***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***

[00:00:28] Mahan Tavakoli: Anu Gupta. Welcome to partnering leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. 

[00:00:34] Anu Gupta: Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be here. 

[00:00:36] Mahan Tavakoli: Can't wait to get some of your insights and talk about your book, Breaking Bias, where stereotypes and prejudices come from, and the science backed method to unravel them.

Before we get to that, though, Anu, we'd love to know a little bit more about you. Whereabouts did grow up and how did your upbringing impact the kind of person you've become? 

[00:01:00] Anu Gupta: Absolutely. Thank you so much. First of all, to everyone who's listening and for being a part of this conversation. I think for me, this book is really a product of my life's work.

It's also a product of my life's journey. I've had a really unique upbringing. I was born in India and my family immigrated to the US when I was 10 years old. Since moving to the US, particularly right before going to college, I've lived in a bunch of other places from Myanmar and Taiwan to South Korea, Singapore India, of course, the UK, Mexico.

So just have had a really global lens on understanding the topic that we're talking about, which is bias. So I grew up in India, grew up in a, I would say upper middle class family Hindu family. And just growing up, I just felt a sense of tension. I was in Delhi that was rooted in a lot of different human identities, particularly gender, right?

My mom, who's a surgeon she worked all day, but she was also expected to do a lot of housework, come and cook and take care of us. But my dad wasn't. He too worked, but he came home and he was just lounging in front of the TV or getting to hang out with his friends. So I saw those double standards that were quite apparent around the lens of gender, but also around class and something that I discovered in college, caste, which I wasn't familiar with at all growing up in India and even going up with the U.

S. afterward. After moving to the U. S. Of course I was the same exact kid that I was in India. Suddenly tables turned and I became an untouchable within my community because of the way I spoke because of my skin color, because of my name and a lot of perceptions people had about who I am because I'm Indian or Hindu descent and , a whole host of things.

So for me, as a recent immigrant, I just shoved everything within me and just did what I was told to do by my parents, by my teachers. This was like the 1990s, right? And then just study hard, excel, do your best and prove them wrong. That's what I did. And I did that really well.

After nine 11, the name calling got a little bit worse because it wasn't just people in my immediate circle. It would be strangers coming up to me, calling me Osama bin Laden and telling me to go back to where I came from. But I would just like, you know what? It's okay.

People have their reasons. Just being the good Asian immigrant I was, I, Continue to just do that work. Things really hit home for me when I went to law school. This was about 15 years ago. I was a second year law student and in law school, everything we're doing, whether it's talking about criminal justice or contracts or torts, a lot of the substantive laws of our country were built upon, , our history of really dark history around enslavement and the forcible removal of indigenous people and Chinese exclusion acts.

But it was very little acknowledgement of the experience of bias that people had within the legal classroom. And when I would share from my personal example, I would feel really unsafe and oftentimes gaslit, like denial of my emotional experience. And that hit home for me and basically made me feel like maybe I'm crazy.

Maybe the world outside me is great and it's me who's the problem. The beginning of my second year law student, I found myself on the ledge of my 18th floor window about to jump off. Literally standing there, I was going to jump onto the Midtown Manhattan traffic below me. But, this is where the mystery of grace comes into play, because I actually don't know what happened.

But instead of falling forward, I fell backward into my apartment. And for me, that moment was like, Oh, crap. What was I going to do? So I immediately called someone who happened to be walking in my neighborhood. And she came over to my apartment, talked me down, probably six to eight hours.

And I went to, the NYU, counseling center the next day. And that's where my journey began, really my journey of breaking biases within myself, because that lifetime of experiences trained me in certain, stories, false stories about who I am and who I'm supposed to be. And that affected the way I saw myself and how I saw others.

And that journey of breaking bias within then became a professional colleague when I when I started sharing my story with other folks, They were like, me too. This has happened to me as well. Like I've suffered so much. And then of course, witnessing inequities and injustices, but more than that, the inefficiencies, right?

The loss of talent all rooted in this idea of bias. So for me, that's where the calling began. I started my company 10 years ago. And the book came out of that really organically piecing together the story of what bias is. How we're not really wired for it, but how we're trained and learning bias.

And then, of course, how can we unlearn bias using the best of modern neuroscience? But also ancient wisdom, right? This isn't something that science has discovered. It's something that science has given language to, but our species has known for thousands of years.

[00:05:46] Mahan Tavakoli: I love your origin story. It's obvious that you haven't written a book to write a book and to be an author, you've written a book to make a difference and your story helps convey that.

