CM 239: Rina Bliss on Why IQ is a Myth
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I would like us to replace standardized intelligence tests and standardized aptitude tests and standardized testing with testing that is much more sensitive to people's individuality and eliminates this habit that we're stuck in of measuring people's social standing, their standard of living, and then spitting that back to them as how smart they are.

Welcome to Curious Minds at Work. I'm your host, Gail Allen. There's never been a better time to question how we measure intelligence. With chat GPT and other forms of artificial intelligence pushing the boundaries of what it means to be smart, there's an opportunity, even an urgency, to rethink everything we know about it. That's why I wanted to talk to Rena Bliss, author of the book, Rethinking Intelligence, A Radical New Understanding of Our Human Potential.

A sociologist and genetics expert, Rena brings a fresh perspective to the discussion that expands what's been for far too long a reductive numbers game. In this interview, Rena offers a new model for assessing aptitude, one that extends beyond test results and mistaken assumptions about genetics. Instead, she explains how intelligence is far from fixed and how it's deeply influenced by the degree of stress, connection, and play in our lives.

Her book is filled with insights on how to rethink what it means to be smart, along with steps we can take to protect and deepen our intelligence. One quick ask, if you like the podcast, take a moment to leave a rating on iTunes or wherever you subscribe. Your feedback sends a strong signal to people looking for their next podcast. And now here's my interview with Rena Bliss. Rena Bliss, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.

Reena, the primary goal of your book is to get us to rethink intelligence. To start, let's talk about how we typically think of intelligence. What are some of the markers that we look to?

Well, normally we think of intelligence as something that we are born with. Usually we think of it in a fixed quantity. Either you're smart or you're pretty smart or you're, you know, okay at things like academics, intellectual tasks. We also tend to look at intelligence in terms of our DNA, our genetics, what's been passed down to us from our parents and from our parents' parents and our ancestors.

We think of intelligent people or highly intelligent people as being from a long line of highly intelligent people. And so typically we measure that intelligence with IQ tests that produce a score. And that really feeds into this notion that IQ intelligence, our smarts are something that are quantifiable and that we can basically know from a score.

I'm glad you brought those up. We're going to do a deep dive on those. But before we do, how would you like us to think of intelligence? What are some other markers we could look to?

Well, I'd like us to actually think of intelligence very differently. Instead of thinking of it as a fixed quantity or a quantity at all, I'd like to think of intelligence as a process, a lifelong journey that we all are on. We are all learning our whole lives. We are all changing and growing our whole lives.

We're all learning from our environments, from whatever places and moments we happen to be in. We're learning from those. And so I'd like us to shift from thinking of intelligence as that kind of score to I am inherently always innately learning. I'm always learning from my environment.

If we trace the thinking on intelligence, I think a lot of us would be surprised. It goes all the way back to the Greeks. How did they see it? So they saw intelligence as fixed and as quasi-genetic. They didn't have a concept of the gene back then, but they had an idea that what you were like came from your parents and that there were certain people who were born and essentially bred to be

leaders and to be highly intelligent and that majority of people were born to be kind of somewhere in the middle. And they even had like kind of jobs that they thought those people do versus the

the intelligent, highly intelligent leaders. And then also they thought that there were a great deal of people who were basically born dumb and who needed to be either enslaved or just, you know, they didn't have any rights, basically. They were just kind of like a little bit different than animals. And those people needed to just be used, basically.

And so they had that idea. And even Plato, you know, whom we all know and who is one of the most kind of popular ancient Greek figures, he had this idea that we should prevent breeding between the intelligence brackets. And so he thought like, you know, we should basically make sure that those of high intelligence continue to only breed with each other.

And that's this notion of eugenics, which we think of as being something that came about around the time of Darwin, but it has been with us for thousands of years. You mentioned Darwin. And in your book, you talk to us about this historical shift. In the 1800s, we get this powerful set of ideas on intelligence. They come onto the scene from people like Darwin, Spencer, Galton. What was this shift? What was this focus now?

