Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hi everyone, Malcolm here. The countdown is on on
Speaker 1: June twenty fourth. We'll be back with Season six, the
Speaker 1: most banana season of Revisionist history ever. I finally get
Speaker 1: out of the house. I've got Phoenix, New Orleans, and
Speaker 1: I go metaphorically to the Magic Kingdom on a mission
Speaker 1: of mischief. Season six is so fantastic. I don't want
Speaker 1: to give too much away. Just hang tight, It'll be
Speaker 1: here soon. It's been an especially busy time for me
Speaker 1: working on season six and promoting our new book, The
Speaker 1: Bomber Mafia. One of the events on my book tour
Speaker 1: was a conversation on Clubhouse with my good friend Adam Grant.
Speaker 1: He's an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School the University
Speaker 1: of Pennsylvania, and he hosts the podcasts Taken for Granted
Speaker 1: from the Ted Audio Collective. We've actually both had new
Speaker 1: books out this spring. Adams is called Think Again, which
Speaker 1: I really loved. It seems he and I are always
Speaker 1: crossing paths on the book to our circuit, and we
Speaker 1: always challenge each other and we always have fun. I
Speaker 1: wanted to play you some snippets of our recent conversations
Speaker 1: Forgive Me by the way for stating the obvious. But
Speaker 1: books make great Father's Day gifts. Why not make it both?
Speaker 1: Get the Bombermafia audiobook from Bombermafia dot com and then
Speaker 1: think again from wherever you get your books, and I'll
Speaker 1: see you very soon for season six of Revisionist History. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's our clubhouse discussion about the Bomber Mafia thrilla to
Speaker 1: welcome Malcolm Gladwell back to clubhouse. Malcolm glad you're here. Yes,
Speaker 1: thank you. I was gonna say not a week passes
Speaker 1: when I am not engaged in some kind of public
Speaker 1: conversation with you. Be careful what you wish for. Yes,
Speaker 1: I wanted to kick off by just asking you to
Speaker 1: tell us a little bit about the Bomber Mafia. I
Speaker 1: think it's anybody who's listened to Revisionist History the last
Speaker 1: couple of seasons knows how obsessed you are with it.
Speaker 1: But for those who are not initiated, give us the teaser.
Speaker 1: Bomber Mafia is the story of a group of pilots
Speaker 1: in southern Alabama in the nineteen thirties who believed that
Speaker 1: they had and could reinvent warfare. That they could through
Speaker 1: the use of technology, particularly the bomber and means of
Speaker 1: dropping bombs with accuracy. They could render every other part
Speaker 1: of the military obsolete, and they could turn wars from
Speaker 1: something that where hundreds of thousands of civilians died as
Speaker 1: a matter of course, to a kind of clean and
Speaker 1: surgical exercise. And they took that dream with them into
Speaker 1: the Second World War and tried to make it real.
Speaker 1: And it's the story of It's a story of that attempt.
Speaker 1: What happens when a group of people with an idea,
Speaker 1: fired by morality and technology meet the real world. This
Speaker 1: is a very different kind of book than you've written before.
Speaker 1: First and foremost because the cover is not white, which
Speaker 1: threw me, but also also because it's a history book,
Speaker 1: and because despite you're going back in history decades and decades,
Speaker 1: it's also more personal, I think than anything you've ever written.
Speaker 1: And I'd love for you to share with us a
Speaker 1: little bit about the seeds that were planted in your
Speaker 1: own life that got you curious about this topic. Well,
Speaker 1: my my my father, who was English, grew up in
Speaker 1: Kent in which is the which was called bomb Alley
Speaker 1: because the German bombers on their way to bomb London
Speaker 1: during the blitz would pass over my father's little town
Speaker 1: in Kent, and he, as a child, would be instructed
Speaker 1: by my grandmother to sleep under his bed, which was
Speaker 1: the only plausible defense against a bomb dropping on her house,
Speaker 1: and he would He had all these stories like a
Speaker 1: bomb once landed in her backyard and luckily didn't explode.
Speaker 1: He was once out picking strawberries with my grandmother and
Speaker 1: German planes passed over head, and my grandmother hid my
Speaker 1: father and my uncle under newspapers for reasons that no
Speaker 1: one really knows. She thought maybe she hid them from
Speaker 1: the pilots they wouldn't bomb them. But it was like
Speaker 1: a He would tell these stories and to me, at
Speaker 1: you know, the age of five or six, these stories
Speaker 1: were unbelievably exciting. You know, I was I was in
Speaker 1: We were in rural southwestern Canada, maybe the most boring
Speaker 1: part of the western world, and my dad was telling
Speaker 1: me nothing happened. I mean, it's a great good thing.
Speaker 1: And my father was telling me these stories about you know,
Speaker 1: like bombs dropping in his backyard when he was my age,
Speaker 1: and I you know, I think that probably instilled in
Speaker 1: me a kind of romantic love of this era. It
Speaker 1: shows and I know that you're a huge fan of
Speaker 1: spy novels and you've read all the fiction you can
Speaker 1: find about war. I think you've done something more impressive
Speaker 1: than writing a page turner of fiction in this book,
Speaker 1: which is you have brought these real life characters and
Speaker 1: their stories to life in a way that feels like
Speaker 1: I'm reading a thriller. I could not put it down.
Speaker 1: I've read now the print version and listen to the
Speaker 1: audio version, and I'm still hooked. And I wonder if
Speaker 1: you could talk a little bit about how you got
Speaker 1: into the minds of these people that you've not been
Speaker 1: able to meet, well you write it is a departure
Speaker 1: for me. So I've never done a book which is
Speaker 1: so much of a kind of first of all, a
Speaker 1: single narrative. Usually I hop around, you know, I tell
Speaker 1: all kinds of different stories. But I also have never
Speaker 1: written a book which was so singularly focused on two characters.
