You're welcome.
The front row is so close.
I love how you chairs out. Looks like this man. That was awesome.
Well, well, as you heard, this wasn't the intended room.
Okay. Sorry.
We're usually in a room upstairs, which is a little less cavernous.
I don't think this is cavernous.
Yeah.
Yeah. How about we don't do... Can we do it a little bit lower so it's just not... I can look at people? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much.
Okay.
So, is this...
Yeah. So, this is a...
high school.
No, this is a private Jewish high school, not...
Got it.
That's connected.
No, we rent.
I see. I see. Gotcha.
In two years time, hopefully we'll have our own space. We're going to build on essentially Lasalle 18.
So between Air Drum and 18th, there's a strip there with our offices and two motels that you don't want to spend any time in.
So those are coming down.
Those are coming. So we've acquired three adjacent.
Right. Right.
Great.
Wow, that's great for congregation members.
It's still a problem. There's still 100,000 Jews in the city.
Oh, sure. No, I mean if you talk to the folks at UJ or JDC, they will all talk about low-income Jews and partly in the Orthodox community, it's bonkers.
Yeah.
I mean really a problem.
I mean heavily reliant on government aid and...
Yeah, sure. Let's start.
I recognize it's a little bit of a subset from the lunch crowd. I just want to say that...
it's a slight subset from the lunch.
I know. I know it's true.
What do you mean smaller group than lunch?
Yeah. Yeah.
Which is more appealing, lunch or us?
Right.
I know. It's tough competition. It's tough competition, which is why we try to give them a chance to eat before.
Otherwise, you have zero.
Exactly.
It's all right.
It's all good.
Shabbat shalom everyone. Was that how your interview on Good Morning America started also?
Exactly. Exactly.
But we finished ours with a Kol HaNeshamah. It was okay.
But the Latino version or the tradition, they're more of a traditional crowd at Good Morning America. The tune was different in here, but the words were the same.
The sentiment was the same.
All right. Well, I guess in sort of Jewish hospitality function, this is I guess your third welcome today. So we welcomed you with an aliyah. We welcomed you with announcements, but I really am so grateful to you both for coming and being part of this conversation today. For writing this book, From Mistakes to Meaning, which...
it's available for sale in hardcover. I would point out, Rabbi...
I just want to say this...
You don't like my not for distribution copy over here.
This was going pretty well until now.
Well, you know, actually, Susan Brooks, our program director just reminded me I kind of buried the lead, which is that you brought books.
You brought books, which we hope everyone will walk out with a copy of their own book. And...
and if it wasn't Shabbat, we would sign them.
Exactly. Exactly. So thank you for the gift of the book. Thank you for the gift of writing the book. You all now know that I'm not going to open this lunch and learn with a list of their accomplishments and accolades. Instead I want to open... part of what I enjoyed about the book was that there was a little bit of a feeling of this is a like detective genre. I felt like I was along the ride with you all going on a journey of discovery around the mistakes that you made, around the mistakes that others make and that we generally make, and that there was what to be found. The closer you looked, the deeper you looked. But I want to start first having you talk a little bit about your friendship, how the two of you know each other and maybe where the detective story in a way begins or at least one act of it which is a fateful walk on the beach during COVID. So tell us a little bit about your friendship and what happened on that beach.
Should I? Sure. So, first of all, thank you very much for having us, Rabbi, and everybody here. And the service this morning was really wonderful. I used to be at Orayta, and I know that a bunch of folks have come over here, ECAR, and it's beautiful to see what you've built. It really is. Josh and I have been friends now for over 20 years. And we have kids about the same age. We've lived near one another. We've been good friends for all that time. But I will say this process has really brought us even closer together. Just the process of exploring these mistakes and talking to people. It really began when it was right around COVID and Josh and I were taking a walk on the beach exactly as you indicated and Josh had said to me, you know Michael I know you made a big mistake about five years ago which was the mistake that resulted in the Sony hack but every time I try and talk to you about it in any way shape or form you basically duck out of the conversation you want nothing to do with it and I don't think that's a healthy thing to be doing and I have a mistake myself that I'm doing something very similar with and I think maybe we should consider writing a book and going through a procedure and process where we talk to other people about their mistakes and somehow figure out how we can grapple with both the mistakes themselves but also the aftermath of it and that's really how the whole thing began.
