fellow welcome to back story with joel goldstein it's now twenty nineteen it's a new year and we have reason to think how will it be will things  some very interesting ideas about how we can make us a better place but let's start with that you started to write a book when you were in the process of writing a book called all at once a path forward and you explain what is the past forward and maybe even how you think we can get there i feel that our path for is a book that speaks about our approach on how we can improve the context of our relationships our environment and in the results for businesses and individuals so how we go about our relationships the information we have and including politics and our business interactions impact those things and every aspect of our lives ok so you know let's look into this how is this possible let's look at the first one you pointed out was that relationships is that your first one communication communication communication very important why  ganz with each other in how we approached our dialogue and the way we communicate with each other in different circumstances and i'll give an example to that ok so i  shared this with you earlier which gave you a laugh but it was a real situation and i was having a conversation with a friend of mine and and his brother joined the conversation and at some point during the conversation they already concluded what i was to them and how i was viewed in terms of my my thought about what we were talking about so much so that when i talked about my difference in opinion i realize that he wasn't really listening to what i was saying because he was very caught on the motion of it and what i did was i repeated his own position to him and he then disagreed with it so how we get back to understanding and being on the same page about our differences of opinion i think is a big big approach to it but the communication needs to have understanding needs to be have respectful and we also need to be able to include differences of a perspective as well and be open to that in order for us to make and that is that we tend to stereotype others and therefore only are so receptive to or open to what they communicating because we put them in a box of one kind or no that's a very important point and i was sharing  minutes before we taped i was telling you that some years ago i had a post doctoral fellow ship and i decided to look at communities that were living next to you nuclear power plants and it wasn't too many years after the big accident at three mile island  and so i was hired as a consultant by the c e o at g p nuclear to come out there and to see if i could help them understand why the community didn't want them to reopen the undamaged plant and so i go out there and i turns out i'm the only woman on the block pursuit for her so therefore my gender put me in a box you might say or could be put in a box but that was almost an advantage in a way so there i am having breakfast with all the speakers that have been hired to come to speak to the community from california from all these institutes and so forth and they're speaking very openly in front of me because they assume that as a woman and i'm nobody and that in a way was in an advantage because they talked about accidents that i had never heard of before accidents that had occurred in europe and military camps and so forth and i would never have heard this if they hadn't sat there talking openly then the c e o comes in and he looks across the room he's hired me but he hasn't met me before and he realizes i have to be  because there's no other woman in the room he walks up and bows to be very polite and shakes my hand and they're all looking at it oh my god who is she up there they were speaking very openly particularly when they told each other that they were going to speak as much as possible and not give the community any chance to say anything or ask any question that was their agenda and i already had heard it and already knew it and so what w interesting is sometimes and this is true of genders and other types of categories race ethnicity you sometimes can be put in a box and assumptions made about what you can and cannot think and understand and communicate with and that's part of how we cut off our communication isn't it absolutely and that's that's really essentially like what you said in terms of putting ourselves in the box because our perspective of how we view the world around us is built off the different different types of framework and those those things are impacted by our culture or religion our experiences and you know even our language changes the way we understand each other in those contexts so the way i speak to you in the language i use in our conversation may indicate to you my background and may have helped form your opinion but that at times is a challenge that we face right now and being able to break that down because there is a lot of different aspects that we have in our in our society that make it challenging for us to to really identify what it is that i mean by what i'm saying so and that's part of the goal of of eliminating the misinformation in in our environments in our relationships our interactions so it's very important that we go about  focusing on this because the impact it will have on our relationships with each other means we will have a better return on investment for poorer in terms of business interactions our rethink it impacts everything so how we go about doing that is extremely important and that's why i find it to be essential especially within the environment we currently have today yeah we've inherited in twenty eighteen we didn't just walk away from it we've  there that have approaches that are very beneficial that can be applicable to people's lifestyles and great results but boils down to people need to know how they can make improvements to get results and i think one of the challenges that we face right now is that we on a centrally in a lot of ways our society we don't we don't may not see what the results are of our policies we may not see what the results of or our business choices or or the laws we vote we impact vote on and how we go about making each dishes and we do every single day to get improve results ok so let's talk about some of the things we need results with you start with misinformation which leads to the question of communication and of course we could also talk about all the various what i call yeah that everyone resorts to rather than face to face communication and i when my sociology i call it sociology classes i often have my students go out and say ok are people talking to each other let's find out so they have to go somewhere where people might be socially connecting let's say eating out somewhere in a diner or something and they sit there and they're supposed to observe what people