Speaker 1: This book is the story of the conflict between two
Speaker 1: kind of legendary World War Two Air Force generals, Curtis
Speaker 1: LeMay and Heywood Hansel, and I really do you know,
Speaker 1: they're incredibly vivid characters, and we because we started this
Speaker 1: project as an audio project. I was always thinking of
Speaker 1: this verse as an audio book, and the reason for
Speaker 1: that was that we have so much incredible archival tape
Speaker 1: of these generals from the Second World Board. There's at
Speaker 1: Maxwell Air Force based in Alabama, there's a room full
Speaker 1: of tape of interviews with virtually every major figure in
Speaker 1: the Air force in that in that period. And once
Speaker 1: you know you can hear them, you I think you
Speaker 1: have a lot more confidence that you can bring them
Speaker 1: to life. And you know, like particularly Lemayh, who is
Speaker 1: this kind of unbelievable, cold blooded, you know, bulldog of
Speaker 1: a man. When you hear his voice, you feel like
Speaker 1: you you know who he is because he has this
Speaker 1: kind of guttural grunt. And that just gave me confidence
Speaker 1: that I could they would be more than two dimensional
Speaker 1: characters on the page if I could, If I could,
Speaker 1: you know, use do a kind of enhanced audio book
Speaker 1: that would bring them to life. Well it shows and
Speaker 1: I thought one of the other interesting features of the
Speaker 1: book was the way that you almost tantalize us with
Speaker 1: these questions of morality. Early on. You ask us to
Speaker 1: consider what would I have done and which side would
Speaker 1: I have been on? And I want to hear your
Speaker 1: answer to this, because you avoided it the whole book.
Speaker 1: But first, can you just walk us through the central
Speaker 1: moral dilemma of the bomber Mafia. Yeah, the bomber Mafia.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons I was so attracted to this
Speaker 1: story is that they are they are obsessive, and they
Speaker 1: are they're technological obsessives. They're they're a very familiar figure
Speaker 1: for us now there are. They're young men who are
Speaker 1: in the grip of a kind of passion that has
Speaker 1: been fired by a technological innovation. They would not be
Speaker 1: out of place in Silicon Valley today. They would, in fact,
Speaker 1: you know, be utterly They're utterly familiar in one sense,
Speaker 1: but in another sense, they're not because they're they have
Speaker 1: a moral vision. The reason they are so passionate about
Speaker 1: what bombing can do and how bombing can transform war
Speaker 1: is that they are desperate to avoid the carnage of
Speaker 1: the First World War, and that part of them I love.
Speaker 1: I love that they considered the the moral implications of
Speaker 1: their dream were as important to them as the kind
Speaker 1: of technological implications, and that's not something I see today.
Speaker 1: And so that I thought that they were this extraordinary
Speaker 1: role model for how you can bring together moral desires
Speaker 1: with technological obsession. But it doesn't work right. You know,
Speaker 1: the story of this book is the story of the
Speaker 1: failure of this dream, and so you you know you,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it is possible. I do not you.
Speaker 1: You're quite right. This book does not give you an
Speaker 1: easy answer to which side should we beyond? Because there
Speaker 1: is no easy answer. All I can say is I
Speaker 1: like the I like the fact that they tried to
Speaker 1: bring a moral vision to to their way of fighting wars.
Speaker 1: And I'm sad that they failed. But that's as far
Speaker 1: as it goes. I don't know. I didn't want to.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of I'm kind of overbooks that give you
Speaker 1: a new little conclusion. I find that condescending almost. I
Speaker 1: respect that. I also think, Malcolm Gladwell, that you are
Speaker 1: letting these people of the hook awfully easily to say that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, they come in with a moral vision. They
Speaker 1: have a sense of almost ideological superiority, that they are
Speaker 1: going to fix all the problems with war while still
Speaker 1: fighting a war and essentially torturing countless people. And okay,
Speaker 1: you know what, good that they had a sense of
Speaker 1: morality even though they did so much harm. Really, are
Speaker 1: you okay with that? Well? I don't know how much
Speaker 1: choice you have once you are committed to a conflict.
Speaker 1: I mean, part of the reason the story I think
Speaker 1: is so compelling is that the deep way you get
Speaker 1: into the story the book, the more you're aware of
Speaker 1: how constrained the choices available to the characters are. You know,
Speaker 1: you think about the kind of second half of the
Speaker 1: book is all about what happens when my two protagonists
Speaker 1: Curtis Lemann Hey would Hansel come into conflict in in
Speaker 1: January of nineteen forty five, when the focus of the
Speaker 1: war has turned from Europe to the war against Japan
Speaker 1: to the Pacific theater. And there they are. They are
Speaker 1: given the task by the Allied leadership of bringing Japan
Speaker 1: to its knees and they get to choose how they
Speaker 1: how they how they will do that, and neither of
Speaker 1: the options available to them are any good. And I
Speaker 1: don't know, I really don't know whether you can It's
Speaker 1: not their fault. The options are no good, right, war
Speaker 1: is there's no kind of easy moral solution in these situations.
Speaker 1: It's like you're supposed you have to win a war
Speaker 1: and if you don't win the war, many many, many, many, many,
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of people will die, right, There's just
Speaker 1: no doubt about that. When wars drag on, they exact
Speaker 1: an enormous human toll. So everybody's agreed we need to
Speaker 1: get this war over with. But there's basically actually there's
Speaker 1: three options. And you know, Hayward Hansel has one option.
