Mandela’s Secret Weapon: How Empathy Can Topple a Dictator

23:47And we were talking about the state of the world. And she was reflecting on how in the last 25 years things have eroded and in the last five years things seem to be eroding even quicker. And then we both had this moment of looking at each other and said, but in these moments of darkness and erosion and difficulty, often the greatest leaders are born because you are tested. You don't become fat, happy, and complacent. And I think in some ways one of the reasons why you see a dearth of great political leaders in Europe right now, potentially, is that we've had years of prosperity and calm and peace.

24:31And that's meant that we've sort of technocratically measured, you know, like wobbled along, but we haven't actually been tested by the grand challenges of our time. And apartheid produced an incredible evil, but it also created corresponding good.

24:47Matt Brittin:It's interesting because I think, you know, at a personal level, I think my reflection is it's often the toughest times when we grow the most individually, but your view on that at a country level is also clearly true from a really horrific time. I also think that there's a lesson in there about the Archbishop's input to you. You know, you said, humiliate him and I'll fire you. That's a really short bit of leadership input. You wouldn't necessarily associate an Archbishop with a threat to fire, but it clearly had a powerful impact and just made you reframe your whole approach. And I think that's an incredibly striking thing.

25:22Matt Brittin:When you look at leaders who've been able to set the tone for an entire country and for an entire generation. It's that sort of power, picking a moment and a really high impact message. Yeah, yes. And Mandela did a corresponding thing. It's weird. The Truth Commission, because it was about investigating the core of a nation's past and looking, pulling back a curtain and looking into its soul, it had these sort of Greek chorus like moments. But Mandela only appeared before the Truth Commission once and didn't appear. He came to listen to testimony. And there was a day of testimony. And I was running the order of who would testify when.

26:04And as it happened, Mandela sat down and then I said, this person should go next. And without any forethought or consciousness, I put forward a woman whose child had been blown up and killed by a bomb placed by the ANC, by the liberation movements. And Mandela's only experience in person of the Truth Commission was hearing how a party that he was the head of had killed through the placing of an explosive in a shopping center a woman's child, a clear violation of international humanitarian law. And, you know, this is like saying the French resistance are the same as the Nazis, you spending all the time on the French resistance but not spending the time on the Nazis because the ANC were clearly, generally, an exemplary liberation movement.

26:52And Mandela was asked about this. Didn't you feel sabotaged or ambushed by the Truth Commission? And he said, I was extremely grateful to be able to listen to that testimony because it's not the correctness of your struggle that you should spend all your time reflecting on. It's when you do things that violate your own principles and norms and have to think about even though you're pursuing justice, you need to do it through just means. Who are these leaders? Who are these people who say these things?

27:22Matt Brittin:Just the most incredible empathy in the most extreme circumstances. You said the E word, so I need to pick up on that. And I was thinking exactly the same. So I am mildly obsessed with the importance of empathy as a core part of leadership. And when I think about the way in which the leaders that we're discussing conducted themselves through this absolutely extraordinary and harrowing period. That is surely one of the qualities that they were able to exemplify. And I'm interested in your sense of to what extent is empathy a key tool in navigating these transitional justice issues and how, in practical terms, can you cultivate it?

28:06So, you know, everyone comes to the table with their lived experience, with their prejudices, with their anxieties. How do you go from that point to creating an environment where there is a much greater degree of shared empathy? So I'm a massive proponent of empathy as a kind of organizing principle of human existence, actually. and Mandela and Tutu had this idea of Ubuntu, this African principle that I am because you are and the most valuable thing you can do is affirm the relationships between us as human beings and our reciprocal obligations towards each other, that the best societies have this deep web of bonds and connections between each other.

28:50It doesn't mean that you don't have individual responsibility, that you don't strive for excellence, that you don't place attention on individual liberty. It just means that you think about how you are in a society. And I think that the evidence is that the societies with high amounts of Ubuntu are happier, more resilient, more creative, more entrepreneurial, more philanthropic, are better able to weather crises, have lower transaction costs, have higher trust. So what you should be doing is teaching at an early age that we're Ubuntu, that we're webbed into each other. And I think you are more attached to leaders who show empathy.

