Transcript
Annalisa Holcombe (00:00:08):
Hello, everyone. On this episode of 92,000 Hours, we are talking with Dr. Jeff Girton. I met Jeff in our PhD program in Yellow Springs, Ohio, about six years ago. Actually, I met him online even earlier than that, because he reached out to our entire cohort to introduce himself and make friends even before our classes started. I came to learn that outreach was very Jeff indeed. He is an extrovert and a friend maker. He is funny and passionate and charming and outspoken. He cares deeply about the things that he loves and the people he loves, especially his daughter, Audrey.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:00:54):
And today, we're talking about values. I think you'll find his take on it really interesting. I did. You know that because you listened to my podcast, you know that I started with the same question that I asked every single person, it's my dearest, most favorite question. And I think it gets to the heart of who you are quickly. So if you don't count school, work, church activity, volunteerism, sports, all those things you do, tell me about what you are most proud of? What is your greatest accomplishment as a human being for who you are?

Jeff Girton (00:01:34):
I don't want you to ask this question. I knew you're going to, I've been listening and knew it was coming. I just struggled, try to figure out how to answer this question. Because obviously, I want to be the cool guy that gives you the unexpected answer that makes you think of how alternate I am to countercultural or whatever. And there's a time where I think I would have given you some kind of philosophical thing. But in the last six years ... Well, actually, ever since you and I have known each other, I have been a parent. I became apparent 10 days before we met.

Jeff Girton (00:02:13):
I mean, she's the only thing that really matters now. So, every time I think something has gone well, I take credit for that. And every time something's gone bad, I try to blame the other parent for that. She's my thing.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:02:27):
Isn't that amazing that after you become a parent, not everyone probably, but a lot of people, it becomes ... Like you in some ways, you really do have a North Star in ways that you didn't know this person was going to be for you.

Jeff Girton (00:02:46):
If you don't, you're doing something wrong.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:02:49):
So talk to me about how parenting has ... Well, I'm just going to bring this up because you talked about first, but talk to me about how parenting has informed or changed your value system.

Jeff Girton (00:03:04):
Ooh. So I went to a Jesuit Catholic school, and I'm not Catholic. I grew up very opposite.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:03:13):
That's interesting.

Jeff Girton (00:03:16):
Yeah. So I grew up very not Catholic and super evangelical. And so, went to a Jesuit school because I wanted to get something religious, but something very different from what I grew up with. And so, in my grad work, I learned about this well-known Jesuit quote or a quote from a Jesuit, and it's something about falling in love is the most practical thing in the world because it changes everything. And I mean, it's very poetic. But Pedro Arrupe, if anybody is listening and wants to look that up, but it's this great quote about fall in love because it determines everything that you do.

Jeff Girton (00:03:55):
And I think you can see parents who have fallen in love with being a parent or fallen in love with their children because that's their North Star and you make decisions that are not the best for you immediately so that you can do what's best for this thing that you love and is a parasite. I mean, that's what children are. They're parasites who give us warm and fuzzies.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:04:22):
First, you made me want to cry, and then you made me want to laugh. So, that's probably really good. That sounds very depth to me.

Jeff Girton (00:04:30):
That's how I do it. That's my MO.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:04:31):
Yeah. Then you're like, this is going just how I wanted it to from the start. But talk to ... Wow. Because we are supposed to be talking today about values.

Jeff Girton (00:04:46):
Yeah, we are.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:04:48):
And already from the start, we are. And I'm interested in that discussion of falling in love is practical because ... I mean, love is a value, is something that in my work with students, I would see coming up over and over and over again. Because people can talk about all the things you can fall in love with. You can fall in love with a person and you can fall in love with something that matters to you. So talk to me about that a little, just because it came up.

Jeff Girton (00:05:24):
Well ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:05:26):
And if it informs any of your own personal values.

Jeff Girton (00:05:29):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things that I really wrestled with, and I think it comes to this right here that we're talking about, is it this myth that we tell ourselves about what we love and what we actually love.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:05:42):
Wow.

Jeff Girton (00:05:45):
Do we really love our children? Or do we love the feeling our children give back to us? Sorry, if you're a second child in this world, you're a product of narcissism. Because what parents do who have a second child is so stupid. It's so traumatic to go from being a single person or a person that's in a partnership of some kind and to go to suddenly be a parent, because your whole life shifts. If you love this thing that you've created, then everything in the world shifts and it becomes now about them, which is why we don't sleep and we don't eat and we don't take care of ourselves.

Jeff Girton (00:06:27):
Because we're being a parent. So then I think the second kid comes around, and it's because we sit there and we're like, oh, think about all these warm and fuzzies I have. But we forgotten what really was happening in the situation of how traumatic it really was. I'm getting really off track here. This is...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:06:47):
How traumatic it really was for the parent?

Jeff Girton (00:06:52):
Yes.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:06:53):
Or for the other child? I mean, that's a whole other thing too.

Jeff Girton (00:06:56):
Yeah, right. I think as a parent, we forget how rough it was to go through that transition, which is probably like some kind of biology evolution that keeps our species alive. Because it is. You fall in love with this relationship you have with this person. And I think people who are trying to raise healthy humans realize that they've fallen in love with that person, not just with a feeling that they've given us. I think that's whenever there's trouble in the world is whenever people are in existence without feeling like people love them, rather than just love the feeling that they get from them.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:07:38):
Yes, I totally agree with you. It's one of the harder things, like as your children grow up and move away and make their own choices, that is part of that whole parenting conundrum too, that this ...

Jeff Girton (00:07:50):
Not ready for that.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:07:51):
Yeah. One day, you'll be there, minister. And you'll be like, how ... It's a different new level of love and a different level of awe that somebody that you knew so well has their own perspective that is not informed by you.

Jeff Girton (00:08:09):
Yeah. There's another question I was expecting you to ask me.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:08:11):
Sorry.

Jeff Girton (00:08:13):
I came ready for that one. I had a good answer ready and you didn't ask it. But it's ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:08:18):
I do that.

