Hello and welcome to tonight's Commonwealth Club World of Affairs program. My name is Michael Lewis. I'm a journalist and author, and your moderator for this evening's program. Just a few reminders before we get started. Tonight's program is being recorded, so we kindly ask you to silence your cell phones for the duration of our program. If you have any questions for tonight's guests, please fill out the cards that were on your seats or through the chat on YouTube.
Now, it's my pleasure to introduce Michael Lynton and Josh Steiner, co-authors of From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You. Michael's the chairperson of Snap Inc. and has spent his career in the media and entertainment business. Previously, he was former CEO of Sony Entertainment. And it's funny, that's all that's there because he was also the head of Penguin Publishing when they bought the paperback rights to my first book, Liar's Poker. And we'll get to that. But we've been close friends ever since. Joshua has worked in government finance and the nonprofit sector after serving as chief of staff for the US Treasury Department. He became a banker at Lazard before co-founding two investment firms and serving as an executive at Bloomberg. Michael and Michael. And Josh, if you're there, congratulations on your new book. Come on in.
Thank you. All righty. So bright is a little bright. But you're used to that, aren't you? So we will learn as we talk about my chapter. Yeah. So it is a little bit of a structure. Because there's a structure to their book. It starts with a couple of personal stories and then tries to generalize from them and some other stories they tell about mistakes. And I mean, I've obviously heard both the stories. I could read about them endlessly. You both make very charming mistakes. They didn't, but I just I'd like to. Let's start. What I'd like to do is just so the audience knows what we're talking about in some detail, go into your story, the mistake, the thing that got you interested in mistakes in the first place. And let's start with you.
Great. First of all, thank you all for coming. And thank you to the Commonwealth Club. And Michael, thank you. This is a little about like, you know, Barry Bonds interviewing little Leaguers about baseball. So I'm sure the audience would be happy if we reversed it and asked you questions about writing. When I was 28, I was chief of staff at the Treasury Department, and it seems all kind of quaint now. But the first years of the Clinton administration were somewhat mired in controversy, including what was known as the Whitewater investigation. And because I was chief of staff at Treasury, all of my personal and professional records got subpoenaed. And as part of that, I did the surprising thing in Washington, which was actually to comply with a subpoena. And I turned over my personal diary and some letters that I had written to my then girlfriend, now wife. And in that diary, were references to Whitewater not written in the way that one really should describe a rather potent, toxic political investigation.
And tell us a few, because you actually don't go into it much in the chapter. Yeah. I mean, just so we get the flavor of this thing.
One of the great things about being 60 is you can complain about your memory, and I'm just going to complain about my memory. No, you know, what happened was and this is relevant for the book and to your point about the broader lessons that we drew. I started keeping a diary when I was traveling through Asia in my early 20s. And it was very sort of atmospheric. And you're traveling around and you meet people and you're curious about what you're seeing, and you jot down notes, and I use that same structure, which is to say, a very informal way of doing it. When I got to Washington, and that wasn't so appropriate when you're describing White House meetings or the fact that the president might have been somewhat annoyed about special counsels or things like that. So that led me to being called to testify before Congress and the grand jury, and having my diary splashed across the front page of the New York Times.
I remember vividly, yeah, so do I.
And that led to this sort of like this sweet spot of humiliation, shame, embarrassment, that perfect triangle of an unhappy Washington experience. It's an amazing experience.
Yeah. When you were. So you're 28 years old and, in the moment, if I had asked you what the mistake was. Right. What would you have said?
Well, this is part of what was fun about the book and partly what was great about working with Michael on it is my impression at the time, right at that moment was first keeping a diary, but then you reflect on it and you realize that throughout history, people who work in public service keep diaries, and it's a useful tool. There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that. It's probably not great to keep the same kind of diary in Washington that you do when you're in Bali and admiring the swaying palm trees. So that's not so great. So at that very moment, I thought the mistake was what I'd written in the diary. Not keeping it, what I'd written in it. And then over time, and really, I think with the help of Michael, as we discuss this in the book, there were two big realizations. One was I just tried too hard to make it okay. Like, you know what? I was embarrassed, and I was caught between not wanting to say that I had misrepresented the facts in my diary, but also not trying to say that what was in my diary was a perfect record of whatever occurred. Right. And I should have just like, you know, follow that old adage, never complain, never explain and said, yeah, it speaks for itself. And that was a mistake. The real mistake, I think.