29:40Your families are stronger. Your relationships are better. And I think there are loads and loads and loads of ways that you can model that in preschool, in school curricula. and if you abstract one level higher,

29:59people looked at Denmark during World War II. The Danes saved double the number of Jews per capita that anybody else did. They took people into their homes and people thought, what was going on in Denmark? And they then went and looked at it and Danes had the sense of what they called metaphysical guilt. It's the guilt that you feel when someone else's rights are being violated and you do nothing. So when they didn't save people, they felt guilty. They felt like, oh, I'm doing something wrong because I'm obligated to save people. Now, imagine if we all had more metaphysical guilt, right? We'd save more people's lives.

30:35We'd care more about the environment. It would be better in aggregate for all of us if we had more of this. So I'm not being sort of preachy. I'm actually saying it's the highest form of enlightened self-interest. is to assert empathy because it will come back and benefit you 10 times out of 10. And in this polarized world we live in, how do we do that, Paul? I think the weird thing is that this polarized world we're in is a recent phenomenon. And I think it's recent, in my view, in part, I think a significant part of it is to do with information ecosystems. for the first time in history, and you'll know this better than many, many, many others, the way we communicate with each other, the way we narrow cast, the way we're able to target has fractured us and polarized us.

31:33And I think if we just try and think our way out of it without thinking about the system and changing the way those systems work, we will be fractured. and then the second reason why we have the polarization is because for the last 25 or 30 years the economic model at least in the west has broken down and ladders of opportunity have broken down and promises that people thought that you lived in a fair and equitable society feel to be broken and if you marry that with our information systems you're able to narrow cast to people and blame the actual injustice that they experience on other extraneous things like immigrants.

32:17And so we need to do the economic system and the information systems at the same time, but we'll do neither of those unless we get the Ubuntu and the empathy right. So it's like chicken and egg, but I bet that we start with Ubuntu.

32:31Matt Brittin:I love the concept of Ubuntu, and I think you go to some, you know, the examples of what's driving people to these extreme views, which is loneliness and economic disappointment. I think we see that around the world. But as Hayatun was going towards you on this, what about at a personal level? You're talking about a societal level. What at a personal level? What ways have you... Because you took what you learned and then you scaled it to lots of countries. So what do you learn about how to create Ubuntu at a very personal level that perhaps people could take as something to do tomorrow?

33:06um i think so i think in in your leadership style one of the things that i have tried to do and we we mentioned ubuntu and all of our c-suite meetings at the conduit we have it as a company ethos and we um we always say our role with each other is to be kind and compassionate to put each other in each other's shoes, to correct rather than to criticize, to hold to delivery and to excellence, but to do this and to drive that down, not through a kind of top-down leadership style, but for everybody to embrace it. And I think one of the things about that is that if that culture sediments in an organization, most complex organizations have to be cross-collaborative and have to have teams that work with each other, people of similar statuses having to be in each other's shoes.

34:07And if you as a leader have to intervene to break the tie or to sort those things out because people are not Ubuntu with each other, it's a wildly inefficient way of running a place. And actually, the company doesn't have joy and it's not efficient. So I think if you embody it in your C-suite, but also you drive it through the organization and tell people that that's what you expect and that's what the culture is. Two things happen. You get better joy and more efficient decision-making, for sure. You get more creativity because people are willing to share information. And then I think the final thing that happens is when people step outside the culture, you don't have to exercise HR, top-down discipline, because the culture swarms and they go, oh, that person's not being very Ubuntu.

34:59And that actually means that the institution swarms like a virus to protect itself. And I think that if you can do that in a company, there's no reason why you can't exemplify it more broadly in a society. Thank you. Well, this is so interesting. You know, we're talking about really kind of meaty issues that are, you know, sort of in the history for decades and for generations. But I want to again come back to the personal. So my family, I think my father was from South Africa, and I know from personal experience that the people who were involved in the struggle against apartheid had to carry a very heavy toll on them and on their family.

