Purpose and Focus: Tonie Leatherberry

This is Jack Raim and welcome to from 0 to 80, where we examine the challenges and rewards of growing up and growing older. You can view more information about this podcast and our guests at the website from 0to80.com that spelled with no spaces. The word 0 is spelled out and 80 is the number 80. So we love hearing from our listeners and you can email me at [email protected]. Please tell your friends about our podcast, the more followers we have, the more likely it is that we will produce more episodes. It's Jack and I'm back. Today my guest is Tony Leatherberry. I've asked Tony to join us today because I find her story intriguing. Today is a member of a number of Board of Directors and before you jump to conclusions, I'm going to encourage you to listen carefully to Tony's story, the challenges and inflection points and how she handled them. We can all generalize these moments in Tony's life to our own. If I had to pick one theme for today's episode, it's that you don't have to accept your circumstances. You can have principles and stick to them and that we all have an obligation to care for each other. Sit back and join me and Tony as we talk about, well, you'll hear for yourself. Tony, it's so good to see you. How are you? I'm great, Jack. It's so great to be with you today. It's been a while. Where do we find you today, Tony? Where are you? I'm actually at home. Isn't that a rare occasion? Where? Outside of Wilmington, Delaware, on the Pennsylvania side, Chad's Fort, Pennsylvania. Nice. In terms of that being an unusual thing for you to be there, tell us how you spend your time these days. Well, I serve on three corporate boards as well as two university boards and one not-for-profit philanthropic board. And so pretty much you sit around knitting all day is what I'm hearing, right? Well, I'm trying to do that because I'm about to become a grandmother any day now. But the needles are still sitting in the basket. I've got to figure out how to, I work that in the schedule. So this will be the first grandchild? Yes. Yes. So I'm going to say goodbye to you now because you won't have any time for me after that child. I promise you. It's the best. I'm forward to it and it's a little girl, so I'm going to have lots of fun. Oh, sweet. So one of the things that I'm interested in, and you and I worked for the same company many, many years ago, but didn't know each other. And I'll explain in a few minutes how we met. But one of the things that really intrigues me about you is your journey as a woman of color. So can you kind of walk us through, where did you grow up, and then where did you go to school, and then how did you get from there to what you just described in terms of how you're spending your time? Absolutely. And I hope that your audience hasn't heard this story before because I tell it many times when I get this question. And so my journey starts out. I grew up in Chicago, it was born and raised there. My parents, I would say, were very progressive thinkers. And so went to Catholic school, K through 12, all girl high school. And my high school didn't have computer science and physics. So they had chemistry and they had biology because maybe you could become a nurse, right? But not some of the material science or physics or any of those curriculums that might prepare you for what we call now a STEM career. And just to reiterate, this was a girl's Catholic high school, why in God's name would you need anything other than to prepare to be a nurse, a teacher or a wife? I don't understand what your point is here, Tony. Well, I come back to my parents being progressive kind of thinkers, right? I distinctly remember this day where my father and I went to the convent and sat down and prayed with the nuns, I kid you not, had a morning reflection and my dad had asked to meet with them. And he said to them, you are stunting my daughter's opportunities. And we have got to figure this out. And so they sat down and figured it out. And what they did is they created a special curriculum for me. They got an agreement with a public technical high school that allowed me to take physics and computer science for two years in that high school. So I would leave my Catholic high school, get out of bus, go to the public high school and learn physics and computer science. And in the summers and on Saturdays, I was in a special program at the Illinois Institute of Technology, or high school students interested in, again, the term wasn't really phrased back then, but STEM. One of the themes from my episodes are sort of inflection points in people's lives. And I'm just going to put a pin in this one and say this had to have been transformed for you. It was. I would say it's the defining moment. And for me, I looked back and I reflect on how lucky and blessed I was to have parents that were very forward thinking. And so from there, again, continuing to have this interest in technology and STEM and actually the program was called Early Identification and Engineering. I was accepted to produce early. So my dad and I get in the car and we drive to Indiana and I say, I can't do the cornfield. And so he said, well, if you never leave home when you're young, you never leave home physically or mentally. So you have to go away. And so we landed on Boston University for a whole myriad of reasons, but two of which Martin Luther King had gone there and my cousin had gone to the School of Theology there. So it being what I thought was a progressive institution at the time. I think it still is very proud to be a Terrier. I still serve on the Board of Trustees at Boston University. So again, part of the journey that I alluded to at