STRONG GROUND: Brené Brown on the Daring Leadership the World Needs Now

I'm Rufus Griscom, and this is The Next Big Idea. Today, daring leadership, courageous vulnerability, and the wisdom of embracing Paravax. So I'll start with this. A couple of years ago, an event planner called me because I was going to do a speaking event. And she called and she said... In June 2010, a social work professor took the stage at a TEDx conference in Houston.

Like a lot of TEDx events, the production was, how do I put this nicely, a little rough around the edges. But if the setting was unremarkable, the professor's talk... was anything but. There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it, and that was the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging.

That's it. They believe they're worthy. 69 million views later, it is the fourth most popular TED Talk ever. And the woman who gave it? She went on to write six number one New York Times bestsellers, star in a Netflix documentary, and host a chart-topping podcast where she's interviewed everyone from Dolly Parton to Barack Obama. Her name is Brene Brown.

And she's my guest today. We talk about what drives her. Wow, I don't think I've ever been asked that question before. The unexpected path she took to get here. I hitchhiked through Europe when I was 17. I've waited tables for 12 years.

I've done a lot of wild shit, really. Like, I learned more in that than I did a PhD program, for sure. And her new book, Strong Ground, which is a playbook for any leader, whether you're already in the C-suite or just starting out. We need braver leaders, more courageous leaders.

That's the future of leadership. There's also a cameo from a special guest. Do we have Adam Grant by chance? Hey, everyone. This episode was recorded live on Zoom with more than 80 Next Big Idea Club members in attendance. Nice to see your faces. This is so I don't ever get to do that. So that's so fun. To learn how you can be one of those faces, visit nextbigideaclub.com. Now, let's take a short break, and when we come back, my conversation with Brede Brown.

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Brene, I think I can speak for all of us here when I say we are so excited to have your book, Strong Ground, as our selection for this Next Big Idea Club season. Welcome to the Next Big Idea. Thank you. And thank you for having me on. And thank you for sharing my work with your community. I really appreciate it. I'm excited. Brene, you encourage us to understand ourselves and each other. And for starters,

I am really curious about you. I think I could make a pretty good guess as to what drove you when, as a young academic, you borrowed money to self-publish your first book, Women in Shame, 21 years ago. I'm less certain about what drives you today. Now you've published six number one New York Times bestsellers. You have a thriving global consulting and speaking business, but you're clearly working.

as hard as you've ever worked, as far as I can tell, but that's now a choice. What drives you? Wow. I don't think I've ever been asked that question before. I think... Probably underneath everything, curiosity, passionate pursuit of mastery. I just, I enjoy the ride. I don't always enjoy the grind, but I always enjoy learning. I'm just, I'm very tenacious. to a fault. And I'm really curious. And so I think that's probably what drives it all is curiosity and tenacity.

I'm really struck by the description on your beautiful bio page of your website. You say, I'm a researcher, storyteller, and Texan. Now, every word of this was clearly crafted with intention, as you advise us to do when you talk about communicating. Why do you describe yourself as a researcher, storyteller, and Texan in that order? These are really interesting questions right off the bat. I'm already worried. Don't be worried. Worried about where we're going. I think...

I've been a researcher since I was probably five or six years old. I think definitely a pattern finder, probably more as a way of just kind of surviving a tumultuous household that got very heated very often. I'm the oldest, and so I became very good at identifying patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior. I was very good at recognizing this is the vibe in the house.

This would have been funny yesterday. It's not going to be funny today. Someone's going to be pissed off pretty soon. I've always understood patterns and thought about patterns and thought about things and patterns. And then I'm a researcher. I'm a grounded theory researcher. So that's always made sense to me.

There used to be a quote on our website, stories are just data with a soul. I'm a qualitative researcher, so I trade in stories. I think it's how we're wired. I think it's how we teach and learn. figure out how to interact with the world. So I'm a storyteller. And I think I'm a fifth generation Texan. I think that identity is very central to who I am. It's kind of my...

unlike the bullshit politics in the state right now, which are not representative of who I think we are. We're so gerrymandered at this point. I don't know that it's a real reflection of how we think and who we are, but I think it's a very big part of my identity. My wife is a Texan. I'm a big fan of Texans. And I find that most Texans have this combination of boldness and warmth.