35:44It was fundamentally unsafe and people had to be lightning rods for this incredibly tense and violent environment. So thinking about the time when you entered the struggle against apartheid and then through to this period of the Truth Commission, what was it like personally did you feel fearful did you feel overwhelmed at points how did you navigate that I always say there were moments when you know I was arrested I was prosecuted I was you know semi-automatic weapon was shot at a car that I was traveling in was beaten and tear gassed and And, you know, so, but you were always protected relative to black South Africans if you were a white South African.

36:44So it wasn't that white South Africans weren't killed. It isn't that you can't be shot and prosecuted. You know, we were. But the first thing I always say is that you are always in a different category. The logic of a racist state is that it wants to kill people that look like the racist state less than people who are the other. The thing that we did in the Truth Commission was because we had this deadly trio of lawyers, church people, theologians, and psychologists who ran the commission. You could imagine an interesting group of leaders and high-powered leaders all in one room navigating the country's past.

37:27But they insisted that we have every Friday get together and have kind of therapy sessions and unburden ourselves and talk about what we were experiencing. The translators who translated the testimony of victims in the Truth Commission, their hair fell out, their teeth fell out. They had extraordinary PTSD just translating the words. eight of the 17 truth commissioners got cancer during the truth commission so you know the i think it's hard you underestimate the toll that trauma takes on the human body at your peril and i think there's now a really compelling body of evidence that you have to deal with it so what about you personally yeah you did a you did a marvelous job there of talking about yeah yeah It's a really good question.

38:18So if I have to make a confession, I was a 26-year-old man, you know, and I sort of thought I was robust enough and I was mission-driven. And so I didn't, I think during the Truth Commission, I genuinely didn't pay enough attention to that. And afterwards, did you, I mean, just the processing of what you must have heard in court.

38:46Matt Brittin:Yeah, how was the pull at the end of the four through a four-year period different from the pull at the beginning of that period? I think what I came away from it was I need a break from this because I will go insane. So I went to New York. I did a master's in law. I went and worked for a year at a gigantic corporate law firm. Can't imagine that. Neither could anybody else. Which was more traumatic. Don't trivialize this, sorry. No, it's hilarious. And I arrived at this law firm, and then two weeks after I arrived, a call from Madeleine Albright's office, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said, we need Paul to go to Indonesia to go and help with the new transition there.

39:41And my, the managing partner at the law firm said, we're not going to see a lot of you, are we, Paul? And I said, I really hope not. So, I mean, it was preordained that I was going to go back and do that stuff. But I had, I think I had a year of studying in New York that was felt like it was a luxury, a moment to take stock. But then I was very sure that what we had learned down in the bottom tip of Africa would be something that would be applicable elsewhere.

40:12Matt Brittin:So let's take that moment then. So you've done this extraordinary process, the lack of which the world had never seen before. It's physically taken a huge toll on everyone. You've decompressed, but then you're being drawn into how we do this in all these other places with similar atrocities to resolve. So how did you sort of think about that request for you to rise again and to scale that to more people? And how did you go about it? So my sort of mentor at the Truth Commission was the deputy head of the Truth Commission, a guy called Alex Perrain, who had been a very important figure in South Africa's white anti-apartheid politics.

40:55and we got so many requests to do to go to places that we you know and this maybe is an interesting lesson as we said we're not going to just be lone rangers we looked at each other and said this is the 30th request we've gone to go around the world and meet with people the way you make change is you build institutions and so we went then to the open society to the true to to the Ford Foundation, to Atlantic Philanthropies, and we raised$25 million just in three meetings to build an institution that was capable of doing it. And then we went and hired the most extraordinarily brilliant people from all over the world, you know, the most incredible Sri Lankan woman with a double PhD from Harvard and Oxford and a really grumpy Scott who was completely brilliant and a fantastic Dutch woman who worked for the tribunals and an incredible Sri Lankan woman.

41:54So we just got this two Sri Lankans, just incredibly gifted, thoughtful people. And then we just started deploying.

