture, you know, when your children or your partner or wherever it's not so conflicted to start with, where, where their love is natural. And there's a series of kind of training phrases one would get in the monastery of may you be safe and well, may you be healthy and healed, may you be, uh, Happy and peaceful at ease. May you be held in love. And you do that for a while for one person. You pick another, another. And as you practice it, it becomes a kind of response that…

AI assessment note: “So the first step, of course, is just to recognize them”

Q I think that's sort of like a good segue into the drama triangle and the role of being a victim and how we see ourselves. Can you talk to me a little bit about the drama triangle, how you came across it, what it is, and how it limits us?

A Okay. I'm, I just want you to know, I'm like a huge fan of the drama triangle. It's the tool I use every single day with myself and with my clients. So I learned this from Gay and Kathleen Hendricks, and, uh, it was originally created by a guy named Steven Cartman, a psychologist. And basically the theory is that we all have learned to do relationship, um, most in this role of victimhood, and that there are three unique flavors of victimhood. And so, um, the first one is the pure victim, and you know, Shane, it's so hard, and the hours, and my emails, and oh my gosh, and the kids, and COVID, and now, now the masks, and oh my gosh, you know, there's just all this I'm at the effect of. And, uh, and so victim has this sense of disempowerment. It's got this, it's taking less than a hundred percent responsibility. It often has a little bit of a whine to it. So then there's another role in the drama triangle, and that's the villain, and the villain's job is to blame. Whose fault is it? So a lot of us have an inner critic that blames ourselves. So gosh, I should have more health, I should be a more effective partner or parent, I should be more successful, or I shouldn't be, you know, blah, blah, blah. Or you, Shane, it's because of you that we're not having a good time, and I was fine until you showed up. So you should or shouldn't be a certain way, or them. I mean, we all know who th…

AI assessment note: “I learned this from Gay and Kathleen Hendricks, and, uh, it was originally created”

Q What words do you use when you talk to yourself about those competing priorities? And I don't want to plant any in your head. That's why I'm not saying any, but how do you think about them?

A I just try to remind myself of the, of, of the positivity of it, that I like playing Legos. You like playing Legos. Right now, you think that you need to be analyzing this data. Right now, you think that you need to be jumping back onto this work call that you know is going on, but you've committed yourself to playing Legos right now to stay in the moment, right? Enjoy the Legos, because in a year from now, Your six-year-old might not like Legos anymore, and he might not play, he might not like, well, he probably will like Legos, but he may not like playing with you anymore, so stay present, stay in this moment, and enjoy this moment, because you know you can't do two things at once, so enjoy the one that you are doing.

AI assessment note: “Right now, you think that you need to be analyzing this data.”

Q And how did you land on this idea of the perception gap?

A To be perfectly honest, it's because I didn't really know the literature well enough, and I thought I had discovered something totally amazing and mind-blowing, but no, because all of science is, is developed in this sort of incremental way, so to be completely transparent, it was a Fundamental misunderstanding of the scientists who've done great work before me. Um, so I had read a really important paper by somebody named John Barge, who's at, uh, Yale, faculty member at Yale University, and, and he had talked about the perception behavior, um, link that we react We can react very automatically, instantly to what it is that we're seeing, and we can sort of build up these habitual patterns of acting in a particular context, in response to a particular person, or when we see something like chocolate cake, oh, I just want to eat it right now. You know, all kinds of pairings can happen that when we see something, we act in a certain way. And he was talking about sort of the malleability of how those pairings come to be, that not everybody sees the same thing and does the same action. Not everybody sees a cigarette and wants, wants to Hold it or doesn't feel that craving, right? Of I want to smoke this. Not everybody feels that way, but some people really do strongly. The actions can vary with, with, um, with what it is paired against. The visual stimulus is paired against. So he wa…

AI assessment note: “it's because I didn't really know the literature well enough”

Q Are there any examples that come to mind as you're saying that about, uh, how somebody has visualized something going wrong and already prepared for it and it helped them succeed?

