Thinking Differently with Matthew Barzun

Published May 25, 2021, 7:30 AM

Every now and then, I get to meet someone who sees the world differently. Matthew Barzun is one of those people. He was early to see opportunities that others  didn’t -  in the internet, in political fundraising and even as US Ambassador. Put simply,  Matthew helps us see the world differently. This is… A Bit of Optimism

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Every now and then I get to meet someone who sees the world completely differently from the rest of us. They don't just have a new way of doing things the way that things have always been done, but they do things unlike anyone else. Matthew Barzen is one of those people. He saw the power of the Internet pretty early on. He also saw the power of small donations in politics pretty early on. He was also the US ambassador to Sweden and Great Britain and saw things that others weren't seeing. This is what I love about Matthew. He thinks differently. This is a bit of optimism. A few years ago, in partnership with Penguin Books, I started my own imprint called Optimism Press. And unlike most imprints, which are usually verticals, they're based on a subject. You know. They do cookbooks, they do business books. I wanted to publish the people and ideas that I had met on my travels that I believed contributed to the greater good. You know. I have this vision of a world that does not yet exist, a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are, and end the day fulfilled by the work that they do, and I wanted to publish the people and ideas that I believe took us a little closer to that ideal. I published a book called How to Make Plants Love You, which is really a metaphor for how to treat people. I published a book all about trust. And now what I'm so excited is I get to publish your book, The Power of Giving Away Power by Matthew Barzen. How does that sound. That's truly good. That's truly good, because when you and I met, I was just astonished by how you defer to others. I watched it happen. I remember the first time we ever met, when you were ambassador to the Court of Saint James, US ambassador to Great Britain. I got to have a meeting with you and your staff at the embassy. And I've had meetings with people before who are in positions of authority, of positions of power, and they own the room, and you didn't. You deferred to everyone in the room, and I was blown away by that. What is the power of giving away power? And where did you learn that? I've just sort of been a witness to this distinct kind of leadership in the course of my life thus far, and watched how people give away power. It's not sharing power, because I think sharing power sort of fundamentally is about division. It's like taking a finite amount of it and then dividing it up. The leaders that inspired me, they created power. Tell me a story that helps me understand, helps me see what the power of giving away power looks like. It's two thousand and six and Senator Obama comes to visit my adopted hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, and we do a big rally and we didn't know how many people would show up. At five thousand people showed up, and there was a spare hour, and I just figured he'd want to go catch up on his BlackBerry with his senatorial work. But he said, hey, no, were there any Republican or independent friends you have from town who didn't come to the rally? And I said sure. He's like, I'd love to just talk to them, So I call around. We get a group around the table and Cena Obama doesn't say much. He really just sort of asked people about their hopes and fears for the country. They go around and at the end everyone said, what an amazing discussion what a great speaker he is, and I noted that he hadn't really said much. And one of the people who couldn't make it to that meeting called afterwards and said, wow, Wow, did he light up the room? And so I found myself saying, well, yes, the room got lit up, but not in the way I think you might think. He got everyone else to light up, and that's how the room light up. I heard a statistic from Jack Daily, the famous sales coach, that a bad salesperson will ask seven questions on average per sales call, whereas a good salesperson will ask thirty two questions per sales call. And when you give the other person the chance to talk, I mean I remember like a job interview where I asked more questions than they asked me and they thought it went fantastic, but they did all the talking. And it's really an amazing thing when you give someone the power to speak, to be heard, how grateful they are to you. I saw you give a little presentation to some junior folks at the embassy that I loved where you make this point. We know that top down leadership doesn't work. The command and control, you know, do as I say, I'm the boss, and we am the sort of already a movement against that form of leadership which we know. And the buzzword is bottom up. And what you so quickly pointed out is it still a