Before Darwin, there wasn't really like theory of the gene. There wasn't an idea of like exactly what was being passed down. It was just more like it's passed down without an explanation, without any kind of empirical research to back it up. Darwin was a person who actually went around the world and

saw things that other people only wrote about. When scholars of their time didn't have any proof of anything, they just made up stories. They were very, very influential people like David Hume, people like Immanuel Kant. They're names we know, but they're also like

You know, they didn't actually do any research. Kant, for one, he never even left the town he was born in. So, you know, he just wrote all of these things that were actually pretty similar to what Darwin came up with. But they were just so stories. And so those people back then were the ones who really racialized this idea of intelligence and higher intelligence people have to be of European stock and all of this stuff. Darwin...

went around the world, actually met people who were from other continents. And unfortunately, he reified that. He reinforced the ideas that had come before there was even any proof. And he said that, you know, intelligence,

was one of those things that genetically speaking had evolved differently in different places in the world, meaning kind of like different continents. So he had this idea that Europeans were on the high intelligence end of the spectrum and Africans were at the lowest end of the spectrum.

His cousin, Francis Galton, he was the first person to really set up an intelligence testing center in Hyde Park in London and get into the business of testing intelligence. And so he's the first person who really just said, we need to do what Plato told us a long time ago, and we need to create a whole...

body of evidence to prove that Europeans are the only highly intelligent people, the only people who should be breeding at all.

And, you know, he had a lot of very strong eugenic ideas. He's the father of eugenics, but he's also the father of genetics, the whole field of genetics. And it's something that many of us might kind of know, but not be aware of how important intelligence was to the beginning of this whole entire science of DNA. Yeah.

You know, you mentioned eugenics. After World War II, eugenics became associated with the Holocaust. And that meant the terminology had to change, almost like, you know, a rebrand. What happened then?

Eugenic societies, initially they didn't go away. There was nothing that changed dramatically except that most scientists who were coming up into the field at that time, they did not want to have a racial significance to their work.

So as scientists got into practicing genetics, and even those who are very prominent eugenicists, they kind of de-racialized the whole field of eugenics. So they got more into the intelligence testing and quantification of intelligence. And it was all about IQ testing by that point.

Still saying we need to encourage people of higher intelligence to breed because they bring a better genetics to society.

You write about the fact that with this shift, with this quantification of intelligence, now we've got a really powerful combination at work here. You've got IQ testing, you've got governance, you've got geopolitics, you've got genetics. Tell us about this combination and why it becomes such an important thing for us to recognize and understand.

We started to IQ test in earnest in the United States. And I mean, this is true for most countries around the world, especially the European countries, Australia, places like this. We started to really get into this and have it be a part of our institution's education process.

also hiring, job placement, and all of that kind of thing. We started to get into it in the 20th century. And again, it didn't stop in the post-war period. It just continued on. And even when testing and the kind of big scientific claims became deracialized, they

only became more important to the institutions of our society. And there's definitely a kind of way that we think of high intelligence as being a national resource, as being something that, you know, we need to know how we compare to other countries. It's something that we pride ourselves in, especially like, you know, having certain industries that are knowledge-based,

And so in a sense, like there could have been a big change in our narrative around intelligence and in our appreciation of the inherent kind of racism in that notion. But it didn't happen when it could have. It didn't happen. And so if you move us over to the present day, you know, we still have all kinds of

biotech firms that are really invested in seeing

genetic IQ tests come out, some form of eugenics using genetic technologies, choosing babies that have higher intelligence. And yeah, so there's still this kind of move to really dig our heels in with IQ and with testing and with seeing it in terms of genetics.

You've mentioned how racism is baked right into these tests. For people who are listening, who maybe this is the first time they're hearing that, or maybe they're not understanding where that's coming from, can you walk us through some of the ways that shows up? There are two main things that happen with tests. One is that tests...

have questions that are culturally and racially biased. They have questions on them that require a certain kind of know-how, cultural know-how.

And for example, you know, in the past, some tests have had questions about Shakespeare. Other tests have had questions about eating utensils that you would only know if you had elaborate eating utensils every meal that you eat, you know? So like that's a class-based thing. That's also a racial thing. That's also that, you know, is...

is entirely like a cultural thing, right? And so the questions on the test privileged people who were of a certain background. Also, tests, the way that they're used can encourage racism in terms of structural institutional racism. By that, I mean,

Right now, you still have these tests being used to track people in different schools, in public school and in private schools as well, for different educational paths. What research has shown is that consistently those tests and that tracking lead to people of color, students of color in particular, as being held back

and placed in subpar educational environments. And those tests, meanwhile, have propelled students that identify as white.