So what did you do actually, instead of that, you said, what?
Well, you can, you know, if anyone's curious and they really suspect you won't be after this evening. But if one were curious and I can tell you this is really easily accessible because all of my children have done this. You can go on YouTube and you can look it up. And there on C-Span is me with a lot more hair.
Awesome hair, by the way. Yeah, I remember, yeah.
Thank you. It's probably the only positive thing that one does remember. And I would go back and forth to the senators and they would read something from my diary and I'd say, well, I wasn't at that meeting, so I don't actually know what President Clinton said. Well, it says President Clinton was furious. And I said, well, I was told that President Clinton was furious, which is different from saying that Clinton was furious. Right. And I'm not an attorney, but I sounded like a bad Matlock or something. And I was trying to, like, balance it all and not have people angry with me. And I should have said, yeah, my guess is he was pretty damn unhappy about the special counsel being called to investigate this. And I didn't.
I remember feeling so sorry for you at the time. I remember right, that's what everyone watches. No, no, no. But I felt it felt really unfair. And it wasn't clear to me. We're going to. I don't want to sit too long in this story, but I wish I would be okay. I want to slander my. No, no, no, I want to say. I want to say, I want to sit here. I want to sit with this just a bit. Because at the time, I thought the mistake was you even admitting you had a diary.
So this is a question mark, and I've gotten that recently. And why did I turn it over? No one knew that I kept it. Nobody. Right? Nobody. Nobody. You know, even at 28, even in the cauldron of this toxic stew of Republicans coming after you and Monica Lewinsky is found in this whole process, right?
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay. Let's just. You're right. So I know this is, like, very appealing. Unfortunately, until Mrs. Lewinsky arrived on the scene after I had already given the investigation.
Yes. I'm investigating. So it's a gumbo of a thing that's going on there.
Yeah. You've heard of the gumbo? She's the sausage and you're the rice. Okay.
Yeah, yeah. I'm like, I'm not even going to go to that. But the record say that was Michael Lewis. For anyone wondering who was thinking when that analogy was drawn, that was not George Steiner. You're letting me make the. Audio portion only that was Michael Lewis.
Okay, okay. So, I've now even forgotten the question.
Now, the question was the subpoena. Look, when you get a subpoena in Washington or anywhere, and I'm not an attorney, as I said, but word to the wise, read it carefully before you do anything, consult with an attorney. But it's super clear the subpoena says turn over all of your records that pertain to the matter under investigation. Right. They don't say, you know what? If some of it's embarrassing, maybe like stick it in a drawer or if it feels uncomfortable, you know, diary. I know, but the law is the law. And, you know, in all seriousness, it's not I'm not trying to be preachy about this, but the law is the law. Yep. And you have a choice. And you're 28 and you decide, okay.
I may was a little bit brave and it was a little bit, I'm sure, fear of being caught too. Like. And I don't want to pretend it was just virtue.
Has anybody catch you? If you're the only one who knows it exists?
Well, this is the whole thing about shame. I mean, we talk about this in the book, and the thing about shame is it's very different from embarrassment. Embarrassment is when someone sees you doing something bad and you're embarrassed and you are unhappy with the fact that they've seen you doing it. Shame is when you feel badly about yourself. Yeah, and it stays with you and it's deeply corrosive. And so even if I'd never been caught, I would have been ashamed of that decision. And so I'm glad I didn't make that decision.
I mean, I think that's you should be proud of that decision.
Then I think I'm relatively proud, certainly enabled me to work with Michael on this great book. But for that decision, I wouldn't be here. So there's a lot of things.
So what do you think the mistake was then?
