Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Adam Grant on the future of work

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

After a macro conversation on the societal effects of shifts in the workforce, Dan sits down with Adam Grant to understand the implications of remote work on individuals.  As a professor of organizational psychology at Wharton, Adam dives into the potential long-lasting effects of a new work from home culture. What are some of the benefits of remote work that we’d want to continue after the pandemic is over? How will the fusion of personal and professional life affect our habits, identity, and culture?In this episode, Dan and Adam discuss  the potential boom of entrepreneurship and creativity in a Post Corona world. 

It's kind of ridiculous that we had to be stuck at home to realize, huh, I should block out time to think and work, as opposed to just having meetings and interruptions all day. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. Today we sit down with Adam Grant, a prolific writer, podcaster, and professor of organizational psychology at Wharton. Adam's been thinking a lot about how COVID will change the way we work. Now, there are a range of strongly held views on this topic, just based on the experience of

the past six plus months. Some employers think productivity is way up and employees enjoy the increased flexibility and time. Others believe businesses are ultimately human organizations and humans need human interaction to be effective. Will company cultures thrive, barely survive, or be completely reinvented. How will COVID change the nature of work? This is Post-Corona. I am very pleased to welcome my friend Adam Grant to this conversation. As I mentioned earlier, Adam is not only an organizational psychology professor at the Wharton School, he has been the top-rated professor for seven years. It's the kind of thing that guests typically don't like to be mentioned in an introduction, but the guest's mother typically likes it for it to be

widely promoted. He's the host of the Work Life podcast, which is one of my favorite podcasts right now. He's the author of three books, which I am proud to say I have read all three. Originals, How Nonconformists Move the World, Give and Take, and then also Option B, which he co-wrote with Sheryl Sandberg. And he is a contributor to New York Times Opinion. So he writes a lot, he talks a lot, he teaches a lot,

and he's been weighing in a lot on some of the issues that we are dealing with in this COVID world. So Adam, thanks for being here. Don't thank me yet, Dan. We'll see where this goes. Well, actually, I was thinking when we would hang out in the past, pre-COVID world, and it occurred to me that I could categorize the two places I have seen you. One are at conferences, and the other is actually at a Sixers basketball game I remember bumping into during the playoffs. I can't remember if it was last season or the season before, but that was back when the Sixers were relevant in the postseason, so I don't want to, I don't want to make a thing of that. But of the conference scene, that is like a, that feels like a bygone

era, right? I think that's temporary. I think people are going to appreciate those gatherings more than ever, once we're past this pandemic. So let me just, before we get going, let me ask you just your current work situation. So can you just tell us how you've been doing your jobs and what you like about how you're doing your jobs now? When I say jobs, I mean your writing, your teaching, and your podcasting. So the only things that have really changed are teaching and speaking, both of which I used to do either in a classroom or on a stage, and now I do from my home office. Otherwise, my work life is exactly the same as it was before.

I think the worst part of this for me is there are just times when it feels like I'm talking into a black hole, right? You make a joke over Zoom and you can't hear anybody laugh. You ask a question to the audience and it's either crickets or then you're frantically scrolling through the chat. One of the things I really love though is the multi-channel engagement. So with my students, for example, I've been using a series of hashtags to try to figure out what people want to contribute to the conversation. And so if students want to ask a question, they use hashtag question and then they type their question out. And then I can call

on people who have non-redundant questions, which is great. And then we also have hashtag on fire. If somebody desperately wants to get into the conversation now, that's a cue for me to shut up and call on them immediately. And what I've loved about that is normally when I get questions from an audience, I have no idea what people are going to say. And so, you know, I'm just rolling the dice. And now I feel like I can choreograph a much richer conversation and a much more inclusive discussion of both people and perspectives than I ever would have before. Okay, so let's use that, what you just said as a mini case study, because you had tried to conceive of that pre-COVID. Every aspect of that is complicated. First of all, the term's complicated. What is it? Multi-channel engagement? So the concept is complicated. The technology,