Speaker 1: He wants to use bombs as sparingly as possible. It
Speaker 1: is a complete and utter failure for reasons outside of
Speaker 1: his control. Curtis LeMay has another option. He wants to
Speaker 1: napalm every city in Japan, which is brutal and unbelievably horrifying.
Speaker 1: But he would say, well, I don't have any other
Speaker 1: options now. The third option, of course, is the option
Speaker 1: taken by in August of nineteen forty five when we
Speaker 1: dropped to atomic bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Again, another thing,
Speaker 1: another option that leaves us sort of leaves all kinds
Speaker 1: of moral questions dangling. I just you know, I have
Speaker 1: difficulty from my comfortable perch in twenty twenty one passing
Speaker 1: judgment on people who didn't have any good options available
Speaker 1: to them. Now I understand I was trying to figure
Speaker 1: out as I listened, as I read, why you were
Speaker 1: so reluctant to take a moral stance here, because you
Speaker 1: are not shy about moral stances, And I thought, this
Speaker 1: is this is not at all Gladwellian. You normally have
Speaker 1: a strong view about what's right and wrong. And as
Speaker 1: I listened to you, now it clicked that they were
Speaker 1: stuck choosing between wrong and wrong, and you appreciate and
Speaker 1: admire the fact that they at least tried to do
Speaker 1: what was right. Yeah, you know, it's this is a
Speaker 1: side thing, But this is an idea that I've become
Speaker 1: kind of obsessed with recently. I've been doing a two
Speaker 1: episodes of my podcast this season, Revision's History, on the
Speaker 1: dilemma of a little small HBCU in New Orleans and
Speaker 1: the problem of if you choose to educate lower income students,
Speaker 1: and if you choose to serve them by keeping your
Speaker 1: tuition low, you create all kinds of problems. Right, can't
Speaker 1: pay for anything. Your school is not considered to be prestigious. You,
Speaker 1: I mean, you can go on and on and on
Speaker 1: and on and on. And the president of the school
Speaker 1: told me, he's like, you know, the problem with the
Speaker 1: way we think about higher education is that we we
Speaker 1: don't consider the degree of difficulty. Now, Adam, you know
Speaker 1: I'm raising this with you because you are a former
Speaker 1: diver and the great, the great contribution of diving to
Speaker 1: the world. And I'm not I'm not being flipp here. Honestly,
Speaker 1: the great one of the great contributions of your sport
Speaker 1: to the world is that it introduced that phrase and
Speaker 1: that concept degree of difficulty into common parliance. And it's
Speaker 1: a crucial idea. It says that you cannot simply judge
Speaker 1: an outcome all by itself. You have to judge the
Speaker 1: obstacles that were that the person pursuing that goal had
Speaker 1: to go through. Right, was faced with and this guy
Speaker 1: in New Orleans, he was like, the problem with HBCUs
Speaker 1: is that no one gives us credit for the degree
Speaker 1: of difficulty involved in what we do. Right. I just
Speaker 1: thought that was absolutely true, and you can't go through
Speaker 1: all manner of things in society. The one thing that
Speaker 1: was absent from the debate this past summer about police
Speaker 1: and by the way, a debate that I was that
Speaker 1: I have been writing about and arguing for police reform
Speaker 1: for twenty five years at this point. But the one
Speaker 1: thing that was absent from this summer was a sense
Speaker 1: of the degree of difficulty involved in police work. It's
Speaker 1: really hard, right, really really hard, and I wish that
Speaker 1: had been a part of it, and it wasn't there
Speaker 1: to the same extent. And that's also what I feel
Speaker 1: about these characters back in the Second World War is
Speaker 1: a degree of difficulty was through the roof, and you
Speaker 1: just have to build that into your consideration of their actions.
Speaker 1: I love that lens in part because one of my
Speaker 1: biggest frustrations with diving is that the formula for degree
Speaker 1: of difficulty is almost completely bogus. How did you decide
Speaker 1: that when somebody does a front four and a half
Speaker 1: that's a three point eight degree of difficulty on a
Speaker 1: three meter, but when they do an inward three and
Speaker 1: a half, it's only a three point four. You could
Speaker 1: you could change that scale dramatically and we would have
Speaker 1: different Olympic gold medalists, we would have actually completely different
Speaker 1: dives done, and we could have a whole rabbit hole
Speaker 1: about this, which I'm very tempted to do, but I
Speaker 1: think it hold on, hold on, hold on, Adam. This
Speaker 1: is like fantastic. Are you saying that there is an
Speaker 1: underappreciated degree of difficulty? With a concept of degree of difficulty,
Speaker 1: there a minimum, there's an underappreciated degree of difficulty in
Speaker 1: asking people who judge a sport to come up with
Speaker 1: a meaningful quantitative metric for scoring the sport, Adam, adam,
Speaker 1: you know more about diving than ninety nine point nine
Speaker 1: nine percent of humanity. You are a You are a
Speaker 1: prominent psychologist who writes in a matter of things, and
Speaker 1: you've never written about this. Do I have to take
Speaker 1: this idea from you? Can I interview about about this?
Speaker 1: I will give it to you. It's yours right now.
Speaker 1: This is just the most interesting thing that I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: this is like fantastic, This is just amazing, the even
Speaker 1: diving god degree of difficulty wrong? Well, but isn't that
Speaker 1: isn't that part of the point that Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: first of all, inventing something almost almost always means you
Speaker 1: get it wrong, because the hard work of creating it
Speaker 1: usually blinds you to the different hard work of optimizing it.