But you also, I think part of what has made you, I think, such a powerful communicator and teacher from my perspective is that you've shared with us your journey and your process of growing as a person in order to help other people grow as a person. And so do you see that Texan background, I don't know if you see it inherent to the state or your specific childhood, as containing both these qualities that you love?

And also some of this, like you've described also this sort of more constrained set of emotions that were acceptable as a child. Do you see that as inherent in the text of sensibility? Was that more specific? I don't want to idealize, you know, that identity because there's also hard parts about it. I think we can be culturally deaf by rugged individualism.

We romanticize the idea that you can go it alone. But I think more true to our DNA is not that ethos. I think we can be emotionally stoic and tough. But I think also, I don't know, it was interesting because at ACL, Austin City Limits, the music festival, Matthew McConaughey and I did this like short. little 30-minute thing on the stage where we talked about our new books because both of our new books have poetry in them. And I asked them this question about...

when you're out on the road, do you ever get homesick? And he said, yeah, do you get homesick? And I said, I definitely get homesick. I get really emotionally untethered if I'm away for more than like maybe two or three weeks. And I said, what do you miss most about Texas when you're out of Texas? And he said, I'd like to come back to Texas where a mile is a mile and an hour is 60 minutes.

And I think there's something about that that rang true for me, just the wide open spaces. And maybe I hope that everybody has a sense of place like that from wherever they're, maybe it's not just unique to a sense of belonging. I split my time between Austin and Houston. And you think about Houston, like my kids went to public elementary school in Houston, where in our elementary school, there were over 50.

countries of origin, first generation represented elementary school, you know? And so I think people don't know that part of Texas where there's a ton of diversity. And there's an ethos here around building long tables rather than high walls. Now, of course, the high wall ethos is also a part of the more different parts of Texas. But I think for me.

There's a kind of work hard, shoot straight, be kind, and there's room for everybody. That is very central to kind of my upbringing, probably. I think of Texas and Texans as sort of like... the archetypal Americanness. Everything that's true about Americans is more true of Texans in some sense, but I think we all maybe suffer from some of the rugged individualism and stoicism.

which is maybe part of why your work has been so powerful in helping people build a more nuanced understanding of their emotions. Turning to Strong Ground, in your description of the book, You talk about this as a time of deep uncertainty when, I'm quoting you here, when bluster, hubris, and even cruelty are being framed as an increasingly acceptable form of leading.

You say in this moment, we need to reimagine the essentials of courageous leadership. I assume you're talking about our political environment right now. Is that the case? I think it's the political environment increasingly around the world. And I also think, depending on how people came to my work. I think people are often surprised that I spend 95% of my time in organizations working with the C-suite leaders and kind of the direct level report.

below the c-suite and so i think you also see that type of kind of hubris leadership happening in more sectors than others and certainly you're gonna there's no shortage of it in the tech sector but you're also seeing it across other sectors and so I think it would be easy to think, oh, man, she's talking about the Trump administration. I think it qualifies for sure. But I think power as a construct is a really interesting thing. I don't think.

in its purest form and has very much value attached to it as good or bad. I think, you know, I love Martin Luther King Jr.'s definition of power, the ability to affect change and achieve purpose. And I think I would agree with the researchers at the Stone Center at Wellesley that powerlessness is probably one of the most dangerous experiences that we have to feel powerless. I mean, I know that I'm dangerous. I don't think I'm physically dangerous, but I think I'm...

emotionally dangerous when I feel powerless. I think power by itself is not bad or good. But I think when we break down, I'm thinking about Mary Parker Follett's work. She was an early kind of management organizational development person, actually a trained social worker. So I studied her in my social work education. She talked about power over, power with. There are essentially two types of power. There's power over, and then there's power with, and power to, and power within.

very important to understand that the genesis of that thinking is completely different. So I think people who use power over work from the belief that power is finite. Like if I have eight slices and I give you one, I have seven. And so people who work from power over believe power is finite and they use fear as a mechanism for maintaining power.

And the hard thing, I think, the more we learn about fear with the advent of pet imaging and neuroscience, the more that we learn that we're not really... neurobiologically hardwired to stay in fear for long periods of time. Fear has a short shelf life. Because one of two things happens in a fearful environment for too long. We hyper normalize the fear or we become complacent and less fearful. So in order to maintain power over.

you actually have to engage in fairly frequent bouts of cruelty towards vulnerable populations in order to maintain that power over. And I think we see that in a lot of different places. Power with and within and power to operates from the belief that power is infinite and actually grows when shared. And you can only imagine that would lead to a very different leadership style.

