No Way Out

The Socratic Experience and Conscious Capitalism with Michael Strong | Ep 7

February 19, 2023 Mark McGrath and Brian "Ponch" Rivera Season 1 Episode 7
No Way Out
The Socratic Experience and Conscious Capitalism with Michael Strong | Ep 7
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Michael Strong is one of the most experienced designers of innovative school programs in the United States: He has more than twenty-eight years creating innovative K-12 programs and schools based on Montessori, Socratic, and entrepreneurial principles.   

He is the author of The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice and lead author of Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World’s Problems.

Chapters in this episode include:

  • John Boyd and the Nature of Learning and Creativity 
  • Entrepreneurs Create Value 
  • Experiential Education and Adult Learning
  • Education as Scaling a Culture
  • Social Physics: Measuring Psychological Safety and Engagement 
  • Soft Skills: The Hard Skills
  • Observable Entrepreneurial Behaviors
  • Exaptive Teaming Skills from High Risk Environments
  • The Most Boring and Cruel Years: Secondary School
  • Thoughts on Improving the Education System 
  • Freedom of Speech: The Dangers of Shutting Down the Views of Others 
  • The Tarantino Rule for Shaping Orientation 
  • To Be or To Do: Mentorship and Coaching
  • Entrepreneurial Solutions over Political Polarization 
  • Whole Foods and the Experience Economy
  • Conscious Capitalism  
  • Decentralize Decision-Making  

Be sure to use the Chapters Feature to quickly browse and navigate to segments of this episode.

The Socratic Experience
Conscious Capitalism
Michael Strong on LinkedIn

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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
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Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
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Connecting the Dots – with Skip Steward
The F-14 Tomcast – with Crunch and Bio
Economic...

Transcripts are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

00;00;01;12 - 00;00;26;15
Mark McGrath
So, Michael Strong, we're glad to have you here with us. I want to start with this, with this quote that comes right out of John Boyd's biography by Robert Corman, a chapter called Spook Base, where he was in command of a black ops base in Thailand. And he wrote home to his wife and in a series of letters, and I'm going to compress them all in one, one sort of paragraph and then get your impressions.

00;00;26;15 - 00;00;52;17
Mark McGrath
But he wrote home to his wife on August 10th in the early I guess it was 1971. Honey, I'm on the verge of a fantastic breakthrough on the thinking processes and how they can be taught to others. What Boyd was obsessing about, he was trying to understand the nature of creativity. He checked out every available book on philosophy, physics, math, economics, science, daoism, and half a dozen other disciplines.

00;00;54;07 - 00;01;19;01
Mark McGrath
Another quote from another letter He's on the verge of a fantastic breakthrough in the thinking processes of how it applies to life. Another letter quote I expanded on the thought process in directions that frankly amazed even me. I may be on the trail of a theory of learning quite different, and it appears now more powerful than methods or theories currently in use.

00;01;21;02 - 00;01;35;21
Mark McGrath
And then the last quote, I think it will bring us closer together and provide an enrichment towards living that has eluded us in the past. And he's talking about all humankind in that respect. What does that what does that hit you with when you when you hear that?

00;01;36;07 - 00;02;05;14
Michael Strong
Well, as you and I spoke earlier, insofar as Boyd is known for the group, I had not known that he had this much bigger conception. And coming at it, I come at it from a couple of primary directions. One is, well, I'll give you three you. One is as an educator. So my specialty is Socratic dialog. And it's really a way to give kids a way to kind of think and do their own search for new possibilities.

00;02;06;06 - 00;02;30;02
Michael Strong
And then I'll dig into that more a bit later. The other is, as an entrepreneur, you know, entrepreneurs are in a way searching for new possibilities, looking for opportunities to create value and monetize value. And then finally and so that's kind of a business entrepreneurship lens. And then finally and it's a learning process. Then finally, you know, I am a hierarchy and I consider myself a vacuum and I love it, including Hayek's Theory of the Mind.

00;02;30;15 - 00;02;52;00
Michael Strong
And Hayek sees entrepreneurship and competition as a discovery process. And in his theory of the mind, he also sees learning as a discovery process. So I'll pause there. Those are sort of initial points of contact, and I expect we'll find somewhere to follow up on one of those.

00;02;52;04 - 00;03;14;22
Mark McGrath
Yeah, it fuzes together. And you know, I think that your background, I think everybody should know about your educational background. I know that you had started somewhere and finish somewhere else and got a much different education. That was more about reading and talking and learning. Tell us about that.

00;03;15;01 - 00;03;40;08
Michael Strong
Sure. So and I would also highlight learning how to learn so Socratic dialog. I had a high school class. I was great at what I called memorization. Forget tests, you know, go in, memorize a stuff, get an A, walk out, forget it. And I think that happens far more than most people realize. But in high school, I had a class where we read and discussed ideas and philosophy Nietzsche, Buber, Plato and that sort of thing.

00;03;41;01 - 00;04;00;19
Michael Strong
St John's College is a four year program. For four years. It's known as great books, but really it's about Socratic inquiry. Because I had good test scores, I went to Harvard and spent a year at Harvard, but it was still lecturing. And for me, I read about ten times as fast as I listen and I find lecture to be an incredibly inefficient way to ingest information.

00;04;01;04 - 00;04;21;01
Michael Strong
But the real exciting part is thinking through the ideas myself. Anyway, so I left Harvard to go to Saint John's four years of reading, thinking, discussing ideas, but to dig in, to learn how, to learn peace a little bit. One of the things that's unusual about Saint John's is in addition to literature and philosophy, we do four years of classic texts and math and science.

00;04;21;01 - 00;04;54;03
Michael Strong
So, for instance, we start off with Euclid, Archimedes, Galileo, Newton and Copernicus eventually get up to know Einstein and quantum theory. And we read really difficult material without external sources, you know, just figure it out. But in terms of figuring it out, you know, we developed I developed a search process, a Socratic search process and calling it a search process to emphasize the analogy with entrepreneurship, where you look at what you understand, what you don't understand and what you need to understand.

00;04;54;18 - 00;05;15;19
Michael Strong
And it sounds very simple, but I think not very many people have a very highly developed version of that. And so you dig in, okay, exactly what do I understand? How well do I understand it? Exactly what do I not understand? What extent do I not understand it? And, you know, as focused and precisely as possible, where do I need to focus my learning attention?

00;05;16;09 - 00;05;39;24
Michael Strong
And, you know, by means of doing that, I developed the ability to, you know, read anything and understand it. You know, Einstein's 1905 theory relatively is great paper. We should all just dig it up and read it. Somebody at St John's joked that the ideal St John's exam. Call it foreign language to start with. You don't know what language the exam is going to be in on Friday of an exam.

00;05;39;24 - 00;06;01;17
Michael Strong
Maybe it's Swahili or Mandarin or Polish, but you go there and you have a great grammar and a, you know, vocabulary and you figure it out. And so this sort of figuring it out, you know, you have a hard scientific paper, maybe it's physics, chemistry, economics, whatever you're given this resources and you figure it out, can you realistically figure everything out?

00;06;01;17 - 00;06;17;21
Michael Strong
No. But much of life is figuring it out. And that's why I talk about the search process of what do I know? What do I don't know, how do I figure out how to get what I don't know, and how do I optimize that process? So it's iterative over and over again, ever more refinement. Is it a concept?

00;06;17;21 - 00;06;37;18
Michael Strong
Is it a term? Is that the argument? Is that the data, you know, there are lots of different ways not to understand something. So I would say that, yeah, I would develop this process of learning how to learn conceptual material. Problem solving is different that even with problem solving, what do I know? What do I don't know. How do I focus in on strategies for getting what I know?

00;06;38;18 - 00;06;55;11
Michael Strong
And you do that over and over again. And that's in some sense the core experience where school do lots of other things. Yes, we teach math and so forth and so on. But I would say developing minds so that they can make sense of reality and isolate where they need to focus is a big part of what we do.

00;06;55;21 - 00;06;56;25
Michael Strong
So pause there.

00;06;58;14 - 00;07;02;08
Mark McGrath
What sounds extremely experiential and immersive.

00;07;03;15 - 00;07;26;15
Michael Strong
I described as experiential education. Absolutely. So it's not a literal education? Yeah, exactly. Sometimes you think of experience in child education as going camping in the woods. Hey, I love Outward Bound. I love camping in the woods. But this is I'm focused on the experience, on the intellectual experience, kind of accustomed to what I do. There was a famous others famous book by a Hungarian mathematician, Georg Solo, called How to Solve It.

00;07;26;29 - 00;07;58;06
Michael Strong
And he kind of developed a field of mathematical problem solving. And he always likes to say, rather than have students learn one way to solve ten different problems, he'd rather that help them develop ten different ways to solve one problem. And again, it's this mental flexibility. We are looking at different strategies developing agility, really. I'm conscious of, you know, thinking of Boyd hanging over the shoulder a little bit, but I think a certain kind of learning how to optimize focus in unstructured environments and become very agile at doing so.

00;07;58;14 - 00;08;19;03
Michael Strong
And it's not a didactic lesson. I'm sure people could listen to us and get a little bit of it, but ultimately it's experiential, it's practicing, it's being in unstructured environments, making sense of them in a certain sense competitively. You know, if math, problem solving their math, competition problems, you know, are math competitions. But even in dialog, no, you don't.

00;08;19;08 - 00;08;39;28
Michael Strong
You want to make sense of things in Jonah. You're going to speak, you want to be sensible. And so if you say something that shows you completely misunderstood, that's kind of, you know, not not what you want to do. So you try to optimize to be able to articulate things clearly based on exactly, you know, questioning. We respect questions we get, you know, kids questioning.

00;08;40;05 - 00;08;51;29
Michael Strong
We huge respect for questions. But there's an art of questioning and part of the art of questioning is exactly where where do we optimize the focus in order to advance understanding as much as possible?

00;08;52;24 - 00;08;57;25
Mark McGrath
Well, I know. I know you're speaking punches, language, and he's dying to get in this conversation.

00;08;59;10 - 00;09;15;11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, actually, I just what's popping in my head right now is how do you scale this type of thinking to a group of two or more people? And let me build some more context for you. In your TEDx talk or TEDx talk, you looked at the South Korean Airlines accident, and I think that was in Malcolm Gladwell's book.

00;09;15;13 - 00;09;23;07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Mm hmm. And how do you do that? How do you help two or more people work together with this type of thinking?

00;09;23;10 - 00;09;48;05
Michael Strong
Oh, that's a really great question. And to use an unusual frame, I see the the issue of education as scaling a culture. And part of that is, you know, the human side is what we need to focus on. Already you can take courses. There is abundant, high quality content available online, mostly for free, but also low cost. So the didactic portion is being done.

00;09;48;13 - 00;10;08;25
Michael Strong
Technology is doing the didactic portion even more effectively. You know, A.I. bots will do it even more effectively. So there are lots of resources. You know, I tell my students, Google is your friend. You know, you can find lots of stuff. So I'm looking at the experience, as Mark said, and then culture to go to your issue of how do you scale up?

00;10;09;12 - 00;10;37;19
Michael Strong
And I think not very many people think of culture, but part of it is, you know, in a Socratic thing, first of all, we sometimes I describe what I do as person a speaks person, be listens, thinks and responds. Sounds simple. Yeah. How many business meetings have you been in? Less alone political meetings where we're not in a situation where person A speaks B, listens, thinks and responds.

00;10;38;03 - 00;11;00;11
Michael Strong
So just to be that granular and then you could add and respond respectfully, even when perhaps the issues are contentious. And so there's sort of a background set of social norms once in a certain sense, it's easy. You know, the basic Socratic seminar thing is we read a book together, an article, a story, mathematical proof. We read something together and we discuss it.

00;11;00;19 - 00;11;23;23
Michael Strong
Hey, we can do that for free all over the world right now. But there are very different quality standards in terms of getting people to ask questions. One one simple defect version, of course, is I'm most of my experiences with secondary students will use examples from their the smart kids like to be the note alls and shut down the other kids.

00;11;23;24 - 00;11;49;11
Michael Strong
So if I if I have an interpretation of something and I say, well maybe Plato is saying this, you know, I'll pick on you, Mark. And Mark is like, No, you idiot. That's what I saying, that obviously that shut down shuts down dialog and that happens in a thousand different, far more subtle ways. And so if you really want to create a learning community, you need to have very high quality norms where we can absolutely have our own opinions.

00;11;49;11 - 00;12;11;06
Michael Strong
Disagree, disagree authentically, respectfully and vigorously. You know, there's whole literature on groupthink and how people want to, you know, submit to the authority or submit to conformity. And then you're not really learning as soon as it's primarily about submission to authority or conformity and what are the mechanisms. So I've got a rubric in the back of my book, The Habit of Thought from Socratic seminars to Socratic practice.

00;12;11;18 - 00;12;31;09
Michael Strong
I have a ten point rubric and the rubric is designed such that it's ten dimensional, which is, you know, unwieldy to use on a daily basis. But if one is excellent in all ten dimensions, and if every participant is excellent in all ten dimensions, then the conversation should go really well spontaneously. One of the dimensions, by the way, is honesty and integrity.