the beginning is you went from a student who was avoiding the cornfields and all by the way, BU is not in March madness when Purdue is just going to point that out to you. I know. I know. I think it was a mistake on your part, Tony, but to be serious, but we did have, we did have the miracle on ice and Mike Eruzioni, who was the captain from Boston University. I just want to say that. I love it. He's the one that wrapped himself in the flag at the end of the game, right? I love the school. In any event. So just for my, I know you a bit and I'll talk about how long we've known each other. I've been out and know you well, but for the sake of our listeners, you went from Catholic girl school, high school, got yourself some STEM education, went to BU as a student and now you sit on the Board of Directors. Fill in the period of time. What did you do when you get out of BU or anything at BU that you'd like us to know about? Well, I would say that I, so I studied mechanical engineering with a concentration in manufacturing. So that's my official degree from BU and with a concentration in manufacturing. I then went to this company known as Digital Equipment Corporation when I graduated and I went to a facility called Springfield Operations in Springfield, Massachusetts, which was the western part of the state. You get on route 90 and you just go do west. And so it was a special facility in that Ken Olson, who was the founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, had decided that he was going to create two facilities which were committed to diversity. Yeah, I'm asking these questions even though just out of full transparency, I worked for the same company. We're going to talk about that company in a few minutes. But when was this that the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation or DECK? DECK was this that he committed himself to create these two plants. So well, let me start with the other plant was in Boston. And the other plant is what I would refer to as a low tech plant. I hope I don't insult anyone by saying that. But they built and produced harnesses and cables and connectors, things like that. The spoke plant was a high technology plant. We were responsible for manufacturing, the disk drives for the rainbow computer and the like. So we were a source device manufacturing facility. Our sister plant was in Colorado. We had one in Kaufbier in Germany. Ken, I think got the idea of this and the plant was opened in 1972, I believe. So I think the 50 year anniversary was 2022, so the plant was opened in 1972. I joined in about 10 years, 11 years later. And just to give the listener some context, Ken Olsen was a bigger than life. I believe Swedish American with a religious core to him that I'm guessing drove some of this desire. My understanding was he was a Quaker and was a principal or foundational to who the Quakers are. So this facility was, I hate to put it this way and people might get uncomfortable with this word, but it was mandated to be to Thursday's representation of women in minorities. And not just the production level, but all the way to plant leadership. And I think that was a very important thing to me, I think it was a very important thing, I think it was a very important thing to do, but I think it was a very important thing to do. And I think it was a very important thing to do, I think it was a very important thing to do. And it was a very important thing to do, I think it was a very important thing to do. The deck was flowing with money, and if you came up with an idea to talk about innovation at its core, you came up with a great idea, you got funded to do it. And so I designed robotic workstation for the five and a quarter inch tape drive, I designed clean room conveyor systems for disk drive manufacturing, that doesn't sound like a big wow, but when you think about particle dispersion, I think about it every day, Tony. I know you do. That challenge was a big challenge to be trying to create conveyor systems in a clean room and environment. And so those are the kinds of projects I personally got to work on. And not only that, but I think more importantly, if we as engineers, and I think about the scene in Apollo 13, where failure is not an option, and they bring all the engineers together and they're bringing duct tape, they're bringing, you know, corrugated boxes and everything to try to figure out how to solve this problem. It was much like that at Spowe. If I had a technical problem to solve, all of my engineering colleagues would get together and we would work on it through the night and vice versa. So they taught us collaboration, they taught us leadership, they taught us how to take calculated risks, and they taught us how to politically navigate. So once we had something now, how do you sell it and how do you convince others and bring their hearts and minds along with where you were headed? I tell a quick story of my first week at digital. And again, we did not know each other there, but it illustrates the point. I was hired into corporate HR, corporate personnel to develop a system. And I went to Merrimack, New Hampshire with my boss, Bob Clark, and two other people to present what I was going to do to I think five people in Merrimack. I got my ass handed to me. I mean, it was ugly. And so on the way back, my boss, Bob and my colleagues began telling me about the debt culture and how to do what you just described, how to sell an idea. Okay, big deal. He's my boss. He wants me to be successful. When I got back to my office, there were three voicemails waiting for me from people that had been in that meeting who had kicked my ass saying, Jack, I think you have a great idea. Why don't