How did that conversation on the beach go? Was it warm and fuzzy right away or did it take time to warm up into the depth of what you actually wanted to be talking about?
Given that we're in a Jewish day school and at Shabbat I won't swear but Michael's initial reaction was I would say not quite as warm and fuzzy as his recitation 5 years later. And you know I think the thing about this is we all get annoyed by other people most often when we see something in them that we don't like about ourselves right and that has a very powerful, I think, at least for me, emotional reaction. And so when Michael's hesitancy, which was reasonably profound in the beginning...
Yeah. That kind of hesitancy with a few other f-bombs in there. I got upset and I was like, what's wrong with you? Like you should be willing to do this and why aren't you willing to unpack it? Why aren't you willing to explore it? And I think I was reacting that way, not entirely, but primarily because for 25 years I had refused to do the same thing myself.
All right. So, let's dig in. You know, we are now the beneficiaries of, you know, five plus years of work that you've done investigating the mistakes that you made, the backstories, what led to those mistakes, what happened in the aftermath of those mistakes. So, I want to give each of you a chance to share whatever it is you want to share this afternoon about the mistakes you made, the consequences of those mistakes, and what you learned from them.
Well, maybe it's helpful to start off with the mistakes themselves. What I explored and we were talking earlier about this was the singular decision to make this movie The Interview which is a comedy involving Seth Rogen who I know is a member of this congregation and Seth had come to us with a movie that was designed as an R-rated comedy about that where two hapless journalists played by himself and James Franco go at the direction of the CIA to North Korea ostensibly to interview Kim Jong-un. But really the reason for it is to assassinate Kim Jong-un. And we were in a competitive situation in that moment with Universal because we had made a lot of movies with Seth. Universal had made a lot of movies with Seth and we knew that if we weren't going to say yes, they were going to say yes. And everybody involved on the creative side of the business, Amy Pascal, who I know also and is still a dear friend of mine, who's a member of this congregation, she was all on board with it. And normally what we would have done was we would have created a process where we all get around a table, finance, marketing, the creative folks and collectively determine whether this was a good or bad idea. And there was a process of real deliberation. But that didn't happen in this case. What happened was everybody wanted to make the movie. We were under a tight time schedule. We decided to do a read-through of the script with the actors. Everybody in the room was sort of dressed casually except for me. I normally always wore a suit. I was literally the suit and I was actually the only person who stood between the movie getting made and not.
I gave him the advice not to wear a suit today.
Good advice. And anyway, so the read-through went brilliantly. Everybody was, you know, high-fiving each other at the end saying how funny it was and saying, 'Let's make it.' And for the first time, I'd been in the job now then for about a decade, I said, 'You know what? I just want to be a part of this group. I'm going to say yes.' And in that moment of enthusiasm, in that moment of letting go, I made a giant mistake by agreeing to make that movie. So that's my story. We can get into, you know, what resulted in it was really terrible. The North Koreans wound up hacking our systems. All of our computers were destroyed. You know, people's personal lives were put out on the internet, mine included. People lost their jobs. It was about six months of hell that came out of that.
Josh, do you want to...
So, you want me to comment on your hell or do you want me to...
No, we'll come back to...