00;12;31;18 - 00;12;52;06
Michael Strong
If you know you have a community where people are not being honest, you know, call it troll. Of course you're not going to get into serious learning if if somebody's, you know, being a manipulative jerk. Likewise, one of them is teamwork. You know, if people are not behaving in a team manner, then are we don't get there. Sensitivity, good manners.

00;12;52;26 - 00;13;15;05
Michael Strong
You know, sometimes people on the left like the sensitivity thing, sometimes old fashioned people like good manners. I see them as basically aligned. We want we need to be respectful of each other. And so anyway, you get these ten dimensions and, you know, evaluate self-evaluation, peer, evaluate kind of an evaluation system to cultivate these ten dimensions. Another mechanism we use is debriefing.

00;13;15;15 - 00;13;32;25
Michael Strong
So at St John's there was no debriefing, you know, just do it. But at the end of each session, we often spend 5 minutes or so, occasionally more, occasionally less check in what worked, what didn't, and a scale of 0 to 10, how was that, you know, some kind of feedback mechanism. So you need a feedback mechanism so that you kind of don't go off the rails.

00;13;34;19 - 00;14;02;17
Michael Strong
You know, I've got a whole lot more. But just giving you a sense of how I consciously I have a new book coming out called subtitled The Conscious Creation of Culture, because we're very deliberately creating higher quality norms around learning. And, you know, I'll add some bells and whistles. One of the things I'd like to do is there's something called immersion air, which is technology that measures psychological safety and engagement in real time.

00;14;02;22 - 00;14;28;19
Michael Strong
You have to wear like a little Fitbit, but I'm very interested and we piloted it for a little bit to see, Hey, I think we're doing a good job of being respectful. But when Brian I talk for 20 minutes, Mark tunes out, Okay, what's going on there? That's actually a physiological device to measure that. So I'm very interested in that in technological ways of measuring is another platform that measures conversations like this, but it measures interruptions, dominance and influence.

00;14;28;19 - 00;15;00;14
Michael Strong
So if we're having a conversation and somebody has been dominant, you have a real time visual that shows who's dominating the conversation, who's interrupting all the time, that kind of thing, you know. So my next phase, what I'm doing is actually I call it tech optimized human interaction, where it's all about the human interaction, but if we want to create high quality culture and scale it, going to Brian's point, ideally we actually have things like the rubric and the debriefing and kind of human mechanisms, but we add tech optimized mechanisms.

00;15;00;14 - 00;15;16;11
Michael Strong
So yeah, when I get to a thousand classes, I can say, Oh no, cohort 45 B has somebody dominating every day and half the classes disengaged. And then the humans would go in and, you know, intervene. You know, I can go on with more bells, whistles on.

00;15;16;23 - 00;15;39;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But this is great. So the dimensions that you have remind me of the components of teamwork. So from components or values, however you want to look at it. Yeah, you break those down into elements and the elements can be like psychological safety. So think of that component as some type of leadership skill or leadership. Yeah, psychological safety and you can do is you can break them down into elements or components of behavior.

00;15;39;16 - 00;16;03;28
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So behaviors are what's a negative aspect of this, what's a positive aspect now? And this is what's amazing about teamwork and I think you understand this better than just about anybody, is that teamwork is observable, right? You can you can see it. It's the interactions that create the culture in your organization. Yeah. So with this and I'll go back to your TED talk in aviation in the cockpit, the way they measure that is from a positive or negative behavior.

00;16;04;08 - 00;16;34;09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And it's I forget the exact name of it in commercial aviation, but it rolls back up in the components. And this is something that is I think, mostly objective. It's not subjective. So on a scale of 1 to 5, are you respectful? I don't know. I am yesterday, not today, whatever. Right. But at that moment when we're observing somebody you can see and I think this is what you can do with your eye is really gauge where they are within a component, an element in a behavior.

00;16;34;09 - 00;16;35;22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So is that totally.

00;16;36;04 - 00;16;52;11
Michael Strong
Totally, totally. Just on the observable, one of the things that I focus on a huge amount and you know, we can do it virtually but if I really like in person is eye contact and body language. You know I would say when I'm leading a discussion, I am almost, you know, I'm going to come up with questions and to the verbal thing.

00;16;52;11 - 00;17;12;13
Michael Strong
I'm so experienced I can do that in my sleep. Most of my attention is right optimized in engagement. And it's very specifically eye contact and body language, actually a little bit different. I had an artist once come to one of my sessions for adults and she drew a diagram at the end where it was sort of the energetics of the situation where we she had, oh, there's anger and tension there.

00;17;12;13 - 00;17;25;20
Michael Strong
There a romantic situation there. There is somebody questioning there. She had a horrible visual of the emotional dynamic, which I thought was fantastic. But yeah, with tech, I want to I want to make this totally objective.

00;17;26;10 - 00;17;45;05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So you can connect the social physics aspect, whatever you're measuring with the objective view from like a coach helping another coach see something. Yeah. And now you can scale this up into some type of common operational picture for organizations to see how their human element or their interactions are going. Just like you would look at their technical skills.

00;17;45;08 - 00;18;04;04
Michael Strong
Huge, huge. You know, to use one authority on this, you know, Jeff Weiner said the soft skills gap is a former president of LinkedIn. The soft skills gap is the bigger skills gap. Now, we're kind of getting pretty good at teaching code and, you know, Excel and PowerPoint, you know, stuff. That kind of stuff is easy to teach that the soft skills.

00;18;04;09 - 00;18;17;19
Michael Strong
We don't yet have a reliable, scalable way to really improve performance in a significant way. And I see, you know, the the human structures plus the tech structures I'm talking about as potentially very powerful tools for.

00;18;18;01 - 00;18;26;20
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Oh, I love it. I love it. This is awesome. So I want to build on this more in your experience, why are the soft skills so hard to coach to adults?

00;18;27;08 - 00;18;50;13
Michael Strong
That's a good question. A couple of things. One is obviously the adults are less plastic than kids. The other is I think it's hard for most adults to be honest with each other about certain issues. So that's that's why becoming more of, as you say, observing an objective rather than personal, you know, if it so easily comes across, hey, you took that too personally.

00;18;50;13 - 00;19;18;16
Michael Strong
You know, it's easy to have an interpersonal conflict. And the more we can go to Oh, I saw that you were not looking Mark in the eye when you said that. I think in my experience, it's helpful to look in the eye when you're communicating like that. The more we can go to observable behaviors and make it not in any sense, you know, blame morality or just, hey, we're optimizing for teamwork, what are the behaviorists are likely to do this let's work together to optimize these so we can be a high performance team.

00;19;19;14 - 00;19;37;08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Ready for a big twist culture. Not all cultures look, you know, place to go around the world. Not everybody looks each other in the eyes. So you get this power distance index challenge when you get to a different place. And I'm not going to say where or when. Yeah. So how do we how do we work across multiple cultures specifically?

00;19;37;08 - 00;19;40;15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Now, when we're one online and we're working globally?

00;19;40;19 - 00;20;03;24
Michael Strong
No, that's a really good question. And I think, first of all, answer it somewhat obliquely and then go to the harder part. But, you know, I've given talks to entrepreneurs from around the world. And one of the interesting things I've noticed is I find entrepreneurs globally to be more similar to each other than the local populations. So, for instance, you know, as in my TEDx talk, Guatemala is one of the most hierarchical cultures there is.

00;20;04;04 - 00;20;28;13
Michael Strong
And yet I worked with a entrepreneurs organization in Guatemala and they feel very kind of, you know, American dynamic, you know, very direct. Guatemalan culture is not direct, but the entrepreneurs are much more direct. Likewise, have been in Russia, probably the most depressing place I've ever been. But I went to a tiny entrepreneurial place, their workplace, and they were again, very dynamic, direct, energized.

00;20;28;20 - 00;20;50;28
Michael Strong
So I think there are certain behaviors, whatever we do need to be respectful of local background cultures. But I also think there are certain behaviors that are simply effective in the modern world and everybody wants to become more prosperous. My wife is from Senegal in Africa, and she and I talk a lot about how, yes, we have to be respectful of local norms and to be effective in the modern world.

00;20;51;08 - 00;21;10;14
Michael Strong
You know, for a kid there, one of our goals there is to have teenagers earning two, three, five bucks an hour, which would make them the richest kid in town by a long shot. But how do we get them to that point? They need to become articulate, confident, you know, look in the eye, you know, their whole host of behaviors where if you want to be in the game, it really helps to learn these behaviors.

00;21;10;14 - 00;21;34;07
Michael Strong
And there could be multiple norms, just like, you know, there's Microsoft, Apple, different Linux, different operating system. But I think there we're probably going to settle on a few set of professional norms that are extremely effective, and you can have local flavors of those norms. But I think productivity is going to drive some commonality of norms.

00;21;34;07 - 00;21;48;10
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00;21;48;10 - 00;22;24;09
Mark McGrath
If I'm hearing you correctly. Tell me if this is a fair restatement of what you're saying, that if I'm grounded in universal principles, for example, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial theory or mathematics, whatever it could be, if I'm grounded in universal principles that are true for everybody, and I have the openness and the self-awareness and the situational awareness and the the empathy to be humble when I interact with people that have different, as you say, the soft skills, right, where there might be some some nuance there.

00;22;24;19 - 00;22;49;03
Mark McGrath
But the universal is the same, is that like my awareness through the through the learning that I get should help me in those situations maneuver or I don't say maneuver it it sounds bad but but navigate negotiate where there is that cultural nuance more effectively and then connect with them on the universals and then try to understand each other's differences.

00;22;49;06 - 00;23;08;24
Michael Strong
Yeah, I think we have to be aware that there are some things, some things that are kind of arbitrary and are sort of chauvinist, perhaps that we Americans do that are not necessary to be transported internationally. So we'll have to learn to see what really is essential. So some kind of kind of being on time, you know, it's one thing to be two, three, 4 minutes late, another to be, you know, an hour or 2 hours late.

00;23;08;24 - 00;23;29;25
Michael Strong
So some kind of being on time, I think, is actually needed for productivity. But, you know, very different. You know, I've been to Estonia where they're very quiet. I was at like a two or three hour dinner in Estonia. Nobody talked. Conversely, you know, in Senegal or Italy, all all the time is or, you know, is there one norm in terms of how much we need to talk?

00;23;29;25 - 00;23;48;09
Michael Strong
It's not clear to me. You know, I've been with talkative groups that are very productive and they've been very slow, quiet, thoughtful groups that are productive. And so I think we have to become very clear on which norms are arbitrary and local and historical, and they may be beautiful in various ways in which norms really are needed for productivity.

00;23;48;09 - 00;24;07;07
Michael Strong
And they could even be different. I can imagine, you know, all male groups might have somewhat different norms than all female groups. And one of the great things, again, about having these objective measures of, say, engagement, psychological safety is we could see that maybe men are more productive with these set of norms and women of this set of norms and mixed group that these are norms and I'm agnostic on that.

00;24;07;07 - 00;24;26;11
Michael Strong
So again, I think all of these things are so culturally contentious. Everybody is going to get mad at me for everything I'm saying, like, okay, who's going to hate that? But I think at the end of the day, if we want to be effective and prosperous and enjoy life, and I think that we need to talk about how different cultural norms are not effective or do or do not lead to enjoying life.

00;24;26;22 - 00;24;35;12
Michael Strong
And as we get better, effective or objective measures for these, let's optimize for those sets of norms that lead to productivity, happiness and well-being.

00;24;36;01 - 00;24;52;12
Mark McGrath
Once before deployment in Southeast Asia, the commanding officer made us all read The Ugly American, you know, to be to be sensitive to these exact to these exact these exact things. And you certainly didn't want to be that guy.

00;24;52;23 - 00;25;11;11
Michael Strong
You know. Well, and I think especially when adapting things for local cultures, you do need the kind of locals who get it and. Right. I never because my wife's from Africa I never do anything without her. You know, she's a filter and she is because she lives in two worlds, both Senegal and the U.S. She also sees, you know, there are some norms that are better for productivity.

00;25;11;11 - 00;25;23;23
Michael Strong
So she and I are kind of creating a joint program to be respectful of Senegalese culture while also optimizing for entrepreneurial productivity without perceiving as a conflict. Just, yeah, some things matter and some things don't.

00;25;24;14 - 00;25;49;10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
There's something to be said about having experience living abroad and going abroad that I think we need to talk about here because the three of us have done that clearly. I spent a lot of time in Europe, some time in Africa, but that perspective of understanding how different cultures are really helps, in my opinion. Leaders cultivate the type of culture they want inside of their organization.

00;25;49;22 - 00;26;01;09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And from what I've seen from coach and organization leaders that don't have that experience, can't make those connections and see the differences as a value add to creating value to their customers. And your thoughts on that?

