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May 31, 2018 - Dr. Oz Podcast

32:24

The Secret Habits of Powerful CEOs

What is it about a CEO's personality that separates them from the pack? And what are the healthy habits you can incorporate to help you land that corner office? Stephen Dubner, the mastermind behind Freakonomics, examines what propels certain people to positions of power... and what are the little-known downsides of being a boss. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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	One that really comes to mind is Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft.
	He seems just to be floating through his job, enjoying it so much.
	He was a pretty cocky, very successful young engineer at Microsoft.
	He was climbing, but he wasn't a super superstar.
	How he got there was by understanding that one of the really important components of success is humility and empathy.
	and he didn't have either of them.
	Hey, everyone. everyone.
	I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
	We'll see you next time.
	My next guest has dedicated his career to challenging the rules.
	He wrote a book called Freakonomics.
	Stephen Dubner's made us question the way we think about everything from politics to the economy to even the way we eat.
	But I actually know him far before most of you did.
	Met him years ago, actually through a mutual friend who we're still both close to.
	And you were the editor of the New York Times Magazine at the time.
	And editor.
	And editor at the New York Times Magazine.
	Oh, and editor.
	The only editor that I really cared about.
	The only important editor of the New York Times Magazine.
	And he changed my life.
	And many of you don't know this, and I'll tell this story for the first time publicly, although I've shared it with everyone I know privately.
	We had been exploring integrative medicine at the hospital.
	This is back in 1995. I had just finished my training, and as a young surgeon, I'd noticed that a lot of the patients hadn't read the books that I had read.
	They sort of needed something beyond what I would traditionally offer, at least what I was taught to offer, which is, you know, what's your diagnosis, how many pills are you going to take, et cetera.
	And the ability to use meditation, massage, audio tapes in the operating room seemed self-evident because anything that might help, I wanted to use.
	And I met Steven and editor at the New York Times Magazine and expressed an interest.
	And I was sort of surprised because I didn't think what I was doing was all that much out of the ordinary.
	But you did.
	Well, I came up to see your, what was it, the Center for Complementary Medicine?
	Was that what it was called at Columbia?
	And it was remarkable because I'd been, you know, I'd been around a lot of doctors.
	I love the field of medicine.
	I have nothing to do with it, but I love it because it's really hard.
	And I like things that are hard where people are working hard to figure out how to get better at them.
	And, you know, to me, the best medical practitioners or researchers are the ones who have humility about how much we don't yet know.
	And so it really appealed to me that you were a regular top-tier trained surgeon who said, hey, yeah, we can do this well, but wouldn't it be nice if we understood especially traditions from the East?
	And I'd grown up with a mother who had trained as a nurse, and she was very, you know, she didn't work as a nurse.
	She was a full-time mom, but eight kids on a farm.
	And she needed to figure out how to fix a lot of people when they got busted up.
	And she was an organic person before that was popular.
	We made most of our own, you know, a lot of our own food and so on.
	And so integrating allopathic and what's the other one?
	Ayurvedic.
	Holistic or integrative.
	Was something that to me has obvious great value, and yet so much of the Western medical establishment didn't acknowledge it.
	So the fact that you were, I thought, was pretty great.
	Maybe more than that, not acknowledge it.
	Medicine is like religion.
	You have a faith system that governs how you take care of patients.
	You're very proud of the fact you've learned from great teachers, but you also realize or believe that you took a lot of effort to learn.
	It must be the way to do it.
	Otherwise, my goodness, what if I only learned part of what I needed to learn?
	What goes on then?
	So you create awkwardness within the medical field when you start to bucket, which, again, I respect completely.
	But it became a big part of what happened in my life because you commissioned an article.
	Chip Brown, a wonderful writer, crafted it.
	And I still remember when the magazine came out, because back then there was no electronic version, hit the newsstands, and on Monday morning...
	My life changed because everyone had been reading it.
	It was a summer weekend, and they all were writing, calling, saying, you know, we saw that note.
