The Art of Listening: Lessons from Mike Hassell on Deep Trade Offs
Mike Hassell shares valuable insights on navigating the complexities of conflicting values in today's polarized world, emphasizing that relationships should take precedence over agreement. He reflects on the best piece of advice he received early in his career: to listen to customers, which has shaped his approach to understanding divergent perspectives. Drawing from his experiences and his book, "Deep Trade Offs," Mike discusses the importance of recognizing that multiple truths can coexist and that conflict is a natural part of human interaction. He highlights that rather than forcing others to conform to our viewpoints, we should seek to understand their perspectives, fostering empathy and balance. As the conversation unfolds, Mike encourages listeners to embrace the inherent tensions in relationships and to approach discussions with curiosity and openness, ultimately leading to greater peace of mind and understanding.
Mike's journey through the realms of engineering and business is intertwined with profound insights on human interaction and understanding. He emphasizes the foundational advice he received early in his career: to pay attention to the customer. This principle has not only guided his professional path but has also shaped his perspective on communication and relationships. As he discusses the pervasive issue of polarization in society, Mike argues that the key to meaningful dialogue lies in listening more than speaking. He suggests that recognizing and valuing differing viewpoints can foster respect and understanding, which are essential for productive conversations. His book, "Deep Trade Offs," delves into the complexities of conflicting values and how these shape our interactions, urging readers to seek balance and peace of mind amidst a chaotic world.
Moreover, Mike reflects on the important role of mentors in his life, particularly his uncle, who inspired him to pursue electrical engineering. This personal connection underscores a broader theme in the discussion: the impact of individual stories and experiences on our choices and perspectives. As he shares anecdotes from his career, including his time at Procter & Gamble and his ventures into startups, the narrative not only details his professional evolution but also serves as a backdrop for his philosophical explorations.
The conversation culminates in a call to action for listeners to engage in more empathetic and constructive dialogues, emphasizing that relationships must take precedence over mere agreement. Mike’s insights encourage an approach to life that values curiosity and openness, reminding us that understanding diverse perspectives can lead to richer, more fulfilling interactions.
Takeaways:
- The best advice Mike received was to prioritize listening to customers over telling them what to do.
- Understanding conflicting truths can lead to better relationships and reduce polarization in discussions.
- Relationships should come before agreement; knowing someone better can change your perspective.
- Recognizing that conflict is natural and can be productive rather than a problem to avoid.
- Awareness of differing values can help navigate difficult conversations with compassion and understanding.
- Ultimately, fostering curiosity about others' perspectives can lead to personal growth and balance.
Links referenced in this episode:
Transcript
Well, Mike, welcome to the podcast.
Keith:I'm so thankful to have you on.
Keith:How are you doing today?
Mike:Great, thank you, Keith.
Mike:I'm so delighted to be here with you.
Keith:Good.
Keith:I'm going to ask you my favorite question.
Keith:I ask all my guests, what is the best piece of advice you've ever received?
Mike:One that stands out to me is when I started my career, just after getting an engineering degree, I went to work for Procter and Gambler and they told me, pay attention to the customer.
Mike:And it's a foundational idea that set the rest of my business career up because I end up working in high tech.
Mike:High tech is not famous for doing that.
Mike:Some big fortunes have been made with.
Mike:Well, Scott Cook was there.
Mike:He's the guy that found an intuit that makes Quicken the software.
Mike:He used that principle and a number of other people went from there to use that idea.
Mike:And in ebay and other places like that make great companies.
Mike:The broader idea from it, though, is that you should listen more than tell.
Mike:And this is going to resonate in what I think we're going to talk about today, about polarization and balance and respect and things like that.
Mike:We all have our ideas.
Mike:We think they're right.
Mike:And if we start from a position of telling other people what they need to know that we know already, we're behind the eight ball.
Mike:And P and G pretty much starts out so I don't care what you think.
Mike:I want to know what the customer thinks.
Mike:And it reorients everything.
Keith:I love that, you know, I'm curious.
Keith:People like yourself who've achieved certain levels in their career always, I think, have people in their lives who have been important to them.
Keith:Who are some people in your life who maybe served as a mentor for you or inspired you on your journey?
Mike:The biggest one of those would be my uncle, whose name was Bill Steele.