A Well, I think the most compelling example to me is Michael Phelps, that this is something that he routinely, uh, has integrated into his training sessions. And, you know, this, this, this came out about, about how he trains, um, a while back, actually, when he was in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, that was his first Olympics where he really hit the international stage hardcore. At the time of this story that I'm about to tell you, he had won seven gold Medals. He needed one more gold medal to do something that Olympians had never done in the history of the Olympic games, which is win eight gold medals in a single Olympiad. Uh, and all he had to do was the 200 fly. That was like his jam, right? That's what he's known for. As he dove into the pool for, for this 200 meter fly, uh, his goggles started to leak. And by the time he had just one length of the pool left, they were completely filled with water and he was essentially swimming blind. If this had happened to me, I would have sunk to the bottom. I mean, I wouldn't be in this situation anyway. I can hardly swim at all. My six-year-old son is much better at swimming than I am now after one summer of really trying, but I would have panicked, and I think a lot of people might have that intuition, too, that, well, that's the end, right? He did, he got seven. That's great. He's tied up, um, but he isn't gonna have won the eighth, but …

AI assessment note: “the most compelling example to me is Michael Phelps”

Q That's a great point. I want to switch gears and ask you a couple questions for we, or personal questions before we wrap up, if that's okay. Well, what do you need to remind yourself when you're stressed?

A Oh, be patient. Uh, you know, I think my biggest source of stress just comes from trying to juggle too many things, um, at one time that, you know, I have a six, a six-year-old and a seventh month, a seven-month-old, and I'm a director of a, uh, international research lab with, you know, 40, 50 people that I'm responsible for, and I, and I'm a wife, and I'm a daughter, and I'm a sister, like, you know, we all have all of these identities that are really important to us, um, And they are often in conflict with each other. And so that's the source of my stress is like, you know, I don't doubt my ability to be a really good mom. And I don't doubt my ability to be a really good scientist or a communicator or a daughter, whatever. I know that I can do a really good job at all of these things. That's not the source of my stress, but, but knowing that it's hard to figure out how to do them all at one time, well, do a couple of them at one time. And I just have to be patient with myself. Multitasking doesn't work for me. I have to remind myself of that. That I'm not a good scientist and mom to a seven month old at the same time. Those are incompatible. She doesn't understand what I'm saying, so I can't, I can't explain, you know, multiple regressions and statistics to her to, to work on the thing I need to work on and also be a good mom, right? So these things don't work together somet…

AI assessment note: “Oh, be patient. Uh, you know, I think my biggest source of stress”

Q There are classes of business where trucks have an advantage over rails?

A Yeah, and this is part of probably why, in, in large terms, why rail has diminished in importance and, and even the freight that's moved in America today, and that's because of reliability. So just-in-time inventories, manufacturing facilities, product lines where they need to make sure that they know, the transportation manager knows that the product's getting to the shelf or getting to the assembly line. Uh, trucks have played a big role in that because they've been much more nimble And obviously, back to your point about infrastructure, you know, we only run where our rails run, too. Trucks have the benefit of the nation's interstate systems, and highway systems, and road systems, so they're much more agile and flexible than a rail network is. So that agility and flexibility, coupled with historically, railways have not always been the most reliable when it comes to a schedule, providing a What I call a truck-like reliable service. I think that has led to the demise of, of the freight that's hauled by rail. And that's exactly, you know, kind of the narrative that we've tried to change to try to create the benefits of scale that a railroad brings with the reliability of truck, that truck brings. It's, it's kind of a hybrid model. That's, that's the way we operate our railway to, to try to make ourselves more attractive to our customers.

AI assessment note: “just-in-time inventories, manufacturing facilities, product lines where they need to make sure”

Q How do you think about volume variance? Like I'm thinking, you know, an auto company that knows how many cars are going to sell every month that works for PSR really well, but something like grain where the variance might be, you know, 20, 30% on any given year and you're expected to carry all of that capacity. How does that work?