one would think, is complicated. The management of the technology and the people would seem complicated. And yet you were thrust into this because of COVID. Had you ever thought of doing something like what you just described in your teaching environment pre-COVID? A little bit. So I thought about a few things. One thing I've done from time to time in the classroom is I've had students write down their key takeaways and their unanswered questions after each class. And then originally I did that on paper. Then at some point it migrated into a Slack channel. But you know, it didn't it didn't have the real time, back and forth that that we're doing now. So when, you know, for years, we have been told, for really, like almost a decade, we had been told that we're headed to

a world of remote work, work from home. And the technology was there and people wanted it. And it was just a matter of time before they lived it. And people like me were skeptical because I felt like the technology isn't that accessible. The technology is going to be really expensive. The technology is going to be hard to use. The technology is going to have all sorts of security issues. And people are kind of in their routines you know they like their commutes they like their subway rides they like all the transitions in the day that go along with the work day really do yeah i mean i like the transitions in my day i like taking my kids to school dropping them off walking them from the school to the coffee shop getting a coffee

listening to a podcast then getting to the office i like those breaks in the day. The idea of being hunkered down all day, you know, with no transitions would have been like hard for me to imagine. And yet we were like instructed to do it overnight. Like mid-March, we were told everyone shut down, everyone's working from home. So are you surprised by how quickly we've all settled into this new routine? No, I'm surprised by how slow people were to preempt the pandemic and try it on their own. You know, the funny thing about all this, Dan, is that if you rewind the clock to the early, it was the winter of 2018. I started reading some research on the effects of working from home. And there were some great data, meta-analyses,

so studies of studies, looking at every possible data point that had been gathered on what happens when people have the flexibility to work wherever they want. And then also some randomized controlled experiments where people are given the chance to work from home, and then we track the effects on productivity and retention. And across the board, it was really clear that on average for most people in most organizations, the benefits of at least some flexibility outweighed the costs. And so I went to 10 CEOs in Silicon Valley and I said, look, I'd love to run a work from home Friday or remote work Friday experiment. And none of them were willing to try it.

They said, you know, we're going to lose the water cooler conversations. We're going to end up in a position where, in a nutshell, we feel like we'll have opened Pandora's box and we'll never be able to close it up again. And the funny thing is now at least three of those CEOs have announced that they may never come back to the office. And so, you know, I'm looking back saying, why were they so unwilling to try the experiment before? And how many other routines should we be testing out that we're not even thinking about right now? I've been struck in my own work environment. I've heard this from colleagues of mine who run companies and run firms, that they say that once they pivoted to work from home in the middle of March, they were surprised by the degree to which productivity did

not go down. And in some cases, most cases, people say productivity went up. Do you think that's sustainable? Do you think productivity stays where it was or continues to go up? Or are we going to expect to experience like a little bit of burnout and then it goes down? That's a great question. I think we don't know the answer yet. I'd love to see, I'd love to be able to fast forward a couple of years and look at the evidence.

But let's start from the data that do exist. So one of the most rigorous experiments that's been done pre-pandemic was a Nick Bloom-led study where he goes to C-TRIP in China. It's a call center. And hundreds of people are randomly assigned to have the chance to work from home. And then there's a control group who doesn't. And over the next six to nine months, productivity goes up 13.5% if you're working from home. People are half as likely to quit. And that's a pretty strong effect. And if you break

down why, some of it is there's a tremendous sense of gratitude and loyalty that people feel when they know that their employers trusted them to work wherever they wanted. And most people tend to reciprocate that with a lot of motivation and commitment. And then there's also the reality that a lot of us have been living, which is when people work from home, they actually work longer days

because they're less likely to get distracted by a bunch of conversations with their colleagues. They don't go to lunch. They might start earlier and finish later because they don't have the commute. And so you could ask yourself whether that's sustainable or not. I don't think we know yet. But the other thing that we need to be really cautious about here is we don't want to overcorrect. Because in that experiment,