Mike:He, he was an electrical engineer.
Mike:I was born into a family of engineers, but they were mostly farm mechanics and auto mechanics.
Mike:They were uneducated engineers and they had good lives, but not really advanced ones.
Mike:Bill quit a dead end job, went back to get his double E degree, and then he worked on the IBM team that invented the barcode scanners that we all use everywhere.
Keith:Wow.
Mike:So when he came to our house, he could fix everything that my mother had piled up for him for months.
Mike:And I just thought, I want to be Bill Steele.
Mike:And that's why I went to Georgia Tech to study electrical engineering.
Mike:And, you know, my path diverged from that in a way we can discuss if you like, but Bill was a big influence on me because he could fix everything and I just wanted to be able to do, do that.
Keith:I love that.
Keith:So you, you kind of mentioned it.
Keith:Give us a little bit about your background.
Keith:I'm curious.
Keith:I looked at your bio and it was a fascinating journey.
Keith:Even though you went to Georgia Tech.
Keith:I'm from Louisiana.
Keith:We won't hold that against you.
Mike:Okay, thank you.
Keith:But tell us about your background.
Mike:Well, I mentioned I was born into a family of engineers on my mother's side.
Mike:I was born in west Tennessee in a little town.
Mike:My family moved to Nashville when I was 2.
Mike:So I grew up in Nashville, went to Georgia Tech and about two years into that I felt like I was being trained for profession rather than being educated more generally because one of my basic characteristics is curiosity.
Mike:Curious about art, about music, about philosophy, about humanities, about history, and also about technology and building machines and things like that.
Mike:So I started thinking about the role of humanities in a technical education and that sort of shaped the rest of my life.
Mike:Because I got the degree, I didn't want to abandon that credential and decided not to go to Silicon Valley but rather to go to business school.
Mike:So I got a deferred admission to Harvard Business School because I was asking that question about the education I was getting.
Mike:I was thinking beyond the received wisdom in the box that I would had put myself in.
Mike:And so they like that.
Mike:They.
Mike:And I had two years to work somewhere.
Mike:So that's when I went to Proctor and Gamble.
Mike:I learned the lesson that I just mentioned and I also met my wife.
Mike:So we married and moved off to Boston.
Mike:So I decided I really didn't like big companies.
Mike:I'm too independent.
Mike:I don't like people telling me looking over my shoulder all the time and telling me what to do.
Mike:So I spent my career in early stage startups and have loved it, ran an incubator, etc.
Mike:But that's, that's basically the shape of my career.
Mike:I moved back to Tennessee after a first venture backed initiative in Boston area on integrated software back when, well, what office became, we had a version of that and we're a competitor to Microsoft doing that.
Mike:But you know, I worked with Steve Ballmer at Procter Gamble, he ended up president of Microsoft.
Mike:You know, other people like him were there getting that background that they took in the high tech and made great strides with.
Keith:I love that.
Keith:So what inspired you to write deep trade offs?
Mike:So at about age 40 I had this aha moment.
Mike:I had started a business called Knowledge Products which reflects What I've just told you, I was interested in the humanities.
Mike:I had a business partner who had gotten a degree at Vanderbilt.
Mike:And then he realized he majored in graduating.
Mike:The easiest path to get there was what he was after.
Mike:And he left a lot of cards on the table, things he could have learned and didn't.
Mike:And he got to middle age and found himself sort of wandering.
Mike:And what he believed, who he found credible, who he didn't.
Mike:So I met him and I thought, this is a great idea for new business.
Mike:So we made audio cassettes on great ideas of history, political thought, economics, science, philosophy, religion.
Mike:And at about age 40, I was working on a project called Moral Problems of Our Age.
Mike:Terrorism, war, euthanasia, abortion, drugs, alcohol, you know the list.
Mike:And I realized that the problems we were talking about were not problems of the kind I had been trained to solve.
Mike:There was no algorithm, there was no formula, there was no equation.
Mike:There's no structured decision process that's going to get to a right answer.
Mike:There are many right answers in that case.
Mike:And I came to see these problems as conflicting truths.
Mike:Their values, each of which has worth, is valid, but they don't fit well together.
Mike:Freedom and equality is one.