Well, we're going to get to that. But, you know, one of the things we really unpacked as we went through this is the idea that every mistake is a three act play. This is what happens before the Me opposition. Yeah. You make that decision. In my case, it was writing what I did in the diary. And then there's the third act, which is how you really deal with it and how you process that shame and embarrassment and my mistake really came in the third act. My third act was a whole new mistake, and I spent too much time suppressing that and having it metastasize inside of me. And, you know, guaranteed no one remembered this or cared about it.
Now I made my student student. No, no, no, but it must have it. Must have. Remembered it. Yeah. No one cared about like no one. No one cared, right? Except for me. And so if I saw an article or a story which even referenced the word diary, my heart rate went up like I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. And that was because I had suppressed this for so long. And so the process of writing this with Michael and talking about it with Michael was, you know, a deep form of exposure therapy.
So I want to get to how the book came about. Before we do that, I want to talk, Michael, tell the story. But before you tell your story, Michael. Yeah, I just want to tell you, I mean, I could have guessed at some point you were going to make a mistake from the first time we met.
I'm glad you're looking at him. Lean back. You. Yeah. Okay. Because we met in Washington. June.
That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with the towel.
But no, I didn't. You didn't have the towel was. You had bought Liar's Poker as a paperback. Yeah. I still had not met you. But you invited me through someone else to come to, Las Vegas for the American Booksellers Association convention and to promote the paperback before it came out. So it was whatever it was six months after the hardback came out, 1990. And then I get that saying that you have commissioned a musical.
I've heard this story. I have no recollection.
Yes, you have. So remember your mistakes. But but I'm musical and I'm just saying that I have to sing and dance in this musical and that, and I'm given a song and a dance number, and the song is called I'm a Big Swinging . And, And I thought, this guy is a risk taker. I thought, something's going to happen here. I apologize. I don't know how. So it came that came off okay. Yes. So but let's talk about let's talk about so you went on so you want to sing the song for us.
Oh okay. But yeah, I mean I actually. Oh I'm a few bars. Yeah. No, but but so, so you so flash forward and we were in business again in a kind of a messy situation. You bought the movie rights to Moneyball? Yeah. And you made Moneyball. Yeah, but after some. I mean, a lot of mistakes, a lot of contortions, a lot of mistakes. Yeah, but let's talk about the your story in this book.
Yeah, I got I watched it, right. I mean, I was there you were there a lot of the time. Yeah. So. And then out of the house. I would love to. I would love to hear it though.
So my mistake. But I can tell you what happened before. And what happened after was agreeing in the moment to make the movie The Interview, starring Seth Rogen, which is about two hapless journalists, Seth and James Franco, who go off to North Korea under the direction of the CIA, to assassinate Kim Jong UN. And it was a comedy, right? Not what you would, you know, naturally think is a comedy. But it was definitely a comedy and pretty funny movie. It was a funny movie. It came out really funny. What led up to it was not funny. Okay, so. We were in a competitive situation at the time. We'd made a bunch of movies with Seth Rogen. They were all of them successful, but so had another studio, universal, and the two people at the top of those two studios, Amy Pascal at Sony and, Stacy Snyder at Universal were rivals. So there was that to boot. And everybody at the studio who was responsible had for making movies had read the script, and they all wanted to make it. Amy, most particularly. And at that moment, we had a really good process in place before we decided to make a movie, we would assemble all the relevant people, bring them into a room, the finance person, the marketing person, creative, and you would go through the numbers and you would talk about what the pitfalls could be and policy and legal, and then you would come to a decision. None of that happened here. I've been in the job for ten years. I had been the suit around the lot for ten years. I'd been the grown up in the room for ten years, and I was tired of doing that. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was, and we agreed because everybody wanted to make this movie. And I was the holdout because I was there was something in the back of my mind that was not comfortable with it that we would do a read through. So you go to a room and all of the actors are there with their scripts, and there was a bunch of people from the production side of the studio, Amy included. And I was once again the only person there in a suit. And the read through happened, and it was indeed very funny, super funny. And at the end of the read through, everybody's high fiving and saying, let's do this. And all of a sudden, totally out of character, I found myself high fiving and saying, let's do this. Which, under the normal set of circumstances, I would have been the person saying, okay, now let's go to another room and I'll figure out whether this is the right thing to do. Right? And in that moment, I didn't realize it at the time, but I made an enormous mistake.
