Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant

SPEAKER_05: Pushkin. SPEAKER_02: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about SPEAKER_04: humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on this show, you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back, and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Malcolm Gladwell here. SPEAKER_05: Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got you back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. SPEAKER_05: Hi everyone, Malcolm here. The countdown is on. On June 24th, we'll be back with season six, the most bananas season of revisionist history ever. I finally get out of the house. I go to Phoenix, New Orleans, and I go, metaphorically, to the Magic Kingdom on a mission of mischief. Season six is so fantastic. I don't want to give too much away. Just hang tight. It'll be here soon. It's been an especially busy time for me, working on season six and promoting our new book, The Bomber Mafia. One of the events on my book tour was a conversation on Clubhouse with my good friend, Adam Grant. He's an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and he hosts the podcast Taken for Granted from the TED audio collective. We've actually both had new books out this spring. Adam's is called Think Again, which I really loved. It seems he and I are always crossing paths on the book tour circuit, and we always challenge each other and we always have fun. I wanted to play you some snippets of our recent conversations. Forgive me, by the way, for stating the obvious, but books make great Father's Day gifts. Why not make it both? Get the Bomber Mafia audiobook from bombermafia.com, and then Think Again from wherever you get your books. And I'll see you very soon for season six of Revisionist History. Okay, here's our Clubhouse discussion about The Bomber Mafia. SPEAKER_03: Thrilled to welcome Malcolm Gladwell back to Clubhouse. Malcolm, glad you're here. SPEAKER_05: Yes, thank you. I was going to say, not a week passes when I'm not engaged in some kind of public conversation with you. Be careful what you wish for. Yes. SPEAKER_03: I wanted to kick off by just asking you to tell us a little bit about The Bomber Mafia. I think it's anybody who's listened to Revisionist History the last couple seasons knows how obsessed you are with it. But for those who are not initiated, give us the teaser. SPEAKER_05: Bomber Mafia is the story of a group of pilots in Southern Alabama in the 1930s who believed that they had and could reinvent warfare, that they could, through the use of technology, particularly the bomber and means of dropping bombs with accuracy, they could render every other part of the military obsolete, and they could turn wars from something where hundreds of thousands of civilians died, as a matter of course, to a kind of clean and surgical exercise. And they took that dream with them into the Second World War and tried to make it real. And it's the story of that attempt. What happens when a group of people with an idea fired by morality and technology meet the real world? This is a very different kind of book than you've written before. SPEAKER_03: First and foremost, because the cover is not white, which threw me, but also because it's a history book. And because despite your going back in history decades and decades, it's also more personal, I think, than anything you've ever written. And I'd love for you to share with us a little bit about the seeds that were planted in your own life that got you curious about this topic. SPEAKER_05: Well, my father, who was English, grew up in Kent, which was called Bomb Alley because the German bombers on their way to bomb London during the Blitz would pass over my father's little town in Kent. And he, as a child, would be instructed by my grandmother to sleep under his bed, which was the only plausible defense against a bomb dropping on their house. And he had all these stories. A bomb once landed in their backyard and luckily didn't explode. He was once out picking strawberries with my grandmother and German planes passed overhead. And my grandmother hid my father and my uncle under newspapers for reasons that no one really knows. She thought maybe if she hid them from the pilots, they wouldn't bomb them. But it was like he would tell these stories. And to me, at the age of five or six, these stories were unbelievably exciting. We were in rural southwestern Canada, maybe the most boring part of the Western world. And my dad was telling me, well, nothing happened. I mean, it's a great good thing. And my father was telling me these stories about bombs dropping in his backyard when he was my age. And I think that probably instilled in me a kind of romantic love of this era. SPEAKER_03: It shows. And I know that you're a huge fan of spy novels and you've read all the fiction you can find about war. I think you've done something more impressive than writing a page turner of fiction in this book, which is you have brought these real life characters and their stories to life in a way that feels like I'm reading a thriller. I could not put it down. I've read now the print version and listen to the audio version and I'm still hooked. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you got into the minds of these people that you've not been able to meet. Well, you're right. SPEAKER_05: It is a departure for me. So I've never done a book which is so much of a kind of, first of all, a single narrative. Usually I hop around, you know, I tell all kinds of different stories, but I also have never written a book which was so singularly focused on two characters. This book is the story of the conflict between two kind of legendary World War II Air Force generals, Curtis LeMay and Haywood Hansel. And I really do, you know, they're incredibly vivid characters. And we, because we started this project as an audio project, I was always thinking of this first as an audio book. And the reason for that was that we had so much incredible archival tape of these generals from the Second World War. There's at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, there's a room full of tape of interviews with virtually every major figure in the Air Force in that period. And once you know you can hear them, I think you have a lot more confidence that you can bring them to life. And you know, like particularly LeMay, who is this kind of unbelievable cold-blooded, you know, bulldog of a man. When you hear his voice, you feel like you know who he is because he has this kind of guttural grunt. And that just gave me confidence that they would be more than two-dimensional characters on the page if I could, you know, do a kind of enhanced audio book that would bring them to life. Well, it shows. SPEAKER_03: And I thought one of the other interesting features of the book was the way that you almost tantalize us with these questions of morality. Early on, you ask us to consider, what would I have done? And which side would I have been on? And I want to hear your answer to this because you avoided it the whole book. But first, can you just walk us through the central moral dilemma of the bomber mafia? Yeah, the bomber mafia. SPEAKER_05: One of the reasons I was so attracted to this story is that they are, they are obsessives and they are, they're technological obsessives. They're, they're a very familiar figure for us now. They're young men who are in the grip of a kind of passion that has been fired by a technological innovation. They would not be out of place in Silicon Valley today. They would in fact, you know, be utterly, they're utterly familiar in one sense. But in another sense, they're not because they have a moral vision. The reason they are so passionate about what bombing can do and how bombing can transform war is that they are desperate to avoid the carnage of the First World War. And that part of them, I love. I love that they considered the moral implications of their dream or as important to them as the kind of technological implications. That is, that's not something I see today. And so that, I thought that they were this extraordinary role model for how you can bring together moral desires with technological obsession. But it doesn't work, right? You know, the story of this book is the story of the failure of this dream. And so you, you know, you, I don't know if it is possible. I do not, you, you're quite right. This book does not give you an easy answer to which side should we be on because there is no easy answer. All I can say is I like the, I like the fact that they tried to bring a moral vision to to their way of fighting wars. And I'm sad that they failed, but that's as far as it goes. I don't know. I didn't want to, I'm kind of, I'm kind of over books that give you a neat little conclusion. I find that condescending almost. SPEAKER_03: I respect that. I also think Malcolm Gladwell that you are letting these people off the hook awfully easily to say that. Yeah, of course they come in with a moral vision. They have a sense of almost ideological superiority that they are going to fix all the problems with war while still fighting a war and essentially torturing countless people. And okay, you know what? Good that they had a sense of morality even though they did so much harm. Really? Do you have anything to say with that? Well, I don't know how much choice you have once you are committed to a conflict. SPEAKER_05: I mean, part of the reason the story I think is so compelling is that the deeper you get into the story, the book, the more you're aware of how constrained the choices available to the characters are. You know, you think about the kind of second half of the book is all about what happens when my two protagonists, Curtis LeMay and Haywood Hansell, come into conflict in Guam in January of 1945 when the focus of the war has turned from Europe to the war against Japan, to the Pacific theater. And they are given the task by the allied leadership of bringing Japan to its knees and they get to choose how they will do that. And neither of the options available to them are any good. And I don't know, I really don't know whether you can, it's not their fault the options are no good, right? War is, there's no kind of easy moral solution in these situations. It's like you have to win a war and if you don't win the war, many, many, many, many, many hundreds of thousands of people will die, right? There's just no doubt about that. When wars