I think it's interesting to see across all sectors. I would include political, organizational, faith communities, how power is used, misused, and considered.

And tapping into that power within and between is such a powerful thing to do. And this gets to me to a central theme in your book of paradox. which I love, the tenacity of paradox, which you insisted on having in the subtitle, despite maybe some pushback. It seems to me really maybe at the keystone of your work is this notion that there's no such thing.

as courage without vulnerability. If we call something courage and there's not vulnerability involved, it's not really courage, right? I mean, would you see this as central? Yeah, I think there's two central things. I think... One was my hypothesis going into the leadership work 15 years ago, which was like, we call it DAW, dead ass wrong. My hypothesis was like completely wrong. I was so bummed. I was bummed for a little bit, but then I learned.

why it was wrong, and then I was excited. So my hypothesis in the beginning was that, first of all, it starts with a qualitative study where we identify 150 transformational leaders. And by transformational, we... We looked at two things. One, the organization was succeeding by both internal and external metrics, and people wanted to work there.

So informational in terms of culture and in terms of, you know, metrics for success. And then we interviewed the leaders asking them, what is the future of leadership? And this study again was like 15 years ago. But it was the first time as a qualitative researcher where I'd done an interview and the answer had saturated across every single person I interviewed. It was absolutely shocking. And had I not been working with a team of doctoral students that could...

Say, yes, this is what we're hearing every place we go. Everyone just said, we need more courage. We need more courage. We need braver leaders. We need braver leaders, more courageous leaders. That's the future of leadership. What got dicey? there for me as a researcher was defining that because close to half of the leaders said that there was no skill set involved in courage. You either had it or you didn't.

And then when we pushed for examples, and this is true, this has been true ever since my research on shame, we don't have a lot of language for what is, but we can have a lot of language for what isn't. And so when you ask people about trust, they'll tell you about betrayal. When you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. We just have much more honest language about what isn't, which is also reflected in psychology where we study.

pathology much more than we study the good stuff. So when I started asking these leaders kind of what do you mean by courage? And some of them could tell me, but some of them just said, you know, like you got it or you don't. And then I flipped the question and said, okay. What's happening in the absence of courage? And this is where they got very specific. And they would say things like, the number one thing that emerged there is a lack of productive.

difficult conversation. Like I'm not surrounded by leaders who are willing to sit down and have difficult but respectful conversation. And then it's like action bias. I've got people moving too fast, not staying in. the messy problem identification piece moving too much here, using shame and blame instead of discipline and accountability, not attending to fear and the people they lead. So when we...

started looking at that, it was very easy to reverse engineer that into a skill set. And that's kind of the four skill sets of courage that we still talk about. Identifying values. We know that you need to have one or two, not 15. So identifying and operationalizing your values, learning how to be in vulnerability, learning how to build and talk about trust, including self-trust, and then how to get back up after failure.

disappointment and setback. So we had these four skill sets of courage. But then I thought maybe what got in the way of that was fear. And that's when they said, listen, if you're going to make a list of daring leaders and... One of the ways you define that is not afraid. I'll never forget sitting across from a 70-year-old CEO who had been a leader for decades. Fortune 30 company said, if there's a list of daring leaders and I'm on it.

And that list means I'm not afraid. Don't put me on your list. I'm afraid every day. I go to bed afraid. I wake up afraid. And I'm afraid most of the day. So I was like, shit. That cannot be true. This is my hypothesis. So then what we learned was it wasn't fear that gets in the way of courage. It's armor. It's what you reach out for to self-protect.

When you're in fear, that actually moves us away. People are being brave all the time while in fear. Very seldom are people being brave while they're armored up. And so the two big...

I guess ethos of the work is one. It's not fear that gets in the way of courage. It's armor. And then the second one is there is no courage without vulnerability, which is what you brought up because. The definition of vulnerability from the research is pretty straightforward. It's the emotion we experience when we feel uncertainty, risk, and exposure. So vulnerability is what I experience when I feel...