	We didn't even realize there was an issue.
	It put the idea of conventional medicine, the kind we respect and what I was trained in, using other approaches on the front burner of debate.
	And all of a sudden, something that had been a covert operation, at least in our case, became the vanguard of how it happened.
	Of course, most medical centers today in America, at least think about it if they don't use it, but I owe you that thanks.
	Well, you're welcome, yeah.
	Your visionary approach, not just to that, but in your life, has always captivated our attention.
	My wife was so happy that you agreed to come today.
	Yeah, she says it.
	She's true.
	I think she's right.
	Arguably the best podcast, period, in America.
	Oh, I'm blushing.
	You have a beard.
	You can't blush.
	You know, part of it is I really feel like I always enjoyed spending time with you, but I feel like you're in the room when you do your podcast, and your conversations are always so smart and insightful, and so I feel like we get to, even though we never see you very well.
	She likes the music in the podcast.
	She likes the timbre.
	It makes me so jealous, so angry.
	But you are, again, Preconomics was, Vitally important book, I argue, to my friends, and all of who like the book, but sometimes don't respect how important it is, because you began to explain how economics can outline why a drug dealer lives at home.
	I mean, stuff that you...
	Why did abortions have potentially a link to violent crime?
	Things that you couldn't even connect.
	And by the way, if you want the answers to those things, check out Stephen's podcast, because it's all there.
	But on the podcast, you're going someplace that is a little different than I had historically seen.
	You're starting to look at CEOs, And not just any CEOs.
	The CEOs that all of us wonder about, most of us respect.
	The Uber CEOs.
	The Uber CEOs.
	The guys who are changing our...
	Although not Uber, the company.
	No, no, no, no.
	Travis, yeah, he has a little tied up.
	But, you know, Zuckerberg and, you know, from food to technology and everything in between, you dive into their lives.
	And I'm curious why you picked that.
	Because when you see an opportunity, there's usually a lot of thought behind it.
	Yeah, so I'll tell you the whole—the backstory won't take long, but it was a little bit of an accident, and then it got a little bit more on purpose.
	So I didn't have a CEO series planned, although— There is a very sort of basic question that I like to ask because, for one, it's fun, and two, because it's so basic, a lot of smart people think it's beneath them to ask this kind of question.
	And the kind of question I mean in this case is, I wonder how much a given CEO actually matters, right?
	Because it's like almost a childlike question that most people are too sophisticated to denigrate themselves to ask a simple question like that.
	Oh, so it seems.
	Or so it seems.
	So then when you go looking for answers, and that question actually grew out of a similar simple question that I asked several years ago and did a podcast, or maybe a couple podcasts on, called How Much Does the President of the United States Really Matter?
	Now, I won't get into that.
	That's a long discussion.
	But suffice it to say that my basic argument was, for the president, much less than most people argue.
	And then the minute you look at what a president can and can't or does and doesn't do, you realize that many of the things that we attribute to, quote, presidential power are luck or circumstance or maybe even we project what happens.
	You know, there are all these people who said, who loved, let's say, Obama.
	The minute Obama gets into office, everything's going to be coming up roses for the next eight years.
	Well, you know what?
	They were the most disappointed.
	And this goes to what I would call the great man theory of history, Thomas Carlyle, this Scottish philosopher who I actually think was kind of a horrible person.
	But he was an interesting thinker.
	And he had this idea that there are a few great men, not women, because this was the 18-somethings, who happened through history and they kind of coalesce their intelligence and power and address or fix an era.
	And that we mortals are so fortunate to have people like that leading us.
	It's a kind of religious idea.
	And I think we, even in 21st century America or the rest of the world, where there's not that kind of religiosity as much anymore, I think we still subscribe to that.
	We like the idea that someone can lead us, can rescue us, can save us.
	I think it's a very naive notion in the modern world, and yet we have that.
	So that was the idea with the presidency.
