Brené Brown: The Algorithms Have Forced Us Into A Hidden…

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What the episode is about

Brené Brown, guest on Steven Bartlett's show to talk about her book Strong Ground, goes from her childhood in Texas to power, algorithms, belonging, vulnerability and trust. The thread that holds it together is a finding from 25 years of research: what stops us from being brave isn't fear, it's the armor we put on to protect ourselves when we're afraid. The episode is 1:50:41 long; the last part is about her marriage and her mother's death.

Childhood and the two emotional buckets

Fifth-generation Texan, parents who did what they could with what they knew, a lot of screaming at home. The allowed emotions were "pissed off or okay": sadness and vulnerability were weakness. As the oldest she was the protector of her siblings, and a therapist later called it hypervigilance. 3:34
Six months into her marriage she went to a therapist wanting out. The therapist told her that Steve liked her much more than she liked herself, and that being seen and loved like that must be unbearable when you don't love yourself. She wanted to fire the therapist; it was true. 9:36
If you only have two buckets, every emotion ends up in one of them: when she is scared, grieving, anxious or disappointed, she gets angry. Atlas of the Heart lists 87 emotions because "the limits of our language are the limits of our world". 10:50
In their research the average person can name and recognise three emotions: happy, sad, pissed off. 11:06

Power over and fear

Citing Jung (the auto-captions say "Unions"): before every great progression there is a regression. The way a government uses power tells you what it is afraid of. 15:31
Four kinds of power: power over, power with, power to, power within. Whoever uses power over thinks power is finite, like a pizza: if I give you a slice, I have less. The other three assume it grows when shared. 17:55
Power over is hard to keep because we aren't wired to stay afraid for long: people go numb or get used to it. So whoever leads with fear has to stage "periodic acts of cruelty" to put people back into fear. Her example is the masked agents taking immigrants off the street in the US, with children holding on to their parents' legs. 20:47, 21:44

Permeable boundaries and algorithms

From systems theory: a healthy system keeps its boundaries permeable, so feedback flows in and out. When the world gets too complex we stop wanting feedback and close up. The system atrophies and becomes self-referencing: are we right? we're right. 23:41, 25:40
Bartlett on algorithms: an algorithm that showed you what you don't already believe would be uncomfortable and nobody would use it. She answers "but great for democracy". Her summary of where we are: emotionally dysregulated, distrustful of each other, not trusting ourselves, disconnected. She still won't give up on people: "we are more good than greedy". 29:22
She proposed "cognitive sovereignty" (taking back control of what we read and how we think) to Trevor Noah, who objected: we already have too much sovereignty, everything is "for you"; what's missing is communal sovereignty. 30:30, 30:37
What scares her most: in rooms with tech billionaires she hears them tell people their kids should study coding and physics, and five minutes later the same people attribute their own success to reading the Stoics. She wonders whether a "thinking class" is forming that reads philosophy and history while everyone else keeps scrolling. Steve Jobs's kids didn't have an iPad. 31:57, 32:21
What she wants for her kids: systems thinking, pattern recognition, reading, history, and being able to hold the tension of nuance and paradox when the brain keeps saying "pick one". 34:12

Where her metaphors come from

The Teddington lock on the Thames, visited after reading Rivers of London. Going home after a hyper-focused workday is like passing through a lock: you need time to change level. When she asked the lock master to hurry, the answer was: "Locking through takes what locking through takes. If you rush it, you risk capsizing." That's why people sit in the car in the garage for 30 minutes on TikTok before going in. 36:25, 37:42
Pocket presence in American football, defined by Emmanuel Acho: "the ability to read the field without seeing all of it, and trusting your team well enough to make a move even though you can't see everything". It takes temporal, situational and anticipatory awareness plus pattern recognition. 39:51

