Making Sense with Sam Harris - #158 — Understanding Humans in the Wild

Episode Date: May 30, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Adam Grant about the social science of the workplace. They discuss how teams work effectively, the nature of power, personality types and fundamental styles of interaction, the critical skill of saying “no,” creativity, resilience, the strange case of Jonas Salk, the nature of mindfulness, the power of cognitive reappraisal, reflections on mortality, the replication crisis in social science, and other topics.  If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, no housekeeping today. I'm going to jump right into it. Today I'm speaking with Adam Grant. Adam is an organizational psychologist who teaches at the Wharton Business School, where he has been the top-ranked professor for seven straight years. He is a leading expert on bringing social science into the workplace, and he's the author of four New York Times best-selling books, including Give and Take, Originals, Option B, and Power Moves. He also hosts the Work Life podcast in association with TED, and he's a repeated TED

speaker. Anyway, the list of his academic distinctions is long, and we get into some of his core interests. In this episode, we talk about how teams work effectively. We talk about the nature of power, personality types, and what Adam has described as the fundamental styles of interaction, giving, taking, and matching. We talk about the critical skill of saying no, creativity, resilience. We cover the strange case of Jonas Salk, which is surprising. And then I browbeat Adam for, I don't know, a good long time about mindfulness, and he proves a very good sport. Anyway, I found it a very useful conversation,

and I hope you do as well. And now I bring you Adam Grant. I am here with Adam Grant. Adam, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. There's a lot to talk about. I have been getting deep into your material. Before we talk about any of your books and other areas of interest, how do you summarize your career? And I guess the one setup point I would make is that you are a much celebrated academic, but you actually have a more obviously entrepreneurial and sort of breaking of the mold approach to your career at this point. I mean, you consult with a lot of companies, you're visible in a way that many academics aren't.

And so I'm just wondering how you think about your career and how you got into your pile of interests? So I fell in love with psychology when I was an undergrad and was just fascinated by the idea that you could take the tools of science and apply them to human behavior. And I knew I was interested in it. I had no idea where I wanted to take it. And my freshman year of college, I was in the middle of a bunch of psych classes and I ended up taking an advertising sales job. And I was horrible at it. I had, I think, a group of clients who had a 95% renewal rate. And I called up a bunch of them my first week and I had zero contracts.

They all churned out. And three people demanding their money back from the previous year. It was really bad. And I'd read Robert Cialdini's book on persuasion for one of my psych classes, and I immediately started applying some of the principles and I got better at the job. And I started to see all the ways that psychology was useful at work. And then the next year I got promoted into this manager role where I had to hire a team and I had to motivate them. And I had a seven-figure budget as a 19-year-old. And I found myself using everything I was learning in

psychology to try to get better at work. And I think eventually what clicked for me is that there's so much good insight in the social sciences that's just not useful in the world. And I feel like most of us spend the majority of our waking hours at work. And yet, so many people don't find what they do in their jobs meaningful or motivating. And I wanted to fix that. And so I guess I deliberately chose an applied field where, you know, instead of being discouraged from doing work that was useful to people, I would actually be encouraged to do that. So here we are. Right, right. And so your PhD is in organizational psychology? Guilty, yes. Yeah, okay. Does that overlap at all with operations research or these different-

Very little. There are a few people who bridge the two um but i did so i did my phd in a psych department and a bunch of my classes were in a business school sort of studying management but most of my training was kind of like think about it as social and personality psychology applied to work where we take your job and the organizational culture that surrounds you really seriously so what do we know about work and career and power and influence? I mean, obviously, this is a very big question, but I want to go into this area. What do we know based on the social science that is most actionable, most important to know, and is therefore most useful in people's lives? Where do you want to start? Let's start with this. Let's start with a noun like a person's career or work. What advice do you have? What do you think you know as a result

of being a specialist in this area that the average person might not know? That's funny. That's the question my students ask all the time, and I never know how to answer it. But I think I have something based on years of trial and error on that. So I think when most people choose jobs, they choose based on the nature of the work, and they choose based on the status of the organization. You know, holding constant factors like pay, for example. Right. And I think there's a big misfactor there, which is culture. We know, we have decades of evidence that the culture of the organization that you join

has as much impact on your happiness, your success, and even your career trajectory as the actual work itself or, you know, as, you know, characteristics of the job that you take. And yet we don't know, we don't know how to consider that because culture is messy, right? It's hard to measure. It's hard to recognize. Sometimes we get conflicting cues. recognize, sometimes we get conflicting cues. And so I guess what I would suggest is for anybody who's looking for practical advice on how to, basically what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to interview a company. Once they give you the job, right, you have to say, is this a place where I can be successful and where I can flourish? And if you ask about what

the culture is like, you get a bunch of platitudes back. People will say things like, oh, we value integrity and excellence. Well, every other company claims that too, right? I think where you really learn about a culture is you ask people to tell a story about something that happened in their workplace that would not happen anywhere else. And if you ask a bunch of people in the same organization that question, you can start to recognize patterns in the stories. So there's a classic study on this where everybody thinks their own organization is unique, but then you hear the same roughly seven stories over and over again. So people will tell stories about how

the little person can get to the top or not, right? Or about how the big boss is human or about will I get fired if I make a mistake? And if you break down all these stories, what you see is that fundamentally they're about, is this organization a safe place to work? Is it a fair place to work? And can I make a dent around here? Can I have an impact or an influence? And those are the things people really care about in a culture. And so I think that anybody who's choosing a job ought to be asking those questions, gathering the stories and trying to get to the bottom of, okay, what does this place mean in terms of safety, justice, and control and impact? Right. What would you say to someone who's running a distributed team? Because in tech, there are many companies. I mean, like, so I now

have a team for the first time in my life, and they're virtually all long distance. And so there's not the same kind of cohesive culture because no one's showing up to an office. And there are huge companies like this. I remember talking to Matt Mullenweg, who started WordPress. He's got something like 11 people in an office and, you know, a thousand times that distributed. What's is that just a filter that will select for people who don't need all of the trappings of culture? How do we think about that? It might be. I think that, though, a lot of people find substitutes for culture. So if your organization is distributed

and you don't feel like you have clear values or norms or a sense of community because you don't interact with those people very often, you tend to find it then instead in your profession. So in tech, you find that groups of engineers tend to spend a lot of time together, even if they work at different organizations, even if they're not in a coworking space.