00;26;01;18 - 00;26;24;00
Michael Strong
Huge. Well, actually, I want to go back to that simple thing and observe. I would say that whether I'm going to different culture or whether I'm working with a new group or whatever, I'm actually consulting on a preschool project. But I'm not a preschool person, but I spend a lot of time observing. And again, my goal is always to support the happiness, well-being and productivity of whatever group I'm working with.

00;26;24;11 - 00;26;42;10
Michael Strong
And the first thing is to observe, see how they interact spontaneously. Yeah, I don't. My goal is not to impose anything about me on them at all. And this is again, the Socratic question is I want to ask them and first to observe, but then I start asking them about what they're trying to do and how they're trying to do it.

00;26;42;10 - 00;27;04;11
Michael Strong
And I want them to come to their own understanding of how to optimize for happiness, well-being and productivity. And again, I'm pretty agnostic on it. So I would say being culturally sensitive and culturally observant is hand-in-hand with being humanly sensitive and human, humanly observant, and be more of a kind of universal coach rather than you know, imposing the one right way.

00;27;04;11 - 00;27;25;19
Mark McGrath
A phrase that we say over and over again came from John Boyd. And you're certainly saying the exact same thing. It's people, ideas and things always in that order. People always first, whether they're your teammates, the people that you're leading, the clients or customers that you're creating value for, people always come first.

00;27;26;19 - 00;27;47;07
Michael Strong
Big time. And just to kind of bring this issue up again on Saturday, I had lunch with a guy who's doing, you know, I wear, which he hopes is going to be human quality. And his his thing is what are the humans going to do? And that's a common theme in talk today. But I think that my interpretation of a lot of AI know autocomplete for everything.

00;27;47;08 - 00;28;17;14
Michael Strong
Noah Smith the economist said that you know yeah you put his great let's be kind of auto complete something quickly but I'm still the generative one and even more importantly, the human side I think is going to be where humans will win for a long time. So I actually think with respect to education and organizations, the human to human ability to observe and develop and coach and, you know, lead a particular organization or particular group of people is going to be one of the most valuable skills as A.I. does.

00;28;17;14 - 00;28;18;28
Michael Strong
Almost everything simpler.

00;28;20;06 - 00;28;44;08
Mark McGrath
It seems like you're model in the Socratic experience would be more well, naturally, it's more preferable right now as things continue to unfold, the old Prussian sort of brick and model brick and mortar, sort of Frederick Winslow Taylor, because that's all going away even faster. And in there you are doing something completely differently. That's helping people navigate that.

00;28;44;19 - 00;28;46;08
Mark McGrath
That changed now.

00;28;46;23 - 00;29;09;00
Michael Strong
Yeah, I mean, my mind, that thing is already dead. I always am surprised when people still believe in it. You know, like, oh wow, that still exists. But of course it's the dominant model still. But it's not an accident that most of our parents are entrepreneurs or creative professionals. They're people who need to create value in the real world, and they are creating value in unstructured relationships with other human beings.

00;29;09;19 - 00;29;32;17
Michael Strong
You know, I'll do a side thing, actually. Mark, you came through Kyle Griffin's this is a Kyle Griffin thing. Yeah. Kyle has said he's one of the world's or the leading software trainers in the U.S. corporate software trainers. And he says that about half of software development is communication. And when I drill down in with him in communication, it really is like I give you my favorite example.

00;29;32;17 - 00;29;53;11
Michael Strong
I once had a UX designer here in Austin who was making 500 bucks an hour doing major corporate contracts. And I said, Why isn't your job outsourced in the air or whatever? And he said, I know better than my customers what my customers want. And as an educator, I pause and think, okay, how do I train young people so they will know better than their customers what their customers want?

00;29;53;21 - 00;30;31;18
Michael Strong
You can see it. You know, that's not something you can put on a PowerPoint. It goes back to they have to become brilliant at observing the human beings, but also improve in observing the whole situation. You know, brand development, what is the whole cultural ecosystem of that particular brand? How and what are consumers going to be responding to that this business can sell to provides value and at a high level it sounds super simple, but, you know, for people that are have gotten deeply into the whole notion of identifying a niche and optimizing for that niche in an entrepreneurial brand landscape, it's very sophisticated.

00;30;31;29 - 00;30;54;14
Michael Strong
And so I do think of this as helping young people develop not only the human skills, but this gets in more to hire in sorts of things, the niche identification skills, you know, it kind of I'll give you another metaphor. You know, the joke is economists is there are no hundred dollar bills lying on the ground. You know, that if there was $100 bill, it would have been picked up.

00;30;54;14 - 00;31;31;18
Michael Strong
Efficient markets, all of that. After reading Hayek, I've came to believe that basically we are waiting waist deep on hundred dollar bills, but most people don't see them. So I kind of a fascinated with this notion of undiscovered niches and how do we develop the vision to see it niches that no one had seen before. Maybe I'm exaggerating up waist deep, but I actually do think that because so few people are really optimizing for niche discovery and some entrepreneurs are, you know, I know entrepreneurs, successful serial entrepreneurs who have lists of 20 or 30 businesses they want to start because they're seeing niche opportunities all over the place, whereas most people, you know, get to

00;31;31;24 - 00;31;41;18
Michael Strong
go to business school. You learn finance and accounting. Do you learn to see new nations? Probably not.

00;31;41;18 - 00;32;10;00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Wow. Well, there are some headwinds now with, you know, making sure our next generation can do this. And those headwinds are going to be, you know, the immersion in technology, the loss of social skills, the loss of capability that we see going along with the increase in technology. So that's a headwind that we all have to fight. And just as a joke, we may want to cut this next part out of the podcast to come about to say something that I tell my friends in private where they ask me what I do for a living.

00;32;10;15 - 00;32;30;22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I told you I used to coach a lot of software teams on the West Coast and all over the U.S. But I tell them that I coached a socially awkward social skills, right? Yeah. Because my experience in training the military is we learn the soft skills, the teaming skills. We brought them over from the cockpit. They're using health care, they're using oil and gas.

00;32;30;22 - 00;32;52;05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And now we're trying to use them in working with teams in software. So that's the space that I think it needs our help right now. Not not necessary software, but working on these social skills going forward. How do we tackle the hard skills of soft skills so we can cut that out or we can keep that end? But any thoughts on on the headwinds that I think.

00;32;52;21 - 00;33;16;19
Michael Strong
You know, my wife jokes that I'm probably on the spectrum. You know, I think one of the reasons that I became interested in this is as a geek, I'm very much an intellectual geek. You know, I saw that there was there was so much there was there's so many people that were not good at it. And I coached, you know, middle school boys, middle school boys need as much social skills coaching as anybody you'll ever find.

00;33;17;10 - 00;33;37;10
Michael Strong
Yeah. And I think actually going back to we need to be a very open, conscious and deliberate about this. I think that the value added from high quality work relationships teams and again I want to emphasize the joy. It's productivity. There's also just the enjoyment of it. You know, I think life is too short to work with jerks.

00;33;37;20 - 00;33;57;21
Michael Strong
And I think there are a lot of people as we get to a larger percentage of the population and the most talented percentage who have a lot of choices with where they work there. They want to work for companies and teams and work with individuals who provide really high quality interpersonal experiences. Because, as you guys know, you go to some work environments and it's absolutely fun.

00;33;57;21 - 00;34;15;14
Michael Strong
You can be working hard ten, 12 hour days, but with right human relationships, it's a joy. Conversely, no matter how much you're getting paid, there's some places where, you know, we go in to rip your hair out and get out of there as quickly as possible. So I think we need to be open, conscious, deliberate about high quality, you know, human work environments.

00;34;15;14 - 00;34;52;00
Michael Strong
And again, I think part of it is one size fits all is why some people push back. If with one person who says this is the cultural, behavioral truth and everybody else is bad, that's ridiculous. I'm very much a pluralist. I've actually joked about a Spotify of human interactions when I have my tech optimized. If you know human software, we could have, hey, let's optimize for kind of a rowdy Italian style meeting and then let's optimize for the quiet Estonian style one and let's off optimize for really sensitive female one and let's optimize, you know, in-your-face male one Again, I'm playing with stereotypes, but I think we need to play with stereotypes and think, yeah,

00;34;52;01 - 00;35;00;24
Michael Strong
what, what leads to happiness, well-being and productivity. And then let's talk openly and explicitly about these things. And, you know, look for when wins.

00;35;02;02 - 00;35;07;09
Mark McGrath
It seems like the situation you're describing there is is more of a flow than to force things.

00;35;08;06 - 00;35;34;17
Michael Strong
Huge, huge. Again, start with observation, ask questions and then work with teams I work with called teams, but groups of students and I work with them to come to an optimum that they buy into that they have a conviction is right for that and just you know pick on the middle schoolers and one group of middle schoolers who claim that they like to insult each other, you know, that that one, you know, overrode their preference to insult each other all the time.

00;35;34;17 - 00;35;54;25
Michael Strong
But with most groups, yeah. How do we work together more effectively? They do. Or most people do want to work together more effectively. So if we put ourselves in terms of coaches with a tech optimized is just another tool for coaches. Then we let each group deliberately optimize for happiness, well-being, productivity.

00;35;54;25 - 00;36;11;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I want to pull on your why a little bit more because I think this resonates with what Marc and I and why Marc and I do what we do and the rest of our team does it as well. Our why or my way is when you leave a high performing performance organization, you will do everything you can to get back to one.

00;36;12;09 - 00;36;21;00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And if you can't get to one, you want to help others try to achieve that as well. Is is that resonant or is that connect back to what your why is and why you do what you do?

00;36;21;04 - 00;36;48;29
Michael Strong
So my, why is happiness and well-being for all 8 billion people, which is ridiculously ambitious. But on the one hand, you know, I don't have time to get into this, but I've been involved in the design of new jurisdictions to create prosperity. That's a whole other thing that is related to the high tech thing. But as an educator, yeah, I think secondary school are the most boring and cruel years of most people's lives, an absolute waste of time during a key developmental phase.

00;36;49;08 - 00;37;17;21
Michael Strong
When I look at a lot of the nine nonsense, the adult world, again, I think those middle school boys who never grew up and middle school girls who also didn't grow up, both of them can be a lot of middle schoolers, but they're a mess, you know? And if we can help people become more mature, thoughtful, reflective, respectful, have very high quality virtues and habits so that during the learning process and secondary, productive, happy and well-being, then we have adults productive, happy and well-being.

00;37;17;28 - 00;37;33;04
Michael Strong
I think you can look at a very wide range of adult problems where if people were happy, productive and well, we'd have far fewer problems in every direction.

00;37;33;04 - 00;37;59;22
Mark McGrath
Yeah, that kind of you know, I have I have four teenagers. I have a freshman in college who's an athlete, really good school. And, you know, she she's good at that following that prescription. And then I have a eighth grade, 14 year old and she, you know, is really good at sort of doing the thing. But the boys are in a completely different mindset when it comes to learning.

00;37;59;22 - 00;38;27;16
Mark McGrath
And it's that's observable to me to see that, that the boilerplate, the cookie cutter, it doesn't work for everybody. And I just wonder like, what are the long term effects of not just the individual, but the tribe and the culture and the society that they're a part of where they've been boxed into something that to me, it seems as if I'm just using my boys example.

00;38;27;16 - 00;38;40;06
Mark McGrath
But, but, but we are preventing human excellence and it's not just happening at a specific high school. I'm familiar with, but it's happening really everywhere where people are getting boxed in and they're not able to realize their potential.

00;38;40;23 - 00;39;10;04
Michael Strong
Well, I would say it's hard. I think it's hard to overestimate the damage caused by the existing school model. You know, I'm very Aristotelian. We are what we repeatedly do. It's all about habits. And if we're developing, say, attitudes and habits, if we're developing our less than optimal habits and attitudes in school and including just been tuned out, if you're a if you're if you believe learning is boring or if you are bored for years at a time.

00;39;10;16 - 00;39;30;07
Michael Strong
And those are habits. You know, I'm all I'm all about work is joy. And again, my vision of the world is 8 billion people waking up and doing good by means of productive activity and enjoying it every day. How many what percentage of the world population is currently joyfully waking up and doing good all day, every day? Pretty small percentage.

00;39;30;29 - 00;39;50;15
Michael Strong
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But you know, it's possible you guys. It's possible. This is like sci fi. Exactly. It's like sci fi. So how do we create a K-12 education system that creates a pipeline of everybody doing this? And you know, how many problems would be solved? How much more quickly? How many dysfunctions would not exist in such a world?

00;39;51;25 - 00;40;09;10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Controversial question for you has to do with our education system. I want to be a teacher. I want to go work at my the middle school up the road with all my background and all that. But I can't write. It's I have to go through training and I have to do this and I'm going to get a lower salary.

00;40;09;26 - 00;40;23;07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It's just the incentive to do it. It's just not there. Is there a way to change that? Is there a way that we can involve adults that are high performers and thinkers to get them into the education system?