triangle? Is it still highly structured whether you're going up the pyramid or down the pyramid, same shape, different direction. And if you really want to change the way leadership looks and sound to drive innovation and trust, you throw the pyramid out entirely because people freak out right, because I think if you throw the structure of the pyramid out, the only alternative is chaos. Well. Yeah, And when we first met in London, David Brooks, whose columns I love, talking about the world at the time, said it's like a hierarchy with its head cut off. And then he said it's a swarm. Swarm is such a negative word, and I thought, yeah, the pyramid, whether you're doing a top down or bottom up, does have in its favor stability of some kind. It's just not the only kind. There's another kind of order, another kind of stability that a lot of these great leaders that the book talks about have discovered. And it's pretty amazing. I call it the constellation. So you have pyramid thinking, which is up, down, in out that kind of way. Constellation thinking in the constellation mindset says hey, look, we are each our own star, and we look at other people as other stars, and we can choose to connect with them to make useful patterns. It is a mindset and it is a way of seeing, thinking, feeling, and behaving. It is not like our default setting. We get very comfortable in the pyramid, or we say well I want to get rid of the pyramid and I'll just be on my own. But that sort of leads to alienations. So there's this alternative out there for us. If we can learn from these other leaders, can you share an example of what a constellation looks like in practice? Like you know how there's a you have a dispute at the thanksgiving table or the dinner table, and someone settles it and it's like, well, I'll google it, right, but really, what settles the argument isn't Google. Usually the first search result you get is Wikipedia. Wikipedia will settle it for you, so you're really wikipediaing it. And so the story of how a commodities trader from Alabama, Jimmy Wales and his team develop what became the largest human knowledge transfer engine the world has ever seen. Is a beautiful, radiant constellation. They weren't saying, well, we are the gatekeepers of knowledge and what should be covered. They opened it up to all of us. And so you could write a sentence, you could write a paragraph, you could collaboratively co create and build an encyclopedia article and it will last forever. Where a lot of organizations get tripped up, right, is like, previous to Wikipedia, we had the Encyclopedia, the knowledge was owned, edited by the encyclopedia company Britannica or whoever. And when the Internet showed up, Microsoft introduced to the Karda right, yeah, which was basically just the encyclopedia but online. Yeah, it was a digital pyramid. But Microsoft still owned edited all the information. And what I find so fascinating about the Wikipedia example is that Wikipedia owns none of the information, is not the editor, is not the arbiter of what goes in or goes out. But it's a crowdsource thing and it has some errors in it, but so does the real encyclopedia totally. And which interesting At the time you mentioned in Karta, I mean it was on its way to be the richest company in the world. World. They could see the power of hyperlinking, they could see the power of video compression, they could see the power of all sorts of things. There is one kind of power they couldn't see, which is the power in you and me. What I love is that clearly this thinking has evolved from your own experience, and your career has been remarkable. You know, you were an entrepreneur and a business leader. Prior to you, the way that political donations were given was people would give the max, and politicians thought, you'd try and get the maximum as many people as possible, and that's what Hillary Clinton's campaign was doing back in the day. And then you were one of the people who said, hold on, if we get ten dollars donations from a lot of people, that's more money than twenty five hundred dollars donations from a few people, and which is now the standard of political fundraising today micro donations, and you were part of the group that invented that. If my memory serves it came in partially because you're an introvert. When you were told to go fundraise totally, you were like, I don't really want to go to people and hit them up for money. But what I can do is throw a party. I think the idea of small donations wasn't particularly new. Normally we do is you'd get ten dollars donations late in the game by email mass email. And I was like, you wouldn't wait to field organized till the last minute, would you. That'd be kind of dumb. You start early, and I was like, this is a farming exercise, like plant seeds cultivate early. If you wait till late, it becomes a hunting exercise. And all the language of fundraising, which I found so abhorrent, not only because I'm an introvert, but because I am just have become allergic to pyramid