drag on, they exact an enormous human toll. So everybody's agreed, we need to get this war over with. But there's basically actually there's three options. And you know, Haywood Hansell has one option. He wants to use bombs as sparingly as possible. It is a complete and utter failure for reasons outside of his control. Curtis LeMay has another option. He wants to napalm every city in Japan, which is brutal and unbelievably horrifying. But he would say, well, I don't have any other options. Now the third option, of course, is the option taken by, I think in August of 1945, when we dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Again, another thing, another option that leaves us sort of leaves all kinds of moral SPEAKER_05: questions dangling. I just, you know, I have difficulty from my comfortable perch in 2021 passing judgment on people who didn't have any good options available to them. SPEAKER_03: Now I understand. I was trying to figure out as I listened, as I read why you were so reluctant to take a moral stance here, because you are not shy about moral stances. And I thought this is, this is not at all Gladwellian. You normally have a strong view about what's right and wrong. And as I listened to you now, it clicked that they were stuck choosing between wrong and wrong and you appreciate and admire the fact that they at least tried to do what was right. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. You know, it's, this is a side thing, but this is an idea that I've become kind of obsessed with recently. I, I've been doing two episodes of my podcast this season, Revisionist History, on the dilemma of a little small HBCU in New Orleans. And the, the problem of if you choose to educate lower income students, and if you choose to serve them by keeping your tuition low, you create all kinds of problems, right? Can't pay for anything. Your school is not considered to be prestigious. You I mean, you can go on and on and on and on and on. And the president of the school told me, he's like, you know, the problem with the way we think about higher education is that we, we don't consider the degree of difficulty. Now, Adam, you know, I'm raising this with you because you are a former diver and the great, the great contribution of diving to the world. And I know I'm not being, I'm not being flip here. Honesty the great, one of the great contributions of your sport to the world is that it introduced that phrase and that concept degree of difficulty into common parlance. And it's a crucial idea. It says that you cannot simply judge an outcome all by itself. You have to judge the obstacles that were, that the person pursuing that goal had to go through, right? Was faced with. And this guy in New Orleans, he was like, the problem with HBCUs is that no one gives us credit for the degree of difficulty involved in what we do. Right? I just thought that was absolutely true. And you can go through all manner of things in society. The one thing that was absent from the debate this past summer about police. And by the way, a debate that I was, that I had been writing about and arguing for police reform for 25 years at this point. But the one thing that was absent from this summer was a sense of the degree of difficulty involved in police work. It's really hard, right? Really, really hard. And I wish that had been a part of it and it wasn't there to the same extent. And that's also what I feel about these characters back in the second world war is the degree of difficulty was through the roof. And you just have to build that into your consideration of their actions. SPEAKER_03: I love that lens in part because one of my biggest frustrations with diving is that the formula for degree of difficulty is almost completely bogus. How did you decide that when somebody does a front four and a half, that's a 3.8 degree difficulty on a three meter. But when they do an inward three and a half, it's only a 3.4. You could, you could change that scale dramatically and we would have different Olympic gold medalists. We would have actually completely different dives done and we could have a whole rabbit hole about this, which I'm very tempted to do. But I think it... Hold on, hold on, hold on. SPEAKER_05: Adam, this is like fantastic. Are you saying that there is an underappreciated degree of difficulty with the concept of difficulty? SPEAKER_03: At minimum, there's an underappreciated degree of difficulty in asking people who judge a sport to come up with a meaningful quantitative metric for scoring the sport. SPEAKER_05: Adam, Adam, you know more about diving than 99.99% of humanity. You are a, you are a prominent psychologist who writes on a matter of things and you have never written about this. Do I have to take this idea from you? Can I interview about this? SPEAKER_03: I will give it to you. It's yours right now. This is just the most interesting thing that I'm sorry. SPEAKER_05: This is like fantastic. This is just amazing. Even diving got degree of difficulty wrong. SPEAKER_03: Well, but isn't that, isn't that part of the point that, well, I mean, first of all, inventing something almost almost almost always means you get it wrong because the hard work of creating it usually blinds you to the