Mike:The freer we are, the less equal we are because we go to very different places, different toleration for risk, different abilities, different circumstances.
Mike:The more you have equality, the less, the more you have to really squash freedom.
Mike:That's just one example.
Mike:And so I thought about this for 20 years and then wrote the book that I published last year, Deep Trade Offs.
Mike:And it's about these value conflicts that we all know about, but we generally don't think about very much.
Mike:We're dealing with them subconsciously, but not generally with our forebrains, with our rational mind.
Mike:It's instinctive.
Keith:I love that.
Keith:So as you wrote this book, what were you hoping people would take away or gain from reading this book?
Mike:Well, I spent four years writing it and 20 years thinking about it.
Mike:And it's just because I was curious about this way of understanding reality and truth.
Mike:How do things work?
Mike:And during that four years, I came to see that this is really behind one of the big problems of our age, which is polarization and our alienation from one another, our hostility to somebody else, usually because we think that we're right and they're wrong.
Mike:And sometimes that goes to, there must be evil or they must be stupid because they don't see the light.
Mike:And this is a formula for not getting along with people.
Mike:And so part of what I've learned and learned to articulate in thinking about this is that relationships come first.
Mike:You know, we don't solve our problems by shouting other people down.
Mike:They dig in their heels and fight us back.
Mike:And so the first principle is to understand that people are generally not stupid.
Mike:They're generally not evil.
Mike:They have different eyes that ideas than we do.
Mike:And, and trying to understand them and balance them with our own ideas is a great opportunity.
Keith:So you talk about some balance and peace of mind in your book In a Polarized World.
Keith:Can you elaborate more on that approach?
Keith:I like the idea of balance and peace of mind, but kind of tell us, kind of develop that out for us a little bit more.
Mike:Well, you know, it's a pretty common observation today that people are alienated.
Mike:They're angry, they're polarized, they don't talk to one another, they fight at Thanksgiving and it's because they think that other people are wrong and they're out to get them.
Mike:Right.
Keith:Right.
Mike:Part of the.
Mike:One of the points I make in the book is that conflict is not the problem.
Mike:Conflict is natural and inevitable.
Mike:It's been going on since the dawn of man.
Mike:A religious person would say it's been going on since Adam and Eve.
Mike:You know, a patriot would say it's been going on since the founding Fathers.
Mike:A historian would say it's been going on for all of recorded history.
Mike:It's just built into human nature.
Mike:We're different, we have conflicts.
Mike:The problem is coercion.
Mike:Where I'm going to make you live by my ideas, that's the problem.
Mike:And vice versa.
Mike:If I think that you ought to follow my priorities, I think is a good word to use, I suppose, my priorities.
Mike:They're all ideas, they're all values, but every value has a rival.
Mike:That's another kind of idea that I've been pursuing.
Mike:I've made a list of 300 values looking up on the Internet value inventories.
Mike:And I combined them and de.
Mike:Duplicated them and I went through all of them and I can.
Mike:I think I can say for every value on that list, I can identify an arrival, a competitor, one that.
Mike:That undercuts that value in some circumstances.
Keith:So I love that.
Keith:And you're just right.
Keith:I just watched a show just recently with a conservative and a liberal on a.
Keith:Discussing just kind of the big ideas of our time.
Keith:And it was funny.
Keith:List them, kind of come to some agreement on some things.
Keith:But of course, there's some things they just don't see eye to eye on.
Keith:As you talk about those conflicting values and things that Divide us.
Keith:In your book, Deep Trade Offs.
Keith:How do you suggest readers navigate these conflicts in their life so that we can have conversation and ultimately get to the point where we have balance and, and peace of mind?
Mike:Well, it starts with awareness.
Mike:We've touched on that earlier.
Mike:We tend to not recognize that this is maybe a solvable problem.
Mike:If we listen to one another and understand tension and leave tension in how we live, we tend to think that these conflicts shouldn't happen, that they are problems that need to be solved and can be solved.
Mike:Back to my Insight at age 40, they are not going to be solved.
Mike:They are perpetual.
Mike:Our founders of our country knew this very well.
Mike:And the Constitution is saturated with ideas for balancing conflict and checks and balances and all of the stuff that we studied in history.
Mike:They were very wise about human nature and about factions, about people or.