thinking like target list, snagging someone hooking them. I mean, it's all hunting and fishing metaphors, and the math of hunting is if you aim. And here I am in Kentucky's all use deer hunting, which may appeal to some and not to others, but others off so forgive me. But I mean, if there's you know, ten deer standing under a tree, and you're up in a tree stand and you shoot at one, best case you get one. Nine runaway, Whereas if your planting seeds, which is what we try to do with these low dollar fundraisers, once people have invested, they're probably gonna want to invest again, They're going to want others to invest, and you get that kind of good math constellation math. I love this and I want to underscore this because I think it's such a great point because I think so much of what we do looks a lot more like hunting, like in business, than it does like farming. Some of the reasons are because we have pressures to do things on certain days by certain times. It's you know, go out and get this, bring me back the results, as opposed to farming, which is a little more like I'm not one hundred percent sure when we will get our crop. I know it's approximately in this timeframe the harvest, but I don't know the day where a hunt. I can go out today and I can I can bag me something and that's it. It's so fundamentally this is about how we manage uncertainty. Yeah, and the pyramid minds set tries to factor it out and so it picks a set goal and it works its way backwards. And I actually think that's a backwards way of working, the constellation way. I mean, sure, look it has goals and things that would like to achieve, but it is open ended and it just sort of embraces uncertainty at the core. And this is fundamentally infinite thinking totally. And it's amazing how many organizations attempt to be hunters and they're so happy when they bag that one deer. Then when it's eating, it's eating. It's over and you have to go out and hunt again. Where farming is a process rather than an event. Farming is an ongoing thing that you just you. And that's how business should be. That's how politics should be. I love thinking of these things as process rather than events. And Doctor Cars talked about it. He liked to think of it as play. You know, business should be about the playing, not about the winning, because there is no winning. The fun little parlor trick to play. I encourage listeners to try this sometimes. So let's say you're talking to ten people and you say, what's the opposite of winning? Is it just to warm them up? And they all say losing? And you're like, yeah, I agree, And I said, now, what is the opposite of winning and losing? From my deeply imprecise and unscientific method of having asked a thousand people this question, nine out of ten of us will basically say, I don't know, not playing, sitting it out. One in ten will say, to your point earlier, playing, loving, laughing, learning, all the verbs that we actually value in life. But it's so quick that if we present it that way, which is the pyramid way, not winning and losing is nothing, and it's like it's everything, it's everything, and we know it. This is supposed to be a bit of optimism. You know, that's so depressing. No, I think it's depressing that nine out of ten people, when challenged with the question what's the opposite of winning and losing, the answer is not playing, sitting out of the game, being a spectator. Whereas the reality of not winning or losing, as you said, it's the joy of play, it's the laughing, it's it's lego versus baseball totally. The reason I find it optimistic and not depressing is that if you look at the facial expressions of the nine out of ten of us who say not playing. Once someone says playing, their shoulders drop a little bit and they're like, oh right, like you know, you don't win a marriage, you could lose one, so it starts an interesting conversation. The reason bottom up feels good for a second, it's really no better than top down. But its fatal flaw is you are either thinking of yourself as at the bottom or worse, you're thinking of other people is at the bottom. And once you have that vision of yourself and others, it's doom. If you think if yourself is a star and you think if other people's as stars and be like, ooh, what could we do together? That is open ended optimistic. Let's say that again. The weakness of the pyramid is that is appealing as the bottom sounds. Either you see yourself at the bottom or you see somebody else at the bottom. So one is self deprecating, the other one is judgmental. And in your model of the constellation, if I see myself as a star confidence and I see other people as a star, I see value in other people? Yeah, you see value in them, You see power potential in them. And the opportunity is not lift up, push down. The opportunities partnership and droll lines, which is what the constellations are, right, They're patterns of dots totally, which by the way, are not self evident. Right, This is why it's not depressing to me, Like Orion's belt