42:04Matt Brittin:And Paul, just before you get into the deployment, what was it, like you got a load of money to do something, but it's something where there can't really be like a playbook. It's more, as you describe it, almost like a state of mind that you brought to the commission. So what was it you were getting these people to go forth into the world and actually do at the most human level? So when the truth, when Mandela was released in 1990, it was clear that we would need to have a transitional justice process to deal with the crimes. And because the elections only happened four years later, we, those of us who were in the kind of engine room, had this amazing luxury.

42:42I say luxury. It was the most extraordinarily violent and difficult part of South Africa's history. got more violent when Mandela was released because the regime was trying to sabotage him. We could go, let's go to Chile and Argentina and Poland and Indonesia and elsewhere and study the transitions that had happened there and then sort of take a smorgasbord approach, take the lessons that worked and didn't work in those places and assemble something that would work. And all the people who came to South Africa at that time all said, we're here to help you learn not make the mistakes we made and so what we did from that moment is say we want to replicate that because and what the thing that made us successful is we never went into another person's country and said this is what you should do we said we have no idea what you should do what we can do is bring you a menu of global comparative experience and let you make your own more informed decisions.

43:44And firstly, people went, oh, thank God. Thank God you're not coming on a plane and shaking your finger and telling us what to do like white saviors. And secondly, that modesty of saying you're here to help, you're not here to preach, gave us a license to do this. And so we just got good reviews because we were smart. We had done it before in our own countries. And then as we went, we brought the most gifted people from those experiences. So the most smart Peruvian and Colombians, they joined the teams and they went on and spread the word. And they said, I always say, if you think we were sophisticated in South Africa, what the Peruvians did were twice as sophisticated.

44:28And it really was, I'm not being cute. So we could bring that kind of global experience to help people out.

44:35Matt Brittin:It's such a heavy topic, isn't it? And it's hard to hear some of those stories and the toll it took on people. But inevitably, there's humor in the darkest moments as well. And you are somebody who has just such a spirit of fun and a twinkle in your eye. I can imagine that that helped you to get through some of that time as well. Well, I tell you a really funny story that happened in the... So you join the student movement and you are being sort of promoted up the ranks into positions of greater seniority. And one of the great honors that you can get is you can be asked to address a mass rally.

45:12And, you know, there's 10 ,000 people gathered at a rally and you're about to go march and confront the police. And the people who they choose to speak are the people who are the sort of, you know, rising stars. So I got chosen to speak at one of these rallies and I was both extremely nervous but very honored. And there's a group of 9 ,800 black South Africans and 200 white South Africans sprinkled in the front. And at the end of each speech, you give your speech and then you start going, you know, viva the revolution, viva. And, you know, viva the spirit of no compromise, viva. And so and I started doing this and I was doing a chanting in this very effective way.

45:57And the crowd was really getting behind me. and then what I did is I transposed there was the defiance campaign at that point in South Africa which was you say viva the spirit of defiance and then there was viva the spirit of no compromise and I in my moments of great enthusiasm transposed them and I shouted out at the top of my voice viva the spirit of no defiance and this entire crowd of 10 ,000 people were about to go viva and then they paused and then these peals of laughter went across all of them and basically it was like, this white guy just can't get it right. He tried and he got it and so I sort of slunk off the stage and then I ran to be the president of the student council and I was knocking on doors two years later to get people's votes.

46:53And I would knock on the door and the person would open the word and say, oh, you're the viveth spirit of no defiance. You've got our vote. So it's amazing how just one Malaprop can stay with you for the rest of your life.

47:06Matt Brittin:People remember when you make them laugh, intentionally or otherwise. Exactly. Did you have moments of levity with Mandela or with Tutu that you can share? Oh, Tutu was completely and utterly, anybody who's listening or watching should type in Archbishop Tutu laugh. There is an entire archive of his most extraordinary laughs. And he would say things that were mischievous and wicked and break into laughter all the time. and so Bono came to visit us at the Truth Commission and Archbishop was always in the beginning of a meeting we would hold hands and he would say a little prayer by way of starting and sometimes he would do this really wicked thing where he would say, Dear Lord, thank you very much for bringing us together and it's so wonderful that Bono is here, such a wonderful musician and he's come to our country to bless our work and bestow his words of wisdom And it's also so wonderful that he will donate$2 million from the latest U2 concert to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

48:19And then he would pause and then he would just go, wah, and burst out into laughter. But he would let it go for about 10 seconds. You could see Bono completely panicking because how can you not give$2 million to Archbishop Tutu? What a salesman. So he was just wicked. He would sort of be, he was not beyond a good prank. Oh, that's awesome. So, you know, having worked with such iconic leaders, were there other people that you encountered during your later career who were similarly inspiring or impactful for you? You know, every country that you go to that's dealing with a history of mass atrocity has this cadre of people who've been forged in the furnace of that terrible time.