Yeah. Well, Michael was making frivolous movies. I was in the government doing the Lord's work. Sorry, I would describe it. No. So at a young age, I was the chief of staff at the Treasury Department when I was 28. And as you alluded to, Rabbi, the first few years of the Clinton administration, no disrespect to the congregation. Normally, I have to describe who Clinton was. I think with this group, I don't have to make that explanation. And as you recall, there was a certain level of controversy on a weekly basis with the president and the first lady. Occasionally, unfortunately. So, one of those was Whitewater, this Arkansas land deal because it involved a bank regulator. Ultimately, the independent counsel wanted to subpoena the records of the people who worked at Treasury, including myself. I took that subpoena seriously, unsurprisingly, and turned over my professional records, all those things, but also my personal ones, which included both a personal diary and love letters to my then girlfriend, now wife, which made reference to Whitewater. It's a whole separate issue about whether that's the way to write love letters. And as a result of all of that, I got subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury. My diary made its way onto the front page of the New York Times. I testified before Congress and it was in that really sweet spot between really humiliating and utterly embarrassing.
So there's a temptation to tell the story exactly as the two of you just did, right? Starting and ending with in a sense the moment of crisis, right? The moment in which you made a decision that you wish you would not have made. But that's not where you went in this book, right? You understood that there are multiple acts, right, to the story of the mistakes that you made and that what you each just described you would label, I think, as act two, right? So...
you read the book carefully.
I read the book carefully. Lots of notes here. If it gets subpoenaed, I'm confident in... No, too soon, Josh. So tell us a little bit about the other two acts, right, act one and act three and how those relate to the moment of the mistake.
Right. So to back up for one moment, when we decided to embark on this, when I finally got over my whatever I was getting over that Josh was referring to, we sort of jumped into the process to write about a couple of other mistakes that we had done before we got to the main event. And we realized in the process that there wasn't anything written about mistakes up until that point. There was a lot of books written about failures and failures are different things from mistakes and we'll come on to that but we also didn't really have a process to explore them. We enlisted the help of a psychologist from Johns Hopkins, Allison Pugh, who has been incredible. And she basically guided us to know the academic literature but also to help us unpack how actually these things happen. So we would write about our mistake. We would all read the mistake and Allison was the one along with Josh to me and me to Josh to say when we're trying to understand what was the impulse that got you to make that decision in the moment and it was a little bit like unpacking one of those Russian dolls. You kept going deeper and deeper in. It's almost like psychoanalysis. In fact, it was a version of that. And as a result of that process, we came up with a bunch of ideas about how these mistakes happen. One of which is what you're referring to, which is this three-act structure. Basically what comes before the mistake that informs how you come to the decision to make the mistake, the mistake itself, and equally importantly the shame that you experience and the desire to sort of put it away from you at the end. And those are really the three acts, wouldn't you say?
So would you be willing to share what you discovered about yourselves as you pulled, you know, pulled Russian dolls out from outside to inside? What was at the core and what were the different layers.
Sure. I think one of the things that's helpful probably and it's obviously very relevant to today's parsha but probably be relevant for every parsha is that when we started this our assumption was that we were going to come up with buckets of mistakes and you start listing them and before long we had 60 plus mistakes because there's all the ones you think of as the seven deadly sins, you know, greed, gluttony, but you keep going through it and there are more and more sins that you began to label and to try to identify and then we tried to come up with buckets and we thought originally we would organize the books around these classifications of mistakes. And specifically to your question, we realized that the only commonality that we were really most curious about is what they revealed about our personalities and who we were as people. That it was less interesting in a way whether the manifestation of that was through greed or anger or gluttony. That wasn't really what was most interesting. We were interested in what came and became revealed about ourselves. And Allison educated us on this really essential element for the book which is this idea of a schema which is that each of us are formed in different ways and we have experiences which shape us and shape our personalities. Sometimes very early in life, sometimes you have a seminal experience in your first job, wherever it might be. And often these mistakes reveal an aspect of your schema. And I'll just give you one way to think about or two ways to think about that schema because it's an essential element of how we thought about the problem. As Michael alluded to, one of the things that Allison did was introduce us to relevant academic literature. And there's a great study on this to help you understand it. So, academics took a group of people and they got volunteers and they said, 'We're going to do a study, one by one, but before we do the study, could you just wait over here in this office and just sit there for a little while?' They bring the volunteer out and then they would ask the volunteer questions about that office and what they remembered about seeing in the office. And the volunteers were much more likely to remember things from that office which they associate with an office, a computer, books, a desk, than they were things they didn't expect to see in an office. And not only that, they remembered things which didn't actually even exist because they had a mental template of what an office should be. And these schemas, these ways we go through the world are essential. Like, you know, you get into an elevator and if there are two people, you both go to the sides. If there are four, you each go into the corner. If there's a fifth person, she or he goes into the middle. And if you didn't know how to do that, it'd be so embarrassing. Every time you got into the elevator, someone would be crowded up next to you. So these schemas are enormously helpful. But they also can lead you astray. And so part of what we really tried to figure out was what was the underlying schema for each of us that was revealed through this mistake. And we'll get into it. And as we introduced other people to this idea and began to interview them about it, what was the schema that was driving a lot of their mistakes?