So you want me to go on? About what?
Yeah, I want to. Yes, I want to. Why? We go ahead and we make the movie. And then round about June of that year, we put out a trailer and we get a notice. We have no formal relations with North Korea, so we don't have any way of hearing from the government. But through channels, there is a notice that comes to the studio, what we think is the North Korean envoy in New York to say, don't put out this movie or bad things will happen. And I sort of take it seriously and I call up an acquaintance at the State Department at a very senior level and the Rand Corporation and say, do we have anything to worry about? And they said, nothing. You have nothing to worry about. They're all bark, no bite. Unfortunately, they were talking about Kim Jong un's father, Kim Jong IL, who had just died two years previously. Nobody really understood how crazy the new guy was, right? And so we ignored it. And all of a sudden in come September, we were going to release the picture in the Christmas period, I'm driving to work and I get a call from our CFO, Dave Handler, and he says, Michael, something's happened. Everything is out of the studio. Nothing is working. No email. All the all of our laptops seem to be fried. We cannot operate. And I show up there and indeed, everything has been brought to a standstill. And from there it was months of disaster, starting with them unspooling they, the North Koreans, unspooling emails in a cache which journalists have to type in Die Sony. And then all of a sudden they get all these salacious emails involving movie stars and people saying things to other people, meanwhile. And everybody get learned everybody's salary, everybody learns everybody's salary. Are you telling me how disruptive that was? That was terrible because you're sitting next to somebody and you're doing the same job, and one person is earning more than the other, and that was disruptive. It was also all of my personal emails were out there, plus all of my kids medical records and then to boot, Julian Assange living in the basement of the Ecuadorean God knows why embassy in London decides to wiki everything, all of my emails. So they're all indexed. So everybody can easily reference them, and then they start releasing movies. We had also up on our system an A Karate Kid, not none of which had been released yet, so they released those over the internet. They released the James Bond script, which hadn't been made yet. It was a disaster. And, at the very sort of at a certain point when it got really, really bad, I decided that I would go to New York and go on Fareed Zakaria Show for ten minutes. I was invited to do so to try and take the heat off of Amy Pascal, who is running the studio, who's getting a lot of flak at the time. Right. I get there and. She's not getting a flack about making the movie. She getting flak about. The. Emails, e-mails and get it out, right? Yes. Exactly right. I get to the studio and in that moment, the government decides to release the information that indeed it was the North Koreans. And Fareed Zakaria turns to me and says, let's hear what the president has to say before we get on. Oh my God. Yeah, yeah. And I say, okay. And a reporter asked President Obama, what are you going to do about the North Koreans? And how do you think Sony has behaved up until now? And probably because he didn't have an answer to the first question, he chose to answer the second. And he said, oh, I should start by saying my wife Jamie did not want me to go on Fareed's show. And in the first place, she said, this kid, no good can come of this. So he answers the second question. He says, I think Sony is, not respecting the First Amendment that this that they're not releasing the movie. Oh, because you hadn't released we. Hadn't released the movie in the theater. Sorry. I neglected to say one thing. The theaters had been threatened, and they therefore said they would not put the movies in theaters. Right. And President Obama not really fully understanding how it all works. We don't have theaters. We rely on third parties for that. He he had he deduced that we were therefore. Censoring. The movie, censoring the movie. So you get it from both sides. I'm getting from both sides. And as he says this, I looked down and indeed, my wife Jamie types out. Because that's how I was, and that's certainly how she was feeling back in LA. And you're right, before you go in the air. Right before I go on the air and read. Those, we're talking points.
Michael, just to be clear. Gets a call from this is a movie. Yeah. Well, and then he gets a call from Jeff Zucker, who was running CNN at the time. He comes back in the room and he says, okay, I just got a call from my boss. It can no longer be a ten minute interview. We either go on and do a full hour, which I had no preparation for, or we cancel the whole interview.