00;40;23;07 - 00;40;40;24
Michael Strong
So for me, it's not controversial at all. Again, for me, the old system is already rotten and gone. It's kind of, you know, of course, I hate to be so mean, but really it is. I live in a reality. Oh yeah. That exists still so very concretely, as an educator, an education entrepreneur, I never hire for education credentials.

00;40;40;24 - 00;41;01;05
Michael Strong
Never. I want people who are bright, passionate, experienced what they do know. If I want somebody to teach software, there have actually been a software developer. If they're teaching music, they've been a musician, you know, experience everything. There is something to be said for working with groups of kids. So I do look for background. Have you been a camp counselor?

00;41;01;05 - 00;41;12;18
Michael Strong
Are you a parent? Have you managed a group of ten, 15 kids? So I would say managing groups of kids is a really important skill, but that's orthogonal to getting an education degree and the right people. Yeah.

00;41;13;04 - 00;41;24;02
Mark McGrath
I was going to say you posted just today about how when you're hiring somebody, you're looking for their ability to figure things out, not so much their academic resume.

00;41;24;17 - 00;41;50;26
Michael Strong
Huge, huge. Well, and then just going policy wise, you know, Arizona has universal educational scholarship accounts now. So every family, 1.1 million children in Arizona have access to 70 $500 where the families can spend it on just about anything. So, you know, Brian, you can take Brian's tutoring service, Brian's coaching service, Brian's mentoring service in Arizona. You know, there's the approval process, but, you know, I'm sure you could pass that.

00;41;51;15 - 00;42;04;18
Michael Strong
It's a pretty basic, you know, lets families buy toys at Walmart or, you know, learning learning games at Walmart or whatever. And so you could set up your own business educating kids in Arizona right now.

00;42;04;18 - 00;42;30;22
Mark McGrath
I want to I want to steer it a little bit because you use a term in your descriptor on LinkedIn, which is a great place for people to fire you. You say the word liberating, bringing people to freedom. And we had a conversation with a professor yesterday, a mechanical engineer by trade that talked about freedom and liberating, and he's coming at it from a mechanical engineering thermodynamics background.

00;42;30;22 - 00;42;48;17
Mark McGrath
You're coming at the same exact thing from a from an educated educators background. We're coming at it from our backgrounds. Isn't it fascinating what you know, what does that mean to you? And and how does that continue to drive your mission? Because we can get into other things that you're involved with beyond education, where that is the goal.

00;42;48;27 - 00;43;05;29
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Liberate is another. I want to I want to add one more thing on top of that, because. Yeah, the physicist that we were talking with the other day pointed out that initiative is equal to freedom, which connects back to John Boyd's work. Right. So I'm just adding that to this. But Mark pointed out.

00;43;06;15 - 00;43;35;01
Michael Strong
Yeah, absolutely. So I think of everything innovation is created, everything. You know, if was not for innovation, we would be, you know, hunting and gathering and have been poor and exhausted, basically. You know, something we said health wise, health wise for the hunter gatherer lifestyle, but none of it. We all like we like central air and, you know, air conditioning and washing machines and sort of sweatshirts.

00;43;35;08 - 00;43;40;25
Michael Strong
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I don't want to wish anything less than modern comforts on anyway.

00;43;40;29 - 00;43;42;01
Mark McGrath
So you're not a Luddite?

00;43;42;07 - 00;44;09;05
Michael Strong
Not at all. Not at all. I'm not a fan of innovation, creativity, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. And I would say that freedom, you know, I'm very interested in the history of creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship. And I think, you know, in ancient Greece, Plato, Socrates, Socrates is, of course, put to death for asking questions. But I think in the Western tradition, most people think he was it was wrong to put Socrates to death for asking questions.

00;44;09;09 - 00;44;29;29
Michael Strong
It was for not believing in the gods of the state and corrupting young. I think that's deeply related to questioning the norms of society and, you know, there's a whole case where at one point China was more prosperous than Europe. And, you know, of course, they're becoming more prosperous now. But for many centuries they were more prosperous than Europe.

00;44;29;29 - 00;44;55;16
Michael Strong
But China shut down inquiry Islam. Islam was the leading civilization for several centuries. And then Islam down inquiry. And so any time you have a top down system, the Soviet Union, you know, at one point in the 1980s, I was working at the University of Chicago and a Chicago computer scientist said that any decent university in the US had more computing power than the entire Soviet Union.

00;44;55;29 - 00;45;22;18
Michael Strong
And why is that? You know, freedom, you know, we we allowed for all of these entrepreneurs and sometimes crazy teenagers like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to just go do stuff. You need lots of people going back to search. You need lots of people exploring possibilities, being wrong, being allowed to be wrong, being corrected, having your errors built on, you know, nobody knows which path is going to work on which path isn't going to work.

00;45;22;22 - 00;45;42;16
Michael Strong
And so any time you have a top down system restricting, you know what's possible, you're going to reduce. I think of it as sort of all these branches that going back, suppose we'd had a law that prevented Thomas Edison from doing what he did. What innovations would we not have? Suppose we had a law that didn't allow Ben Franklin to do what he did.

00;45;42;27 - 00;45;56;01
Michael Strong
You know what we wouldn't have had? And to think of all of the famous creators and inventors, if there had been a law preventing them from doing it, we would not have what we have. We absolutely need freedom for creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

00;45;56;01 - 00;46;13;27
Mark McGrath
I think, too, what you're saying is that how would anybody even know what we need or don't need? Because they sat in a group in a collective and planned it out centrally and told everybody to do, which is another thing that came up yesterday. And back to Friedrich Hayek, who who plans for who and where does that take us ultimately?

00;46;13;27 - 00;46;17;02
Mark McGrath
Because we cited yesterday, that's that's the Road to serfdom.

00;46;17;25 - 00;46;37;15
Michael Strong
What big time and what are my favorite cases in terms of who knows, you know, how did we get to modern computers? Well, going way back, Euclidean mathematics created, Euclid created the axiomatic system, where from a few principles you deduce, you know, all the books of geometry and this structure. Other cultures had mathematics, but not this axiomatic structure.

00;46;37;15 - 00;47;04;12
Michael Strong
The axiomatic structure then led to people questioning the fifth postulate and which led to non-Euclidean geometry and the Euclidean versus non-Euclidean geometry, which sounds as esoteric as you can, please, then led to the formalization of logic. How do we know exactly what's true or not? Mathematics. The formalization of logic gradually led to the creation of formal, logical systems that serve then as the Foundation for Modern Computing.

00;47;04;12 - 00;47;25;05
Michael Strong
So, you know, weird old non-Euclidean geometry who thought that's on the path or an axiomatic system in 500 B.C., we can go on on with endless examples, but it is impossible. All restrictions of inquiry reduce our available search space and therefore the innovations that might make our lives better.

00;47;25;26 - 00;47;40;18
Mark McGrath
Mm hmm. It's it's coming up on an episode before where, you know, imagine being the guy that ran into the to the court in the castle and said, hey, I'm pretty sure that the earth is not only round, but it's not the center of the universe.

00;47;41;24 - 00;47;44;04
Michael Strong
Big time. Bruno was burned at the stake.

00;47;44;21 - 00;47;47;12
Mark McGrath
That's right. Giordano Bruno. That's a great example.

00;47;47;12 - 00;47;51;11
Michael Strong
Yeah, these are very real. They're very real. And so it's like a very.

00;47;51;11 - 00;47;54;08
Mark McGrath
Leo had his problems and and others.

00;47;54;08 - 00;48;14;01
Michael Strong
Right? Yeah. I'm passionate about freedom of speech for this reason. I'm a big fan of Elon's Twitter, whether or not he's perfect at implementing it and. There certainly have been, you know, legitimate issues. The fact that he at least aspires that, you know, as you know, Facebook made all sorts of unilateral decisions that don't make sense in retrospect.

00;48;14;09 - 00;48;41;28
Michael Strong
We need platforms. I'm big on blockchain and no decentralized systems because we want to preserve innovation. You know, just touching on China for a bit. China is amazingly disciplined. There's incredible discipline there. But I think the constraints on innovation in, China will prevent them. I basically would rather bet on the U.S. as crazy as we are with our approach towards freedom than kind of a Chinese, let's control everything, approach.

00;48;41;28 - 00;49;01;09
Mark McGrath
You know, the I know that there's a I mean, if you Google it, China and Winnie the Pooh, the first thing that comes up is a CBS article that talks about how Winnie the Pooh is banned in China because I don't know if it was South Park or somebody was saying, you know, the the president of China and.

00;49;01;09 - 00;49;25;26
Mark McGrath
You know, I mean, to your point about freedom of speech, that kind of stuff happens here every day. And it has since, you know, the 1780s, I guess. But that kind of top down control, to think that you can ban and cancel an idea or a depiction or a thought or art and artistic expression. I don't think that I may ever get your perspective on this.

00;49;25;26 - 00;49;42;00
Mark McGrath
You know, with all this cancel culture and, you know, what is it? What would that mean for artists that over time have had such impact, like, you know, Guernica You know that that Pablo Picasso painted. I mean, you know, I'm sure that was illegal enough in a francoist Spain.

00;49;42;15 - 00;50;12;12
Michael Strong
Yeah. You know, there used to be a tradition of real respect. I think of it as a heroic tradition and heroic tradition of freedom. And that includes Socrates and Galileo, Milton, John, Stuart Mill. You know, the ACLU view of the 1950s, you know, it used to be the case that everybody understood the First Amendment, the United States, the freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, freedom of assembly are essential and almost sacred.

00;50;12;12 - 00;50;35;08
Michael Strong
I think when I think of the rhetoric on freedom of speech issues up through maybe the seventies, it was almost sacred. And it is very concerning for me that people no longer see why it's so critical. Again, you know, there are bad things and I don't I think there are lots of ways to deal with people saying and doing bad things, but shutting them down is not one of them.

00;50;35;21 - 00;50;57;28
Michael Strong
You know, give you a different sort of example. I've got a student who is a fan of things that I think are completely inappropriate, but I would rather talk through it with him and even have him talk through it in class than just tell him to shut up. You know, I think, again, people don't realize that engaging with diverse ideas is a learning process.

00;50;57;28 - 00;51;11;22
Michael Strong
And, you know, one way I think about this is if we shut these ideas out of the public square, it's going to happen on four channel or wherever. And it's even worse. You know, you get these toxic poison corners, the Internet.

00;51;12;10 - 00;51;28;20
Mark McGrath
We had a rule in our house, we still have it. It's called the Tarantino rule. And if you want to watch a Tarantino movie, you have to ask dad and dad has to watch it with you. And we're going to have a conversation about these things, because otherwise they're going to go watch it anyway somewhere else. Brilliant. Just.

00;51;28;27 - 00;51;49;03
Mark McGrath
Just like I did when I was a kid. So Saturday, my 17 year old, I mean, 17 that we sat down, we watched Kill Bill and we went to it. We talked about it. And, you know, we've done that with. And what's interesting about that, I think when we took that approach, we were over at a friend's house last night and they said, You never believe what Michael came up.

00;51;49;03 - 00;52;12;02
Mark McGrath
And he was talking about Tarantino movies, but he wasn't talking about sex, drugs and alcohol. What he was talking about was the different genres of film that he uses and how he actually uses film and not digital and this and that and the music that he uses. And he came to a completely different understanding rather than if I said, You're never allowed to watch those, and he did it behind my back.

00;52;12;02 - 00;52;17;19
Mark McGrath
You have no context on sort of the greater scope. I mean, it seems like that's in the theme of what you're.

00;52;18;05 - 00;52;18;27
Michael Strong
Big time.

00;52;19;04 - 00;52;20;18
Mark McGrath
What you're sharing and suggesting.

00;52;20;18 - 00;52;22;27
Michael Strong
Yeah, great. Great parenting advice. Yeah.

00;52;23;19 - 00;52;26;15
Mark McGrath
Well, we're trying.

00;52;26;15 - 00;52;46;06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Well, there are other ways to suppress the flow of information inside of organizations. And it's not just the cancel culture. It's and we talked about earlier, psychological safety, creating that environment where people can be their full self at work. But there's other aspects of as well. And that's the system the reward systems and organizations can suppress differing views.

00;52;46;06 - 00;53;08;07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. And then you brought up earlier that the way we hold meetings, who's dominating the meeting that will actually suppress, in my opinion, those that have to reflect more on on the ideas over 24 hours. You know, they have to go back and think about it. So are there any other ways that organizations are suppressing the flow of information that's preventing them from being really successful?

00;53;08;10 - 00;53;40;18
Michael Strong
No, that's a good question. I think a particularly challenging issue is yeah, I think of people, human nature. We're we're evolved to submit to authority and just submit to conformity. And I think we need to be very conscious and deliberate for allowing and supporting inquiry, search, exploration, new ideas that may go against either the authority, including the leader of the bosses, views and the kind of conformist norms of any organization, you know.