Jeff Girton (00:08:20):
Well, it's a good idea, because you got me off guard here. But it's the idea of who am I. And, again, I was trying to come up with a good answer for it. And I would say, who I am right now as a person and who I've been for maybe 20 years, the majority of my professional adult life, I've been disillusioned across the board. And I think ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:08:46):
Wow.

Jeff Girton (00:08:46):
... I am growing with my disillusionment through different things. I grew up in a very linear world. My parents just convicted me of this idea that we reap what we sow and you do good things and good things happen because God loves good little boys. And so, you follow the rules that God has put out for us and, and life is just going to take care of itself. And there are all these rules that came along with that. And if you just follow these rules, then things are going to work out and you're going to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and life's going to work out.

Jeff Girton (00:09:24):
And I learned that none of that matters. None of it at all. Yes, most of us cannot get ahead without being good at what we do. But that's being good at what we do isn't what gets us ahead. It's this standard thing in life that we just have to meet this threshold of. And then typically, what actually gets us ahead in life is just dumb luck, luck from who we were born to, and where we were born to, when we were born to. But then luck isn't just who we rub shoulders with, who we meet in the parking lots to who we went to school with, or who somebody knows somebody else that knows me.

Jeff Girton (00:10:07):
And so, there's ways the world just operates by luck. And I think we try to tell ourselves the opposite. Because it seems scary if it operates by luck. It's random and it's chance there's ... I'm out of control if it operates by luck, and that's something that gives a lot of us the heebie-jeebie, anxiety, creepy kind of things.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:10:33):
How have you handled given that you came to that realization or felt the disillusionment? What was that journey like for you? Because that could devolve into some dark places.

Jeff Girton (00:10:51):
It does, yeah. And it does every time. Because I get my bearings, and then all of a sudden, I dig deeper with something else because I'm a person who doesn't learn from my mistakes. And so, I make the same mistake again and I'm like, I'm disillusioned again. And I go through another devolving dark place. I mean, disillusionment, what it's about is that we have learned the rules to just get through in life. Whatever rules that means in terms of relationships, in terms of how we interact with people, who we talk to, where we live, all those kind of things. We know the rules.

Jeff Girton (00:11:32):
And then when we learn that the rules that we've been basing things on aren't really what's happening, it's really scary. Because now, it's like, hey, I felt competent in life. And suddenly, I'm not because now everything that I feel like I've known is now changed. And so, you're out of control. You don't know how to behave, you don't know how to proceed because you can't trust the things that you've always trusted.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:12:00):
Interesting. How has that affected your own value system?

Jeff Girton (00:12:04):
Yeah. So for me, one of my personal strengths or go-to things is I'm very curious. And so, through my academic work, I just kept finding myself asking this kind of question like, why did I have it so wrong? Or how did I misunderstand this? Or what really is the key to success? If I tried these things, then I want to learn. Like this is BS, this isn't the key to success. I tried this. And so, what's the next one? And so, for me, I dealt with my dark places by academically trying to understand it and learn more and pick it apart, and then eventually trying to research to understand it.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:12:50):
Would you say ... I mean, I've done this work with students and with other people in my life, poor people, that I deal with, take them through an exercise. We have it on our space where you can go through and identify what are your core values and define them for yourselves. I'm interested if you think of the things that are core to you. Because it's interesting, you've already brought up so many things that are so laden because you've talked about curiosity.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:13:25):
But you've also talked about your academic pursuits so there's some ... And then you've talked about your religious upbringing and then you've talked about rules. And I'm ... Already that fast. And there's a lot of dense material within those sentences right off the bat. So talk to me about what is it that you value?

Jeff Girton (00:13:55):
What do I value? I don't really know what really it is that drives me to this. I've listened to a lot of your podcast, and several of them are like mini therapy sessions where somebody asked a question or brings up something and I pause...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:14:17):
By the way, I'm no therapist. Just so we know.

Jeff Girton (00:14:19):
Yeah, put the disclaimer out there. They're definitely not therapy sessions, because you don't talk back whenever I'm talking to my phone as I'm listening to you. But you guys, you bring up things that there was a guest that talked about conflict avoidance, and it was this quick little side note. Well, I think we're all actually conflict avoiding. But anyways, like, oh, want to know more about that. But there's been that moment. I was like, oh yeah, I always think I'm not afraid of conflict. But then I start to think about it, I'm like, I do conflict avoidance things. There's so many good topics that just really, I think, pause me and send me into this internal dialogue with myself, which is my own personal free therapy, so...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:15:07):
Which is the goal that we all think about ourselves a little bit more in how we operate.

Jeff Girton (00:15:13):
Right, right, yeah. So I think my answer to that is that what drives me is a sense of justice.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:15:21):
That sounds so like you, yes.

Jeff Girton (00:15:25):
Yeah, social justice. Absolutely. But I think we need to maybe understand a little bit more personally so that we can extend that empathy to people who are less privileged and then need social justice to happen to them so that they can just live. I think that ... Okay, so here's part of my history that other people don't know, that I grew up super evangelical. And you're going to ask the question later about a mentor. And I'm not going to answer that, because mentors weren't something I didn't grow up with in the evangelical church.

Jeff Girton (00:16:05):
Because everything is about authority, and it's about this authoritarian structure. Now, that was my experience to the church. And what I've learned since then is that my church doesn't have a hierarchy on authority. There are plenty of other churches that do that. But also, lots of our business world operates in a very authoritarian hierarchical structure. And so, I think I just grew up in a microcosm that's the same valued as lots of capitalistic value systems, but it just comes from a different place.

Jeff Girton (00:16:41):
And so, whenever you're at the bottom of the hierarchical chain, there is no such thing as justice. And if you exist down there, then you just have to learn to live in an unjust situation. And so, I think that's part of what has driven everything about my intellectual curiosity.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:17:02):
That's so interesting, because this is so an aside probably, and it's so about me. And so, but it's been ... I've recently been thinking a lot about this in the work about authority in the workplace because I know that I, personally, have a significant mistrust, distrust of authority. It's a blocker for me. It is something that I personally struggle with like the idea of managing up, just that idea pisses me off. And that I'm supposed to please a particular person where I'm like, what are you talking about? That person has their job, I have my job, let's both do our jobs.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:17:47):
And I do the same with people that report to me. So when people report to me and they say things like, well, that's above my pay grade, or that's ... And I think like, no, no, we're all in this ... We all work here. Especially when it comes to things about what we value or what our culture is, it can't be one person's because that's not the truth. The truth is that the culture we're all in. And so ...