So I did indeed go on, and I tried to explain, and it turned out to be really useful because I could explain what was actually going on at the studio and what the people at Sony were actually doing, and they were very brave. And, and I actually had to explain that the president was wrong and the, the. The. The, the coda on this was that ten days later, I'm driving in my car in LA and the phone rings and somebody says, I have President Obama for you. And he called and he apologized. He said, I'm sorry that I said what I said.
Bring tears to my eyes. But we have a president who apologized.
Exactly, exactly. But firm one doesn't make any mistakes. But that's true. Yeah, exactly. We have a president currently who is not prone to that. And then at the very end of it he said, but don't you think making a movie about a hostile leader of a country and where you assassinate them, don't you think that's a bit of a mistake? And I had to admit it was. And it was the first time I suddenly understood that it was a mistake.
All right, well, that's interesting. That's sort of what happened. So it doesn't seem to me that out there to make a movie about the assassination of some political leader, because there are an awful lot of them out there already. Not really not you don't see people blowing up Putin or, gee, or, you know. Day of the Jackal.
Well, that was Charles de Gaulle, and it was a long time ago, and they missed. We didn't miss. Maybe, maybe the crime was making it a comedy. Yeah. Maybe. But anyway, however, I remember at the time, we had many conversations at the time and I was very I still feel very sympathetic towards your your situation. Yeah. It's not clear to me that if you had done, you're gone through your ordinary process that that you wouldn't have made the movie.
One thing would have definitely stopped it, which, there were a lot of things that would have stopped. Really? Yeah.
I bet you my g the the general counsel would have gotten in the way. But our head of public policy, who also told me it was a mistake, reminded me, which I knew all the time that I was working for a Japanese company. And the Japanese have a very specific relationship with the North Koreans, which is a bad one. And they had, they had actually kidnaped the North Koreans, 100 school children off the streets of Tokyo back in the late 70s and in the and just as we were making this movie, Prime Minister Abe was trying to make amends with North Korea specifically to get those kids back. Oh, God. So there was a whole there was a lot of theater going on. There was a lot of things going around in the background that I was not aware of, but I should have been aware.
They want to I want to plumb the depths of your mistake for a minute before you said if you hadn't made it, someone would have made it.
So this whole story would be about universal then? No,
because they probably would have listened to the threats and not put it out. I also had I had a history a little bit with this kind of thing because I had and I had worked at Penguin, which is when we met and I came after a few years after they published this, The Satanic Verses, which is another version of this whole story.
That's right. Even worse. Yeah, but they kept at it. They published the book and they put it on shelves. And that really emboldened me to do the same here. You know, you can't bow to censorship, right? So what do you think? Analyze your mistake. What where is it coming from?
Well, that's in the book too. So yeah. So we, we talk about in the book that early in our lives, we develop a way of seeing the world. There are many ways of seeing the world that become ingrained with us. And we call they're called schemas. And they're useful in many ways because they give you a shorthand on how to deal with things in a moment. You have an immediate response to certain stuff. Yeah. Well, you wrote the book you wrote Thinking Fast and thinking, well, I, Kahneman and. I wrote the. The Undoing. Right. And so that's a piece of it. And my schema that that came to the fore was I was my parents moved us to Holland from the, from the United States when I was like 8 or 9 years old. And I arrive in Holland in September right into the school without speaking any Dutch. And I was a very lonely kid for a few years. And I, in that period, really developed a strong desire to be accepted within a community, accepted with the cool kids, which I clearly wasn't. And that sort of persisted through a lot of my life. And it definitely came up in that moment where I suddenly thought to myself, I want to be. I'm tired of being the grown up. I'm tired of being the guy in the suit. I want to be having fun with all of these guys. And that schema played out right then. In there.