 The pendulum to a certain extent to have swung, where a lot of people say, why is it that it's now only the experiences of a certain sub segment of society that needs to be prioritized or understood what would you say? To that, before we talk about how we can discover some of those stereotypes and prejudices to address. 

[00:06:26] Anu Gupta: Yeah. It's such a beautiful question and it's an important one, right? Because just imagine if you're a child growing up in an abusive household and every day you're told you're ugly, you're stupid, you're beaten.

And then you grow up as an adult, you're 20 years old, but you have 20 years of conditioning where you've been told you're basically anathema to our existence, and then you're told, Oh, just forget about all that. You're fine now. Move on. Like, how would that feel? Of course you can't move on, right?

Because part of it is that our brains and our nervous systems, that person has been wired by that conditioning. And that's very similar. I'm just giving an example at an individual level, what happens in our nervous system and in our brains. And, logically we know that we're okay, we're alive and we can move on, but our emotions don't catch up.

And that's what I would say to the folks is that actually most people want to move on. They don't want to be in pain. Most people don't want to be living and reliving and their traumas, but they can't. And this is really important because oftentimes we think that bias is rational. It's logical, right?

And we can fix it with policies. We can fix it with beautiful language. We can fix it with slogans. Or we can fix it with science. And if we could, it wouldn't be a problem. Like our society is being torn apart because of bias. Because we haven't gotten to the root of the problem, which is that bias is emotional and in order to address this challenge, we have to meet it where it's at, which is that the cause of this is really pain.

Feeling other feeling, but one isn't good enough at an individual level, but then that gets extrapolated within families within communities. So really starting there. For me my saving grace ultimately was discovering this idea of neuroplasticity that, I took a course in mindfulness based stress reduction, for example, really rooted in the neuroscience that Oh, wow, if we practice these tools, we can actually rewire our brains, we can rewire the ways we think we can rewire the ways we are with one another with ourselves.

And that's what's reassuring and what we can do. And the last thing I would say is. For the folks that want to say, let's move on. Yes, it's happened. That's a bad part of our history. But I think part of it is like when we say that there's a negative emotion under it that we don't want to feel because it makes us feel guilty or ashamed of our own association with, whatever group we're a part of.

And that's basically what we need to get comfortable with. Because if we continue just as people do with trauma, like all these awful things happen to me, but I'm just going to suffocate it, repress it within me, it's going to manifest in so many other ways. Physical ailments, mental ailments, challenges with our spouses, with our friends, with our kids.

So we have to address it, we have to heal it. And healing it actually doesn't have to be that hard, right? And this is what we want to talk about. The science and ancient wisdom gives us the ways to do this in a way that feels incredibly kind, incredibly useful, incredibly, I would say soul giving.

But in addition to that, it gives us the opportunity to really imagine who we can be individually, having that peace of mind, sense of purpose within, but also who we can be within our workplaces, within our communities, within our families. 

[00:09:49] Mahan Tavakoli: To be able to do that, Anu, we first have to understand where these things come from.

 As humans, we were used to being in tribes of 150, anything beyond that, then they are the other, and we found reasons for othering. So where do stereotypes and prejudices Come from order then for us to be able to try to understand and address them.

[00:10:14] Anu Gupta: It's such a great question. And I go into this in the book, so I really look at. History that we have recorded history in the last 10, 000 years, but also going to a lot of, , origin stories of a lot of indigenous nations and indigenous stories, including my own right within the Vedic tradition within the Buddhist tradition within Sufi traditions and understanding just beyond what the Western sciences have created this idea.

The tribes used to exist with 150 people. Yes, some tribes did, but we don't have concrete evidence to that. These are theories, , there's this beautiful parable that in each one of us, an evil wolf and a good wolf,

and the good wolf within us is. The one that feeds us with compassion with kindness, with understanding and the bad wolf is really greedy and selfish and competitive. wolf that's gonna win is the one we feed. So where the mind goes attention flows, 

so that's really our opportunity. And there have been many societies, particularly in animist and indigenous traditions that lived with one another in peace, that were rooted in what's known as inclusion paradigm, inclusion, consciousness, interdependence, understanding, compassion.

And then there were some that were rooted in competition and hatred, like the one you were talking about in group, out group. The way I define bias is that it's a learned habit.