Either I put myself at risk, I feel uncertain about something, or I'm emotionally exposed. And taking it out of the leadership realm, when we asked people to give us examples of vulnerability, they said things like, The first date after my divorce, trying to get pregnant with my second miscarriage, sending my kid to school, knowing how excited he is to make first chair in the orchestra.

And knowing that there's a very good chance you will not make the orchestra at all. You know, like every parent can be, every parent is like, Oh God, you know, that's, you get that, you know, like you feel. Absolutely. Saying I love you first. Oh, boy. That's right. You even had someone come up to you and say that this resulted in. He said, I love you. And she said.

I think you're really cool or something like that. That was one of those career moments where you're like, I need to tap out of this whole thing. This whole thing is a big mistake. Because I was at the front of the room after a talk in LA, and he was such a young kid, maybe in his early 20s. I think he was a teacher. And he said, can I tell you a story? There was like this growing group of people that were interested in the story. So I was like, I hope it's a good story, but okay.

I read Daring Greatly and I decided to tell the girl that I loved that I loved her. So I took her out to dinner and we went to our favorite restaurant and I waited till the chocolate volcano came. That's our favorite dessert. And I said, I love you. And she paused for a second and said, I think you're awesome. And I think we should date other people. That's right. And then she Ubered home.

And he said, so I got in my car. And by this time, everybody's looking at me like they're going to turn on me for driving this young kid into these bad decisions that hurt him. And he said, so then I got in my car and I drove home and the whole way home. just said out loud, fuck Brene Brown, fuck Brene Brown. The entire, that entire auditorium is listening and laughing. And he said, I got home.

And I bust through the door and my two roommates were wired in on their laptops. And they were like, dude, what's wrong? And he said, I told her I loved her. And she told me I was awesome. And one of his roommates said. That was so dumb, dude. Why did you do that? That's not the way it works. If you're going toward them, they run. So you always act like you're leaving, and then that's what makes them like you more.

And he said, oh, okay. No, no, no. I'm not going to do that, dude. I'm daring greatly. And he said both of his roommates just got really weepy and was like, right on. I thought if there's a story about vulnerability, that would, yeah, that would relate it. You know, I love that. I will tell you though, it was the moment in my career that kind of changed everything.

was at Fort Bragg working with special forces. So I do a lot of work with the military and I asked the troops a really pretty simple question. I said, give me an example of courage. in your own life or an example that you've witnessed in someone else, give me a single example of courage that didn't require uncertainty, risk, or emotional exposure.

And there was just like this really heavy hush that fell in the room. And after probably 30 seconds, then heads kind of started to fall into hands and it got really hard. And then a young guy stood up and said, three tours. There's no courage without vulnerability.

And then the next week I was with Pete Carroll and the Seattle Seahawks doing some work and I asked the players the same question. Give me an example of courage on or off the field that didn't require vulnerability. And of course they wanted to huddle up. And they came back and said, there's no courage without vulnerability. And then one of them very wisely said, because this endearing greatly, I use the Theodore Roosevelt quote as the epigraph for the book. Yes.

One of the wide receivers for the Seahawks said, I think that's why LeBron writes man in the arena on his shoes before the games. Because... It's not the critic who counts. It's not the person who shows up who's critical. It's the person who actually is in the arena, who fails, who suffers, who loses, but continues to show up. And I think in the world today, Roosevelt has turned out to be a dicey dude, so I don't use the quote as much. But I do think in the world today, there's so many...

cheap seats and by cheap seats, I don't mean like cheap seats. I mean, just people who are never going to step once in. and be vulnerable and do hard shit that may not pan out, who are so full of advice and judgment and criticism for the people that are in the arena getting knocked around.

This brings me back to this question of versions of leadership and versions of confidence. that are not showy. And one paradox, I love your invitation in this book for all of us to lean into paradox, embrace where we encounter paradoxes in ourselves, in the world, because that's probably the pathway to wisdom, to deeper understanding.

And one thing I've noticed in my own life is I found myself becoming both more confident and more humble at the same time. And I've concluded that we tend to think of confidence as something that's loud. But actually, true confidence is quiet. True confidence doesn't need to assert itself, right? The thing that needs to assert itself is the opposite of confidence, right? And I think that's what we see in a lot of the unfortunate forms of leadership we see around us.

