Advisory Opinions - Constellations

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

On this episode, our hosts are joined by Matthew Barzun, an American businessman, diplomat, and longtime political fundraiser. Sarah and David dive into his paradigm-shifting book, The Power of Giving Away Power, and what it teaches about leadership. Along the way, they also discuss everything from what Barzun learned during his time fundraising for former president Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, to the etiquette of bowing to royalty while working as an American ambassador abroad. Show Notes: -Matthew Barzun’s book, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go -Teddy Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena quote Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing the first ever Mazda CX-70, our largest two-row SUV, available as a mild hybrid inline six turbo or as a plug-in hybrid, crafted to move every part of you. Welcome to the Advisory Opinions Podcast. This is David French with Sarah Isker, and we have another very special August episode. But before we dive into it, this has been an historic weekend. The crisis in Afghanistan is still unfolding. And so I just want you to know that we have been, and if you've not been reading the dispatch, you need to be. We have been covering this extensively. The Morning Dispatch has covered it extensively. I've written about it extensively. So has Jonah, Chris Stierwalt, Tom Jocelyn. There has been basically wall-to-wall coverage and analysis of the events in Afghanistan. So if you have not read it yet, please go to thedispatch.com, read it. We look at it from about every conceivable angle. So yeah, after you listen to the podcast,

please go do that. But before, we've got a podcast to listen to, and it's August, and this is one of our special August episodes. And I'm very, very excited about this one. Sarah, do you want to introduce our guest? We are joined by Matthew Barzen. He is the former United States ambassador to the UK. Before that, he worked on President Obama's 2008 campaign. He was the national finance chair for his 2012 campaign. He also served as the U.S. ambassador to Sweden before he became the U.S. ambassador to the UK. But he is here today

because he is the author of this incredible book that I had not heard about and that now I'm going to be buying for all of my friends. It is called The Power of Giving Away Power. And I'm just really excited to talk to him about it because even from the title, I was like, I don't even really know what this is going to be about. What does this even mean? How the best leaders learn to let go. So Matthew, I've thought a lot about where we should start this conversation. where we should start this conversation. And I wanted to start with a quote that you had memorized that I guess you even recited at your wedding. I'm wondering if you can recite it for us and then tell us what you think about that quote. Okay. Oh, this is great, Sarah. First of all, David, Sarah, thank you for having me. This is the quote when I was 11 years old, my parents got divorced, and my Uncle John was a very cool uncle, and he

just sensed that I was struggling and unhappy. So he took me on like an 18-hour road trip, and he made me memorize this thing. And it's the famous in the arena, it's not the critic who counts. The credit belongs to the man who's actually in the arena. It's not the critic who counts. The credit belongs to the man who's actually in the arena, whose face is marred with dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, blah, blah, blah. I don't think I should continue for your listeners, but it is well known. I actually memorized, it turns out, the JFK version. JFK liberally paraphrased from, I mean, gave Teddy Roosevelt credit, but paraphrased. So I learned the JFK version, not strictly the Teddy version. And he did, my uncle made me, you know, at my college graduation, when we were gathered,

he would make me do it at the wedding and anytime we're gathered. And I love that you picked up on that because we went back and forth with whether it should even be in the book or not. And it felt really important to me to include it. But, and I'll say it here to your listeners, it, so, I mean, this particular quotation by Teddy Roosevelt, 1910, it's sort of a graduation speech of sorts that he gave at the Sorbonne in Paris. And I mean, everybody loves this. And by everybody, I mean, John McCain loved it.

All the midshipmen upon graduating from Annapolis are asked to memorize it. President Obama reads it in one of these rare bipartisan moments as his eulogy to Senator McCain a few years back. Brene Brown, whose work is remarkable, it inspired all of her work and her book titles all do it. Nelson Mandela and LeBron James has it etched into his basketball shoes. So this is like a wonderful pantheon of leaders who I respect, but it inspires in me frustration. You reject it. I kind of do. I mean, look, I get it, but to me, it presents a false choice, right? This is, first of all, it is a gladiatorial frame for life. I mean, go in there, fight for victory, and if you fail, at least you fail while daring greatly so that your place will never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat, right? So go in, battle it out by yourself. And the choice is, if you don't go, quote, in the arena, you are sitting on the sidelines. You are just being a bystander. And I get it. If those are the only two paths, I can see why,

you know, going in the arena and fighting it out, win or lose, wins out. I also understand how frustrating it can be to be second-guessed by people who don't know the first thing about whatever it is you're working on. But what I think it leaves out, tragically and really importantly for where we are today as a country, the third option, so it's either fight it out or sit it out, right? And I think there's a whole bunch of things as I look around our country right now that we need to work out, play through. I mean, pick what verb and preposition you want, that life is a lot more than just fighting it out or sitting it out. And especially in our democracy, and I think the work you guys are doing at the dispatch is a good example of this. Of course, the critic counts, right? It starts out with, it's not the critic who counts. And it's like, I understand cranky,

annoying people, but like in our democracy, integrating and listening to and absorbing and struggling through critics is really important to what we're engaged in together. So ignoring critics, I think, is a terrible thing to encourage, especially to the next generation. That was a mouthful. No, that was a very good introduction. And it just comes at this really interesting time in my life that I'm reading this book. A, I mean, I love the jobs that I've had managing people, working with large groups of people. We've both worked on campaigns where your discussion of what it's like to work on a campaign when it's working well and what it means to have volunteers and integrating them into a good structure,

I was like, wow, yes, I've never had someone put that into writing. As listeners know, due to the what I would call total collapse of my political party, I am no longer working in presidential campaigns as I have done for my whole career, basically. And so it is very hard for me because I also know that quote intimately, have known it since whenever, because now I feel like I'm no longer in the arena and that feels like a failure. And so it was so, that chapter hit me in a really interesting way that I'm telling you this because you probably don't know a lot of how people read your book and what they're thinking as they turn pages.

And for me, I was like, oh, wow, that's really meaningful to me to have someone say that actually there's maybe another way other than those two options when I feel like one of those options has been foreclosed to me. And this is the thesis of your whole book. And I love, I mean, it got me from the beginning with the constellation. I mean, I'm such an American history nerd and it was incredible. And you have little pictures of the United States seal. So I know this is asking a lot, go through constellation versus pyramid. And if everyone listening can take out a $1 bill, it might help them in this conversation.