It's a learned mental habit that distorts how we perceive, reason, remember, and make decisions, there are two types of biases. There are unconscious biases, and then there are conscious biases. Conscious biases are learned. False beliefs still a mental habit, but it's a false belief. Someone looks at me, 

they know that I'm gay, or I'm an immigrant, or I'm a new Indian. They have a whole host of associations about me without knowing who I actually am. And unconscious biases learned habits. So this is really at the unconscious level, like when we look at media, the way certain humans are being portrayed, the way women are being portrayed, for example, a lot of times in a very sexualized manner, those associations are being made to human bodies, but at a subliminal level, and that impacts the way we perceive ourselves and others, how we reason about ourselves and others, and then how we make decisions and also how we remember. So that's what bias itself is. And because it's learned, it can be unlearned.

[00:12:25] Mahan Tavakoli: That's why what you just mentioned, the new becomes even more important that mindfulness, which is part of your neuroscience based toolkit as well.

I want to touch on that. I love . You've all know Harari's writing and some of his thoughts and what he talks about is that with AI, that mindfulness becomes even more critical now at a time when AI can get to know us really well.

[00:12:55] Anu Gupta: It's so true. In his book, 21 lessons by 21st century, he mentions , mindfulness is one of the things we will need in this century. And I couldn't agree with him more. He's one of the three books that inspired my book itself, reading through sapiens. I've read it maybe 10 times and listened to another dozen times because it gave me permission to think in deep time.

Because as someone who was trained as a lawyer, as a legal academic, I was always told to just focus on my discipline and just think about that one, sub issue of a sub issue and comment on it. But reading his work, I was like, Oh, wow. We can actually expand the field a little bit and try to understand this from that lens.

And what I discovered through my research is that what we're calling mindfulness. is something humans have been doing across traditions, whether it's spiritual tradition or religious tradition, animist or non animist countries and societies. And basically it is our power to be aware,

you mentioned PRISM. So PRISM is this somatically informed neuroscience based toolkit I created. That's an acronym for five tools. And the basis of PRISM is mindfulness. So each of the five letters in PRISM stands for a tool, but it starts from M and goes up to P, which is perspective taking. So with mindfulness, we become aware of what the message is, who the messenger is, why are they creating this message?

 And then also its impact on my body thematically, right? If you read news or watch videos that are hateful, there is a certain thematic reaction to that in our bodies. Can we become aware of that? Simultaneously, if you watch something that, is, showing us kindness, something that's compassion Oh, wow, that feels differently in my body. So really becoming aware and that's where it starts, and when it comes to this idea of bias, we become mindful of what arises in our mind when we're around a certain type of a person, let's say a person in a wheelchair.

What are the assumptions we're making? Someone who, wears a hijab. What are the assumptions we're making? Someone who wears a turban, someone who's dark skin, light skin, man, woman, non binary, you name it. And then we can just become aware of it. There's no shame in it. One of the challenges with a lot of the backlash we've experienced around these issues over the last couple of years is because the way it's been done.

It's not about the end goal, because we are diverse as a human species, that's why the United Nations was created. That's why our country was created. We acknowledge diversity. We each are diverse and we are diverse as a species. That's the way these conversations have been done, which has been laden with shame, been laden with guilt.

And it's been very anecdotal, so it's felt exclusive, like it's about one person's experience, one type of people's experience without acknowledging our common humanity. That's been my fear, actually, for 10 years that I've been doing this work, which is why I felt like I had to write this book now.

So let me go back to the prison toolkit. So we start with mindfulness, become aware of stereotypes, and then we go to ask stereotype replacement. So the second you notice that, oh, wow, there's a negative stereotype that I have about this person, you replace it with a counterexample. That's real life, right?

So in the lab, let's say if you're with Black men and something negative is coming up, you replace it with an image of Dr. Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela, or Desmond Tutu, all Black men, but they're not living up to that story, that false story that we have learned. Then we move to individuation, and this is really great because individuation is a bridge between the mental practice of mindfulness and stereotype replacement to more like body based practice.

Individuation is really decoupling these group based associations from the individual. So if I'm with Anu, I'm with Anu, the human that he is, versus my ideas of Anu because of his color or his gender or something else, and then also feel what that feels like in the body. Oh, there's a little bit of uncertainty.

I've never met someone who's Indian. I've never met someone who's gay. I've never met someone who's both, right? How does that feel in the body, and then we move to heart practices, which is prosocial behaviors, which are exactly what it sounds like. So behaviors that are prosocial, things like actively cultivating loving kindness, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, generosity, and a whole host of mental states that are positive.