Speaker 1: But also that the concept of degree of difficulty is
Speaker 1: so much more complicated everywhere else, and the fact that
Speaker 1: we couldn't get it right in diving, It's like all
Speaker 1: you have to do is, you know, measure how high
Speaker 1: people jump, how fast that they can spin, and you
Speaker 1: know how much control you have. Actually, there's a there's
Speaker 1: a whole metric of jobs for degree of difficulty, right,
Speaker 1: we can we can measure job complexity and know that
Speaker 1: when a job has higher degree of difficulty, intelligence seems
Speaker 1: to become more important. Um and oh, there's there's so
Speaker 1: much we can talk about here, but I want to
Speaker 1: I want to get back to the one of the
Speaker 1: central questions that apply degree of difficulty to moral dilemmas raises,
Speaker 1: which is, once you recognize you're in a situation with
Speaker 1: high degree of difficulty, what do you do? What are
Speaker 1: your what are your takeaways from from studying these bombers?
Speaker 1: The great mistake the bomber mafia makes is they is
Speaker 1: they like many technological innovators, by the way, is they
Speaker 1: they they do not have the imagination And it's not
Speaker 1: a fault, but no one would to come up with
Speaker 1: all of the possible comp locations of their dream. And
Speaker 1: you know this is the this is the time honored
Speaker 1: problem of the innovator, Right that the thing that makes
Speaker 1: them good at innovating in their specific rate region is
Speaker 1: the narrowness and and intensity of their focus. They don't
Speaker 1: they're not distracted. They're like I on the prize, right.
Speaker 1: But the problem is that when they take that idea
Speaker 1: in the real world, that becomes a liability all of
Speaker 1: a sudden. You've got to think about fifty things that
Speaker 1: never occurred to you tomorrow. So the skills that get
Speaker 1: you to the real world are the skills that also
Speaker 1: impede you once you reach the real world. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: so you you have a parallel here which I didn't
Speaker 1: see until just now between the Bomber's dilemma and how
Speaker 1: we think about degree difficulty in diving, which is I
Speaker 1: think the central tension in diving and degree difficulty is
Speaker 1: do you base it on how hard it is to
Speaker 1: do at all or how it is to do well?
Speaker 1: There there are some dives that only a few people
Speaker 1: in the world can even make, and those some people
Speaker 1: would argue those should have the highest degree difficulty, and
Speaker 1: others would say, no, you take the hard dive that
Speaker 1: everybody does but everybody misses, and that's the dive that
Speaker 1: gets the highest degree difficulty. Your version of this, I
Speaker 1: think is is precision bombing, which is you say, okay,
Speaker 1: how you know how many bombs can you drop? Or
Speaker 1: you know how much? How much can you terrify or
Speaker 1: demoralize a city with your bombs? Versus can you hit
Speaker 1: your target perfectly? What? What does that teach us about
Speaker 1: what's really difficult? Is it the execution or is it
Speaker 1: the ability to to show up in the first place?
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's a really good question. Um. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna cop out and say bows or it depends. Um. Point.
Speaker 1: I can tell you what interests me more, which is
Speaker 1: I'm more interested particularly this is a weird thing to say,
Speaker 1: particularly as I get older in the execution, because more
Speaker 1: and more I find myself I am interested and fascinated
Speaker 1: and amused by people's obsessive dreams. But what impresses me
Speaker 1: is execution. That you can just do it in a
Speaker 1: way that so everyone starts tries to do the same thing,
Speaker 1: there are three people who pull it off. Those are
Speaker 1: the three that if that's that's what impresses me is
Speaker 1: like you know, it's like, you know, any of us
Speaker 1: can make an attempt at Mount Everest or run a marathon,
Speaker 1: but a handful of people get to the top or break,
Speaker 1: you know, two hours and dirty minutes. Those are the
Speaker 1: people I take my hat off to. Okay, that speaks
Speaker 1: to something you've alluded to a couple of times, and
Speaker 1: something you made me rethink in this book, which is
Speaker 1: the idea of obsession. I have always thought of obsession
Speaker 1: as something bad. I think of people with OCD, I
Speaker 1: think of an obsessive stalker. And you you have a
Speaker 1: very different take on obsession. I think you even see
Speaker 1: it as a beautiful thing. And I want to hear more.
Speaker 1: I do I, and I wonder why I do. I
Speaker 1: don't know if I had a good answer to that him.
Speaker 1: I don't. It's not as if the easy thing would
Speaker 1: be to say that I you know, I grew up
Speaker 1: with an example of obsessiveness. Actually I didn't. Neither of
Speaker 1: my parents could even plausibly did be described as even
Speaker 1: coming close to that standard. My brother is the least obsessive. Hello,
Speaker 1: I mean he sort of, he's not. Obsessives were dabblers
Speaker 1: my whole but Dad's whole thing was he loved doing
Speaker 1: lots of things, even if he did them badly. That
Speaker 1: was his favorite thing. He both built greenhouse in her backyard,
Speaker 1: and he was so proud of how inex or inexpertly
Speaker 1: he built it. He would show off all of the
Speaker 1: crazy angles and the gaps. Then he thought that was hilarious. Okay,
Speaker 1: I have a few things that I'm curious about then.
Speaker 1: The first one is you called yourself a dabbler, and
Speaker 1: yet you're also an elite runner. I think you once
Speaker 1: beat the Canadian record holder if I remember correctly. Isn't
Speaker 1: running the most obsessive sport ever? I mean you literally
Speaker 1: just do the same thing over and over, step, step,
Speaker 1: the opposite, the opposite. So how many when you were
Speaker 1: diving as a kid, how many hours would you spend
Speaker 1: in the pool a day? I mean, actually in the pool,
Speaker 1: probably four seconds to dive from the time you left
Speaker 1: the house to the time you got home again, what
Speaker 1: are we talking about time devoted to the task? I'm
Speaker 1: three hours during the school year, probably eight or nine
Speaker 1: in the summer. Okay. In my entire time, as you know,
Speaker 1: I was a very good age class runner. In my
Speaker 1: entire time, as a very good age class runner, I
Speaker 1: never never spent more than an hour a day running never,
Speaker 1: and I never ran more than five days a week.
