Revisionist History - Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

Whenever Malcolm and Adam Grant cross paths on the book tour circuit, it's always a good time. Here are pieces of two conversations from Clubhouse: one about Malcolm's The Bomber Mafia and another about Adam's Think Again.Find out more at bombermafia.com and adamgrant.net. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Join me for my new miniseries on the art of fairness. From New York to Tahiti, we'll examine villains undone by their villainy, monstrous self-devouring egos, and accounts of the extraordinary power of decency. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi everyone, Malcolm here. The Countdown is on. On June 24th, we'll be back with Season 6, the most banana season of Revisionist history ever. I finally get out of the house. I go to Phoenix, New Orleans,

and I go, metaphorically, to the Magic Kingdom on a mission of mischief. Season 6 is so fantastic, I don't want to give too much away. Just hang tight. It'll be here soon. It's been an especially busy time for me working on season six and promoting our new book,

The Bomber Mafia. One of the events on my book tour was a conversation on Clubhouse with my good friend, Adam Grant. He's an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and he hosts the podcast, Taken for Granted from the TED Audio Collective.

We've actually both had new books out this spring. Adam's is called Think Again, which I really loved. It seems he and I are always crossing paths on the book tour circuit, and we always challenge each other, and we always have fun. I wanted to play you some snippets of our recent conversations. Forgive me, by the way, for stating the obvious, but books make great Father's Day gifts. Why not make it both? Get the Bomber Mafia audiobook from BomberMafia.com, and then think again from wherever you get your

books. And I'll see you very soon for season six of Revisionist History. Okay, here's our Clubhouse discussion about the Bomber Mafia. Thrilled to welcome Malcolm Gladwell back to Clubhouse. Malcolm, glad you're here. Yes, thank you. I was going to say not a week passes when I'm not engaged in some kind of public conversation with you. Be careful what you wish for. Yes.

I wanted to kick off by just asking you to tell us a little bit about the Bomber Mafia. I think it's anybody who's listened to Revisionist History the last couple seasons knows how obsessed you are with it. But for those who are not initiated, give us the teaser. Bomber Mafia is the story of a group of pilots in Southern Alabama in the 1930s who believed that they had and could reinvent warfare, that they could, through the use of technology, particularly the bomber and means of dropping bombs with accuracy,

they could render every other part of the military obsolete and they could turn wars from something where hundreds of thousands of civilians died, as a matter of course, to a kind of clean and surgical exercise. And they took that dream with them into the Second World War and tried to make it real. And it's the story of that attempt. What happens when a group of people with an idea fired by morality and technology meet the real world. This is a very different kind of book than you've written before. First and foremost, because the cover is not white, which threw me.

But also because it's a history book. And because despite your going back in history decades and decades, it's also more personal, I think, than anything you've ever written. And I'd love for you to share with us a little bit about the seeds that were planted in your own life that got you curious about this topic. grew up in Kent, which was called Bomb Alley, because the German bombers on their way to bomb London during the Blitz would pass over my father's little town in Kent. And he, as a child, would be instructed by my grandmother to sleep under his bed, which was the only plausible defense against a bomb dropping on their house and he would he had all these stories like i don't a bomb once landed in her backyard and luckily didn't explode he was once out picking strawberries with my grandmother and german planes passed overhead and my grandmother hid my

father and my uncle under newspapers for reasons that no one really knows. She thought maybe if she hid them from the pilots, they wouldn't bomb them. But it was like he would tell these stories. And to me at the age of five or six, these stories were unbelievably exciting. We were in rural southwestern Canada, maybe the most boring part of the Western world. And my dad was telling me, well, nothing happened. I mean, it's a good thing, and my father was telling me these stories about, you know, like bombs dropping in his backyard

when he was my age. And I, you know, I think that probably instilled in me a kind of romantic love of this era. It shows. And I know that you're a huge fan of spy novels, and you've read all the fiction you can find about war. I think you've done something more impressive than writing a page turner of fiction in this book, which is you have brought these real-life characters and their stories to life in a way that feels like I'm reading a thriller. I could not put it down. I've read now the print version

and listened to the audio version, and I'm still hooked. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you got into the minds of these people that you've not been able to meet. Well, you're right. It is a departure for me. So I've never done a book which is so much

about kind of, first of all, a single narrative. Usually I hop around, you know, I tell all kinds of different stories, but I also have never written a book which was so singularly focused on two characters. This book is the story of the conflict between two kind of legendary World War II Air Force generals, Curtis LeMay and Haywood Hansel.