It is a helpful visual aid. Thank you. Okay, so July 4th, 1776, there are two declarations, not just the famous one made that day in Philadelphia. And the second declaration was basically, we need a logo for this new country. And it turns out it took longer to design this logo. And they didn't call it a logo. It's the great seal of the United States. Longer to design the logo than it did to win the war.

And making a very interesting story really short, first of all, they put the sort of the guys who wrote the Declaration of Independence, they gave them the logo challenge. Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson. They spectacularly fail. But the one thing they do contribute to what ended up in the logo is the motto. They were good with words better than images. So they got the E Pluribus Unum from many one. That survived into the final version we have now.

But it went back and forth. And finally, this wonderful guy who's a little bit lost to history, Charles Thompson, kind of synthesizes the whole thing, builds the new logo. And it was going to have two sides to it. The back has the pyramid. And we were familiar with that from the dollar bill, the sort of unfinished pyramid with the weird seeing eye at the top. That's the back. And for the front, they had the eagle and they had the olive branches and the arrows and that stuff and the shield. But they were missing in the lingo of the day, and there was a formula for these things back then, they were missing what was called the crest, which is

supposed to be the essence of the whole thing. And they settled upon what they called the radiant constellation. And it was 13, originally asymmetrical. On the dollar bill, it's all kind of cleaned up. But the original one was asymmetrical stars, big, little, spread out. And that represented for them how you could be. And E Pluribus Unum is written under the constellation. So that's how we could reconcile being one and many at the same time. It didn't mean from many bricks, one pyramid, which it could have, right?

Which is sort of like fit in or be left out. No, in a constellation, it's like you can stand out and be your own individual as a star, but you can connect to other stars to create something more useful, more powerful than you ever could alone. And I think that's the best idea America's ever had.

We fell short of it then, We continue to. But striving to, and the technical term, which turns some people off, and I'm curious how you think of this. I mean, the technical term is interdependence, right? And we celebrate, I started with July 4th. It's like we celebrate, and I know why we do it, our Independence Day. Any band of revolutionaries can declare independence. That's not that hard. The hard bit is figuring out, you know, basically how to be free together and with and through one another. And that's the triumph of the Constitution. That's blah, blah, blah. And so I think this symbol, which I've looked through a million times on my passport on a dollar bill, we don't tune it in. And in closing, I think just I've been accused of sort of getting a little too excited about this symbol, which guilty. But I think it's so neat because Aristotle and I'm brutalized.

A reader sent me this. Aristotle said something like, you know, a person cannot think without an image and something like that. And so we have these default images in our mind, and if we can replace it with a different image, it can really help guide us. And anyway, so George Washington got to name the first five Navy frigates. And he wasn't fanciful, right? USS United States, USS President, USS Constitution, the USS Congress, and you guessed it, the USS Constellation. That's how kind of central and non-abstract and concrete this was to them at that time.

And I think it can serve us well now. Oh, man, David, I just, I'm so into this. Well, I like the word interdependence because that makes my civil libertarians heart sing because one of the arguments I've consistently made to the left and to the right is that our civil liberties are interdependent. If a person on the right prevails in a First Amendment case, you have magnified, you have

expanded civil liberties for everybody. If a person on the left wins, you've expanded civil liberties for the person on the right, that they're interdependent. When one loses, we all lose. for the person on the right, that they're interdependent. And when one loses, we all lose. So I love that analogy a great deal, but I want to move from it to go back to the first question Sarah asked. Because I also have had, it's hard to find somebody who doesn't,

in some sense, like the Teddy Roosevelt quote. But I've also had problems with it because it puts such a binary around the very idea of a sense of purpose and meaning in life in a democracy where hopefully, if you're living at peace and with prosperity, you've got an awful lot of people who are doing things like going to work in the morning and then taking their kids to soccer practice in the evening and then winding down with a BBC crime show in the evening. And it makes it seem like that life, that life of making a living, raising a family in peace and a degree of prosperity is somehow doesn't matter

all that much. It puts that binary on the few, I guess, at the apex of the pyramid who are engaged in some sort of conflict as a lifestyle. That's right. Well, and you know, I've been reading your Afghanistan coverage over these last few days and was reminded of that, that if you, and we talk, and this is a little trick I used to do to try to get this point across. Just because I love that you love the word interdependent. It strikes a lot of people as kind of a wimpy, group hug, kumbaya, collectivist word. So it alienates, I don't know, half of America or something. And so to get around that, I said, okay, well, you ask 10 people, what's the opposite of

winning? And everyone says losing. And that just kind of gets them warmed up. And then you say, okay, more interestingly, what's the opposite of winning? And everyone says losing. And that just kind of gets them warmed up. And then you say, okay, more interestingly, what's the opposite of winning and losing? And nine out of 10 of us say, I don't know, sitting it out, not playing. Nine out of 10, not playing. One out of 10 says playing, or laughing, or learning, or loving, or any of the other words that we do, to your point, on a typical day and a typical family that don't lend themselves to winning and losing. But we've gotten so conditioned into this, the world of the pyramid of ranking, rating,

sorting, sifting, winning, losing, that if that's taken away from us, we think we are doing nothing as opposed to building a life. I mean, you do not win parenting. You do not win your career. You do not win a marriage. Although if you try to, you could certainly lose one. Well, that's, yeah, I think that's such a great formulation. And the idea that you take that sort of man in the arena formulation, take something that is incredibly meaningful and full of purpose, this building of a life and a family and hopefully in a land of peace, and drains it in significance compared to what you do and whatever conflict that you encounter. And you might not encounter and you know one of the the goals of those who engage in conflict is to create an

environment where people live in peace and you don't want to drain from purpose the very kind of life that you're trying to create um i don't know. I was actually so intrigued by that. I was so intrigued by that. I don't have a question. It's just an observation. I'm just telling you I was intrigued by that. Okay, so you're reading along in this book, and the constellation versus pyramid,

and I was so here for the historical lesson. And by the way, this was not all of it, right? He can't even walk you through. I actually loved the sort of boy band, the original, you know, founders boy band ideas that they had for what should be on the seal. I get that it was a little busy, but you should read the book just to get

some of the awesome ideas that didn't make it. Even though Ambassador here rejects them, rightfully so, as the rest of America did, should read the book just to get some of the awesome ideas that didn't make it. Um, even though ambassador here rejects them rightfully. So as, as the rest of America did, I suppose. Um, but you do sort of get to the end of that chapter and you're like, okay, but I guess I did think like, yeah, that's, that's nice. That's touchy feely. That's what we tell kindergarteners about sharing and caring. But how does that work in a business environment? How does that serve a profit motive, for instance? And then you turn the page and you're like, hey, you bet you're wondering how this works in the business environment. And I was like, I am, Ambassador. I am wondering that. So you have some good examples. I'm

wondering which one is sort of your go-to, if it's Wikipedia or Visa. But I also wanted you to discuss Mary Parker Follett, because I love what perhaps I think one of the growing pains our country is going through right now. There's a lot of downsides to it. I hate how divisive things feel, but we are discovering people in our history and in particular women, people of color who were sort of lost for a variety of reasons. And surely Mary Parker Follett is one of these incredible women who we don't know anything about except you. You wrote an entire chapter. Well, maybe an entire book about her. And it's awesome. Kind of. Well, thank you. She's sort of the matron saint of this constellation mindset, I think. And I discovered her kind of late in... I would love to go back and write more about her.