	With a CEO, it's similar in some ways, but it's different because a company is different than a country.
	But if you look at the data, you know, what you'd like to do is take a thousand companies and randomly divide them and install different kinds of CEOs and see, measure how it works.
	That's what you do in a lab experiment, right?
	You can't do that.
	When you look at research that tries to sort of replicate that, you see that the answer of whether the CEO matters a lot is very murky.
	You're kidding me.
	No.
	With those pay packages they get?
	Well, exactly.
	But on the other hand, well, that's exactly the kind of questions we got into in the podcast.
	If a good CEO isn't necessarily so much better than what might be a bad one, why are they getting paid so much?
	But then there's an answer for that, too.
	At least an economist would say, well, here's why.
	Because it is a really hard job.
	It is a fully demanding and engaging job.
	You have to pretty much sacrifice most of your personal life if you want to lead a certain kind of company as CEO.
	And so the only way that you can at least hope to get the most qualified and not even most qualified, most devoted person is by offering to pay so much money that that person will feel so compelled to at least try their very hardest.
	Because if they're only getting paid half a million dollars and they're working 90 hours a week, they might just say, you know what?
	Then they'd be a medical resident.
	Yes.
	But not even that.
	A quarter of that.
	Coming up, Stephen Dubny reveals his worst CEO interview yet.
	So the CEO series actually began—this is going to sound a little mean-spirited, but you're friends, so I'll tell you— I got an interview with Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook.
	I was interested with that open letter he wrote about how Facebook should be using its power to better society.
	This was a year ago or so, roughly, I don't know.
	And so I wrote to his people, and I said, honestly, I never lie, I never promise something I can't do.
	I said, I'm really interested in this, I'd like to have a conversation about this.
	It took several months.
	I finally got an interview with him, and it was not a very interesting interview for me.
	Do you use Siri or Alexa or any of those, right?
	You know how when you sometimes ask it or tell it to do something, you'll ask Siri a question, and she'll give you an answer very confidently that has nothing to do with the question you ask?
	That was kind of like talking to Mark Zuckerberg.
	Oh, my goodness.
	Anyway, he's obviously very bright.
	He's obviously very good at what he does.
	But for me, as a conversationalist, it wasn't my favorite.
	So then we had this interview.
	We had this interview done, and I didn't know quite what to do with it.
	It wasn't really great, and I didn't want to just put out an interview because he's famous.
	And then right around then, I heard that Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, was coming out with a memoir.
	He's a relatively new CEO of Microsoft.
	And he is, to me, a fascinating fellow.
	Microsoft, fascinating company.
	He turned it around quite a bit.
	I happened to have interviewed the previous CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer.
	And so we got an interview with Nadella.
	It wasn't amazing, not knock your socks off, but interesting on a number of dimensions.
	And I thought, wait a minute, we've got Zuckerberg and Nadella.
	What if we use these to start a project to look at leadership, to look at how it really works, what they actually do, how you get to be CEO, what are the big decision points, who they learn from, what happens when it's time to go.
	And then we went out and recruited a bunch of other CEOs to the cause, and the conversations just got deep.
	Deeper and richer because I began to learn more about what the job actually is.
	What was your favorite one?
	Well, it's...
	Okay, so even though I just kind of was nasty towards Zuckerberg, I enjoy them all because I love what I do.
	It's a privilege and it's fun.
	It's just fun.
	You prep and prep and prep.
	You read and read and read.
	Then you have a relatively short amount of time.
	And then you just try as best you can to learn as much as you can.
	So it's really fun.
	So none of them were at all bad.
	My probably two favorites.
	One was David Rubenstein, who is a former founder and now former CEO of the Carlyle Group, which most people in the world have not heard of, but they are among the most powerful institutions, period, in the world, private equity group.
	And he's a remarkable human.
	Even though he either is truly humble or fake self-deprecation better than anyone I've ever heard.
	Because he's just a really remarkably down-to-earth seeming person.
	Great conversationalist.