Speaker 1: And by the way, nor did anyone else I know.
Speaker 1: In fact, and if I had done that, I would
Speaker 1: have gotten I would have gotten hell from my coach.
Speaker 1: He would have said, you are destroying a Running is
Speaker 1: all about restraint, you know what. The the the little
Speaker 1: adage they repeat to you when you start out running
Speaker 1: is train, don't strain for tomorrow is another day. Running
Speaker 1: is the op It's the anti obsessives past time. It's
Speaker 1: all about restraint. It's all about never only when you
Speaker 1: race do you push yourself to the edge. At all
Speaker 1: of the times you hold yourself in check. Right the coach,
Speaker 1: I have a I'm intoining right now for this mile
Speaker 1: race I'm doing, and I have a disguise helping me
Speaker 1: coach and he looks at my my workouts online. You
Speaker 1: know what he tells me. He's like, yeah, you need
Speaker 1: to probably take a little more recovery on that, or
Speaker 1: you should take some more days off. He's making sure
Speaker 1: I'm not obsessive runners. You've totally misunderstand running. This is
Speaker 1: probably why you don't run. You don't get it. That
Speaker 1: might be true. You're bringing your crazy eight hour a
Speaker 1: day memories from childhood to bear on a completely different sport.
Speaker 1: I don't know you have bursts of obsession in running.
Speaker 1: I've heard about your stereo routines, for example. No, those
Speaker 1: are He's not. It's an obsession. That was. That's I
Speaker 1: used to get together with three very good friends of
Speaker 1: mine and we would do a workout on the stairs
Speaker 1: in Fork Green Park in Brooklyn. To say that was
Speaker 1: obsessive is nuts. It was totally fun. We would like
Speaker 1: you have a long recovery because you jog down the
Speaker 1: stairs and you sprint up them. On the job down
Speaker 1: the stairs, you like gossip and catch up on stuff
Speaker 1: and chat, and then you just have a little zip
Speaker 1: up the stairs and it's like it's it's the furthest thing.
Speaker 1: You don't know what you're talking about. Meanwhile, you're executing
Speaker 1: these insanely complicated dives that if you if you're off
Speaker 1: by two inches, you lose. This is nothing, nothing in
Speaker 1: common with what but what I'm up to. Well, I
Speaker 1: have to tell you that one of your so called
Speaker 1: friends said that when he went with you for the
Speaker 1: first time, he wasn't sure if he was going to
Speaker 1: vomit or die. So not everyone's experienced mirrors yours, but
Speaker 1: every other occasion than he smoked me, so I didn't
Speaker 1: know what he's talking about anyway. The other the other
Speaker 1: thing I wanted to ask you about obsession is I
Speaker 1: think about this research by valorand on two kinds of passion.
Speaker 1: He calls them obsession, obsessive passion, and harmonious passion, and
Speaker 1: he says, obsession obsessive passion is basically it's it's extrinsically motivated.
Speaker 1: It's driven by guilt, by pressure, by this, you know,
Speaker 1: compulsiveness that really undermines people's ongoing interest and commitment. Whereas
Speaker 1: harmonious passion, instead of feeling like you constantly have to
Speaker 1: push yourself to do it, you're pulled in by the activity.
Speaker 1: You're interested, you're intrinsically motivated, you're curious, you're excited, and
Speaker 1: your energy is sustained by your enthusiasm. And I wonder
Speaker 1: if if that's part of what you're describing, or if
Speaker 1: you think there's actually still an upside to the obsessive
Speaker 1: part of passion. Well, it's funny that the word I
Speaker 1: was waiting for you to say in what you in
Speaker 1: that in that um little dichotomy you described was um pleasure. Um.
Speaker 1: So I grant. I suppose that there are there are
Speaker 1: different motivations initial motivations for certain kinds of of a
Speaker 1: obsessive pursuits. But to me, the real issue is not
Speaker 1: why you start, but where you end up and does
Speaker 1: the does the immersion bring you pleasure? And it always
Speaker 1: amazes me how how little that word is used in
Speaker 1: particularly in connection with people's work. I always ask people, well,
Speaker 1: do you find your work fun? To be in? The
Speaker 1: simply the most important question, And I'm not interested in
Speaker 1: some people. We have all kinds of reasons why we work.
Speaker 1: Some people work because they have a family to support.
Speaker 1: Some people will work because they would be bored otherwise,
Speaker 1: I go on, some people work because their parents, would
Speaker 1: you know, disdain them if they didn't. Whatever, The question is,
Speaker 1: once you're at work and immersed in it, are you
Speaker 1: enjoying yourself? And you know, when I think about the
Speaker 1: people I like working with, they're all people I don't.
Speaker 1: I like working with people who do a good job,
Speaker 1: Sure everyone does, but I really like working with people
Speaker 1: who are enjoying themselves. That's really what what compels me,
Speaker 1: and I think of for some people who root to
Speaker 1: enjoyment is obsession, right, It's like that's you get singular
Speaker 1: in your pursuit because it just brings you joy. I
Speaker 1: don't understand why those words are so rarely used in
Speaker 1: this context. So, like to go back to the bottom
Speaker 1: Offia for a moment. They're in the middle of Alabama
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties. You could look at them objectively
Speaker 1: and you could say these losers off in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere, pursuing an idea that will never go anywhere.