And I really do, you know, they're incredibly vivid characters. And because we started this project as an audio project, I was always thinking of this first as an audio book. And the reason for that was that we had so much incredible archival tape of these generals from the Second World War. At Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, there's a room full of tape of interviews with virtually every major figure in the Air Force in that period. And once you know you can hear them, I think you have a lot more confidence that you can bring them to life.

And, you know, like particularly LeMay, who is this kind of unbelievable cold blooded, um, you know, bulldog of a man. When you hear his voice, you feel like you,

you know who he is because he has this kind of guttural grunt. And that just gave me confidence that they would be more than two-dimensional characters on the page if I could do a kind of enhanced audiobook that would bring them to life. Well, it shows. And I thought one of the other interesting features of the book was the way that you almost tantalize us with these questions of morality. Early on, you ask us to consider, what would I have done? And which side would I have been on? And I want to hear your answer to this because you avoided it the whole book. But first, can you just walk us through the central moral dilemma of the Bomber Mafia?

Yeah, the Bomber Mafia. one of the reasons I was so attracted to this story is that they are obsessives and they're technological obsessives. They're a very familiar figure for us now. They're young men who are in the grip of a kind of passion that has been fired by a technological innovation. They would not be out of place in Silicon Valley today. They would in fact, you know, be utterly, they're utterly familiar in one sense, but in another sense they're not because they have a moral vision.

The reason they are so passionate about what bombing can do and how bombing can transform war is that they are desperate to avoid the carnage of the First World War. And that part of them, I love. I love that they considered the moral implications of their dream were as important to them as the kind of technological implications. That's something I see today. And so that, I thought that they were

this extraordinary role model for how you could bring together moral desires with technological obsession. But it doesn't work, right? You know, the story of this book is the story of the failure of this dream and so you you know you i don't know if it is possible i do not you you're quite right this book does not give you an easy answer to which side should we be on because there is no easy answer all i can say

is i like the i like the fact that they tried to bring a moral vision to their way of fighting wars. And I'm sad that they failed. But that's as far as it goes. I don't know. I didn't want to. I'm kind of over books that give you a neat little conclusion. I find that condescending almost. I respect that. I also think, Malcolm Gladwell, that you are letting these people off the hook

awfully easily. To say that, yeah, of course, they come in with a moral vision. They have a sense of almost ideological superiority, that they are going to fix all the problems with war while still fighting a war and essentially torturing countless people. And okay, you know what? Good that they had a sense of morality, even though they did so much harm. Really? Are you okay with that? Well, I don't know how much choice you have once you are committed to a conflict. I mean, part of the reason this story, I think, is so compelling is that the deeper you get into the story, the book,

the more you're aware of how constrained the choices available to the characters are. You know, you think about the kind of second half of the book is all about what happens when my two protagonists, Curtis LeMay and Haywood Hansel, come into conflict in Guam in January of 1945. When the focus of the war has turned from Europe to the war against Japan, to the Pacific theater. And they are given the task by the Allied leadership of bringing Japan to its knees. And they get to choose how they will do that. And neither of the options available to them are any good.

And I don't know, I really don't know whether you can, it's not their fault the options are no good, right? War is, there's no kind of easy moral solution in these situations. It's like you have to win a war. And if you don't win the war, many, many, many, many, many hundreds of thousands of people will die, right? There's just no doubt about that. When wars drag on, they exact an enormous human toll. So everybody's agreed, we need to get this war over with.