Yeah, I think everything you're saying is really true and very much resonates for me as beautiful. One of the things that's helpful in my work is I have a very huge reference set. So pattern recognition can be easy for me because I have a very large reference set. And it's not because I'm like a scholar. It's because I hitchhiked through Europe when I was 17. I've waited tables for 12 years.

I've done a lot of wild shit, really. Like I learned more in that than I did a PhD program for sure. But I've done a lot of things because I do work from the motto that like nothing's wasted. Somewhere this is going to be useful somewhere along the line. Even though I think at this point in my life, I have a solid understanding of things that used to be a mystery to me.

I am completely sure that I know nothing. And I'm really proud of my work at this point. Yeah. And then I also... know that in the big scheme of things it's how I spend my days like someone asked me the other day like I don't know if this happens when you enter this season of your life but it's like have you thought about your legacy and I'm like

I thought about my legacy. It's like, I spent my whole life working to not give a shit what other people think. And you think I'm going to care about what other people think. I'm like, Jesus. No, I don't think about my legacy. I think about. what am I going to Uber eat for dinner? Like that's what I'm thinking about right now. I'm not thinking about, you know, I'm thinking about my kids and I come from, I come from a hard family, a lot of trauma, a lot of weird, you know, just hard.

And I'm thinking, did I get a first down? Not did I get a touchdown, but did I move the ball 10 yards down the field in my lifetime? Then my kids will need to move it another 50. So I think what you're saying about paradox, you know, I am a big Liverpool football supporter. And if it has a ball, I probably follow it. I'm a sports person.

I was talking to Raj Bennett, who has the podcast Men in Blazers, and we were talking about Liverpool right after they won the Premier League. And he said, it was so crazy that Arnie Slott, the current coach of Liverpool, came out and... sang a chant, led the whole Liverpool stadium, Anfield, in a chant of Jürgen Klopp, Klopp, Klopp, because the old manager before he was a coach. And Raj said, he's...

egoless, don't you think? And I said, no, none of us are egoless. I think he's disciplined in his humility. Yes. Yes. I love that. I love that line. I think that's what's missing in leadership. People are lacking discipline in their humility. I was talking with Walter Isaacson last week who brought up that Ben Franklin... had said that humility was the one of his many virtues that was the hardest for him. But he's discovered that attempting humility can be as useful as having it.

Because attempting humility requires listening to other people and presenting your ideas modestly. And that in the process of doing that, you actually have the effect of learning. Right? I'm taking a note. Yeah. Right? Isn't that good? My mother is not easy to buy Christmas presents for. She has everything, and she hates waste. She sees gift giving as an inefficient form of resource allocation, and she's not wrong. A lot of gifts end up in closets. One year, I gave her a blanket.

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Eye-opener for me in Strong Ground is the way you talk about language. You quote Wickenstein as saying, the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. And then you say... What does it mean if the vastness of human experience and emotion can only be described as mad, sad, or happy? And this kind of gets back to your personal journey. It's kind of a journey of expanding language. in turn, possibility.

Yeah, Ludwig Wittgenstein. That's a wild quote to me. The limits of my language are the limits of my world. That's true. Because over the last 15 years, we've been surveying adults to see what in terms of like emotional granularity research. What emotions or affects can people predictably recognize and name accurately? And the mean is three for adults. Happy, sad, and pissed off.

Those are your three buckets. And then you have this huge human experience of awe, wonder, grief, disappointment, anguish. And all you can do is file them into these three things. It's really interesting to me because I think. connecting that to my own upbringing where we were allowed two things, really just happy and pissed off, but you couldn't be anything else. And so you were pissed a lot.

So it took me a long time to get over that. Like it took me a really great therapist, a great marriage, you know, because blame and anger and those emotions are so yummy. You know, they have so much agency, you know, I like them and they can land on other people. So you're pushing them on other people. And so just being able to like, you know, be newly married.

to Steve, instead of being pissed off, saying, I'm anxious. And he's like, yeah, I get it. Me too. And I was like, oh, Jesus, not you too. So learning this emotional vocabulary, but what's interesting to me today, this is not research, this is political theory, my own wondering and curiosity. is if you're leading with power over, again, a country or an organization or whatever, and you're maintaining that with predictable bouts of kind of cruelty and control.

You would want angry people because they were not bored, right? Yes. I wanted angry people. This is just like five minutes from a tinfoil hat, but I wanted angry people. One of the things I would do is vilify empathy. And then the second thing I would do is deconstruct the education system and attack social emotional learning. Like I would want to make sure that.