49:08and sometimes they ascend into governments and are just these very inspiring and sometimes they are unlikely people who get plucked out of these strange circumstances and become deeply historic. So there was a really amazing guy called Dris Ben-Zekri who was Moroccan. And he, you know, Morocco had a truth commission process where the current king who is descended from the prophet and whose father was responsible for some of these terrible atrocities was commissioning an investigation into his father's era as a way of trying to put the past behind him but also not wanting to disrupt in any way the powers and prerogatives of the Moroccan royal house.

50:03and Dries said something he was this incredibly articulate fearless guy who had the confidence of the king but also the confidence of the human rights movement and he always said something that stuck with me which was when you're doing something of great consequence and you are trying to persuade people with power to do things that they are not sure they want to do you have to sit on the red line between what's permitted and not permitted. And if you're over the line, you lose your job. And if you're away from the line, you're not pushing hard enough. So my job is to wake up every day and to sit on the red line.

50:47I thought that was just a very astute observation about what achieving change really is. Because, you know, you've always seen in your life the people who are the rhetorical maximalists who always say you must do this and anything short of this is a cop out or a sell out. And then, you know, the people who are the cop outs and the sell outs. But the people who sit on that red line are the most, I think, extraordinary people.

51:15Matt Brittin:And Paul, you've gone on to have a big change in what you're doing now. You founded a club in London, The Conduit, which is about sort of sociable entrepreneurship a bit. So what led to that shift and what is it you're trying to do as a leader now? In a way, I think what the conduit is seeking to do is scale and institutionalize Ubuntu. Because so we have a 25 ,000 square foot building in the heart of Covent Garden. We bring together 150 ,000 people, walk through the doors. We do 150 talks. We bring conferences together. But our real superpower is by looking at really hard challenges and saying, who can we assemble from this extraordinary community into durable coalitions to tackle these problems at scale?

52:09And so you will know that we're doing work on a thing called the Flood Action Coalition. Greatest near-term risk the UK is facing is£10 billion a year in flooding. The technologies that we used to have we can't afford and are not effective, so dams and walls. But we have this remarkable natural resource. We can build wetlands and riverine restorations and leaky dams. They're a sixth of the price. They're just as effective, and they produce these remarkable climate co-benefits. They sequester carbon. They promote biodiversity. And so you can bring them into being. You can finance them from existing revenue streams, and you can create new revenue by monetizing the carbon co-benefits.

52:55But you can't do something at scale with that level of complexity without creating Ubuntu. You need landowners. You need investors. You need ecologists. You need the National Trust and the Rivers Trust. You need the Environment Agency. You need DEFRA. You need banks like UBS. You need insurers like Aviva. You need technology companies like Google. And the innovation required to solve these at scale requires an orchestrator, and that's what we do. And it's sort of like going back home, actually. I feel like I'm able to do what, like Mandela and Tutu would be going, like, do more of that because it's bringing together people who share things and are generous with each other but are solving things.

53:40We're not just admiring the problem. We're going, time's short. Times are hard. Let's go and do this. I was thinking about how I would describe you if I was going to come up with an alternative job title and what you do. And I thought, well, how about purpose doula? as in, you know, like a midwife. And now I think it has to be Ubuntu doula. This is what I'm going to use as my description. I don't know how you feel about that, Paul. I'm, you know, it's a gender term and I'll embrace it. You know, I think women leaders are infinitely more effective than men in almost everything.