00;53;40;18 - 00;54;00;25
Michael Strong
And sometimes you do need to submit to authority and conform. I'm not saying we should always everywhere, but I think we need to think in terms of pathways to elicit information. So, you know, something as simple as anonymous surveys of employees or exit interviews with employees, you know, I think a focus on creating a healthy culture. And to what extent did people feel shut down or not?

00;54;01;13 - 00;54;14;29
Michael Strong
To what extent do people feel comfortable, send different ideas? An ombudsman, you know, there are a lot of kind of mechanisms like that to improve the quality of the culture so it doesn't become submerged authority, conformity.

00;54;16;01 - 00;54;21;10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
How important are stories or narratives to you in understanding the culture of an organization?

00;54;21;12 - 00;54;45;06
Michael Strong
Really great question. So Alister McIntyre is a famous 20th century philosopher. He wrote a book called After Virtue. And His Take is that, you know, most of traditional cultures are in some sense virtual cultures. That is, young people are raised in a sense of excellence. And he has three elements of a virtue culture. And his complaint with modernity is we've lost that that modernity, we're all kind of isolated individuals with no sense of virtue.

00;54;45;06 - 00;55;13;20
Michael Strong
So actually attention, I want to acknowledge, is huge respect for individual conscience and freedom to express that, while also acknowledging there's something healthy about having a culture, common culture around excellence. Those are tensions and interesting to push back against them. But McIntyre is three elements of a virtue culture, or one a moral tradition. So in some sense, you know, what is the tradition within which we are trying to be excellent?

00;55;14;00 - 00;55;38;14
Michael Strong
I mentioned for me Galileo, Socrates, John Stuart Mill, very much heroic moral tradition on this particular issue. So that that kind of story about the heroes of our culture, the great achievements of our culture, and it could be a company culture. You know, Apple had this founding story with Steve Jobs and then he was, you know, sent out to the wilderness at Pixar and then came back and the iPhone and all that, you know.

00;55;38;17 - 00;56;05;03
Michael Strong
So I think the heroic narrative of the organization and culture is really important. He also mentioned and it could include, you know, all sorts of different aspects. You know, a culture is rich in tech, but he also includes the notion of, you know, practices. So what what are the things we do together? Do we go out for beers after work or do we wake up and do yoga every morning?

00;56;05;03 - 00;56;27;06
Michael Strong
Or do we have stand up meetings or do we call each other when somebody is, you know, in a difficult situation? You know, there are all sorts of practices that ideally support the virtues or alleged virtues of a culture. So if you claim freedom of speech is a sacred virtue and. Right, you're shutting people down. Hello. That's inconsistent.

00;56;27;06 - 00;56;45;22
Michael Strong
You know, and then the other thing is, you know, even things like, you know, jokes, you know, what kind of jokes are appropriate, which kind of jokes are a violation of the sacred. So there is something like this is sacred to us. This is really important. And, you know, if you're not on board with this, you know, maybe this is not a good fit for you.

00;56;45;22 - 00;56;59;02
Michael Strong
And so I think that's where you have to have the distinct distinction between a common culture that provides a common template for excellence with respect for individuality within the parameters of our template for excellence.

00;57;00;07 - 00;57;25;25
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I want to pull in that thread of going out after work. This is this resonates with me from my background in aviation. So we currently do debriefing great learning in there, but the best learning happens after the debrief at the air club or when we go out. That's where we can have those open conversations with new mentors and really find out what's going on when it comes to the technical aspects of aviation and what we need to do and the social aspect of as well.

00;57;25;25 - 00;57;53;07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
That's important inside of organizations. And I don't see that happening today. Right. You know, in a lot of places, they most teams aren't most members on teams don't even know each other's names. They never see each other physically and they can't access each other to go out and have this type of social interaction. So with that in mind, how do we do that in this type of environment where we're hybrid working and we may not ever have physical contact with our coworkers?

00;57;53;07 - 00;58;13;01
Michael Strong
Yeah, that's a really good question. And so couple of things. One is, you know, it's not a substitute by any means, but, you know, in our internal Slack channel, we have a coffee shop and the idea is to go hang out at the coffee shop and, you know, you can do video or just audio or chat, but, you know, to make it explicit, we also have faculty.

00;58;13;01 - 00;58;37;22
Michael Strong
We actually have faculty Socratic seminars once a month where we all get together and we have a conversation. And it's it's a learning experience. It may have nothing immediately to do with a well, actually, just I forget Mark or Brian. Do you guys know Donald Campbell? Do you know who Campbell is? So Donald Donald Campbell worked with Popper, was an ally of Popper in evolutionary epistemology.

00;58;37;25 - 00;58;59;03
Michael Strong
And this is actually creativity. I'll send you this article. So evolutionary epistemology sort of another branch of of all of this. But we had a conversation on an evolutionary epistemology. Is it directly related to the classroom? Not directly. Was really a difficult thing to read, but we wanted to just enjoy it. One of our practices is intellectual inquiry.

00;58;59;09 - 00;59;19;15
Michael Strong
So as a community we practiced once a month, 2 hours of intellectual inquiry. That has nothing to do with daily work, no no agendas to get done, nothing like that so much. Separately, we have an annual trip to Greece and not everybody can come, but bit by bit, a little bit of in-person. I know a lot of virtual programs that have maybe four times a year in person.

00;59;19;25 - 00;59;30;15
Michael Strong
So it's just a little bit of let's to get together and hang out, time in person, revitalize the virtual relationships quite a lot.

00;59;30;15 - 01;00;09;04
Mark McGrath
Then it builds cohesion too, and mutual trust and empathy towards each other and understanding of each other's background. And you know what you deal with beyond, you know, I mean, a lot of the things that you're describing and I know it reminded Ponch of, you know, the ready room in a squadron, but it also too, it reminded me a lot of the Marines, it's how we operated to learning from each other, having a common lexicon, having jokes, plenty of jokes, but but a strong culture that, you know, when I when I spoke with you last week on the phone when I left Quantico, I had just left my former commander that I haven't worked with

01;00;09;08 - 01;00;36;09
Mark McGrath
in a professional role since 2002. Yet, all these years later, the power and the culture of that organization and the things that we've been imbued with, it carries us through all the way. I always ask, you know, we we travel around and, you know, I'm a historian by undergrad and we stop at the graves of famous Marines and we'll see Chishti put his grave or we'll see John Barcelona's grave.

01;00;36;09 - 01;00;57;00
Mark McGrath
And what company does that like? If you're in a company, you drive around and Oh, so-and-so from worked at our company many years ago is buried over here. Nobody you know, anybody even knows that. But that just it's a cultural thing about the Marines. But I guess my thesis has always been it's not you don't have to be exempt from that.

01;00;57;07 - 01;01;06;16
Mark McGrath
You can do the exact same thing in the business world and not spend 1/2 in the military and still recreate that that kind of a cultural bond.

01;01;06;23 - 01;01;24;15
Michael Strong
Yeah. Know and of course, the Marines are famous for creating esprit de corps, you know, but I think those kind of rituals, we call them rituals. Ritual doesn't need to be, you know, an esoteric religious thing. It could be this is what we do together on a normal basis. We go out after work together, or we do occasionally go and visit.

01;01;24;16 - 01;01;28;07
Michael Strong
I think that's really beautiful that the graves of, you know, key figures.

01;01;29;02 - 01;01;55;13
Mark McGrath
One thing, too, I mean, have you seen this? Like the Marines have a transformative process. So like if a young high school kid stands on the yellow footprints in the middle of the night in San Diego or Paris, down south South Carolina in 90 days, you have a marine. You transform from what you were in through the process of disruption design, very effective design, and very, very impactful disruption.

01;01;55;13 - 01;02;18;06
Mark McGrath
Let me tell you, you create you transform from one thing to another. You know, I've always tried to observe that and look for that in in the business world. I think it's possible. And and I don't think it has to involve, you know, a shattering of correspondence like that, like the way the Marines do that. There's other other ways to do it.

01;02;18;28 - 01;02;23;19
Mark McGrath
But, you know, what are some ways that you would think that that could be effective? Or where have you observed that?

01;02;24;06 - 01;02;52;10
Michael Strong
Well, kind of just backing up a little bit. I'm very fascinated with, you know, traditional cultures, initiation, rites of young men and women, men especially men. And I actually think if we had something like a healthy initiation, right at age 1213, you would have 95% less, you know, violence, substance abuse. You know, there are all sorts of things where young men are not formed properly.

01;02;52;10 - 01;03;29;22
Michael Strong
And if they were formed. Just a quick anecdote. There was a situation in southern Africa where these elephants, young elephants, had been taken from one game reserve to another. And these young elephants started raping the hippopotamuses hippopotamus and and, you know, turning over tourist cars and just incredible violence. And after trying various things and figure it out, they finally the ecologists finally realized they the young men males didn't have old males, so they bought a bunch of old bull males from another reserve.

01;03;30;00 - 01;03;52;10
Michael Strong
And within a few weeks, the young males were no longer acting like this. That's not quite the same. But again, I think we can't some sense of forming a culture together. And often in the case of males, older males forming young males so important and not done in any serious, you know, maybe outside of a few, you know, Boy Scouts or athletic teams.

01;03;52;17 - 01;04;18;06
Mark McGrath
But I think I think you're hitting a mentorship coaching. Learning really, really builds and develops that. I think of how, you know, the structure when when my parents split I was eighth grade and the structure of an all boys Catholic high school to the Naval ROTC program to the Marine Corps, you know, provided a pretty good, you know, direction and framework.

01;04;18;06 - 01;04;25;26
Mark McGrath
And it seems that's what you're what you're speaking about there, but also to what you're doing. You're doing that directionally with with with learning.

01;04;25;26 - 01;04;50;05
Michael Strong
Well, big time. And actually something that I think is implicit in what we've been saying, but it's worth being explicit is I think it's important to have a moral vision. And, you know, it's become a norm in our society where we're supposed to be completely relativists, not make any moral claims at all. You know, and I think that's because some people perceive some moral traditions as too narrow and brittle, and people have rejected religion and all sorts of a lot of reasons.

01;04;50;12 - 01;05;08;12
Michael Strong
We want to be respectful for different cultures. But I think if we have no moral vision at all, it's catastrophic. And I think even within a business, it's important and legitimate. You know, I worked with John Mackey, Whole Foods Conscious Capitalism, or that is purpose. You need to have the company needs to stand for something. The leader of the company needs to stand for something.

01;05;08;26 - 01;05;29;01
Michael Strong
And I think it's you know, I just posted on a slack over the weekend is it more important to be your best self or your most authentic self? And I said, of course, your best self, you know, and so I think we can have a conversation about a particular moral tradition, direction and so forth. And, you know, there are all sorts of ways to do this in a respectful, nuanced way.

01;05;29;08 - 01;05;44;09
Michael Strong
But I think it's really important to to stand for something. And everyone in the organization knows you stand for something. And then ultimately, if people violate kind of your sacred or a moral core of then they need to go.

01;05;44;09 - 01;05;46;07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Reminds me of to be or to do right.

01;05;46;21 - 01;06;04;21
Mark McGrath
To be or to do. You know, John Boyd used to counsel young officers to say you're going to come to a crossroads and you can be or do. And if you be, if you're going to choose to be, you'll get all the promotions. You'll everybody's going to like you. You'll have all the club memberships, you'll be a team player.

01;06;04;28 - 01;06;36;00
Mark McGrath
But you wouldn't have done anything other than what you were told. You wouldn't have you would have done nothing more than defend the status quo, whereas the doers, you're going to lose friends. People are going to think you're nuts. People are going to say, Why are you doing that? You know, you're going to be wildly unpopular with with maybe people at the top and everybody is going to fight you, fight you, fight you until they eventually join you, because they're going to see that you actually did something that improved the greater capacity for free and independent action.

01;06;36;29 - 01;06;55;18
Michael Strong
Good time. And that goes back to developing an individual conviction of what's right. And if had and this again, I'm fascinated with the tension between we have to develop our own personal conviction about what's right. And we also, I think, want and need to live in a culture of others where there's some kind of moral tradition to go on.

01;06;56;01 - 01;07;31;05
Michael Strong
And sometimes there will be conflicts. Sometimes we'll lead an organization will read, Leave a religion, leave an ethnicity. You know that having one's own conscience can ultimately lead to a separation. But I think the alternative either being completely conformist or not having an individual conscience, I think it's a disaster. And I think that's why I'm so against kind of relativism, as I think we need to develop individual convictions to do the right thing and we need to be embedded moral cultures where there are certain general expectations about what it means to do the right thing.

01;07;31;05 - 01;08;03;02
Mark McGrath
And you mentioned you mentioned an organization does a phenomenal job of bringing people from all backgrounds in business together, which Kyle who you mentioned earlier, sent you my link to the talk that I gave for a conscious capitalism event here in Columbus. And it's you know, it's the organization we're talking about, conscious capitalism. Love to hear your perspective on that story, on how it, you know, the genesis of it and how it has and continues to bring so many people from so many different vantage points.