Jeff Girton (00:18:18):
So ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:18:18):
... it's a struggle for me. Because then, how do those people feel when I say back to them, that's not true. And they're like, what are you talking about? You have all the power.

Jeff Girton (00:18:25):
So here's a little bit of the problem that we exist in. And probably anybody listening to your podcast, unless you have a very international reach maybe, but in America, we are the most individualistic culture in the entire human existence. And if you just said that you can't do this as an individual, what does that mean about our organizations, about whether that organization is a for profit thing, a government, and education, a church? If we think that the individual is what's important, I mean, then we're going to run our organizations like we've been running them and we're going to get the results that we've been giving.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:19:06):
Love it. Okay. Talk to me about like ... Again, Jeff, how am I supposed to dig in to all of these things? So talk to me about what you mean by that, our value as a society on individualism and what you learned about what that means in practice and in here.

Jeff Girton (00:19:30):
So you had a guest on talking about your core values as a person, and I want to look at the turn values a little bit differently. So one of the ways I tried to ... When I was in the classroom, asked my students to think about this, was to ask them the question, when was the last time you saw your parents naked? And that's exactly. It's one of those things where half the room is like, I need to unthink what I'm ... Like, no, no, no, no, stop, stop, stop. And then the other half is like whatever, yesterday, no big deal.

Jeff Girton (00:20:04):
And I can't tell one student that they're right or they're wrong or they're weird or they're not weird. And it's not a family value, but it's this norm that we live with. And for families who grow up where clothing is optional most of the time, it is what it is, and life moves on just like it moves on when you're in my house. But there's other ways of doing that. And it's no different. It just has more or less clothing, but it's one of those things that we grew up with nobody telling us this, we just grew up in a place where it was the norm. And we don't know any better.

Jeff Girton (00:20:45):
If you grew up in those households where everybody is clothed from the chin to the ankle, then that's just what you think life is. And nobody told you, this is how it's supposed to be. Or the opposite, right? If your parents run around naked or whatever, nobody told you this is a good or bad thing. Unless maybe your mom was like, now when you go stay at somebody's house, please don't ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:21:07):
Don't tuck away your pajamas. But it's that story the ... I think about it like it's that ... I tell the story. It's the fish were swimming in the water and one of them says, "How's the water today?" And they say, "What are you talking about? What's water?" Because it's just the water you swim in, you don't even realize that you're swimming in water. It's just what it is.

Jeff Girton (00:21:29):
Right. It's their existence. It's so common that you don't think about it. And that's what individualism is to Americans. The idea that we can pay a CEO 300 times with a median worker makes the fact that that's not alarming to people should be alarming. That ratio is so grotesque. This is not to say that people at the top shouldn't make a lot more than the people at the bottom or the median. Of course, they should. But is that person contributing 300 times what the rest of the organization is offering? And so, let me just get a little bit into the weeds with this.

Jeff Girton (00:22:14):
And you and I both have been in academia. So academia is built. The design is to be as monetarily inefficient as possible. Now, I don't know that that's its intent, but that's its design. And so, when I hear about people who are frustrated with college costs, first of all, they don't know what they're talking about because they're the ones demanding swimming pools and rec centers and things like that. So I mean, they're the ones also driving up the cost. But there's also this element that when you're an instructor, you're bringing in revenue. You bring students into the classroom.

Jeff Girton (00:22:53):
Students pay to be in those seats, and you are the one contributing revenue to the university. Now, hopefully, you're also contributing academic and intellectual things as well. But you're the lowest paid person in the academic system. If you want to get paid more money, you need to move farther away from students, you need to move farther away from doing the work that actually makes the university tick. And so, if you look at what values we have, we value people with titles, which is a matter of authoritarianism. We don't value people who contribute to the university.

Jeff Girton (00:23:30):
We value people who have a title. Because if you valued people who contributed to the university, you would promote people based upon their product, their outcomes. But instead, we promote people based upon who knows who to get promoted to the next level of the academic chain. And so, you're really inspiring people to do poor jobs at the things that the public needs us to do. Does that make sense?

Annalisa Holcombe (00:24:01):
Yeah, it absolutely does. And it also ... I mean, of course, when you think of how we pay teachers or ...

Jeff Girton (00:24:09):
Exactly.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:24:09):
... how we pay the service members, how we pay police officers, and those things that are core. And boy, it was sure brought home to us during the pandemic when we said things like these essential workers, so you're essential. And then we wonder now why so many ... When we say like, wow, people aren't coming back to the work. And it's because it shone a bright light on the ridiculousness and the hypocrisy of our society in terms of what's essential and what isn't and how we value those things.

Jeff Girton (00:24:49):
Now, to put that in term exactly what you just said, put it in terms of my research, it's the myths that we tell.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:24:56):
Yes, completely.

Jeff Girton (00:24:56):
And so, I've got a couple of two doors down, is a couple and they're both in physical therapy of some kind. At the point they are now in the pandemic, they're just almost hateful to the concept where the public wants to call them heroes. And it's like, "Well, that's how we show our appreciation." And she's like, "No, this is how you show us that we are the grunts of the world that you don't care about." And I scratched my head about that and she was like, "You tell us we're heroes to make us enjoy what you're putting us through." And I thought, well, that's fascinating.

Jeff Girton (00:25:33):
It's so true, that we're healing these people up and lifting them up as icons of our culture. These are our heroes. But what we really mean is, hey, we're sorry that we've put you through this, we hope you still keep taking care of us. And I think that we need to understand ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:25:54):
I think that's right.

