- Welcome to "The Minor Consult," where I speak with leaders shaping our world in diverse ways. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr. William Brody. Over the course of his distinguished career, Bill has served as president of Johns Hopkins University and as president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. An accomplished radiologist with a doctorate in electrical engineering, as well as an MD degree from Stanford, he co-founded several medical device companies and has been elected as a member of both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering. His service to Stanford University, his alma mater, has been extensive, including serving on the university board of trustees and the Stanford Healthcare Board of Directors. And most recently, Bill has published a book that compiles reflections and leadership lessons gleaned from his extraordinary career. Our paths first crossed when we were both at Johns Hopkins, and I'm honored to count Bill among my dear friends. Bill, thank you for being here today.

- Lloyd, it's so great to be here and thank you for the invitation.

- Absolutely!

- It's always nice to come back to Stanford near my ancestral home.

- Exactly!

- Yeah.

- You grew up in California?

- I grew up in Stockton, California.

- Yes!

- And I was gonna go to Stanford and then I encountered a physics teacher at the local university. He said, "Well, what about MIT?" I said, "How do you spell it?" I went to a very large public high school and I applied to MIT 'cause I wanted to combine medicine and engineering and it didn't exist anywhere. And I looked at the course catalog of MIT, said, "Well, maybe if I go there I can do a little bit of both." And I did, and so it was a good decision. But then when I wanted to get a... I wanted to do an MD/PhD in electrical engineering, so I applied to that very famous medical school in Boston. And they said, "Well, Mr. Brody, do you wanna be a doctor or an engineer?" I realized that was a toxic question not to be answered "Engineer," so I said, "Doctor," and. But then I came out to Stanford to interview. In those days, Stanford had not long been down from San Francisco, it wasn't as well known, but the dean met me and said, Bob Glaser, and he said, "Bill!" He walked me out in the plaza and he pointed out over there, he said, "See those buildings about 300 yards away?" I said, "Yeah!" "Those are the school of engineering buildings. You come here, you can do both." So I just simultaneously enrolled in both. There was no MD/PhD program for engineering and medicine at the time, and it was just a spectacular choice, so.

- Absolutely!

- I was lucky. Yeah.

- Well, luck favors the prepared mind.

- That's right. Yeah!

- And your mind always has been. And then after medical school, you started out in cardiac surgery, you worked with Dr. Shumway, you spent some time at the NIH as well.

- Yeah.

- But tell us about that experience.

- Oh, well, he was the most amazing person I think I've ever met, and I've met some pretty amazing people. He was such an incredible surgeon. And, of course, had developed the heart transplant operation. But he was a master psychologist, a standup comic who used humor with double entendre to make a point. Like, one day he'd say to me, "Hey, Brody, you're not half as good as they say you are." And anyway, I went on the service as a, you know, junior resident and he immediately ignored me. He knew who I was, I had worked in the lab and everything, but when I joined clinic, it's like I didn't exist. He just wanted to test me, 'cause he thought I had gotten through too easy with life.

- Sure.

- It's a good message. But he was a psychologist, but an amazing surgeon. And one of the chapters in my book "Uncommon Sense" is, "The Bleeding Always Stops."

- Yep!

- So in the operating room, and I was a junior resident down at the end of the table with a scrub nurse, and they're doing an operation on an aortic valve replacement. And then this side, the senior resident, the chief resident, was actually doing most of the work 'cause Shumway was a great teacher. Anyway, he nixed the aorta and the blood was spurting up very high. Now, I said in the book that it was coming off the ceiling lance, well, probably that physically not possible, but it was quite dramatic, you know? And I'm going, "Ah! Oh!" And Shumway just calmly sits there like this. And he said, "You know, the bleeding always stops." And with that, he turned to the scrub nurse, asked for a suture and forceps, and he closed it off and moved forward. Now I can tell you some other people that I worked with had, you know, they would've gone, "Oh, you stupid son of a gun! You got it!" You know? And then they would throw instruments. I mean, horrible.

- Yeah, yeah.