roughly half of people when it was over said, I want to come back to work. I don't want to work from home anymore. They said, I want more structure in my life. I want a sense of community. I even sort of miss my boss. And I never thought I would say that, but I do. The other thing that I think is really important here is that despite being more productive in their jobs, they were less likely to get promoted because they didn't have FaceTime with senior leaders. And so I think any organization that's not fully remote in the future and that's dealing with some kind of hybrid model is going to have to deal with some real status inequalities between the people who are in the office and have the FaceTime and the people who don't. You referred to the water cooler combos as distractions. They could be distractions,

or they could be kind of part of the creative energy that's sparked by the serendipity of kind of bumping into someone and bouncing an idea off them, where you in the moment may bounce an idea off someone that you otherwise wouldn't have if it involved scheduling a call, getting on Zoom, it becomes like a production, whereas you can just like walk across the hall or bump into them and get instant feedback. Isn't there something lost there? Maybe. I mean, I'm not entirely sure, to be honest, because if you look at the research on creativity, one of the things it tells us is that individuals are more creative than groups. So, you know, we see this in brainstorming groups where instead of putting five or six or seven people in a room together, if you put them alone, you get more ideas and better ideas.

We know there's less conformity, that people don't talk over each other, that people don't bite their tongues because they're afraid of looking stupid. There's also a pretty neat Ethan Bernstein experiment showing that individuals have more ingenious ideas than groups, but they also have more dumb ideas than groups. And so where you really want the group is in the evaluation and refining stage. You want to let people come up with their own creative ideas independently and then say, okay, let's leverage the wisdom of crowds to figure out which of these are really worth pursuing and developing. And I wonder if that's where the water cooler is useful, right? It's not for eureka moments. It's for people saying, hey, you know, I've got this idea. I'm not sure if it's any good or not. What do you think of it? And then they get good feedback and they're also able to potentially solve some of the biggest challenges around making that idea reality.

So this movement over the last, I don't know, 30 years, it feels like 20 years of these offices redesigning around, you know, kind of a newsroom culture or trying to create a trading floor culture, even if it's not a trading floor where everyone's in the scrum together. You know, Bloomberg was one of the pioneers of this. Mike Bloomberg, even so much so that when he was mayor, he ran City Hall like it was a trading floor where he was in the middle on the floor. And he thought it was valuable for people to overhear everyone's discussions and get quick feedback. Does the data belie the positive sense of why this was so important? You know, Dan, it's funny that you bring up the open office because

I think one of the few silver linings of COVID is that it may finally bury that concept for good, which is something I've been waiting for for a long time. So you've been a bear on it for like a while, even when the concept was cool? I never got why it was cool, in part, because, you know, my job as an organizational psychologist is to look at the data first, and then say, Okay, we should formulate our policies and practices based on that. And the studies are very consistent in showing that number one, when you have open offices, it's extraordinarily difficult for people to concentrate, right flow and deep work,

just fly out the window. And people are just constantly interrupted. They're dealing with a lot of noise. It's especially hard on introverts. And then number two, ironically, the whole point of doing the open office is to encourage that kind of spontaneous collaboration. And you get the exact opposite of it. There's another Bernstein and Turbin experiment, which showed that when two different companies switched to open offices, face-to-face communication went down dramatically, and people were more likely to email their colleagues who were sitting right next to them, just as a way of coping with the overload. So it's an idea that I get why companies did it, because it seemed to be a lot cheaper,

and you could fit a lot more people in your space. But I think from a quality of work and collaboration standpoint, it was not a good idea to begin with. Wow. And I mean, I've got colleagues who say, and I felt this a little bit too. I have colleagues who say that for the first time during these last six months, they can actually think their words. They can actually think during the workday. I mean, if you're in one of these open trading floor formats or you're actually in an office, it's just once you go in, you lose control of your schedule, because there's just 1000 things going on. There's always fire drills. And you can't think whereas if you're at home, you actually have some control. Yeah, and there's no reason we couldn't have done this a lot sooner, right? So

some years ago, Leslie Perlow went into a fortune 500 software company in India. And they just they were dealing with this, I can't get any work done. People are always controlling my schedule. And so she ended up working with them to run an experiment where they set a quiet time policy. And the norm was that there were no interruptions allowed Tuesday, Thursday, Friday before noon. And you had 65% of engineers with above average productivity during those quiet time periods, in part because they could get their work done those three mornings, but also in part because of the efficiency gain of, you know, you check your inbox after lunch, you realize 12 people

have the same question, and you can feel those conversations all at once as opposed to having 12 separate individual meetings. And I think the hardest part of that experiment was maintaining the boundary. So they found this productivity gain and then the experiment's over. And, you know, one day a manager comes into work and says, you know, Dan, I know we're supposed to do this quiet time thing, but this will really only take five minutes. And pretty soon your whole morning is shot. Right. And so I think. By the way, my rule is it's never five minutes.

