Luke Burgis - The One and the Ninety Nine S8 | E14

Summary

Radical Candor: Communication at Work – Episode Summary
S8 | E14: Luke Burgis – The One and the Ninety Nine
Release Date: May 13, 2026
Hosts: Kim Scott & Luke Burgis

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Episode Overview

In this compelling episode of the Radical Candor podcast, Kim Scott is joined by Luke Burgis to discuss his new book, The One and the Ninety Nine. The conversation explores the tension between individual identity and belonging, using the biblical parable of the lost sheep as a framework for understanding personal growth, workplace dynamics, family systems, education, and modern political identity. Through personal stories and thought-provoking examples, Scott and Burgis delve into how we can develop a “solid self” within communities—at work, with family, and in society—rather than losing ourselves to conformity or unhealthy group dynamics.

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Key Topics & Discussion Points

1. The Meaning Behind "The One and the Ninety Nine" (03:00–06:30)

• Book Title & Parable:
  • Inspired by the biblical parable of the lost sheep, the book's title reflects the essential tension between “the one” (the individual) and “the ninety-nine” (the group).
  • Burgis emphasizes that the critical word is “and” – the interplay and integration of individuality and community, not radical individualism or collectivism.
  • Quote (Luke Burgis, 04:22):
    "My message is not like radical individualism ... the most important word in the whole title is the word 'and.'"
• Application to Work & Life:
  • The parable is reframed as a lesson in leadership, care, and culture—drawing parallels to workplace dynamics, where attention to individual needs ultimately serves and strengthens the whole team.

2. The Story of August Landmesser: Courage & Non-Conformity (06:46–11:50)

• Historical Example:
  • Burgis recounts the story of August Landmesser, famously pictured not giving the Nazi salute at a rally, as an example of being “the one” who stands apart for moral reasons.
  • They discuss how difficult and rare it is to resist groupthink, even in more trivial situations.
  • Quote (Luke Burgis, 09:02):
    “When I saw that, I thought … wow. He had to be the one in the ninety-nine.”
• Moral Reflection:
  • The conversation prompts listeners to reflect on whether they would have the courage to dissent, and how everyday choices—like gossip—shape our character.

3. Family Systems, The “Solid Self,” and Workplace Relevance (12:31–19:57)

• Murray Bowen’s Theory:
  • Introduction to Bowen’s family systems theory: understanding individuals through the systemic lens of family relationships.
  • Tendency to develop a “pseudo self"—adapting beliefs and behaviors to maintain family or group harmony.
  • Quote (Luke Burgis, 15:13):
    “He did an experiment … if I can do it once in my family, I know it will probably cause friction, but I need to be the one to do it.”
• Application to Work:
  • The importance of bringing a “solid self” (not your “whole” or worst self) to work, and how roles like “peacemaker” can lead to self-censorship or insincerity.

4. Education, Mimetic Desire, and Rites of Passage (24:35–37:28)

• Educational Critique:
  • The education system fails to provide enough space for self-discovery; relentless busyness crowds out time for reflection.
  • Discussion of Marshall McLuhan, technology’s impact on attention, and the loss of sensory depth in digital environments.
  • Quote (Kim Scott, 25:27):
    "I feel like one of the problems with our education system is that it doesn't give kids time to, as my grandmother would say, rusticate."
• Antidotes: Rites of Passage & Ownership:
  • Burgis emphasizes the need for true rites of passage—experiences that are risky, challenging, and foster ownership and maturation.
  • Entrepreneurship and “dangerous” learning are offered as ways to foster real growth and independence.

5. Mimetic Desire, Authenticity, and Career Choices (37:28–40:53)

• Mimesis Defined:
  • Burgis explains René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire: most of our desires are implicitly copied from those around us.
  • Recognizing when choices (e.g., college major, career) are driven by true passion or the influence of others.
  • Quote (Luke Burgis, 38:29):
    “I entered college and majored in what the most confident students around me were majoring in...it was finance.”

6. Political Identity: The Challenge of the “Solid Self” in Polarized Times (41:46–47:16)

• Formation of the Political Self:
  • How our political identities are subtly and powerfully shaped by our environments and early influences.
  • The concept of the “pseudo self” vs. “solid self” extends to politics: can we hold space for tension rather than fleeing to ideological extremes?
  • Quote (Luke Burgis, 46:44):
    "We often flee tension at the very first stages of it...if we're able to do a little bit more of that...we will be better for it. That is how we—the solid self—emerges."
• Algorithms & Division:
  • Modern media and technology exacerbate polarization, algorithmically sorting us into echo chambers.

7. Mimetic Desire, Scapegoating, and Violence: Girard’s Legacy and Its Misunderstandings (47:16–52:11)

• Girard’s Warnings:
  • A brief foray into the distinction between mimetic desire and violence, referencing Peter Thiel’s application/misapplication of Girard’s ideas in tech and business.
  • The impossibility of “solving” violence with more violence, per Girard—contradicted by some contemporary figures.
  • Quote (Luke Burgis, 51:11):
    "The lie for Girard was always that you can prevent or solve the problem of violence with violence...that, that is what the scapegoat mechanism is."

8. Endurance, Tension, and Belonging Without Losing Yourself (52:11–55:56)

• Personal Story:
  • Burgis closes with a moving account of his relationship with his father, highlighting how caring for his father through difficult transitions became its own rite of passage.
  • The value of sitting with discomfort and relational tension—whether in elder care, work, or social life—is underscored, as the “pearl” rather than the “blister” of personal development.
  • Quote (Kim Scott, reading Burgis’ book, 53:10):
    "Maybe it's not supposed to be comfortable in life. These things take work."
• Practical Takeaway:
  • True belonging and leadership require embracing discomfort, engaging with friction, and resisting both isolation and conformity.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On caring for individuals and community (Kim Scott, 05:38):
  “Caring for the one is how you care for the whole.”
• On adaptation and self-censorship (Kim Scott, 18:27):
  “My role in my family: I was the peacemaker … that meant I didn’t always tell the truth.”
• On rites of passage (Luke Burgis, 34:06):
  “Rites of passage … you sort of have to separate and enter what's called a liminal stage where you sort of feel alone … before you are reintegrated back into a group.”
• On AI arms race (Luke Burgis, 51:49):
  “Instead of being nuclear weapons, it’s AI … the lie for Girard was always that you cannot drive out violence with violence.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:00 – Book title and parable origins
• 06:46 – August Landmesser: resistance and nonconformity
• 12:31 – Family systems theory and its application at work
• 24:35 – Education system challenges and the need for reflection
• 33:26 – Rites of passage and true self-discovery
• 37:28 – Mimetic desire and career decision-making
• 41:46 – Politics, identity, and social mimesis
• 47:16 – Girard’s warnings: mimetic desire and violence
• 52:11 – Personal reflections: tension, family, and becoming oneself

