Episode Details

Dr. Calvin D. Sun is an emergency room physician, author of Monsoon Diaries (HarperCollins), and founder of the Monsoon Diaries travel community. He has visited every UN-recognized country in the world and is ranked among the ten most traveled Americans. During COVID, while most hospital doctors were silenced by media clauses, Calvin was working per diem across four New York City boroughs, free to speak to anyone who called. He did 10 to 20 interviews a day.

What makes him a natural fit for Well Said: he has spent his career in the hardest communication situations that exist. Delivering devastating news. Deciding what to tell his partner after a brutal ER shift. Speaking truth to the public when his colleagues legally couldn't. He has thought harder than most about the difference between honesty and truth, when withholding protects the people you love, and what it actually means to read the room.

In this episode:

- Ubuntu: the philosophy that says a person is only a person through another person, and what that means for how we show up in every conversation

- Why authenticity isn't a fixed trait but a relational one — who you are depends entirely on who you're talking to

- How Calvin's father's journal, written for the wrong son, shaped his entire relationship to writing and vulnerability

- Why changing your environment, whether that's a foreign country or a different cafe, is one of the most underrated communication tools there is

- The three communication principles Calvin has lived by: read the room, show your cards with intention, and stay consistent

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