And maybe we start with her and then get back to the business example. Because, well, so I'm sitting here and I made this rule about not quoting too many dead white guys in any one chapter. And I say this, I mean, one day I will be one, right? So I'm, but I just was sort of like, hey, I I it was just a little self-check thing and so I wanted to quote Peter Drucker um because he had a lot of wise words to say about leadership and management um in fact Harvard Business School picked it they asked 200 global gurus who's business gurus who's your guru and he was the number one so he's the guru's guru so I'm reading about on Wikipedia. And then I discover an essay he wrote towards the end of his life where he reveals all along that he had a guru. So this is the guru's guru's gurus, Mary Parker Follett, as you

mentioned. She's writing a hundred years ago, grew up in Boston, brilliant woman, probably would have gone on to be a professor, but that wasn't open to her as a woman. And so she ends up spending 25 years on the front lines of social work with waves of immigrants coming to Boston and just America in its growing pains. And so at the time of this really important book she writes, after 25 years on the front lines, she is dealing with America coming out of a global pandemic, racial, social, economic division everywhere she looks, raging debates about big business, the power of big business, equal fear about government overreach and overregulation. So it sounds kind of familiar. And she says all these things are kind of daunting. But she said, I think we can do something about it beginning tomorrow at our next meeting. And so she gets really practical and tactical.

And this is what I loved about, she has so much to love about her work, but she basically says, look, our democracy hinges on how people treat each other around small tables. And the next time we're gathered virtually or in person, she's like, there's four possible outcomes of a meeting and only one of them is worthwhile. Bad outcome number one, you try to win the meeting. And by the way, I was thinking about this this morning in the context of all the meetings that are happening in Washington over the last 20 years about Afghanistan policy. So run that through it just to, and you can think of something much more mundane that we're all doing in Monday morning meetings, but I think it holds up for both. So bad outcome number one, you try to win. You come in with an idea fully fledged,

and you hope that everyone adopts it. It's like, why did you invite anyone else to that meeting? Number two is the flip, right? It's like, just come in and acquiesce. It's like, oh, David or Sarah, you know, they seem super fired up. Just let them have their way? It's like, just come in and acquiesce. It's like, oh, David or Sarah, you know, they seem super fired up. Just let them have their way. It's like, that's not okay. Like, why are you at the meeting, right? You're denying that group a unique perspective, namely your own. Here's the tricky one.

Bad outcome number three, according to Follett, is something we're told from a young age is what we all should be doing, which is compromise. And she said, I don't think so. She said, I think compromise is just basically little versions of bad outcome one and two. It's little mini victories and mini acquiescences. At best, you leave a meeting with a subset of the idea you came in and wanted to win. So she says, the only reason we should gather around the table is co-creation. And this gets back to the in the arena thing, is making something together, making a determination, making a product, making a product roadmap, whatever it is.

The act of making something, and you all see it in the work of the dispatch, I'm sure, this magic thing happens, which is you are part of that thing that you make together. You're part of it. It is forever part of you, but you haven't lost yourself in a bad sense. You haven't been absorbed by it and lost your individuality. You are more you because you've participated in the making of that. And so when I reflect on how we ought to 100 years later take her learnings into our next meeting, I kind of boil it down to three things. One, expect to be needed, right? You have to bring your whole truth, as we say, to the meeting no one else can. Two, expect to need others. And critically, expect to be changed. And this, I think, is an interesting challenge, which is

if you have done the first two things and you have made something with that group, you ought to leave that meeting just a little bit different than you came into it. And if you have, then the next time you bring your whole self to a meeting, it is a new and improved self. And if you've failed that challenge to expect to be changed, then you just keep, you're just sort of a one night, one note Charlie, and you just keep bringing that same truth and you are not growing. So that's Mary Pollack, Mary Parker Pollack, who I think has a lot to offer our democracy right now. So I'm interested in, because your experiences in the Obama campaigns shape some of your thinking along these lines.

And one of the things I want to talk about and what to have you talk about is the 08 campaign and the small dollar fundraising opportunity slash challenge that you faced, that you had this enormous amount of grassroots enthusiasm that you had to kind of make some key decisions about. And so if you could kind of walk us through that and what was the result, I found that to be very interesting. that to be very interesting. Oh, I'm glad. I, yeah, so this is back in the 2000, 2007. So the 2008 campaign, and I'm a volunteer from Kentucky. And we had, we had had Senator Obama visit Louisville.

He had not declared his presidency yet. This is back in 2006. And he was raising money for the Senate, but he agreed, thankfully, to do a big free rally for people. Well, I said big. I didn't know if it'd be big, but I was like, we can't have you come to Louisville and talk to 40 people at some high dollar fundraiser. He said, sure, I'll do it. And we put out the word. And I had these two amazing women in Louisville I worked with, and they put out the word. Anyway, got 5,000 people to our minor league ballpark. And it was like every zip code of Louisville. It was just one of these wonderful moments. And I think he was supposed to speak for eight minutes, and he spoke for 48 minutes, and it was just powerful. And so my co-organizers and I wondered out loud,

looking at the sea of faces who didn't normally come to Democratic events, how many of these folks would invest in the campaign if he does run for president? And we hoped he would. And so he did run, and he comes back to Louisville, and we organized this low dollar fundraiser. And then they call like 10 days before, and they said, good news, we're coming. Bad news, we can only do your high dollar fundraiser. We can't do the low dollar one. Bad news, we can only do your high dollar fundraiser. We can't do the low dollar one. And I am so defeated. I was like, no, no, no.