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Conclusion & Where to Find More

The episode closes with a powerful reminder: true leadership and belonging are forged in the crucible of tension, not comfort. Burgis’s insights apply at home, at work, and in the public square. His book, The One and the Ninety Nine, is available June 16th. Find more at Luke Burgis’s website, lukeburgis.com.

“If we want to belong without losing ourselves, we need to get used to the feeling that other people are different from us. We need to learn to be in relationship with them. And communion is a really hard place to get to. But the work is really worth it.”
—Luke Burgis (55:11)

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For listeners: This episode invites you to reflect on your own experience of individuality and community—how you can show up as your “solid self” at work, with family, and in society, for your own growth and for the health of the groups you’re part of.

Transcript

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[B]

And welcome to the Radical Sabbatical. The rest of the Radical Caner team is taking a sabbatical, including me. The thing I love to do more than anything else is to read great books, and recently I read the One and the 99 by Luke Burgess and we are lucky to be in conversation here today. Welcome, Luke.

[A]

Thanks so much, Kim. It's good to be with you. My first contact with you came. Maybe the audience should know we share the same amazing editor, Tim.

[B]

Yeah, shout out to Tim Bartlett, who

[A]

is wonderful, who is humble, great at his job, but he's not a poster, doesn't post a lot, and I happen to see on his Instagram a photo of Tim and you in some idyllic cabin editing one of your books. And, and I called Tim and I was like, tim, where do we get to the part of the editing process where we're sitting in a place together going through? He's like, well, that was a bit of a special situation.

[B]

Well, you know, I have this. I have this she shed in the backyard, which you all are welcome to use. It's basically three sliding glass doors and one big window and it's a great place to write and think so.

[A]

Beautiful.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Well, thanks for having me on.

[B]

Well, thank you. I'm so excited to talk to you about this book. As our listeners know, there's in radical candor, there's sort of a picture of what it means to be a leader and you are at the center and then there's your relationships and then there's your responsibilities and from the way that you conduct your relationships and your responsibilities, your culture emerges. So I can't think of of a better book to interrogate all the parts, but in particularly the U part of that diagram than the 1 and the 99. Why don't we start with the title? Why did you call this book the one in the 99? It's the. It's the parable which has always puzzled me and you helped elucidate it, so. Thank you.

[A]

Thanks. Well, it's always interesting to ask what the original title of a book might have been.

[B]

Oh, yeah. What might it have been? That's a good question, which I didn't ask. Thank you.

[A]

We knocked around a lot of ideas. One of mine was the things we have to do alone or something like that. Like, you know, when we have to do things alone.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And because I was wrestling with this tension between the self and the crowd, the individual and groups and the way that we shape groups and groups shape us. And. And I thought, you know, a lot of the difficult and important things that I've had to do in life, the things that I would call rites of passage, where I grow up, I mature, I realized things about myself. They were things that I kind of felt at the time like I was going through them alone. And then I realized that, well, that's not really what the book is about. Because I'm trying to get to a place where once we've gone through one of those experiences, we come out the other side. Being in a more mature, healthier relationship with a community, whether that's your family or a group, your workplace or whatever. So, like I'm going to keep it as the 1 and the 99. The most important word in the whole title being the word.

[B]

And. Yes.

[A]

So that it's not, it's not just the one. Because my message is not like radical individualism or something.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. It's so good.

[A]

Yeah. And I was inspired by this parable of the lost sheep, which was, you know, if you don't know it, it's this kind of bizarre biblical parable where a shepherd leaves 99 sheep to go in search of the one who wandered off. Who want. Who wandered off, who was lost. And that parable has unsettled me my entire life.

[B]

Me too. Yeah.

[A]

From an economic standpoint, like, do you really just kind of Chase the 1% who operates like that?

[B]

Yeah. What about all those poor 99 sheep?

[A]

What, like, does the shepherd not care about them?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I've heard a lot of theological, high minded explanations for it. And I got to thinking, I think this is actually a really interesting kind of parable about sociological dynamics, workplace dynamics. What happened to the sheep while it was missing before the shepherd found it?

[B]

Why did it go wandering off?

[A]

Why did it go wandering off in the first place? Did it come back different than when it left?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

You know, so I was like, maybe I can get inside the mind of that sheep a little bit, because I felt like I have been that sheep at various times in my life.

[B]

We all have. That's why the parable resonates, I think we all feel like. And one of the things you said that. That really helped me understand the parable in a new way, is that the reason for the parable is that it shows that the shepherd loved all the sheep. Like he. He loved. If any one of the hundred sheep had wandered off, he would have gone in search of it. And so caring for the one is how you care for the whole.

[A]

Yeah. And. And. And the other kind of precondition of the whole thing is that is the precondition of freedom, where, like, it seems like the sheep was allowed to wander off.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And if it hadn't been, then you'd be dealing with an issue of, like, extreme authoritarianism or something.

[B]

Yes. There was no vents. And you know what events is? No events is a virtual fence. And now shepherds use events. They put, like, collars on all the sheep, and if the sheep wanders too close, out of bounds, it gets shocked. There was no vents in this.

[A]

I. I had never heard that. I don't have. I don't have a dog, as you could tell anymore. But no, there were no vents for sure.

[B]

Yes. Yes. And then you also pair this story with the. Pair the parable with the story of August Lander. I don't know if I'm saying his name right. Who refused to salute. So talk about that and how that ties in with the parable of the sheep.

