Well, the video is lost. But my friend Ben Pace (do you know him? he is great) was kind enough to take notes on what he said specifically in response to my question.
My question was something like: “Why do you think some people are afraid of retaliation from you? Have you made any threats? Have you ever retaliated against a Leverage associate?” This is not the exact wording but close enough. I used the words “spiteful, retaliatory, or punishing” so he repeats that in his answer.
I also explicitly told him he didn’t have to answer any of these questions, like I wasn’t demanding him to answer them.
I am pasting Geoff’s response below.
Great questions.
Um.
Off the top of my head I don’t recall spiteful retaliatory or punishing actions. Um. I do think that I… There’s gotta be some other category of actions taken in anger where… I can think of angry remarks that I’ve made, absolutely. I can think of some actions that don’t pertain to Leverage associates that after thinking about for a while I realized there was something I was pretty angry about. In general I try to be really constructive, there’s definitely, let’s see, so… There’s definitely a mode that, it’s like, I like to think of all sorts of different possibilities of things to do, for example this was for EAG a while back, we were going to go and table at EAG and see if there’s anyone who is good to hire, we received word from CEA that we weren’t allowed to table there, super mad about that because we created the EA Summit series and handed it to CEA, being disinvited from the thing we started, I was really mad “let’s go picket and set up in front of EAG and tell people about htis”, y’know a number of people responded to that suggestion really negatively, and… Maybe the thing I want to say is I think there’s something like appropriate levels of response, and the thing I really want to do is to have appropriate levels of response. It’s super hard to never get mad or never be insulted but the thing I try super hard to do is to get to the point where there’s calibrated response. So maybe y’know there’s something in there… I have been in fact rly surprised when people talked about extreme retaliation, I’m like “What.” (!).
There’s definitely a line of thought I’ve seen around projects where they deal with important things, where people are like “The project is so important we must do anything to protect it” which I don’t agree with, y’know, I shut down Leverage because I talked to someone who was suffering too much and I was like “No” and then that was that.
Anna made a relevant follow-up question. She said something like: I expect picketing to be [a more balanced response] because it’s a public action. What about [non-public] (hidden) acts of retaliation?
I saw some of his reaction to this before my internet cut out again. (I think he could have used a hug in that moment… or maybe just me, maybe I could use a hug right now.) 😣
From the little glimpses I got (pretty much only during the first hour Q&A section), I got this sense (this is my own feelings and intuitions speaking):
I did not sense him being ‘in cooperate mode’ on the object level, but he seemed to be ‘picking cooperate’ on a meta level. He was trying to act according to good principles. E.g. by doing the video at all, and the way he tried to answer Qs by saying only true things. He tried not to come from a defensive place.
He seemed to keep to his own ‘side of the street’. Did not try to make claims about others, did not really offer models of others, did not speculate. I think he may have also been doing the same thing with the people in the chat? (I dunno tho, I didn’t see 90%.) Seems ‘cleaner’ to do it this way and avoids a lot of potential issues (like saying something that’s someone else’s to say). But meh, it’s also too bad we didn’t get to see his models about the people.
Well, the video is lost. But my friend Ben Pace (do you know him? he is great) was kind enough to take notes on what he said specifically in response to my question.
My question was something like: “Why do you think some people are afraid of retaliation from you? Have you made any threats? Have you ever retaliated against a Leverage associate?” This is not the exact wording but close enough. I used the words “spiteful, retaliatory, or punishing” so he repeats that in his answer.
I also explicitly told him he didn’t have to answer any of these questions, like I wasn’t demanding him to answer them.
I am pasting Geoff’s response below.
Anna made a relevant follow-up question. She said something like: I expect picketing to be [a more balanced response] because it’s a public action. What about [non-public] (hidden) acts of retaliation?
I saw some of his reaction to this before my internet cut out again. (I think he could have used a hug in that moment… or maybe just me, maybe I could use a hug right now.) 😣
From the little glimpses I got (pretty much only during the first hour Q&A section), I got this sense (this is my own feelings and intuitions speaking):
I did not sense him being ‘in cooperate mode’ on the object level, but he seemed to be ‘picking cooperate’ on a meta level. He was trying to act according to good principles. E.g. by doing the video at all, and the way he tried to answer Qs by saying only true things. He tried not to come from a defensive place.
He seemed to keep to his own ‘side of the street’. Did not try to make claims about others, did not really offer models of others, did not speculate. I think he may have also been doing the same thing with the people in the chat? (I dunno tho, I didn’t see 90%.) Seems ‘cleaner’ to do it this way and avoids a lot of potential issues (like saying something that’s someone else’s to say). But meh, it’s also too bad we didn’t get to see his models about the people.