I mean, just have him come to the low dollar one, 20 bucks, and we'll have all the people at the fancy one just come to the, you know, if you only have time for one, I get it. We'll just do the big fun one. And they're like, no, no, no. And so I'm really depressed. And my lovely wife, Brooke, basically was like, you need to go to Chicago, hop on a Southwest Airlines flight or drive up there, whatever. This is not the kind of campaign you want to volunteer for if they will cancel that thing for the high dollar. I mean, that's crazy. Go make your case. And I was like, I don't want to be one of those annoying, pushy people in politics. There are way too many of them in both parties.

She's like, no, no, come on. Don't just... So anyway, I ended up going to Chicago, make my case to David Plouffe, who's the amazing campaign manager. And he sort of listens nicely. And he's like, sorry, man. We're going to do rallies in the summer. And I remember being so frustrated. I was like, this is not a rally. We already did a rally when he was here a couple months ago. This is people investing. But the money on the low dollar, I mean, on the small high dollar ones adds up so much quicker, right? I mean, your listeners can do the math. At 2,000 bucks a pop versus 20. And so anyway, and then David looks at me, he's like, man, you look really bummed out. And I was like, I am really bummed out. And I'm also

just kind of wondering how I'm going to give all the tickets back. And he's like, man, you look really bummed out. And I was like, I am really bummed out. And I'm also just kind of wondering how I'm going to give all the tickets back. And he's like, what do you mean? I was like, well, we've sold 3,200 tickets at 20 bucks. He's like, you're kidding me. Go for it. It was so interesting. Somehow in all the back and forth, I had failed. I had failed, not David.

I had failed to actually say that we had done this. We weren't just hoping to maybe do it. And then that was a big success. And the campaign, we rolled that out across the country, letting people invest a little bit early, which lets, as you touched on earlier, I think that lets these things, um, multiply in a way. Um, and you know, Sarah, you said something interesting that I wanted to circle back to if I can, which is, um, when you were finishing chapter one being like, I don't know, maybe this is kind of touchy feely, feel good, kindergarten sharing.

Uh, it's really interesting. I think that if we take Mary Parker Follett and this constellation mindset seriously, which I think we should, even a phrase that certainly on my side of the political aisle is very trendy is not helpful, which is power sharing. And I think it's like, look, lording power over others is obviously not a great idea. Hoarding it to yourself is tempting, but leads to alienation and loneliness, and that's not so great either.

but leads to alienation and loneliness, and that's not so great either. And therefore, it is tempting, not lording, not hoarding, I know, we'll divvy it up and share it. But what the great leaders, not only Mary Parker Follett, but the folks who did Wikipedia, the folks who did the biggest commercial organization in the history of the planet, which is Visa, all realized that power isn't something scarce, like something you mine in Eastern or Western Kentucky or elsewhere, right? It is not a scarce resource that you mine, it is something that you make, and you make it with other people sitting around a table. And once you make that switch of mindset, you realize that power sharing, even though it sounds better than those other two options, it invokes scarcity in people. And it's like, I'm going to give, I'm going to have a

little bit less and you're going to get some more as opposed to this idea that we can multiply it and make it together. Okay. I have to borrow your expertise, your, your other expertise. You actually have several expertises, but we need to follow the fundraising rabbit hole for a second because, as I said, I come from the presidential campaign world. I do one thing. I've worked in every department of a presidential campaign except fundraising. And it's so funny when you were like, I hate asking people for money and this is how it went. I was like, yes, that's why I can never work in fundraising. And you're like, but here's how you do it. I'm like, nope, nope, nope, nope. Still hate it. That's so great.

Can't do it. But the fundraising world, y'all revolutionized political fundraising in 2008. There's just no question. A page was turned. We can never go back to those high dollar just no question. A page was turned. We can never go back to those high dollar only fundraisers. And we saw it. I think y'all turned the page in 2008. And then we saw the death of the high dollar fundraisers in 2012. There was a moment. And it was the high dollar fundraiser where Mitt Romney says the 47% comment. And my thesis is that you have a few things happening at once. Low dollar events that y'all created in 2008, you created in the tangible world. As you said, it was people asking each other and 20 bucks and tickets. It was a high dollar fundraiser just put into a low dollar model in a lot of ways. Yeah.

And all of a sudden people are like, well, wait, wow. Yeah, it's only 20 bucks. But for just a little bit of the candidate's time, we're getting people invested. It's like a town hall plus. It's a rally plus. Add in the internet and all of a sudden the burn rate goes up. So it takes more money to raise that money online. But you get something very valuable back, which is the candidate's time. There's no more rally plus, it's just online. But now the result is in order to get those online dollars, everything is a fundraiser.

Everything your candidate says is a potential clip you can put on Twitter. Everything is a fundraiser. Everything your candidate says is a potential clip you can put on Twitter. Anyway, I'm curious what your perspective is. I think you've largely left the political fundraising world, but you must still be watching this with intense interest as the Democrats sort of battle in 2022 here. Totally. I do feel very out of it because if you're out of it one cycle, you're pretty much out of it. And I've been out of it more than two, I guess now. But look, I think it's, yeah, I don't even know where to begin on that one. The McCain-Feingold legislation had just gone into effect, which limited—I didn't know the old way, right, which was, without boring the listeners, but, you know, sort of unlimited soft dollars to the Republican National Committee or the Democratic National Committee and then hard dollar. So, like anything, those rules created a certain set of behaviors that optimized for how to do well in that realm. And when I entered the scene as a young, you know, neophyte who was bad at it, these new rules meant that you couldn't,

that sort of big game hunting. And that was the analogy. It was sort of like, you could sit there and take someone out to coffee forever because there was no end to the number of zeros she or he could put on a check if they got excited for the party, right? In the McCain-Feingold world, that just didn't exist. So you sort of, in a nice way, you didn't have to waste a lot of time cajoling and cultivating and all these sort of, like you're raising money for a university or something. It could just be much sort of quicker. It's just like, hey, I'm really interested in X. I'm passionate because of whatever reason. Would you like to help out? And it just kind of made it quicker. And you all of a sudden would look at the world and not look at target lists of 1.5% of your city's population who had previously given to a Democrat or Republican.

You could just sort of look at 100% of the people, Right? And so it drastically kind of widened the perspective, which I think was helpful there for a while. And then SuperPAC, you know, at the end of my time, all of that started to come back, which was kind of more like the old way, and I don't have experience with that. So what do you think of now? What do you think of the small-dollar online fundraising?

