Hi, TED podcast listeners. It's Elise Hugh here from TED Talks Daily. Thanks for making our podcast part of your routine. We really appreciate it, and we want to make your favorite TED podcasts even better. We put together a quick survey, and we'd love to hear from you. It only takes a few minutes, but it helps us shape our shows and get to know you, our listeners, way better. Head to the episode description to find the link.
Thank you again for listening and for taking the time to help our shows. Алло, здрасти, бабо. Здрасти, миличак. Добави ли си картата виза в телефона, както те посъветвах? Бабо, нямах време. Отнема секунди? Ай, що ма аз успях? Е! I want to recommend a podcast called Think Fast, Talk Smart to help you become a more effective communicator. Every Tuesday, host and Stanford lecturer Matt Abrahams sits down with experts to discuss how to hone and develop your communication skills.
Whether you want to make small talk that leaves a big impression, nail your big presentation at work, or perfect your wedding toast, this show will offer you science-based strategies so you can communicate with confidence and clarity. Listen every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts and find additional content to level up your communication at faster smarter dot IO.
I'm Adam Grant, and this is Taken for Granted, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist, and my job is to rethink how we work, lead, and learn. My guest today is familiar to listeners of Work Life. Actually, to pretty much anyone who listens to podcasts or reads books. Malcolm Gladwell.
Malcolm and I find ourselves on stage together about once a year, and he's my favorite sparring partner. It's the closest I'll ever come to being the Karate Kid or Rocky Balboa. A few weeks ago, as part of the tour for my new book Think Again, Malcolm and I did a live chat on the audio platform Clubhouse about what we're rethinking.
It built on a rollicking discussion we had back when Malcolm was on tour for his most recent book. So we're gonna do something unusual here. We're gonna play the highlights from both conversations. In the fall of 2019, I hosted Malcolm in my Authors at Wharton series. He was launching his book, Talking to Strangers. It's about why we misread people who we have limited information on.
The book discusses judgments that police officers make, especially of people of color. And although the world has changed some since we recorded that conversation, I think you'll find many of Malcolm's observations on race particularly precious. I came in thinking about some of the interesting tensions between his books.
Blink was about how surprisingly accurate our snap judgments can be. But talking to strangers is about how inaccurate they are. And Outliers was about how the rich get richer. But David and Goliath is about how the underdog can beat the favorite. Malcolm Gladwell, welcome back to Penn. Thank you. So I have noticed over the last couple of years that you seem to really enjoy contradicting yourself. I do. Yeah. Why?
Well, I'm more worried about not contracting myself. So I would be very concerned if I was still saying the same things. Today, as I was saying 10 years ago, that would strike me as being deeply problematic. Why? Well, I would like to think that my current self is a good deal more interesting and thoughtful than my 10 years before self right and also i've never attached any stigma whatsoever
to contradiction consistency is surely the the lamest of all human virtues i want to i'm not even sure it is a virtue i've never understood why that should be high on our list of I mean, and even phrases like, so-and-so talks out of two sides of their mouth. So? Is that so wrong? Why can't I talk out of two sides of my mouth? You can, but you go to great lengths to push this to the extreme. So your last book, David and Goliath, was almost the reverse of outliers.
No. I disagree. And I would know. But let me make my case first, and then you can tell me why I'm wrong. So, Outliers was about cumulative events. And David and Goliath, I think, was about cumulative, in some ways, disadvantage. Yeah, okay. Fair enough. Right? I rest my case. Why do you think they weren't opposites, though?
Well, they were kind of, I thought that David and Goliath was a gentle corrective to the excessive enthusiasm that greeted outliers. So I was like, you know and then sometimes when you write something you're like am i sure and so you want to kind of go back and noodle around a little and because you know even the most thoughtful observations contains an opportunity for
joyful contradiction that's to say not nasty contradiction but you know you can make an observation and you can say oh here are all the interesting exceptions and sometimes the pile of exceptions get so high that it's almost as high as the initial interesting observation and that's the kind of situation that I kind of like
Okay, so you found yourself in a new one of those now. So I read Talking to Strangers and felt like this is kind of the reverse of Blink in many ways. Well, now I'm just saying you should say that. This is one case where I don't believe I'm contradicting myself. Why not? Because what is the last story in Blink? Amadou Diallo. So the last major chapter in Blink is about the shooting of Amadou Diallo, a young African man in the Bronx.
who is a group of police confront him outside of his home and make a series of snap decision judgments of him that are all entirely wrong and shoot him dead. Okay, what is the opening story of Talking to Strangers? The story of Sandra Bland, a young African-American woman who was pulled over by a police officer who makes a series of catastrophically bad decisions about her and she ends up dead.
I think of this as a continuation. This is part two of Blink. This is a sequel. This is a sequel. So Blink was a kind of journey through... snap judgments that began with well when are they good and then slowly began to kind of explore the notion that actually they're only good in a very very limited set of circumstances and they're mostly kind of troubling and but I it astonished me how few people and this may be as a tribute to how badly that book was written
How few people understood what I was doing in that book. Like actual serious professors of psychology. I was once on a train to Boston and I sat next to a neuroscientist. so like I mean with all due respect to what you do Adam The neuroscientists are like way out there, right? That's where like your high IQ guy goes, right? So I'm sitting next to a neuroscientist. I have so many thoughts right now. And he says to me.
Yeah, I really disagreed with your book, Blink. I read the first chapter and I was like, I can't go on. I was like, well... the argument of all. and if you finish the book you might have a more thoughtful understanding of where i was going with it if neuroscientists can't figure out what i was doing in blank what hope is there for the rest of us I think you're giving neuroscientists a little too much credit. So when I go to understand human behavior, I do things like
survey people or run experiments or talk to them and then have to figure out what cues are reliable and which ones aren't. They take a picture. Yeah, inside your brain. I get super excited about the picture and draw all kinds of conclusions. It is the kind of Instagram of science, isn't it? That's what neuroscience is. I'm joking, by the way, for the neuroscientists in the audience. I really am joking.
I am curious, though. So a lot of Blink was about the surprising ways that our snap judgments are accurate. What happened to change your mind? There's been a lot of really interesting science since I wrote Blink. So Blink was written, comes out in 2004, it's 15 years later. In Blink I was quite taken with this notion that facial expressions were a universal and reliable cue to the way you feel in your heart.
So the emotions in your heart are represented on your face. It's a billboard for the heart. That's an idea that Darwin puts
forth and then is kind of popularized and becomes a consensus position in many ways in psychology for many years. Blink was very much taken with the original consensus and this book is like actually now there are all kinds of people who are saying wait a minute and my favorite can i tell my favorite my favorite study on this one is and this is a German study, and it could only be a German study, just so you know. conduct us anywhere they lead you down a long narrow corridor into a room
where you're asked to read a passage of Kafka. Of course. It was either Kafka or Nietzsche. They were like, well, which one? There's no other possibility in a German psychological study. I'd quit the study right there. But they continue. You read the passage of Kafka, you answer a series of questions, and then you say you're free to leave.
so you open the door to go back down the long narrow hallway only it's not a long narrow hallway anymore they have moved the partitions that made the hallway and on a chair is sitting your best friend looking at you bail Right and the question is what do you do? When you see this, you've just been reading Kafka, you think you're about to go home, and all of a sudden it's, whoa, right?
