1 Big Idea to Think About

  • The foundation of life is human kindness and human connection. We cultivate these when we stop relying on our intelligence and start following our intuition.

1 Way You Can Apply This

  • Recognize one moment this week that encapsulates the Korean concept of “Jeong”. What was it about that moment that was memorable? How did it help build connection between you and the person or people you shared it with?

1 Question to Ask

  • How can I more easily recognize and act on opportunities to show genuine kindness?

Key Moments From the Show 

  • The “Red Helicopter” moment (2:50)
  • Acting intuitively instead of reactively (6:09)
  • The difference between intelligence and wisdom (15:43)
  • Solving big problems by listening to our intuition (18:40)
  • The Monopoly years – becoming less curious and learning how to fix it  (20:52)
  • Being consumed by a system that doesn’t have your best interests in mind (28:47)
  • The transformative power of reading (29:50)
  • Jeong: Finding goodwill and human connection (34:35)

Links and Resources You’ll Love from the Episode

Greg McKeown: 

Welcome to another episode of the Greg McKeown podcast. I’m your host, and here we are honored to have James Rhee, CEO, educator, and now the author of the book Red Helicopter: A Parable for Our Times. Lead Change with Kindness, Plus a Little Math. This beautiful book has swiftly captured people’s imaginations, and I think you’ll see why. James holds the prestigious position of the Johnson Chair of Entrepreneurship at Howard University and is a senior lecturer at both MIT and Duke Law School.

But beyond these impressive titles, James is a passionate educator and activist. He’s deeply influenced by the caregiver values of his first-generation Korean immigrant parents. His journey into leadership is as compelling as it is inspiring. It began, as you will see, with a simple childhood act of sharing his lunch, for which he received a toy red helicopter, a symbol of kindness that later influenced his leadership philosophy.

This philosophy became pivotal when he took on the role of CEO at Ashley Stewart, a company teetering on the brink of liquidation. What was intended to be a brief tenure turned into a transformative seven-year voyage where he not only revived a faltering business but also fostered deep, lasting connections with a team that became like family. 

Amidst navigating these professional challenges, James faced profound personal loss with the passing of both his parents, contrasting sharply with the joy of cultivating genuine friendships and witnessing the undeniable impact of radical kindness.

Today, James will share with us the powerful lessons from that journey, lessons of resilience, transformation, the magic that unfolds when we lead with a generous heart. So let’s dive into this enlightening conversation with James Rhee. 

Welcome to the podcast.

 

James Rhee: 

Thank you, Greg. And that was a beautiful introduction. And you can also add another thing to my list of things. I’m a big fan of your work, and I really enjoyed your book when it first came out. I read it a few times over the course of my journey, so thank you for having me.

 

Greg McKeown: 

Well, that’s a beautiful addition as we get into this conversation. For me personally, I appreciate that so much. Could you maybe take us back to the red helicopter moment and bring that alive for us? Why was that so important? Why is that the thing that you focused on as you wrote this book and so on?

 

James Rhee: 

It was like many good things, sometimes a source of embarrassment or pain, like you sort of sometimes cloud the truth with ego and mistaking being educated for wisdom. So the story was a symbol of a lot of things that were maybe sources of pain and embarrassment, actually, but ultimately truthful. So, yeah, I was in a, you have to picture 1976 bowl cut dimple James, coming home from kindergarten, public school, Long Island immigrant parents not hip to the ways of their new country and caregiver parents.

And me holding this little toy, $3 red helicopter, whatever it was, and being told that maybe I had taken it from school and then thinking they did something wrong and saying, oh, maybe in America, we didn’t know everyone gives toys at Christmas time, and we’re sorry, you won’t fit in. And then them being annoyed, particularly my father, that I didn’t know why this family came in to give it to me. And so it was a lot of wrongs, right? Or potential wrongs. And then, ultimately, it was a right that they found out. I gave it to my; I got it because I was giving half my lunch that my korean mother meticulously prepared every morning, that I was sharing my lunch sometimes with my friend who didn’t have lunch. And I didn’t know his mom had died that summer.

And the dad just wanted to come in and just, he just very graciously. I remember him just patting me on the. And he just wanted to meet the boy who gave his lunch to his son sometimes. And that feeling that was in my chest, and it was very pure, and it was my dad, I remember sort of looking at me, and my dad didn’t express emotion all that much. I know what he was thinking now, that, oh, my five-year-old boy is so wise. He has such abundance; he’s so generous. It’s such an obvious thing that his friend didn’t have food. He gave his food. And I remember my dad just looking at me like that. 