[A]

August Landmesser is a guy who by all accounts joined the Nazi party early in its formation because he was looking for work and they were the only ones offering jobs. And as he.

[B]

By the way, let's just. Can we just pause on that for a moment? I've get a lot of. Of notes from a lot of people who feel like I'm about to join this company. I think this company is doing evil things, but I need a job. So I think there's a lot of people out there who might connect, even though this is an extreme story, who might connect with it.

[A]

I think so. I mean, because most of us. Who knows what was Going inside his mind at the time, maybe he thought, I'll just join for a year and then I'm out and I'll get a job. And maybe not realizing exactly what he was getting himself into. So, yeah, I think it's very relevant to all of us. Even though it's a story about Nazi Germany. He joined the party. He was a couple of years in, and he met and fell in love with a Jewish woman and was continually harassed and given a hard time and told. He got engaged to her. And he was threatened with imprisonment. He was fined, and he realized the tension between the love of his life and the party. And he eventually got completely disillusioned with him. The reason that we know his name today is that he was captured in a famous. A now pretty famous photo. Seen it where?

[B]

Yeah, he's.

[A]

That he's at a rally in a shipyard. Hitler is there. And little did he know that some photographer was up in the stands taking this photograph, and everybody in the crowd is saluting Hitler and he's standing there crossed.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Except him like this. And, you know, when I saw that for the first time, because he'd had enough at that point, he just seemed like he just didn't care.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What the consequences were. When I saw that, I thought, you know, wow. I mean, he. There was no social media back then, so he certainly didn't do it so that he could be seen and praised for his actions. He probably had no idea that there was a photographer taking that picture in the first place.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, but. But he did it anyway and. And he had to be the one. Quite almost literally. There's probably hundreds of men in that picture, but he had to be the one in the 99. And I. I was. I. I don't know. First I was troubled. I was like, would I have done that? First of all, if I'm honest with myself, would I. Would I have done that knowing what the consequences could actually be? And then what leads a person to be able to do that? You know, it didn't just. I doubt he just woke up and spontaneously was the kind of person with the character that would do that. What separated him from everybody else in that crowd? And I wanted to sort of understand, like, psychologically what was going on there. So that kind of opens the entire book as, you know, question that I needed to answer. Like, a book kind of always starts with a burning question that you need to figure out for yourself.

[B]

Yeah. And I think it's. That is a. A lot of people wonder, would I have had would I have had. And even if the consequences, even if there hadn't been consequences, like, it's very hard to be the only one in a room of any sort doing anything. Like, I, I just went back for my 40th high school reunion and, and we all had the same haircut. We were looking at the yearbook, like, do we all have to, like, why did nobody dare to have a different haircut? So, so, I mean, you know, silly, silly example. But it's really hard to even, even if there aren't dire consequences in the situation and even if it doesn't matter as much. Maybe if there are dire consequences and it does matter, it's easier to stand up or harder, I don't know. But I think your book explores all those questions and, and helps us come out of reading the book with some greater confidence that we could be the August land messer of the, of the, of that time. So thank you for writing.

[A]

I, I hope so. Because I, I, I, I hope that none of us ever find ourselves in a situation where the consequences are that could be that severe. But you know, on a daily basis, I mean, I find myself getting caught up in stupid things like gossip. Right.

[B]

Where. Yeah.

[A]

You know, I, I need to, I, you know, and I go home at the end of it and I'm like, I wasn't particularly proud of myself for just sort of like, you know, passively letting myself get caught up on the stream.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I, you know, and when it happens every day, eventually, you know, after a thousand times, it does actually change your character. So I think sometimes we need the extreme examples to see the way that we're subtly affected on a daily basis.

[B]

Yeah. And also how to figure out when not to pay attention to things like when is the right thing not to read that article because you're getting pulled into some sort of. Anyway, well, let's start where you start, which is the Family and the self, which was such an interesting chapter because certainly I feel like my family is such a part of such a source of strength and support, and at the same time, it was important for me to leave home in order to become myself. So, so talk a little bit about the, the experiment that you described that Murray Bowen. Was that his name? The Murray Bowen experime?

[A]

Yeah. Murray Bowen was a Georgetown psychologist who is known for applying systems theory to the family for the first time. So he realized in his practice that if an individual comes to him complaining about some struggle they're having in the family, that it was impossible to fully diagnose what was going on without understanding the whole family system. Yeah, shocking. Like he, you know, he had to come to this realization and. Yeah, but, I mean, it seems relatively obvious, but everybody had sort of treated it as individual psychology. So he was a little bit of a counter to Freud in a certain sense. So he would ask, well, tell me, where are you in the family system? Let's talk about the family dynamics. Do you have siblings? And he realized that in every family there's an emotional sort of system that because we're part of it from such a young age, we learn certain ways of existing in that system, often to maintain equilibrium and in moments that could create anxiety, to sort of lower the anxiety. And in order to do that, we often have to adapt ourselves. Right. To what the expectations are of us. And, you know, Bowen tells this story about how he had a work problem in his Georgetown office. Where I use the example of gossip in my life because I work in a university. It happens quite a bit. Happens in every workplace. And he noticed that this was happening in his office. And then he would drive home about a half hour home at the end of the day, and about halfway through his drive, he would realize that he had sort of completely become somebody else while he was in the workplace. He would participate in it in a way that he wasn't particularly happy of. And as soon as he had a little bit of distance, he realized how silly it all seemed. And a lot of the, you know, he's all worked up about it when he was in the office and on his drive home, he would chill out and he tried to fix that problem. And he came to the realization that, you know, he was working and inventing family systems theory and at the same time, and he said to himself, you know, maybe I don't have a work problem. Maybe I have a family origin problem. And maybe if I can solve the problem in my own family, I will solve the problem at work. And the problem being his ability or inability not to just melt into some kind of a.

