Speakers:
SPEAKERS
Clint Murphy, Edward Hess
Clint Murphy 00:00
Good morning, and welcome to the show had a great pre conversation with some of the stuff we’re going to talk about today that resonated with me as I read your book on your work journey. And where I wanted to start was a conversation about reading books. Like you, I grew up without much money. And my mother also said reading was the one thing that she would always have money for, which meant I’ve always been a big reader, which is why we’re here today and why I have a podcast where I get to talk to authors, can you share what reading meant to you growing up, and how that continues to inform your life.
Edward Hess 00:44
Reading was foundation, fundamental in my life, we lived in a small rural town in, in Georgia and a family was different than everybody else, which meant I was different than everybody else. And we didn’t have a lot of friends didn’t have a lot of opportunities. And my mother was smart enough. She came from Massachusetts. And she’s smart enough to say, well, you know, son, you got to read. And we came from a humble background. And so my mother would save up money over weeks and weeks, and she’d say, Okay, let’s go to the bookstore. And there was one bookstore in town. And she said, You have to read stories about people that were successful. You have to read stories. And that can be athletes, that can be politicians that can be lawyers, that can be so but I want you to read stories about people that have been successful. And I remember the first book, I was able to buy. And as I said, we were very poor. And so I got to buy one book, I wrote about the book about the mayo brothers, who were the founders of Mayo Clinic, and the great Mayo hospitals in the United States. And I read that book about how they became a doctor. And I said, Wow, I’m gonna be you know, and this was like, I was in the second third grade this like, Okay, I’m going to be a doctor. And she said, slow down, that’s good, you’re learning something, let’s go buy a book about an athlete. Let’s then the next time Let’s go buy a book about a politician, or let’s go buy a book about a, you know, a warrior, etc. And so it made my approach to life, which is still there. I mean, goodness, I was thinking about the other day, because I had someone asked me, I probably in the last, gosh, I’ve been here 12 years. I mean, I’ve read 4000 books in 12 years, because I know how many I gave to the local place where once you get books in if you gave them away to give to people, and I know how many I got. And so reading has always been part of my life, whether it’s an escape or learning mechanism, or whether it’s bringing me back to being centered and thinking back to what I need to do. It’s been a joy. It’s been a joy I am, you know, my reading has changed over the years to reading science, reading the great philosophies and great religions and reading, if you will, the great teachers, you know, books on CEOs who learned to do it, right. So it’s fundamental, it’s foundational. And I’ve tried to read a couple of books every week.
Clint Murphy 03:25
That is amazing and beautiful. And something I aspire to in my life right now. It’s roughly 50 a year for the podcast. And I’m a little stretch dad more than that. But I look forward to the day where it is 100 to 200 a year, approaching 400. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there at that was 4012 years. That’s an astounding number. I love it. The one thing you likely picked up across a number of these people you read books about, and it resonated in your life. And it’s one of the number one things I tell people they need in their lives to succeed is the idea of ownership. Can you talk about what ownership looks like to you? And why the listener when we say own your life, the various facets of your life that we want them to own? their emotions, their mindset, their behaviors, their techniques for learning how to increase the gap between a stimulus and a response.
Edward Hess 04:33
You’re spot on. And it’s, you know, my recent book, as you said, is own own your work journey. And that’s to take ownership, not all of your work journey, but that includes ownership of what’s going on inside of you. And I don’t know about you, but you know, I went a long time in schooling. fact it was only graduate school. When I got to understanding you know, the need to take ownership. The ego mind how to manage emotions. All right. In fact, and this is sort of a little bit of an embarrassing story. But it wasn’t until my early 30s, and I was having a conversation with my wife, who is and was a scientist, about emotions. And we were getting to a heated discussion. And she all of a sudden said, slow down, slow down. She says, do you know, you do not have to automatically express your feelings in your behaviors? And I looked at her? And I said, Excuse me, I don’t understand what you’re saying. She says, Well, when you feel yourself getting upset, or angry, or whatever, do you know that you have the power to slow that down or change that you don’t have to behave that way? I said, No, no one ever taught me that. She says, Well, I need you to be working on that. And so this concept of the you, we all have an ego, we all got a mind, we all got a body. We all are basically chemically oriented through emotions. And you’re right. Books primary purpose is to teach people how to take ownership, ego, their mind, their emotions, their behaviors, their words, their thinking, their listening etcetera. And you can do that, because there’s science behind how to do that. And also, it’s all part of the great seven religions underlie this, and the Great Eastern and Western philosophies, all have stuff that I have been fortunate enough to learn fortunate enough to teach. Fortunate enough to coach on all of this, all right, is not something that is new, or something that is unique to this era, or something that’s unique to the United States. This is all been here for all of us. And unfortunately, in our education system, in many parts of the world, we don’t get this. And so it really comes down to if you want to have happy life, a successful life, a meaningful life in the age of smart technology.
All right, in the age of smart technology, which is only going to get smarter, smarter and smarter. You’ve got to take ownership of you, by definition, ego, mind, body, motions, words, behaviors, listening, thinking, and how to build caring, trusting relationships, , well, how do you do that? Well, you do that through daily practices, daily deliberate practices, you can’t do it without doing daily practices, and you start out small and you build up and over time you get better. And the key thing is, time never ends. And so people that excel at learning people that excel at being a good person, people that find true happiness in meaning. All right, many of those people will tell you that they still today. All right, spend their time that they have allotted to every day, my daily practices, deliberate practice. And what’s so funny about some of this, where people find interesting is, you take them NBA teams in the United States, basketball, professional basketball teams, almost every team has a mindfulness meditation coach full time on it. And you watch NBA basketball, and you can see scores, who can go to the half court line, and shoot three point shot Swish, a high percentage of the times. Why? Because the goal is inner peace for all of us inner stillness and calmness that enables us to go out into the world, being non judgmental, fearless, quiet inside, because the greatest thinking, science shows the greatest thinking, whether you want to call it an innovative thinking that greatest thinking occurs when the human body side and then what comes is, Wow, where did that come from? That’s really cool. So you got you got athletes who have bought into this. And then you got the Warriors. All right, the Navy SEALs.