And anyway, so it’s a bittersweet memory. And then it was a memory that I ultimately I suppressed a lot because it reminded me of some pretty hard times for our family. And it was, you know, in my private equity life and in my sort of this high-status life that my parents also wanted me to have, say, being caring, kind, generous. It’s not things that are encouraged, sadly. It’s almost viewed as a weakness often.

And these were two things I tried to reconcile for most of my life that I’ve always wanted to. That’s who I am by nature. And it’s these things that’s the memory. And it was a moment of pure truth. Right? It’s like, what is? Didn’t have lunch, share your lunch. It’s not overthinking. It’s a real ode to, like, human beauty and human intuitiveness. Right. Understanding nature. And I lost a lot of that for big parts of my life.

 

Greg McKeown: 

Well, that’s an interesting segue, too. But I want to just unpack some of the themes of the experience for a moment because the first part of what you just shared was the confusion. Now, you described it as, well, sort of lots of bad things, but really, it was not knowing whether something was good or bad or what’s going on. And it’s parents who don’t know what are the norms yet, and what was a spontaneous moment versus what was an expected moment, and what have you done wrong? Or what have you? You know, it’s a whole. It’s a microcosm, as, of course, you’re saying at first. It is a microcosm of that confusion and disorientation that clearly your parents will have been experiencing as immigrants into America. And you, as well as a child who can’t change any of that and can’t read any more of what’s going on, you know, really any better than they can at one level, certainly any confusion they have is going to be filtered back to you.

 

James Rhee: 

Yeah, I think that, you know, the whole book is a parable and a metaphor, right? So it’s information overload. It’s emotional and informational chaos. It’s having so many loose ends. Not having certainty about what’s going on and the way that one reacts to it is actually much more important. You’re never gonna have certainty of all the facts. There’s so much chaos, frankly, all the time, and a lot of it now is an induced chaos. We can get to that later.

That was just a very metaphoric moment for me, of just, like, really trusting my intuition about what was right. And there were a lot of forces that I didn’t know, a lot of dynamics. But the problem was very simple. There was a boy. I liked him. He made me laugh. He didn’t have food. I had some. I solved the problem, and I gave it to him. That’s it. And, you know, there’s a lot of ways to dissect what happened. And it just was, to me; I also look at it just as its simplicity of problem solving. It was just a very direct action of doing something about something.

 

Greg McKeown: 

Yes. And to just keep the metaphor parable going, that tension of the very first moment of having done it. Yes, you’re bringing us to the simplicity of the action. But then there’s all of the confusion around it, which serves as a. As an indicator for our modern existence, where everybody is absolutely buried with noise and of a very particular kind of overwhelming noise, where I think living reactively has become normalized.

It’s extremely rare to find somebody who isn’t living reactively, and it’s almost of necessity. I remember Elon Musk talked about the problem of roads, and he made this example, but I want to use it as a metaphor to continue our conversation. But he said, well, he said, “As soon as you can build vertically in the city, as soon as you can have 30, 40, 50 levels, floors on a high-rise building, you’re going to have traffic problems because you can’t build the roads in the same 3D format.”

 

James Rhee: 

Yes.

 

Greg McKeown: 

And so that’s why, of course, he’s talking about these tunnels and so on. But I think that there’s a metaphor there for our modern world. As soon as you digitize everything you create, you can multiply, literally, so close to an infinite degree of increased complexity, but you didn’t produce any more time. And so, in a similar way, you’re going to create a gridlock experience where there’s not enough time and not enough attention to handle this limitless digit and multiplication of everything.

And so somewhere in here, I think that there’s just something to underscore about your parents, again, sense of disorientation and the modern experience that it’s not always, I think, that we don’t want to be kind. It’s that we’re so overwhelmed we become shallow and reactive, and we can barely see the need. And even if we do, we see it just momentarily before we’re pulled, rushed forward.

 

James Rhee: 

Yes. And I think one of the ways. Look, when you published your. What year did you publish your book?

 

Greg McKeown: 

It was 2014. Just writing the decade of essentialism. Just now.

 

James Rhee: 

Yeah. If you think about your book, and my book has not been around for ten years, but the way I also wanted to write my book, your book stood out for me when it came out in the sense that it was not a prescriptive book. Neither is mine. It’s sort of this. It’s a bit of an invitation or permission, right? To say, hmm, here are some illustrations. I think you know much of this. You know it. Let me just ask you to pause and remind you. And the way you wrote it as well, it was very inviting. And I tried to write my book in a similar. In a similar vein.