you come up sometime next week and let's talk about how to sell it? That was the culture of supporting each other. Rare. Yeah. It gets rare today. I really do. I think it's rare. And I think in a lot of ways, digital equipment corporation was ahead of its time. Absolutely. And for those of you that think this was an up with people Walton Mountain at Christmas Time vibe, this company, Tony, correct me if I'm wrong, this company grew three years in a row at the rate of a Fortune 500 company, which means if you took the revenue this year and compared it to last year, just the difference was a Fortune 500 company three years in a row. Yes, it was growing. And unfortunately, it made one fatal mistake and that, you know, that's the lesson learned right in terms of vision in terms of maybe even bias. Yeah. And that was, unfortunately, the leadership felt that computing capability should only be in the hands of scientists and engineers and did not have a vision that you and I could be talking in our homes on a Saturday morning using computing technology. That was the downfall. That one decision was the downfall. Yeah, and it's sad because that company no longer exists. All right, Tony. So now you're working for this company in Springfield. You're experiencing what a supportive culture is like. Take us from there to the next step and hopefully the next inflection point in your career. So I think the next inflection point was how do you shift from being, you know, sort of this technical engineer playing with your robots on a Saturday afternoon? You're a nerd. You don't have anything better to do. And that unfortunately is true. That is the guy I ever heard. To understanding how decisions are made, how investments are made, how the business is run, really. And so my then engineering boss got an opportunity to move to Maynard, which was the headquarters for those who do not know anything about digital equipment corporations history. To be the leader of making these decisions around capital allocation for proposals coming from all over the world, so related to storage device manufacturing. And so he took me with him and I got to review, you know, cases or individuals requests for capital allocation, the kinds of projects they were, they wanted to do looking at that in terms of our portfolio of projects, understanding where those projects would fit with advancing our capabilities, going around the world. And again, I'm like 26, 27, going to Germany, going to the Netherlands, going to Puerto Rico, looking at the manufacturing capabilities and understanding what these engineers wanted to do next. All right. So as a 26 year old Tony in Springfield, Massachusetts, I can imagine a couple of reactions to that offer from your boss, hell no, that sounds scary. That's corporate. I'm not going to do it. I'm comfortable here. I live here. I've got friends here, possibly family here. Hell no. Or tell us what went through your mind when he offered you that opportunity. Okay. When how soon do I need to pack my bags? Yeah. And I think that starts with trust because he hired me into, into digital. He defended me when I had a bad transaction. We can talk about that transaction in a moment, but I think it's important to talk about sponsorship. And then he said, I want to take you so that you can get a broader exposure to the organization. So how fast do I need to pack my bags, right? And I know enough about you to know that what goes around comes around and you have spent time mentoring other people. But for my listeners, obviously they're very smart. They understand the importance of having a mentor like the boss that you just described. But in our lives, when we talk about our purpose, it's also important to pass that on to do for others what's been done for you. Okay. So you said, how long do I have to pack my bags? You now end up in corporate, go. Okay. And so let me start with the bad transaction because you use the term mentorship. And I would say there's another term that I often use in that sponsorship. And so bad transaction, because you know, it's not always flowers and perfume and candy and puppy dogs, you know, they're things that can go wrong. So when I was designing the clean room technology, as things happen, you get organizational changes, you get a new manager, you get someone's promoted, they go do something else. So my immediate manager went on to do something else. And I ended up with a new manager who I think came from PE, but he also was new to digital. So deep, GE, as you can imagine, had a very different culture, hierarchical button down. You don't challenge the boss. You do as they say versus this wild wild west culture of digital equipment corporation. I was on assignment to do this clean room design work and he was taking over the products. And so I was on assignment for a short period of time then I was coming back to that group. So he didn't know anything about me, had worked with me and with the GE mindset, who is this person that's on my budget line employee, you know, budget line, I'm going to get rid of them. So I come back to him. He basically told me I had to justify my existence. And one day he gave me an assignment that I didn't agree with. And so maybe there are two lessons here. One is about courage and standing up for what you believe in. And the other one is about sponsorship. So he insisted I won't go into details about the project. He insisted that I was going to do this and I told him I wasn't. I said it goes against design principles. It goes against our manufacturing process and how we can ethically say that these products meet their specifications and their requirements in terms of not having any infancy failures. And so he just insisted I was going to do this. So Jack, you may remember this culturally when people disagreed, what did they do? Do you remember? Well, I know what I did. I would, I talked to the person I disagreed with and then if they couldn't get on board, I would then work around that person and not in a Machiavellian way. I would typically come to them. I'm just going to get some support. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. And you're probably a little more mature than I was. There was a thing at digital that when you didn't disagree with someone, you threw your badge down. I never had to, but I've heard stories of people that did. I did, I threw my badge, threw it right down and said no. And again, like 25, 26 years old, standing up to your boss like this. But I had no fear. I was like, I can always go home. I can go do something else. I, you know, I'm not doing that. So I picked the badge up, walked out of his office or his cube and went up to the engineering manager. I told you about that. It hired me. And, you know, they were in the ivory tower, you know, just pick up and I told him what I had done. I said I threw my badge today and he just went like this. For those that can't see Tony, she's got both hands wrapped around her head. Right. And he just started shaking his head and he was sitting there and he's like, why do you always do things like this and I said, 'cause the guy is not very bright and that's not what I said. I'm sure it's not. I'm trying to be diplomatic and I said to, I explained the problem and what he asked me to do. And my manager who was a gentleman by the name of Paul Smith, an amazing man said, you're absolutely right. Maybe that wasn't the best way to handle it. But how would you do it? And I gave him my explanation, which was to redesign packaging that would allow for this piece of equipment to ship, without breaking it down after we had tested it. And so he said, here's some money, go get the packaging engineers, go figure it out. Okay, sponsorship to me is when you have someone who actively listens, they still coach and counsel you on maybe how you could have handled things differently. But then they give you the air cover to take the risk you need to take. And that's a little bit different to me than mentorship, which is someone who advises you. That sponsor is going to take a little bit of the heat. Maybe a lot of the heat for when you need that support. So, that gives you an example of, I think, how I try to teach my younger colleagues how to navigate, how to appreciate, how to be smart enough to understand where the tailwinds are. Are the headwinds maybe not the tailwinds. The headwinds are and how they're going to deal with it and look inside of themselves to figure out how they're going to deal with it. And be willing to walk away from something that's against your values or your purpose. Let me tell you my quick digital story. When I was in HR, I was in charge of the systems group that the people that were responsible for you getting your paycheck 52 times a year. And we called it 52 Miracles. We had a contract that we were about to sign for payroll systems. And one of the companies bidding on it was digital's largest customer. And we chose someone else to deliver the contract for a whole bunch of reasons rather. The next thing I know, and you'll recognize this name, I got a call from WinHindle, probably the second most powerful person next to Ken in the company, said Jack, I just got a call from, you can fill in the blank with the name of the company, they're very upset. You didn't choose them for this contract and you tell me why. And I took about five minutes and told him why. And he said, I totally agree, thanks Jack, take care. And that was it. That is another example of air cover, which I think is missing a lot today in organizations. You're more likely to get thrown under the bus if you do something that's rubbed certain people the wrong way. Okay. And you're absolutely right. So when I'm on panel discussions or spending time with individuals, I always say, when you go into a situation, I have three simple questions. The first question is, and whether it's a new job, whether it's a new job opportunity, whether it's board of directors opportunity, you ask yourself three simple questions. Or at least I do. The first one is, how am I creative? How am I uniquely contributing to this ecosystem? The second question is, what am I going to learn from? What excites me about it? And the third question is, do the values of this whatever ecosystem align with the values of my own? Three simple questions, and they are germane to how I make decisions. And for our younger listeners, if that last one, the question of value seems a bit excessive and shouldn't be a reason you would turn down an opportunity. I have to say, in my career and Tony, and we're hearing it from Tony now, if your values are not in alignment with the organization, you may not pay the price tomorrow, but you will pay the price over the course of your career and you will suffer dramatically. And I couldn't agree more. So I keep those core values really close to me, and they're around a sense of community. It's about character. It's about contribution. So all of those things are underneath that third question. And when I first joined digital, I saw the company philosophy on the wall of every conference room. And if any of you out there have worked for organizations, this is usually some BS statement put together by some consultant. No one ever reads it. No one ever pays attention to it. Tony, correct me if I'm wrong. It was like 10 points and the 10th point was, the 10th item was regardless of what's written