	Very perceptive about people.
	And really fun to talk to.
	And then the other one that was very different, who's remarkable, was Indra Nui, who's the CEO of PepsiCo.
	Again, a remarkable human.
	She had nothing to do with business or PepsiCo.
	She trained as a scientist.
	She still looks at life as a scientist, including running.
	And, you know, she's the kind of person that when you ask her a question like this, sometimes when you're the interviewer, you have to be a little bit devil's advocate, a little churlish.
	And I might ask her a question like, how does it feel to be the CEO of a snacks and beverage company at a time when the world has decided that your products are kind of borderline toxic?
	So that's a kind of...
	natural-ish question.
	Oh, my goodness.
	Well, yeah, but I mean, it's an important question, too.
	And the way that she knows how to not just answer it in a pat way, but how to— she's thought that through for real a hundred times, and she's thought through what the responsibilities are of a company, what the responsibilities are to the public for health and nutrition, but also what the responsibilities are for shareholders and how to balance that— Additionally, she's just a neat person.
	And so that, I think, was probably the most invigorating conversation.
	That was the one at the end that I thought to myself, if I could be any of them or be really good friends with any of them, I think Ingenoid would be at the top of the list.
	I'm intrigued at the whole premise because CEOs have become rock stars in modern America and they are the modern day warlords.
	I believe that's what they are, generals or captains.
	And they've been captains of industry for a while, but it takes it a bit beyond that.
	You asked them, I'm sure, about how they define success, what it looks like for them.
	They're judged in that capacity.
	Their compensation and fairness to CEOs is often tied to the price of the company.
	Not always, but when it's a well-designed package, it should be.
	So they have a lot to win and to lose if it doesn't work out well.
	So what does success look like to For example, Indra, who's got to manage a company where the more money they make, it might mean the more soil they're selling, although I know they're trying to diversify.
	Uh, that's a really good question.
	Honestly, I hate to, this sounds a little bit like a cop-out.
	I think it would be really different for each of them.
	And that was one of the big discoveries that we had, which is that there is no CEO template.
	You can't even come up with a list of characteristics that say most good CEOs are or do this, and most bad ones are or do this.
	There is a lot of variance just in the eight or 10 that we interviewed.
	For Indra Nui, her success, I think, uh, she would argue is a very integrative, holistic one where she is, she is not out to make as much money as possible.
	She makes a lot of money.
	She's a CEO of PepsiCo, but she's also wildly philanthropic with her money toward causes that she believes strongly in.
	Girls and women's education in India where she grew up and so on.
	For Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric who we interviewed, who was a hoot to interview and I find to be a really interesting thinker.
	His measure of success, he looked at it like sport.
	He grew up playing sports.
	It's winning.
	How do you measure?
	My number is more than your number.
	So, what was interesting about that, however, about speaking with him, is, you know, he's been very good over the last, whenever he stepped down in, gosh, it was a long time ago, 2001?
	Yeah, 15 years ago.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	So, he's been very good during that time of not commenting on his predecessor.
	Predecessor?
	Successor.
	Excuse me, thank you.
	Jeff Immelt.
	Who just stepped down himself.
	Right.
	And right around the time that we were doing the interview with Welch, I think that was right around the time that either the announcement had been made that Flannery was coming in or it was close to the transition.
	Even so, he just said, look, I had my shot.
	I did my thing.
	And then I quoted to him.
	I said, well, Jack, you did write in this book or somewhere he wrote, I said, the truest measure of success of a CEO is what kind of shape the company is in afterwards.
	So I said, based on that, I would have to say, I didn't say it quite like this to him.
	Based on that, we'd have to say you were a pretty crappy CEO because GE has been pretty close to in the toilet since he left.
	And even then, when he had a chance to either attack a successor for bringing down his reputation or defend himself for making moves that maybe made the company look better than they were at the time, he still took the high road, still said, look, I had my shot.
	I learned so much from talking to these people because...