Kids did not have access to robust language. It's like, what is the Avengers assemble? You know, like you could assemble the people in my family very quickly around any kind of rallying cry against the other. All we knew was happy and pissed off. And so you could, you know, kind of activate us pretty like quickly, I think. And so I do believe that.

emotional granularity. Look, I was shocked and pissed off when I finally finished coding the data for Strong Ground. I was relieved as hell and I was pissed off. Well, was that the right word? Oh, no, it wasn't. I was relieved that the original theory of courage stood up to all the new data post-pandemic and AI. four skill sets of courage are hanging solid, like actually a higher confidence level than even when we first did the data. So courage, the four skill sets still stand. Was I pissed off?

I was, I'm looking for the right word now because I have to work the work, blah, blah. But I was, what is the word that captures? Oh, shit. I don't want this to be true. But it makes total sense. Whatever that word is. Disappointed confirmation. I had a good sense of disappointed confirmation.

When the strong ground skill sets for the future of leading emerged. And A, it was a complex set. I wanted it to be 10 because that would be so good. I was so happy with the gifts of imperfection that just 10 actually emerged organically from the data. But this was like 32, and that's too many. And they were complex. But I was really disappointingly confirmed that it starts with self-awareness. Like, I really wanted it not to do that.

I really just want the future of courageous leadership and citizenry and personhood to start with self-awareness. I know it's true, but it's such a bummer because that's so hard. A leader who cannot recognize how they're feeling, whether they're kind of above the line. and fully functioning or below the line and operating from fear, you know, that can't control their own nervous system and manage that productively is really dangerous in this environment.

And I think you see that actually when you look at the MIT Sloan study that came out recently that says 90% of early investments in AI have failed and yielded zero ROI. I think what you have on that is what I see when I'm in a C-suite where like, Laura Foreman, you're like right in front of me. So I'll use Laura. Laura's my CTO and I'm a CEO. Laura, we need an AI strategy by Wednesday.

And Laura will say, oh, Wednesday's short. That's like two days. And what do you want it to do? I don't give a shit what it does, but we need a strategy. The board wants a strategy. All my friends have strategies. And so they just kind of from this place of scarcity. and out of control-ness went. And so they didn't settle themselves or the ball and look down the pitch.

And he used all these other skills that are going to be really relevant moving forward, like anticipatory awareness, situational awareness, systems thinking. They just yelled at Laura to put something together. And Laura did a...

Great job, but the ROI is zero. There are several themes that to me are kind of in the background in Strong Ground. One is sort of our political... situation, which you've alluded to, and our leadership situation, which you've alluded to. Another is AI, which has come up just now. I think that a lot of people are writing books right now about

what makes us uniquely human, what skills we can lean into. That's something you refer to sort of obliquely here and there. I love, though, your focus on, and this came up when you were talking about what drives you, on deep curiosity that leads to mastery. And you write, what we need today is deep, chase it down, absolutely need to know curiosity. We need the kind of curiosity that makes chasing down the answer as exciting and fun.

as actually finding the answer. Do you see, when you're talking about that kind of deep curiosity, I wonder how, whether that intersects with the way you think about how we're all navigating this world with this other intelligence emerging. Yeah, I'll start by saying the platitude I like the least right now. is that what makes us uniquely human will save us in our jobs. I really dislike that profoundly because we are so shit at what makes us uniquely human. So I really dislike that.

everything that makes us uniquely human has been driven out of us, um, for the last 20 years, especially in the, by this Welchian approach to know humanity because humanity gets in the way of performance. And so now all of a sudden you're going to try to turn that tanker. I would say first we need to get really better at being human. Like we're living in an environment where like empathy is being vilified. I literally, literally saw a bumper sticker.

on a truck in Texas last week that said, Jesus hated empathy. Oh my gosh. This is what scares me the most, I think, about things. I think we're disconnected from each other. I think we're dysregulated. And I think we are distrustful of ourselves and each other. And I think those are the core human skills is regulation, connection, and trust. And so before we rely on those, we better build them.

and rebuild them. And I don't know that we're going to do that while we're scrolling at the rate that we're scrolling. You know, when that moment that the, what do we call it? frustratingly or the disappointment but confirmed feeling came up for me. Really, my first thought was I don't really give a shit whether I ever teach this to leaders or not. I want my 20-year-old and my 26-year-old to have this skill set. I care about this for my kids.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. I care about this like compendium of mindsets and skill sets that I think will future ready us for my kids. And I think about that because. I'm in really wild rooms with really big leaders of state and leaders of tech companies. And I'm getting the sense. that they are trying to build these skills that I'm talking about while actively making sure that the rest of us don't.