above, always do the right thing. Yes. And that drove the culture. That's right. That's right. So I'm going to jump around a little bit. I would love for you to continue talking about your journey, but I want to go back because especially these days, it's particularly important, I think, for us to discuss. You were brought into the Springfield plant and I'm going to say I'm not sure what the ratio is, but part of it was your education, having a degree from BU in mechanical engineering. And part of it may have been your race and gender. And when you reflect on that and you look at what's happening today in terms of diversity, education, equity and affirmative action being thrown under the Supreme Court bus, tell me a little bit about your thoughts as to what that will mean going forward for this country. Yes. And, you know, none of us have the answer, right? I still think it comes back to one simple thing. And that is, if you're in an organization, you should ask the question of, why does that organization exist and who does it serve? And I don't mean that from a philanthropic standpoint only, I mean it from a business standpoint. So, who does it serve? And who are you generating revenue from? And if you look at simple demographics and demographics are shifting, how can you just exclude certain demographic categories? I mean, it's just simple, it's not simple, but it's math to me, it's just remove the emotion from it and think about it in terms of a logical problem to solve. And so that's the way I try to have the conversation, which is if I am in and consumer business is probably the easiest consumer business in retail, well, I getting my unfair share of someone's wallet and how do I reach their heart in mind so that I get their unfair share of wallet? And so, you know, you can get rid of diversity programs, you can get rid of affirmative action, but at some point, if you're going to exclude groups of individuals and however they represent it, it's going to impact the bottom line. And I have to tell you, Tony, when I joined deck and looked around me and saw the number of people that are typically marginalized and that includes color and gender, and I began gently asking, first of all, my heritage is Lebanese Americans, so I think I've always been sensitive to that. And when I began gently asking about how this came to be, the answer I never got is, well, we have an affirmative action program, and but the answer was, we know from our experience that having that kind of diversity is great business. Let's not even look outside our four walls at a customer base, let's just look at who's making a difference in this company, and it's the diversity of thought. It's people being willing to throw their badge down on the table based on their principles, and that's what drove it. And I don't think I've ever been around an organization that was built on those principles the way the digital was. That's right. And to your point, I don't know for some reason, I think this is where bias can set in, fear can set in, but to your point, that doesn't mean because it's a diverse group of individuals, you're compromising quality and standards. And I have, I've been in rooms where people think that that's what you're going to compromise. No, we get the best in the brightest. We get the people with the highest potential. We get people that are creative thinkers, problem solvers. That's what we should be looking for, right? And so, you know, if we dial it forward, when I left deck, I left deck in '91 and joined Deloitte and Tush. And then, back then, when I joined Deloitte, interestingly enough, it wasn't extremely diverse. It was diverse, but not extremely diverse. And I joined our Cleveland practice, and I had these Maverick partners, and they didn't care who you were, they would throw you at it. And so, again, culturally, it was what I was used to, and to the day I retired, I mean, actually, email came out yesterday, those same partners, who are all retired now, along with me, we stay in touch and we get on a phone call about every two or three months, and someone gets an article in, you know, in the Wall Street Journal, they'll send it out to the rest of us, and it's still a community, and I think that's what's so important is it's a community. Yeah. And you and I both know that that is the same for people that worked for digital. In fact, you and I met basically through the digital Facebook page, and through my online business called Dexwag. I thought I'd put a plug in there, folks, Dexwag. But I want to go back to why it's important not to exclude people. And one of the reasons for that, and I just heard this term the other day, you may be familiar with it, we've all heard the term meritocracy, and that is hiring people based on their merit. The term I heard the other day, which I think is the problem if we don't push diversity, is mirror, M-I-R-O-R, mirrorocracy, and that is if they're all, and I'll put a point on it, all white men making the decisions, and we don't have a mindset of hiring the best, we may just hire people like us. And a lot of managers, and I know you know this, are guilty of hiring people who think exactly the way they do, because they don't want to be challenged. They don't want a badge being tossed down on their desk. And if you look at the failure of many, many companies, I think we can trace it back, either the moral, or the financial failings. We can trace it back to the lack of diversity. Talk to us about, and this is going to intersect with the personal interest I have, which you know about, but talk to us about your dissertation, because I think it relates to this topic. I think that's right, and so I just successfully