What they're trying to do often is say, hey, we want to build a lot of time together, even if they work at different organizations, even if they're not in a co-working space, right? What they're trying to do often is say, hey, we want to build a culture around our profession, where we have, you know, a set of beliefs that are important to us and a set of practices that we try to stick to and then maybe improve over time. And I think if that's the world you live in, I think most people want to feel like they're part of an organization where they can make a bigger contribution than if they were just working solo. And I see culture as mostly a force that reduces friction in doing that, right? Because so much of the collaboration and coordination we do causes us when we work with other people to become less than the sum of our parts. And I feel like part of what we're trying to do in building an organizational culture is to say, okay, how do we get people on the same page

in terms of what their mission, their values are, their ways of working together? And hopefully we can do that in such a way that then when we work together, we actually accomplish things together that we couldn't solo. And so I guess to say concretely, if you're working in a distributed team, one of my favorite new practices is to write a user manual for how to work with you effectively. Have you ever done this, Seth? No, no. I learned about this, actually. I think my wife should write that manual. Well, this is actually one of the key insights, right? Is you want people who know you well to write the manual for you.

Right, right. But it's stunning to me that when you buy a computer or a car, there's a manual for how to operate it. But the other people you work with who are way more complex than any piece of technology or machinery, there's no user manual for how to work with them. So there's a group of managers at Bain, the consulting firm who did this really well. They said, all right, I'm going to go to all my teams that I've worked with for a long time, and I'm going to have them write the one pager

for what brings out the best in me, what brings out the worst in me, what would you want to know if today were day one of working with me, and what are my blind spots? And then we're going to collect all those. We're going to create one document around it. And then I'm just going to share it with anybody who works with me in the future. And I think it's such an easy way to try to make sort of, I guess, a collaboration a little bit more predictable and also not push each other's buttons. Interesting. Is there more that we know about the variables that conspire to make collaboration more than the sum of the parts rather than less than the sum of the parts? Yeah, I think we know less than we should. I think the first, I mean, the starting point for me is that a lot of collaboration shouldn't exist in the first place. One of my first mentors was Richard Hackman, who spent a half century studying teams. And he did it because he hated working with other people.

And he chose this career where he wanted to figure out how does anybody ever work together and actually not only do it well, but sort of enjoy it. And he had a fun philosophy for what an organizational psychologist does, which is you take all the jobs that you wish you had pursued and you get to live them vicariously by studying them. And so he wanted to be a spy. And so he went and studied US intelligence agencies and how to improve their effectiveness. He was interested in being a musician at one point. So he studied symphony orchestras and how to increase the quality of music they played. He loved flying. And so he studied airline cockpit crews. And so he was constantly looking across these different worlds to figure out what made a team great.

And one of his most basic findings was that for the most part, teams fail when you give them tasks that are better done by individuals. Like, for example, writing a book. Really bad idea to have multiple people write a book together. Right. Especially more than two, especially if they don't share a voice. And there's not kind of one consistent narrator. Right. And I think that the first question to ask is, is this a task that really requires interdependent collaboration or is it a task that's better done by individual people working separately? Yeah, that rings a few bells. So what about power? Again, we're just leaping from noun to noun. You now consult with a lot of powerful people.

How do you think about power in the year 2019? Well, I guess, you know, what I was taught growing up is that power corrupts. I remember in middle school looking at the poster on the wall, and it was the Lord Acton quote that said, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. They had that up in your school? Yeah, in my middle school classroom. And I had the same teacher for three years, so I stared at it for three years.

And I don't know if I was skeptical of it then, but there was something about it that didn't sit right with me. I think what I found really bothersome about it was that it gave individuals no agency. You know, it was like, okay, if a good person becomes powerful, you know, all hope is lost.

And that just didn't ring true to me, I guess, intuitively. And fast forward a couple of decades, we now have a growing body of evidence in psychology that yes, power can corrupt, but I think more often it reveals. So one of the things we see pretty consistently is that the way people use power depends on their preexisting values. And I think there are lots of good examples of this. We've controlled experiments that show it, but the pattern looks a lot like, I think, of two lawyers who got into public office.

And one of them was threatened to be disbarred in the first case he ever tried. And the judge said, I doubt that you have the ethical qualifications to practice law. And that lawyer's name was Richard Nixon. Right? It's not so clear that power corrupted him. I think he was corrupt to begin with.

And then he ended up using power in a corrupt way once he gained the highest office in America. There's another lawyer who was so ethical that he ended up refusing a client because he said, I believe you're guilty. And therefore, I cannot defend someone that I don't believe is innocent. And that lawyer also became president. His name was Abraham Lincoln. Right. And I think that, you know, to me, the arc of what we've learned in psychology is very often, you know, it's not that power necessarily corrupts people, although it can be a powerful force, right? It can be hard to resist some of the temptations of power. The intoxication as Nietzsche described it, right? But I think that more often, people end up morphing power

to serve their own ends. And that it's not so much that power corrupts people, it's that people corrupt power. Yeah, you sort of find out what people really want when they have more tools with which to get it. Yeah, that's exactly right. And also, one of the consistent findings in psychology is that when you give people power, they become disinhibited because they think, look, I've gained now the freedom to express who I am and what I want. I don't have to put on an act anymore. And so, you know, Caro, after doing his deep biography of Lyndon Johnson. Yeah, that's on my desk. I want to read that. I mean, it's a great read. It's a long read. It's a major commitment.