Jeff Girton (00:25:54):
Yeah, right? That we tell these lies, but they're really myths that we pass on to each other so that we can continue to live the way that we want to live. And it's a way of saying like, hey, look, we're doing the right thing because these are our heroes. When in reality, it's, hey, we should feel sorry for all the stuff that we've, as a society, have made you have to do for us.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:26:18):
I'm so interested in that too, because we are talking about academia. And you were talking about that. As you know, I work in a completely different place than I used to work. So I was all private liberal arts, and now I am online virtual adult education. That is super different. And what I've been thinking a lot about, as I dive deeper and deeper into this in the past couple years, is that we have these myths about what college is supposed to look like and that we stopped our lives for four years, and we go to school.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:26:53):
And we meet the people that will make us people and it will be beautiful. And for 13% of college goers, that's the truth. And then the rest of our whole society doesn't have that experience. And because of the movies we'd show and that this ideal of what college is supposed to look, the whole rest of society, which is most of us think we did something wrong or we're lesser than and we're not worthy of what education is supposed to look. And we can't learn, and we're not good enough. And that is not true. It's just that we are part of a myth about what something supposed to look like that was probably built for just a few of us, really. And we haven't figured out how to build it for everybody.

Jeff Girton (00:27:41):
Yeah. So I have also taught in adult programs, and there's a comfort that I enjoy working with adults, because they're ... So part of education is learning things that you don't want to learn. Because you think you don't need to know those things. But there's some people who may have been down the road before you. And yes, of course, there are times where, for whatever reason, every academy gets it wrong and makes you do a wasted class. But in general, you don't know what's important to you until afterwards.

Jeff Girton (00:28:16):
And so, with these adult classes, one of the things I love about them is students are much more engaged because they look for the practical ways to apply information. And then when they know that this isn't relevant to them, they check out. But the difference is they check out respectfully like, yeah, it's okay. I'll write the paper, don't worry. Let's just move on. Where I think 18 year olds are trying to fight the good fight and stand up for something. I'm like, listen, they're adults, they've been disillusioned just as much you and I have. They get it.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:28:47):
That's so funny. One of my students, after he graduated, came back and he said, "Do you know what I wish I would have learned in college, is that a great portion of every day adult life is going through things that you just have to slog through it." And there are no cliff notes. And there is no study guide. You just have to sit down and do it. And it's not going to be pretty and it's going to be boring. He's like, "There's a great portion of adult life. That is just that."

Jeff Girton (00:29:17):
Yeah. And it's not a great portion of success, which I'm sure there is too, but of just adult life, of taking out the trash and that is just one of those things that ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:29:29):
You just have to.

Jeff Girton (00:29:30):
Yeah, unless you've got money, just go take out the trash. Nobody enjoys it. We all do it and...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:29:35):
Welcome to life, yeah. If you like this topic and you want to dive a bit deeper, you can listen to our original podcast about values with Dr. Dick Chapman in season one of the 92,000 Hours podcast. You can also work to identify and understand your own values by completing a core values exercise by going to our website at www.connectioncollaborative.com/blog/corevalues. But for now, let's hear more from Jeff. So talk to me a little bit about this. We've alluded to it. And I want to get deeper into this whole idea of what your study has been about and what intrigued you to talk about power distance. Talk to me about what it is and why that was your sticking point of curiosity that has informed your life in so many ways.

Jeff Girton (00:30:57):
So, dear Malcolm Gladwell, if you're listening to this, please read the first page of my dissertation where I talk about you in my acknowledgments. So I am a huge fan boy of Malcolm Gladwell. And years ago, in a book he wrote, a chapter in which he talked about the term power distance. And it clicked. It was just interesting to me. Long story short, in his book, it was about this person from a Colombian airline, and Colombia has a very high power distance as compared to the US. And basically, this guy was following orders while the plane crashed.

Jeff Girton (00:31:35):
And the black box recording is him being super respectful and polite while he's flying the plane into the ground. And I mean, he knew he was crashing, but his power distance was like, well, these people have an authority over me, and so I need to treat them with respect. And his point was that power distance is so ingrained in him that while he's professionally doing his job, knowing that he's going to his death seconds later, this cultural value is still driving the way that he communicates to the person that...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:32:06):
Helping him die.

Jeff Girton (00:32:08):
Yeah, yeah. And so, the way he wrote about that story just intrigued me. And then growing up, I saw this all throughout my life. So we as a ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:32:18):
Because you talked about authority so much in your evangelical upbringing.

Jeff Girton (00:32:22):
Yeah, yeah. And so, one of the things that authority is about is a title. And so, my dad was a pastor. And so, instantly, he had this sense of reverence that people would give to him, whether he deserved it or not. Just because he had that title, they treated him as if he was a different level of human. So much so that there was this metaphor, this way that they treated him where he was a little bit higher human than a human, but definitely lower than God. That he was this intermediary, which put him at some level of being extra or superhuman. And I started looking at how we have researched power distance in the past. And we do this to everybody. I mean, in our organization.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:33:07):
Wow. And when you say something like that, it sounds claustrophobic and horrible to me, but I bet a lot of people would love to be superhuman. But to me, it sounds like, ooh, oh my gosh, that would be too much.

Jeff Girton (00:33:20):
There's a lot of people in this world that feed off of it, that see themselves as somehow a little bit better human. Not better quality, but just as a more human than the other person. And ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:33:32):
Oh my gosh.

Jeff Girton (00:33:33):
... somehow they get off on that. It gives them an ego boost or fills a need for them. I'm getting off track here.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:33:41):
So, that totally informed you. How did you get to this like ... Talk to me about what that means, this power distance and authority, and what was it that you studied and why did it matter to you.

Jeff Girton (00:33:56):
Okay. So, the short way to understand power distance is that in high power distance cultures, you imagine a monarchy or a king where there is some kind of cosmic order that has somehow set this human is now ordained by whatever cosmic power to be the ruler over these other humans. In the opposite level, the opposite of a power distance, high power distance culture would be a culture who believes every single person is equal and every single person has the freedom to impact their own life.

