 And Lenny Mendenza, who he was a senior director at McKinsey Freers, and I did all the presentations for Lenny, and Lenny always introduced me the same. He said, no matter what Bob does, and he's described some of the other stuff I've done, no matter how hard he tries, he's always gonna be known as the asshole guy. And that's just my fate in life. And yes, this book has sold more than all my other books combined, and it's just a way that it's going to be. So I accept it as my fate. I did it too much. And it's such a brilliant book, so simple, the idea is so instinctively appealing, and it's about the no-asshole rule. I would seek advice from you because one of us have, and I have had my share to inabundance. Leading the A guys at work. How do you deal with your manager who is really that proverbial asshole? Oh gosh, I mean, I gotta ask this question so much. So I thought when I wrote this book, the no-asshole rule, I thought it was about building organizational culture. There's only one chapter about how to deal with assholes, and it's mostly about leadership and culture. But after getting 8,000 emails, what's basically the same question that you just asked, I've got an asshole boss, what do I do? That I wrote the asshole survival guide, which didn't sell particularly well, but I tried to think about it. And to me, in some ways, it's the old distinction between exit voice and loyalty. And you've kind of got to do a human calculation, which is that we all get in situations we can't escape from, which are temporary or permanent. And if you're just sort of stuck there, you've got to develop the mindset. I hate to say this to toughen yourself up. In exhibit one would be one of the heroes of the asshole survival guide and a friend of mine, Becky Margiata. She went to West Point, was a relatively early woman at West Point. She's about four foot 11, and she said that probably about three times a week she would have an upperclassmen with their nose at the inch from her face, like nose to nose, screaming at her for things like that. She would be asked to memorize all the headlines in the New York Times that day and she'd get one wrong. And she gets, and this is just the hazing, right? That's the hazing for West Point cadets plebes. And she said her coping technique was to view them as comedians. The nastier they were, the funnier they seemed to her. And she said she would mostly get in trouble for giggling accidentally while she was being screamed at instead of falling apart. She said, that's why I tend to get in trouble for. And she made it through. She became captain of the head of successful career. So, or the classic way to do it is, they call this temporal distancing. When you're going through something difficult, imagine that you're in the future and you're looking back at it, it won't seem so bad. But it's kind of like doing self-cognitive behavioral therapy and we all have, you know, sort of like when you're in a bad airplane flight and you're in the middle seat and it's just horrible. You kind of say, it'll be over. I look back and it won't seem so bad. The next thing is just to leave. And this, I'm a big believer in quitting, by the way. This is something like people talk about quiet quitting and everything, I don't care what you call it. If you're like in a situation where they're treating you like shit and quiet quitting, I'm kind of confused why this is supposed to be a new concept because as long as I've known about the workplace is when there's a toxic person, we've all been incredibly skilled at avoiding that person. Like, you don't invite them to meetings. You don't go to the meetings that they're at. This is just the way life has been. If it's your boss, well, you put in less effort. The evidence that the boss doesn't treat their employees like dirt, get less out of them. This has been known for 60 years by Gallup. I don't know, 50 years. So there's quitting. And then the last way is to fight back. And I've got very clear guidelines about when you should fight back, which is that if you're gonna fight back and you don't have any power in the situation, you're gonna probably get squished like a bug and you're probably gonna lose. You're probably better off just leaving your hiding from your boss or something. But if you're gonna fight back, first thing you gotta do is to document. The second thing you need to do is have allies. And the third thing you need to do is to have somebody who has enough power that you can go to them that they'll actually help you with it. And if you don't have all three, you are in trouble. And although there's another strategy I'll talk about in a minute. The example I have is that right after the No Asshole rule came, a woman who was an animal control officer saw a dog catcher. She wrote me about how they got rid of a nasty fellow dog catcher. And it was, they complained to their boss about a really abusive and actually racist coworker. And he said, I can't do anything about it. And so they put together what they call the asshole diaries that she and all of her coworkers just recorded everything that this woman said for three weeks. They brought the asshole diary all together as