- But by being so calm, it allowed us to assess the situation. And I use that all the time, you know? The worst thing is I could die, you know? Well, okay, now we know the worst thing. Let's go into this thing a little bit more logically and think about what might be a good solution.

- Sure! Sure.

- So that was that.

- You made a transition to radiology. Can you tell us about that? And then sort of how your career evolved after that.

- So part of my five year program in cardiac surgery, two years was to be at the NIH. So I went to the NIH in 1973 as a fellow in cardiac surgery. And one of the things that happened is the radiology department was right next to my office in the surgery division, and I would walk by there every day. And, you know, I just looked at it. I had no interest in radiology. And then one day I saw them tearing apart a room, taking all the equipment out. And then over the space of a couple weeks, they brought in a Data General mini computer and then this thing that rotated around the patient. It was one of the first three CT scanners, CAT scanners, in the United States.

- Right!

- And I looked at this, "This is a revolution!" And with my PhD in double, I said, "This is a better place where I can make contributions."

- Exactly.

- So I told Dr. Shumway I wanted to do it, and I thought he would yell and scream at me. The doctor at, the surgeon at the NIH, did yell and scream at me when I told him. But when I told Shumway, he said, "Well, Bill, I always thought you were too smart for cardiac surgery." Again, you could figure that one out. And I went to UCSF in radiology and then finished up and got recruited to Stanford, and it was just a wonderful experience.

- Great! Great! Stanford was your first faculty position, you built your career here, and then, ah, you started a company in MRI. You had some transformative ideas that you wanted to pursue in a company to revolutionize MR, which was very, very, very, very early days of MR. So can you tell us about that?

- Yeah, I didn't invent MR, but we came up with a different way of doing it.

- Right!

- Instead of having to build a big ditch and line it with, so that the magnetic flux wouldn't cause other problems and vice versa, I wanted something we'd just wheel into a standard radiology room, take out the x-ray machine and put this in. And that's what we did. It was a very different magnet. It was actually not unusual variant of the magnets that they use in the slack linear accelerator called a picture frame magnet.

- Right.

- It was electric so you could turn it on and turn it off. It was self-shield and it could be used with critically ill patients. So that's what we did, and that's what I wanted to do, and I couldn't get any NIH funding. And I had support from big, like GE and Siemens for my other work, and then they said, "Bill, just stick to x-ray." So, but I had a friend who was a venture capitalist who'd started a bunch of companies and he said, "Ah, Bill, we'll just start a company." And I said, "Well, I don't know anything about that." He said, "Well, you can stay at Stanford and, well, you just be a consultant and I'll get the money." And he raised $3.5 million to build this magnet that everybody said was impossible. And it was so impossible that we couldn't hire anybody, any of the physicists or engineers who knew anything about MRI or NMR, because they said, "It'll never work."

- Yeah.

- So we just hired some really bright people, mostly out of Stanford. Not all, but. And they didn't know it wouldn't work. And so we're going and they'd hired a CEO and the CEO didn't work out, and so they went to search for a, you know, a more experienced CEO from the industry. And they all would look at it and then they would call up their friends in engineering and say, "Hey, what about this technology?" Say, "Nah, that'll never work." I subsequently learned, whenever I hear that, "Nah, that'll never work," that's when your ears should perk up. That's where you should say, "Hey, maybe there's something worth doing." So anyway, they said, "Bill, we want you to take a one year leave of absence from Stanford and you can go back. We don't want you to stay more than one year, 'cause you don't know anything about business." And so that's what I did. I took a leave of absence to go run this company and it ended up being four years. And after two years, Stanford said, "You gotta come back." And I said, "Hmm? Isn't there anything we can work out? A part-time?" "Nope!" So I gave up my tenured professorship not knowing where we'd go, but, you know, we did and we sold one of our early machines to Johns Hopkins.

- Right! Right! And they recruited me, ultimately not then, but after we got NIH, FDA approval, they recruited me to run radiology.

- Right!

- Now, some people said it was because I knew something that they could use, but I actually believe they wanted me just to service the machine and keep it going. And the machine lasted over 10 years. It was really great. It was a research machine where people like Elias Zerhouni, who was a young faculty member in radiology, developed this whole idea of cardiac tagging to measure the contractility of the heart. So, yeah. So it was a great, great time.