But there's basically actually there's three options. And, you know, Heywood Hansel has one option. He wants to use bombs as sparingly as possible. It is a complete and utter failure for reasons outside of his control. Curtis LeMay has another option. He wants to napalm every city in Japan, which is brutal and unbelievably horrifying. But he would say, well, I don't have any other options. Now, the third option, of course, is the option taken by, in August of 1945, when we dropped two atomic bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki

again another thing another option that leaves us sort of leaves all kinds of moral questions dangling i just you know i i have difficulty from my comfortable perch in 2021, passing judgment on people who didn't have any good options available to them. Now I understand. I was trying to figure out as I listened, as I read, why you were so reluctant to take a moral stance here, because you are not shy about moral stances. And I thought, this is not at all Gladwellian. You normally have a strong view about what's right and wrong. And as I listen to you now, it clicked that they were stuck choosing between wrong and wrong. And you appreciate and admire the fact that they at least tried to do what was right. Yeah, you know, this is a side thing, but this is an idea that I've become kind of obsessed

with recently I I've been doing a two episodes of my podcast this season revisionist history on the dilemma of a little um small HBCU in New Orleans and the the problem of if you choose to educate lower income students, and if you choose to serve them by keeping your tuition low, you create all kinds of problems, right? Can't pay for anything. Your school is not considered to be prestigious. You, I mean, you can go on and on and on and on and on.

And the president of the school told me, he's like, you know, the problem with the way we think about higher education is that we don't consider the degree of difficulty. Now, Adam, you know I'm raising this with you because you are a former diver. And the great contribution of diving to the world, And I know I'm not being, I'm not being flip here. Honestly, the great, one of the great contributions of your sport to the world is that it introduced that phrase and that concept degree of difficulty into common parlance. And it's a crucial idea. It says that you cannot simply judge an outcome all by itself. You have to judge the obstacles that the person pursuing that goal had to go through, was faced with. And this guy in New Orleans, he's like, the problem with HBCUs is that no one gives us credit for the degree of difficulty involved in what we do. Right? I just thought that was absolutely true. And you can go through all manner of things in society. The one thing that was absent from the debate this past summer about police, and by the way, a debate that I was, that I had been writing about and arguing for police reform for 25 years at this point.

But the one thing that was absent from this summer was a sense of the degree of difficulty involved in police work. It's really hard, right? Really, really hard. And I wish that had been a part of it. And it wasn't there to the same extent. And that's also what I feel about these characters back in the Second World War, is the degree of difficulty was through the roof. And you just have to build that into

your consideration of their actions. I love that lens, in part because one of my biggest frustrations with diving is that the formula for degree of difficulty is almost completely bogus. How did you decide that when somebody does a front four and a half, that's a 3.8 degree of difficulty on a three meter. But when they do an inward three and a half, it's only a 3.4. You could change that scale dramatically and we would have different Olympic gold medalists. We would have actually completely different dives done. And we could have a whole rabbit hole about this,

which I'm very tempted to do. But I think it- Hold on, hold on, hold on. Adam, this is like fantastic. Are you saying that there is an underappreciated degree of difficulty with the concept of degree of difficulty? At minimum, there's an underappreciated degree

of difficulty in asking people who judge a sport to come up with a meaningful quantitative metric for scoring the sport. Adam, you know more about diving than 99.99% of humanity. You are a prominent psychologist who writes No Matter Things, and you have never written about this? i have to take this idea from you can i interview about about this i i will give it to you it's yours right now this is just the most interesting thing that i'm sorry this is like fantastic this is just amazing that even diving got degree of difficulty wrong well but isn't that isn't that part of the point? Well, I mean, first of all, inventing something almost always means you get it wrong because the hard work of creating it usually blinds you to the different hard work of optimizing it. But also that the concept of degree of difficulty is so much more complicated everywhere else.