If I had a nickel for every time someone says to me, I just need to talk to you for five minutes. It's a lie. My favorite is 30 seconds. Like, has there ever been a conversation that's actually been 30 seconds? I just need 30 seconds. And I actually have this rule. It's never less than 15 minutes. I think you're right there. And I think because of that, you know, whenever many of us do go back to the office, whether it's full time, or whether it's in a hybrid schedule, or even just occasional face time, I think we should we should try to preserve the same kinds of boundaries that we've seen during the past six months. There's just it's kind of ridiculous that we had to be stuck at home to realize, huh, I should block out time to think and work as opposed

to just having meetings and interruptions all day. So in this podcast series, we're focused on a lot on the macro. We talked to Derek Thompson, who we've spoken to about the future of the labor force from a macro perspective. In terms of your research and what you've heard, I guess, anecdotally, about the sort of the dividing line that's a racing between personal life and work life during this time. You know, we've all, remember that YouTube video that went viral of that Professor Robert Kelly,

who I think was in Seoul, who was doing that BBC interview and his kids walked in the background, photobombed, Zoom bombed, or video bombed by his own kids. And that was like comical, sort of endearing, but like it seemed otherworldly. That has happened to me in the last six months a million times I mean I sit there and I'm working and my kids walk in with some technical question about you know zoom because I'm basically Campbell and I are now like school day IT people and there's

just no sense of boundaries and that's kind of new for at least the U.S. right I mean people have been pretty rigid about keeping their work and personal lives separate. And it seems to me that that's not true if you come from a Protestant background and you work for an organization with a Protestant work ethic, where there's a very strong expectation that work is supposed to be task-focused, efficient, professional, and relationships and emotions should be kept outside. And the data on Americans on that, I think, are fascinating, which is, you know, if you compare us, let's say with Poland and India, we are multiples less likely to invite our coworkers over for dinner and go on vacation with them. And I think that's, you know, a lot of that is the, you know, the lingering effect of this idea that work is a separate sphere of life. But Dan, to your point, there are huge individual differences here. My colleague, Nancy Rothbard studies what she calls integration versus segmentation.

And there are people who are integrators who are thrilled to blur the boundary between work and home. And they've actually been thriving during this experience of the past six months, whereas segmenters are more stressed. They're more anxious. Their well-being's been hurt by the fact that they feel like, well, I'm either working from home all the time, or I'm actually sleeping at work. And it kind of bothers me that I don't get to keep this separation. And I think we haven't done a very good job trying to figure out how to create a work from home model for segmenters that doesn't just destroy any semblance of boundaries that they had. Israel also is more in the kind of India and Poland camp than the U.S. one, I remember. I mean, Israel is such a family-centric and child-centric society that it completely bleeds into the

workplace and vice versa. I remember my sister, soon after she moved to Israel, she lives there now, she's raised three children there, she had a meeting, she was doing political work at the time, and she had a meeting with then Prime Minister Arielaron and it she had some mix-up with her babysitter she had a little like a one year old or even younger one year old girl and she had a mix-up with the babysitter and the babysitter couldn't take her and she suddenly and she had this meeting with in the prime minister's office and she called the prime minister's chief of staff and said the guy's name was was duby wiseglass and said duby i've got a huge problem i gotta i have to reschedule the meeting i apologize i gotta you know deal with