People are like that just feels so weird. And it's it was a little woo and cuckoo. It's the science around this is pretty clear. Stanford medical school has a whole center dedicated to studying these positive emotions. So does the university of Wisconsin in Madison, and what practicing and cultivation of these skills, these tools is doing changing the underlying affect the emotional aspect. So oftentimes we think about bias from a head based way. Great. , we can bridge the information gap, correct misinformation, but that emotional landscape beneath it of fear, which a lot of tech companies play off of that remains.

So what these tools try to do is help us feel safe with ourselves and with one another. And then we move to perspective taking, which is, a capacity that so many of us have, cause we all watch media. And actors do this really well when they portray other people, sometimes you go to a show or watch a movie and we get goosebumps.

We're watching a fictional story, but the actor who's performing has embodied the life experience of this other being, so powerful. And that's basically imagining what it's like to be in the shoes of another being, not how we would want them, but how they actually were given the causes and conditions of their life.

And they're not special. They're humans like we are. We can build these skills and the science around this is so clear that it takes about three to eight weeks of daily practice to build a habit. So we can practice these prism tools and literally break bias within a month or two, but it requires regular practice and commitment.

[00:18:50] Mahan Tavakoli: I absolutely love The prism tools that you have a new, because what you have done with this is taken something that is a lot of times talked about conceptually from a principal perspective and broken it down to practices that we can engage in as individuals in order for us to conceptually agreeing.

. It enables us to actually do something about it to make progress on our own levels. That's what I most appreciate about it. 

[00:19:28] Anu Gupta: Yeah, thank you. That was really important to me, and one of the challenges that I've experienced, and , I was trained as a human rights lawyer, 

and then social scientists going into legal academia, never thought that I would move into this industry of, breaking bias , mental health and DEI, but it just happened, that's where I was placed. And I don't know if I'll remain in there, but my ultimate purpose is really to give people tools so they can feel more connected to themselves and one another.

And really save on the costs of bias. Let's not forget, particularly if you're a business owner, if you're a business leader, bias is really expensive. It costs so much money. It's really inefficient for, our people to have bias. And oftentimes, I meet with business leaders.

They're like that's why we're creating AI. I'm like, that's even worse because what's happening is that the data sets upon which these algorithms are being built are flawed because they're rooted in the biases of the humans that created them. So this is why , we need to get this right.

Otherwise, we're going to be in a whole lot of trouble.

[00:20:30] Mahan Tavakoli: And AI whether for the applicant tracking systems or other tools, it has drawn from a large data set and it has inferred biases that you might not have thought of before yourself.

Exactly. 

[00:20:47] Anu Gupta: It's so true. I'll give three examples, like someone named Deshaun, generally an African American name, the person has all the degrees, has great, resume, but because the data set found, 20, 000 other Deshauns with a criminal history, this one candidate.

Was rejected, this is just an example, right? So basically it impacts this person. It impacts the company who couldn't hire great contact facial recognition technology. This is still a problem. Driverless cars driving over. black and brown people because they can't see them because it wasn't coded in because the person designing it didn't think about, as we see with any and all Hollywood movies about black and brown people.

And I'll go on a side track there. So this past weekend, I went to see the most, recent despicable me series. My nieces really wanted to see it. It was really fun. We had a great time, they loved the minions, but it was so interesting because in the previews. With the exception of the Pharrell movie that's going to come out at some point later this year.

All the movies were with white people and that's it. And even in the entire film, Despicable Me, there were no characters of color other than like a few here and there in the background. And I was like, wow, like we're a country that's almost 45 percent of color. And there's no representation of any of us, , whether we're Asian American or Black or Indigenous or mixed race.

So it was just interesting, and I'm pretty sure that people that are creating these movies aren't consciously like, Oh, we want to make sure that black and brown people are not in this film, but they're just not thinking about it. But it has a huge impact on so many people across the board, millions around the world and how they feel about themselves.

And how they feel about others, like who is human and who isn't. 

[00:22:30] Mahan Tavakoli: And you do address the impact of whether it is policy or media on our biases. One of the things I want to get your thoughts on, Anu, is that, , I love the PRISM toolkit that you have shared with respect to the journey we can go on.

I wonder if it is a journey we can bring other people. On as well. So as a team leader, bring the team as a CEO, bring the rest of the organization, because part of the backlash that I've seen is people who have not been ready for one reason or another, who have not sought it. Have been given a mandated training, whatever, oftentimes not done well, where if anything, it produces a counter impact.

So what are your thoughts on how others can be brought along on this journey? And can they? 