And the fact that we couldn't get it right in diving, it's like all you have to do is, you know, measure how high people jump, how fast they can spin, and, you know, how much control you have. Actually, there's a whole metric of jobs for degree of difficulty, right? We can measure job complexity and know that when a job has higher degree of difficulty, intelligence seems to become more important. And, oh, there's so much we can talk about here. But I want to get back to one of the central questions that applying degree of difficulty to moral dilemmas raises, which is once you recognize you're in a situation with high degree of difficulty, what do you do? What are your takeaways from studying these bombers? The great mistake the bomber mafia makes is they, like many technological

innovators, by the way, is they do not have the imagination, and it's not a fault, but no one would, to come up with all of the possible complications of their dream. And, you know, this is the time-honored problem of the innovator, right? That the thing that makes them good at innovating in their specific region is the narrowness and um and intensity of their focus they don't they're

not distracted they're like eye on the prize right but the problem is that when they take that idea in the real world you're that becomes a liability all of a sudden you've got to think about 50 things that never occurred to you tomorrow so the skills that get you to the real world are the skills that also impede you once you reach the real world. Well, okay. So you have a parallel here, which I didn't see until just now, between the bomber's dilemma and how we think about degree of difficulty in diving, which is, I think the central tension in diving and degree of difficulty is, do you base it on how hard it is to do at all or how hard it is to do well? There are some dives that only a few people in the world can even make.

And those some people would argue those should have the highest degree of difficulty. And others would say, no, you take the hard dive that everybody does, but everybody misses. And that's the dive that everybody does, but everybody misses. And that's the dive that gets the highest degree of difficulty. Your version of this, I think, is precision bombing, which is, okay, how many bombs can you drop or how much can you terrify or demoralize a city with your bombs versus can you hit your target perfectly? What does that teach us about what's really difficult? Is it the execution or is it the ability to show up in the first place? Oh, wow. That's a really good question. I mean, I'm going to cop out and say both, or it depends. Disappointing.

I can tell you what interests me more, which is I'm more interested, particularly, this is a weird thing to say, particularly as I get older, in the execution. Because more and more, I find myself, I am interested and fascinated and amused by people's obsessive dreams. But what impresses me is execution that you can just do it in a way that, so everyone starts, tries to do the same thing. There are three people who pull it off.

Those are the three that if that's, that's what impresses me is like, you know, it's like, you know, any of us can make an attempt at Mount Everest or run a marathon, but a handful of people get to the top or break, you know, two hours and 30 minutes. Those are the people I take my hat off to. Okay. That speaks to something you've alluded to a couple of times and something you made me rethink in this book, which is the idea of obsession. I have always thought of obsession as something bad. I think of people with OCD. I think of an obsessive stalker. And you have a very different take on obsession. I think you even see it as a beautiful thing. And I want to hear more. I do. I wonder why I do. I don't

know if I have a good answer to that. It's not as if the easy thing would be to say that I grew up with an example of obsessiveness. Actually, I didn't. My, neither of my parents could even plausibly be described as even coming close to that standard. Um, my brother is the least obsessive, although, I mean, he's sort of, he's not, he's not obsessive. He, he's, we're dabblers. My whole's whole thing was he loved doing lots of things, even if he did them badly. That was his favorite thing. He both built a greenhouse in our backyard. And he was so proud of how inexpertly he built it.

He would show off all of the crazy angles and the gaps. And he thought that was hilarious. Okay, I have a few things that I'm curious about then. The first one is you called yourself a dabbler and yet you're also an elite runner. I think you once beat the Canadian record holder, if I remember correctly. Isn't running the most obsessive sport ever? I mean, you literally just do the same thing over and over. Step, step. The opposite, the opposite. So how many, when you were diving as a kid, how many hours would you spend in the pool a day?