I mean, the online stuff had been there before i mean um what i like you touched on it what i thought was neat about the way we did it and others did it also was the in-person the um basically i mean now with my my bookingo, sort of the constellations that you could, that would form in a given city or a subset of a city, and really more modeled on field organizing. I mean, that's where we got our inspiration. And I'm sure you worked in field organizing. If you did everything but fundraising, you must have. And they're just the ethos of field organizers. It's just lovely. And I think we kind of borrowed from that. It's like, we're not fundraising from a few gajillionaires. We're organizing money. It's a different kind of support. But adopting that kind of snowflake

model that I talk about in the book that the field organizing team had done and applied that to money. And I think that was helpful. I mean, asking for money on the internet sort of late in the cycle was common, but that's sort of too late. Like if you wait to feel organized until the end of a campaign, you're not going to get very much success. And stealing a line from Seth Godin, the wonderful business writer, and I used to teach these seminars for other volunteer fundraisers. This is about farming. It is not about hunting. And so if you find yourself talking about bagging donors and target lists and

nail like hunting language, isn't helpful for fundraising because if you shoot at one deer, you maybe get one nine run away. Farming is sort of seeds and multiplying. You get the idea. Can I switch gears entirely to just a weird question that I have based on your record as an ambassador? Sure. Okay. All right.

We'll see. I mean, how this this has always intrigued me because you come from the United States of America. We have no nobility. We have no aristocracy here. We have no royalty with all of the incredibly elaborate rituals are attached to introductions to communications with, you know, monarchs.

And so you are ambassador to Sweden. There's King, what, Carl Gustav, correct? And then Queen Elizabeth is Queen of England. How are you as an American prepared for these meetings from a standpoint of etiquette? I don't know. I've always wondered about this. from a standpoint of etiquette, I don't know, I've always wondered about this, to walk into those rooms and to do it, to not make a fool of yourself. That's one question. And the other one is,

is there specific protocols that Americans follow that others don't? Because I know there's this tradition against dipping the flag, for example, towards a monarch when we're the Olympic team. So marching in front of foreign monarchs, we don't dip the flag. Other countries dip the flag. So yeah, so that's my question. Yeah, well, okay. So I remember I watched, do you remember on HBO, it's probably 20 years ago, they did that beautiful, I think of like a five-part

thing based on David McCullough's book on John Adams. Yeah, John Adams. I was thinking of that. Yeah. So there's that amazing scene where Paul Giamatti is playing John Adams and he is there talking to King George and he does some excruciating like a hundred yard backwards walk because you're not allowed to turn your back on the monarch. And so I, my wife and I had to go present our credentials, which is the sort of technical thing when you arrive in a country. It doesn't happen the day you get there, but it happens in the first few weeks. And you are asked to go in a, like a morning suit and you wear a top hat and you get taken there in a carriage into Buckingham Palace. I mean, it is so unusual and strange for anyone. And I think I speak, like, I challenge anyone to

feel comfortable in a top hat. I mean, you just look like you're in some bad, I don't know, what, like bad Abe Lincoln impersonator. That's awkward. But there's a wonderful guy whose job it is to meet with you before the big day. And so my wife and I go meet with him at the palace, and he's just going to do a run through, like what's going to happen. And you're wearing normal clothes at this point. And he's talking you through it. And I remember he says, he says to my wife and me, he says, now, we want to reassure all Republicans that, and my wife and I both, and we're both Democrats, right? So we just had this like instinctive, subtle, I mean, it wasn't subtle as you'll hear in the story, but I felt subtle of just sort of like, what, you know, and then he catches it. He's like, oh no, I don't mean that

kind of Republican. I mean, you people from republics. And I just thought that was so funny because I don't know if you two think of yourselves. I mean, I know technically I was an American history major, but like, I don't think of myself as like, we're from a republic very often, you know what I mean? And, um, but he does and they they do and so he said it by way of saying you um when we say bow we don't mean some deep from the waist subservient bow it can be and it's hard for listeners to see but like head like a yeah yeah i take a little nod of the head that was sort of it um and then curtsying for a woman, which is trickier than slightly bowing your head for a guy. The slightly bowing the head was not that hard.

And it turns out in modern whatever, and the point is Queen Elizabeth is unbelievably good at making you feel comfortable and welcome. So in the moment, it's not stressful at all. And she and her team, they're pros, they've done this for a long time, and you just kind of come in. And the other funny thing they said was like, I said, well, how do you know when it's over? You know, it's like if you're at a cocktail party, like when's the time to move on? And he said, he said, that's it. That's a good question. We get that question a lot. And I'm going to give you an unsatisfying but true answer, which is, I won't tell you how, but you will know when it's over. And he was right. It's like it's all going along. And he said, but this is the loving

part of it. The whole thing was lovely. But he said, don't you worry about it because you're going to spend the whole time in your head being like, have I stayed too long? Have I stayed too long? Or whatever weird inner dialogue you get going. If you're a nervous American, as I was, he's like, just enjoy the moment. Like it ain't going to happen again. So enjoy it. And when it's over, it'll be over and obvious. And so it was, um, it was a lovely experience. And, you know, I'm not a big Royal, like I wasn't into all this stuff. Like I didn't, you know, disproportionately, so that probably helped. But you also have to learn all the titles. Like you even mentioned in the book, Admiral, the Lord, you know, John or whatever, and

like how you combine titles and like, do you go to school for this? Well, they do teach charm school where they don't teach you any of that kind of stuff. The nice thing is if you're American, you just basically get a pass on a lot of this stuff. Good. Well, and I think it's sort of nice because it's like if you care about the underlying thing, which is the other person there, and you're trying to be respectful and nice and useful together, that kind of shines through. And I think people know that Americans generally aren't obsessed with it,

which is lovely, I think, about us as a country, that we're not preoccupied with all that hierarchical stuff. And to that point, I should have corrected you earlier. So please call me Matthew, Sarah. You said ambassador twice, but my audio cut out, so I couldn't. Please. Matthew, Sarah, you said ambassador twice, but my audio cut out, so I couldn't. Please. So my next question, a giant meteor is heading to the United States of America, and you can evacuate to either Sweden or Great Britain, one of your two postings. Which country are you

evacuating to and why? Oh, that's so mean, David. So I am the father of twins. So I instinctively just don't do the favorite thing. It's ingrained in you. If you raise twins, you're punished early and often for doing this. And I'm a recovering diplomat, so twice over. Not going to take that one. Yeah. I mean, I love both places. They were... Well, let's make it more positive then. Let's not... Of your national twins

between the UK and Sweden, what are the more endearing qualities about each? I think for the Swedish, there's a great thing on Netflix that they have a new series called This Is Pop, P-O-P, like this is about pop music. And it's mini documentaries. They're really good. One of them is just on Sweden

and how amazing they have been at making not only Swedish, not like Ace of Base and Roxette that are Swedish bands, but you, Sarah, talked about the boy band founders, but I mean, they did Backstreet Boys, all these hits, Britney Spears were produced. Hit Me Baby One More Time. It was written by Swedes, right? That's why it makes no sense, Max Martin and others. So there's's why it makes sense, I think. there that produces that kind of thing where within one person you can get that kind of creativity. And so I love that. And the music that comes out of there. And they do winter better than anyone else. And they never talk about it. Right. There was like summer because it lasts forever. You know, it's dark so long.