do and my students come back and they're really shocked no one's talking to anyone they say even the littlest child is you know right doing is somewhere else and this they said they barely speak to the waitress so you know it's really quite enough savation it really shocks them we're not speaking to each other we're not looking at it right and this is something that hinders us in many ways and we have to side to way to get back to communication which is ironic because even you know the example you provided there is a way in our applications that we have today that we really know how to interact with the waitress because of the way technology has allowed us to do that different platforms have given us the opportunity to not have to make that interaction but for a long time technology was introduced into our environments that compliment it or virus and right now at times it is a distraction from our environment because you know what if i'm driving my vehicle i'm paying attention my phone and i run somebody over and there's nothing on my phone more important than the fact that i just impacted so many people's lives and how we go about using technology in a way that complements our environment rather than distracting it from us can improve our experiences and that's a lot of what i'm trying to do here is trying to improve our experiences in as many aspects as we possibly can so that way we can enjoy each other more we can kind of get out of that inability to have a conversation or really relate to each other so there's there's a lot of benefits to it and how we we can make improvements ok you also there were three topics you took this information the second was politics and the third was business ok so tell us a little something about politics then tell us something about this well aren't so politics as you know for example we we have voting rights very poor and we have a new house of representatives so our political challenges that we face right now is is kind of falls back on what we talked about with misinformation our political position on on how we feel the choices should be made in our environment so if i were to ask you who has more rights do you have more rights or do i have more rights and the question is so sometimes it could be offensive it is that it could be an offense of approach in question but i'm asking that because as citizens it's important for us to have a dialogue about what we feel we have as equal rights in what we feel we have the right above or as a priority over your rights for example so how we have that that language is really important to to establish growth the problem is that we have right now is that if you feel that i'm not giving you your rights you're going to be defensive and that doesn't prove communication whatsoever so as citizens my understanding is that we have equal rights and even if you're not a citizen you know there approach on how we come a citizen but let's have a dialogue about how we get to the result let's look at and propose policies that gets us to the solutions that we have and it doesn't necessarily have to be policies and it could just be aligning our interest in terms of business or relationships making solutions more efficient and more effective to individuals businesses and u as as wholes you know so it's kind of getting back to where we might have been at one time but we do on our way didn't absolutely and i think that one of the biggest challenges that that i face as an american as an individual is that what is my identity my denny was very clear when i was growing up and what my identity now in terms of being an american is not as clear and what it means to me to be an american i'm very proud to be an american i feel that we have done amazing things within this country and stablished leadership within the in the world but how can we improve that and how can we continue to drive that and build those relationships so and that's that's hopefully what i'm what will be accomplished through this and many ways we've lost our way of having the way we have but i think it's a breakdown of or the way we're communicating with each other and  our ability to recognize that somebody may have a voice our opinion makes it very challenging for us to even to hear what the other people are saying because we may not want to or we may not understand what they mean by it so and this can go through that you know with the generations that just about it what age we're talking about right there with some friends of mine who had a little girl or eight years old who was on happy didn't want to go to school wouldn't go to school they didn't know what to do and i said bring her over and let me talk to her right in so of course i know what to do with children i taught many years ago in the lower east side in new york and i had a lot of experience with people of different nationalities and ethnicities and so a little girl came over and i took out my hand puppets yes and i had one i had a skunk for a skunk and i had a little chipmunk i said which one do you want to be she wanted to be the skunk and then she would soak time to inform was quiet he would start to talk he started to tell me what was troubling her returns out of course that she was being bullied into this class that she was in and the teacher wasn't recognizing it or helping her with it i'm sure that comes up a lot but the thing is communication even with a little child is so critical absolutely how do we get there you see right don't know how to get there at all the benefits of us being able to identify those markers and and being able to apply them by using macro and micro micro data to to identify those those opportunities yeah can be beneficial to society in general because for example my wife works in trenton nj she's a teacher i'm very proud of her and you know she has some very challenging situations that she has to face with certain students approach on providing solutions to those students is is going to impact who they are going to grow up to be and that's going to be an impact on our society so how we go about having never poor and those relationships and building off of that impacts what environment we end up having and how we how we can create that for each other and we have as individuals we have the opportunities to make those choices and we're lucky to  live in a free society that gives us an opportunity but we should not waste the time we need to take to that opportunity and apply our skill sets to them so that way we can get a better return  investment i talk about that over and over again but you know our community is so i find that when we really apply ourselves to the processes we can stop be similar cynical about what the results or and if we look at how we can challenge our approach on getting the results will make that involve us involvement will make us understand