he says don't worry just bring the baby and so and he says i mean he he all but said there are no boundaries here and she brought her baby to the prime minister's office and the baby sat in the prime minister's office while my sister like right next to the prime minister while she was having the meeting. And I have like a thousand stories like that where it's just a completely different mindset. That's so interesting, Dan. It tops my favorite Israeli integration story, which was a student who went to class one day and did bring her baby and the baby was crying. And the professor picked up the baby and started soothing him while still lecturing in the class. Like, okay, how many countries on earth would that happen in? But

that actually goes to something I wanted to ask you, which is you wrote Startup Nation. You spent a lot of time thinking about how creativity and innovation flourish in an economy like Israel's. What's your reaction to this whole idea that maybe independent thinkers are more creative? And does it match up with what you've seen in some of the most impressive startups that you've had a chance to observe? The part I'm having a hard time with is the communal mindset. Everyone's on top of everyone and everyone's in each other's lives. And they have all these shared experiences and all these communities and sub-communities and sub-sub-communities and it could be your your the team you do reserve duty with in the army two weeks a year into your 40s it could be

your kid's school community it could be your work community and they all are kind of mingled up and sort of everyone for better for worse is in everyone's business. So you're right that it takes like an independent thinker to take a step back and think about a problem and solve it. But I just wonder this sort of the information sharing that goes on when you have a cluster like Israel. You know, I've always viewed that as an advantage. And I worry that if everyone's locked up at home, you lose that advantage. Yeah. This goes back for me to one of the early questions you were asking about these spontaneous water cooler conversations. And I think that people who have the kind of network you're describing are actively seeking these out and they're benefiting

from all this flow of information. But we don't have the creative collisions, whatever purpose they serve anymore. And so I've been starting to pay attention to what organizations are doing to substitute for that. And I've heard from a growing number of people at different levels of organizations that they're holding open office hours now, even an hour or two a week, just so people can drop by whenever. I've watched a couple companies create an open Zoom room so that people can just pop in like they might the cafeteria or a break room. And I wonder what else we're going to see evolve to try to substitute here. What have you seen, Dan? In my day job, we're wrestling with that right now. I have not seen anyone really pull it off. I think initially, the first

couple months, there was like this flurry of webinars and, you know, all these different, you know, live conversations that basically tried to take the equivalent of like a book party or an interesting conference, like one you and I participated in together over the summer, and just try to move it on to Zoom, or move it on to Google Meet. Like, just, we're going to take this offline experience, and we're just going to move it online. And it kind of worked early on, and I think it was almost exciting early on. Like, it was fun. You sit at your desk in the middle of your day, and you participate in, you know,

different conversations, you know, these discussions about a book, working groups. And now I think it's just, again, this is anecdotal. I think people are burning out on it and they just don't want to stare at a screen and be part of like a big kind of conference that's moved online. So, you know, I've started to see some companies run executive roundtables where instead of bringing the huge group speakers, they'll gather a small group and actually make it more of an interactive discussion. And I think the benefit is obviously that there's a lot more engagement and idea exchange there. The downside is that the company loses access to the shared vocabulary. Right. And I don't think this is something I first appreciated when I became an organizational psychologist, but I think a huge part of my job these days is to help people develop and communicate in a shared language, to be able to describe what it means whole organization, all of a sudden people can say, okay, there's a dynamic that I've probably felt, but I hadn't fully articulated.

And now I have a framework and a body of evidence around it. And now we can begin to make sense of how we want to move forward in the direction we're hoping to go. And I don't know how to substitute for that. Right. So let me ask you then, sort of pivoting off of that, new hires. So I am struck when I talk to friends at different firms and different companies, and I should say just, you know, parenthetically, that I feel like we're mostly talking in this conversation about the sort of knowledge economy. And anyone, you know, what is derisively referred to often on Twitter is the

pajama class, you know, people who can actually work from home. There are a lot of, you know, parts of the labor force that can't work from home. So we're really talking about people who work in, you know, who work in offices, a lot of, you know, white collar professional service work. I'm hearing from friends and colleagues at other, you know, at other institutions, we have a great culture. We have a great work culture. And we're kind of, in this environment, spending down the culture capital. Because we've been working with each other for so long, because we can finish each other's sentences, it's working.