Jeff Girton (00:34:32):
Now, the differences in cultures that are higher power distance, we believe that you get ahead in life by having a title, having a name, being born into the right family, being born into the right side of the tracks, being born the right color, although we don't like to talk about that. But that's really what high power distance means, is that there are some people whose birth puts them at a different level than the rest of us. But that sounds awful to us in the United States. Because here, our earliest documents say we believe that all humans, all men are created equal.

Jeff Girton (00:35:08):
And the fact that I even have to step back and say, men, not humans let's us know that when we wrote that, we still believe that humans had different levels of value to them. So, we think our myth is that equality is the rule here in the United States, that you get ahead based upon the quality of what you can bring to this world. But in reality ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:35:34):
Yeah, that it's a meritocracy. If you just do well and you follow those rules, go get the golden key.

Jeff Girton (00:35:38):
Yeah, right. And so, in a low power distance society, we, in theory, believe in meritocracy. But I think what informed my research was I somehow ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:35:48):
You were disillusioned, you were like ...

Jeff Girton (00:35:51):
Yes, I smelled a lie. I was there like, there's something wrong here. I've always been told, we believe that all men are created equal. But if you look around, that's not what's going on. And so, what's this difference between what I'm told and what I observe? And that's how I found my question, was to go research this dynamic.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:36:13):
What's fascinating to me, Jeff, is that I think you get at something that everybody struggles with and then we solve it in different ways. Your way to solve this was like, I'm going to dig in, I'm going to approach it with curiosity, and I'm going to become an academic, I'm going to use that tool to figure this out. But I think that that piece is also something that really informs a lot of people who are on the opposite spectrum of you politically, who are feeling like, this system isn't working for me and I am mad as hell. Because you're telling me if I do these things, it'll work and it's not working. And the answers are on two polar ends. But the problem is probably the problem. Does that make sense?

Jeff Girton (00:37:03):
Or what if my liberal friends and my conservative friends are both doing the exact same thing through their different lenses?

Annalisa Holcombe (00:37:16):
Talk to me about that.

Jeff Girton (00:37:18):
So I'm very much in a place in my life where I realized there's a certain group that's just never going to listen to me and never going to change my mind or never going to change their mind, and that's okay. And I've learned that. But at the same time, one of the dynamics that I think is happening is that we all, all of us, whether we're on the Republican or Democrat side, left or right, center, whatever, we all have bought into the fact that we need to scurry around and kick our own butts in this life to try to get ahead. And we do it differently.

Jeff Girton (00:37:57):
I think there are some people who would rather do it through authoritarian means, and then there are some people who would rather do it through more egalitarian means, if you will. But in the end, there's no such thing as justice. This world is not fair. And your matter, your ability to achieve success in this life is mostly built upon luck. And here's what's wrong with that. I can't tell my daughter that. My daughter is six, for those who don't know, and I can't tell her stories at night about, you know what, Audrey, just do whatever the hell you want to do, because nothing really matters. There's no such thing as justice in this world.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:38:40):
So nihilistic, right?

Jeff Girton (00:38:42):
Yeah, right? But that's really what I should be telling her, is that, don't listen to mom and dad about what's going to make you happy. Don't listen to us about what kind of career you should get. Because probably whenever, you're 20 and going into career, whatever that is, it's not existing today. There's no way we can control all these things. And so, we try to run this race faster and harder. And still, we're running a race that's rigged. Because we think our merit is going to lead to success. And that's just not something that we can trust will happen.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:39:15):
So how are you going to make me not come out of this conversation feeling like, well, I just need to go cry for a little while and put my head under my pillow?

Jeff Girton (00:39:24):
Because let me tell you, I once went to China. I met this guy named Ted. Ted is just a normal Chinese schmuck just like I'm an American schmuck. And he was our tour guide for the day. And I was talking to him about democracy. And I was like, "Tell me what's the best thing about being a Chinese person and talking about your culture." And Ted just thought for a while and didn't answer, I thought, oh, man, I offended him or something like that. And finally, he just gives me this like Confucian saying that I've never heard before and I really wanted to dig into it.

Jeff Girton (00:40:01):
And when I looked out the window, he was like, "Yeah, look at all those people." And we had just left Tiananmen Square. And there were 30,000 Chinese people waiting in line to see Mao Zedong's body. And he's like, "Look at all these people. What would happen if you all told them that they could be whatever they wanted to be and just go strive to do whatever they wanted to do?" I'm like, "What do you mean?" That's what you're supposed to tell them. And we had this conversation.

Jeff Girton (00:40:28):
And he said, "The problem is, if you look at the world from my worldview, destiny is going to happen, and whatever is going to happen is going to happen." You think you can control destiny. And so, here's the thing, if we really believe that anybody in the United States could pull themselves up by their bootstraps and be a millionaire, why aren't you?

Annalisa Holcombe (00:40:50):
I think that's why people get so depressed.

Jeff Girton (00:40:54):
Exactly, right. Because we believe this myth that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And yes, there are some people that can, I'm sure. And there's evidence that that happens. But that's not something that we can help people achieve. It's a matter of luck to do that. And so, if we shift our worldview, that there is nothing that you can do that's going to overcome certain tragedies, certain great opportunities that happen in your life, that you can prepare yourself for those as best as possible.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:41:28):
And that opportunity may present itself to you and you could do something about it then.

Jeff Girton (00:41:33):
And if opportunity doesn't present itself to you, it's not your fault.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:41:37):
It wasn't your fault.

Jeff Girton (00:41:39):
Right. And I don't know how to help you sleep better at night, because I sure don't have the answer to that myself. But we have to realize that the rules that we think have ordained society in life and in all these myths that we tell us, they're just things that that we do because we've just always done them, just like people who do or don't see their parents naked. And it's one of those things where we've gotten ourselves to a place that's probably not healthy for us. And it's slowly eating us all alive.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:42:16):
What are your suggestions about what happens next then?

Jeff Girton (00:42:19):
Oh, see, that's the problem. It's just easy to point the problem, not to solve it.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:42:25):
That's right.

Jeff Girton (00:42:29):
I think the answer to this is to understand collectivism without getting in too much of a soapbox here. If you want to make America great, and we all do, America was greatest when we were at our most collective. The thing that turned America from a debtor nation to being somebody that is now the world superpower was this period of time in World War II where we were under attack and we joined together and said, hey, let's sacrifice together to do what's good for us.