A Whenever you get two key points. Number one, any customer that can Can give us accurate forecasting, um, as much as they can. The more information we have, the better we can plan the way, where our models work. Uh, but some things like grain, and that's a great example, and especially relevant in Canada, uh, there are ebbs and flows. There are peaks and valleys. You know, there's, there's droughts, and there's peak harvest. Um, so what we have to do is size our network. You know, we look at Five-year averages, three-year averages, um, you know, the, the big swings, they're, they're quantum swings sometimes, but historically and generally they're not. They're within a, a range. Uh, so again, back to my principle, we can never build a railroad for Easter Sunday. I could never build a railroad that says I can handle a 40% peak in one year because the next 10 years I've gone out of business. Uh, so what we have to do is keep Some surge capacity, and we do. Uh, by nature, our railroad, because we operate in Canada, uh, winter requires surge capacity as well. You just can't run trains as long and as large as you, in the winter time as you can in the summertime because of mechanical limitations. Air going through a train, train line, you just physically can't do it. Uh, so by nature, We have some laden capacity or surplus that we design. Back to your point about that trade-off between…

AI assessment note: “we look at Five-year averages, three-year averages... we can never build a railroad for Easter Sunday.”

Q Why don't trains move faster? Not only freight trains, but like, why in Canada and the US don't we have high-speed rail, and why aren't the freight trains moving faster? Why are they limited in terms of the speed? Again, we're on a closed network. I'm just asking from an outsider looking in.

A Let's, you're mixing apples with the R just so that it's, it's important to start from a basic understanding. When we talk about passenger rail, they can move faster. And obviously there are numerous examples of locations where they do, but if we look at the Canadian example and the preponderance of the U.S. example, their freight, those faster trains are running on freight rails. It's not often that you have a dedicated passenger network. So when you intermix the two, the complexities and the needs of the traffic, track infrastructure for the two creates a disconnect. So a freight train is heavy. You're limited by tons in weight. So we go back to that scale question. You want to run long, big, heavy trains that are safe and efficient. Well, they're not going to move as fast As a passenger train, which can accelerate quickly, can decelerate quickly, just all of those scientific facts of passenger trains conflict with passenger, uh, freight trains, so if you try to create an infrastructure that allows both, you get into safety concerns, and I've experienced this, I, at Canadian National, actually, in my history, I remember several developments that I went to, And it was created because of a disconnect between the two. You have to super elevate curves. So for a passenger train to go fast around a curve, which the curves are out in, in the geography, uh, you elevate the outer rail…

AI assessment note: “if we look at the Canadian example... those faster trains are running on freight rails.”

Q And it sounds like that actually makes the rails less capital intensive as well. Fewer sidings, fewer maintenance, the yard switching. Does that change at all?

A Uh, no, you're exactly correct. At the end of the day, you're able to do more with the less. Uh, you'd be able to, you're able to run the railway more efficiently, and listen, this is a capital-intensive business. You know, I think about, um, I'll give you a great example. At CP, when we implemented Precision Scheduled Railroad back in 2012, 2013, uh, we were running with 1500 locomotives in service a day. Uh, today we're moving more freight With about two-thirds of that, so a thousand to 1100. Well, if you think about in simple terms, 500 additional locomotives, well, just in capital expense alone, they cost two to three million dollars apiece, and then you've got to have two or three mechanics per locomotive to maintain them, you've got to have repair parts, and then if you apply that, that thinking, not just to locomotives, but to rail cars, Uh, to track infrastructure, to switches and track the facilities. I mean, you get into this virtuous cycle of inefficiency if you don't really right size and optimize your assets. So it's, it's, um, through that process, again, it's just the right way to run any business. I think you could apply it to any manufacturing business. You could apply it to the airlines. You can apply it to the trucking lines. You can apply it to the assembly plant. Again, it's all, all goes back to Process refinement and executing what good looks like through…

AI assessment note: “no, you're exactly correct. At the end of the day, you're able to”

Q Are there any examples that come to mind that you can share?