Yeah, you don't go into that lightly. But one of his observations was that the power never corrupts. It always reveals. And I think that is one of the things that, you know, I don't think one is true and the other is not. But I think that's, for me, a fundamental shift about power. Let's give people a little bit of credit, right? Let's think that's, for me, a fundamental shift about power. Let's give people a little bit of credit. Let's say, look, it's possible that if you are a person of decent

character and integrity, that power could bring out the better angels of your nature, as Lincoln put it. Yeah. One thing that, again, this could be a bit of a caricature, but I feel like I've discovered this in my wanderings among powerful people, that it's not just power. I guess fame might be a more relevant variable. But at a certain point in a person's career, as they get more powerful and more famous, they seem to surround themselves with people who insulate them from the normal tests of truth. And there's less reality testing going on. And so you can meet people who, you get the sense, have never heard a strong argument against their cherished ideas. And it can be a bit surprising. They're just surrounded by, yes, men and women, and they have been told they're geniuses

so often that I'm thinking of one case in particular, I won't name him, but it's just, you get, there's a kind of delusion where you've been drinking your own publicity for long enough that you're out of touch with reality. I've seen that happen more times than I'd like to admit. And, you know, I think to me, it suggests poor judgment on the part of a leader, right? That you ought to know that one of the dangers of gaining power is that, yeah, I'm sure you've heard leaders remark at some point in their career, like, huh, it's so interesting. As I gained status, I suddenly got funnier. Why did that happen? And you have to see that going in. You know that your judgment of other people's character

actually gets worse as you become more powerful because they are more motivated to impress you and to flatter you. And if you recognize that, then you set up systems to counteract that. So yeah, I think the mistake that a lot of leaders make is they gain power and they say, I need a support network because I know my success depends on being able to multiply all my talents. And so I need a whole group of people around me who are going to extend my work, who are going to strengthen it, who are going to reinforce it. And I think what they overlook is they also need a challenge network, right? A group of people who believe in their potential enough that they want to tear their work apart to try to make it better. And, you know, it's definitely scary when I've seen a couple leaders who, you know, occasionally would walk into their office and they say, good morning. And you can almost

hear the people wanting to say in response, great point. You're like, nope, nope, too soon, too soon. There wasn't actually anything said yet. And yeah, I mean, I think that's how most group think starts. Okay. So let's get into give and take because we've almost landed on it already. Summarize your thesis there and the different personality types or would you call them personality types or they're just, it's, and I'll let you explain it, but the differences in people and their styles here are orthogonal to like the big five personality traits, right? Yeah, they seem to be. Yeah. So let's talk about that. So there's actually, there's really interesting. So, you know, we think about the big five as the major dimensions of personality,

right? So how extroverted versus introverted are you? Where do you stand on emotional stability versus how reactive are you to stressful events? How conscientious and dependable are you? How agreeable, disagreeable are you? Which I want to talk more about, maybe my favorite big five trait. And then how open versus traditional are you in your thinking? And we see these traits exist in most cultures around the world that leads us to think they're pretty fundamental, right?

And there's even pretty good biogenetic evidence that, you know, that we can trace to, hey, there's a heritability coefficient that's attached to each of these. And, you know, these traits, they exist in us, they matter, they're kind of hard to change. But we thought for a long time there were just kind of five, right? And then most of the additional traits that were discovered, we could kind of fit under the umbrella of an existing trait. And recently, there's growing evidence that there may be a sixth factor of personality, which is selfishness. And I found this really exciting because for the past 15 years, I've been studying individual differences

in your motivation to help others versus advance your own interests. And so, you know, not surprising to me that that's emerging. But I don't think about these as personality types, in part because what I'm really interested in here is your values. When you interact with another person, what are your goals and intentions? And I was struck by evidence from around the world, this has been shown in North America, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, but also in some pretty remote places like the African Maasai, that there are three fundamental styles of interaction that you see emerge again and again. And so on the extremes, I've come to call them givers and takers. So the givers are the people who are always asking, you know, what could I do for you? Takers are the opposite, right? It's all about what can you do for me?

And most of us, we don't want to be too selfish or too generous. And so when we meet somebody new, we choose a third style as our default, which is called matching, right? If I'm a matcher, I say, hey, I'll do something for you if you do something for me. And I think of these as styles rather than personality traits, because I think these are choices we make in every interaction. So, you know, I might be a giver when I'm mentoring a junior person. I might be more of a taker when I'm negotiating my salary with my employer, where, you know, my goal is definitely not to make sure that they win that negotiation, right? And then I might be a matcher if somebody who's maybe a rival of mine or a competitor asks me to share some information and

say, hey, wait a minute, quid pro quo. And yet, I think we also all have a dominant style. And that's what I've been finding in my studies over the years is that there's a way that we prefer to treat most of the people most of the time. And I think that style has real consequences. Yeah. So in reading the book, I'm sure this is the universal experience of people who read it, but the first thing the reader does is try to figure out which style he or she owns. And I'm sure there's some self-deception at play in the conclusions people draw there. But honestly, I think I tend to be a giver in most respects, but I'm a kind of battered giver, and I'm a very busy giver, right? So I noticed that a few things are happening now. One is there are some salient cases where I feel like I've been

taken advantage of and it's sort of mattered. So now I'm more on guard in certain situations. I view my past self as a naive giver, right? So as a kind of a mark. And I have to some degree outsourced my disagreeableness and my disposition not to give reflexively to a manager, a lawyer. I mean, there's a layer between me and reality and all the takers of the world. And that, to some degree, I'm sure many people experience this. It can be a kind of good cop, bad cop relationship where you get to kind of maintain your dominant style because you have an asshole who's working for you, right? I hope they're not an asshole, by the way. I hope they're just a matcher who believes deeply in justice and is trying to punish all the takers. Okay, yeah.