54:15Matt Brittin:It's fascinating listening to you because I think, you know, we're all about trying to understand how to lead in this crazy, uncertain world. It's more unpredictable than it's ever been. But your leadership journey started in the most extreme sort of circumstances. And what you've learned, I think, seems incredibly relevant to leaders of today. We could all be a bit more at Ubuntu. And rising leaders need to step up and play their part too. I think that that's right. And I think we're in those moments. I feel like the moment we're in right now is like the moment before Brexit when everybody thought it couldn't happen and then it did.

54:51the moment before irreversible climate change that people think, oh, it's not going to happen, and then it does. I think that the prospect of serious global conflict is not unimaginable, and serious disruptive economic change as a result of AI and other forces is, you know, it's not fanciful. and so we're in this sort of slow motion quiet before the storm things haven't quite hit us but they could and i think at these moments there are times it's which we have to sort of not be complacent i think that complacency is the real challenge that we had we need leaders who are not complacent we need corporate leaders who rise to the challenge we need civil society leaders who are not satisfied by just growing your what you do by 10 % every year we need step change and I think that sense of urgency married with optimism is actually, it's the optimism that makes the urgency not feel daunting I think we have no excuse not to be doing it given what we all know that is a powerful place at which to end the bulk of the conversation but Paul, I hope you're aware that we always like to end with a speed round.

56:22So you've done all the hard questions on this. This is now going to be an opportunity to do something. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Speed round. Those are terrifying speed rounds. No, don't worry. There are no right answers to this. And if you need a minute to think, do you think? But we're looking for answers of a sentence at most if possible. So I have heard that you quite like a shimmy on the dance floor. So I want to know what piece of music makes you leap out of your seat and get onto that dance floor? I will do any U2 song. Is that because you're sponsored by Bono? Bono is a controversial figure, but I will do any U2 song.

57:08I still haven't found what I'm looking for is, you know, still one of those songs that I was actually at a U2 tribute band in Dublin about three weeks ago. And I had a really wonderful time. I mean, when you're when you're going to the tribute bands, then then you are a true believer. So that is good to know. You've worked with obviously extraordinary leaders. We've been discussing that. But what's the most unexpected source of leadership wisdom that you've come across?

57:43Wow.

57:47I think that I keep going back to it, but I think that domestic workers in South Africa have this frank, direct way of speaking to people. and in the old days they raised an entire generation of people and so I think that the sort of black matriarchs in South Africa were always, they were infallibly wise. I hear you. So I think we've all walked away with the sense that we need more Ubuntu in our lives. Beyond that, is there any kind of universal lesson you can abstract from all this extraordinary work you've done, particularly on transitional justice, that you think is relevant to anybody who's thinking about leadership?

58:38Because it's the lightning round, I'm going to say never... One of my mottos in life is never make human beings choose between ethics and desire because they'll always choose desire. So what you have to do is make what's ethical desirable. and I think that that also allows you to put like essential human impulses like love and pleasure and gratification into things that are earnest. I like that. That's deep. So next I'm going to ask you in a working week what makes your blood pressure go up? if my to-do list grows. And what do you do to bring your blood pressure down apart from tackling your to-do list?

59:27Cook. Cook. And what gives you your highest high when you're at work?

59:35I love watching an idea turn into something specific. So I love going, we dreamed up something six months ago and it landed. That idea manifested itself and it changed something. And so I'm always sort of, I get kind of slightly sweaty palms when I see that about to happen. Excellent. Did you want to come in there? Yeah, I've got a question for you. You've got sweaty palms as well? Always.

1:00:06Matt Brittin:Pass the mic. Nominate another guest who you think we could learn from.

1:00:19Can I do two? Yes. I think Jacqueline Novogratz is wonderful. And Acumen's just had its 25th anniversary. And she has a lot of thoughts and reflections and wisdom and battle scars along the way. I'm also a great fan of Danny Shishkanda Raja, who has been in leadership positions in lots of different places. and is, I think, insightful and brilliant and challenging. Excellent. Thank you. I'm going to seize the mic back again here. What's your most embarrassing moment as a leader? We want confessions.