- That's wonderful. And then briefly spent, you briefly spent, some time at University of Minnesota and then recruited back to Johns Hopkins when Mike Bloomberg was chair of the board of trustees to be the president of Hopkins. Can you tell us about that period in your career?

- That was the best job I ever had. Yeah. Again, you have to have a certain equanimity to, you know, when people yell and scream and, you know, there're always, as you know, there are always crises. There's never a day without a crisis in this job, you know? And so we had those, but, you know, it worked. And working with Mike Bloomberg was amazing.

- Yep!

- He's quick, smart. He was philanthropic. Now his big money came after I left, which tells you how good I was. But it was still substantial money.

- Sure!

- And what he did opposed to other donors is he would say, "Bill, what's the most important thing to the university?" And I would say, "Well, we have to redo the Homewood campus." And, "Okay! So what do we need to do?" And he said, "Well, I'll start it, I'll kickstart it, but then you have to raise the rest of the money." And we wanted to do something for the Peabody Music Conservatory and renovate a building, which turned out to be spectacular.

- Yes.

- And I went to Mike and he said, "Well, music is not really important to me, but if you say it's important, I'll back it." And again, "Here's what I'll put in, and you and the dean have to raise the rest of it." And so.

- Yeah.

- And there were a couple of those where he put up $30 million so we could build a building faster for computer science, and it would save money, it turns out, because we were building another building nearby. So he put in 30 million, he said, "But I want you to get the 30 million and then I'll move it around." It's like instead of it's a folding chair, it's a folding gift.

- Yes!

- Which is really clever.

- Yeah!

- And that was a tribute to Mike. But I eventually got the money from John Malone, but it took 10 or 12 years. And the whole time, every time I talked to Mike, he'd say, "Bill, have you gotten the money for the 30 million? I really wanna use it somewhere else in the university." So.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- Right.

- So!

- And the book, "Uncommon Sense," which we have here and is a compilation of a lot of lessons and stories and wisdom, much of it from your presidency at Johns Hopkins. And can you tell us about what prompted you? You taught a course, of course.

- Yeah, that's right!

- Maybe start by talking about the course that you taught during the January term at Hopkins, and how that ultimately led to the book.

- So before I was president, a few years before, I had helped to participate in a strategic plan for the university. And the part that I really pushed on was improving undergraduate education. I thought the most important part of a university, whether it's Stanford or Harvard or University of California, are the students. Yes, the research is important, but it's the students who become the innovators, as Stanford has so clearly demonstrated. So I thought that when I became president, I would get to know the students by teaching a course. And my staff said, "Well, you can't do that because at least 50% of your time will be fundraising." Then I found the January term and said, "Well, in January, not much happens in Baltimore." And so I taught a course over a seminar and I did it for over 10 years. And then I taught it when I was president. And then when I came back some years later after COVID, I taught it three times. And the whole idea was to teach critical thinking. I had no prerequisites. I didn't want just the science and the pre-med people, I just wanted people who would think. And I tried to use problems that didn't require an IQ of 130, just required somebody who was willing to use their brain to think, and it was very rewarding. When I taught it at Hopkins, I subtitled it, "Everything You Needed to Know About Life That You Won't Learn From a University."

- Yeah!

- Yeah, I didn't do that when I published it.

- Okay. Okay.

- Yeah.

- Tell us about some of those stories in the book.

- Yeah!

- Yeah.

- So the reason I use stories, one of my favorite authors and writers is Tom Friedman. You know, "The World Is Flat" and all that, but if you read the building, the books, it's filled with stories. He has a way of getting into people's minds and homes, and he illustrates things with stories. And I realized how powerful those are, 'cause he sometimes didn't invent the ideas and he didn't plan on it, but he just, but presented them.

- Sure!

- So I wanted to use a set of stories 'cause I thought it'd be more powerful for the students.

- Yeah. Yeah.