I mean, actually in the pool, probably four seconds a dive. From the time you left the house to the time you got home again. What are we talking about? Time devoted to the task. I'm three hours during the school year, probably eight or nine in the summer. Okay. In my entire time as a, you know, I was a very good age class runner. In my entire time as a very good age class runner, I never, never spent more than an

hour a day running. Never. And I never ran more than five days a week. And by the way, nor did anyone else I know. In fact, and if I had done that, I would have gotten,

I would have gotten hell from my coach. He would have said, you are destroying your, running is all about restraint. You know what the, the, the little adage they repeat to you when you start out running is train, don't strain for tomorrow is another day. Running is the op. It's the anti obsessives. Pastime. It's all about restraint. It's all about never. Only when you race, do you push yourself to the edge at all of the times you hold yourself in check right the the coach i have a i'm in training right now for this mile race i'm doing and i have a this guy is helping me coach and he looks at my

my workouts online you know what he tells me he's like yeah you need to probably take a little more recovery on that or you should take some more days off he says he's making sure i'm not obsessive runners you totally misunderstand running. This is probably why you don't run. You don't get it. That might be true. You're bringing your crazy eight hour a day memories from childhood to bear on a completely different sport.

I don't know. You have bursts of obsession in running. I've heard about your stair routines, for example. No, those are, it's not, it's not obsession. That was, that's, I used to get together with three very good friends of mine and we would do a workout on the stairs in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. To say that was obsessive is nuts. It was totally fun. We would like, you have a long recovery because you jog down the stairs and you sprint up them. On the jog down the stairs,

you like gossip and catch up on stuff and chat. And then you just have a little zip up the stairs. It's the furthest thing. You don't know what you're talking about. Meanwhile, you're executing these insanely complicated dives that if you're off by two inches you lose there's nothing there's nothing in common with what i'm up to well i i have to tell you that one of your so-called friends said that when he went with you for the first time he wasn't sure

if he was going to vomit or die so not not everyone's experience mirrors yours but on every other occasion that he smoked me, so I know what he's talking about. Anyway, the other thing I wanted to ask you about obsession is, I think about this research by Valorant on two kinds of passion. He calls them obsessive passion and harmonious passion. And he says obsessive passion is basically, it's extrinsically motivated. It's driven by guilt, by pressure, by this compulsiveness that really undermines people's ongoing interest and commitment. Whereas harmonious passion, instead of feeling like you constantly have to push yourself to do it, you're pulled in by the activity. You're interested, you're intrinsically motivated,

you're curious, you're excited, and your energy is sustained by your enthusiasm. And I wonder if that's part of what you're describing, or if you think there's actually still an upside to the obsessive part of passion. Well, it's funny that the word I was waiting for you to say in that little dichotomy you described was pleasure. So I suppose that there are different motivations, initial motivations for certain kinds of obsessive pursuits. But to me, the real issue is not why you start, but where you end up. And does the immersion bring you pleasure?

It always amazes me how little that word is used, particularly in connection with people's work. I always ask people, well, do you find your work fun? To me, that's simply the most important question. And I'm not interested in some people. We have all kinds of reasons why we work. Some people work because they have a family to support. Some people work because they would be bored otherwise.

Some people work because their parents would disd support. Some of them will work because they would be bored otherwise. I go on. Some of them will work because their parents would, you know, disdain them if they didn't. Whatever. The question is, once you're at work and immersed in it, are you enjoying yourself? And, you know, when I think about the people I like working with, they're all people. I don't, I like working with people who do a good job. Sure, everyone does. But I really like working with people who are enjoying themselves. That's really what compels me. And I think of, for some people, the route to enjoyment is obsession, right? It's like you get singular in your pursuit because it just brings you joy.

I don't understand why those words are so rarely used in this context. So to go back to the Barber Mafia for a moment, they're in the middle of Alabama in the 1930s. You could look at them objectively and you could say these losers off in the middle of nowhere pursuing an idea that will never go anywhere. Or you could say these are a group of people who have successfully found a place where they can find joy in their passion and work. And that makes them winners.