So maybe give us some examples of what kinds of schema you discovered either within yourselves or as I mentioned earlier part of the structure of the book is that you interviewed 10 or so individuals all of whom have been successful in their careers who are accomplished in their own right and instead of as I said before asking them about their accolades you ask them about their mistakes and in each chapter part of the journey of discovery is towards the underlying schema that then was sort of running in the background often quietly without maybe their knowledge of it but that had everything to do with the mistake that they made so what were some of the schema you encountered about yours?
Yeah, it's maybe helpful just to talk about my schema perhaps but to your point we interviewed a lot of different people and actually most people were successful in their career but some were not and they represent all variety of schema. But in my case, what happened was and again it took a while to figure this out. What was that impulse that wanted me to say yes in that moment and be part of that group? And when I really thought about it, I've always had this desire, although I don't always show it, to be part of the cool group. And I've always had a degree, in fact, a big degree of FOMO, you know, this fear of missing out. And I couldn't ever put my finger on why that thing nagged at me. And what we sort of got to the bottom of was when I was eight or nine years old, I was living in New York in Westchester County and my parents who themselves were immigrants to the United States moved my sister and I to Holland, to the Netherlands, in September and they just threw us right into the school system there. It's an experience they had had themselves in the 40s when they had moved from Europe. So, they didn't think much of it, but I didn't speak the language and I didn't obviously know anybody. And it made me very, very lonely for those first few years trying to get myself situated and everything else. And that was what actually informed that schema in that moment because it really got me to a place where I was always thinking I want to be part of that group. I am not part of that group. How do I become a part of that group? And I think if I, in fact I know having gone through this process that that was the schema, the impulse that drove the mistake and that was a very revealing part of who I am and what motivated me in that moment.
You know, just to pick up on that and I'm a little bit obsessed with these and Michael's often like enough of the academic studies. So if you start rolling your eyes, they're useful. But just to give you a sense of this because this is why at least we found so fascinating about this process is that we would have some reaction and we'd try to think about okay is this universal or is this specific to each of us and one good example is on this issue about peer pressure. So there was a guy named Solomon Asch in the 1950s who did a very famous study at Swarthmore and he took volunteers and he didn't tell them that they would be paired and grouped with professional actors and they would go into a room and each of them would be given two cards. On one card would be three lines of different lengths. On the other card was one line which was the same length as one of the other three. And the people running the study would say to the people, 'Okay, the card with one line on it is the same length as one of the others. Is it A, B, or C?' And when the professional actors lied and said it was C when it was actually B, 75% of the time the volunteers lied and got it wrong. And you think to yourself, that's an incredible example of how groups of people can influence other people's thinking. They then went back and redid the study using MRIs. They put people into an MRI and they did the same study both to validate it and make sure that it was true many many years later. And what was amazing is not only did they validate it, but when people were lying, the part of the brain that got activated was the part that we use for spatial reasoning. They thought they were telling the truth. They didn't think that they were misrepresenting what's going on. And so these groups of people can have an incredible impact. We all know it from peer pressure in movies and we might even know it from today's parsha, Rabbi. If you think about what Aaron was going on, right? Groups of people when they get together and they're fearful, they're scared, they want to belong. It goes back all the way to there. It's been validated by the research and then Michael experienced it in that moment when they were doing the read-through.