isn't obvious, Like you have to be shown and be like, do you see how those things make a line? But there is no line. It's a visual leap to choose to see it. And so once you choose to see it like these constellations leaders did, then we can all learn we're all capable of seeing, thinking, feeling, and acting this way. So you turned me into an optimist again. What I thought was depressing was that nine out of ten people saw not playing as the only alternative when you count when you're lose. And what is optimistic about is it only took one person to say no, joy the play that nine people went oh yeah, and so yeah yeah. The depressing part is we're all thinking about pyramids and top down and bottom up, and all it takes is one person to say have you seen this constellation? And everyone goes, oh, yeah, well that's right. And it's sort of a lower stakes one is you get people to finish this sentence. Hey, the world isn't black and white, it's multi colored. See tis why I didn't want to play it with you, because you're the one in ten, sigmon, that's why we're such good pals. I'll tell you nine out of ten, and maybe it's eight out of ten. Say gray, right, the world isn't black and white, it's shades of gray. And it's like you nod your head and you're like, no, the world isn't black and white. It's color, and it's like, we know it's colored. Look around. I love that? Can I use that? Please? Please? This is why I love your thinking, because nine out of ten people go to one direction and you're the guy who says, well what about this? And everybody goes, oh yeah. I love that seeing, in other words, not only seeing what is, but seeing alternatives and seeing what isn't there, and seeing new ways of thinking. It's sort of like that's where magic happens. I've gone through this in past relationships, and the word past is operative here, which is when I'm in a relationship and I start to focus on all the things that are wrong, it's doomed because I literally see nothing else. We do this at work too. You have a colleague and you just see all their mistakes and what they got wrong. You can't get around it, and it becomes an obsession. And all it takes is one person to say, well, what's good? What did they do right? And instantaneously you have a list just as long. Yeah, And it completely and profoundly changes your view of this other person and how you show up with them and how you talk to them and how you interact with them. So my wife is trained in art therapy. So I've learned a lot from Brooke right because it's a great trick and you and I did at that time with the Embassy team. But if you get people to draw things as opposed to right things, you learn different things. They kind of open up work. But there's a great thing if you go onto utie tube and you search for go pro skiing the trees. For everyone I offended with hunting metaphors, we'll try to win them back with skiing. But if you do, if you show someone like a ten second clip of someone you know in Colorado skiing through the trees with a GoPro helmet, you know, you say, hey, what's your reaction to that image? And everyone will be like, holy shit, trees, Like that's all you see is just trees? Right, that this guy is flying through and you think, how do they not die? Well, it turns out if you get a lesson from a ski thing on how to do that, they only have one rule. Don't you ever, ever, ever, ever look at a tree? And then they say, just look for the white between the trees. And then you show the exact same clip again and all you see is the white. Yeah, you just see how much they're really Most of the space in front of you isn't trees, it's white. And back to your relationship point, It's like, now it'd be pretty dumb to pretend there are no trees. And I saw this weirdly, just to from human relationships to the Brexit debate. When I was there at the end of my time in London. One side sort of seemed to be like, there are no trees, everything's fine, and the other side it's like, it's just trees. We're all going to get smashed up. Yeah, you know, anyone like, there are trees, now look for the spaces that aren't trees. Yeah. So the answer is not this or that. It's not black and white. It's a little more. Yeah, it's color. It's color. They teach pilots this. By the way, you know, the human brain cannot comprehend the negative, right, don't think of an elephant, right, right, And so when pilots are taught don't look at the obstacle, don't hit the obstacle, they like invariably steer their planes into the obstacle. There was a Singapore Airlines plane a bunch of years ago that was told like, don't hit the tractor on the runway, and they full on hit the tractor on the runway because the pilots are fixated on the tractor. You know, it's like being fixated on the trees. You're gonna hit it when you say follow the clear path or follow you know, so then you fixate on the clear path. Yeah, and you know this is high school driver's education. We have three teenagers at home, so this has been, you know, top of mind at least when I was