Connection, faith, belonging

We're neurobiologically wired for connection, and where it's missing there is always suffering. Her definition of spirituality: being inextricably connected to other people by something bigger than us. For her that's God: she calls herself "a pretty serious God person" and tries to find God in the face of everyone she meets, even when she'd like to punch them. 43:15, 44:02
Braving the Wilderness: you can't belong to anything if you don't belong to yourself first. Fitting in is the greatest threat to belonging, because the first person you betray to fit in is yourself. 44:52, 45:24
Ideological bunkers: "I don't even know you, but I'll call you friend because we hate the same people." If my bond with you depends on you never questioning what we agreed on, it's counterfeit connection. 45:46, 47:15
Her one limit on who she'll talk to: people whose beliefs deny her humanity or other people's. Dehumanisation works by pushing people out of the circle of moral inclusion, and the first tool is always language ("infestation", "illegals"). Staying in no man's land is lonely, and she says so. 50:25, 51:16, 52:00, 52:51
A digression on the responsibility of podcasters: Bartlett explains the PhD who adds on-screen notes when a guest says something outside scientific consensus, and that the goal is to be kind, not nice. Brown respects the choice and recalls the COVID funerals in the Houston medical district. 56:22

Vulnerability and courage

Definition: vulnerability is the emotion we feel in the face of uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. 1:04:39
At Fort Bragg she asked special forces soldiers for one example of courage without uncertainty, risk or exposure. Nobody could give one; a young soldier stood up and said "three tours". The Seattle Seahawks gave the same answer. 1:05:25
Courage is saying "I love you" first. The story of the young man who said it over dessert and was told "I think you're awesome, and we should date other people". His roommates asked what he was thinking; he answered "I was daring greatly", and they got teary-eyed. 1:06:38, 1:07:54

Trust: slow stacking

Trust or vulnerability first? Neither: it's a slow stacking, a bit of one and a bit of the other. 1:10:40
Throwing your darkest story at someone you've just met is armor too: "smash and grab", or "spotlighting". The other person backs away and you take it as proof that vulnerability is dangerous. The kind answer is: thank you, I don't have a place to put this yet because we don't know each other well enough. 1:11:34, 1:12:01
Armor is sometimes survival. Telling a young black woman or the first LGBTQ person on a team to "be vulnerable" isn't the same as telling her, at this point in her career. Vulnerability isn't more necessary for some people, but it is more difficult. 1:12:49, 1:13:47
The marble jar: her daughter Ellen, in fourth grade, came home crying because her friends had told the whole class her secret. Trust is a jar that fills one marble at a time, with small things: making room at the lunch table, remembering your grandparents' names. 1:29:18
John Gottman's "sliding door" moment: two pages from the end of a mystery novel, he sees his wife crying while she brushes her hair. He can pretend not to see, or stop. He takes the brush and asks what's wrong. 1:31:35
For leaders: a "trust me" in the middle of a crisis means nothing if you haven't asked people about their mother's chemo before. Trust isn't being always right; it's saying "we were wrong" and thanking people for six months of work on a priority you're cancelling. 1:32:40
What breaks trust in a way that's worse than cheating: slow emotional disengagement. 1:35:25

Joy and gratitude

Joy is the most vulnerable emotion. Many people "dress rehearse tragedy" and choose to live disappointed rather than risk being sucker-punched by disappointment. She calls it foreboding joy. 1:14:46, 1:15:05
The people who manage to stay in joy use the shiver of vulnerability as a cue to practise gratitude. It isn't automatic, "it's a training". Her example: watching her 16-year-old daughter leave for prom, she repeats "I'm grateful" so as not to follow the truck. 1:16:46

Armor and midlife

She hasn't overcome anything; she's overcoming. The only thing she has overcome is the belief that she'll ever arrive. She knows she's "scary when I'm scared" and catastrophises. Two days before the interview she could easily have made herself liked and chose not to: "the person I'm going to betray last is me". 1:18:47, 1:19:44
Why we never fully fix ourselves: if we could, we'd have so little grace for others that we'd be tyrants. 1:20:34
The main finding of her research: it's not fear that gets in the way, it's armor. Everyone is afraid; the danger is the armor that moves us away from love, connection and our values. 1:22:00
Midlife is when the universe grabs you by the shoulders and says: you were given gifts, choosing not to grow into them "is not benign". 1:23:19
Her armor: at work perfectionism, micromanagement, "recklessly decisive"; at home control, taking over every piece on the chessboard. The opposite of courage isn't fear, it's armor, self-protection. 1:24:27, 1:25:23
The four skill sets of courage, tested on 165,000 people in 45 countries: knowing your core values; wrestling with vulnerability; building trust, including trust in yourself; getting back up after failure. 1:26:13