different hard work of optimizing it. But, but also that the, the concept of degree of difficulty is, is so much more complicated everywhere else. And the fact that we couldn't get it right in diving, it's like, all you have to do is, you know, measure how high people jump, how fast they can spin and you know, how much control you have. Actually there's a, there's a whole metric of jobs for degree of difficulty, right? We can, we can measure job complexity and know that when a job has higher degree of difficulty, intelligence seems to become more important. And oh, there's, there's so much we can talk about here, but I want to, I want to get back to the, one of the central questions that, that applying degree of difficulty to moral dilemmas raises, which is once you recognize you're in a situation with high degree of difficulty, what do you do? What are your, what are your takeaways from, from studying these bombers? SPEAKER_05: The great mistake the bomber mafia makes is they, is they like many technological innovators, by the way, is they, they, they do not have the imagination and it's not a fault, but no one would, to come up with all of the possible complications of their dream. And you know, this is the, this is the time-honored problem of the innovator, right? That the thing that makes them good at innovating in their specific rate, region is the narrowness and and intensity of their focus. They don't, they're not distracted. They're like eye on the prize, right? But the problem is that when they take that idea in the real world, you're, that becomes a liability. All of a sudden you've got to think about 50 things that never occurred to you tomorrow. So the skills that get you to the real world are the skills that also impede you once you reach the real world. SPEAKER_03: Well, okay. So you, you have a parallel here, which I didn't see until just now between the bomber's dilemma and how we think about degree of difficulty in diving, which is I think the central tension in diving and degree of difficulty is do you base it on how hard it is to do at all or how hard it is to do well? Right? Like there, there are some dives that only a few people in the world can even make. And those, some people would argue those should have the highest degree of difficulty and others would say, no, you take the, the hard dive that everybody does, but everybody misses. And that's the dive that gets the highest degree of difficulty. Your version of this, I think is, uh, is precision bombing, which is you say, okay, how, you know, how many bombs can you drop or, you know, how much, how much can you terrify or demoralize a city with your bombs versus can you hit your target perfectly? What is, what does that teach us about what's really difficult? Is it the execution or is it the ability to, to show up in the first place? SPEAKER_05: Oh wow. That's a really good question. Um, I mean, I'm going to cop out and say both or it depends. Um, I can tell you what interests me more, which is I'm more interested, particularly, this is a weird thing to say, particularly as I get older, in the execution. SPEAKER_05: Because more and more, I find myself, I am interested and fascinated and amused by people's obsessive dreams, but what impresses me is execution. That you can just do it in a way that, so everyone starts, tries to do the same thing. There are three people who pull it off. Those are the three that, that, that's, that's what impresses me is like, you know, it's like, you know, any of us can make an attempt at Mount Everest or run a marathon, but a handful of people get to the top or break, you know, two hours and 30 minutes. Those are the people I take my hat off to. SPEAKER_03: Okay. That speaks to something you've alluded to a couple of times and something you made me rethink in this book, which is the idea of obsession. I have always thought of obsession as something bad. I think of people with OCD. I think of an obsessive stalker and you, you have a very different take on obsession. I think you even see it as a beautiful thing. And I want to hear more. I do. SPEAKER_05: I, I wonder why I do. I don't know if I have a good answer to that. I don't, it's not as if the easy thing would be to say that I, you know, I grew up with an example of obsessiveness. I didn't. My neither of my parents could even plausibly be described as even coming close to that standard. My brother is the least obsessive. Although, I mean, he's sort of, he's not, he's not obsessive. He is, we're dabblers. My whole, my dad's whole thing was he loved doing lots of things, even if he did them badly. That was his favorite thing. He both built a greenhouse in her backyard and he was so proud of how inexor, inexpertly he built it. He would show off all of the crazy angles and the gaps in the, he thought that was hilarious. Okay. SPEAKER_03: I have a few things that I'm curious about then. The first one is you called yourself a dabbler and yet you're also an elite runner. I think you once beat the Canadian record holder, if I remember correctly. Isn't running the most obsessive sport ever? I mean, you literally just do the same thing over and over step, step, the opposite, the SPEAKER_05: opposite. So how many, when you were diving as