a posse to the boss. And then the, even with civil servants required that the boss got, all of a sudden the person disappeared. If you can do that, it's great. Or she actually is now somebody I know a little bit, Gretchen Carlson. The way that she got rid of Roger Ailes, who was her boss at Fox News, Roger Ailes said to her directly, if you have sex with me, I will give you a better hour on TV. But she had a tape recorded. And it's in the state of New York. It's actually, it's against the law in like California to record your boss without their permission. But in New York, which is one party consent, she got that. So there are ways to fight back. So those are the three main ways that you know, get out of there, suck it up and deal with it somehow or put together a posse and fight back there. There is a fourth way which works with some bosses. There's a bunch of evidence that people who leave others feeling terrible, they lack awareness. We as human beings are not very aware of others see us. There are some situations where if you gently go to your boss and give them the feedback, there are some situations where it actually works. Especially, and this is a distinction I hadn't made, we're mostly talking about certified assholes. That's what we call them in the book. There's a people are time again assholes. All of us under the wrong conditions can be nasty, unpleasant people. Psychologists are very good at creating situations that turn us into jerks. When we're in a hurry, when we're tired, when we're around a bunch of nasty people, most of us humans become nasty. So there's also the temporary type assholes. And that might be the best way to give the feedback to your certified asshole boss, is to say, I know you're not usually like this, but we've been seeing these behaviors lately. I do have a number of examples of people who have written me over the years about how they made the journey from, they describe themselves as recovering assholes sometimes. And then one of the key things they do is they have people in their lives who will tell them, give them negative feedback and they try to get better. And somebody who does not get credit for this is Steve Jobs. There is an argument, and this is in the book, it's from Ed Katmell. Ed Katmell, who was president of Pixar, he met with Steve Jobs once a week for 26 years. And he said when he first met Steve, it was pretty clear Steve was an asshole. And this was like around the time he'd been thrown out of Apple. He next wasn't going very well. And when he was young, he was really a jerk. And the sign was, and this is Ed's report, that as Steve got older, and he went through sort of like the dark years, and then he came back to Apple, and he still could be tough, but he became a better person. And also that was one of the key things that Steve's board did to help him with. So what's the name of the trillion dollar coach? How can I forget his name? Campbell, that's it. Campbell, so Campbell who was on his board, that was one of the things that Steve would go for a walk with Campbell every Sunday and they'd talk about things. And that was one of the people who made Steve a nicer person. Bill Campbell. Bill Campbell, how can I forget his name? Bill Campbell, I met him a couple of times. Talk about mentoring, your audience says no. Bill was mentored to jobs. He was mentored to the Google people, like in Silicon Valley known as a trillion dollar coach. And he would mostly not charge people either. So he was one, Bill Campbell was one of the key people who helped jobs become a better person, and less of a jerk, and that's one thing that really did not like the Walter Isaacson biography. This is Catmull's point, is that he saw this change in Steve over the years, and he said, you know, the last couple of years of Steve's life, he would spend 20 minutes talking to my assistant into the Pixar security guard about their families and how everything was going. So it's not like he was a complete sort of selfish jerk. He became better with age. And it was parked because he basically got fired from Apple because he was a jerk. I mean, that was, that's the basic reason. So anyway, so there is hope for us jerks. Does a setback, a temporary setback, a permanent setback, does that really change personality? What happened with Steve? I think it may depend on the person, and this is the career thing, is that if you have a setback and you only blame other people and you don't change the people you're hanging out with, if you look at your friends and the people you spend time with, it's a pretty good indication of probably what your values are. If you have a setback in life, to me, those are the two things that I think of, which is, am I learning from it and am I taking responsibility? And the other part about it, you know, this happens to all of us temporarily, is that some people get depressed. So it's okay to get depressed temporarily. We're all just human, but I do say this to my friends, and this is, you know, mental health is a big issue these days. Finally, is that if you're going through one of those periods, it's great to have an executive coach, but sometimes a therapist is even better.