You have also spoken about the ways in which intelligence is perceived as innate, inherent, just a part of us, and it's fixed. We have evidence that intelligence is not innate for folks who are either trying to make this argument with others or trying to rethink intelligence. Environment plays a role, and you talk about this in the book. One of the things that's been revealed is something called the Flynn effect. Can you tell us about the Flynn effect?

The Flynn effect shows that when you look at just those very flawed IQ test scores, but when you look at them and you look at them over time, human IQ scores have been going up over time for as long as we've had these tests. So that shows that it can't be just genetics because our genetics gets passed on, right? So it's like we're not having entirely...

radically new genomes, right? So it means that there's something changing about our environments that is promoting those scores to go up. And that's across the board around the globe. The other thing that Flynn has shown, which is just really amazing, elegant, beautiful research, is that

Test scores are very different all around the world based on people's standard of living. So that's what he and the many, many people who have done research in this vein have shown, which is that that's what's going on with those scores going up around the world over time, is that our standard of living has gone up. When you go to places where

People have a very high standard of living where education is offered to everyone. You see the highest scores. When you go to places where it's uneven, where there's a lot of social inequality, you see uneven scores. And then when you go to places where there's no public education, lack of access to basic resources, you see very low scores.

And another thing that Flynn has shown more recently is that when you compare African Americans in the past to now, since the end of segregation, their scores have jumped up at a faster rate than any population. And so what that shows is that

access to education, access to basic resources really bumps scores up. There are other people who've done really interesting research that shows this kind of like the malleability of scores, especially based on people's environments, doing it on like more of a, less of like a global population level, doing it on more of like a finer resolution, you know, this group of people, these individuals,

One of those studies shows that adoptees changing from one kind of socioeconomic status to another, they tend to gain enough points in their scoring to bump up to a whole other IQ bracket.

So people go from scoring sub-average to scoring above average, or people go from scoring average to scoring high. So that kind of shows you that the environment is really driving our scores. And that's even for these flawed tests. If you'd like the chance to get a free copy of this week's book, sign up for our newsletter, The 1-2-3, by heading to my website, gailallen.net.

Each new subscriber will automatically be entered into a drawing to win our most recent guest's book. Before we release the next podcast, we'll send the winner their free copy and give them a shout out on the podcast. This week's winner is Teddy from Hawaii. Congratulations, Teddy. We'll be sending you a copy of Rob Cross and Karen Dillon's book, The Microstress Effect. What's the 123 newsletter? It's one topic, two insights, and three actions you can take. Now back to my interview with Rena Bliss.

Thank you.

Tests do not actually tell us how capable a person is of thinking, taking in and using new information, making decisions, or solving problems. They tell us nothing about how variable a person's score could be if they were coached and consulted the way that some families do, or how much they would improve if they had all the right resources, cultural and substantive, at their disposal their whole lives.

And I just, I feel like I want to take that out and frame it and post it everywhere. Tell us a little bit about that in relation to what you just said. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that is so hard to handle for me is that there are IQ consultants. There are, I mean, we know there are college consultants, there are SAT consultants. I don't know anybody who hasn't had some kind of help with SATs or PSATs, you know,

I think that any and all standardized testing can be gamed. And that's because there are people who sell those services. And there have been scandals around this, you know, but I think in general, nothing's changed very much about our systems because we still do it. The fact of the matter is that even though scores have gone up since desegregation, our country is very segregated.

And the big cities are, you know, carved into all kinds of class and ethnic enclaves. And people just don't have the same resources. We are not operating at the level of some of those Scandinavian countries that have like perfect literacy and, you know, have free education from birth. Right. So I think that what we have to do is

think of how we can make sure that everybody gets those basic resources. And I'm not just talking about educational resources. I'm talking about things like having healthy food, having clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, having a healthy, safe place to live. I mean, that's something that unless you are not living in a healthy, safe place, you probably don't think about it very much.

But when you see the difference in environments and living environments, it's really heartbreaking and it's not right, you know. And then to test people and say like, oh, you know, you don't have the future that my kid has because sorry, you know, you're just not showing up as being that smart anymore.

In recent years, as you mentioned earlier, we've been doubling down on the idea that we can track down what are called intelligence genes. What does this mean and how is it beginning to show up or how has it been showing up in today's products? There have been researchers looking for intelligence genes since Galton started way back in the day, you know, looking for markers, biomarkers. And so now we have really...

amazing methodologies, amazing tools, in a sense, to look for genetic associations or genes involved in some kind of thing, some kind of human traits or some kind of human behavior or social outcome even.