A Um, yeah, contract examples. You know, we just recently went through a contract negotiation with a customer that, uh, because their current service provider is not providing them an ability to grow in their markets and satisfy their existing customers' needs, they came to us with a big opportunity, and they would have loved for us to take all their business. That said, I know my network can't handle all their business and still satisfy all the commitments that we've made. To all of our other customers, so we sat down with the customer and said, listen, number one, and I was involved in these discussions, I can't service all your business. I'm just going to set you up to fail and set myself up to fail. However, if there's business lanes that I can help you and you can help me and we have capacity and existing train starts, then I'm more than happy to entertain those lanes. So we literally went through With a fine tooth comb, every OD pair, so every origin, destination. So if it's coming into Vancouver, and it needs to go to Chicago, if it's coming into Vancouver, it needs to go to Montreal. We pick and selectively worked with the customer to customize the lanes that we served, and that's the business that we bid on, and that's the business that we won. So I've not jeopardized my ability to meet any existing commitment, and I've created a superior product that allows this custome…

AI assessment note: “we just recently went through a contract negotiation with a customer”

Q sports or business, is that they set a bar that is higher than other people think is possible. And then they challenge people to reach that. And I'm wondering, are there any stories that stick out in your mind of when Hunter did that with you? Uh, cause you mentioned he was the most challenging person you worked for. There's probably moments where you wanted to quit or give up.

A Yeah, I've got, I've got so many of them. I'll, I'll tell you though, he was a master at doing that. He would raise the bar so high, uh, that even if you didn't make it all the way, you were accomplishing a whole lot more than anybody else was. Um, because he caused you, he created a world where you had to stretch. You had to really understand your business in every detail and drill issues to the root cause and define what good looks like in a way that, um, you don't know what you don't know and you don't think it's possible. And I'll, I'll tell you this one situation. Back when I first really was learning the way he thought, in my mind, I, I worked in the other railroad for four years before I joined the Illinois Central, where's, where I first met Hunter, and I, my first job, I worked my way up from a frontline operating position. Um, I pride myself in being an operating officer, and I thought I knew a little bit about running trains from my previous four years of experience. I went to Memphis, Tennessee. I was in a tower, and in our terms, the tower train masters were like an air traffic control. You've got a yard master that's directing train movements, and you're in the background overseeing the priorities and the coordination, connecting all the dots, building the train plans. So I, I remember we had a train design, which was kind of new to me, um, but it prescribed all t…

AI assessment note: “I'll tell you this one situation. Back when I first really was learning”

Q And the working together management system isn't just for organizations. I believe you and your wife use a version of this at home. Can you, can you tell me more about this? How, how does it apply at home?

A My wife just walked by and, and, uh, but she walked by. So I, they, they all, the kids, they all, um, they all think this is so, so fun, but, uh, Nikki and I have been married, I've mentioned, for 52 years, and we have five darling children, and when they started to come along, I was at Boeing, and I'm, I'm program management, and, and lots of people, and I'm watching these seven people now, and so I said to Nikki, uh, I mean, you know, this is in very, uh, we're complicated with our size of our family. We need to do a business plan review every week. And Shane, she goes, Alan, this is not Boeing. This is our family. I waited for a week to, to reflect on this, and that all made sense, and then, so I said the next week, okay, what if we have a family meeting every week? And she said, well, what would we do in a family meeting? I said, well, my suggestions, and I welcome yours, would be after we come back from Mass, On Sunday morning, that we have an agenda for our family meeting. The first agenda I would propose is that all of us, including you and me, we go around the house, we pick up all of our stuff, we take them back to our cubby or back to our room, because after a week with seven people living lives, it looks like a bomb's gone off in the house. And I didn't sign up for a compelling vision of picking up the house every, every week. And neither did any of the participants.…

AI assessment note: “what if we have a family meeting every week?”