[00:23:28] Anu Gupta: The answer is absolutely yes, which is why I wrote the book, has over 130 exercises that I'm really hoping the readers go on with me, and the safety and security of their own, space, their own homes, their own minds.

So I think that it's really important what you've shared. And, my dream one day is that these prism tools will be taught in school, like in elementary school and middle school. So just as we have subjects like math and, literature and history from an early age, there's actually a class every year that gives young people.

And understanding of their own brain, the understanding of their own behavior and how these tools can help them. How can support them and managing and regulating their emotional life. But, until we get to that day, what we need to do right now is really bring people along. And one of the reasons why the backlash has existed, like you said, it's not just, these mandates that have been superimposed on people, but the quality and the content that's been given to them.

Has not been rooted in adult learning methodology. So I invite everyone to bring everyone else along, but it's really important to understand how adults learn, which is it needs to be playful, needs to be inviting, and it needs to be kind. If those things are missing. Particularly if there's shame, what happens in our nervous system is that we get triggered, our nervous system shuts down, and we can't learn. And that's what's happened with a lot of training, is that it shuts people's nervous systems. And then that curiosity is completely shut down, and people are in this fight and flight response. My invitation really is, we have to bring this to everyone we know, and do it with kindness and compassion.

 Which is why, in my introduction in the book, I have Shared agreements, five shared agreements that I really hope people follow for themselves as they go through the book, but also with the people they engage with, because it's so important to build trust around the stuff because ultimately bias is personal and it's painful, and I don't care who you are.

I don't care if you're the richest the whitest and the most European person in the world, you've experienced bias maybe because you're short, maybe because you're the middle child. Maybe because, of an addiction of some sort, you have felt sense experience of what the suffering of bias feels like, and part of the opportunity is for us to really own that, that for ourselves.

And once we do that for ourselves, we can then do it for others as well.

[00:26:05] Mahan Tavakoli: Which is why we should come from it from a perspective of inclusion, Anu, rather than exclusion. One of the mistakes I've seen people with good intentions make in trying to promote diversity and inclusion in organizations and trying to address bias is that they've approached it as an issue of exclusion. . Therefore causes a lot of hostility rather than one that.

Seeks inclusion, as you mentioned, of all people, all of their experiences. 

[00:26:40] Anu Gupta: Beautifully said it's so true. And I think to come from that mindset of inclusion really requires a sense of curiosity, a sense of wonder, a sense of all, again, all of those pro social behaviors. And most important to give others the benefit of the doubt.

I have a chapter in the book on gender. Most people have been through, if you're in a workplace, a sexual harassment training or something along those lines. And it's always felt like half of the population is bad, and the other half is a victim, 

men are bad because they're sexual predators, and women are the victims who have no agency and need to be protected, I'm making a gross generalization, but that's how it feels emotionally for most of us. Sexism. It's bad for everyone, including men. . It sucks for us because there are all sorts of, expectations that we have to live up to because of this construct of what a man is supposed to be 

and so for me in this chapter, I use my experience as a man right and like to get at this challenge, which of course creates so much suffering for people who are not men, but it also creates a lot of suffering for people who are men. We know that from the data, rates of addiction, rates of mental health challenges, suicidality among men among straight men is so high because they can't really be their full emotional being.

And we have to really look at this as, like you said, from a place of inclusion. , how do we bring people in? and see each other suffering their pain and then work to create solutions to it. 

[00:28:16] Mahan Tavakoli: That is a beautiful way of being able to get closer to that ideal of achieving a bias free world.

Now,

 There has been backtracking by organizations from a couple of different perspectives. One, it's been there, done that with the training two, they're hemming and hawing because some of their stakeholders are pressuring them to not focus as much. On these issues would love to know your perspectives on what is it going to take to a certain extent.

The pendulum has swung. What is it going to take to get the pendulum to swing in the right direction? Because I think it's possible that we didn't do it well last time around, which is some of the reasons for some of the backlash now. 

[00:29:07] Anu Gupta: Yeah. And I think it's Something that a lot of us are wondering ourselves across the spectrum.

So one of the things that's really important to understand is, what is the goal? Like, why are these initiatives created in the first place? Why did the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission established in 1972 or 1973? Why was the Civil Rights Act passed? was this legislation needed, and the ultimate goal of all of this legislation, anti discrimination legislation and policies has been behavior change, to support people in changing their behavior.

So the goal of policy is to really create standards, so policies, for those of you who haven't read the book, is the second root cause of bias. It's really important to understand this. It regulates, what we can do, what we can't do, what's right, what's wrong, for us to live together in a society. Now, Behavior change, of course, can tell us these things, what it also requires is training, so oftentimes you call these things training, right? Diversity training, sexual harassment training. But how often are we actually getting trained? We're being told things, do this, don't do that. We aren't being trained to think differently.