Mike:As long as people are free, especially if they're free, as long as they're human, they're going to have different interests, different priorities and organized to pursue those priorities.
Mike:People care about these things.
Mike:That's another way to looking at a way of looking at conflict is because people care about things and they think they should be different.
Mike:So, you know, chapter two in my book is about ideals and reality.
Mike:I think the world ought to be X way, you think it ought to be Y way, and one of your listeners thinks it ought to be Z way.
Mike:And, you know, we all have these ideals of way things should be.
Mike:And the point is they're never going to be that way.
Mike:There are going to be some mix of what I think and what you think and what somebody else thinks, because they're all truths, they're all legitimate values or based on legitimate values.
Keith:So as you did research this book, I know when I've done research in mine, I find some interesting things that I.
Keith:I wasn't aware of.
Keith:What was the most shocking thing you discovered in your research for this book?
Mike:Well, the thing that comes to mind when you ask that question is a quote that I ran into when I was doing the philosophy part of our publications at Knowledge Products, our audio presentations.
Mike:Friedrich Nietzsche said that conviction is the greatest, is a greater foe of truth than lies.
Mike:This made no sense to me.
Mike:You know, I think, I thought there's beliefs which you hold tentatively.
Mike:They may.
Mike:They may be overturned at some point because they're.
Mike:But, you know, then there's truths which have been proven, you know, by science and evidence and things like that.
Mike:At the other end of the spectrum and in the middle is convictions which I sort of thought of as hardened beliefs and you know, soft truths kind of in the middle.
Mike:And Nietzsche overturned that and it took me years to figure it out.
Mike:But what I've come to understand or believe about that is that he's saying that if we, if we have really hard convictions, we've closed our minds to listening to other people and competitive ideas that may undermine our convictions.
Mike:So like the, the great baseball pitcher Satchel Page is credited as saying, you know, it's not what you know, what you don't know that is a problem, it's what you know that's not true.
Keith:Right.
Mike:We know lots of things that, that need to be qualified, in some cases overturned.
Mike:But an open mind is one that, that is, is receptive to that kind of being alive, that kind of changing and growing.
Keith:And like the great Yogi Berra said, nobody comes here more because Russell Bond's too busy.
Mike:Right.
Mike:He was great, fantastic.
Mike:Love Yogi Berra.
Keith:So you have over 300 quotes that for a wide range of sources in your books.
Keith:How did you select these quotes?
Keith:I'm sure you had way more than 300 you could have put in.
Keith:So how did you narrow it down to that and select that approach to your topic?
Mike:Yeah, first of all, when we did knowledge products that we had an innovation there that we were producing like an audio magazine where a narrator would kind of give a narrative flow, a line, a story, and it would be populated with quotes from people that were involved in the story we're telling.
Mike:So if it's a giants of political thought, we're talking about say the Federalist Papers and James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton hire actors to characterize those people and to tell the story of the Federalist Papers and how it, how it was designed to manage factions.
Mike:As I mentioned, that's one of 140 productions we did over about 12 years.
Mike:And so each, each production had about 100 quotes in it for a three hour audio presentation.
Mike:140 times times 100 is what, about 14,000?
Mike:Yeah, so I started with that and then I had 20 years of pursuing this idea of deep trade offs of what became deep trade offs.
Mike:So that's another few thousand quotes.
Mike:So I basically sort them into categories and then when I write a chapter on say, equality or liberty or you know, centralized being centralized or decentralized, you know, being clear or ambiguous.
Mike:Those are kind of abstract, but you know, I have dozens of quotes that are in favor of one or the other.
Mike:Transparency or privacy.
Keith:Right.
Mike:You see, you see the idea?
Keith:I do, yeah.
Keith:Which of those subject that you wrote about was the most difficult for you to write about.
Mike:Well, the book has three chapters plus, well, four chapters, three trade offs and then a fourth one about what to do about them.
Mike:And the last one is a collection of a lot of people's ideas about process, tactics, how we behave to deal with conflict.
Mike:That's the way a lot of books and magazine articles talk about it.
Mike:The chapters are trying to get at something deeper, which is to recognize an ambivalence, an equivocation at the very nature of things, that these are seesaws all over that we're writing and not quite aware of it.
Mike:So actually one of the most, the funnest of those three was about honesty and deception.