No one else is having joy in the army in 1935. Wow. So when you talk about obsession then, you're talking about single-minded focus to pursue mastery in a way that brings joy. Yeah. But the social aspect is really crucial here. It's funny because, you know, the, this book, the bottom mafia is the, really the first

book that I've ever done where from the from the very beginning of this book it was a team effort it literally i know i'm my name is on the cover but that's a misnomer there's six people seven people at pushkin who played as large or in some cases larger role than me in putting this together i've've never done that before, ever. I can't even, I was not the guy in college who had a team of people and we worked together. No, no, no, no, no. I never did a team. I was never on a basketball team.

Never did any team sports. Never. Teams, not in my, I did not even, I wasn't a kid who went home from school and did homework with his dad. Never happened, right? This is not, doing stuff with other people is not something I have ever done. And I did it with this book. And you know what? This is the most fun book I've ever done. Never had so much fun writing a book. It's like fantastic,

right? It's that. And why? Because everyone else was as into this idea as I was, right? And pursuing different parts of it. And that's, so like, I, you know, here I am writing about a group of people who find joy in each other's obsession. And I am with a group of people finding joy with each other's obsession. It's like this lovely, at my, you know, at my advanced age, I'm much older than you, Adam. I get to say things like that. At my advanced age, I discovered this fantastic thing called, you know, strength in numbers. The joy of shared obsession.

Yes. I love that. That was Grant and Gladwell Clubhouse, part one. After the break, we meet again to discuss Adam's book, Think Again. It's been said that nice guys finish last. But is that really true? I'm Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, and I'm exploring that very question. Join me for my new miniseries on the art of fairness. We'll travel from New York to Tahiti to India

on a quest to learn how to succeed without being a jerk. We'll examine stories of villains undone by their villainy and monstrous self-devouring egos and we'll delve into the extraordinary power of decency. We'll face mutiny on the vast Pacific Ocean, blaze a trail with a pioneering skyscraper, and dare to confront a formidable empire. The art of fairness on cautionary tales. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Adam, can you give us an overview of Think Again? The core idea builds on some brilliant work that my colleague Phil Tetlock did.

And the premise is that we spend a lot of our life with these mindsets of occupations that we never have worked in. We find ourselves thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians more often than we would want to admit. When I'm in preacher mode, I'm trying to proselytize. When I'm a prosecutor, I'm trying to win a case and prove you wrong. When I'm a politician, I have a constituent, I'm trying to get their approval, so I'm doing all this campaigning and lobbying. My big worry with preaching and prosecuting is that people are not willing to think again. Because I'm right, you're wrong. You're the one who needs to change. I'm good. When people are in politician mode, they look a little bit more flexible, but all they're doing is they're flip-flopping what they say in order to communicate what they think their audience wants to hear. And so if it looks like they're

rethinking, they're doing it at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, or they're just towing the party line and appealing to their tribe without actually changing their internal beliefs. My hope is that people will think a little bit more like scientists and say, you know what? I don't have to believe everything I think. I don't have to internalize every emotion I feel. When I start to form an opinion, that's just a hypothesis. Let me go out into the world, run some experiments, observe, talk to people, and test the hypothesis. And I should be then surrounding myself with people who don't just agree with my conclusions, but actually challenge my thought process. And the goal of all that is to try to break us free of overconfidence

cycles, where we take pride in our knowledge. We have too much conviction that leads us to confirmation bias. And then we become a little bit arrogant. What I want to do is activate rethinking cycles, where we have the humility to know what we don't know. We doubt some of our convictions. That makes us curious to go and discover new things. And that reinforces this mindset of being a lifelong learner, saying, wow, I just learned something. There's so much more to learn. Well, you have written another wonderful book and I found it actually, there's so many fascinating things. My only critique of this, I have a critique of this book, by the way. I hope you have more than one. I have several, but my large one, which is a, is it's four books. I'm reading this book.

I was like, why are you, you're like jumping ahead to the next idea and I'm not done with the one you're on. Either you have to, you have to like, you know, slow down and write and chop your ideas into pieces and devote, or you have to write longer books. You can't do, you can't keep doing this and like race. Anyway, that's a it's a very mild. It's a it's a it's flattery designed as disguised as criticism.