[B]

A dynamic that wasn't expressing who he really wanted to be and even what

[A]

he truly felt his. His own convictions about, he couldn't even tell the truth. Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So he, he did an experiment where there was some drama in the family and there was going to be an opportunity where the. The family was going to be at the same house. And up until that point, he had sort of operated like the person that's about to go home for Thanksgiving. Yeah, you know, I don't know what your Thanksgivings are like, but. But you Know who sort of was like, this is not going to be fun, you know, especially after the election or whatever. And, you know, I'm just going to kind of shut down. I'm just going to, like, emotionally shut off. I'm just going to shut off my brain. I'm going to shut off everything. I'm just going to sit there, I'm going to eat my turkey, I'm going to get through it, maybe have a

[B]

third glass of wine, maybe have a

[A]

third glass of wine, and then I'm going to go home. And he realized that he had sort of been. Or I'm just going to say whatever I need to say to make Uncle Jim happy and just get him to stop talking about that. And he realized that he'd been doing that his entire life, and the pressures in his particular family were very, very sort of strong. And he said, you know, this time I'm going to go into that reunion as what he calls a solid self. Right. I'm going to try to stay a solid self as opposed to melting into what he calls the pseudo self, which is the version of ourself that will just instantly change and adapt to whatever somebody else expects. He said, if I can do it once in my family, I know that it will probably cause friction and tension, but I have to do it. It's like a healthy tension and friction. I need to be the one to do it. I don't think anybody else is going to do it. And he. He did it. He had a very particular strategy for doing it, which I walked through in the book. And after he did it, he said he was able to actually go into his Georgetown office as more of a solid self that didn't get swept up in the current of gossip. So, you know, there's this whole debate about taking your whole self to work and. Which I know you've out and spoken about. And I think what I learned from Murray Bowen was like, well, maybe we don't have to take our whole self to work. That's probably not always a good idea. But I think that I should take my solid self to work.

[B]

Yeah. You want your best, maybe even. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not. Not your worst.

[A]

Yes, my best self.

[B]

Yeah. And I. I think it's so true that this. I mean, it's true at work, but it's also true, probably more true in family dynamics where there's this notion of false harmony, or what I call ruinous empathy, that kind of gives way over time to what I call manipulative insincerity and. And and radical candor. And I think that, that, like, I don't think I would have managed to get married if I hadn't used what I was learning about management at work to get out of a bad romance and into a happy marriage, you know, because it's. It's very hard when you're. When you're used to, like, my role in my family. I was the peacemaker. And that meant I didn't always tell the truth or I didn't always say what I really thought and I had to learn how. And not. There was nobody explicitly saying, I don't want to hear what you really think, Kim. But. But I. It was like a version of self censorship.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. And I. I mean, I'm. I'm an only child too. So I think, you know, the way that Bowen would see that is like an only child has a very. Is really enmeshed because it's just you. Right. Like, really, really enmeshed. It's a triangle in the parental dynamic. Right. You are the triangle.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, and then when there's one sibling, his whole theory kind of is founded on the idea that we're in emotional triangles usually. Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

There's always a third person involved. Right. Like whenever there's something going on between two people, we draw in a third person in order to resolve the tension. And isn't that exactly what gossip is?

[B]

Yes. Yeah.

[A]

It's like if two people can't talk to each other, they instinctively have to go talk about.

[B]

They talk about the person. Yeah. Not to. But about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I love. There's another. There's. I wonder what you think about this. I recently talked to Tom Rath about his new book, what's the Point? And he said that one of the dangers in embarking on a new career as a young person, start kind of starting out is that you're familiar with what your parents did and maybe a few friends of your parents. So you're familiar with like six jobs, but there's lots of different career paths. And because you don't break free, free of that family system and like, explore the big world, you limit yourself. Is that. To what extent is that part of this breaking free of the. The family in order to become a robust self?

[A]

I mean, it's. It's huge. I. One of the many hats that I wear is as a college professor at a university.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And I have. I have a lot of freshmen and I May. I have 30 students that I advise in any given semester. And the number one thing we Talk about are jobs and career paths. And it is shocking how much parental expectations come up. And they really just know the one or two jobs that, you know, that they see in their family of origin, it really kind of forms their universe of what they actually seen. And I sort of tell the students, like, you know, there's a lot of jobs out there, even though everything's changing a little bit right now. In particular, it's kind of a scary time.

[B]

Maybe it's a liberating time. Like, you don't have to get on some path you don't want to be on because it may be worth worthless. This is what I tell my kids anyway, so you may as well do what you enjoy, because who knows if what you don't enjoy is going to have any value.

[A]

Yeah. And one of the exercises that I will often give them is do something that you enjoy. And if you're trying to decide between two or three different things, you know, it's not the most pleasant experiment. But, like, if neither one of them really worked out, like, let's say it didn't become your career.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Let's say they were both, like, complete failures. Like the kind of thing you didn't even want to put on your resume or something like that. Like, which one would actually contribute the most to you growing as a person? Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

If the. If the professional metrics were like a zero. Like, let's just set that to zero. Yeah. Not that we want that to happen. And it's actually like a really helpful, kind of like Occam's Racer for making decisions. If all else is.

[B]

Yeah. You're actually describing my career because for. For the. For the longest time, the thing I most loved to do was to write novels. And I had a big fat stack of rejection. So it was contributing zero to my ability to earn a living. You know, I just had nothing but a set of a bunch of failures from that. But I kept doing it because I love doing it.

[A]

And stage in your career were you writing these novels?

[B]

I started early. In fact, I think I wrote my first one in 1999, so a while ago. And I decided 1999 was going to be the year of my fantasy when I did only what I wanted to do. And so I quit my job, and the economy's chugging along, and people are like, what are you doing writing a novel in this economy? But anyway, I did, and I'm glad I did, because it. But even though it, you know, it. It eventually led me where I wanted to go, but I didn't you know, so. So I had this. On the one hand, this thing I was doing all the time while I was working at Google. I was writing a novel. Like, I was always writing a novel. And I always felt like that it was 100% intrinsic validation and 0% extrinsic validation. And I wouldn't say my. I mean, I did like working at Google, so I wouldn't say it was exactly the opposite. It wasn't 0% intrinsic validation, but there was a lot more extrinsic validation than intrinsic in my. In my. In my career, for much of my career, until Radical Caner came out.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I'm so inspired to hear that, especially that you did that while at Google. I've always wanted to write a novel, and I've never had the courage to publish. I've got, like, a bunch of drafts, and now I've made the mistake of writing a couple serious nonfiction books, which I think is like. To go. Now I got to go from that into getting back into that, like, youthful imaginative. There's probably a reason why many novelists are on the. But there's still a chance.