- And they were, some of them were simple ideas and some of them more complicated. Another theme of the course was randomness. We don't really know how to deal with randomness very well. That wasn't part of our hunter-gatherer, you know, heritage. And we have a tendency to see things and interpret the pattern as significant when it's just randomness. And one of the way I test that is having them toss a corn, a coin, 200 times.

- Right! Right!

- And I say, "Okay, half the class," and I didn't know their birthdays. "If your birthday is between January and June, just toss it 200 times and write it down in a single column and bring it into me. And then the next, the other group, I want you to cheat. Don't toss it, but put a sequence of heads and tails down that you think will be representative of reality." And then when they walk in with their papers, they just walk in and I say, "Hey, Lloyd, you cheated. Hey, Susie, you didn't cheat." And I'm right about 80% of the time because what most people don't know, if you toss a coin 200 times, it's at least an 80% chance that you'll have a run of five or six or seven or some or eight heads or tails. It's amazing! And so if you have that stream, you can say, "You didn't cheat." But if you don't have it, you can't be completely sure. But most people think, "Well, I just have the equal numbers." Try to close the equal number of heads and tails.

- Sure!

- Yeah, so.

- Or it's gonna alternate heads, tail, heads, tails, but, yeah.

- Yeah!

- Exactly. Exactly.

- But when you add them all up?

- Right. Right.

- So they worry about that, but they don't worry about exactly how the sequence works.

- Other things you talk about in the book have direct relevance to leadership. Can you talk to us about the leadership lessons you've learned in your career? And you're a spectacular mentor. And as you're working with people at various stages of their career and listening to them and providing feedback to them, what are some of the principles that you keep in mind?

- Well, I think one is to be, I don't like the word, but is to be authentic. You know, people can figure you out pretty clearly. If you say, "Employees are our most important asset" and then a week later you fire a third of them, which we're doing now, I mean, you've kind of lost your credibility. So one is trying to be honest. I always believe that the finances, if you're in a company or a university, the finances, not all of them, but the general finances are to be used to be shared. Finances can either be a weapon where I hold onto it, you know, I'm not gonna tell you whether we're making money off of what you're doing, versus showing you what, you know, what we do. And use that to try to change behavior. I think picking leaders, there's the whole adage is, you know, "Are leaders made or born?" And I think it's a combination of several things. One is the individual. What is your personality like? And what is your skillset? If you are somebody who has never made a single decision in your life, and the next decision you make might be the first decision ever, you know, that's probably not a good thing. Or you may be a dictator. I know some people who would've been good dictators for countries if we needed one. But they were running a company.

- Sure!

- And so, it... But it's not that you have the skillset. So I'm very good at, let's say, reading x-rays. That's probably important if you want a radiologist. But you also, if you want a chair of radiology, what does the department need? So you have the needs of the department, the skillset, and the personality of the individual. And there are many examples of that. Churchill was somewhat of a dictator, and he failed in public service before the Battle of Britain. He came in and he had what they needed. They needed a dictator, and they needed somebody who would have hope. And he said, "We will never, never, never, ever lose." And then after the war was over, he was booted out of office again.

- Right.

- Because they couldn't stand this guy. So you have to look at it that way. And, you know, certain personality traits are more complicated than others, like narcissism. And others, people who, you know, are immune to conflicts of interest and don't have any problem, you know, bending things with it. And all those things really depend on the environment in which you find yourself.

- You also have some observations and advice on, quote, "Career planning, career trajectory."

- Yeah!

- And you cite an example of a leader here at Stanford. Tell us about that example and the lesson that you learned from it.

- Yeah, so one of the chapters of the book is "Career Planning is an Oxymoron."

- Right!

- I never thought I would be a university president. I never wanted to be a university president. I didn't even wanna be a, you know, a chair of a department. And I didn't envision myself early on being a radiologist. So these all things happen by, a lot of it is by chance and opportunity. And so what do you do with all that? So I just have a whole stable of examples of people who started off one and got somewhere else. And I happened to meet, at a Stanford event, this fellow who had spent 20, is that right, 20 years of his life in ballet. From age 10 to age 30, he was a, became a primo ballerino. I guess it's a ballerino. And he starred in "Romeo and Juliet" and all these things in New York or Boston. I mean, he was right up there at the top. But, as many people know, ballet dancers suffer many injuries. And he probably knew every orthopedic surgeon in New York City.