Q talk about the decision to join Ford because when we talked before, you said you originally were actually not going to join Ford. So can you walk us through that decision, how you ended up joining Ford and sort of some of the immediate cultural differences that you felt between Ford and Boeing? And then after that, we'll dive into some of the principles, uh, and working together management system.

A Oh, sure. Clearly I love, uh, I love for, I love Boeing and, and I always have, I was on the design team of every Boeing airplane. And I realized very quickly that at the time, the airplanes were the first internet, because we were actually connecting people around the world, and people could find out that we had more in common, they were different, and, and we then choose to work together for the greater good. And so I never thought I was going to ever leave Boeing, and I had a lot of opportunities along the way. One day, Bill Ford called. I'm going, Bill Ford? The great-grandson of Henry Ford? And, uh, I had a Ford vehicle when I was growing up, and I just, I followed Ford a lot, because as I learned more about history, and World War II, and Ford and Boeing working together, I'm just always very interested in it, so I, I knew I was in trouble when I was talking to Bill, because I wanted to know more. I kept asking him all these questions about why they were in the situation they were in, and he shared the whole story with me, and They'd become a house of brands, and, and purchased Aston Martin, and Jaguar, and Land Rover, and Volvo, and, uh, still, uh, 70, 80% of the business was Ford, and which, as you know, you can't be world-class too many things at the same time, and so they, uh, they were going to lose seventeen billion dollars, and he said that the biggest issue he had …

AI assessment note: “I initially, I called him back and said I was going to stay at Boeing”

Q I think that's really insightful, and poker gives you sort of like the added component of you have something at stake, right? Didn't Emmanuel Kant say something about the role of betting in his critique of pure reason?

A Yes, he did. He did, and I was so excited when I found that section of critique of pure reason and was able to, to apply it to poker. Kant says that Betting actually forms an integral part to improving your decision process and improving your level of certainty in something, because people can say all sorts of stuff and just make all sorts of pronouncements if they're not held accountable for it. However, if you're forced to put a monetary value on your opinion, on how certain you are of something you're saying, on how certain you are about You know, if you're a doctor, how certain you are about your diagnosis, if you have to bet on it, all of a sudden it forces you to stop for a second and think, okay, am I really this sure? How much do I value it? And Kant even proposes a thought experiment to start upping the values. You know, would I, would I say this and stand by it for 10 dollars? Yeah, sure. What about for a hundred? Okay, yeah, that seemed reasonable. A thousand? Okay, well, maybe I need to look through some of my assumptions. Give me a second. A million? Okay, okay, right. I'm not, I'm not that sure anymore. I really need to figure it out. Or, you know, a million? Yes, I will bet even a million. I'll bet everything because that is how certain I am that I'm right. It really forces you to take a step back and reflect because all of a sudden you have something very, very …

AI assessment note: “Yes, he did. He did, and I was so excited when I found that section”

Q And not only that, it takes willpower to make good decisions. It doesn't take a lot of willpower to follow a schedule. Right? Because you've been taught our whole life, like, look at your calendar, follow the rules.

A Decision-making energy is a finite resource, and you know, there's that great book called Willpower by John Tierney, and it's a finite resource. When it's gone, it's gone, and there's only two ways to replenish it, which is sleep and glucose, which is why at the front of the supermarket, after making the decision between 30 kinds of salsa and 12 kinds of eggs, you know, you got a wall full of sugar. That's why it's there, because your decision-making energy is low. You know, when Leslie and I got married, we got the, you know, we go to the department store, we get the tells on gun, we get to choose which kind of glasses do you want, honey? Which kind of plates? And at the end of the day, you're exhausted. You're choosing 300 dollar ice buckets that you'll never use because your decision-making energy is zapped. When I wrote the happiness equation, I did a study, and I found out by my own research that we were making around 300 decisions a day. So by route, anything that you routinize, am I using that word right? I don't know. Anything that you put into a system, Enables you to have more cognitive load available for the rest of the day.