a kid, how many hours would you spend in the pool a day? I mean, actually in the pool, probably four seconds to dive from the time you left the SPEAKER_05: house to the time you got home again, what are we talking about? Time devoted to the task. SPEAKER_03: I'm three hours during the school year, probably eight or nine in the summer. SPEAKER_05: Okay. In my entire time as a, you know, I was a very good age class runner in my entire time as a very good age class runner. I never, never spent more than an hour a day running. Never. And I never ran more than five days a week. And by the way, nor did anyone else I know. In fact, and if I had done that, I would have gotten, I would have gotten hell from my coach. He would have said, you are destroying your, running is all about restraint. You know what the little adage they repeat to you when you start out running is, train don't strain for tomorrow is another day. Running is the op, it's the anti-obsessive pastime. It's all about restraint. It's all about never, only when you race, do you push yourself to the edge. At all of the times you hold yourself in check, right? The coach I have a, I'm in training right now for this mile race I'm doing and I have a, this guy is helping me coach and he looks at my, my workouts online. You know what he tells me? He's like, yeah, you need to probably take a little more recovery on that or you should take some more days off. He says he's making sure I'm not obsessive. Runners you totally misunderstand running. This is probably why you don't run. You don't get it. That might be true. You're bringing your crazy eight hour a day memories from childhood to bear on a completely different sport. I don't know. SPEAKER_03: You have bursts of obsession in running. I've heard about your stair routines, for example. SPEAKER_05: No, those are, it's not, it's not an obsession. That was, that's, I used to get together with three very good friends of mine and we would do a workout on the stairs in Fort Green Park in Brooklyn. To say that was obsessive is nuts. It was totally fun. We would like, you have a long recovery cause you jog down the stairs, you sprint up them. On the jog down the stairs, you like gossip and catch up on stuff and chat and then you just have a little zip up the stairs. It's like, it's the furthest thing. You don't know what you're talking about. Meanwhile, you're executing these insanely complicated dives that if you, if you're off by two inches, you lose. There's nothing, there's nothing in common with what I'm up to. SPEAKER_03: Well I have to tell you that one of your so-called friends said that when he went with you for the first time, he wasn't sure if he was going to vomit or die. So not everyone's experience mirrors yours. No, no, no. SPEAKER_05: And then every other occasion that he smoked me. So I know what he's talking about. SPEAKER_03: Anyway, the other thing I wanted to ask you about obsession is, I think about this research by Valorant on two kinds of passion. He calls them obsessive, obsessive passion and harmonious passion. And he says obsessive, obsessive passion is basically, it's, it's extrinsically motivated. It's driven by guilt, by pressure, by this, you know, compulsiveness that really undermines people's ongoing interest and commitment. Whereas harmonious passion, instead of feeling like you constantly have to push yourself to do it, you're pulled in by the activity. You're interested, you're intrinsically motivated, you're curious, you're excited, and your energy is sustained by your enthusiasm. And I wonder if, if that's part of what you're describing or if you think there's actually still an upside to the obsessive part of passion. SPEAKER_05: Well it's funny that the word I was waiting for you to say in what you, in that, in that, in that little dichotomy you described was pleasure. So I grid, I suppose that there are, there are different motivation, initial motivations for certain kinds of obsessive pursuits. But to me, the real issue is not why you start, but where you end up and does the, does the immersion bring you pleasure? And it always amazes me how, how little that word is used in particularly in connection SPEAKER_05: with people's work. I always ask people, well, do you find your work fun? To me that's simply the most important question. And I'm not interested in, some people, we have all kinds of reasons why we work. Some people work because they have a family to support. Some people work because they would be bored otherwise. I go on. Some people work because their parents would, you know, disdain them if they didn't. The question is, once you're at work and immersed in it, are you enjoying yourself? And, you know, when I think about the people I like working with, they're all people I don't, I like working with people who do a good job. Sure. Everyone does. But I really like working with people who are enjoying themselves. That's really what, what compels me to. And I think of, for some people, the route to enjoyment is obsession, right? It's like, that's, you, you, you get singular in your pursuit because it just brings you joy. I don't understand why those words are so rarely used in this context. So like the, to go back to the bottom off you for a moment, they're in the middle of Alabama in the 1930s. You could look at them objectively and you could say these losers off in the middle of nowhere pursuing an idea that'll never go anywhere. Or you could say these are a group of people who have successfully found a place where they can find joy in their passion and work. And that makes them winners. No one else is having joy in the army in 1935. Wow. So when you talk about obsession, then you're talking about single minded focus to SPEAKER_03: pursue mastery in a way that brings joy. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. But the social aspect is really crucial here. It's funny because, you know, the, this book, the bottom mafia is the really the first book that I've ever done where from the, from the very beginning of this book, it was a team effort. It literally, I know I'm, my name is on the cover, but that's a misnomer. There's six people, seven people at Pushkin who played as large or in some cases larger role than me in putting this together. I've never done that before ever. Not, I can't even, I was not the guy in college who, you know, had a team of people and we were like, no, no, no, no, no. I never did a team. I was never on a basketball team. Never did any team sports. Never. Teams not in my, I did not even, I didn't even, I wasn't the kid who went home from school and did homework with his dad. Never happened. Right. This is not, doing stuff with other people is not something I have ever done. And I did it with this book and you know what? This is the most fun book I've ever done. Never had so much fun writing a book. It's like fantastic. Right. It's that, and why? Because everyone else was as into this idea as I was. Right. And pursuing different parts of it. And that's so like, I, I, you know, here I am writing about a group of people who find joy in each other's obsession. And I am with a group of people finding joy with each other's obsession. It's like this lovely, at my, you know, at my advanced age, I'm much older than you, Adam. I get to say things like that. At my advanced age, I just, I discovered this fantastic thing called, you know, strength in numbers. The joy of shared obsession. SPEAKER_05: Yes. I love that. SPEAKER_05: That was Grant and Gladwell Clubhouse, Part 1. After the break, we meet again to discuss Adam's book, Think Again. SPEAKER_02: The one thing we can never get more of is time, or can we? This is Watson X Orchestrate. AI designed to multiply productivity by automating tasks. 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Eat food out of a tube. But only for six months. And they're like, wait, look at Frank. That's what you told him. And he's still up there. Recruiting for astronauts. If you're NASA is hard. If only there was some sophisticated job recruiting site capable of finding those few Americans who are perfectly happy to float around in space for an undetermined length of time. Sadly, for NASA, there's no such tool. But for the rest of us. Oh, yes, there is. Zip Recruiter. New hires cost, on average, forty seven hundred dollars for all of us non-spaceflight companies. And with that kind of money at stake, you have to get it right. So what's the most effective way to find the right people for your roles? Zip Recruiter. See for yourself. Right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Gladwell and experience the value Zip Recruiter brings to hiring. 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Cut to three thousand years later and we could very well be talking about the story of those mattresses in a box. You know what I'm talking about. They promise something special inside. But in the end, many would say it's a curse. After all, they're just glorified slabs of foam that are crushed, crammed into a box and then left on your doorstep. If you want a mattress that feels like a true gift from the gods, consider a Saatva luxury mattress. Saatvas don't come in a box. That kind of quality simply can't be crammed into a cardboard container. What's more, Saatva will set up your new mattress for you and take your old one at no extra charge. If history has taught us anything, it's do not open Pandora's box. And right now you'll save two hundred dollars on a thousand dollars or more at Saatva.com slash Gladwell. That's S double A TVA dot com slash Gladwell. SPEAKER_05: Adam, can you give us can you give us an overview of Think Again? SPEAKER_03: 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 beliefs. My hope is that people will think a little bit more like scientists 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 SPEAKER_05: wonderful book and I find that 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 large one, which is a, is it's four books. SPEAKER_05: 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 and devote or you have to write longer books. You can't keep doing this and like, anyway, that's a very mild, it's flattery designed, 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 books? And I'm wondering, do we have a kind of emerging Adam Grant's philosophy of life? Can you talk about how does this one fit with your previous books? SPEAKER_05: I think this, it's an interesting question and I will accept your backhanded