Mike:You know, let's take a poll.
Mike:Who's for honesty and who's for deception?
Mike:We kind of know who's going to win that one.
Mike:Right?
Keith:Right.
Mike:But the truth is we deceive all the time, most of all ourselves.
Mike:And sometimes it's for good purposes because there are other values at stake.
Mike:For instance, we deceive our children around this time of year because it brings them joy.
Mike:Right?
Keith:Right.
Mike:We deceive people so it won't.
Mike:They won't be harmed by some truth.
Mike:Like, you know, you come upon a traffic accident, somebody's bleeding out, you say it's going to be all right, you calm them down.
Mike:You know very well the odds are they're going to die.
Mike:Right.
Mike:And there's stories from World War II and others where people lied to protect Jews who were under threat.
Mike:You know, most of us as moral beings would defend that and say it is appropriate to lie in that circumstance.
Mike:But there's a number of values that then that take precedence over truth and honesty.
Mike:One of them is preventing harm.
Mike:One of them may be privacy in some cases, sometimes preserving a surprise, you know, for later benefit.
Mike:And so once we realize that no value trumps everything else, then there's a great enterprise before us to sort of think through what are the values involved and how do they line up against one another in this particular situation.
Keith:I'm curious, what kind of feedback are you receiving on the book?
Mike:Well, I have a.
Mike:There's about 50 something reviews on Amazon and I think most of them are five star.
Mike:You know, people really like this way of thinking and I think they see of it, see it as an opening to getting along with other people, you know, trouble some people that it may be suggesting that truths are not solid, you know, that there are not truths in an absolute sense with a big T.
Mike:Right.
Mike:And that is a rich philosophical vein to explore.
Mike:I do think that truths are circumstantial.
Mike:There's lots of different kinds of truth.
Mike:This is one of the things I'm working on now to write further about it.
Mike:But, you know, there's logical truth, there's, there's symbolic truth, there's psychological truth, there's religious truth, there's scientific truth, legal truth.
Mike:They're all different.
Mike:They have different standards of getting to truth in each of those situations, but they're all truths in some meaningful way.
Keith:So as you think about this book, as I always think, I've done books too, and I get.
Keith:Everything's published and it's all out there.
Keith:If you could go back, is it something you would change in your book?
Mike:Well, I did change toward the end.
Mike:I had five chapters involved and it was just too long.
Keith:Right.
Mike:And so I narrowed it down to just three trade offs plus this fourth short chapter I mentioned.
Mike:And so it's a 200 page book.
Mike:The point was to make it digestible.
Mike:And so there's a lot of other books that I want to write.
Mike:If there's an audience for this, there's a lot more to say about other trade offs that have not been addressed in this 200 page book.
Mike:So in one sense, you know, it's a huge scope of, in the topic of subject matter, but the challenge is making it accessible and readable and, and clearly understandable.
Mike:I just got a note from a friend who said he had read it twice because there's just so much to absorb, he felt the need to do it the second time.
Mike:And I love that.
Mike:You know, I do think it is a thing that you can go back to and get something new out of every time because these are really some great quotes from some of history's, you know, best thinkers.
Keith:I love that.
Mike:So, yeah, in terms of doing something differently, I, I think I've done the best that I could with that one.
Mike:There's a lot more to do.
Keith:So you say there's some trade offs you think you want to tackle next.
Keith:What are some of those trade offs you want to tackle in a future book?
Mike:Well, I mentioned centralized and decentralized, open and closed.
Mike:There's a reason to have a closed mind about certain things.
Mike:You know, I'm not really open to having extramari affairs.
Mike:I have a very happy marriage and I don't consider that a desirable form of an open mind.
Mike:You know, Anthony Bourdain, who nobody would call a conservative, have some great quotes from him about how comfortable he is in the kitchen.
Mike:And how he likes being around things that he knows and understands and that reassure him.
Mike:That's a form of a closed mind.
Mike:So, you know, there's mostly benefits to open mind.
Mike:We've already talked about those.
Mike:But there's also reasons not to and circumstances not to.
Mike:One that particularly interests me is focus and sensitivity.
Mike:They cannot happen at the same time.
Mike:You know, my mother is pretty clear to me, has add, never diagnosed, they didn't know about it when she was young.