1:00:58Matt Brittin:Aside from mischanting in front of 10 ,000 people. Yeah, I mean, that was a good one, I must say. I've got another one, actually. I was in Ghana and I was helping with the Truth Commission process there and I was put on breakfast television to be interviewed on the Good Morning Accra show. And I was with my three colleagues, Vasuki Nasaya, Eric Darko, and myself. Eric is Ghanaian, Vasuki is Sri Lankan, and I'm South African. So we get into the makeup booth. and being Ghanaian television, the kind of, what's it that you, the thing that you tell me, what you used to sort of... Foundation? The foundation, the foundation.

1:01:45I love that Matt answered that. Well done, that's so great. He's a big fan of foundation. I always wear makeup. So the foundation went from very, very dark to sort of, you know, cappuccino, but definitely not like for a white South African. And so the kind of makeup artist very gingerly took the cappuccino and put it on me and basically turned me like four shades darker, like some kind of spoof from it. So firstly, I have this interview in which I look utterly ludicrous. But then having done the interview, I completely forgot that I had it on and then went to go beat the Ghanaian Minister of Foreign Affairs in what is equivalent blackface.

1:02:28And he found it. it took him about 10 minutes to to stop laughing so it was a it was it was a really good way to start the day. Well you have done very well to provide us with two very very concrete stories of your embarrassment as leaders so I feel like we should probably draw this to an end you've been generous what do you know now that you wish you'd known earlier?

1:02:54I think as a leader, I think that I've learned never respond when you're angry or frustrated. Always spend at least a day reflecting. and then the second thing I've learned is as a leader always follow the second and third bounce of the ball so when you do x think how is that likely to be received how is that person likely to act what are they likely to do and if they do that and that's undesirable then why am I saying that so maybe I recalibrate because I've what I've done is I've anticipated second and third or the consequences of what I've done. And so I think both of those are sort of signs of kind of reflection and maturity and impulse control, which is not my natural state of being.

1:04:00Matt Brittin:There's a stretch goals for me too. Well, great words of wisdom to end on, and we're always learning. Every day is a school day. So thank you so much, Paul. Really an extraordinary discussion and a very humbling one. and we've really enjoyed learning so much more about you than we knew at the start. Thank you, Paul. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Oof, actually feeling quite emotional after that, Matt. Yeah. I mean, such a serious set of topics, but so many incredible lessons for life and leadership and also the role of laughter in connecting with people and getting through some of those tough times.

1:04:40Matt Brittin:massively incredible examples of people he'd learned from. I mean, Tutu and Mandela is on everybody's kind of dinner conversation list as some of the most inspiring leaders the world's seen. Absolutely, and he wears that experience very lightly, and I guess that's part of what it's like to do such an extraordinary job so young. You almost don't know what you don't know. I think that really struck me as well. He was so youthful that he was able to kind of play such a critical role in such a heavy environment. And that seemed to propel him as well on a mission in life. Yeah. I mean, for me, it is basically a modern miracle that essentially was a peaceful transition post-apartheid in South Africa.

1:05:26And I remember, you know, sort of seeing the before and the after, and it's just so hard to compute that this is in living memory. But I thought it was a brilliant example of the fact that there is always light and shade. Even when you're in your darkest moments, there is always light and that might come from being inspired by people and his comments around who inspired him yes he worked with the most senior leaders uh some of you know the most famous leaders in history but he was also inspired by um domestic workers and um you know the kind of the

1:05:59Matt Brittin:dignity actually that word came up a lot didn't it i think also i heard a lot the connection between the macro, the country level, the civilization level issues and the very personal. And, you know, you pursued that question of empathy and how it's built and trust on an individual level, but also in a nation going through a process and then across 30 or 40 different nations as well. And I think those lessons, you know, the word of the day obviously is Ubuntu. Yeah. And that kind of sense, I am who I am only because of the we that we're part of. and I think that's really important today in this world of complexity and we talked about that.

1:06:37So remember to keep in touch with us you can find us at whatwedontknowatboxlight.io and you can find us on all the social feeds you know where they are and we really look forward to hearing from you we love your questions we love your comments tell us who you want to hear from tell us what you want us to talk about thank you so much.

1:07:02you