The Navy SEALs are trained how to manage fear, trained how to do mindfulness meditation, to calm themselves. They’re trained that when they are sent into battle, they are calm. They can sense, see, understand and react appropriately. So if you think about it, if you got great athletes, great dancers, musicians, okay, I’m picking individual types of work that people can do and measure. All of these people use the practices and tools, which I talked about which you talk about alright, it’s not rocket science. It’s deliberateness. And it’s starting out small, you’ll have ups and downs. But you got to keep at it. And all of a sudden you get leaps, and you get a little more smoothness, then you get more leaps. And it’s amazing the impact it has on you. And I’m talking about a general you all right, impact on family impact on friendships, and it gives you the ability to go out into this crazy world we’re living in.
Clint Murphy 10:32
When we look at that, Ed, we’re on that journey to always be our best selves to continuously learn. And for the listeners, we’re talking about a navy, navy seals or elite athletes. And they may say, Well, that doesn’t apply to me. But you give the example in your book with where technology is taking us, and how that may replace up to 50% of our jobs. That’s right, for the person that’s listening. Why do they, I know you’re on this journey, always to be your best self. I’m always on a journey to be my best self. Why is it important that the people that are listening out there today? Why do they want to be on this journey to always be better tomorrow than they are today.
Edward Hess 11:24
Because if they’re not on the journey, there’s a high probability they will be left behind. And being left behind is extremely serious. And it’s there’s nothing positive about being left behind not having a job, especially in a country, which does not have a social safety net. So there is no net out there that’s going to catch anyone. And the reality is, is that even if you have a job, the best scientists are predicting that a person will have five different jobs in the next 20 years, because of the technology is going to continue to advance. So that’s why the concept in the book of you have to be a highly adaptive learner , need to be able to learn, unlearn and relearn at the speed of technological change. In order to do that, you need all that personal stuff we just were talking about. But why should they? What should motivate them to embrace, the deliberate practice is to embrace the personal stuff that we’re talking about. Because going forward, there’s only going to be really three types of jobs that technology’s not going to be able to do and technologies are going to continue to advance. Those three types of jobs right now are thinking in ways that smart technology can’t think: critical thinking, innovative thinking going out into the unknown, and figuring things out ,making decisions when there’s not a lot of data.
Well, if you look at the reality in the United States today, and especially in the education system, critical thinking is a void. All right, we don’t really teach people how to critically think. So critical thinking is number one. Number two is excelling at building caring, trusting relationships, positive emotional relationships with other human beings, technology may be able to impact your emotions, but technology cannot create emotions with other human beings. And so if you’re working in spaces where other human beings are needed, and are necessary, being able to bring your best positive emotional self to that relationship is going to be a key job skill. And there’s a third job excelling at doing trade jobs that require lots of human dexterity. moving your arms, you’re, you know, you could be crawling in this human dexterity and iterative diagnosis of the problem, trying to figure out what is the problem in iterative trial and error approaches to solving the problem.
For some time, that’s going to be very hard for robots to do all those to do those three things. So those are the three jobs, all right, that basically three potential jobs that people have, you will not have a high likelihood of being in those jobs continuous for the next 10, 15, 20 years if you don’t bring your best self to work. It’s going to be highly competitive. We live in a survival of the fittest culture, in the business world. Now, that doesn’t mean you compete against other people. No, your biggest competition going forward is yourself is your stuff. It’s what’s going on inside of you. And you have to transform that and it is doable. It may sound like a lot and everything, but it is very doable. All it takes is commitment and holding self accountable. And yes, one day you’ll forget. But don’t forget two days. Just mark off that one day. All right. Some of the feedback that I’ve gotten over the years is people using the words. And you don’t really explain it that well, because it’s really joyous. Oh, yeah, it is joyous. And then you know, or other people will say, I start, I didn’t like it at the beginning, but took it back up. It’s the best thing I ever did, even though it took me two times to get going. And so this is not hocus pocus stuff. This is not dreams. This is like, whoa, the world we’re in now is very different. And it’s going to get very, very different continuously. Because we’re only talking here about technology and jobs. You know, we’re not talking about geopolitics in the world, and how that’s going to influence us jobs, etc. We’re talking about major issues that human beings have got to rewire themselves. One point, this is the science, that’s basically proving our brains are wired to go out in the world and seek confirmation of what we believe. We don’t go out in the world to test case test our bliss, we go out in the world seeking confirmation number two, we’ve got in the world to affirm our ego, our story about who we are. So you know, our best friends, generally speaking, are the people that like us the most, all right, and people we listen to are generally people that tell us what we want to hear. And then we have our stories. That’s what the ego is about is one big story of who am I? Well, we go out there automatically seeking cohesiveness, confirmation of our stories. That’s how our brain is wired, rewiring the brain takes transforming the brain, which takes practices. All right, which you do generally for many, many years. But it comes and it comes slowly. And you see the difference. So that’s why in the book, you know, I’ve got 35 works, it’s only 140 page book, 100 scheme, 127 page book, but it’s you know, I’ve got 35 workshops in there, in, you know, 28 practices and tools that are proven. I mean, all somebody’s got to do, and you know, and you have your own stuff that you give people all they got to do is do this every night, see how you did need to make amends, send text, call people in the morning, whatever, start the next day, daily practices. It’s simple. And it works. And you know, it works.
Clint Murphy 17:33
You’ve done it. It’s exactly that the past guests of the show’s been on a couple times, Brad Stulberg, he talks about a three legged stool and for him, the three legged stool is is part of what you’ve already been talking about. And what those legs are at is it stood the test of time. So you talked about the major religions, you may talk about Buddhism, stoicism, Taoism that predate most of the religions and these practices were already there. And then you take it and say, Well, yeah, not only were they there, they’re backed by science. We’ve tested them, they work, cognitive behavioral therapy, at these things have been tested, and they work. And then the third one is you have to be able to actually implement it in your life can’t be theoretical, it can’t be something that works in a lab that you and I can’t do. So when I look at the things that do change my life, a lot of them are in the book as the workshop, whether it’s box breathing, whether it’s mindfulness, whether it’s meditation, whether it’s specifically loving kindness meditation, which is for me, one of the number one ways to develop empathy towards people that we otherwise would have a challenging relationship with. So I absolutely agree on the fundamental nature of these areas that you have in the book, which we’re going to talk through. So we’re gonna get through a lot of the ones that I just threw out there. But you hit on something that I don’t want to let go, because I think we really want to reinforce this for our listeners and watchers, is this idea that the biggest obstacle on this journey is not someone outside of us. It’s not society, it’s not the government. We are our biggest enemy, the person in the mirror, can you take us through? Why are we the ones that are in our own way?