But we're spending it down. We're not refreshing it. And that's a problem. But the real problem, and that's a problem, but the real problem is what about our new hires? Imagine onboarding to an organization in this environment. And I haven't heard any really creative ideas on how to deal with that. Well, let's see. I'll take a crack at that with a couple of data points. This is one of the most frequent questions I've been getting from organizations. About how to teach a culture?

Yeah. And how do you build a culture when people are never in the same room? And how do you help people who are now onboarding, having not been physically co-located, understand what the culture once was? It's almost like they have to be archaeologists and go and find what the culture once was. You know, it's almost like they have to be archaeologists and go and find all the artifacts that were preserved from last year and then say, okay, well, how do we make these visible? So there are, I know of three things that can help with this. Okay, bring it. The first one, yeah, so number one is culture, organizational culture,

just like any kind of culture, is communicated through stories. And so one thing we see, and this has been true since, let's see, research goes back to at least the 1980s on this, is when you really understand a culture is when people tell stories about defining moments when core values were upheld or violated. And so I think the first thing you do with new hires is you bring in your culture carriers, the people who exemplify the values and norms of the organization. And you ask them to talk about the moments that really brought the culture to life, when somebody went above and beyond to live it, or when somebody fell short of it. And that, you know, those stories start to crystallize for people, oh, that's what we're all about. Okay, so number two, this is some research that my colleagues Dan Cable, Francesca Gino,

and Brad Stotz did. They were interested in socialization, and this was also pre-pandemic, but their fundamental question was, should organizations basically say, look, whoever you were when you came here, you should abandon that sense of self because we want you to take on our values and identify with what we stand for. And a lot of organizational socialization has gone that way in the past couple of decades, especially if you're going to join a strong culture. And their intuition was we ought to do something different, which is instead of telling employees to become like the organization, we should find out what's already great about the employees and then bring that in as part of who we are. And so they did this experiment where some people were very much socialized in the existing culture and others were invited to, the exercise was actually pretty fun. They were asked to come up with their personal highlight reel, which was like the work version of, you know, the sports center, you know, here are my greatest plays. Here are the moments when I've been at my best. And the employees who were randomly assigned at

hiring to do that self-expression exercise and share the times when they were at their best, they perform better and they also were more likely to stick around in the first half of the year. And so, you know, I think there's something to be said for recognizing that whenever you onboard people, they're bringing talents and strengths to the table that you're not aware of and may not even be in the job description that you hired them for. And if you can find out what those are, not only are you going to leverage more of their potential, but you're also putting them in a position to feel like what's unique about them is valued from day one. Do you think we're going to see, coming back to the point about your earlier point about all the independent thinking and now having the space and time for independent thinking, do you think we're going to

see a rise in entrepreneurship or a new breed of entrepreneurs? You know, after like Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, you know, have talked a lot about the classes of entrepreneurs that have come out of different crises. They talked about the class of entrepreneurs that came after the trying to start a company during or right after the dot-com crash was a pretty bad time to try to start a company. And yet there's a class of entrepreneurs that are unique to that period. They say the same thing about the 2008 financial crisis. Entrepreneurs who tried to build a company after 2008 or immediately like 2008, 2009, there is something to that class of entrepreneurs, their skills, their talents,

the adversity they had to face. Is there going to be something interesting about this environment and the entrepreneurs it will give birth to? That's a fascinating question. I definitely need to give it more thought. But if I had to guess, I would say that they're actually competing forces at play here. So there's this actually kind of startling study that Emily Bianchi did where she was interested in what happens to people who graduate from college and start their careers in a recession. And she showed that if that's you and you're in a tough situation when you start your career, that a decade to two decades later, you are more satisfied with your job. And that's controlling for industry, the kind of work you do, the salary you get paid, because you just appreciate having a job.