So the first thing they do is they ask you after you're like, whoa, what are you doing here? They ask you, how surprised were you going to scale up one to ten? And everyone says, oh, you know, eight and a half, nine, totally surprised. Then they say, what do you think your face look like? And they say, well, my face must have shown surprise. I must have been this. Right? Jaw drops, eyes go wide, eyebrows go foom.
they show you the video temperature effect And what they find is that the actual videotape of your facial expression at the moment when you were registering 8.5 or 9 on a scale of 10 of surprise, your face shows no such thing. some people maybe do a little bit of an eyebrow raise a lot of you will just like look like oh
So the idea that our face is a reliable cure to the way we feel is a fiction created in part by Hollywood and in part by Darwin, who spent too much time looking presumably at dogs or whoever. I don't know who he was using. I have to say, when I first read this research, I thought, okay, this is kind of an interesting finding, but I don't know if I buy the interpretation of it.
Because we also know that people are remarkably bad at judging their own emotions, especially if they're low in emotional intelligence. And so it's possible, in fact, that many of them thought they were surprised when, in fact, they weren't. Or they only concluded that they were surprised later. Maybe they were terrified. Kafka is really unsettling. And then the room, I don't know. Oh, but, but, so something should be on their face. Maybe.
Maybe. It's hard to imagine they feel no emotions in that situation. Now, I just wonder if there's a lag between the emotions they're feeling and the ones they display. The more compelling evidence was the evidence of a number of people. And I talked to these two really wonderful researchers who went to the most remote corner of the world and showed. So what they did is you get. In a series of photos.
people making quintessential emotional faces and the eight-year-olds will get it will get this will nail this they'll get all of them right they know what an angry face is they know what a happy face is they know is so then they go to like a little what's called the Trobian Islands which is like where anthropologists go and they want to get as far away as possible. Basically, the only Westerners the Trobians have ever seen are anthropologists.
It's very, very curious. So they have actually a weird sense of what the Western world is like. They think the Western world actually is just a large group of nerdy academics. That's their notion. Their mental picture of American society is like guys in tweed jackets. And, you know, so the Trubian people at this are like unbelievably terrible. So only 58% of them can recognize happy faces as being happy on things like our angry face
They're all over the map. A huge percentage of them think an angry face is a happy face, and an angry face is a fearful face, which is the opposite of anger. I mean, it really goes to show you how culturally imprinted a lot of these things are. And my favorite is, they completely have no understanding of a surprise face because for them surprises It's the sound it's not as expression at all
So I have to say, though, when I think about that, I never thought we were supposed to believe that facial expressions were that universal or that reliable as indicators of emotion, right? I think if you read the Ekman research, what he did was he said, hey, even if you go to a culture very different from your own, people will recognize some of the prototypical expressions at a rate that's better than chance. And that suggests that there might be some universalities in expressions.
But then to expect that every culture would recognize every emotion and they wouldn't have their own norms, that seems a little bit extreme, doesn't it? And the way that that argument was represented, perhaps to be fair to Ackman, represented by others in subsequent years, the universal claim became quite strong. But you're right. I think this was... I'm sorry, say that again. Did you say I was right?
This is such a satisfying early victory, I didn't expect it to happen. You know, take pleasure in these small victories, Adam. See how far it gets you. was my point oh the real issue is not what academics think though it's that who believes this more than anyone else I mean law enforcement well particular cops are like the great offenders and that because this is a book that begins and ends with a story of... a police officer gets someone very wrong.
That's a relevance to me. We should be, we should obviously be careful with facial expressions and body language. I'm curious though, one of the things I was surprised by is you didn't talk much about vocal cues in the book. And there was a paper that Michael Krauss published recently that he led where it was five experiments.
where you have a chance to observe somebody expressing different emotions, both facially, body language, as well as vocally. And the finding was that if you close your eyes and you just listen to their voice, you read their emotions more accurately than if you're looking at their face, too. And so I don't think we understand yet why this is, whether it's harder to control your voice and so your real anxiety might leak.
or whether there are aspects of the voice that are less likely to vary from person to person or culture to culture. But where have you come down on vocal cues? Should we trust them? I love the question, where do you come down on local kids? Where do you come down on one of humanity's major forms of communication? I don't know, Adam. I think I'm in favor of one of them. I would ask this question parenthetically because I'm...
now in the podcast business. I mean, now in the vocal cues business. And why is the vocal cue so kind of emotionally resonant? Maybe part of it is that we are uniquely kind of susceptible or
in the way that we process auditory cues. Or maybe it is that your eyes are just a source of so much noisy and misleading information. I think that whenever possible... unless you want to date them the people that you you should if you want to make an accurate assessment of someone you shouldn't you should try not to see them in the early going okay hold on a second because You went so far as to at least imply if you didn't fully say that parents should not even meet a babysitter.
and interview them before they hire them. No, I'm not a parent. You obviously don't have children. But you, okay, so wait. Adam, we were talking earlier about contradictions. Let's discuss the contradiction. It just came out of your mouth. Wait, I'm the contradiction? Keep going. You're just sad.
with great gusto talking about somebody who said, the auditory cue allows you to be much more skilled at making sense of all manner of someone's character, et cetera, et cetera. And then in the same breath, Like, not a minute later, you expressed outrage at the notion that you'd want to, that you would not want to meet your babysitter. Well, I thought you just said the auditory cue was better. Call the babysitter up.
You just said that was better. Oh, I want the behavioral cue. I want to see if they drive like a maniac into our driveway. I want to see whether they show up on time. When you're previewing babysitters, do you take them for a drive? No, you've heard this before. You watch out the window and you're surreptitiously tracking their driving habits before they come in. How many babysitters are squealing their wheels? Do you have some incredibly long winding driveway up there?
I also want to see if they show up on time. As I said, I'm not a parent, so this is all abstract for me. Clearly not. All I know is that when I was a child, we had babysitters. I did not want to interact with them. Why would I want to interact with them? My parents dragged some stranger into the house who's invariably annoying. I'd like to be left alone. This explains a lot right now. I understand the life you lead so much better.
I have some bones to pick. We can talk more about the book, but I know you wanted to talk about other things that we disagree on. So this has kind of been annoying me for 14 years. Because I think you first told me about it when we first met on your Blink tour. Okay. You've carried this
festering annoyance around with you now for 14 years? It's almost a grudge, but not quite. So the issue is, you wrote this whole book about how chance and luck and opportunity are much more important than we realize in shaping our success. And you didn't mention anywhere in the book that single best predictor that we have of anything we can measure is your intelligence, your cognitive ability. That's true across jobs. It's more true as jobs get more complex.
And that's all luck, right? I didn't choose my intelligence. I was born into it. It's highly heritable. And so there would have been such a compelling chapter of that book that says, hey, you know what, how smart you are is one of the biggest determinants, if not the biggest determinant, of how your future is going to turn out. And guess what? That was kind of a, it was a lot.
I was just trying to get us to stop falling in love with people just because they have sky high IQs. Which is fair. Yeah. But. I thought it would have been a really interesting argument to say, hey, wait a minute. This thing that you have no control over is actually a big driver of your fame and fortune and your success. But you don't like that story, do you? Well, is it a story? I mean, so I actually...