Edward Hess 19:29
Because we’re the only one that can change ourself. And generally speaking, most people have a high view of themselves. They’ve created a story. I mean, there are people that are depressed that have a negative story, unfortunately, but you know, everybody sort of figures out some story that makes them feel good about themselves. And the fact of the matter is, is you just take In the brain science that we just talked about, I mean, that’s science. I mean, you know, they’ve wired the brains and taken all the pictures and can see what’s connected to what, all right. And what I find is, is that many people, quote, buy into the story. Many people start to story. But what’s lacking is the daily discipline. They start sliding in once you slide, you know, they say, Well, I can’t catch up on that I’ll do this another time, or whatever. You’ve got to it’s that accountability in. That’s why some of the people who are the most successful this have accountability partners, people that I’ve worked work with, I always ask them, I said, Do you have a significant other? Someone will say, what is that? Alright, well, do you have a really close friend? Or do you have a person that you’re living with? Or are you married to? Or what do you have somebody that you think has, you can trust that you think will be happy to see you be more happy. And this, one of the best leadership coaches in the world was ranked number one in the last 10 years, he has definitely, you know, adaptability Parra, countability partner, every day, this guy’s up in his years now, every day, at a certain time, he gets a call from his accountability partner who knows what he’s working on. And she checks in, and they have a conversation, a lot of people that I’ve worked with, who started out, didn’t want to get a friend or family member or wife, spouse, male, whatever, and they slit. And then they asked their partner, hold them accountable. So that partner knew what they were working on. And they took 1520 minutes at night after the kids were in bed, or they’re no kids at after dinner or whatever. And they talked it through. And that accountability partner, I’ve found that that increases the probability somebody will stick with it. Because let’s go back to our ego, we don’t want to look bad in front of somebody that we really trust, and who trust us, and he’s got high hopes for us. You know, it’s a little bit like, once I get an accountability partner, I don’t want to be a loser. I want to be a winner. Okay? And that’s okay. All right, I’m okay with that. I’m okay with that exact answer. I don’t want to be a loser. That’s why I’m doing it. He is you’re doing it. And it’s going to have impact. And once you get there, you know, you’re not going to let go because you don’t want to go back the other way. But it said accountability partner, which it’s noticed, it’s a person’s ego, that basically, and we don’t want to have a big ego, but the person’s ego with an accountability partner that motivates most of us as men, men are, have the most men have much more difficulty embracing these practices, and doing it than women do is a general rule. And I’ll give you an example. I assume if you know that, about collective intelligence and the science of collective intelligence from MIT, and Carnegie Mellon, but maybe the listeners don’t, but currently, started out with MIT wanted to do a study on collective intelligence, because their theory was, when you have a group of people working together, the intelligence of the group is greater than the intelligence of any one person. And they wanted to see okay, what how do you optimize collective intelligence? They spent a lot of time, years. And they did five different research studies take testing different things. And it came down to this, it came down to in those five studies came down to that the key thing about collective intelligence, optimizing human performance is the emotional relationships between the people in the teams, or the ability to have positive emotional relationships. So those five research studies from MIT found the most successful collaborative teams are teams of five people, okay, who are all women. The second best teams are four women, one man, third best, three women, two men, you get where it’s going. Carnegie Mellon looked at that and said, This is not this is an aberration. So Carnegie Mellon did their three test. And Carnegie Mellon came to the same conclusion. So you got two of the most highest ranked technology engineering schools in the United States and probably even the world. All right, coming up and saying to us, collective intelligence, if you want to have meaningful business relationships. You want to build businesses, you want to get people together, you want to get everybody on board on the team. You need collective intelligence, not competition. It’s not ego. It’s not fighting to be right. It’s getting to what is the right answer and everybody being in the game and being listened to. And the story is, all right, the more women that means us men need to get our act together, and learn how to build caring, trusting relationships with other human beings, and let go of the ego, let go of needing to be right, you need go letting the look good, okay. It’s not competition. It’s collective intelligence. And that’s sort of where this is going to go. It’s very funny. After all this stuff came about, and I started using it quite a lot. I was giving a talk in Seattle, to people from the big technology firms out there. It was probably 100 people. And we were having this conversation about collective intelligence. And a woman raised her hand. She was all of these people were senior level. She said, Professor has to have a question. I said, Okay. She said, Well, as you can see, I’m a woman. And I hear what you say. And you know, other than needing a man in order, if I wanted to have a baby, why should men even be in the business world, this woman was a senior person at one of the big companies. And I looked around, and there’s only about 20 women and out of the 100 was only about 20 women there, and the men’s faces just turned red, or frown, or stared at her. And I asked her, Well, what do you think? And she says, Well, I know that I can buy sperm from the smartest people in the world, because it’s been, it’s already been put into the freezers. She says, I don’t know. And I said, all right. And I asked the guys, what do you think? And nobody would answer. But that tells us something about the makeup, if you will, of what a lot of people, even if they’re not going to be in the technology, space, just human beings, we mend. have heart we, we men have more work to do. And it’s harder for us to do because the way we are wired, because women are not wired, like we are wired, they’re wired to be more, you know, to be kind, caring, compassionate, because there many of them are mothers, etc. And so taking all this into account, and picture here is that people have the technology is calling the game now is there is no what if, what if, what if the game is on. In fact, you know, some of the brightest people in the AI space, the people who created AI, all in the last three to four weeks, have come out with pretty strong statements that within the next two to three years, human beings will be the second smartest people in the world, technology will be the smartest, well, people gotta basically wake up to this, that means this stuff is accelerating far faster than anybody thinks.
Clint Murphy 28:14
Yeah, sorry. I mean, this all is similar to the work we’re doing on ourselves, it always goes slow until it goes fast. And when it goes fast, it becomes exponential. And that’s what we always want with our own work with the work we’re doing on ourselves. We want it to go, we think linear linearly. But eventually, we want to trigger exponential reality. And with these technologies, they go even more exponential than we do. There’s an important thing to think about there that you’re talking about, because our audience is probably 65 to 70% Men, maybe even skewing up to 75, depending on the channel that we’re on. And the biggest thing that I see, that gets in the way, for a lot of men, is we’re not wired to talk about any of this with each other. Women generally, when you look at Instagram feeds for a lot of women, a lot of it, there’s self help elements in there. There’s self development elements in there. There’s language around improving and emotion and feeling and, and how to be a better woman every day. For a lot of men, it’s like the Instagram feed is good looking women, or sports. There’s not many men who are seeing deep work or emotional intelligence or how to grow empathy or how to grow humility. And this is where we’re going to focus a little for now is because you talked about this being one of the most important things we have to start with and you talked about it in that section there is this idea of quieting our ego we don’t even look at that we simply look at like what makes me happy. In the moment, it’s attractive women or it’s sports or nice cars. Like there’s just this shallowness of, we’re not taught to go deeper. Right?