- Right.

- And so he said, "I can't do this anymore." And he had never gone to college. And he told me the story that he decided to apply to college at age 30, and he was married and about to have a couple kids. And Yale University picked him and he went, majored in economics, he was obviously very bright, and he was about to graduate and go to business school when he saw an announcement in the student lounge for an internship with a fellow named David Swensen. David Swensen actually wrote the book on how endowments should be managed. And during his tenure, Yale's Endowment went like this and Harvard's Endowment went like this, and I don't know where Stanford's Endowment, but he was way up off it. And so he trained a number of people who ended up running, eventually running endowments. So when he finishes this internship, Swensen says to him, "Well, Rob?" It's Rob Wallace. "What are you gonna do when you finish? You know, you're about to graduate!" He says, "Well, I'm gonna go to business school. And guess what? I just got my acceptance to Harvard Business School." And Swensen said, "You know, Rob, I think you're making a serious mistake." He said, "I'll tell you what. I'll make you a deal. If you come and work for me for two years and you still wanna go to Harvard Business School, I will pay your tuition for two years. No questions asked." Well, Swensen never had to pay off. Rob Wallace ended up finishing a program of two years with him, managed a big family office in England, and ultimately became the head of the Stanford Investment Company. There was another fellow in medical school who wanted to be a general surgeon. In the middle of it, he bought sandwiches and sold them at the medical school lounge. And by the time he was doing his internship, he'd bought the delicatessen and had to hire somebody to run it. And they did such a bad job of running it, he said, "Ah, it can do better than that." So he dropped out of medicine and he became supposedly the largest independent caterer in Silicon Valley.

- Right.

- And he taught medical students twice a month or something for fun.

- That's fantastic. Other words of wisdom from the book that... I love the book, by the way.

- Well, thank you! You had to say that!

- Knowing you, I see so much of you.

- You had to say that, but it's nice of you.

- No, I didn't have to say it. Knowing you and it reflects many conversations I've had with you over the years and wisdom from you, and. But what are some of the others that stand out to you?

- Well, I think there's a whole series of threads. We really haven't talked about randomness, but there's a lot of interesting applications of randomness. And I talk about, you know, you're listening to the radio and the Warriors are there, and Steph Curry has a streak of, I don't know how many, 10 three-pointers in a row. Oh, he's in a hot streak! As opposed, he sort of changed his behavior. But there're actually statistical tests, very simple ones, to determine whether that was out of the ordinary for Steph or that was within the ordinary. Now he has about a 40-something percent chance of making a three pro, ah, a three-pointer. If you and I got out there with, in my case, it would be 0.001%. If I had two in a row, yeah, that would be a pretty amazing feat, so. And you can test that. But people don't do that, they just kind of accept it. "Oh, yeah. It's a hot streak." And then they think, they ascribe that to the fact that they put on different pair of shoes or they put their left shoe on first rather than right. So we, throughout life. And we associate an event, two events with causality, when in fact it's just, you know, it's just random.

- You also talk in the book about an equation for success.

- Yeah.

- Would you tell us about that?

- Yeah! So I called it, "The Calculus of Success." That was to give it some credibility among my quantitative friends. That's the only quantitative part in the building. So success is a combination. First, it's a combination of preparation and opportunity. Okay? Preparation is your innate ability. And the other part of it is hard work. And there are some people, like certain basketball players, like Steph Curry, he had obviously had incredible innate ability, but he has spent incessant number of hours just working on three-point shots. I mean, just ad nauseam for anybody else. So those are the things that matter. But the other part of it, besides preparation, is opportunity. And opportunity is basically luck! Good luck, or bad luck. And opportunity is not only luck, but the ability to recognize luck when it comes.

- Yes!

- And as Louis Pasteur said, "Chance favors the prepared mind." Which Michael Bloomberg told me, "The harder I work, the luckier I get."

- Yep!