In January, I started a company with my friend Jacob to make podcasts. Pushkin. Pushkin. It's called Pushkin. We now have 16 employees. And the thing about intelligence... is that it's not a scarce commodity. And so the things that predicts success in that select universe have nothing to do with intelligence but they are They are parallel to intelligence. So what I'm really interested in is conscientiousness and hard work.
curiosity and flexibility and all those kinds of things. When I interview people for a job, they're all smarter. Okay, thanks, Zach. Yeah. I'm way more interested in, can you get your work done on time? So there are certain things, very particular things, that I'm increasingly interested in, and I think are really, really useful predictors of real success at the kind of granular level so one is the kind of people's willingness to
persevere past the point of pretty good. Now that does not strike me as having anything to do with intelligence. In fact, a lot of really, really smart people I know don't persevere past the point of pretty good. But I really, really, really, really want to work with people who will do that. I'm thinking of someone in my podcast company right now. I have no idea what her IQ is. I assume it's super high. I have no clue. What I do know is that
She's insanely good at this thing of pushing past pretty good. She won't. I won't stop and say it's good enough, and she will not. And she's right, and I'm wrong. And a lot of my podcasts are... They get into her hands and they go from B pluses to A plus that I don't know what that is she has it I can't there are very few people who have that and I do not think it's because
she got double 800s on her SATs. Yeah, it sounds like she's a maximizer rather than a satisficer and also sky-high achievement motivation. Yes. So now, doesn't that suggest that you're kind of highly reductive, very un-atom-like, highly reductive obsession with intelligence needs some correction.
Of course not. Wait, but that has nothing to do with her being those two things, whatever they were, and the particular jargon you're using in the moment. That's not correlated with intelligence, is it? No. Not at all. Completely uncorrelated, in fact. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, of course, I won. But my work here is done. All right. What else should we talk about, Adam? No, but in fact, I think this is interesting. We're at a place like Penn where intelligence is a filter.
I've been wondering whether we should have intelligence diversity. And we should deliberately admit people who are not as bright as the average student or slower thinkers. With what? I say you do their cult legacies. Wow. Wait, why? So just before we go further, how many legacies in the room do we know? All right, no one's willing to raise their hands. I actually haven't seen the empirical data on whether legacies are less intelligent. Did you not see the big study that was done?
that came out last week. There was a paper published because of the lawsuit filed by Asian American students against Harvard University on the grounds that they were being discriminated against in the admissions process. Harvard was forced to turn over its admissions data and the admissions data are super fascinating and in the category of white students who are either
Legacy, faculty, children, donors, kids, or athletes. 43% of the white total fell into one of those five categories. And virtually everyone in one of those five categories would not have been admitted without. having one of those qualifications. So white affirmative action is a very, very big deal at Harvard University and it comes almost entirely at the expense of Asian students.
So to answer your question, yes, Harvard is actively practicing precisely what you are prescribing for Penn. They call it something different, but admitting lots of legacy and donor kids. is a way of having intelligence diversity. And you can... You should go and ask them how well that experiment's turning out. Maybe it works really well. I don't know. Certainly helps in fundraising, right? Which seems to be the principle since Harvard University, like
is a hedge fund with an intelligent education operation attached to it as a fundraising arm. I don't know why you're laughing. That's what it is. Harvard is a $40 billion hedge fund. Harvard operates this thing in Cambridge. Which funnels in kids. who send the money once they graduate. I don't understand why this is hard. So I want to shift gears a little bit. So there are some other revisionist history episodes that I listened to and had some strong reactions to.
that I want to push you on a little bit. So one of the things that you did was you introduced this idea of casual strength, which I thought was brilliant. And you basically, I think if I heard you right, you landed at saying we should continue banning performance enhancing drugs. but performance restoring drugs should be fine.
Yeah. Well, what I wanted to do, so the casuists, the Jesuit tradition of casuistry is all about trying to resolve difficult moral dilemmas, new moral dilemmas without resorting to principle. So what you do is you take existing case that you agree with an existing case that you disagree with and you see it well is it closer to the one or the other
So there's two cases. One is where we're using an artificial means to restore our ability, and one is an artificial means to transform our ability. I don't understand why there is this weird notion that just because something is a product of pharmaceutical ingenuity we can't use it to recover from an injury right that seems crazy to me yeah I found that convincing The thing that I started to think about more that left me wondering though was why should we stop at performance restore?
So I, as a kid, wanted to make the NBA. You start high school less than five feet tall, you feel like it's probably not going to happen. And so then you start to wonder, well, why should I only be able to restore myself to my natural ability? Why should I not be able to be as fast as any of the players that I looked up to?
um how do you know where to draw the line on that and why why is it fair then to give some players their their natural genetic advantages yeah well you know we're about to this is all going to happen right with with All these recent advances in gene editing and such. people are going to be trying at least to engineer these athletes. The athletes are the first place we're going to do this. Maybe the case that we may need to kind of put a a fence around a lot of athletic
Arenas ask ourselves what is interesting to us about athletic competition? Maybe what's interesting to me about watching a basketball game is the knowledge that I am watching people Exactly as they were um born to be but also there's another interesting which is like so i had this i had a really fascinating discussion with some guy about the notion of recovery and he was talking about lebron james a lot of it is the fact that lebron gets more sleep than everybody else
You might need to say that one again for this audience. He is maniacal about sleep and sleep is the single most powerful determinant of your ability to recover. Part of what makes him interesting is that he's the guy who takes sleep seriously. And I'd hate to kind of remove that from consideration. Yeah. Well, I like, I like your, I think your argument, if I can put it in psychology language, is that it's not his maximum performance that makes him great. It's his typical performance.
And I think that's actually true probably for most people. I wondered, you did another episode on rules for life. where you claimed you had a lot of them, but you didn't release most of them. Would you add this as a rule for life, and can you give us some of your other rules for life? Add what as a rule for life. This idea that it's better to be consistently good than intermittently excellent.
I hadn't thought about that. First of all, I hadn't thought about the difference between your optimal performance and your average performance and typical performance. That's actually a really lovely little concept. Let's play with that for a moment. what does that mean exactly so if I like if I prefer your typical self to your optimal self what does that mean in terms of Our friendship. Yes. This is a very strange way of interacting as friends. But strangely, my favorite one.
I don't think you would ever want that, but I think that often in sports, and we do this when we hire too, in professional jobs, we want to see how good they are at their best. I just realized something. What? The last time we had a conversation, we had an argument. You said that you thought comedians had one of the hardest jobs.
I said they were better psychologists, I think. But you said it's really hard to be a good comedian, and I said it's harder to be a good teacher. Yes. And you vehemently disagree with this. I did. The way to resolve this agreement is exactly this. A comedian is mad. I thought we already resolved it. No, no, no.
You still haven't changed your mind? Really? Things that have been festering. This has been festering. But this is the explanation. We're talking, it's apples and oranges. A comedian is measured in terms of their optimal performance. They have a carefully rehearsed, time-limited performance, and that is how we come to understand their genius. A teacher is all about typical performance. A teacher, you measure a teacher on their ability day in, day out to come in and keep an even keel.
In the face of all kinds of provocation and exhaustion and what have you, they have to remain this consistent common presence in the classroom. So it is two profoundly different tasks. So the right answer is that both are impressive for very different reasons.