taught how to drive. You obviously, staring at your phone and texting while driving is like really stupid and will get you killed. Right. What is counterintuitive is that if you do the opposite, right, and they have these weird trackers Sweden, which is like car safety capital of the world, So I went to go see like where they test on. You see these videos of people driving with the headsets on and staring in their laps, which is dangerous, And then they do the opposite right and they just look at the road in front of them, and that will get you killed too, because it's called tunnel vision. So it turns out we were all taught in Driver's ED. The safe way to drive is that little red X if you picture the car safety Academy. It should be moving every two seconds ahead of you, behind you, to the side, in front of you again, way down the road of place. So guess what it looks like if you plot safe driving constellation a constellation of stars, it's called engaged driving. Once you start to look at the world this way, it casts some strange shadows and on some sort of sacred cows too. I mean, I'm just thinking about, like the most exhausting driving is like when you're on a long road trip where you're a little tired and you still have to drive home and all you do is focus out the front window to stay awake and get home safely. But the reality is it's exhausting, Like road trips are exhausting when you start just staring out the windshield, focused on driving, but relax driving. As you said, you check your side mirrors, you check your rear mirror, you look out the front, you look to the side, you quickly change the radio, you know to check, and your eyes are all over the place all the time, and it's not as exhausting. What's interesting. So, what I think is so interesting about your work is that you're telling us when you're obsessed and fixated, not only you're exhausted, you're not getting any help, you're not seeing any opportunity, and you might bag a deer, but my god, you're missing out on so much more. That's it. I mean, it's why I think the first three words of the book are pretending is exhausting. Yeah, And we just do so much pretending that we know what the answer is and work our way back from there, pretending we can factor out uncertainty. Just pretending, pretending, pretending, And it's tempting because you think you're doing the right thing by focus, focus, focus, but you know you're factoring out so much. You tell a story that is I just love it. And this is purely for me. Who knows if it'll ever make it into that vodcast. This is just this, This is for one listener. Can you please tell the story of cell phones and how we figured out how to make dialing work on a cell phone? Oh my god, it's okay. So I learned about this amazing woman when I was in Sweden, and her name is Lilah Olgrin. She was the youngest and the only female engineer on This is the nineteen seventies they have I think it's Finland, Sweden, and Norway. I don't know if Denmark was part of it. If this does make the podcast, we'll learn, because I will have offended some veins. But I think it was just Finns, Swedes and Norwegians trying to develop cellular telephony, so cell phones, and there was a race going on in the US to do it too. Anyway, So they put all these engineers in the room and they had figured out almost all of it, right. They had these cell towers along this strip of highway in Sweden picture of Volvo. They actually had carved wood handsets. It's really kind of quaint and awesomely Swedish. So they figured out almost all of it. They have cell towers, they have the bulky car phone, and it all kind of works except for one huge problem, which is, as you're driving down the highway, your phone, your car phone establishes contact with the first base tower and you start to dial the digits. But then you keep going down the road and by the time you make connection with the second tower along the road, you've lost connection with the first one, and so the numbers get junk and it doesn't work because what they're trying to do is get the dial tone, so trying to make it like a regular pick up the phone, hear the dial tone, dial the number exactly. So you establish connection with the first tower, you get your dial tone, you start dialing, and then you lose it before the next tower can pick it up. The clever people are like, well, okay, you could drive slower, but that's dangerous, right, Or you could just have like many more cell towers, but that's sort of not feasible and really expensive. So everyone stumped. And so Lila, Now I was not in the meeting, obviously, but I like to picture this that she sort of raises her hand in the back and says, what if we dial the number first and then hit send? And then I imagine it sort of goes something like, what do you mean no dial tone, and she's like, yeah, we don't need a dial tone. She says, there's a microchip in this clunky cell phone. It is more than capable of just storing all the numbers and then sending them in one go. So her invention is