01;08;03;02 - 01;08;25;15
Mark McGrath
I remember when you and I first met, we talked, we started talking about Rothbard and Hayek and Austrian economics, but like a lot that think that way or that come to that conclusion. They come at it from in my case, it was the right. In your case it was the left. But there they are all agreeing on universal principles and sort of shedding those sort of synthetic differences that we think we share.

01;08;25;20 - 01;08;29;15
Mark McGrath
We'd love to hear your story and perspective on how it all started and the work that they do.

01;08;29;20 - 01;08;58;28
Michael Strong
Sure. Really, it started because John and John Mackey, you know, founder and former CEO of CEO of Whole Foods, he dropped in. He left September after, you know, many decades. He started in the seventies. So I guess it's 40 years of something. But he and I met about 20 to 23 through a mutual friend and entrepreneur. And he and I had both come from the left become, you know, basically entrepreneurial libertarians.

01;08;59;05 - 01;09;20;13
Michael Strong
But we were not we still had the heart of the left, you know, in terms of, you know, peace, love and all that kind of stuff. You know, when I in the first meeting where we got together in person, I this is back in the day of print magazines. We spread out of print magazines and all the right wing magazines had guns and, you know, weapons and dollar signs and things like that.

01;09;20;13 - 01;09;46;29
Michael Strong
And all the left magazines had flowers and babies and nature and, you know, sweetness like things, you know. And we kind of talked about how if there were good ideas about how entrepreneurs could solve problems, they weren't getting out because of this political polarization. And so initially we thought instead of talking about, you know, many libertarians or anti-tax and anti-regulation, you know, we're like, no, we want to be entrepreneurial solutions.

01;09;46;29 - 01;10;09;15
Michael Strong
So originally it was freedom. Lights are world entrepreneurial solutions to world problems within that that turned out to be too broad. So then we created a couple of other programs. One was peace through commerce all the way as entrepreneurs and markets can create peace, reduce conflict. We actually had a few people from the military working with us on that for a while, and then we had another program accelerate in women.

01;10;09;15 - 01;10;30;01
Michael Strong
Microfinance is great, but wouldn't it be better if developing world women had 20 million, 50 million hundred million dollar businesses? And that's how I met my wife, by the way. I got laid. Choose the Senegalese entrepreneur. The joke is I gathered a bunch of people together, a bunch of developing world women entrepreneurs, and I the best one, and asked her to marry me.

01;10;30;05 - 01;10;55;13
Michael Strong
So she she enjoys that. And then finally conscious capitalism. John John really deserves credit for conscious capitalism. He loved the big picture entrepreneurial solutions to world problems. But looking more narrowly, he saw that his new Milton Friedman had the notion that there you go, that business is just about and a lot of economists talks about talk about profit maximization.

01;10;55;13 - 01;11;21;05
Michael Strong
But as an entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs are more about purpose than about profit. You know, you have to John's analogy is profits are like blood. You know, you've got to have oxygen in your bloodstream. But for most entrepreneurs, it's not because they're not really about the money. You know, he got into it because he cared about healthy food. I'm an education entrepreneur because I care about education and happiness and well-being of young people.

01;11;21;18 - 01;11;39;10
Michael Strong
You know, a lot of entrepreneurs have an idea where they want to change the world, something they think is true, good or beautiful. And then, yeah, you get into business. You've got to make you can't earn revenues. You have to be in the black at some point. And so there is this nuts and bolts got to be profitable sort of situation.

01;11;39;10 - 01;11;59;28
Michael Strong
But early on, you know, there was there was kind of a political thing kind of negotiated in between left and right, because a lot of the left is anti-business. A lot of the right, you know, at least some of them claim they don't care about all these good things. Not all, but some, you know, and there are some hard libertarians are all selfishness all the time kind of thing.

01;12;00;10 - 01;12;23;21
Michael Strong
Now, like no where people want to do good. And then there's also operational, it becomes challenging. It's one thing to start a purpose driven company when you're small. But we got into what happens when you get outside capital. So, you know, as angel investors they can be mission aligned. That's easy. You know, when you get to VCs, sometimes VCs put pressure on you to all about our life.

01;12;23;29 - 01;12;46;28
Michael Strong
And then certainly when you get to, you know, higher of capital, including public markets, then the pressure is to be focused on profits at the expense of other things become more severe. And so there's both kind of the political jujitsu move, but also the operational. How do we create organizations where we have real purpose driven values while also being successful, profitable businesses.

01;12;48;28 - 01;13;23;02
Mark McGrath
And so many people from the broadest range of backgrounds and interests and beliefs seem to be towards those things that you're talking about, because I think it's like a lot of the things that Ponch and I talk about. Truth applies to everybody. The laws of, economics, just like the laws of gravity apply to everybody. Whether you accept them or not, it still applies to you or you still you can understand these things and you can thrive in what we call VUCA volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity.

01;13;24;15 - 01;13;44;29
Mark McGrath
And if you know, there's oftentimes I think there's a reluctance to even be open to that. But it's amazing when you do open yourself up to that, you end up forming beautiful groups that bring people together and in something beautiful like commerce, which is when done well and ethically and morally, it everybody's better off big time.

01;13;44;29 - 01;14;08;27
Michael Strong
And I'm a fan of Dan Pink's Drive. Dan Pink writes a lot of good books and drive. He talks about purpose, autonomy and competence. And we need the purpose. I think this is where John's country, perhaps conscious capitalism is absolutely right. We all need purpose. We're craving a meaningful, purpose, driven life. And so I think that's universal, you know, obviously the entrepreneur has the autonomy and then competence.

01;14;08;27 - 01;14;46;09
Michael Strong
How do you do this effectively? And I think part of what brings the different people together as you talk about, Mark, is this craving after purpose, but also the confidence. How do we increase our competence in a highly uncertain environment? You know, it's one thing to have these ideas, you know, at this point, you know, I'm I respect practitioners more than intellectuals because, yeah, it's one thing to have all these ideas about how you do something, but if you're with a group of conscious capitalist leaders who are trying to actually be purpose driven and profitable, you get solved in solving you get busy solving nuts and bolts problems and challenges and a lot of disagreements

01;14;46;09 - 01;14;48;15
Michael Strong
vanish once you're all working together to get something done.

01;14;49;06 - 01;15;01;13
Mark McGrath
What was the when you started with John? You know, what was the what were the biggest resistance? You know, what were the, you know, the quote unquote haters? I mean, what were they what were they saying about these ideas when you were coming out with them?

01;15;01;25 - 01;15;22;02
Michael Strong
Well, you know, just getting started on the political side, you know, there are a lot of people on the left who are aggressively anti anti-capitalist. So even, you know, the term conscious capitalism was a deliberate, you know, juxtaposition because, you know, a lot of the hard Randian capitalist may not like the conscious thing. A lot of the consciousness, peace and love, hippies hate the capitalist things.

01;15;22;10 - 01;15;57;09
Michael Strong
So we were deliberately trying to juxtapose those two worlds together, you know. And so self-selection is important. People that didn't want to practice capitalism in a more conscious, purpose driven way would be self-select out, and people that are anti-capitalist would be self-select it out. You know, I would say there's still it's hard to form a new culture in a new community, but those are the those are the biggest ones, people who didn't welcome purpose and trope and purpose in business and people who are from the get go, anti-capitalist But other than that, I think there's a huge craving.

01;15;57;09 - 01;16;16;04
Michael Strong
And I think one of the reasons it's grown is so many people, you know, there is still some tension because we're so partizan today, I would say even within conscious capitalism, occasionally the partizanship causes some friction, but we're trying to make it more transcendent about let's solve problems, and how can you be against solving problems?

01;16;16;28 - 01;16;28;21
Mark McGrath
Have any you have any anecdotes on transformation stories or success stories where people came to a new understanding by by exploring and expanding on what work conscious capitalism talks about?

01;16;29;11 - 01;16;58;14
Michael Strong
Well, I would say mostly the people who are coming in are already sympathetic. So, you know, we're not trying to convert the unconverted. We're not you know, we're not preaching to the heathens, so to speak. I would say more more than the transformation stories early on or just finding their community. I think a lot of people, a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs and businesspeople that started because of business felt really lonely and were really gratified to have a community, but then also a set of tools.

01;16;58;14 - 01;17;26;25
Michael Strong
So, you know, a community of people. Suppose you want suppliers that in a certain way, or you suppose you want a certain set of behavioral norms for your organization or what we've been talking about culturally today. So I would say more than kind of, you know, transformation, it's companies that are already looking into this direction and gradually became much more committed because they had a community and set of tools and practices so they could go much farther.

01;17;26;25 - 01;17;40;18
Mark McGrath
Yeah, it's I mean, it's just an amazing it's an amazing group. And that seems to be growing, too, across not only the United States with chapters popping up everywhere. I know the Columbus one here is is pretty active, but also globally too, right?

01;17;40;28 - 01;18;04;01
Michael Strong
Yeah. And I would say one of the things that's distinctive and actually go to they're always these forces to pull things out. Everybody wants a purpose sign. But there are also I would say a tension is external standards where something that John and I felt powerfully about is that each business leader should be able to set his or her own purpose.

01;18;04;13 - 01;18;24;24
Michael Strong
That is we should not be telling you what the purpose of your organization is. You need to get clear on the purpose of your organization. Conversely, there are things like big corporations which, you know, they're adjacent to conscious capitalism, but they're much more of a sort of checklist certification approach. And frankly, you know, I looked into becoming a big corporate point.

01;18;24;24 - 01;18;50;10
Michael Strong
I found that I was not personally aligned with all of their checklists. So I deliberately decided not to go in that direction. And I'm a believer in pluralism. So I think we it's fine to have multiple different certifiers of different kinds of behavior. But again, I'm for freedom first, which means I don't think any of these should become you know, coercive or mandatory, because that's exactly going back to the heroic Socrates Galileo mill tradition.

01;18;50;23 - 01;19;19;15
Michael Strong
You know, some of us could violate something and, you know, actually become do do better. Kind of an interesting odd story there. Henry Gifford is a building maintenance in New York City and here with I don't know if he's given up on it, but he was showing that simply old fashioned things like improving traditional heating and cooling systems and buildings were more effective in saving energy than LEED standards.

01;19;19;24 - 01;19;45;04
Michael Strong
So all these LEED standard building get all of this media attention for being green buildings. And, you know, Henry was able to show that it was just huge. Most traditional buildings were not operated in an optimal way. And you optimized traditional systems and you could be far more energy efficient in many Leeds buildings. So that sort of an existing system where you get an old boiler room guy who let's let's fix the boiler.

01;19;45;24 - 01;20;00;10
Michael Strong
I'm simplifying a lot. But you know, it's sort of an interesting example of all the cool kids are running around doing leads and maybe we should have somebody optimizing old systems.

01;20;00;10 - 01;20;13;22
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01;20;13;22 - 01;20;32;21
Mark McGrath
It seems to me too. It's it's a much better approach than some of the other things we're seeing that are more mandating and hitting with a fist. You know, people I want to live in a clean area. I want to breathe clean air, I want to drink clean water. But I don't necessarily need somebody beating me over the head.

01;20;32;21 - 01;20;54;10
Mark McGrath
Whatever they call it, ESG or whatever. I mean, it just seems like engaging people differently around where they are and and what's important to them. I think we can all agree on those things. We all want clean air. We all want I don't want to trash in my neighborhood or garbage on the roads or the parks and other things.

01;20;54;10 - 01;20;58;12
Mark McGrath
It seems like there's a lot more to agree on those things rather than alienate people.

01;20;58;16 - 01;21;28;03
Michael Strong
Huge, huge. And this goes back to, you know, integrity, individual conscience. That is I think right now we're in a world where I think large organizations eventually become the de facto most large organizations over time generate. And we always need fresh new organizations. And I think insofar as a lot of people are only focused on the large organizations, one of my favorite examples is in 1970, IBM was the third largest corporation in the world.

01;21;28;16 - 01;21;54;02
Michael Strong
And just a few years later, you know, jobs. Now, a couple of teenagers in Silicon Valley began to do something that ultimately overcame the largest one, largest companies in the world. You know, and I see that as microcosm of, yeah, we can't going back to freedom, we can't mandate top down. We've got to let freedom, we've got to let strange and confident, you know, marginal weirdos as well as, you know, isolated, brilliant people.

01;21;54;02 - 01;22;24;13
Michael Strong
But I think it's important to say that it's not just the people you think who are going to do the amazing innovations, including in you know, it turns out that a teenager boy and slap created the most effective device for clearing plastic from the open ocean. And he didn't face regulatory. But again, who would have said, oh, we need to we didn't let a teenager work on this big pollution problem you no radical support for pluralism and getting away from those top down mandated things very valuable.

01;22;24;19 - 01;22;45;17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So you know when you walk into an organization and they have that one room for innovation because innovation can only happen in that one room, right inside. There's fun. It's it's ironic when you work with these organizations, they think it's only the the select few can go in there and do design thinking and you know, I've been through five days of this and that, so therefore I'm going to go create something of value and they come out with nothing.