It so happens that I valorize typical performance, and you have an affection for entrepreneurial performance. No, I think your whole analysis is right, except you're thinking about the wrong kind of comedians, which I was not clear about a year and a half ago. So the comedians I had in mind were two kinds of comedians. One were comedy writers.
who have to go and do it day in, day out. So I was thinking about Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David writing Seinfeld and producing, what, 200 episodes? We were talking about performance. Yeah, but that is their performance, right, is to actually create the script. And then the other was improv comedy, where you have to do it on the fly.
and you get judged on every single idea that you make up. But improv is still optimal performance. It's not typical performance. It might be. Unless the improv lasts for like weeks. In which case, it's a whole different matter. Yeah, but I was thinking about aggregating somebody who is good at improv night after night. The also something interesting about hiring people. So you're right, the job interview is measuring optimal. when many cases were interested in typical.
So how would you change hiring for your department of Penn if you were interested in typical... Wait, I'm interviewing you here. What's going on? No, no, this is interesting. You're asking me a question? Yes. Tell me what typical hiring looks like if you did it at Penn. What are we hiring for? Faculty, staff? Faculty. Faculty. So faculty hiring, we first read all their research papers and decide whether their work is interesting and rigorous and important. That's optimal.
Although if we have enough of them, we're starting to move toward how optimal is their typical or vice versa. And then we have them come in and do what's called a job talk, where they present on their new research to a group of faculty. and we interrupt a lot and grill them on their findings, and then we get a taste of how they handle criticism, of how they perform in front of an audience who's actually often tougher than our own students. Yeah, that's optimal, not typically.
Probably, yeah. But then we also look at their teaching evaluations and their student feedback, and that, I think, is more typical. Yeah, yeah. I think I have some lightning round questions. Are you up for them? Yep. Okay. Favorite book you've read this year? Favorite book you wrote this year? I just read a really great book about the Shava Ranch.
That I just thought was kind of fantastic. If you could give one piece of advice to your 21 or 27-year-old self, what would you say? 21, I should have left North America. I thought about it. had a chance to, and didn't. And I completely regret it. The same. At 27, I actually, at 27, had another opportunity to go somewhere and didn't go and regret it. How do you know if you are successful? If you can do what you want. Really? Freedom?
Not impact? No, it's about like Yeah, no one's standing in the way of what you wanna do, read, write. ¡Chao! But you achieved that 15 years ago. Yeah, I was successful 15 years ago. And now? Well, I guess I still am. No one's stopping me. But you have a company now. You've constrained yourself more. They don't involve me in anything significant. I'm just arm candy for the operation. Suspicion confirmed.
Last question. We have a group of students in the audience who often describe themselves as insecure overachievers. What is the one piece of advice you would most like to offer them? Insecure overachievers. Why would you call yourself do self-identify as an insecure over shaver because you're insecure? Me? No. The group. Why would you agenda? I mean, is that a bad thing to be? It's probably a good thing to be, right? It means the insecurity is driving you're overachieving. Probably.
I would hire an insecure chair. I think that's what that person I was talking about at my company that I like so much, I think that's what she is. And it's fantastic. You mentioned when we were walking on stage that you read an article about how the whole United States is Southern? Yeah, I've been obsessed with this recently.
I first read this essay a couple years ago when I did a podcast episode on the Brown decision. And it is an African-American professor of history at Chicago called Charles Payne. essay, maybe 15 years ago, called The Whole United States of Southern, which remains, I think, is the most brilliant, one of the most brilliant essays I've ever read. And it was that phrase was was something that George Wallace
the infamous segregationist governor of Alabama in the late 60s once famously said. Payne's argument was that the project of Southern white segregationists and racists during the civil rights movement was to personalize the discussion of racism. Their argument was, if only black people and white people can look each other in the eye and be nice to each other.
and be polite to each other and open doors for each other and do all those kinds of things, we'll be fine. And the reason they wanted to do that is that they desperately wanted to distract attention from the institutional response to racism to... segregation and gerrymandering and voter suppression and redlining and all the kind of... And the title, when George Wall is famous, he says, the whole United States is Southern, what he meant was, we won.
Our way of thinking about race has won the day. That we can distract everyone with arguments and little petty discussions about conduct such that they will stop talking about institutional questions so why did why is this come up with for me well my book only considers that
The question, the book begins and ends with the famous case of, infamous case of Sandra Bland, the young black woman who's pulled over by a police officer. And I'm talking about the broader problem we've had with these encounters between African Americans and law enforcement but I don't talk explicitly about race or I don't talk explicitly about whether or not the cops who are confronting these African Americans are racist
That question is absent from the book. Why? Because I wanted to talk about this entirely along structural terms. I wanted to talk about what are the institutional mechanisms that Create these fateful encounters between African Americans and law enforcement
I don't want to fall into the whole United States' southern problem of saying, oh, that case is about a racist cop, because whenever we make that, draw that conclusion, we think we're done. We're like, well, what are you going to do? Guy's racist. so sorry about that next time we'll do better we say that and because we keep saying that this problem does not get better this issue has been going on for This country hundreds of years right and if you look actually at the numbers
you know we have had pretty consistently for a long time now about a thousand deaths every year of civilians at the hands of law enforcement we're not make that is way out of sync with other Western democracies we're not making any progress on this I have now gotten to the point where I'm not even sure if there is a conflict between institutional arguments and personal arguments, if it come down to whether you let in tens of thousands of refugees or whether you wore brownface to a party.
I really don't care what you want of a party. Honestly, I don't want to hear it. I don't want people to spend time on it. I don't want to waste energy on it. I'm much more concerned about the thousands of people who are suffering in some country and have nowhere to go. I want to judge people on a very different set of criteria.
So I'm curious about why this happens. So it seems to me that a big part of it, and this is not just true for racism, it's also how we deal with sexism a lot, It seems like a big part of it is because we're much better intuitive psychologists than we are sociologists. So we explain behavior in terms of people's individual motivations and values and attitudes, and we're horrible at seeing the collective forces that affect all of us. Do you think that's the story? Is there more behind that?
I mean, it's a really, really, really good question. Actually, I feel like you are better positioned than I am to answer. I'm a little bit baffled by it because we did go through a period.
in this country and many other countries where we were very interested in structural solutions to problems but it's kind of fallen out of favor I feel there's something that's gone on very recently where it is somehow way easier for us to describe to get worked up about blackface than it is for us to get worked up about voter suppression I do not understand that. I think maybe the other factor that comes to mind is there's a lot of evidence for efficacy being a problem.
So I don't feel like I can change a structure or influence an institution. Whereas the idea that I might be able to get an individual person to be less racist or less sexist, it feels a little bit more palatable.
And so I think people just put more faith in these kind of more individual factors, but they don't solve the problem. Isn't the truth the opposite? Isn't the truth that it's actually easier to change structural things than it is to change interpersonal attitudes? Probably collectively, but not for me, right? Not as an individual citizen. Do I think we could productively solve gerrymandering and voter suppression? Yeah.
I actually think we can't. I mean, I don't think, and I think if we paid more than five minutes attention to it, it wouldn't take that long. Yeah, but we is the operative for it. Yeah, I agree. Since Malcolm and I talked, brutality against George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others has led many people to reflect on how they can become anti-racists. One of the most important lines of research I've read is by Miguel Unzueta and Brian Lowry.
They find that seeing racism as an individual problem allows white people to distance ourselves from it. Not me. I'm not prejudiced. I don't believe any group is superior or inferior. Recognizing it as an institutional problem requires us to admit that we've benefited from unfair systems, or at least haven't been held back based on the color of our skin. We'll have more on this topic this season on Work Life.