Then it gets really light. And my family would always go home. I'd stick around, but my family would come back to Kentucky for the summer when school got out. And they'd be like, how can you leave here in the summer? And then it was a wonderful, wise Norwegian-American friend of mine who said, look, everybody does summer well. I mean, big deal. Like, it's hard to screw up summer. But they have figured out how to make winter, which is long and dark, just beautiful, like candlelit breakfast and, you know, cross-country skiing on the foot. It's just amazing. So I love winter. And then on the UK side, they often complained about the bad weather

in London and the UK, but it's so, what's the right way? You know, in so many places in America, I grew up, Boston, California, even in Kentucky, all the grass dies in the winter or in the summer if it burns in California. But the, not in the bad fire sense, I'm sorry, just, you know, like it turns brown in the summer. In the UK, it is unbelievably green because in the depths of winter, no leaves on the trees, but all the grass, because it's so wet that it's so, it just really is unbelievably green. So winter, it's a green winter and then a white winter and those things. I think they both do winter really well. I think there's something terribly romantic about the rain in the UK that

is not true anywhere else. And I don't know why, Maybe it's because I read all of these, you know, Charlotte Bronte books and like the rain on the moors as they're walking, you know, to find one another. And I don't know. But like, to me, it's like terribly, all of it's very romantic. And you can imagine history happening. well i reminded a friend who's an amazing author named uh alan de botton who started the school of life and has written a zillion books he makes a great point i was thinking about he was saying how americans typically don't you know we're not big into titles and all that kind of aristocratic stuff and he makes a point in one of his books that when we're, let's say you're reading some Jane Austen thing and they talk about, you know, the Duke and Duchess of so-and-so walk in the room and everyone's a flutter. Right. And he's like, I think he's sort of talking to Americans. He's like, oh, we sort of judge them now. Like, oh, come on.

Who cares? Right. And why is that so worthy of talking about the next morning? You know, and he said, yeah, but you should apply that if two unbelievably famous celebrities walk into a party today. You would be talking about it the next day and telling your friends, and we'd all be a flutter too. And so we've just shifted it from royalty or aristocracy

to celebrity in our country. And I was like, ooh, that's true. It's so true, and maybe worse. And maybe worse. Oh yeah. There's a lot of ways that might be worse, but you're right. If Bennifer walk into a room right now, like, yep, that's all anyone's going to talk about for sure. Yeah. And so I thought that was a good sort of caution. I don't know how I got us onto that, but here we are.

Okay. I want to wrap a little bit with more Constellation versus Pyramid. We talked about applying this to meetings. And by the way, so fascinating because at my time at the Department of Justice, in senior staff, each one of us have such different roles by the time you get to like that very senior staff, um, that it's very easy to walk into a room for a meeting and think that what you're going in for is buy-in from everyone else. You're the expert. You're just trying to explain what you're going to do and have them all say, uh, yep, we're on board with that. And we understand the risks for instance, which seems like a really productive reason to have a meeting.

But I did realize over time, I mean, I spent months with the buy-in model in my head, and I realized over time that I had these very brilliant people. Yes, they weren't brilliant in my specific lane, but just so smart. And so over time, it just naturally evolved where I would come in and say, here are all the options I'm considering. Here's why I'm considering this, why there's like a plus here or a minus here. I'm wondering if anyone else has has thoughts on this or maybe a different thought entirely. like opening up your expertise to them, these very smart people and saying, you know, is there anything in your lane of expertise or just you being a smart person where you can spot something that I haven't thought of in my thinking? And the meetings became, I think,

far more productive. And I think we had way better outcomes from that. And like, I was reading your book and I was like, wow, I need to do that intentionally now. Like I, and I, like it changes your whole mindset when you think of it that way, that like these things you think are good, buy-in, compromise, everything else, like, nope, chuck it. That's actually not a good use of time. Totally. I love that you're doing that and you're doing this already.

And I was asked by someone's like, oh, okay, great. So can you picture, um, my senior Senator Mitch McConnell, uh, in, you know, sitting down with Joe Biden and co-creating in a Mary Pollack style thing. And I said, look, actually, I think probably, yes, I could, but right now it is hard to kind of imagine a lot of that I grant, but I was like, but, but don't, but let's just take that one level closer to just within the Republican tribe or within the Democratic tribe. What you all know, and many of your listeners know, some of the worst, most nasty fighting in Washington is within the parties or within the administration, right? Not Republican versus Democrat. And so what if you just said, look, within DOJ or, I mean, famously, it's like, oh, the State Department and Treasury and DOD. I mean,

all those kind of institutional rivalries where people are just showing up, getting in the arena, trying to win or compromise between them. It doesn't seem a big stretch of imagination to be like, why couldn't more meetings be the one like you described, Sarah, where you actually try to make something and you'd have to start with, I think, five words. I don't know. We might dot, dot, dot. And it's like, I don't know. And the weird thing, we do the opposite of that. We send, in the case of the Afghanistan stuff, again, which is so heartbreaking in the news right now, through Republican and Democratic presidencies, this pattern of saying, well, we'll go ask the military leaders to come back with three plans, and then they'll present us three plans, and then we'll pick the one.