There's a just inject one thing on this. One of the things we did in the book was try to find the relevant psychological literature that goes along in support of the schemas that we were discovering. This and there's one great study that was done in the 1950s by a guy named Solomon Asch at Swarthmore, which I should just mention. So, yeah, no, no, you're right. To Michael's story is, he takes the subjects and he tells them what I'm going to do, this experiment. He doesn't tell them that he's putting them with professional actors, and the subjects are put in a room with a bunch of professional actors, and they're given two cards on one card or three lines of different length. And another card is a line which matches one of the three. And the test was when the professional actors who the volunteer things are other volunteers lie and say, oh, that line is a when it's actually clearly B or C 75% of the volunteers at least once give the wrong answer. And if you don't have a. Pair of lengths of lines. Comparing length of line, which it's. Very obvious which. Totally. Obvious people will be led to say the thing that they say the wrong thing correct is a. And if they don't lie, it's less than 1% of the time, okay that someone gives the wrong answer. So they think, okay, this is the 1950s at Swarthmore. You know, it's a difficult time in our country. So let's just go back and try to repeat this. And so at Emory University, they went back and did the same test. They put people on MRI's, gave them a version of the same test. Exactly. The same results. So they were able to replicate the results. But not just that. When people were lying, the part of the brain that got activated was the part of the brain that we use for reasoning. They thought they were telling the truth. They didn't think they were lying. It's so powerful that when you're surrounded by people who are giving you influence or pressure or trying to tell you something's right or not, that your brain actually is so confused that you think you're telling the truth.
Which what surprises me about your interpretation of your story. Michael. Yeah. Is, is that of all the people I've known in the movie business, you were the least susceptible to this kind of thing. That's true. And in fact, you stood out as being seemingly indifferent to the glitz around you.
Yes, that's very true. And in fact, most of the people, because this thing was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, and I got a lot of texts and emails about it from the people in Hollywood, and they all pretty much said this. This is this is a false interpretation. No, I think no, no, no, quite the contrary. When I got out, when I moved out there, I put on armor really. And I, I consciously avoided some aspects of being part of that community because everybody wants something from you all the time. And so there was a part that I think I gave off that vibe all the time. Yeah. In truth, after ten years of being the sued, as I mentioned earlier, and being Mr.. No, I got tired and I really did in that moment, want to be with that group of people. It wasn't often that was the case, but in that moment it was definitely it's. Also true, Michael. So just to say that, you know, mistakes are super painful when you repeat them, but sometimes the mistakes that are most painful are ones that go exactly against who you think you are as a person. And so for me, well, that's true too. And so that was why. And for me, in the case of the diary, I thought I had pretty good judgment. There's a woman here who worked with me. And she will differ. But, I thought I had pretty good judgment. And so when you do something which goes against who you think you are. Yeah, it's especially painful.
Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. So let's talk a little bit about how you decided these many years later to, to revisit the mistakes and why you thought it would be valuable. How did the book come about?
It started with the walk. I mean, you and I walk all the time. Josh and I were taking walk. We were good friends before. And Josh turned to me and he said, you know something? I think we should potentially write a book about mistakes. I know you have a mistake because Josh and I talked during that period. He was very helpful to me on a certain subject. Actually, a couple of things during during the hack and I nowadays, this was five years later. Whenever I try and come back and revisit that subject with you, you avoid it. And I know you don't want to talk about this, and I know that it because and he said, I have a mistake in me too. And I know that I'm avoiding it as well. And I know that it's not good for either one of us. It's not healthy. And I think we should explore the subject. I think we should try and figure out a way to get to the bottom of some of this stuff. And I said, let me think about it. And then when I thought about it, I thought, yeah, I can't just keep living with this thing and not it.
Bother you that much? It did. Bother me.
It bothered you that much. I still I never looked at a wiki. I never looked at any any pieces on this. Any time people even mention the word hack, you know that I would just walk out of the room. So it would really hung over me. So that's so. So you just say this is, what, five years ago or something? You. Yeah. Yeah. This conversation.
You wouldn't know, but it's hard to write a book. Michael.