Well, I think that is the right recipe. And I guess as one of the pieces, I noticed this, I noticed the liability of being a giver. At least this is what I imagined had happened here. I met a guy who kind of was offering his services to collaborate with me on the meditation app that I recently released. And he was clearly somebody who, at least to hear him describe himself, was a huge giver, had been a huge giver, but felt just mightily burned by his previous encounters with people where he had essentially been instrumental in building a billion-dollar company and was uncompensated for it. So he's giving good ideas to people

and was just unremunerated, apparently. But now his style of approach to me was like out of an SNL sketch in terms of his defensiveness. I mean, he basically blackboxed every piece of advice he could have given me. There was nothing... He deliberately wouldn't add value to anything in a conversation because he wanted to monetize everything. The thing was so transactional that it was like a comedy sketch. And I got off the phone with this guy and it was

just, it would have been so exhausting to figure out how to work with him. And yet I can see, having had a few collisions of this sort, I can see how people could get there where you just feel like you're sort of open to the point where you're a really bad match for the people you happen to be around because they take everything. They take all the credit or they take all the opportunities. And then some bear trap shuts within you and you have a different style there. And then in that mode, it seems clearly toxic and unpragmatic. Yeah. I think it's really interesting to ask the question of how do people become takers? And I think some of that, obviously, there are sociopaths out there who just don't care about other people.

But I think more commonly, at least when I've studied this, you do see that there's a whole subset of takers who have just been taken advantage of one too many times, who used to be givers. And, you know, they kind of got burned and said, all right, I got to put myself first or else nobody else will. And I think there's actually a name for that kind of almost overcorrection, right? From, you know, somebody who was too self-sacrificing, too selfless to now being maybe too selfish and transactional. There's a psychologist, George Kelly, who called it slot rattling. And it's the idea of, okay, there's a particular trait and I'm on, you know, I think I'm on a bad spot along that spectrum. And I find that out. And then all of a sudden I go to the opposite extreme. But then I find out that's not good either. And I spend all this time trying to figure out, okay, how do I get in the optimal zone? And Kali's observation was

there is no optimal zone. What you need to do is add other traits to your field of vision. And so, you know, one would be flexibility, right? To say, okay, it's not inherently good to be a taker. It's not inherently good to be a giver either. There are situations where each might be appropriate and I need to be more, you know, more judicious about deciding which one is right. In this world, I would say one of the mistakes that we make that I made in the early days of my research is I thought we were dealing with one continuum where takers on one end were selfish, givers on the other end were generous.

But when I measured independently, I surveyed thousands and thousands of people and gave them a series of questions about how motivated they were to help others and then how motivated they were to achieve their own goals and also then got their colleagues to rate them. So we had really nice 360 data. I found that self-concern and other concern were completely orthogonal. So how much you care about other people and how much you care about yourself are uncorrelated. And so then- So let's just linger on that. How is that possible given that in so many situations, there's a zero-sum contest

between the two? So I think the key is that in a given situation, you often will face a trade-off. But if you aggregate all the situations across your life, you can often find ways that it's not zero-sum. So this is one of the reasons people love relationships as opposed to transactions is, oh, I can help you and it feels like maybe it costs me something in this moment. But over time, there's a chance that we both benefit from the relationship. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I was taking a narrow view of that because as I've often said, there's a place where selflessness and selfishness, wise selfishness coincide because you realize that you want to be surrounded by happy people. You want good relationships. Love is one of your primary values. And then all boats rise with that tide.

That's the goal. And it's interesting because it's been studied a lot in negotiations. So there's a meta-analysis that Karsten DeDrew led of every study that's ever been done of going into a negotiation, what are your motivations? And then how well do you do relative to your counterpart? And the overall finding is that the best negotiators are high in concern for themselves and high in concern for others simultaneously. And what that allows them to do is immediately figure out, okay, what does the person across the table from me need? And how do I help them get that? But then also make sure I get what I needed out of this interaction too. It's very different if you're negotiating with someone and you get what you want clearly at their expense, right? They feel burned.

Yeah. You're sabotaging any future relationship there. Done. Yeah. Yeah. It's over. And there was one of my favorite studies of negotiators actually measured their cognitive ability. So they took an IQ test before negotiating. And then the question was, do smarter negotiators do better? And the answer was no, that the smarter you were, the better your counterpart did in the negotiation. And some of that might be because more intelligent people are more likely to take the long view and say, look, you know, yeah, I might, quote unquote, lose this negotiation today, but that's not ultimately the only test of whether we built a good relationship or whether there's a way we could help each other in the future.

But also, the smarter you were, the more able you were to identify ways of benefiting the other person that cost you nothing. And I think this is one of the kind of basic mistakes people make, is they think, oh, well, every act of generosity has to be at a personal expense. I'm like, no, that's altruism. I don't think anyone should be altruistic because it's not sustainable. I think what we should do is say, let's look for ways of helping others that don't require us to sacrifice ourselves. And we can all do that. Well, yeah, you can sacrifice one thing, let's say time, but to your mutual advantage.

Yeah. sacrifice one thing, let's say time, but to your mutual advantage. Although there's one case, did you write an op-ed about not responding to emails? Do I have that correct? I wrote an op-ed about why people should be responsive to reasonable emails. You must've gotten some pain for that. I did. I responded to all of them. Okay. Well, you can respond to me now. So this is where I think I disagree because now I'm in a position. So I once woke up with 50,000 unread emails in my inbox. So I had to declare email bankruptcy, obviously. But I still get a lot of cold emails and I actually don't feel... So your argument, just state your case. What point did you make in that op-ed?