- And he told me, he said, "If you go to work, you get a job, doesn't matter what the job is, you get there, you be the first person in the morning to arrive and the last person to leave, and I guarantee you, if you do that long enough and you have some background about the industry you're in, you'll all of a sudden see opportunities." And he got made, he was not a computer scientist, but he got made, his last job before they closed down the division he was in at Salomon Brothers was Head of Information Technology.

- Right!

- And, you know, that's where he got the idea. He knew as a trader that the tools you need to trade bonds were just not there. You had to use a hand calculator basically, and that's how he came up with Bloomberg, so.

- And Bill, how would you define success in your life, in your career, throughout your career and now?

- Well, when I was young, like most young people that are aggressive and interested, you know, you're looking for what I call, "Trophies and awards." And I realized that, for example, if you get them. If you get elected to the national, one of the National Academies, you realize that most of the time you spend at a National Academy meetings is electing new members. And Richard Feynman said, "I refuse to be a member of an organization whose sole purpose is to elect members." Now there is more seriousness to it, but nonetheless, I think, you know, how you spend your time is really critical. And so, but we spend a lot of time getting trophies and awards. And so when I finished up at the Salk Institute, we had had a series of large houses and I had collected lots of things, photographs and awards, and I had my little league baseball medals, which weren't for ability. It was just for participation, unfortunately. But I got all these stuff and I said, "What am I gonna do with it?" I mean, it was literally boxes and boxes of stuff. And I asked my kids, "Were you interested in taking this?" They said, "Dad, get real." So I wasn't gonna rent. You know, the things, they were wonderful when I got them.

- Sure!

- A lecture and a war, you know? But it's not like carrying, you know, around with you that they really lose meaning. And so I basically got rid of almost all of them. The few mementos that are really precious to me, I kept. But they weren't necessarily saying, you know, how good am I in popping my, you know, my buttons with pride and what is important to me? And I realized was the people that I came in touch with. With you, with Governor Wes Moore when he was a student at Johns Hopkins, with Dan Weiss, who was the CEO of the Metropolitan Art Museum and now is retired from that and now he's the CEO of the Philadelphia Art Museum, the two top museums in the world. And, you know, it's seeing those people come and do so well, as you have, that give me, you know, give me just a great feeling.

- Well, I know that I'm speaking on behalf of all of us that have benefited from your mentorship, Bill, in saying that it's extraordinarily meaningful for us and we're eternally appreciative for that. Maybe-

- Well, thank you. But I get more of it, more out of it than you do. That's the thing that people-

- I think that's the thing about teaching for all of us.

- Yeah! I mean, teaching is just such a wonderful thing. But teaching has, you know, lost the luster. But when you have a super teacher, you realize how good they are and how hard it is, you know? It is hard work.

- Absolutely! There are lots of lessons in the book. What's the most important lesson that you would like readers to take away from the book?

- Well, I think the one that has the most applicability is called, "Turtle on a Fence Post."

- Yep!

- So if you see a turtle sitting on a fence post, what do you think? You say, "Well, how the heck did it get there? It certainly didn't get there by itself." And in life, and whether it's in science, whether it's in your daily life, whether it's in politics, when you observe something that doesn't validate itself, it's not self-validating, you have to say, "Why is it there? Why is that turtle there?" And if you spend time figuring it out, it's there for a reason, you just don't know the reason. And you see that. And in science, you see it. Rontgen wasn't the first person to discover x-rays, a bunch of people did, but he was the first one who saw this glow in the fluorescent screen or darkening of a film that was something that nobody else who had generated x-rays had noticed, and that led to the discovery of x-rays.

- What did you learn from writing the book?

- How hard it is! It's easy to write! I love to write. And when I was president of Hopkins, I used to write a column called, "Change."

- That's right!