And that whole, no matter how smart and well-intentioned all the players are in that dynamic, it sets up this win, lose. You go off, then you come back. And it's just, I think it fails that volet test of making something together. But do you know what the problem is? Live and in the room. You hit on it. You have to walk in and say, I don't know. And if you don't have trust with the other people in that room, it's very, very hard in Washington, DC, in any room, even with your spouse to walk in and say, I don't know, because that's not why you were brought there. Especially, you know, not maybe not, especially when you are sitting in, uh, uh, you know, the Roosevelt room and you're, you know, you took up a chair, someone else could be in that chair

and you're going to sit there and say, I don't know, you better have a relationship and that interdependence already built. And I think that's a lot of the problem is how do we change the mindset going back maybe to elementary school? I've been watching a lot of the problem is how do we change the mindset going back maybe to elementary school? I've been watching a lot of Sesame Street. My kid was 14 months old and Sesame Street has this thing that they're teaching kids now that anytime they have a problem, they have to approach it with, I wonder what if let's try. And it feels very Farzan. I will tell you, it feels very constellation style learning instead of learning.

Yeah. I mean, I, I, that's pretty cool. Yeah, I think so. And it is,

I mean, hopefully you're young 14 months. Well, like it is about habits, right. And it's like all habits. They're hard to start. And they don't, you know, well, like it is about habits, right? And it's like all habits, they're hard to start. And they don't, you know, and important to pass down. And we've just lost the habits of

interdependence, right? Just demonstrably, like we haven't done it. And I was thinking about, I was trying this out on a British friend to see if it worked for British politics. But if you had two cars in a parking lot here in America, and you had to guess which is the Democrat car and which is the Republican car, it's a very easy game. They only have, they're identical cars, one bumper sticker each, one word on each bumper sticker. Car number one says freedom, car number two says together. Right? We all know it, right? The Republican is the freedom car, Democrats the together car. And in my adult lifetime anyway, I've just watched that whole debate play out.

And so if you do a COVID overlay on top of this, it I think brings it even, you don't need COVID to do this, but freedom has been taken to its extreme where it is freedom from, freedom from, just leave me the heck alone. The together has gone to its logical extreme of total togetherness. One bumper sticker last cycle on the Democratic side said, not me, us. Like, lose yourself in the collective, right? And I sit around and look at all the challenges of Kentucky or Louisville or the United States. And I think what we desperately want and need isn't freedom from, and is not total togetherness. And by the way, on total togetherness, sometimes people talk about herd immunity as if we're a herd of cattle. I mean, it's, you know, it's like, that's creepy. Like that doesn't work here, regardless of your

political party. What we desperately want and need is freedom together. Freedom, not a mealy-mouthed compromise, middle-of-the-road crap, like fully free with and through one another. That is the best idea America has ever had. And it's hard. And it takes daily work. It is hard, meaningful work. And it is grounded in habits. And we can all do something about it, like effective at our next Monday morning meeting. And I think by extension, if we go back to Washington, but it's fun to point fingers out there. But it's in us, right? To Sarah's point, it's like, it is the intentionality and the habits we bring to our next encounter with

anyone. And I haven't thought this through yet, this part, but on any issue you cover on the dispatch, there's the crowd that wants to end it, you know, end our presence in Afghanistan, wants to end it, you know, end our presence in Afghanistan, end Roe v. Wade, end funding of police, you know, you name it. And then that instantly draws out the defend it crowd, right? So end it, defend it, end it, defend it. And the hard work of a democracy is a different thing entirely. And this gets back to why in the arena is so unsatisfying if you sit with it for a while, which is we need to mend it. So I get the ended arguments, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't. I understand the defendant,

but then there's the hard work of mending it. And what I'm wondering out loud, I'd love to know what you all think, maybe, and I haven't thought this through, that you're only going to be good at mending things you actually love. So if we take something slightly less partisan about NCAA and compensating athletes, which is a big issue here in Louisville because we don't have a protein, but we have an amazing University of Louisville, University of Kentucky, David talked about. You've never officially had a protein. We all know you've had a pro team. But anyway, that's- See, very good. See? So you say, should you be involved with rethinking how that system works if you hate college athletics and you think sports are stupid? I think that's kind of disqualifying. And you think sports are stupid. Like, I don't, I think that's kind of disqualifying.

And that, you know, again, if you love the game, you ought to care a lot. And sports are a helpful diversion for this because it's like, you realize that mending and amending the rules of baseball, basketball, whatever it is, is what the game is. You can't's like, you realize that mending and amending the rules of baseball, basketball, whatever it is, is what the game is. You can't be like, ugh, you know, I hate the rules of baseball. It's like, well, that's all baseball is. You know, so here's my reaction to that, by the way, on the, you have to love it in order to want to mend it. My initial thought was, ah, yes,

but I have found in my life that the more I learn about anything, the more I grow to love it. Like, you know, for instance, my husband is, uh, is decided I all by himself, I guess, to become an F1 fan. I, I mean, I don't like car racing. What is the point of this? It's not human achievement. It's just like cars going around in a circle. And I tell him all this. And then he starts telling me about the different people involved and all the drama.

And that in F1, the cars aren't going around in a circle. It's like these little, there's turns and here's how you build the cars. And like his enthusiasm is infectious about it. And the more I learn about it, the more I find little things to love about it. And I wonder if that's, if there's something very human,

that it's hard, in fact, not to love something the more you learn about it and invest in it. Totally. And we'll take a quick break to hear from our sponsor today, Aura. Ready to win Mother's Day and cement your reputation

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Speaking of learning, let's wrap with a really important question. Speaking of learning to love something. Okay, but then I have an actual ending thing for him, but okay. Oh, an actual. Oh, mine is not an actual ending thing. Oh. Okay, well, speaking of learning to love something, during the pandemic, we have learned to love the British crime drama. And I don't know if when you were ambassador,

if you ever had time to dive into the world of British crime dramas. But if you did, or did you, and if you did, which one was your favorite? And the correct answer is Broadchurch. Yeah, well, you did it. You did Broadchurch. Obviously Broadchurch. Obviously Broadchurch.

And to have those worlds of Broadchurch, and I'm forgetting her name, the amazing actor who then goes and plays Queen Elizabeth in The Crown. I'm having a senior moment. But anyway, yes, Broadchurch. Olivia Coleman. Olivia Coleman. Yes. So great. Okay. So actually the, the way that we got introduced was because of your involvement in the national constitution center. And I want to bring this back to AO topic, David, and perhaps our favorite AO topic that we keep coming back to, which is the first amendment. And the national constitution center is going to get the First Amendment inscription that was along Pennsylvania Avenue, along the Newseum, and it's coming to Philadelphia. No way. You didn't know this?