Edward Hess 30:11
Yeah, you’re exactly right. And you know, the quiet ego, I’m going to confirm I probably would, over the years have done in percentage is probably 90% Man in the audience. And I’m looking at, you know, 1000s of diagnostics, that one diagnostic, over 1000s of people, and trying to get people to men specially to think openly and sort of say, Okay, what am I good at? What am I not good at? It’s interesting is out of those, and I think it’s now Around 4000 people, the number one behavior that people men basically don’t do well at is humility, the number two behavior on all these tests is listening. So come to the table, knowing how smart I am. And knowing that I got probably the right answer. And when you know, instead of when someone else makes a different point, me stopping and asking questions to make sure I understand the person, what do I immediately do the next when the person starts, I raised my hand or say, Jim, I disagree with here’s what’s right. And so that’s sort of our wiring. And the only way that I have been able to help people transform that is by helping them create a new story, which they read every day, before they leave home, or talk with anybody or I’m talking about man, or go to work. And that’s the story about new smart. All right, my five new spark principles, which I’ll just read them to you, um, define define, not by what I know, or how much I know, but by the quality of my thinking, listening, relating and collaborating by the quality of my thinking, listening, relating. My mental models are not reality. They’re only my stories of how my world works. They’re not anyone else’s stories. And I’ve made them up for me, I’m not my ideas, okay, I must decouple my beliefs, not my base, from my ego. In other words, I’m not the person who’s this week, I must be open minded and treat my beliefs as high, not my values, my beliefs is hypothesis to be constantly tested, and subject to modification by better data. That’s the big turning point. Okay. That’s the point where I want to excel at being a critical thinker. And I accept the fact that no one on their own is a critical thinker, a critical thinker only comes about when one when it’s out their stress testing and looking for different answers in intentionally trying to find the information that will say I’m wrong. And then the last one is my mistakes and failures, opportunities to learn. So let’s go back to deliberate practice. You know, somebody can read these principles. But the fact of matter is, they don’t start behavior change doesn’t take place, in my experience, and less before startup every day. And before you go to a meeting, before you having a conversation, you read those five smart principles, and then afterwards at night, you grade yourself. And then you figure out, okay, what am I going to do different the next time? All right, and then it would what this brings in it also brings in the emotional connections. And maybe what I need to do is I need to take some mindfulness meditation practices, so I can calm my mind. So my mind is not talking to me, when I’m listening to other people, and I don’t let my mind talk to me by creating my answer while they’re talking. So you find that quiet ego is very related to mindfulness, meditation, being able to learn how to control what’s going on in our head, and be able to focus on our breathing, and not focus on those words, let those words just float by. And after you become good at mindfulness meditation, you know this, you do it, mindfulness meditation, you can come to the table with a quiet mind, because the quiet ego is all part of me, excuse me, a big ego or the ego working, where’s it coming from? This common from my mind? I’m thinking about why I’m right. I’m thinking about why I’m better. I’m thinking about why I’m wrong. I don’t want to be thinking about that. I want to be 100% Listening to what If the other person is saying, How do I do that, I have to learn how to quiet my mind. So quiet mind, in quiet ego are almost like Bosom Buddies, brother, sister, whatever. All right, then you need both. And people need to basically work on both of those things in but you got to get the mindfulness meditation down. And so many men say meditation, whoo. That’s not how to meditate, I mean, but they’re just afraid that they can’t do it. And the fact of the matter is, it’s very hard to learn to do it to stick with it. All right, in people that are really good at it will tell you, it took me a long time to get from three minutes to six minutes, six minutes to 10 minutes, 10 minutes to 20 minutes. But once I got to 20 minutes, I was pretty good. Then I moved to 30. And I moved to 50. Okay. And you really great meditators, even people working really great meditators are, you know, do 60 minutes a day meditating, you know, you can take a five minute meditation walk, and you know, and, and have your mantra, let’s just say the mantras. One, one of the ones I use inner peace. So when you know you pencil on how you walk, but whichever foot you put down, first, you say the word enter. And then this put the second foot, you say, peace, and you just do the walk saying inner peace, and you don’t think about anything. And that helps train your mind. And then you find yourself, okay, why can be quiet after a while I can be quiet without even saying inner peace, I just went up, when something comes through, I don’t attach to it, I don’t take it on, I take a deep breath, and focus on my breath. But it’s a great thing to have abuse and lots of workshops, sending people out for short, five to 10 minute walks. And so each of them comes up with their own two words, they want to say inner peace, be positive, stay quiet, whatever they choose, doesn’t matter. But just concentrating on those words, it helps you learn how to concentrate your mind. So you can basically not have to listen to your mind. And it just goes away, folks away.
Clint Murphy 37:09
When we look at that I always want to contrast for people, this idea of separating. So we have mindfulness in your definition in the book that you give that is very similar to what I’ve evolved over time, paying attention to the present moment, on purpose, without judgment. And it’s definitely had a material change on my life. So that’s mindfulness. And then we have meditation in a lot of people think, Well, those are the same thing in we like to contrast it and say, well, mindfulness is where we want to get we want to, we want to be mindful at all times, meditation, that’s a practice in, but the book is full of daily practices. That’s a practice that allows us to increase and develop mindfulness in our life. It’s a tool that leads to the other in so for you, what does a meditation practice look like for you? And how have you seen that impact your mindfulness in your life?