	Obviously, they're accomplished.
	Obviously, they work hard.
	But, you know, I learned something.
	There's a wonderful psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, one of your alma maters.
	Is that your only alma mater?
	I can guarantee it's a bunch because I have to pay them all.
	So, there's a research psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania named Angela Duckworth, who wrote a wonderful book called Grit that I'm sure many people have heard about, if not read.
	One of the things that Angela identified in people who are basically successful at a high level, whether it's athlete, CEO, whatever, grit is a big component, stick-to-itiveness.
	But she also said that one of the surprising components of successful people is a real high level of self-awareness and self-assessment.
	Constantly going over what you've done, what decisions you've made, being very not critical, like all negative, but really thinking hard about why you did what you did, how it turned out, and really trying to get good feedback and assess your moves.
	That is what I noticed among every CEO I interviewed, a huge level of self-awareness.
	Even for someone like Zuckerberg, who sounds kind of programmed, but believe me, he's very aware of how he sounds and what kind of goal he's trying to accomplish.
	In the Zuckerberg interview, I read that he acknowledged it was quite lonely, which is interesting because he's at a social media company.
	All the walls are gone.
	I've been to the headquarters here in New York.
	I suspect it's the same on the West Coast.
	So it's designed not to make you feel lonely.
	Is that about him or is that about CEOs in general?
	I actually don't remember Zuckerberg saying that.
	You're probably right.
	I don't remember.
	The ones that I remember saying they were lonely, because I did ask the question of everyone, is it lonely at the top?
	That's kind of the cliche.
	Jack Welch said, are you kidding me?
	You're surrounded by your best friends and you call them into your office and you say, you're now a millionaire.
	How could that be lonely?
	So that was him.
	But I'll tell you...
	Two of the three women, and maybe three of the three women that we interviewed, did say it was lonely.
	And I think that gender has a lot to do with it.
	I do think it's very hard.
	You don't have a peer.
	Look, Zuckerberg has evolved and matured a lot.
	I mean, look, he's still only 30-something, right?
	Yep.
	So this is something that David Rubenstein from Carlyle commented on.
	We also spoke with Jeff Sonnenfeld, who's a kind of leadership expert at the Yale School of Management.
	He also commented on how Zuckerberg has done very, very well to learn from his board and to learn from mentors because it's not easy.
	Look, imagine being Zuckerberg.
	You have that much success at age 20-whatever.
	It's very, there's a word, one of my favorite words that nobody uses, unfortunately.
	It's called ultra-crepidarian.
	Say it, ultra?
	Yeah, ultra-crepidarian.
	You made that word up.
	I did not.
	It's a real word.
	So ultra-crepidarianism is the notion that, or the belief that because I, or you, let's say you, you're a good surgeon.
	The belief that because you're really good at surgery, you must also be really good at, let's say, you know, maybe something...
	Now, it could be true that you're good at TV, but the belief that simply, you know, it's called, you know, mastery of domain or domain transference.
	And so it's very easy to imagine that someone like Zuckerberg said, look, I just built a social network and I'm worth X billion dollars.
	You want to have a board to come in and tell me that I need to set up a management policy that's more friendly toward blah, blah, blah?
	Come on.
	And to his credit, I think he's worked hard at that.
	To me, however, the biggest takeaway from the CEO series, What I learned is this.
	Even at a very high level, these companies that are worth many billions of dollars, where the scrutiny is unbelievably high, where performance is quarterly and the stakes are high, even in that realm, or maybe even especially in that realm, People think that the keys to success are brilliance, strategy, the new great idea.
	And what they undervalue constantly is execution, getting it done, making a plan, checking the boxes, making sure that you have redundancies built in.
	And honestly, I think that is for me and for anybody listening to this, the single biggest takeaway.
	You can have a plan to be a nicer person, to be healthier, to get more involved with your community, whatever.
	You can have a great idea.
	It's all about the execution.