 

Greg McKeown: 

Yes, I think you’ve done that.

 

James Rhee: 

There are a lot of people that are profiting a lot, creating the chaos, and they don’t want you to have concision and precision and just sort of real simplicity. They profit off of you being confused because most of the books that get written these days, and I had a real struggle with a lot of the conventional publishing luckily, I found a really supportive publisher. I didn’t want to write the book that said, “The world is crazy. Here are the five ways that I know I’m better than you are. And you have to do these five things. And it will improve your life.” 

I just didn’t want to write a book like this. So we are going to deal with chaos. I wanted to create a soothing environment, a kind environment that gave permission for people to be more confident in their own intuition and the piece of that intuition. And so my parents, they really.

It’s interesting, like, I sort of metaphorically talk about the game of Monopoly in the book. In that they really wanted me to sort of learn the rules of engagement in this country. Learn the rules of Monopoly. And what I’m trying to say in the book is that. Dad, Mom, there were so many rules that it’s not in the rule book. You can’t just keep going around in circles. So you have to have a mechanism that you’re able to parse through all the chaos. It will always be chaos. But parse through the uncertainty with a guiding principle. And take control and have agency over your life. And for me, that red helicopter was a symbol of powerful agency.

 

Greg McKeown: 

There’s something else you said that I wanted to come back to. And it was the distinction between. I can’t remember the precise words, but the difference between smart and intelligence, and wisdom. And this is an idea that’s been very much on my mind of late. That is no correlation between the two. That being smart, you don’t get smarter and smarter and smarter and then get wise. You don’t put lots of smart people together in a room and then get wise.

Wisdom is just a different continuum. And I think, well, at one level, one has to say you only achieve wisdom if you seek wisdom. Not if you’re not. If you’re just trying to be the smartest person in the room. Or anyway, just any reflections on that, as you’ve been trying to, I suppose, make sense of the experience you’ve had in life and the learnings. And you’ve been writing about these things. Now, what do you think about this distinction between being smart and being wise?

 

James Rhee: 

Great Indigo Girls lyric from their song “Closer to Fine”. “I spent two years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper, and then I was free.” 

And I think for many people, and particularly, I’ll say from my immigrant family, having a parchment from a well known college, well-known law school, that was a source of pride. And I’m not going to say that like it was not great getting into Harvard when I was 18, but when people, I got very tired very quickly of people saying, even particularly now when I’m 53 years old, yeah, I got good grades and I was qualified at 17. Are you hiring me or working with me because I was smart at 17,18 years old?

I just, I have. The more I have gotten older, I’m just, yeah, I just have gotten more skeptical about a lot of the. It’s the type of education that we are imposing, particularly on kids now, which is just memorized, like pure skills-based memorization education. Like the best thing that I got from my education has been to ask questions like I’m a voracious. Just anytime I get bored, or I feel like I’m the smartest person in the room, I know that I’m not time for me to leave. And so the Buddhists have another level of beyond wisdom, though. It’s, you know, it’s education wisdom. And then there’s this intuitive, intuitive human ken, like just sort of that. And that’s a lot of human.

 

Greg McKeown: 

What was the word you just said? Human ken.

 

James Rhee: 

Ken, like Ken. It’s like, it’s just a different level of. Because oftentimes education, you learn it, wisdom, you live it, and then there’s a level of understanding that you’re born with that. It’s just an existential. You’re born with it. And I think a lot of the book that I’m talking about is somewhere between wisdom and that.

 

Greg McKeown: 

Well, I mean, I think that this is, you know, this comes close to the thesis, isn’t it, that you’re trying to put out, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but this idea, and it comes back to the red helicopter, there’s something intuitive and simple, and we have it, and we were born with it. And if we would listen to it, it’s there. And it may be hidden below layers and layers of noise and layers and layers of rules, of rules and social games and social ladders and social systems and what has been described as the social imaginary, you know, the visualization of how things should be underneath all of those layers, deeply hidden but universal, is this sense of what’s the need.

I can see the need, I can observe it and I can do something about it. And there’s a simplicity in that that I think you want to say, cut out all of that clutter. This is what it’s about. What did I get wrong?