Edward Hess 38:10
Hesitating a little bit, trying to figure out how to frame it. I’ve been doing meditation for some years. And I’ll give you just an example. It may sound weird, it may sound crazy, whatever it is, but it is what it is, I have found over the last six to eight months, the technology stuff going on, and the pressures in our society, I have found it more stressful in the last six months, trying to figure out how to help people be all they can be to help people get around these things which are so new and big and scary to people. So as an example, I mean, in the last few months, I’ve had to double my morning practices, double the length, in order to be at the same level of behaviors, and calmness than I was before. Because there’s so much coming in to all of us. And so I start off my morning with a gratitude practice. First gratitude to for being here gratitude to the people that helped me get here. And, you know, wish them well. And then I, I moved to mindfulness meditation, where years I’ve been able to learn how to do that. And you know, I do that minimum 60 minutes for the mindfulness meditation minimum, somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes in the morning. And then I do a second process, if you will, and that I have a journal, and I have things that I’m working on So I then read through the parts that I need to what am I trying to work on to be better, and say those things out loud, it’s transformational. I would say to you, most people get to a really good place, if they can really do a quiet, have a quiet mind, you know, 20 to 30 minutes. All right? You can, that’s a good place to be, you don’t have to go necessarily, more, that would be a good place for people to shoot for. Now, how long does it take you to get the 20 to 30 minutes, you can take people six months, six to nine months to get there. The key is, you don’t beat yourself up. Because when you start thinking about something, you go back to, you know, focusing on my breath and breathing in slowly and as much as you can, and then breathing out slowly. So your concentration is on the Breathing in breathing out and feeling it in your body that you know. So it’s the science is there. I mean, the science is overwhelming that people are calmer, happier, not as angry, not as fearful. Okay? I mean, it’s in your right, it’s 1000s of years old. Okay, the mindfulness meditation is 1000s of years old. But it works. Because then you go out, and you bring it up. The goal here is to bring your best self to your world each day. And I’m going to be ups and downs. You know, I screw up, sometimes you screw up sometimes. But all right, we’ll get back into equilibrium and everything, because we know how good it can be. All right. That’s what and you know, I’ve been advocating for some time that in schools, it should be part of training, and definitely in high school, definitely in high schools, and even really, in middle schools. And even in, you know, the fifth, sixth, seventh grades, just taking little, little breaks. And I mean, this needs to be part of our almost societal way of being, because that’s how we as a society, are going to have a chance of being successful in this new world, which is going to be completely changed over in the next 20 years. Like, it may be shorter.
Clint Murphy 42:20
Yeah, a lot of what we’re talking about in the show today, or generally, that we talked about in the podcast, so much of it, I think our children and students would benefit from and would have a much better long term life, knowing how to listen, how to be empathic, how to meditate, how to be mindful, how to live with humility, and gratitude, you know, where’s the class on that? Versus let’s study trigonometry? When was the last time you used calculus. So it’s just so fascinating that we know these are the things that will change your life. And we don’t necessarily teach them. And I hope that it’s hard to do this. And I hope that as a father, I teach these things to my two boys. And I know that generally, our children listen to us, the least of all the teachers that are out there, though, if they see us doing it consistently, if they see us doing the practice, that tends to lend some weight and credence more than simply the words. And I want to backtrack, because we’re talking about ego. We’re talking about quieting the ego. In the first thing that you talk about quieting the ego and it ties to a past book you’ve written Humility is the new smart is we need to develop humility in our life, to quiet the ego. So for the people listening, what are some of the attributes that define humility to you? And how do we increase our humility? through certain practices?
Edward Hess 43:53
Yeah, you look at the science behind humility, and leading psychologists, June price tanking has best of lists a small list of how do you define humility, and I’ll just read it, have an accurate view of your abilities and achievements, accurate view, be able to acknowledge your mistakes, your imperfections, your limitations, being open to new ideas, contradictory information, keep one’s abilities and accomplishments in perspective. And that ties with also with the new smart principles. It’s, I go back to daily practices. If you want to adapt humility, you should you create your own list if you want but you know, there’s in military book in my new book, or you take these safe, you put these together nine sentences, and I read these sentences to myself. When I wake up in the morning, when I walk into school, let’s just say school And then I read them during the day sometime during the day to see how I’m doing. And then I read them at night. Again, before I go to sleep, and I grade myself, how did I do today? And so there’s this back to this accountability party. And so, you know, you tried to give people the definitions, behavioral definitions of what humility looks like. See, it’s all about behaviors. It’s deliberate behaviors. And so it’s not words. All right, you defined in humility definition I just gave are the new smart principles definition which I gave earlier. They are, they are behaviors. All right? That, okay, and so I can change behaviors, because I can actually, quote, see him feeling whatever, instead of trying to, you know, tried to figure out what the word means. So I’m really big on behavioral realizing everything that, you know, I talk about whether it’s humility, whether it’s how do you generate positive emotions? And how do you basically take minimize negative emotions, there’s daily practices of behaviors you do. So it all comes down to and I have found with people that I’ve worked with, they have unilaterally taken some of this into their family house and their breakfast and their dinner table and everything with their kids. And the kids get it when you’re talking about, okay, well, this is a behavior. What do you think? How do you think Jim or Jane would react if you behave this way instead, the way you behave? And that starts a conversation with the child, for example? Okay. And do you think Gemma Jane, would feel better? Because you behaved that way? Yeah. Because I like Jim and Jane, I’d like for them to like me and everything. And I didn’t mean to hurt them. Okay. And so you don’t really know whether you hurt them. We’re just talking. Maybe you should ask them tomorrow, did I do something wrong and saying this to you? Because if I did, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. Because I like you. Hate. And this type of coaching and behaviors, recently written pieces, which have been published on the need to transform the public school education system in our country. It’s not the first time I’ve ever written about this, this issue. But it’s in the classroom. All right, you can teach people mindfulness, 30 people, 25 people, you know, it doesn’t relate to standardized tests. All right, basically, going forward, public school systems, the teachers are going to be like coaches, and there’s going to be a coach and a junior coach, so to speak. You know, for every three to five students, the organization is going to be three to five students learning these behavioral practices in the ways of AI and everything. It can be 20 to 30 people. All right, doesn’t work that way. Because you we’ve got to go to behavioral transformation. We’ve got to basically start early on having our children and grandchildren wired to be highly adaptive learners, who can learn, unlearn, and relearn at the speed of change. Because if you think about learn, unlearn, and relearn speed of change, means that I can’t have all these fixed ways of being, I can’t have this fixed. This is my story. No, my story’s gonna change what’s gonna help me change my story. The story I have about myself. My story about myself is I’m an adaptive learner. Because I’m doing this stuff and it’s helping me be open minded. It’s helping me change my mind. It’s helping me go out and find the best answer. That’s the new game. That’s the new game.
Clint Murphy 48:59
And so when you say learn, relearn, unlearn, because that’s a line you use a fair number of times throughout the book, what are you meaning by learn, unlearn, relearn in that continuous loop that’s sounds nonstop.