IQ is still one of those things that people are looking for. And they use IQ test scores to group people and then they say, okay, these are people who have scored high. And so we're going to look in there and see what's similar about their genetics and try to find any markers in their genomes that they share. And when

When they do that, they find, you know, thousands of markers and then they talk about like where the markers are located and what could possibly be going on with these different markers. And there have been companies that have said, like, I think we're ready to take that and then take some other research into educational attainment variants that are associated with getting through college or getting, you know,

through a PhD or what have you and put all that together and sell you some kind of app or some kind of test so that we can predict that for you or for your unborn child. I mean, you could do genetic testing on pretty much anybody these days. So yeah, they've been doing that kind of thing. And there is even one company that's talked about really wanting to bring the genetic prediction

into play for selecting embryos. And I think that's where we get into even more dangerous territory because we're talking about choosing to program our unborn children based off of pretty shaky research. When you take those test scores and then you just group them together and say, hey, you know, these people, what they shared in common were these gene variants.

we're still forgetting that those test scores are mapping for us all this social privilege. So there might be something else that we're mapping there, you know, that's not just like how well you can think, how smart you are, how high you're going to score and how far you're going to get in life. The epigenome is something we're hearing more and more about today. What is it and how is it connected to this conversation about intelligence?

So the genome, we call the genome basically the genes that we inherit from our parents and that give us the power to be human, to do our thing, grow our brains, grow our organs, and then use those organs and talk and think and run and do all the things that we do, all our human activities, right?

But for a long time, we thought that that was the end of the story. When you look at a strand of DNA, you're going to see a lot of material that we don't include in what we call a gene. And for a long time, we thought that was junk. They actually called it junk DNA. In the last, I'd say like 30 years, we've done so much great research into that junk. And we found that

That part of our DNA strands actually tells our genes whether they can turn on or off. And that means that those are the kind of control mechanisms, the on-off switches. So we actually can't grow our brains and be ourselves and do our thing without that part saying, time to go to work. The other thing we've learned, though, is that that so-called junk, the epigenome,

epi meaning on or on top of the genome, that part right there, it actually is responsive to our environments. And it is very, very responsive to things like stress. Stress is one of the biggest toxins to human beings. And when we are extremely stressed, our epigenomes fail us and they actually modify our DNA.

And the craziest last part of it that I'll share with you is that we pass those changes, those modifications onto our future generations, to our kids, and they pass them on. So we can pass on this genome that's supposed to empower us to do all of these great things.

And we can also end up passing on with the wrong kind of environmental adverse factors. We can actually pass on off switches where we should be passing on on switches. Is that related to what you describe or what you call epigenetic weathering? Yes, definitely. So weathering is kind of premature aging. And that happens based on things like, you know, just aging.

inordinate amounts of stress, too much stress when you're younger, especially when you are, you know, when you're developing and growing and your brains are especially growing quickly and your organs and everything are very vulnerable.

that is a really sensitive moment where you can begin the weathering process. And you find that some people have aged way sooner than they should in terms of what other people who are of the same kind of background and social identity, you know, are biologically aging at. And so, yeah,

The main, you know, kind of areas of research that are going on, the hot areas of research in weathering and epigenetic weathering specifically are around racism, sexism, all kinds of studies out there showing this. They're showing that especially Black Americans, Black moms, Black male youths,

And also Latinx. I mean, the list is long, but, you know, it's just people are aging faster, genetically, epigenetically speaking, because of the way that our society treats them. Reena, when we stop viewing intelligence in this one rigid way, fixed, innate, only speaking to a certain kind of intelligence,

hopefully we start to get curious about how it can be nurtured. And that's something that you're very curious about. And in your book, you talk about three key ways to nurture it. One way I'd like to discuss is centered on growth and a growth mindset. Can you walk us through your thinking on this, what the research shows, especially the impact a growth mindset can have? Yes, definitely. I think the growth mindset is something that a lot of people are familiar with. I mean, this research shows

has, you know, been so strong that it's been implemented in, you know, business, in education. There are, you know, there are programs for the home and for parents. And I mean, it's really strong and wonderful. In terms of intelligence and, you know, getting us to think differently with our kids in the classroom and in the workplace. I, I,

think that right now it's very much focused around neuroplasticity. And that is a topic I love to talk about in a nutshell. You know, it's the idea that our brains are always growing and developing. We're always learning. And therefore we're always, you know, having this opportunity to become more intelligent. And so intelligence is not fixed. It's actually developed.