Jeff Girton (00:43:03):
And without getting too deep into that and taking that metaphor too much, I think we just need to realize that when we think it's about pulling me up by my bootstraps, then we've lost. It's that when we pull us up by our bootstraps, we all can get better, but it's that we need all of us to be working for it to succeed. I can't do this all on my own. And when we've seen us do things on our own, it's because we've had a lot of luck involved.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:43:38):
That's so interesting. It brings up for me when you talk about that. I went to a luncheon a few weeks ago, which, by the way, that was crazy. I went to a luncheon a few weeks ago. And the speaker was ... She worked with ... I have to get her information, but she worked with Robert Putnam who wrote the Bowling Alone. And she has written another book with him together. And so, she was talking about their research showing that in terms of American society, we have never been so ... The last time we were this far apart from each other in terms of our social cohesion was at the Civil War, that we are ...

Jeff Girton (00:44:28):
Wow.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:44:28):
... just like that right now, and that we went up and up and up, and then started to go down somewhere in the '60s, in the 1960s. And so, and I can't get that out of my head like, so what is it about the 1960s that started us? Ding, ding, ding, what do you think, Jeff?

Jeff Girton (00:44:47):
I can tell you, but no, no, keep going.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:44:49):
No, no, no, that's what I want to know. Talk to me about that.

Jeff Girton (00:44:52):
Okay, so there's this thing called the Kerner report. So 1968, we kept talking just a couple of years ago about how much our world was looking like 1968 whenever you had these inner city riots. The word inner city didn't come to American vocabulary until the Kerner report talked about what happened with all of the public disobedience and all that kind of stuff. So, if you don't know your history, we had this huge unrest for the summer 1968.

Jeff Girton (00:45:27):
And so, the government said, we need a commission to go figure out why this happened so that we can prevent it from happening again. All kinds of people, I mean, like a huge commission bipartisan went and did this whole study. And they just found that economics were so far from each other, that the people who had and didn't have led to this, and that there were things that we were going to have to do and invest in as a society to get that gap of haves and have nots back together again. That report failed miserably, because somebody leaked a piece of it to the media before they could get it. And one of the things the report said was, we're going to have to spend a lot of money to build up the infrastructure in these places to re equalize.

Jeff Girton (00:46:12):
And so, our economy wasn't the greatest in the late '60s anyways. And here's these farmers saying, you want me to pay taxes in Iowa to go give to Detroit. And that's what happened right there at the end of the 1960s. And we were 20 years away from that when all of our unrest in the United States was really just picked off. And it's a very similar situation where there's parts of us United States who just don't feel like we're part of the other part of the United States. And we're able to de-empathize because we just want to live in our own little boxes.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:46:49):
Yeah. You had mentioned in another conversation that we had earlier about the ... Talk to me about de-empathize. How important is empathy in a situation?

Jeff Girton (00:47:02):
So here's something about empathy that Daniel Goleman writes about, in that there are three kinds of empathy. John Littlewolf, Dr. Littlewolf, mentioned one of these really well. And it's the idea that the first part of empathy is just taking somebody else's perspective. It's just literally seeing things through their vision. The second part of empathy is just cognitive. Or I'm sorry, that's the taking somebody's perspective is cognitive. The second part of empathy is compassionate empathy. It's I feel this, I want to do something about it.

Jeff Girton (00:47:35):
And then there's the emotional part of it, which is, oh, my gosh, this would be awful and you feel the same way that those people feel. Well, what we know about leadership is emotional empathy is never helpful from your leader. You don't want the people in leadership to look at you with the kind of empathy where they feel the same kind of feeling you do, because then you're both in the same stuck place. Compassion is really helpful. But what we really need is just for our leaders to start by taking our perspective.

Jeff Girton (00:48:06):
And then once they take our perspective then, what would you want somebody to do if you were in that same boat? And that's when compassion comes in. And I think we refuse to take that first step of just simply taking somebody else's perspective because we know how much empathy hurts. It's why we turn the channel as soon as that starving child is on TV. When ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:48:32):
It's too much. If you really feel empathy, you're going to be exhausted afterwards.

Jeff Girton (00:48:36):
Yeah. Jeremy Rifkin says, "There's no empathy in heaven." And if you think about that, it's true. Because if heaven ... I mean, whatever heaven is to you, but if heaven is this place of no pain, then you cannot have empathy in heaven.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:48:53):
Yeah, that makes sense. That's super interesting. One of the things that I struggle with when you talk about power distance and authority as you know and we talked about that I have, I struggle with authority. And I like your idea of collectivism because I think I might naturally come from that space. And I struggle with things like even ... So here you are, an academic and working in a university system. And one of the things that I've been struggling with the university system is that I worked with people in a university system where we talk all the time about the importance of collectivism, the importance of all sorts of things that seem a little more left leaning.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:49:45):
And yet the structure itself is so authoritarian that it's like we don't have the ability to shine a light on ourselves in terms of the way that our own structures and the way that we hold it over people. I mean, your faculty, your staff. And I can't tell you how many times I would hear like the staff are so upset that the faculty think they're so much better. And then there's the back of ...

Jeff Girton (00:50:17):
That's true.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:50:18):
Right, it is true. I mean, I tell that story. I remember having a faculty member seeing me at commencement with my robe, because your robe has to signify who you are and what degree you have. Your degree is so important. And I think it's this, underneath that maybe it's supposed to be a sign of meritocracy, but it's not. It's a sign of social stratas. We're stratifying who we are and think it's natural. It's crazy for me. And I remember that one faculty member saying, "Oh, what? You have a doctorate?" And I said, "Well, I have a JD." And that person said, "Oh, well, that's not a real doctorate. That's not a real degree." I was like that I will always remember.

Jeff Girton (00:51:13):
And the only reason is...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:51:13):
And this is a sociology professor, who is known for talking about how we're all supposed to consider each other. And these things that end up being something that, for me, are that myth, that myth is when it's hard. That we say that the academy is not about authority and industry is so much authoritarian. I'm like, I'm not sure that's actually true.