Edward Hess 49:13
It is non stop if the technology continues to advance and be as powerful it is. So what it means is, okay, I did something this way. Before I do it again, is there anything going on and you do this in teams, generally speaking in the business world, or in the work world or in the schoolwork? Okay. Is there anything that has come up or that we know of, or that we heard about that could impact what we just decided two weeks ago? No, we think everything’s have we gone and look for things? Oh, well, no, we haven’t. Okay, so why don’t we go take a couple hours and you take this, you take this? What do you want to take everybody break it up? Let’s go take a see has AI changed anything that we need to know of in the last, you know, couple of days. No, there’s nothing that we see here. Oh, Okay, so we can go. So it’s that having that how do I embed into the dailiness the need to stay abreast and to evaluate is the way we did it three months ago still the way we need to do it now. And let’s figure that out. And that’s all part of critical thinking. That’s all. When you look at the critical thinking list in the in the book, critical thinking is not listening to and automatically doing what your mind says. It’s not bias thinking, it’s not accepting the first thing comes into your mind. It’s not believing that everything you believe is correct. It’s not automatically taking advice from a friend, it’s having going out and constantly stress testing. All right, what you’re doing, what am I trying to do? Why am I trying to do that? What’s my purpose? What facts or evidence to have to support it? What facts or evidence would disconfirm it? What do I not know that I need to know? How do I get that information? How do I look hard for disconfirming? information? Data, not a doc. And then you go down to tools, the five why’s you keep asking why why? Why do you get to the root cause or purpose of critical thinking? Think about? Okay, I think this is going to work. What’s called pre mortem. Okay, what would make this not work? So you start wiring your brain to think critically automatically, instead of looking for affirmation? And you use those questions. I mean, I have companies that have on each learning team room, each conference room, they printed out the list of questions to ask of different things so that people can see every day, and they go through in the beginning, what is what are we going to try to do? And at the end, they go through? Did we do this? Did we do this? We do this? We didn’t do this? We need to do? How are we going to do this? Okay, well, you to go away and do that and come back report.
Clint Murphy 51:57
Yeah and that felt really powerful to me how you outlaid. Hey, let’s do the pre more. And then how do we analyze it at the end? To see what happened? Where did we go wrong? What didn’t work? What did work? Why is critical thinking something that isn’t taught or used as much in the world as it should be, Ed?
Edward Hess 52:20
Well, that’s a very good question. I think part of it, what’s going on now in the world is, at least in the United States, in higher education, is the fragility of students emotionally. And it’s hard to think critically give what other people if you’re, you know, fragile, you know, everybody wants to be loved. Everybody wants good grades. All right. And that’s it. My statement about fragility of students is scientifically based. NYU has the best studies on this, they have a whole research center on this. And it’s very different than when I was raised in schooling, when you were raised in school, when I was raised in colleges and everything. I mean, people asked hard questions of each other. All right, and you didn’t get upset, it was all about how to get to the right answer. All right, what is right, what and then what did we miss? You know, it’s any the issue today on critical thinking is the fragility of students makes it very hard. So that’s going to have to be changed. And that also then gets down to the emotional side, and then how you treat people, they etc. And also it gets down to having to deal with the social divisiveness that we have in our country. So if you think about it, the way our country is operating to is puts a lot of inhibitors in the way of our society becoming the type of society we need to be to be competitive workwise to be happy, several. So it’s this whole way I think, is going to require many different types of transformations across society and how we behave and how we treat each other. But where it’s leading, what the technology is really saying is, is that we need to do what people have been talking about for 50 6070 years. Okay. In the late 1960s, one of the smartest psychologists in the United States, wrote a book on the transformation of the public education system. All right. 1968 Abraham Maslow was one of those people, Carl Rogers was one of those people. Arthur combs, who’s the Dean at the University of Florida, education school, where I got my degree, and one other gentleman wrote a book, and they’re what they’re talking about in the book and the late 1960s never adopted and what people now come and say, Wow, we need this now. I know you needed it later. All right. So this whole thing about we’re talking about, we have an overlay of a survival of the fittest culture in the business world. We have social divisiveness. So we as a country have lots of challenges that, you know, every country has different challenges, but we have lots of challenges that we’re not dealing with to basically help prepare our younger children, okay? Your children, my granddaughters, okay? Preparing them for the world, that we are bringing them into an hour or leaving for them. And that’s why your work is so important. That’s why what you do is so important, why I was honored and thrilled to be able to spend time with you, because you’re into all of it. And you’re working with people helping them. And that’s just all we got to do is to figure out okay, how do we scale that? Yeah, we got to scale that.
Clint Murphy 55:45
And that’s the fun part of actually having a first ever I’ll call it the growth guide business planning session with my wife and our first team member, we’re having a business planning session after this call at. And I mean, that’s what it’s all about talking about, how do we scale this? How do we get the message out to more people? How do we how do we get more people like you add on to the show to have these conversations so that we can help young people and I really want to zone in a little on this idea that you brought up the fragility of the students? And a lot of what I read in the papers nowadays, I don’t read the papers much. But when I do, and it’s talking about the colleges and the universities, it seems a little bit really challenging to me how much of it stems from triggering, right, and everyone’s triggered by everything. And it reminds me of when I first heard someone talking about someone telling them, they were intense, were intimidating. And their reply was No, no, I’m not intimidating. you’re intimidated. In separating, I’m not triggering you. You’re being triggered, you’re choosing to be triggered. And sometimes it may be at something that’s completely innocuous. But the person on the other end, whoa, that’s triggering, you’ve got to be out of a job. And it’s where’s this line that is leading to our children and leading to this next generation, having that fragility and that softness, that doesn’t allow that challenging of thought, that doesn’t allow that questioning of what is right versus this is, like, Why does everyone get to choose their reality?
Edward Hess 57:32
Yeah. I mean, it’s a great questions. And the answers are pretty obvious, right? That in the sense that no, everybody doesn’t get to choose their reality. All right. And when you’re out in the world, I think I don’t have the magic answer. I have come to the conclusion over the past three years, I’ve been working three years hard on this issue is I think we got to restructure the reframe restructure the education system in a way that we reduce them. We have more coaches, if you will, of people from a developmental viewpoint, then, you know, then is available now. But it gets down to like, if you just take, just take the public schools elementary for a moment, and because I know right now, I’ve been working more on that. So it’s just easier, you know, and I’ve written all right, that, basically, class size is 20 to 30. Yes, you can have 20 to 30 people, but there’s going to be teams of students, three, no more than five students that are going to need a coach working with them on the project on the content during the day. So even though you got 30? No, you really got six or seven groups.