growth. It's growing. It's in process, as I said earlier. But one thing I want to add to that is, you know, knowledge about the epigenome, the things we just were talking about, you know, just knowing that even our DNA is setting us up for that growth. Our DNA doesn't give us

the quality of our thinking. Our DNA just gives us that neuroplasticity. And it's a beautiful thing. You know, we have these brain structures. We can grow and change throughout our whole lifetime. So if you...

you know, follow what I'm saying and you really want to redefine intelligence with me and you want to think of it as a process, a lifelong journey, then you'll want to think in terms of growth. Adopt a growth mindset. See yourself and everyone around you as always growing, always developing, always able to take advantage of the learning opportunities in our environments.

Another nurturing approach that you talk about is connection. And what do you mean by this and what impact does it have on our brains? Well, as a professor, as a teacher, and I used to teach in the K-12 system, so I really think that we need to think of how we're learning. So if you do want to follow me in this direction,

redefinition of intelligence, you're going to want to know like how can I promote learning

If learning is the process, the journey, then how can I have better learning? What's the best way to learn? And that's where I like to go into education research and learning research and show that the kind of learning that's collaborative, the kind of learning that is reciprocal, that has a synergistic dimension to it,

learning where you're learning with another person, or even if you're completing tasks at home, you're working from home as I do much of the time, or you're on Zoom or something like that, just even framing what you're doing, even when you are doing pretty solo activity, framing it in terms of meeting your own learning goals, but also meeting someone else's. That kind of thing just makes the learning better.

It makes your growth better. There's something about adding a social emotional component to learning that we know makes it more effective. And I talk about connected learning and connectivity because I want us to think

How can I take a lot of these tasks that I'm almost being asked to do as, you know, an individual, almost like as if I don't have connections, I don't have friends and family and loved ones. And how can I make it something that relates to those people? And how can I actually even think, are there opportunities for us to do this together?

What's one change that you'd like to see when it comes to intelligence? Maybe a change in something that we currently do that could have a big impact on people's lived experiences. I would like us to replace standardized intelligence tests and standardized aptitude tests and standardized testing with testing that is much more sensitive to people's individuality

and eliminates this habit that we're stuck in of measuring people's social standing, their standard of living, and then spitting that back to them as how smart they are. I want to replace that. And I say replace because I know that when I talk to educators, especially K-12 educators right now, they're under so much pressure to just

produce some kind of evidence of what's going on in their schools, right? And so I know that they're not going to say, yes, we can get rid of testing all across the board, but they need something. They need some metrics, right? But I do look at other systems. Finland is one that has zero standardized testing, but it does have

a test that schools can administer that is only reflective or the information is only used about the school on a complete school population level. So as to give them a sense of what the school needs work on. No one gets their individual scores. No one's tracked for a better or worse education because they didn't meet the standard, right?

And so whatever we can do to do things a little bit more like that, where we use tests or assessments as ways of helping individual students one-on-one in an individualistic kind of like, you know, oh, you need help with that thing? Let's work on that.

you know, that kind of way. And then if there needs to be some kind of standardized test, have it be at a population level and not, you know, some kind of branding mechanism for individual students. That's, that's probably my, my dream of all dreams. Reena, the theme of the podcast is curiosity. What are you most curious about today?

Oh, I'm so curious about so many things. I mean, that's such a great, great question. I am actually very curious about what we can do differently in the public school system.

I've been talking to a lot of friends who are educators in different parts of our public school system. I have some friends who started charter schools. I have other friends who work in the schools that I went to when I was growing up.

And I'm, you know, a professor at a very large public institution, one of the largest in the country. And so I want to know what we can do differently and what's going to be

the direction will take in the next few years. I really do think that people have bought into the growth mindset. And I think that there's less convincing around that and less need for convincing around adopting a growth mindset. But that's still a kind of like personal strategy that I think is very important. It's one place to start.

But I wonder what's going to happen systematically. I wonder what we can do when we put our heads together on that. Is there anything I haven't asked? You know, your book is just really phenomenal and there's so much in it and I can't cover everything. Is there anything I haven't asked or any message that you'd like to leave us with?