Jeff Girton (00:51:45):
So the letters matter. The letters to your degree matter. Because it's a way for him to look up say, well, I have my sociology, probably PhD. Well, you're one of those JDs thing. You're like an MD, writer or you're somewhere on the profession level, not the academic.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:52:06):
Yeah, it's a professional.

Jeff Girton (00:52:07):
Exactly. Whenever the letters that he really needs to be different are your chromosome letters, which is really what this is about. But it's a way for him to use the system to remind you that he's above you. And that's what the problem I think is with one of the ways that we get stuck in this thing. Where even though we know the right answer, it's this sense of justice that I think we're missing out on. Because we believe, in theory, that the world operates in a very just way. And so, what that means is, as I've been climbing the ladder, poop rolls downhill. And I know that because I've been the recipient of a lot of that as I've been climbing the ladder. And so, all of us say, when I get up there to that place, I'm not going to be that kind of boss.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:52:53):
I'm not going to. And yet we do it.

Jeff Girton (00:52:57):
And that's exactly right. And so, we do that, it's not because we want to betray everything about our values, it's that we sit there and say, well, I had to go through this. If I had to go through with it, then they did too. Alright, there's a religious school not far from here where I live that is actually known as being a pacifist religious based school. And not too long ago, the police went into a fraternity and arrested a fraternity member, because he used a towel during a hazing incident against somebody bare testicles and ruptured them.

Jeff Girton (00:53:33):
And they had to rush him to the hospital. I mean, that's just one of the worst cases of hazing that I've ever heard of. But what person thinks it's okay to do that, and the only answer I can come up with is the person who said, hey, it was done to me, then I can do it to them. And so, somebody has to be that person that disrupts the cycle for us to say, we need poop to stop rolling downhill, and I'm going to be that person that's going to do my darndest to interrupt that cycle so that we can get out of this somehow.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:54:09):
Fascinating.

Jeff Girton (00:54:12):
Yeah. I'm the kind of person that I would rather be called by my name, not by my title. At the same time, there was a time where all my life I was like, I'm never going to have people call me doctor. But there was a time where I was like, no, I've earned this, dammit. You will call me this. People around me, my trash guy is going to call me that, just because I need that validation. And it's because we've been climbing that ladder so long and we deserve to feel that, that little bit of sense of accomplishment.

Jeff Girton (00:54:46):
But here's the thing, when you play by these rules and you reach the top and you realize that the rules were fake, that they were a lie from the beginning of the process, it's really tough. But a lot of us want to cling to that, because we've invested so much into that. What does it mean about us if we've climbed the ladder for all this time and we haven't gotten? We have to cling to that. At the same time, my response to that is when you force somebody to call you by your title and you do it in hopes that that's going to inspire them to drive harder to get to you, you're playing the rules of a fake meritocracy.

Jeff Girton (00:55:30):
Because you're thinking that the only thing that's standing between them and success is determination. That if they call me by this name and they see me in this role, that they'll have this vision and they'll just work harder. When the reality is, that's probably has very little to do with their ability to succeed or not. That it's their ability to succeed is based upon some measure of luck. And that luck maybe did the car break down when my books were due to start the semester.

Jeff Girton (00:56:03):
And I've seen a student's entire semester derailed from something so small and temporary, but in their situation, in their at that moment, that wasn't so small. And so, I don't think that those kind of good intentions actually inspire people to climb. I think it's the stuff where you tell people, I climbed, I'm not as happy as I might seem, and I don't want to tell you all the trauma it took to get here. And I don't know if that helps people so that they don't throw their hands up now and say, forget it, I'm not going to do that. But what I hope is that at least it helps us drive our meaning internally rather than from this external thing, which is what authoritarianism is about.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:56:55):
That's super interesting.

Jeff Girton (00:56:56):
I need my daughter ... If she's the most important thing to me, I need the way that she looks at me to be the thing that fulfills my soul, not my paycheck.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:57:07):
Yeah. And you want to be in a society in which the way that she looks at you is not determined by your paycheck.

Jeff Girton (00:57:17):
Exactly.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:57:19):
In the mentoring program that I did, and we bring in, during our ... We call them Saturday sessions, and during the sessions, we bring in people to tell, we called it their E True Hollywood Story. And then I realized after several years that young people have no idea what an E True Hollywood Story was, and that time was over. But we would have them come in and we'd say, everything is on the table here, do not tell us. I'll tell people about your cool CV that shows that you're the president of X and you've done Y. But when you come in, they can ask you anything.

Annalisa Holcombe (00:57:52):
And tell them the real story of your life. And people come in. If they had courage, they would come in and tell the real story like, I'm on my second family. Because to have a CV that looks like that meant that I hurt my spouse and my children and I don't have a relationship with them because that's the only way I could find to have a CV that looked like that. And it blows people's mind, because we don't tell that story that there are sacrifices that you are willingly making to have what we consider, in our American society, the dream. You know what I mean?

Jeff Girton (00:58:33):
Right. And that dream looks good on paper. But in the meantime, are you crying ... Not crying yourself to sleep at night, but ...

Annalisa Holcombe (00:58:40):
But you may be alone.

Jeff Girton (00:58:42):
Yeah. So just something interesting that happened. One of the things I do in my coffee business is I deliver coffee since I don't have a brick and mortar and I do a lot of porch drop offs and COVID and whatnot. But now that I'm getting to know my clients more and my delivery time, has actually been a lifesaver for me. I'm a huge extrovert, and COVID has been so awful for me, in terms of just extraversion, introversion stuff. And so, I'm hearing all these people's stories, I'm like, hey, how are you? And I guess I just have that talk to me and tell me everything kind of thing.

Jeff Girton (00:59:17):
And so many of my coffee clients are professional people who are barely holding it together. And I've never heard so many people in such a short time talk about how much anxiety they're dealing with. And life has shifted in COVID. We're figuring things out because life was so bad and our system was so fragile that it just broke. And COVID just exposed this thing that now we're putting the pieces back together again. And I just heard that last month, there was something where more people quit their job. It was some record that we hit.

