Professor Avi Loeb (Host)

That's a bad practice.

I don't surround myself just with people who agree with me.

I want to hear the other side.

And at the end of the process, if you see the other side conceding and siding with me, you will know that we made progress.

So that's the way you should look at it.

And I hope we will be there on a relatively short time frame.

I hope...

the committee will make important advances and by the way it all depends on the information that is being shared with us obviously we will make the best lemonade out of the lemons we we are handed uh and so the the rate of progress will depend on

the level of cooperation we get from government.

But I have a lot of good connections within government.

I've been leading a lot of institutes, committees, boards over the last decade and a half at the national level and also at the university level.

And so I have a lot of experience managing groups of people and getting the best out of the system that I operate within.

And one trademark that I have is my style of leadership where I'm transparent and everyone knows where I stand and nobody thinks that I'm manipulating them.

I'm talking about people who work with me.

And they're not people that do not know me.

People who do not know me will always say toxic things just because they don't know me.

But the people who work with me will tell you that I'm always transparent, straightforward, and they have their trust in me.

And as a result of that,

uh the work is far more efficient that's why i served three terms as chair of the astronomy department at harvard the longest serving chair it never happened before three terms of three years because my constituency had a lot of trust in me and i didn't need to waste any time in telling them stories we just work together very effectively and the same is true of many boards and committees i chaired the board on physics and astronomy of the national academies

in the United States.