- And it was fun to do. But, ah, I wrote. So I wrote it in 2009 when I did the first, finished being president, and then tried to find a publisher and couldn't find a publisher and put it away. And then when I came back after COVID, I came back to Baltimore and I started teaching it again. And the fellow who worked for me, Mike Field, who was my speech writer, is an outstanding guy. He had actually sat in on some of the lectures. He said, "Bill, you really gotta, you gotta do this." So I said, "Mike, I need your help." So he helped put it, you know? We had all the gut stuff there, but. And then finally I got it to some shape, and I sent it to a fellow that had worked for me who had written a few serious books. And he said very kindly, "You know, Bill, I think you need an editor." So that was version number two. And then we hired an editor who was very good, who tried to create a story.

- Sure!

- And some flow to it. And she said, "If you don't, if the readers get stuck somewhere, they're just gonna turn down the book and stop. So you want them to, so like a novel."

- Sure!

- And she did it. She didn't do a lot, but what she did made a huge difference.

- Yeah.

- And then when I got the Johns Hopkins Press to do it, we went through I think two more editors.

- Okay!

- Yeah. So it's a lot of work. And then once you have the book, you know, you have to deal with all the things that, "Oh, well, how do you?" You know, "How do you market the book and all?"

- Sure!

- Which, you know, it is not my ken. But anyways. It's been a wonderful experience, but-

- Fantastic!

- It's a lot, lot harder than I ever anticipated. And will I write another book? I don't know. I have a lot more stories that I could use.

- I'm sure.

- Yeah.

- I hope you do. And I highly recommend the book to everyone. And Bill, I'd like to close with two questions that I like to ask all the guests on this podcast. The first is: What do you think are the most important qualities for a leader today?

- I think it really requires an understanding of what are your skill sets and what does the organization need, and your personality to the extent that which you can recognize your personality. One of the people I trade with, trained with, Alex Margulis in radiology, told me, "People never change unless they're senile, and don't ever forget that." And so there's certain traits, if you try to change, you can't.

- Sure!

- And so, I... I'm just not... I can help coach people, but sometimes I can't coach them through behavioral traits that are causing them problems when being that.

- Yeah.

- Now I was asked by Mike Bloomberg to talk him out of running for mayor.

- Right! Right!

- And Mike, who I have enormous respect for, but I said, "Mike, you really don't wanna take this thing on because, you know, you suffer fools poorly, you wanna move quickly." And I said, "What are you gonna do if the boilermakers or the sewage collection people come and picket you and, you know, call you names and all this stuff?" And I said, "How are you gonna deal with that? Or what about if you run for the election and you're defeated?" And he said, "Bill!" He said, "Look." And he'd just become a billionaire. He said, "Bill, if I take my money, my billion dollars converted to thousand dollars bills, put it in the middle of Park Avenue, throw gasoline on it, light it up a great bonfire." He said, "The next morning, nobody will call me." He said, "I want to make a difference." And Mike, despite whatever limitations he may or may not have had, wanted it so badly that he was willing to subvert those and let all of the good things that he had go. And he was just so smart. I mean, he was quick, quick, a quick study. And that's what he did. He did all these things in New York and said, "Well, this doesn't make sense, we're gonna do it." People said, "Oh, you can't do that!" But he did.

- Yep! And finally, what gives you hope for the future?

- Oh, I think what we need, first of all, you have to have hope. We have systems in the Constitution which are supposed to be self-correcting. And in order for them to work, the bulk of the population have to have trust in those systems. So if we can establish or maintain trust in the Congress. In the White House? I'm less sanguine about the White House, even in the best of times. But the federal, you know, the fed, the banks, the banking systems, obviously the Supreme Court, we realize how important the Supreme Court is. And I think I have optimism that those systems ultimately will self-correct.

- Bill, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a wonderful conversation as always. And thank you for listening to "The Minor Consult" with me, Stanford School of Medicine Dean, Lloyd Minor. I hope you enjoyed today's discussion with Bill Brody, President Emeritus of Johns Hopkins University, past president of the Salk Institute, and author of "Uncommon Sense: Rethinking Ordinary Problems in Extraordinary Ways." Please send your questions by email to "The Minor Consult" at theminorconsult.com, and check out our website, theminorconsult.com for updates, episodes, and more. To get the latest episodes of "The Minor Consult," subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thank you so much for joining me today. I look forward to our next episode. Until then, stay safe, stay well, and be kind.