Speaker 1: Or you could say these are a group of people
Speaker 1: who have successfully found a place where they can find
Speaker 1: joy in their passion and work, and that makes them winners.
Speaker 1: No one else is having joy in the army in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five. Wow. So when you talk about obsession,
Speaker 1: then you're talking about a single minded focus to pursue
Speaker 1: mastery in a way that brings joy. Yeah, But the
Speaker 1: social aspect it's really crucial here. Um. It's funny because
Speaker 1: you know, the this book, The Bara Mafia is the
Speaker 1: really the first book that I've ever done where from
Speaker 1: the from the very beginning of this book, it was
Speaker 1: a team effort. It literally I know, I'm my name
Speaker 1: is on the cover, but that's a misnomer. There's six people,
Speaker 1: seven people at Pushkin who played as large or in
Speaker 1: some of these is large a role than me and
Speaker 1: put it in this together. I've never done that before, ever, not,
Speaker 1: I can't even. I was not the guy in college
Speaker 1: who you know, had a team of people and we
Speaker 1: were no, no, no no, no. I never did a team.
Speaker 1: I was never on a basketball team. Never did any
Speaker 1: team sports, never teams. Not in my I did not.
Speaker 1: I didn't even. I wasn't the kid who went home
Speaker 1: from school and did homework with his dad. Never happened. Right,
Speaker 1: this is not doing stuff with other people is not
Speaker 1: something I have ever done. And I did it with
Speaker 1: this book. And you know what, this is most fun
Speaker 1: book I've ever done. Never had so much fun writing
Speaker 1: a book. It's like fantastic, right, It's that and why
Speaker 1: because everyone else was as into this idea as I was,
Speaker 1: right and pursuing different parts of it. And that's so
Speaker 1: like I, you know, I here, I am writing about
Speaker 1: a group of people who find joy in each other's obsession.
Speaker 1: And I am with a group of people finding joy
Speaker 1: with each other's obsession. It's like it's lovely at my
Speaker 1: you know, at my advanced age. I'm much older than you, Adam,
Speaker 1: I get to say things like that. At my advanced age,
Speaker 1: I discovered this fantastic thing called, you know, strength in numbers,
Speaker 1: the joy of shared obsession. Yes, I love that. That
Speaker 1: was Grant and Gladwell Clubhouse Part one. After the break,
Speaker 1: we meet again to discuss Adam's book, Think Again. Adam,
Speaker 1: can you give this? Can you give us an overview
Speaker 1: of Think Again? The core idea build on some brilliant
Speaker 1: work that my colleague Phil tet Luck did, and the
Speaker 1: premise is that we spend a lot of our life
Speaker 1: with these mindsets of occupations that we never have worked in.
Speaker 1: We find ourselves thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians more
Speaker 1: often than we would want to admit. When I'm in
Speaker 1: preacher mode, I'm trying to proselytize. When I'm a prosecutor,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to win a case and prove you wrong.
Speaker 1: When I'm a politician, I have a constituent, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to get their approval, so I'm doing all this campaigning
Speaker 1: and lobbying. My big worry with preaching and prosecuting is
Speaker 1: that people are not willing to think again because I'm right,
Speaker 1: you're wrong, You're the one who needs to change. I'm
Speaker 1: good when people are in politician mode, they look a
Speaker 1: little bit more flexible. But all they're doing is they're
Speaker 1: flip flopping what they say in order to communicate what
Speaker 1: they think their audience wants to hear. And so if
Speaker 1: it looks like they're rethinking, they're doing it at the
Speaker 1: wrong time for the wrong reasons, or they're just towing
Speaker 1: the party line and appealing to their tribe without actually
Speaker 1: changing their internal beliefs. My hope is that people will
Speaker 1: think a little bit more like scientists and say, you
Speaker 1: know what, I don't have to believe everything I think.
Speaker 1: I don't have to internalize every emotion I feel. When
Speaker 1: I start to form an opinion that's just a hypothesis.
Speaker 1: Let me go out in the world, run some experiments, observe,
Speaker 1: talk to people, and test the hypothesis. And I should
Speaker 1: be then surrounding myself with people who don't just agree
Speaker 1: with my conclusions, but actually challenge my thought process. And
Speaker 1: the goal of all that is to try to break
Speaker 1: us free of overconfidence cycles where we take pride in
Speaker 1: our knowledge, we have too much conviction that leads us
Speaker 1: to confirmation bias, and then we become a little bit arrogant.