And I wonder, given that a lot of people are starting their careers in a crisis, if a lot of people are going to accept work that they would have thought was not good enough before. And that might depress entrepreneurship a little bit. On the other hand, we've also just seen some atrocious company responses to the pandemic. I mean, the mass layoffs and downsizings, which are the most common and the least effective form of organizational change. I think they've shattered whatever faith a lot of people had in companies. And so I think there's going to be a group of people who just are deeply cynical about the motivations of corporations, who think that at-will employment is absurd and will just say, you know what, I'm going to opt out. I never want

to be part of that again. I'm not going to let my future be in the hands of a bunch of greedy crooks. And so, you know, I'm going to build a better kind of organization. And I think we will see a breed of entrepreneurs that's basically revolting against the lack of noblesse oblige. What do you think? Yeah. I think the line I've been thinking about it is just the extent to which people have more time to think about problems they want to solve without, I mean, just space and time during the day to think about problems in the world they want to solve and to actually explore them. I mean, an entrepreneur, partly, you know, part of what makes an entrepreneur tick is being able to identify a big problem they want to solve and then decide to try and go solve it when everyone, potential venture investors, potential hires, all the various stakeholders tell you you're crazy,

it's not going to work and kind of still drive through it. In 2008 and 2001 slash 2002, I think that what Mark and Ben were referring to, these entrepreneurs were just dealing with a horrendous macro environment. So if you could build a company in a horrendous macro environment, you could overcome a lot. What I think is in this environment, the macro environment is bad too. But I also think one, so it's not just about having to deal with a difficult time. You also have time to actually really think like we were talking about earlier and not deal with all the naysayers and not go to meeting after meeting where venture capital way that you may not otherwise, if you are, you know, like you talked about in your, in your, you know, in the original about, you know, this, this notion that entrepreneurs go all in is not actually true. It's more myth that, that actually many entrepreneurs are very risk averse and they're, they want to keep their one job while they're

thinking about this business opportunity, or they want to stay in school while they're considering a business opportunity, they don't drop everything and, and, you know, absorb a ton of, a ton of risk. And I think if that's, if that's true, which you have like a lot of research and great stories on in your book, I think it's true. It's this environment lends itself to that because people, you know, people can, can get a lot done. Yeah. That's, that's really interesting, Dan, because you're right.

At a basic level, I can't go on vacation, right? In a real way. I can't do all the same hobbies that I had before. And so, you know what? Maybe this is the year to tinker with that startup idea that I've always been curious about or to see a problem in the world that the pandemic has caused

that I actually think I might be able to tackle. Right. And spend a ton of time going deep on it without scratching the surface and then being told by everyone that you're wrong. But you can actually spend time really reading, researching. I mean, anyways, to me, it's... So I think that we could see a lot of that. One question, or two questions before we wrap up after the Spanish influenza 1918, 1919 you go into the 1920 and some economists have talked about the 20s being this like the roaring 20s was in part because

there was all this pent up energy from the Spanish flu and once one way or the other we had worked through the Spanish flu, people were rearing to go and excited to do things, excited to do big things, and excited to get to work in the world. Do you think we could have some dynamic that's comparable to that coming out of this environment? Could we? Sure. Will we? Hard to say. I think a lot of it depends on the way that we bounce back and how long this takes. But I-traumatic stress, which is actually post-traumatic growth. The idea that a lot of us don't just bounce back from adversity,

we actually bounce forward. And that's not to say we're glad it happened. If we could undo this pandemic, all of us would in a heartbeat. But given that we're stuck with it, a lot of us will take it as an opportunity to say, look, I need to find a new purpose. I need to reconsider what my path is in life. And I think that exactly to your point, there are a lot of people who are itching to go and do something interesting and exciting. And you're also going to see a tremendous restoration of control

as an antidote to the helplessness that a lot of us are feeling right now. And yeah, I think that could ignite a lot of entrepreneurial energy and firepower. I just wonder how much of that gets offset by the fact that, you know, that many people have been stuck jobless for a long time, that many people are extremely anxious about their health. And I don't know how to weigh those two effects. In, you know, the post-traumatic growth term is used a lot in israel because you know people are often asking people who visit israel who study israel

how is it that they are so innovative because to be innovative and entrepreneurial you've got to also be sort of dissatisfied with the current state of the world and or the current state of a situation you're dealing with, and incredibly optimistic that, you know, you can solve it. You have that kind of confidence in tomorrow. And people say, how does Israel have confidence in tomorrow? I mean, they, you know, the war that established their independence, 1% of the population was killed in that war, 1948, 1949. You know, they've had waves like the early 2000s, where thousands of Israelis, you know, are killed over a period of time, and suicide bombings, and

restaurants getting blown up, and it just, you know, people sending their sons and daughters to serve in compulsory military service. It could be real combat situations. I mean, it's just this, this cloud hangs over the country. How are they sort of so optimistic? And this is the term they use. It's trauma followed by growth. I think that there are ways in which it's helpful to be aware of the concept of post-traumatic growth, right? Because you can look at a terrible present and still see a brighter future.