01;22;46;00 - 01;23;05;03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. So you see these artifacts popping up all over the place and that's not it. And you pointed out you can't manage this. You can create the conditions, right? You create the conditions where the interactions create value. And that's what we're trying to do with coaching organizations. And I think the same thing is true with schools, right?

01;23;05;17 - 01;23;24;00
Michael Strong
I know. Absolutely. And you spontaneously used the term I was going to create value creation. One of the reasons I like value creation is it's such a general sort of thing. You can create value by lots of ways, not just, you know, new technology. You can create value more effective customer service, you know, a more dazzling customer experience.

01;23;24;01 - 01;23;46;04
Michael Strong
I'm very big on the experience economy, and I think a lot of the ways that we'll create value in the future will be higher quality experiences. And often it is people on the front lines of customer interactions who may be the best value creators. Maybe they initially do some kind of value creation interaction, and then if they're in an organization that supports that, then you can spread that value creation.

01;23;46;18 - 01;24;17;06
Michael Strong
I think one of the great things about Whole Foods is organization is they empowered teams. So in a Whole Foods store, you know, the the meat section and the produce section and the beverages section are all pretty much autonomous and they get a bonus based on the team performance, that portion of the store performance. And so the stores have significant autonomy and then the units within the store have significant autonomy and people are compensated in part by performance of their local team.

01;24;17;06 - 01;24;35;24
Michael Strong
So again, the Whole Foods is to a substantial extent decentralized. So that who's going to know how to improve the produce section? One of things people think of Whole Foods and organic food. I think Whole Foods and museum quality produce sections. You know what? We most go to most Whole Foods and it's a gorgeous produce section. Why is that?

01;24;36;04 - 01;24;42;01
Michael Strong
The produce team is incentivized to produce a really high quality experience and it's different in each store.

01;24;43;27 - 01;25;05;04
Mark McGrath
You have a beautiful diagram on your on your website for the Socratic experience with with four points that center around geometrically centered around purpose. You have number one what you love. Number two, what the world needs. Number three, what you're good at. And number four, what you can be paid for.

01;25;06;19 - 01;25;31;17
Michael Strong
Yeah I it's a that's a guidestar for all of us. That's something that as an organization, one of our cultural touchpoints, we go over it in training every summer. I also teach a daily class where Mondays what do you love? Tuesdays what are you good at? Wednesdays we do more nuts and bolts skills, sorts of things, but then productivity skills on Wednesdays, then Thursdays.

01;25;31;17 - 01;25;52;21
Michael Strong
What does the world, what will the world pay for Fridays? What was what does the world need? And we have discussions and examples every day and go through these things over and over again with the students, because each of those would say something I am good at is kind of endless expansion on just about anything. So today we did What Do You Love?

01;25;52;21 - 01;26;11;23
Michael Strong
And we talked about what? How does what you love change over time. How do you know what you're going to love five years from now and how do you kind of make decisions based on this? So kind of going back to the uncertainty thing, everywhere you go, it's how do we become even or what do you love? Is creating value for yourself in a sense, but how do you do that more effectively?

01;26;12;06 - 01;26;37;00
Michael Strong
We don't want a 14 year old devoting their life to Anima when maybe they're 25. They're not into anime anymore, you know, but how do they even begin to think about that? And so I use the metaphor of search kind of a search function. So just while I'm on that one more, one of my favorite books is Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind and Jane's use as an interesting metaphor for consciousness which is it's like a flashlight in the attic.

01;26;37;14 - 01;27;01;00
Michael Strong
And so, you know, you shine the light on different corners of the of the attic. And I see that as a lot of how we learn is we get students to focus on different aspects of their consciousness. What do you love one day but different dimensions? What do you love? What do you love ten years from now versus today, you know, in terms of reading the text, what words do you not know what punctuation do not understand?

01;27;01;03 - 01;27;21;09
Michael Strong
You know that questions are way of shining light on different aspects of experience, and those of us with more experience can shine the light on more different corners and thus help the, you know, my case. Students develop their own search functions once they've seen once they've seen me model shining light in corners of the attic, they had no idea existed.

01;27;21;21 - 01;27;29;06
Michael Strong
Then they'll be able to kind of look around comprehensively as well and complete the search of the search space, but more effectively.

01;27;30;28 - 01;27;43;07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So, Michael, this aligns well with what Gary Klein shared with us recently. We haven't published that podcast yet, but it's using the he calls it the shadow box method. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work.

01;27;43;07 - 01;27;43;13
Michael Strong
No.

01;27;43;26 - 01;28;15;03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
No. Okay. But everything that you're saying is very aligned to how experts can help mentor people are coming up through the ranks and using that expertize from their past experience to have them show them how to make decisions in complex environments. And then something else I learned from Gary and his books, and this connects back to aviation. A nice little story about four pilots transitioning to an AI six years and years and years ago before after we had wooden flight decks, by the way.

01;28;15;21 - 01;28;44;28
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But, you know, you're flying the, you know, pilot with a wizard behind you and four in an A-6 you're side by side. So your sight picture changes. And Gary talks about the story and it's one of his first books. But when the pilots start flying, they six he had difficulties landing. And two, to make it a short story, long or a long story short, an expert had to come to him and help him or asking the right questions.

01;28;44;28 - 01;28;59;15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Put your thumb out there and what you see, show me what you're looking at and then let them the solution. Right. But what and that's what you're trying to do with the Socratic approach, right. Is let them figure out the solutions that are correct.

01;28;59;20 - 01;29;21;08
Michael Strong
Absolutely. And it is by pointing in certain directions, asking a question as a way of focusing attention on a particular issue. And, you know, I think that the more that because ultimately there are a lot of issues where they have their own standards of integrity, they have their own notions of capacity, they of their own ideals. You know, this is getting away from controlling people.

01;29;21;08 - 01;29;43;18
Michael Strong
So other than, you know, somebody violates the sacred of the company or the school, you fire them. But beyond sort of firm boundaries, beyond that, you want to support individuality. And so how do you help support individual decision making at the lowest level possible? You try to have clear goals and principles. You know, for us, we're trying to optimize lifelong happiness, well-being of every child.

01;29;44;03 - 01;30;11;09
Michael Strong
And then we have this set of practices. And then beyond that, yeah, are your students engaged? Are your students, you know, behaving in way as the culture is successful? Are they responding to each other respectfully as a whole, teamwork, integrity and so forth? So we can create a structure that helps each person in the organization try to do play their role well, giving them a lot of freedom to do their role as they see fit.

01;30;12;19 - 01;30;21;24
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Here's a strange question or some context. So let's go outside of the classroom and go into sports and or performing arts. You can use the same approach there, correct?

01;30;22;04 - 01;30;46;23
Michael Strong
Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, I would say some of the best coaches I know focus on getting solid principles in place, solid practices in place and encouraging, encouraging, you know, the decision making of the individual, you know, on the field or whatever. I think in many ways, top down control is always limited. You know, there are certain situations where top down control is essential has to happen.

01;30;46;23 - 01;31;08;12
Michael Strong
But I think any time there's complexity, anytime you're engaging, I'm sure this goes down to boy, anytime you engage in a complex environment and the world everywhere is complex, you need to create as much autonomy in the individual as possible and then align that autonomy with the broader goals, principles, moral traditions, the organization, and then then give them freedom to do what they need to do.

01;31;08;24 - 01;31;13;05
Michael Strong
Because you will never have the context that they have.

01;31;13;05 - 01;31;31;13
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And to Boyd shifted from command to control. Command is leadership and appreciation and control. And we're going to connect back to the Toyota production system and even things that we're learning from neuroscience that control is outside and bottom up. So if you think about this from a customer perspective, your customer controls your organization.

01;31;31;28 - 01;31;33;19
Michael Strong
Big time.

01;31;33;19 - 01;31;55;26
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And those that are closest to the customer have to respond in kind. They need that freedom to deliver that value. And a lot of organizations are just not designed that. And that's what we're trying to help them evolve to, because we have so much friction with Taylor as take approaches and what we learned in our MBAs. This is a big shift for organizations to handle.

01;31;55;26 - 01;32;01;03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And if they don't figure this out, in my opinion, you know, they die. The organization.

01;32;01;03 - 01;32;02;16
Mark McGrath
The lessons and irrelevance.

01;32;02;26 - 01;32;20;17
Michael Strong
And in some ways your opportunities that are really about, you know, value, how do you add value? And then I was using customer experience, but customer experience not just in terms of the sales call or this interaction with the organization. But, you know, again, one of the ways in which Steve Jobs was brilliant is I'm very much an Apple fanatic.

01;32;20;17 - 01;32;44;23
Michael Strong
I hate if I'm on Microsoft software. I run away screaming. But, you know, I think it's for some of us at least. Yeah, jobs was absolutely at adding value and he was not a technologist. First and foremost, he was a designer, but he was focused on how do I go back to that other example I used? How do we give the customer better than the customer knows what they really want?

01;32;45;04 - 01;33;14;00
Michael Strong
And, you know, in terms of organizations, right. How does every and every individual organization be really thoughtful on how to add value to every customer? And it's a it's a huge, unstructured problem when you think about it. Human beings have so many different needs are so diverse, different cultures, different products, matching the multitude of customer needs and wants with an organizational capacity to fulfill those needs.

01;33;14;00 - 01;33;22;00
Michael Strong
And once is an unlimited, undefined problem that will require endless creativity on behalf of every individual in an organization.

01;33;22;23 - 01;33;44;00
Mark McGrath
That's the second tenet, right? First of conscious capitalism is higher purpose, and the second is the stakeholder orientation towards the says, recognizing that the interdependent nature of all of life and the human foundations of business, the business needs to create value within for its various customers, employees, vendors, investors and communities.

01;33;44;19 - 01;34;04;25
Michael Strong
Big time. Big time. And a couple of things. One is, you know, just in Whole Foods, one of the things John did is created sustainable seafood standards for Whole Foods. That was creating value for people who cared about sustainable seafood and the fishermen who are trying to bring it seminal, some more animal compassion standards. That's a very specific example in that case.

01;34;04;25 - 01;34;26;28
Michael Strong
But more broadly, when you create win wins, when you're creating value for everybody you get more enthusiastic partners. And I go back to the fact sometimes I, you know, I'd love to write a book on Mrs. Plus Maslow, so I am pretty much a museum economist. But Mrs. was living in a world where it was all materialistic. And I think for most of us we've got enough stuff.

01;34;26;28 - 01;34;48;23
Michael Strong
Most of our garages are full of stuff. Don't use. What we need are high quality experiences and for that we need a different kind of focus in terms of value creation. Again, it goes back to how do we create a world where from the morning we wake up until the more time we go to sleep we're having. And then of course, all night long we're having fabulous experiences.

01;34;48;23 - 01;35;09;06
Michael Strong
Clearly we're not there, you know, what are the examples I like to use as alarm clocks? You know, first I try never to wake up with an alarm clock, but an alarm clock seems to be the buzzy radio alarm clock. And then you had the music radio, and now you can get alarm clocks that cook bacon next to your bed, that provides sunshine, that provides sense.

01;35;09;26 - 01;35;29;26
Michael Strong
If you have a hard time getting up, you can get a robot alarm clock that runs away from you. You have to chase it all over the room in the morning, you know. And so if you look in any particular domain, it's about solving these human problems. And the more effect we are doing it, the closer we will get to a world where all day, every day we wake up and experience joint in delight and a flow state every day.

01;35;30;01 - 01;35;58;23
Mark McGrath
Oh, I love your comment about Jesus and Maslow. I want to show you my my combo. Here is musician Boyd. And I made this picture a while back and how I connected originally with Hunter Hastings when we wrote our paper was about seeing that, you know, the proxy, a logical axiom of human phenomena, right? The human decisions are and human action is is what we observe as economic economic action.

01;35;58;23 - 01;36;19;27
Mark McGrath
Right. And that's the title of his book. Yep, Human Action. And then it hit me after I left the Marine Corps and had been embedded with with everything Boyd And really starting to see the, the bigger context that what Boyd was saying about how we orient and how our orientation shapes what we see how we formulate decisions, actions, and how we learn from that.

01;36;20;14 - 01;36;53;25
Mark McGrath
It tied right in to what means this was saying that humans overcome their uneasiness. They they they think about it and they come up with a solution in their head. They make the decision and they act and they're doing it. So in an environment of uncertainty and then they learn from those actions. And then as they go, they are always trying to improve their conditions and capitalism gets derided, I think is oftentimes it has a capital C and people conflate it with cronyism and corporatism and other things.

01;36;53;25 - 01;37;12;00
Mark McGrath
But when you think about small C capital is I mean, you think about free exchange. It goes back to what I think what Mises was saying and then what Boyd is saying by studying so many Eastern thinkers, is that when we interact, transact together and do things together, we should all be better off big time. Everybody should be better off.