	And whatever tricks or stunts or nudges you can find or design for yourself to actually do it, that's how you get to success.
	It's very easy to look from afar and think, oh, Mark Zuckerberg, brilliant.
	Indrenoy, brilliant.
	Maybe.
	But the key to making it happen is by getting, you know, those hundred things that you want to get done that day.
	If you get 99 of them done, that's a good day.
	Coming up.
	The truth about the health of some of the most successful people in the world.
	Let me check the boxes on the health of these folks.
	Did you ask them if they slept?
	Yeah.
	Not everyone.
	It was remarkable how many of them did not sleep very much.
	And we were chastised a little bit by our listeners for saying, why are you promoting a non-sleeping model as a good one?
	I wouldn't say I promoted it.
	I let them say what they do.
	It's not like I'm endorsing, but like Indra Nooyi is like a four-hour sleeper.
	I believe David Rubenstein is like a four- or five-hour sleeper.
	But there were a lot of wrinkles.
	David Rubenstein, for instance, doesn't smoke, drink, or golf.
	The golf because he was no good at it.
	But interestingly, he grew up, he'd seen alcohol doing things to people.
	He said, you know what?
	I'm not touching that.
	So again, everybody's different.
	But if nothing else, there was a big awareness of what they did, what their inputs, how their inputs, whether it's sleep, drinking, eating, et cetera, affected their outputs, a big awareness.
	Was there a specific way that they all dealt with stress?
	If it wasn't sleep, because that's how many of us deal with it.
	You know, that is a question that I certainly should have asked.
	Oh, no.
	And it is a question, it is a subject that came up.
	I'll tell you one thing that I drew from a few of them.
	One that really comes to mind is Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft.
	He seems to be wildly unstressed.
	He seems just to be floating through his job, enjoying it so much.
	He's also very trim.
	He just, he looks to be the picture of kind of, I've got it figured out, right?
	What was really interesting, the most interesting moment speaking with him about how he got there was, this is both professionally and personally for him, How he got there was by understanding that one of the really important components of success is humility and empathy.
	And he didn't have either of them.
	So he was a pretty cocky, very successful young engineer, computer scientist at Microsoft.
	He was doing well.
	He was climbing, but he wasn't a super superstar.
	He and his wife had their first child.
	Their first child was born with profound physical difficulties.
	Oh my.
	And his...
	First response, and it's to his credit that he writes about this and talks to me about it, his first response was, oh man, this is going to really mess up my life.
	It's like, here I am, a hotshot computer scientist.
	His first thought was not for his kid, not for his wife.
	It was about how this is going to be a lot of work, a lot of money.
	And it was through coming to grips with that, and I should say changing his attitude and coming to really love and empathize with his son.
	And, you know, things have worked out relatively quite well, considering the handicap.
	That was for him the key insight to saying, look, I can be really successful at my job.
	Maybe I'll even run Microsoft someday.
	But unless I learn to empathize with people and literally be able to see the world from their position, I'm not going to be a complete person.
	And I think that was a really powerful takeaway.
	So much so – That one of the reasons that Microsoft now has placed so much emphasis and capital in augmented reality is because there are many, many, many uses of augmented reality for all different kinds of people with all different kinds of handicaps and limitations.
	I mean, just think about, you know, we live in a world that's remarkable.
	We...
	In part because it's been gradual and in part because we're a little bit, psychologists call it habituation, you give us one good thing and we just say, okay, that's great, give me more, right?
	But think about this, we're in a world now where in a few years probably with autonomous vehicles, being elderly and or blind and or handicapped will no longer be a mobility issue.
	That's remarkable, okay?
	And so, again, augmented reality, you can just imagine the many, many, many opportunities that will open up.
	I'm not saying Microsoft wouldn't have gotten there had Satya Nadella not been the CEO. I think that's naive.
	Nor am I saying that Satya Nadella wouldn't have gotten there had he not had this empathy awakening, had he not had a child born with a severe handicap.