I also worry, though, that at times it creates an extra burden for people. Like, okay, I was barely hanging on here and just hoping I could scrape by, and now you're telling me I have to be better because of this tragedy? No, thank you. Right. Wrapping up, what is one domain of our lives that you think will be forever changed by the pandemic and that no one is really talking about right now? That's interesting. What will we have gone through during this time where we say, you know, now this one part of the COVID period, we're not giving that back. Okay. I'm going to go out on a limb here. Bring it.

And say, I think the odds that this will happen, they're actually pretty low, but they're higher than they were pre-pandemic. I think it's at least, there's a small possibility. I'm going to hedge like a social scientist here because I am one, I think there is a non-trivial possibility that this is the last straw that will break the camel's back of the nuclear family. I think that the idea that we all live in our own houses and we do our own cooking and grocery shopping and raising of kids, it's been kind of a silly idea for at least a number of decades, because if you were to just think about anybody who's in an impoverished situation, why would you want your child in the hands of one or two adults when there could be a whole system

or community of caregivers, right? Aunts and uncles and grandparents. And one of the most interesting things that I've seen happen in the past six months is I know groups of entrepreneurs who are now living like they're in college. Eight or 10 of them rented a big house together. They've agreed to a shared set of social distancing policies. So they've created a... Like, it's a pod. It's a living pod. Yeah, it's a kibbutz.

Perfect. Capitalist kibbutz. Yeah, exactly. And I don't think there's any reason why we couldn't be doing that right now. And I think more people are going to say, you know what, who knows when the next pandemic will hit. I don't want to be stuck just with two or three people. I actually want to be integrated into a community. And I wonder if we're going to see a renaissance of real community living. That would be revolutionary. I mean, I would love it. I don't know about you, but the thing I miss most from college is the dining hall. Right. Not because, not, I mean, it was great that food was always there, but also because, you know, it might be

midnight and you just finished a project and you're not tired and you go in and end up talking for two hours about the meaning of life with, you know, with a bunch of people who have different viewpoints. And I don't know about you, I don't have access to that anymore. No, not at all. I mean, I haven't, I mean, even pre-COVID. Your point is even, yeah. No, that is, what's interesting is that really is, I mean, you look at, that is the kibbutz movement. I mean, it was, I mean, on a larger scale, these communities were much bigger, but that maybe that should be a book, how COVID will give birth to a kibbutz revolution in the West. You're giving me ideas.

I think if there's one person on earth who could write that book, it is you, Dan. So if you don't write it, no one else will. All right. Well, Adam, thank you. I will say this is, many of these conversations we have are pretty dark and sometimes dystopian,

and this is actually kind of uplifting and illuminating. So thank you for joining us and lighting a candle instead of another conversation that stares at the darkness. Well, thanks for that. I hope it's an uplifting but still realistic image of a possible future. All right. Hope to see you soon. Stay safe.

Likewise. Thanks, Sam. Thanks. That's our show for today. I highly recommend you keep an eye out for Adam Grant's work. You can follow him on Twitter, at Adam M. Grant. And also look out for his podcast, Work Life,

which is a TED Talks podcast. Before we wrap, I want to invite you, our listeners, to send in your thoughts, suggestions, and questions about what the post-corona world might look like.

Just record a voice memo on your phone and email it to me, dan at unlocked dot fm, so I can share it on future episodes. Post-Corona was produced by Ilan Benatar.fm, so I can share it on future episodes. Post-Corona was produced by Ilan Benatar. Our researcher is Sophie Pollack.

Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.