I guess I don't think there's anything that you haven't asked. It was such a pleasure to talk to you. This is a really wonderful, wonderful experience. And I just will leave us on the message of let's redefine intelligence. Let's not just rethink it. Let's redefine it. Let's do this together. I know we can do this. I know we can. Let's think of ourselves as neuroplastic, as people who are destined to be neuroplastic.

smart and healthy. And let's work our systems to meet that challenge. Because there's been such a shift, I feel like we are continually learning new things about our biology in ways that even just a decade ago, we weren't.

Do you feel like we have a better chance than ever because we are learning more? Or do you feel like the genetic component of this keeps crowding out those possibilities? What do you think about that? Clearly, you're very hopeful and very optimistic. But I'm also curious how you see those competing arguments. Well, I am...

I'm a mom of three. They're very little right now. And so I, I see a lot from the parent angle of things, the kind of things that I'm marketed, the kinds of things that I'm kind of sent through social media and through the whole internet and, you know, everything out there and what's in the public sphere for us. And I, I,

I do think that the genetic messages are a countervailing force for all of the change that I'm hopeful about. Yes, I think I am an optimist at heart, but the genetic message, I fear that it can remain dominant because it has for so long, because it's almost something that we, it's a bias we can hold without thinking

even knowing it. And our institutions, in a sense, hold that bias because they score us, because they spit out numbers about us. And so even when we might be like, oh, I'm into alternative education, I'm into gentle parenting, I'm into curiosity-based learning and connective

and connected learning, we can still have that bias. And when I see geneticists going around and talking about how we need to have different educational paths for people who have different genetic backgrounds, different genetics, you know, I think, man, there's something very simple and sexy about what they're saying. And yet it's so dangerous.

So I hope that we can look past that. And I hope that my book will help people to kind of wake up to that scheme as being just a very bad scheme. But, you know, genetics, DNA, it's sexy. It really is.

If people who are listening want to take a step in the direction of being part of the solution, they're hearing things, they're learning things, or they see the system and want to be able to make some kind of inroad, would you have a recommendation for them of one even small thing they could do? Yeah, I think learning kind of the basics of neuroplasticity, learning the basics of epigenetics,

Even, you know, in just a Google search and just poking around on the web, I think that people will be really delighted to learn these things that we now know about ourselves. And that will help them be armed with the right knowledge. And that will help them to be skeptical about these quick fixes and these, you know, sales schemes and

that definitely will come their way. I mean, I still am getting marketed all kinds of Mensa IQ score, you know, like test yourself and all of this stuff. I mean, it's been my whole adult life. I've been marketed this stuff, but I'm like, even just, you know, the other day I was marketed another IQ program on TikTok, you know, and it's just, I think that if people are

Learn just a little bit. I think they'll be very excited to kind of keep that critical mindset. And also, it's just a beautiful message. It really is a beautiful message that our bodies are sending us through all of this new science that we grow and we learn our whole lives. There's potential in us, all of us.

I think a lot of people think, "Oh, I don't think like other people. I'm not as smart as these other people." Or people who have scored high, they feel like they're imposters anyways. They're like, "I don't think I'm really that smart." It's just like all of that, it comes out of us accepting this rank comparison way of looking at intelligence, this score-based way of looking at intelligence.

So I think that seeing that we actually are growing and changing, that means that you can't quantify me. I'm completely in motion. I'm a work in progress. And I think that people would like to hear that message and just know that our epigenomes also say that. It's like, you're a work in progress. Sure, you could pass on worse DNA modifications than you got from your parents, but you know what? You could pass on better ones.

you can actually heal the future generations. So I think that is probably going to make people very happy to learn that. That's a really powerful way to end the podcast. And you've given us a lot of insights and ways to think about some steps we can take, which I think is really helpful. I can't thank you enough. It's been such a pleasure to speak with you, Rina. Thank you so much, Gail.

Curious Minds at Work is made possible through a partnership with the Innovator Circle, an executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer and editor Rob Mancabelli for leading the amazing behind-the-scenes team that makes it all happen. Each episode, we give a shout-out to something that's feeding our curiosity. This week, it's the nonfiction book The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Moore. The combination of deep reporting and riveting storytelling makes this book the ultimate page-turner.

At the same time, Laura sneaks in a lot of lessons about what it really takes to run a U.S. supermarket, including how prices get set and products make it to shelves. I was hooked from the first paragraph.