compliment SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_05: The, I mean, 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 SPEAKER_03: 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 SPEAKER_05: revisit your ideology. That's fine. SPEAKER_03: No, I think I think there is a 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 thread 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 that my work has 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, you know, it's humility. So I guess what I'm looking for at large is a way to align character with with with achievement. How's that? SPEAKER_05: Yeah, no, that that actually that fits with that's what I've always sort of sensed in. SPEAKER_03: 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 SPEAKER_05: to religious themes in things to sort of bear, particularly if they're kind of slightly sublimated. But it always struck me that there was some there was some kind of moral case being made in your books that maybe you weren't making explicitly, but that 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 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 SPEAKER_05: worldview would be very at home with the arguments that you're making. SPEAKER_03: That's interesting. I I love it when when ancient wisdom matches up with modern science. And I think where the ancient wisdom often leaves me short is around, you know, OK, a lot 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? SPEAKER_03: Yes, I want to be humble, but I don't want to become meek or lack confidence. And so I think I guess what I want to do in a lot of my work is try to use evidence to pick up where where these these higher principles leave off and ask, OK, what does it mean to do this without sacrificing, you know, our ambitions? Yeah, yeah. I was struck by, because I am, SPEAKER_05: as you know, a BlackBerry fanatic and user, not financially strong a word. It's from, they make it in my hometown. I have a, you know, it came out of my dad's university. And you have a little thing where you talk about Mike Lazerita, who ran RIM Blackberry for many years, and he made this error and they went from 50 percent market share to whatever it was, five percent in five years because they failed to understand the smartphone revolution, the typing on a keyboard as opposed to typing on a screen, 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, SPEAKER_05: I sometimes see Mike Lazerita 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. You know, I think he's like doing cool projects. He made himself, I don't know, a billion dollars probably. At the end of the day, SPEAKER_05: 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 Lazerita as being a loser. And SPEAKER_05: also, like, so what if he wrote it all the way down? Like, he believed in a certain kind of aesthetic functionality in a phone. Like, I happen to believe that too. Mike chose me over the many millions who wanted a phone that did everything. Like, I don't know. Is that any different? And then with this, I'll let you, 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 is just an image, has been for 30 years, an invitation to masochism. SPEAKER_03: Starting with Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas, four Super Bowls, zero wins. SPEAKER_05: Exactly. Do I read, you know, if I read your book one way, I would say, well, Malcolm, you should just rethink your football allegiances. They make no sense. Like, you got to, this is not working, this Buffalo thing. There's a certain pleasure in me sticking with them through thin and thin. But it's sort of like, do you see what I'm getting at? Mike, I do. Oh, there's so much to work with here. OK, let me start by saying, SPEAKER_03: 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 the screen. I will never be as fast as I was. I'm not worried about Mike Lazerides 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? They 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 SPEAKER_05: 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 said, 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. So, SPEAKER_05: you know, Mike just educated a bunch of people about how to be entrepreneurs and how to think about it. I think it's win-win for Waterloo. Anyway, it'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 SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_05: 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 Tilson at windmills, to persist in, you know, the whole story of Don Quixote is Don Quixote continues to wage these battles that cannot be won. He will not rethink anything. And SPEAKER_05: 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 is 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. SPEAKER_03: 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 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. SPEAKER_05: That's all for now, dear listeners. Thanks for hearing us out. Thanks to Adam Grant and his team at TED for their help with this episode. My audiobook, The Bomber Mafia, is available at bombermafia.com and Adam's Think Again is available wherever books are sold. Till we meet in the clubhouse again, I'm Malcolm Gladwell. 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