 

James Rhee: 

No, I think that that’s right. It’s also. It’s a sense of connectedness. That we all have, you know, we have it. It’s encouraging people to not play this game of Monopoly, just like the rules of accounting, that it’s. They’re conventions. These are all simulations. And it’s to really define the type of life that you want to lead without being a nihilist. Meaning a lot of the work and the philosophy that I’m writing about, it was all done. That’s why I wrote in the prelude. It all happened. Like, I’m doing this using the capital markets in the current systems, but I’m encouraging people to really sort of take that look at yourself from afar. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m sort of living. I watch myself in my life, which has allowed me to sort of make fun of myself and say, why did you say that? Why did you do this? It’s to really understand that, to define the life that you want and to not live in a simulation.

And I find, like in the movie Memento for me, the red helicopter story, in both metaphorically, it’s like the memento, like, it just wakes me up. And I’m like, you know, I have a choice about how I’m going to act in this scene, in this scenario. It’s my choice.

 

Greg McKeown: 

Something that I think is important in your story is these years that you felt you weren’t on the path that you intuitively had understood as a young immigrant Korean boy. Tell us about those years, the Monopoly years, I suppose one could call them.

 

James Rhee: 

Yeah, I think it really started the first year I attended Harvard. It was before that, the first 18 years. Middle class upbringing, little safety net, not much at all. Public school, nothing on my resume. The only thing on my resume were dishwasher, Red Lobster, and busboy Village Way restaurant. And I was valedictorian of a public high school. It didn’t mean. I mean, I was actually quite happy. And I did very well in school because I was curious.

Like, I loved to learn, like I really did. And I played sports, music, and it was just. I had a lot of hobbies. I was a really interesting person, actually. I had opinions, you know, and my opinions and I had a lot of friends. And then I think the weight of going to Harvard, as I look back now, was a heavier weight than I had bargained for. It’s a big moniker to put on an impressionable…

 

Greg McKeown: 

It’s symbolic, isn’t it? Symbolic for you. It’s symbolic for everyone you meet. And then, of course, there’s the actual somewhat cutthroat norms of Harvard Business School and of the law school. A sense if you. If you’re at the bottom, you’re gonna get cut. Those are non-trivial things, too. They’re more than just symbolic. They’re going to act upon you.

 

James Rhee: 

Yes. And there’s a whole, like, you know, invisible social stratosphere, all of these things which, you know, I was not exposed to growing up. And anyway, so, like, you know, I’m not. It’s not like I’m not a passive, non-type quote “A person.” So, like, I was a pretty intuitive person. I was like, oh, there’s a new rule there. There’s a game. It’s a game, right?

 

Greg McKeown: 

It’s a game.

 

James Rhee: 

Really is a game, right? And I have to sort of, like, pick the top hat. I got to go around, around the board and, like, you know, I got to land on community, like, community chest. I need to have that network. I don’t want to buy the light blue properties. I think maybe I can start with the green properties. It’s. It’s this whole thing. And I was like, oh. And there are all these unwritten rules of collision and, like, oh, okay, got it. So anyway, so those are the things. And every time I went through it, I also liked a lot about Harvard, made a lot of really good friends, and learned a lot. But it’s like, I got tired, and so that’s why I went and taught high school. Like my life is that I would do something and say, “Oh, I got it. Not impressed. And by the way, let me decipher this to everyone who thinks that some hieroglyphics are unnecessarily complicated; let me show people what this is.” 

So that’s why I went and taught high school at a school where a bunch of the kids were kind of underachievers; maybe they weren’t going to aspire to college. I’m like, ah, you got this. It’s not as daunting as you think it is. And that’s my whole life has been learn something.

Simplify it. Core principles. Here’s the core, like, quote, algorithm. You got it. And do it in a very human way. And so that’s when it really started. And then when it really got real for me, when I think I was at my most unhappiness, most unhappy, most beleaguered, was actually at the height, quote, of my career, which is when I was late thirties, I was at, like, a really prestigious private equity firm, and I had, quote, the resume. I’d sort of, like, done everything, and like, this is where you want to land. And I just said, well, a lot of people seem particularly unhappy, you know.

Yeah. They’re not happy. And, like, they’re. And they’re drowning it out, either with many different substances or, like. And I also felt myself becoming less interesting, you know, like lost hobbies. I have a big passion for music. Stopped playing music, and stopped taking lessons.

 

Greg McKeown: 

You became less curious even at the not. I don’t know if it’s even in spite of. I think the question is whether it was causation or correlation, but perhaps because of where you were being successful, you became less curious. Does that sound right?

 

James Rhee: 

Yeah, it was. I was reading less. Partly, I was a young dad working a lot, but I had always managed to find time to read a lot of fiction. Like, I had stopped reading joy reading, like learning reading. Right. Stopped taking music lessons, which is ridiculous for me. Like, I’m a. I love playing music, and then I play too much golf, and I was deluding myself to say that. And I like golf, but it was like, it wasn’t a hobby, it was work.