I want to come back to this week's parsha because I was very excited in our prep call when you said maybe we'll talk about the parsha and I thought to myself, take that. Good morning, America. Context is also very important and you got to know your audience.
Yeah, exactly. Michael, I mean thinking a little bit about the schema that you just shared.
You wrote in the book that there was a German expression that your mother used to say to you when you were a kid. Something like you can't jump over your shadow.
Your own shadow. You can't jump over your own.
My mother who herself was a psychologist.
Yes. She used to say I can say it in the German but the English translation is one cannot jump over one's own shadow.
Right? So, and then you sort of wrote that that's part of what's happening here, right? That's another way to understand the schema, right? Is that it's a shadow of sorts and of course it...
writes about this as well.
We could talk about metaphors today too.
Yeah. Exactly. Right. So, the question that I want to ask this now projects us a little bit into the future from 2015 so maybe it's a question about the present actually which is how have you found right there's great power right name it to tame it there's great power in understanding what are the underlying schema how do they influence us how might they show up when are we vulnerable to their power yeah right naming it doesn't necessarily make it go away. I mean, these are in your case, right? This is a formative childhood experience that shapes and shaped how you behave in a whole range of circumstances. Now that you have an awareness of this schema, right, now that you know where the shadow is, how do you interact with it differently?
I think the best way to describe it is, the way my wife talks to my kids. I have three daughters. All of them now are in their late 20s, early 30s. And what she used to say when they got, which as many kids of that generation are anxious, she would say to them, that's not you talking, that's your anxiety. And in my case, what I came to understand once I could identify that own schema was when all of a sudden that impulse comes up. And by the way, it still comes up all the time. You know, I'd love to go to that party. I want to be in that meeting. All that kind of stuff. I can really separate myself from that impulse and remind myself of there's another way to think about how you're going to approach whatever decision it is you have to make.
It's that separation that I find so valuable. So you actually in the book the two of you write about a number of strategies right that actually help either intercept the autopilot of the schema or that allow you to slow down and think differently. Could you tell us about and then there's some great acronyms as well, but some strategies and acronyms that have helped you and that might be helpful to us when you find yourself at the cusp of reverting or falling back into the hole that a schema might entrap you in.
Yeah, there are some shortcuts. I would say though before we got to those at least it's our view that the most important part is really what you were discussing. It's the conversation. And the profound aspect of it for us was really partly because it deepened our friendship and because it allowed us to identify and then ultimately get far more comfortable with the schema that we were traveling around with. So probably our view would be the most important thing is this acronym that we use which is DUET because it was a conversation between the two of us and the D stands for disclose. You have to start by saying okay there's something I've done in the past I'm embarrassed about it. I'm ashamed of it. We can talk about the difference of those two things. But it starts by willingness to say, you know what, I'm not going to carry this around by myself alone anymore. There's someone in my life with whom I can have a conversation. And even if there isn't, I can at least write it down in a way that will be helpful. That's the D. The second is you have to unpack it as Michael alluded to because the first assumption about what happened we found was almost always wrong. We went there and we figured out, 'Oh, I got it, Michael. This is the answer.' And Michael would roll his eyes at me and go, 'No, no, no, no. That wasn't what's going on.' And it's a slow process of unpacking and unraveling these things to try to get to the bottom of it. The third piece of it is empathy. And if someone comes to you and wants to talk about their mistake, you just have to demonstrate empathy, which is very different, especially for men, of describing your own mistake. So, try to keep that on the inside and recognize, no, no, this isn't the moment for you to talk about yours, but demonstrate empathy. And the last part is trust. Trust that the person with whom you're speaking is going to treat it confidentially and treat you with empathy and trust yourself that when you disclose this thing, people aren't going to think worse of you. They're not going to be hateful. They're not going to be looking to disparage you, but rather they'll probably respect you for your willingness to talk about it.