So you’re gonna have to basically, you can’t deal with the fragility and the sensitivity in large crowds. Because if it’s, if it’s me, talking to you, and we’re trying to figure out our fragility and everything and to be better collaborators together, okay, the other people are just gonna turn off, right? So you can’t do it in a classroom.
So you got to have small teams, preferably three. All right, people that basically come together, and so you got to have a coach. So not only you’re going to have to have lots of teachers, but you’re going to have lots of true coaches that basically work with the kids. And then the kids come up and bring their story back to the other six or seven teams that mean human transformation all comes down to making meaning with another person or persons just plural, but small number, making meaning which means that takes time to understand what people say, and to understand what the words mean to them. And then having them come as you learn from your words means this to me, and my words meant this Now, where does this bring us? That’s very hands on coaching type of stuff.
All right, in, you know, if you look at our education system, generally speaking, unless it’s some private schools, where wealthy private schools but public education, it’s on Okay class sizes, so many people standardized test, you know, and you wouldn’t be on the standardized test, what have they shown is shown that we’re not doing it? Well, that’s why you started, what is you’re still not doing it? Well, you got to bring it back into this, it’s heaven, the world we’re going to live in is going to be even more emotional than the world we’re living in now. Because the non emotional stuff is going to be the easiest stuff for technology to do. So how do you develop emotional well being and learn emotional tools? It’s not being in a class of 20 25 30 people, it’s not being in a class of 15 people. I mean, haven’t done many, many workshops with companies and everything. I can tell you, if companies with smart people, the max is five people per workshop, the max four is better. All right, you get down to three, they don’t have enough room. So it’s free. So it’s boring. But the fact is, is in how does it happen? People start having conversations, and it starts out and it takes longer than you think. And then they sort of have to take breaks. Okay, go walk outside and each choose a partner, what did you learn? Share what you learned? Wow, I hadn’t thought about that. Thank you for that. Oh, I’m glad I thought that too.
Maybe it will, how do we get around this? It’s that type of individual work, that’s going to be necessary. And there are some different school systems that have been doing this for years. Okay. That that’s different. All right. I mean, the Montessori schools basically have built a lot on what we’re talking about. There’s other schools, but it’s like, how do we scale that into scale, it’s gonna take a lot of money, all right. And we as a country, it takes forever for us to get money out there to where it’s needed. So all of a sudden, we got the whole political issue now is on the table, that we’ve got to basically make extensive funding in our system to help our people, okay, be highly adaptive learners, because of the technology, who can learn unlearn and relearn it the pace of technological change, those are going to be the countries that win. Okay, some of the European countries are way ahead of us on that, because of their school systems. Some of the countries that are not that are more rigorous, I will just use that word, you know, they can do whatever, you know, the leader of the country says, all right. And, you know, and so it depends, they get there, but they got a choice.
And so we’re the transformation that’s happening in our country today, or that needs to happen is much more than the embracing of artificial intelligence. It’s the embracing of the human side of artificial intelligence, and how do we basically transform at a pace faster than we ever had? Which means we got to do something with our financial system, if you will, for states and localities? I mean, you know, you got the federal government, they make decisions, then it goes to the state government, they make decisions, and it goes to the counties in the cities, and they in minimizing, how long does that take too long, too long.
Clint Murphy 1:03:26
That’s why and that’s why almost nothing changes. We’re still educating people the way we were almost like, are we that different than we were 100 years ago?
Edward Hess 1:03:35
I don’t know. But I don’t know, I think that we probably are different because the industrial revolution changed a lot of stuff. But are we different than when the Industrial Revolution worked out? And are we any different than then? Probably not?
Clint Murphy 1:03:51
No, are training people to get into the factories, but that’s not really where the jobs are nowadays, no robots are gonna run the factory where to go? Like, we need to train people to be in the world, running the robots, and that feels like it’s missing.
Edward Hess 1:04:04
Yeah, no, you’re right. And yes, and we have to end we have to come to the conclusion that there are countries out there who are way ahead of us on this, and that we should be open minded and learning. All right. I mean, you several European countries are examples. And it’s also I think, more even more complex, we’re going to have to deal with the complexity of our society. I mean, we’ve got to get beyond extensive divisiveness because that gets in the way of the speed that we need to do. And half. I mean, we sort of like it’s, it’s almost like, you know, and I was laughed at recently when I was talking with Sperry. And this is not me bragging about who I was talking to, but just given to some semblance leaders, leading high leaders in Washington about the fact that way our government is managed that It is managed in such a way that we can adapt to pace of change that we need to figure out different ways of structuring our governments. I said, Well, do you have any ideas? I said, Well, you can look at some countries out there that have done it pretty well. The Nordic countries or and Denmark, or you can, you know, look at Canada’s system, but you can’t, you know, we’ve takes us so long to get something done. While technology is shooting out there, and our people are all getting more fragile, and scared, and am I going to have work? And yah, yah, yah, yah. So, all the while you got the race between China and the United States for world dominance. And you got the race of two three big technology companies as to who’s going to own the world technology wise. So wow, that’s pretty simple. No, it’s not. It’s pretty simple that it’s not simple.
Clint Murphy 1:05:55
Ed, do you have time for 4 rapid fire questions? Okay. You’ve read a lot of books in your life, what is the one book that’s had the most significant impact on your life?
Edward Hess 1:06:06
I’ll give you probably the most significant impact all the books that I have read, reread, and continue to reread, and almost read part of those books. They are the books on the stoic and Buddhist philosophies, and Dustin’s book on the seven great religions.
Clint Murphy 1:06:25
That doesn’t surprise me, I have up on my screen as I was looking at all the questions that I’ve compiled for you. And it really struck me, the eightfold path we have right understanding, right mind, it just jumped out at me. You have, you know, right action, the right words, how to choose the right behaviors. And so that really jumped out at me. So I’m not too surprised at that answer. You probably read a lot of books at the same time. I’m imagining when you’re taking down 4000 over 12 years, what are some of the ones that you’re reading right now?