Speaker 1: What I want to do is activate rethinking cycles where
Speaker 1: we have a humility to know what we don't know,
Speaker 1: We doubt some of our convictions. That makes us curious
Speaker 1: to go and discover new things, and that reinforces this
Speaker 1: mindset of being a lifelong learner, saying, wow, I just
Speaker 1: learned something. There's so much more to learn. Um, well,
Speaker 1: you have written another wonderful book, and I find it. Actually,
Speaker 1: there's so many fascinating things. My only critique of this
Speaker 1: I have a critique of this book. By the way,
Speaker 1: I hope you have more than one. I have several,
Speaker 1: but my my large one, which is a is it's
Speaker 1: four books. I'm reading this book. It's like, why you
Speaker 1: I You're like jumping ahead of the next idea and
Speaker 1: I'm not done with the one you're on. I either
Speaker 1: you either. You have to you have to, like you know,
Speaker 1: slow down and write and chop your ideas into pieces
Speaker 1: and devote. Oh, you have to write longer books. You
Speaker 1: can't do you can't keep doing this and like raise anyway,
Speaker 1: that's a it's a very mild. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: it's flattery designed is disguised as criticism, but I wanted
Speaker 1: to start. I kept thinking when I was reading this book,
Speaker 1: how does this fit in with Adam's previous books? And
Speaker 1: I'm wondering, do we have a kind of emerging Adam
Speaker 1: Grant philosophy of life? Can you talk about how does
Speaker 1: this one fit with your previous books? I think this
Speaker 1: it's an interesting question, and I will accept your backhanded
Speaker 1: compliment any day. Thank you for the enthusiasm and also
Speaker 1: the criticism, which I look forward to more of. I
Speaker 1: guess this book is sort of a meta book in
Speaker 1: that in each of the books I've written before, what
Speaker 1: I've tried to do is I've tried to get people
Speaker 1: to rethink something that I think that they've gotten wrong,
Speaker 1: or maybe an assumption that's been incomplete. The I mean,
Speaker 1: but do you What I want is whether you think
Speaker 1: there is a kind of Adam Grant ideology that's emerging
Speaker 1: from writing all Are you getting a kind of sense
Speaker 1: of well, wait a minute, here is how I see
Speaker 1: the world, and if you read all my books you'll
Speaker 1: get this Grantian vision. Yes, although it would be a
Speaker 1: little ironic to commit to an ideology, because then I'm
Speaker 1: not staying open to rethinking my opinions and beliefs. Am I. No, No,
Speaker 1: you could have a component. You could have an ideologies,
Speaker 1: which is that you revisit your ideology. That's fine. No,
Speaker 1: I think I think there is a there's an overarching
Speaker 1: thread that runs through all my work which I didn't
Speaker 1: see until I'd written a couple of books. The threat
Speaker 1: is that the very things that you think are critical
Speaker 1: for success in life, I can actually be attained through
Speaker 1: building character. And I think that my work has has
Speaker 1: looked at different kinds of character strengths and said, you
Speaker 1: don't have to choose between your goals and those virtues,
Speaker 1: whether it's generosity or now it's you know, it's humility.
Speaker 1: And so I guess what I'm looking for at large
Speaker 1: is a way to align character with with achievement. How's that? Yeah? No,
Speaker 1: that that actually that fits with That's what I've always
Speaker 1: sort of sensed in Well, why didn't you just tell
Speaker 1: me that a few years ago? Because then I would
Speaker 1: have understood who I was and what I was trying
Speaker 1: to achieve. No. No, but I'm curious me because I'm
Speaker 1: always very attracted to U two religious themes in things
Speaker 1: to sort of ary, particularly if they're kind of slightly sublimated.
Speaker 1: But it always struck me that there was some there
Speaker 1: was some kind of moral case being made in your
Speaker 1: books that maybe you weren't making explicitly, but that there
Speaker 1: was something about reading a books that felt very comfortable
Speaker 1: to someone who was used to thinking about the world
Speaker 1: in terms of character, ethics, morality, those kinds of things.
Speaker 1: Like if I was thinking if I had a Bible
Speaker 1: study of evangelicals and I said, this week, we're not
Speaker 1: reading it's a New Testament. We're going to read the
Speaker 1: works of Adam Grant. I think actually people with that
Speaker 1: kind of world would be very at home with the
Speaker 1: arguments that you're making. That's interesting. I love it when
Speaker 1: when ancient wisdom matches up with modern science. And I
Speaker 1: think where the ancient wisdom often leaves me short is
Speaker 1: around you know, okay, a lot for me at least
Speaker 1: a lot of the principles and recommendations that come out
Speaker 1: of religious traditions or missing the nuance about how do
Speaker 1: you actually do this in life? Right? So, yeah, of
Speaker 1: course you want to be a generous person, but how
Speaker 1: do you give to others in a way that prevents
Speaker 1: you or protects you from burning out or just getting
Speaker 1: burned by the most selfish takers around. Yes, I want
Speaker 1: to be humble, but I don't want to become meek
Speaker 1: or lack confidence. And so I think, I guess what
Speaker 1: I want to do In a lot of my work
Speaker 1: is trying to use evidence to pick up where where
Speaker 1: these these higher principles leave off and ask, Okay, what
Speaker 1: does it mean to do this without sacrificing you know,
Speaker 1: our ambitions? Yeah, yeah, I was struck by because I am,
Speaker 1: as you know, a BlackBerry fanatic user, not fatally struggle words.
Speaker 1: It's from they make it in my hometown. I have
Speaker 1: a you know, it came out of my dad's university.
Speaker 1: And you have a little thing where you talk about
Speaker 1: Mike Lazaridis who ran rim BlackBerry for many years, and
Speaker 1: he made this error and they went from fifty percent
Speaker 1: market share to whatever it was, five percent in five
Speaker 1: years because they failed to understand the smartphone revolution, the
Speaker 1: typing on a keyboard as opposed typing on a screens,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. He was not willing to revisit
Speaker 1: his assumptions about what a smartphone could be. And I
Speaker 1: was thinking about that, and I was like but you know,
Speaker 1: when I go home sometimes to visit my mom, I
Speaker 1: sometimes see Mike Lazaritas, like buying books in the bookstore.
Speaker 1: He doesn't live that far from my mother. He's a
Speaker 1: very happy guy. He didn't have any regrets. I don't
Speaker 1: think he built this beautiful house, all these trees outside.
Speaker 1: You know what I think. I think he's like doing
Speaker 1: cool projects. He made himself, I don't know, billion dollars.
Speaker 1: Probably at the end of the day, you know, I
Speaker 1: suppose he could have his shareholders might be upset that
Speaker 1: he didn't rethink his assumptions. But it was very hard
Speaker 1: for me to think of Mike Lazaritas as being a loser.