I don't think you have to answer cold emails, by the way. Oh, you don't? Okay. That's how I read your op-ed, that if someone is writing you a reasonable cold email, it is of necessity rude to not respond to it. Definitely don't feel that way. Oh, okay. By the way, I think this is a whole different animal for public figures, right? Or people who are visible to the point that you could even get 50,000 emails. Right. and said hello, you wouldn't just snub them, right? You'd respond to them. And if somebody left you a voicemail, most people call them back. And I think some people have evolved this idea that, well, email is different. And if somebody writes me a message, I don't have to respond to it. And if that's the norm in your workplace, fine. If that's the norm in your field, totally

okay. The problem is that because so much communication is being done on email today, it's mostly taken as a sign either that you're not conscientious, which of all the personality traits in the big five is the best predictor of job performance. If you're judged as somebody who's disorganized and unreliable, that's generally not good for your career. Then also, it sends a signal that you don't care, that the person who took the time to write you just doesn't matter to you. Neither of those signals, you wouldn't want to send either of them, right? If you have a job. You have the luxury of not having a job. You're probably protected from all this stuff. I've worked very hard not to have a job. It's served you well. But I think that it's fine to exercise judgment on any individual email that

comes in. I think if somebody has a habit of just not responding, They're taking a risk in, you know, in a digital age. And I think that, you know, that what I mean is you should have a hierarchy, right? Of, of, okay. So in my world, I'm responsive to family first, students, second colleagues, third, everyone else fourth. And, you know, that, that makes, that makes it really easy, right? The everyone else category is going to fall by the wayside. If I don't, you know, if I haven't gotten through responding to the other groups. Yeah. This opens the larger topic of saying no. And the more things are going well, the more you actually need to say no to triage the various opportunities. And what I experienced with emails, it just, it takes, there's enough of it that if I were going to be scrupulous about saying no in the most conscientious way, there'd be no time for anything else. I mean, it just

takes too long to say no to some of these emails. So if you've sent me an email and you did not get a reply, this explains what happened. So, but how do you think about saying no and triaging with respect to all the demands on your time? I think when I first got into this field, I thought, I confused being a giver with saying yes. And the whole point of choosing a set of values where you say, look, I want to be someone who contributes to the lives of others. And I enjoy being helpful

and I'm happy to do it without strings attached is you get to choose where you want to have your impact. And so you shouldn't be a slave to other people's priorities, right? At the same time, I'm not of the belief that when you get an email or a request, that's always somebody else's priorities being dumped on you, right? I don't know about you, but my inbox is also the place where I get really helpful advice from my colleagues. And I can immediately find the answer to some esoteric question where I'm looking for a data point about it. And so I feel like, you know, in a cosmic matching sense, right? If I ignore email, then probably I'm not going to end up getting very helpful responses. But

I think that saying no is a critical skill for anybody who wants to be generous or anybody who wants to get a lot done. And the way I've come to think about it is you ought to have a set of priorities around who you help, when you help, and how you help. So the who is easy, right? I give you my list of students coming before colleagues. And that means that if I have a choice in a given day between a fellow professor who wants my feedback on a paper and a student who's looking for some career advice, I'm going to choose the student. And that means I'm comfortable with the student feeling I'm more generous than my colleague. Because I didn't become a professor

to try to be helpful to other professors. I think they'll be okay. Also, if somebody has a history or reputation of selfish behavior and they've kind of proven themselves to be more of a taker, I'd want you to shift into matcher mode and say, look, I'm not going to reward that behavior.

I'm not going to reinforce it. I'm going to either not help them or I'm going to make sure that they're paying it back or paying it forward. And then the when is basically about saying, look, I've got to block out time to get my own stuff done. And too often there's a temptation, I think, for a lot of people who like to be helpful to prioritize other people's needs ahead of their own. And then they're constantly falling behind on finishing their own work.

And then the how to me is the most fun is just to be clear and proactive about saying, look, there are certain ways of helping others that I enjoy and that I'm uniquely good at. And so I'm going to focus on those. And for me, that's, I love sharing knowledge about work and psychology. My favorite cold emails to get are, have you ever seen a study? Fill in the blanks. I'm like, oh, all these hours that I waste reading these completely trivial and tiny studies might come in handy for somebody else. And I really enjoy connecting people when it's mutually beneficial, if there's a way that they could actually help each other. And I feel like I live in this world where I bridge between lots of different fields. And so that's a fun and easy thing to do. How do you connect them? Do you send a cold email

connecting them as a fair complete? Or do you ask whether they want to be connected to? Depends on the people. Yeah. So I just I just sent one yesterday, actually. I hope I'm not telegraphing too much. But you know what style I would prefer. Of course. But so yes, I would say I generally prefer the double opt in. Every once in a while, there's a person where I know, look, they would be insane not to want to make this connection. And so I'll just make it. I've done that. So I always default to the double opt-in, but on a few occasions where I haven't, where I've just thrown two people together, I have literally said that you would be insane not to want to know each other. And those are easy to predict. So I had an example this last year. I was going to tape a live podcast episode with Malcolm Gladwell, and we're sitting in

the green room beforehand. He's like, I'm doing this episode, my podcast on why you should pull your goalie. And I really want to talk to Sam Harris, but I can't find anyone who knows him. Right. I'm like, wait, I'm sure you know lots of people who know him, but I just met Sam. I think it was a week after we met. Right. And I didn't ask you if you wanted to meet him,

but I assume in general, you're probably happy to talk to Malcolm Gladwell. Yeah, that was fine. But I apologize. Yeah. Although that connection landed me in the weirdest episode of a podcast because it was, I don't know if you heard that it was up to an interview, but it was just, he was interviewing me about home invasions. It was fascinating. My wife and I probably had a two-hour debate about it afterward. So interesting.