Jeff Girton (00:59:58):
And I mean, I think we're in a place where people are reevaluating everything. Because this is like a reset moment for us. And not everything is going to get fixed. But I think we're taking steps because we realize everything we've been doing has just led us to this very precarious moment. And I think a lot of us are going through that devolving dark point to get to the dawn. But I think it's because we've been playing these games that are so unhealthy for us because it's the only path that we can somehow try to control to get to the top.

Annalisa Holcombe (01:00:42):
And now, we know that from what you're telling me today, that that top can look very different if you think differently about what it is that you value, and that you get it ... Like maybe where we have our own determinism is in ourselves taking a moment to define what we value in our own lives so that we can really think that through.

Jeff Girton (01:01:07):
Our values. Shalom Schwartz is the kind of the guru of what values is like, motivational goals mean. And his concept of values are the things that are our compass, they're the things that drive our decisions. And that every tough decision in our life is made between two competing values where we feel like both of these are the thing that we should be going towards. And I think that's probably where this anxiety is coming from, is that I'm in this beginning place of disillusionment where I can head towards the success path that I've always been told.

Jeff Girton (01:01:45):
Or I can try to figure out this thing that my heart and my body and my soul and my mind are telling me is a better way maybe. And I think that we're determining right now or we're seeing what is most important to us.

Annalisa Holcombe (01:02:02):
That's so great. That's so great. So I want to honor your time and honor this discussion. I want to make sure that I have talked about what you want to make sure gets across in this discussion. And I had to struggle to not, because I did it several times, but I had to struggle to not tell stories about the whole mythology of things that we talk about and how it's partially why I'm not doing the PhD right now, because I struggle with what I thought it was supposed to be and what it turned out to be.

Jeff Girton (01:02:34):
Can I not honor your time and interject there for a minute?

Annalisa Holcombe (01:02:38):
Yeah.

Jeff Girton (01:02:40):
So speaking of that, so for those of you who don't know, Annalisa and I went to a nontraditional program. I mean, because they admit that getting your PhD is something that most people fail at who start the process, because it's so difficult. And so, they tried to make the system better, and they're very open minded, progressive people. But in my dissertation, when I talked about how the concept of gatekeeping, that making sure that people go through these hoops that people have gone through, I was told by a person on my committee, but you do understand that we are the gatekeepers and we have to make sure that this follows certain conventions. And even though our program is challenging all of those conventions, there was a point where somebody said, but you're kind of ...

Annalisa Holcombe (01:03:37):
But not that one.

Jeff Girton (01:03:38):
But not this one. And there was no good reason for it. The only reason was, in essence, they didn't say these words, but this is the way it's always been done. And so, it's tough for people who have been at the top to say, oh, you shouldn't do it this way. Because that means that somehow I did it wrong.

Annalisa Holcombe (01:03:56):
The way I did it ... Yeah. That wait, I want you to have to. I remember going to law school, and while I was in law school with some friends, they were like, I am never, ever going to be that person that treats my paralegal or my assistant like they're lesser than because that's ridiculous. I've been that person. I never want to do it. Or actually, I remember, they were like, "Why are we charging people so much money per hour? That's crazy. That doesn't make any sense to me."

Annalisa Holcombe (01:04:25):
And when we were graduating, he's like, "You bet your bottom dollar, I'm going to charge people at least that much. Because of all I had to just go through." It stuck with me where I was like, you changed from here to here. And I think that the whole idea of values and the myths that we tell, I don't know, I think I had this idea in our PhD program that because it was about leadership and change, that we'd actually be doing more about leading and changing. And I struggle and have continued to struggle with what that means.

Annalisa Holcombe (01:05:10):
It really came to a head for me because I remember when Trump won and I'm at a school that's about leadership and change that is very so much about social justice. And then when nothing changed in the way that we approached where we were as a society or how we did things, I was just like, what? This is not what this is supposed ... It stopped me in my tracks where I was like, I don't think I believe in this. And now, how am I going to jump through your hoops when you're not doing the things that I came here for?

Jeff Girton (01:05:48):
It lets you know how ingrained in us this is. The fact that it's so much a part of our DNA, that the people who have been at the leading, cutting edge of change in terms of the way that the academy is run and certain social justice things, that even those people have our blind spots. And that we're protecting what's ours. We're not letting other people into this level of success. And I think that's part of authoritarianism, is that the ladder only has one space at the top. And so, authoritarianism is intentionally an alienating thing where it separates us.

Jeff Girton (01:06:35):
And it's narrowing down who can be at the top. And as we've seen, in past, it's the powerful person who, as long as ... And this is true no matter who's on the ballot, Democrat or Republican, we only can choose to or we have two to choose from. And so, a lot of us will just double down. And it's like, well, I don't really like the guy or very rarely the woman, but I'll vote for him because they're the ...

Annalisa Holcombe (01:07:04):
It's a lesser.

Jeff Girton (01:07:04):
Yeah, it's a lesser to evils or is the best way to get the thing that I need him to get to. I don't agree with him about that, but this is the thing that I'll allow them to do and I'll forgive the other things.

Annalisa Holcombe (01:07:15):
Yeah, exactly. So it's a complete struggle all the way through. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for taking the time with me. I'm having so much fun.

Jeff Girton (01:07:26):
You are good at this. And I love listening to you ask questions of your guests. You are such a person that brings goodness out of people, because you are very egalitarian in your nature. I think how to play the game, obviously, because you've had to. But when it's you and another person, you're the opposite of this higher goal thing. And I really appreciate the curiosity you bring out of other people.

Annalisa Holcombe (01:07:55):
Awesome. Thank you so much. My thanks, again, to Jeff Girton. You can connect with him on LinkedIn. And if you're interested in supporting his new entrepreneurial effort, Red Five Coffee, you can find him on Facebook at Red Five coffee in Ohio. He ships everywhere. And trust me, it's really good. Next week, we're going to do something different. Your guest will be me, and I'll be talking about vulnerability. Yikes. I'm nervous, but ready. I hope you'll join me.