Speaker 1: And also like, so what if he wrote it all
Speaker 1: the way down? Like he believed in a certain kind
Speaker 1: of ascetic functionality and a phone like I happen to
Speaker 1: believe that too. Mike chose me over the many millions
Speaker 1: who wanted a phone that did everything, Like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: is there any different with this solid trude. I was
Speaker 1: thinking this into context of I'm also a fan of
Speaker 1: a deeply committed Diard fan of the Buffalo Bills. If
Speaker 1: you know what an involve football, you know that that
Speaker 1: is just an invitation has been for thirty years, an
Speaker 1: invitation to masochism. Start starting with Jim Kelly and Thurman
Speaker 1: Thomas four super Bowl zero wins. Exactly do I read you? Know?
Speaker 1: If I read your book one way, I would single Malcolm,
Speaker 1: you should just rethink your your football allegiances. They make
Speaker 1: no sense. Like you got it? This is working, this
Speaker 1: Buffalo saying there's a certain pleasure in me sticking with
Speaker 1: them through thin and thin um, But so like, do
Speaker 1: you see what I'm getting at? Like I do? Oh,
Speaker 1: there's there's so much to work with here. Okay, let
Speaker 1: me let me start by saying, I love that you
Speaker 1: are rethinking your claim that you've made to me several
Speaker 1: times in this friendship that you always for the favorite,
Speaker 1: because the Buffalo Bills are definitely not the favorite. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's true, So welcome to the underdogs. It's about time
Speaker 1: you came around. Thank you. Secondly, I'm BlackBerry. I still
Speaker 1: want the keyboard back. I hate typing on a screen.
Speaker 1: I will never be as fast as I was. I'm
Speaker 1: not worried about Mike Lazarides at all. What I'm worried
Speaker 1: about And Malcolm, where is your empathy? Where is your
Speaker 1: compassion for all the people who lost jobs because RIM
Speaker 1: went under. They didn't go under, I mean it basically did.
Speaker 1: How many people are working there now? Well no, well,
Speaker 1: actually this is a sidetrack. But years ago I wrote
Speaker 1: this piece about what happened when I think it was
Speaker 1: General Dynamics had a very large presence in Rochester and
Speaker 1: they shut down their factory and left. This is in
Speaker 1: the seventies, and everyone in Rochester said, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this is the end of Rochester. And then this researcher
Speaker 1: I forgot who it was, went back ten years later
Speaker 1: and said, what happened to all the people who got
Speaker 1: laid off from General Dynamics? And he said he pointed
Speaker 1: out that the resurgence in the tech industry in Rochester
Speaker 1: was a direct result of all the people who were
Speaker 1: freed from General Dynamics and went on to do cool things.
Speaker 1: The exact same thing happened in Waterloo, in my hometown.
Speaker 1: All the people who left for RIM are the foundation
Speaker 1: of this incredible tech resurgence in southern Ontario. So do
Speaker 1: you know, Mike just educated a bunch of people about
Speaker 1: how to be entrepreneurs and how to think about I think,
Speaker 1: and it's win win for Waterloo. Anyway, it's a side point. No,
Speaker 1: I think I think you're right. I think that's a
Speaker 1: great point. And I'm feeling the joy of being wrong
Speaker 1: right now because I think you can see the impact
Speaker 1: on the ecosystem if you know, if you go to Canada.
Speaker 1: I think there's a part of me though that I guess.
Speaker 1: I also I also feel bad for you and me
Speaker 1: because we want that keyboard, right. I would love it
Speaker 1: if there was an iPhone competitor that you know, that
Speaker 1: worked a little bit more like the BlackBerry did. And
Speaker 1: so I feel like we're missing out on, frankly, some
Speaker 1: possible technological advances that didn't occur because they know they
Speaker 1: stopped producing products. What this book is is a kind
Speaker 1: of rebuttal to don Quixote. Don Ka Hoode is everything
Speaker 1: that he stands for is something this book is refuting.
Speaker 1: Right that this book is saying, to persist in tilts
Speaker 1: and windmills, to persist in You know, the whole story
Speaker 1: of Don Hodi is Donka Hoode continues to wage these
Speaker 1: battles that cannot be won. He will not rethink anything.
Speaker 1: And you know that book suggests as a kind of
Speaker 1: nobility in that romantic attachment to a cause, even in
Speaker 1: the face of and you're saying, actually, no, Don Cohote
Speaker 1: is going to be much better off if he rethinks
Speaker 1: this position about being this shivalrous night and starts scientifically
Speaker 1: examining his options. Right, like this is this book is
Speaker 1: the anti It's the antique, don Quixote. I never thought
Speaker 1: of it that way, but I like it. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying you should always give up on your passions or
Speaker 1: let go of the causes that are important to you, right.
Speaker 1: I want people to stand by their principles, their core values.
Speaker 1: But I would be thrilled if more people were willing
Speaker 1: to say, look, I'm committed to a set of principles,
Speaker 1: but I'm willing to be flexible about the best plan
Speaker 1: to advance those principles. And I think that really requires
Speaker 1: us to think a little bit more like scientists and
Speaker 1: a little bit less like preachers or prosecutors or politicians
Speaker 1: who are convinced I'm right, you're wrong, and I'm only
Speaker 1: going to try to cater to my own tribe. That's
Speaker 1: all for now, dear listeners, Thanks for hearing us out.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Adam Grant and his team at TED for
Speaker 1: their help with this episode. My audiobook The Bomber Mafia
Speaker 1: is available at Bombermafia dot com and Adams Think Again
Speaker 1: is available wherever books are sold. Till we Meet in
Speaker 1: the Clubhouse Again, I'm Malcolm Gradwell.