Edward Hess 1:07:00
Oh, David Brooks, new book, which just came out on how to, I don’t have it here to have the exact title for you. How to, it’s really about how to understand other people. Oh, no, a person, how to know a person. It’s, it just came out. And I’m not finished it. But I can tell you I’m, I’ve, you know, I definitely will finish it. Because it’s so timely, because that’s all about emotions, ultimately. And it’s all about human interaction, and humans coming together and respecting each other. And if you think about it, that’s we sit back and think that this AI stuff from a far away, that’s going to be the key determiner of the success of our country going forward, is the is how people basically relate in with each other.
Clint Murphy 1:08:01
Yeah, I’m, I got excited even looking at that. That’s a conversation I want to have on the show that I’ve got to reach out now.
Edward Hess 1:08:10
And it’s, it’s, that’s a good, that’s a good book I’ve been reading. I don’t have I’m here with my wife a couple of I mean, I’ve been trying to read as many of the AI books. And I don’t have any here beside me right now that have aI books that have come out by leading AI people who are actually working on been on most of the big podcasts. There’s two or three books that I found them there to be very helpful for a person such as myself, who’s not trained AI. So I’ve been looking for, if you will, books that helped me understand AI and the pros and cons. And etcetera there’s stuff right now on AI that comes out. Bear with me just a second. That is stuff somewhere. Professor Wharton Business, Ethan Maalik, Mo LLRC. K, who does articles every week on AI, and everything in his work on and teaching people how to do the prompts and teaching people how to use it. And he hasn’t, he’s working on a book, but he’s got, effectively a book already printed, done through his articles. His articles have been very helpful to me, and they’re actionable and in actionable, easy to use, and not it gets to the pros and cons succinctly. Instead of blowing it up. Something that’s too smart for the average person to do.
Clint Murphy 1:09:43
That’s what we need is we can read it and take action and I often find that missing when you look back at the last 12 months. What’s one thing that you’ve bought that Edie has said to himself? I wish I’d bought this sooner under $1,000.
Edward Hess 1:09:59
That’s a great question. And what have I bought? That I wish I had a box? I mean, two years, you said, yeah, we can go two years, two years, we’ll go a year and three months. I guess the best thing I’ve done the last year in three months, my wife wanted to go to a spa in Mexico called Rancho Laporta, who’s the owner of the spas, also the owner of the big spas in Beverly Hills and everything. But her husband came from World War Two came a professor in California. And they built this spa called Rancho Laporta, who’s the ranked the number one spa. And so I went to it, because it had lots of very smart meditation people and all types of things you could do for physical mental Limassol, organic food, they have a 4000 acre farm, that they grow everything to an amazing place. And that was a great personal experience, because I got to talk to, I’ve been meditating a while, I got to talk to several meditation gurus, experts about what I was seeing, in my mind, at this stage in my meditation as to what you know, in getting, what do they see in their minds? And where is my mind? You know, am I off base on base. And so that was an extremely educational experience with insane. And also, I mean, it was people there who were just learning how to do meditation, and so you would do meditation, things was, you know, all mixed up. But it was getting that one hour with, quote, an expert who’s been doing it for 3040 years, in saying, you know, this is what I’m sensing in my mind when I’m meditating. I mean, what are you seeing, you know, and what are the colors? You’re seeing? What are the images you’re seeing? Where does this come from? Where does this take us? That was very liberating for me, and helpful for me, because I have a physical disability. So my mobility is quite limited. But I was working on the mind and the heart. All right. And so that was the best experience and so, so cost some money to go there. So that’s what I would say the best money that my wife and I spent, because she did. She learned a lot of stuff, too. And yeah, that was the best money I’ve spent.
Clint Murphy 1:12:40
Wonderful and together as a couple. I love that. Because this shows about growth. What is one mindset shift behavior change or habit that you’ve developed over in your life? This one is like, what is the one thing that’s had the most oversized impact on your life.
Edward Hess 1:12:57
The 5 angels that helped my life, and especially the football coach in Carrollton, Georgia, who took me and my family under his wing, and changed our life. But he also got me the opportunity to go to college on a full scholarship. That was, I remember him morning and evening. He and his wife just had a monumental change. And then and then there are other people along the way. That helped me. I mean, I’ve had, I’ve had a couple of handfuls of people. I mean, I went to I was trained, had three different professions. I’ve only been trained for one of them. All right. And I mean, I was trained to be a lawyer and was able to get into a good law school. But it’s, it’s because of people. I mean, I would got accepted into law school. In June, when the law school was starting in September, and all the class was full. And I never had taken the law boards. All right. And so there was one dean gave me 30 minutes to make my speech and whatever I did, he said, I’m gonna take your here, as you all may take the law boards a doubt you may put an application and he said, No, I’ll see you. And so he’s people that have somehow sent something inside of me. Those are the people that that I have deep, deep gratitude to, in the sense that I understand. It’s not about me, and I didn’t get here by myself. People gave me chances. You know, when I went to Wall Street, I was put in charge of two divisions. And I told the chairman, I says, I don’t know how to do an IRR. He says, I know that but I know you’ll know. This was a Wednesday since I know you haven’t done by Friday. You’ll learn by Friday. And he was right. So it said going back to learning in the books from my mother that just go out there and do Learn. And so no, I’ve lived a very fortunate life. And I am the person I am because of others.
Clint Murphy 1:15:08
It’s a wonderful, wonderful answer. And we went pretty wide and deep on the book. Is there anything that you want to leave the listeners with? that we didn’t cover off?
Edward Hess 1:15:17
Yes, that’s very kindly. Yes. No. I mean, you had you had good questions and everything. I think the best thing I could say about the book is it’s designed to be actionable, just short book. But it’s a powerful book, if the reader embraces and does the practices, and the reader will never ever remember my name, or even probably maybe the name of the book, once they get into the practices, because they’ll become their practices. And then they’re going to share that with their family or their friends, or anybody that you know, will listen to them to be helped change other people to get to the path where we all want to go to have meaningful work and happiness in this age of smart technology.
Clint Murphy 1:16:06
Beautiful, and where can people find you.
Edward Hess 1:16:11
Give you my www.edwardhess@darden.virginia.edu Or they can go online and look at the book and then there’s ways to reach me from the book on your work, who to debate ownyourworkjourney.com One way or just go look on Amazon. And you know, they’ve got lots of stuff on Amazon about me.
Clint Murphy 1:16:32
Perfect. Thank you, Ed. appreciate having you on the show today.
Edward Hess 1:16:35
Oh, thank you for a wonderful conversation and I appreciate what you do and what you and your wife are doing. You are good souls, my friend. Good souls.