Mike:My son had ADD that he grew out of.
Mike:I'm, I'm the opposite scale between those generations.
Mike:So I'm hyper focused.
Mike:And people wouldn't come into my office when I was working on audio products, scripts, knowledge product scripts.
Mike:And I would know.
Mike:They came in so focused on what I was doing that I didn't hear or see them.
Mike:As a teenager, my mother would talk to me and I didn't respond because I was in, in the groove.
Mike:And she would really get angry like you're ignoring me and.
Mike:No, I'm not just ignoring.
Mike:I didn't hear you.
Mike:You know, it was shut off.
Mike:And so I have those personal experiences to be able to see that focus and sensitivity are incompatible.
Mike:You know, and it, it basically ends up being about attention.
Mike:Where do we put our attention?
Mike:And we live in a world that's where tension, attention is in short supply.
Mike:It's overburdened.
Mike:There's too many things to pay attention to.
Mike:So what do we ignore?
Mike:What do we savor?
Mike:Big questions for our psychological lives.
Keith:No, it's fascinating.
Keith:No, I'm thinking about that because you're right.
Keith:There's those two things are in our direct tension with each other.
Keith:Right.
Keith:And there's so many others.
Keith:Yeah, yeah.
Mike:You have to do them both.
Mike:It's not like either one can be ruled out and win or lose.
Keith:Right.
Mike:As one person said about our former governor, United States is this genius is that nobody ever permanently wins.
Keith:Exactly.
Mike:You know, and so everybody is, is in it.
Mike:And, and so things keep rebalancing and rebalancing.
Mike:That is a form of health.
Mike:It's a form of ongoing conflict.
Mike:We should be grateful this rather than resentful for it.
Keith:And you're right because the, the founding fathers were brilliant in fact, that they, they designed tension in the governing system so that one particular side shouldn't have total control.
Keith:It should be balanced.
Mike:That's right.
Keith:Which drives us all crazy.
Mike:Yeah.
Mike:There's 30 of these deep trade offs that I've identified and I keep fighting, you know, like duty and entitlement.
Mike:You Know, you end up talking about rights in there.
Mike:There's a lot to say about rights.
Mike:Rights is in conflict with democracy.
Keith:Right.
Keith:Yeah.
Mike:Democracy is about voting on how we're going to do things.
Mike:Right.
Mike:And rights are designed.
Mike:Natural rights are observations about things that people shouldn't be forced to do.
Mike:Do if they don't.
Mike:If 51% folk to reimpose slavery can't do that.
Mike:Right.
Mike:It's a natural right not to.
Mike:Not to be enslaved.
Mike:Right.
Mike:I saw an article the other day that the Montana Supreme Court has declared that there's a right in the Montana Constitution to have a safe environment.
Mike:Well, nature doesn't provide that.
Mike:Nature will kill you within a few months if you stay outside.
Mike:Right, Exactly.
Mike:Not a natural right.
Mike:It's.
Mike:It's a.
Mike:It's a state right.
Mike:And so some sophisticated understanding of what is a statutory right, what's a natural right, what's a moral right.
Mike:Because these days people tend to think, I want something, and therefore it is right and it is a right.
Keith:Yes, exactly.
Mike:That's bad logic.
Keith:It is bad.
Keith:And I love how you.
Keith:You bring that up, because I don't think we think that way, that those, those tensions aren't necessarily bad.
Keith:It's okay.
Keith:How do we just like you said, how do we have balance and peace of mind with attention.
Mike:Right.
Mike:Right.
Mike:And recognize that, you know, Keith may have a different conclusion than I do, and that's okay.
Mike:And he might be right.
Keith:Right.
Mike:You start with the idea that.
Mike:That how can I accept what somebody else is saying?
Mike:What can I find that's true in it and maybe improve myself?
Mike:There's.
Mike:There's really a great psychological idea here.
Mike:There's psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who talks about the motivated reasoning and the confirmation bias and a generally defensive way of responding to challenges to our ideas.
Mike:We dig in our heels and we fight when we're challenged.
Mike:And he said, we're behaving in that way like a lawyer or a soldier.
Mike:We're out to win.
Mike:Right.
Mike:Said the better mechanism is to behave like a scout or a judge.