[B]

Yeah, no, absolutely, there's still a chance. And maybe you'll, you know, you'll pull one of those old ones out of the drawer and get it published. I'll certainly read it. I love your writing, so that's exciting. All right, so now let's talk about education and the self. My kids are juniors in high. This chapter really resonated for me because. Because my kids are juniors in high school, so they're. I think I was never more stressed than when I was a junior and senior in high school. And it's worse now, way worse now than it was then. And so I've been thinking a lot about the ways in which our education system and the pressures that. That the whole college situation puts on kids. It makes it really hard for them to become themselves. And the other day I was watching the Vow, which is this Netflix documentary about a cult, the sex cult in X. IBM or something.

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

It has. It's. I can't pronounce it, but anyway. Yeah, yeah. The part of the cult leader's strategy for control was to keep people so busy that they didn't have time to think for themselves. And there's this one scene in. In the show where they're. They're playing volleyball. I mean, it seems kind of innocuous, but this volleyball game was like a source of control because they were doing that instead of sleeping. They had to Play volleyball at like 2am but I feel like we're kind of doing that to our kids with. I know this isn't exactly what you were writing about with education, but I feel like, I feel like one of the problems with our education system is that it doesn't give kids time to, as my grandmother would say, rusticate children need time to be themselves.

[A]

Yeah. You know, as one who struggled in school my whole life, I got kicked out of one of my high schools. I, I was bored out of my mind. And, and now I'm a professor and I'm part of a university. I think about this question all the time. And I've been, as you know from reading the chapter, I have been influenced by Marshall McLuhan quite a bit who says, you know, the medium is the message.

[B]

And boy, that that is never has that been more true than today.

[A]

Yes. And you know, he wrote quite a bit about education in a digital world.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it tells this interesting story that I can't get out of my mind about how some kids in Southern California were dropped out of school. I think they were in Watts and they were interviewed and they sort of explained their reason for doing it. And it wasn't like a rejection of the school. It was like we were letting our education get in the way of our education. And like, we're learning a lot more out here in the world where like every day feels like an adventure. And I don't think we can, we should like, discount that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, like, like the, in, in the, in the world that we're in. I mean, I think like the Internet caused massive problems to traditional forms of education because, you know, when the kids are on the phone or they're tempted to be on the phone in the back of the classroom, it actually is for a relatively good reason. And that's that first of all, like, the lecture might suck, but you know, this thing that we have in our pockets actually does give us access to a lot of fascinating, like, information out there and we can go on a. Choose your own adventure.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Where we can go learn about anything that we want and we can, you know, you've got 12 year olds becoming entrepreneurs. I mean, that is really, really exciting. And that quite frankly, is what our education system is competing with.

[B]

Yes, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Against that. So, you know, the book is kind of about, you know, we're, we're, how do, how can we have a healthy posture against some of the homogenizing forces in, in the world? And I think like one of the ways, especially in the Technological environment that we're all in. McLuhan is saying that, you know, we, we need to. Technology always sort of dulls one. One particular sort of sense when we're using it. And we sort of need to reacquire, like a sensory perception. We need to train our senses so that we can make sense of the way that our. Of the environments that we're moving in and out of the way in which they're affecting us. And if we're just talking about facts and information all the time, if that's all education is, and we're not training people to perceive the way that they are being affected or the environments that we're in, we're not actually educating students for an uncertain future. Like, the best thing that I could give my two daughters is the ability to sort of sense the world around them and what's going on and not have their senses dulled. And for me, that's the impetus behind the bad, unhealthy uses of smartphones in the classroom. Like, to the extent that it's dulling the senses, it's bad.

[B]

Yeah. There's no smell. There's no, there's. There's no, like, natural sounds. There's no bugs and birds. I mean, unless you go to one of those sites that gives you bird song. But you're not getting the kinds of senses that our minds and bodies evolved

[A]

to need and even the sense of discerning what's true. So if you look at a social media platform like Twitter. I still call it that. X.

[B]

Call it Twitter the way.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. You know, we'll call it Twitter RIP. Yes, Twitter. Rest in peace. You know, the way that even truth is evaluated on that platform is totally different than the way that it was for centuries. Right.

[B]

Is it evaluated on that platform?

[A]

It doesn't seem like it is.

[B]

No, I think it's not evaluated.

[A]

But that's also. Like, people would look into another person's eyes and they would sort of evaluate.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, we, we've just sort of in the, in a scrolling kind of feed like environment. Even the sort of. Not even just the physical senses, but sort of like the, the, the, the. The more holistic. Like, like sensing the truth. Like, even those things, like all of the little subtle cues that we pick

[B]

up on, they're gone because it comes up to a up thumbs up or thumbs down or hard or not hard or whatever. Very simple. And it turns out that when you. When you think about the difference between writing something on Twitter and saying something at a dinner party. So if you're at a dinner party and you say something sort of ridiculous and extreme, you're going to get a lot of eye rolls and you're going to notice those people are going to, you're going to sense it. Like, not only are you going to notice the eye rolls, but you're going to sense the disapproval in the room. Whereas on Twitter, all you get is the one person who's like, whoa, I got to pay attention to that. Because it's. Which is why it moves us towards extremism, I think.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. And it's just a day after day where we're not exercising that. John Henry Newman used to call it the illative sense where, you know, it's like you can't explain why you know something is or why you know it's true. Because it's like, it's like 40 or 50 small signals are all converging on this one thing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And that's that, that's what I'm worried we're losing. So, yeah, education somehow has to kind of restore that. And that is, that is something that is kind of personal. And if our education system is not giving it to students, we need to find ways to give it to my. I think it's probably why homeschooling is on the rise. Right? Like, yeah, exposing that.