Well, some time. Well, yeah, it's a different kind of book. I mean, I on that note, this is a very it is hard to write a book like this. Yeah. Because it's a book with lots of different little stories rather than one big narrative. And then you're there, you're figuring out how how to get across the many little ideas you want to get across and some big ideas through a whole bunch of different characters, including yourselves. And that's just it's like different from what I do once I find a story and I'm in the story, it just kind of writes itself.
Sure it does. It really does. It really does is the hard part is finding the story for me. But but you you. So you decided to do this thing. What makes you even think? I mean, there are all kinds of questions I have. I mean, if you asked me to write a book about my mistakes, I'd say like, where do I start? And hundreds of them, right? And I've always kind of thought a well live. Life is filled with mistakes. Yeah. You want to make mistakes. Yeah. And you don't want to create a situation where you're afraid to make mistakes because you've sort of fetishized them in some way. You've obsessed about them. On the other hand, maybe YouTube never made any other mistakes. You know, maybe that's the thing. You live on the West Coast. We're very uptight. Yeah, yeah, well, it's just. Like the difference. I mean, those were pretty dramatic. Well, no, I think I'm saying. We. Started this. We didn't start with the main act. We, you know, we started writing about other mistakes. We had plenty of material, but the realization was a we had to practice and be. It takes a. While. What do you mean you had to practice?
We had to practice talking about mistakes. Oh, I see, you know, we're so accustomed in life you run into an old friend and you say, how are things going? And you what you expect is maybe there's something difficult going on their lives. But for the most part, they like talking about something. They're happy about their work or they're their. Children, or they're in excess. Yeah. And when one of the ways we think about this is, you know, imagine you go to your college reunion and you sit down in the dining room, the table, and on your left is a woman and she's started three companies and she's worth $6 billion. And across from you is a scientist. And his experiment has failed. But in the process, he came up with a new polymer. It's really cool and on your right is a guy named Joe. And you said, Joe, like, I haven't seen you in 20 years. And he says, yeah, yeah, I know. And I go, well, why not? And he said, well, I made this really embarrassing mistake. And I was ashamed to come back to reunion. Now you have a choice. Like, do you want to hear about the unbelievably successful entrepreneur? You can hear about the polymer or you can talk about the mistake, obviously. Right. Obviously. Except there wasn't a book about mistakes before, and obviously we don't know how to ask the right questions. And we screwed up a bunch of times. Like you rush to a conclusion right about what the root cause of it is, or you then start talking about yourself. Well, I made that mistake too. There's 73 ways where you can shut the person down.
Exactly. Yeah, no. And approximately we got to 72 and we couldn't come up with the 73rd. And so it took a lot of practice and that's what we had to do.
Well, first with ourselves and then we also got this awesome psychologist from Hopkins, and. I saw, what's her name, Alison. Papa Dan.
So how did you choose your. This person is your kind of guide to the literature.
It was a really careful process. I called the president of Hopkins, and he put me in touch with the chair of the psychology department, and she introduced me to Alison.
And you told her what you were doing, which you make of it.
She was, I think, a little baffled at first and then. Yeah. And she was a little I would say, I would say she was rightly concerned, like, who are these two yahoos? And why would I actually jeopardize my academic career by being, you know, jumping in the water with them? Yeah. Yeah. That's my interpretation.
Neither one of you ever written a book. You've just written a diary. And so. We went back to the. Beginning about. No, no, no. Okay, I have some. If you had some of you variance you mind. I'm. No, no. You had some experience. Yeah. It's putting words on a page and the end. The world was riveted by it. Were there you had that experience by words or or. Anyway, we. Sold more copies in this book. Yeah. But but so you so so so that's. So you're coming at it completely fresh as like, how do we do this. Yeah. And that's interesting coming at this fresh as non authors.
Well our editor. Here Shannon Welch is here and she's awesome. And we did our first draft and we were like oh who's ever done. We're done this. So good. Like really good. She's like yeah yeah yeah. So it turns out if you haven't written the book before, it's harder than it looks.
Well, how did you do it? You did the alternate chapters. Did you, would you do did you write it together?