I want to recommend a podcast called Think Fast, Talk Smart to help you become a more effective communicator. Every Tuesday, host and Stanford lecturer Matt Abrahams sits down with experts to discuss how to hone and develop your communication skills. Whether you want to make small talk that leaves a big impression, nail your big presentation at work, or perfect your wedding toast, this show will offer you science-based strategies so you can communicate with confidence and clarity.
Listen every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts and find additional content to level up your communication at faster smarter dot IO. Алло, здрасти, бабо. Здрасти, миличък. Добави ли си картата виза в телефона, както те посъветвах? Бабо, нямах време. Отнема секунди? Ай, що ме аз успях? Ей! Welcome back to Taken for Granted and my live conversation with Malcolm Gladwell. We recently caught up on Clubhouse, where Malcolm asked me some questions about my new book, Think Again.
Our chat was hosted by the amazing Kat Cole. You may remember her from the work-life episode on networking for people who hate networking. It was about how being a helper helped Kat rise to the top of Cinnabon at a shockingly young age. She invited some insightful comments and questions from an all-star group of listeners. So you'll hear some of their voices as well.
Adam, can you give us an overview of Think Again? The core idea builds on some brilliant work that my colleague Phil Tetlock did. And the premise is that we spend a lot of our life with these mindsets of occupations that we never have worked in. We find ourselves thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians more often than we would want to admit. When I'm in preacher mode, I'm trying to proselytize. When I'm a prosecutor, I'm trying to win a case and prove you wrong.
When I'm a politician, I have a constituent, I'm trying to get their approval, so I'm doing all this campaigning and lobbying. My big worry with preaching and prosecuting is that people are not willing to think again. Because I'm right. You're wrong. You're the one who needs to change. I'm good.
When people are in politician mode, they look a little bit more flexible, but all they're doing is they're flip-flopping what they say in order to communicate what they think their audience wants to hear. And so if it looks like they're rethinking, they're doing it at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, or they're just towing the party line and appealing to their tribe without actually changing their internal belief. My hope is that people will think a little bit more like science.
and say, you know what? I don't have to believe everything I think. I don't have to internalize every emotion I feel. When I start to form an opinion, that's just a hypothesis. Let me go out into the world, run some experiments, observe, talk to people, and test the hypothesis. And I should be then surrounding myself with people who don't just agree with my conclusions, but actually challenge my thought process.
And the goal of all that is to try to break us free of overconfidence cycles, where we take pride in our knowledge, we have too much conviction that leads us to confirmation bias, and then we become a little bit arrogant.
What I want to do is activate rethinking cycles, where we have the humility to know what we don't know. We doubt some of our convictions. That makes us curious to go and discover new things. And that reinforces this mindset of being a lifelong learner, saying, wow, I just learned something. There's so much more to learn.
Well, you have written another wonderful book and I found it actually there's so many fascinating things my only critique of this I have a critique of this book by the way I hope you have more than one I have several but my my large one which is a is it's four bucks. I'm reading this book. I was like, why are you... You're like jumping ahead to the next idea and I'm not done with the one you're on.
Either you have to slow down and write and chop your ideas into pieces or you have to write a longer book. you can't do you can't keep doing this and like race anyway that's a it's a very mild it's a it's a it's flattery designed as disguised as criticism. But I wanted to start, I kept thinking when I was reading this book, how does this fit in with Adam's previous book?
and i'm wondering do we have a kind of emerging adam grant philosophy of life Can you talk about how does this one fit with your previous book? I think this, it's an interesting question, and I will accept your back-ended compliment any day. Thank you for the enthusiasm and also the criticism, which I look forward to more of. I guess this book is sort of a meta book in that
In each of the books I've written before, what I've tried to do is I've tried to get people to rethink something that I think that they've gotten wrong or maybe an assumption that's been incomplete. But do you... What I want is whether you think there is a kind of Adam Grant ideology that's emerging from writing all this. Are you getting a kind of sense of, well, wait a minute, here is how I see the world. And if you read all my books. you'll get this Grantian vision.
Yes, although it would be a little ironic to commit to an ideology because then I'm not staying open to rethinking my opinions and beliefs, am I? No, no, you could have a component. You could have an ideology, which is that you revisit. your audiology, that's fine. No, I think there's an overarching thread that runs through all my work, which I didn't see until I'd written a couple of books.
The threat is that the very things that you think are critical for success in life can actually be attained through building character. And I think that my work has looked at different kinds of character strengths and said, you don't have to choose between your goals. and those virtues, whether it's generosity or now it's humility. And so I guess what I'm looking for at large is a way to align character with achievement. How's that?
Yeah. No, that actually... that fits with, that's what I've always sort of sensed. Well, why didn't you just tell me that a few years ago? Because then I would have understood who I was and what I was trying to achieve. No, no, no, but I'm curious. I mean, because I'm always very attracted to
to religious themes in things, particularly if they're kind of slightly sublimated. But it always struck me that there was some kind of Moral case being made in your books that maybe you weren't making explicitly but There was something about reading your books that felt very comfortable to someone who was used to thinking about the world in terms of character, ethics, morality, those kinds of things.
Like if I was thinking, if I had a Bible study of evangelicals and I said, this week we're not reading the New Testament, we're going to read the works of Adam Grant. I think actually people with that kind of role would be very at home with the arguments that you're making. That's interesting. I love it when ancient wisdom matches up with modern science.
And I think where the ancient wisdom often leaves me short is around Okay, for me at least, a lot of the principles and recommendations that come out of religious traditions are missing the nuance about how do you actually do this in life. So yeah, of course you want to be a generous person, but how do you give to others in a way that prevents you or protects you from burning out or just getting burned by the most selfish takers around?
Yes, I want to be humble, but I don't want to become meek or lack confidence. I guess what I want to do in a lot of my work is try to use evidence to pick up where these these higher principles leave off and ask, okay, what does it mean to do this without sacrificing, you know, our ambitions? Yeah, yeah. But even that, I mean, that's why. Christians have Bible studies and that's why
Jews study Torah, because the original texts are only the beginning, right? They require additional interpretation and understanding. They're not sufficient on their own, otherwise you wouldn't need to study them. When it comes to having those conversations about the ideas in those texts, I just happen to love the tools of the scientific method as a way to figure out what's going to be effective for more of the people more of the time.
Am I right that this is the most... Your books are never explicitly personal, nor are mine. That's not the game we're playing. However... I feel like this book is more personal than previous ones. There were many more glimpses into you and your own personal evolution. than I've seen in previous books. Is that accurate, first of all, or am I just imagining that? Definitely accurate. Why? So why? Why is this book more personal? I think there are three reasons.
The first one is that I decided to take a longer window to write this book than I ever have before. And I wanted to go and test out a lot of the principles that I was learning about and gathering data on. And that generated a lot of stories and examples, some of which I thought were worthy of sharing. The second reason was I felt like... This is, it's so easy to tell other people to think again.
And I think one of the things I've learned about getting people to open their minds to ideas that they might be resistant to is that if you can show openness and model that humility, that they tend to follow suit. And I thought the more I could sort of show my cards and say, look, here are times when I've struggled to rethink things that I believe.