called green button dialing, and it is on all seven billion or whatever cell phones on the planet. Isn't that cool? I mean, it's there's an entire generation that recognizes that that's how telephones work. My kids have never heard a dial tone, right, that you dial a phone number and then you hit send, rather than get a dial tone to ensure that the line is open. We talk about is the line open? Then you dial the phone number and it goes through. And I just love that this young person with an entirely new perspective who challenged the pyramid, thinking of that the senior people in the room of how this works, and that is the standard of how we dial a cell phone today. I love that. And another one of Constellation hero is this guy Vince Serf, who is amazing who co invented the Internet right TCPIP protocol. And I don't want to get too dor key here, but he had a similar kind of insight right, that computer networking wasn't new. But the way it used to work is if I had a computer and you had a computer, we would have a dedicated connection, right, and we could only talk to each other. We were locked down, but it was truly reliable. And so his innovation, without getting too much into the details, was no, no, what if we could talk to each other but there wasn't any fixed connection. We could chop this up into a lot of different pieces and then the end guarantee it got assembled and it was called an unreliable network. I mean, his his architecture, so to speak, and it built the most reliable network the world's ever seen by making this sort of leap of unreliability and leap of uncertainty, which is kind of cool. Well, it's making the leap from the fixed pyramid, which is certain. I know the direction it goes. It goes up or down, and it's and it's and it's saying we're gonna do it. We're gonna hook computers up like a constellation where each computer is a star and that's it, and that's it. Well, and then he describes and then kindly came like you did. Kindly came and just offered his time to the embassy, and when we did our session with him, he's getting all these questions from awesome like activists and people are rightly concerned back then and now with wait a minute, how's this Internet thing gone? And privacy concerns and surveillance concerns. All that kind of stuff was very much in the news. And he's sort of halfway through and he's answering everyone's questions, but he says, you know, you all tend to talk about the Internet like it's one big thing, and he's like, it's not one thing, it's many things. And then he kind of goes He's like, it's not really a thing either, and he's like the Internet was a verb and I'm like, oh, that's cool. He's like, we used to say would you internetwork with me? And he said he was like asking someone to dance, and I thought that was so beautiful because it's like that leap of faith you have to make of like I'm going to ask you to dance. You might say no, but if you say yes, you know, and there's that will you inter network with me? And that's kind of that's the constellation. Let's change tax lightly you grew up in Massachusetts, right, O's out of Boston. I know something about you that I don't think you know that I know. Uh, you were kind of a bit of a loner as a kid, right You had to take responsibility for yourself at a certain age. Yeah, I lived alone. Slightly misleading, and my lovely parents will maybe be listening to this, but my parents got divorced when I was eleven, and my favorite place in the world was in Cape Cod which was my father's family's place. So, for understandable reasons, my mother didn't want to go there for the summer after they were divorced. But I was like, well, the divorce, that is your problem. It is not my problem. I am going to go down there. It's my happy place. And so they wonderfully and sort of miraculously said, okay, So Monday through Friday I would live alone at age eleven, and my dad would come down on weekend. That's insane, you're eleven, Like an I have an eleven year old niece. I couldn't imagine leaving in a house by herself for five days a week. They were relatives nearby, do you know what I mean? So it wasn't like I mean, I was not raised by wolves, and it does sort of sound that way, but I did learn a lot, But you did. You made yourself breakfast every day, you took learned how to cook. So from the age of eleven, five out of seven days you raised yourself. So that's sort of the story I tell myself. I think if I went back, I mean, it's true and it's slightly tell at the same time, and it actually happened. So I'm a great believer that the solutions we find to the challenges we have when we're kids become our strength as adults. So I was a kid with add and it wasn't a thing back then, so it wasn't diagnosable. I was just hyperactive and couldn't focus and got yelled at and didn't do my homework, couldn't read a book, wasn't good at paying attention. But had this minor little problem. I had to still get through school, and so at a pretty young age, I learned to ask questions, and I learned