AI assessment note: “Anything that you put into a system, Enables you to have more cognitive load”

Q discipline and you've created guardrails in the environment, so you've created an artificial environment where it's hard for you to violate that discipline even when you don't feel like it. Right? So when you don't, you've taken when you're strongest and when you have discipline and you've turned that in to an environment that will carry you Even when you're not disciplined. Well, because now the friction is so high.

A I was walking here an hour ago down the street. There's a church just down the street from us here in Ottawa, and it says on the front of the church, tweet others the way you want to be tweeted. I don't know if you saw it. It's just down the street from you. And I was like, oh my God, that's hilarious. I'm going to take a picture and post it on Twitter. And I was like, well, then I'll have to download the Twitter app. And then when I download the Twitter app, it's going to ask for my password. And it's going to send a code to my email, which I'm going to have to log into Forget it.

AI assessment note: “I'll have to download the Twitter app. And then when I download”

Q Is there a story that comes to mind when you think of make everyone the hero of their own story in terms of how it's amplified the effectiveness of that person?

A You know, probably, you know, here, here would be one, which is so, you know, I, I brought Jeff Wiener in to be the CEO because Jeff's one of the great scaling leaders of our You know, of our cover our era and in the technology space and, and Jeff knows a whole bunch of things about scaling organizations that I, you know, simply learn from. It's one of the things that In general, you know, try to work with people, even employees who you learn from. Because if you're, if you're hitting that, that good of a bar, you're, you're at least in a good space. And yet, uh, one of the things that Jeff came to me and said, hey, I'm finding your co-founder, Alan Blue, to be disruptive. He's not fitting in the, the scheme in which I'm setting up. And, you know, it's up to me to scale. And so I said, well, Look, I think it's that you don't yet realize both Alan's strengths and then the value of having, you know, kind of founders still in the mix. Um, and so I want you to trust me on this, and I want you to give Alan kind of a A bit of a, a minister with a kind of a, a diversified or broad or, you know, kind of a fragmented portfolio and see what you get from it and give it some real time in order to do that. Um, and if, you know, six months from now you come back and say, look, this is really just still not working. Then, then we can have another conversation, but I want you to do that. And t…

AI assessment note: “I brought Jeff Wiener in to be the CEO because Jeff's one of the great”

Q shapes language, you're in for a real treat with this episode. We cover her nine laws of cognition, why movement, not language, is the foundation to thought, how language changes how we think, gestures, and the relationship to language, why she dove into the work of Leonardo da Vinci, and the importance of perspective taking. It's time to listen and learn. What get you interested in how the mind works?

A I think everybody is puzzled by the mind. Whether to pursue it or not is a choice and how to pursue it is a choice. When I got into newly birthed cognitive psychology, I had been interested anyway in the visual-spatial world. Um, we are constantly Experiencing it, and so it's a large part of our lives, and most of the theories at that point were based on what philosophers called propositions on language-like representations, and attempting to reduce everything in the visual-spatial world to these propositional statements, which are minimal statements About truth conditions, and that struck me as odd, because the visual spatial world precedes language evolutionarily. It takes up far more of the cortex than language, and it has to have its own logic, not logic based, not a logic or a structural Based on language. If anything, I thought maybe language is based on the way we perceive and interact, perceive space and interact with things in space. So I began looking at various aspects of the visual-spatial world, looking for its own, own structure and own logic, and that brought me back to language. Because we use language to describe and talk about the world, and spatial language seems both primitive and primitive in the sense of its origins, both ontologically and phylogenetically. We talk about where things are, where to look, what to do. Those are all about our interactions with…

AI assessment note: “When I got into newly birthed cognitive psychology, I had been interested anyway in the visual-spatial”

Q Do gestures override language too? Like, I'm thinking of a scenario where somebody says yes, but they're shaking their head no.