what really is is happening that is breaking to communicate and help each other care about each other how could we know each other and care about each other unless we could communicate and that was our strength and yet we weakened it and we had no idea that in twenty eight hundred so many problems c erupt but here we are it's twenty nineteen it's a brave new world where hopefully and so what what do you think we could start to do that would open the door well i think to participate in and in your community and have a dialogue the first thing that we can do is is challenge yourself to to what you think are the information that you receive you know challenge facts you know there used to be the saying trust but verify the challenge that we face right now is that that trust is broken down because of so much misinformation so what i do is i might approach is that i verify and i trust afterward off of what is created from verifying and but that means we have to challenge ourselves to take that risk to have that dialogue and you know i have i have friends from every background possible to establish understanding of why they come to the clues as they do about their experiences and what they what they feel so me being able to meet people where the rat will determine what how i feel too so i thought that all of us should challenge ourselves in order to get there  there's another approach that i also recommend and that's through us working together so i have my website all at once dot net and if people want to contribute  to the website and participate in the dialogue in the communication at the bottom of the website there's going to be resources opportunity and they can put apply the same information that they feel that they have experiences they have maybe people in understanding and relationships even finances or facilities i'm talking about solutions that can be created for our research you ation in our very environment so we can improve those situations the world that we look at today can be much more complicated complemented by what we can create do you think that perhaps getting people to get together in groups and speak to each other face them a power point presentation or you know be the only one who's speaking because i'm not the only one who's thinking absolutely and once you start with the assumption that everyone needs to think and wants to then you open the door on it so even a business meeting should be an open door yeah absolutely and and what that does is allows for transparency but it also gives a moderate people the opportunity to kind of fill out the situation if you give an opportunity and the freedom to participate then you don't know what what could come out of it you know people may have insights that we are not aware of because just the door is never open to them and there's other people in which they can't seem to get through because their head is too big and the problem that we face is that you know as a society both of those those challenges if you know one of the other can distract us and keep us from you know come up with solutions that benefit us all so i think that it's a good opportunity for the future so well you've offered us some hope and we certainly are looking for and we certainly need hope i think that twenty eighteen was a very very difficult year i think when we came to the end of it we saw violence we saw hatred we saw segregation we saw all the things we thought we weren't about and it was very hurtful and made us wonder who are we where are we and therefore we have to look back at ourselves again but we need people we need good leadership we need leadership says this is what we're here to do this is what we're we need to look at others respect others understand that people have rights and respect those rights and i think we've gotten pretty far away from that so we're hoping that perhaps people will start to focus on the things that you think are important but we need to help them to focus they can't do it just right our own you know i mean just in the same sense that like considering that i am dyslexic and i have to a d h to the fact that i don't may not be able to understand something a certain way and i had teachers that showed me the way that's the same type of process that we need to have for each other and be able to see what we can do and make improvements for those things because as a person in a leadership position i have to be responsible for the outcomes and the conditions in an environment for those around me and getting them to to have an environment that is as productive and supportive of their needs is essential to you know how we work together you know and it's and it's not more apparent than any time than right now and how much it's essential that we work together and find these efficiencies and find these these opportunities and then capture but that means a lot of ways we need a dialogue and we need to have a conversation we need to have a place to go to fight where we can capture the opportunities and that's what i want to try to do and i'm very grateful today to have you let me on to to be able to reach the community and speak about it well you have a lot to share and a lot to say and i want to thank you carter nathan alan i like three names because i never got three i always wanted a middle name but i never got one times when i was a little girl i would take on a middle name i would decide that that was my middle name but did you have to go to no no but i figured ask no no no well thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us and your you struggled yourself with many aspects of communication and the fact is that you've come out on top and you are working on a book in which as you said it's called all at once a path forward and it's your path forward as that is all our paths forward and you're not just opening the door for yourself you want to make sure that everybody has a chance everyone has a door to open don't need to be competing with each other we don't need to be taking to each other and competing with each other because it's not bringing us any closer right to our goals you know because it's again it's a sense of community  and that's kind of what we lost and we have to find it again and we have to make twenty nineteen that time and that place right that goal and thank you so much if you for wanting to do it is there any last words you'd like to share with us  i would just like to say thank you very much again for the opportunity and just trying to share something that i wrote as a young man i wanted to wealth and i as i grew older i understood the greatest wealth one can have his ability to establish wealth and others wealth as knowledge and opportunity and experience in their own freedoms teaching others to fish and teach them the skills to teach those beyond them can grade the values of those