Marriage, her mother, strong ground

38 years with Steve, neither with a model of a healthy couple. Three commitments: keep showing up, don't believe it's supposed to be easy, ask for help (couples therapy, the Gottmans' books). "My setup for success was zero." 1:40:02, 1:41:24
Her mother died on Christmas Day after four years of dementia, cared for by Brown and her sisters. Her mother had been the turning point of the family (the first to go to therapy, she left the husband, worked three jobs). One day the illness brought back the cruelty Brown hadn't seen since she was 14, and she didn't go back for two months. Steve was always there. When her mother died she felt "nothing but relief": the grief had come week by week, over the years. 1:41:31, 1:45:23
The note on her bathroom mirror: "I'd rather be the oldest woman in the gym than the youngest woman in assisted living." The title of the book comes from a trainer: "Find the ground, Brown", push your feet into the ground and connect mind and body. 1:46:33, 1:47:07
Closing question, "what are you optimizing for right now?": "Strength and longevity. Mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally." 1:48:35

Quotes

"It's not fear that gets in the way of us being brave with our lives and our work. It's armor." 1:22:00
"The limits of our language are the limits of our world." 10:50
"Courage is the willingness to show up and be all in when you cannot predict the outcome." 1:21
"There is no courage without vulnerability." 1:05:25
"Fitting in is the greatest threat to belonging." 45:04
"In order to fit in, the first person you betray is yourself." 45:24
"I don't even know you, but I'm going to call you friend because we hate the same people." 45:46
"Locking through takes what locking through takes. If you rush it, you risk capsizing." 37:42
"Joy is so vulnerable that when some of us get close to it, we dress rehearse tragedy to prepare for disappointment." 1:14:46
"If we could fix it and never have to wrestle with it again, we would be so short on grace for other people that we would be tyrants." 1:20:34
"They gave you gifts. Choosing not to grow into them is not benign." 1:23:19
"Now the person I'm going to betray last is me." 1:19:44
John Gottman (via Brown): trust is earned in small moments every day. 1:31:35

Exploration

Ideas

Armor as the real opposite of courage moves the work: no need to stop being afraid, only to notice what I grab when I am.
Vulnerability and trust grow together, in small amounts. Pouring everything out on day one isn't openness, it's a test set up to fail.
Gratitude as the practical answer to foreboding joy: something you train, in the moment the shiver arrives.
"Locking through": the passage between one part of the day and another needs its own time, and skipping it costs something at home.
A "thinking class" that reads philosophy and history while selling the scroll to everyone else: reading, attention and the ability to hold a paradox become a form of power.
Belonging to yourself comes before belonging to a group; a bond that depends on never asking questions is counterfeit.

Questions it raises

What is my armor when I'm afraid? At work and at home, is it the same?
- At home it's scrolling and food, to fill a silence that feels threatening: the thirty minutes on TikTok in the car before going in. At work it looks more like perfectionism, which is armor too.
Who are my "marble jar" people, and in whose jar do I put marbles?
- It's a great strategy, at least to apply mentally.
What do I do when joy arrives: do I enjoy it or wait for the blow?
- The practice I have is gratitude, before meals and in the evening prayer. Brown's point is to use it right at the moment of the shiver, not later.
Does cognitive sovereignty conflict with Trevor Noah's communal sovereignty, or do we need both?
- We need both. Choosing what I read and limiting the feed is the first; the shared meal and a weekly hour with a friend are the second. One without the other ends up either alone or scrolling.
Is finding God in the face of everyone I meet a practice I could adopt?
- Yes, it's love of neighbour. The hard part is the people I'd rather not see, which is exactly where she uses it.