Mike:A scout is looking for the truth.
Mike:You're going to die if you don't get a correct assessment of the battlefield out there.
Mike:Right.
Mike:So if you get mis.
Mike:If you identify a misperception, you're.
Mike:You're better off.
Mike:Right.
Mike:You better find your mistakes and change them.
Mike:And that's a better frame of mind for this, that, you know, we're not all right.
Mike:We need to grow, we need to improve.
Mike:And we don't start from a position that everything that we've decided is the right way.
Keith:So have you sent this book off to your congress people?
Keith:So.
Mike:I have not.
Mike:I, I have a friend who wrote the forward.
Mike:He was a candidate for governor and Vermont years back and he says every, every councilman and senator and you know, representative ought to read this.
Mike:That's, I think, kind of a fool's errand for me to suggest they're going to follow any suggestion like that.
Mike:You know, it's hard these days because people don't read as much as they used to and, and the ones that do read have so many options.
Mike:There's a lot of great stuff out there, right.
Mike:So it makes it hard to publish a book and get attention for it.
Mike:Those are, you know, publishing book is about a third of the effort.
Mike:Getting attention for it.
Mike:And you know, having people understand why it's worth their commitment and time or persuaded why that's their commitment of time is hard.
Keith:I love that.
Keith:I love to ask my guest this question.
Keith:This is, I'm enjoying this conversation immensely.
Keith:But I'm curious, as you think about this book and what you're doing in this sphere of your life, what do you want your legacy to be?
Mike:Well, I have thought that if I can have a part in promoting this more even handed way of thinking, eventually it gets to getting away from right and wrong, good and bad.
Mike:You know, good and bad is one of the future chapters.
Mike:You know, there's evil and bad and etc.
Mike:It's a complicated topic in philosophy and making a rich discussion of it accessible is the challenge I'd like to address.
Mike:But I think all of this taken together, if I could have some influence on changing people's mindset, I think it would reduce the amount of anxiety and alienation and stress that we have.
Mike:I think it would bring more peace of mind and joy to people.
Mike:And that's something I'd really like to accomplish.
Mike:I think my lifetime is not long enough to do it.
Mike:If I can plant some seeds that germinate over, you know, over the decades, maybe, maybe a lot faster than that, I don't have a control over that.
Mike:But that's, that's really what I'd like to accomplish with this work, this way of thinking.
Keith:I'm curious, when you just mentioned good and evil, I wonder how different that discussion is in a theological perspective versus a philosophical or political perspective, because I think it's probably a different conversation.
Keith:So you even have topics there that if you break them down based on the area that you're looking at it from, is probably Also a different conversation.
Mike:Exactly.
Mike:And that's.
Mike:That's part of the challenge.
Mike:You know, in knowledge products, we did a history of China in three hours.
Mike:That's 2,000 years.
Mike:You've got to leave a lot of stuff out.
Keith:Right.
Mike:What you have left has.
Mike:Needs to be rich and, you know, have a lot of layers where you.
Mike:You see ways to probe particular things, but you say something in 10 words and move on.
Mike:And that's the way that kind of conversation would have to be.
Mike:One of the.
Mike:One of the trade offs is for a future chapter is belief and skepticism, which sort of goes to your question.
Mike:If you start with a position of belief, some people think that.
Mike:That truths and in what is good, what is valuable, is given to us.
Mike:It's revealed to us in a religious way.
Mike:Scientists don't think that at all.
Mike:They have to have evidence.
Keith:Right.
Mike:So faith and evidence are big competitors.
Keith:Yes, exactly.
Mike:Okay.
Mike:And I think there are different kinds of truth.
Mike:There are religious truths that are not backed by evidence.
Mike:We just don't have the evidence for a lot of those things.
Mike:And that's okay.
Mike:I believe them and I live my life by them.
Mike:I'm active religiously, an elder in my church.
Mike:But they're not scientific truths, they're not legal truths.
Mike:And I think a mature way of coming to terms with this is to see all of these as valid ways of thinking, some of which I might prioritize over other.
Mike:Because I think, give me a better life.
Keith:Exactly.
Keith:So as we wrap up our conversation, what key takeaways do you want the audience to gather?
Keith:From our conversation today.
Mike:Two things come to mind.