[B]

That's one of the reasons. That's the only reason.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I think also when, at least when I started at Google back in 2004 and I was leading AdSense, an AdSense team. And so for folks who don't know, AdSense is where you put. Google, put ads on other people's websites. And I really believed at the time, and the, the long tail, which has since been disproved, I didn't understand that, that all that the Internet and social media. Well, social media media didn't even exist then, but it was about to exist. But all of these things have a rich get richer algorithm. And I thought there was a long tail and more people were going to go find what they really wanted and instead these, these platforms have, have made them all, have made us all want the same thing. Going back to your previous book, wanting.

[A]

Yeah, And I, I gave Google AdSense a lot of my money in 2004 and 5, which is when I was launching an e commerce company and that was the way to grow.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it worked. I mean, it worked for, for one

[A]

thing, but it worked until it didn't too.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So, so you talk about three sort of antidotes to the problems of education. There's sort of rites of passage replacing a quest for more knowledge with sort of space and time to think deeply and leisure time, I'll call it. So explain. Explain what you meant by those antidotes to our. To our educational system, which is sort of failing us.

[A]

You know, I think that rites of passage. Let me just focus on that one because I think the most important one, you know, graduating from college for me and I think for a lot of my students does no longer feels like a rite of passage. And I'm a little clear on when it stopped being one. I think when it just sort of became a certificate. And you know, a rite of passage has three stages. The first stage, you sort of have to separate and enter what's called a liminal stage where you sort of feel alone. And this is why initially sort of the book was going to be the things that you must do alone.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Before you are sort of reintegrated back into a group. And I think like the rites of passage. And I don't mean rites of passage like going from third grade to fourth grade or fourth grade.

[B]

Yeah, grade. It's becoming an adult. It's like a. It used to be almost what bar mitzvah is and, you know, except five years later.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, totally. And. And you know, the. The rights of passage in. We're just. We're losing rites of passage not only in education, but in a lot of parts of our society. Like, one of the ways that I think a rite of passage shows up or should show up in education is that we. We try to. We. This is why I think entrepreneurship is a really important part of education or why you're seeing. Or we're seeing a lot of sort of entrepreneurial schools because somebody is sort of doing applied knowledge applied to a problem that they see in the world learning as much as they can to sort of like. Like tackling it as a mission and trying to build a real thing so they're invested in it and either succeeding or failing. And the process of going through that, like getting invested, having skin in the game, trying to solve like a real problem, and sort of having the education be context dependent is. Is a kind of rite of passage that sort of forces the student to enter a place where they are taking ownership of.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Of something. Like complete ownership of something. And I think, like, one of the problems with education and one of the reasons why I was so bored is like, I didn't feel like I had ownership of anything. Like, you know, if I. It sucks to feel like, you know, if I don't. If I don't show up for a week, you know, nobody's going to miss me and nothing will change whatsoever. Right.

[B]

So.

[A]

And that's. So I think, like, there's ways to integrate these little rites of passage where there is kind of the, the separation, the liminal state, and then the, The. The maturation at the end of it, little by little. I mean, I don't know by week, month by month or whatever, where people are sort of taking a risk, they're taking ownership. It's scary. Like, education should be scary. It should feel.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And that's. That's kind of what I'm trying to say. Like, we need to find ways to make it actually feel dangerous again. Because if it doesn't feel dangerous, you're not learning anything. You're not learning, and you're not going to continue.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're not. You're never going to succeed, like, if you're guaranteed. Like, I think that failure is in short supply in our educational system, and so is independence. I mean, for me, I think graduating from college meant that I needed to figure out how to earn a living like that. That's what it meant. I. I was. No. And the economy was such that it wasn't unreasonable for my parents to say, you're not coming back home. You know, you gotta go figure out how to pay the rent. I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to. You know, I don't know. I don't know if it's gonna be possible. And so then what does it mean?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, at times of uncertainty, we become hyper memetic. Like, it's like mimesis. And this is. I wrote my first book called Wanting, which is about mimetic desire. The way that we usually unconsciously imitate the desires of other people. And when we're feeling uncertain or a little scared, we default to imitating what other people. Right. So, like, for me, what did that. What that looked like was entering college and majoring in what the, you know, the most confident students around me were majoring in.

[B]

And what was that?

[A]

It was finance. So I went to. I went to NYU undergrad. Business school.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I entered. I applied for college as a pre med major.

[B]

Oh, wow.

[A]

And I got there, and the mimesis was so strong that I immediately changed. I competed for the best jobs on Wall Street. I got one because I was. Because I'm fiercely competitive and I'm pretty good at math.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I really, really hated my job. So I was like chasing all of

[B]

the things you didn't really want.

[A]

Yeah, things that I didn't really want. And when, when there are. When we lack those kind of dangerous rites of passage where people can take real owner, we just default to doing the easy thing, which is often the mimetic thing. And it usually takes something that happens to us. I mean, for me, it was in my late 20s. That kind of wakes us up and makes us realize like, you know, I was just kind of coasting and doing what I had sort of the most approval to do up until now. And that's kind of when I actually, my education started when I was 28, 29 years old and I had a company fail. But I wish it would have happened like 15 years earlier.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think you also said that to a certain extent becoming an entrepreneur was a bit of a memetic. Like at a certain point you had to leave.

[A]

It also was, you know, and, and part of, you know, what Rene Girard says about memetic desires. We have an idea that we have authentic desires. And it's radical message is that we're social, don't really.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Learn. We, we learn through imitation and we even, we even acquire our very desires through contagion, sometimes good or bad, by the way.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Not always bad.

[A]

And, and this idea of the authentic self or the authentic desires is, is itself, you know, often, often an illusion. And there's nothing wrong with that. Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like owning that.

[B]

That fact.

[A]

Right. So. Yes. I mean, when I looked back on it, I left my job in investment banking to go to a startup which in 2005 wasn't really that cool, especially because mine was a healthy vending machine company. Yeah, nothing. Nothing cool about that. My, my managing director boss was like, you're out of your mind. You'll never work on Wall street again. And I was like, I think this is gonna.

[B]

Fine. Awesome.