defended in November. I actually have an ISBN number, so it's officially published. And we're now calling you Doctor Tony. We're now calling me Doctor, which I'm still trying to get used to the title. I'm passionate about education. I think it is the great equalizer. I was afforded the opportunity to be the president of Delight Foundation, whose mission is focused on equity through education. And so spending a lot of time making decisions about how we invest dollars into education supporting various school programs and the like, I realized how important it was to your point earlier to think about all groups and whether or not they had an equitable opportunity for education. And so as I spent time doing this, I realized I went to the NCES, the National Educational Statistics Source by the government, and realized that black males were of any demographic group had the lowest success in higher education, whether that was based on a graduation rate of four years or a GPA, but if you compare them to any other groups that that source analyzes, they have the lowest success rate. So as I was thinking about pursuing an advanced degree, I decided to do it in education and decided that I wanted to study why, and there's a lot of research out there that says black males are approached from a deficit standpoint and isn't something that is necessarily considers what they need to be successful. And so three pilot programs were put in place at Delaware State, Howard University in North Carolina, A&T, so I picked one of those schools to be the subject. The pilot program was an integrated intervention program called the black male initiative, which focused on uniquely understanding their challenges and then curating programming or support mechanisms to help them be successful. One component of that was mental health, culturally a lot of men in general, but black men don't want to address mental health challenges. And so what was really rewarding as I was doing the research on this particular school and their program was how the men actually do acknowledge that challenge and how they're supporting one another and they're putting wellness programs in place. So they're taking their own agency and supporting one another. Who is providing the driving force for that? Was it the students or staff or a company? What you're finding is the students are, it's called an agentic engagement. They are advancing their own agents taking ownership. And so the school has created a structure where they have a director dedicated to this program who happens to be a black male and who has an advanced degree, a doctorate in education as well. They have study groups, they have study hall two or three times a week with peer support one another from a study standpoint. So the advanced or the upperclassmen are helping the junior classmen around certain courses. They have engagement activities where companies come and meet with them. A former alum come who are successful to tell them how they've navigated. They have programming where they do social things. And like I said, the mental health one, they've had mental health days. They're starting to create those themselves and they do a lot around career preparation. So preparing for internships, interviewing skills, preparing their resumes. And so all of those things are coming together. Yeah. And to the point where the dean will say, we've got ten students who are doing academically well, but they're $5,000 short in terms of their tuition, from a rally to get tuition funding for these students. Yeah. Let me pull on that thread a little bit and talk about, there's another thing that we're working on in this podcast. And that is the pandemic of loneliness that is in the country today. And so I'm just going to make, of course, you know, I'm going to do this, Tony. You know, be well enough to make it about Jack for a minute. When I was an undergraduate in engineering school, there was, there was nothing about my demographic that would suggest that I would feel lonely, isolated, isolated, exactly the word I was going to use, isolated. And my mental health, quite frankly, I can remember spending most of my time either scared or depressed. And there wasn't anyone to talk about this with because everyone else around me appeared to be doing just fine, thank you. My grades were good, but I didn't think anyone else was feeling the way I was feeling. And for you to describe how these young men have created a community for themselves and to be able to discuss what they're feeling, to be able to help each other academic is simply amazing to me when I look at it through the lens of my education and my, my youth. Right. And you're absolutely right. I will add a component to that, which is in my research. We talked about isolation. We talked about loneliness, you know, a lot of these gentlemen are first generation college attendees. Right. So they don't have anyone back at home that knows what college life is about, knows what there has an understanding of what their experiencing. Many of them had even expressed that when they were in high school, they didn't really have to work that hard. They were smart. Mm-hmm. A lot of people weren't as ambitious as they were. They didn't really have to work that hard, and then all of a sudden they get here. And oh boy, and my challenge, I wasn't prepared for this. And so, so that whole notion of student preparedness came into play. But equally, this whole notion of the reason why this program is so important to me is that I'm with like-minded people, encourage me. I'm not isolated, right? Once I got into this program, I realized I wasn't alone. I wasn't the one feeling depressed or feeling isolated or