A Right. And, and My husband, who was a paratrooper and had an uncanny sense of direction, um, right and left, um, in a, in any language eluded him, as it does many people. Many people confuse right and left for good reason, and he would .1, he'd say go right and point left, and I knew follow the gesture. Um, it's not, um, the language is not, it comes later, Gestures precede language, um, and they're more, more in tune because they're more direct. Susan Goldenmeadow and some of her colleagues, she's done gorgeous work on gesture, especially in children, looked at children on the cusp of, of, um, conceptual thinking. They're going from this sensory motor, so they're, they're, you get Two cups, one is thin, and one is fat, and, and pour water from one to another, and children who are small think that pouring the water changes the amount in the glass, and you ask them to explain, and children on the cusp of getting that idea will gesture something like pouring before they can articulate it. So they've got the concept of conservation, That pouring water doesn't change the quantity. They've got the concept. They can't say it in words, but they can show it in gesture. So their understanding is ahead of their ability to articulate it, which makes sense even for us, um, not just for children. The articulation is an additional layer that's really quite difficult.

AI assessment note: “he'd say go right and point left, and I knew follow the gesture.”

Q I want to get into some of the implications of that in a second. The question that came to mind is that people tend to think of themselves as a visual or verbal or mathematical thinker. Is there any evidence behind that? Or can you be good at more than one of them? Or how does that work?

A Yeah, I mean, the, the disappointing is that you can be good or bad at any of them more or less independently, so that's discouraging in, in some way. You think if you're a visual person, if you're not very good at visual, maybe you're better at verbal, and maybe you are, because we do tend to compensate and use Use media that, um, and channels that were, that we feel more at home and we're more adept in, but they do seem to be pretty independent. And I should say that a lot of our spatial thinking is really not visual. Um, the taxi drivers in London that get you to any of these obscure streets aren't imagining a map as they're navigating. They simply have a spatial sense of Of where things are relative to each other that may not, you might not necessarily always have a conscious experience of them. Blind people navigate quite well, many of them, and it's spatial, not visual, and they'll navigate by other cues, acoustic cues, smells, wind, the texture of the ground. These are all kind of landmarks And cues that keep people without sight oriented, and I know many people who've been blind from birth who, who are blind later, who have amazing spatial abilities. They can be excellent mathematicians and get, get around space better than I can. So space is not just visual, and in fact, the areas of the brain that capture space are multimodal. They're, they get input from many differe…

AI assessment note: “you can be good or bad at any of them more or less independently”

Q so many questions here. I think the first one is sort of with Aaron Donald, he might require three people to block him and he might not get anything on the stat sheet, but he might be the reason that the quarterback had sacked And how do you account for stats like that, where it doesn't show up on a stat sheet, but it is sort of affecting the play?

A I mean, I think that's the difference between stats. We call it, we, we term it hidden production. And I'll try to paint the picture for everyone. If Aaron Donald lines up I'll say this. So an offensive line, there's usually five players, a center and two on each side of the center, right? So let's say Aaron Donald lines up between the two offensive linemen on the left side of the center. So we call that a tackle and a guard, and he's between those two. Most of the time, or the majority of the time, Another, a team's going to probably put a tight end over there, so now there's a third player to the left of the center, and the line's going to slide to Aaron Donald, so that means the center, he could either go toward Aaron Donald or away from Aaron Donald, and a lot of times the center's job is to, is to kind of clean up, if you think of basketball, just make it hard for the player to drive to the basket, which at this point is the QB, so oftentimes, right, you're going to get Two, sometimes even three players aware of Aaron. So let's go back to when we made the trade, uh, for, uh, Von Miller. The reason we made that trade is we knew, we knew that Von really wanted to win a second Superbowl. And we also knew that when we add players like Von Miller, that when we've had, we've had, when we've added good rushers in the past to our model team, With, uh, Aaron Donald, uh, you see tho…

AI assessment note: “We call it, we, we term it hidden production.”