to listen to answers, and I learned to ask for help a lot. So I'd go talk to teachers after class and ask them to explain it to me. I'd ask my friends who were smarter than me. And remember when I got to college, I had to take classes with good professors because I couldn't skip class, because I had to listen to the answer. I couldn't just like skip class and go read the book and do fine because I couldn't get through the book. I didn't have the focus to read a textbook. Now, as an adult, that was all a survival mechanism, the ability to ask for help, and now as an adult, the ability to ask questions and listen for insight. I've made a career out of it. It was all a survival mechanism. That's where that skill came from. Of the many kind things you've done for me with me was when I got my personal find Your Why with Simon Sinek in the back of a heavily armored and ambassadorial car. And the weird thing about this moment, we're like driving from our residents to the embassy and You're like, oh, let's just do it now, and I think great, But we're not alone, right because we have security Tony the driver, and then the security guy in the front seat, so we're not alone. But you know, you asked me for a specific grown up We're not going to do it here, but a grown up thing I was proud of, whether anyone knew it or not, And that kind of came fairly easily, which was this Obama low dollar fundraiser thing we talked about earlier. And then the second thing, You're like, specific childhood memory, happy childhood memory. Yeah, And it was like the most awkward silence, and I could just feel Ben and Tony in the front being like man, and then I'm like and then I was like, I had a totally happy childhood. I have a wonderful mother and father and siblings and friends. But I really couldn't. And then I started saying lame ones and you wouldn't in that great Simon way. You're like, no, more specific, more specific, more specific, and I was like, this is so painful, we're almost at the embassy. It put me out of my misery. And then finally I had one that met your rigorous standard for specificity and happiness, which was teaching sailing. I am probably thirteen years old, and I'm tiny, like prepubescent, five foot nothing, and there's some little seven eight year old kid crying his eyes out in the tiny boat. It only fits one person, and the boom is going back and forth and whacking him on the head. And so the older teachers were like, hey, Matthew, you got to go hop in that boat with him and set him straight. So I get off the big boat where the teachers all were hop into this tiny boat because I fit and wouldn't sink the thing, and just tell the little kid some basic stuff so he could stop crying, stop getting hurt, and go off and sail. And then they picked me up and you're like, great, perfect, that's all I need. And I was like, I don't get it, and you said big boat, little boat. And then you said, do me a favorite, like at your desk, get home, buy a little toy boat, one big, one little, and put them there so right you can't see it here, but right on my table on the other side of the screen is a big boat in a little boat. Because of your ability to sort of go between, to go between, and I sort of need both. I need sort of the big boat with older people wiser. You know, most of my many of my friends are a lot older than I am, because I just love learning from people older and then being able to sort of hop in the little boat, which is probably why I loved going to sixth form colleges or of high school seniors, went to two hundred schools, twenty thousand kids. And I now know where this comes from, so I didn't I mean, I knew the insight, but I didn't know the origin story. And the origin story is this you as an eleven year old and your ability to go between worlds. And it is true. You know, you're an ambassador playing at a very high level. I mean that's a big job, and you talk to other ambassadors and world leaders, and then you spend more time than most ambassadors, as you said, visiting high schools to talk to kids, but you did it with your own teams as well. You know, most ambassadors live in their ivory towers behind all the guarded walls, and you spent a lot of time with the most junior people in the embassy to share what you knew before you went back into the big boat. And this contant big boat, little boat, big boat, little boat is your happy place, you know, as you said, and I didn't know the origin story. I absolutely love that. One of the things that makes you able to go into a little boat is the humility because a lot of people may attempt to get into the little boat, but because they bring all their weight, they sink the boat. They suck the energy out of the room. They become blow hards, they become I know so much. Let me tell you everything. And you're an experienced person who gets into a little boat, who shows up to a room of kids. And I've seen you do it when you invited me to speak to the embassy. Unbeknownst to me, you also invited me to speak to kids that I didn't