You're on the Board of Trustees. I don't know. I know. I know. I know. But you know what? I've been out here, Toby and Jeffrey and the team, I'm sure they told me and I missed it. I'm sorry. But wait, okay, so tell me. So you know the museum, you know the inscription. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like the huge, you know, it's 100 feet or something of the First Amendment. being it was taken down not too many months ago from D.C. and it is going to wind its way up to Philadelphia and be installed in the National Constitution Center. And in fact, I believe that Judge Ludig is very involved in this, a friend of the pod.

And so when it is unveiled up there, Judge Ludig, I'm sure, will be giving remarks. And I hope to make the trip up because I love Philly cheesesteaks. And then I'm sure I will see you there in person for this. But I was curious how you can apply your constellation versus pyramid to the First Amendment, which is, you know, it's the first for a reason. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. I, um, when I was in the UK, as you know, I would, it was the one country where young people, people under 25 had a lower, according to Pew Research, a lower opinion of America than their parents and grandparents. Like every other country they surveyed, 39 other countries,

young people liked America, uh, as much as or more than their parents. But in the UK, there was this deficit. And these kids didn't remember, you know, FDR and Churchill, and they didn't remember what they remember, Afghanistan and Iraq and Edward Snowden. There was a lot of other stuff going on in these young people's minds. So I thought, well, I should do something about this, right? And the one thing I knew I didn't want to do is show up and give a lecture on American foreign policy because I have three teenagers. For so many reasons, yeah. So many reasons. They didn't want it. I didn't want to do that. So we ended up doing this thing, as you know, which was this kind of workshop. And by the end, I did it with 20,000 British

18-year-old young women and men. And I gave them a blank index card and had them draw a picture of something that frustrated them about America or draw a picture of something. And then on the other side, draw a picture of something that inspired them about America. And so on the frustration side, which is where we spent most of the time, because that's where most energy lives, right? Which is why, by the way, phrases like, oh, what unites us is greater than what divides us sounds good, but it often just leads to sweeping disagreement under the table and not providing a place where you can get real and actually build something more along the lines of the meetings you tried to do at DOJ. Anyway, So number one frustration was guns. I have 10,000 pictures of handguns

drawn by young British, uh, basically high school seniors followed by racism and police brutality, right? So those are the big three frustrations with America, 2013, 14, 15, 16. Interestingly, not foreign policy quote issues that we're trained to as diplomats talk about. And those things did come up. The U.S. support of Israel, Israel-Palestine surveillance, drones. I mean, they would come up, but on the big word cloud that I made, those are tiny words and these other ones are really big. So to me, the answer was, look, we can distinguish all we want. Our domestic policy here is foreign policy, whether we like it or not, and they are paying attention. And they are paying attention to our constitution. This is how it gets

back. So I would say, well, okay, guns. And I'd say, well, look, I mean, I, you know, I own three guns. And they, and you could just see the shock, you know what I mean? It's like, look, a hundred million, and I don't want to get into the here. Like I said, well, look, we think incredibly differently about guns, our two countries, like our founding reality and the myth. We not in a bad sense of myth, the story we tell ourselves, like we got independence from you guys with guns that they would rather we didn't have. Right. So this goes deep in our nation's history. And, um, and so we were talking about the constitution and they really knew it, you know, and they, they knew, um, uh, we, the people, they knew the first amendment. And I would do a little exercise. I'd be like with blanks for

what the things are freedom of, you know, and they would list them all. And then we get to the second amendment. Um, and they pretty much knew that one too. And the full thing, right? The bit about the militias too, not just the right to bear arms shall not be infringed, right? So it's like the whole sentence. And then we got to the third one, which was really fun. It's like the third amendment. And I, you know, my brother's a law professor, but I think this is true that no Supreme court case has ever been fought about the Third Amendment. And my brother's a law professor, but I think this is true, that no Supreme Court case has ever been fought about the Third Amendment. You're right, although we had a listener yesterday

email to say that there is a case about the Third Amendment. Just yesterday. But wasn't that a circuit court opinion? Yeah, no, and it's not. This is not. Okay, so I'm good. Yeah.

So what's fun, if you picture it sort of laid out on a thing with the First Amendment up top, the Second Amendment in the middle, and the Third Amendment, because the point I'm trying to make is limited to these three, just for visual sake. And then you've got the Third Amendment, which is about not quartering troops in your house. And the way I tried to imperfectly, you guys can be the judge, describe to these young British people about the debate around guns in America.

Because we are stuck, I think everyone would admit. Like we are stuck in this debate, whatever side of it you're on. And I said, look, I think there's a bunch of Americans who just think that the second amendment is basically just like the first one. It's you shall not, you know, limit freedom of the press, religion. Oh, and you can't do that to guns either. Right.

Then there's a group of people that are like, no, no, no. Calling attention to the second, the militia part. And it's like, look, quartering troops in your house is kind of quaint and out, out mode. We don't do that anymore. It's not a thing. That's why we don't fight about it. And by the way, militias aren't a thing anymore.

So it should be thought about more like the third and less like the first. But that's our battle between those two. I love that the Third Amendment now has come up on this podcast multiple times just in the week. Like, this is crazy. It's amazing. Thank you. I'm just glad to be part of that new tradition.

Well, Ambassador Plenipotentiary, thank you. You have to call me, Matthew. We can't end with that. Come on. No, but thank you guys so much for what you do and for having me on. This, again, the book, How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go,

The Power of Giving Away Power. Y'all, this was so good. And like the back with all the like, you know, little quotes, there's usually like three quotes from people. This is like a crazy list of people. Richard Thaler, Ken Burns, Anne-Marie Slaughter.

What the what? Lots and lots of people on the back there applying the barzen method so well and it's called a blurb i think like those wonderful words of of um which blurb is like a like an awful word for this beautiful as a first-time author like reaching out to these amazing busy people who were so kind to offer encouragement and nice words. And then it's become a verb, like, oh, blurb it. So it sort of cheapens what to an author anyway is like the most wonderful burst of energy. It feels like an onomatopoeia. And yet maybe, I don't know, is a blurb, doesn't that feel onomatopoeic to anyone? Yeah, it's like in the way that burp does do you know what I mean

that's what I think is unfortunate yeah well that's how we're going to end this yeah we'll end on a burp walked right into that one yep that's how it ends thank you so much and thank you

listeners please go rate us on Apple Podcasts and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and check out our work at thedispatch.com, which is very heavy with some of the best reporting and analysis you're going to read about what's happening in Afghanistan. So go to thedispatch.com and check that out. And we will talk to you on Thursday. Thank you.