Or here are situations when I've just run into a brick wall and just kept running anyway. You can see how hard this is that I often don't practice what I teach. And I thought maybe also if I shared those stories that maybe I would benefit from some of the principles of self-persuasion, which say that when you make an argument to convince somebody else, the person you're most likely to convince is yourself.
And I thought I could activate some cognitive dissonance. And the more I talked about these ideas, the more I wrote about my own personal struggles with them, the more I would end up holding myself accountable and getting other people to hold me accountable for actually living them. And then the third reason is we sat down at the 92nd Street Y in 2016, and I remember your opening question when you interviewed me about originals was, why isn't there more of you in this book?
And I said, well, hello pot, I'm Kettle. You never write about yourself in your book. But I really spent a lot of time thinking about that. And I thought you, just by asking the question, sent a pretty strong signal that I should be willing to share more and open up. Yeah, yeah. Do you regret planning that scene now? No, I still want more. You're convincing me of the value of... Like, I thought this...
The moments in this book that I loved the most were the ones when you were talking about your own experiences. that was where, very much to the points you were just making, there's something, particularly when you're talking about humility and leaving your mind open to revisiting assumptions and things that when it's Which is an inherently difficult
thing to ask anyone to do. You need the person who is asking you to do that to talk about their own experience, right? It's what It's what not only convinces you that it's possible, but also establishes the authenticity of the argument. This is jumping ahead, but my favorite part of this whole book is when you start talking about how you change the way you taught.
those little glimpses of things and whenever you talk about you know inviting students to kind of participate much more in the structure of classes and instruction and and that's just not like The easiest thing for someone in your position would be to do the opposite. is to say, the students need me to give them the full 90 minutes of Adam Grant. I'm Adam Grant, right?
I just thought that was really interesting that, can you talk, actually tell me, tell us a little bit, let's talk about the book a bit now. Tell us a little bit about that portion of the book and then, and reflect a little bit on how you made those ideas. How you kind of approach those ideas in your own experience in the classroom. When I started thinking about writing Think Again, I realized that I wasn't giving my students an opportunity to do it.
The more we focused on evidence based management, the less opportunity there was for students to question my arguments, the data I was bringing to the table, and also each other. So I decided I was going to throw out 20% of the class every year and try to rethink some of the core ideas that I was teaching, bring in new topics.
And one of the things I did just to kick that off was I left a day of the syllabus open. It was blank. And I asked the students to generate ideas for what they wanted to do in class. I said, I'll consider anything as long as it has pedagogical value. And they came up with all these brilliant ideas. The first year, they did this initiative called Deer Pen Freshman, where they wrote letters to their former selves about the decisions they had wished they had rethought.
about not declaring a major too soon, about not over committing to a romantic relationship that was going in the wrong direction, about not making their resumes so full that they didn't leave time to build a relationship. and it was so powerful to watch it happen, and it ended up getting adopted at a bunch of other schools, and so I saw that, and I said, okay, this is a staple of my class.
We need to rethink what we teach and learn every single year. And the hope is that great ideas then get built into the structure and culture of the class. But more importantly, that students get in the habit of thinking again. What's the cost of that? I can see the benefits clearly, but there must have been costs. I mean, time costs? Does it make your life more complicated in some way? It felt like a risk at first because I didn't know exactly what the ideas were going to be.
At the end of the day, I became a professor because as a student, I had some extraordinarily empowering professors who gave me much more of a voice than I ever deserved and even let me run some of their labs when I was a college student. And I wanted to pay that forward. And I guess my first principle there was trust the student.
And I'm really glad I did. I think the only other cost really was that we get so excited about the new ideas once they've rethought the class that we're always adding new activities and new content to the class and it just keeps growing and ballooning and it's hard to fit it into a semester. There was a word that I kept waiting to see, and I could be wrong, but I don't think it appears in the book, and it's the word pleasure.
But, which is odd to me that it doesn't appear or if it appears it appears only briefly because it seems to me you are articulating an idea about what is pleasurable in engagement in the world. You're not just making the argument that being willing to revisit your assumptions is useful in a utilitarian sense or more effective in managing certain kinds of problems. That doesn't strike me as being
Those are good things, but they're probably not sufficient. I sense that you had a more ambitious agenda, that you were also saying that this is actually a better way, subjectively, to live your life. that it will bring you more happiness in the end to be this open. And I wondered, am I right, first of all? And two, should you have made that point more explicit? Fascinating. I think I tried to get at this a little bit in chapter three on the joy of being wrong.
That joy of being surprised and delighted by discovering that your belief's about something that matters. might have been incomplete or incorrect is something I think we should all experience, not only because it's fun and stokes curiosity, but also because it allows us to run experiments in our own lives and shift the choices that we make. And I guess I wanted to get at that indirectly a little bit too in chapter 11 on rethinking our career and life choices.
To say look so many of us end up only doing our rethinking in hindsight and that leaves us with a lot of regret saying, if only I had chosen a different major or considered a different career or married a different person, I might have had a different life. And I think there's obviously a lot of benefit that can come from doing that rethinking up front.
And I don't know, though, if it's always directly going to lead to happiness. I think There's a new research in psychology by Shigehiro Yishi and his colleagues, which says, we mostly, when we talk about people's emotional experiences or their subjective experiences in life, we're mostly talking about happiness, and now we've started to add meaning.
And I think those are two reasonable things to focus on. But there's a third dimension of what people seek out in life, which is called psychological richness. which I think is a great concept. Psychological richness is I'm having interesting experiences. I'm learning new things. And I don't know if being an enthusiastic re-thinker will always bring you happiness or even meaning, but I think it definitely leads to a richer life. Well, that's really good.
But the book amounts to an argument for that then, for us raising the value of psychological richness as a goal. right it's you are articulating a kind of i mean i'm the reason i'm getting at this is that i was struck by because i am as you know a blackberry uh fanatic
It's from, they make it in my hometown. It came out of my dad's university. And you have a little thing where you talk about Mike Lazaridis, who ran... RIM BlackBerry for many years and he made this error and they went from 50% market share to whatever it was, 5% in five years. because they failed to understand the smartphone revolution, the typing on a keyboard as opposed, or typing on a screen as opposed, etc, etc. He was not willing to revisit his assumptions about what a smartphone...
could be. And I was thinking about that and I was like, but you know, When I go home sometimes to visit my mom, I sometimes see Mike Lazaridis, like buying books in the bookstore. He doesn't live that far from my mother. He's a very happy guy. He doesn't have any regrets. I don't think he built this beautiful house with all these trees outside. I think he's doing cool projects. He made himself, I don't know. Billion dollars probably at the end of the day
You know, I suppose he could have... His shareholders might be upset that he didn't rethink his assumptions. But it was very hard for me to think of Mike Lazaridis as being a... loser and Also like so what if you wrote it all the way down like he believed in a certain kind of ascetic functionality in a phone. I happen to believe that too.
Mike chose me over the many millions who wanted a phone that did everything. I don't know. Is that any different? I was thinking this in the context of I'm also a fan of, a deeply committed, diehard fan of the Buffalo Bills. If you know anything about football, you know that that has been for 30 years an invitation to masochism. Starting with Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas, four Super Bowls, zero wins. Exactly.