[A]

I gotta do. I was like, fine. But. And I didn't realize this until years later that the reason that I did it was because somebody else in my group had left to start a company before I did. And I couldn't even. And it was massively influential on me. Like, I don't know if I would have done it or had the courage to do it if that person hadn't done it first. And I don't even know if the thought had really crossed my mind until they had done it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. I thought I was doing. So I, My first startup was in 1999, a little older And I thought that I was really, you know, bucking, but I, of course, was jumping on a bandwagon, but I thought I was bucking a trend, you know, and that is often true. And. And I'm glad I did. But, you know, it's also useful to realize when we think we're doing something so new, it may not be so new after all. And you talk a lot about mimesis when you talk about politics in the self, which is where it probably shows up right now more acutely than anywhere. So talk about how to break free of political mimesis.

[A]

I think that I don't. I don't. You know, there's not an easy answer to that question.

[B]

No, no, there's not. But you do wrestle with it.

[A]

What I. What I'm trying to do is show maybe the way that the political self can. Can be formed in the first place. And if we can become aware of that a little bit, sometimes we just have a little more self. Awareness about our political self, and people have greater or lesser sort of senses of self that are tied specifically to politics. And, you know, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't part of the reason that I wrote the book. Right. I mean, I lived in Italy from 2013 to 2016.

[B]

You came back to a country that probably felt unrecognizable.

[A]

I lived on a hill in Rome reading philosophy every day for three years. I wasn't online. I wasn't really on social media. And I came back to the States in June 20, 2016.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And I felt like I was like a fish out of water. It was like a very bizarre experience for me. And I did notice that everything was politics all the time. In a span of three or four years, something actually changed. And that even friends that I had, their self was more bound up with politics than ever before. You know, Burgess, like, you need to get. You need to get way more invested in this, you know, and.

[B]

Yeah, let me.

[A]

Let me figure out what's going. And I think, like, in the last 10 years, probably even worse.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So. And, you know, in the book, I sort of traced this concept of the pseudo self and the solid self that we talked about earlier.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, from Murray Bowman's family systems. Like, how does that play out in politics? Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And is there. Eric Hoffer wrote a great book in the 1950s called the True Believer.

[B]

Yes. That is really

[A]

super influential on me. And he says oftentimes people join mass movements to flee an unwanted self. And when I read that, I thought Huh. I was like, I wonder if there's some connection between the pseudo self and sort of like attraction. Right. To strong men or to, you know, to certain movements or something like that. And then I thought back to, you know, mimesis and mimetic desire. And it is true, if Gerard is correct, we are subtly formed. Our desires are subtly formed from a very early age. Our ideas are formed through all these different forces and people that we usually can never name. So there's a certain sense of political self that is formed from a young age largely through mimesis.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I have very early memories of just like being at my grandmother's house and little things that she would say would sort of definitely contributed to because I was so young. Right. Like this very impressionable on me when I would hear my parents say things. And then, you know, we sort of get to a point, most of us in our lives where we are start reading where we. We go into a different environment. Maybe it's college, maybe it's our first workplace. And we start to encounter people that grew up in very different situations than us. And I sort of say, you know, in the book that any of these things, this is not a politically coded thing at all. Sort of goes just back to the Matrix. Like there are these sort of like red pills that just call them like

[B]

green pills and orange pills or something

[A]

because, well, now there's like the Internet has like the black pill.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's not nothing about Democrat or Republican.

[A]

It's nothing about. It doesn't mean. Doesn't mean conservative or Republican. A red pill in the Matrix is just a thing that you encounter that makes you question, like everything that you thought you knew.

[B]

All these assumptions, waking up from it's being. Waking up from the dream.

[A]

And it is kind of like an anti memetic thing that happens where it's like, now I have to like, sort of wrestle or confront this new great book that I read, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

For many people, it's like they read, I don't know, Dante or whatever, something for the first time. And it's like, then you somehow have to reconcile that with the kind of mimetic, memetically formed things. And you have a decision to make, right. And then you have to figure out how to integrate that or you will feel very disintegrated.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And there are a couple of ways to deal with that weird feeling of encountering these new things. One, you can just reject them completely, or you can sort of actually sit with the tension and find a Way to sort of be with other people and in society in a productive way without running or something.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

And if there's one thing that I've. Was that the core of everything that I'm writing about is that we often flee tension at the very first stages of it. Like, we flee tension in politics.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Tension in religion. We flee tension in the workplace. We don't like tension and anxiety. That's normal. Right. But if we're able to do a little bit more of that as individuals and frankly, as a society, we can sit in the tension and don't let the algorithm sort us into these fantasy lands where we just listen to things that we want to hear. We will be better for it. Like that. That is how we. The solid self emerges. And I was like, I can't read this book without having a chapter on politics. Or I would be like, yeah. Honestly, everybody would be like, what's up, Burgess? Like, you're.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You don't want to touch that. I tried to do it in a way that was a little bit.

[B]

It was. That was inviting. That was inclusive of everyone, no matter what they might believe. Yeah. Yeah. Can I ask you a question about Gerard and Peter Thiel? Maybe to veer into a place where maybe not everyone will agree, but it seems to me. I'll just share my opinion. Seems to me like Gerard, if I understand his writing, there were two things that were very dangerous that he warned about. One was mimetic desire, and two was violence. And mimetic desire is often a way to avoid violence, but it creates a whole other set of potentially worse and more devastating. Did I get Gerard right, or am I totally wrong?

[A]

He sort of drew a connection between mimetic desire leading to rivalry, which then spread the scapegoat, which was resolved. Right, by.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Violence against a scapegoat.

[B]

Yeah. Right. Right. So. So I'm I'll just. Again, at the risk of totally misinterpreting, but simplifying two bad things, memetic desire and violence in his writing. Is that more or less fair?

[A]

I think mimetic is. Sure, let's run with that.

[B]

Memetic desire is dangerous, is something one needs. It's inevitable, but you also need to be aware of it if you're not going to be entrapped by it.

[A]

It's. It's. Yes. I think medic Desire is dangerous is a totally fair statement because especially if we're not aware of it, it almost always ends up in conflict.