 

Greg McKeown: 

Well, bringing golf into it names something in contrast to the reading and the music because the golf, I mean, it really does sound sort of like first-world problems, but that doesn’t make them not problems, and quite serious problems in there, in a sense of the loss of meaning when you go into a certain institution and, “Oh, that’s what’s expected now. You’ve got to go and play golf. That’s part of the uniform, it’s part of the lifestyle, it’s part of the system.”

And you were increasingly being consumed in a system that didn’t have your point of contribution in mind. It didn’t have. How can we help James become the fullest 3.0 version of himself? How can we help him fulfill the measure of his own creation? Who is he supposed to be? A corporation isn’t built well for that. A high performance corporation is often not built well for that. And so that distinction between the reading and I want to underscore the reading for a second, because I felt something when you said that, and I could sort of feel the idea of we’ve stopped reading being writ large as if you were making, even though you’re observing your own experience, that you are speaking on behalf of many, many people, and that some people listening to this conversation if they examine themselves, think, when was the last time I read for pleasure?

You know, I, in my own life over the last few years, have created, you know, participated in creating the worst possible thing, which is turning our children into book pushers. You know, so at first, you think you’re doing a good thing, which is, you know, you’re encouraging them to read. And they have become avid readers. You know, they’ve read an enormous amount. But then, as they become teenagers, what they’ve become is, “Dad, have you read this? Oh, why haven’t you read that yet? It’s time for you to read this. Oh, that was so great. You would love that.” 

And it’s, like, a little overwhelming in its own right. But what they’ve done is they’ve brought me back into classics. In fact, I just finished reading David Copperfield, I mean, like, last night, and I’d never read that before.

And it’s so rich and good, especially. And the data, of course, the research supports this, that if you want to build greater empathy, you read high-quality fiction. It expands your sense of the complexity of the world, and I think helps to enhance exactly the kind of, you know, between wisdom and intuition that you’re describing, that connectedness and so on. So, I just didn’t want to miss that point.

There are two ways of thinking about the loss of reading. Your reaction.

 

James Rhee: 

Yes. And I have two reactions. So, number one, particularly with men, you know, is there a correlation? I haven’t read the study between loneliness, lack of friendship, men not reading, and we all know women are the main readers, and that’s just truth. Men with hobbies, that’s declining. All of these stats, are they all related? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. You know, are the fact, and this is all colloquially as well, like. But when you look at declining marriage rates, birth rates increasing, you know, I get a lot of feedback. You know, just men, they are just talking about their jobs and golf. I hear it a lot. Okay. And then, and I found for me one of the most refreshing things for me at this stage of my life. I’m working with a lot more women in my endeavors, vocationally and avocationally. Like, it’s, there’s a more richness and lateralness and breadth of interest. 

So that’s the number one reaction. Number two is that, you know, it’s also, I’m doing, I’m making a real point of criticism, I think is a fair word, about our current state of our democracy and capitalism balance. And there are a couple of places where maybe I sort of break the author’s voice and sort of really say it. I’m like, really? This is. I learned economics really through the lens also of, like, Dickens, Melville, and Austin. This was at a time when fiction actually was very steeped in socioeconomics. It’s a humanistic discipline. And you were learning about the well being, that texture that you were talking about of the characters in the book. They were written, and they were like parables. It was fiction, but it was a parable, of course.

So, like Barnaby, the Scrivener, which is, like, one of my favorite reads, I mean, that is as relevant today as it was in 18, you know, whatever, 50 something when. When he wrote it. So, yeah, so anyway, so that’s that element of putting some fictional lens on, like a tint on some really non fictional going or nonfictional goings on right now. That’s part of why I wrote the book. The way I wrote it was to have it feel like literature.

I’m really saying nonfictional things. Right. It’s sort of encouraging people, that richness of characters, identifying with characters, not just numbers.

 

Greg McKeown: 

This is it, of course. I mean, we are narrative beings. And so whether it’s a parable literally, in the way that you have conjured this book, or whether it’s great literature that is parabolic, it is metaphorical, but you really just get lost in the story so that the message is not on the nose, but that it sort of grows up inside of you as you crescendo the story and what happens to the characters, and you are changed by those books.