Anyway, but yeah, I think that it's reasonable to assume that if there's one person who can help the other, the receiver would be happy to receive that connection. Right. To change topics here, what do we know about creativity at this point? I think we know a lot about how to thwart it. I think we know how to undermine it to thwart it. I think we know how to undermine it as parents and teachers. I think we know how to stifle it at work. And I think most of what I know about how to unleash it is basically getting the obstacles out of the way. So you want to talk about kids, adults, both? Yeah, let's talk about both. And well,

well, let's focus on creativity, but I actually would like to know how your understanding of psychology may or may not have affected your parenting. Because I'm amazed at how little science seeps through into one's daily life. I haven't focused on developmental psychology or any of the relevant fields narrowly, but I just know from talking to people like Paul Bloom or people who are closer to those data, it's amazing how little it constrains or inspires our parenting. I think it's one of the most irresponsible things we do as a society. I mean, we don't educate parents in the most basic knowledge about developmental psychology. And I'm kind of torn on that because on the one hand, just as a casual consumer of that literature, not somebody who's ever really contributed to it. I've learned a lot from it. On the other hand, I never wanted to be one of those psychologists who screwed up our kids, which I feel like is, you know, it's kind of the norm. But also I've, I've been pretty persuaded by the, the wealth of evidence on behavioral genetics that says a lot of what we think are parenting effects are actually shared genes. And that's why I say I think it's easy to undermine a kid. So not being supportive, not showing unconditional love, really easy to damage a child. We have decades of evidence on

the, you would know this as a neuroscientist, on how much harm you can do by depriving children, by exposing them to chronic stress, abuse, poverty, etc. But I think if you take out all the bad things that happen to kids, I'm not sure how much upside there is around trying to be the world's best parent, right, or trying to get it perfect, as opposed to just saying, look, we're all going to make mistakes, no matter how hard we try at it. But I guess there are a few things that I think we ought to be aware of as parents. I think the biggest thing I've learned as a parent, actually, that I think we ought to be aware of as parents. I think the biggest thing I've learned as a parent, actually,

is that a big part of being creative is building resilience. Because I think, you know, part of having ideas that are novel is it requires you to face rejection. It makes you feel like you're alone, right? As a nonconformist who's maybe not fitting in. And there's some evidence that the most creative kid in a classroom is the least likely to be the teacher's pet. Because, you know, creative kids are annoying in class, right? I know even as a teacher of, you know, college students and MBA students that, you know, the ones who are wildly creative, they're not quite sticking with the lesson plan. And they often want

to take the conversation and, you know, onto a tangent. And then I worry that the rest of the class is going to miss out on, you know, the, the, the key concepts we were going to cover. So when I, when I think about all of that, I think that if you are going to be creative, one of the skills that you need early on is you need to be comfortable with disapproval socially. And I think that one of the ways you, uh, you foster that comfort is you encourage kids to think for themselves and recognize that they don't always need the approval of a parental figure in order to, you know, to feel okay. And there are some interesting ways to do this. But one that I've applied with our kids is I read all this research showing that one of the beliefs that kids need in order to be resilient is they need to feel that they matter.

And mattering in sociology has three components. One is that other people notice me. Two is they care about me. And three is they care about me. And three is they rely on me. I think most parents are pretty good at the first two. But we miss out on the third, which is I matter when I feel that other people are counting on me. And I think too many parents let kids be helpless, right? There's all this discussion now about snowplow parenting, where we clear the path for kids as opposed to preparing kids for the path. And so I thought, okay, we're supposed to show our kids that we are willing to rely on them. So one of the things I'll do is when I'm nervous before a big speech, let's say, I'll actually go to our kids and ask them for advice on how to handle that.

Oh, interesting. And it's so interesting. Remind me, your kids are what ages? So they're 11, 8, and 5. So very young to imagine they could actually contribute to your well-being in that way. Yeah, I mean, I don't have high hopes for our five-year-olds' advice on that all the time. No, I know, but just the fact that you would kind of model that reciprocity is interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I don't want them to feel like I'm, you know, I'm needing it.

Right. But I want to show them that I value their input. Right. As a team effort. Yeah, exactly. And so the great thing about that is one, I've signaled that I have confidence in their ability to think through, you know, how do I, how would I handle a stressful situation? Two, I then get to watch them practice their own problem solving.

And so instead of, so a couple, the first time I did this actually was before I gave my first talk at TED. And, you know, I talked to our oldest and she gave me a bunch of like pretty good tips and, you know, said, hey, you know, you should, you should think about what, you know, why you're excited to give this speech and who, you know, in the audience it could help. And then a few weeks later, of course, she's in a school play and she's nervous. And instead of me giving her advice, she gets to think for herself and know that she already has some ideas about how to handle that situation. And I think we could give kids those opportunities more often, right?

Instead of telling them how to solve a problem, we ought to give them opportunities to think through the problem themselves and even show them that we're willing to consider their advice. Yeah, that's great. So how does unconditional love mesh with this concept of grit that we have been hearing more about? Well, it's interesting because Angela Duckworth is a close colleague of mine who put grit on the map in her research. And she has found the exact same thing for parenting that I've found for work, which is there's another, there's a two by two in the, in the work world. I've talked about this in terms of, you know, giving and taking, and then how agreeable and disagreeable people are, which just as a quick

aside, I used to assume that being agreeable meant you were going to be a giver because, you know, if you're nice and friendly and warm, you're going to be helpful. But the data I've gathered suggests that those are independent and that agreeableness is about on the surface, how pleasant is it to interact with you? Whereas giving and taking are, what are those real intentions deep down? And so when you draw the two by two, I've found that often the best leaders are the disagreeable givers who dole out more tough love, who challenge you because they care about you. And Angela has a two by two of parenting that's almost identical, which is how supportive are you? That's your unconditional love factor. And then the other axis is how demanding are you? And the goal is to be in the high, high cell and say, I am both supportive and demanding.