We aren't given the skills. We're told that you should go practice mindfulness, go figure it out on your own. You've told me what mindfulness is, but we haven't really done mindfulness. So that's the challenge. That's been the challenge with a lot of these trainings is that they haven't actually done the work of behavior change, supporting folks with the tool, the skills they need to be more curious, to be more empathetic, and that's the goal of PRISM for me.

Now, with respect to the backlash, that's a bigger story. It's not just about how a lot of the trainings were conducted, but it's become politicized, our identities, our existence has become politicized, has become a political issue around right and wrong. And that is once again, the seed of exclusion., because a lot of the people that are promoting the backlash are rooted in this idea of us versus them and a right way of being human. Everyone else is wrong. My existence is right. And in order for you to be right, you have to be like me. And that's what happened to me 15 years ago, because I was trying to be something I couldn't, however many times I tried to wash my face, it wouldn't become white.

It just won't. We have so many examples of this from history. So that is a larger struggle that we're all a part of. And I really feel like it's going to be the challenge of our century. Like a hundred years ago in this country, it was a challenge of segregation and exclusion. of non white people.

200 years ago it was slavery, owning people. I think this century, we have to now move beyond all these, false concepts and labels of us versus them around identity, around race and gender and sexuality and political beliefs, and really be like, who do we want to be as a nation?

Who do we want to be as a global society? And can we really lean on inclusion? In the family that I grew up with, there's this idea that I was introduced to very early, live and let live. Really beautiful, right? Simple. What is it going to take for us to get there? Why is my existence preventing others from living?

It's not. But those ideas, right? Those stories connected to my humanity is somehow affecting people. And that's what we have to address. 

[00:32:34] Mahan Tavakoli: It is a big challenge that we have, Anu, but the work first begins with us. The first step to change is the me working on myself, working on my perspective, taking my pro social behaviors up to my mindfulness, and then The sphere of influence I have around me. I think we are much more likely to be able to make a difference in the world.

If we view it that way, rather than the them, because on the other side of it, I do live in a very pure. Pro equity and inclusion bubble. And I hear lots of conversation that is exclusionary about the thumb that don't get it. That don't get it do need perspective taking as well. So I love. The exercises that you've shared, the frameworks that you've shared for me and for us. It's not for they and for that. 

[00:33:41] Anu Gupta: Us. Exactly. Yeah. We are the change we've been waiting for. And Gandhi said, be the change you wish to see in the world.

So if you wish to see more peace, be peace. You wish to see more compassion, be compassion. You wish to see more inclusion be inclusion,

[00:33:57] Mahan Tavakoli: So to that end, ANU, in addition to your book, are there any other books or resources you typically find yourself recommending as people wanna go deeper into this journey of breaking their own bias? 

[00:34:13] Anu Gupta: Yeah. The three books that inspired me to write this book were cast the origins of our discontent.

Sapiens and the dawn of everything. So these are all a little bit more academic on the heady side, but really talk about how human hierarchies have come about. And my book really goes into this idea of bias and how we learn it and how we take and learn it. The other book that I loved absolutely love is the book of joy.

 It's a collaboration between His Holiness and Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, who were lifelong friends. They've both been through a lot in their lives, around this idea of bias and oppression and marginalization, and yet they carry with them this idea of joy. So the book is of course a joy to read but also gives us a lot of life skills on how we can move through what may seem scary and uncertain in our times.

[00:35:01] Mahan Tavakoli: And it must have been a joy for you to get the Dalai Lama to write the foreword for your book. 

[00:35:07] Anu Gupta: Oh goodness. It was a blessing beyond imaginable. And yeah, I really feel like his name on the cover is like a spiritual shield for this work. 

[00:35:16] Mahan Tavakoli: A new for the audience to find out more about your book, follow your Work, where we descend them to.

[00:35:24] Anu Gupta: So go to my website, ANU Gupta. And why. com so a n u g u p t a n y. com. Also, you can find me at a new good time. Why on all social media, Instagram, Twitter, X, Facebook, and other places. 

[00:35:40] Mahan Tavakoli: I really appreciate the conversation and love the book, breaking bias, where stereotypes and prejudices come from and the science backed method to unravel them.

Thank you so much for the conversation. I know Gupta. 

[00:35:54] Anu Gupta: Thank you. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here.