01;37;12;09 - 01;37;33;05
Michael Strong
And just, you know, terrific. On a side note that I think far more than people realize, the regulatory state prevents us from creating higher quality human experiences. So one example, you know, globally, one, the greatest sources of unhappiness is commuting, you know, sitting in traffic for hours. There was actually for a while a bus company in the Bay Area.

01;37;33;12 - 01;37;57;07
Michael Strong
It was like a Starbucks, you know, high quality coffee and music and soundproofed and comfortable couches and cushions. And so you could sit on a bus and have this really cool experience. Last I checked, they had been shut down because they violated various regulatory things, you know, very differently in school. A lot of what I do as an educator does not follow the traditional grammar of schooling of this is third grade, this is the math textbook.

01;37;57;11 - 01;38;20;24
Michael Strong
You know, I'm individualizing things way more than this allowed and standard schooling system, different kind of thing. I know somebody who wanted to create a and maybe he's succeeding at this I've been out of touch a community where you know there would be this like recreate in small town where there would be no visible tattoos and no visible piercings other than earrings.

01;38;21;02 - 01;38;40;05
Michael Strong
That's a particular esthetic that he had. And I think he absolutely should have the right to create that. And other people do, too. And, you know, then the question is, will he be allowed to do that? So I think we need to in our homes, there are all sorts of things where we were very picky about what kind of experiences we have in our homes and our partners and with our kids and so forth.

01;38;40;20 - 01;38;59;15
Michael Strong
And I think we need to allow people to curate again high quality experiences, and that means customizing things in ways that may be different from the norm. And initially a little bit strange, but that curation of new of experiences is going to be necessary to increase the lifelong happiness and well-being of everyone.

01;39;00;28 - 01;39;16;28
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I can think of nothing more appetizing than looking at the waitress delivering my food with something hanging out of her nose. That's. There you go. That turns me off. And, you know, and I get that. But I'm glad they have the right to do that with same time customer experience for me. Not so hot.

01;39;16;29 - 01;39;18;14
Michael Strong
Exactly. Exactly.

01;39;18;16 - 01;39;49;27
Mark McGrath
When that's your choice. I mean, that's that's everybody's unique. Everybody's orientation is unique. And we can form our own choices without fear of coercion. You know, I was thinking as you were talking that if I don't have those other things to cross-reference, I mean, orientation is ultimately a cross-referencing process where I'm evaluating things that I've learned, experience. I've been I've been handed down through my my genetic my genetic coding or my my cultural traditions, that sort of thing.

01;39;50;20 - 01;40;08;14
Mark McGrath
If I don't see mismatches, my cross-referencing is going to be off my my orienting is going to be off. I'm going to I'm going to be acting, deciding and acting in a way that could be misaligned or disconnected from from reality. So I think I think you need all the above.

01;40;09;11 - 01;40;38;20
Michael Strong
Absolutely. And again, I think something that's been unpopular is the notion of the formation of the tool. Again, it's basically Aristotelian. But one of the things I'm shocked by this may seem oblique with all connected is I'm very in a lot of cartoons for kids are full of you know disrespect violence aggression crassness just plain crassness. And as a parent, I did not want my kids to be exposed to crassness.

01;40;38;20 - 01;40;57;27
Michael Strong
And I think I've seen a lot of parents who are apologetic for liberating their kids. You know, can I that's why kudos to you on Kill Bill and Kill Bill is kind of stupid and relatively benign. There's much worse out there. But I think we should all be completely unapologetic about curating the environment in which our children grow up, including their media environment.

01;40;58;09 - 01;41;19;21
Michael Strong
And, you know, part of it, an esthetic experience, a moral experience, a spiritual experience that is our souls are formed by, you know, we got an Aristotle. What we are is what we repeatedly do. And so if we allow kids to repeatedly be exposed to brutality, then why would we be surprised when they have a taste for brutality?

01;41;19;21 - 01;41;20;19
Michael Strong
Later on down the road.

01;41;21;19 - 01;41;44;01
Mark McGrath
Steppenwolf had a song It's never too late to start all over again. And I wonder, you know, the principles that you're talking about that similar to what we're sharing with leaders and teams and companies, you know, have you observed an age limit to accepting and implementing universal principles? Because, frankly, I don't I don't think one exists.

01;41;44;02 - 01;42;14;16
Michael Strong
No, no. It's the same everywhere. You know, there's gradually more agency autonomy as people go from a child to an adolescent to an adult. But I'm in favor of as much agency as possible. But also it's again, the tension is people are either dogmatic conformists or they're, you know, do whatever you want, individualist. And I think that tension we need to get right is respecting that individual within a coherent framework, coherent culture, virtue, cultural framework.

01;42;14;26 - 01;42;30;05
Michael Strong
Because absolutely, you know, for everything we've been talking about, we need to decentralize and let individual decision making. But we also need principles and a common culture and an inspiring tradition we share. And, you know, most very few organizations, I would say, are getting those just right.

01;42;31;08 - 01;42;57;21
Mark McGrath
I mean, do you define I mean, I found this and I just wonder, you're it's I would I would suspect the answer is yes, that once you get people to this point where they can effectively understand universal principles, the synthetics that are created through politics and social media and other things, they're not as important. And we in the in those things don't unite.

01;42;57;21 - 01;43;25;02
Mark McGrath
You know, those things don't bring people together. The podcast that we released today with John Robb, we talked a lot about that, how our our orientation, our perspective being hijacked by so many different things that attack our humanity of of interacting with people. I would think that most people, you and I, as libertarians would say, you know, the non-aggression principle, let people know the golden rule is that you do unto others as you would have done to you.

01;43;25;02 - 01;43;32;04
Mark McGrath
It seems that most people are are decent, and when get together and they talk things that are true for everybody, they tend to get along.

01;43;32;19 - 01;43;56;10
Michael Strong
Yeah, no big time. You know, I describe our secondary curriculum as the conscious development of personal identity, which sounds like a lot, but I think more than ever before in history, we're pulled in a million different directions. And if people don't have time with young, don't have the time to really slowly think through moral reasoning, think through their own personal commitments, who am I and what do I stand for and why do I stand for it?

01;43;56;20 - 01;44;20;10
Michael Strong
Then they're going to be buffeted by the winds from left to right to this gossip thing. To that gossip thing. You know, they're candle in the wind. And basically they're all just going all over the place and. If you have time to develop your own sense of conviction and integrity and what's valuable to you and what matters to you as an individual, ideally, when you're an adolescent or younger, then you're going to be robust against all of that nonsense.

01;44;20;22 - 01;44;43;28
Michael Strong
Just as a as a nice aside, yesterday I read an article by a lesbian journalist who'd been assigned to do the ten anti-transgender things that J.K. Rowling had said, and she went to look for it and couldn't find a 2010, you know, egregious anti gender transgender things. And so she actually got fired from her job and apologized Rowling for even thinking that.

01;44;44;11 - 01;44;56;04
Michael Strong
But that's so rare. How many people have a personal conviction to stand up and do what's right, even at the cost of your job, rather than, hey, let's go to this opportunity, that opportunity, this mob, this that mob, those kind of things.

01;44;56;11 - 01;45;12;17
Mark McGrath
It's yeah, we talked about that with Sean Raab about how a lot of this is done with impunity, you know, where people can do things and get with it. And one of the examples I had brought up the movie, It's a Wonderful Life, that one of the scandals at the time was that Potter went unpunished.

01;45;13;02 - 01;45;13;15
Michael Strong
You know.

01;45;14;03 - 01;45;27;11
Mark McGrath
For what he did, the George Bailey, that people thought the movie was, was horrendous. So, I mean, it seems to me that when he was learning in leadership that you're talking about, there's also two there has to be a level of accountability that people have.

01;45;27;16 - 01;45;53;16
Michael Strong
Huge, huge. And, you know, I think social media is a problem because there's not a level of accountability and we need better social media reputation systems. So that there is accountability there that's most egregious. Yeah. And absolutely in any you know aside thing but Brian Robertson of whole ocracy is a friend of mine and their decentralized leadership. But in Brian's thing and if you have decision rights, you also are accountable for those decision, right?

01;45;53;16 - 01;46;13;15
Michael Strong
So the idea is you know an organization can decentralize decision making, but you know, if you're responsible for, you know, the produce section at Whole Foods or the, you know, they're engagement of student engagement or customer service in my organization, if if it's not you're not performing, you know, there's an issue and we need to talk about it.

01;46;13;15 - 01;46;35;03
Michael Strong
Address it. And if it's egregious, get rid of you, you know? And so I think with accountability, you know, with with freedom comes accountability. The two go hand in hand. And those two are kind of systems. And again, I think at a social level, we have a lot of freedom and very little accountability. One of the great things about the market is you succeed often only a few respond to customer needs.

01;46;35;11 - 01;46;39;02
Michael Strong
There is a sort of built in accountability scams out there, but relatively few.

01;46;39;22 - 01;47;02;22
Mark McGrath
I think we could go on for another 2 hours and we're going to have to have you back. Michael, there's just so much to take from the various things that you've been involved with as an entrepreneur, as an educator, as an enlightened ear. I think of bringing people to these ideas and anything to add. I mean.

01;47;02;22 - 01;47;24;11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
We there's so many things we can talk about. He brought up Brian Robertson and a locker C, you know, his connection to learning about holography from the cockpit of an aircraft which is pretty amazing. Right. And there's a nice connection there. Back to, you know, how do we with command and control actually look like from a limited hierarchy, right?

01;47;24;14 - 01;47;49;01
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. And hierarchies are natural in the world. You can't eliminate them. And that's a law of physics, actually. So. So, you know, that's that may be going to extreme with trying to flatten out the organization 100%. But at the same time, we're still learning about leadership and appreciation, and it created an efficient and agile organization. But yeah, Michael, it's been amazing conversation today.

01;47;49;01 - 01;47;53;20
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I wish we could have more time with you now, but I think we can ask you back in the future. Is that correct?

01;47;54;05 - 01;48;13;03
Michael Strong
I'd love to be back. So clearly, yeah. All three of us have a lot in common and with a lot of shared frameworks. And you know, Mark and I talk to them preliminary. There's so many connections. I think that's what it's exciting about. Talking to you guys is, you know, you can talk about the Socratic piece, the whole ocracy piece, the conscious capitalism piece, the high tech business piece.

01;48;13;03 - 01;48;31;17
Michael Strong
But mostly these are separate. What's exciting is to be with people who see all the connections, because I think ultimately there's an evolving sort of new framework or family of evolving new frameworks that are more powerful synergistically. And I think it's really delightful to explore the synergies among these frameworks with the two of you.

01;48;32;12 - 01;48;58;05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I feel guilty being on this side and based on our limited experience in the last month and a half works, both are so much. And my wife has asked me, what's it like to be here learning and thinking about how we're going to respond and how we're going to move this forward. This is probably the coolest gift that I've ever a part of, is having a podcast where we can reach out to people in many disciplines and communicate.

01;48;58;05 - 01;49;28;00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And I think that's what John Boyd ultimately gave us is. I call it a roadmap for now, but he left it open for us to have these conversations and I really wish one, I get better at this to, that we can really open up people's eyes to see how related and interconnected things are. And there's, you know, remove the islands of disconnected efforts that are getting in the way of creating agility, innovation, resilience and safety in organizations.

01;49;28;14 - 01;49;34;03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So I'm very thrilled that here with us, I learned a lot today and I look forward to our next opportunity to talk to you.

01;49;34;03 - 01;49;46;13
Mark McGrath
We're going to send we'll send everyone through the show notes page to the Socratic experience. But also to conscious capitalism. Is there any other place you think we need we need to direct people towards.

01;49;47;29 - 01;50;05;15
Michael Strong
You know, maybe go ahead and include my LinkedIn page just because, you know, we didn't get into the whole Free City is startup cities thing and their budget their whole other layers of what I do that yeah if people want to get in touch I'm happy to subject to time. I'm happy to explore opportunities with all kinds of people.

01;50;05;26 - 01;50;16;21
Mark McGrath
No, we will absolutely do that. And for the sake of the recording, we'll close it here. We want to thank Michael Strong for joining us on No Way Out. And Michael, we're looking forward to having you back real soon.

01;50;17;08 - 01;50;20;05
Michael Strong
Likewise. Thank you, guys.

01;50;20;05 - 02;06;28;29
Mark McGrath
All right. Don't go anywhere.


"Spook Base" and the Nature of Creativity
Entrepreneurs Create Value
Experiential Education and Adult Learning
Education as Scaling a Culture
Social Physics: Measuring Psychological Safety and Engagement
Soft Skills: The Hard Skills
Observable Entrepreneurial Behaviors
Exaptive Teaming Skills from High Risk Environments
The Most Boring and Cruel Years: Secondary School
Thoughts on Improving the Education System
Freedom of Speech: The Dangers of Shutting Down the Views of Others
The Tarantino Rule for Shaping Orientation
To Be Or To Do: Mentorship and Coaching
Entrepreneurial Solutions Over Political Polarization
Whole Foods and The Experience Economy
Conscious Capitalism
Decentralize Decision-Making