Now, to your point earlier about situations, it's really hard to be both in one sentence, right? But I think over time, grit comes from your kids feeling like you believe in their potential, you care about them and their well-being and success. But also you have really high expectations and standards for them. And I don't think those things have to be at odds. I think I would like another axis there, which they might find disappointing or dispiriting, but I've been on this hobby horse for more than a decade now, and I find this as a parent as well. It's an immense reservoir of confidence interpersonally for the other person to know that you will never lie to them, right? Because then when you're praising them, they know you're not bullshitting them. And I don't know, I think it's not something that is explicit in many people's thinking here. It's just like, if you're just trying to be supportive

and demanding by turns to say, to take those two variables, it's easy to see how the level of honesty may just accidentally fall wherever it falls. That's one of the reasons that I like the disagreeable giver idea, the language at least better than demanding and supportive. Because I think part of the heart of being disagreeable is saying, look, I'm going to tell you the truth that you need to hear, even if you don't want to hear it. And as somebody who by personality, you can probably tell I skew much more in the agreeable direction. And I think one of my Achilles heels in my career has been wanting to be liked. One of the things I've tried to learn over time is to say, look, yes, in the short run, it is more painful

to tell people a hard truth than it is to tell them what seems like a kind lie. But in the long run, that's not creating a foundation where people trust me and where I have integrity. And so I have an aspiration to be more disagreeable and sometimes have overcorrected on that. But I think that, yeah, I mean, there are, this goes back to the idea that you want to challenge network, not just a support network, right? People who are willing to pick your arguments apart because they think it's important for you to get it right. Yeah. Actually, there's one more point on creativity that I think you made in one of your books. I think it's been made elsewhere too, but one of the false assumptions about creativity is that there's just a higher quality of work coming out of creative people, whereas it seems like it's, and correct me if the research hasn't backed this up, but it seems like there's just a, in most cases, it's just a higher volume of work. And then it's just more at the far end of the distribution to choose from. Yeah. The dominant finding in the creativity literature is the more creative you

are, the more bad ideas you have. And that's just because you generate more ideas. And I think the Dean Simonson, who's a very prolific psychologist who studied this pretty extensively throughout history, is Dean would say that you want to think about creativity as fundamentally Darwinian. That you have what's essentially blind variation, that as a creator, you are too close to the idea and have too little access to the taste of your audience or the needs of your field to really judge whether your ideas are any good. And so you have to generate enough blind variation that some of those ideas will be selectively retained. So you look at classical composers, for example, and there's good evidence that one of the distinguishing factors that made Beethoven and Bach and Mozart better than their peers is they generated often not just twice as much work, but 10 times as much work as most other composers. And what that means is their mean composition is not considered greater than lesser musicians, but their peak is higher because they had more shots at goal, essentially.

You can also see this within people's careers, though. So Simonton did an analysis of Thomas Edison's innovations over time, and he found that the periods in which he generated the most patents were also the periods in which he had the best shot at a truly influential patent. And that, you know, during the same window where he kind of did the work sort of pioneering the light bulb, whether or not he actually invented it at all, he was also trying to create a fruit preservation technique that totally backfired, maybe even caused fruit to rot faster. Not sure. He created a technique for mining iron ore that didn't work, invented a doll so creepy that it scared adults and kids. So you look at that and it's like, okay, how is that the same

inventor? But Shakespeare, same thing. Same period he was working on some of his greatest hits, like he goes, Macbeth was also the time when he wrote Timon of Athens, which nobody thought was any good. So I think, yeah, I think there's a rule that says you have to generate a sufficient quantity to stumble onto some quality. There was an anecdote you tell in Give and Take that I hadn't heard. I was amazed that I hadn't heard it upon reading it. But this goes to the consequences of being a taker or an apparent taker, even in great success. Just the story of Jonas Salk and his press conference, maybe you can tell that because I genuinely hadn't heard it and I'm amazed given how famous he was and how much he appears to have contributed to our well-being. It's just an amazing story. I was shocked when I stumbled onto this story. I had no idea because Jonas Salk's a hero,

right? When you think about givers, when I think societally, right? Great people throughout the past century, he was pretty close to the top of my list. And I actually started looking into him because I was interested in writing a chapter about sharing credit, and I thought, oh, a great scientist who did so much good is probably an exemplar. And when I look for stories when I write, I always start with the science and then say, let me find a good example to illustrate it. And so, you know, I had a bunch of studies about credit that I wanted to bring to life, and I went to Salk. And I read this really surprising article by a historian

that said, you know, Salk was, uh, was asked why he didn't patent, uh, his vaccine when he, you know, when he first generated it. And he said, well, you can't patent the sun. You wouldn't patent the sun. Like it's, it's, you know, it's, it's a public good. It turns out it's a lie. It turns out his vaccine wasn't patentable. And so he was trying to paint himself as this very altruistic guy when, in fact, the due diligence had been done and a patent was not obtainable because I think the work was not sufficiently novel. So that was the first layer. And then I thought, OK, I've got to learn more about this guy. He's obviously a more complicated figure than he seems to be.

And I read a whole book. It was a biography of polio, really, but it was sort of a biography of S he seems to be. And I read a whole book. It was a biography of polio, really, but it was sort of a biography of Salk in a way. And I learned a couple of things. One was that he would always refuse press interviews because he was too busy. And then he would allow himself to be cajoled into saying yes. And then, I'm doing all this important work, but I would, okay, if you really need me, I can talk to you. Again, trying to paint this picture of himself as somebody who had these very noble ideals. And then the kicker was he had a core lab of people who really did essential work. Without them, there would be, I think, no Salk vaccine.