But I wanted to start. I kept thinking when I was reading this book, how does this fit in with Adam's previous books? And I'm wondering, do we have a kind of emerging Adam Grant's philosophy of life? Can you talk about how does this one fit with your previous books? I think this, it's an interesting question, and I will accept your backhanded compliment any day. Thank you for the enthusiasm and also the criticism, which I look forward to more of. I guess this book is sort of a meta book in that in each of the books I've written before,

what I've tried to do is I've tried to get people to rethink something that I think that they've gotten wrong or maybe an assumption that's been incomplete. The, I mean, but do you, what I want is whether you think there is a kind of Adam Grant ideology that's emerging from writing all these. Are you getting a kind of sense of,

well, wait a minute, here is how I see the world. And if you read all my books, you'll get this Grantian vision. Yes. Although it would be a little ironic to commit to an ideology because then I'm not staying open to rethinking my opinions and beliefs, am I? No, no. You could have an ideology, which is that you revisit your ideology. That's fine. No, I think there's an overarching thread that runs through all my work, which I didn't see until I'd written a couple of books. The thread is that the very things that you think

are critical for success in life can actually be attained through building character. And I think that my work has looked at different kinds of character strengths and said, you don't have to choose between your goals and those virtues, whether it's generosity or now it's humility. And so I guess what I'm looking for at large is a way to align character with achievement. How's that? Yeah. No, that actually, that fits with, that's what I've always sort of sensed. Well, why didn't you just tell me that a few years ago? Because then I would have understood who I was and what I was trying to achieve. themes in things to sort of bear, particularly if they're kind of slightly sublimated. But it always struck me that there was some, there was some kind of moral case being made in your books

that maybe you weren't making explicitly, but that there was something about reading your books that felt very comfortable to someone who was used to thinking about the world in terms of character, ethics, morality, those kinds of things. Like if I was thinking, if I had a Bible study of evangelicals and I said, this week we're not reading the New Testament, we're going to read the works of Adam Grant. I think actually people with that kind of worldview would be very at home with the arguments that you're making. That's interesting. I love it when ancient wisdom matches up with modern science. And I think where the ancient wisdom often leaves me short is around, you know, okay, for me at least, a lot of the principles and recommendations that come out of religious traditions are missing the nuance about how do you actually do this in life, right?

So, yeah, of course you want to be a generous person, but how do you give to others in a way that prevents you or protects you from burning out or just getting burned by the most selfish takers around? Yes, I want to be humble, but I don't want to become meek or lack confidence. And so I think, I guess what I want to do in a lot of my work is try to use evidence to pick up where these higher principles leave off and ask, okay, what does it mean to do this without sacrificing, you know, our ambitions. Yeah, yeah. I was struck by, because I am, as you know, a BlackBerry fanatic user, not fanatic, too strong a word. It's from, they make it in my hometown.

I have a, you know, it came out of my dad's university. And you have a little thing where you talk about Mike Lazaridis, who ran RIM BlackB blackberry for many years and he made this error and they went from 50 percent market share to whatever it was five percent in five years um because they failed to understand the smartphone revolution the typing on a keyboard as opposed or typing on a screen as well etc etc he was not willing to revisit his assumptions about what a smartphone uh could be and i was thinking about that and i was like but you know when i go home sometimes to visit my mom i sometimes see mike lazaritas like buying books in the bookstore he doesn't live that far from my

mother he's a very happy guy he didn't have have any regrets. I don't think, he built this beautiful house with all these trees outside. You know, I think he's like doing cool projects. He made himself, I don't know, a billion dollars probably. At the end of the day, you know, I suppose he could have, his shareholders might be upset that he didn't rethink his assumptions. But it was very hard for me to think of Mike Lazaridis as being a loser.

And also, like, so what if he wrote it all the way down? Like, he believed in a certain kind of aesthetic functionality in a phone. Like, I happen to believe that too. Mike chose me over the many millions who wanted a phone that did everything. Like, I don't know. Is that any different? With this, I'll let you.