One of the things I found surprising about your book was that some of the chapters, you know, detailing the stories of others that you interviewed.
Sorry, Rabbi, can I interrupt one sec? I just think for this group also, I mean, many of us have kids and I do think the modeling part of this is pretty important. I mean, we have three children and for reasons that escape me, they do care about what I think. And they hold us up all I'm sure it's true for many of your children, some cases grandchildren. They admire you. They see what you've done, what you've been able to accomplish. And I really do think a big part of our hope for this book is it gives people permission to model this behavior. And it starts by modeling it and sharing to them and talking to them about something that you might be carrying around. And by doing that, that gives them permission to then do it themselves.
Absolutely. And I think what it also does is it disrupts the potential formation of a new schema around perfectionism.
Yeah. And we have a lot about that in the book. Right? If you see a parent who is unwilling to speak vulnerably with their children and who project a kind of model of the only love is bound up in my own perfectionism and my expectation of your perfectionism and we're never willing to talk about the schmutz that's part of everyday life and the real mistakes that we make, we are often unknowingly contributing to the formation of a schema that could be very damaging.
Yeah, I know. I totally agree. I actually in all seriousness we should talk about today's parsha because the extraordinary part about this is you're surrounded by mistakes. Right. I mean obviously the people of Israel make this terrible mistake. It looks like God's about to make this terrible mistake by just wiping them out. But I mean you're over and over again and then you see this conversation really like the thesis of our book. This conversation between Moses and Hashem about what should happen. And there's an assumption by Hashem that he's going to go off and do something. And then realizes, well, no, I'm going to pull that back. And then, okay, he pulls it back, but then Moses decides, well, you know, half measure might be okay. I'm just going to kill 3,000 of them. I mean, it's full of all the things that we were trying to understand.
Yeah, there's a little... there is a duet going on, right?
Between Moses.
In fairness, there's a conductor and there's like a participant, but it is a duet. There might be a power imbalance. Although interestingly, right, as happens throughout the Torah, despite the power imbalance between God and Moses, it's Moses who presents the winning argument again and again or makes the case for God to shift God's course of action.
Right.
Right. And then we can have theological debates about what's going on there. Is this actually representative of God changing and God is creating the pedagogic moment opportunity for Moses to become the teacher? But since we're on the topic of this week's parsha, when you mentioned it the other day, I started to think to myself, so what was the operating schema for the Israelites that led them to behave the way that they did when Moses was according to their perspective, you know, one day late coming down the mountain, right? And I'm curious if you have an answer to that. I'm happy to share my thoughts.
I think Josh would be better equipped to answer. You want to or should I? Or I can also share sort of my thinking.
But I think one of the things because I did, you know, like any other nice Jewish boy who got bar mitzvah, I did think to myself, okay, I'm not going to show up here without having at least read a little bit about the parsha. So I did go off and do that. One of the things to your point that did interest me and I apologize if like this probably was your sermon last year or something. There's a reading of what Aaron did which was a little bit for those people who remember Mutiny on the Bounty which is how do you keep people busy and distract them right and that's one reading of the parsha that Aaron recognizes that there's this crisis and Moses is missing and people are getting more and more anxious and distracted and everything else and he's thinking okay I got to keep him busy long enough for Moses to come back and that he never expected to get all the...
way to the golden calf. And that his mistake was not actually the golden calf itself but using a not particularly perfect leadership technique to keep the group together. And it's one of the great things about studying midrash is you go off and find these interpretations and then you realize it plays itself out in popular literature for thousands of years later in a very similar way to how do you keep groups together in a moment of crisis.
You know Aaron is described elsewhere in text as rodef shalom, a pursuer of peace and a lover of peace. And it's meant in the rabbinic tradition as praise for Aaron, right? As a quality of leadership that we should aspire to. And yet there is a critique within that description of Aaron as it pertains to this particular incident, which Josh, I think connects to what you're saying here, which is that, you know, maybe in simpler terms, we'd call Aaron a people pleaser.