And that really makes me nervous because I was in a room where a tech CEO was asked, what should we be telling our kids to study? And they were like, computational mathematics, coding. And then weirdly, like 20 minutes later in this Q&A, someone asked, to what do you attribute your success? And I think he forgot what he had said about computational mathematics.

And said, a deep study of philosophy and the Stoics really underpin everything that I'm about. And I was like, so while we're like... driving our kids out of liberal arts programs. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so, so we're going to study liberal arts. We're going to study art and history. It's like when they asked Steve Jobs, Isaacson, your guy that you just taught.

They asked Steve Jobs in the New York Times article, I bet your kids love the iPad. And Steve Jobs said, ooh, my kids don't have an iPad. Isaac went on to say, that's true. They never pull out technology. They talk about art and history and music. And so what I'm scared about witnessing is bifurcation, the right word? Like a...

We're going to have deep curiosity and study history and language and the arts and philosophy. And you little folks, just keep scrolling and don't worry your pretty little head about the deep thinking. In an odd way, I think that AI may be returning us to the importance of the humanities.

One final note I wanted to land on the topic of our essential humanness is the one line of yours I've heard you say many times that always stops me in my tracks is in the absence of connection, there's always suffering. And of course, I think we could also state that in the positive, in the presence of connection, of real connection, there's joy and there's learning. And that's when we think about our kids and where we want to land. To me, that's really at the center of it.

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Do we have Adam Grant by chance? Hey, everyone. Adam, good to see you. Likewise. Very excited to see you out here. Hey, Brene, welcome to the Next Big Idea Club. Thanks for joining. What a sweet surprise. Well, I was told to prepare questions and the list is so long that I don't want to cannibalize the whole group, but I will say I'll give you a choose your own adventure. Great. Let's go. So my top three at the moment, number one.

How is vulnerability different when we're interacting digitally as opposed to in the same room? Number two, what's the hardest paradox for you to manage personally? And number three, you were just talking about how we're dysregulated. So can you coach us a little bit on regulation? And I'm purely asking for a friend and not at all for my children or myself.

Very good Adam Granty questions. I'll go with the hardest paradox for me right now because I get asked. about this, not about for me, but I get asked about this paradox a lot. I think the hardest one for me, and I'm curious why this is, and I know you're going to be able to quote some research for me. I am trying to work on... discipline, and freedom. And I am trying to work on the fact that I need to be unfindable at least 15 hours a week.

And so I do that because I don't want my life to be counted in 15-minute Microsoft calendar increments. And so I want to be unfindable. And I used to do that a couple of years ago. It was really good because the only way I could do is swim laps. My most unfindable place is in the water. But I read that this was important. Jim Collins writes about it. So in Jim's book, I was like, okay, so they said true freedom requires discipline. So I've become...

Better at doing that. But just last week, your name came up, Adam with Barrett, my chief of staff and sister. Complicated, but lovely. Not her, the relationship. She was talking about the fact that no one responds to emails as fast as you. But then I was like, but he's also disciplined with his time.

So what do you make of this? Like, I can sit on the computer and respond, or I can have unfindable moments when I'm working out, taking walks with my family. What do you make of this paradox? And why is it so freaking hard for me? I don't know. I feel like I'm muddling through this the way we all are. I think, for me, email response is my procrastination. What? I mean, you get fast emails when I'm writing and I'm stuck.

Apparently you're stuck a lot at them. Yeah, it's true. But do you think that discipline, that freedom requires discipline? I think in an always on world, it definitely does. And I think. The most important discipline is a skill that you've taught me better than anyone, which is boundary setting. I mean, for me, what that looks like is I look at my literally empty calendar tomorrow and a bunch of people want to meet. Sorry, I'm booked.