I was thinking this in the context of, I'm also a fan of, a deeply committed, diehard fan of the Buffalo Bills. If you know anything about football, you know that that has been for 30 years an invitation to masochism. Starting with Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas, four Super Bowls, zero wins.

Exactly. Do I read, you know, if I read your book one way, I would say, well, Malcolm, you should just rethink your football allegiances. They make no sense. Like, this is not working, this Buffalo thing. There's a certain pleasure in me sticking with them through thin and thin. But so, like, do you see what I'm getting at?

I do. Oh, there's so much to work with here. Okay, let me start by saying I love that you are rethinking your claim that you've made to me several times in this friendship, that you always root for the favorite, because the Buffalo Bills are definitely not the favorite. Yes, that's true. So welcome to the underdogs. It's about time you came around. Thank you. Secondly, on BlackBerry, I still want the keyboard back. I hate typing on a screen. I will never be as fast as I was. I'm not worried about Mike Lazaridis at all.

What I'm worried about, and Malcolm, where is your empathy? Where is your compassion for all the people who lost jobs because RIM went under? It didn't go under. I mean, it basically did. How many people are working there now? Well, no. Well, actually, this is a sidetrack, but years ago, I wrote this piece about what happened when, I think it was General Dynamics, had a very large presence in Rochester, and they shut down their factory and left.

This is in the 70s. And everyone in Rochester said, oh, my God, this is the end of Rochester. And then this researcher, I forgot who it was, went back 10 years later and said, what happened to all the people who got laid off from General Dynamics? And he pointed out that the resurgence in the tech industry in Rochester was a direct result of all the people who were freed from General Dynamics and went on to do cool things. The exact same thing happened in Waterloo, my hometown. All the people who left RIM are the foundation of this incredible tech resurgence in southern Ontario. So, you know, Mike just educated a bunch of people about how to be entrepreneurs and how

to think about, I think it's win-win for Waterloo. Anyway, it's a side point. No, I think you're right. I think that's a great point. And I'm feeling the joy of being wrong right now because I think you can see the impact on the ecosystem if you go to Canada. I think there's a part of me, though,

that I guess I also feel bad for you and me because we want that keyboard. I would love it if there was an iPhone competitor that worked a little bit more like the BlackBerry did. And so I feel like we're missing out on, frankly, some possible technological advances that didn't occur because they stopped producing products. What this book is, is a kind of rebuttal to Don Quixote. Don Quixote is, everything that he stands for is something this book is refuting, right? This book is saying to persist in Tilson at windmills, to persist in, you know, the whole story of Don Quixote is Don Quixote continues to wage these battles that cannot be won. He will not rethink anything.

And, you know, that book suggests there's a kind of nobility in that romantic attachment to a cause, even in the face of... And you're saying, actually, no. Don Quixote's going to be much better off if he rethinks his position about being this chivalrous knight and starts scientifically examining his options, right? Like this is, this book is the anti, it's the anti Don Quixote. I never thought of it that way, but I like it.

I'm not saying you should always give up on your passions or let go of the causes that are important to you, right? I want people to stand by their principles, their core values. But I would be thrilled if more people were willing to say, look, I'm committed to a set of principles, but I'm willing to be flexible about the best plan to advance those principles. And I think that really requires us to think a little bit more like scientists and a little bit less like preachers or prosecutors or politicians who are convinced I'm right, you're wrong, and I'm only going to try to cater to my own tribe.

That's all for now, dear listeners. Thanks for hearing us out. Thanks to Adam Grant and his team at TED for their help with this episode. My audiobook, The Bomber Mafia, is available at BomberMafia.com. And Adam's Think Again is available wherever books are sold. Till we meet in the clubhouse again, I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Do nice guys really finish last? I'm Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, and I'm exploring that very question.

Join me for my new mini-series on the art of fairness. From New York to Tahiti, we'll examine villains undone by their villainy, monstrous self-devouring egos and accounts of the extraordinary power of decency. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.