Right. Who didn't actually have the boundariness in that particular moment to say something to the people that would have been hard for them to hear because there was group consensus building about what they wanted to do. And Aaron ought to have said, I recognize the energy that is bubbling up here. I see the excitement. I see the anxiety. I see the worry in the group. Let's take a beat. What you're doing is actually heading down a catastrophic road that you don't want to be. But Aaron, that would have meant positioning himself against the entirety of the people in a way that might have been uncomfortable for him and his personality.
That was his schema. And then there was another piece in the Torah obviously about how you shouldn't let your sons marry women who come from a different faith because ultimately they'll revert back to their faith and they'll bring their husbands with them.
Right? And so that's religion as a schema where God is instructing the Jews not to marry outside the faith because of how deeply embedded religion is. And that's a form of schema for some people too.
Yeah. This is more than a good Jewish boy if you studied the haftarah. That's like... not me, not me.
That's sort of another layer here. Another level. So okay. So, but since we're now, you know, sort of really in the realm of Jewish thought and how Jewish thought relates to the writing that you've done, I guess I want to ask in the first chapter of the book, and this connects to something you said earlier, Michael, about what has been written on this topic and what hasn't been written on this topic and the paths that you needed to pursue in order to develop your understanding of mistakes and of the field more broadly. So there's a section in the first chapter where you kind of go through a number of different religions and a number of different theories about sin or mistakes really more sin and that is part of the process of realizing you're going to have to go down a new path. So tell us a little bit about what you found to be the disconnect between the religious orientation to this topic and it could be Jewish or beyond and where was why was there a need to head down other paths?
No I think you should criticize Judaism Michael go right ahead.
That was the criticism part of the question. It's a little bit I'll touch on the surface, but Josh should jump in. As Josh mentioned, there was an effort at the beginning to try and explore mistakes by categorizing them. And when we did that, we created this enormous list. And the list looked very similar as Josh indicated to the seven deadly sins, except in a longer version of it.
But that's really a morality tale more than it is anything else. And that's not really what we were going for. We were trying to understand what is the emotional impulse that leads you to these decisions.
And so I think that at that moment where we sort of understood that we shouldn't just be categorizing them according to the morality of religion but trying to understand it from a psychological and emotional perspective that the divide showed up.
I think just to pick up what Michael said there were lots of paths we could have taken in some of the stories. We talk a lot about race and gender and the role of race and gender in the decisions that people made and we could have had a book which was really only about these big societal trends and the impact of those on people and their mistakes. We could have to your question come at it from religion and ultimately we chose a different path. But that's not to suggest that we didn't think these societal trends were important and it wasn't to suggest that we didn't think religion could help us understand what was happening. But you know 250 pages seemed like a lot. So it would have been a lot longer book for everyone to endure if we embraced all those different paths.
Right. Right. So obviously I read the book through the lens of my training and through what I've learned on your schemas.
Would you like to reveal any other than Judaism.
Well, I'm trying to practice the E of duet and not overshare my stuff. We're in conversation with...
But now you have permission. Fair enough.
That's true. He trapped me. He trapped me. Maybe it'll come.
Okay. I'll tell you one funny thing.
You didn't hear when I was talking about perfectionism. You didn't hear.
Okay. I was going to get there. We went on Wall Street Week with a guy named David Westin, who was very generous to have us. And David, to his credit, at one point we turned to him and said, David, why don't you tell us about one of your mistakes? And so for those of you who don't watch Wall Street Week regularly, you can go find it on YouTube. And there he is. David Westin on air decided to talk about one of his mistakes. And that was from our perspective gold.
Because that was the moment where he's like, Okay, if you guys are willing to go on national television, talk about it. I invited you here. Maybe I should be willing to do it, too.
Yeah. Yeah. Now, admittedly, he had made a very...
Let the silence fall. Michael bail me out there.