Mike:One is symmetry.
Mike:Remember the word symmetry?
Mike:Always look for the other side of the seesaw.
Mike:Pretty much any of these problems that we address.
Mike:Instead of asserting that our side of it is right and the other side is wrong or evil, look for the value of the other side and find symmetry.
Mike:Find balance.
Mike:Once you start thinking in terms of symmetry, it's much easier to get to some balanced perspective.
Mike:The other one is that relationships come before agreement, not the other way around.
Mike:We hear about people who won't talk to somebody else because they don't agree and they're going to suffer by fighting.
Mike:We don't have to fight.
Mike:I've got people who believe very different things than I do.
Mike:Political and we politically.
Mike:And we just talk about something else.
Mike:We like each other.
Mike:We laugh with each other.
Mike:Sometimes we avoid it.
Mike:Sometimes there's a time for.
Mike:For engaging.
Mike:But relationships come first.
Mike:And people are not love, are not shoved into change.
Mike:They're loved into change.
Mike:So, you know, Keith, if I got to know you really much better than the brief history that we have in our relationship, it's much more likely that you're going to change my mind or I'm going to change yours if we trust and like each other.
Keith:Right.
Keith:That's amazing.
Keith:Is there anything I haven't asked you that I should have asked you?
Mike:Well, in 30 minutes.
Mike:No, I think you've hit some really good high points, but there's plenty of other stuff to talk about.
Mike:You know, this, there's a lot of tentacles of this kind of thinking, a lot of implementations of it.
Mike:But you know, I think we've hit some pretty good key points today.
Keith:No, it's a fascinating book and I think you've.
Keith:You've brought up some things that I think we have lost sight of in our daily discourse.
Keith:That there's tensions in our connections, our relationships, even in our conversations that need to be there.
Keith:And we really need to honor the fact that there are tensions and not try to either run away from it or create a sense of anxiety or animosity because of those tensions.
Mike:Yeah, exactly.
Mike:And you know, the fascinating thing about this is this is not all that great a surprise to people.
Keith:Right.
Mike:It's just not like you're overturning your world.
Mike:It's like you're recognizing something you already knew but weren't thinking about very deeply.
Mike:And sometimes there's great surprises in it.
Mike:And a lot of times, as one reader said, it's like seeing your nose.
Mike:It's been there all along, but.
Mike:But.
Mike:And I haven't noticed it in years.
Keith:Right, exactly.
Keith:So where can people find your book?
Keith:Deep trade offs and connect with you on social media?
Mike:The book is available on Amazon.
Mike:It's also available in bookstores.
Mike:A distributor will carry it, but carry it.
Mike:But you have to generally have to order it.
Mike:You know, the bookstore these days just can't carry all of the books that are being published in a year, much less backlists and stuff like that.
Mike:So Amazon is a great place.
Mike:I have do have a website, deeptrade offs.com people can leave a message for me there.
Mike:I do, I do have a Facebook page.
Mike:I don't really use social media for promoting the book.
Mike:I long ago kind of concentrated my time and attention to writing this stuff and researching more instead of getting active on Twitter and X and things like that.
Mike:I thought Twitter, when it came out was just the worst idea ever.
Mike:Why do I Want to hear 100 character responses to everything that happens every day from millions of people.
Mike:I don't have time for that.
Mike:I don't have attention for that.
Keith:Right.
Mike:And so you won't find me on Instagram or Twitter.
Mike:I've never tweeted and I've never posted on Instagram, but I do use email and phones, and if somebody wants to reach me and they can leave a message on deeptrade offs.com that's amazing.
Keith:So, Mike, again, thank you so much for taking the time to being on here and thank you for doing this work because like you said, it's like kind of realizing your nose has been there all along, but you just ignored it.
Keith:It's a great place for us to start to think about how we interact with each other and how we can interact in a way that we don't have to walk away hating someone disagrees with us, but can recognize that we can have difference of opinion and still respect each other's opinion.
Keith:So I appreciate this conversation and what you've done and the work you're continuing to do on this important topic.
Mike:Well, thank you.
Mike:And I appreciate you helping me get the word out about it.
Mike:Any of your listeners who want to join that, I'd welcome it.
Keith:Thank you so much, Mike.
Mike:Thank you.