What am I booked on? Thinking and writing. And that discipline protects my freedom. You do the same thing though, don't you? Okay. I don't want to bring everything back to gender. However. I'm going straight to this Maya Angelou. Was it Maya Angelou? I think it was Maya Angelou. The talk about women's work and creative work being done in stolen moments.

Like, it's taken me a long time to believe that I'm worth blocking off my time for thinking and that I don't just do it when no one's looking in the carpool line. That's such an interesting framing because I don't think about those boundaries as at all for me. I think about all the readers I'll be letting down if I don't write. And all the students I'll be letting down if I don't.

formulate the best thinking that I can do. Why are you so responsive to the people you know personally and not the whole world that wants to be enlightened by you, Brené? No, it's not the people that I want to go personally. The people like my kids and my husband are like, block the time. I think it's more, I'm getting better at it. I'm definitely, I'm going into my fucking era for sure. this last birthday, but I do have a lot of, I do have to work on, I enjoy thinking and writing so much.

that I can feel guilty about taking time to do it because it's like my happy place. I'm going to fix that shit. I'm making myself a note. I'm going to work on this. I love it. Eating healthy when I'm pregnant, as opposed to being like, I'm going to do this and this and this, as opposed to doing it, I'm going to do it for me. Yes, I think that's actually helpful.

And your weird but predictably good turnaround on me. Thank you, Adam Grant. Well, let me just push you one step further on it because it's so much fun to be in that position. One of my all-time favorite quotes is E.B. White, who said, I awake in the morning, torn between enjoying the world and improving the world. And this makes it difficult to plan the day.

Brene, you just told us you have the great fortune of living a life where one of the things you enjoy most about the world is also the way that you most improve the world, which is through thinking and writing. Why are you turning that into a paradox? You're lucky to love where you make the biggest difference. So shouldn't that be the clearest place to focus your time? I have literally never thought about this before this second.

Well, I'm very tempted to do a little riff on, there's a Ken Sheldon paper on how over time people gravitate toward goals that are both personally and socially beneficial. Early in our lives and careers, we tend to... think about that as a trade-off. And as we gain wisdom and experience, we realize, no, I want to be in the zone where I get both the intrinsic and the pro-social elements.

To me, that's where the only sustainable motivation is. This is interesting and it's also meaningful. How dare you not spend your time on that, Brené Brown? It's really helpful, Adam. Thank you. I mean, that's really... Yeah, because the bullshit that, oh yeah, I will have to do some work on that. Because I think the stuff that's getting in the way is a lot of my founder.

I will check the font that you're using. I will reread the emails you're writing. It's a lot of the, it's not highest and best use thinking. It's interesting because then you do get into the paradox of highest and best use thinking. And the love is in the details. And so there is a paradox there that can be difficult. This is a really helpful thing. I mean, y'all, people are like, what is wrong with them when they're together?

I have no idea how weird it can get when the two of us are together, but always good. It's a really thoughtful question.

That was Brene Brown speaking with me, Next Big Idea Club curator Adam Grant, and dozens of Next Big Idea Club members live on Zoom last week. To learn more about becoming a Next Big Idea Club member so you can join in the next such conversation, visit nextbigideaclub.com. We just selected Walter Isaacson's new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.

And if you sign up now, you'll get a signed copy of the book, as well as an invitation to attend a virtual Q&A with Walter, exactly like the one you just heard with Brene. As someone who's interviewed Walter three times now, I can tell you he is a treat to spend time with. He's not only brilliant, he's a Rhodes Scholar, professor at Tulane, at least 11 honorary degrees.

But he's also down-to-earth, charming, and able to speak intelligently on almost any subject under the sun. And the topic of his latest book... is among the most important subjects that he's tackled in my opinion it promises to be a great conversation plus if you become a next big idea club member you'll get the six best books of 2026 sent straight to your door

access to our private WhatsApp group, I'm in there every day, and ad-free versions of the show. So again, that's nextbigideaclub.com and use the code podcast at checkout to take 20% off your subscription. I hope... to see you in there. Today's episode was produced by Caleb Bissinger, sound designed by Mike Tota. Special thanks to Torrey Yu. I'm Rufus Griscom. See you next week.

Have you thought about being a therapist, Adam? I don't have the patience. You don't? Nope. You would just cut to the chase and be very directive about what needs to happen next? Yeah, I can't listen to anyone talk for an hour. I don't even want to listen to myself talk for five minutes.