And he snubbed them. He refused to give them credit for the work that they did. When they made the big announcement they finally had the vaccine available, he didn't mention any of their names and basically fractured

his relationship with all these people. Yeah, they were left in tears from that press conference apparently. Yeah, actually crying. And these were people who toiled away trying to work on a problem

that was so critical to humanity and just wanted their boss to say their name. They wouldn't do it. And it was apparently really important to him that he was the sole inventor. And again, not even an invention per se. But there's this whole debate about whether he then was blackballed from the National Academy of Sciences because of that, or because his work was too applied and people didn't see it as making a basic contribution to knowledge. But I think that we see this a lot. I think there are a lot of people who work very hard to craft images as givers. And if you look at the way that they dole out blame and take credit, it doesn't really follow the value system that you would hope for. All right. Well, another lateral move to the topic

of meditation, which I warned you about. So you wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, which was widely considered a broadside against the scientific consensus or- Is that how it was viewed? Or the rumors thereof about the utility of mindfulness. I don't think that's true. It's interesting that you say that. So why do you think it was perceived that way? Because it wasn't my intent. I don't think we have to get into the weeds of that. I think what would inform this conversation more is that I heard you do a podcast with my friend Dan Harris, who's got the 10% Happier podcast and meditation app by that

name. And Dan is just a hardcore evangelist for meditation now because he's found it so useful in his life. So you had a conversation there where your basic skepticism about just the whole project, whether there's a there or there, came out. But it was in your op-ed as well. I mean, basically, you and I are going to agree here that the science in support of the benefits of meditation is thinner than many people would acknowledge who are relying on it, right? It's being hyped. Yeah. And I think any serious scientists will tell you that. I guess the better way to put that is that there's a range of kind of quality of science attesting to the benefits of meditation. And some of it is obviously thin. Some of it's obviously interesting, but all of it's preliminary, right? And so it's not, I mean, I would put Richie Davidson on the side of obviously interesting,

but still preliminary. Yeah. But so to come in at the ground floor here, I think you were talking about with Dan having met so many people whose lives they imagined had been changed by the practice of meditation, and the evangelism was starting to rub you the wrong way such that your look at the data coupled to the personal enthusiasms of annoying people caused you to say, all right, enough is enough. I'm not interested in this. I don't know when you recorded this conversation with Dan. It must have been about a year ago. It was in the fall, I think, actually.

So give me your hot take on meditation, and then I will try to perform an exorcism on you. Oh, well, apparently I didn't know I was possessed. This is interesting. You're possessed by doubt. I think we should all be possessed by doubt more often. Isn't that a precept of science? Up to a point. Even without having an experience in it, I think there are things that you could understand conceptually that would make it seem obviously of greater

interest that whether or not it was something that you wanted to act on. Well, anyway, we'll get there. I just want to get your up to the minute take and then I'll say a few things that Dan didn't say in his exchange with you. I believe that. I think it could be more interesting to me than I let on. I think I have a natural skepticism of anything that has evangelism behind it. And I think my responsibility as a social scientist is to look at the evidence and ask in a balanced way, what do we really know? And I actually started reading mindfulness research in 1999 before the, you know, the make mindfulness movement took off. And one of the first observations that I thought was interesting is you can become mindful without meditating. You can at least create a state of

mindfulness by teaching people to think in conditionals rather than absolutes. And you could also get there by teaching people to just notice the things in their environment, right? So I felt like my early assumption was we ought to decouple meditation from mindfulness because there are many ways of cultivating and focusing attention on the present. There are many ways of learning to be nonjudgmental. And meditation might be one path there. But like any complex system that's governed by equifinality, right, that there are multiple

routes to the same end, maybe there are other ways you could get there too. So that's kind of where I came in. And then as all these people started saying, well, I mean, I felt like I was getting judged. So what kind of meditation do you do? I don't. Well, wait, I'm sorry, what? How could you not? What's wrong with you? And that only happens so many times where you think like, huh, I didn't even know that that was a virtue to meditate. I just thought it was a practice that some people like in the same way that some people prefer to go running and others prefer to play basketball. I guess what's starting to happen for people is there's this expectation that its benefits have been so obviously demonstrated that it is analogous to physical exercise. Where it's like, wait a minute, you don't exercise at all? You don't run, you don't bike, you don't lift weights? That begins

to seem pathological. And I would imagine the circles in which you run, if you're going to conferences like TED or wherever, you're surrounded by people who would assume that the benefits are so clear cut that you're taking some kind of stand for not being interested. Yeah, no, which, which obviously was not my intent. I just, I think it's never, I mean, I've, I've tried it. It's never, I probably had not been taught a way to do it that worked for me. It had never, um, it never just felt like something that was, that I wanted to make time for. And all the, my, my big beef was that aside from the fact that I think, you know, the claims far the fact that I think, you know,

the claims far outstrip the science, you know, how many randomized controlled trials do we really have, looking at isolating meditation from all of the different components of activity that you might be able to get without meditating? And then how objective are the outcomes? And how, how consistently do they work? Is it effective for most of the people in most of the situations? I feel like there are a lot of open questions there. You know, but I don't disbelieve that I think it's probably helpful for most people in most situations if the goal is to reduce stress or to cultivate mindfulness. I just, I looked at that and I said, okay, but we see the same effects on stress reduction

of exercise. We see very similar effects on mindfulness of some of these other activities that I mentioned. And so my feeling had been, I like to use my time productively. I'm not someone who's good at quote unquote doing nothing. And I realized that meditation is not doing nothing. But when I compare it to reading, where I feel like I get some of the same benefits, I'd rather read. When I compare it to exercise, I'd rather spend, you know, an extra 10 minutes or one hour a day doing more exercise than I would meditating. And by the way, I can, you know, I can think and reflect while I do that. And so I was just reacting to the force, the feeling of being forced to do this one activity that

I think the science suggests is probably helpful, but I don't feel like I need it. The funny part to me was when I would ask people, well, why are you so evangelistic about it? I would ask people, well, why are you so evangelistic about it? And the common answer was, well, you know, it helps me quiet my monkey mind. And all the chatter. I've never heard voices in my head. I don't know what a monkey mind is, and I don't think I have one. Well, this is the interesting part.

This is the part that made me think we had to talk about this. Good. Tell me. So, I guess one more question. Have you ever done psychedelics? No. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast,

along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.