realize. I was doing two things at the embassy that day. But I remember you were there with me, and you sat You didn't like ladies and gentlemen, simon, and then you left. You sat there with the kids the whole time. And then you and I answered their questions, but you didn't lecture them. And most ambassadors lecture most people from the big boat lecture people in the little boat. Of it and I seek it out And that is me at my best and me at my worst. Is we debated you and I keeping this in the book. We ended up keeping it, which I'm glad. But the story of where I'm it's a wonderful couple invited me to this big formal dinner, and I was supposed to at the beginning of the meal stand up and do what's called a tour de horizon. Is it a diplomacy thing. It's a diplomacy a French term. I'm not pronouncing. Well, well you got the tour do right? Thank you? Anyway, So what is It's like a survey of the waterfront, so like, let me tell you about and in fact I had. It's just one of thing I sort of had to do as ambassador. So you stand up and you provide the like the pronouncements on US foreign policy priorities, and let's look east to the relationship with China, let's look south to what's happening in Syria or South Sudan. It's an update. It is an update, and it is usually expected to be given in this tone of kind of off and wrong, never in doubt right, which is sort of the default diplomatic tone that I am capable of faking. But it's faking when I do it anyway. But I got sort of good with like I made it into a little memory game, nor it said, and I'd be like, you know, look east, looks out look west for the Transatlantic Trade deal, look up for the polar you know, climate and the melting polar ice cap. And so that sort of made it a fun game internally for me because I hated it. And so my lovely wife brooks there at the other and she looks across the table at me and it's like, you don't look good. And I sort of shoot back a look like I don't feel good. So I like loosen my tie and I was like, oh dear, I get to get out of here. So I was like, pardon me one second. It's sort of crowded. I like scooted my way out and there's like four like a little mini flight of stairs to go to the bathroom, and I don't make it. I just make it to the top of the stairs and I pass out and projectile vomit everywhere, or maybe projectile vomit and passed out. I don't remember the order, or maybe simultaneously. But it was humiliate. I mean, this was like a crowded restaurant. We were like in the private table in the back, but like everyone saw this. Yeah, And so I wake up like in the arms of Simon. The security guy like catches me as I pass out and I wake up like smiling, and I was like totally relieved, which is a weird feeling when you've just humiliated yourself and others. And I just sort of felt this like I'm just I'm just not going to do this shit anymore. I'm not going to pretend. And so it was this little mini epiphany. What was it about that experience that gave you the confidence to give up the lying, hiding and faking, you know? I think it was in contract. Earlier that morning, I had been up in Scotland and I had done a bunch of these sessions we talked about with the high schoolers and they were dealing with Scottish independence and they were dealing with it wasn't yet Brexit, but just wrestling with all these issues. And it was so energizing just watching and learning from this next generation. And then the contrast with and this is my problem, not our wonderful hosts. I mean, they made me feel welcome, you know what I mean, And they may not have even wanted the thing I thought they wanted, but I just got myself in that strange place. So I'm just allergic to pyramids and I don't want to do it, and I think the goal is that the rest of us can give them up to because constellations, let's be honest, are so much prettier, so much prettier. I'm so proud that Optimism Press is publishing your book. I'm so proud that we get to share. You know. It's one of those things where for me, you know, I get to meet these amazing people and I get to learn from them, and I count you among them, and it always bums me out that other people aren't learning what they know, and so for me, one of the great joys is getting to share so much of the things that you have taught me with more people. That's what I love about the opportunity to publish someone's book, to publish your book in particular, And it was so much fun backwards and forging with you as you were writing it, because it was the stuff that I cherish and the stuff that I learned from you that is now in that book. And I don't have to remember all the stories. So I guess this is my very long winded way. I'm just saying thank you, thank you for sort of being willing to put it out there, for giving up the Pyramid and champion the Constellation because it's a nicer way to live when you see everybody else is a star. Thank you. 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A Bit of Optimism

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