	But those are kind of the threads that I like to look for when you're speaking to someone to understand how they tick.
	How's a child doing now?
	Do you know?
	Pretty well.
	He's, I think, mid-20s.
	I believe it's cerebral palsy.
	It's interesting you bring this up because we were at a conference talking about cutting-edge advances, and I was seeing a lot of how VR is changing the world of people who are not physically unable to keep up right now.
	And the most shocking idea that I heard about was even before I went there.
	Think about the walking cane that folks who can't see use.
	Visual impairment is a huge problem.
	It hasn't changed in hundreds of years.
	I mean, literally.
	So I started thinking to myself, it is sort of bizarre that we're patting ourselves on the back, but of course it should change that.
	And this young man who's blind and an engineer has a company now that's a Turkish guy.
	He takes the walking stick.
	It's like Siri.
	You say, I'm going home.
	take me home.
	And it actually will take you home, which is so fantastic.
	GPS and a walking stick?
	The other thing I never thought about it is, if you're walking, the stick tells you where the ground is, right?
	But who tells you about what's in your head?
	And there's a little sonar system that goes up and says, you're about to walk into a signpost.
	So we, I think, took a lot of time to fill up baseline technologies, but now it's beginning to spread to places where all of us can acknowledge that it's changing our lives in ways we never, it's not just about efficiency, it's that even more people play the game of life.
	Yeah.
	Which may be the best.
	Last question.
	Is there a question you wish you had asked that only now, in retrospect, having thought about this and davened on it for a while, you wish you had?
	You know, there's a kind of cliched question that, I mean, I ask a lot of cliched questions.
	I'm not scared of them.
	But there's one that I do sometimes ask people in an interview.
	I have a kind of list of standard questions that are kind of in my back pocket for anyone.
	And the one that I didn't ask the CEOs is what keeps them up at night.
	And I didn't because I thought it was too obvious.
	I thought they would talk about the buyout, the activist board member, whatever.
	In retrospect, though, one thing I loved about doing the series is they were, to a person, for the most part, very open and candid and generous with their, not just their time, but with their spirit.
	They really talked about what it's like, not about, you know, the just nuts and bolts of it.
	And the reason I hadn't asked the question is because I thought I would get pro forma answers.
	And in retrospect, I think I would have gotten great answers.
	And I think it would have helped humanize them even more for our listeners to understand.
	Because here's what I don't like in our society.
	I don't like the...
	There's way too much us versus themism.
	And it's not just political.
	It's not just cultural.
	It's everywhere.
	And I think we've all contributed to it somehow.
	But I hate the idea that a lot of people hear the word or phrase CEO and immediately think, oh, nasty capitalist captain of industry, you know, you You have no idea.
	You have no idea how another person really thinks and feels and so on.
	Do some of them make and do things that you don't like?
	Sure.
	But you could say the same for your organic basket weaver down the road, too.
	Nobody has a monopoly on goodness.
	And so I think anything that we can all do collectively to understand how other people who are very prima facie different from us, how they actually think, what they love, what they hate, what scares them, the better off we all are, honestly.
	Well, I think the three of us will agree.
	I hope most folks listening, it's hard to hate up close.
	Yeah, right.
	And what you do so beautifully is get us close to people.
	You're remarkably disarming, insightful, churlish at times, as you point out, with remarkable vocabulary, and a wonderful friend and man I admire tremendously, Stephen Dubner.
	Again, his podcast...
	I'll say it again, arguably one of the best, period.
	Maybe the best in the country.
	So insightful, so thoughtful.
	The Secret Life of CEOs is an element of that.
	And, you know, Freakonomics and all the TV show, which I was blessed to attend, where he turned insight and knowledge into a game show, which is, you know, few could do.
	The creative soul of Stephen Dubner.
	Thanks so much for having me.
	I'm only here for Lisa Oz's My feelings about Mehmet are unmentionable, but I'm very happy to be speaking with Lisa.
	Really?

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