If I read your book one way, I would say, well, Malcolm, you should just rethink your football allegiances. They make no sense. This is not working, this Buffalo thing. There's a certain pleasure in me sticking with them through thin and thin. But so like, Do you see what I'm getting at? I do. Oh, there's so much to work with here. Okay, let me start by saying I love that you are rethinking your claim that you've made to me several times in this friendship.
that you always root for the favorite because the Buffalo Bills are definitely not the favorite. Yes, that's true. So welcome to the underdogs. It's about time you came around. Thank you. Secondly, on Blackberry, I still want the keyboard back. I hate typing on a screen. I will never be as fast as I was.
I'm not worried about Mike Lazaridis at all. What I'm worried about, and Malcolm, where is your empathy? Where is your compassion for all the people who lost jobs because RIM went under? I didn't go under. i mean it basically did how many people are working there now well no well actually this is a sidetrack but Years ago, I wrote this piece about what happened when
I think it was General Dynamics, had a very large presence in Rochester. And they shut down their factory and left. This is in the 70s. And everyone in Rochester said, oh my God, this is the end of Rochester. And then this researcher... I forgot who it was. Went back 10 years later and said, what happened to all the people who got laid off from General Dynamics? And he pointed out that the resurgence in the tech industry in Rochester was a direct result of all the people who...
were freed from General Dynamics and went on to do cool things. The exact same thing happened in Waterloo, my hometown. All the people who left RIM are the foundation of this incredible tech resurgence in Southern Ontario. do you know mike just educated a bunch of people about how to be entrepreneurs and how to think about
I think it's win-win for Waterloo. Anyway, that's a side point. No, I think you're right. I think that's a great point, and I'm feeling the joy of being wrong right now, because I think you can see the impact on the ecosystem if you go to Canada. I think there's a part of me, though, that I guess I also feel bad for you and me because we want that keyboard.
I would love it if there was an iPhone competitor that worked a little bit more like the BlackBerry did. And so I feel like we're missing out on, frankly, some possible technological advances that didn't occur because they stopped producing products. But that aside, I want to turn the tables on you just for a second here. Wait, wait, I have one last thing I want to say. Okay, go for it. What this book is, is a kind of rebuttal to Don Quixote.
Don Quixote is, everything that he stands for is something this book is refuting, right? This book is saying to persist in tilts and windmills. to persist in... The whole story of Don Quixote is Don Quixote continues to wage these battles that cannot be won. He will not rethink anything.
You know, that book suggests there's a kind of nobility in that romantic attachment to a cause, even in the face of... And you're saying, actually, no. Don Quixote's going to be much better off if he rethinks his position. about being this chivalrous knight and starts scientifically examining his options, right? Like this is, this book is the anti, it's the anti-Don Quixote.
I never thought of it that way, but I like it. I'm not saying you should always give up on your passions or let go of the causes that are important to you, right? I want people to stand by their principles, their core values. But I would be thrilled if more people were willing to say, look, I'm committed to a set of principles, but I'm willing to be flexible about the best plan to advance those principles.
And I think that really requires us to think a little bit more like scientists and a little bit less like preachers or prosecutors or politicians. who are convinced, I'm right, you're wrong, and I'm only going to try to cater to my own tribe. And I think that forces us to scrutinize our planet. And ask ourselves, okay, is this going to be something that allows me to pursue my values?
Okay, I do want to turn the tables on you here. Malcolm, one of the things I love most about your work and also your mind is how eagerly you rethink your assumptions. And I know probably your most discussed idea, which you're tired of hearing about by now, is what you call the 10,000-hour rule. I wondered how you've rethought that concept since Outliers came out.
Well, I mean, you know, there was my initial thing was ivory thought I should have written that chapter in a totally different way because anytime You suggest an idea and then the response to it appears to misunderstand your argument. Then you write your argument wrong. It's your fault, not your audience's fault.
Clearly I made much to, I didn't mean for 10,000 hours to be the dominant meme that emerged from outliers nor did I mean to suggest that it was the path to I was interested in it only because I was interested in the notion that if excellence takes a long time, then excellence requires a lot of help. If you're going to pursue something for 10,000 hours, you need a community of people. Helping you your mom's got to drive you to
Diving practice at 5 a.m. If you take so long time to become a good diver right like or a hockey practice at
4 a.m. or whatever. That was why I was in it, but I didn't make that argument. So I have beaten myself up over the way I wrote that chapter. But then I realized the thing that the way I have revisited is the other thing I didn't think about was that that standard that suppose it's true then it's it's it's hackable So I presented it as a kind of something cast in stone, as opposed to an observation about a particular way of learning.
So the next question is, well, is there a way to do it faster? And the answer is, yes, there is. You can be smarter about it. And you know, online chess allows people to become very good at chess a lot quicker than playing in chess clubs. because you can calibrate your opponent perfectly and you can play many more games so there's there's all kinds of and i can imagine a curriculum for we could go in and and i think it's already happening i've seen data on this in medicine now
By redesigning curriculum and redesigning medical technology, it's possible for surgeons to reach levels of high expertise much quicker. Learning curves have changed. The shape of them have changed. And I spent actually no time in the book talking about what is the most exciting aspect of 10,000 hours, which is, okay, can we get it down to five? That's what's interesting. I was off on this other. So yeah, I have thought a lot about it.
That's fascinating. I guess as a follow-up on that, I'm sure you've seen the Brooke McNamara meta-analysis showing that deliberate practice effects don't look like a rule. They vary by person, but also by field. And if I remember the data correctly, you can explain what 21% of the variance in music performance by how much practice people do, 18% for sports, but less than 1% for profession.
And I found that surprising. I would have expected the opposite. I would have thought, okay, in sports, there's a certain level of raw physical talent that you need, and there might be limits to how much you can gain from practice. Whereas in any profession, you mentioned surgery, I can study, I can learn, I can work on my skills in a way that's much less dependent on my innate talent.
What do you make of that, and what does it mean for thinking about how much practice we need in order to become experts or excellent at anything? Well, it's funny. My answer to that question has changed since reading your book. No, because now I think, well, there's another dimension here, which is, let's go back to our surgeon. So...
Do surgeons have the kind of mindset that you're describing? If they do, if they are people who are willing to admit to their mistakes, to rethink the way they do things, to keep their mind and practice. Turning and churning over the course of their career then the benefits to
experience are very different than if they have a certain way of doing things and they never revisit them. So now I'm much more interested i'm not interested in raw numbers about how much time has they spent and what are their outcomes now i'm interested well who are they how do they make sense of this who's around them and working with them what's the culture in their surgical team. There's a thing where you talk about motivational listening and how there are certain kinds of techniques to get
that really help people revisit and change their minds on ingrained practices. That if we're smarter about the way we convince people, we can do a much better job of... doing that well that made me think well a lot about the surgeon stick with the surgeon if he or she is doing something the wrong way a lot depends on who's the person trying to convince them to do it differently and how good are they
their job now those are all the questions I care about now in other words I think the old question is kind of boring That's great. There's so much more I want to talk about. But one of the things I'm enjoying about Clubhouse is it's a rethinking of social media. And it's not just me and you having a conversation. We've got a whole audience here. So Kat, do you want to bring in some other voices? Yeah, I would love that. So, Rahaf, would love to come to you. Go ahead, Rahaf.
Hey guys, so I have a question that a bunch of people have actually asked. Adam, I think the concept of rethinking everything is hitting a point of discomfort for a lot of people. So I'm going to take the question, is there anything too sacred to rethink? What are the things that Adam... or not what refuses to rethink, and how do you determine what those are? What are the things that you would refuse to retouch or rethink?