feeling lonely, right? Because I have individuals who are having similar experiences. If I did bad on a test, hey man, there's another day. It's working on it harder next time. I screwed when up last week. That was my turn. This is your turn. We'll get through it together. Exactly. Yeah. And again, I want to pull on that thread because I believe the statistics that three out of five people in this country are lonely. I'm going to be interviewing a group of 20-somethings this coming week who, through my experience with them, have found ways to come together as a community, a very informal community. To overcome loneliness. And what you're describing, the ability to put some sort of informal infrastructure and formal infrastructure around these people, I think is critically important. I think you've told us about where your sense of purpose comes from, but just to sort of wrap it up in a digestible bundle. Tell us about your sense of purpose and what you traced that back to in your life. Well, I think my sense of purpose is that whatever resources I have, if I can touch individuals, heart, mind, make a difference, that's my sense of purpose. So it doesn't have to be magnitudes of people or these big, fancy programs. If I can touch one person's life and they say, you made a difference in my life, that's worth it to me. It comes from my parents at the end of the day. I know that sounds a little cliche, but they were always volunteering. They were always giving. They were always helping. And it was just learned. It was something that was a part of who we were. So it's just natural to who I am. And my, by the way, again, for our listeners, especially our younger listeners. So one way this happens is you learn from your parents, from the people around you. Your family about what it means to be a human being and what it means to care. I had some of that in my family, but a lot of what drives me is my experience as a younger man, some of which I described during my college years and not wanting anyone else to have to go through that. So on a daily basis, and I've talked about this in a prior episode, you cannot shut me up when I encounter someone that gives me an excuse to talk to them, whether they're wearing a t-shirt with something that I recognize or whatever it is. And I can't tell you how many times I have felt better from doing that. And you can see a perceptible difference in the other person. It doesn't have to be huge programs to do it. It has to be paying attention to the fact that we're all basically three years old and all we want is our blanky because we're all hurting at one level or another. To reach out with the humanity that you just described around the college students to reach out to someone else is so fulfilling, not only for them, but for you, you'll get so much more from it. I agree with that. I, again, comes from my parents within my capacity. I'll try to help anyone, maybe sometimes to a fault, but I don't try to solve their problem. Yes. I try to help them, again, to your point around critical thinking. Even in our lives, we need to apply critical thinking. And so I try to help them map out, where are you? What's around you? What's the environment like? How are you reacting to that environment and what actions are you taking? And are those actions beneficial or not? And only you can choose. My dad used to say to me, the only person you can control in a situation is yourself. So, it's how you're going to show up. Yep. And I see so many people, Tony, who are suffering because they, and this is one of my messages to my listeners, they watch the nightly news, then they watch the eight o'clock news, and then they watch whatever, whatever, whatever, and they take on all of the troubles and all the problems of the world and get completely wrapped around the axle. And don't step back and do what you just described. That is, what can I personally do? What can I affect? And it doesn't have to be a world peace. It could be changing the life of a neighbor or a colleague of work, or even changing your own life. Or your own. Because at the end of the day, it's sometimes we're our own worst enemy. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Tony, I'm looking at the clock, I have, I normally ask this question. I'm going to ask you, and then I'm going to ask you a form of this question. What advice would you give to the 20-year-old Tony? I think the advice I would give to the 20-year-old Tony is keep the same big heart. But understand your value more. Yeah, so acceptance, I think, when you're a 20-year-old, is something that a lot of us face in terms of, does this group accept me? Can I get in this sorority? All of those kinds of things, right? You're good with who you are. Okay, so the question I've never asked anyone on this podcast, I asked you about what advice you'd give to the 20-year-old Tony, what advice would you give to the 80-year-old Jack? Keep doing what you're doing. Live life fully every day. As a friend says to me, find joy every day. And so just keep me in Jack. That's the advice. It's all a guy. It's all a guy. Tony, thank you so much. I love talking to you, and it's been great seeing you. Thank you so much. Thanks. That concludes today's episode. And just a reminder that you can view more information about this podcast and our guests at the website from 0 to 80.com. Again, no spaces, and the word 0 is spelled out, and 80 is the number 80. So that's from 0 to 80.com. We love hearing from you, and you can email me at Jack@from0 to 80.com. And most importantly, please tell your friends about our podcast. The more followers we have, the more likely it is that we will produce more episodes. Thanks and be well.