[B]

Yeah. And it's also sort of what Robertson. There's a great quote from Robertson Davies, one of my favorite novelists, who said, if you're not consciously aware of your beliefs, you can be sure that some not very creditable belief will seize you. You know, and I think that's the danger of mimetic desire. And also mimetic politics is. So why is it that, that his most famous acolyte, Peter Thiel, is investing in violent, violent and memetic desire, like between Palantir and Meta? Like, what's, what's up? Like, it seems like Jared was warning these things are bad, and then Peter Thiel's doubling down on them. I mean, what's going on?

[A]

I, I, I'm not in Peter Thiel's head. I think, like, meta was an investment in mimetic desire as a profitable, yeah, you know, this is a platform that sort of potentially makes mimetic desire very profitable. And maybe. Right. I'm, this is just pure speculation. Like memetic desire just is, you know, we can't, you know, we can't really make it go away. We're memetic creatures. We always will be. Here's a business that, that gives it, it an outlet to sort of live online. And, you know, that maybe was more of like a pure, it's going to work because it amplifies mimesis, therefore it's going to work. And, you know, with my VC head on this will, this potentially would be a very profitable investment. The balance, your question is, is a very different one because it's just a very different company than, than Meta is. Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's literally engaged in intelligence to support war efforts. And it's very mysterious. I mean, I, it's hard to reconcile

[B]

with an acolyte of Gerard.

[A]

To me, I mean, I, I, I have asked myself, like, if Gerard were alive today, like, what would he, oh,

[B]

he'd be screaming and yelling and pulling his hair out and saying he'd be, I think. But I, I, maybe I believe what I want to believe.

[A]

No, I don't, I don't think so. I mean, I think it's very fair because the, the, the, the lie for Gerard was always that you can prevent or solve the problem of violence with violence. Yeah, that, that, that is what the scapegoat mechanism is. Quite literally. It's like if we just kill this one person.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Right. We can bring peace to the society.

[B]

Yeah. The rest of us can get along.

[A]

So it's very curious that, you know, the, the, the, the way to, you know, my understanding is we're sort of in a new arms race now. And, and instead of being nuclear weapons, it's AI instead.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[A]

And. And if we just sort of out AI China, then the world would be safer. It doesn't. I don't think that that's true. And I think that it does sort of fundamentally push against with like, one of Gerard's fundamental things is that the, the satanic lie, literally says it's satanic, is that you cannot drive out violence with violence.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, well, we could talk for another two hours about that, but, but I want, I want to. I. I want to read sort of the last line of your book because it's so beautiful and I think that it sort of helps people know what. Like what. Where all of this leads. You're. You're describing your father who's moved into an assisted living facility and he's not happy about it, which is, I think, an experience that so many listeners can share. And he says, well, maybe it's not supposed to be comfortable in life. These things take work. And I think that that's such a beautiful way to end the book because it does take work and it is profoundly uncomfortable to become yourself, but it's worth it.

[A]

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. There's a story of my relationship with my dad that runs throughout the book, which I wasn't expecting when I started to write it. It's not even in the book proposal.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Like. Like none.

[B]

That's amazing.

[A]

None of the stuff about my dad was in the book proposal in any way. And then this weird thing happened when I started to write it, and I realized that my dad, my becoming the full time caregiver for my father has taught me more in the last few years. It's been my own rite of passage, first of all.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Has forced me to be in a liminal space of my own. And my dad is this very weird, curious thing where I had to move my dad, who's been very independent his whole life, into an assisted facility home. He's now at a VA facility. And he was just thrust into a community with a bunch of strangers in his late 70s. Incredibly jarring. And this all happened after I'd conceived the book and I was like, wow. In my very life right now, like, my dad is like, living the very tension that I am trying to, like, figure out for myself and in the world. And he made me realize, like,

[B]

you

[A]

know, if we're looking for a perfect home or a perfect community or a perfect workplace that is free of tension and friction where we get along with everybody, it just doesn't exist. You're going to be severely, severely disappointed. But if you begin to sort of see the. That very kind of tension as an opportunity to develop thicker, deeper relationships. I can tell so many stories about my dad's facility and like, the. Because I ate lunch there, like every day for a few months. Spent a lot of time there.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And just to sort of like, see the way that he. He has changed from when he first got in there, is now friends with these guys that he, you know, like, who is this guy? You know.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

In there? And despite his advanced Alzheimer's, you know, I'm seeing something play out in his relationships and his ability to sort of be there. He doesn't really have a choice, you know, his ability to be there, which is quite beautiful and profound. And quite frankly, I've learned a lot from it, which I tried to. Tried to end the book with. With a bit of tension. Right. Because that's the whole point of the book, is that this is part of what we have to learn to do if, if we want to belong without losing ourselves. We. We need to get used to the. To the feeling that other people are different from us. We need to learn to be in relationship with them. And communion is a really hard place to get to. But the work is really worth it.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a little bit like, at the risk. I'm going to take a risk. I'm going to quote Rudyard Kipling, who someone said, you can't quote Rudyard Kipling anymore. And Rudyard Kipling got a lot of things wrong because despite his many efforts, he was never quite able to break free from his thinking about the tyranny of Empire. But he did try. And one of the things he said was the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack. And there's a lot of tension in that statement and, and sort of living with that tension and allowing that friction to create a pearl of great price, rather than just a blister on your toe is what it's all about. And sometimes you might have to get that blister on your toe in order to absolutely get to that pearl of great price. Well, Luke, thank you. Thank you so much for the conversation. Where can people find you and when can they buy your book?

[A]

Thanks so much for having me. Kim. Book is out June 16th in the US and the UK and you can find me@luke Burgess.com.

[B]

amazing. Thanks so much. Take care.

[A]

Thanks so much.

[B]

The radical candor podcast is based on

[A]

the book Radical Candor via Kick Ass

[B]

Boss Without Losing Losing youg Humanity by Kim Scott. The Radical Candor podcast theme music was composed by Cliff Goldmacher. Follow us on LinkedIn Radical Candor the company, and visit [e-mail] you can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried.

[A]

This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your [e-mail] to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion.

[B]

You're welcome, Columbia.

[A]

Engineered for whatever.