I don’t know if you know the movie About Time, but I watch an edited version of it when I watch it myself. But there’s something extremely touching to me about the premise. Not the premise of the movie, but a tiny description. So, I don’t think I’m spoiling too much about this movie. And, for goodness sake, it’s been out for a long time. So, you know, there’s sort of a. You know, you get past a certain sell-by date on not spoiling a movie, but. But quite early on in the movie, you find that the men in the family are able to do a certain kind of time travel. They can go back in time in their own life and relive experiences and so on. But before you know that, they’re introducing the main characters, and they. And the protagonist of the movie is describing his father. He says, “My father is a retired professor who always seems to have a lot of time on his hands and always has time to play table tennis with me, and he’s always reading.”

And that’s what he spends his almost infinite amount of time doing. He has this choice of what to do, this father. And that’s not the main character in the show. But he chooses to read. He says, dickens, you know, all of Dickens, three or more times, you know, and all of these. There’s always going to be books for me. Books, books, books. That, plus spending time with his son at any moment, his son wants to connect. And there is something about that combination and there’s something about that idea that his father seemed to have a lot of time on his hands, that even as I say it now, I feel emotional about it. I so want that. And, I feel like even with all the work that I have tried to do on this, I still feel myself too rushed, too many things. And it’s hard to imagine that my children would say, “Oh, dad just always seemed to have a lot of time on his hands.” 

I’ve spent an enormous amount of that time with them, making memories with them, traveling with them. It’s not like I look back at my life with that sense of regret, but the sense of Kairos. Right? That sense of breath and presence and space. This. I wish I could do better.

 

James Rhee:

Yeah. It’s like catching the fireflies or more fireflies around this sort of time. Or it’s the end of the movie Up when Russell says to the older gentleman, forgetting his name, says when they were sitting on the curb, and they’re counting the cars, like red, blue, red, blue. It’s that. And it’s, you know, in the book, I talk about, like, the concept of this korean concept. Jeong.

 

Greg McKeown: 

Yes, please tell us more about Jeong.

 

James Rhee: 

Yeah. And this is part of the other wrinkle to this whole story is that look, I’m Long Island Bruce Springsteen singing American kid. And then part of the design of success in the seventies, eighties, and nineties for me was to be actually less Korean. Okay? 

And so that’s another wrinkle to some of this. And Jeong is like, you know, the book is also a lot about language, right? About, like, what’s. What do words really mean? What does kindness mean? What does math really mean? Accounting is made up. Do you know this? It’s not accountable. Do you know that? It’s really pretty particular about words. And so is a Korean word that does not really have an English equivalent. The closest one is goodwill, which is why I did my TED talk on goodwill, because if it was fully in Korean, I would have said Jeong.

And Jeong is a. It’s a connectedness between people. It’s a feeling of just. It’s a feeling that transcends linearity. It transcends. It bends time. It takes people’s past, future, and present, and it’s in your chest. You feel it. It’s in a different place. It’s not here in your head. It’s like you feel in the cavity of your chest. And that feeling, which is the closest feeling I can sort of say to your listeners who are not steeped in Asian philosophy, it’s like the end of the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, that feeling you get. And it’s like this. That was Mary showing George. He saw it, right? And then he said, “Ah, I didn’t value it correctly.” 

And Red Helicopter is very much. It is just trying to convey. The whole book is Jeong.

 

Greg McKeown: 

It’s an ode to Jeong.

 

James Rhee: 

It is. And by, you know, just when people read it, the way it was designed, written, the illustrations. And then, even when I sign the book, it becomes more than just a book. It’s a. It is an item of Jeong. It becomes a red helicopter. Yeah. And it’s a fellowship. Right. It’s this. And that’s what I’m asking people to consider, is finding that it’s yours and it’s yours. It helps you escape to a different place sometimes from the chaos.

And it actually gives you the courage of conviction and of agency that, in some ways, you’re able to suspend time. It’s a very empowering feeling when you, like, there are these moments when you’re just like, I’ve been here before, or time has stood still.

 

Greg McKeown: 

Yes.

 

James Rhee: 

And then you feel, you know, somehow, like spiritually in, like, quote, in control. But the irony is that, you know, you’re not. That it’s ephemeral and that those are moments that are fleeting. And it is a practice that we can all work on to just sort of have those moments. And I think the important thing of Jeong, for everyone to remember, you need a counterpart. Just like kindness, you have to have a counterparty.

And so these human connectedness, these human relationships, particularly as we’re going through, it’s an era of. You can’t stop it. It’s going to be a lot of augmented reality and just simulated living. I’m asking people and reminding people. I was like, physiologically, you need this. You can’t simulate it.