I don't want to make a case that people should rethink everything. First of all, I think we need to have quality standards. And you shouldn't just roll the dice and say, alright, I'm going to pick a new belief tomorrow. What I want people to do is change their minds in the face of sharper logic or stronger evidence. And I think that means that we always talk about how people are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. The Moynihan quote.
I think that's true when you have opinions in your head. But if you're going to voice them out loud, you have a responsibility to base your opinions on data or on logic and to revise them if better data or better logic come along. And for me, that means you need not just a support network of people who encourage you and cheerlead for you, but also a challenge network of thoughtful critics coming in good faith to poke holes in your thinking and help you maybe see some of your blind spots.
And what I'm trying to do is just encourage people to bring a little bit more of that into their lives. And of course, you can have a core that you protect that you're not willing to rethink. One thing that I have no intention of rethinking is my passion for the scientific method. I can't think of anything you could do to convince me that randomized controlled experiments are not the best way to advance medicine, for example.
And if you wanted to try to convince me, I would ask you to do a bunch of experiments showing that experiments don't work. And so you would be proving my point even as you're trying to invalidate it. And I think I would say that there's a spectrum of how often people rethink their assumptions. And I covered some research on this in Chapter 3 of Think Again on superforecasters.
where people compete in these tournaments to predict the future. And the average forecaster, when they make a prediction about who's going to win the World Cup or who's going to win the next presidential election, will change their mind about twice. The superforecasters, they change their minds twice as often.
They tend to update their predictions four times on a given question rather than two. And so I just want to move us a little bit more to the right of that curve and say if we did a touch more rethinking than we currently do, we'd be better off. And rethinking doesn't mean you have to change your mind. It just means you're open to reconsidering and reflecting. Love that. Julie, what are you hearing, seeing?
Yeah, so can you share the tactical steps that you take during your week to think, to rethink? You know, what are the actions you take in Malcolm being inspired by the book?
Are there steps that you're taking? One of the things I've done differently after writing this book is Anytime I've ever given any kind of performance, whether somebody read an article of mine or I gave a speech or they were ready to give me feedback on a podcast episode, I've asked, what's the one thing I should do differently?
And sometimes it's been like pulling teeth to get them to answer, and I've even had to criticize myself out loud to get them to respond to show that I really mean it and I can take it. And I've changed my question now. What I like to ask people is, what's something I should be rethinking? And it's an invitation to let me know if you see any assumptions I've made that you think are incomplete or incorrect.
And I guess that's the social part of this. The more personal part of this is for years I've been advising students to schedule a career checkup twice a year in their calendars. Just like you go to the doctor or the dentist when there's nothing wrong. We should also be doing the same things to reconsider our career plans and ask ourselves, you know what, is the job that I thought I wanted still what I'm looking for? My hope is that I get to try on new careers and new identities.
But in the meantime, I've started putting rethinking time in my calendar. I like to have an hour a week. where I look over the arguments I've made, the arguments I haven't listened to carefully enough, and ask myself what I should be questioning. And I think making it a habit has made it much more real. Malcolm, what do you do to rethink?
Well, it's funny. I was, um, I realize it's built into the writing process for me and that over the years I've realized that there are enormous benefits to postponing.
There's always a moment when you write something when you have to decide, okay, this is going to be my... what i'm going to say this is my argument this is my line and i've realized there's huge benefits to postponing that moment as late as possible So I will sometimes substantially revise not just the way I make an argument, but the argument itself. I mean, when I'm writing books, sometimes I do it when we're, you know, I wrote, we wrote an entire chapter of my last book.
with days before the final deadline, which drove my editor crazy. But with my podcast, I do that a lot. You just like, and you have to structure your... editorial process so it permits that kind of You know, so when we have a meeting, when they say, we just had a meeting for this new season of Visionist History, and I, you know, my producer says, well, what ideas do you have? And I say, well, I have this, this, this, this. But you should be very, very careful.
Not to say, I'm going to make the following argument. What you say is, I'm investigating the following issue. And that seems like a minor semantic difference, but it's hugely important. What I'm saying is I have not made up my mind yet, and I would like the opportunity to change my mind many times between now and when I hand in this script.
And that's a discipline that reading a book sort of reinforced to me the value of that discipline. And that's you thinking like a scientist, not like a preacher or a prosecutor. Yeah, it's funny. I'm not a complete... You know, many people are... quite pessimistic about this moment in our Culture. about our ability to get people to rethink their positions or to...
And I'm actually not. I'm an optimist on this. There's this model called the Persuasion Knowledge Model, which says that when somebody discovers that you're trying to influence them, a change of meaning occurs. And what seemed like a reasonable, thoughtful discussion now becomes a manipulative tactic. And they put their guard up, and it makes it much more difficult to have influence.
I think it was an outliers. I want to convince you that success was much more driven by luck and opportunity than most of us are willing to admit. And I thought it was such an interesting strategy because it went against what I thought I knew. And I thought the transparency, Malcolm, that you brought and just telling the reader what you wanted to convince them of
was so refreshing. And I decided to do a little twist on it when I was writing Think Again and say, you know what? I don't want you to agree with all my conclusions. I just want to make you rethink some of yours. And then the rest is up to you. You know I'm always reminded of this little anecdote from Obama when he was in the White House.
He didn't want to have to spend any time thinking about what he had to wear because he felt his cognitive space was limited. You know, when I first heard that, I thought, oh, that's ridiculous. And I thought about it, and now I think it's brilliant.
Because we spend a lot of time constantly rethinking stuff that's just dumb. Like why do I sit in front of my closet for five minutes deciding what sweater to wear? That's a complete waste of time. I should just close my eyes and grab a sweater. They're all fine sweaters, right? But then there's stuff that's consequential.
So maybe this all just starts with just zeroing in on what things really matter. I'll give you an example. I'm a big runner, and like many runners, I'm incredibly interested in this question of whether trans people, particularly boys who transition to girls, should be eligible to run in competition. And my initial position was to say, no, they shouldn't. Women's sports should be a protected category.
However, I realized that's not an issue I should simply take my reflexive position. It's too important to the sport I care passionately about and too important to the well-being and rights of an entire community. And it's been really hard to revisit this to kind of think, well, wait a minute, maybe I'm wrong. I feel I have an obligation to read every considered argument that comes out on any side of that issue because I need to keep my mind open.
You know, I don't feel the same way about the sneakers I wear when I run. I wear one kind of sneakers, and I'm not revisiting that. That's trivial. But this is really important, right? So this process is something that's not easy. It's not easy because I have very strong prejudices on it. And I have to fight myself to get over those prejudices and keep my mind open.
That's why a lot of what you were writing about in the book resonated with me so much, that there are times and places where you have an obligation to be willing to revisit what you thought. and a moral obligation to keep your mind open.
part of the TED Audio Collective. The show is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Greta Cohn, Dan O'Donnell, Jessica Glaser, Joanne DeLuna, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quinn, Ban Ban Chang and Anna Phelan. This episode was produced by Constanza Gallardo.
Special thanks to Kat Cole for hosting Malcolm & Me on Clubhouse. For their thoughtful contributions during the conversation, gratitude to Catherine Connors, Paul Davison, Mona Hamdi, Denise Hamilton, Rahaf Harfouche, Harold Hughes, Steph Simon, Swan Sin, Chandra Washington, and Julie Walsh.