Claude Steele

Yes.

I have a story about Miles Davis and Gil Evans, who are two great jazz artists of the 20th century.

Miles Davis is a cool, hardened African-American trumpet player, probably the best of that century, if you want my opinion.

Gil Evans is a

from rural Canada, a band leader, a white, tall, skinny guy.

He's kind of square.

He's eating radishes out of a brown paper bag in these sophisticated jazz clubs in New York City.

But they really became...

absolute best friends and that friendship was is is rooted in the concrete connection that they're both very open to their shared humanity even though they're very different kinds of people and come from very different backgrounds with different orientations and have maybe even have different interests maybe even have conflicting interests

Miles Davis is very concerned about his sort of propriety about the employment of African-American jazz musicians at the time.

Gil Evans is not African-American.

But they jump over those differences because they're not trying to prove to each other that they're not prejudiced or they're not distracted by those things.

They really

want to help each other in their goals and in their careers.

And that attitude of listening closely to each other and trying to be responsive to each other's needs establishes a profoundly close relationship between the two.

But I also think a lot of us Americans have relationships that go across identity divides that one might think of as prohibitive, but that we learn to just connect very elementally to each other, to listen to each other.

That formula, focusing there on that kind of behavior, returning to emails, being timely, trying to, those things just wipe aside these identity differences and the worries that make up churn.

Those elemental behaviors that connect us to each other, like, I like that guy.

That guy hears who I am.

He hears what I'm concerned about.